Chin Up, Honey

by Curtiss Ann Matlock

  Thankfully, Catherine began to talk, although Emma was so focused on not crying that she missed most of the first part of what the woman had to say. It was something about how their coming together for therapy displayed their respect and desire for each other and their obviously deep relationship.

  Emma agreed with the respect part. She certainly still respected John Cole, although she wasn’t so certain about respecting their relationship. They didn’t seem to have a relationship, to her mind.

  Catherine was saying, “For many years, you both have poured your energy into raising your child and building a secure business and home, so much so that you’ve lost sight of your relationship together. You are simply no longer connecting as man and woman. What is required is to learn to reconnect.”

  She gave them a reassuring smile and went on talking in an equally reassuring manner about how different men and women were, and how compatibility was something of a myth. Even though Emma thought that Catherine’s soothing manner was probably a requirement for being a therapist, she appreciated it.

  Then Catherine said, “Now, I have some homework to get you started,” and handed them each a thin sheaf of papers.

  At a glance, Emma saw a lot of questions, with spaces for answers. She peered over to see if John Cole’s papers looked the same. They did. She could not imagine him with a pencil in hand and working his way through the questions.

  As if Catherine read John Cole’s mind, she said they didn’t have to answer every question, but she recommended taking time to read through them and to think about the answers.

  Then she leaned forward. “I want you to understand that during these first weeks you will be doing some reconnecting to yourselves and your lives. You need to be aware that you will experience a lot of uncomfortable emotions.”

  She paused and seemed to be waiting for a reply, so Emma nodded and said, “Okay.”

  “For that reason, I strongly recommend that you do not discuss your marriage or pursue sex. In fact, I suggest that you do not even spend much time together over the next few weeks. You each need some time off.”

  Emma felt strongly disappointed and didn’t offer another okay. She and John Cole were already not discussing their marriage or having any sort of time together. What good were these sessions, if they weren’t going to start something going?

  “The best thing you both can do right now is relax,” continued Catherine. “Stop all the trying. You’ve done that, and it has not worked. It’s time to lighten up and just go with the f low, until you come back here for another session. Okay?”

  Emma didn’t reply to that, either. She felt the woman’s instructions were aimed directly at her. She didn’t think this was called for. In fact, she felt a little left out, because Catherine chatted with John Cole all the way out to the receptionist’s desk.

  Then John Cole exhibited the most amazing behavior. He not only jumped in with Catherine to arrange the next appointment but readily agreed, without the slightest prompting from Emma, to the suggestion to schedule two more appointments. Emma was as astounded as ever in her life. She wondered if he were showing off for Catherine, who pretty well seemed to assume there was no question about them coming back.

  Emma had the thought, although she did fight against it when she felt it coming up and knew that it was not very helpful, but then there it was full-blown: Why couldn’t he have been this willing ten years ago? So much wear and tear could have been avoided.

  Right away, on the drive back to the Stop, Emma experienced some of those strong emotions Catherine had spoken of, and she found out that it wasn’t a good idea for her and John Cole to be confined in a car when that happened.

  John Cole asked her if she was okay. Whenever he did that, it just made her so annoyed. She knew he wouldn’t want to hear that she was so sad that their marriage had gotten to this point, so why did he ask?

  “I’m fine. Why?”

  “Well, you seem awfully quiet.”

  “I don’t have anything to say.” That she was the one who generally did all the talking was quite evident. She didn’t expect him to talk, but he expected it of her. She felt her hair about to stand on end. “And Catherine said for us not to talk.”

  After a minute John Cole came out with, “I don’t think she said not to have any conversation. She meant just not to talk about our marriage.”

  “And what do you want to talk about? You didn’t do much talkin’ in there.”

  “What do you mean?” He looked all innocent.

  “You didn’t hardly say anything, John Cole. You just mostly sat there. The only thing you volunteered was to about call me a liar when I said we don’t have sex.”

  “I answered what she asked, and I was simply givin’ my view. The point is for me to give my view. It doesn’t have to match yours. We do have sex. You just apparently forget, and you haven’t said anything about it to me.”

  “I have too said!” She could not believe it. She shut her mouth in exasperation, but then, “And answerin’ what she asks is not takin’ part. She can’t ask you every little question about what she may need to know.”

  The next instant John Cole drew back and smacked the steering wheel, yelling, “So what do you want me to say? I just don’t know what you want, Emma Lou!”

  He was saying more, too, but Emma didn’t hear him. She was screaming back at him, “I can’t stand this…I can’t stand it anymore. I hate you! Let me out!”

  She had gone haywire-flooey, knew it full well, but was too caught up to stop. She grabbed at the door handle, which thankfully did not open because of the automatic lock.

  John Cole took hold of her wrist. Even though she tried to shake him off, he gripped her, while they continued to say who-knew-what to each other in the worst fight of their entire married life.

