Tag Archives: love

The Love Boomerang

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Today, we tested this hypothesis. (dollsofindia.com)

We had one of those days you could make a movie out of. And even the bots know that in a movie, before the happy ending, something bad needs to happen.

The real-life drama began at 10:30 a.m. It set out on a quest: to Toys ‘R’ Us for a bubble gun, Play Doh, and poker chips.

Mbot asked if he could take Junepbear into the store. He sometimes asks, and I always say no. He never fusses. But today, I was feeling extra-magnanimous. I thought, “it’s just a quick trip. And if he has one hand filled with Junepbear, then he cannot touch as many toys.” And so I said yes.

We found a bubble gun. We found the Play Doh. (On sale! But it’s cheaper at Target). We checked out. The bots’ behavior was exemplary. Which is why, upon leaving, I stopped when Gbot clambered into the big toy car in the vestibule between the sliding sets of exit doors, wherein lie The Claw game, bubble gum machine, and various other mechanisms meant to lift the last of your change from your pockets. I did not put a quarter in the car.

Nonetheless, Gbot pretended to steer with delight for a few minutes, and then it was Mbot’s turn. He climbed up, and very carefully set Junepbear on top of the truck. I looked at the enormous floppy old bear there and thought, “We are going to forget him. We can’t forget him. Of course we won’t. There’s no way. He’s huge. He’s blue. The top of the car is red. I am looking right at him. And we’ll only be another sixty seconds.” Sixty seconds later we headed out to the car.

Fast-forward 4 1/2 hours. My niece had come to botsit while I went to a coffeeshop to work. At 2:40, I left the coffee shop for home via Toys ‘R’ Us because I’d forgotten the poker chips. I got them. I returned home at 3 o’clock and decided to load everyone up with the hope of driving them quickly to sleep. As my niece strapped them in, I went searching for bears. Found none. Checked the car. Not there. Under the beds I found Spruce Bear. And that’s when I remembered the last place I’d seen Junep. On top of the play car at Toys ‘R’ Us. The one I had twenty minutes ago walked right past. Lying trustingly against the red paint. Waiting patiently and silently. An empty dread filled my ribcage. I ran through the house again, looking everywhere. But the bear had left the building.

Mbot, mercifully, did not fully grasp the gravity of the situation. He was cheerful that we were going back to the toy store. But what if someone had walked off with Junep? Look! A free bear! A big one! It was unthinkable.

I broke the speed limit heading south. Now that my registration is current, I was only breaking one law, not two at once, which is a key, a former boyfriend pointed out long ago, to avoiding run-ins with the law (see The Ex-Con’s Rule).

We marched into the vestibule. Another cold flash as I saw the red top of the car: empty. We marched to the customer service counter. I knew before we reached it that Junep wasn’t there. He would have been on top of a counter. The employee persisted, even after I’d described the missing party, to look in cupboards into which he could not possibly fit. I was irritated but at the same time I appreciated her perseverence. She called someone on her walkie-talkie. No one had heard of Junepbear. “Thank you,” I said. Mbot remained mercifully unconcerned, sure that the universe would spit his beloved back out. Sure that his bear was back home on his bed.

On the way out, we re-entered the vestibule. We would look there again. Gbot broke free and climbed back up into the driver’s seat of the play car. I turned to watch him–and there on the floor, wedged between the car’s rear wheel and the Claw game, was a crumpled, raggedy lump of faded blue. I believe I closed my eyes in relief and felt another wash of emptiness in my chest and abdomen, a “but what if….”  I picked up Junep. I handed him to Mbot, who smiled brightly and held him tight. “You’re here!” he cried, and Mbot constructed an elaborate and entirely fictional narrative about why the bear was there, and I’m afraid I was so awash with relief that I can’t remember a word of it.

The symmetry–or asymmetry–appeals to me: that loving something so much and so long and so hard actually raises the chances that others will find it physicaly unappealing. It’s some kind of good karma, what you love coming back to you.

But Junepbear has totally lost his shopping privileges.

Why I Feel Good About the Feathers in My Car’s Grill

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Maybe I should have made a really ugly hat. (mainstylelist.com)

Or, to bastardize Emily Dickenson: Self-Forgiveness is the Car with Feathers in its Grill.

