“Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion’s starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don’t see that.
It seems to me that love is everywhere.
Often, it’s not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it’s always there – fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends.” ~From the movie LOVE ACTUALLY (One of my holiday favorites!)
Oh, My loves, God only knows what I’d be without YOU!
“I have a real conundrum”, was how he answered my standard nightly inquiry which goes something like this:
Me: “How was your day?”
Husband: “It was (fill in the blank).”
Usually, he says “good.” Other times I can tell by his face that I shouldn’t ask. More often than not there’s a story or a funny anecdote that starts a conversation that carries us through dinner.
But never, in the almost seventeen years I’ve asked the question has it been answered this way.
“Wow, really? A conundrum. What happened?”
He hedged.
I don’t like hedging. Hedging makes me anxious.
“I’ll feed the dog,” he volunteered.
When it comes to eating our dog is probably a lot like yours. Since she comprehends any sentence that has the word food or feed or treat in it — the “spinning around the kitchen” phase of the evening begins as she excitedly waits for her dish to be prepared.
“Come on! Tell me what’s up!” I urged as he shoveled kibble into warm water.
When he bent down to give our whirling dervish her dinner, I spotted some residual unsteadiness left over from the bout of vertigo he’s been battling for the past couple of weeks.
Slowly, he came back to standing, leaning on the kitchen counter directly across from me.
Those corners in the kitchen, those are sacred. Over the years they have become our preferred conversation spots.
If I think about it, almost every conversation, big or small, has a least started in those corners.
We may shift back and forth while we prepare dinner but it all begins in those corners.
If things get tense, we maintain our distance, like fighters in the ring.
But I have laughed my ass off and been flooded with tears (often at the same time) in the corners of our kitchen.
We hug a lot there too.I don’t know why, but kitchen corners are conducive to hugging.
Anyway, it took a while for him to explain.
“I wanted to get you a tree,” he said looking at me sheepishly.
“I wanted to surprise you…with a Christmas tree.”
“What?”
You see, since we met, Christmastime at our house can be…complicated.
For me, it is the BEST time of year. You can find me Ho, Ho, Ho-ing my way through December.
For my husband—not so much. No, No, No-ing is more like it for him.
It could be due to his horrible, Jesuit boarding school, Oliver Twisted childhood—no one knows for sure.
All I DO know is that Christmas can be a minefield, a subject we have litigated into the ground only to come away without any reasonable solution as to how we can navigate without blowing somebody up.
If you read my last blog post you know that I’ve decided to go treeless this year. It was a compromise I’ve never been willing to make—until no——made easy by some brilliantly timed post-holiday travel.
In an act of holiday self-care (which,I highly recommend for everyone) I decorated my sister’s tree on Tuesday which was a fix for this Christmas Junkie.
So, I’m good with it. Really.
And that’s the part that confused him.
He continued, “On Monday, I finally felt up to driving to that awesome nursery where we saw those live trees,” he said.
“The ones with the silver needles you like?
He could see the bewildered expression on my face but he kept going.
“So I had it in the back of my van and I was going to set it up this morning…until I read your blog.”
I still wasn’t following so he continued.
“You said you were happy that you didn’t have a tree. That you liked the ease and simplicity…”
“Well, yeah…but…”
“So I drove back there to return it, but they don’t take back Christmas trees.” I could see a look of chagrin trying to hide behind his sexy, white beard.
I started to laugh. “What? No you didn’t!”
“Yep,” he said, starting to see the humor. “You are the proud owner of a living, silver pine tree which has been driven all over hell and back the past two days and is now lurking in the back of my van trying not to feel rejected.”
“Awwwwww, come on! You did not!” My eyes filled with tears as I launched myself into his arms. I told you those corners were for hugging.
“Lemme see him!” I squealed.
“I’m sorry.” He nuzzled his face in my neck. “I just can’t seem to get it right.”
“Don’t be sorry. Ya did good.”
Sometimes when you let something go. Like really let it go with no residual bullshit–it hunts you down and lurks in a van in your driveway.
Friends, Angels? Do you believe they walk among us? I sure do! Read this and see what you think. xox
As we rushed out through the smokey maze of the Casino at the old Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas, it suddenly hit me that he had once again forgotten to give me my show bonus. The monetary incentive he used to physically wring me dry.
The realization stopped me in my tracks. F*#&!
We had just finished a week-long, Estate Jewelry Show.
I was bone tired from being on my feet for over twelve hours a day—in heels, and to add insult to injury, our plane reservation left us no time to eat before the flight home, so to top it all off—I was hangry.
In other words—I was in NO mood for any fuckery!
We had grossed over one million dollars—in a week. The two of us. And I was about to fly home empty-handed, once again.
You see, I had a boss who hated to pay me. He just did.
And no carefully scripted notes or heartfelt talks, or angry outbursts on my part had done anything to change that.
I had coached him repeatedly on the merits of showing respect. It wasn’t difficult, all he had to do was pay me. And not make me ask for my money, which I HATED.
What would this be, the third time that day I’d had to ask him for my money? I was quite familiar with this humiliating power play, and I was sick of it! Listen, I had done everything I could think of to sidestep this idiocy! Even after years of his bonus structure consisting of whatever loose cash he had in his pocket, not his fat, overstuffed money clip mind you—but his pocket change, I had won one hard-fought battle by finally getting him to agree to a pre-set bonus amount.
“Why are you stopping?” he bellowed back at me impatiently. His aluminum wheelie suitcase, a rectangular R2D2, skipped from wheel to wheel, trying to keep its balance. I could’ve sworn it looked in my direction with a help me face.
He continued his frantic march through the casino toward the door.
“I’d love to get my bonus before we leave?” I asked for the third time, running to keep up. I knew that if I let it slide, even for a day or two, the odds of getting it would become so slim even a Vegas bookie would pass on that bet.
I wasn’t sure he’d heard me until in one fluid motion, he swung to the right, deftly executing a wide, sweeping, u-turn back in my direction. Still in motion, he reached into his murse (man purse) and dumped a handful of gambling chips in my direction. Surprised, I reached out with both hands in time to catch most of them. Several of them did make a break for it, the slippery little buggers rolling on their sides underneath the dollar slots nearby.
“That should cover it,” He insisted. “Now hurry up, we don’t want to miss our plane.”
I stood there red-faced and flabbergasted, knowing that he’d left me no time to cash them in. Quickly, I shoved the chips in my purse and proceeded to get down on my hands and knees to see if I could retrieve the ones that had made their escape.
A pot-bellied, middle-aged woman, with a cigarette with two inches of ash precariously dangling from her lipstick-stained lips, was straddling two stools in front of three slot machines. Without ever looking away from the rapidly rotating numbers she was counting on to change her life, her foot kicked the chips my way, like a bedroom-slippered hockey stick. “Uh, thanks” I mumbled, crawling around on the ground in my skirt and heels, totally in awe of her unbroken focus.
“Janet, let’s go!” He chided from inside the automatic revolving glass exit doors before turning right to join the cab line.
