Bootstrapper

by Mardi Jo Link

  And I can’t believe I’m actually stuck in my own driveway, because just think of the good luck that has gotten me this far. It has taken the hands of fate striking the hour of destiny on the solar system’s great cosmic clock, what with the calling of the radio station and the winning of the tickets and the asking of the man. And now I’m going to be felled by something as pedestrian as the weather? I don’t think so.

  Maybe I am this excited about the prospect of being out on a date with Pete. But maybe I just want to be a girl again for one night. Please, God, let me do that one little thing. Then I’ll go back to being a broke, single, underemployed, man-hating mom. A statistic. But just for one night I’d really like to dance and listen to live music and drink and have some actual fun with another adult. A male adult.

  I thought I’d followed all of the intricate steps necessary, in their proper order, to make this spontaneous moment happen. Now this.

  I look up, as if by some miracle of spiritual physics my frustration could penetrate Cookie’s roof, and say a prayer. Sir or Madam, I mouth to the concave brown Naugahyde upholstery overhead, and whatever, whoever, is beyond it. Please let me get out of my driveway. Please. Because do you really think men like Pete are a common occurrence? Do you really think you scattered them all over your frozen creation down here like pinecones or something?

  And then I gun the engine. And maybe I gun it again, putting both feet on the accelerator this time, just for that teensy-weensy bit of emphasis.

  Cookie’s roof says nothing in return, but her front tires respond to the accelerator accordingly. They grind themselves deeper into the drift until her wheel wells are packed with snow and the sickening, ratcheting, wind-up sound of rubber on ice reverberates through the cold.

  It takes me almost half an hour of working with the snow shovel and the pointed spade I fetch from the recesses of my garden shed to get free. I arrive at the nightclub Streeter’s and park what seems like miles away from the door because I’m so late and the place is so packed that it’s the only spot I can find. After a trudge across the frozen tundra of the parking lot, I am sweating mascara and my hair looks like I did the Polar Plunge into a pool of slush.

  How do other single people manage? Is a date really worth all this trouble? This is what I’m thinking when I see Pete, standing in the crowd that is milling around outside, and he is smiling my way.

  “Wow, you look great!” he says, actually seeming to mean it. Which indicates one of two things: he is either legally blind and has failed to mention it, or he likes me as much as I like him and so doesn’t even register that I look like, and have the disposition of, a drowned blond wolverine.

  And then we are inside, and even though it’s open admission Pete scores us two great seats on the mezzanine that circles the dance floor, and Uncle Kracker comes onstage, and he’s smiling and good-looking, and he starts to sing and his band sounds great.

  After a few songs I see the real-estate agent who sold me my farm and she walks up to my seat and tries to pull me onto the dance floor and Pete motions to go ahead, he will save our seats. He will keep an eye on Ugly Brown because I am all camisole now, all faded jeans and vodka.

  I’m dancing with a circle of women, some I know but most I don’t, but it doesn’t matter that my feet are still squishing inside my snow-soaked boots, because we are women without a worry or a care, all grinning one big grin. Yes, I think, feeling a carefree sense of well-being I’d forgotten was possible, it is worth it. Just to feel like this for a couple hours, it’s worth the slush and the wind and the rubber bands.

  Uncle Kracker is singing that everything is going to be all right and I want to believe him and he crouches at the edge of the stage and points down into the crowd for a minute and seems to point right at me. I look around, to either side of me, to the dancing women nearest me, and he laughs into the microphone while he’s singing and points at me again.

  My real-estate agent and her friends see this and simultaneously release the universal rowdy-woman-pack cry “Woo-hoo!” into the night and we keep dancing and she leans in and shouts in my ear, “Cracker!”

  The intimation is, of course, that you have to be a huckle-berryish, brassy country girl like me to attract the attention of a rocker named Uncle Kracker. For once my overly sensitive and politically correct self isn’t even offended.