Doesn’t seem to make sense. That’s because sense has little or nothing to do with it. Sense is the thing that tries valiantly and in vain to override instinct, synapses, chemicals–namely, hormones.

Let me start again: Every May, drivers in Phoenix are treated to a feast of aviary roadkill. It is often found in pairs. Doves, I think. Of some kind. Rather small. Gray and feathery. In May, one will notice couples of these birds crossing the road, chasing one another from one lane to the other–blind to oncoming hazards much bigger, much harder, and with much more inertia than themselves.

For those of you who haven’t guessed it already, May is, for these birds, mating season.

Made me think of my own mating seasons. The strange, bad, funny, head-shakingly inappropriate choices I made in love on the road to Husbot. In disecting the intricacies of my intimacies, it is easy to not forgive myself some of the remarkable detours along the way. In my MFA Creative Nonfiction program, we were warned about this. Be kind, we were told. Be kind to your younger self. You were only a child. A teen. A young woman. Still a young woman. And be kind to yourself, now. I know everyone preaches that. But it begs the question: If I’m TOO kind, then how the hell will I EVER learn ANYTHING? Ah, that darned rationality stepping in again.

I recommend to everyone who can empathize to drive under the speed limit toward two birds walking in the road–one named Romeo, the other Juliet–expecting them to fly away at the last moment, thus miraculously avoiding contact with your car as birds always do–and then thwump, feeling the impact on your grill and watching a shower of small gray feathers wash across your windshield. It might make you realize that we need to forgive ourselves our mistakes in love. And consider ourselves lucky in all cases in which we don’t end up just a feather under the windshield wiper.

 

 

 

Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall, Who’s the Fluffiest One of All?

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Is this bunny loved? Or not loved? It's all so complicated....(www.barbaricthoughts.blogspot.com)

A few days ago I found myself attempting to answer this question:

Mbot: “Why is Junepbear not the fluffiest and Spruce Bear is the fluffiest?”

Let me clarify: Spruce Bear is Gbot’s bear, light blue, about thirty inches tall, given to him the day he was born twenty-seven months ago. Junepbear is Mbot’s bear, light blue, about thirty inches tall, given to him the day he was born forty-two months ago. Aside from minor design changes at the bear plant in China, Junep and Spruce were identical on their birth days.

They are not identical any more.

Junepbear is over fifty percent older than Spruce Bear. He is Mbot’s go-to buddy in the face of bedtime, owies, air travel, car travel, and injustices of any kind. He in not unfamiliar with the interior of the washing machine. Lately, I have begun to use the delicate cycle.

We have read The Velveteen Rabbit, that timeless story of the transformative powers of love.  And so, to answer the question about who is the fluffiest one of all, I alluded to that. “Remember that when the little boy loved and loved the rabbit so much, the rabbit got all shabby-looking on the outside? That’s what’s happened to Junepbear.”

Mbot thought about this for a moment, and got things a little mixed up. He asked, “When you love something, does it get fluffier?”

“It gets fluffier on the inside, Moon Pie,” I said.

Which maybe explains the fluff inside my head that causes me to forget just about everything these days unless it’s written on my hand. The day I forget to look at my hand, I’ll really be in trouble. But at least I’ll be loved.

Who are you in charge of making fluffier on the inside?

A Handful of Salt, The End

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I am (finally) weaning Gbot completely off the bottle. No more comforting suckling, even of water, through a synthetic nipple in the evening and again come morning. It is not a process conducive to sleep for either of us. I don’t think I’ve been this tired since he was an infant, back in the days when sixteen month-old Mbot raged against sleep. I remember lying in the recovery room after the C-section, numb from the ribcage down, Gbot swaddled on my chest. The intensity of the relief I felt was overwhelming, and it was caused not only by the fact that I had a new and beautiful, healthy child, and that I was healthy too (as I hadn’t been with Mbot), but by the knowledge that as long as my legs were numb, I couldn’t get up and do anything.

So instead of doing any more today, I’m going to post the last part of A Handful of Salt.

Old Woman Feeding a Cat, by Gabriel Metsu, 1629-1667 (www.codart.nl)

His body was trembling, but it was from the cold. I drew my open hands down his broad, thinly shirted back. Heard the hollow metal clink as my keys fell from numb fingers onto the ice at our feet. “It’s freezing,” I replied. “You need to go upstairs.”

