The Day I Stop Wanting to Look Out Over Open Water

It begins like any other, blinding under a cool sun | From the Archive

The day I stop wanting to look out over open water begins like any other—an unusually brilliant morning in November, North Center Lake blinding under a cool sun.

This time of year, the lake bounces so much light into our house that our whole kitchen burns with it. Until the lake skins over with ice, that is. John is making biscuits with mushroom gravy, his specialty. I am frying eggs. Cat Stevens is crooning “Oh Very Young,” and John is singing along in his enthusiastically tuneless way while also trying to tell me something about work. “She said I’d make a great principal,” he says between lines of the chorus—something about denim blue and sky, something about lasting forever—a kickass principal, is what she said.”

“Who said?”

“Gretchen. My student teacher?”

“Hand me that metal spatula,” I say. Max is on my hip—he’s big for two, and heavy—and John is closer to the utensil crock. At the table, Sophie colors feverishly, then erases until she tears holes through the paper, flimsy as newsprint, that John pilfers from the middle school where he teaches. Sophie does not yet know how erasers can burn, leave scars. She narrates her scenes out loud: Run, Carl, run! and Now you have wings! Fly, fly! and No biting, Sugar! Thank God, she herself almost never bites anymore, although she does still talk about biting, with an air of what I can only describe as longing.

John hands me the spatula. “Of course, you’d make a great principal,” I say. “Everyone knows that.” It would suit John, too, being a principal, making big decisions—he’s known for deciding things quickly and without hesitation. Adults make 35,000 decisions a day, he always says, and with each one, we become more depleted. It costs energy to belabor things. Trust your gut. John chooses his path and sets down it, rarely looking back. Like when he decided to be a teacher, or to call off his wedding to the first Janine. For John, decision and action are a single powerful gesture. It’s beautiful, in its way, that immediacy, like an eagle airborne one moment, wings flattened against the blue of the sky, and nosediving the next, all muscle and downward force, plunging toward unbroken sea or undulating field, toward that single flicker of motion signaling the possibility of survival for another day.

John goes on about the in-service—interdisciplinary blah, blah, blah, he says, like how can they present these ideas as if they’re new when the research has been clear for decades, and God, what pains in the asses student teachers can be, how lucky to get a competent one, not like that idiot in Sharon Green’s room, the one who couldn’t teach his way out of a paper bag, and, actually, last Monday, told a gaggle of seventh-grade girls that he was too hung over to help with their two-step algebraic word problems. John’s teacher rants are familiar to me after five years of marriage, so it isn’t until we’re settled at the table, John and Sophie on one side, Max and me on the other, all of us breaking open our egg yolks and tearing apart steaming biscuits—the gravy is perfect—that I notice how every time John says her name, Gretchen, he smiles a tiny smile, just a flicker on the left side of his smooth upper lip—he never has been able to grow a mustache, though occasionally he tries—such a smooth lip, barely twitching.

I’ve met Gretchen on one of my trips to the school, bringing the kids to visit John’s classroom. She’s lovely. Straight dark hair all the way down her back, impossibly shiny. Young, of course, and those teeth. The same perfect white squares that the prettiest girls always have. John is still talking now, but his words run together, tangle themselves into a knot as Sophie asks for more gravy and Max knocks over his juice. By the time I’ve cleaned up the spill, the kids are basically finished. I scrape my mostly untouched eggs and biscuits into the trash. There is a kind of wind inside my body.

While John fills the old porcelain sink, I clear the table. John likes washing dishes. Another admirable trait. “Come on, guys,” I say to the kids when the table is empty. “I have a surprise.” Sophie grabs my old doll Burnett from the floor, plucks another biscuit from the platter, and gallops behind Max and me into the small wallpapered study on the far side of our dining room. I close the door of the study behind myself and kneel down on the oak floor in order to lean in very, very close to my children’s eager, round faces. Those silken cheeks. “You know what Mama’s going to let you do?” I say to them. “Watch a—” Before I can finish, Sophie is bucking and shrieking with joy, tiny biscuit bits flying from her mouth. Max shrieks too, and Sophie swings him around by his arms. “Maxie! Hop on!” she shouts. “Horsie will give you a ride!” I slide The Red Balloon into the VCR. The kids were enchanted by this film when we watched it recently for the first time. A film like this—well, it counts more as art than TV, I think. Plus, Max won’t cry this time when Pascal loses his red balloon, because, having seen this film before, Max knows the ending, can look forward to the other balloons appearing en masse just in time to rescue the sad boy.

