Here is the sequel to last week’s post How I Met and Married Bruce Part 1 and more of the back story to The Love Behind the Anniversary.
I met Kurt at the Rockton Inn when I stopped over for a blackberry brandy, my throat and nose raw from a cold. The Super Bowl played in the background. I liked the music of his words. We talked until two that morning. He said, “I don’t drink as much when I’m kayaking. I watch bees fly in and out of their nests and people think I’m boring. Sometimes I go off when people are drinking and smoking dope and just sit still and listen to the woods. People think I’m crazy. Up until now I haven’t met any women who like to do what I like, who do what I want.”
What he wanted turned out to be kayaking. My brother had kayaked a few years earlier, nearly dying when he flipped over in the Gauley and got caught in a suck hole. Later that spring Kurt showed me the Gauley, where a pipe released the river from behind the dam. The river churned and left me with a chill thinking about my brother’s near brush with death.
I liked the outdoors and the water. I wasn’t sure I could stand the suffocation when the boat flipped and you had to swing it around and up. I wasn’t sure I could stand all that water in my face. But I would be happy to go along, drive him back to his car.
He told me everything I needed to know in that first talk. I thought about how the world can be a dangerous place. I ignored what I heard. I wrote in my journal: Even good men like Kurt go to bars to pick up women to get off their rocks. “I don’t get involved” he said,“with one night stands. Most girls aren’t looking for relationships. They want to get laid.”
“No,” I say, “they put out because that’s the only way they can be touched. They hope for the possibility their performance in bed will bring you back. They know themselves as women through your touch. There’s a difference between sex and making love.”
I asked him what he looked for, what made an easy target.
“The vibes,” he said, “and how they respond to the lines I use, the body language.”
He makes his own rules. He is the beginning and end of his own life. He doesn’t need God or religion.
All of a sudden I realized I perceived that God had been a reality to me in subtle ways, sometimes fleeting, but still a reality I had witnessed that I can’t deny, and I’m not sure easily obey or disobey.
My words were prescient. I saw Kurt for himself and still got involved. I got involved with him more fully than I’d gotten involved with any other man. I found I could be with a man twenty-four hours a day, and it still be good. There was no heavy lid clamped over me, a man-hole cover, like I’d felt in my parents’ marriage, a lid that made me afraid to get married, it was so heavy, shutting out the sunlight. My desire to marry stopped being split.
Through my gynecologist I found a therapist who didn’t frighten me. She was a blonde woman, very Scandinavian, who felt safe to talk to. Like Father MacFarlane, she measured her words, she listened. She made me do the work, helped me ask the right questions. I told her I wanted to get married. I wanted to work on my bad dating habits.
I saw some things with Kurt I’d been needing to see for a long time. I’d seen the peculiar darkness the strict rules of conservatives could evoke through my work at an evangelical publisher and at a conservative think tank. I was getting ready to experience the darkness living without rules could bring. I lived through it and did my own share of harm and even found a share of redemption.
He pulled up to the house one afternoon and loaded me and my skis into the car. We went with friends to Cascade Mountain skiing. He paid my way. That night the wind was blowing snow across the road. We saw a car in the ditch. Kurt stopped to hook chains on his four wheel drive truck to pull him out. He locked the wheels and hooked up the chains. The heater blew across my thighs warming them, but not touching the deep cold I felt from being on the slopes for a few hours.
I looked across the fields and thought I saw a white horse galloping through the ground blizzard. I thought I saw a whole herd. I sensed the animals more than saw them, sensed the white stallion whose mane curled down in s curves from his neck. Kurt got back in and put the car in four wheel drive, the chain engaged, we pulled, our vehicle skidding, the second one beginning to move. When we got closer to Rockton, we saw a semi in the northbound lane, swerve and drive in the median towards us. It moved slowly and gracefully, coming to a stop before it reached our lane.
It wasn’t long before I was over at his apartment every evening and all weekend. We woke up to WJVL, the Janesville country station. I learned to like country music, the songs more like stories than Top 40.
