Unraveling

by Owen Thomas

  Leonard had made the mistake of believing that his Jeffersonian-Easly pedigree was simply proof that he was destined to live up to the Walnut Hills High School motto – Sursum ad summum – which was Latin for Rise to the Highest. Leonard had not been a braggart, but neither was he inclined to hide from the fact of his connections. But rather than look reverently upon his family history, or even indifferently, Leonard’s peers had rather decidedly held those connections against him. The name Leonard had quickly become a nasal inflected Lennerd, and then simply Nerd. He had been beaten up twice in his sophomore year and once as a junior.

  None of these incidents inflicted any lasting physical damage, and all of them certainly would have occurred regardless of the name by which people knew him. But in Leonard’s mind, just as in Hollis’ memory, it was all about the name. Joining the swim team in his junior year had raised some eyebrows and even some respect when he had shown what he could do in the water at the State Championships. But such successes had occurred far too late to alter his identity. People had made up their minds about Leonard-Lennerd-Nerd. On the day of his graduation, as Leonard and Homer and MaryAnn listened to the Valedictorian address given by one of many students who had finished with a higher grade point average than his own, others were busy soaping the windows of his car – Thomas Jefferson was a Nerd!

  When he left home and moved away to the dormitories of the UNOH Fighting Dogstars, Leonard had started introducing himself to others by his middle name. Those who did not know him – which was most people – had no reason to think of him as anyone other than Hollis Johns. Those few students who did know him either had not associated with him or had quickly overcome their initial confusion and adapted. And soon, even for those people, he was just Hollis.

  Even his parents had accepted their son’s preference for the most part, although MaryAnn occasionally delighted in reminding him of his given name. To her, Hollis would always be Leonard, or – whenever she was particularly peeved and wished not only to control his name but also to revoke his identity as a mature adult – Leo.

  It had not been thirty seconds into Hollis’ tirade about the new furniture that he had known his mother would do whatever she wanted to do, even if it was in his own house and involved the co-opting of his own wife in his emasculation as a husband and provider. MaryAnn had called him Leonard to make a point: he was who he was, whether he liked that person or did not like that person. At that point in his life Hollis was a person without the resources to purchase a chair that was not filled with beans and wrapped in vinyl and, unless she wanted to sit on the floor in a pile of dried legumes, or sit at a card table or lie down in bed, his poor wife had no place to sit down and relax after standing all day at the blackboard. Hollis did not have to like that fact, but he did have to accept it. Just as he had to accept that his mother, unlike him, did have the resources to provide for his wife’s comfort and would do so no matter how much it might have wounded his pride. Had Hollis persisted in objecting, she would have progressed to calling him Leo. So he had stopped protesting and had wisely conceded the fight. MaryAnn had returned home the next day, kissing him on the cheek and leaving him with the humiliation of a well-furnished home and a comfortable wife.

  The house in Dayton was married in his memory to their only car of that era, a second-hand Volkswagen Beetle, baby blue with a large yellow daisy painted on the back. The car was technically Susan’s, a holdover from her last year of college – her parents had supplied the Beetle, Susan had supplied the daisy – and, like her income as a teacher, it was reliable but very, very small.

  It was Hollis, however, who drove the Beetle during their years in Dayton because it was Hollis who needed to be mobile in order to fulfill the demands of his profession. One simply did not take a bus to meet the prospective buyers of a brand new thirty thousand dollar home. Such did not inspire confidence; it may as well have been a rule tested on the Ohio real estate exam. True, it was scarcely more inspiring – and perhaps less inspiring – to rattle up the driveway in a baby-blue, daisy-emblazoned Beetle that was so small relative to the shoulder girth of the driver as to conjure images of clowns disembarking beneath the big top. But, as Homer would say, one makes do in life as best one can. Hollis made do by always arriving early and parking a block away.

