Everything You Want Me to Be(61)
I phrased the next question carefully. “Why would you invest in a whole new business when we’re only here on a temporary basis?”
She didn’t say anything and, to be honest, I already knew. The answer was right in front of me.
“You’re not just here for Elsa.” I dropped into one of the kitchen chairs and stared at her profile. She didn’t confirm or deny. “You like it here. You’re not going to move back to Minneapolis when she dies, are you?”
Still she didn’t speak. She just kept washing dishes, her hands idly squeezing the rag over a saucer as she gazed out the kitchen window into the abyss of white.
“Dammit, Mary, answer me. I think I deserve an answer. Have you been planning this since before we moved?”
She rinsed a dish and set it in the rack, then slowly pulled a coffee cup out of the suds. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“Clearly I don’t. How can I understand what you won’t say?” I crossed my arms, determined not to leave this room until she came clean.
“It’s . . .” She stopped, shook her head, and started again, moving the soapy cup from one hand to the other, still staring absently through the glass framed by faded gingham curtains. “I don’t know how to say it. It’s like the trees.”
“What?”
“In the city you can’t see them.” She paused, thinking. “They’re all squished together, tangled into each other until you can’t tell where one tree stops and another starts. Their branches are sawed off so they don’t hit power lines or roofs. Some of them have those red spray-painted death rings around their trunks and they’re chopped down when their roots grow too big under sidewalks. They’re sad to look at, all contorted and disfigured or pruned down into nothing.
“But here, here you can see the trees for what they really are. My whole life I watched them growing at the edges of the fields like cross-stitches holding a quilt together.” Her gaze focused on the pines behind the garage and her voice lost that hardened edge she’d acquired around me.
“They stand tall in windbreaks around the farms and you can really see them. You can trace their silhouettes, follow how their branches bend and curl. Some are craggy. Some are thick and strong. Some are stooped like old men against the wind. You can understand their nature here. I didn’t realize it until we moved back and I felt myself breathing again. I was walking home from Winifred’s one day and I just stopped and stood there studying the shapes of the trees on the horizon. They were like portraits, each one of them, and it was the most beautiful thing I’d seen. I knew then that I couldn’t go back. I couldn’t breathe in the city; I was suffocating more every day.”
“But we live in the city.” I felt compelled to make some stab at an argument. “Our lives are there. Our friends, your job. Your boss said you could come back anytime.”
Logic was all on my side. I knew it, could taste it on the words, but they felt hollow against Mary’s eloquence.
“And work in a beige, five-foot cubicle for ten hours a day? With no sunlight? Surrounded by stale air and browbeaten, angry people? No, Peter. I can’t spend my life like that. I’m going to terminate the lease on the front forty this year and buy more chickens next spring. I’m going to be a farmer, like my father, and his father. I’m going to sow my fate with the land.”
Neither of us spoke for a while. The weight of her decision blanketed the room, silencing both of us, forcing us to confront what we’d both known. Eventually she finished the dishes, hung the rag over the faucet to dry, and sat down across from me.
I looked at her, really looked for the first time in months. The transformation I’d sensed, and resented, in her was complete. The girl I’d married had long, glossy locks of blond hair streaming from beneath her veil. Her cheeks had been flushed as she walked up the aisle and her eyes glowed with tears and simple, untainted emotion. The woman in front of me sat practically emotionless, radiating only a calm confidence. All the romance had been carved from her like baby fat, making her strong, making her whole. Her description of the trees echoed through the air between us, plain poetry that could have graced the pages of any number of pastoral novels, and I realized how beautiful she was, and how insignificant I’d become to her.
“So this is it? It doesn’t matter what I want?”
“You’ll have to make your own choice. Whether you want to stay with me or not.”
“How am I with you now? We don’t talk to each other. We haven’t had sex since last fall. Christ, what happened to us, Mary?”
She was quiet for a minute, to the point where I thought she’d retreated into her silence again, but then she drew a breath and made a quiet admission.
“I think it was easier to be angry with you because you hated it here than be angry with myself because I hated the reason we were here.”
Before I could reply, Elsa shuffled into the kitchen, coughing weakly and asking about dinner. We went through the motions. I helped Elsa to her chair and Mary served something from the crockpot that I ate without tasting. By the time I went upstairs to stare out our bedroom window at the chicken barn, any ire I’d harbored toward Mary had turned inside out. Her honesty was contagious. I’d always assumed I was a good person—eating right, running, living consciously, whatever the fuck that meant—when the exact opposite was true. I was the guy who cheated on his wife while she took care of her dying mother. I was absolute slime.