by Debra Monroe
He was on the porch when I arrived. I put on the sleek sandals right away and stumbled, crossing the grass. I said, “I’m glad I’m here at long last.” Too enthusiastic. I meant the opposite, glad to have gotten a sitter, to have told Marie over and over she wouldn’t miss me, to have fed her, answered her questions as I’d bathed, dressed, put on makeup, questions about mascara, lipstick, perfume. Then the long drive. I was already weary. I blurted, “I’m a little overexcited, you see. I’m usually home on Saturdays, watching PBS. Last night, I dreamed that when I knocked on your door Lawrence Welk answered.”
In the dream, a younger, nattier version of Lawrence Welk had greeted me in a 1950s square-shouldered suit. I’d felt pleased he was familiar but troubled he was old-fashioned, although we were the same age. I also thought: he’s dead, right? I was going to a lot of trouble to date a stranger, I thought, yet I reminded myself to be open-minded, not superficial. Gary smiled. “I suppose I’m flattered. You blew off Lawrence Welk for me.”
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My plan not to introduce Marie to Gary ended fast. I came home from a fourth date in Austin, where I’d spent the night. Marie had spent the night at a friend’s, with a family I knew well, I’d thought. When I went to pick her up, Marie and her friend, age six, and a brother named Brother, age four, were running down the driveway, almost to the highway, with backpacks on, leaving on a trip, they said. I drove them back to the house, where the mother and father slept so hard I pounded on the bedroom door to wake them.
Even without this unsettling morning-after, I’d hit my limit about how often I could be away from home. A month later, as Marie slept, I folded laundry while Gary watched baseball. He said, “I need to tell you something. I wasn’t quite honest when we first met.” I thought: my God, he has an STD, or he’s addicted to crack cocaine, what? He said, “I exaggerated when I said I would never marry again. I would, if I keep feeling the way I feel now.” I smiled and kept folding laundry. The next years passed easily except for the rationed privacy, so little time to talk, Marie always nearby; Gary’s son, Fraiser, often nearby; not to mention the people from Gary’s long roster of character references.
On holidays we went to parties with Gary’s ex-wife and ex-in-laws, where we picked up Fraiser to take him to celebrations on Gary’s side of the family. I’d stopped flying to Wisconsin for Christmas—Spooner so far from an airport, and we’d get snowed into Minneapolis, stuck in overheated hotel rooms, no toys or snacks, watching the Cartoon Network. I’d done my best celebrating at home with Marie and a tree, as Marie, indoctrinated, had pointed out that we lacked a dad and grandma. We didn’t, if we spent Christmas with Gary’s ex-wife, where Gary’s ex-mother-in-law, with her thick Mississippi accent, urged Marie to call her Nana Pat. All the ex-everyones, including Gary’s ex-wife and her partner, his ex-sisters-in-law and their partners, his ex-niece and children, bought Marie gifts. Nana Pat treated me like family too, saying, “My stars, I love Gary. I’d prefer him married to my daughter, but if it has to be someone else, you’re nice.”
Then we went to a small town due east of Austin, La Grange, where Gary’s parents doted on their grandson but seemed as if they’d waited years for a girl to visit them in her colorful dresses, chattering, bringing crayon-colored cards, offering to demonstrate her dance-class routine. I met Aunt Alvina, Aunt Gladys, neighbors. All attested, approved. Gary was a good man. The reputable lineage stories covered eighty years.
Harvest parties in bottomland. A grandfather who, when Gary was little, held Gary by his feet to see cotton entering the gin. Aunt Alvina told me about a time she went to a dance in a borrowed tulle dress. “Ach,” she said, laughing. “I thought I was beautiful. But Texas in midsummer. I started to sweat after one dance. Dye ran in streams down my arms. I wasn’t beautiful then.” And they didn’t like just anyone. Aunt Gladys told me to keep an eye on Zea, who came in to buy groceries and cook for Gary’s parents, who were growing more feeble, confused. I felt bad for Zea. Outsider, I thought, no one to defend her.
Everyone inquired kindly after my family, then looked mystified. They’d heard of Wisconsin. But they’d settled in this area 150 years ago—except for the years when Gary’s parents followed oil field work before returning to the ancestral county.
