Dropped Threads 2 (9 page)

A Marriage in
                    Seven Parts

Dana McNairn

I

On my wedding day, as I entered the banquet hall on the arm of my new husband, I realized with a jolt that the room was clearly divided into two camps. On the left-hand side of the hall, my husband—let’s call him Andrew—had guests from all over the globe. His relatives and friends were seemingly cut from the same cloth, striking in their wholesome good looks, pearly white teeth, tuxedos and flowing gowns. Their appearance bore the stamp of stability and easy acceptance of their rightful place in the world. Most had celebrated double-digit wedding anniversaries. They sipped fruit punch or expertly cradled champagne flutes, chatting quietly in well-behaved groups.

On the right—my side—the throng was tattooed, boisterous and roaring drunk. I saw my tiny grandmother reach up and swipe a drink from a huge man in an open-necked shirt with a giant ship tattooed across his chest. Men tugged uncomfortably at unaccustomed ties and ill-fitting dress shirts. Since most of the men’s shirts were short-sleeved, rolling up the thin fabric was a cinch and afforded a better view of the snakes, daggers and screaming eagles that coloured their arms. The women on this side of the room preferred jewel-toned pantsuits and took comfort—even in the daunting presence of so many strangers on the other side—in the assumption “the bigger the hair, the closer to God.” Most were on second or third marriages. An uncle, affectionately nicknamed “Lurchin’ Larry,” held court, an unlit cigarette dangling from his mouth as a beer bottle occasionally punctuated the air when he wanted to make a point. His sister—my mother—wobbled beside him, one hand gripping his arm. Her other hand alternated between smacking him and wiping tears of laughter from her eyes, without spilling her drink. Children ran howling and screeching, stabbing one another with chicken wings and carrot sticks.

I looked back to the tranquility of the left-hand side of the room and again to the din of the right. And sighed.

The bride also had a tattoo and was panting for a drink.

II

My husband was tall, dark and handsome. And a virgin. I, ahem, was not. He had just turned twenty, and I, just twenty-two. He married me because, among other things, premarital sex was not an option, given his traditional upbringing and young man’s idealized values. We loved each other, so why not make a vow before God and do it up right? Not only did I worship his strength of character and hope some would rub off on me, but I also craved the respectability of a formal union, a partnership.

When we announced our sudden engagement with the marriage date not far behind, Andrew’s mother burst into tears and fled the room. She assumed I was pregnant. How little she knew. To show our commitment—or, rather, to be taken seriously because of our age—we paid for everything and only after much tussling allowed Drew’s father to pay for the liquor. Later, he commented on the prodigious amount of booze my family and friends had consumed. “See?” he said. “You should have eloped.”

Our wedding night was awkward, clumsy and comical. In our tender and steamy fumbling, we banged teeth, cracked heads, blushed profusely and toppled right out of the giant hotel bed smack onto the carpet. Evidently, we had both seen too many movies. It was mercifully brief. Afterwards, we laughed ourselves asleep.

III

We settled quickly into our new life. I took Drew’s surname and practiced writing my new name. For months my signature looked awkward and scrawled—it felt like forging my mother’s on a note for school. When I heard the words “Mrs. Smith,” I never knew who was being addressed—there were a handful of us—so I tended to ignore the salutation initially because I kept forgetting that was my name now. “It gets easier,” an aunt commented dryly. “Eventually you’ll have a hard time remembering your old one.”

Drew practiced wearing jewellery for the first time in his life, donning his wedding band with shy pride. We both worked—Drew in television, me at an ad agency—and scratched our heads at the piling bills. So we worked longer hours, sought out increasingly prestigious and better-paying jobs and fended off the pointed questions about when we were going to have kids. We moved a couple of times, each place bigger than the last, until we were in a huge, beautiful house Drew’s parents once lived in. The two mothers-in-law competed for our time, but Drew’s mom won hands down. She was more persistent, and my mother just assumed we’d feel the love she sent from wherever she was roaming at the time.

Drew cooked and cleaned and folded laundry, accommodating my late nights at work. He overlooked my many failings: a lack of housekeeping skills, an inability to keep my mouth shut at family dinners or to remember anyone’s birthday (including his) and, above all, my uncanny talent for disgracing myself in public by using bawdy language and forgetting to wear underwear. I overlooked his abruptness, his sometimes hard-to-live-up-to ambition and those awful pasta-in-a-bag concoctions he was so fond of.

I learned many things during my marriage. Including how to lie.

I lied about liking his grandmother’s casserole, about enjoying the semi-annual Smith family reunions and about wanting to have Drew’s cousin stay with us. I—the one who had swaggered through high school in square-toed motorcycle boots—had mastered the art of pretense to such an extent that I eventually succumbed to wearing pouffy Laura Ashley dresses and little gold lamé slip-ons while hosting all those damn dinner parties. I did it because I wanted to fit in with this strange, wondrous family who never raised their voices, never swore and never threw things at one another.

