The Mighty Queens of Freeville Read online

  She used to laugh when she told this story. She would point out the absurdity of making such an empty gesture when at the end of it, she’d still have less than nothing. The only thing different would be that a nice little ring would be lying on the creek bottom.

  Save yourself, I thought.

  I TURNED TO my husband.

  “I release you,” I said.

  “Huh?” he said. We generally didn’t talk like that.

  “I release you. I’m done.”

  I could tell that he wanted to run off and find a phone booth in order to call his girlfriend. Instead, he took out a little notebook, and we started to divide our stuff into column “you” and column “me.” I discovered that I didn’t care too much about any of it, so he got the French farm house dining room table.

  I said I’d take the chairs.

  I found a mediator to meet with the two of us, and we kept the lawyers out of it. We learned how to talk like dispassionate accountants, which was fine because we had business to do and things to negotiate. He didn’t want our child to be dragged around as he had been at Christmastime, so he didn’t insist on seeing her over the holidays. I wanted for our daughter to have a father in her life because my father hadn’t been in mine, so I told him that I would help him be a father to her—not on my terms, but on his.

  We found that we’d both learned about divorce from our parents, and if we weren’t able to subvert history and rearrange our futures enough to have a happy marriage, then at least we could have a good divorce.

  I decided to forgive him, though it was way too soon to do so and I didn’t know if I was ready. But I decided to forgive him anyway. Forgiveness didn’t work the way I thought it would. First of all, it wasn’t a natural impulse, and even though in my life I have been a practicing Methodist, Presbyterian, and Episcopalian, forgiveness wasn’t quite the spiritual experience that I had been taught it would be. Forgiveness, it turned out, was a choice that I had to make, not to get him to come back, but in order to let him go. Whether it meant anything to my husband or if he even noticed it, I don’t know. That wasn’t the point.

  The day the moving vans came, our little family stood together, quietly watching our belongings toted out of the house by teamsters. I imagine that moving men witness an awful lot in their job as people play out the joy and anxiety they feel as they contemplate leaving one place and moving to another. Our two moving crews were quiet. They slipped in and out quickly. I told myself that if I had cared too much about material things before, I never would again. I didn’t care if the container holding our stuff fell off the ship carrying it across the Atlantic.

  The vans, as it happened, were pointed in opposite directions on the street. I was taking Emily, now a toddler, back to the States. We would live in my sister’s spare bedroom in my hometown until I could figure out what to do next. He was moving to Russia. He said that he would see our daughter when he could, and though I wondered when that would possibly be—given the distance, his schedule, and his fear of running into my cousin Roger’s fist—I tried to believe him.

  On our flight to the States, our jumbo jet hit a wave of extreme turbulence as we passed through the jet stream. The flight attendants locked down the cabin and strapped themselves into their seats. I was terrified. I’ve always been a very nervous flier, and at the slightest sign of trouble I lurch into a state of high anxiety, complete with flop sweat and the fear of passing out, or worse—the peeing of one’s pants. The plane was bucking and I thought I could feel it twisting.

  I tightened my seat belt and unconsciously felt along my daughter’s tummy to make sure that hers was snug. I looked out at the other passengers. Though to me they looked exactly like the cast of a television disaster movie—executives, a children’s choir coming back from a competition in Scotland, and a nun wearing a habit—they didn’t seem to realize that they had been cast in my disaster. They seemed calm. Of course, I thought, they don’t know what I am going through. They don’t know that I couldn’t make my husband love me anymore and that I am headed back to my cruddy little hometown to try and build a new life from my sister’s spare bedroom.

  Nobody—not a single one of these people—knows how to make love stay.

  My daughter tugged my sleeve.

  My God. I am a single mother.

  “Weeeeeee Mommy!” She looked up at me with eyebrows raised and a huge, expectant smile. “Roller coaster!”

  Jesus. She looked exactly like her father. I laughed.

  “Yes. That’s right. Roller coaster.”

  TWO

  Tea Alone

  On Mothering without a Net

  IT WAS MARCH in Freeville.

  My little hometown had been worked over by winter’s harsh blasts, and now the rains—cold, hard, and unrelenting—had arrived to finish the job. The trees lining Main Street were iron-colored skeletons, and without foliage or winter’s massive snowbanks to camouflage them, the clapboard houses looked tattered and sagging.

  My sister Rachel pushed her daughter Railey’s toys out of the way and gave us Railey’s bedroom in the back of the minuscule two-bedroom bungalow just off Main Street that she had bought the year before.

  Emily and I moved in. I had nowhere else to go and no plans beyond a vague idea that I would somehow wait for my fortunes to change.

  More important than the loss of my current fortunes though was the way my future had changed shape. Geometry no longer described our family. We used to be a triangle: Mommy, Daddy, Baby. Now Emily and I were two points, connected by a thread. We used to be a group—my husband, daughter, and me. Now I was part of a couple. Our lives once had a forward trajectory. Now I was blown back into my own past.

