After the Fire (3 page)

I believe there's a passage in the Bible that speaks to this—something about seeing the mote in someone else's eye while being blind to the boulder in one's own. This was definitely the case when I wrote this poem. It gives me no pleasure forty years later to realize how right I was.

My sister's first husband is long gone, of course, but then so is mine.

It frightens me to see her,

Trembling on the brink of life

And love.

                I want to reach out,

To help, to offer her a hand

And guide her from the precipice.

But still I know that she

Must make her own way blindly,

Although we who have gone before

Long to give her the newfound vision

We have of this world.

For Christmas the year after we married, my first husband gave me a Kenmore sewing machine—not the top-of-the-line zigzag model, but the loss-leader, straight-stitch,
$39.95
version. I never succeeded in making it work properly, which was no doubt due to operator ineptitude. At last I closed the lid, shutting the machine inside, and relegated the wooden cabinet to the role of side table. Upon this ungainly piece of furniture sat a gold-framed photograph—an eight-by-ten portrait of me wearing my wedding dress.

The wedding had been cobbled together in a hurry. On New Year's Day 1967, my fiancé made me an offer I couldn't refuse: “If you can have the wedding organized in time, we can be married over semester break.” I had been waiting more than five years to hear those words, and after he said them, you couldn't see me for the dust. On January 29, less than a month later, we tied the knot. I was a first-year teacher and my husband was a student. That made us poor. The wedding was a bargain-basement affair. The wedding dress cost $125. Flowers for everyone came to a total of $30. All photographs, including the one on the dead sewing machine, were taken by a team of camera-wielding friends.

For me this poem is interesting in terms of both what it says and what it leaves out. The picture was taken in a church social hall. The amateur photographer posed me in front of a basement wall. The problem is, the wall contained a padlocked door that led to a storage room. The photograph plainly captures the brass lock. Not surprisingly, it is missing from this wistful study of the image. Instead, using my poetic license as a blinder, I managed to ignore the bad omen that locked padlock really represented.

The lace is there, white and flowing to a train

From the slender waist.

The breasts are young and firm,

Expectant under a well-fitting bodice.

Studying the picture closely, one expects

To see those breasts rise and fall in lightly taken breaths.

A slender neck, bedecked with antique pearls,

A slight smile, a veil of cloudy lace.

How long before that smile lies buried

Beneath a hundred petty tyrannies?

It is disturbing to realize that “Portrait” and the next two poems, “Entrapment” and “Idle Conversation,” all predate my divorce by ten years and two children. The children, you see, were part of my over-all game plan. In fact, they were my two highest face cards.

I had set out on a single-minded crusade to save the man I loved from himself. For years he had assured me that he would stop drinking once we had children. To my credit, I had some reason to believe him. His father had been drunk when he went away to World War II and had come back sober. To my knowledge, my father-in-law never had another drink, and he never went to meetings, either. My father-in-law told me several times not to worry, that when his son was ready to straighten up he would. It turned out my husband wasn't made of quite the same stuff as his father.

Totally unaware that my husband was incapable of keeping his promise, I spent the first five years of our marriage hoping beyond hope that we would get pregnant. Each month when that didn't happen, I was plunged into a pit of despair.

When I wrote “Entrapment,” I had never lived anywhere but Arizona and had never visited the fish ladder at the Chittenden Locks in Seattle. Years later, when I did go there, I was shocked by the battered condition of the fish I saw. The salmon simile was far more appropriate for what was happening in my life than I could possibly have imagined.

And yes, in those days, that's exactly what a marriage license cost in Tucson, Arizona—two bucks.

If there were some definite way of knowing,

The report of a rifle, a shotgun blast,

That would tell her precisely when

The trap was sprung, it might be

Somewhat easier to deal with the shambles

Her life has, before her very eyes, become.

But no, she had been eager enough,

And even had the danger signal warned her,

She would not have listened, seen, or noticed,

But plunged on, like a salmon rushing upstream,

Bent on procreation and destruction.

For five years we lived on a hill thirty miles from town and seven miles from the nearest neighbor. After dinner, my husband would sit in his recliner and fall asleep, leaving me with an empty evening in which I could write poetry, read a book, or watch TV.

As far as television was concerned, I watched whatever I wanted because I could change the channel whenever I liked. During those times when my husband went through treatment, his homecomings were always punctuated by ferocious fights when he was awake and wanted to select the programs. Over time I had grown accustomed to keeping my own company in the evenings, to doing things my way without having to take his likes or dislikes into consideration. I know it was stressful for him to try to stop drinking. It was equally stressful for me to try to live with him when he was sober.