“By myself?”

“Yes,” I said.

Dave bent to pick up the keys. They lay shining beside the toe of my pump. He could have put them in his pocket, but it wouldn’t have mattered. He handed them to me.

I drove home carefully, because four-inch heels and gas pedals are another one of those untenable pairings. Why do I drive more cautiously than I love? The statistics of loss in both, due to alcohol or carelessness, are uninspiring.

 *   *   *

The Gordon setters slept. Michael wound down his monologue. The ice in my water was melting, leaving opalescent globes of sweat on the glass’s exterior. The glass was still half full. “I’ll think about it,” I said. What’s the next step?”

“Email me a writing sample,” he replied. “But not the first chapter of a novel.” He had no interest in other people’s dreams. “And no more than five hundred words.”

But wouldn’t that be like you only showing me only half of one of your pictures? I did not ask. I mean, if a picture’s worth a thousand words? Instead, I shook his hand. The dogs raised their heads before dropping them again between chestnut paws, and I stepped out into the cold.

In the eighth grade, I learned quickly that my application of the periodic table failed on several fronts. It was highly useful, but only if I didn’t ask too much of it. Yet it held some disturbing truths. Early on, I identified the perfect element I wanted to be: carbon. It is highly stable, and is capable of forming multiple stable covalent bonds—that is, it doesn’t give or take energy, but shares equitably. Then I discovered that it is alone in its perfection. And so it can form no perfect bond other than with itself. In the place on the periodic table where the perfect elements should exist, right down the middle, an interesting phenomenon occurs: Just when you think you’re going to sneak up on the admirable, well-balanced atom with half its outer shell filled, a rogue energy level appears, holding a single electron. Imagine that: all that empty space, needing to be filled. All that wanting. And so nature made even an atom of iron an object that desires.

I drove home through snow falling as though dumped from Dylan Thomas’s whitewash buckets down the sky. I peered out into the darkness as frozen stars bombarded the glass, as though I was going at warp speed through deep space—away from Michael, away from Dave. I would not write five hundred words. Three years later I would see a copy of the book, glossy and weighty in my hands. I paged through it, admiring the photographs, each one more breathtaking than the last. But what I was really looking for was words. Had he found a bird and poured his handful of salt onto her tail to catch her, as the old wive’s tale recommends? It was with a deep satisfaction that I saw he had not. There wasn’t any text at all.

I parked my Subaru in front of my cabin and shuffled through the silent snow on the porch and opened the door. My cat, backlit on the kitchen counter, cried softly in greeting and landed on the linoleum floor with a thump.

I have a theory about why old women with cats have been made the brunt of jokes through the ages: old women with cats in their valence shells don’t need men. And that makes them powerful. But the silence beyond the purring was deafening.

Maybe an optimist can get to happiness from nowhere on nothing. But it seems an impossibility in nature to get there from nowhere on nothing, with no one. Even the dogs, even the cat, would agree.

A Handful of Salt, Part 2 of 3

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It is ironic that when life shovels at you bucketfuls of stuff to write about, there’s no time to write. I have been running–and that is to be taken literally–much of the day, trying to stay one step ahead of twenty steps behind. Trying to remember what my sister would tell me: you’re only behind if you think you’re behind.

And so in the name of needing to sleep, which might improve both  my situation and my outlook, today I’m prematurely posting Part 2 of “A Handful of Salt.”

Michael rubbed a soft hand across the table top and smiled a handsome smile. “Many people don’t appreciate it,” he said. “It has a lot of character.  I like things with character.”

“I can tell,” I smiled, nodding around the room. “So do I.”

“But then,” he chuckled self-consciously, “I can find character in a handful of salt.”

Behind me, one of the Gordon setters snorted—the pundit. My hand encircled my glass of ice water, which I hoped was not leaving a ring on the wood. I was certain he’d correct me if there had been a chance of that: look over his stylish half glasses and wordlessly slide me a coaster. Michael shook his pepper-and-salt head and repeated, smiling to himself, “A handful of salt. If you can believe it.”

It sounded like another challenge. I wanted to say. Let me tell you about salt.

A salt is a convenient working relationship: a positively charged ion conjoined with a negatively charged ion to form a neutral compound, a compound complete, a comfortable partnership. Table salt consists of a halogen atom bonded loosely to an alkali metal: a crystal built of sodium and chloride, elements drawn from either end of the periodic table, opposites having attracted.

