After the Fire (4 page)

For years I have concealed

My anger behind the trembling barrier

Of a newspaper, always wondering,

With some dismay, why the white heat

From my heart failed to sear the newsprint

Into leaping flames.

Imagine a flawless day in Phoenix in early April. It was Sunday afternoon. I had come home from church with the kids only to find the doorknobs of my house coated with olive oil. My husband explained that one of my relatives had told him a passage in the book of Revelation suggests that putting olive oil on doors will drive evil spirits away.

The evil spirit in question was the young female boarder I had taken in. A recent divorcée, she needed a place to stay, and we needed the money. She was also my ace in the hole. I was selling life insurance. It's a profession that often requires nighttime appointments. As a district manager, supervising other agents, I needed a good deal of flexibility to come and go. I didn't dare leave the kids at home alone with their father, but it was virtually impossible to hire babysitters to care for children in a house that was also home to a drunken adult male. Naturally my husband hated the boarder. She was my ticket out.

So I came home, struggled to open the greasy doorknob, and then went looking for an explanation. Once my husband told me what was up, I lost it. Completely. He disappeared into the bedroom and collapsed in a drunken stupor. I was outraged—a wild woman!
Diary of a Mad Housewife
had nothing on me. I wound up out in the backyard, heaving his half-filled booze bottles against the side of the house. Then, realizing how dangerous it was for him to be there when I was that crazy, I went into the house and called a doctor.

Admittedly, I'm the one who could have used locking up at that point. My husband was harmlessly passed out; I was the one on a rampage, but if I went to the hospital, who would care for the children? Not my husband—he was too drunk. And not the boarder, either. The olive oil ruse had worked. Scared to death, she was packing to leave. So I did the only sensible thing. After convincing a doctor to admit my husband to a mental health facility, I woke him and persuaded him to take a shower that was four days overdue. Then, like someone taking an old dog to the vet to be put down, I coaxed him into going for a ride and delivered him to the hospital.

The bottle shattered as it hit the wall.

I stood with arm upraised and knew

That I had smashed it.

It could as easily have been his head.

I broke the bottles one by one with cool deliberation.

By the very act of breaking them

I certified their victory.

One further note about denial. I had always heard that alcoholics hide their drinks. Because my husband kept his bottle of vodka right there on the kitchen counter, I deluded myself into believing the situation was less serious than it really was. (It turned out there were a lot of other bottles hidden around the house, and I had only just started discovering them.)

I kept minimizing how critical things were even after he went into DTs in late 1972, days after our daughter was born. At the time, we spent five days without sleeping because he was convinced that there were bugs crawling all over him and there were spies with complicated, high-tech listening devices hearing everything we said via a secret listening post down by the
charco,
a watering hole, a mile away. Even though he spent one whole afternoon playing chess with and talking to an opponent I couldn't hear or see, I stuck it out because I thought he was really quitting. When he started drinking again, three weeks later, my hopes were crushed. The problem is, all of that happened seven years before that April afternoon when I broke the bottles.

What finally pushed me over the edge? A number of things. Yes, there was the olive oil, but there was also the time my husband showed up at my six-year-old son's T-ball game so drunk at five o'clock in the afternoon that when the game was over he had to crawl from the bleachers to the car on his hands and knees. I was there with my children, with my children's friends, and with my children's friends' parents. And there was my husband, crawling like a baby on all fours.

In cartoons, when a character has a sudden epiphany, a lightbulb magically appears over his head. That afternoon the lightbulb came on for me. From then on nothing was ever the same. The roller coaster had inched its way to the top of the grade and then, for even longer, had clung there, poised on the pinnacle. Now it was ready to plunge to the bottom.

In the early eighties, getting a divorce was the last thing I wanted to do, but I knew it was what I had to do in order to save myself and to save my children.

I live a life of unrequited loss,

Of loss undignified and unfulfilled.

I bear the burden of a private pain

And crave the comfort of a public grief.

Things were bad. My husband had moved from the bedroom into the part of the house that had been occupied by my now long-gone boarder. We were still married, but I could no longer stand to be in the same room with him or to eat at the same table. I was walking around in a world of hurt, trying to make sense of all the awful things that had happened over the course of several incomprehensible weeks.

As I was pouring out my troubles to a friend one day, she asked me if I knew what was going to happen next. I told her I had no idea.

“Your husband has propositioned a friend, and she turned him down. He's propositioned you, and you've given him the same answer. What do you think the chances are that he might molest your daughter?”

It was a question that shocked me to my very core. Having been molested myself at age seven, I was terrified that the same thing might happen to my daughter. I have no proof that it ever did happen, but when my friend asked the question, that outcome wasn't at all outside the realm of possibility. I could not, in all honesty, say, “Absolutely not! Such a thing could never happen!” Because, somehow, I was afraid it could.

