The Crane Wife Read online

  “Horseshoes,” Doug Bush tells me, “is the manliest sport because you never have to put your beer down to play it.”

  Doug Bush sounds like a robot when he tells me this because he had throat cancer from smoking and his vocal cords have been replaced with a box he has to press with one finger to speak.

  Doug Bush pushes his button and tells me, “I could have been your father.”

  XIII | GEODE MAN, 1970

  When my father drove three hours north to my mother’s all-girls’ college in upstate New York, he did not complain about the distance or the cold. They went to a bar called the Tin & Lint, where my father drank Schlitz and my mother drank gin rickeys. They went to the racetrack and bet on horses, my father paying and my mother favoring the dapple grays, no matter what their odds. But if their romance, and my existence, hinges upon a single moment, the geode is it.

  “Where are we going?” my mother asked.

  “The parking lot,” my father said. “I have a present for you.”

  Up in the dorms, my mother’s friends spied from the windows.

  He hefted something from the trunk of his car. A rock the size of a small melon.

  “Thanks for the rock,” my mother said.

  “It’s a geode,” my father said. “It has crystals inside.” He took a hammer from the trunk and handed it to my mother.

  “What color are the crystals?” my mother asked.

  “I don’t know,” my father said. “They could be blue, or purple, or brown, or gray. We have to crack it open to find out.”

  “You crack it,” my mother said. “And I sure hope those crystals aren’t mud brown.”

  (The thing you have to understand about my mother is this: she meant it.)

  My father swung. The rock split. My mother inspected.

  Amethyst crystals.

  She kissed my father and they went to the bar.

  Hours later, as he walked her back to the dormitory, they heard giggling from the third floor. Girls hung from the windows.

  “Geode Man!” they called. “Come back and give us a rock, Geode Man.”

  The geode sits in my parents’ living room.

  It frightens me. The rock. The story. Because I wonder: If those crystals had been any other color, would I have made it into this world at all?

  XIV | KNIVES, 2002

  A tarot reader comes to the house and lays cards for my sister and me. She tells my sister that she will marry a man who works with knives.

  My sister thinks: a doctor.

  I think: a butcher.

  We resolve to be on the lookout for handsome chefs.

  “What about me?” I ask. “Who am I going to wind up with?”

  “I see a plane,” the reader says. “I see you going far away from here.”

  “What am I supposed to do with that?” I say.

  XV | WHAT WE’RE IN FOR, 1950 & 1973

  My grandfather got married when he was seventeen—so young he needed his mother to sign the marriage certificate for him. My mother married my father a month after her college graduation. I’m sure it’s hard to marry young and synchronize your growing up with another person’s. But I imagine it is easier, too.

  It is amazing that those of us who do not find love young muster the strength to try again—years of history clattering behind us like so many tin cans dragged behind a wedding sedan.

  XVI | NEWPORTS, 2003

  I worked as a waitress at a tiny restaurant where I made almost no money. The kitchen staff called me “The Russian” because my handwriting was so bad they assumed it was Cyrillic. The chef was thirty-eight and I was nineteen but I didn’t care because he was wonderful and I had fantasies of his following me into the walk-in freezer and untangling me from my apron and fucking me against the bags of frozen shrimp and tortellini. This never happened. But I did try.

  By “try,” I mean I became convinced that if only I could go out on smoke break with the other waiters and the chef, I would get to know him, and despite the fact I never spoke, he would intuit that I was pining for him to do this.

  So one day I showed up with a pack.

  “You smoke?” the chef said.

  “Since forever,” I said.

  I lit my first cigarette. They were Newport menthols.

  Ten years after my first cigarette, I stopped the way I started: for a boy.

  I texted an old smoking friend:

  I QUIT. FOR A BOY. PREDICTABLY.

  She texted back:

  THE ONLY THING YOU SHOULD EVER QUIT FOR A BOY IS SEX WITH OTHER PEOPLE.