When I first learned about the periodic table, in eighth grade earth science, I thought I had discovered the Rosetta stone for human behavior. I could identify people by their elements. And from that predict their actions, and their reactivity with others. It was like some kind of chemical Zodiac. Instead of reading the stars—Gemini, Sagittarius—I read oxygen and gold.

Reading the atomic horoscopes of family and friends allowed me to circle the truth without entering it. Invading the nucleus of an atom is treacherous business. Safer to hover like an electron in a valence shell. Valence derives from the Latin valentia, or power, and depending on the atomic weight of an atom, electrons occur in any of one to five valence shells that, like orbits around a planet, lose strength the further they get from the nucleus. At least that’s how pictures represent these atomic bonds.

On my periodic table, my mother was magnesium, an alkaline earth metal. Magnesium carries only two electrons instead of a full load of eight in its outer orbit—the valence shell which, when the atom bonds with another, either collects electrons, gives them away, or shares them. This means it joins easily with other elements, giving away its own energy for the greater good.

My sister was sodium, an alkali metal, one half of salt. Alkali metals carry only one electron in their outer orbit. Sodium bonds so easily that, like the alkaline earth metals, it does not occur free in nature, and in bonding, it gives its electron away. Back then, before she grew up, I’d watched her give away too much, witnessed the search for a stable state.

My father was a noble gas; specifically, xenon. Xenon means stranger in Greek. Until the 1960s (August 1963, in my father’s case), noble gases were believed to be unable to form compounds at all. Then it was discovered that they could bond, but only under extreme conditions. In the presence of a strong, pretty young nurse with a good laugh and a practical streak, for example.

For a long time, I thought I was, like my father, a noble gas. I did not bond well. I was satisfied with my autonomy, until I realized that I wanted to bond. I desperately wanted to bond. But not just in any old way. I decided I wanted to be a perfect element: one that had all its energy levels filled except the outer one, which would be exactly half full. And I would share those electrons in a strong union, engage in the perfect coupling. I wanted to bond without losing a part of myself, and also to be able to stand alone at room temperature.

*   *   *

The night before I sat facing lovely Michael across his exceptional table, I had stood with a different man at minus twenty degrees Celsius wearing four-inch heels, balanced on ice. After several months, Dave had proven an inappropriate and unstable partner. I was afraid he really was xenon, the stranger, which has a melting point of minus 112 degrees Celsius, so low it was unmanageable under normal earthbound conditions. I was afraid of my attraction to someone who so obviously could not offer the perfect union. What tragic sort of element was I, to want so much?

“I should have fitted these shoes with crampons,” I joked, hugging myself in the cold. “I don’t like the idea of needing to cling to someone just to stand up.”

“Maybe it would be good for you to try it.” Then he laughed softly. “So maybe we were made for each other.”

I thought of my toenails within my impractical shoes, the red polish. Cherries in the Snow, no less. They were the last part of my body that held the imprint of his fingers, from over two months ago, just before he’d told me that in spite of his intention of falling in love with me, he had not managed it. The polish was almost gone now. I’d left it, to chip grotesquely and slide off the ends of my toes, a visual reminder that if my body could slough him off, my mind could do the same. I had never been in love with him: I’d been in love with who I’d wanted him to be.  Why we were together last night, I was not quite sure. An excuse on his part about needing a respectable date for a company Christmas party. But I knew he was really seeing about us. Just making sure. As was I.

We had stood beside the car in haloes of each other’s breath, like paintings of medieval saints. But the saints had died for their beliefs, and I was not having much luck even living for mine. He looked at me how he often had, out of the corner of his eye, like maybe his words meant less if he was not fully facing me, and pushed his hands into the pockets of my suede coat and brought his face close. “I’m sorry,” he said, after he kissed me. “For not knowing what to do with us.”

___

To be continued in a few days.

A Handful of Salt

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In the spirit of posting fully formed essays on Sundays, today I’m beginning a three-part piece called “A Handful of Salt.”

*   *   *

A Handful of Salt

Michael the photographer brought eggs from his own chickens to my brother-in-law’s shop, and gave them to my sister.

