by Tina Welling
“People fall in love for all kinds of reasons—some healthy, mature, and realistic; some not. When choosing a life partner, you question yourself about this quality of love and whether it has components of need to it that will burden the relationship.”
I thought for another moment and continued. “What can’t be factored in is the uneven growth patterns of individuals. So this love has to hold patience within it and acceptance.”
And then to lighten up the conversation, I added, “But you guys are lucky. Your mother will choose both your wives for you.”
They’d heard that empty threat before, but laughed anyway.
Like his father, Saddler was a collector of brochures. By the time we’d ordered breakfast at the Green Bottle Café the next morning, he’d wandered off to the rack by the front door and picked up brochures about every adventure opportunity within a couple hours’ drive. We passed them around to one another, discussing their merits while eating, and decided by the end of breakfast to kayak the Loxahatchee River that afternoon.
We loaded one of my canvas grocery bags with drinks, chips, cheese, salami and three apples, drove an hour to the river and rented kayaks from a man inside a shabby trailer. The adventure was advertised in the brochure as Florida just as it appeared in the 1930s. The boys and I joked that meant the owner’s residence and his lack of plumbing.
Outside, behind the trailer, a big hand-painted sign warned about the danger of alligators. NO SWIMMING, it said. The owner’s son outfitted us with three muddy and faded kayaks and eased us off the banks of the Loxahatchee into shallow red-brown water, where a gentle current floated us around a bend and into the silence of a bald cypress swamp.
Immediately our faces opened in delight at the strange environment. Hundred-foot bald cypress trees arched over the river, the limbs leafless at this time of year, though draped elegantly in Spanish moss. I had always read about cypress knees and had wondered what they looked like. They looked rather like the knees of scrawny skeletons, and they poked out of the water a couple of inches or a couple of feet, as part of the trees’ vast root systems.
Cam spotted the first alligator.
“Hey, look,” he whispered, lifting his oar and pointing left toward shore.
Saddler paddled up near his brother. “Mom, check it out.”
“Oh, my God. Keep your hands in,” I hissed in a loud whisper. “Boys, do you hear me? Keep your hands in the boat and get out of here. Quick.” I paddled up behind them. “Go, go.” Sweat plastered my hair to the back of my neck. Forgetting I was the mother of two men now, I felt suddenly responsible for putting children in danger.
Both of them laughed at me.
“Let’s go pet it,” Cam teased.
By now we were back-paddling in order to maintain a steady view of the alligator. The river water was a rusty brown around us, except in the sunny spots where it looked orange-red. The alligator’s five-foot-long body was lying in a slice of orange, sunlit water near shore. Its bumpy-skinned shape was wedged among cypress knees, its head lay floating on the surface of the water and it looked far more at ease than I felt, even shielded in a kayak and sandwiched between two men. I wished we were wearing armor and helmets. When the alligator failed to leap out of the swamp and swallow one of us, I eventually relaxed.
Saddler started to laugh quietly. “I was just remembering when I turned sixteen and we were walking to our car after getting my new driver’s license,” he whispered.
I whispered back, “I remember that day.”
“We came to a busy street and you reached out to hold my hand before crossing it, like I was still a toddler.” Saddler laughed again and Cam joined him.
I said, “I remember that, too. The best part was that you didn’t say a word and just let me hold your hand all the way to the car.” I smiled at the memory. “That’s when I knew you had grown up.”
We paddled on. Half an hour later, we came to a dam built of logs, where the water spilled several feet lower into a rowdy swirl of dips and waves, nothing like Wyoming whitewater, but fun for the guys and intimidating to me. Cam and Saddler swooped over the dam with ease.
I gave wide berth to the fast-running water, in order not to get pulled in, and worked my way toward the portage.
“You can do it, Mom. Cowboy up,” Cam called.
“I don’t think so.”
Saddler said, “It’s easy for a Wyoming Woman.”
I wanted to be a good sport, and my sons were longtime judges of what I was capable of. So I paddled over to get in position to take the rapids.
My sons were cheering, “Red rover, red rover, send our mother right over.”
I entered the spill and paddled like a fool, trying to keep nose forward, but the water pressure on the tail of my kayak pivoted my boat around and lodged it sideways on a log. Abruptly my kayak tipped and took in water. It all happened so fast. One minute high and dry; the next minute, river water swirling around my waist.
I remembered the alligators and thrashed around trying to get to my feet. Was it thrashing that drew their attention or was that sharks? I rose halfway up and fell with a splash. The logs were slimy with algae. I used my paddle for leverage, stood up halfway, lost my footing and fell back down again with a big splash. Exhausted, I looked up. Cam and Saddler were laughing so hard no sounds were coming out of them yet. Then sudden explosions bent them over at the waist and they howled.
What the heck? I thought. I joined them.
They were both strong guys, strong enough to paddle up the log dam. They secured their kayaks, waded into the river and together tipped the boat and poured out the water. We continued downriver, even more charmed with our environment now that we had completely submerged ourselves in it.
