by Linda Zercoe
In March, when the audit was finally done, Doug started coming over to my house on the weekends. He seemed to like ripping out linoleum, going to the hardware store, picking out wallpaper, scrubbing. We worked well together.
In the spring he started talking about getting married. I told him it was too soon, but two months later I asked Nancy to babysit for the dinner date when I suspected he was going to propose. In the antique railroad car at Rod’s Ranch House in Convent Station, Doug—who’d brought a rose, a letter of proposal, and a love letter—asked me to marry him. I agreed, but the engagement had to remain secret since we worked together. We planned the wedding for the following fall.
I was 31, he was 30. We had fun spending time together. We worked well together and had enough in common. He cooked well. He was responsible. I was happy not to be so lonely. On his balance sheet I tallied up the debits and credits and concluded that his assets far outweighed his liabilities. Everything happened so fast. The feelings of love were the same as they’d been with Dave—the expectant feeling of joy getting ready to see him, the full, warm feeling in my heart when I thought of him, the care I felt, the desire. At times I had to remind myself that this was Doug and not Dave.
The summer before our wedding, Doug’s apartment lease came up for renewal. Since he was working at my house all the time and we would be married in a couple of months anyway, we decided he should move in. We started making a life together. For over a week he carefully cut the wick cord draining the newly lanced abscessed boil on the cheek of my ass every morning before work. We grocery shopped together. I learned he snored, a lot. He bought Kim a Nintendo Entertainment System with Super Mario Brothers, and when they weren’t playing it together she was playing it alone. Just thinking of that repeating jingle still makes me want to get a hammer and smash something.
After spending the weekend together living in the same house, at work Doug would question me in front of others. “How are you doing?” “How is your daughter?” “How’s the work on the house coming along?”
I didn’t think it was funny. It made me anxious.
“You are no fun!” he said.
We planned the wedding. I didn’t want a big affair, since I’d been there, done that, but Doug did. We were to be the hosts and would foot the bill. Together we compromised on a guest list of about eighty-five people. One weekend we went to Massachusetts for Kim and me to meet Doug’s family. I didn’t understand why they didn’t seem very welcoming. In the weeks that followed, Nancy and my sisters planned a wedding shower—a small lingerie party at a Japanese steakhouse, since this was my second time around. Not one member of his family came. Just like a Romeo, he wrote his family a scathing letter in defense of me. I told him I didn’t think he should send it, so out of deference to me, he didn’t. The apparent lack of closeness in his family was strange to me. I was glad they lived far away.
After planning our wedding with the priest, who questioned why we were still keeping our impending marriage a secret, we met with the human resources partner at work to tell him our upcoming plans. Doug volunteered to leave the firm since he was a manager now and the company had an antinepotism policy. The partner laughed with delight at the news and insisted that neither of us would be leaving.
As the news of our engagement spread through the office, we heard the usual jokes about supply closets and conference room tables. When we told Janet we were engaged at the “end of busy season” party at the Copacabana, she practically fainted.
“I thought you two hated each other.”
On the day of the wedding, a peak weekend for fall colors, the storm clouds rolled in. My parents came to my house. Nancy helped me dress in my blush pink ball-gown. Kim, our designated flower girl, was dressed as a pink princess and missing her two front teeth. The limousine pulled up to the house. The photographer finished and left for the church. We got into the limo but, to my horror, it wouldn’t start. My father ran to the neighbor’s house in his tuxedo to try to get the limo jump-started. I began perspiring. Doug had been threatening to abandon me at the altar if I didn’t turn up on time. But it was Doug who’d booked the limousine at the lowest possible cost.
We made it to the church thirty minutes late. Doug was still there, and the ceremony was very nice. It was magical for Kim. We were too cheap to hire someone to videotape it, but Doug’s father had just bought a new video camera, and our copy of his tape includes snippets of the ceremony between his test shots playing with the zoom feature and panning head to ankles while we took our vows.