I’d go home the next morning, and he would say, “I’ll check with you later,” and he did. I felt a quiet familiarity drop over me. My parents had courted on skis. This man reminded me of my father. For once I was with a man who paid my way, who wanted to be with me.
We made love. My guilt felt like slamming against a closed door, or a clear slick window like a bird swooping into the glass to get inside, a bird whose feathers scatter each time it hits. Neither one of us was good at dropping our guard.
But we could hold each other in the night.
I thought old hay dust catching the light from the barn window when my brother practiced flips off the solid beam, high over the hay. He could do it without knocking his breath out, but when I tried, the breath sucked out of my lungs leaving only the dry dust caked in my throat. From that day on, I stopped trying new things, withdrew to my books, the safety of what I knew well–prayer thrashed up against a granite cliff wall and a horse ridden around a bottlecap flat and sat in the woods and watched the ferns grow.
I asked Father Mac Farlane about how I was deliberately going against what I’d been taught. He thought a minute. He said morality was a part of the story of a community that lives and acts out Christ’s story and thousands of others’ stories. “It’s the community that decides out of its story that it will live within a certain context, where people help and support each other. But a woman in isolation from that community might work out her own salvation with fear and trembling and be out of the normative standards, but still be working out her faith.
“We tend to look for the Bible for a set of rules for individual life instead of the outgrowth of how it operates for the whole community. There’s the ideal and the reality of operating in the world. You work out what drives you. If it’s a morality imposed on you, you follow it reluctantly or guiltily. It’s right to continue to be in conversation with the community and the therapist, and work out your values for yourself.”
Kurt and I did alright with each other until we drove to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan for a ski weekend with his company. It was Valentine’s Day. On the chair lift I asked him why he wouldn’t go to church with me, since I went to the bars with him. He said he wouldn’t. At the top he skied down the mountain, faster than I could. I crossed back and forth, fell a few times, let him go.
At dinner that night we ate with another couple, the man a manager for Kurt’s company. Kurt started talking about how my dog was spoiled and how the women in the North are corn fed and fat. Southern women worried about staying a size five. The other couple looked at me hard. When Kurt got up to go the bathroom, the woman said, “He drinks too much don’t you think?” The man said, “He may not be right for you.” He kept looking into my eyes longer than Kurt ever did. I don’t remember how I replied.
That night we had the discussion I was used to hearing from other men, that I was dreading. He told me he didn’t want to be committed. “You take sex more seriously than I do. I like to play around. It doesn’t mean as much.” I should have gotten up right then and walked out.
But I tried to make it work. My conscience was right, dead right. I couldn’t fit myself into what the culture was saying about sleeping with a man who was not married to you. I began having nightmares. I didn’t break it off when our relationship ended. I stuck around to see what happened. I saw some things. This is where my shame comes in—when his ex sent his children to live with him.
That year Don Williams’ song “Ghost Story” often played on the radio. He’s just a ghost story so don’t let him scare you. He’s not really there like he seems. I thought about emotional ghosts like the echoes of the Big Bang left in the stars. Ghosts like the surging ocean crest like a green stallion humping the sand standing gravely, ghosts, emotional ghosts where I expect the world to go wrong. I knew they were there. That’s all.
The next few weeks were full of the dark spirits that rise when a father likes booze and sex and a no-longer-girlfriend is too broken to shelter the children from his behavior. I saw some things I don’t care to tell you.
If there was ever a horse, I imagined him rearing up, teeth bared, flipping over hitting the ground with a dull thud and then up again, racing away with all his might. One night I walked out, drunk, I dreamed about a dark forest, dark as night with its own darkness and twisted vines, and this in daylight because there was a broad beam of sunlight dropping down. It had substance, it dappled the woods beneath it like the back of an appaloosa horse. Always horses. I wanted to be near horses.
I asked myself and my therapist, what was I doing with this man? I’d felt comfortable with him. Why was I staying in the relationship? Why with this man who drank? She listened. She did not judge me.
It’s no wonder the children I taught at the university had an attitude. It’s no wonder they were in my face when they don’t like something and they sit like stones. It’s no wonder they pick up guns to shoot to kill. No wonder.