Lucille caught us piling out of the car and into the backyard, our clothes sticky with river water. She stepped from her back door, smoothing hands across her apron, and I introduced her to my sons. She’d been keeping an eye out to invite the three of us to join her and Shank tomorrow morning for tea.
“Eleven o’clock every Sunday morning. We never know who to expect: some old students from the college, some new students that hear about it, teachers, maintenance workers, administrators.” Behind her, Mitzi was up on her paws, peering at us through the screen and emitting an occasional whimper to remind Lucille that she’d been left behind. Lucille ignored her.
“Shank and I started the tradition when we first got married to help pull our separate friends and colleagues together. You folks come and join us tomorrow.”
Sounded more like an order than an invitation, but we were happy to accept. “We’ll be there,” Cam assured her.
“I’m baking my muffins right now. Blueberry oatmeal and orange almond.”
“We’ll be there early,” Saddler said, which made Lucille laugh. Then she frowned and cocked her head to the side as if listening to something deep in her house. “Shank!” she hollered. “You get your boots out of that kitchen right now.”
Her voice sounded severe and mild all at once, as if she darn well meant what she said, but already had moved on to forgiveness.
“Every week the same thing,” she said to us. “I make the batter; Shank sneaks in and eats it. He’s going to get salmonella poisoning from raw eggs. But telling him does no good.” She reached for the screen door handle. “I better get in there or we won’t have muffins in the morning.”
The boys and I grinned at one another, then trudged up the stairs to the whimpers of my own puppy behind the screen door on the porch. How nice it was to have such a sturdy, conventional couple as Shank and Lucille in my acquaintance, while I was wrestling with my own marriage. Not that my aspirations included making muffins every week and snapping at my husband to leave the batter alone, but I liked thinking that such close and cozy partnerships as Shank and Lucille’s were alive and well.
The feeling reminded me of when I was young and enjoyed the same sense of stability with my parents’ relationship, while I dreamed about the dif
ferent kind of marriage I wanted for myself. My parents’ marriage served as a springboard for my ideas. My sons were right when they said that Jess and I wanted less rigidity to gender roles, but were unsure how to express that. We didn’t intend to plow down the barriers that held our parents’ gender roles, just bend them to our liking. While thinking we were just experimenting, just opening ourselves to new ideas, we had instead taken interim steps to change the concept of male and female roles in family life. My sons would take another step and their children yet another.
My cell phone rang. I looked at the screen and told the boys to go ahead with their showers. I’d take mine last.
“Perfect timing,” I greeted Gina. I opened the door for Bijou and walked with her down to the yard. Shade from the acacia tree graced the grassy area in the late afternoon.
“How’s it going down there?” Gina asked.
I filled her in on the boys coming for a visit and how helpful Jess was in setting it up.
“He’s such a good guy,” Gina said. “We have to remember the positive when we’re struggling with people.”
“That will be your job,” I said, “because sometimes I have trouble remembering.” I asked how she was doing and we got all caught up with each other while I waited for my turn in the shower.
Later, on our way to an early dinner, I gave the guys a tour of campus, telling them all I’d learned about its history as a pineapple plantation. I spotted a familiar figure sitting in the distance beneath the bottlebrush tree, knitting needles wrapped in fluffy yarn and flickering like bird feathers in the speckled shade. I guided the guys over.
“Caridad, meet my sons.” As a sophomore in college she was right in between the boys. We sat on the grass with her. She told us her first knitting project was an afghan for her parents.
“By the time I had finished it, I’d dropped so many stitches that instead of square it came out almost triangular. My dad took one look at it and said, ‘How clever. It’s for the bunk in the prow of the boat.’ ”
We laughed. Soon after, we parted and the boys and I headed for a restaurant on the beach. Saddler collected more brochures while we waited to be taken to our table, and I knew that after tea with Shank and Lucille in the morning, I was in for “more fun in my life” tomorrow.
Twenty-two
Jess
Walking Therapy, Lola called it when I made my appointment. Probably it’s a Jackson Hole thing. Nobody in this valley could stand staying indoors. Mornings you saw people climbing Snow King Mountain with their dogs in the dark, then skiing down in the gray light before starting their day in the office. Special lunchtime ski passes were sold for the bankers, doctors and office workers who’d rather ski than eat. So now there was Walking Therapy. What next? Outdoor surgery?
Lola said: meet her at the Cache Creek trailhead at eleven o’clock and bring my dogs. So here we were, watching her pull into the snowy parking lot with the Bernese Mountain dog I remembered greeting clients in her office a couple years back. I watched the two of them walk toward us, Lola depositing her car keys in a pocket.
“So, Lola, lose your office? We all know real estate is expensive in Jackson Hole.” In fact, Teton County was just named “Most expensive county in the U.S.” for yet another year. That’s what happened when you had the Grand Tetons in your backyard and only four percent of the land available for private purchase. Still, my greeting sounded sharp and implied Lola wasn’t successful enough to pay high rent. Her expression didn’t change, but there was an almost imperceptible halt in her step as she came toward me. I wasn’t looking forward to this session, and I guessed she knew that now. Just covering my butt by petitioning support against Annie’s “marriage sabbatical.” This was the price I had to pay.
“Jess, good to see you.”