I could hear the damn plastic chip clattering together in my bag as I ran to catch my flight back to LA.
In the hour it took to get from Vegas to Los Angeles, I began to seethe with rage.
Not only had he made me repeatedly beg him for money he had literally thrown poker chips at me in lieu of my bonus! I had never felt so disrespected. In. My. Life.
I don’t know about you, but when I get in touch with that level of anger, I have a tendency to burst into flames tears.
Hunched down in my middle seat toward the back of the plane, I cried and cried and cried. Big, wet, sloppy tears.
I decided I would rather die, covered in honey and tied on an anthill than take the prearranged ride home to Park La Brea with him and his wife. What I knew for sure was that someone was going to die if I got in that car with him. And I was way too overdressed to spend a night in jail.
As we exited the terminal, the crowd spitting us out onto the curb, I spotted his wife’s car to the left. Without making a sound, (or so much as an indecent hand gesture) I made a beeline to the right, jumping into a single cab that just happened to be waiting there for me.
The moment the door shut and we pulled away—I freaking lost it.
I began to ugly cry, complete with gasping for breath and rivers of snot running down my face.
There I was, trapped in a horrible working situation with no solution in sight. What do you do when you ask someone repeatedly to treat you with respect and they blatantly disregard that request?
I know what you’re thinking, quit! But I couldn’t. I had the kind of career everyone wanted. Travel, great pay, jewelry, prestige. Which led to a lot of financial obligations, AND I was thirty-seven and single. Wahhhhhhhhhhhh. That sad truth made me cry even harder.
As we wound our way through the late-night traffic on LaCienega, I spotted the dark, soulful eyes of the cab driver, staring at me in the rearview mirror. His deep brown skin, white turban, and singsongy accent gave away his country of origin. India.
“Beautiful lady, why you cry?” He cooed.
“Ohhhhhhhhhhhhh, I’m just feeling so sad,” I boo-hooed. “I don’t know what to do.”
I watched his eyes search my face in the mirror as I inadvertently wiped snot into my hair with the back of my hand. “Beautiful lady, don’t be sad, it can’t be that bad,” he murmured in his soothing, heavily accented voice.
“Ohhhhhhh it is, I think I hate my boss…he doesn’t show me any respect…he paid me with…”
I started to wail. Loudly. “With, with, poker chiiiiiiiiiiiiips!”
I grabbed a couple out of my bag and tossed them onto the front seat for dramatic effect.
“Beautiful lady, you have God’s respect and that’s all that matters.”
“Really? I mean, I guess…”
At that moment, the cab came to a slow, rolling stop in front of my high-rise apartment building.
Since I had cried the entire ride home, he had to wait as I scavenged around in my bag for cab fare. In the meantime, the lovely man retrieved my suitcase from where I had launched it, the driver’s side backseat, opened my door, and wheeled my bag inside the lobby, depositing it in front of the elevator doors. When he returned to the cab, I had composed myself enough to hand him his fare, including a generous tip for being such a good listener.
“Here you go, thank you for being so kind to me,” I said sheepishly through the tissue that was attempting to wrangle my false eyelashes back into place.
“Oh no beautiful lady, you keep that. This ride is on me.”
And before I could even argue with him, he pulled away into the dark Los Angeles night. As I watched his tail lights fade into the distance, I realized a couple of things that were not normal. And they gave me goosebumps.
They still do.
Number one: I never told him where I lived!
I just got in the cab and fell apart while he drove me home — to Park La Brea, a literal labyrinth of apartments, turnabouts, and one-way streets. My friends refuse to pick me up lest they never find their way out. Even with my best directions, many a cab driver has made a wrong turn and been spit back out onto Wilshire Boulevard.
Number two: There are ten high rises inside that complex.How is it that he had managed to navigate all the twists and turns and one-way streets and deposit me right at my door? I’ll answer that. He was an angel. My angel. Plain and simple.
When I finally managed to come out of my stupor, slowly walking inside the lobby, I noticed he had propped the elevator doors open with my bag. Getting inside I was stunned to discover he’d also pushed the button to the ninth floor!
My floor! How did he know?
I really, truly believe that angels are everywhere and only show themselves when we need them.
“The onlytruecurrency in this bankrupt worldis what you share with someone else when you’re uncool”. ~Lester Bangs, Almost Famous
I am as about as uncool of a person as they come. Seriously. And so I’m sharing some of the ‘currency of the uncool’ with y’all, my fellow passengers on this E-ticket ride called life. And here’s what I’ve noticed lately:
Every damn person, myself included, thinks they’re doing this pandemic thing wrong.
Not that there’s a “Living Your Best Life During A Global Catastrofuck” handbook, which I personally view as a terrible oversight on God’s part and I will have words with her about it when this thing is over; but, you can get goaded by social media (which tragically, has been our only glimpse into the void) into thinking there’s a right way to be living your life right now and when I say ‘you’——I mean me.
In the beginning I pretty much winged it since it was my first pandemic and just like the rest of the world I was making shit up as I went along. I baked an embarrassing tonnage of chocolate chip cookies and distributed them to my neighbors— like life jackets on the Titanic. I mean, who doesn’t want to be discovered ten thousand years from now with the fossilized remnants of chocolate chip cookies as proof of their last meal?
It all felt very dystopian future meets apocalyptic end-of-times——if you’re living inside of a Nora Ephron movie.
Once my sweat pants got tight, I looked at Instagram and switched to gardening, and home improvement (you guys, my thumb has never been greener, my silverware shinier, or my back sorer) in-between Zoom calls. Zoom. Don’t get me started.
I could write an entire book on the way Zoom has simultaneously saved and ruined my life.
It has kept me connected in the weirdest way imaginable by lulling me into a false, Jetsonian sense of intimacy with one-dimensional images of people I used to be able to hug, smell and taste (don’t ask). It has introduced me, or rather my head from the neck up, to people I’ve never met; revealed my questionable taste in home decor to strangers I would never invite inside my house——and saved my ass as far as work is concerned.
Have you noticed? Some people are Zoom naturals. It’s a thing.
They glow and effuse with breathtaking ease. Their ideas flow with an effortless acuity, in long, erudite monologues that sound like they were written by Aaaron Sorkin. Not me.
I show up more times than I care to admit, tragically unprepared, mumbling and laughing inappropriately, with my hair styled by a helicopter, whitening strips on my teeth and an adult beverage in my coffee cup.
So yeah, Zoom.
And as grateful as I practice being for my health and life in general, I have to admit to a certain sense of Ground Hog’s Day claustrophobia. Every day has begun to bleed into the next. There’s not much to look forward to. There are no weekends anymore. Don’t ask me what day it is or the month, I do not know. It’s warm, there are flowers, and if I owned a bikini I could wear it—so I’m guessing summer.
All I know for sure is that today ends in a Y.
Another thing I’ve noticed lately that I’m sure is probably true for you too— All I do is work.
