Stop.
This morning underscored for me what our life together has become. Dan sleepily reached for me when the alarm went off, as always, at six a.m. Though half-awake I was happy to have his arms around me, and to feel him pulling up the long men’s shirt I always wear to bed. But then, with no attempt at even a modicum of tenderness, he immediately mounted me, kissing my dry mouth, thrusting in and out of me with rough urgency, and coming with a low groan after just a few moments. Falling off me, he then turned away. When I asked him if he was OK he reached for my hand while still showing me his back.
‘Can you tell me what’s wrong?’ I asked.
‘Why should there be anything wrong?’ he said, now pulling his hand away.
‘You just seem . . . troubled.’
‘Is that what you think I am? Troubled?’
‘You don’t have to get angry.’
‘“You seem troubled.” That’s not a criticism?’
‘Dan, please, this is nuts . . .’
‘You see! You see!’ he said, storming out of bed and heading to the bathroom. ‘You say you don’t criticize. Then what the hell do you do? No wonder I can never, ever win with you. No wonder I can’t . . .’
Then, suddenly, his face fell and he began to sob. A low throttled sob – so choked, so held back. Immediately I was on my feet, moving towards him, my arms open. But instead of accepting my embrace he bolted to the bathroom, slamming the door behind him. I could still hear him crying. But when I knocked on the door and said: ‘Please, Dan, let me—’ he turned on the sink taps and drowned out the rest of my sentence.
Let me help you. Let me near you. Let me . . .
The water kept running. I returned to our bed and sat there for a very long time, thinking, thinking, despair coursing through my veins like the chemical dye I have to shoot every day into people who may be harboring a malignancy.
Is that what I am harboring here? A cancer of sorts. His cancer of unhappiness, caused by his loss of career, and now metastasizing in so many insidious directions that . . .
The water was still running in the bathroom. I stood up and went over to the door, trying to discern if I could hear him still crying over the sound of the open taps. Nothing but cascading water. I checked my watch: 6:18 a.m. Time to wake Sally – unless she happened to hear all the shouting earlier and was already up and concerned. Not that Sally would ever show much outward concern – her one comment after being nearby when Dan railed against me a few weeks ago was a blasé:
‘Great to see I come from such a happy family.’
Were we ever a happy family? Do I even know a truly happy family?
I knocked lightly on her door, then opened it an inch to see that she was still very much asleep. Good. I decided to let her have another fifteen minutes in bed and went downstairs to make coffee. Dan showed up a few minutes later, dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, his gym bag in hand.
‘Heading off to work out,’ he said, avoiding my line of vision.
‘That sounds like a good idea.’
He moved towards the front door.
‘See you tonight.’
‘I’ll be home at the usual time. But you know I have my weekly book talk with Lucy at seven. And tomorrow—’
‘Yeah, you’ll be heading to Boston at lunchtime.’
‘I’ll make all your dinners for the weekend tonight.’
‘You don’t think I can cook?’
‘Dan . . .’
‘I’ll take care of the dinners myself.’
‘Are you angry I’m going to Boston?’
‘Why should I be angry? It’s work, right?’
‘That it is.’
‘Anyway, if I were you I’d want a break from me.’
‘Dan . . .’
‘Don’t say it.’
‘You have me worried.’
He stopped and turned back, still not able to look at me directly. Then, in a half-hushed voice, he said one word:
‘Sorry.’
And he was gone.
Now, nearly eleven hours later – turning down my road after having spent much of the working day trying to keep the entire unsettling aftertaste of the morning somewhat at bay – a certain dread hit me. A dread that has been so present since that day twenty-one months ago when Dan walked in from work and said that he’d just been laid off. The economic downturn had meant that annual sales at L.L.Bean had fallen by 14 percent. The people on the executive floor decided that they could shave some excess off the info tech department – which handles all the online sales and marketing for the company – by cutting the two people in charge of ever expanding its sales capabilities. One of these people happened to be my husband. He’d put in twelve years at L.L.Bean – and was floored by such a summary dismissal, just four days after New Year’s Day. The look on his face when he came in through the front door that night . . . it was as if he had aged ten years in the ten hours since I’d seen him. Reaching into his back pocket he pulled out a letter. The letter. There it was, in hard typography. The notice that he no longer had a job, the regret of the company at ending such a long association, the assurance that a ‘generous termination package would be offered’, along with ‘the services of our Human Resources department to help you find new employment as quickly as possible’.
