by Debra Monroe
No wonder Jed believed in conspiracies, I thought. Because Vick’s wife was from Mexico, or wasn’t. She was from Germany, she said with a Mexican-Spanish accent. Jed’s sister was married to a rich rancher. She bought a house her husband didn’t know about and filled it with furniture and Navajo blankets. She had a boyfriend everyone liked except that, unlike the husband, he wasn’t rich. Jed’s eighty-year-old mother had never been told her oldest son was dead. She thought he was living in a trailer park, drunk.
I didn’t find this out all at once. It took the entire summer.
The production company would have paid for Jed’s lodging, but Vick loaned Jed a little rental house for the length of the shoot—to make our weekends together pleasant, Vick told me as he met me at this house on the edge of a colonia, the former manager’s quarters, to give me a key, telling me he’d had the house cleaned and filled with furniture. It was a burden, being naturally generous, he added. And Jed and I must keep the loan of the house quiet because Vick’s wife would object. I thought Vick’s wife would object that the house, loaned to Jed, wouldn’t be earning rental money. I didn’t yet know the extent of Vick’s ill-gotten riches or that the secret about the house was me, not Jed.
It was summer. I wrote steadily, but every other weekend I drove to the border town. Besides Jed, Jed’s mother, and maybe Vick, everyone must have assumed I had my eye on the family fortune. Jed’s sister—hoarder of Old West antiques and Talavera pottery—snubbed me. Vick’s wife and children did. I asked Jed why. He said, “Who cares? What’s that hyper word you use? Hyperanalytical. Don’t be so hyper-analytical. What’s the other word you use? Persona. You’ll need a new persona to get along down here.”
But I couldn’t help wondering. They thought I was too young for Jed? I was somebody’s midlife crisis? The only relative who smiled at me was Jed’s mother. I’d bring groceries and cook her dinner. I still remember a photo Jed took and then enlarged because it made him happy to see me in his mother’s kitchenette, holding a saucepan as she tied a polka-dot apron over my pretty dress, as she would call it, and hugged me from behind.
Or I cooked at the house Vick provided—chicken baked with olives, capers, figs; cucumber salad; couscous; chilled wine. We’d invite the prop people, the makeup artist, the location scout. For a few hours people who didn’t write books, but they read them, sat on a patio surrounded by a trellis that hid the steel fence with razor wire. There’d always be a live band deep in the desert, playing conjunto. A hot wind blew my cloth napkins off the table like tiny kites. My sundress billowed. Sim sprawled on concrete. Our guests ate with gusto, laughing. Jed said, “You have no idea how much thought goes into this. Note red tomatoes on a yellow plate. Presentation increases appetite.” True, I loved to cook, combining my mother’s home ec lore with all I’d learned as a waitress, listening to chefs. Conversation flew, never once touching down on the poverty on every side.
When Jed went back to work one Monday morning, I went into town to say goodbye to his mother. She told me how, when she was a new bride married to a sharecropper, he came home drunk, and she locked him out. When he was halfway through a window, she slammed it on his back. “Did he get mad?” I asked. “Oh no,” she said. “He knew better than to drink.” Clear-cut conflict resolution, I thought. She had the right to anger, nothing else. I said, “Was he hurt?” I never found out because she answered her phone with the enlarged dial pad that blinked when the phone rang, and when she hung up she was upset. “You have to leave, dear. Vick’s wife is coming with a relative you don’t know.” She even said “shoo” as she opened her door and shoved me through.
I didn’t blame her, I thought, driving. She got flustered. “I’m a flibbertigibbet,” she’d said once. She’d had Vick when she was sixteen, and now she lived on Vick’s largesse, his wife’s too. And who was the relative I didn’t know? Jed’s semi-estranged daughter? I sighed. Sim, in the passenger seat, sighed. He laid his head on my shoulder. Next, I saw flashing lights. I was being pulled over—the border patrol, looking for drug mules.
An officer with mirrored sunglasses asked for my license. He glanced at my overnight bag, a box of kitchenware, a laundry basket with bed linens I took to and from the bedroom in Vick’s little house. Whore’s bedroom, I thought. “One last question,” the officer said. Sim hadn’t moved his head next to my ear, but his growl amplified. The officer asked with a trace of a smile: “Are you both U.S. citizens?” Then he said, “Get back to civilization. If you run into trouble down here, your dog friend won’t be much use.”