On my way back to the kitchen, I turn off Cat Stevens. Tuck my stupid, unwashed chin-length hair behind my stupid, unwashed ears. It’s just John and me now in this November light. Just us and the rhythmic splashing of our neighbor, bailing water from his giant koi pond and tossing it onto the frozen grass. November is the season for emptying. Splash, splash, splash.

I sit at the table—the end with the word HURRY etched into the pine—and rest my chin on my knuckles. I sit this way for some time, until John finally turns around, flips up his palms toward the ceiling, like, what? What? 

“Gretchen,” I say.

“Gretchen?” John wipes the grease out of the cast iron pan with a paper towel. Never use soap and water on cast iron, he always says.

“Sit down,” I say. He does not sit down. “Is there something going on?” I say.

John sets the pan on the table and gives me a long, straight look. His eyes are so beautiful. The deepest brown, and the exact same shape as Max’s, those outer corners sloping always downward into a minor chord, even when he is happy, even when he is laughing. Cold radiates from my pelvis. Outside the kitchen window, two little girls—probably four years old, maybe five—stamp along the sidewalk in colorful plastic raincoats—one bright yellow and the other a mess of flowers. I watch them move in near silhouette, the lake blazing behind them.

“Okay,” John says. He sits down. “Okay. I like her. I do. It was—you know, the way she looked at me, and I thought—so last week, I asked her out.”

“You asked her out?” The neighbor’s splashing has stopped, but now my pulse splashes through my ears, a torrent inside my head.

“I’m sorry.” John touches my arm and I yank it back, pin it to my side. “Come on,” he says. “I’m really sorry. That’s why I told you.”

“You didn’t tell me. I asked you.”

“But I was going to tell you. Listen, I didn’t even do anything. I like her. Liked her, I mean. But that’s it.”

I stare past him to those little girls, dancing around on the sidewalk in their bright raincoats on this dry, windy day. John’s voice does have sorrow in it, genuine sorrow. But it’s obvious the sorrow is not for me. It is for him—for the pain of wanting and not getting. I want to scratch his face. Pull his hair.

“Get out,” I whisper. “Just get out.”

“Christ, Jeannie,” he says. “Nothing happened. And she’ll be gone next week, anyway. Their internships are over.”

“You make me sick,” I say. I’m sweating through my shirt, cold droplets rolling slowly from under my arms down my ribcage. It occurs to me with a jolt that I am very, very ugly. A monster, really. And old now, too? I am twenty-six, and already a crone. I am everything I have most feared becoming. And I don’t care. I lean across the table, breathe heavily, hiss, “How dare you. How dare you? Here I am, taking care of our children day and night, while you’re off falling in love with a twenty-year old.”

“Twenty-five,” John says. “Which is not the point, I know. It’s just, when I gave her a ride to the in-service—”

“You gave her a ride to the fucking in-service?”

He turns up his palms again.

My throat swells, but I will not cry. Instead, I swallow hard, swallow again. Soft tissue tightens around my words and somehow serrates them, so they emerge as ragged strands of sound. “What did Gretchen say, exactly, when you asked her out?”

“I told you. She said no.” John is pleading now. “She said, maybe you should talk to your wife.”

There is more, though.