‘What a joke,’ Dan said. ‘The last time they laid off a bunch of people from my department none of them found any work for at least two years . . . and the only people who did find new jobs had to go out of state.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, reaching for his hand. But he pulled it away before I could touch it. I said nothing, telling myself at the time the man was so understandably floored by what had happened. Even if Dan was never the most tactile or outwardly affectionate of men, he still had never pulled away from me like that before. So I reached out again for his outstretched hand. This time he flinched, as if I was threatening him.
‘You trying to make me feel bad?’ he said, the anger sudden.
Now it was my turn to flinch. I looked at him with shock and just a little disbelief.
I quickly masked it by changing the subject, asking him about the sort of ‘package’ they had offered him. As these things go, it wasn’t too mean: six months’ full salary, full medical insurance for a year, plenty of free career counselling. At least they had the decency to wait until after Christmas before delivering the terrible news – and it wasn’t just the IT department that had suffered cuts, as around seventy employees across the board had been shown the door. But as soon as Dan said ‘six months’ full pay’ I could almost hear what I was thinking simultaneously: We’re just a bit screwed. Only three months earlier we’d taken a $45,000 home-improvement loan to reroof our house and deal with a basement that was riddled with damp. As home upgrades go they were hardly sexy – but absolutely necessary. We took them after much dinner-table discussion and scribbled calculations on the backs of assorted envelopes. Our roof was leaking, our basement was wet. We were filling the space between these two encroaching molds. We had no choice but to borrow the money, even though we knew it would strain our already stretched household budget. Between our $1,200 mortgage per month, the $15,000 it cost to send Ben to U Maine Farmington (and that was a bargain, compared to a private college like Bowdoin), the $250 lease on the car that Dan drove to work (my vehicle was a twelve-year-old Camry with around 133,000 miles on the clock and in urgent need of a new transmission), and the $300 in essential monthly premiums to cover Ben and Sally under my hospital insurance scheme, the idea of burdening ourselves with another $450 per month for ten years was disheartening. Add all these essential outgoings together, and we were already spending close to $3,500 per month. Now Dan earned $43K per year and I earned $51K. After tax we had a combined net income of $61K – or $5, 083 per month. In other words, this left us with just under $1,600 after our main outgoings to pay for all our utilities, all our food, all our clothes, all Ben and Sally’s additional needs, and whatever we could squeeze out every year
to fund a one-week vacation.
I knew many families around us who were making do on far less. Even though Sally did complain that we always seemed to be counting pennies she finally got wise and started using her weekend babysitting money to buy all the iPods and funky earrings and the butterfly tattoo (don’t ask) that she came home with after a day out with some girlfriends in Portland. Ben, on the other hand, never asked us for a penny. He had a part-time job at the college, mixing paints and stretching canvases in the visual arts department. He refused anything more than the room and board we provided for him in addition to his annual tuition.
‘I’m living la vie de bohème in Farmington,’ he said to me once when I tried to press $100 into his hand (I’d done a week’s worth of overtime). ‘I can live on air. And I don’t want you to lose the roof because you slipped me a hundred bucks.’
I laughed and said:
‘I doubt that is going to happen.’
