Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Introduction
Chapter 1. - The Hitch
Chapter 2. - Meet the Sunshines
Chapter 3. - Attach and Release
Chapter 4. - D-I-Y Spells Die
Chapter 5. - Ring of Fire
Chapter 6. - Penis Ennui
Chapter 7. - Back in the Saddle
Chapter 8. - Feast of Sorrow
Chapter 9. - For Richer, for Poorer
Chapter 10. - The Rearview
Chapter 11. - Southern Man
Chapter 12. - A Pilgrim’s Progress
Chapter 13. - The Facts of Life
Chapter 14. - Mom, the Musical
Chapter 15. - Mommy Wears Prada
Chapter 16. - Me, the People
Chapter 17. - The Crush
Chapter 18. - Good-bye, Girl
AFTERWORD
Acknowledgements
RIVERHEAD BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Copyright © 2011 by Kyran Pittman
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. Published simultaneously in Canada
“Mommy Wears Prada” and portions of “For Richer or Poorer,” “D-I-Y Spells DIE,” “A Pilgrim’s Progress,” and “Feast of Sorrow” first appeared, in slightly different form, in Good Housekeeping.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pittman, Kyran.
Planting dandelions : field notes from a semi-domesticated life / Kyran Pittman.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-101-51418-4
1. Motherhood. 2. Families. 3. Man-woman relationships.
I. Title
HQ759.P548 2011
2010048173
306.874’3092—dc22
[B]
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity.
In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers;
however, the story, the experiences, and the words
are the author’s alone.
http://us.penguingroup.com
Dedicated to my mother, Marilee, who is my homeland;
to Patrick, who is my refuge; and to my sons—
Alden, Jonah, and Carey—a mighty nation.
Introduction
I jumped the white picket fence. Not in the way the story usually begins, with the heroine breaking out, busting loose, setting off across the wild world in search of her authentic, enlightened self. That would be uncharacteristically normal of me. I broke in, not out.
Some people need to break out. They’re called to distant, exotic places to find truth and wisdom: a monastery on a mountaintop, a boat on the high seas, the foot of a bodhi tree. There’s nothing wrong with that. I happened to be called to find it in the laundry room and in Cub Scout den meetings. That’s what I get for following my bliss. But those are exotic locations to me.
My children laugh when I tell them Mommy’s an alien. “Look, it says so right here,” I say, showing them my United States permanent resident card. To them, “alien” conjures images of E.T., the extraterrestrial being trying to navigate suburbia, Sesame Street, and trick-or-treat. It’s more apt than they know. I came from “out there.” Way out there. Fifteen years ago, I pushed off from a forgotten island at the edge of the continent and landed in middle America. I came to marriage from an adulterous, scorched-earth love affair. I went from being a wild child to being a good mother. I grew up in a home that was free-thinking, free-loving, and free-falling, and willingly entered a life of Cub Scouts on Monday, bills on Tuesday, playgroup on Wednesday, groceries on Thursday, errands on Friday, sex on Saturday, church on Sunday.
Some people come here automatically, to this town called Ordinary. The straight and narrow route will take you right to the middle of it in a hurry. Some people never know anything else. But I hitched in by the back roads, peered over the fence, and chose it.
I choose it every day.
“Beeeee good,” I tell my sons, turning back to my field notes, the blog where for five years I’ve recorded my outside-looking-in observations on this big, little life. Part Underwood typewriter, part Moleskine journal, part refrigerator door; it’s become a catchall for everything that digging in yields up.
“Look at this,” I’d say, holding up some fragment of everyday to myself and anyone who happened to be reading, turning it over this way and that. Look.
People began wandering over to see what it was I was so taken with. First a few online readers, then more. Then Good Housekeeping began to publish my essays, and the neighborhood suddenly got a whole lot bigger. “I have something just like that!” my virtual neighbors would say in a comment or an e-mail, and come running back holding the stories they found in their own backyard. They offer them up with a mix of shyness and excitement. Sometimes they doubt themselves.
I thought maybe it was worth something, but I don’t know . . .
It’s probably too small to matter . . .
It’s kind of a mess and it’s broken in places . . .
“It’s beautiful,” I tell them. It’s funny. It’s deep. It’s extraordinary.
Look.
We live in an age that exalts lifestyle over life. We call caterers and decorators “gurus.” Whole television networks are dedicated to telling us how our homes, gardens, tables, and wardrobes should look. Even our beliefs are subject to fashion—the more exotic, the better. But most people can afford only the extract—they get some of the flavor, but none of the substance. Imported spirituality is the new truffle oil.
