Chapter Twenty-six
I WOKE UP the next morning feeling drained…but, magically, a bit better on the nausea front. Maybe, I reasoned, I’d have the shortest bout of morning sickness in the history of pregnancy. I stood up from my bed and waited for the nausea to kick in, but it didn’t. Feeling hopeful, I washed my face and got dressed; Marlboro Man was gone, of course, having gotten up and gone to work while it was still dark. I put on my makeup, wondering if I’d ever get up at the same time as Marlboro Man. Wondering if anyone ever did.
Around eleven, after calling my dad to check on him, I scoured the kitchen for lunch ideas and finally settled on chili. It would be okay for several hours, I figured, so whenever Marlboro Man came home it would be ready. Wives made chili for lunch, right? I still hadn’t figured out the flow of things. I diced up some onion and garlic, breathing through my mouth to avoid making myself sick again, and threw it into a pot with a two-pound package of ground beef, which I’d thawed in the fridge earlier in the week. I didn’t have packets of chili seasoning in my pantry—I hadn’t put that item into my grocery shopping loop yet—so I improvised, sprinkling in chili powder, paprika, cayenne, cumin…whatever spice smelled remotely like I always remembered chili smelling. By the time it really started bubbling, the smell of chili had taken over the universe and the queasiness had returned with a vengeance. It was the worst smell I’d ever experienced—pungent garlic, the horrible, overwhelming aroma of cumin…the stench of cooking flesh.
By the time Marlboro Man walked in the door, I was stirring in the canned kidney beans and minutes away from throwing up.
“Mmmm…smells good,” he said. He walked over to the stove and wrapped his arms around my waist, resting his palms on my belly. “How are you, Mama?” he asked. Butterflies went crazy in my stomach. He did it for me, even when cumin was making me sick.
I’m better today,” I said, focusing on my physical condition. “How are you?”
“I’m good,” he said. “I’m worried about you, though.” His hands caressed my ribs, my arms, my sides.
He touched me all the time; physical indifference was never a problem with Marlboro Man.
The phone rang suddenly, and I continued stirring the chili as he walked into the living room and picked it up. He talked for a while as I added the last dash of salt, then came back into the kitchen.
“Marie’s only got a few hours,” he said. “They’re telling all the family it’s time to come down.”
I turned off the stove. “Oh no,” I said. “No.” It was all I could say.
“If you’re not feeling up to it, you don’t have to come,” Marlboro Man said. “Everyone will understand.”
But I wanted to. Her fight was ending. Even though I was the newest member of the family, I couldn’t possibly not go.
But when we walked through the door of Marie and Uncle Tom’s house, I wanted to be anywhere in the world but there. Family was huddled around, hugging one another and crying. Food was being served, but no one was eating. I didn’t know how to greet people. Whether to smile. Whether to hug. Whether to cry. I thought of my parents. I felt oppressed. I couldn’t breathe.
Matthew met us at the door and tried to smile as he hugged us both, then led us to the back bedroom where his mother lay in her bed, unconscious and breathing laboriously. Marie’s brother sat at her side and held her hand in his, bringing it to his face affectionately and speaking to her in a gentle voice. Her parents stood close by, consoling each other in an embrace. Matthew joined his sister, Jennifer, on the bed, touching their mother’s legs…her arms…anything to maintain the physical connection they knew would soon no longer be possible. And her husband, Tom, sat on a chair, presiding sadly over the whole gathering of friends and family. It was so heavy with grief, so horribly sad—I couldn’t bear to be in the room. My mother-in-law was in the kitchen helping with the food and dishes; I slipped backward out of the bedroom to be with her instead. Marlboro Man followed close behind me. After enduring the death of his brother Todd years earlier, he’d had about enough of this kind of mourning to last him a lifetime.
Just as we arrived in the kitchen, sobs came from the bedroom. Marie had taken her last breath. I heard Jennifer crying out loud for her mother; Marie’s parents saying “No…no…” over and over. I heard the tears of Marie’s closest friends, who were also huddled around her bedside. I felt myself breaking and excused myself to a guest bathroom on the other side of the house. I was crumbling.