Actually we decided to pay off part of the new roof loan with Dan’s severance. The basement was now dry. And Dan turned in his leased car and used $1,500 to buy a 1997 Honda Civic that never made it above 60 mph. But at least he had wheels while I was at the hospital. The one-salary situation meant that money was ferociously tight. We were just about making all our bills every month and had absolutely no cash to spare. Dan had knocked on every door possible within the state. Perhaps the most terrible irony of his story was that, around eighteen months after he’d lost his job at Bean’s, he discovered that they were readvertising his old post. Naturally he contacted the head of personnel. Naturally the guy spun some yarn about sales upturn allowing them to re-expand the department they had just reduced. Naturally the guy also told Dan he should reapply for the job. Then they went and hired someone else who was (again according to the head of personnel) ‘simply more qualified’. Shortly after that Dan also lost what seemed to be that shoo-in position in the State of Maine’s IT department in Augusta – and the outbreaks of rage really started, perhaps augmented by the fact that, just two days ago, the head of personnel at Bean’s called and said they did have an opening – but it was in the stockroom. Yes, it was an assistant supervisor’s position. And yes, after six months he would be back in their health insurance system. Yet it only paid $13 an hour – but, hey, that was almost twice the minimum wage – and just about $15K a year after taxes.
That extra $15K would give us just the necessary breathing room, and avoid debt (which I have been so damn determined to dodge, but which we are careening towards very quickly). It might even allow us to borrow Dan’s brother-in-law’s condo in Tampa for a week during Christmas and have a proper family vacation in the sun. Of course Dan knew all that. Just as I also so understood he hated the idea of going to work in the stockroom – and for half of what he used to be making within the same organization.
‘It’s like he’s throwing me a bone,’ he said to me on the evening it was offered to him. ‘A crappy consolation prize – and a way of soothing his conscience about having fired me.’
‘It wasn’t him who fired you. It was the boys upstairs. It was their decision to make the cutbacks.’
‘Yeah, but he carried out their dirty work for them.’
‘Unfortunately that’s his job.’
‘You sticking up for him?’
‘Hardly.’
‘But you want me to accept his offer.’
‘I don’t want you to take the job if it is something you absolutely don’t want to do.’
‘We need the money.’
‘Well, yes, we really do. Still, we would find a way to keep things somehow ticking over . . .’
‘You want me to take the job.’
‘I’m not saying that, Dan. And I have asked the hospital if they would let me do ten extra hours of overtime a week – which would bring in around two hundred and fifty more dollars.’
‘And make me feel guilty as hell . . .’
Now, as I was turning this all over in my mind, I headed down my road. It’s a country road, around a mile from the center of Damriscotta. A road that loops its way through slightly elevated countryside . . . though the realtor, when he first brought us to see it, referred to the surrounding landscape as ‘gently rolling’. When I mentioned this once to Ben (in a discussion we were having about the way salesmen inevitably pretty things up) he just shook his head and said:
‘Well, I suppose if you were a rabbit you’d think it was “gently rolling”.’
The fact is that, down towards the waterfront, the terrain is elevated, humpy. The town lawyers and doctors live on those wonderful prospects overlooking the Kennebec River. So does one rather successful painter, a reasonably well-known writer of children’s books, and two builders who have cornered the market in this part of mid-coast Maine. The houses there are venerable clapboard structures – usually white or deep red – beautifully maintained and landscaped, with recent SUVs in the driveways. Hand on heart I have never had a disagreeable thought about the people who are lucky enough to live in these elegant, refined homes. Hand on heart there is a moment every day when I drive by this stretch of waterfront houses and think: Wouldn’t it be nice if . . .
If what? If I had married a rich local doctor? Or, more to the point, had become that doctor? Is that a tiny little stab I always feel – and yes, it has been a constant silent prod recently – whenever I pass by this stretch of real estate, before turning upwards towards my far more modest home? Is midlife inevitably marked by the onset of regret? I always put on a positive face in front of my work colleagues, my children, my increasingly detached husband. Dr Harrild once referred to me (at a surprise fortieth birthday party two years ago) as ‘the most unflappable and affirmative person on our staff’. Everyone applauded this comment. I smiled shyly while simultaneously thinking: If only you knew how often I ask myself: ‘Is this it?’
