My Monticello(6)
Work double shifts weekends at the rural country club on the outskirts of your Blue Ridge college town. The steep, winding bike rides make you feel like you’ve hardly left the place that reared you. Shuttle trays to large round tables: gin and tonics, jumbo shrimp cocktails, chicken cordon bleus. Ancient couples shift in three-piece suits and gowns glinting with costume jewelry. All that pomp against your black V-neck sweaters and second-skin leggings, your hair always coming undone around your face. The men ogle your cleavage. A few pinch your bottom, saying, Smile, why don’t you? Watch how, as soon as their wives turn away, they circle back to lay more money on your table. Save every goddamn penny and buy a plane ticket to Europe.
Ride the trains from Firenze to Prague, from Prague to Munich. Tell yourself, I am here, I am here, like a song. Tell yourself here are History and Culture and Power. Here are the old writers who wrote books that you believe saved you. Here you are with your notebook outside a café: If you hold your mouth right, you feel like you nearly belong. Never mind that the cobblestones underfoot recall your steep and rutted driveway, that the hostel’s duvets summon Momma’s mildewed quilts. Bolt upright in the sleeping carriage at the knock in the night as your train crosses yet another border. Curt foreign voices demand, Passaporte! Hand over your full and legal name.
Outside a discotheque in Paris, lean into a striking dark-haired man. He whispers your chosen name to you, his accent making it new again. When he asks where you’re from, list a string of cities you hope to soon visit. Tell him London. Tell him Barcelona. Tell him Tangier. Hurry back to his place and allow him to take you—a satisfying shock like diving into spring water. Call out a strand of inelegant rrrrrrs followed by a sob of release.
Turn your head, catch the eye of another man, less beautiful, but an artist—a photographer—and from a good French family. Don’t go to bed with this second man right away. Stay with him in his family’s sprawling flat in the city, rooms framed by velvet curtains, arranged under dusty chandeliers. Stay with him well past your flight, forfeiting your final fall semester. Promise yourself you’ll go back and graduate in the spring.
When this man questions you about the States, answer him as if America is a dream you are still dreaming. Close your eyes and conjure vast open spaces and sleepy small towns. Summon cities for him, bar-lined streets, smoky stages raising men with skin as brown as your father’s, their bodies curled over snares or saxophones. Speak to this man in French of Art and Ambition, those foreign words rattling around in your neediest places. Flash him your crooked eyeteeth and hope he sees what you mean to show.
Marry this man in nine months’ time, a tiny, secular ceremony back at your parents’ home. The animals have been sold off or buried, but there’s still one near-level field. Tell yourself it’s only a handful of days, it makes sense that your husband-to-be needed to see this place. Don’t tremble inside those peeling-paint walls as you hear Father’s lone voice echo in the darkened hallway. Don’t startle when Momma lays a tattered family Bible in your hands. Silver photos chafe between yellowed pages, your own stark and shining maternal ancestors whose lives ended here where yours began.
Your parents look older than their years, their faces creased and furrowed. They refrain from using your new name but also hold the old one deep in their throats. Let the girl from Momma’s church scatter petals on the ground. Let Father march you down the grassy aisle, solemn in a dark suit and boots buffed to glossy. Feel how he clutches your powdery shoulder as if to share something through the press of his thumb. Your new husband seems to find all of it charming, even the new A&P in town, even Momma’s cola-soaked ham. As you walk with him along the muddy bank, he mimics the way your father says crick for creek.
Rent a place near DC, just outside the Beltway: A posh agency there wants to represent your husband’s work. Tell yourself it will be six months more in Virginia, a year at most. Your husband photographs looming constructions: bridges, fa?ades. He’s out the door before the light breaks to brilliance and he works through sunset when the day is nearly gold again.
Metro to Foggy Bottom, to Dupont Circle. Step through the automated doors, escalating up into swampy summer heat. Don’t bristle at the homeless woman near the exit, whose moony face reminds you of your mother, if Momma were dirt-lined and liberated. Don’t stare at your server at the teahouse, with her closely cropped hair and ebony skin, though her eyes hang on you for a moment too long.
Come winter, Metro to the National Mall emptied of tourists. There you are, a bright dot of a woman alone in a wide gray landscape. Peel off your red gloves, blow heat into your pinkened palms. Scrawl something you remember of your one time in Europe: a story—you hope—of a girl who got away.
Come spring, dredge yourself from a nightmare of sinking to find yourself unaccountably seasick. Your husband is away in Rome photographing famous ruins. Accept that this is your fault, after all these years of brutal care. You’ve been reckless in the ways you’ve wanted, as if there was no end to want. As if the hungry burden of your husband’s foreign body could free you from your own.
Motherhood presents itself as a dull ache at your center. Your husband sounds ecstatic on the phone: He’ll be home in five days, seven at the most. Hang up and call Momma, who gets to sobbing—from joy? From grief? Eat unrolled Ho Hos and fried thick-cut bologna. Don’t ask yourself, Where am I headed now?
Abandon yourself to wrenching labor, break open and birth a son. Eighteen months later carry a girl, a daughter. Choose your son’s name, a clever French one, but let your husband name the girl. It sounds like a fine name, the way he first says it, though your daughter soon plucks a nickname from it, perky and provincial. Your husband’s career continues to lift, his vivid seascapes lining gallery walls. While his agency flies him all over the world, you are tasked to stay behind and raise the children. Dig your nails deep into your thighs each night but never let the inky bruises show.