I was hungry to be a good wife—albeit with a comforting bottle of Talisker Scotch in the closet and cigarettes outside on the back steps—who regularly shopped with all the tidy Smith womenfolk, made darling apple wreaths and learned how to coo at stuffed animals.

Yet what I really wanted was to pace wolfishly around the house, half-naked in tattered jeans, spouting Dylan Thomas or my own bad poetry. Or go to a séance. Or cover a war for the
New York Times
. Or eat fudge for breakfast. Or have sex on the kitchen table. Or not make the bed every morning. Or, better yet, sell everything in that big beautiful house, pack up some underwear and my bewildered husband and hightail it overseas for a while. I would have settled for an annual two-week car vacation to some dull, dusty town, if it meant I could actually drag Drew away from work. I would have been happy stealing a midday nap with him every once in a while—but enterprising young executives don’t permit themselves such indulgences.

Instead, I mastered gift-wrapping for the endless celebrations of family birthdays, anniversaries, retirements, baby showers, graduations and Groundhog Days. Instead, I reluctantly climbed the corporate ladder into an airless office, amassing clients and doing power lunches—and tried to remember to wear underwear. Instead, I attended the mandatory Smith Sunday dinners, quietly chewed my roast beef and nodded sympathetically at conversations I had heard before. I was proud of myself for keeping my mouth shut.

And besides, I had a gold card with no spending limit to anesthetize the empty feelings in my life.

IV

I decided to go back to school to study journalism—and to shake my growing irritability and impatience. If my current career was unsatisfactory, I could hide out in academia and find another one. Even though Drew agreed to this increased financial burden, I wanted to be fair, so I also worked part-time. Juggling jobs, family get-togethers, school assignments, housework, yard work and just trying to get some dinner on the table every night took its toll. Now I was the one never home. And when I was, Drew’s abruptness and impatience became harder to ignore. I failed to see what could possibly be bothering him. We had money, a roof over our heads and were pursuing our almighty careers. Yet his biting temper persisted and flourished, so I ignored him. Withdrawing emotionally was the only way I knew to handle the problem. That way, there’d be no shouting—I had had enough of that growing up.

During my last year of school, while I glided on the euphoria of my approaching graduation, Drew admitted he was lonely and had been for a while. He said he had never really experienced loneliness until he got married. I felt sick with guilt and shame. Part of me agreed with him, but part of me wanted to kick over chairs. He was being unfair, unreasonable and unaccommodating! Another layer of love eroded by neglect and selfishness.

V

No one tells you about the arguments and bitter silences that can seep into the marriage bedroom. It was year four, and the wheels were off the wagon. Blinded by our ever-lurking self-pity, we lost sight of fairness and decency. Neither of us was able to shake off the hurts and slights we thought the other intended. Drew became more vocal about wanting kids—he felt it would help us—but I told him I was pretty sure I wasn’t ready, pointedly eyeing the limp or dying houseplants, the wine bottles on the counters and the stack of parking tickets on the desk.

He aspired to corporate grandeur—too rigid and structured, I whined. I wanted the freedom of the bohemian—too unstable and unrealistic, he huffed. I responded with increasingly antagonistic and appalling behaviour—staying out late, keeping company with other men and coming home drunk—masking my unhappiness by punishing a man who didn’t deserve it.

We both had a decision to make. I had to put as much passion and enthusiasm back into my marriage as I had into my education. Drew had to put as much passion and enthusiasm back into his marriage as he had into his career. We still loved each other—although the intimacy had faltered a bit. Drew, to his everlasting credit, did his best to remain fair and patient. I, on the other hand, did not have the wisdom or emotional maturity to see past my own arrogance.

I went away, far away, to Australia to think. As I was leaving, he whispered in my ear that he would agree to whatever decision I made.

When he picked me up from the airport six weeks later, he knew by the resigned look on my face what the decision was. I managed a weak smile; he bowed his head and exhaled deeply, like a man who had been holding his breath for too long. A couple of weeks later we marched hand in hand, making the rounds to tell the relatives. They listened in stunned disbelief. There had been no fever-pitch battles, no scandal, no abuse, no thrilling financial crash, no plate throwing. They hadn’t seen us fighting, nor had either one of us ever spent a night or two on their couches. The families didn’t get it; faces crumpled in bewilderment and shock. I had come full circle—my mother-in-law burst into tears and fled the room. Girlfriends wailed I was “throwing away a perfect marriage” and shook their heads. Drew and I soldiered on with our earnest explanations. What mattered was that we could see a future of misery, choking on trying to do the right thing. To our families, the separation was cowardly—pure selfishness on my part and a loss of control on Drew’s, for failing to rein in his wife.

