vacivity: emptiness
On an otherwise pleasant summer evening in Michigan, I attend a wedding reception held on a driving range of a country club in Linden. I sit on a folding chair at table 22, a yellow napkin in my lap, beneath a giant tent decorated with twinkling lights. I’m acquainted only with the bride’s father, busy overseeing the festivities. I know no one else. I don’t feel like meeting anyone else. I’m not good at small talk under the best of circumstances and now, shortly after my second husband abandoned me, just the thought of indulging in “pleasantries” is exhausting. What would I say? Discussing divorce at a wedding is a buzzkill any way you slice it.
The band plays. Drinks flow. I partially listen to idle conversations.
On the back of the cardboard placard for table 22 is a photograph of the bride’s dog. His face is dusted with snow. I later learn the photo is snapped through a window, the dog outside, looking into the living room. The dog’s right eye appears eager: The door will open soon. I will be in my warm home. (Totally projecting human sensibilities onto an animal.) Yet the dog’s left eye portrays such sadness I want to weep. I can’t weep here in this tent with several hundred happy people.
The photo of the dog speaks to me—or maybe barks—especially the sad left eye. Often when I should feel happy I’m despondent, convinced tragedy waits to strike. Conversely I’m content, if not actually happy, in a crisis—knowing things can’t get worse. So during the festivities I wear my psychic “do not disturb” sign. If this were a wake, I’d be right in my element. Table 22. Catch 22.
I hold the photo in my lap stroking the paper image. I want the real dog, in the fur, here with me now. I want to own the dog. I want to kidnap him, bring him inside from the cold. I slip the photo into my purse. The dog’s name is Jersey, which maybe weights the moment with too much symbolism. But maybe not.
Years ago, for my own Jersey wedding, to my first husband, I purchase a sale dress costing $19.95 in a hippie boutique. I hedge my bets by investing as little as possible in this mistake that will last six years ($3.32 a year). The night before the wedding my face erupts in hives. I try to hide the red patches with makeup. But there I am the next day saying “I do,” I guess, though I have absolutely no recollection of the ceremony. None. All I recall are the hives, the navy-blue dress sprinkled with velvety purple flowers, the neckline low enough for my former high school home economics teacher to have a stroke—had she been there. Which leaves the stroking-out role to my aunt who, horrified by the dress, never gives me a wedding present.
I don’t remember saying “I do.” But surely I wanted to say I don’t.
I do remember this: I’m surrounded by wedding guests but feel as if I stare through a window trying to find a way into life. And if not my life, then anyone’s. I’m not picky. Any life would do. In that moment, stepping into my husband’s life, is the best, the only solution.
This man, my husband, is nice. But he is a stranger. We don’t love each other enough. He doesn’t buy me an engagement or wedding ring. I don’t expect one.
Why do I marry him in the first place?
No one, before, has asked for my hand, let alone my entire being, in marriage. So maybe I’m grateful. One summer, when still in college, I worked in DC and lived at McLean Gardens, a residence hall for single women. I saw firsthand the future of a previous generation of solitary women holding teaspoons, every night at dinner, which they delicately dipped into glass goblets of rice pudding. It wasn’t pretty. From blossoming to coffin, with no husband or family in between, was one slippery slope to be avoided. My marriage—to last until death do us part—takes care of everything. Doesn’t it?
No. My second wedding occurs in the backyard of my run-down house in Texas. For this wedding I up the ante purchasing a mail-order dress for $39.95 and worth every penny. This marriage lasts twice as long as my first. A virtual eternity. Nevertheless, did my poor home economics teacher teach me anything? This two-piece, red cotton number with blue-and-white flowers is strapless and slutty.
During the ceremony all fifteen guests are attacked by a swarm of fire ants.
Am I unable to be a wife simply because I never learn to cook or sew? I never have children. I never learn things that seem more or less second nature to other women.
Initially, in high school, I (kind of) (more or less) (sort of) toy with becoming a woman who will cook and clean and sew for an eventual family. I even go so far as to take (because it’s required) home economics from Miss Z. I purchase a few yards of dull-brown cotton material to craft into a skirt. I open the Butterick pattern, and I tumble into a crinkly wash of tissue paper tattooed with strange lines, notations, and designs. The edge must lie on the fold, cut on the bias, to prevent raw edges and seam allowances from raveling, use zig-zag setting on the machine.
But I myself am replete with raw, unraveling edges, no seam allowances whatsoever.
