Crybaby Ranch (15 page)

Is it possible I adore this man more than I even let myself suspect in weaker moments of daydreaming? Suddenly, I'm ashamed of my pile of romaine leaves.

“Great.” I smile hugely, but try not to let the smile linger on my face too long or look directly at anybody with it gleaming there. I gather up all the romaine, except one serving, and stuff the leaves into a plastic bag. I sprinkle sugar on the strawberries, slice the tomato, and steam the asparagus.

We sit with plates on our knees. A picnic. I am grateful to be eating yellowtail snapper, strawberries, and asparagus while sitting beside the woodstove, eleven inches of snowpack outside my window. Caro struggles at cutting bite-sized pieces of steak with her plate on her lap. She is not so pleased. Bo and I give her lots of attention to make up for our mutiny.

After I refuse their help, Bo and Caro leave and I cart our used dishes back to the kitchen. I consider how difficult it is to be Caro's friend. People are service modules to her; we play roles, fill slots. I am in her friend slot, Bo is in her lover slot—never mind the pun—Dickie is in her provider slot. She is real. We exist because of her. Except, of course, for those rare moments like earlier when she expresses such insight. Still, if she remembers to give me the needlepoint screen and yarns, I'll be surprised. Slowly, I eat the two remaining strawberries with my fingers before rinsing the bowl.

When Caro lavishes compliments about what a dear, close friend I am, I'm flooded with guilt that I haven't exerted myself more in developing this friendship. My mind zips around in search of how I can fulfill her statement and make it true, and it's never occurred to me before that I have no responsibility for her exaggerations. I drizzle the rest of the lemon sauce on the leftover asparagus in a storage bowl and stick it in the refrigerator.

I squirt Ivory into the dishpan and slip in the silverware. Caro is impossible to nail down about her past. All I get from requests for further information is a flip of her wrist. She never remembers or will tell me later. I fish around for the sponge, then decide I can do this job tomorrow. I pour the last two inches of champagne into my glass, or rather dish, and carry it to the living room. So far I've only heard a single reference to her father. “Pa,” Caro called him, then remarked flippantly that this was, “Short for
faux pas
.” But refused further discussion about her family.

I sit before my stove, fire door open to enjoy the flames, and I feel both relieved Caro is gone and lonesome because Bo left with her. I had been looking forward to tonight, which Bo said over the phone he especially cleared for my homecoming. Did he exhibit a shade of disappointment at Caro's intrusion, or was it just that my own disappointment swamped the room so fully everyone's feet got damp?

I rise from the sofa and wedge a short, chunky log into the woodstove and stoop before the opened door to watch it catch flame. Why is Caro clinging to Bo and why is he letting her?

Suddenly, a deep weariness floods my chest. I close the fire door and decide to undertake the task of finding my toothbrush, buried in my suitcase, so I can get ready for bed.

I rifle through fruit-colored shorts and tank tops, ridiculous clothes held up against the backdrop of log cabin walls. Even in the peak of a mountain summer these thin cottons are useless; one snag on a Wyoming bull thistle finishes them off. A pair of these shorts houses my toothbrush in its pocket, if I can only remember what I wore early this morning, in that other life, that other season and land.

“Once I was like you,” my mother said as I tucked her into bed last night. “Now look at me.”

I didn't shed a tear. In Florida, I seem to unconsciously assume an army nurse facade. Nothing shocks or dismays me. My mother put her used underwear in the dishwasher beside the silverware. The army nurse cheerfully sorted clothes from dishes and washed everything over. I should offer a name to this inner soldier of mine: Agatha, perhaps. Agatha, the army nurse. Even-tempered and nonjudgmental, Agatha absolutely loves her work.

When I find my toothbrush and carry it to the bathroom, I recall buying this toothbrush back in October and picking one up for Bo at the same time. The toothbrush he kept in my bathroom had begun looking worn. While hiking later that same day, I found the skeleton of an elk tangled in sagebrush and I dragged out the jawbone. Back home I dug around, elbow deep, in the trash can to retrieve one of the old toothbrushes I'd tossed and surfaced with Bo's red one. The elk teeth were caked with dirt.

Bo walked in the back door, noticed what I was doing, leaned sideways against the sink counter beside me, and folded his arms. I glanced at him, and he nodded down into the sink, where I was scrubbing away on the inch-wide elk teeth with his toothbrush.