A grandfather, who had remained silent during our unexpected visit, finally grunted, “Well, what did you expect, all those bridesmaids dressed in black?”

VI

But it wasn’t a control issue—it never was—nor was it titanic ego clashes, religious issues, lack of sex or money, or even nightly wrestling with the toilet seat. Subsumed by being Mrs. Smith, I allowed someone else to define who or what I was, and destroyed a marriage by not being able to discover it for myself. Drew, in moulding himself after his parents, echoed my mistakes: we were both trying to please others rather than ourselves. His family wanted him to succeed and prosper, as they had. I did not want to fail at marriage, as the others in my family had.

He once said, “Truth is love.” Now I know what he meant. It is regretful I didn’t understand that better in my marriage, but I am honoured that this man was such a big part of my life. He always stood up for truth. I shied away from it because it meant I would probably have to change some aspect of my personality. I wasn’t ready to have my weaknesses highlighted—it was arrogance that held my head aloft, not authenticity. The marriage was bittersweet—we were gathering experiences before we knew what to do with them.

VII

A couple of years later, Drew called me one morning in a panic. He had lost his decree nisi and needed my copy—pronto—or he couldn’t get married that afternoon. Howling with laughter, I teased him about being a polygamist and blackmailed him for a dinner in exchange. I’m pleased that he finally has what he had wanted all along—a wife who wants what he does and three beautiful children. Probably they all like pasta-in-a-bag, too.

I lead a highly nomadic life now, taking perverse pride in the sheer number of addresses I’ve accumulated. I eat vegetarian, wear boxer shorts, write really bad poetry and haven’t seen the inside of an office in years. I haven’t covered any wars yet, but I’ve been in war zones. While my ex-husband jogs, plays golf and has a platinum credit card, I am perennially broke and worry about lung cancer. But I’ve never been happier. I’m a writer now, passionate about travel, food and honesty. I still don’t have any kids and I haven’t picked up another mother-in-law—yet. Drew and I manage to get together once in a while for lunch. We’re usually laughing too much to eat anything. The best thing I ever did was marry Drew Smith. The second best thing I ever did was divorce him.

Northern Lights
                    and Darkness

Lisa Gregoire

The word “dickie” always makes me laugh.

When I was a kid, my mom would buy them for me. She was obsessed with being cozy—it’s what happens to people who grow up poor in a family of eleven. They can’t understand why you don’t take comfort when you can afford it.

A dickie is a knitted bib you wear beneath a sweater so it looks as if you’re wearing a full turtleneck when you’re not. I always feared schoolmates would mock me if they noticed the bib dangling below my collarbone.

I was twenty-seven and an Iqaluit newspaper reporter of two years when I found myself in the Northern Store thinking about Mom. I no longer cared if people saw my dickie. I bought three in different colours and wore one every day for the next two weeks. It wasn’t for the cold, though it was jaw rattling on Baffin Island in February. It was to hide the purple fingerprints on my neck.

I almost died once. Few knew it had gotten that bad with David. One of them was a friend from CBC who agreed to share a bottle of liquor with me the night after it happened. He listened as I dropped parts of the story, like puzzle pieces on the floor, unable to put them together in any sensible order. How it happened where I’d been house-sitting and how, only months before, a teenager had committed suicide in the same bedroom by removing his head with a rifle blast. I know. I saw the gruesome police pictures. David choked me unconscious there. I locked myself in the bathroom after I came to, watching the bruises turn from red to blue. He left in silence at daybreak, and I abandoned my tiled refuge for the couch and a cigarette.

I came to Iqaluit on a lark. I was tired of my weekly newspaper job in Ottawa and eager for real experience. I planned to stay only a year, but I found in Nunavut an enchanting wilderness I could not abandon. The longer I stayed, the more I discovered. I felt tough and privileged among the few living in this barren place.

I collected animal bones. I sat for hours in summer watching the sun dance crimson and orange across the lichen. I was a city girl, for God’s sake. I’d never seen a walrus before. Or giant ravens and herds of caribou.

Walking on the land became my favourite pastime. No trees. No people. No power lines. Just crunchy snow and the green shimmy of the northern lights like silent, magic wind.

David chased me from the Legion once, the Legion with the fourth-highest liquor sales in the country. I had decided to leave without him. Booze often stole his beautiful smile, leaving behind hard stares and silent suspicion. Friends knew he was changing his skin and held him back when he tried to follow me. It was part of the usual late-night drama in the North, and they were probably pleased it was me this time and not them.

I started running. He wriggled from his shirt and chased me, bare-chested in the—30° C night. I hid like a rabbit beneath a house propped up on stilts above the permafrost. I halted my panting breath and he ran past seconds later. I heard his footfalls approach and recede. It was the first time I truly feared him. My heart was pumping so fast my ears were ringing. What a rush.