I believe in seeking. I believe ardently that you should drop everything and run toward your true self, as far as you have to go. But I want to put in a word for the path that winds through the backyard, because it can be just as meaningful and wondrous as the one that goes up the mountaintop, if it’s your path. You want a spiritual discipline? Try staying vitally connected to the same person year in, year out, through surprise pregnancies, late mortgage payments, toilet seat battles, and the occasional, strong temptation to walk away and make a living tending bar some
where on the coast of Maine. Domestic life is full of moments of truth, if you stay awake to them.
What follow are some of my moments of truth. Writing them down is what keeps me awake and alive to that which is everyday and near. I hope they speak to the possibility of settling down without settling for, and the power of small things to make a life infinitely vast. They are an apronful of stories carried breathlessly up to the fence by that strange woman in town, me. They are for my neighbors who live inside the white picket fence with me, and they are for the wanderer who pulls off to the side of the road, looks over it, and wonders why anyone would want to live there.
Look. Look what I found. Come see.
1.
The Hitch
Will you marry me?” Patrick asked.
A light breeze came up, and the woods around us fidgeted; a whispered commotion among the fallen brown leaves. I opened my eyes and looked past bare branches of hickory and oak into the flawless February sky. It was my first winter in the South, and it felt more like early autumn to me, just crisp enough to wear a sweater. The sun had warmed the sandstone ledge we’d chosen for our picnic, and the trail that ran beside it, winding through a picturesque Arkansas valley, seemed reserved for our private enjoyment. It was a perfect day.
So why did he have to go and ruin it with that question?
Fortunately, I had an easy out. A wee technical glitch: I was already married to someone else.
That wasn’t part of the official story we gave when people wanted to know how on earth a guy from Arkansas and a girl from Newfoundland came to meet. Nor was the manner of our introduction. “We met in Toronto,” we’d say, as if we’d both had other business there, besides meeting in person for the first time, after three months of writing torrid and anguished e-mails. It’s quaint to think such a thing was once unheard-of, but for years we thought if word got out that we met on the Internet, we’d wind up on some lurid afternoon talk show.
“It’s a long story,” we’d say, if someone should press for details. “It’s complicated.”
But it wasn’t, not really.
Two people fell in love. What other story is there?
Granted, I hadn’t seen my husband in nearly twelve months, but I made the case—prim adulteress that I was—that it wouldn’t be proper to get engaged.
“Ask me again when I’m free,” I said lightly. It was ridiculous. I had never been more free. I had run away from home. I had no job. Patrick supported us both with his salary as an art director for a small ad agency, the one place in town that would hire him after he threw his career and professional reputation down the drain, chasing me up and down the North American continent for a year. I spent my days doing pretty much whatever I felt like. Once a month, I showed up to read a few poems at an open-mike session held in the back of a downtown bar, and that was as close as I wanted to come to having a commitment.
I left responsibilities and routines behind with my wedding china and crystal, part of the scaffolding that had propped up my married life. It was a shelter I’d constructed from scraps of conventional wisdom, papered over with pretty magazine pictures, and glued together with sheer wishful thinking. When I met Patrick, it all came down in a jumbled heap. Suddenly, none of it made the slightest bit of sense to me. I didn’t know why I was dressing for success, or saving for retirement, or drinking enough water, or not going to bed angry. I stopped working, planning, and counting. I slept too little, drank too much, took up smoking. Why not? My whole life was on fire.
I stayed in the smoldering ruins for a while, too sad and too scared to move on. Then I left, bringing my sadness with me because it was familiar by then, like the smell inside my husband’s raincoat, which I kept, also—as if I needed it in the high desert of central Mexico where Patrick waited. A few months of sun and alcohol drew the dampness from my soul. By the time our money ran out, I was ready to resurface. We headed back across the border to the United States, where I began to enthusiastically embrace life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
I was carefree, and altogether careless. Earlier that winter, I’d gone with some girlfriends on a weekend road trip to Dallas, hellbent for leather, with no thought for what might happen to me if we got pulled over on the interstate, somebody’s joint in the ashtray, a temporary visitor stamp in my passport. In a tattoo parlor in the nightclub district known as Deep Ellum, I got my navel pierced.
“You’re bleeding a lot,” the guy who skewered me remarked. “Been drinking much this weekend?”
I’m in a tattoo parlor in Deep Ellum on Sunday morning, getting a hole bored through my belly button, I thought. He needs to ask if I’ve been drinking?