I locked myself in the blue half bath and sunk to the floor, with my back against the tile wall. I felt like an intruder. It wasn’t my place to be there. But maybe it was; I was Marlboro Man’s wife. It was his family, so it was also mine. Meanwhile, my dad was at home alone, probably going crazy in his suddenly empty house. I needed to check on him, to help him through this. But I couldn’t bear the thought of walking into our house again without my mom there. I felt a pang of nausea as my eyes welled up with tears—tears for Marie, tears for my dad, for my sister and brothers and my grandparents. Tears for Marlboro Man and his recent stress, for Marie’s daughter, who was fresh out of college and would begin her adult life without her mother. I thought of every happy Christmas of my childhood and realized I’d never have one again. And I thought of Mike, who thrived on routine and stability, and wondered how he would endure the upheaval. I thought of Marie, and how kind she’d been to me in the short time I’d known her. My tears turned into a wellspring, my sniffles into heaving sobs.
Stop it, I ordered myself. You can’t be hysterical here. You can’t walk out among Marlboro Man’s family with red, puffy eyes.
It was their grief, not mine; I didn’t want them to think I was just putting on emotion. But I couldn’t control the tears, no matter how much I tried. I grabbed a washcloth and dabbed it on my face as I heard the plaintive wails of Marie’s family from the other room. It was over; Marie was gone. My parents were over; they were splitting up. Knowing the rest of the house was otherwise occupied, I stayed there in the blue bathroom and buried my face in my hands, crying uncontrollably. I’ll have to stay in here, I imagined, until I can compose myself.
I’ll have to stay in here until I’m sixty.
I DIDN’T ATTEND Marie’s funeral. By the time it rolled around days after her death, my morning sickness had turned into a debilitating all-day nausea that dictated every motion of my body for all the hours I was awake. What I’d experienced a couple of weeks prior was just a little tummy ache compared to the plague of queasiness I was now enduring.
I was miserable. I wanted to be a young, energetic new wife, full of vim and vigor. Instead I was olive green, plastered to my bed, and unable to raise my head from the pillow without munching a handful of sugared cereal. Every time Marlboro Man entered our bedroom to check on me, he’d step on an Apple Jack. I’d hear it crunch into the carpet and he’d look down at the crumbs on the sole of his boot…and all I could do was watch. When I could bear to stand erect, I’d taken to sniffing lemon halves to ward off the nausea. Spent lemon halves littered the house; I was afraid to let one out of my sight for more than ten seconds.
I was a vision of loveliness—charming in every way—and no help on the ranch at all. Marlboro Man was working hard—the many loads of cattle he’d bought in the month before our wedding were starting to come in, and I wanted to help him get through it. But the smell of manure was too much for me to take. The smell of air alone sent me into dry heaves, even with a lemon wedge shoved under my nose. I couldn’t cook. Everything—from apples to bread, not to mention animal flesh in any form—would make me cry and hurl. I’d drive twenty-five minutes to town just to pick up a pizza, then stop halfway home and put it in the trunk because the smell was so horribly overpowering.
All the while, Marlboro Man tried his best to sympathize with me, his new hormone-poisoned and depressed wife. But there was no way he could possibly understand. “Maybe if you just hop up and jump in the shower,” he’d say, stroking my back, “you’ll feel better.”
He didn’t understand. “There’s no hopping,” I’d wail. “There’s no jumping!” I wanted to go home to my mom and crawl in my old bed. I wanted her to bring me soup. But there wasn’t a home to go to anymore.
I was in a new place, in a new world…and suddenly my life was completely unrecognizable. I didn’t want to be pregnant. If I’d gone ahead and moved to Chicago, I wouldn’t be. I’d be away from my parents’ separation and nowhere near pregnancy hormones and maybe wearing a sleek black turtleneck and eating Italian food with friends.
Italian food…
Ugh. I feel sick.