More than a single bright Sunday in November, one pretty student teacher with impossibly smooth hair and a wide smile. What happened before that day was how I came apart after Max was born, how the pieces of me pulled away from each other like poorly laid sod on parched Wyoming soil. Even as I put myself back together, those pieces never fit the same as before. Max had colic, wanted only me. So I held him twenty-four hours a day, tied to my body in his baby bundler, and vacuumed the living room for hours because it was the only thing other than nursing that soothed him. If anyone else, including his father, grandparents, early childhood teachers, neighbors, grocery clerks, even Sophie, so much as looked at Max, he might cry.

And I blamed myself for his colic, because of that scary woman at the therapy group, the moaner who threatened to bring a gun and shoot us all in that awful fluorescent basement. Bang, bang, bang, she said, cocking her finger. I brought my unborn son with me into that den of despair and wrath and goneness, I carried him there inside my spoiled body, week after week, to endure what was beyond anyone’s ability to endure. I did that to my perfect boy, and now I could never, ever take it back.

That first year, Max cried and nursed until my nipples bled and scabbed and bled again. I contracted a fiery case of mastitis. A storm raged in me, spiraled right through fall into winter. Snow fell, snow melted. When new growth poked through the mud, so, too, did memories. Groves and thickets of the past, pushing into the present. Spring warmed to summer and summer fell to autumn. Winter, in its cruelty, came again. Now it was not just Mafia and my childhood self who intruded, but also fresh knowledge of the woman I had allowed myself to become. During those long winter days snowed in with two small children, I slowly recalled things from my recent past. Incredulous things. Like that stretchy black bodysuit I wore for John on our first wedding anniversary at the Hotel Luxe, when Sophie was not quite six weeks old, my lumpy post-partum body stuffed into that tube of Lycra with its sexy crotch hole for my still raw episiotomy scar from the jagged knife wound where the anonymous male doctor had sliced all the way through the tough muscle of my vaginal wall and every other layer of muscle to follow until the blade came out the other side, leaving not only a gash but a swollen bruise the size of a grapefruit. That’s what John had said the day we got home from the hospital with our firstborn, what he said when I asked him to look down there because it hurt so much I couldn’t breathe, what he said before he turned white and slid down the wall: the size of a grapefruit.

Time and again that second winter with Max, when he was one year old and still fragile—“highly sensitive,” the books said—it all came flooding back, that body suit and firm mattress, my young husband desperate to come like a freight train, six weeks is a long time, are you okay, me floating out and away. I became so electric that winter that if Sophie so much as nipped me, one little bite that barely hurt, just an attempt, really, not even a real bite, I would throw her favorite book across the room and smash its binding. That March, Baby Girl brought in fleas, fleas that chose me as their human host, red bites up and down my ankles and calves, diatomaceous earth—chemicals will kill you—coating our wood floors, clinging to the soles of our feet, sticking to our clothes, grinding into our sheets. Finally, the sunny morning when Sophie eyed her baby brother in his adorable striped rugby suit, pink and blue—he was eighteen months and walking now, in that teetering and tentative way that toddlers walk, so fragile you can blow them down with one strong puff. Sophie watched him quietly and long as he toddled his way through a shaft of light on the oak floor. Then she shoved him hard into the corner of the banister. The edges of the room darkened around me, closed into a shadowy tunnel, through which I lunged to slap my firstborn daughter across the cheek. I watched my handprint bloom like a hibiscus.

I wanted to die.

What happened next was swift and irrevocable—its own kind of doorway.

“You know, I lied,” I told John in the middle of another fight about sex, and how angry he was about not getting it. Angry that I “had two legs and should know how to use them.” Angry that I was, as he now said, frigid. “I lied and lied,” I said again, as Max nurse greedily with his whole body. “I never had nine orgasms with you back in the beginning. I never even had one. And I still haven’t.”

I thought of my therapist, what she said about women and sex. “You could at least try,” I said meanly. “Slow down and use your hands.” But that’s not all. God, he was a hard worker, my young husband. A two-hour round-trip commute to an inner-city middle school by day, two shifts a week at the night school, too, walking through the door after ten o’clock for what? Laundry. Although with Max, at least, we had a diaper service. I had demanded that, now that I demanded things. Still, diapers were nothing in a sea of everything, and whatever else needed doing, John did it. He did. But that didn’t stop me from telling him how I’d been pretending. It didn’t stop me from pushing him away from me with all the force I could muster.