Gary’s family knew I was a professor, but they’d have been as happy if I’d been a secretary. The University of Disrepair, on the upswing for years, is the most beautiful campus in the state now, an emerging research institute. This is a good time to call it by its real name, its sixth: Texas State University. Why had it had more names than a woman who’d divorced too often? At the turn of the other century, the not-recent turn, it was Southwest Texas Normal School, when Southwest was meant to describe a region in the United States. Normal was traded for Teachers, College for University, and so on. Southwest next to Texas got dropped since southwest Texas is four hundred miles away, not here.
Gary had watched the University of Disrepair convert itself from a local curiosity into something respectable. Like me, I thought. Yet I was guarded, discussing my own past.
I’d summarized it, bare bones. My first husband was a musician, never a good idea. My second husband had a temper. I’d been single twelve years before I met Gary, really? I mentioned Jed, and one dating website fiasco, a man with whom the short-lived romance had run its course, but he’d been fired, and I thought we’d mete out bad news and break up after he found a job and a small surgery I’d scheduled was over. He broke up with me over the phone. “Your surgery?” Gary asked. Botched. I didn’t say that. Or that I’d asked acquaintances for help, awkward. Or that home alone, I’d had complications. I said that when I was getting my master’s degree I’d inadvertently heard a professor describe me as “reasonably intelligent, but with unaccountably bad taste in men.”
Gary looked worried.
When my dad came for a visit, Gary’s office was in the midst of a big project. Gary drove out for a hurried dinner: hello, goodbye. My dad respected that Gary, a man, was busy. And I was glad that Gary missed my dad rehashing what was wrong with my mom, whom my dad had divorced twenty-five years earlier, and she was dead, which made the criticism sound more wrong, as my stepmother seemed to think too, knitting, repressing hysteria, a squeal, as my dad poured out half of his can of Pepsi and added booze, and it was hard to keep track of how much he’d had until he was staggering and scrappy.
Describing my past to Gary, I’d simplified because—according to the codes of my childhood—I’d lived like a man. Free love, the so-called sexual revolution, had its inconsistencies. After casual sex was pro forma, women who said No were unhip, frigid. At the same time, they weren’t supposed to pile up a “number,” the new term for copious notches on the bedpost that men are improved by having. I hadn’t meant to be “a sexual adventuress,” as I’ve heard Edna St. Vincent Millay and Martha Gellhorn described, which doesn’t seem fair. Martha Gellhorn once said, pithy, that she’d heard male desire described as so urgent and primal that saying No had seemed as cruel as withholding bread.
The conventional wisdom would be that I’d been naive: wanting it all. Freedom plus routine. Go-for-broke ambition plus a home life. But I hadn’t premeditated any of my wanting. I wasn’t even ambitious. I wasn’t a pioneer either, a first-wave feminist—just a particle in that mass wave of women entering what had been, a generation earlier, a male province. Since first grade, I couldn’t stop reading. And because my relationships had failed, or because I’d had to earn my way—which, in my mother’s era, were one and the same problem—I’d stayed in school, no reason to stop. Age-appropriate and career-minded men, my equals, yet raised by homemakers married to breadwinners, had been as confused.
I didn’t have to ask Gary the same questions because no one was a skeleton in his closet, least of all one of his previous selves. He came from a small town where higher education was rare, but no one was alarmed when a boy precociously interested in books bettered himself through school. Precociously distracted
by books, I’d been expected to better myself by becoming an asset to a go-getting man. This time I could be, maybe, because Gary and I had met later in life and didn’t have to decide where to live for whose career.
Our small wedding was in my yard. Sim, who’d lived to a good old age, had died peacefully under the porch swing. So I spent the morning before the wedding chasing deer while wearing an old dress and fancy hair—I’d paid a woman at a salon to pile it on my head and shellac it with spray. In the end, I augmented my ransacked flowerbeds with fake flowers from the Dollar Store, a trick I’d learned from visiting movie sets. It was going to be so hot, so uncomfortable, our vows so brief before people hurried inside to eat and drink in the air-conditioning, that no one would notice a few blooms weren’t real.
Then I moved into the big, remodeled house in the city. A month later, we went to a party, celebrating Gary’s semi-retirement after decades of service, and a few younger, female lawyers assessed me as future sisters-in-law might: was I suitable? Others lawyers regaled me with stories about how instrumental Gary was, how fun, how considerate.
