Unkiss Me (3 page)

17.

Locust Pose

Here are the imperatives of owning a business on the other side of a massive mountain range from where you live:

Find enthusiastic, honest caretakers who will happily greet customers pulling in for their three-dollar soaks morning, noon and night.

Understand that to journey to this place requires a full day of driving there, a full day of driving back, over sometimes treacherous, icy roads.

Allow your partner to be gone for huge stretches of time, and be willing to become, functionally, a single parent again.

Kiss any savings good-bye.

Kiss any notion of a vacation, other than at this business, good-bye.

Realize that everything is out of your control, absolutely everything.

This last point is always the most difficult for you.

18.

Full Locust Pose

Hundred mile an hour winds rip the hatchback off the caretaker’s car.
One of the little trailers is lifted off its blocks and slammed back down to earth a few feet away. Some windows are blown out. You pester the carpenter to buy more insurance.

In July, nobody ventures outdoors without a baseball cap, lest their hair get infested with gnats or mosquitoes.
The yearly mosquito festival produces the revenue for the chemical warfare that, by airplane, is distributed in a huge gaseous cloud over the surrounding countryside.

This is the quintessential “man’s man” type of place.
Cowboys routinely march cattle past the gates. The alkali lakebed in the distance attracts duck shooters; the hills are a haven for deer hunters. Everywhere you look, it seems, men are riding something—pursuing something. And you have to admire a place so harsh that even the slightest touch of hand to earth will produce chapped, bleeding fingers.

Often, when you accompany the carpenter on visits to the business, you enjoy yourself in spite of your misgivings. The sky is a parade of sudden weather change: oyster-colored clouds give way to deep blue faster than you can put on a layer of sun screen. Star clusters you’ve forgotten about enchant you with their nightly show. Swimming in the mineral pool at dawn, you feel the power of these healing waters, the slick silicates and heat routing out the beginnings of arthritis; you begin to understand why folks used to ride up here on buckboard for a soak.

You watch the carpenter as he strides along in his Red Wings and ball cap, the way he’s such an unlikely resort owner, and you get that he gets the irony.
Here is a man, a self-described anti-consumer, who has bought himself the oddest piece of property in the state. Even though he ceases to call you by name when you’re out here—referring to you instead as Wife—you can’t help but be infected with his overflowing happiness. You have a tendency to throw care to the wind, out here. You drink too much, daydream too much, and tend to say, “Oh, what the heck,” every other minute. But what you don’t know now, what you don’t even suspect, is that your egg and the carpenter’s sperm have once again danced. In nine months, your family will expand to include a tiny version of the carpenter, right down to his bovine astrological sign.

19.

Bow Pose

Ah, pregnancy!
The distention, the disfiguration, the convexity of it all! When you had a normal life with your first husband, you wore smocks, sewed outfits, and watched the expansion with amazement and naiveté. Not this time. Maybe it isn’t your chaotic, nonlinear life so much as you are ten years older, and ten years more neurotic. You get every test, read every book, live on the internet, and have insomnia for the three weeks between amnio and results of amnio because the ultrasound technician noticed your fetus’s pinkie had a shorter than usual mid-section.

Meanwhile, the carpenter’s need to be out at his “ranch” takes a giant step forward.
As you worry yourself with the potential for any number of congenital anomalies, sudden maternal death, or even (since you were so lucky with the first two), a really ugly baby, the carpenter spends an increasing amount of time East of the Cascades. There is more of you each day, and less of him. Eventually, you develop pre-eclampsia, and receive a mandate to stay in bed. Bed rest they call it. Right! The carpenter, claiming not to be annoyed at having to forestall a trip to the ranch, yells at you because you won’t stay in bed. But does he make the kids’ lunches? Do the dishes? The laundry?

On the designated day, you and the carpenter lumber up to labor and delivery.
With your first boy, you had a long, arduous Demerol labor. With your girl you refused all intervention and medication and had a “prepared” childbirth. This time, you—like many older mothers who’ve done it and have no trust of the medical community, or a need to prove stoicism in the face of pain—feel the need to micromanage the entire experience. They can give you Pitocin, but at six centimeters or contractions two minutes apart, whichever comes first, you will have your epidural. Period.

“Don’t I have a say?” asks the carpenter.

You look at this man, your husband, the father of the child who is about to be propelled from your womb; you look at the question mark in his brow, the pleading in his voice, and laugh. For the first time in nine months.

20.

Fixed Firm Pose

For several days after your baby is born, you are locked in place.
You can’t tear your eyes from this miracle, this perfect creature. You are falling in love. He is skinny and shriveled and bald, and you can’t keep your hands off of him. The carpenter is afraid to hold him. The way this new father contorts his face, stiffens and stops breathing when his baby is placed in his arms annoys you. It is not endearing. Your dead husband got it immediately, after the birth of your first-born. At least that’s how you remember it. You grab the baby back. Send the carpenter off to fetch a fresh onesie. One day, he will be very eloquent in the description of his initial terror, his fear of breaking his son, and then you will weep with him, nod your head sympathetically, but right now, you just wish he’d get a fucking clue.

21.

Half Tortoise Pose

Slowly, painfully, turtle-like, the carpenter settles into fatherhood.
It is with such glacial speed, you don’t even notice it. One early morning, after the baby cries off and on until 4 A.M, you are too exhausted to lift him once again from his crib. Somehow, the crying stops, and when you open your eyes, there it is: father and son. The baby’s head is draped over the carpenter’s big, sexy shoulder in sleepy contentment. You have waited so long for this. In the entire world, there is not a more beautiful sight.

22.