  Next Pete and I dance to a slow song and his arms around me are plenty tight but they feel more like support than restraint and I’m not absolutely sure but I don’t think that’s the third vodka talking. Back at our seats, the looming real world creeps in as the alcohol wears off and I get quiet thinking about the week ahead.

  My divorce hearing, by my rough calculations, is scheduled for forty hours from now.

  The music is blasting as the band plays their last few songs so I think my mood blends in. I think that no one notices that the woman who was dancing and laughing earlier is sitting down and is quiet and moody now.

  Pete touches my arm, though, wondering. “Everything okay?”

  I look at him and start to smile, and start to yell, “Everything’s great, everything’s cool,” but then I see his green eyes and that inquiring frown and feel the squeeze of his cabinetmaker’s hand on my wrist and so for some reason instead, I just tell him the truth. Actually, I yell him the truth. As loud as I can, so I can be sure he’ll hear me over the music.

  “My divorce hearing is Monday!” I holler.

  The band decides this is the exact second that their show is over and their song ends, and before most of the applause can erupt, my announcement reverberates across our section of the mezzanine. People turn and look at us, then laugh behind their hands, and I am mortified. What made me think I could date?

  Pete says nothing, but his jaw goes a little slack in what I think is surprise and what I really hope is not embarrassment to be seen here with me.

  “Let’s go,” he says, and with him leading and holding my hand we weave our way through the crowd and out into the parking lot. We walk between the parked cars in the general direction of my truck, not really in any hurry despite the cold.

  “Hey, I want to show you something,” he says, his voice low. “What do you think?” He gestures toward an old pickup truck we’re now standing next to. I give it the once-over and see that it is a sibling or at least a first cousin of Cookie, except that it’s all white instead of two-tone brown.

  “Of what?” I say.

  “Of the truck,” he says.

  His regular ride is a royal-blue pickup, a newish one with cloth seats that he keeps scrupulously clean and waxed year-round. He also owns a plow truck and has told me all about the classic Mercury Comet he’s restoring. This white junker he’s pointing to is a little rusty, a little raggedy, and old.

  “I just bought it this week,” he says, listing all of the work it needs—brakes, a new hood, new ball joints (whatever those are)—as if these are all valuable attributes. There’s even a crack running halfway across the bottom of the windshield. This truck is what we call a “winter beater”—a cheap but tough vehicle you drive in the winter because you don’t care if it gets beat up by salt, snow, ice, bad drivers, snowplows, or suicidal deer.

  “Guess what I named it?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Cracker,” he says, nodding in emphasis, as if this should please me. Maybe the name is in homage to the singer we just listened to, but I don’t think so, and he has to explain the name to me.

  “It’s the same make and year as your truck. You’ve got Cookie and now I’ve got Cracker. You’re the writer. I figured you might appreciate the irony.” This last word he enunciates as if it is on a vocabulary list and he has to use it in a sentence in order to get the extra credit.

  “Are you making fun of me?” I ask, smiling now.

  “Nope,” he answers, deadpan, “but it didn’t hurt to ask.”

  And that’s how our meet-up, half date ends. Cookie and Cracker head off into the blowing and drifting win
ter night in two different directions. No kiss, no plans to see each other again, just a shared automotive bond—something, despite being born in the Motor City and spending the majority of my life in the most car-saturated state in the country, I’ve never experienced before.

  The next morning my sons come back home, making the hundred-yard trek across the road, back to the Big Valley and up our plowed driveway right at noon. I’m a mother again, not a nightclub cracker, but I notice that the snowdrifts that were in my driveway are gone, the passage is clear now and lined with drag marks from a plow truck. Pete must have been here, plowed, and left before I even woke up. I can’t think of anyone else who would plow my driveway without being asked. Or paid.

  The boys are accompanied by their father, who shuffles along with them from his little rented place across the road, but only as far as the middle of my driveway, and then his shoulders slump and he turns back. I watch through the living room window as my beloveds walk these last steps alone: three refugees from the divorce war, trudging through the snow, returning to their frozen homeland.