  XVII | GUYS AND DOLLS, 2004

  I go to college and join a theater troupe, which troubles my mother. It is Christmas break, and we are sitting on the couch in our living room.

  “Never date a man who knows more show tunes than you,” my mother says.

  My father, in the next room, hears this. He enters the living room, stage right, doing the Charleston.

  “I got the horse right here!” he sings. “The name is Paul Revere!”

  He Charlestons out of the room, stage left.

  “I’m serious,” my mother says.

  My father reenters, somehow, stage right again, singing:

  “Getting to know you! Getting to know all about you!”

  XVIII | THE FIXER, 1999

  My uncle Randall, my mother’s brother, is a journalist. In the late nineties he was traveling through the Balkans to cover the problematically unserious prosecution of Serbian war criminals. He wanted to go undercover to interview a man who was known to have committed numerous rapes and murders, and who was living, quite openly, in a small Bosnian village with a personal militia for protection. Every local fixer told him this was a batshit-crazy, terrible, likely lethal idea and turned him down. Then, one day, someone said:

  “Have you talked to Goca Igrić? I think she’s who you’re looking for.”

  Goca is also a journalist. She is Serb and chain-smokes Marlboro Reds and drinks several pots of Turkish coffee a day and was, at the time, under threat of death from all manner of political and criminal organizations after spending the war years defiantly speaking out against Slobodan Milošević.

  I once asked my uncle when he fell in love with Goca.

  Though they didn’t start dating till ages later, he said perhaps it was that first time they met, in a café, when he told her what he wanted to do and asked her to be his fixer. He said Goca paused after he’d described his batshit-crazy, terrible, likely lethal idea. She exhaled all the smoke from her lungs and said, “I don’t think I can not do this.”

  “Maybe that was when I knew,” my uncle said.

  It was the first thing my family ever taught me about love that felt as honest as blood. I can’t not do this.

  XIX | LITERACY, 2004

  Stanley was a wonderful actor and liked to read aloud and once, when things were already almost over, he read to me from The Iliad.

  He’d been reading for fifteen minutes when I suddenly understood that sometimes people are not so much in love as they are in need of an audience. I was a backstage person who sewed and welded and toggled light boards and perhaps this is why I was slow to understand this—but once I did, I began disappearing myself. A good backstage person. A good woman.

  It was not Stanley’s fault I thought this was what I was meant to do. It was years of family stories that hid the ways women knew in their blood what was wrong or right. Hid truth behind the scrim of romance or, worse, fate.

  I disappeared myself the way you slowly ease the light-board controls. Down and down, so the spots dim, and fade to black, and then go out completely.

  XX | COLOR-BLIND, 2003

  My sister, Leslie, commits the greatest act of love I’ve ever seen.

  She had been seeing Doug for some time when she found out he was color-
blind.

  My sister lost her shit because all her perfectly coordinated outfits were ruined. My sister takes her outfits very seriously.

  “The way you see me,” Leslie told Doug, “I clash. I look terrible.”

  “You’re beautiful,” Doug told her.

  But for my sister’s reds to become greens was unacceptable. She hated green.

  The next time I saw her, Leslie was wearing a green sweater. She was wearing it with a navy skirt.

  “Nice sweater,” I said.

  “It’s atrocious,” Leslie said.

  “Then why are you wearing it?”

  “Because to Doug this looks like navy and red,” she said. “And nautical colors are really in right now.”

  XXI | THE BLACK CAT, 2006

  A gang of girls was going to the Black Cat for Brit Pop Night so we could dance to The Smiths and the Sex Pistols and smoke and wear too much eyeliner and not give a shit about the boys or the fact that in another few months most of us would be graduated and adrift. I was going because I wanted to dance but maybe also because of a tall girl named Maggie, who wore big glasses and button-down shirts with the sleeves rolled up in a let’s-get-down-to-business manner that filled me with longing. In our theater meetings, Maggie took copious notes like I took copious notes, and she always seemed to be looking up from those notes to stare at me at the precise moment that I was looking up to stare at her.

