Chapter Twenty-seven
THE NAUSEA lingered for weeks. In the meantime, I tried my best to acclimate to my new life in the middle of nowhere. I had to get used to the fact that I lived twenty miles from the nearest grocery store. That I couldn’t just run next door when I ran out of eggs. That there was no such thing as sushi. Not that it would matter, anyway. No cowboy on the ranch would touch it. That’s bait, they’d say, laughing at any city person who would convince themselves that such a food was tasty.
And the trash truck: there wasn’t one. In this strange new land, there was no infrastructure for dealing with trash. There were cows in my yard, and they pooped everywhere—on the porch, in the yard, even on my car if they happened to be walking near it when they dropped a load. There wasn’t a yard crew to clean it up. I wanted to hire people, but there were no people. The reality of my situation grew more crystal clear every day.
One morning, after I choked down a bowl of cereal, I looked outside the window and saw a mountain lion sitting on the hood of my car, licking his paws—likely, I imagined, after tearing a neighboring rancher’s wife from limb to limb and eating her for breakfast. I darted to the phone and called Marlboro Man, telling him there was a mountain lion sitting on my car. My heart beat inside my chest. I had no idea mountain lions were indigenous to the area.
“It’s probably just a bobcat,” Marlboro Man reassured me.
I didn’t believe him.
“No way—it’s huge,” I cried. “It’s seriously got to be a mountain lion!”
“I’ve gotta go,” he said. Cows mooed in the background.
I hung up the phone, incredulous at Marlboro Man’s lack of concern, and banged on the window with the palm of my hand, hoping to scare the wild cat away. But it only looked up and stared at me through the window, imagining me on a plate with a side of pureed trout.
My courtship with Marlboro Man, filled with fizzy romance, hadn’t prepared me for any of this; not the mice I heard scratching in the wall next to my bed, not the flat tires I got from driving my car up and down the jagged gravel roads. Before I got married, I didn’t know how to use a jack or a crowbar…and I didn’t want to have to learn now. I didn’t want to know that the smell in the laundry room was a dead rodent. I’d never smelled a dead rodent in my life: why, when I was supposed to be a young, euphoric newlywed, was I being forced to smell one now?
During the day, I was cranky. At night, I was a mess. I hadn’t slept through the night once since we returned from our honeymoon. Besides the nausea, whose second evil wave typically hit right at bedtime, I was downright spooked. As I lay next to Marlboro Man, who slept like a baby every night, I thought of monsters and serial killers: Freddy Krueger and Michael Myers, Ted Bundy and Charles Manson. In the utter silence of the country, every tiny sound was amplified; I was certain if I let myself go to sleep, the murderer outside our window would get me.
And if the prospect of serial killers wasn’t enough, my thoughts would invariably turn to my parents…to my family. My mom, happily on her own in her new one-bedroom apartment. Would I ever be able to forgive her? My dad, deeply depressed in his empty house. What if he just lost it one day and ended it all? My sister, at college and floating. Will she ever want to come home again? My brother Doug, whose bitterness over my parents’ divorce was tangible. And Mike, who was exactly the same as he’d always been. I wondered why the rest of us couldn’t be so blissfully oblivious to all of the human complications around us.
I was exhausted, unable to make it through one day without crying or gagging or worrying. I’d fallen in love, married a cowboy, and moved to the peaceful, bucolic countryside. But it was peace that eluded me the most.
The honeymoon was over, almost before it ever began.
AMID THE stack of issues facing us as a newly married couple, one thing I decided we no longer needed to worry about was the big renovation of the house next door. Marlboro Man had been dead set on continuing the project—more, I suspected, for my sake than for his. But as the work crew arrived day after day and unloaded pallets and boxes and supplies, I couldn’t reconcile it with the financial turmoil I knew the ranch was in. Marlboro Man wanted to plow through and get it done—he wanted us to have a real, grown-up home when our baby arrived. But even if we made it through the remodel itself, we’d still have to furnish and fill it. I couldn’t imagine picking out hinges and doorknobs and sofas in the midst of all the other stress. I didn’t like the feeling of contributing to the already heavy burden.
“Hey…,” I said as we climbed into bed one rainy night. “What if we just put the house on hold for a while?” I reached over to my bedside table, grabbed the lemon half, and took a big sniff. Lemon halves were my new narcotic.
Marlboro Man was quiet. He worked his leg under mine and locked it into what had become its official position. It was warm.
“I think maybe we should get to a stopping point,” I said. “And just put it on hold for a while.”
“I’ve thought about it,” he answered quietly. He rubbed his leg slowly up and down mine.
Feeling better, I set the lemon back on the table and reached my arm toward him, rolling over and draping my other leg over his waist and resting my head on his chest. “Well, I was thinking it might be easier for me not to worry about it with my parents and the baby and everything else.” Maybe it would be more effective, I thought, if I turned the focus on me.
“Well, that makes sense,” he said. “But let’s talk about it tomorrow.” He wrapped his other arm around my waist, and within seconds we were in a totally different world, where parents and drywall—and crippling nausea—were no longer welcome.
AFTER A few days, I brought it up again. Our little house will be fine, I told him. We should just wait…I’m only twenty-seven…I haven’t earned a big, huge, fancy house yet…I’d feel like an impostor. I don’t want to have to do all that cleaning. I’ll get scared with all that space. I don’t like furniture shopping. I’m not in the mood to decide on paint colors. We can finish it later, when things get back to normal. Though I knew deep down that “normal” in agriculture was probably a relative term.
Marlboro Man agreed, and after a few days of boarding up and capping off and sealing, the last of the workmen pulled away from our half-finished yellow Indian home on the prairie. And what should have been a moment of disappointment or sadness actually had the opposite effect: I didn’t care one bit. I smiled, realizing that all the best things I’d imagined about marriage actually were possible—that it transcends things and possessions and plans. That no matter how much I would have loved a dishwasher and a laundry room inside the house, what I wanted most was Marlboro Man. And I had him.
Not two months into my marriage, it was a delicious moment of affirmation and clarity.
Then I realized I’d be having a baby in a few months, and I wouldn’t have a dishwasher.
My heart began to race with panic.