We try to think of places with beaches and mountains and settle on Seattle. For Christ’s sake, please take your hand out of the urn now.
— Betsy, there are so many things wrong with this. This isn’t better, it’s just different.
— It’s sisters on a sailing adventure! I moved you to the mountains!
— A houseboat is not a sailing boat.
— It can be if we want it to be.
— Also, I feel like this is pretty obviously you blaming me for your drinking problem.
— It’s not. I was thinking about how I wish I’d started drinking a little sooner so that maybe I could have quit a little sooner.
— You don’t wish you’d just never drank at all?
— Nope.
— Huh.
So we set out for Seattle. It takes almost two years. We’re almost there when we run into some trouble in Mexico, because I studied French and your Spanish is—
— For shit, I know, Betsy.
— I was just going to say you struggled with it.
— It’s fine, my Spanish is for shit.
So when I get arrested for prostitution (really just drunk and disorderly, but I’d gotten my tube skirt and my tube top mixed up, so basically I had made an extremely short dress out of my shirt), and I’m sure that I’m facing life in a Rosarito Beach prison, it takes a while before you’re able to understand that I understood wrong and that all they want is about six thousand pesos for their trouble. Should have just left you there. Very funny. You owe me six thousand pesos. I have no idea how much that is. Neither do I.
— I should have probably mentioned something sooner, Betsy. I never really thought through the houseboat thing, I just wanted something that was as different as I could think of from Muscatine, Iowa.
— That’s okay, I never really think through anything.
—. .
— I’m kidding! Sort of.
Respectable Living
Five years pass. You have still not made a recording. You gave up a lot of things — and you should have been rewarded, but you weren’t. You’re not ready to give up, not yet; you’ve been making a respectable living for years now; few singers get to this level, ever. It could still happen, your voice is still glorious, but you’re growing tired of the effort. You like paperback novels and doing needlepoint and you don’t at all mind having a few weeks off between jobs. You’ve spent parts of summers in New Hampshire since I was in high school, have often considered taking the entire summer off to go up there and sit on the deck, look at the mountains, read, sew. But let’s not kid ourselves. Relaxation is not an area in which you excel, and doing anything with less than excellence is not for you. You’re all for a good long bubble bath or a half glass of wine now and again, but sitting around for a week with nothing to show for yourself in the end is for lazy asses. In late May you head up for the summer — Victor will take some long weekends and part of August — and it’s about four days into sitting on the deck reading and looking at the mountains when the black flies start to bite, and for whatever reason, you taste really good to the black flies, and the bug zapper doesn’t help, the coils don’t help, and no amount of Off! helps prevent the black flies from chomping on you and covering you with golf ball — sized welts. This black fly-biting coincides, though, with your growing a bit itchy in another way, which is to say that sitting on the deck for four days reading and looking at the mountains turns out to be the maximum sitting-still period for you, though you don’t realize it in that way; what you do realize is that you should build a screened porch on the other side of the house, which will obviously and once and for all solve the black fly problem. So you run to town, buy a book on building stuff, find a design for a porch, run to the lumberyard, ask where people rent bigger tools and supplies. The people at the hardware store laugh when you tell them what you’re planning, that no, you’re not picking this up for your husband. But you’re not insulted. This is no different from reupholstering a chair, you tell them; you simply follow directions.
It doesn’t occur to you to be insulted. You’re not a feminist. Or, more accurately, you think you’re not a feminist. You spend next to no time thinking about feminism. When you think of what a feminist is, you think of unattractive women with hairy armpits holding signs in the streets and feeling sorry for themselves. Your response to life is, in essence, a response to the word “no.” It doesn’t occur to you that this is in any way feminist — that your desire for a career, for something other than the domestic life that 1957 thought you were supposed to have, has anything to do with this — or even that you’re doing something for your daughter (much less her generation) in this way, not even in an I’m-just-trying-to-feed-her way (because you still think that’s the father’s job). You want what you want, that’s all. And right now you want a screen porch. So you build a screen porch. There’s some building and taking apart, because there are parts that aren’t perfect; some nails go in angled a tiny bit wide and the floorboards are off by a fraction of a centimeter that even a top-notch carpenter would be happy with, and it’s to be expected that that’s part of the process, same as everything else. You’ll do it and undo it until it’s right. Two weeks later, you have a marvelous screen porch; you get some lounge chairs, a table, it’s adorable. But your body is killing you, so you decide to splurge on a massage. It’s forty-five dollars for an hour and a half, way cheaper than in New York, still a huge splurge, but just this once you spring for a massage, and it’s transcendent, and you can see now that this should be a legitimate business expense for you, given the amount of stress you have to endure. What’s more, you make a connection with the masseuse. She asks a number of questions pre-massage: she’s a firm believer in the mind-body connection, wants to know not only what hurts but where you “hold things” in your body, a mind-blowing idea for you, but one that rings as true as anything you’ve ever heard. So you tell her. You say you hold them in your neck and shoulders and in your fingers and in your chest and sometimes your back and in your skull. My calves are fabulous, you say. Utterly empty of things. Ha!
Afterward, she makes suggestions. There’s a bookshop in town that specializes in spiritual books; she recommends some titles. She mentions that she’s learning Reiki, explains what that is, and if you’re interested in being a guinea pig, she needs practice. The spiritual bookshop might be the loveliest place you’ve ever been. The gray-haired woman behind the counter is positively lit up, and the room smells divine with handmade candles and scented oils and lotions. You sample scents and browse books and by the time you head to the counter you’ve racked up a hundred and nineteen dollars’ worth of merchandise. A shitload of money, but that’s all right. It’s an investment in yourself.