I write, Zoom, shovel shit, paint shit, stain shit, clean shit, wash shit, cook shit, fix shit, edit shit, watch shit——lather, rinse, repeat. And if you’re someone who is home schooling kids, well, we are not in the same league, let alone the same zip code! And I thank you for your service and will insist you go straight to the head of the line at the Pearly Gates.
And all of this—since March!
My sister and I, agreed yesterday in one of our epic Karen bitch-seshes, not on the way California is handling Covid (because, oh bloody hell, we’re all gonna die!) but on the fact that we’ve forgotten how to have fun.
Fun. You know, that thing you do in-between work and more work and twice as much in the summer.
Fun. We’re not even doing THAT right!
But I am not alone. WE are not alone in our Narnia of despair. If you haven’t seen this already, it from Saint Glennon 0f Doyle, author of Untamed and patron saint of all women embracing their inner cheetah while confined to house arrest.
She gets it.
I think—somewhere in the middle of last week—I hit a wall.
I am sad. I feel lost and aimless in my home most of the day. I am cranky with my people. Even though we’re together all day—I’m somehow gone. I’m claustrophobic in this covid world. The news makes me terrified and so full of rage I want to scream. I wander around all day with this nagging feeling that I’m not doing enough writing enough helping enough creating enough parenting enough wifeing enough BEING enough—that I’m wasting my time, my hours, my days, my life.
Is it just me? And if so I was just joking I’m fine, totally carpeing the hell outta these diems and all that shit.
Crawling along. Gonna keep going. Love you madly.
“No feeling is final.” -the magical Rainer Maria Rilke.
~Glennon
In closing, I know this:
Stillness brings up so much shit!
Perfectionism kills.
Don’t watch the news.
You must march to your own damn drum.
Nap if you’re tired.
Try to belly laugh once a day.
And cookies and pie are essential to our mental health (which is the reason I’m telling myself I couldn’t find flour in a store until June).
And when I get twitchy and snarly, I will report myself to whoever is in charge of me (besides my husband who has been my quarantine roommate and is struggling with combat fatigue) which is usually my sister or my BFF—for an attitude adjustment and yet another virtual hug.
“Pain is real, and sometimes it can’t be avoided, but suffering is a choice.”
I don’t think I have to explain why I’m writing this. Unless someone, a thousand years from now digs this up and wonders. So I’ll just let a single word be the explanation: Pandemic.
Scary, huh? I mean, seriously, 2020—can we have a do-over?
Anyway, until they figure out how to do that, here’s an hour-long chant/meditation that I adore that you can fall asleep to or have playing softly in the background while you build that puzzle or cuddle your cat.
Because that’s what we’re all gonna do now. We’re going to hit pause, be smart, chill, and get to the end of this, this, shit show—together.
You can fight the restrictions, steep in worry, and run around town like a headless chicken looking for that last bottle of hand-sanitizer, OR, you can take this time to reintroduce yourself to your family, read a book, binge on every episode of EVERYTHING you’ve missed, and check on your neighbors. I’ve been exchanging contact info with mine (from six feet away of course) just in case the shit hits the fan and we’re forced to isolate. Isolation can be lonely and scary and I always have extra butter in case anyone runs out. And AAA batteries and so many boxes that I’m embarrassed to say how many, of Kraft Mac n cheese, you know, real zombie apocalypse type stuff.
Humor. Humor will get us through this. I’ve already tried screaming and it doesn’t work.
I know Valentine’s was a week ago but I don’t follow the same time-space continuum as most. Anyway…
This. This freaking post. I wrote it back in 2016 as an homage to our love. And truthfully, to show off our oh soglamorous life. Now, it has become, BY FAR, the most popular and most requested of any other almost 1700 posts I’ve written! I’d like to think it got traction because of the story, or the writing, but I know it’s because it has the word “poop” is in the title. That’s okay, If you’re here to read about poop—I still love you.
Carry on, xox JB
“Bird poop brings good luck!
There is a belief that if a bird poops on you, your car or your property, you may receive good luck and riches. The more birds involved, the richer you’ll be! So next time a bird poops on you, remember that it’s a good thing.”
~Bird Poop Expert
What about if a single bird poops on your head while you’re driving in your car? You know, moving target and all. That feels like a whole lotta good luck coming your way—along with super silky hair, right?
I’m about to talk about poop, a lot!
Bird poop to be exact, so if you’re eating your eggs, best to put down your fork right about now. Or oatmeal or yogurt for that matter. Maybe you should just stop eating until you’re finished reading, okay? Studies have shown that reading while eating can lead to something serious that could render you dead, like choking while laughing, so in essence, I just saved your life. You’re welcome.
And now, back to the bird poop.
Many people the world over believe that if a bird lets loose on you, then good things are coming your way. One idea is that it’s a sign of major wealth coming from Heaven (the place where ALL real wealth resides). And based on the belief that when you suffer an inconvenience (like a head full of bird shit), you’ll have a whole lotta good fortune in return.
The most popularly held belief is that if a bird hits your noggin, it is so lucky, so random and rare (statistically speaking it is rarer than being hit by lightning), how can a lottery win be far behind?
A Case in point — and a true story:
Can a head full of bird poop be lucky, you ask?
A Bay of Islands man swears it is! After winning $100,000 on an Instant Kiwi ticket, the man disclosed that a bird had recently pooped on his head and that his friends had insisted it was a sign of luck coming his way.
“I thought it was a load of shit,” the man admitted, (pun intended) “but when I was in a Lotto shop I had $5 left in my wallet so figured I would buy a scratch-off and test my luck.”
“I could not believe it when I scratched the right numbers and realized I had won $100,000,” the man told NZ Lotteries.
“It is such a great feeling! I plan to start a new life with this win. I want to wipe my debts and just enjoy life.” The man, originally from Christchurch, plans to move back down there, undeterred by the recent earthquake.
“This win gives me the funds to be able to get down there and be able to help out in any way I can in the city’s rebuild,” he said.
Let me just start by saying that the man in the story is WAY more altruistic than I’ll EVER be. Or maybe not. After he pays off his debt and relocates, how much city rebuilding can he do? I’m worried about him and his financial planning acumen. He has to make that money last and $100,000 doesn’t go as far as it used to. Maybe he’ll have the free time to volunteer. Okay. I feel much better now.
Anyhow, on Saturday the hubster and I decided to get a jump-start on Valentine’s Day being that we had flaked, waiting until the last minute and all the good ideas for Sunday were taken. Left to our own devices, we hopped into the car, put down the top, and decided to drive really fast out of the beautiful, summer-like temperatures and head into opaque whiteness of a foggy abyss, the beach. Faced with the choice of putting the top back up or leaving fogville altogether and going for a big lunch—you guessed it THE BIG LUNCH WON! (No surprise there.)
Winding our way through the tree-lined upscale neighborhoods at a brisk 40 mph (oh, don’t get your panties in a bunch, it wasn’t a school zone and besides, it was Saturday. Nobody drives below 40 mph. on Saturdays), on our way back into town on our search for the perfect kabob, I felt something clobber my cranium.