  But then we didn’t make it to the Black Cat, because there was a snowstorm.

  (Eventually, we would kiss. Eventually, we would go to bed together. Eventually, I would fail to say bisexual, would fail to say queer, would fail to speak the truth and come out the way I should have, would fail her. Eventually, I’ll tell you this whole story.)

  We were so disappointed by the snow. The canceled plans. And so we all went to the same tired party we’d been trying to avoid and went through the motions of having a good time.

  I went out on the balcony to smoke and watch the snow come down. There was a small crush of people out there. I spotted Maggie. She was not wearing glasses. She was wearing a black tank top. She waved at me from across the balcony. I waved back. Then we stared at each other like we did in meetings and she lifted up her shirt a little. On her stomach, she’d written, in red lipstick

  I’D RATHER

  BE

  AT

  THE BLACK CAT

  XXII | ASHOKAN FAREWELL, 2007

  A friend of mine was working on one of those farms where he dressed in old-timey clothes and wire-rimmed glasses and pretended to be a tinsmith, a banjo player, a man from 1901, for tourists, who loved that sort of thing. But he was actually wearing the clothes, and smithing the tin, and playing the banjo, so where the performance ended was hard to tell.

  I went to visit him. “I’m going to introduce you to Frank,” my friend said.

  Frank was a short-order cook who chain-smoked and had hair that fell in actual fucking ringlets and lived at the farm. But the thing was, there was also a donkey named Frank on the farm, so when my friend brought me to meet “Frank” I wasn’t prepared because I’d been anticipating meeting a donkey, and then here was this man with actual fucking ringlets.

  One thing led to another.

  Frank led me downstairs and as he took off my shirt I said, “Wait!”

  I’d spotted a giant sepia photograph of two people holding a baby, framed over the fireplace, and I asked who those people were, because they were beautiful.

  He said that they were his parents, and that the baby was him, but that when his parents got divorced his parents hated each other so much that neither of them could stand to look at the picture anymore, and were going throw it away, so he took it.

  I put my shirt back on, because maybe everything just winds up terrible in the end and there’s no point at all and we couldn’t possibly fuck with all that tragedy watching over us, could we?

  Frank took my shirt back off, but not unkindly.

  XXIII | HOPE, 2008

  My relationship with Bob lasted a full year longer than it should have because Barack Obama was running for president and had so raised our expectations of what redemptive things were possible that we thought perhaps he could save us from the petty, insidious ways we’d been hurting each other. We, too, could change.

  Thanks, Obama.

  When I left Bob, he wrote a short story about it and gave it to our writing workshop. In the story, he was a rock star and I was a baker. In the story, he’d invented that I’d been infected with chlamydia by my first boyfriend and had to have my ovaries removed and was now barren. In the story, I was called Zoë and screamed at the rock star in the middle of the street. Screamed things I’d actually screamed in the middle of the street the week before.

  “This dialogue is so alive,” the teacher said. “A real breakthrough in your work.”

  “But do you have your ovaries?” my friends asked.

  XXIV | BENDER, 2009

  Al invited me out to Long Island in the middle of winter because I had never had a 7-Eleven Slurpee before. This was absurd, but I said yes, because of how he asked, formally:

  “Would you care to join me on Long Island this coming Saturday at two for a Slurpee and perhaps a walk on the beach?”

  I took the train two hours past places with names like Wantagh and Islip. In the station bathroom I applied lipstick and the woman next to me, whose boobs were all but out of her shirt, made eye contact in the mirror and said, “Honey, you don’t need that.” Al picked me up and we got Slurpees and we drank them on the beach in our winter coats.

  Our parents were different but had shaped us the same way. I think we were afraid of becoming them. I think we were afraid that what we found in each other was more than we deserved.