“He’s really nice,” she told me. “And he’s looking for a writer for his next book.” I had not met Michael, although my sister had told him about me, and the eggs struck me as suspicious: bait, perhaps. I thought what he really wanted was a new girlfriend who was even moderately literate. That way he could get his text for free. Or his sex for free, depending on how you looked at it. My sister called me a pessimist.

“Pessimists,” I retorted, “are what optimists call realists.”

But the eggs worked. I went to Michael’s website, and saw that he’d quoted Mark Twain on his homepage: “Optimist: someone who can go from nowhere on nothing to happiness.” After that were his images that had appeared in National Geographic: red sandstone arches and scrub desert, close-ups of weather-creased Ute faces and children dancing before an old wooden schoolhouse. My friend Zorana once said: Just because you don’t want to bear his children doesn’t mean you don’t go have a drink with him. “If you don’t get out,” she’d said, “you’re gonna get weird.”

“But I never have gone out much,” I’d replied.

“Yes,” she noted wryly. “And things are going swimmingly”

I agreed to meet Michael on a Sunday evening at his place. I kissed my cat goodbye on the top of his head and  navigated  the icy streets in my ten-year-old Subaru, squinting through clouds of my own breath; it was not snowing again but the air was like a knife in the chest. I parked next to a Land Rover. Of course Michael had a Land Rover. A successful photographer with chickens and a Land Rover—I was already envisioning our future on the road together. My sister could feed the chickens. How could she accuse me of pessimism when I had so little control over my ability to hope?

The house was modest and well-kept, in an old neighborhood in a town originally built to house miners, and where the streets—Silver, Galena, Carbonate—bore the names of the ores they’d pulled out of the hearts of the surrounding hills. The door opened inward to my knock and against a yellow glow stood Michael. He was my height and handsome (of course he was handsome). I reached out to shake his hand. Behind him, two dogs raised black heads from between gingery paws.

“What beautiful dogs,” I said. “I love Gordon setters.”

“Most people don’t even know what they are,” smiled Michael.

“Poor them,” I said.

“Come in,” he gestured. “Join us.”  He took my coat and offered me a chair at the kitchen table. I sat at the polished, irregular slab of worn pine that appeared to be a beautiful accident, like his photos did, and looking around, saw the house was filled with such objects, carefully arranged—a river rock, a basket, a rug, an arm of driftwood, each weighted with the self-consciousness of uniqueness. I got the feeling he’d carefully collected himself, too.

Two things were implicit in the fact that I was here, in this mountain town, in this room, in my thirty-one year-old body: that I was searching, and that I thought he might hold answers. He offered me a glass of wine. “Ice water, thanks,” I said. He poured two and lowered his fit frame into a farmhouse chair. Light shimmered off his oval wire-rimmed glasses.

Across the table were strewn photographs and a big book on California similar to the one he’d begun on Utah. “I’m looking for a very unique person,” he began, and my hackles rose. He continued. “A person who can share my vision. This project will be all-consuming,” he continued. “I’m creating a beautiful book that will capture the spirit of a varied place and people. It will be something both I and the person I choose to work with will be very proud of.”

The dogs snored softly on the polished pine floor, as though they had heard it all before. I certainly felt as though I had.

“Tell me about your budget,” I suggested. “If we decide we can work together, how would I be paid?”

“Well,” he began.

“Well” did not sound auspicious. It turned out that the proposal was not yet written, in fact. It turned out that would be part of my job. Selling the proposal would also fall under my jurisdiction. He shined a quiet, conspiratorial smile on me. “Whoever I choose will have creative control over the entire text. I need someone with great energy, great imagination, who can look at my photographs and see words.”

So, either I was a person of great energy and  imagination, or I was not. If I was not, I was just like all the other disappointing people in the world. If I was, I would say yes.

In the third grade, Christina Forchemer told me that she knew how babies were made, she’d seen two people making a baby on Police Woman. I went home and checked with my mother, who reassured me that God gave you babies when you asked for them. The next day, Christina and I reached a compromise: half the babies came from God, and half from men somehow. But the seed of distrust had been planted; there was something unpleasantly believable about Christina’s explanation. And I had learned that if one truth was uncomfortable and one made you feel good, the one that made you feel good could usually be dismissed. My sister would scoff. “See? Pessimist.”

“But really,” I’d reply. “Do half the babies come from God?”