“Hey!” I exclaimed, hands on my head looking around like a freak. You have to admire my economy with words. Don’t feel bad. I’m a writer.
Anyway…
At first, I suspected it might be space debris or a tiny piece of meteorite. It was only when hubby, with his two bare man-hands, picked a rather large and thankfully solid piece of avian excrement out of my hair—that I realized my good fortune. Lottery WINNER!
Can I just take a moment to thank my husband for his courage, strong stomach, and lack of any real hygienic awareness? (He’s French). You are my hero and I will split the money with you AFTER I rebuild a city.
Needless to say, when the laughter subsided, (thankfully we share the same warped sense of humor that causes us to laugh at another’s misfortune—and poop), we hightailed it to the diviest Liquor Store we could find (because everybody knows THAT is where REAL wealth resides — not Heaven) and bought us some Power Ball, Super Lotto and Mega Millions tickets —and a box of Triscuits—the rosemary and olive oil kind.
Then with big shit-eating grins on our faces (not literally, that’s an idiom, mind out of the gutter people!) we drove to lunch.
Lottery or not, nothing says LOVE like picking bird poop out of your beloved’s hair—so I’m already a winner!
Love you my Big Handsome!
I know. You guys envy my life of glamour and romance. What can I say? I’m one lucky girl.
We first met on December 18, 2000. Then he died. On this, the nineteenth anniversary of our first blind date here’s a recounting of just what happened from back in 2014. This is our very personal Christmas miracle.
“Life is a dream walking. Death is going home.” – Chinese proverb
He died for a minute and 56 seconds. His heart stopped and his breathing ceased. I’d just say 2 minutes, but hospitals and doctors are exact. They are to-the-second precise. So, when he tells the tale; he died for a minute and 56 seconds because four seconds more would be way too long.
Just writing this makes my eyes well up.
He…is my husband.
In December of 2000 he contracted bacterial spinal meningitis on an airplane. Or as I now call them, flying, metallic, germ delivery systems.
He’s a car guy, often referred to as a gear head. That second week of December he took a one-way flight from LA to Houston to look at a car, which he then purchased and drove back with a buddy. Trouble was, he boarded that flight with a bad head cold. It was mid-December, everyone’s sick with something around the holidays. Right?
As luck would have it, that was just the route an opportunistic virus used to infect him. The meningitis rode in, like a sinister villain in a spaghetti western, on the back of streptococcus pneumonia. Once the pneumonia had chewed up his lungs to the point where they resembled snowflakes, all the meningitis had to do was dismount, and stroll on in.
Meningitis is a jerk. And an opportunist.
He’s a fragile, lazy, coward of a virus. If everything isn’t just so, he takes his badass self and leaves town. But pneumonia is efficient and the path had been prepared, so he set up camp in my husband’s lungs.
Three days after he got back to LA, as pneumonia went about doing its dirty work, he felt pretty lousy. Meanwhile, meningitis was still lurking in the shadows. He felt lethargic. By then he was probably running a fever, but men don’t check stuff like that. He just got out of bed, showered and dressed. He had plans that night.
He had arranged a blind date with someone who was recommended by a friend’s girlfriend. She sounded…intriguing. And she had big boobs. Yep, he was just that shallow.
That someone was me.
The blind date story is epic and meant for another day. We got married nine months later, so I’m gonna say it went pretty well.
I’ve always been fascinated by near-death experiences (NDE’s.) Now I live with someone who’s had one and he’d be the first to tell you, it profoundly changed him, it set him free.
Two days after our first date, and a super gushy follow-up phone call, he drove the new car up to San Jose, with his dog, to celebrate the Christmas holidays with his younger brother, his wife and their two young kids. He was driving five hours to cook the Christmas bird.
If a turkey is involved you drop everything and call my husband. He is the Turkey Whisperer. THE turkey cooker extraordinaire. The next morning, in between long stints in bed he did all the prep. He was trashed, feeling sicker with each passing hour and had developed the headache from hell. Now, he figured, he had a hell of a bad flu bug.
I will remind you, my husband is a BIG guy. He’s 6’3″ 230 lbs of big handsome, and that helped save his life.
When he makes a promise, he keeps it. It’s one of the things I admire about him, and damn it, he cooked that turkey. From his sickbed, even though he never had a bite.
The next day he got out of bed once and collapsed. The paramedics were called and he was rushed to a local teaching hospital that was affiliated with Stanford.
During transport, the paramedics called him Ralph. “Stay with us Ralph. Any pain Ralph?” My husband’s name is Raphael. I’ve been told they do that to piss you off and keep you conscious and talking. It worked. “My name is Raphael” he kept correcting them.
Genius. But it was short-lived.
His brother told the doctor all he knew, that Raphael had complained of a terrible headache and the flu. He used to have migraines but this was different. The ER was about to send him home with migraine meds, but his brother refused. He’d never seen Raphael that ill. THAT solitary act saved his brother’s life.
Just about that time, it ceased to matter. His blood test came back with an astronomical white cell count, and he had gone into a coma. Now suspecting meningitis, they did a spinal tap. So, normally our spinal fluid is clear and under pressure. Normal is: 70 – 180 mm H20, his reading was over 400 and the fluid was thick and black, like oil. As the story goes, it was right about this point in the evening where he flat-lined. After they brought him back, they wrote TERMINAL on his chart, pumped him full of morphine and wheeled him into a room to die.
It was during this time that Raphael remembers a foggy, all-white environment, no walls, ceiling or floor. He could see all sides at once. The best thing was, he was out of pain, his head no longer hurt.
He was looking at three beds which contained three Raphael’s.
The Raphael on the right was saying: I am suffering, why would I stay in this bed, I want to go where it’s peaceful. Where there’s no pain. Pointing at a bright white tunnel.
He represented the physical self.
The Raphael in the bed on the left said: Go ahead and go! Quit complaining. That’s fine, it really affects no one except those that are left behind. He represented the intellectual self.
The Raphael in the middle was the observer. He just listened to the two others arguing. He just WAS. No attachment. He represented the soul.
That white tunnel was the path home. It was a silent, pain-free, deliciously peaceful place where he wanted to stay forever. But they started his heart and brought him back.
That night a female doctor very much like Dr. House from TV, took a look at his chart. She specialized in ONLY terminal cases. Since it was a teaching hospital, she was allowed to literally throw everything in her extensive medical arsenal at these patients, searching for a cure. It was equal parts medicine, alchemy, and wishful thinking. After she did everything she could, she just handed it over to a higher power. Her success rate was 3%. I know, calm down, they were terminal cases after all.
It was the fight of his life and he was on the ropes. At that point, his size was the only thing saving him.
By that time the hospital had reported their diagnosis of bacterial meningitis to the CDC. Thirteen people from his flight to Houston had come down with it, four had died. Raphael’s brother was told to get his whole young family tested. It was a stressful, scary time.