  Hollis found his parents’ decision to purchase him a house rather than a second car fairly inexplicable, but hardly something he could have complained about. The opportunity had quite naturally presented itself when the white 1962 Plymouth Valiant he had driven all through college disappeared one night from its usual spot in the Kent State Visitor lot about a block from Susan’s dormitory. MaryAnn, who had given him the Valiant after high school, might have sprung for a new car. But Hollis could almost hear his father lecturing his mother: Just leave it be MaryAnn. Christ Almighty, you’ve got a tit made of pure silver but you will ruin him. Mark my words. Like you have ruined me. Let the boy make his own way in the world. Takin’ the bus will do him some good.

  Whatever the reason, MaryAnn had apparently concluded that one free car was enough and she was ready to move on to real estate. The theft of the Valiant had produced sympathy and even some vicarious outrage, but no replacement. He might have asked his parents for a loan, but Hollis was, after all, the son of Homer, and he had an uncommon need to believe in his own self-sufficiency.

  The privilege of driving Daisy – against Hollis’ best efforts, Susan’s pet name for her car had survived the nuptials and the changing of her own name – came with the regular responsibility of dropping Susan off at her school in the morning, and picking her up in the afternoon. Hollis did so unfailingly and without complaint. He was almost always early at both ends of the day. He had resolved early on that he would not be one of those husbands a wife was able to use as an excuse for being late or for having a messy home or other perceived domestic shortcomings. Theirs was a partnership and he was a full participant. Dinner might be late to the table, but not because Hollis had failed to pick up the groceries on the way home. If they were surprised by visiting family or friends, any discomfort at the state of their home would not be due to a failure on Hollis’ part to keep his clothes picked up, his dishes in the sink and the lawn mowed. Hollis would, by God, keep up his end of things. He would not be Susan’s burden or her excuse.

  Not that Susan needed excuses. For while she was far more relaxed than Hollis about social perceptions and the general notion of domestic obligation, she had always carried her own water. She took pride in their marriage and in the life they made. What was important to Hollis was, naturally and without reservation, important to Susan. She worked hard not just on her own priorities – chief among them the teaching of a new generation of Aquarians and volunteering at the Dayton County Pioneers Home – but also on his priorities, which included some regular demonstration to the world that he and his comely bride were exemplifying, rather than simply living, the American dream as two physically beautiful specimens bound by a common albeit distant destiny of obscene wealth and enviable perfection in every way. That was Hollis’ priority.

  That, and learning the guitar.

  Any instrument might have done, but the guitar seemed particularly well-suited to his life plan. Their life plan. More affordable than a piano. Easier to learn than a violin. More substantial than a flute. It was an instrument that was easy to pick up in a casual way, playing a few riffs as the dinner guests wander back into the living room with their after-dinner cocktails and speculate about what mood the market will be in next week. They would probably ask whether Hollis had any worries about his portfolio, or about whether Ohio real estate values were due for an adjustment, and he would simply smile and shake his head and play the notes of his unconcern.

  That was how he saw himself.

  And he could imagine that then Susan would appear with offers of dessert and coffee and then someone in a suit would ask if she plays as well as her husband and they would both look at each other and laugh and she would take off
her rings and she would play something Spanish and their guests would all smile and look at each other and shake their heads as if to say I should have known. For Hollis and Susan were just the kind of people, and theirs was just the kind of marriage, that one might easily expect to produce prodigious wealth and impressive talent under the same massive roof.

  A credible soulful flourish on a well-worn, six-string acoustic, Hollis believed, would tend to soften the sharper edges of financial achievement. An outlet for artistic expression would help guard against the garishness and shallow sensibility that came with the kind of success he courted and to which he believed they were destined. Hollis believed that it was always the extracurricular pursuits – music, the arts, athletics, spirituality, philosophy and casual command of the esoteric – that tended to make a person interesting. Worth remembering. Such endeavors were steps along the path to personal deepening. Deepening. It was the same natural process of maturation and enrichment and mounting complexity that pulled thin alpine streams to the sea, and that coaxed high adolescent voices into the chest, and that gave body and gravitas to young, freshly corked wines. The deepening was gravitational. Directional. Spiritual.