The reception was at an elegant night club, The Black Orchid, in a hotel in Morristown. Everything was beautiful. Doug’s brother toasted Doug and forgot about the wife. Doug’s mother drank too much, and there was an incident with a couple of my aunts in the ladies’ room. An eyewitness said Doug’s mother was complaining to her oldest daughter that I wasn’t good enough for her son when one of my aunts flew out of the bathroom stall pointing a finger in her face and saying that she and her family weren’t “fit to shine her niece’s shoes.” My sister ran out of the bathroom and grabbed my Aunt Marion, fearing that the fight would become physical, and dragged both her and my other aunt away.
I did get general wind of the scuffle but was quickly distracted by the many other guests and general merrymaking. Doug had warned me that his mother drank too much. Then I noticed out of the corner of my eye Doug’s father physically removing her after she stumbled repeatedly into my father on the dance floor. Before the main course had even been served, she had been removed to her room for the rest of the night.
At the end of the evening Doug and I went to his parents’ hotel room to say goodnight and good-bye. Their door was open, but when his mother saw us coming down the hall she slammed it in our faces. I thought she was mourning the loss of her son. I didn’t know at the time that, since I had been married before, even though I was widowed, I was tainted for her—dressed not in blush pink but in scarlet red.
For our honeymoon, we went to Acapulco. It was wonderful even though I cried the whole time. I was a mess of emotions, sad because I thought my wedding was ruined by Doug’s family, depressed from quitting smoking, overjoyed and hysterical. I had not had a single break in five solid years. I felt relief, love, and then guilt. I had for all intents and purposes closed the chapter on Dave and started a new chapter with Doug, five years and two months later.
We hung out at the pools by day, reading and playing spades, and ate ourselves into a food coma every night. We flew home at Halloween to be with Kim for trick-or-treating and then left for Kennebunk, Maine, where we stayed at a bed-and-breakfast for another week. The place was so simple, so quaint, I wanted to move there. I think Doug would have too. Even though I loved my job, my life, I was feeling the effects of the rat race and all the stress from all the life changes—college graduation, career change, new job, buying a house, taking and passing the CPA exam, getting married, all in eighteen months.
I came home, still depressed. Kim and I had become three—Doug, Kim, and me. I remember thinking, Oh my God, what did I do? Great, now I have another person to take care of, with all the associated expectations and disappointments. At that time, I really focused on the negatives, but in the years that followed we became a family—for better or for worse. We remodeled the little Cape Cod, went to Kim’s softball games and dance recitals.
I also gained ten pounds. I decided my depression must have been nicotine withdrawal. During the busy season at work, while spending three months of my life in a conference room auditing a precious metals dealer in the company of two chain smokers, I started clipping their cigarettes and smoking them in the ladies room. Within a week I was buying again. Doug and Kim were very disappointed. I’d failed.
Doug and I weren’t getting any younger, so before our second anniversary the three of us became four. Blue was the color of my newborn son at his one-minute Apgar score in August of 1990. What the doctors didn’t tell us—between delivering the head and then the shoulder
and saying, “This kid is a football player”—was that the cord was wrapped around his neck. I heard “It’s a boy,” saw the blue, didn’t hear the cry, inhaled and exhaled the relief that comes with the delivery, and then held my breath, waiting for him to breathe. Hearing my own heartbeat in my ears, I watched the neonatologist suction my baby boy, wiping meconium stool from his face under the neon light of the hood of the open-air incubator.
And then I heard it, the cry, the repeated air-gasping cry that announced, Mommy, I’m here! Daddy, I’m not going anywhere! I cried with relief, tears rolling down my cheeks as the placenta slid out. Then Bradford, our baby, was brought over to Doug and me, wrapped up snuggly, red from all the crying. We cried tears of joy, tears of relief, awestruck by the act of witnessing a miracle, assisted by the obstetrician and the neonatologist. I was worshipped like the Madonna by my husband for two weeks and one day. Then, I was just me.
