by Ada Calhoun
A few years after Jeremy died, his parents moved out of the house where they had raised him, where I had spent my childhood summers. One day I had to drop off my parents’ car at a repair shop near Ann and Bob’s new place, so Oliver and I visited them for lunch. The house was charming—with a jigsaw puzzle in progress on a table and an adored Boston terrier named Pip frolicking around. My aunt and uncle cheerfully bore platters of cold cuts and rolls into the dining room.
Ann and Bob had been frugal and saved for retirement, and now they are enjoying it, with trips around the country and doting on their grandchildren. After a lifetime of beaters, Bob had bought a new car with heated seats. For fun, they’d driven it down to Florida and back.
“You see all these stories of couples that divorce after the death of a child,” Ann said when I asked how they’d made it through Jeremy’s death. “Fortunately, that wasn’t the case for us. We were the opposite. It made us closer. We were in it together. We held each other up. God, I can’t imagine going through that alone.”
They looked at each other and started trying to pick out what had kept them together. “Respect, I guess?” Ann said. “We’re nice to each other. We know now it’s not all butterflies and fireworks.”
They were quiet for a second, thinking. “Remember when you threw that dish at my head?” Bob asked.
“Right!” Ann said. “I did do that. I don’t think I was trying to hit you in the head, though. It shattered against the wall.”
What was the fight about?
“He was so stubborn,” Ann told me. “Well, he still is. If you tell him you don’t like something he’s doing, he argues with you, and explains how you’re just not looking at it the right way. That used to drive me insane. I just wanted him to hear what I was saying.”
She looked over at Bob and then said, “The way I look at it, when you get married, you have these rough edges. Everyone does. And then as you stay together, you wear down each other’s rough edges, until they’re smooth.”
She made a gesture with her hands: first the knuckles clunking against each other, then the palms gliding one over the other. “It’s not like we’re so much different than we used to be, exactly,” she said. “But we’ve adjusted to each other. We know what to expect, how to work around it. And now when he goes away for even a day or two, I miss him.”
This is something I’ve heard again and again from the long-married.
“He’s very efficient,” one woman I know said, looking at her husband with so much affection, I felt like I was intruding. “And I procrastinate. We used to fight about it all the time, but now we just work around each other. He lets me sit there and drink coffee in the morning while he bustles around. When we’re on vacation, we spend one day the way he wants to—usually getting up early and driving to every bakery in town—and the next day the way I want to—sleeping in, strolling. We take care of each other. But we had to learn that, how to sync up.”
Another friend told me that his tradition-minded parents didn’t have much binding them together when they married: “She was Jewish, and he had a good job; that was enough.” They struggled while their kids were growing up, resolving to stay together until the nest was empty and then go their separate ways. But something funny happened: by the time the children were grown, neither wanted to leave.
If I try, I can conjure the feeling I had when looking into Steve’s eyes back then, watching him move languidly through a run-down college apartment full of smoke, feeling his body pushing into mine against the wall of a barn, smiling out the car window when he reached across the front seat to hold my hand. What I felt then was longing, was wonder, was magical. And yet, considering those moments today, what we had back then seems small.
Tolkien believed that original sin was responsible for the world’s suffering. Of soul mates, Tolkien said, “In such great inevitable love, often love at first sight, we catch a vision, I suppose, of marriage as it should have been in an unfallen world.”
Tolkien’s “companions in shipwreck” are what my aunt and uncle resembled, standing in their bright kitchen, more wrinkled and weathered than they’d been back when I was a little girl swimming in the pond, hunting for Easter baskets, and watching TV with their son. They’d had the worst thing happen to them, and yet here they were, her giving him a peck as he left for Home Depot. They are the real soul mates, and I don’t read books about mysticism anymore.
TOAST 5
Fighting in Rental Cars
To the end, spring winds will sow disquietude, passing faces leave a regret behind them, and the whole world keep calling and calling in their ears. For marriage is like life in this—that it is a field of battle, and not a bed of roses.
—Robert Louis Stevenson,
Virginibus Puerisque, 1881
“SO I REALLY LIKE FLEETWOOD MAC all of a sudden,” Neal says as we drive to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, listening to the classic rock station. “And I was like, ‘Why do I like this now?’ And then I thought, ‘Oh right, I just turned forty.’ ”
Then Neal tests my musical knowledge.
“Who’s this?” he asks, pointing to the radio.
“CCR,” I say.
“You always think it’s CCR.”
“It always is CCR.”
“Not this time. Guess again.”
“I don’t know. The Eagles.”
“Ha, nope. It’s Boston.”
“Okay.”
“You can tell it’s one of those seventies bands with the place-names because of the solos and the changes.”
“Now who’s this?” Neal asks three minutes later.
“CCR,” I say.
Three hours later, we were only halfway there, and the car had become a pit of misery. We’d gotten off at the exit recommended by an app promising to identify exits with the best gas, food, and lodging options. We had waited for this embarrassment of riches—Exxon, Shell, and Sheetz? Yes, please. We were low on gas and starving. But we had taken the promised-land exit only to be met with rolling hills. Mile after mile, there was nothing. As the blocks and trees rolled by, all was silent except for a book on tape coming from the speakers.