He said, “Were you eventually going to tell me?”

I realized Bo didn't know about the new toothbrush and I followed his mind pictures of me sneaking his red one back into the medicine cabinet after I'd brushed the elk's encrusted teeth with it. I burst into laughter.

Now, as I undress for bed, I remember how Bo's face softened watching me laugh, how he seemed to absorb me, stripped to pure glee, into himself. I remember how I needed to dip my head to encourage my hair to fall alongside my face and hide my psychic nudity from his eyes. I smile now at how easily his wit can set me off. Bo knew that day I wouldn't actually sneak his toothbrush for such a job, and he knew that the mental picture he was pretending to carry could be transferred to me with one brief remark and trigger my laughter. To me, this is the utmost in intimacy. This is about as sexual as two people can get, with or without their clothes on.

I lift my comforter and check for the tiny black spiders that are wintering near my ceiling beams. Occasionally, one will travel down and chance sleeping with me. All is clear, and I slip between my flannel sheets and stretch out stomach down, grateful to be home in my own bed.

I
t is taking me days to unpack my suitcases and move back into my life, into my feelings and body rhythms. I've been home a week, but after being housebound—or carbound—so long with my mother, I can't get back into my habit of spending time outside. When I ran into Caro at Fred's getting groceries this morning, she claimed I looked “like a goddamn marshmallow.” So I dig around for my twelve-year-old blusher, cracked and orange, hoping it will lend some life to my face. Suddenly in the mirror my mother's cheeks come to mind, rouged by my father's heavy hand, and I burst into whole-body sobs.

“Zann, what's the matter?” Bo's voice, full of alarm, is punctuated by the slam of the back door.

“Nothing,” I call, as if I'm farther away than two short steps into the bathroom. I wish I'd heard him drive up. I reach for a tissue from the box on the back of the toilet, but Bo is there first. Knees bent, he dabs at my face with the wadded-up tissue as if repairing a canvas marred by unsightly blobs of paint.

“Aw, Zannah, tell me what's the matter.”

To my horror I begin bawling all over again. Bo puts one arm around my back and presses his cheek on top my head. “You've been so goddamn cheerful all week.” He peers down at me and shakes his head like he'd never believed in that act all along. “You haven't said shit about it since you got home.”

“About what?” I sound as much like a creaky door as I do a coy, weepy woman.

“Florida.” Bo dabs at my face again. “I know it wasn't any picnic down there.”

As my crying snuffles to an end, tears congest and words flow instead. “We did every little thing together, all three of us, once my dad got back from the Keys.” I reach for Bo's Kleenex. “We went to Bay Harbor on Sewall's Point for Mom's hair appointment together, and my last night there, we all lined up in front of the bathroom mirror trying to remember how Andre said to back comb.”

Bo reaches for my washcloth and holds it under the hot-water faucet. I recall the nose-stinging fragrance of hair spray filling my parents' large mirrored bathroom back in Florida. “You're a beauty, Elizabeth Arden. Look at that.” Dad had teased Mom's dark hair until it stood on end like lightning-filled cumulus around her face. “The prettiest girl in town and I'm in her date book. Of course, we have to drag along this homely kid.” Dad tipped his head my way. Mom rolled her eyes at me in the mirror, and for a moment, she was back again, sharing humor with us. “Next step,” Dad said, hairbrush high in the air like a sickle, “we form this hay into a stack so we don't scare everybody at Gentleman Jim's Restaurant.”

Now, in my own medicine cabinet mirror, my eyes sideways to watch Bo wash my face, I tell him that may have been our last shared joke. I never know what losses my mother will experience before my next visit. “She's moving through this so fast. The doctor doesn't know how to help her.”

When Bo finishes, I see more color in my face. It's just in all the wrong places—my nose and my eyes. I feel better though or, if not better, more at home in myself. Coming alive once again, the birth each time I return home to myself no less painful than the last. But I tell Bo, “I'm getting faster. It was two weeks before I cried last time.”

I haven't polished the knack of fully acknowledging my mother's symptoms while caring for her at the same time.

I watch Bo rinse my washcloth, vigorously twisting it one way then the other so it will never be square again.