I remember hearing it on the news. It struck me because one of the women who died was my age at the time, 43. Shit. I have to get on a plane in five days, I worried.
Since he was away, I had no idea he was even sick. We only had our one blind date, with a promise of a second on December 28th. He never called. He never showed. I called twice, which was only mildly pathetic, and both times his cellphone went right to message. So I left for New Year’s Eve in Miami. When I didn’t hear from him by the end of the first week of January I told my friends, “Frenchy better be abducted by aliens or dead by the side of the road, because those are the only two excuses I’ll accept.”
Yikes! We still laugh about that.
His medical file is as thick as a phone book with the lists of drugs and scans his doctor administered that first night. There is even a straight jacket included. She did say he put up a hell of a fight to live. Apparently so.
By the middle of the second day of her treatment, he was slightly improved. She determined he would live, but he’d be a vegetable from the cerebral fluid pressure and its horrible condition.
No brain could ever recover from that.
His family, his siblings, who were all now at the hospital, looked at each other to determine who would care for him and for how many months.
A couple of days later, with the determined doctor holding one hand, one of his sisters holding the other, he woke up. Just like that.
Startled, the doctor shooed everyone out of the room and started asking him questions, which he answered…perfectly…in detail. Not just, What’s your name? But since he’s an architect, and French, she quizzed him on the architectural intricacies of the Pompidou Centre, even speaking French with him. It was evident he could see her, he could hear her, and he was still his whip-smart self. THAT she could never explain. She considered him a miracle. Everyone at the hospital did. Honestly.
Finally, he asked what day it was. When he found out it was January, he said, “I have to call Janet.” For those standing around him, some doubt set in, because no one had heard of any Janet. They thought he had an imaginary friend. Uh oh, brain damage.
Nope, apparently, infatuation survives near death. I love that part of the story. It’s like a movie.
He remembers dying as easy, with nothing to fear.
He recalls that he had a decision to make, and either way everything was going to be okay.
Afterword, all the outpouring of love, together with the morphine, broke open his heart—and he was a changed man.
Luckily, he decided to stay and give me a second date, and for that, I am forever grateful.
The phone was ringing. That’s odd, I thought, trying to clear away that cotton candy that inhabits your brain after you’ve just fallen asleep.
Only minutes earlier I’d turned off the light after struggling to stay awake while reading my latest self-help book, “The Road Less Traveled.”
It has to be late, I mumbled, rolling on my side to get a look at the time on the digital clock radio next to the bed. It was half past eleven.
Now it is my experience that NO good news is EVER on the other end of a phone that rings after eleven. Ever!
Either that person is drunk and dialing, picking a fight about something that happened a week ago, telling you that someone is sick—or there’s been an accident.
This call ended up kicking all of those things to the curb.
“Janet, sorry, are you awake? I know it’s late.” It was my friend Rita (not her real name).
Rita is one of the “herd”, as we were called. We were given that moniker because of the level of noise that entered a room wherever we showed up, and because there were always seven of us. Seven teenage girls attached at the hip through all four years of Catholic high school.
I’m sure you can imagine.
We shared everything teenage girls share—all the firsts.
First periods, first cigarettes, first joint, first drunk/sick night, first loves and all the trouble, chaos and complications that boyfriends bring to a young girl’s life.
Now we were in our late twenties. Everyone was pairing up, I was the first, already married and divorced, Rita, the smart, choosy one, was the last. Several of us had left LA, but the following weekend there would be a reunion of sorts.
Rita was getting married.
“Yeah, sure, no problem, I’m awake…what’s up?” I sat up in bed.
“I think Marco’s cheating on me” she started to cry.
“What? Noooooo.” I said, lighting a cigarette. I was up now, sitting on the edge of the bed. This was in the days before mobile phones, although I did have a fifteen-foot cord on my yellow push button telephone – so I could wander.
She was crying harder now, rustling papers in the background.
Still groggy, the cigarette was getting me high, had I heard correctly? “What are you talking about? What happened?” I asked. The rustling stopped.
“A woman called me yesterday claiming that she and Marco are in love! That they have been for a long time…she knew my name.” she spit out that last part like she’d bitten into a lemon. I could hear in her voice she was getting mad.
“Oh. My. God.” I replied while frantically searching my drawers for an ashtray, but deciding to settle on a potted plant.
“That’s bullshit, he loves YOU, you’re getting married in less than a week…” She interrupted, her voice agitated, almost yelling, “She told me to check the phone bill for her number. Janet, it’s on here over sixty times just this month, the same with last month and as far back as I…”
“Hold on a second, where is Marco?” They’d been living together since the engagement, but he had a job that took him out-of-town two weeks of every month, so the rest of the herd didn’t really know him all that well.
“He’s in Atlanta until tomorrow night.”
“Did you call him? What did he say?” This I had to hear.
“Of course, the minute I hung up with her.”
“And?…” I was dying to hear his explanation.
“Well he denied it, said she’s a girl from work, that she’s super needy, really insecure and kinda crazy. He explained that her number’s on the bill because he’s her supervisor and they have to talk about work problems. I mean I know things have been super stressful at the office lately, with all the layoffs and personnel changes.” She was quiet for a minute. “He started accusing ME of having cold feet!”
That didn’t sound right, but I stayed on script. “Okay, well let’s see—she’s just a kook from work and he’ll set her straight honey.” I lit a cigarette with a cigarette, something I never did, but this situation called for it.
“That’s what I thought, but she called again tonight, I just got off the phone with her and called you!” Her voice took on a desperate edge.
“Shit.” My blood went ice-cold.
There was a sweater in a pile of folded laundry that was waiting patiently on the chair to be put away. I pulled it on, switching the receiver from hand to hand, turned on the light, and started pacing, wandering the room.
“She’s been here! At MY house! They’ve been here together! She described the condo and she even described me! She’s seen me, she waits for me to leave! Get this – she says that I’m the girl he marries and has children with— but she’s the girl he loves. Fucking bitch!” That sent a jolt of whatthefuckery throughout my entire body. Rita NEVER used the “F-word.”
He was feeding my friend a crap sandwich. And that other woman! It sounded like the asshole was dishing out crap all over the place.
I was speechless. She continued. “She said he’s Latin and that it’s a cultural thing.” She started crying again. “They laugh at me, she says they laugh about how unsuspecting I am, that I think I’m going to get married and ride off into the sunset…they laugh at me, Janet.” As I listened to her sobs, tears filled my eyes and I started to sniffle so I pressed the receiver to my chest so she couldn’t hear me.
After a long time I thought of something to say, “What does she want from you?”
Rita cleared her throat, her exhausted voice barely a whisper.
“She wants me to walk away, to break things off, otherwise at the wedding, when they ask who objects—she’s going to stand up and tell everyone the truth.”
“That’s bullshit!” I yelled. “That only happens on soap operas!” my voice was so loud it actually startled me.
“Janet, what should I do? He’s just going to deny it. So what if she IS just a crazy girl from work, she’s still going to ruin my wedding!”