Jed’s mother started to die, and he moved in to oversee the home health care he didn’t trust. When it was clear her dying would last more than a few weeks, he stayed, paid by Vick. I was focused on a new book coming out, the advance from it that would purchase a car, and an addition to my house if I kept it simple. “Extend the cottage motif throughout!” a colleague’s wife said when I held a party in honor of another colleague’s engagement.
I’d given up the wild life. I was moving on, forward. I wanted to be a mother. This can’t be explained entirely rationally. I’d been raised to be a mother, yes. I’d never not hoped to be a mother. My wanting turned urgent now: biological, animal fact. I’d once been a child with my doll, Gisele, I thought. Then I’d gone on The Pill to delay my motherhood, not eliminate it. I’d married husband #1 with his lovechild a precursor to the child I’d one day have myself, I’d assumed. I’d married husband #2 because I’d wanted to be a mother, not his mother, though. Motherhood was one facet of traditional female identity I couldn’t let go. I could forgo being a wife, I knew, but not being a mother. I thought hard about my decision because adoption requires months and months of interviews in which I’d describe why I hoped to be a mother and what kind I believed I’d be.
As I spoke to social workers, I realized I’d be a mother not so different from my own—until she got distracted by the end of one marriage, that is, and subsumed into the perpetual crisis of another. Given my history, marriage seemed like an obstacle to good child-rearing, I thought, not an aid. Single and focused, I’d cook, clean, sew, nurture, set rules, and enforce them gently. I’d respect the ways my not-yet-arrived child would be different than me. I’d be just like my mother and her mother before her, but changed, a new rendition of an old recipe, an improvisation. I’d retain only the best bits of the past, modified.
I’d researched adoption using the Yellow Pages and the telephone because, while the Internet had been invented, the local dial-up server—run by two guys in a pole barn, eating potato chips whenever I stopped by to tell them it was down again—took forever to load pages. But the Internet was showing up in student stories in my graduate fiction class. I embarrassed myself once, commenting in class that it was unconvincing for lovers to meet, as two characters in a student story did, online. A student—not the blushing student who’d written the story—said, “Um. Debra. No. Not anymore. Wider selection.”
Then my mother’s husband died, heart attack, and she resurfaced, sleeping on the floor of my study for weeks at a time as I pored over blueprints I’d paid Jed to draw. She was like a mother-in-law, I thought—wanting to bake cookies or tell me how to do my laundry, and I called her Mom though I didn’t know her, not anymore. One Sunday afternoon, she watched football with Jed Pharr, both of them joyfully shouting at the TV. She said later, “He’s wonderful. Who could ask for anything more? And he loves his mother.”
Blood loyalty. Even in-laws—apart from Vick’s wife because of the ferocious way she watched over Vick’s money—didn’t merit it. I didn’t. I didn’t care now. I’d once loved Jed, but he wouldn’t fit into my new life as a mother. My own mother would, if she’d stop praising my stepfather, her revisionist history, and turn back into the mother I’d once known. Still, Jed wanted to talk to me on the phone every night. He wanted to have sex when he trusted home health care nurses to take over for a day or so. He said, “I get so much out of a little time with you, I can wait for weeks.” I answered a f
ew of his calls.
My add-on was finished, my cabin converted first to a cozy cottage, then to a commodious house, by the time my daughter arrived: six pounds of dreams-realized. I had sex with Jed Pharr a last few times, my attention fixed on the baby monitor on my dresser.
So ended Jed.
I loved my daughter first, most. Forever.
And if, throughout this book, I’ve emphasized my slow-breaking take on Jed’s strange clan, or my family’s mistaken but enthusiastic impression of him, or a neighbor’s advice about husband #2, or a landlady’s advice about husband #1, all along I was tapping into scant collective wisdom. Had I lived in one spot forever, I’d have had the verbal equivalent of courtship letters of reference, people who’d have known my lover since he was a child. But I’d lived all over, and I’d lived by my wits, making choices by myself. If I turned out to be wrong, having based my decisions on who was locally available, on who suited my past if not my present or future, I alone was responsible, alone.
