The Crane Wife Read online

  ALSO BY CJ HAUSER

  Family of Origin

  The From-Aways

  Copyright © 2022 by CJ Hauser

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to New Directions Publishing Corp. for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Tell Them No” from Be With by Forrest Gander, copyright © 1995, 2010, 2012, 2013, 2015, 2017, 2018 by Forrest Gander. Excerpt from “The Ivy Crown” from The Collected Poems: Volume II, 1939–1962 by William Carlos Williams, copyright © 1953 by William Carlos Williams. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

  Several pieces originally appeared in the following publications: Electric Literature: “The Man Behind the Curtain” (December 12, 2019) The Guardian: “This Is Small Talk Purgatory: What Tinder Taught Me about Love” (December 7, 2019)

  Lit Hub: “My Niece Is Probably the Reincarnation of Shirley Jackson: CJ Hauser on Motherhood and The Haunting of Hill House” (July 2019) The Paris Review: “The Crane Wife” (July 2019); “The Second Mrs. de Winter” (October 13, 2020)

  Slice Magazine: “The Mechanicals” (Winter 2014)

  Tin House: “Blood: Twenty-six Love Stories from Life” (Winter 2016)

  Cover illustration by Megan Galante

  Cover design by Emily Mahon

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Hauser, CJ. author.

  Title: The crane wife : a memoir in essays / CJ Hauser.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Doubleday, [2022]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021043397 | ISBN 9780385547079 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780385547109 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCGFT: Essays.

  Classification: LCC PS3608.A8697 C73 2022 | DDC 814/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021043397

  Ebook ISBN 9780385547109

  a_prh_6.0_140427249_c1_r0

  in gratitude for

  the family we are given

  the families we are choosing

  & ideas of home with room enough for both

  Stumbling again

  dumbly

  home into the

  line of my

  own questioning.

  —FORREST GANDER, “TELL THEM No”

  CONTENTS

  I

  Blood: Twenty-Seven Love Stories

  Act One: The Mechanicals

  Hepburn Qua Hepburn

  The Man Behind the Curtain

  The Crane Wife

  II

  Kind of Deep Blue

  Act Two: The Fantasticks

  The Lady with the Lamp

  Mulder, It’s Me

  III

  Nights We Didn’t

  Act Three: Dulcinea Quits

  The Second Mrs. de Winter

  The Two-Thousand-Pound Bee

  IV

  Unwalling Jackson’s Castle

  The Fox Farm

  Uncoupling

  Siberian Watermelon

  » For readers who would like content warnings, an annotated Table of Contents appears on this page

  I

  …sometimes not even our mouths belong to us. Listen, in the early 1920s, women were paid to paint radium onto watch dials so that men wouldn’t have to ask

  the time in dark alleys. They were told it was safe, told to lick their brushes into sharp points. These women painted their nails, their faces, and judged

  whose skin shined brightest. They coated their teeth so their boyfriends could see their bites with the lights turned down. The miracle here

  is not that these women swallowed light. It’s that, when their skin dissolved and their jaws fell off, the Radium Corporation claimed they all died

  from syphilis. It’s that you’re telling me about the dull slivers of dead saints, while these women are glowing beneath our feet.

  —PAIGE LEWIS, “THE MOMENT I SAW A PELICAN DEVOUR”

  Blood

  TWENTY-SEVEN LOVE STORIES

  I | PUT YOUR BOOTS ON, 1918

  Cap Joyce was a cowboy who ran an Arizona dude ranch called the Spur Cross because acting like a cowboy, for tourists, was more lucrative than the actual herding of cattle. He had a trick horse named Patches that could bow, roll over, and nod the answers to math questions. Sometimes Cap stood on Patches’s back and played guitar. Then the Great War came. He sold Patches and left his wife in charge of the ranch and went off to fight in France, where he was mustard-gassed, but survived, and was heavily be-medaled for the trouble. He was my great-grandfather.

  Cap had been home a week when the ranch hands took him aside and said that his wife had been carrying on with the foreman. They wouldn’t have mentioned it, the ranch hands said, except they didn’t seem to be stopping.

  Cap said, “Where is he?”

  Cap went to the bunks. The foreman was dressing.

  “You fuck my wife?” Cap said.

  The man froze. “Yes,” he said.

  Cap said, “Put your boots on.”

  The foreman put on his boots.

  Cap shot him dead. He did not bleed much, they say.

  II | UNION MAID, 1984

  My first kiss was a communist. His name was Jack. He was part of a kids’ playgroup in New York City. All the mothers were part of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union except for mine. Her involvement remains a mystery.

  In the playgroup, the babies crawled over the carpet and the mothers shared pots of coffee and by and large the babies were naked and if they were not naked they were wearing overalls. Good communist babies wear overalls.