  I wonder what their father’s house looks like on the inside, how the furniture, art, and the lamps we picked out together look arranged his way now, and in a whole new place. I’d like to know, but he has never invited me in to see. Not that that’s enough to keep me out.

  Because the next time I go to pick up the boys, Mr. Wonderful is not at home, and I’m invited inside the strange place by my sons and seize the opportunity to creep through the rooms like a burglar, noting the clean kitchen, the neatly folded laundry, and the dust-free bookshelves. In the midst of leaving us, Mr. Wonderful has somehow managed to make his emergency domicile, in a word, cozy, and it pisses me off.

  Instead of being happy my sons have a nice place to share “parenting time” with their father, I’m disappointed that he’s not suffering more. Guilt over this toxic feeling and the others I bear him will creep forward through the years like something darkly contaminated. It’s sickening, and yet I can’t stop myself from feeling it.

  On the Monday morning after my date with Pete I gather the boys together at the kitchen counter. It is early, maybe 6:00, 6:15 a.m. Weekday mornings require split-second timing. There’s homework to be checked, permission slips to be signed, string instruments for orchestra class to make sure are in their cases, and growing bodies to get bundled up and off to school. To accomplish this, I’m still getting up by five and they follow at six.

  “Family meeting,” I announce, and they groan but assemble dutifully at the kitchen counter and look at me with dread. In their experience, a family meeting is usually just an opportunity for additional chores to be meted out. To them, by me.

  I’ve used family meetings to make weekly bathroom-cleaning assignments (three bathrooms, three boys: this is the kind of math I can handle), unveil a weekly chore chart, and give them snow-shoveling assignments. The agenda for this morning’s meeting, however, has only one item on it and does not involve physical labor.

  I’m dreading this conversation, and the four cups of coffee I’ve already downed, doubling my usual intake, are not helping. Silence engulfs the kitchen, penetrated only by the sound of my own leg’s uncontrollable jiggling.

  I take a deep breath, let it out, then inhale again. I try a simple mantra from my recent efforts at meditation. Breathing in long, she discerns that she is breathing in long. Breathing out long, she discerns that she is breathing out long.

  “Um, okay,” I say, taking in another breath, then exhaling again. “Well. So. Today is kind of a sad but important day.”

  Three sets of eyes stare right into mine, interested now despite the early hour. I don’t do hesitancy, ever, at least not in front of them.

  Breathe in, exhale.

  If there were a Mardi mantra, it would go something like this: Get on with it, you gutless wonder. Rip off that Band-Aid. Repeat as necessary. But after another breath, I just blurt it out.

  “Today is the divorce hearing. Today I’ll go in front of a judge and he’ll sign some papers from the lawyers and it will make everything official. After today, your dad and I won’t be married anymore. We’ll still be your parents, but we’ll be divorced.”

  And then I do exactly what you’re not supposed to do during meditation; I brace myself and hold my breath. I don’t know what kind of reaction I’m expecting from them, but the boys just look at me for a moment, blink, and say nothing.

  “Do you want to ask me anything about it?” I prompt.

  Whatever sting I’ve expected is not forthcoming, though, and so instead of feeling relieved, I know right down to my anxious core that I deserve their wrath, their anger, or at least their disappointment in me, and I even have some pathological need to receive it.

  Since not one of them offers this up freely, or immediately, I do my best to pry it out of them.

  “Do you want to share how you feel?” I ask.

  I am not unrewarded for my efforts this time. Owen stands up, shoves his stool in, and stomps upstairs.

  “If you guys cared about your kids you wouldn’t be doing this!” he shouts.

  Luke follows quickly behind, his slim form soundless on the stairs next to Owen’s pounding, not looking at me and saying nothing. He is the middle child off to do what he does best, make peace.

  Will remains at the counter, frowning. I know this look. It’s not an angry frown, it’s an inquiring frown, a frown that means he’s trying to figure something out.

  “Mom?” he asks finally, lifting his head from where he’s been resting it on his crossed arms. “Does everybody get their own lawyer when they’re born? ’Cause I don’t know who mine is, and what happens if I need ’im?”

