Denial

It is the common misconception of marriage that you simply add another person to your life; that it is a choice you make in the same way you choose relish or mustard with a hot dog. Then, after making your selection, you keep going the way you were, only with a condiment. This idea is fostered by love songs and flowery cards and in novels with buxom women gracing their covers. 

This is called ‘romance’.

Here’s what they don’t tell you; marriage neither adds to your individual existence, nor subtracts from it. It merely alters it. Forever. Neither participant is flawless. Therefore, it goes without saying that when combined in marriage, just as strengths are doubled, every weakness is increased two-fold. Think of two pieces of paper glued together. One can’t be removed without tearing the other to pieces first.

This is called ‘separation’. It is best done quickly, as in ripping off a band-aid.

Unfortunately, even after the ripping is over, it’s not really over. It’s never really over.  There will always be scars, ugly thickened places where the glue held tight. And there will be holes, where pieces are missing. You can’t run from the emptiness anymore than you can run from your soul, for it is the place inside you that has torn loose, a ragged wound with edges that unravel a little bit more every day.

This is called ‘divorce’.

Last night I dreamed of the house I lived in when I was a little girl; an old farmhouse, a shotgun house, the kind where all the rooms open off a long hall running down the middle. Our neighbor said that was so you could shoot through the front door and out the back without anything getting in the way. Because he was so earnest in his telling and also because he was an old man with teary eyes and butterscotch in his pockets,  I believed it must be a useful thing, but then I was also the kid in fourth grade who wrote an essay on Why I Know Santa Claus Exists.

For the record: This is called ‘naïve’.

I remember specific and unusual things about that house; that the crack under the back door was too wide and when the snow blew hard from the north you had to roll up a towel and wedge it beneath the door or else the floor all the way down the hall would be covered with a fine dusting of snow. One time the electricity went out after that happened and the snow turned to ice and I skated in my house slippers and heavy winter coat all day. I also slept with my mother in the bathtub that night because the propane heater kept the bathroom nice and toasty no matter how cold it was outside. I remember how, when the attic fan was turned on, it created a suction strong enough to lift a sash from a housecoat right off the ground. The first time I saw that happen I was ten. I thought it was a cobra and screamed so loud it brought my mother in from the back yard where she’d been hanging laundry. She still had a clothes pin in her teeth and we laughed until we cried.

The pipe beneath the bathroom sink had a leak. It happened during a particularly bitter cold spell, when the plumbing froze, but we didn’t find out about it for a long time. We kept a rug on the floor there so our feet wouldn’t  freeze on the linoleum in the winter months and by the time summer came, it was so humid everything was damp anyway, so we never took notice. Every so often, though, the rug would sour and Mom’d come home with a new one and for a while it would be okay.

This is called ‘denial’.

When the floor got spongy, Mom called a plumber, but  by then it was too late. The damage was done. He billed us thirty two dollars for labor and parts. I think the leaky pipe  cost a dollar and forty two cents.  But the floor was a different story. To fix it, we’d have to strip it all the way down to the foundation and gird any damaged joists  with new lumber on both sides. Then we’d have to replace the plywood with a special type of wood that resists water damage, plus install new linoleum on top. I don’t remember how much it was all going to cost. It was enough my mother never gave the idea a second thought; she just bought a new throw rug and I learned to brush my teeth standing catty corner to the sink to avoid falling through the floor.

When we moved, the owner of the house claimed damages and withheld our deposit. My mom got mad and said she’d sue him. She didn’t, but she took all the glass door knobs off the doors for spite. To this day, when I see a glass door knob, I think of how much a dollar forty cent leak really costs.

I used to wonder if she’d known up front what it would cost to fix the leak, whether things would’ve turned out differently. I don’t think so. I suspect she knew there was a problem all along.  I mean, how many rugs does it take before you look under the sink?

She pretended because she didn’t want to know the truth, and then she kept on pretending because she couldn’t afford to fix what was really wrong. And when she couldn’t live with her mistakes any more, she left.

In most ways, we’re opposites, my mother and I. But in that one way, I’m very much like her. And really, when you think about it, opposites are like that. An ocean is an expanse of water without land. And a desert is an expanse of land without water. In America, a Christian goes to church. In Africa, a Christian is the church. In one word lies the difference between the Sahara and the Pacific; Africa and America; life and death.

This is called ‘truth’. And it is priceless.

excerpted fiction
copyright 2011