When I dreamed about making love to the devil, I stopped seeing Kurt. I was done. I’d gone too far. Friends told me gently it was about the evil I was involved in. A young man at church saw I was crying in the pew and asked if everything was all right. I told him I didn’t have any hope. I told him I’d been dating a man who drank. John invited me to Al Anon. “If you don’t have hope this will help you,” he said. He showed me what made a child a of an alcoholic.
Were it not for that group, I wouldn’t have found the strength to pull away from Kurt. But John and the group gave me the community I’d been looking for all along when I went to the Rockton Inn that night in January. They weren’t even afraid to hug, or to listen to a shameful story.
When I told Father MacFarlane I’d realized I was a daughter of an alcoholic, a light, a literal light, went on in his face. Suddenly I made sense to him. I told him John had shown me what the symptoms were and I fit every one. I remembered my Aunt telling me my mother was afraid to drink when she had cancer because my father had quit booze, had been an alcoholic. I remembered the drugs in the cabinet he took for pain. I remembered how he made a point of not drinking, of not having liquor, beer, or wine in the house, how he went to the Capital City Rescue Mission every week as a board member. I wondered if he had been a dry drunk.
My recovery began.
While I was spinning down to the end of Kurt, Bruce fixed my phone. I was on my way with Kurt, his daughter, her sophisticated friend, and some other friends to West Virginia and southern Pennsylvania. It was spring. The rivers were up. I would drive to the end of their run, pick them up and take them back to their cars. Bruce saw my sleeping bag and asked, “Oh you like to camp.” I told him how I was leaving to go kayaking. He talked to me about bicycling, how he was going to ride across Iowa. When he tells the story, he always says he knew I wouldn’t be kayaking. He gave me his card with his phone number and address written on the back should I ever decide to join the bike club.
I didn’t call Bruce because I was tired of calling men. If he wanted to go out with me he could call me or run into me. We almost ran into each other a couple times in Rockton. He waved at me while he drove his GTE van. He’s a slender man, with sandy brown hair. He has blue eyes that fade to light green in colors I’ve seen in the ocean off the Florida keys. One of them has a streak of rust. He jokes about his nose. He’s the most handsome when he wears a turtleneck. Once I walked into the ice cream store, and he waited and finally drove away just as I walked out.
We finally bumped into each other when I was doing laundry because my house had been overrun with mice while I was away for three weeks in Dallas and New York. My dog stayed at the vet’s. We bumped into each other immediately after I’d finally understood what I needed to know.
I’d found out in Dallas. I was there for the Christian Booksellers Convention, a publicist for an evangelical publisher. I had lunch with Lenore, a woman who had helped me escort the Scheaffers during CBA a few years earlier, the July right after my father had died. She’d listened to me rave one afternoon when I thought I would lose my mind. Lenore had steadied me away from the brink. I trusted her.
I told her my story, how I’d been with this man, what I was thinking about adult children of alcoholics, how maybe something had gone terribly wrong with my father. She nodded her head. She told me I had the symptoms of an incest victim.
I trusted her. I was not afraid when she said this. I was relieved. All of a sudden everything made sense–from the nightmares to the terrible, self destructive dating I couldn’t seem to get out of even when I was being torn up.
“Sometimes we repeat in adulthood what he know as children,” she said.
She told me about a therapist who was expert in this, that I could talk to.This woman had told her she wasn’t an incest survivor, that her trouble had come from somewhere else. She’d try to call the woman and set it up for me.
I drove to the woman’s office in a rental car borrowed from an editor of one of the magazines I pitched books to. I told my story. Linda Martin said that little girls play with sex like kittens play at fighting each other. If they sense a man responding, they try to please. She said that some foster families can’t handle a child’s sexuality because the girl is so sexed the father can’t stand it. Often men desert their families when the girls reach puberty because they can’t handle their feelings. I didn’t remember anything physically happening, except for one dream that was like reality but a dream because my dog hadn’t stirred where my father got on top of me in the night. It bubbled out in a line from a poem, “afraid of the weight that would make me a woman.” She said it was just as damaging to be the husband’s wife on an emotional level. The injuries weren’t obvious, but they were there. Later I would map out the rooms in our house, showing a different therapist that my room was basically the closet to my parents’ bedroom, my dad’s side of the bed next to my door. That therapist said that was as graphic as if I’d walked in with bruises.