I petted her dog; she petted all three of mine.
“I save this for special clients,” Lola said, pulling on her knit hat. “Thought you’d especially find this comfortable. I remember our last visits. You didn’t say much. Being outside is more your style.”
That was different. Whatever resentment I was holding against her—for whatever reasons—melted. The fact was that I did appreciate being out here this morning. The day was a beauty and not too cold. We headed up the canyon on a snow-covered dirt road I knew well. The road wended up and down hills, between wooded mountain slopes, for the next few miles, and the dogs could run unleashed.
I blurted, “Annie left.”
“Oo-oh.” Lola stopped dead in her tracks. “Oh, Jess.”
Nobody had sounded so compassionate about this news before, and I was afraid I’d start to cry. Of course, nobody got the news straight out like that, either. When I told the boys, I’d softened it to the point of sounding like Annie just needed some sun. And I tended to do the same with anybody else who asked.
We walked on. Our dogs ran in a happy pack among the trees, over the frozen creek, up and down the slopes beside us. All my intentions for tattling on Annie being a bad wife and leaving me with all the work just dropped away. Suddenly I started talking; I had not a single idea that I would tell this.
“A lot of people, Annie included, would like to use my story to figure me out. It happened all the time as a kid in school. I’d get a new girlfriend, and pretty soon somebody would whisper in her ear, ‘You know what happened to him when he was a kid, don’t you?’ Like this accounted for who I was, for everything I did or didn’t do.”
I heard the call of a raven and looked up. Snowy cottonwood limbs laced across the path above us, black and white against a deep blue sky.
Lola said, “Tell me your story, Jess.”
“Hell, I don’t even remember it. I was only four years old. Sure, it’s a big deal when your mother dies, no matter how old you are. And before I fell in love with Annie, I used to carry this mild ache in my chest, a kind of yearning I didn’t notice until it went away. But, really, I was four years old, for God’s sake. I can’t carry any blame. And after she died, I still had a pretty decent life. People took care of me. My dad, an aunt. My mom’s mother, Gran Genie, lived with us till I started second or third grade. The point is, the accident happened. It wasn’t my fault—everybody said so—and I grew up.”
Words rolled out of me, like a boulder falling downhill. I couldn’t stop, didn’t want to. The push inside me almost hurt. I leaned over and grabbed a handful of snow and patted it between my palms as we walked.
“I never got the whole story in one sit-down explanation. Families work like that. I remembered when our son Cameron was ten and learned for the first time about his grandmother’s death. He was put out that nobody had told him, even though it was one of those family facts we all freely alluded to. It was kind of like that with me, too. I said to him, ‘Cam, heck, I never did hear the whole story myself. I’m darn near forty, and I just learned a few months ago from your great-aunt Tula that your grandmother was driving to an art class when our car was hit.’
“He asked me, ‘What kind of art?’Painting, I told him. I told him, ‘Tula said, in fact, it was the art instructor who stopped to help us.’ ”
I felt driven to tell this as if I were in a spell and not really here in the canyon, not really in my body. Yet my bare hands ached with the cold from pressing the snow into a hard, icy ball. I tossed the snowball ahead, and all four dogs leaped at once to try to catch it before it fell through three feet of soft snow and disappeared.
“Cam looked kind of like those old pictures of my mom, I was thinking that day. Sandy hair, perky nose, expressive eyebrows.
Those eyebrows said he was going to make me tell the whole goddamn thing.”
I glanced at Lola. She walked with her eyes on me.
“Fact was, I’d never told the story to anyone. Instead, the story got told to me. In bits and pieces, it dribbled my way, and all I had to do was fill in a detail here and there from what someone else passed on. Even with Annie, others got to her first. ‘He watched his mother die right before his eyes.’ ‘Th
ey found him lying in so much of his mother’s blood the EMTs didn’t know who to work on first, but turned out it was too late for her and he barely got scratched.’ I tried to send Cam to Annie for the story.
“He said, ‘Come on, Dad.’
“I said to him, ‘Cam . . . my mother and I were driving to her class, like I said. We got hit on the driver’s side. Icy road, drunk driver. He was injured, too. Unconscious, I guess. This art teacher came upon the accident, got us covered up with some old blanket from his car, then took off for help. He told me before he left to press this shirt of his against my mother’s thigh.’ ”
Now I took a shaky breath, and despite the cold, sweat seeded my forehead. My throat felt tight and achy. I took another breath.
“I said to Cam, ‘I was supposed to keep this cloth tight around her artery—I didn’t get that then, but I did get that I had a job to do and that it was important. I had to push on this shirt knotted up under her skirt until this man came back.’ ”
I had to stop walking. I bent over at the waist. I remembered Cam saying, “I guess it didn’t help, huh, Dad?”
Lola patted my back. I hung there a moment. She pulled fresh tissues out of her coat pocket. I stood and blew my nose.
“I loved that kid, and I knew he was listening to this story of mine the same way he’d listen to any story I read to him before bed: putting himself into the role of that little boy on the roadside, soaked in his mother’s blood, and next he would be feeling that little boy’s . . . that little boy’s . . .”