I needed a moment to think.  “What a lovely table,” I said, caressing its glowing grain with a finger. In one half of my brain, alarm bells were going off. But the other half was zooming through watercolor canyons in a Land Rover with my heart strapped on tight to the top of the vehicle between the kayak and the mountain bike. Cameras and a laptop computer on the floorboards, dogs’ ears flapping out the windows. We would always be back in a week. The cat would understand.

*  *  *

to be continued next Sunday

Adventures in Shopping

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Did she get it at Nordstrom Rack? (www.ccsd.k12.wy.us)

I bought a dress today. Mbot was at school learning about Charlie Brown falling off the Mayflower (I still haven’t gotten to the bottom of this cryptic retelling of what happened this afternoon within the walls of Montessori) and Gbot was drinking himself to sleep–a promising sign, because he recently has decided he has no patience with shopping. I admit, he gets it from me. But at least I don’t holler in the aisles of Home Depot.) I steered the MidgetMobile down the I-10 and up the 101 to a Nordstrom Rack that recently opened thirty minutes away (insert trumpet blasts here).

Gbot, beatifically comatose in the stroller, and I swept into the store. I picked out socks, tights, and a pair of sunglasses needed since August, when mine were used as an ice skate across the concrete floor, and then headed for the fancy stuff via the shoes. Tried on a pair of strappy sandals: Nope, still can’t walk in heels. Then hit the dresses. I managed to find five items that looked like a) they might fit, b) they wouldn’t make me look twenty pounds heavier and c) weren’t hideous.

I needed a dress because on Friday evening, two friends of the family are reaffirming their wedding vows, made some thirty years ago, and I have nothing to wear.  A reaffirmation of wedding vows after over ten thousand chances to do something regrettable every day is a remarkable and lovely event. It is not about me. But being confident and comfortable in your clothes makes it easier to forget about yourself and concentrate on the important stuff.

Although I weigh the same as I did in my pre-Bot days, the short skirts in my closet are somehow too short (were they always?) and my old dresses no longer seem to fit around the ribcage. And so, stroller draped with cut-price couture, I wheeled the slumbering Gbot into a dressing room.

Dress #1 had sausage casings for arms. Dress #2 was…huh. Cute. And comfortable. It was  also marked down 60% and casual enough to be worn with boots, which would allow me to sidestep the walking-in-heels problem. Dress #3 made me look three days postpartum. Dress #4 had been designed for someone with breasts just under her chin. Dress #5, a black Ralph Lauren sheath, turned me into a waistless Doric column. The ruthless lighting deepened the creases in my face and glinted off a rogue gray hair.

I bought the socks, the tights, the sunglasses, and dress #2. I was out of the store in forty minutes. Gbot was just waking up.

I’m still feeling inordinately pleased, in a way I don’t when I spend a lot of time and money. I feel like I’ve accomplished something exceptional. And maybe in some way, I have, in addition to completing a shopping expedition without the G-Bomb going off. It is no small feat to attend a dress-up occasion comfortable and confident, especially when you don’t get a lot of practice. I never could have done it thirty years ago, even with a narrower ribcage and a creaseless face.

Thirty years: something lost, something gained. For better or for worse?

Little Cheaters on God, The End

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Can gods and girlfriends see through pasta? http://www.wielandshoehe.de

Little Cheaters on God, Part 1

Little Cheaters on God, Part 2

Little Cheaters on God, The End:

From a glassed-in booth at the postampt, I told my mother to put away the special pins, the thread so fine it was almost invisible. I imagined her rolling the half-sewn gown in sheets and moving it to the upper shelves of her closet, to commune with her three feathered hats from the sixties. At least the hats had been worn. At least the hats were just hats, and not symbols of a life-sized misplaced hope, some wild misjudgment of both myself and someone else.

We’re postponing the wedding, I said. I don’t know when.

It’s okay, my mother told me. I’m sure you’re doing the right thing.

Both R and I were using the word postpone. R was certain it was just a matter of time before we’d be back together again. And I was too much of a coward to say cancel. But every time I said I love you, I’d realized I was crying. And if what hurt the most was telling my mother that the gown would not be worn, I knew leaving was the right thing to do.