I wanted to sing for joy. Finally my behavior made sense. Finally I didn’t have to be controlled by these self destructive compulsions.
I wrote in my journal: It’s amazing when I faced my fear of men as an actual fear born of my father’s intense and pressing love, I was able to be released from it and a whole new pattern set in. My parents both kept me as my father’s friend. They were afraid to let me become too beautiful. Every diet I went on, my father sabotaged with trips to the bakery. My mother said when I grumbled he was just showing his love. I gave up and ate the cookies.
Then there was the time I got my hair permed in the most feminine hairstyle I’d ever had and my mother was furious. She resented my becoming feminine. She pushed me toward my father when I was afraid of his love, telling me I would be sorry if I didn’t take the day trip with him to Saratoga and the Adirondacks.
I’ve borne the weight of men my whole life, my father’s ugly weight before I was ready. He told me how marriage was diapers and baby poop and ironing a man’s shirts. But he leaned and leaned and leaned on me and I was just a child.
Right after the trip to Dallas, I visited family in New York and felt the breach that would widen through the years. How could I tell them my parents had done this thing? They thought my parents saints. My brother’s face grew red; “I don’t want to hear it,” he said when I mentioned alcohol and our father and Al Anon. I kept quiet.
When I returned to Illinois, I arrived to a house full of mouse droppings. Mice had overrun the place when Rockton Grain was torn down. The night I dreamed: The Normanskill flooded its banks and I was out walking, but the currents threatened to sweep me away. Two men followed me. The water was silvery grey when reflecting the sky and muddy up close. Lines of geese flew in to land. I told the men to look at the water. The water rose and fell. It dropped five feet after it threatened to sweep me away.
Some people have said high water is a vision of blessing, pressed down, spilling over. I met Bruce when I stepped out of the laundromat to go have lunch with a local columnist who talked to me about his love life, who steadied me, encouraged me to leave Kurt. Bruce said he had pictures from his bike trip across Iowa, would I like to see them?
“Well yes. Yes I would.”
He was the kind of man I wouldn’t have looked twice at six months before. He wasn’t flashy. He was too much like the boy next door. But I’d had it with flash and charm and being on the edge with a man.
We met at the Rockton Inn after work and talked. I swear when I told him my story, how my parents were both gone, I swear I saw tears stand in his eyes.
He took me for a ride in his new Celebrity. We made plans to go to Belvidere with my bike to see if it could be fixed, so maybe I could ride with him at the bike club rides. He told me about two oak trees he wouldn’t cut to clear the fields. I told him about the white pines the gas company almost cut to put their pipeline through our land, only the Normanskill heaved up against one of its banks, made it slip right where the pipe was supposed to go. They had to move the pipe.
I knew there was something good about this man.
The next night we drove down to the bike shop and found out my bike was not repairable. The frame was bent completely out of shape. We got back to my house and got out of the car. Bruce did not ask to go inside. He stood leaning against the door.
I stood by a hemlock tree. We said a few words. He lifted his hands and said, “Oh what the heck” and walked over to hold me. I swear he held me delicately, as if I were a bird that would fly away. I told him I wouldn’t make a good girlfriend, that I get serious. I do want to marry. That was the scariest thing I could say.
He said he did too. He’d never settled down because he scared women off.
I felt things I hadn’t felt in a long time, that had to do with the poem about the horse I’d written in college, a horse I thought had gone far, far away. He held me and he listened to my body sing, the first who listened in a long time. “It’s all right. Just feel what you’re feeling,” he said.
I wrote later: Your arms echoed around me like the arms of God. After you left I felt your hand on my back, and you in my arms. I came alive as a field in the warm sun with a gentle wind blowing over it. You flowed through me like wind through a hay field the farmers called sheep running through grass.
