by Ben Schrank
“What’s that to you?” the father asked.
“I’ll leave if that’s what you’d like me to do.”
“Johnny came to you about our problems?” It was the wife talking now.
“He did.”
“That’s bad,” the wife said.
“He ought to know better,” the father said, roughly.
But the wife must have cut him off. She said, “Maybe we should thank him. Here’s a chance to talk and I’m going to take it. We ought to have it out. I will tell you what’s the matter. My husband here, he tells me everything I do is wrong. Not just one thing or another, either. Every single goddamned thing! How I cook peas to the way I make beds to the style I like for my hair, to—the way I sneeze! Can you imagine? Can you imagine the life I’m having to live here with this man? And now you—you come in my home, uninvited, and you say—well—what have you got to say about it?”
There was a silence. I dared not look at Johnny.
“Is that fair, what Annie said?” my Pop asked. “May I call you Annie? And you’re John Senior, aren’t you?” We heard the sound of Johnny’s father quietly shifting, twisting around.
“Yes. It’s fair. I’m not happy.”
There was a stirring across from me and I looked up to watch Johnny do just what I would have done, what I had done only weeks earlier in my bedroom back home in Manhattan, which was to shove his glove into his mouth and bite down hard on the leather, taste the oil and salt and dirt. I knew he would chew and rip at the catgut twine that held everything together, just like I had. The taste of a baseball glove was like yesterday’s roast beef or three-day-old brisket. But you couldn’t eat it. You could only bite down and taste the oil seeping out.
“How serious is it?” Pop asked. “Is he violent with you?”
“It gets close. John, you’re not happy. Are you going to stay?” Annie asked.
“Yes,” John Senior said. “I don’t want to leave.”
“You threaten to leave all the time. You threaten me.”
“It’s words. I’m ashamed of them.”
“You can’t take all the blame,” Annie said, and I could hear the shudder in her voice.
“That’s all right if he does,” my Pop said. “It sounds like he knows he’s in the wrong. He can shoulder it for tonight, maybe for the summer. For as long as it takes. He looks able to do that.”
“Hank is right. I can. Annie, when I’m critical of you, when I tell you you ought to do things different, well, you can just send me right out of the house.”
“Easy for you two to say! But in the moment it’s not so easy.”
“At least it’s on the table,” Pop said.
“There is that,” Annie said.
“You two love your boy. I know there’s a girl upstairs sleeping. And I can see you’ve got another on the way.”
Johnny’s dad made an ahem noise.
“Listen, you know where me and my wife, Bess, live. How about if you all come to our house on Sunday after lunch. We’ve got an extra canoe and you and your children can go out for a paddle and we’ll take our grandson in the other canoe. In the evening, we’ll have fried chicken. We can set up a table for the children and one for us adults. And we four can talk and you can maybe bring a little lightness and gaiety into the lives of a couple of old folks.”
“You’re not old,” Annie said.
“We don’t mind being old. You won’t either, but that’s not a concern for a long time to come.”
We could hear a shifting, of the three of them getting up from their chairs. Without saying a word, both of us scrambled up and raced to the edge of their front yard and somehow we knew to lie there in the grass, our gloves thrown down at our sides, as if we’d gotten tired of playing catch and had decided to stare at the stars. Though the night sky was cloudy and there were none to see.
“Come on now, Peter,” Pop said. “Let’s go home. And you, Johnny, I believe we’ll be seeing you at our house this Sunday.”
“Yes, sir.”
Johnny ran up and into his house without saying goodbye to me. We made our way down the street.
“Doesn’t look like there’s much of a moon tonight. Bess will be waiting. Maybe with some cobbler if we’re lucky. Sometimes, you know, you get to have what you want and you get to be what you want to be.”
“Always?” I asked.
Pop grew quiet as he pondered the question. We were walking along a town road, as opposed to the country road we lived on, which was farther out and down the hill from where we were. Those houses by the water were our world and we were away from there.
