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Authors: Deb Caletti
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age? I didn’t know. I just knew that with her skittishness and those horses somewhere out there and that big white moon and the sense that we were all lost together, I was glad when I saw the two beams of Shaye’s headlights come down the road.
While Shaye was away, my mind had been weighed down. Images and feelings tossed—my daughter eating gallo pinto in an outdoor restaurant; my husband opening a beer as he took off his shoes and unrolled his socks in an empty house; a hit of grief that Hugo was gone, gone, gone to wherever the dead go. My heart was heavy with fear and despair about Thomas and me and our own wrecked ground, and I could hear coyotes, and there was the kind of dark out there where you could disappear and never be found. But as soon as Shaye showed up with plastic bags filled with white cartons, and a fat grocery sack with the neck of a Jack Daniel’s bottle sticking from it, all that disappeared. It just went in a comforting, familiar flash, because, damn her, I knew it! I knew she’d eat all the fortune cookies on the way.
—
I called Thomas after dinner. Well, I had to. We’d only had a fight this cataclysmic once before, a few years ago, when we’d fought again about his mother. She’d come for a visit, and he accused me of not trying. I hadn’t tried, but all that history had left me cold by then. I suppose every marriage has its issue, the issue that’s been shot at and strangled and drowned and stabbed, and yet its mean little heart still goes on beating. This was ours. June Bennett. Of course, the fights about his mother weren’t about his mother. The issue is never the issue. It’s about what you need most colliding with what he needs most.
He wanted me to be more generous. I wanted him to do something . It was like he’d brought a wild animal into our house and then let it piss on the carpets and rip things up with its teeth while he stood there and smiled indulgently. Or, worse, didn’t notice when it drew blood. I tried to handle her various rejections and jabs and green-eyed moves with kindness, with bribery and gifts, with every self-help-ish term from boundaries to detachment . None of it solved anything, naturally. Thomas was the key here, and he was unwilling or unable to move from our fixed triangle. My hands felt tied—in such situations, if you fight your own battle, you lose, and if you don’t fight your own battle, you lose. I wanted him to make me a priority, and he wanted me to make her a priority, until finally, after that argument, I left. It was a short-lived gesture that lacked true courage, though I ate a burger that arrived under a dome of silver and remembered that I was a human being with a life apart from Thomas.
This time, though, June Bennett was dead, and I had run away to the ranch, and there were six months of small lies, but you went on after a fight, after a day or two or a week, didn’t you? It got lonely otherwise. Ignoring each other is hard work, and downright awkward in a shared bathroom. He sees you undress. The toilet flush reveals. Your toothbrushes still touch in the cup.
His crimes were small, and so were mine, and this was repairable. And the thing was, I wanted to tell Thomas, more than I wanted to tell anyone, about Nash. About the horses, and Shaye, and how you could really see the face in the moon in the desert. The sheets smelled like someone else’s closet and someone else’s laundry soap. Thomas was the one I told things to. Isn’t it part of why we marry, to have a person to tell your life to? You choose each other and become the principal witness. You begin to require his response to the funny sight, the victory, the trouble, because it completes the experience. Telling your witness sets a small volume or a large one to its place on the shelf. There , is what a part of you says.
And while I sometimes could have relayed my day to a large appliance and let it hum back in the right parts—not because Thomas wasn’t
While Shaye was away, my mind had been weighed down. Images and feelings tossed—my daughter eating gallo pinto in an outdoor restaurant; my husband opening a beer as he took off his shoes and unrolled his socks in an empty house; a hit of grief that Hugo was gone, gone, gone to wherever the dead go. My heart was heavy with fear and despair about Thomas and me and our own wrecked ground, and I could hear coyotes, and there was the kind of dark out there where you could disappear and never be found. But as soon as Shaye showed up with plastic bags filled with white cartons, and a fat grocery sack with the neck of a Jack Daniel’s bottle sticking from it, all that disappeared. It just went in a comforting, familiar flash, because, damn her, I knew it! I knew she’d eat all the fortune cookies on the way.
—
I called Thomas after dinner. Well, I had to. We’d only had a fight this cataclysmic once before, a few years ago, when we’d fought again about his mother. She’d come for a visit, and he accused me of not trying. I hadn’t tried, but all that history had left me cold by then. I suppose every marriage has its issue, the issue that’s been shot at and strangled and drowned and stabbed, and yet its mean little heart still goes on beating. This was ours. June Bennett. Of course, the fights about his mother weren’t about his mother. The issue is never the issue. It’s about what you need most colliding with what he needs most.
He wanted me to be more generous. I wanted him to do something . It was like he’d brought a wild animal into our house and then let it piss on the carpets and rip things up with its teeth while he stood there and smiled indulgently. Or, worse, didn’t notice when it drew blood. I tried to handle her various rejections and jabs and green-eyed moves with kindness, with bribery and gifts, with every self-help-ish term from boundaries to detachment . None of it solved anything, naturally. Thomas was the key here, and he was unwilling or unable to move from our fixed triangle. My hands felt tied—in such situations, if you fight your own battle, you lose, and if you don’t fight your own battle, you lose. I wanted him to make me a priority, and he wanted me to make her a priority, until finally, after that argument, I left. It was a short-lived gesture that lacked true courage, though I ate a burger that arrived under a dome of silver and remembered that I was a human being with a life apart from Thomas.
This time, though, June Bennett was dead, and I had run away to the ranch, and there were six months of small lies, but you went on after a fight, after a day or two or a week, didn’t you? It got lonely otherwise. Ignoring each other is hard work, and downright awkward in a shared bathroom. He sees you undress. The toilet flush reveals. Your toothbrushes still touch in the cup.
His crimes were small, and so were mine, and this was repairable. And the thing was, I wanted to tell Thomas, more than I wanted to tell anyone, about Nash. About the horses, and Shaye, and how you could really see the face in the moon in the desert. The sheets smelled like someone else’s closet and someone else’s laundry soap. Thomas was the one I told things to. Isn’t it part of why we marry, to have a person to tell your life to? You choose each other and become the principal witness. You begin to require his response to the funny sight, the victory, the trouble, because it completes the experience. Telling your witness sets a small volume or a large one to its place on the shelf. There , is what a part of you says.
And while I sometimes could have relayed my day to a large appliance and let it hum back in the right parts—not because Thomas wasn’t
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