“Maybe when Marco comes home, you guys have a heart to heart. He has to figure this mess out… I don’t know, maybe postpone things…” Rita jumped in, she was bordering on hysterical. “I can’t call off the wedding! I just wrote the balance check for the hall! This morning was the final fitting on my dress!”
“Okay, I know, listen.” My tone was firm.
“If he’s cheating on you, you sure as hell are NOT going through with this wedding! I don’t care how much money is lost and how embarrassing it is. People will just have to get over themselves.”
Crickets.
“You know I’m right. I’ll help you. I can call people and…” She interrupted me. “I’m tired, I have to go. I’m sure when Marco comes home this will all get settled.”
Her voice turned Stepford.
“I’m sorry I called you so late, you’re right, it’s probably nothing.” What was happening? I never said that. I never said it was nothing. “Goodnight.” The line went dead.
I couldn’t sleep the rest of the night, struggling with whether I should share it with anyone else. If this whole thing didn’t blow up before then, the rest of the herd would be in town by the end of the week so I decided it was best to just zip it.
The next time I saw Rita was at the rehearsal. I was singing Ave Maria and One Hand One Heart from West Side Story at the ceremony, so we did a run through. Rita looked beautiful and happy, all smiles. Even when I searched her eyes while saying our goodbyes after the rehearsal dinner, there was no hint that anything was amiss. Marco sat beaming, surrounded by relatives and friends from out-of-town.
So okay. They’d worked it out. It was one just of those late night calls that you just chalk up to nerves and forget it ever happened.
The next morning, up in the choir loft, after Rita’s entrance in her big, flowing, white gown, I watched from above, scanning the crowd. Marco’s family and friends on the right and Rita’s giant Irish Catholic family on the left – and a mystery woman dressed all in black wearing an enormous hat and standing in the back.
Who was that? I bent waaaay over the ledge to try to catch a glimpse of her face, but short of doing a half gainer with a twist off that balcony – it wasn’t going to happen.
All black. To a wedding? Really bitch? My heart was pounding. Was this the “other woman” all set to ruin Rita’s special day?
I was helpless to do anything. It was time for the Ave Maria. The minute the song was over, the last note still reverberating, riding the incredible church acoustics, I ran back to the ledge, searching for the stranger in black – but she was gone.
I wish this story had a fairy tale ending…
As it turns out Marco did have another woman. Several actually. He let it be known right after Rita told him he was going to have a son. They tried to play happy family for a while, but I think the marriage lasted all of three years.
It’s been about thirty years and Rita hasn’t had a serious relationship since. She’s never been able to let herself trust a man again.
She got the big white dress – but at what price?
The thing that Rita really lost was the trust of her own internal navigation system. She stopped trusting herself. She’d known in her gut what was going on, even when he denied it, but she thought she was too far in to get out. She wanted to save face, to be married, only to be divorced a few years later, as a single mother.
We all do things we know in our hearts are doomed to fail. We stay in situations that we know aren’t right, because we’re deeply invested. But there can be a way out, there’s always way out.
Gut check – intuition – rumors – lies – denials. WE KNOW.
If it feels bad – it probably is.
Have you ever found yourself in a similar situation? It’s not just about weddings. Did you get out? How did you do it?
Carry on,
xox
22 October 2019/
by jbertolus/
in Uncategorized/
Comments Off on The Big White Dress—But At What Price? 2014 REPRISE
“The Crane Wife” is a story from Japanese folklore. In the story, there is a crane who tricks a man into thinking she is a woman so she can marry him. She loves him but knows that he will not love her if she is a crane so she spends every night plucking out all of her feathers with her beak. She hopes that he will not see what she really is: a bird who must be cared for, a bird capable of flight, a creature, with creature needs. Every morning, the crane-wife is exhausted, but she is a woman again. To keep becoming a woman is so much self-erasing work. She never sleeps. She plucks out all her feathers, one by one.This is a story we can all relate too, right? Who hasn’t tried to be something they’re not in order to get someone’s love or approval?It was sent to me by one of the miraculous women I’ve had the profound privilege to mentor the past few months. When I took on that task, I was certain it would be a sacred energy exchange—that the wisdom would flow both ways—and boy, was I right! I invite you to take the time to read this women’s beautifully written story of self-discovery—and then do what I did—email it to everyone you love.Carry on,
xox
Ten days earlier I had cried and I had yelled and I had packed up my dog and driven away from the upstate New York house with two willow trees I had bought with my fiancé.
Ten days later and I didn’t want to do anything I was supposed to do.
*
I went to Texas to study the whooping crane because I was researching a novel. In my novel there were biologists doing field research about birds and I had no idea what field research actually looked like and so the scientists in my novel draft did things like shuffle around great stacks of papers and frown. The good people of the Earthwatch organization assured me I was welcome on the trip and would get to participate in “real science” during my time on the gulf. But as I waited to be picked up by my team in Corpus Christi, I was nervous—I imagined everyone else would be a scientist or a birder and have daunting binoculars.
The biologist running the trip rolled up in a large white van with a boat hitch and the words BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES stenciled across the side. Jeff was forty-ish, and wore sunglasses and a backward baseball cap. He had a winter beard and a neon-green cast on his left arm. He’d broken his arm playing hockey with his sons a week before. The first thing Jeff said was, “We’ll head back to camp, but I hope you don’t mind we run by the liquor store first.” I felt more optimistic about my suitability for science.
*
Not long before I’d called off my engagement it was Christmas.
The woman who was supposed to be my mother-in-law was a wildly talented quilter and made stockings with Beatrix Potter characters on them for every family member. The previous Christmas she had asked me what character I wanted to be (my fiancé was Benjamin Bunny). I agonized over the decision. It felt important, like whichever character I chose would represent my role in this new family. I chose Squirrel Nutkin, a squirrel with a blazing red tail—an epic, adventuresome figure who ultimately loses his tail as the price for his daring and pride.
I arrived in Ohio that Christmas and looked to the banister to see where my squirrel had found his place. Instead, I found a mouse. A mouse in a pink dress and apron. A mouse holding a broom and dustpan, serious about sweeping. A mouse named Hunca Munca. The woman who was supposed to become my mother-in-law said, “I was going to do the squirrel but then I thought, that just isn’t CJ. This is CJ.”
What she was offering was so nice. She was so nice. I thanked her and felt ungrateful for having wanted a stocking, but not this stocking. Who was I to be choosy? To say that this nice thing she was offering wasn’t a thing I wanted?
When I looked at that mouse with her broom, I wondered which one of us was wrong about who I was.
*
The whooping crane is one of the oldest living bird species on earth. Our expedition was housed at an old fish camp on the Gulf Coast next to the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge, where three hundred of the only six hundred whooping cranes left in the world spend their winters. Our trip was a data-collecting expedition to study behavior and gather data about the resources available to the cranes at Aransas.
