Baby boy, at three and a half, perceives the void outlined by these stories. He climbs into my lap, and with both hands pulls my face toward his. “Who grandfather’s name called?” he whispers.
“Al,” I tell him. “And Patrick. Poppy and PawPaw.”
“Who grandmother’s name?”
“Nanny.”
“Who other grandmother’s name called?”
“Honey.”
“Honey,” he repeats.
Old grief is a cunning street robber. It can pick your pocket slyly in a crowd, without you noticing your joy is gone. Or it ambushes you straight on, out of nowhere, steel to your gut. Your knees hit the ground and you’re breathless.
I gaze into the flame of the rose candle. Not in joyful anticipation, but with thought for La Virgen María de los Dolores, Virgin Mary of Sorrows. Patrick and I spent a season of Lent in Mexico, where a fiesta is dedicated to the sorrowful mother, and people open their homes to display elaborate house altars in her honor, adorned with wheatgrass and bitter oranges.
I was in fresh, raw grief at the time, mourning the end of my first marriage. It was the kind of sadness that makes every breath an effort, a decision. It sounds very romantic to say I ran off to Mexico with my lover, but the truth is, I spent most of my days there in a fog. The Night of the Altars pierced it. Sorrow and loss were allowed. I wanted to gather all the oranges into my arms, bite them through their skins. I began to understand that the pain wouldn’t let go of me unless I clasped it first.
I sometimes think we haven’t been able to gather in the pain of losing our parents. As they were going, our children were coming. There hasn’t been time or space. In the case of Patrick’s parents, I’m not sure we’ve ever come out of shock. Even my dad’s death, more expected, still seems unreal. My mother and sister experience his absence nearly every day, but I only encounter it when I visit. I remember riding in the back of a car with my sister in front of me on the way to Mom’s from the airport a few years ago. My sister was saying, “When Dad died . . . ,” and I could hear my own voice inside my head, asking “What did she say?”
My husband doesn’t have the geographic disconnect, but he also manages to get around the gaping hole. We don’t visit Patrick’s parents’ graves, a half-hour drive. We almost never get together with his brother’s family, although our relationship with them is genuinely warm. Apart from Christmas cards exchanged with a steadfast few, we don’t see or hear from relatives or friends of his parents. Patrick’s never been back to the house his father sold soon after his mother died. It’s as if the entire space they carved out in the world simply closed over.
Every year, my children’s schools have a Grandparents’ Day, and every year I have to scramble to come up with a substitute grandparent for each of them. Once, the best I could do was get a co-worker they’d never met. The schools insist I come up with somebody. I lamented the situation to a friend’s ninety-four-year-old mother once, half hoping she would take the bait. She had outlived two husbands and a daughter.
“Well, honey,” she said, smiling, and patting my arm, “that’s just the way it is.”
She was right. I decided we needed to accept reality. The reality, I told my boys, is that they have only one grandparent, and she lives 2,500 miles away, and it’s too bad, but Grandparents’ Day is probably always going to be a drag for them because of it.
It’s just the way it is. Sorrow and loss are allowed.
I have to remember her words when Patrick describes for the boys how deeply the presents would be piled under his tree. Oh, don’t tell them that, I think. I don’t want my children to feel lack. But they do lack, and it’s not in presents. It’s in three wonderful people who would have loved them unconditionally, and indulged them shamelessly, the way only grandparents can do. Even my youngest, the only child to never meet any of them, understands that some of his family are missing, and misses them.
I have to let him. Even if it means I have to miss them, too.
9.
For Richer, for Poorer
I never used to pay attention to foreclosure notices. They were just inscrutable boxes of black-and-white text I had to flip past to get to a more interesting section of the newspaper. I slow down when I see them now, as I might do if I were passing headstones in a graveyard. I’m aware there are names and dates buried in the legalese: a street, an address. A home. Sometimes I’ll stop and read them. The names are often followed by the words “husband and wife.”
I wonder how they’re doing, if they’ll make it.
It wasn’t that long ago that my husband and I were the ones facing foreclosure, hanging off a cliff by our well-gnawed fingernails. I know the exhaustion and terror of staring into that abyss. It’s hard on the soul, and it’s hell on a marriage. It’s tempting to assume that people who fall on hard times have brought it upon themselves, through recklessness or greed. But every financial disaster is disastrous in its own way—easy enough to see where the downward spiral ends, harder to sort out where it began.
The year our last child was born, Patrick left a twenty-year career in corporate advertising to open his own design studio. Other people on the verge of such a leap might have gotten all their ducks in a row first: formulated a business plan, banked a year’s worth of living expenses.
We’ve never been other people. There was no plan. Our ducks tend to be free-range. We’d chased after them a few times—like running off to Mexico early in our courtship to live until our money ran out, then coming back to the States to start over with nothing but our clothes and an antique Mercury Comet, powder blue and chrome. “Fortune favors the bold” was our motto.
When we married, we vowed to keep following our bliss. But after our kids came, Patrick’s wistful notion of working for himself kept getting deferred. “When the children are all in school,” I’d tell him. Or, “When we’ve saved enough money.” And then, “When we’re out of debt.” When it feels safe to abandon a predictable paycheck, matching contributions to a 401(k), group health insurance, and paid vacation, that’s when. That day never came. Patrick kept the lid on his growing unhappiness until it began to leak out messily; then he and his job broke up.