I moved to Denver, where I knew no one, to take an editing job. R accepted a position in Frankfurt. He sent me two dozen roses on my birthday. And, now that the world had discovered the internet, we began emailing:

“….I shudder at the thought of losing you. Will you be there in a year for me? I continue to plan my life with you. Love, R”

I told him I was meeting new people. There was someone named S. He was fun, if unambitious. Most important, he liked to kiss me, I said.

R was beside himself. His misery drew out a promise of me to try one last time. On Christmas Eve, R flew to Denver. He still had the same wide, sandy-lashed blue eyes, the same rough stubble over the cleft chin. But now it was impossible for me to look at him without seeing all the hope he had once inspired in me, and all the sadness we’d caused each other.

He brought a gift. It was a juicer.

“Nancy suggested it,” he said by way of explanation, citing his father’s wife.

Sitting on the kitchen counter beside the juicer as midnight approached, he announced that he wanted a new start on new ground, based on truth and openness. Then he said, “Of course you know I’m gay.” He paused, waiting for my acknowledgment. When I remained silent, processing this epiphany, he continued. “Well you are too, right? I mean, you’ve slept with girls?”

I wasn’t, and I hadn’t.

This was the early nineties. It was back before people had gay ex-fiances. I had concluded that our problems were due to my problems: I was unattractive,  inexperienced, and uncommitted. My myopia–not being able to focus past myself–had rendered me legally blind to him.

And now I realized he needed me. He needed me to complete the picture of who he wished he was. His family and two half-brothers didn’t know he was gay. He needed me not because others didn’t accept his sexuality, but because he didn’t.

I told him that perhaps he should have brought up the topic of sexual preference before he’d brought up the topic of marriage. I told him to get back on the plane.

On Christmas Day I bought a bag of oranges. When the universe gives you a gay man with a juicer, at least make the juice.

But I was left knowing that the only real relationship I’d had had been based on lies. That the only man who’d deemed me suitable for marriage was not attracted to women. So what kind of a woman did that make me?

Four years later, I turned thirty. I was still single, living alone with my cat.  One morning, I picked up the phone and heard R’s voice. He wanted to tell me about his job. A nice one with a reputable firm in Boston. That year alone he had traveled to Barcelona, Lisbon, Madrid, and Seoul. He told me about his house. It was a nice one, too, with a dock and a ski boat. He told me about his guy problems. He was afraid Chad was using him. I listened, and told him Chad was using him. He didn’t know how to get out of it. But he feared he couldn’t do any better.

You’re using Chad, then, too, I pointed out.

Well, yes, he agreed.

Like you used me, I did not say. Like you are still trying to use me, I did not say. I realized he was hoping that I’d come to believe I couldn’t do any better, either.

Essayist Susan Griffin writes, “What is hidden, kept secret, cannot be loved. It exists in a place of exile, outside the realm of response.”

I didn’t have those words all those years ago on the telephone. Instead, I said, You have to stop being afraid of what’s inside you. I said this, afraid, still, that there was something inside me that was keeping me from being wholly loved. But wise enough to know that if there was, whatever it was, it couldn’t be hidden. It couldn’t be hidden, and be loved, too.

Little Cheaters on God, Part 2

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Continued from Little Cheaters on God.

Our first evening together again, we ventured down to the street and crossed a footbridge over the narrow, serene Neckar, its polished green surface bearing placid swans. I felt like I was watching myself in a fairytale that wasn’t what it looked like at all. We strolled up the narrow, cobbled streets of the old town, to a restaurant in a castle that dated to the fifteenth century. There, I fell in love again, but not with R—with my first German food. The restaurant specialized in maultaschen, a southern German version of a ravioli, stuffed with meat, spinach, onions, breadcrumbs, and a dash of nutmeg, and served in a rich meat broth. In this landlocked province where fish is hard to find, the savory dumplings are traditionally served on Good Friday, when the Catholic church forbids eating meat, because the meat is concealed inside the dumpling. If you can’t see what’s inside, it doesn’t really count, was the reasoning. Their nickname, in the tongue-tying Swäbian dialect, is “herrgottsbescheisserle,” which translates as “little cheaters on God.”

Each day, I walked from our flat into the old town, over footbridges, and across the cobblestones, to my language classes. The cobblestones were the reason R insisted on buying such horrible cheap shoes: they would be chewed to death by cobbles anyway.

“Buy the expensive shoes,” I urged. “Why do you think they are so much more teuer? Because they’re made better. They will last.”