Oliver’s audiobook addiction has given him an idiosyncratic vocabulary rich in Britishisms. “My baseball hat is eluding me,” he will say. “A spot of juice would do nicely!” The other day at a sleepover Oliver said, “Pancakes? What a rollicking good breakfast!” This prompted his friend’s father to ask me when I picked him up, “Do you have a nineteenth-century British nanny?”
I knew the audiobook era had affected me and Neal when we had this conversation while I made dinner:
“That school is not safe,” I said. “That one girl almost died and then that boy this year did die, and the headmaster never got fired? There are only, like, two good teachers and the rest are idiots.”
“Yeah,” Neal said, “but where else would we send Oliver if not Hogwarts? Durmstrang?”
I had bought us a break from Harry Potter by taking the Red Badge of Courage audiobook out from the library, in honor of our Civil War excursion.
“The way seemed eternal,” the novel intoned psychically through the car speakers. “In the clouded haze men became panic-stricken with the thought that the regiment had lost its path, and was proceeding in a perilous direction.”
“That exit app sucks,” said Neal.
“I already deleted it,” I said.
He continued to look grim. We were almost out of gas and in the middle of a run-down Pennsylvania landscape where the locals, evidently, had no need for gas or food or glass in their window frames.
Recently, I ran into a friend who looked exasperated. I asked him if he was okay and he started right in: “ ‘We can shave off seven minutes if we go this way,’ she said. I knew it was a bad idea, and I was right. We got stuck in terrible traffic. And the kid is screaming that he has to pee and then wets himself. I should have stuck to my guns. Of course, then we’d have been in traffic somewhere else and I would have been the
asshole. You’re either the asshole or the victim. I’m not sure which is worse. I just drove the whole way silently, livid, wishing I could be anywhere else.”
“We crucify one another in marriage, and in marriage we learn to be crucified,” says Episcopal priest Father James Krueger. “In my marriage I see clearly what a schmuck I can be, and without that mirror I’m doomed.”
“Quarrels,” wrote Ovid, “are the dowry which married folk bring one another.”
Oliver, from the backseat: “Are we going to run out of gas?”
“Almost definitely not,” I said.
Neal made a noise. It was half “Ha,” half “We’ll see,” and 100 percent infuriating.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing,” he said.
“What?” “Nothing.” How many times have we said those words; how many different things they have meant.
Boxers learn to get hit without getting mad. I want that skill—not with the getting hit part, but the ability to not take personally a hideous “Ha.”
“At this cry a hysterical fear and dismay beset the troops,” said the audiobook. “A soldier, who heretofore had been ambitious to make the regiment into a wise little band that would proceed calmly amid the huge-appearing difficulties, suddenly sank down and buried his face in his arms with an air of bowing to a doom.”
I hadn’t even wanted to go on this trip. It was Neal’s idea. He had noticed the boy’s enthusiasm for Civil War history and realized that Gettysburg was only a hypothetical three and a half hours away. (And I quote, “Ha!”) And now here we were in the middle of nowhere. I glared at Neal as he stared straight ahead at the road. In my head, I began to mentally compose a book titled All the Problems with You: A Definitive List.
“For some unknowable reason—which may have to do with the sex act—your spouse brings out your worst side,” the poet Sparrow says. “I’ve never been as awful to anyone as I have been to poor Violet. Has she been ‘awful’ to me? No. But she has deeply resented me, in a manner that borders on the cruel. And can I blame her? Not really. That is the fucking tragedy of marriage. Ultimately, one is responsible. You can give one thousand—or thirteen hundred—reasons why everything is the other person’s fault, you can convince yourself, and often convince your partner, but you are always wrong. All your misery is created by you—absolutely all. The absolute brutal truth of this culpability is inescapable, and excruciating. Luckily, it takes you about twelve years of marriage to realize it.”
A friend of mine and her husband have a “time-out” phrase that they deploy when their arguments go to this dark place: “Pig Newtons,” from the Louis C.K. skit in which he describes arguing with his young daughter and losing his temper when she insists that Fig Newtons are in fact called “Pig Newtons.” “You know when you get in these fights where you’re both so sure you’re right and the other person is being ridiculous?” my friend says. “Sometimes you just have to say, ‘Pig Newtons’ and walk away.”
Only in a car you can’t walk away, because you are trapped side by side in a large piece of metal hurtling through space at sixty miles an hour. This is why fights in cars are some of the worst fights: you can’t storm off.
Oliver and I once attended a baptism at which we found ourselves giggling at the babies’ different responses to being sprinkled with water: One grimaced and tried to push the priest’s hand away. Another beamed in her sparkly shoes. Another balled up his fists in fury, reminding me of the classic Onion op-ed written by a lobster: “Just Wait ’Til I Get These Fucking Rubber Bands Off.”
In his sermon, the priest told a story about his family pet Winkie, a cat who “spent her whole life biting the hand that fed her” and whose litter-box motto was “Close Enough.” When Winkie died, the priest comforted his mother on the phone, saying, “She was a good kitty.” His mother replied, “No, she wasn’t. She was an awful kitty. But she was our kitty, and we loved her.”