  Here are some of the things that I wore: a tiny pair of lederhosen (Germany), a real silk kimono with a red bird stitched on the breast (Japan), a rabbit-fur coat with wood fasteners (Russia). My grandparents had been traveling and always sent me, the first grandchild, souvenirs.

  There is a picture of this first kiss. Jack, in overalls, is on hands and knees, long black hair in ringlets. I am practically bald, bending toward him, hands planted on the rug. I am wearing a pink velveteen jacket (Paris).

  A week later the union ladies said: “You can’t keep coming if you dress her like that.” The week after, my mother brought me to the group in the rabbit-fur coat, not thinking the union ladies were serious. They were.

  III | THE LAND OFFICE, 1921

  When Cap got out of prison he went to the land office with a mind to start a new ranch in Wyoming. There was a woman at the front desk, a secretary. Her name was Robbie Baker.

  “Can I help you?” she said.

  “I’m going to marry you,” Cap said. “And I need some land.”

  That was my great-grandmother.

  IV | BEESTING, 1989

  Brian Katrumbus could run faster than any boy in kindergarten and had hair like corn silk. It was Valentine’s Day. A week earlier, when I’d been stung by a bee while daydreaming out the window and then cried quietly, not knowing what to do, it was Brian Katrumbus who told the teacher that something was wrong with me. He poked the teacher and said, “Something is wrong with her.”

  I’d picked out a very special valentine for Brian Katrumbus. I wore a Band-Aid over my small wound the day I watched him open his envelopes, waiting to see how he would receive my card.
But Brian Katrumbus had a system. He ripped open each envelope, and then shook it, so whatever candy was inside tumbled out onto his carpet square.

  Then he tossed the valentine away. Like shucking peas.

  V | TRADES, 1932

  Cap and Robbie married. They spent the Depression living out of a car with their two sons. One of these sons was my grandfather Eddie. Cap drove across the country, trading with Native peoples. He offered ad space for their “trading posts” in his “wild west” magazine in exchange for the tourist-intended crafts—headdresses, bows, and beads. Cap later sold these crafts, or traded them for food. Fake “Indian” crafts. Fake “cowboy” magazines.

  “What did Robbie think about all this?” I ask. “Where is the woman in this story?”

  “Robbie stuck with him the whole time,” my family says.

  A job came through for Cap, in New York.

  Cap hated the city, the job. He drank.

  (This is a family tradition that filters through the generations. We hate things, so we drink. We love things, so we drink. We have bad luck, so we drink. We fear good luck, so we drink. It has to do with a kind of sadness that is blood-born. My mother keeps a scrap of paper taped to her diary, a quote from Yeats that reads: “Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy,” and the first time I read that line it hummed over my mind like a diviner’s stick.)

  Cap almost landed a role in a cowboy movie, but was beat out for the part by Tom Mix.

  Cap was disappointed. He drank.

  “But about Robbie,” I say. “Did she want Cap to be an actor?”

  “Still, Robbie stuck,” my family says.

  I want to learn from what went wrong in the past but sometimes it seems everything worth knowing has been redacted. As if ignorance is the only thing that allows each successive generation to tumble into love, however briefly, and spawn the next.

  VI | ALL CACTI ARE SUCCULENTS BUT NOT ALL SUCCULENTS ARE CACTI, 1994

  My parents go on vacation to Arizona. They bring back souvenir cacti for my sister, Leslie, and me. Little furry stumps, potted in gravel.

  Within a month, both our cacti are dead.

  My sister’s cactus is desiccated and shrunken. Dead of thirst.

  Mine is slumped over, rotten through. I have overwatered and flooded the roots.

  Our parents exchange a look. As if they know already that love will not be easy for us. That we are differently but equally screwed.

  VII | AS SURE AS THESE STONES, 1948

  My grandparents met in the theater.

  Cap failed to become an actor, but years later his teenage son, my grandfather Eddie, would play the role of “crippled boy healed by a miracle” in a play at the Blackfriars Guild. Maureen Jarry was the props mistress. She was older than he was. We still don’t know by how much. She refuses to say. Eddie lied about his age, of course. He told her he was twenty. Maureen told him to buzz off. At the time she was dating the lead actor—older, and quite successful.

  My grandfather has always been a persistent son of a bitch.

  He worked on my grandmother for weeks.

  Nothing.

  Then this happened:

  One of the props for the play was a handful of gravel Maureen gathered from the empty lot behind the theater each night. In the final scene of the play the lead actor’s character held out the gravel and said, “As sure as these stones do fall to the ground, I heal thee,” and he would turn over his hand and the stones would fall and by this miracle my grandfather’s character could walk again. But one winter night, my grandmother gathered what she thought was gravel from the back lot but was actually, as my grandfather enthusiastically describes it, “frozen dog turds.”

  And so, hours later, when the older actor spoke his line and turned his hand over, no stones fell, and he found himself instead with a handful of recently thawed dog shit.