“I said sometimes. Not always.”
Bang went his hand on my head and then he gripped my shoulder and then down, roughly grabbing up my hand and holding it in his own cool, callused one as we crossed the road and made our way home, just ten minutes farther along. We walked carefully, since those massive steel Pontiacs and Fords kept on rumbling by us in ones and twos on that moonless night.
“You listened to us talking?”
“Well … yes.”
“Sometimes people need a little help. There’s nothing wrong with that. Bess? Bess!” He called out to his wife from fifty yards away. Darn the neighbors!
“Yes, yes, hurry before the storms come.”
My Pop chuckled and gripped my hand tighter. This was a joke between them. The still night held no hint of a storm.
It was nearly nine. Late for us. We ate a dinner of turkey slices with gravy, green wax beans, and homemade sourdough bread. For dessert there really was cobbler, two kinds, peach and rhubarb, with vanilla and strawberry ice cream.
I went into the living room to read Tales of King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table while Pop told Bess all that had happened at Johnny’s house.
I heard her say, “You’re tired. Go out and have a smoke on the porch while I clean up these dishes.”
“Bess, you’re the best…,” he said.
I watched him go outside to smoke the peat and green tobacco that he mixed himself and then tamped down in a cobalt-colored scrimshaw pipe. He liked to sit on the back porch on a hard chair, leaning against the side of the house, the front legs two inches off the floor. I remember he’d told me that he loved to smoke and listen to the bullfrogs croaking at the edges of the lake.
There’s nothing wrong with asking for help with your marriage.
Emily, October 21, 2011
Emily sent her contest entry in via e-mail before departing for work on Friday morning.
From: Emily Babson
Date: Friday, Oct 21, 2011 at 8:48 EDT
To: Marriage Contest
Subject: Could this be the winning entry?
Dear Peter Herman,
I learned about Marriage Is a Canoe when I was eleven years old. Your book lived in the bathroom off my parents’ bedroom, on top of the water tank, between copies of The Bonfire of the Vanities and The Closing of the American Mind. Most kids my age were reading either Judy Blume or Anne of Green Gables, but I’d discovered my parents’ bathroom collection. There were too many weekends when I read in that bathroom with the door locked while my parents fought, before they came to their senses and divorced. Your book was my favorite and I read it over and over again like only an eleven-year-old can.
During what would now be called my tween years, I went to sleep each night with my hands balled up in fists, determined to ignore the misery in my house and to grow up and have a happy life like your grandparents had. I imagined marrying a boy who liked to kiss and walk in fields and think about the world he lived in, a boy just like you were in that book, because you embodied a joyful and thoughtful way to live that was beyond my parents’ grasp.
I was a quiet and judgmental child, and I regret that now. But I wasn’t wrong. I tried to turn my back on my parents’ failed marriage and to make Canoe become part of me. I believed that if I read it enough times, I could join
its club, like the Christian kids I knew who were jealous of bar mitzvahs and went to every single one in our town. I know I’m not alone. I am sure there are many people my age who read Canoe surreptitiously, alongside Our Bodies, Ourselves and The Joy of Sex. We feel like we know how to be happily married not because of what we saw when we were children but because of what we read in your book. But I have no interest in making a generational declaration. This is my contest entry, and I want to win. I loved your book then and I used it to guide myself into the life I live now. If it weren’t for your book I’m not sure I would have gotten married. I would not have taken the chance, after seeing what I saw at home. So, instead of the lives I’ve seen, your book has become the bedrock of my faith in marriage.
Sure, writing to you is a long shot. This letter is silly and so am I. But it’s so silly that it’s liberating. I don’t feel bashful or ashamed. I am grateful to be able to write to the man who made me believe that married life can be fantastic. And a little part of me hopes he can help fix my married life, which started out as pure bliss and has now descended into an anxious state, an imperiled state that lacks trust.