  Of course, artistic expression without artistic ability was out of the question. Embarrassment was not part of the plan, nor was pretension. The image in Hollis’ head was not to be confused with the wandering musical posers that had over-populated their college years. It was a genuine, finely honed talent he had in mind. Proficiency was key. It would take practice and lots of it. But he could do that. They could do that. They were young and determined and neither of them shied away from a challenge. If they simply practiced, if they devoted enough hours to sitting cross-legged in front of each other mastering chord progressions and pick patterns, they would learn and, with time, their improvement would build on itself and would grow exponentially. It was an investment worth making; an investment in him and in her and in them.

  For their first married Christmas together, Hollis purchased matching second-hand flattop Guild Acoustic six-string guitars and a tattered Simon and Garfunkel Songbook. He signed them up for weekly lessons on Sundays at the First Methodist Church that was within walking distance of the house and they attended without fail. They practiced for an hour and a half in the evenings, after Susan had cleaned and stacked the dishes and after Hollis had taken out the trash and before they both had gone to bed to make music of a different kind and to talk in whispers about the dream of children and what they would name the babies when they came. If a boy, then he voted for Benjamin, after his grandfather, Benjamin Easly, a man of fortitude, wealth, power and great intelligence. She voted for David, ostensibly after the statue, but more likely, Hollis suspected, after David Crosby whom Susan had been known to openly and ardently admire when she was young and stoned and awash in Aquarian groupies.

  If a girl, then Susan liked Matilda, after her great-grandmother. Matilda Leona was a woman of uncommon beauty who had broken every rule of God, country and family by walking out of an all but arranged marriage and a mysteriously burning Barcelona home, smuggling herself to America, and after many years of notorious independence as a teacher and a writer of women’s stories, marrying a German born farmer twice her age growing corn and potatoes in Southern Indiana. Hollis favored the name Cecelia because he liked the sound of it and because it was the first Simon and Garfunkel song he learned to play recognizably.

  Although Susan had endured enough bad guitar on the lawns of Kent State to last a lifetime, she had agreeably indulged her husband’s musical ambition. The truth was, she was as helpless as anyone else to resist the enthusiasm that Hollis had for being Hollis, which accounted for more than one-half of their marital union. So she had practiced with him, night after night, he singing, she strumming, him picking her humming, until their fingertips were callused and hard and they had tortured The Sound of Silence and American Tune into rhyming, atonal confessions of a grave and earnest sin, the lyrics coming like sorrowful, broken, halting pleas, begging to disassociate themselves from the clamoring strings.

  Although learning the guitar had never been Susan’s personal priority, it was a priority for Hollis that became, by extension, a priority of the marital union and, by extension once again, a personal priority of her own as a member of that union. That, as they say, was marriage, and Susan was a team player. She had taken to the instrument with gusto, soon surpassing Hollis in ability and, ultimately, in enthusiasm. Before Hollis’ guitar was completely edged out of the living room and into the closet by his sudden and consuming passion for the more solitary artistry of darkroom photography, Susan had worked her way through Simon and Garfunkel and was tackling Neil Young.

  Susan’s natural inclination to support the team, however, did not relegate her identity or esteem to the ranks of second-class membership. She had retained her feminist ideals. Of all the causes that had animated her college years, the fundamental equality of the sexes remained close to the core of her self-definition. The other passions in her life as a student radical, while never openly disavowed, tended to desiccate over time and fall away from lack of attention, except, notably, her former interest in all injustices having to do with American foreign policy, which had not faded away over time.