I was wearing a dress and heels, and Marie was turned out in pink. My stepson, Fraiser, stood by, mature, serious. I’d stepped into the part for which I’d been trained, and my advanced degree was a helpful flourish. Everyone seemed startled, yet not exactly unpleasantly, that the books I wrote weren’t typically academic: not quite this or that about gender in the twentieth century, not quite this or that about social class in postindustrial America. When we got home, Gary asked what so-and-so or so-and-so and I had talked about. I couldn’t keep names straight. Gary seemed too casually curious, as if he worried I’d said something confessional, not lawyerly and close-to-the-vest, not the trifling small talk I’d spent my writing career bypassing, going instead straight for the secret, emotional core. I also realized I’d smiled nonstop while clenching my teeth. I was playing a role: last self. This isn’t to say I didn’t mean it. I was acting, and I meant it.
The children must feel the strain too, I thought. Yet, since Marie was little, she’d said I should find a dad. I read her entries in her English class journal: about a great brother, a great father. Her teacher said, “She’s made friends so quickly. It’s not easy in this neighborhood where most kids have known each other since they were babies. Their mothers likely met in Lamaze class.” One day, when Gary said that I’d put too many doilies in the living room, that it looked like my old house, undeniably froufrou, both a home and a quirky domestic museum, I said, “Two is too many, then? I’ve winnowed. I’m down at least fifteen doilies.” Gary had vetoed lace curtains. Fraiser said, “But I think it looks homey now.” He asked for a few of my chairs and lamps for his bedroom. When I passed his open door I felt a jolt, a reminder that the past isn’t gone, just off to the side.
But I was accustomed to small towns, not cities. The talk is different. Traffic is. Entering conversations seemed like edging forward on one of those ramps leading to the six-lane highway I took to work now. In reality, as in this analogy, my driver’s ed took place on country roads known for blind spots and wild animals but little traffic. I spoke carefully to strangers. One day, I hurried to pick up my daughter at school. The mothers I met—ones who weren’t clocked in somewhere until five-thirty—never hurried. I said, panting, because I’d run: “Wow. Parenting is labor-intensive, you know?” Two mothers made disapproving eye contact. One said, “I knew when I had my children that it’s a huge commitment.” A third mother said, “I think she’s being funny. Did you have a busy day?”
I chatted with my colleagues at work, an hour away. I spoke on the phone to long-distance friends. I told happy news. This is key. The life you describe is the one you get. Yet I had niggling unease. I mentioned this to my husband. Maybe I was just confused, I said. “Maybe I’m not alone enough to understand what I think.” He looked alarmed. Was I unhappy? Not that, I reassured him. I wasn’t feeling myself yet. What self? Even if I was unhappy, we were married with children now. We didn’t have time for existential quibbles. We got a call that Gary’s parents were in trouble and needed help.
Aunt Gladys had gone to check. My mother-in-law had fallen. My father-in-law couldn’t lift her. Irrationally, she wouldn’t let him call the ambulance. Or rationally, knowing she’d end up in a hospital, then a skilled nursing facility, which is what used to be called a nursing home. For days, they’d camped on the floor, eating whatever food my father-in-law could put together and carry. “But where was Zea?” I asked. Gary said, “Maybe she asked for the week off. I’m not going to judge before I get her side of the story.”
Her side of the story had gaps in it.
Knowing Gary would be the one to decide if Zea would keep her job when my mother-in-law recovered, Zea bought Gary a wrapped, beribboned gift, which turned out to be four crucifixes: a big, iron one for Gary; a big, calico one for me; a small, terra cotta one for my stepson; a small, polka-dot one for my daughter. And Zea had tried to make folksy conversation by saying, about Barack Obama, that she didn’t mind blacks if they weren’t lazy. She’d heard through the grapevine that Gary had married a woman with a daughter. And I still love Gary’s family profoundly as I consider that not one of his relatives, raised in the South during Jim Crow, had felt the need to mention that Marie is black.