My husband, Eli, and I have been married for almost three years and you could say we have hit a rough patch. Eli cheated on me. He became entangled in a romance with a woman who works at the company he owns. He tells me it’s over. I want to believe him. Despite this recent transgression, I am in love with Eli and I think he has it in him to be a good husband. He is also charming and attractive, to the point where these parts of him could be called a disability. Women used to throw themselves at him when we were dating. And I understood women would continue to do so after we married. I am not naive. But I also knew Eli was good for me. I am a habitually shy person and Eli is gregarious. He has friends who call him out of the blue, who just want to see him. I don’t. If it weren’t for Eli, I would spend all my time either at work or thinking about work at home. He makes me feel like a whole person. Without him, I would be lost and forever fretful, like the new kid at school.
Up to now I’ve been very good at not overanalyzing my personal life. But I have come to suspect that I have been lazy about love. Now I’m paying for it. So I am ready for an enlightening conversation about what we may and may not ask of love and marriage. I never imagined that I might meet the man who wrote the book that saved me when I was a girl. And now I feel that nothing could be more important than to sit for a few hours with you and my husband and talk things over.
Sincerely, and with many thanks for your kind consideration,
Emily Babson
PS: I just reread this and apologize for the gravity. I’m not usually so grim.
PPS: I trust you won’t share this e-mail with anybody without my consent.
Stella, November 2011
Stella was in a cover meeting with the art department that was not going well at all. They were in Horatio Alger—one of the better conference rooms because it had windows. And Stella had enjoyed good results there before. But somehow this time she could get nothing from the art people, from Angela and Bobby and their director, Julie, who was invariably in a shitty mood because of a divorce that had been dragging on for more than a year. The haggling over the settlement was forcing Julie to be very careful with money, so she had to stay home in Tarrytown with her kids most nights and this made it near-impossible to date. Stella knew all this about Julie because she commiserated with her in the halls and the bathroom. And though Stella wished that listening to Julie would translate to an easier working relationship, it seemed to have the opposite effect. Poor Angela and Bobby weren’t even allowed to show their comps.
They were supposed to be discussing the cover for a nonfiction book about the new slow-growth happiness model for life by a Toronto Sun reporter that Stella had bought in a little auction six months earlier.
“It needs to feel light,” Stella said. “But at the same time very smart.”
“The whole book does?” Julie asked.
“Well, yes.” Stella smiled and raised her eyebrows, thinking, I am the sun and I bestow brightness and light. “The whole package, you know.”
Julie massaged the jade bracelets on her right wrist and stared out the window. Angela and Bobby had images turned facedown on the table. Stella yearned to turn the color printouts over but she was afraid of Julie, who was well past forty and secure enough at Ladder & Rake to feel free to yell at Stella if she dared get between her and her direct reports.
Julie took a deep breath and said, “Stella, we hear you and we do have some ideas, but first you really need to be more—”
The door to the conference room opened and Lucy Brodsky stepped in. Everybody went stiff and then just as quickly pretended not to.
“We were just—” Julie paused and waved her hands in the air. “Does Helena want me?”
Nobody wanted a walk and elevator ride with Lucy Brodsky to see Helena. Nobody. Even if the meeting went great, it was still bad news, because a good meeting led to another meeting. And nobody had two good meetings in a row.
“No, not you, Julie. Don’t worry,” Lucy said. “Stella? Can I check in with you about one quick thing? Group, I’ll have Stella back with you all in a moment.”
“Of course,” Stella said to nobody as she followed Lucy out of the room. Stella turned and blinked hard at Julie, who continued to frantically wave her braceleted arms in the air, pawing at the space where Stella had been standing as if she could pull her back to safety.
“We’re in Melissa’s office,” Lucy called over her shoulder. “I thought I’d check in with her first, you know, about Canoe.”