Nevertheless, I stitch together scraps of material that wouldn’t fit the shape of any known body size on any planet in the universe. I snip the seams, pull out thread, begin again. Three times. Four times. I abandon the kick pleat. The hem sags, depleted. Grease from french fries smudges the front when I forget to wash my hands after lunch. The straight brown skirt with a kick pleat and one-inch waistband, envisioned in my head as well as in the pattern, fails, again and again, to materialize. It wouldn’t even make a decent shroud.
In a revolutionary move, I hack five inches off the hem in order for it to feel freer, lighter. As if I wave a wand, I create a miniskirt even though the stitching resembles Frankenstein’s monster’s face.
The home economics class switches from sewing to cooking. My skills fail to improve. I somehow substitute sugar for flour in what is supposed to be a chocolate cake. I dump it into the trash along with the former hemline, hoping never to lower my sights or my hemlines again.
In English class that same year, still in a snit of causeless rebellion, I write a term paper about the Black Death, while other students research uplifting, inspiring aspects of history, such as the Renaissance, the discovery of gravity, the invention of penicillin, etc.
Even putting the bubonic plague aside for a moment, I know Miss Z’s pre-Martha Stewart’s vision of life doesn’t exist. Never has. At least not for me. Nevertheless, does it seem contradictory if I say that I want(ed) it as much as I didn’t/don’t want it? But as much as I didn’t want it, I do want it, but not enough to (have) pursue(d) it.
In short, I put all my diseased eggs in one casket. Maybe I flunked home economics on purpose. Maybe I flunked Home on purpose. Maybe I flunked Marriage (twice) on purpose. Thus, the eggs. Thus, the casket.
The photo of Jersey the pooch reminds me of my own childhood dog, a Scotch terrier.
A different Scottie lives two blocks from my house in Michigan. He lunges against his white picket fence whenever I pass his yard on my morning walk. He waits for me at the corner of the fence, waits, in order to race the length of it barking and growling until I’m out of sight. I could cross to the other side of the street. I could walk a different route. But soon I look forward to seeing him.
One morning I decide to bark back. We follow each other the length of the fence barking at each other. Do I think that if I speak his language he will acquiesce, accept me in his doggy universe?
One day as I approach his yard I don’t see him until I reach the far end. There he is. Why hasn’t he hurtled toward me? We contemplate each other, neither of us barking. Just as I’m about to step out of sight, he growls, half-hearted, just to let me know that he hasn’t abandoned his essential dogginess.
He’s inside his house on another morning. I see him through the window, his paws perched on the back of the couch. Smoke curls from the chimney. He gazes out at me. I want to sit beside him, close to him. He doesn’t seem to be barking, but he follows my every step.
Once in seventh grade I hit my own Scottie with his leather leash.
This is the most immoral thing I’ve ever done.
Our family drives in the Plymouth, with my Scottie, from New Jersey to Londonderry, Vermont, for a Labor Day vacation. But before we leave the house, while packing the trunk, my father, in a rage that smells of zinc and rancid oil, yells at my mother, my sister, and me. We’ve packed too many suitcases. We aren’t correctly placing them in the trunk. I want to put my case with dolls on top of the other suitcases, worried the dolls will be crushed. His toneless voice says I can’t bring the dolls, period. I am ordered to return them to the house. He accuses my sister of bringing too many books. He yells at my mother because she forgot to pack snacks. The nails of my terrier click around all four of us, not pausing, as if trying to find the one member of the family to whom he most belongs.
My father’s anger settles over our heads like sweat.
I clasp the handle of the case holding my dolls, unmoving. My feet are seemingly rooted to the floor of the garage. The cold from the concrete pulses up my legs to my kneecaps. I hold my breath as if that will diminish my senses. I will evaporate from this moment, this father, this house.
Driving along the New York State Thruway, my father yells about the traffic. He yells when I ask if we can stop for hamburgers. He yells when I say I have to pee, though he acquiesces when he stops for gas anyway.
My sister sits on the far right-hand side of the back seat, I on the far left. The air between us crisscrosses with edgy static. We ignore each other surely believing the other is the source of our father’s fury—or as if we inherited a silent form of his fury. I don’t know how to reach her any more than she knows how to reach me. Or maybe we look out opposite windows wishing for an interstate miracle. We will float free of the car, materializing in another car, adopted by another family. Another life.
Our Scottie walks back and forth across the back seat. He first stands on my lap to poke his head out my window, then my sister’s. Maybe he searches for his own form of escape. Eventually he gives up and falls asleep between us.
Our father yells for 204 miles, his power a steady avalanche burdening his imperfect family.