At the time, my income as a part-time administrative assistant barely covered groceries. It was just something on the side, a foothold in the grown-up world. The job that mattered most to me was being home with our three small children. I thought it was the thing that mattered most to Patrick also—a noble reason to put up with an unsatisfactory situation for a few more years, at least. I was angry, disappointed, and frightened when he came to the end of his rope.
But I could also see how deeply unhappy my husband had become, and how long he’d been trying to hide it. His career as a hired hand in a small market was at a creative dead end. Freelancing from our home would give him the variety and autonomy he was longing for, and allow him to spend more time with our kids. We had a little bit of savings, and Patrick had twenty years’ worth of contacts in the business. I was willing to give it a chance. As the saying goes, when the students are ready, the teacher will appear. Ours was a financial adviser named Linda. A friend recommended her, assuring us that even one session would be an hour and $75 well spent. Linda listened to our hopes and fears, reviewed our numbers, looked us straight in the eye, and told us in her no-bull New England accent, “You can do this.”
Although Patrick had talked over the years about striking out on his own, I had frankly underestimated the motivating power of independence. The husband I had feared was too laid-back to chase clients methodically and determinedly sought work, and work came. But his business tends to be one of feast or famine, subject to seasonal cycles, economic conditions, and chance. Months sometimes passed between checks; sometimes, between jobs.
“Why didn’t we go to med school?” I said to Patrick when my son asked why he couldn’t buy his school lunch instead of packing it every day. “What were we thinking?”
Linda gave us perspective for the long haul
. “Look,” she’d say, when our confidence wavered, “most start-ups don’t show any profit at all in the first few years. You guys are making your living from this right out of the gate.”
Well, barely. But it helped to hear it. Besides her sheer faith in our abilities, and helping us budget, Linda’s most valuable contribution during our start-up year was to remind us that we had choices. “You could rent out a room in your house,” she pointed out. “You could sell it. You can enroll the kids in public school instead of paying private tuition.”
She was right. We did have choices. But we were trying not to exercise the tough ones. I, especially, was still clinging to the infrastructure of salaried life. We may have lived paycheck to paycheck, but at least there was a paycheck, and we knew when to expect it. As much I as prided myself on being resourceful, I never wanted to be the poster girl for frugal living. I enjoy material comforts as much as the next person. I’d been looking at sharing a car and hand-me-downs as short-term pain for long-term gain. Packing lunches and clipping coupons felt thrifty. The idea of making drastic changes to our living space or the children’s education was traumatic. The school is special, we explained. Our home is sacred.
Linda challenged us to rethink all our assumptions. “What are you waiting for?” she asked, when she learned I had put writing on the vocational back burner.
I found I didn’t have a good answer for that, since it was something I could do from home. I had the uncomfortable awareness that I had been using my kids as a shield between my dream and me. I kept my paying job, but I also began writing again. My first fee—$100 for a guest commentary in a newspaper—felt like a cool million.
At the end of our first year in business, we got a pleasant surprise: We weren’t too far behind our income from Patrick’s corporate job the year before. Cost-cutting measures filled in some of the gap. We closed the rest with savings withdrawals and credit cards. Meantime, Patrick and I were reveling in the novelty of being at home together every day.
The second year proved to be a different story. Nearly every month, there was a point at which we thought the last job had gone out the door. No one would ever give us another dime. And then suddenly Patrick would be deluged and working seventy-two-hour stretches. Remind me how this is less stressful than agency work, I was tempted to ask at those times. Remind me about all the togetherness, I wanted to say, when he was working morning to night and I was feeling nostalgic for Monday to Friday, eight to five.
We survived those months one last-minute reprieve after another. Disaster would loom, and a check would appear at the fifty-ninth minute of the eleventh hour. I was frustrated, fatigued, and furious at the zero-sum-ness of it all. Always just enough. Always just in time. I was sick of just. We were living retroactively, unable to get enough traction to get caught up, much less ahead. The question of affording school tuition for the next year became moot. I wrote the headmistress, informing her we’d have to withdraw. She steered us to scholarship funds that would fully supplement the financial aid we already received.
On registration day, my third-grader saw the brochure for after-school chess classes and asked me if he could sign up. “I don’t have money for that today,” I said, in the most neutral tone I could muster. A smartly dressed mother at the sign-up table turned to look at me. A moment later, another parent walked up beside me, the mother of the kid whose used social studies book I had bought for my son. In what would have been a comedy of errors if it hadn’t been so embarrassing, the check I had written for it had bounced, and then the check I had written to cover that had bounced. The book wound up costing me an arm and a leg after all the fees had been paid. It’s expensive to be poor.
Not one of these events in isolation would have fazed me. I’m okay with telling my kids when we can’t afford something. As my friend who works in a posh boutique assures me, even wealthy people bounce checks sometimes. But all together, it was just too much. I cried more that year than I had in all the other years we’d been married. I worried we were failing our kids.