My dad often sang a tune to me about ‘accentuating the positive’ when I was younger and getting into one of those rather serious moods I used to succumb to during the roller-coaster ride that was adolescence. But considering how often I caught him singing those upbeat words to himself I can’t help but think that he was also using the song as a way of bolstering his own lingering sense of regret. Dr Harrild actually heard me humming this once in the staff room and said:
‘Now you are about the last person who needs to be telling herself all that.’
Dr Harrild. He too always tries to accentuate the positive – and genuinely be kind. The trip I’m taking this weekend being an example of that. A radiography conference in Boston. OK, Boston’s just three hours down the road, so it’s not like being sent to somewhere really enviable like Honolulu or San Francisco (two places I so want to visit someday). Still, the last time I was in Boston . . . gosh, it must be two years ago. A Christmas shopping trip. An overnight with Sally and Ben. We even went to a touring production of The Lion King and stayed in an OK hotel off Copley Square. The city was under a fresh dusting of snow. The chic lights along Newbury Street looked magical. I was so happy that Ben and Sally were so happy. And I told myself then that I was going to find the money to start travelling a little every year; that life was roaring by and if I wanted to see Paris or Rome or . . .
Then, a few weeks later, Dan was out of a job. And the dream was put on permanent hold.
Still, thank you, Dr Harrild. An all-expenses-paid trip to Boston. Gas money. A hotel for two nights. Even $300 in cash for expenses. And all because he was invited to this radiological convention, but his eldest boy has a football game this Sunday and he wanted the hospital represented at the convention, and when I raised the concern that maybe I wasn’t senior enough (i.e. a doctor) to be attending, he brushed that worry away with the statement: ‘You probably know more about radiography than most of the senior consultants who will be there. Anyway, you deserve a trip on us, and a break from things for a few days.’
Was that his way of letting me know that he’d heard something about the state of ‘things’ at home? I had been p
retty damn scrupulous about not telling anyone at the hospital or around town about Dan’s problems. Still, small hospitals and small towns breed small talk.
Not that Dr Harrild would ever really engage in such gossip. But he was right about me needing a break – even one that would last just under seventy-two hours. A change of scene and all that. But also – and this was a realization which, when it hit me a few days ago, truly shocked me – the first time I had been away on my own since Ben and Sally were born.
I have let myself stand still.
But tomorrow I am on the road. Alone. Even if it is a destination I already know – and one that’s just a small jump from the place I call home – travel is travel. A temporary escape.
I turned into our driveway. The reclining rays of an unusually bright autumn sun reflected off the new roof of our house. A two-story house, somewhat squat, finished in off-gray clapboard that I would love to darken by two shades if I could ever find the $9,000 our local house painter told me it would cost to redo the entire exterior (and it really needs it). Just as I’d love to landscape the half-acre of land that fronts it, as it has become rather scrubby. Behind us, however, is a wonderful oak tree that, right this moment, is almost peacock-like in its autumnal beauty. Sometimes I think it was the tree that sold me on the house – as we bought it knowing it was a fixer-upper, a starter place from which we’d eventually graduate.
But enough of that (as I tell myself most days). We have raised two children here. It’s our home. We worked hard to buy it. We continue to work hard to keep it (though the last mortgage payment falls in seventeen months – hurrah). It is our history. Only now can I honestly say that I’ve never warmed to the place. Nor has Dan. How I wish we’d talked ourselves out of ever buying it.
Our home.
I thought that as I pulled up our driveway and saw Dan sitting on the bench that covers most of the front porch, a cigarette between his lips. As soon as he spotted my car pulling up he was on his feet like an anxious schoolboy, dumping the cigarette onto the porch deck and then trying to hide the evidence by kicking it into the crabgrass below. Dan has been allegedly off cigarettes for six months – but I know he smokes several every day.
Five Days Page 5