I saw Jed once more when my mother died. She was still young. Her dying lasted just thirty-six hours. She’d been in Oregon with a new husband—nice, as far as I could tell. I flew to the funeral and back, and then I had to catch up at work while caring for my baby. Jed came for a day to help. Help me how? I was grieving, busy. After he left, I was carrying my daughter in her car seat down a stone path in front of my house, and I passed a flowerbed planted for shade—purple beauty berries, white caladiums—and a rattlesnake cooling on wet soil uncoiled, rattled. I hurried inside and called Jed. “How could I help you from here?” he said. I heard a TV, the volume turned low down. His mother’s dying lasted ten years.
The snake was gone by the time I went back outside. I looked everywhere in my flowerbeds that were lush, but designed, monitored, with bars of soap tucked under a rosebush, mothballs mixed with pentas, cayenne pepper on the leaves of a passion flower vine—ideas I’d read about in the local paper, article after article about the growing deer population with no predators except humans, and none of us hunted, so the deer were starving, but not in my yard, I thought, as a doe slowly chewed impatiens. Deer salad, I thought.
My daughter’s days ordered mine now, her ethereal breaths through the baby monitor that stayed green, serene, until it bleeped red when she woke, hungry, the tempo by which I slept. One night Sim stood outside my window, barking. He’d turned so tame he wanted me to get up and chase a possum off the porch for him so he could go back to sleep. I pushed at the possum with a broom, then wandered onto the sidewalk in my nightgown and looked at the sky and thought I saw a falling star, or a UFO. I looked again. A plane flew sensibly, explicably, across the heavens. Nothing startling and lucky would streak into my life without years of preparation, I’d learned. Not a career. Not a child. It had taken research, meetings, paperwork, to become a mother the nonbiological way.
I heard a crackle in the dark. I’d lived here eight years now, the longest I’d lived anywhere besides Spooner. Apart from wasps, or a rattle-snake in a cool flowerbed on a hot day, and another that bit Sim when he was still macho, wrangling with anything that moved, I’d lived in peace with animals. Except when I didn’t. A male with a small rack on his head was bent over my vincas, which were deer-proof, according to the gardening book. I said this to him: “You’re not even supposed to like those.” All at once, I was surrounded by deer. A big buck. Four or five smaller deer. A doe I recognized because every spring she had a set of twins, the newest standing next to her now. The deer looked at each other, a deer communique, as in: why is the woman in a silver nightgown upset? Next, the doe stared into my eyes so long I thought I understood her. She had a herd. A herd helps. For a moment, I thought her eyes said that. Then she blinked and started chewing.
A Dress Rehearsal
I was taking in new information so fast that I thought in headlines. Well-Adjusted Man Marries Oddball Recluse. Daughter Sees Transition as Tween Movie Plot. Fifteen-Year-Old Hates Eggs. Husband Reasonable on Every Subject Except Baseball. My ten-year-old daughter, Marie, and I had moved to Austin, Texas, to live with my new husband and stepson, a communal life requiring synchronized schedules, preferences, quirks. But I’d lost the knack. Or I’d never had it. I’d lived in the rural hills for eighteen years: single, then a single mother. Before that, I’d lived with husband #1 and husband #2.
My new husband and I had dated for four years. I’ll call him by his real name, Gary, because we’re still married. The dos and don’ts for dating with children, for blending families (puree, stir, knead), are common knowledge, unlike thirty years earlier when divorce was a scandal never discussed with outsiders, and details about what’s wrong with your ex were discussed only with your children, already privy, so my parents reasoned. Or they couldn’t help themselves, stunned by the newfangled moral disaster, divorce.
I’d used a sitter for work; I was averse to using one for leisure. My job was filled with deadlines and responsibilities, also interesting talk, so I’d mostly deferred the desire for adult company. Single professors abounded, younger than me, usually female. I’d dated via matchmaking websites, ruling out men who smoked, took drugs, didn’t have postgraduate education: specifications that yielded up short-lived fiascos, also a handful of MBAs. I’m not anti-MBA. But conversation, Stage One in Seduction for Grownups, didn’t fly. And selecting dates online—a bit like shopping online, this feature looking good until, close up, it doesn’t—magnified the problem of no one to serve as character reference.