We’d been meeting with Linda less regularly, since we could no longer afford to pay cash, and I hated to take advantage of her willingness to run us a tab. When I put in an SOS call, she insisted we come in that day.
Ironically, in spite of our day-to-day crises, the big picture was looking good. Patrick’s client base was growing; my writing was getting picked up. To quit now would be to throw away all that promise. “Now is not the time to take your eyes off the ball,” Linda reminded us. “Let’s go over all of your choices.”
The “choices” now were very simple: declaring bankruptcy or selling the house. Linda calmly outlined the pros and cons of each. Everything was on the table now. My husband and I tiptoed around it gingerly, the way we walked around each other.
Only from the safety of Linda’s office could Patrick say aloud what he thought we should do. He had asked me to come out on this limb with him, and he knew there were days I was close to pushing him off, when I wished he would just grow up, get a real job. Rescue me.
“I think maybe it’s become harder to hang on to the house than it would be to let it go,” Patrick said quietly.
Easy for you to say, I felt like shouting. This was all your stupid idea anyway. But I knew Linda would never let me get away with it. Choices, she’d say. Decisions. It was time for us to make one. Patrick was open to either selling the house or rebooting our debt load by filing for bankruptcy. Whatever it would take to turn us around, forward facing. I wanted to explore refinancing our house first. Our credit was shot, but we had built quite a bit of equity. All of us agreed it was worth a try.
It’s nice to think, before life really tests you, that you’ll be the couple who exemplify unity and grace under pressure. I would like to tell you we are that couple. But the truth is, the navigation of life’s more harrowing storms has not always been accomplished using our indoor voices. On a good day, I was proud of my husband for striking out on his own, and proud of myself for being able to take the leap of faith with him. On a good day, one of us could always find a way to make the other smile. “Got to keep you in the lifestyle to which you’ve lowered your expectations,” he’d say with a wink and a grin, when I’d chide him about working long hours. On a good day, I knew that our marriage did not depend on the score on our credit report.
The Tuesday before Thanksgiving 2007 was not a good day.
The fall quarter had been unusually slow. Patrick made only a few hundred dollars the entire month of October. A client who owed him thousands more was MIA. Our attempt to refinance our home had hit a brick wall. We were spiraling down. The only avenue left was to try and sell quickly, ahead of foreclosure. In the meantime, there was the immediate future and the holiday season to get through. I knew we would have to swallow our pride and reach out. That morning, I drove past a man on the freeway holding a cardboard sign. COULD USE A LITTLE HELP, it said. I had ten dollars in my purse and I didn’t know where the next ten dollars was coming from. I was on the opposite side of the road. It would make a good story to say I turned around and gave him half of what I had, but I didn’t. I borrowed the words of his sign and hung them on my heart instead.
We could use a little help, I e-mailed my mom and a family friend through tears. I was exhausted, embarrassed, and afraid. “If we lose our home,” I said to Patrick balefully, “I don’t know if I can forgive you.”
Patrick, already haunted by the thought of failing to provide for his family, bent his head and walked outside to sit on the porch and brood. All night, my bitter words hung in the air. I thought it would make me feel better if I could point my finger at someone and say, “You did this, now you fix it.” It didn’t. I had the sick feeling I had cashed in something precious for something very cheap.
The next day, the eve of Thanksgiving, I got up early and considered our blessings. We had family and friends who would not let us go homeless or hungry. We had three healthy and happy sons whom we hoped we were buffering from the worst of
our anxiety. We’d had promising signs that our respective careers would flourish if we could just pull away from the whirlpool our reverse cash flow had created.
And we had each other. Once, that had been all I ever wanted.
“Meet me a little bit of the way,” Patrick said to me, when he was living in Mexico, and I was frozen in fear and indecision at the opposite corner of the continent. “Just a little bit,” he repeated. “I’ll come all the rest of the way to meet you.”
I packed a bag, got on a bus, and met him a few hundred miles from where I put down the phone. He came the other few thousand. The best part of my life was everything that happened after. Surely, after ten years of marriage I could find it in me to meet him more than just a little bit of the way.
Patrick came downstairs with the same stricken look I’d put on his face the day before. I took his hand in mine; felt the innumerable, tiny scratches etched into his wedding band. If I counted them up, like the rings of a tree, would they tell the years?
“I’m so sorry,” I said to him. “We can let go of this house. But not each other.”
Soon after the Christmas decorations came down, the FOR SALE sign went up. That was a Thursday. The SOLD sign went up Saturday. Sunday, we went out and picked out our new house. We are people who routinely spend an hour driving around trying to decide where to spend thirty-five bucks on supper. By extrapolation, a set of back-to-back real estate transactions should have taken us a year. But I guess if you include all the hand-wringing leading up to the decision, it sort of did.
I can hardly tell you now what that was all about, but I’ve since come to believe that houses have minds of their own. They choose who comes and goes. As it turned out, our house had been making eyes at another woman for some time. She lived a few blocks away, and had been in love with it for years. She and her husband had looked at countless listings, but none of them turned out to be what they were looking for. “What are you looking for?” a visitor asked her one evening, out of curiosity.
Planting Dandelions Page 10