“They will all fall apart,” he said. He believed Cole Haan headed a giant conspiracy to make consumers pay more for the same shoes you could get at Kinney’s. It was as though he could not imagine a pair of shoes that were comfortable and lasted, too. I could not help wondering what his hopes were for our marriage.

He ended up with a pair of German shoes costing twenty-three marcs, thirty-eight dollars. They were plum and prune-colored saddle shoes. I couldn’t stand his shoes, his miserliness, and his pessimism. The shoes fell apart. Fast. In two months he was sitting at the tiny table berating German craftsmanship and wielding a tube of superglue. Meanwhile, the crack between our pushed-together twin beds came to feel like a chasm wider than the Grand Canyon.

In the evenings, R would come home dejected from work and I seemed to have no power to cheer him, although we were doing all the things a young couple with very little money in Germany does. Weekends, we explored the countryside in the reliable old red Saab. We slid across the polished stone floors of minor castles in fabric booties; we ate käse and völlkorn brot in fields overlooking lush valleys. Once we splurged and spent the day at Bad Urach, a spa town with a health club built around a mineral spring, which appeared to be popular among the elderly. Clothing was optional. At this point, soft pretzels, hasselnuss chocolade, and apfel strudel had become a very real part of me. But seeing all those old, wrinkled legs, drooping abdomens, and soft dimpled bottoms and breasts in more shapes and sizes than I could have imagined—like the offerings behind the counter at the backerei—mine suddenly didn’t seem distinctive one way or the other.

R signed me up for a German class that was held in small classroom on the second floor of a narrow, otherwise empty building above the Neckar. Around town, the Swäbian dialect, which occupies its own dictionary with a spine three inches thick, settled around me every day like a muffling blanket, rendering me mute. The inability to communicate transported me back to the seventh grade, of never knowing what to say. Here, I knew what to say, but I didn’t know how to say it.

My fellow classmates were much older than I, and just as mute, a Turk and an Italian and two Spaniards and one Brit and three men from Afghanistan and a French woman. I never knew what was going on. But one day, we opened our workbook to an outline of a fat naked man with no eyes or ears or penis and had to draw body parts and then identify them in German. I gave the gelded German man big crossed eyes and labeled them augen, and pointed elf ohren on either side of his head, sharp vampire zähne and a fuzzy ring of Bozo haar. Then the instructor told us other words to write in the correct places. He had a stomachache. I fitted him with a wide belt and a giant buckle that read magenschmerz. The man had a headache, she said. I wrote kopfschmerzen inside a pointed party hat.

When it was my turn to hold up the workbook to show my fellow classmates, the Afghan men and the Turk and the Italian and Spaniards made appreciative eye contact and broke into chuckles. That’s when I realized I hadn’t laughed for days.

But I loved the ancient crooked streets of Tubingen, the old logging trails through the forest on which I would walk for miles, my mind reeling with the fact that every single inch of these hills had been tread for millennia. I loved the built-in history, I loved the happy drunks at every festival. And of course, the food—I logged leagues those trails trying to outrun the apfel strudel. What I didn’t know was that every single inch of my predicament had been tread for millenia, and that there was no outrunning it.

Three months went by, then four. From beside the Neckar River I watched the swans, paddling, unconcerned, with one wedge of black foot, the other tucked among the wing feathers on their backs, and wrote my mother letters. They went like this: “Everything is fine. R is fine. I am fine. There are swans here. They are fine. I am learning German, and German is fine.”

I had never written such a dull letter in my life. But where I had, in my letters to him from Australia, found a voice I’d loved, here I found another voice. It was one of my first hands-on experiences with using fiction in order to achieve a deeper truth. I could not admit to anyone that something was wrong but I could not pretend any different. It didn’t help that I didn’t know what was wrong. But I knew if I sent out those wooden missives, alarm bells would ring from Idaho to Virginia. And I was frantic to be heard. Franticness can be happening within one body walking into the postampt with a handful of thin envelopes. An insect drowning, in the sea or in a puddle. Several seconds, a minute at most, legs scrambling, not meant for swimming. It is small and it is private, the state of being frantic.

[And as that's over 1,000 words, I'll leave it there for the moment. Third installment next Sunday: Little Cheaters on God, Part 3]