“You’re picky,” my mother had said before she died, suggesting unattached men around town, the man who changed the oil in my car, the man who cleaned the chimney on my woodstove. True, I wanted a man who’d studied the history of humanity; who’d also, at some point, like me, worked menial jobs and therefore wouldn’t think I was a savant on the wild side of a social class rift because I had; who knew that running a tidy, books-balanced household where my child came first was as important, or more, than my career.
One Friday night, after my daughter was asleep, I sat deciding whether to answer a dating website message from an artist recently relocated from Los Angeles, twenty years my senior, formerly famous, he seemed to be saying. Then I got a regular email from a friend of a friend of a friend. Gary and I were being fixed up. Or provided with each other’s contact information so we could fail or succeed in private. He already knew more about me than I did about him because he’d used an Internet search engine to see my English Department website bio and photo. All I could find about him was a quote in a newspaper story in which he explained that an unconstitutional law had finally been overturned.
Gary’s first email demonstrated a concise prose style, also manners. I answered. In a few days, he said he didn’t want to rush me since I was a full-time single mother, while he was a shared-custody single father with more flexibility, but we could meet for lunch at a restaurant halfway between our houses. He’s tall. I confess I like tall men. The conversation was so engrossing I was almost late meeting my daughter’s bus as she came home from her first day of first grade. This was the dilemma. I’d gone to lunch because my semester wouldn’t start for a week, but her school year had begun. Times like this were rare. One of my e-dates once said about a former girlfriend: “I don’t like women with kids because—and maybe that’s what it takes to be a single mother—they’re rigid.”
When I was home, I graded papers, or read for class, or wrote. I cleaned house, letting my daughter run her toy vacuum next to my real vacuum, or I explained what dusting was and that I’d rather she didn’t dust the shelf displaying my grandmother’s vases. I shopped. I cooked. I took care of flowerbeds as my daughter dug in her own tiny plot, planted with carrots and pansies. Saturday mornings, she had dance class. Saturday afternoons, kids’ birthday parties: piñatas, roller skates, cake, chitchat with married mothers. Every Sunday, I drove Marie to the university town, and we spent the day at the playscape and then came home and started our week over again, the alarm set early.
Sa
turday night, we’d watch the TV connected to the old antenna that came with the house when it was a cabin. The TV got two stations, one of them PBS. Some parts of motherhood are once-in-a-lifetime. The first time your child smiles. The first time she reads. The first time she says something more charming or insightful than you could and— understanding anew that someone other than yourself is real, separate—you love her more. But motherhood is mind-numbing routine too, doing laundry while saying, “Whoa. Do not jump on the sofa because you could fall, not to mention the walls are shaking.” PBS helps because you can hear, if not watch, a documentary while doing chores.
But that doesn’t extenuate what I’m about to confess, self-medication, engrained habit. I was in deep before I knew it. I’d grown too attached to The Lawrence Welk Show, which first aired during my youth, but airs for eternity now on PBS on Saturday nights. I was nostalgic for days when my parents were married, affectionate, and our family watched as my dad said hard work had lifted Lawrence Welk out of a small town and made him successful, and I’d scowl, thinking: do Gail Farrell and Dick Dale, who are singing “One Toke over the Line, Sweet Jesus,” know it’s not a religious song? My wandering grandmother had seemed smitten, a Welk groupie. I watched every week. My Saturday nights matched my parents’ and grandparents’ decades earlier. The music was calming, restful.
When Gary suggested going out on a Saturday night, I hesitated. But I told myself to take a chance, get tired. He offered to pick me up and drive me home—three hours of driving, impractical, half that if I drove to the city instead. I’d liked the way he’d looked on our lunch date, in a white, starched dress shirt with faded jeans, and boots. Yet I didn’t know how he’d dress for dinner at a good restaurant. I’d dated men who’d shown up for dates in shorts and T-shirts, and I’d be overdressed in jeans and a tank top with stylish shoes. This time, I wore a floaty black sheath that, depending on accessories, was glitzy or casual. I drove to the city wearing a pair of beaded flip-flops, sleek sandals on the seat next to me. I’d wear the flip-flops, or say I’d worn them for driving and then change.
