1. Wealth and Well-Being
It was late, I was tired, and I
should have been asleep. Instead I kept flipping through the pages of my Title
Nine catalog before I ran them through the shredder.
I don’t kayak through rapid waters,
surf high waves, or climb treacherous rocky cliffs. I feel good about myself if I manage to get
in a run on a workday or if Monty and I take the kids hiking on a weekend. So I
guess the Title Nine “real women” models are all just over-achievers, as
they’re pictured pursuing their out-door adventures with trendy clothes and
gazelle-like legs that go higher than my torso. On one page, a way-too-smiley
model named Meryl was spelunking. The sidebar information about her said she’s
a mother of four and an animal masseuse. Her goal was to visit everywhere on
earth where there are underground caves.
Women like Meryl exist. She’s every
other woman in my neighborhood.
I started getting their catalog
because the chic, outdoorsy clothes Title Nine offers are the type that all the
chic, outdoorsy women in Seattle wear. But looking through this catalog was as
disheartening as a trip to the neighborhood playground, where mothers push
their jogging strollers, walk their rescue dogs and pontificate about how old
their kids should be before they go to Belize for the first time.
I sighed. Traveling is another
thing I don’t do much of, but my husband can’t say the same. A few weeks ago,
over dinner and without ceremony he said, “They’re sending me to Botswana for a
month. I have to go if I want to keep my job.”
I didn’t disagree; I just tried to digest
this piece of information as I swallowed down my peas with cream sauce. We’d
been fighting about his traveling for months and I always lost the argument. So
I pushed the issue to the back of my mind, choosing instead to focus on the
here and now, like work deadlines, daily tedium, and the task of raising a
family.
That only worked for a while. Then,
the night before he left, the truth came crashing in and I didn’t deal with it
well. While he packed his bags, I cleaned. I had a sudden, urgent desire to dust
the bookshelves and the coffee table, to wash the towels, and to rid the
microwave of grease and grime. I guess I thought if my house was in order that
my life would be too.
At around 11:00 Monty came downstairs and
found me in the office, sorting through all the old mail, including the Title
Nine catalog. I had gotten the paper shredder out and was feeding it credit
card applications and useless insurance information.
“Hey,” he said. “Are you coming to
bed?”
His t-shirt and shorts hung loosely
on his lean, muscular frame, and his dark hair was all mussed up. It was an appealing
look but I resisted his charms. “In a few minutes.” Another sheet went tearing
through in a noisy grind. “I don’t know why they send us this stuff; it’s such
a waste of paper.”
He stepped up behind me and put his
arms around my waist, pulling me close and murmuring into my neck. “You have to
do that now?”
I pulled away. “Yeah, I kind of
do.”
He slumped against the wall. “I’m
leaving for a month tomorrow.”
“I know,” I said, looking at an old
bank statement instead of him. “And whose fault is that?”
“So you’re going to be
passive-aggressive and punish me?”
I sighed in irritation. “No. I’m
going to be plain old aggressive and tell you that I’m still mad you’re going.
You promised me last fall that you were done with this kind of trip.”
“We’ve been over this a million
times.” He tapped his fingers against the wall, rapidly and with power. “You
know I have to go. It’s my job to take trips like this. I don’t have a choice.”
This was his usual argument. For as
liberal as Monty claimed to be, he still had this archaic idea that his role as
“father” was to ensure the well-being of his family, and well-being means wealth.
I understood but I didn’t agree.
I dropped the bank statement on the
desk and pushed the whole stack of papers away. Then I faced him. “You have a
choice and you choose to stay with this job where you have to travel 30% of the
time, where you’re often unreachable and you’re putting your health at risk.
And it doesn’t matter how much I tell you not to go, you’re always going to go
anyway, aren’t you?”
His chin dropped and he rubbed his
eyes before answering. “Yeah, I guess I am.”
I folded my arms across my chest
and looked away.
“What do you want me to say?” he
demanded. “I asked you to consider moving to New York so I could do something
else and you said no. I don’t know where that leaves us.”
“Nowhere good,” I replied.
He shook his head and his green
eyes darkened. “I don’t understand why we’re arguing about this now, the night
before I’m leaving, when this trip has been planned for weeks.”
I shrugged. “I guess tonight it
just finally feels real.”
Monty took a deep breath in through
his nose and slapped his hand against the wall. “I’m going to bed.”
“Fine.”
He walked away and I continued with
my paper shredding, thus halting the last argument we’d have in the home we’d
bought together.
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Blue State
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Love. Family.
Growing Older. They’re all part of the state we live in.
Lucy has left
her home in Seattle Botswana