  “I am healed!” my grandfather called out, all the same. He danced around the stage without his crutches. “Oh, I am healed!”

  VIII | CORN SYRUP, 1997

  My middle school put on Macbeth. Danny played the second murderer.

  The second murderer was my first proper kiss.

  I was the director’s assistant and liked skulking backstage in all black and carrying a clipboard. It was opening night. Danny ran offstage after killing Banquo. He found me in the dark, and we whispered. It had gone well. He was triumphant. He was covered in red corn-syrup blood.

  “I want to hug you, but—” he said.

  “Hug me,” I said.

  Then I was covered in fake blood. This is what love is like. My best friend started dating his best friend and we would all talk on the phone at night. It was an elaborate process, getting all four of us on the line, and once we did, we were often confused about who was who.

  “You’re so funny,” I would say, to who I thought was Danny.

  “That wasn’t me,” he would say.

  After these conversations, my best friend and I would call each other directly. Which one said he liked Nirvana? Which one wanted to be a cook? Whose mother could drive us to the movies? We were never sure.

  IX | BLOOD, 1967

  My mother has told me a hundred times about the boy who sold his blood to buy her flowers. “He had a motorcycle,” she says. “He had no money, but he wanted to take me on a date so he went out and sold pints of his blood so he could do it.”

  Pints.

  “He was woozy at dinner,” she says. “He couldn’t eat at all. He seemed like he was going to faint. But he’d bought me flowers. Lilies. Isn’t that romantic?”

  This story bothers me. It intrudes upon my father, and that’s part of it, but it’s also the way my mother wields those flowers as some false barometer of love.

  As if her generation were worthy of blood and mine only backstage corn syrup.

  My mother has asked me on every Valentine’s Day since I was fourteen, “Did he buy you flowers?”

  “I told him not to,” I say.

  “Why would you do that?” she says. “What kind of standards are you setting?”

  “I don’t want that kind of relationship,” I say. “I don’t want flowers.”

  I want to say: Stop pretending that the point is the lilies and not the blood.

  X | SCRABBLE CHAMPION, 2000

  The first time I slept with the boy, I thought I would bleed because that’s what virgins do, but there was nothing on the sheets. No red banner for him to hang out the window or whatever grand gesture was meant to make you feel how important a moment it was. I had grown up riding horses. The moment had passed years before without my knowing it.

  We’d thought his mother would be out all afternoon but she came home early and knocked on his door in the middle of it.

  “What are you doing in there?” she said through the door, not because she was concerned but because she was the sort of woman who liked company.

  “Playing Scrabble,” the boy said.

  “Who’s winning?” she said.

  “Both of us,” he said.

  XI | NOTHING WILL COME OF IT, 1969

  My mother, Brenda, Boo for short, was going on a blind date, in a group, with a man named Doug Bush. But Doug Bush got sick, and my mother’s friend wouldn’t come unless Boo had a date, too. So the man who is now my uncle Paul enlisted his little brother, Tom, my dad, to stand in.

  “It wasn’t a date,” my mother says, which is news to me.

  It’s news to my dad, too.

  “What do you mean it wasn’t a date?” he says. “It was our first date—of course it was a date.”

  My father remembers that at dinner they ran into some friends, and he was talking to one of the guys about the little green Triumph my father had recently bought from him on the cheap. About how it kept breaking down and he
was trying to fix it.

  He remembers my mother saying something like: “How typically male to be talking about your cars.”

  He remembers saying back: “How typically female to complain about car talk.”

  “There was banter,” my father says.

  My mother remembers almost nothing except that when she was dropped home that night by my uncle Paul…

  “By me!” my father says.

  “Was it you?” Boo says. Either way, when she was dropped home, my grandmother Maureen asked her how it went, and she said: “Nothing will ever come of it. He’s down at school in DC.”

  “The fact that you said that shows that it was a date,” my father says.

  “I remember what I wore.”

  “Of course you do,” I say. “Of course that’s what you remember.”

  “Do you remember?” she asks my father.

  My father is a practical man. My father keeps T-shirts from the seventies in his active rotation.

  “It was a blue dress,” he says. “With a collar, and a belt like this.” He mimes a kind of cinching.

  “Yes,” says Boo. “My mother made that dress.”

  Why has she redacted what she felt that night but kept the dress? Why is the very thing that is missing here the bit I most need to know?

  A year after this maybe-first-date my father would graduate and my mother would be at college and my father would burn out his Triumph going to see her so many times. It would literally explode on the side of the highway.

  XII | THE MANLIEST SPORT, 2001

  I am at a friends-and-family picnic when I meet Doug Bush, the man who was meant to be on that blind date with my mother. I am sixteen and have been trying to flirt with the only boy at this picnic who I can say with absolute certainty is not related to me: the hired fiddler, playing in the barn. When this proves unsuccessful, I wind up drinking beers and playing horseshoes with Doug Bush.