The ladies bunkhouse was small and smelled woody and the rows of single beds were made up with quilts. Lindsay, the only other scientist, was a grad student in her early twenties from Wisconsin who loved birds so much that when she told you about them she made the shapes of their necks and beaks with her hands—a pantomime of bird life. Jan, another participant, was a retired geophysicist who had worked for oil companies and now taught high school chemistry. Jan was extremely fit and extremely tan and extremely competent. Jan was not a lifelong birder. She was a woman who had spent two years nursing her mother and her best friend through cancer. They had both recently died and she had lost herself in caring for them, she said. She wanted a week to be herself. Not a teacher or a mother or a wife. This trip was the thing she was giving herself after their passing.
At five o’clock there was a knock on the bunk door and a very old man walked in, followed by Jeff.
“Is it time for cocktail hour?” Warren asked.
Warren was an eighty-four-year-old bachelor from Minnesota. He could not do most of the physical activities required by the trip, but had been on ninety-five Earthwatch expeditions, including this one once before. Warren liked birds okay. What Warren really loved was cocktail hour.
When he came for cocktail hour that first night, his thin, silver hair was damp from the shower and he smelled of shampoo. He was wearing a fresh collared shirt and carrying a bottle of impossibly good scotch.
Jeff took in Warren and Jan and me. “This is a weird group,” Jeff said.
“I like it,” Lindsay said.
*
In the year leading up to calling off my wedding, I often cried or yelled or reasoned or pleaded with my fiancé to tell me that he loved me. To be nice to me. To notice things about how I was living.
One particular time, I had put on a favorite red dress for a wedding. I exploded from the bathroom to show him. He stared at his phone. I wanted him to tell me I looked nice, so I shimmied and squeezed his shoulders and said, “You look nice! Tell me I look nice!” He said, “I told you that you looked nice when you wore that dress last summer. It’s reasonable to assume I still think you look nice in it now.”
Another time he gave me a birthday card with a sticky note inside that said BIRTHDAY. After giving it to me, he explained that because he hadn’t written in it, the card was still in good condition. He took off the sticky and put the unblemished card into our filing cabinet.
I need you to know: I hated that I needed more than this from him. There is nothing more humiliating to me than my own desires. Nothing that makes me hate myself more than being burdensome and less than self-sufficient. I did not want to feel like the kind of nagging woman who might exist in a sit-com.
These were small things, and I told myself it was stupid to feel disappointed by them. I had arrived in my thirties believing that to need things from others made you weak. I think this is true for lots of people but I think it is especially true for women. When men desire things they are “passionate.” When they feel they have not received something they need they are “deprived,” or even “emasculated,” and given permission for all sorts of behavior. But when a woman needs she is needy. She is meant to contain within her own self everything necessary to be happy.
That I wanted someone to articulate that they loved me, that they saw me, was a personal failing and I tried to overcome it.
When I found out that he’d slept with our mutual friend a few weeks after we’d first started seeing each other, he told me we hadn’t officially been dating yet so I shouldn’t mind. I decided he was right. When I found out that he’d kissed another girl on New Year’s Eve months after that, he said that we hadn’t officially discussed monogamy yet, and so I shouldn’t mind. I decided he was right.
I asked to discuss monogamy and, in an effort to be the sort of cool girl who does not have so many inconvenient needs, I said that I didn’t need it. He said he thought we should be monogamous.
*
Here is what I learned once I began studying whooping cranes: only a small part of studying them has anything to do with the birds. Instead, we counted berries. Counted crabs. Measured water salinity. Stood in the mud. Measured the speed of the wind.
It turns out, if you want to save a species, you don’t spend your time staring at the bird you want to save. You look at the things it relies on to live instead. You ask if there is enough to eat and drink. You ask if there is a safe place to sleep. Is there enough here to survive?
Wading through the muck of the Aransas Reserve I understood that every chance for food matters. Every pool of drinkable water matters. Every wolfberry dangling from a twig, in Texas, in January, matters. The difference between sustaining life and not having enough was that small.
If there were a kind of rehab for people ashamed to have needs, maybe this was it. You will go to the gulf. You will count every wolfberry. You will measure the depth of each puddle.
*
More than once I’d said to my fiancé, How am I supposed to know you love me if you’re never affectionate or say nice things or say that you love me.
He reminded me that he’d said “I love you” once or twice before. Why couldn’t I just know that he did in perpetuity?
I told him this was like us going on a hiking trip and him telling me he had water in his backpack but not ever giving it to me and then wondering why I was still thirsty.
He told me water wasn’t like love, and he was right.
There are worse things than not receiving love. There are sadder stories than this. There are species going extinct, and a planet warming. I told myself: who are you to complain, you with these frivolous extracurricular needs?
*
On the gulf, I lost myself in the work. I watched the cranes through binoculars and recorded their behavior patterns and I loved their long necks and splashes of red. The cranes looked elegant and ferocious as they contorted their bodies to preen themselves. From the outside, they did not look like a species fighting to survive.
In the mornings we made each other sandwiches and in the evenings we laughed and lent each other fresh socks. We gave each other space in the bathroom. Forgave each other for telling the same stories over and over again. We helped Warren when he had trouble walking. What I am saying is that we took care of each other. What I am saying is we took pleasure in doing so. It’s hard to confess, but the week after I called off my wedding, the week I spent dirty and tired on the gulf, I was happy.
On our way out of the reserve, we often saw wild pigs, black and pink bristly mothers and their young, scurrying through the scrub and rolling in the dust among the cacti. In the van each night, we made bets on how many wild pigs we might see on our drive home.
One night, halfway through the trip, I bet reasonably. We usually saw four, I hoped for five, but I bet three because I figured it was the most that could be expected.
Warren bet wildly, optimistically, too high.
“Twenty pigs,” Warren said. He rested his interlaced fingers on his soft chest.
We laughed and slapped the vinyl van seats at this boldness.
But the thing is, we saw twenty pigs on the drive home that night. And in the thick of our celebrations, I realized how sad it was that I’d bet so low. That I wouldn’t even let myself imagine receiving as much as I’d hoped for.
*
What I learned to do, in my relationship with my fiancé, was to survive on less. At what should have been the breaking point but wasn’t, I learned that he had cheated on me. The woman he’d been sleeping with was a friend of his I’d initially wanted to be friends with, too, but who did not seem to like me, and who he’d gaslit me into being jealous of, and then gaslit me into feeling crazy for being jealous of.
The full course of the gaslighting took a year, so by the time I truly found out what had happened, the infidelity was already a year in the past.
It was new news to me but old news to my fiancé.
Logically, he said, it doesn’t matter anymore.
It had happened a year ago. Why was I getting worked up over ancient history?
I did the mental gymnastics required.
I convinced myself that I was a logical woman who could consider this information about having been cheated on, about his not wearing a condom, and I could separate it from the current reality of our life together.
Why did I need to know that we’d been monogamous? Why did I need to have and discuss inconvenient feelings about this ancient history?
I would not be a woman who needed these things, I decided.
I would need less. And less.
I got very good at this.