  Then all of a sudden, they were stopped in front of the Berry Truck Stop, and Emma saw Shelley Dilks standing there, right in front of them. She was looking right through the windshield at them. It was just awful.

  Without a word, John Cole got out of the car and slammed the door behind him, leaving Emma there in the passenger seat. Just right there. He spoke to Shelley as he passed. The woman cast Emma a curious look and hurried into the building after John Cole, as if attached to him by a line.

  Emma pulled herself together enough to drive home. She sat slumped over, like a woman defeated. She had tried her heart out to do all that she knew how to do with her marriage and herself. Heaven knew only a crazy woman would have behaved as she just had. And oh, Lord, John Cole had scared her when he exploded. Remembering, she began to shake.

  She had to pull over twice on the way home, because she was crying so hard. In one day she had experienced a therapy session for the first time of her life, along with the biggest fight of her marriage and the most crying she had done in years.

  That evening, they were as polite as strangers to each other.

  Emma gave John Cole his supper in his chair, saw him look at her in surprise, then turned around and took her meal off to her workroom, where she ate and perused the questions on the papers Catherine had given them.

  John Cole had left his copy in the car, of course. Emma had given it to him when he came home, and he had promptly laid it atop his stack of magazines. Not to be negative, but she figured the papers would be buried there six months from now.

  The first page of questions was a listing of beginning statements to be completed. Not a thing about marriage, either.

  The first one read: My five best qualities are…

  She grabbed a pencil from the jar and wrote: My smile. Then she tapped the pencil on her lip for a few seconds before writing cooking. She stopped abruptly, though, with the thought that possibly something like that wasn’t the type of answer Catherine was looking for.

  More tapping of the pencil, and frowning. How silly. Oh, well, she would think of more later.

  Statement number two read: The five things that I think made my partner fall in love with me are�
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  She wrote: my smile…and I was pretty. Everyone had said she was pretty, even John Cole.

  She gazed at the statement for long seconds. Nothing else came to mind, and the statement did seem something more for John Cole to answer.

  The next few statements were equally as annoying, asking why her partner might fall out of love and five hateful things she might have done in recent weeks.

  She wrote down about how she had yelled at him that afternoon. It came to her that she had yelled, “I hate you.” The memory made her feel so bad that she couldn’t write anything else.

  Finally she came to the statement that read: I wish…

  She began to scribble rapidly. I wish John Cole would talk. I wish the television would explode. I wish John Cole and I could be happy with each other again. I wish John Cole would pay attention. I wish I had lived the first part of my life differently. I wish I hadn’t married so fast. I wish we had had more children. I wish John Cole loved me like he used to. I wish I could love John Cole like I used to.

  She drew back and gazed at that last sentence. Tears came to her eyes.

  Jamming the pencil back into the jar, she snatched up the papers and put them away in a drawer. Then she swept her hands over her worktable, as if to clear away any residue of uncomfortable feelings.

  She carefully chose fine card stock of various textures and hues. Meticulously, she arranged and drew and cut and pasted. She took refuge in her craft. She set about working on the cards with the engagement announcement for the families. One for the bride and groom, one for herself and John Cole, and one for Sylvia Kinney, whom she did not yet know. Night closed around the windows, where moths fluttered and June bugs buzzed. Emma didn’t hear them. She did not notice the passage of time. She was totally focused on crafting each card into a mini scrapbook, each one an heirloom.

  It would be for Johnny and Gracie an offering, a way to remember how they began, so that if ever the time came that they found themselves lost, perhaps this reminder of their beginning would help them find their way back to each other.

  It was one more effort in all of those since his birth to give Johnny what she had missed.

  At his workbench in his shop off the garage, John Cole was working over a lawn mower’s carburetor when he looked over and noticed that he had tossed several greasy sockets atop the papers from the marriage counselor, which for some inexplicable reason he had carried out here with him.

  He snatched up the sockets and saw oil splotches staining the white paper. Tossing the sockets aside, he went to clear the area around the papers, and in doing this, he succeeded in knocking over a Coke can that had just enough liquid left to splatter over half the top sheet. Snatching up the papers, he smeared them with dark greasy fingerprints.

  “Ah…geez.” If Emma saw this, she would not be pleased.

  He intended to read the papers, he really did, only not tonight. That afternoon had been enough for him.

  With a deep breath, he very carefully placed the now-soiled papers inside one of the toolbox drawers, atop the finest of his tools, and slammed the drawer closed.

  Just then there came a loud meowing. A battle-scarred yellow cat—the one that until that afternoon he had thought Emma didn’t know about—came through the opened door and ambled over to the plastic dish beneath the workbench. The cat sat down and regarded John Cole with expectation.

  John Cole shook dried food into its bowl and watched the animal eat. He wondered if, now that Emma had revealed knowing about the cat, maybe he should take it in to meet her. She would really like it.

  In two seconds of looking into the future, he saw Emma feeding it salmon and steak, and pretty soon it would be fat and in the house, curling up in John Cole’s chair and sleeping in his bed.