I left the restaurant then and went home, where I picked the fight that would propel my husband out of the house. It wasn't hard. All I had to do was take a little bit of the anger off the top. Mount Saint Helens was waiting underneath, ready to do the rest.

The quarrel, once enjoined, immediately escalated

To atomic proportions, leaving us

No alternative but to retreat

To opposite ends of the house.

Most of my friends and relations hadn't been at that fateful T-ball game to see my husband on his hands and knees. So when I started divorce proceedings, several of these well-meaning folks showed up on my doorstep, Bibles in hand, to tell me that the unbelieving spouse could surely be saved by the believing one if I'd just shape up and pray harder. The problem was, by then I was beyond praying.

I still loved my husband, but I knew that I couldn't save him and save myself, too. I wrote “Moving Out” in the afternoon of moving day, while he was loading his boxes into his 1956 GMC pickup truck and getting ready to drive away.

I will not be the price of your redemption.

I will not pay my life to ransom yours.

Survival is the thing that I must cling to.

It's you or me now. I have made the choice.

Reproach hangs heavy as you pack your boxes,

Separating ours to yours and mine.

Don't let me stop him, God, don't let me stop him.

Don't let me weaken. If I do, I'll die.

I cannot tell you the exact date my husband moved out. More than thirty years later, I know it must've been a Tuesday night, because I wrote the next poem, “The Collector,” after coming home from grocery shopping on Wednesday morning. Pushing a cart, I had raced through the store with tears streaming down both cheeks, not buying all the things I used to buy for him. I'm sure people who saw me in that state must have suspected me of being an escaped mental patient. And how, you might ask, do I know for certain that it was Wednesday morning when I went grocery shopping? Easy. Wednesday was double-stamp day.

I believe this poem is a benchmark. It shows how low I was in early March 1980. Please remember that, other than that one unpublished children's book and my furtive bits of scribbled poetry, I had yet to do any serious writing. I am preparing this new edition of
After the Fire
in the spring of 2013. It's thirty-three years since I went shopping on that fateful Wednesday morning. My marriage had failed, and I thought my life was over. I wasn't dead, but I fervently wished I was. Now that my forty-sixth novel is due to be published this fall, good friends like to mimic that old Virginia Slims commercial when they tell me, “You've come a long way, baby.”

One last side note. My mother saved Gold Bond Stamps, which is probably why I gravitated to S&H Green Stamps. Unfortunately, trading stamps really did go out of style, but some people never change. Now, instead of saving Green Stamps, I am into frequent-flier miles. So are my daughters.

DNA is like that.

I like the green ones best.

I count them up as any miser would

And watch them grow with satisfaction,

For they are the tangible symbol

Of what is processed here—

Toilet paper, lettuce, pork and beans.

The taxes must be paid in cash.

God knows there's precious little of that.

Some say trading stamps are going out of style.

I'll collect them till I die.

At least it's something I do well.

Once my husband was out of the house, I thought that would be the end of it, but of course, it wasn't. Every Saturday morning, around six thirty, he'd show up out front and beg me to take him back. “After all,” he'd say, “you said in sickness and in health. This is sickness. Take me back.” But by then I had finally figured out that if eighteen years of my loving him hadn't fixed him, he wasn't going to get well.

People ask me why I moved from Phoenix to Seattle. I tell them, I was a refugee from a bad marriage and a worse divorce. The real reason I had to leave town was that I was weak and susceptible and every bit as addicted to my husband as he was to booze. Even waiting to meet him at a restaurant to discuss the terms of our divorce, I felt my heart rise in my throat at simply seeing the man walking toward me on the sidewalk. I was outraged that my body could betray me in such a fashion. He was bad for me. He had drained me of all joy and laughter, although I didn't know how thoroughly for a very long time.

Six years later, and a year into my marriage to my second husband—the nice one—we visited Phoenix. I took my new husband by the insurance agency office where I had once worked to introduce him to the people who had been my fellow employees there. None of the people in the office recognized me because, in all the years we had worked together, they had never seen me smile and had never heard me laugh.

He rings the doorbell. More distant

Than a stranger, he stands on the porch

Of the house that used to be our home,

Begging me to come and talk,

Just talk, he tells me, nothing more.

I probably should have named this poem “Collateral Damage” instead of “Why?”

The kids were little when their father moved out of the house. My daughter was in first grade, my son in kindergarten. Since I was the one who had instigated the divorce, I was the one left to answer the children's questions, and I did that as best I could. I sat them down and read a book aloud to them,
The Boys and Girls Book About Divorce.

More than thirty years later, the results are mixed. My daughter, seventeen months older than my son, remembers enough of what went on back then that she has been nothing but supportive, both of me and of my second husband. My son, on the other hand, still holds me responsible for what happened. And maybe I am.