My mother and I have seen the truth and horror in each other's eyes and have held on to it together. We have shared this. But work needs to be done and professionals know how to do it. So Agatha thinks up helpers like using baby wipes in the bathroom and hiding smashed pills in a spoonful of applesauce. Agatha doesn't fall apart when my mother doesn't recognize her daughter. And Agatha forgives herself for loss of patience when my mother repeats and repeats the same question or wanders the house throughout a long night. But, eventually, Agatha departs…and leaves me with a blotchy red face.

“Why don't you throw this stuff away?” Bo opens my compact and smells the musty caked powder. “You don't need it.”

He's complimenting me because he doesn't know what else to say, but I follow his advice and discard the blusher in the wastebasket.

Bo says, “How about if I fix some Irish Cream coffee?”

“Great.”

Baileys Irish Cream in dark rich coffee was our favorite treat before I left for Florida.

Sitting in my familiar place on the bench beside my stacks of books, elbows on kitchen table, I realize this is the best spot to ease back into my psychic clothes. Here, I daydream. Here, I sketch out new jewelry designs. My famous artist friend says it's important to daydream. To daydream, Kelly says, is an artist's job.

The geranium blooms on the windowsill above the sink. I tell Bo thanks for watering it while I was gone.

With strong square hands, he reaches for coffee beans and mugs. I admire the way his forearms flare into muscle from beneath rolled-up flannel sleeves before tapering into surprisingly narrow wrists. Bo's fine denim-covered butt passes in front of the kitchen cupboards from sink to stove; I admire that, too.

“The geranium's getting leggy,” he says.

“Leggy?” My eyes move down the backs of Bo's legs.

“We should cut it back.”

His Levi's are tucked into unlaced Sorel Pacs, and he's leaving little puddles of melted snow on the floor, but the worst of it is probably drying in the bathroom, so I don't mention it.

“My mother planted red geraniums just like this one outside the screened porch in Florida several years ago and now they're big as bushes.”

“So you all went out to dinner your last night there.” Bo is determined to keep me talking.

“Dad sat across from Mom and me in a booth at Gentleman Jim's. He said to Mom, ‘You and I are partners, aren't we?'”

“What did he mean?”

“I think he began the statement conversationally. His tone was a bit patronizing at first. Then the words seemed to shift the atmosphere between them, and he reached across the table and held Mom's hand.”

That moment in the restaurant, waiting for dinner, I felt breathless at the sudden vision of my father's truth: My mother and he were partners. They were playing out a holy exchange of life lessons. I was humbled by their vast undertaking. At that moment, I believed I understood the purpose of life, and I believed with absoluteness that life extended beyond the brief span we attribute to it. And though I can't with dependable certainty draw forward either belief at will just now, I'll never forget the certainty I felt of both at that moment.

None of this I say to Bo, who has stopped his work and turned to me.

I say, “My father has never acknowledged emotions before. With this disease he's learning to interact with my mother on an emotional level, because nothing about her life is rational. When I was a teenager, he sent me to my room if I became teary-eyed and told me I could join the family again when I conducted myself with reason.”

“What about your mother? What's she getting from the partnership?”

“I know she never got this loving attention from my dad before, or this acceptance. Mostly, I feel overwhelmed by the hard road her spirit has chosen, but occasionally I glimpse a kind of harmony emerge in her life.”

“Goddamn big price to pay for some attention.”

“It makes sense to me. In a way, we all give our lives for attention and acceptance.”

Bo considers. “This partnership deal, are you talking about something unconscious here?”

“I suppose. But whatever explains the exchange I witnessed between my mother and my father defines what I want in my own life. I want to learn life through partnering. I saw love and its long meaning that moment. I witnessed its worth despite the pain.” I sound formal, as if I've thought this out, yet I am surprising myself with this statement of intention.

Bo nods. Behind him the coffee drips through the filter into the pot.

I remind myself, or perhaps it's Agatha's reminder before she finally departs, there will be times I'll forget this vision. That with the rage of the powerless I'll wonder where to point the finger of blame for my mother's illness.

“My father's energy is like his hair—cowlicks spurting in all directions. I think he's finally found his match in tending Mom. He gives himself totally to her these days.”

Bo brings our mugs to the table. As he pulls out a chair to sit, I scoot off the bench and go searching for cookies to have with our coffee.