Again, dealing with hindsight, I can see that would have been an excellent time for me to have given Al-Anon a try, but I was in denial. Going to Al-Anon would have meant admitting there was a problem. It would also have meant that my parents had been right all along. The first time I brought my new boyfriend home to visit, my parents warned me he was an alcoholic. I arrogantly replied that, as teetotalers, they didn't know what they were talking about. True, living with a drunk wasn't easy, but it was a hell of a lot easier than admitting I had been wrong.

So I hung in there. The fiction in this poem, like the missing padlock in “Portrait,” is the newspaper. My husband was never sober long enough to read newspapers in the evenings.

I'm smiling as I write this because I'm astonished by two things—my stubbornness and my stupidity. I can't figure out which came first or played the most important part. It's one of those chicken-and-egg questions that will never have a definitive answer.

“Do you love me?” he asks.

“Yes.” The answer is simple.

She has given the required response

A thousand times before, and

It is the truth, although perhaps

The truth is no longer so simple.

His head comes up slowly.

The word has registered and she knows

She will be trapped into saying

What she herself does not yet fully understand.

“But I love myself better,” she adds after a pause.

He watches her for a time, puzzled,

Pulling his eyes from the newspaper for once

To study her with knitted brows.

She sits awhile longer wondering:

Is it true? Can I give more to myself

And less to him whose life is welded to mine

By a coat of living chain mail?

The answers are too staggering to consider.

She sighs and rises. “I'm going to bed,”

She says, knowing, with sinking heart,

That he will follow.

There's a ten-year pause between “Idle Conversation” and “Homestead Revisited.” The pause included a change in career—from being a school librarian to selling life insurance—and five physical moves—from Arizona to Washington, from Washington back to Bisbee, from Bisbee to Tucson, from Tucson to Phoenix, and finally from Phoenix to Seattle. That time frame also included the births of my two children. All this was done in the company of a man who was gradually sinking deeper and deeper into the depths of alcoholism.

Being both a working mother and the wife of an increasingly childlike husband didn't leave much room for writing poetry. I took it up again once I was in Phoenix and looking down the barrel of having to get a divorce. Now there was no longer any pretense of the writing being artistic—it was all too personal and painful.

While living in Phoenix, I made a solitary trek back to Three Points one day to see the house where my husband and I had lived during the five years we taught on the reservation—the rough cottage we had rented for forty dollars a month when we were first married.

For me, going back in 1982 to what we had called “The Hill” was not a happy homecoming.

A windswept house on barren lava flow

Surveys the desert floor for miles around.

To this unlikely spot whose beauty none but we

Could well discern, we brought our new-made vows

And love.

Because I was still operating under the mistaken impression that I was “woman enough to keep my man,” I assumed that my husband's love of booze was the only problem in our marriage. I erroneously believed that having another woman competing for my husband's affections would somehow be less hurtful than fighting a losing battle with the bottle of vodka that sat in plain sight on the kitchen counter.

I see now that “The Rival” paints a simplistic picture of something that was, in fact, far more complicated.

My rival is a fiery, golden dame

Whose wanton touch caresses care away

And makes a stranger of my lover's heart and soul.

Anyone who has had the misfortune of spending time living with an addict knows the pain of readily broken promises and the misery of glib, meaningless apologies. “When I get home, we'll go to the Dairy Queen.” Or to the fair. Or to the mall. Or we'll fly a kite. Or read a book. No promise is too small to be broken, or too large; too trivial, or too important. Broken promises are the building blocks of the cancer that eats away at marriages and severs the fragile relationships between parents and children. And like the final straw that breaks the camel's back, there is always that one last broken promise—the one that is, in fact, the very last one.

I meant to . . .

                  I'm sorry.

I forgot . . .

                  I'm sorry.

I overlooked . . .

                  I'm sorry.

I didn't notice . . .

                  I'm sorry.

It's too late.

It's over.

                  I'm sorry.

I'm Scandinavian. I don't usually shout or throw things when I am angry. Instead, I do a slow, silent burn. And, like a placidly serene Mount Saint Helens, sitting on that core of molten lava, I'm building up to a pyroclastic blast. When I finally cut loose, watch out.

In this case, the newspaper isn't fiction at all—it's clear reporting. By gobbling up what was going on in other people's lives, I hid from what was going on in my own. Denial again. I was an expert in denial. I had to be. Otherwise, I would've had to do something about it, and I wasn't ready.