“Sure, that makes sense.” Stella rolled her eyes back in her head and pretended to scream as she followed Lucy down the carpeted hall. She hadn’t had a conversation with her boss in days. She stared at Lucy from behind. Lucy was so clean, with her black hair and white blouse and black patent leather pumps. Stella bit her lips and looked down at her scuffed Camper Mary Janes. She’d been promising herself forever that she would throw them away. But instead she’d gotten into the habit of only wearing them on quiet days, when she didn’t expect to see anybody important. Boy, did that never work out.
“Just in here,” Lucy said, as if Stella didn’t know where her boss’s office was.
“Hi!” Melissa said, and frowned. “We were talking about Canoe, me and Lucy were. And we thought we’d better reach right out to you.”
“Okay,” Stella said. “Great.”
Melissa was standing, wearing jeans and a suit jacket over a flower-print blouse with a floppy collar.
“You were in with Julie?” Melissa asked. “She giving you what you need?”
“I’ll get something good out of her eventually,” Stella said.
“Wonderful,” Melissa said. “Let’s sit down.”
A small blond conference table squatted between Melissa’s desk and the door. The three of them huddled around it. Melissa slouched back, folded her arms over her chest.
“So, Stella. I was checking in with Melissa about Peter Herman. Where are we with him?” Lucy asked. Stella stared at Lucy. She wanted to say, What’s it to you? But she didn’t figure Melissa would back her up. She glanced at Melissa’s desk. There was a wrinkled manuscript spread out across it. The poor woman must’ve actually been editing one of her self-help/memoir titles and been interrupted for this meeting. Melissa was one of those editors who actually liked to edit.
“Well?” Lucy smiled. “Come on. Help me out here.”
“The contest,” Stella said, “is going absolutely great. We have thousands of entries and sure enough, sales are inching up. I mean I’m not talking huge, but definitely up like nine or eleven percent this week. Plus, I think we found our winner. I just need to get Peter Herman’s approval. That could happen today!”
“Let’s focus on Peter. What is going on with him?” Lucy had a stylus poised over her screen.
Stella didn’t have an answer. Behind Melissa’s desk, on the windowsill, were photograp
hs in silver frames of Melissa and her arts-administration husband, their two girls, and Florence, their dog. They stood in their skinny backyard in Riverdale. And here was Melissa, happily editing in the office. No wonder Melissa didn’t speak to her. She had no ambition and was jealous of Stella’s youth and unpredictability. Yeah, that’s what it was.
“Stella?”
“Sorry. He’s great.” Stella pitched forward in her chair. “He is really onboard and it’s—well, it’s exciting to be working with him.”
“I see,” Lucy said. She tapped the screen on her iPad. “Okay, here’s the thing. It’s nice that we’re seeing sales growth on Canoe. That’s good, sure. But Peter Herman is a highly valued author. And Helena.” Lucy paused. Stella and Melissa stared at her. Lucy bent in toward them. “Helena does not want anything to go wrong with Peter Herman. You understand? So come back to me soon with a happy report from Peter Herman that I can give to Helena. Like an e-mail or something that you could forward? Otherwise, Helena will be unhappy. You see?”
“Yes,” Stella said. “I see. But I am saying that he’s happy.” Stella caught Melissa shooting her a shut-the-fuck-up-and-let’s-end-this-meeting glare. But Stella was proud of her project and wanted to talk about it.
“That’s the message you want me to convey?” Lucy asked. Her smile turned thin. Stella thought she could give someone a paper cut with her lips. You wish you could be me, Stella thought, suddenly. You wish you could get free of Helena and come up with some wild schemes. Stella looked at Lucy and Melissa and thought, Actually, you both do. Great editors created great ideas. They didn’t sit at their desks and try to fix manuscripts. Stella stiffened. Why should she be cowed by the day-to-day vicissitudes of the workplace? Someday, if she was lucky, Lucy would be working for her! And Melissa would edit her castoffs.
“Look, I’m excited,” Stella said. “We should all be. This crazy thing is going to work.”
“Fine. Let’s call this an update.” Lucy tapped her iPad and Stella listened to the whooshing sound of a sent e-mail. “Keep us posted will you, Melissa?”