The day after the biscuits and gravy, we drive with Sophie and Max all the way to Minneapolis and even farther, to Fort Snelling, where the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers converge. Wind pummels us back and forth in our lane, whines eerily through the windows of our big blue sedan. The kids are in high spirits. Sophie, especially, is all soprano chatter. She leans over onto Max’s car seat, whispers brightly that her spirit animal used to be a squirrel, but isn’t anymore. “Now it’s a sugar glider, Max,” she says. “Baby sugar gliders live in their mamas’ pouches like kangaroos. They look like flying squirrels. But they’re not.” Max listens, wide-eyed, as his sister explains the many differences between rodents and marsupials.

John’s eyes are glued to the road, chin set. I think of putting my hand on his thigh. Sophie is telling Max about how the boy sugar gliders don’t have pouches, they have furry “scroters.” I miss Sophie’s horse phase for its sheer comedy, but I am besotted with her at four. Her banter is delicious.

At Fort Snelling, we wander around the historic walled fort with its nineteenth-century stone buildings and monuments, browning grass fields. The kids can run in any direction with nothing to stop them: no roads or obstacles, no parents yelling stop or no. There is nowhere for them to disappear and nothing we need to regulate, really, yet John and I stand at attention at the edge of the field, tracking them out of habit. Max is chasing Sophie with all he’s got.

“He’s so determined,” John says.

“Someday he’ll outpace her,” I say. I reach for John’s hand. “I love you.” I squeeze his thick fingers, press my arm into his, warm and solid through his nylon jacket. My husband. I rest my cheek on his chest and feel his heartbeat in my own ear, even through layers of clothing. We could call this desire. I kiss him. He lets me. I open my mouth against his, explore his lips and tongue as if for the first time.

Twenty feet away, Sophie and Max are screaming, “Steer toward the island! The engine’s still going!” Amelia Earhart is their latest disaster game. These tragic re-enactments were, in fact, the beginning of the end of Sophie’s horse antics. Amelia Earhart is her favorite, surely, but Amelia’s mysterious disappearance is only one of the many tragedies that Sophie and Max love. Others include the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, the sinking of the Titanic, the Hindenburg explosion, various nonspecific incidents in the Bermuda Triangle and the Sargasso Sea, and a handful of obscure nautical mishaps they know by heart from their Shipwrecks of the Great Lakes cassette tape.

Now, in this windy field, flying their imaginary Electra brings out the wild in these children, reddens their cheeks and sweeps back their hair. Their unzipped nylon jackets billow behind them like flags. John wraps his arm around me as we watch. “You’re the co-pilot,” Sophie yells. “I’m Amelia!” She’s always Amelia. For the next hour, our children fly their plane, crash land it, and start over—a continuous loop. There is nothing else to do. After the crash landing, they have no script.

No one does.

When the already gray light eventually shifts and the temperature drops by several degrees, the children grow cold and cross and their play devolves into bickering. We pile back into the car and the end of wind comes as a terrific relief to us all. We grow quiet, softening into the dry heat and gentle rocking of Big Blue—that is what we call this giant old Plymouth, inherited from John’s parents for the price of an expensive transmission repair. The children eat peanut butter sandwiches and drink from thermoses of hot chocolate. When their chatter stops and they drift to sleep, the backseat fills with their steady breathing, their chorus of air.

At home, we carry their sleeping bodies, heavy as donkeys, into the house to their beds. So deeply asleep are they that we leave them in their clothes, smelling of cold wind and sweat, only pulling off, with care, their shoes and jackets.

We crawl into bed ourselves, and I pull John on top of me and inside of me until he comes, quickly and urgently.

Her name will be Lillian.

It means, I vow.

A version of this essay appears in my memoir, The Part That Burns, as well as online in Hip Mama Magazine, under the title “Open Water.”