It was quite a change from just having a 9-year-old daughter in the house. We were showered with blue—baby blue onesies, blue sweater sets, mini blue jeans with snaps, blue rattles, blue cards, and blue baby wrappings infiltrated our home like the cloudless blue sky on those hot August days. I loved every minute of it. I knew he was to be my last child so I savored every second of his tiny new life. Many a day I would just sit and hold him on my chest while he slept between feedings.
Shortly after Brad was born, my Aunt Marion was diagnosed with metastasized bladder cancer and given less than six months to live. I was beside myself. I decided to stop smoking (again), giving up each cigarette as a prayer offering for her healing. I stopped smoking for good. Besides, since I spent most of my time in the house, I didn’t want Brad to breathe in secondhand smoke. It didn’t occur to me that I could have smoked outside, nor had it occurred to me to stop smoking when I was pregnant, even though people smarter than me freely commented that smoking wasn’t good for my baby. It took my aunt’s illness to motivate me to stop.
Miraculously, I later learned that the scans were erroneous, and chemotherapy flushes of her bladder healed her completely. I was so happy.
But after a few weeks, I started crying. I couldn’t understand why I felt so blue. Was it hormonal, or nicotine withdrawal, or was it that I knew that I had only four months of maternity leave and then would need to hire a nanny to take care of the children? The idea of leaving my new baby with a stranger made me sad. I wondered why I didn’t feel bad about working or school when I didn’t think I had a choice, but now felt bad because I thought I did have a choice. Guilt, depression, confusion, hormonal upheaval, lack of nicotine, and dilemmas of career versus baby track and dependency versus independence were the ingredients in the soup of my emotional turbulence.
Doug would come home every day from work, shut down and exhausted. He didn’t want to talk about anything. I was left to figure this out on my own. He wouldn’t weigh in one way or the other. So then I added anger, bitterness, and disappointment to the mix. Tapes of my mother’s voice ran through my head. Snap out of it! and What do you have to complain about?
When the four months were up, a nanny was hired, and back to work I went, complete with the commute and the long hours, smack in the middle of busy season. I started smoking again. But now I had it all, the marriage, the children, the career, the house, working in New York. I was living the dream. Wasn’t I?
Part 2
Chapter 8
Go West
April–December 1993
By 1993, Nancy and I had been best friends for more than twenty years. It was only natural to consult with her regarding the dilemma I was facing. Should I move to California?
As we sat over lunch, I reiterated the main reasons why I was reluctant. She knew one of my aspirations since Dave’s death was to be financially independent, have a successful career, and to work in Manhattan. During the past year Doug had been commuting from the firm’s New York office to its San Francisco office to assist the team out there in winning a new client. In the proposal, the client had been promised that Doug would be part of the ongoing audit team. We knew that if he agreed to move, it would demonstrate his commitment to the firm and be positive for his career. I didn’t really plan on the firm’s winning the engagement, but Doug did. The firm won and asked Doug to move.
Second, I was disillusioned about our marriage. I hadn’t felt supported when I took some time to stay at home after Brad was born, first during maternity leave but then for a full two years. We started fighting all the time, probably for sport, but also I think because we were both by nature professionally competitive and probably envious of what we perceived as each other’s greener grass. I suppose on some level I envied his opportunity to advance, to receive recognition, and to be paid for his efforts even though I wanted to stay home with the children. I believe he envied my freedom.
He would comment, “What do you have to complain about when you have the whole day ‘free’?”
He further suggested, “You should go back to work, then I can take the baby golfing all day. What’s the big deal?”
These types of comments basically summed up the extent of validation and support I received for staying at home. Therefore, I returned to work. I was back to commuting to my fifty-to an occasional eighty-hour-per-week, stressful but rewarding job—while also caring for our two children, managing the nanny, homework, the house, the bills, shopping, and the rest. By this time, my daughter Kim was 12, a sixth grader, and Brad was 3. It was clear to me that Doug and I weren’t connecting at a satisfying level quite a bit of the time.