Camel Pose

Life continues.
The shingled cottage is too small for five people. There is no real yard, and, as you recall, the preschool years require ample running room. So, once again, you move. Pack, carry, unpack, carry, pack, carry, unpack, carry. You should have your baby surgically sewn to you. God, you’re so fat! How did that happen? The baby didn’t even weigh seven pounds! Your tits alone weigh seven pounds apiece.

“Remember your ten eight-ounce glasses of water a day,” says the nursing consultant. “It’s very important in this heat.”

You buy a bicyclist’s camel-pack so that, in addition to everything else, a bladder of water is now attached to your back with a plastic tube that snakes to your mouth. The August heat, the new house, the new baby, your two almost-teenage kids, it’s enough to break your back.

23.

Rabbit Pose

But you are happy with your little brood.
You always wanted a bunch of children. Back in your grandmother’s attic, where you spent most of your childhood summers, you constructed paper doll families. Always there was a baby, and always there was at least one teenager. The husband was always named, for reasons you can’t remember, English. Maybe because you hoped the husband you would one day marry would speak that language. Stun! you tell yourself, as your childhood lexicon dictates, the carpenter has forgotten English. He forgets to tell you that he’s getting high every single day while working on scaffolding, while using power tools, while driving around in his beater truck. When he’s high, there’s no stopping him: his dreaminess, his appetite, his treasure hunting.

You decide to put your foot down.
No more piles of junk in your driveway, no more debris on your lawn. The carpenter is hopelessly in love with the potential of all things not quite beautiful, and the evidence of this begins, once again, to spring like weeds from the corners of your perfect little garden. During the only snowstorm of the winter, the carpenter rents a U-Haul to bring home an enormous, fractured, stained glass window. Come spring, the baby crawls up to this work-in-progress when you turn your back for two seconds, and blood dribbles from his index finger like cherry juice. This is the first of several emergency room trips for this child. You look at the carpenter, his disheveled hair, his torn pants, his more-and-more-common look of “Huh?” Then, you point at the monstrosity in your driveway: the broken window that injured your son and has caused your new neighbors to call the city, prompting another one of those pesky clean-up-or-else letters, and you tell him, “I can’t do this anymore.”

24.

Head to Knee Pose with Stretching Pose

Between the utterance and the act, many months pass.
Couples’ counseling with two different therapists. Many, many books—even those codependent no more books with the Jonathan Livingston Seagull jewelry-wearing authors. You spend time now in bed with your dead husband; you have become close again. Your dead husband would never have bought an RV park out in the desert. Your dead husband didn’t spend his days meandering, always choosing the longest distance between two points. He didn’t construct his workday around getting stoned. That’s true, says your dead husband. But not because I wouldn’t have wanted to.

You sink into metaphor.
Metaphor has always been your best friend, hasn’t it? You begin to think of people as trees. The dead husband was a birch. One of those striking-but-fragile trees, with lots of good, serviceable seed. Birches often splinter into kindling before maturity. The carpenter is a cottonwood. Yes, definitely a cottonwood. Biggest tree in the neighborhood, rooting near water, and getting fluff all over everything at least once a year. You, well, you’re obviously a willow, just look at how you bend. A weeping willow, of course, also a creek dweller, hence your association with the cottonwood.

But, along comes the drought.
Money has dried up. You wake up, and you’re forty years old and you don’t have a pot to piss in. Except the hot springs. The carpenter wants to move out there. He woos you with the kind of house you know he could build. “C’mon,” he says, “just imagine what a great life it would be!”

“You need to go to rehab,” is your response.
In fact, it’s your response to everything. You are absolutely convinced that if the carpenter just stopped smoking weed, everything would be perfect. Okay, maybe not perfect, but less screwed up. So you decide to stop being a weeping willow, and see what life would be like as a giant redwood, the most “don’t fuck with me” of all the trees. As a redwood, you now feel confident giving the carpenter an ultimatum: your family or your herb.

25.

Spine Twisting Pose

The carpenter moves to a project house, and then an apartment.
“The hovel,” he calls both these places, as a way to smother you in guilt as you lay on your new queen mattress in the family dwelling. You are on the phone with him an average of four hours each day. You have never spoken with him this much. He’s joined a twelve step program, and, he tells you, he goes back and forth between thinking these guys have a point and these guys are full of shit. You vacillate between wanting him back and drawing up divorce papers. You look at your little son, the blond hair, the blue eyes, the innate mechanical aptitude. There he is, hammering the pegs down in his workbench facsimile. Sawing your pillow with his little plastic saw.

The older children are teenagers now.
How did that happen? Your daughter tells you to stick to your guns. “He’s had his chances, Mom,” she says. But you know she loves the carpenter with all her heart. The man who taught her how to swim. The man who once carried her on his shoulders up the Snake River Canyon, when she was too tired to walk.

Your teenage son tells you he misses the carpenter.
He sees his side of things. You look at this boy, who will be shaving in a year or so, and you want to throttle your dead husband. Suddenly, your anger about his death—the unfairness, the grotesque way he died when a Delta 88 slammed head-on into his Mustang, four days before his daughter’s birth—swells from the depths of your gut. And now, now especially, with your first-born approaching manhood, you begin to see DNA working its mysterious weave: the toe-out gait, the tenor of his voice, the analytical shyness when he’s forced into conversation with someone new. His sense of irony. His sense of decency. The way he never gets stains on his clothing. And here comes the unwelcome intrusion that this same revelation will visit when your youngest boy approaches adulthood. This little towhead beside you has a living father. Do you really want to cheat yourself out of the beauty of watching a father recognizing himself in his son? Cheat your son out of daily contact with the only man who will ever love him unconditionally? Can’t you just accept the fact that you married a stoner who isn’t going to grow out of it? Your dead husband, the bastard, speaks again: So, you planning on buying another jogging suit, or what?