One evening after that he came over and asked me to dinner at the Rockton Inn. He was wearing a black T shirt with the insignia from a Wisconsin sheriff’s department on it. He said he didn’t want me to think because we hugged under the tree that he wouldn’t be back.
He drove me out to Roland Olsen Forest preserve. We walked through the woods with half a moon lighting our path. He showed me where to step. His kiss was like water cupping moonlight. He said he used to know the names of the constellations. He had a telescope and could see the tip of Saturn’s rings certain times of the year. He talked about his volunteer work with the church. He was a Lutheran. Even though he’d worked hard, been used up, he was not bitter.
Bruce said he’d heard a story once about a boy in the winter pressing his hand against the a cold pane of glass and not knowing summer would come, but it did come. He said, “That’s the way it is with you. I think summer has come.”
The next night he brought me a picture of a rainbow in the trees. “This is what I want you to remember, the flood won’t happen again. I think summer has come.”
Father MacFarlane was skeptical at best about Bruce and I. I couldn’t blame him, but things had changed. I knew it in my soul and by the way Bruce looked toward my window when he came back to town from a day at work and how he stopped by on his way home. I knew it by the way he didn’t go on vacation alone with me because it wouldn’t look right, or be right for our commitment. And by the way he bought me a bike, telling his friend I wasn’t much to look at, but often the pretty ones were bitches, and I’d made him a good breakfast.
I could tell by the way we spent a whole day together, and I felt nothing jagged in him to cut me. I thought of a piece of clay with glass buried in it, that could cut a hand trying to break the clay. We watched my first draft horse show. He was proud to introduce me to his friends and his mother, even though her dog bit me when my back was turned.He was kind to her. He helped her make supper. I knew he would treat me well, but at the same time he made it clear that I came before she did.
I could tell the day he asked me to marry him, while we rode our bikes down a hill north of Capron and there was a thunder cloud to the south that was gray and anvil shaped. It looked like the city of God dropping down. And I said, “Yes!” shocked he would ask.
I took him to my parents’ grave: Here he is folks, the man you prayed I would meet. I loved you so much and hurt so badly when you died I gave you all my feelings. Now they’re just out of reach. Please let me have them back, so I can offer them to Bruce.
We tried to make love in the woods behind the farm house where I grew up, but the snow burned our skin, and my brother’s dog would not stop barking. My brother liked Bruce. “Do you think he will like me?” He asked.
We got married the following April, a small ceremony with his mother, the pastor, my girlfriend, my brother and his wife, the pastor’s son. We drove down to the Carolinas for our honeymoon.
Even though I fought a terror of abandoment, I knew where it was coming from, I knew to fight it. I let go of my therapist. I let go of Al Anon. I felt guilty I hadn’t stayed celibate for a year into recovery until a friend told me I’d chosen life by choosing Bruce.
Since then I’ve made peace with my family. The writing of The River Caught Sunlight and work with some other therapists brought that peace. Loving Bruce and being loved by him brought that peace, sometimes persisting through terror and loss and silence. Besides aren’t all families broken? Don’t most set us up to bang around with not good things? Isn’t that the beauty of walking with Jesus, that forgiveness is ours and the Lord truly sweeps under and over and in between our broken behavior and redeems it?
Coda
I now believe something happened before I had language, perhaps when my paternal grandfather lived with us, perhaps when I was plunked in the hospital for a hernia repair as a baby, perhaps my mother feeling grief from beloved people dying.
I am very proud of my mother’s legacy as I shared with my essays about Del Logan and Paul Huey. She was often distracted and stuck with a daughter who had the spiritual gift of tears. What a trial to be the mother of someone so sad, a sadness born of her religious faith. My father loved me so well, he did not call me home, when my mother died, even though living without my mother was an emptiness that broke his heart. He knew living on my own was hard as all get out. His last words to me were, “You’re smarter than they are. I’m proud of you.”
I have other essays about making peace but I hesitate to post them because I’m not sure I want to impose them on you. I posted these two essays, and did some cutting, because I wanted to tell my love story as a follow up to The Love Behind the Anniversary and show how my spiritual director held me close to the Lord, even though I did badly. I wanted to show how even pitch darkness can be redeemed and healed.
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