The other reason I was hesitant about committing to the move was a concern about uprooting Kim. We had always lived on the East Coast. All of our family and friends were there. Two thousand, six hundred plus air miles was logistically too far away to attend a family picnic. Besides that, the three-hour time difference was a big deal in the days before cell phones. And when Doug was home, his fatigue and disengagement were irritating. Because of all of these circumstances, I thought that perhaps now would be a good time to call it quits and go our separate ways. I had to wonder, did I want to give up all my dreams for him?
Nancy and I weighed all the pros and cons, and as would be expected of any great friend, she couldn’t and wouldn’t tell me what to do. Talking all of this over with her helped, though.
I decided we should all go. I thought of it as a chance to start anew. I also believed in the personal values around family, commitment, and perseverance, and I was always hopeful. I got on board with the plan, even if I did have reservations—which of course I kept to myself. I did love Doug enough that I wanted him to be happy. I wanted us to be happy.
Instead of looking for the gold of the forty-niners, I was hoping to find love, peace, and contentment. I thought, What better place than the Golden State? So, we were going to California, and by golly, we were going to make the best of it! I did strike a deal with Doug, asking him to take some areas of responsibility off my plate once we arrived. He agreed to pay the bills and do complete kitchen management, which included shopping, meal planning, cooking, and cleaning up. Maybe now I would have some time to relax, to take care of myself.
The next few months were a flurry of activity in preparation for our move. For the sale of our house, the relocation company required that we have all sorts of inspections, one of which was a test for radon. Radon, a radioactive gas, was detected in the basement of the house. This problem had to be remedied before we could put the house on the market and before the relocation company would sign the papers agreeing to buy it if it didn’t sell. At the cost of several thousand dollars, a large contraption was erected in the corner of the basement that looked like the robotic invader from a war with another world, complete with its large radioactivity sticker placed like a medal in the center of its chest. The radon was vented to the outside of the house, invisible, odorless, and undetectable by us either before or after the remediation.
Surprisingly, the house sold quickly. In fact we had two buyers. I came home fro
m work early to find the first buyer at the house with the realtor and a home inspector, and was there when they received the call that we had rescinded the contract and sold to a higher bidder. Of course Doug had not informed me of this development. I was blindsided and had to endure the wrath, tears, and name calling by the people in my house until they stormed out, slamming the door.
Doug’s response was the usual, “What’s the big deal. It’s over. We made more money.” What, as usual, was I complaining about?
It was a time of high stress to say the least, the highlight of which was dealing with the horrifying real estate costs in the San Francisco Bay Area. It would be essential for me to return to work immediately so we could buy a house that we felt we could live in without going backwards in our accommodations and lifestyle. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a job since my company had no positions to offer me in California. Fortunately, however, Doug’s relocation package guaranteed mortgage financing, factoring in 100 percent of the trailing spouse’s income. After four or five discouraging trips back and forth across the country, we finally bought a cosmetically challenged typical California ranch house in a great neighborhood in Danville. For me, this move was incredibly scary and a huge commitment financially, emotionally, and most important, for our relationship. Now, I was not only reluctantly committed and perpetually depressed, but also a trailing spouse. This in and of itself was problematic for me, since I was used to having my own identity. I despised the idea of being someone’s luggage.
Then, just before leaving my job in New York, a recruiter in Chicago contacted me about a job in San Francisco. Bank of America headquarters was very interested in my credentials and I would have an interview once we arrived. So we hugged and kissed our family and friends, and temporarily said good-bye to our household belongings. On the way to Newark Airport, we made a detour into Manhattan, where we picked up a beautiful, luminous, eighteen-inch cultured pearl necklace Doug had had made for me. Then we all boarded the westbound one-way flight to San Francisco on July 13, the day before my thirty-sixth birthday.