With kids, we see them at their worst and keep loving them. They yell, “I hate you!” and you have to be the grown-up and say, “You’re mad. I still love you.”
When Oliver and I are quarreling, I still hug him good-bye when we get to the drop-off door at school. “Have a good day,” I say, kissing the hood of his puffy coat. Why is it so much easier to do this with children than with adults? At our worst, why can’t I just think of Neal as my sometimes-awful pet cat?
“From another a shrill of lamentation rang out filled with profane allusions to a general. Men ran hither and thither, seeking with their eyes roads of escape.”
But lo! Suddenly on the horizon, a cluster of businesses. At the blessed gas station, Neal pumped while I took Oliver to the bathroom. We used the drive-through of the nearby McDonald’s, and the GPS rerouted us so we only lost thirty minutes to this detour rather than the years I’d imagined.
In the audiobook, Henry Fleming picked up the flag and charged.
A couple of hours later, we pulled into Gettysburg’s Visitor Center, where kindly older gentlemen in ranger outfits kept handing Oliver playing cards of Civil War generals. “I got Meade and Lee!” he said ecstatically.
We watched the Visitor Center film, in which Sam Waterston does the voice of Lincoln and Morgan Freeman explains the political context of the Civil War. From old portraits, the wide, young eyes of soldiers stare out at you while the music swells, and if you don’t cry, you are a sociopath. By the end I wanted to sign up for jury duty, vote, and volunteer to be a foster parent.
Then we went into the Cyclorama. I thought that meant it was going to rotate, like a revolving restaurant, but no: we stood on a platform surrounded by what was at one time the world’s largest oil painting. The light changed, and spotlights plus a voiceover told the story of the Battle of Gettysburg. By chance, we were standing in the best spot, looking straight into the bank of trees from which would stream five thousand Confederate soldiers, and then twelve thousand more, in Pickett’s Charge. The Confederates would reach this copse of trees to our left, then climb over the stone wall right in front of us. It seemed impossible we would survive, but then three days passed and we were still there, and the enemy was running back into the woods.
“This is the best day of my life,” Oliver said as we exited the Cyclorama. “Can we go to the gift shop?”
My cousin Jeremy and I once went on a trip through historical Massachusetts with our mothers that we called the “Ye Olde Giftee Shoppe Tour.” We posed in front of every swinging wooden gift-shop sign with curlicued lettering we saw. We saw a lot of them.
At the Gettysburg gift shop, Oliver picked out a dark blue Union canteen, an Abraham Lincoln T-shirt, and a little bag of toy soldiers and plastic pieces that could be assembled into Meade’s headquarters. If he’d wanted a permanent Gettysburg tattoo, I would have let him get one of those, too.
That night Oliver arrayed his toy soldiers and wonky plastic house on the restaurant table while Neal and I drank wine and ate French fries. It was as pleasurable a meal as I’ve ever had, despite waiting half an hour for a table next to a shrieking baby.*
“We reach out for help at odd points; we bloom at unpredictable ones,” notes Frank Bruni, writing in support of long family vacations and the myth of preordained “quality time.” He adds, “The surest way to see the brightest colors, or the darkest ones, is to be watching and waiting and ready for them.”
The next morning, we drove the Union line and the Confederate line and climbed an observation tower that let us see Dwight Eisenhower’s old house and miles of battlefield. As we were getting into the car after descending, a man standing next to his motorcycle said to Oliver, “Nice canteen.”
“Thanks,” said Oliver.
“All I wanted when I was your age was a Confederate hat,” the man said.
“Oh, I have a Union hat and a Union jacket!” said Oliver. “But not the pants. No one has good pants.”
“Well, you have a great day, young man,” said the Confederate.
“I will,” said Oliver. �
��You too!”
On this patch of earth 152 years earlier, our two families would have battled to the death. Now we were smiling and wishing each other a good trip, admiring one another’s souvenirs.
At the end of the second day, we pulled into the parking lot of the Gettysburg cemetery and sat quietly, listening to the last section of The Red Badge of Courage. “He had rid himself of the red sickness of battle,” the speakers said. “The sultry nightmare was in the past . . .”
The reason we had such a terrible drive, I thought, was so we could have such a lovely trip. We could have stayed home. I’d wanted to. And we would have had a fine time. But how much better to have the infuriating low and exhilarating high. Neal made us do this; it was all his fault—and we had had one of the best times of our life.
“Are we going to get out of the car?” Oliver said after a minute of sitting there.
“Shhhh!” Neal and I said at once.
From the speakers: “He turned now with a lover’s thirst to images of tranquil skies, fresh meadows, cool brooks—an existence of soft and eternal peace. Over the river a golden ray of sun came through the hosts of leaden rain clouds.”
A bugle played from the speakers, and the book was over.
Neal turned off the car.
“Yes,” he said, “now we can get out.”
As we walked toward the final stop on the tour, the cemetery, Neal glowed with the setting sun. Here he was, a small-town southerner who—I realized, for the first time in our marriage—had converted for me, a Yankee so urbanized that growing up I’d thought sparrows were baby pigeons.