“Much of Dad's early-retirement funds will be spent on Mom's care. There isn't an insurance company in the world that covers Alzheimer's disease,” I say, stretching on my toes to reach deep into the high cupboard over the stove. “Thank God he's well set there.” I sit back down with my loot, a half-empty tin of Piroulines, a cream-filled wafer so expensive and delicious I have to hide them from myself.

Bo stirs the Baileys into his coffee, then into mine. I feel all these words pushing the lump away in my throat. Bo's listening soothes like a deep massage. If I keep talking like this, Bo might wish he had voted for the muteness of my tears. I offer Bo the tin of wafers. There's an interesting survey question: Would men prefer to hear women talk out or cry out their sorrows? I bite off the tip of a wafer. In this survey no third choice would be offered, such as: Suffer in silence.

“Your dad sounds like an unusual guy.”

“Oh, he is. The star of the family, the one Mom and I worked to impress.” I dip my wafer into my coffee. “Events were not real to us until we reported them to him.”

Anger toward my father rises up out of nowhere once again. It's so inappropriate I'm embarrassed inside my own head.

I chase the little piece of wafer floating on top of my coffee. I sigh. “I don't know. While my dad encouraged Mom's dependence, I badgered her to get a job, to volunteer, make more friends, learn birding, anything. We both should have left her alone.”

I take a sip of my coffee. I feel a deep gratitude for Bo's company and care.

I say, “Tessa is having a potluck and scavenger hunt later this afternoon. Come with me.”

 

Turns out Bo knows most everybody at the party and introduces me to more people than I do him, even though a lot of Tessa's guests are associated with the bookstore. After the scavenger hunt, we all sit around with paper plates on our laps, the guests' dogs dozing between rows of Sorel Pacs at the front door.

Bo tells how his scavenger hunt team of five men stopped in the driveway of a woman, known locally as an ice climber. While she was unloading groceries from her car, the men asked if she had any crampons they could borrow, one of the items on the team's list.

“She hurried into her house without answering us,” Bo says. “I think she misunderstood and thought we asked for tampons.”

Bo is good at parties. I am not so good. Erik wouldn't go to parties and I never went alone. In Findlay, Ohio, if you're not with your husband at a party, you're just looking for trouble—or so goes your reputation. I'm way out of practice and not back into my skin from my Florida trip enough to be entertaining in a crowd. Fortunately, Bo hangs close.

Too close for many people at the party to believe we're “just neighbors,” as I keep explaining. One woman, whom I haven't met before, asked a few minutes ago if I was aware that Bo spent a lot of time out with some reddish-haired woman.

“Oh, that must be his mistress,” I said, using Caro's joke. “Isn't she pretty?” That took care of her.

But perhaps the stress of trying to be sociable is getting to me. I'm beginning to sneeze and sniffle. I ask Tessa for a tissue and she returns loaded with herbal remedies. She hands them to Bo, rattles off the dosages to him and says, “Stop at Fred's for oranges on the way home. And take some of the echinacea yourself to bolster your immune system, Bo, or you'll get this cold next.”

Bo reads the list of ingredients on one of the herb bottles, “Deer antler, peony, tortoiseshell, placenta—of
what
they don't tell.”

“Why don't we just swallow pond scum?” I say.

With these remarks, Tessa decides not to chance us following her directions. “Open up, both of you.” She squirts a dropper of a foul-tasting tincture onto each of our tongues, and we both rush to the kitchen sink for water.

Tessa follows me to the bedroom. While I'm getting into my coat, she says, “Inner crying. Colds and grieving, same symptoms: watery eyes, filled sinuses. Take care of yourself and don't come to work tomorrow.” As manager, Tessa has authority over schedules. I know she thinks I have not fully acknowledged my sadness over my mother, and of course, she is right, but I don't like to encourage her reading metaphors into my life, so I just thank her for the day off.

A snowfall began during our potluck, and the Suburban's windshield wipers work against heavy piles of wet snow as we pull away from Tessa's house. During the drive home, everything in sight—the road, the buck-and-rail fences, the rumps of cattle—is covered unevenly, as if the snow had dropped in clumps instead of flakes. By the time we reach my cabin I'm chilled and achy, eyes streaming and nose stuffed up.