  “You’re okay right where you are, buddy.”

  He went to the side door and looked toward the house, where he could see light shining from the windows of her office, and Emma inside, bending over her drawing table.

  He thought, as he invariably did, that she was as pretty today as the first day he had seen her. It seemed to him that he got older, worn and tired and limping along, about like the old mower he was working on, but Emma was as lively now as then.

  He stood there gazing at her for long minutes, then returned to the workbench and the carburetor, something he felt competent to take apart and put back together.

  13

  In the Beginning

  1966

  Emma and John Cole met on New Year’s Eve, when Emma went out driving with three other girls from her senior high-school class. The girls were from a fast crowd, and had grown faster still with the thrill of being young women in their last year of school. Emma had taken up with them only a few weeks into this school year, when the headiness of being a senior had propelled her out of her shyness. This, coupled with providing a much-needed tampon to one of the girls in a particularly crucial moment, had put her into a new and quite nice in position of being in with the in group.

  In a big Chrysler belonging to the head girl of the group, they all went on a lark up across the Virginia line to Norfolk, where they ended up meeting a party of sailors at a McDonald’s drive-through.

  Upon flirting with the group of sailors, Emma began to realize fully that she was attractive, something that had slowly begun to dawn on her. Until that time, she had immersed herself in books and silent dreams, and been influenced by her mother’s efforts to keep her from being “too full of herself” with pretty clothes or makeup. Of course, by that year, Elvis movies and Seventeen Magazine were making it even to their little provincial part of the world. Emma had secretly begun to lighten her hair.

  At the end of an evening of flirting, first in the McDonald’s parking lot and then following the sailors to a party at a private house, Emma had paired off with John Cole, whom she considered by far the most attractive all around. There was something about the way he looked at her with his very blue eyes, something delightful that happened to her when he smiled at her. And he was exceedingly polite and didn’t act as if he had a right to jump on her, as did a number of the other sailors. Emma might have been lacking experience, but she had a wisdom born of wide reading. She knew what was what.

  When John Cole called her the following week, she could not believe that such a young man, from what sounded like a very good family, and who owned his own car—my heavens, a Galaxie 500 convertible!—and who was just so handsome and sweet and adorable, was actually interested in her.

  Yet right then, had anyone asked her, she would have admitted to having decided that she had met her future husband and saw no reason to look further.

  On Saturday, he drove south for a first date and to meet her mother—her father being out of town somewhere and totally forgotten—and had so impressed her mother with his manners, his sporty Ford and the fact that his family owned a hardware store, that her mother had said to Emma, “You’ll be well cared for. Don’t let him get away.”

  That had pretty much been the extent of her mother’s advice in regard to marriage and a future. Not one word of consideration for higher education or a career. At that time, her mother did not have an education or a career herself. None of the Macomb women did. When they became of decent marriageable age—anything from seventeen upward was decent—they found their Prince Charming and married him, with the idea of living happily every after. Why it never occurred to any of them that life did not work in the way of Prince Charmings was a mystery. All but one of them had been married and divorced, and several more than once. They seemed to just keep going around the same pole made of men.

  Emma’s mother seemed to have somehow bumbled off the path when, after her husband had run off for the final time, she had enrolled in the local junior college. It had been pursuit of a college professor that had gotten her there. While nothing had come of the romance, Emma’s mother had obtained enough education to get a teaching certificate. By that time, age had more or less been against her in securing a husband
of a sort she could manage; however, with the good luck of Emma’s father dying, she had taken on, even though divorced, the much preferred status of widowhood.

  Emma and John Cole began dating steadily. A total of three times, John Cole made the trip south, but all the other times it was Emma taking the bus north, or catching a ride with someone. The bulk of their courtship took place through the mail. She wrote him every day, sometimes twice a day, long missives of five or more pages filled with f lowing script, to which John Cole replied once or twice a week, very short letters in short printed words. He said he was not one to write much, and she had accepted this. Indeed, her own father had never approached conversation with her, nor really much with her mother that she had ever seen. She had for years known weeks when she did not even see her father, who was a traveling feed salesman during the week, and divided his weekends between watching baseball on television and passing out on the couch.

  In the spring, she and John Cole decided to marry, setting the date for two days after Emma’s high-school graduation. John Cole had not surprised her with a ring.

  “…I, uh, didn’t want to take a chance on gettin’ somethin’ you might not like,” he had said.

  They had gone together to the jewelry store, where Emma made a selection according to the pleasure and displeasure that she read on his face as she tried on various rings.

  “This one,” she said at last.

  “You sure?”

  After a good study of his face, she said, “Yes,” nodding at first tentatively, but upon seeing his smile widen, she said, “Oh, yes!”

  He had stunned her by pulling out cash money that he had saved, surely since early in their relationship, paying in full for the entire wedding-ring set. She saw far into her future, and saw it looking good. The same could safely be said for John Cole. They left the store with their arms wrapped around each other.