Everything You Want Me to Be(11)
God, I did not want to move to Pine Valley. But she looked so hopeful and tired, and I don’t know how it happened but two months later we moved in with her mother and I lost my entire life. Although she said it was only temporary, we both knew that meant we were staying until Elsa died, whether that took months or years. Lately, I hated to admit it, I’d been hoping for months.
The entire summer everything was Elsa, Elsa, Elsa. How was Elsa feeling today? Did she need a new oxygen tank? Could she take a shower by herself? It felt like we did have a baby, except our baby was an old, set-in-her-ways woman with a failing body.
Elsa was grateful, but all her gratitude seemed reserved for Mary. Me, she treated like a mildly irritating foreign exchange student.
It started with the vegetarian thing. She questioned everything I ate, from kale to black bean burgers to tempeh. When I went running, Elsa shook her head like she’d never seen a human move faster than a brisk walk behind a plow. And if I cracked a beer at night, she sniffed and pointedly looked away.
I honestly didn’t care what my mother-in-law thought of me, but she was coming between me and Mary. Every time Elsa cold-shouldered me, she stretched Mary’s peacemaker position a fraction thinner, pulled her daughter a little further away. One day I fixed the fence around her chicken barn while she toddled out after me to supervise, and we even had some good conversation about Mary’s childhood, except by the next week she’d forgotten all about it. The deprivation of oxygen to her brain was robbing her memories, especially the most recent ones, so all my attempts to improve our relationship were pointless.
And then there was the squawking. Even though the chickens were housed on the far side of the main barn, the clucking and rustling and scraping of those birds were omnipresent, no matter what time of day. It was enough to drive anyone insane. There were only about fifty of them, the last of Mary’s father’s flock, but they seemed to provide eggs for half the county. People stopped by all the time to pick up a carton, and Mary personally delivered them to our neighbor, Winifred Erickson, who usually followed Mary right back to our house and chatted with Elsa for hours. Mary collected eggs twice a day, starting at 6:00 a.m., cleaned the nests out, cleaned the floor, and hauled the feed—without making more than a few bucks a day as far as I could tell—and she wanted to talk about not having money?
“Why don’t you get rid of the chickens?” I kept asking her.
“I don’t mind it. I grew up doing this. I just don’t know how Mom managed it by herself.”
“Why do you have to manage it? We can buy eggs at the store.”
“Mom won’t hear of selling them,” she said, which had become her standard line of the summer. Our seventy-three-year-old baby wants this. Our seventy-three-year-old baby won’t tolerate that.
It was creeping into everything. Mary wouldn’t discuss books with me anymore. She said she had no time to read, yet she watched those awful shows with Elsa every night. She didn’t want to drive into the city to see any plays or even spend a night with our friends.
She’d shake her head. “It’s too far, I’m tired just thinking about it.”
Thank God the house got internet service. I set up my computer in a little bedroom upstairs that warehoused Christmas ornaments and dusty cardboard boxes marked with phrases like Uncle Joe’s funeral or Dewitt 1938. That’s where I read, made my lesson plans for the fall, and checked Facebook every night, watching my friends go to bars, literary readings, parties, and conferences.
I wasn’t going to lie; I had a lot riding on tonight’s date. I was desperate to remove our relationship—even for a few hours—from the farm and Elsa, to resurrect the kind of fun, spontaneous times we’d had in college, before grad school and illness had claimed all our Friday nights. Mary liked the idea. She’d been excited when I mentioned it earlier in the week.
“A night out,” I’d said, “before the school year starts. We won’t do a single productive thing.”
She laughed. “Promise?”
Now, driving back to Pine Valley with a silence that was building even higher walls between us, I wondered again where I’d screwed up. Or did she screw up? Any stranger watching us tonight would have been embarrassed at how hard I was trying, but I was obviously trying the wrong things. The wrong movie. The wrong restaurant. Would it have been better if we’d gone to the local Dairy Queen and traded bites of Blizzard while teenagers flirted their way around our booth?
The lights of Pine Valley warmed the horizon, and as much as I hated personification, it was like the town itself was visually shoving the answer down my throat. Yes. Yes, you tried too hard. You wanted a Minneapolis date, but you don’t have a Minneapolis wife anymore.
With that uncomfortable thought in my head, we drove into town, a small grid of streets surrounding one main drag of businesses underneath the soybean plant’s smokestacks on the horizon. A few gas stations, the Dairy Queen, and a CVS pharmacy were the only places still open at 9:00 p.m. on Friday night.
“Can you stop at the pharmacy? I need to pick up Mom’s medicine and some pictures.”
Obediently, I pulled into the parking lot and killed the engine, following her inside. She went to see the pharmacist and sent me to the photo counter in the opposite corner of the store. The salesgirl didn’t notice me approach and I didn’t care enough to try to grab her attention.