You, Reader, might think it’s odd I haven’t mentioned it, as if, as Marie’s mother, I haven’t adequately considered race and racism. In fact, I could write a book about what it’s like to be her mother considering race and racism; I did write that book, my fifth, and this isn’t it. What that subject is now—now that Marie’s growing up and navigating her own shoals—is her business, not ours. At any rate, Gary told Zea that his parents wouldn’t need her now. Aunt Gladys said, “People don’t think Zea is—how do I say this?—good.”
My mother-in-law languished months in the hospital, then in a nearby nursing home, befuddled every night at dusk. There’s a term for this, sundowner’s syndrome. Away from the familiar as darkness encroaches, the patient panics. Gary had been reconsidering my in-laws’ house, its size, its disarray. No doctor will venture to say when he or she thinks it will be time for your elderly parent to go home—until the doctor does say, and then it’s in two days. Quickly, Gary finessed the details of a contract for an assisted living facility in Austin. I made a list of furnishings from my in-laws’ house to be put in the pickup and moved. Aunt Gladys packed clothes. I took over the shopping list from the facility: three sets of bed sheets, ten towels, hampers, a plastic cabinet with drawers.
One Sunday night in winter, Gary and I moved the furniture into a tiny, modern apartment. We whispered as we put together the bed, carried the recliners, set up the TV. It was after eleven when—and I felt bad for the old people asleep in the next room—I tried to quietly hammer mounts on the wall to hang a domed picture of Gary’s great-grandparents and my mother-in-law’s favorite picture of sunflowers. I hammered again, hanging rods for curtains I’d bought, unpackaged, ironed. Gary and I argued in whispers. Only the bed, chairs, and TV mattered, he insisted. Curtains and familiar pictures matter, I said.
Sunrise. Sunset. One each. My mother-in-law fell down within a day.
She was hospitalized again. Then another nursing home. Months.
Gary spent so much time in these settings, he started to talk about when our time would come. He talked about our house being our last with stairs. He dreamed he was trying to land an airplane, he said, but didn’t know how and a crash was imminent. When I pointed out that this was a death dream, he said he didn’t put stock in that abracadabra idea that, as you sleep, dreams explore pressing problems with daytime censors turned off.
His mother settled at last in a skilled nursing wing at the assisted living place. My father-in-law could see her daily, and it was cheery, at least the bird cages and fish tanks. The residents, not so much. Some reached for my daughter and stepson, wanting them. Or, mouths agape, slumped in chairs, eyes gummy and hazed, they wanted to be my daughter a
nd stepson. “Gutta,” one woman said, gibberish, or some odd bit of Czech or German.
Gary’s mother never forgot who anyone was. But in the midst of talk about what we might do for lunch that day, she’d say she was using the time to go speak to Gary’s teacher in the one-room school in Kirbyville because that teacher wasn’t worth salt. Her memory served up long ago days in the same way that Gary’s parents’ house had as he’d dismantled it. He’d found a postcard from Aunt Gladys, mailed from Mexico in 1944. A jewelry box from Woolworth’s holding a dog collar, and inside its lid, lined with fake satin, the name of a long-dead pet, the day it died, written in pen by my mother-in-law.
My mother-in-law started to die. We should call hospice, the doctor said, and a funeral director. The funeral director asked for the dress my mother-in-law would be buried in. She didn’t have dresses. Her new clothes, which I’d bought for Christmas or Mother’s Day, were velour warm-up suits with fancy zippers. I worried about clothes for the children too. My stepson found a pinstripe suit and red satin tie at a thrift store. I took Marie to a mall, where I also shopped for my mother-in-law’s burial dress, without success.
I searched online. Prim, yet springlike, Aunt Gladys stipulated. Given these parameters, JCPenney was too hip. Did Montgomery Ward still exist? Gary stood behind me as I logged on. We scanned pages of women’s clothes, tiny thumbnail photos. We paused, looking at one photo of “Watercolor Floral Dress with Daisy-Trim Jacket” right next to “Intimate Memories,” a strapless minidress with holes for breasts to poke through and a black rectangle covering the model’s nipples, though not her serene, catalog-model face. We searched and found more prim, springlike dresses next to peekaboo corsets and garter belts. “Is this website hacked?” I wondered. Gary said, “Or Montgomery Ward is trying to stay in business by covering every market niche, and they need a new website design.” We ordered the “Watercolor Floral Dress with Daisy-Trim Jacket.”