I glance at the back of his neck hoping to see pustules—announcing the onset of Black Death—sprouting below the hair line.
We stay at an artists’ colony located in a sprawling farmhouse. One afternoon I walk alone with our Scottie on a leash. The wide lawn spreads toward a field leading to woods. The terrier starts to bark. I stare at my dog as if I can will him to stop. He won’t. I feel all the impotent rage of a girl who can’t control anything, even a dog. Just below the sound of the harsh barking, I smell turpentine and fermentation, a chilly breeze on my face. Dead brush and leaves burn in the distance. Time seems disturbed, place fractured, as if I no longer know where I am or what I want.
On this day with too much wind and gusting trees it’s as if the day itself is having a tantrum.
Then the snap of leather against the brindle fur of a Scotch terrier.
After I hit my dog, blood rinses through the veins in my left arm, cold and feverish, like distemper.
The dog stops barking. He growls.
The word “brindle” is from Old Norse: “piece of burning wood.”
The autumn day contains the red scent of fire.
Is this what girls do when a father’s love feels more like flame than warmth? Is this why the girl fails love?
Both the dog and I are burning.
November draws near, and the Scottie down the street in Michigan is out in the yard less and less. I don’t see him for days. The air smells cool with abandonment. I feel separated from the world as if I stand behind a veil. I miss him, his tumbling energy defending his home, keeping strangers at bay, though now sometimes seeing me as “not stranger.”
The first thing I do after this second husband leaves me, after his car pulls out of the driveway for the last time—love dying before actual death parts us—is purchase a fire extinguisher. Because I am now solely responsible for protecting a century-old house with questionable electrical wiring. I sit on the kitchen floor reading complicated directions on how to operate it. I’ll never remember them. Should the house catch fire, only ashes will remain by the time I capture my cat Quizzle and figure out how to pull the trigger on the nozzle.
A fire extinguisher will not save me from certain death.
In short, I am alone in my house with Quizzle, a fire extinguisher, and (foreshadowing here) a Nazi flag in the basement belonging to my now ex-husband.
This is not Miss Z’s or anyone’s version of home, of life.
A solution: Perhaps that version contains homemade applesauce!
There is no way to explain how memory connects fire extinguishers to Nazi flags to applesauce, but the next thing I know I’m at the grocery store where I purchase a sack of Granny Smith apples. Back home, with no recipe, never having made applesauce, never even considered making it, I suddenly know how.
I peel the skins. I cut each apple into six wedges, digging out the cores. I drop sixty pieces of apple into a pan of boiling water. I stand by the stove, stirring, until the apples soften, more or less, to the consistency of sauce. I add about twenty teaspoons of cinnamon.
I wait while it and I simmer.
By ten at night, I fill a bowl with applesauce. I sit at the kitchen table and eat and eat and eat. Even before I finish one batch of applesauce, I cook up another pan of this improvised manna. Or can applesauce lead me to nirvana whereby I no longer need to worry about divorce, my house burning to the ground, or even death? Is this applesauce-nirvana Miss Z’s version of a Perfect Life?
I fear I need more.
But because I don’t have more, as the holidays near, I start lying. Compulsively.
I stand in line in the grocery store with bags of Granny Smith apples. I—who never speak to anyone in a checkout line, ever—hear myself saying that my two daughters, who live in New England, are coming home for the holidays! I’ve already bought the turkey/ham/sweet potatoes/pumpkins, but, oh my, I forgot apples for homemade pie!
The next trip to the grocery store I am the proud mother of two sons who live in California. I bring back my parents from the dead, my husband from divorce. My in-laws are visiting, too, I proudly announce. A family reunion at my house. All the presents are bought. The tree is decorated. Oh, I wonder what my husband bought me for Christmas!
On New Year’s Eve after surviving, via prevarication, this first Christmas without my husband, I am alone with Quizzle. We sit before the television watching the festivities. Quizzle curls against my leg. I bought one present for myself, a package of six Godiva chocolate truffles. Beginning at 6:00 p.m. I will eat one chocolate an hour to lead me into 1998. I offer Quizzle one salmon-flavored cat treat an hour as well. I have brushed and combed her fur for our minor celebration.
Snow begins falling shortly before midnight. I don parka and boots and walk deserted streets in my quiet neighborhood. Christmas decorations cast green, red, gold lights across icy sidewalks and streets. Mine is the only dark house. In some homes parties are in full swing. In others televisions flicker. Where curtains are open, I catch glimpses of Christmas trees, fireplaces, knickknacks, pictures. Families. One year resurrecting itself into another.
I am the dog gazing in the window.