  Instead, the Ohio National Guard had retired those particular passions rather abruptly. After that terrible day, she stopped talking about Viet Nam and Cambodia altogether. Not because she had come around to Hollis’ view of international politics, certainly not that, but rather because some combination of fear and psychological trauma and pain had kept her from picking up that particular banner. Out of respect and understanding – for he had been with her on that day – Hollis had generally let those issues go and did not spar with her on such matters.

  But Susan’s belief in equality between the genders stuck with her. The cause of women remained a flashpoint for her anger and her occasionally grandiloquent indignation as they read the Sunday newspaper or drove to the market or walked to their guitar lessons.

  “If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us, Hollis, if you suppress our wages and restrict our access to property and power, do we not bear your children and cook your meals and tend slavishly to the almighty appendage?”

  She did not, he knew, mean to implicate him personally in these tirades against his gender. He was not the enemy or a part of the problem. He knew that.

  It helped to understand that Susan had a natural passion for reform. She saw herself as an agent of change. She needed to vent her anger. To rail. To be contrary. Emotion was part and parcel of what she had to say. She needed to believe that she knew what was best and what was wrong and why things were the way they were. And all of that meant that he, Hollis, needed to let her have what she needed. He needed to be tolerant. He needed to listen and nod and to offer words of vague encouragement. Yes, and I agree, and Of course were usually his friends, at least if she did not choose to follow up. Sometimes a simple MmmHmm was all it took.

  “They will bar the gates, Hollis,” she had said of Shirley Chisholm one day from the bathroom as he was sitting on the bed pulling on his socks. “You mark my words. The party will block her way like she has the plague. And do you know why?”

  Hollis had not answered her, partly because the subject was wearing thin and partly because he knew that an answer on this issue was really just a form of conversational punctuation allowing her to refill her lungs with oxygen. She had appeared in the doorway in her slip, braless, her breasts like large, perfect apples covered in fresh snow, and had pointed a foamy toothbrush at him accusingly.

  “I’ll tell you why. It’s not because she’s Black. It’s because she’s a woman. This country will elect a Black man long before it elects a woman of any race.”

  He had looked up attentively, or so he thought.

  “It’s true Hollis. Don’t roll your eyes. It’s true. She has more courage and integrity and passion to really c
hange this county than any of those yahoos. McCarthy? George Wallace? Edmund Muskie for Chissakes?”

  Hollis knew better than to toss Dick Nixon into the conversation, so instead he had pulled on his other sock and nodded.

  “But it will never happen. She will go down in flames because this country cannot stomach the very idea of a woman who is capable of leading men. The Joint Chiefs saluting a broad. That’s the deal breaker right there. This country could more easily see a Martian in the White House than a woman. A Martian with a penis!”

  Hollis’ contribution had been to seriously doubt Martians actually had penises.

  “Then they’re out too!” she had responded, storming back into the bathroom. “No penis? Too much like a woman! No job for you! Vote McGovern! He has a goddamned penis!”

  Despite her pessimism, Susan was a tireless supporter of Shirley Chisholm’s bid for the history books. It was not difficult for her to reactivate the network of friendships she had forged at Kent State and had loosely maintained since graduating. They were a group of fifteen almost instantly, swelling to over forty within a month or two of effort. They wrote to the Chisholm campaign and received position statements and boxes of buttons and posters that boldly announced things like Catalyst for Change, and Chisholm – Ready or Not, and Ms. Chis for Pres. They all joined the National Women’s Political Caucus and spent hours every other weekend canvassing neighborhoods in Dayton and Toledo and Cincinnati and Columbus and Cleveland and hosting discussions on the need for an Equal Rights Amendment and a path to the Holy Grail of a Madam President. There were burnt offerings for Bella Abzug and Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem.

  When it was Susan’s turn to host, Hollis did what he could to help with the preparations – mainly cutting the grass and picking up the house and bringing the extra patio chairs out of storage and making sure the liquor was sufficiently stocked – but then he tried to make himself scarce after Susan’s friends arrived.