When I arrived back at our apartment—hours late, clutching a bloody gauze pad to my stomach—Patrick took one look and assumed I’d been mugged and stabbed. Even after I calmed him down, he was less than titillated by my antics. He had been glad to see me throw off the pall of guilt and grief, but he was beginning to consider the tiger and its tail. What spurred his proposal, several rocky weeks later, was the fear that he was losing me. In my experience, one of three suggestions almost always gets floated as a life preserver whenever a serious relationship starts to founder: get married, have a baby, or buy real estate together. Any one of those propositions is challenging enough under ideal circumstances, but that rarely stops people from thinking that the solution to an already complicated situation might be to make it more so. I was sure Patrick’s sudden desire to get engaged sprang from the same last ditch as my estranged husband’s insistence that we should start thinking about having children, just before we finally split up.
“You’d be a bad mother anyway,” he shot at me, when I couldn’t agree that babies were a priority. It was in those last bitter days when he would throw any words that would cut me, and I let him, because I absolutely deserved it, even when he hurled his scotch glass across the room in blind frustration one night, aiming for the wall, and it broke across my forehead instead, to his grief and horror.
It was a very small cut, but the physical pain was a relief. Here, at last, was a feeling that was simple, direct, and honest. I didn’t want it to go away. The throbbing spot on my temple was the nearest thing to lucidity I had felt in a long time. We stooped together to pick up the bits of broken glass, our heads bowed, as if in prayer, over what was shattered and couldn’t be put back together; the awful mess I’d made. He was a gentle and kind man who adored me, and I was making him crazy, because I had fallen in love with someone else, and I could not let either man go. I was a bad wife. Of course I would be a bad mother.
Patrick, looking from the outside in, took my part when I wouldn’t, gallant as only the interloper can afford to be. But now the triangle had turned, and he found himself in my husband’s former corner, while a poet I’d met at the open mike occupied his. I told myself it wasn’t cheating. Or if it was, it was covered by my preexisting state of adultery, and I could just slip it in under general faithlessness. I rationalized that my relationship with Patrick was elastic and expansive enough to handle me testing my wingspan. But even as I raced breathlessly from “meeting” to “meeting” with my poet friend, even as we kissed hungrily, backed up against a table strewn with the drafts of our poems we were ostensibly “meeting” over, I knew I was being stupid. I’d used up all my allowable karmic tax deductions where cheating was concerned. To keep repeating the lesson was to be willfully remedial. The piercing in Deep Ellum was my attempt to snap out of it. I needed to get lucid.
The poet had his own reasons to not be stupid. When I came back from Dallas, we agreed to end it before the furtive make-out sessions went any further and things got out of hand, a distinction I had yet to demonstrate any aptitude for making. I was barely through patting myself on the back when Patrick found out about it anyway.
It was one thing for me to decide it was over between me and the poet. Being told it was over was another. After all, Patrick was the one who had come along and busted open my pretty, safe life, insis
ting I deserved to be free. Who was he to shut the gate now? Maybe it was over, and maybe it wasn’t. We fought about it for weeks. He wanted a promise of fidelity, and I didn’t want one more thing in my life that could get broken. But then he smashed his three-thousand-dollar Martin guitar into a tinder pile of splinters and unlashed strings, to illustrate the point his words weren’t driving home: something had gotten broken anyway. The guitar was the only object of value he’d kept through our cataclysmic affair, which had cost him his house, his job, and his savings. It was the last thing he had left to sacrifice, the final installment of my ransom, and he was ready to walk away.
It was a repeat performance of a one-act melodrama. New man, different props, same me. I was tired of driving nice guys crazy. I was a bull, and all the world a china shop.
I knew I had to assume some responsibility for my life and for my relationships. I decided to take another stab at monogamy. I was even willing to find a job, if it would keep me busy and out of trouble. The risk of idleness was worse than the threat of deportation, so I put the word out among our drinking associates that I was looking for work. Our drummer friend, Hollywood, a weathered and whiskered reprobate in the mold of Levon Helm, sent me to a blues shack down by the tracks, the venerable Whitewater Tavern.
As far as anyone knows, the Whitewater has been in Little Rock longer than Jesus, and its “corner crew,” the shift of hardcore regulars who cling to the corner of the bar with the tenacity and devotion of old-world Catholics at daily Mass, sprang out of the red dirt with it. Its hymnal is the blues. Hang around awhile and you will hear “Stormy Monday” in more variations than should be musically possible or musically desirable. The place cycles through phases of vogue. Every few years, a new generation of white college kids rediscovers it, and it becomes the fashionable place to demonstrate one’s authenticity and hipster cred. New management comes in with new ideas. “Stormy Monday” goes out, replaced by punk, or pop, or rap, or whatever music the hot new band in town is playing. The corner crew hunkers down; smokes, drinks, waits. The band gets signed and goes on tour, the kids move on, the band breaks up, the place burns down. Somebody plays “Stormy Monday.” Repeat. The Whitewater Tavern is the blues.
Planting Dandelions Page 1