  On the beach that first day, Al had a flask of whiskey. He asked me if I’d like some. I said yes.

  What he actually said was: “Have you ever been on a bender?”

  What I actually said was: “I have always wanted to go on a bender.”

  We bent for four good years.

  XXV | “THE IVY CROWN,” 1979

  “What was that poem you read at your wedding?” I ask my mother. “That sappy Rilke poem?”

  “It was not a sappy Rilke poem,” my mother says. “It was William Carlos Williams and your grandfather cried when he read it.”

  “What was it called?”

  “I can’t remember the title but it was something about ‘Love is cruelty,’ blah blah blah.”

  “Love is cruelty?” I say.

  My mother says, “It’s a good poem.”

  Sure

  love is cruel

  and selfish

  and totally obtuse—

  …

  But…

  …

  we have,

  no matter how,

  by our wills survived.

  …

  We will it so

  and so it is

  past all accident.

  XXVI | REMEMBER THE WILSONVILLE BEE MASSACRE, 2013

  I hopped a plane to Oregon after seeing Arlo, an old boyfriend, and deciding we were still in love, and meant to be married. We thought perhaps I should forget my plans of getting a PhD in Florida and move to Oregon instead.

  We drove three hours to the coast to sit on the dunes and stare at the Pacific, a romantic evening, but then there were these helicopters shining their searchlights down on the waves. We covered our ears as we watched the lights truck over the water’s surface, searching for a body.

  I flew home, confused. I tackled my friend Cora to the bed and cried on her and said: “I love him but I’m not in love with him! But maybe we should just get married anyway! Maybe I should move to Oregon! Maybe this is just what true love feels like!”

  Cora is a good friend, and so
she did not point out that I had just used the words “true love.”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “You’re going to shut up and then you’re going to move to Florida, where you know no one, just like you planned. And sometimes you’ll call me and tell me about it. And this will be good.”

  “But—” I said.

  “Shush,” she said. “Shut up now, and everything will be fine.”

  On my last day in Oregon, on our way to the airport, we’d driven past a crowd of people dressed like honeybees, yelling. The people in the bee suits were protesting a pesticide sold at the local hardware store that was damaging to bees. We were both so tired by then. We were failing but we were hopeful and we didn’t know what would happen once I got on that plane so we were primed for hysterics when we saw one bee-man who was holding a sign that read:

  REMEMBER THE WILSONVILLE BEE MASSACRE!

  It is easy for some massacres to seem small in hindsight. For all the blood spilled to seem less in memory. But there are others that go around with signs and shout at you every day of your life, pointing, Look at all this blood. Just look at it. There are some massacres you make yourself.

  We looked at each other and we asked: “Will you remember?”

  We said: “How could we ever forget the Wilsonville Bee Massacre?”

  XXVII | CYCLICAL, 2013

  I am in a largely deserted mall in Tallahassee, Florida, where, until a few weeks ago, I’d known no one. I am about to see a movie with a group of new friends, including Nick, a man I think I like, and to whom I am trying not to pay an obvious amount of attention.

  I walk past the dead mall’s many blanked-out storefronts, and then I see them, a ways off, these new, kind people. They are waiting for me, but before I can reach them, my sister calls me on the phone, crying.

  “What’s wrong?” I say.

  It’s her boyfriend, she says. She loves him but she’s not in love with him.

  Leslie says: “But maybe this is just it. Maybe this is all love ever feels like and I’ll never feel anything more than this.”

  I don’t cry when she says this, even though my sister is like a limb of my own body and when she is unhappy, I feel it keenly. I do not cry, even though I feel the family blood-sadness rising within me, whispering about the futility of everything. Because it seems unfair that I should have made these very same mistakes but not spared her them. That everything that has happened before, to our family and our friends and even to ourselves, is so heavy to carry, and yet is in no way a protection against our future stupidity and pain. Is in no way a promise that we will not make these mistakes again.