*
“The Crane Wife” is a story from Japanese folklore. I found a copy in the reserve’s gift shop among the baseball caps and bumper stickers that said GIVE A WHOOP. In the story, there is a crane who tricks a man into thinking she is a woman so she can marry him. She loves him, but knows that he will not love her if she is a crane so she spends every night plucking out all of her feathers with her beak. She hopes that he will not see what she really is: a bird who must be cared for, a bird capable of flight, a creature, with creature needs. Every morning, the crane-wife is exhausted, but she is a woman again. To keep becoming a woman is so much self-erasing work. She never sleeps. She plucks out all her feathers, one by one.
*
One night on the gulf, we bought a sack of oysters off a passing fishing boat. We’d spent so long on the water that day I felt like I was still bobbing up and down in the current as I sat in my camp chair. We ate the oysters and drank. Jan took the shucking knife away from me because it kept slipping into my palm. Feral cats trolled the shucked shells and pleaded with us for scraps.
Jeff was playing with the sighting scope we used to watch the birds, and I asked, “What are you looking for in the middle of the night?” He gestured me over and when I looked through the sight the moon swam up close.
I think I was afraid that if I called off my wedding I was going to ruin myself. That doing it would disfigure the story of my life in some irredeemable way. I had experienced worse things than this, but none threatened my American understanding of a life as much as a called-off wedding did. What I understood on the other side of my decision, on the gulf, was that there was no such thing as ruining yourself. There are ways to be wounded and ways to survive those wounds, but no one can survive denying their own needs. To be a crane-wife is unsustainable.
I had never seen the moon so up-close before. What struck me most was how battered she looked. How textured and pocked by impacts. There was a whole story written on her face—her face, which from a distance looked perfect.
*
It’s easy to say that I left my fiancé because he cheated on me. It’s harder to explain the truth. The truth is that I didn’t leave him when I found out. Not even for one night.
I found out about the cheating before we got engaged and I still said yes when he proposed in the park on a day we were meant to be celebrating a job I’d just gotten that morning. Said yes even though I’d told him I was politically opposed to the diamonds he’d convinced me were necessary. Said yes even though he turned our proposal into a joke by making a Bachelor reference and giving me a rose. I am ashamed of all of this.
He hadn’t said one specific thing about me or us during the proposal, and on the long trail walk out of the park I felt robbed of the kind of special declaration I’d hoped a proposal would entail, and, in spite of hating myself for wanting this, hating myself more for fishing for it, I asked him, “Why do you love me? Why do you think we should get married? Really?”
He said he wanted to be with me because I wasn’t annoying or needy. Because I liked beer. Because I was low-maintenance.
I didn’t say anything. A little further down the road he added that he thought I’d make a good mother.
This wasn’t what I hoped he would say. But it was what was being offered. And who was I to want more?
I didn’t leave when he said that the woman he had cheated on me with had told him over the phone that she thought it was unfair that I didn’t want them to be friends anymore, and could they still?
I didn’t leave when he wanted to invite her to our wedding. Or when, after I said she could not come to our wedding, he got frustrated and asked what he was supposed to do when his mother and his friends asked why she wasn’t there.
Reader, I almost married him.
*
Even now I hear the words as shameful: Thirsty. Needy. The worst things a woman can be. Some days I still tell myself to take what is offered, because if it isn’t enough, it is I who wants too much. I am ashamed to be writing about this instead of writing about the whooping cranes, or literal famines, or any of the truer needs of the world.
But what I want to tell you is that I left my fiancé when it was almost too late. And I tell people the story of being cheated on because that story is simple. People know how it goes. But it’s harder to tell the story of how I convinced myself I didn’t need what was necessary to survive. How I convinced myself it was my lack of needs that made me worthy of love.
*
After cocktail hour one night, in the cabin’s kitchen, I told Lindsay about how I’d blown up my life the week before. I told her because I’d just received a voice mail saying I could get a partial refund for my high-necked wedding gown. The refund would be partial because they had already made the base of the dress but had not done any of the beadwork yet. They said the pieces of the dress could still be unstitched and used for something else. I had caught them just in time.
I told Lindsay because she was beautiful and kind and patient and loved good things like birds and I wondered what she would say back to me. What would every good person I knew say to me when I told them that the wedding to which they’d RSVP’d was off and that the life I’d been building for three years was going to be unstitched and repurposed?
Lindsay said it was brave not to do a thing just because everyone expected you to do it.
Jeff was sitting outside in front of the cabin with Warren as Lindsay and I talked, tilting the sighting scope so it pointed toward the moon. The screen door was open and I knew he’d heard me, but he never said anything about my confession.
What he did do was let me drive the boat.
The next day it was just him and me and Lindsay on the water. We were cruising fast and loud. “You drive,” Jeff shouted over the motor. Lindsay grinned and nodded. I had never driven a boat before. “What do I do?” I shouted. Jeff shrugged. I took the wheel. We cruised past small islands, families of pink roseate spoonbills, garbage tankers swarmed by seagulls, fields of grass and wolfberries, and I realized it was not that remarkable for a person to understand what another person needed.
CJHauser teaches creative writing at Colgate University. Her novel, Family of Origin, is published by Doubleday.
(the law of) diminishing returns
phrase of diminish—
1. Used to refer to a point at which the level of profits or benefits gained is less than the amount of money or energy invested—
I talked to a man recently, a very accomplished man, who acts like he has the world by the tail. And by that I mean, he looks down on everyone who hasn’t had the good fortune of being him.
Whatever life decisions you’ve made, how you’ve chosen to invest your money, even what music you listen to is met with butt-puckered lips that to go along, like a fine wine pairing, with his disapproving face. (I have it on good authority that when you purchase them at the Smug Store—they come as a pair.)
That’s okay, dude. Gimme all ya got. I worked in Beverly Hills for two decades. Water off a duck’s back.
Anyway, all evening long, as I listened to his risk-averse, conservative, privileged and inflexible views on life, I couldn’t help but wonder, How does his poor wife put up with this shit?
Then I remembered. She does it by trotting off on one of her horses, that’s how.
Oh, dear God, how I wish I had that ability.
The ability to bend to someone else’s will. The ability to let someone else run my life. To bankroll it with a marionette’s worth of strings attached. And then buy me a pony to reward my compliance.
I wish I had a price for my silence. It would have made my life SO much easier.
Because, you see, I was born with a big mouth. A big, loud, mouth that says stuff that makes guys like that shrivel in their underpants. Stuff like, “You’re not the boss of me!” And “Take your fucking pony and shove it!”
Some women trade all of the flack, disagreements, head-butting, and power struggles that happen in relationships for diamonds, vacations, fast cars, and ponies.
Not me. I call that foreplay… or Tuesday.
Unfortunately for me, (and probably for any man who has had a serious relationship with me) I have never been one of those women you could placate with bling. Biting my tongue and swallowing my opinions is much too high of a price to pay—for such little reward.
The law of diminishing returns.
Just one of the laws I have come to live by.
Along with no right turn on red, and chew before swallowing.