A couple of days later, he wrote an apology of misspelled words on loose-leaf paper and dropped it by my office. He was so sorry. He didn’t mean it. He really loved me.

We met for coffee, shoulders stooped and staring at the tabletop. He gave me a pendant, gold letters fused together into “Little Princess.” Before he said a word I had already forgiven him. I had seen his family in action before: laughing, crushing hugs of love and seal stew one minute; booze-soaked insults and late-night brawls the next. Like a see-saw between heaven and hell. We hugged with relief and the dizzying ride continued. In us.

Forgiving had a way of returning power and control to me. I was hooked. So this was what it was all about, I thought. This was the story I’d written so many times. Man beats woman. Woman returns to man. Public scorn and confusion ensue. Only now it was me.

I travelled throughout Nunavut as a reporter for the Iqaluit weekly, but few communities were as stunning as Pond Inlet, David’s hometown. I covered a conference there in the midst of my madness with him. I had come to know many of Nunavut’s leaders. Some were losing the battle with drugs and alcohol; others were worn and wise. They liked to tease the white reporter, and I accepted it as part of my initiation. I was a stranger, and like other transients before me, I would eventually leave. They knew that.

It was a large conference to discuss how the Nunavut land claim would be settled. Drum dancers and throat singers performed as they would have centuries ago. Men and women cut raw seal and caribou on cardboard on the hall floor and shared news with bloodied lips and hands.

I tried to join in their feast. The caribou and whale blubber were palatable, but I couldn’t get near the walrus. In traditional fashion, it had been wrapped in skins and stored for weeks under rocks. The rotting flesh was grey-green and glistening. I retreated to the back of the room to eat vending machine chips with Inuit teenagers.

I tried suicide that year, if you can call it that. Was I trying to fit in? Centuries’ worth of Inuit fortitude was fraying among the young, who were killing themselves in alarming numbers. Lost somewhere between raw meat on the land and microwaveable Big Macs at the corner store, they struggled in my world and I in theirs.

It happened a few nights after my neighbours called the RCMP. David was throwing bottles and shouting death threats through thin apartment walls. I spent hours at the cop shop that night in my ripped flowered dress with my shins and forearms raw from his blows. Was this the first time he had attacked me? asked the officer. No. He found me a pack of cigarettes and I wrote out my statements, thinking maybe I should have hidden beneath a house instead.

Days later, I caught a glimpse in the bathroom mirror and did not recognize myself. Someone else’s empty eyes. Some poor sucker’s flat, grey face. I stared for a long time, wondering how my own flesh could abandon me. My phone calls to old friends and family back home that night left me quietly weeping into the shrill ringing. This final betrayal by my own body felt like an omen.

Then the tears stopped and everything turned slow motion. Calm.

I got a bedsheet from the closet and tied it to the shower-curtain rod for a noose. But when I tested my weight with my arms, the rod gave way and I fell tumbling into the tub. As I sat there with a sore ass and the metal rod on my lap, I started to laugh. My plan was absurd and the result slapstick. I laughed myself straight. Then I went to bed.

I played a lot of hockey that year. It was a welcome distraction and one of the few healthy hobbies I had. Most of my teammates were Inuit, and I made fast friends. For several, it was the only escape from brutal spouses who broke their jaws and hearts. Beneath elbow pads and helmets, they were invincible. They carved deep lines in the ice and barrelled to the net with ferocious intent.

I gathered the courage one night with my female drinking buddies to tell my secret. They nodded and poured more vodka from a bootlegger’s bottle. Then they rolled up sleeves and pant legs and we compared scars like old soldiers in a perverted contest to see who was the bravest of the broken. I was unrecognizable even to myself, but here I was normal. It’s frightening how fast you fall when the people who love you aren’t there to see you slip.

In the end, I dug a firewall to stop the flame from spreading. I told my dad. Oh, not every detail, but enough. “I’ve pressed charges,” I said into the phone. “There will probably be a trial. And then I will come home.” I could feel his alarm building by the way he cleared his throat and reached clumsily for something other than “I see,” and “Um-hmm.” Eventually he found the words. Was I okay? He was sending me a plane ticket. There was no shame in leaving. He wanted me gone. Soon, I told him. Promise.

Mom told me later that he’d spent days alone in the garage after that call, occupying restless hands and quelling the urge to rescue me. I had no choice. My heart was long broken, but telling him meant I was now responsible for his. The rabbit couldn’t hide this time. I had set a trap.

David pleaded guilty. Denied nothing. It saved me the publicity of the stand, and I was grateful but not surprised. He never had trouble admitting what was happening. He just had trouble making it stop. Sort of like me.