  Our first few days in Freeville involved lots of coffee drinking and toilet paper. We are not Kleenex people, so when it looked like my case of chronic crying might in fact be terminal, Rachel gave me my own roll of Charmin, which I worked down to its cardboard tube.

  Rachel and I had to speak in code because Railey was both precocious and a blabbermouth. We didn’t want my niece’s pre-K class to be treated to the details of my marriage’s disintegration, so many of our conversations went like this:

  “I really want to call him.”

  “Don’t call him.”

  “OK. After today I won’t call him.”

  “Don’t call him today, either.”

  “Well, I already called him today but he didn’t answer.”

  “Good God. Well, don’t call him tomorrow, then. Jesus, can’t I leave you alone for a minute?”

  “Please don’t.”

  My relatives littered Freeville like downed tree limbs after a storm. The village’s population of 458 had remained stagnant since the 1930s—my family’s own population growth had filled in gaps left by death and attrition as residents gave up on the region’s October-to-April winters and moved to Florida. At that time my two sisters, four cousins, three aunts, and mother lived within a short distance of Rachel’s house. My cousin Jan, sisters Anne and Rachel, and I had had our kids one after another, so our combined six children were ages two to six.

  My family started to circle. It was like the scene in The Wizard of Oz where Glinda the good witch asks the shy munchkins to come out to meet Dorothy. “Come out, come out, wherever you are…,” she trills, and so my family emerged from their homes up and down Main Street, tentatively at first—because no one knew what to say—and then more boldly as they discovered that it didn’t really matter; I wasn’t quite ready to listen. I just wanted a soft place to fall.

  Emily became acquainted with her young cousins in my sister’s tiny living room that soggy March, and they engaged her in the hand-to-hand combat that was their particular style of play. Aside from one friend in London who had a child Emily’s age, she had never really played with other children before. This was play as a full-contact sport, and my mother and I (both softies) would wince as Emily was repeatedly trampled.

  “Well, you have to think that maybe this wi
ll toughen her up,” Mom offered helpfully, after four-year-old Nathan rammed her with his Big Wheel. (Nathan menaced the village on his Big Wheel like a teenager in a Camaro.)

  “You mean the idea, ‘that which doesn’t kill me makes me stronger?’” I offered as I scooped up my toddler to comfort her. I could see the utility of that way of thinking and of course wondered if I should apply that theory to myself. The problem is, I can’t for the life of me figure out what’s so great about being tough in the first place.

  I had no ideas and no prospects, so I behaved like the house wife I had become during my marriage. I took care of Emily, cleaned my sister’s house while she was at work, walked her dog, and hung out with Railey when she came home after school. Emily and I walked to the post office on Main Street each day and stopped at the village store for a treat. In the evenings we would visit with Mom.

  My mother’s lovely little house on Mill Street is filled with comfortable furniture and family things passed down through generations of our clan. Among her possessions were toys my grandfather had played with during his Freeville childhood almost a hundred years ago, including a tin stagecoach, which Emily placed dolls on and pushed around the kitchen floor. A portrait of a glowering ancestor menaced visitors from the living room.

  Mom and I sat at her kitchen table, drinking coffee and watching Emily engage in play that, in this age of plastic, seemed pulled from another time. Mom had purchased a set of wooden alphabet blocks for Emily to play with, and I noticed that my mother had set them up on the windowsill of the kitchen to spell:

  T-E-A

  A-L-O-N-E

  “So, what do you think you’re going to do?” my mother asked one evening.

  “Do? You mean tomorrow? I think I’m going to take Emily over to the Marquis farm to see them make maple syrup.”

  “No; what are you going to do next?”

  “Next? I don’t know.”

  I didn’t have a “next” yet.

  One morning a week, my family gathered at Toads diner at the edge of the village for breakfast. My extended family members are in the habit of visiting with one another constantly—even though they see one another almost daily, they still feel the need to punctuate the week with planned get-togethers.

  At Toads, we’d pull up high chairs and booster seats and three generations of us would talk over one another until the last pancake was eaten and the coffee had run cold. In the presence of my mother, three aunts, cousins, sisters, and our children, I started to remember who I was before I’d had the stuffing knocked out of me.

  I come from a family of women who have a lot to say. In fact, my mother and her three sisters, Lena, Millie, and Jean, have been engaged in a conversation about nothing in particular that started in 1929. To successfully track a typical encounter with the four of them would require a team of linguists with clipboards and sensors, feeding streams of data into a supercomputer.

  Conversational categories include:

  Ancestor Trivia

  Politics and You

  Jellies and Preserves

  Movies, Books, and Popular Culture

  Humidity

  Law & Order (the television show)

  Pets: Dead or Alive

  Snow Removal

  Cold and Ice

  Offspring

  Curtains

  The only topic I can think of that my mother and aunts will never broach comfortably is talking about other people. A hint of gossip and the needle scratches across the record. They go silent. They also don’t like to talk about themselves, but they will happily talk about you to you and ask you questions about yourself. This is probably why I have always felt fascinating when I’m around them; I develop a case of self-enchantment that I can’t help but associate with being in their presence.