  He thinks that a conflict like the one between his father and me is a foregone conclusion. That this is what’s in store for him: You grow up, you get married, you lawyer up, you get divorced.

  If I had been standing, this lob of friendly fire would have cut me clean in half, but I’m sitting on an upholstered chrome counter stool directly across from him, trying to breathe, my midsection protected by kitchen cabinets.

  “Lawyer is a job,” I tell him, exhaling in a voice as even as I can make it. “Just like teacher or bus driver.”

  “Ohhhh,” he says, and as this new concept crystalizes, the frown disappears.

  “And if you play your cards right, maybe you won’t ever need one.”

  “Well,” he says, grabbing the strap of his backpack, “I only know Go Fish and Concentration, but Big Grandpa said he was going to teach me solitaire.”

  “Not with a Club, the Heart is broken / Nor with a Stone,” Emily Dickinson wrote, “A Whip so small you could not see it / I’ve known.”

  Monday afternoon my whipped heart and I sit inside a courtroom at the Grand Traverse County Courthouse and I don’t even bother and try to breathe. This is the moment I’ve been alternately wishing for and dreading for the last nine months.

  My divorce lawyer is going over some paperwork with me. We’re sitting at the back of the courtroom on a long wooden bench that resembles a church pew while up front the judge dispenses with the ruins of another woman’s marriage. She is eighty years old if she’s a day. At least I’m not her.

  And then it’s my turn, and the temporary custody arrangement Mr. Wonderful and I have been observing these last six months is made official and our possessions are divided. The one wrinkle is that my main form of transportation, our green minivan, will go to him. I’ll be left with just the farm truck, which has only three seat belts, but I’ll worry about that later. The good news is that I still have a shot at owning the Big Valley.

  The judge gives me ninety days to refinance the farm in my name only. If I can’t find a bank loony enough to lend me the money, I’ll have to sell it, but this is not even an option in my world. Approaching a loan shark is an option. Joining a multilevel marketing scheme is an option. Selling twigs and berries on the Internet is an option. Ding-dong-Avon-calling is an option. My sons and I li
ving anywhere but in our farmhouse together is not going to happen. I will find the money.

  I wait for the gavel strike, but that is just a symptom of watching too many episodes of Law & Order. It never comes. Instead, the judge lifts his head from behind a stack of paperwork and takes off his Clark Kent–style eyeglasses.

  “Good luck to you, miss,” he says. It is only five words but he means them. Regardless of how many women he said these words to yesterday, or will say them to tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after that, when he says them to me I can tell he really means them.

  It’s the purely nicest thing a complete stranger will say to me all day, and maybe ever. He is not Clark Kent after all, he is Superman, his black robe a cape. That I feel such a huge pulse of gratitude for this small kindness only illustrates how alone I really am.

  Exactly three months shy of my twentieth wedding anniversary, my marriage is severed.

  Outside the courtroom I am heading for the stairway and home when I hear a familiar voice. It’s coming from way down the hall and it rises above all the other voices in this high-ceilinged space and somehow cuts straight through the crowd and directly to my ear.

  I like this voice, but wonder if it is an auditory mirage. Because it’s Pete’s voice I hear. And what would he be doing here?

  “What are you doing here?” I ask him. He sees me but his smile doesn’t disappear, it just grows wider as he lowers his head a little and shakes it slowly back and forth.

  “My divorce,” he answers.

  “What?” I ask.

  “My divorce is today, too. Right now. Any minute, actually.”

  I had been paying at least some attention to the woman whose divorce was immediately before mine, but haven’t given one thought to whose divorce would come afterward. Strangely, this is like my fear of death, but in reverse. I worry about what will happen to my soul after I die, but give little thought to what it was doing before I was born.

  On the wall is a locked document case that displays the day’s courtroom schedule. Pete points at it. With my index finger leaving a sweaty, snail-like smear on the glass, I run down the day. There’s “Mardi Jo Link vs. Mr. Wonderful,” and right below it, “Pete vs. Mrs. Pete.”