  Of my mother and her three sisters, only my aunt Lena had managed to stay married, though she was hardly smug on this topic. Aunt Lena’s very long marriage to my uncle Harvey was seen as a glitch in the clan’s otherwise perfect record of going it alone. My mother and aunts Mille and Jean had all been single mothers. Being with them reminded me that it could be done.

  Though I doubted I’d ever be comfortable anywhere, I considered settling down permanently in my hometown. At the very least, I knew what life there would be like. Generations of my family had grown up, grown old, and died alongside generations of the other families in Freeville.

  In small towns, everybody knows where the bodies are buried—literally. Our town cemetery contains headstones bearing the names of local families, and I know the intimate details and familial backstories of many of them. Of course the downside to knowing your neighbors’ stories is that they know yours too.

  When my father abruptly departed from our family in order to run off with a truck stop waitress, his behavior was scandalous enough that I was aware of the news circulating around us in murmurs. The talk was like snowfall—everywhere and impossible to dodge. Our small dairy farm failed in agonizing stages as a result of my father’s leaving, and one day all of our farm equipment—including the leftover hay stacked inside the barn—was sold in an auction attended by a couple of hundred people, many of them neighbors and families that my siblings and I went to school with.

  I was twelve. I hated the idea that so many people were witnessing the worst day of my childhood.

  I came of age in an era when people openly referred to house holds of divorce as “broken homes.” During my small-town adolescence, my parents’ divorce and my family’s broken-ness were the awkwardness that I could never shake, so I papered it over with accomplishments and certificates and prizes. I sang. I danced. I ran endless laps around various sports fields, chasing balls of every size and shape. I campaigned for office and served on decorating committees. I was very busy keeping busy.

  Now, thirteen years after my triumphant turn around the football field as Dryden High School’s class of 1977’s Home-coming Princess, I was home again, and my life had slowed down so much that I was actually moving backward.

  I didn’t even sleep in a grown-up’s bed.

  One day I borrowed my mother’s car and drove to the bank in Dryden, three miles away. My separation agreement had come from London in the mail and I needed to have it notarized. (If the first stage in becoming a single mother is the dramatic emotional part—the crying, making up, breaking up, and more crying—then the second stage is all about shame and paperwork.)

  A chilly rain was melting the dirty but diminishing snowbanks lining every road and parking lot. I unhitched Emily from her borrowed car seat and tucked her—along with the documents giving me full and legal custody of her—under my coat as I dashed into the bank.

  My hometown bank was last renovated in 1967 and is a gem of period fieldstone decor and burnt orange wall-to-wall carpeting. Four of the six tellers were named “Tammy.” The Tammies stood expectant at their banking stations. They sported the poodle-fronted she-mullet hairdos of small-town beauty queens and country-and-western singers that were popular at the time. I went to high school with most of them. I went to high school with the older siblings of the rest of them.

  I was directed toward the back of the building where the notary public sits. Carla was in Rachel’s class in school. Her parents had grown up with my parents. I looked up to her the way I looked up to my sister, though in Carla’s case it was purely because she was older and had been a standout on our high school swim team.

  Carla examined my documents, then looked at me and then at Emily. “So you’re moving back home?” she asked as she pulled her stamp out of its velvet-lined case.

  She didn’t mean anything by it. She was just making conversation.

  On the way home, after I stopped crying, I pulled the car over to the side of the road. Emily had fallen asleep in her car seat. I adjusted the rear-view mirror in order to look at her. Her head was cocked at an impossible floppy drunken angle, and I wondered why toddlers so often slept like that, yet never seemed to have neck aches. I turned off the wind-s
hield wipers and let the rain sluice down the windshield. I closed my eyes.

  If I stayed in my hometown, I would run into people who knew too much about me for the rest of my life. I would be the ex-cheerleader and former “most likely to succeed” who didn’t quite make it. I would be a second-generation member of a broken home.

  I felt I was living a life that seemed pulled from a movie on the Lifetime Channel. Even though I had always been told that I bore a passing resemblance to the actress Valerie Bertinelli, I had a horror of providing the plot for a Valerie Bertinelli movie (“To night on Lifetime: Not without My Daughter!”) Nor did I want to live in fear of running into one of the Tammies.

  I wanted to write the next chapter of my story, and so for the first time in a very long time, I made what felt like an actual decision. I chose to settle in the last place where I had been on my own—before marriage, parenthood, and divorce.

  I went to college in Washington, DC, and then stayed on to work there for three years after graduation. I still had some friends there and thought I’d be able to find a job.

  That night I asked Rachel what she thought. “Yes,” she said. “That sounds just right.”

  It took a month to figure out where to live. It took another month to say good-bye.

  By May, spring had finally come to Freeville, and the trees were smeared with peridot-colored leaves. Daffodils rose in clumps along the banks of Fall Creek. Our neighbor Dave had removed his shirt—Dave takes off his shirt on the first warm day and doesn’t put it back on until October. In Freeville, seeing Dave’s torso as he works in his yard is the first sign of spring. “Well, I see Dave’s shirtless—I guess it’s time to plant the flower boxes and get the bikes out of the barn,” my mother said.