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After This, Everything Else is Going
1
We agreed on this project together, though not, I know, for the same reasons. I don't know what Tom's reasons were. At the library book sale, I found a book published in 1921 called Simple Living. I bought it because of the cover—an art deco design on the front; an oil lamp in one corner and a vine woven through the title. The text and images were engraved into the cover. Inside, the paper, with its wide margins and clear, simple script, was creamy and fresh as linen. I started reading it, just to see. It was strange how relevant it seemed.
I thought getting rid of material things would take away whatever it was that stopped me from feeling anything. Feeling things in the way I was supposed to, the way it seems everyone else is able to feel. But I didn't present it to Tom like this. We talked about how living more simply would let us be closer, to each other, to what we really wanted out of life. You want to start with the big things of course: jobs, the house, the pace at which everything passes you by, so that you think Thursday is Tuesday, and you are amazed that it has already been a month since you forgot your sister-in-law's birthday. But simplifying isn't easy. I forgot that it involves everyone.
First, we emptied out the garage, then donated everything from the Public Storage cubicle to the Salvation Army.
Tom's boss was delighted with our decision. He let Tom go. Having less money, a whole lot less money, makes simplifying easier.
Tom started work with an old college friend, landscaping. He started shoveling snow in January, just temporarily, and then worked his way through all the seasons into August. He joked about wasting his Ivy League education on mulching and digging out dandelions, but I could see he enjoyed it. He'd never had so much time to think. When we were in college, he'd told me that was all he ever wanted to do: think, and care for me forever. Which I knew, at the time, was supposed to sound romantic, but then, and now, sent a shiver down my spine.
For my part, I started working four ten-hour days, and then only three days when the company began making cutbacks. It's cheaper for them to overwork me as a part-timer than to offer all those perks that come with full-time. I'm frazzled and underappreciated at work, but who isn't? At least no one can call me at home anymore.
Living simply is fun at first. Tom thought it was exciting when we realized we would have to sell the loft. "It's almost like a sacrifice," he joked. "We are persecuted yuppies." And then he slumped down off the couch he was sitting on, clutching the imaginary knife impaled in his heart.
I had always hated the place anyway. We had so much open space that our furniture looked like undersized, cheap sculpture. The three Christmases we'd spent there made the 8-foot tree look like a potted plant. None of our friends visited because they stayed in their own lofts with their own miniature furniture. We spent more money on our heating bills than Tom's parents spent on their 1973 mortgage.
We sold the Jetta right away because Tom wouldn't, couldn't give up his truck. "I might need it for hauling stuff," he argued. We talked as he leaned against the headboard, just in his boxers, surrounded by piles of paperwork, sorting through things to throw away. He'd started showing ropey, long muscles instead of the slightly puffy ones that he'd had before from running on a treadmill at Bally's.
"You would never get that truck dirty," I reasoned. I was dragging boxes of clothes out from the back of my closet. My mother had always insisted I keep every dress from every dance I'd ever gone to since I was six years old. I finally had a perfectly valid reason for throwing them all out.
"I'm changing," he said. "I'm all about utility now."
"Simplifying isn't about utility," I said. "That makes it sound…" I searched for a word. I decided on "Victorian." I noticed a bruise on Tom's outer thigh. "What's that from?" I stepped over to the bed and leaned over toward my husband. I ran my finger around the outer circle of yellow. It was a bruise several days old, thick with blood in the middle, and about the size of a quarter.
"Oh, something I ran into," he said and kept sorting papers into different piles. "I don't remember. I can't keep track."
"What do you mean?" I crawled up on the bed completely and began looking over his legs, up the side of his torso, around his back. He had spotty bruises, little cuts, and long snaking red welts with jagged edges that appeared and disappeared, as if they had been dropped randomly on him.
"It's just part of working," he shrugged and gave me a wide grin. I felt guilty, not because he had the marks, they weren't serious or important, but I felt guilty I'd not noticed them before.
"I suppose the truck might be practical," I said. I stood up and went back to sorting through ugly dresses.
As I look back on it, it seems like that conversation built a little wall between us.
2
My mother started to call and tease me about my "slacker" husband. She hears these words on cable and then tries to use them to relate to her eighth-grade students. I could hear the worry in her voice. "He's still mowing lawns?" she'd say. Then she would catch herself, "He must have a nice tan though."
"He's making good money," I assured her. He wasn't. We were getting desperate to sell our place to preserve this carefully crafted thing we called our "credit report."
My mother held two opinions that she couldn't reconcile about us, I told Tom. She wanted us to be successful, which meant having a well-behaved house and well-maintained children on the one hand. On the other hand, she's constantly asking if we were happy. "How do I make her see that the two may not go together?" I asked him.
"Did you say 'well-maintained children'?" he responded. How the man could constantly fix on my syntactic mistakes while missing the bigger point amazed me.
"Maybe," I said, "that's not the point."
"How many coats of paint does a baby require?" he asked.
"Exactly why you are not fit to be a parent," I told him. "Everyone knows they need three."
I believe we deflected important things through humor.
3
After we got rid of the TV, we started playing board games. At first it was Monopoly, chess, Sorry, whatever was in the closet. Trivial Pursuit, we discovered, was no fun with two. We settled on Scrabble; it's good for two people, let us talk and play at the same time, and it was vaguely educational, so it made us feel good.
Tom knew all the words that had a "Q" but not a "U," and I knew dozens of two-letter words that had obscure scientific meanings. We tried playing with no 'E's or only with words from Star Wars. Of course, that was Tom's idea. We had endless quarrels about what word might or might not have been uttered in one of the movies until he brought home the scripts one day. He'd bought them, brand new.
I think it was a waste of money.
4
I began saving newspaper articles about disasters and would read them to Tom at night. Not just any disasters, because the world was full of them, only those that destroyed everything someone owned. Disasters that qualified were house fires, or floods, or random explosions, tornadoes, sinkholes—those that forced people to start all over without any clothes or furniture, no report cards or photographs, or unwanted wedding gifts stuffed into the back of closets. Tom thought it would be an amazing opportunity – to be a fully mature adult and define yourself with possessions that you chose, all on your own. To have only the clothes, paint, dishes, the new everything you chose.
I argued that it never happened that way. Most of the stories I found were about people with no insurance, or with jobs that would never let them just build from the ground up, just go to the store and choose whatever they wanted to surround themselves with. These people ended up with donated clothes, living in temporary apartments with furniture from the Salvation Army or the Red Cross. They had lost the ability to define themselves.
"But they have nothing they have to take care of," Tom said. "It's the ultimate in simplicity."
"But simplicity," I answered, making quotes in the air with my fingers just to annoy him, "isn't about not having stuff to care about. It's about being able to choose what you want to care for."
"So...?" he asked.
"So if someone burns everything, you've lost all control. It's the same as being controlled by having too much stuff. It's being controlled from the outside."
"So you have to have some stuff, and not other stuff, and not too much of anything?" He shifted his shoulders from side-to-side with each phrase.
"Maybe," I said. I wanted to pout. He's better at arguing than I was and I always felt like I backed myself into a corner.
"How do you know what's good stuff and what's bad stuff?"
"Tom," I put the newspaper down, "It's about being able to choose what you care about." He looked at me, like he was accusing me. "It's about not letting someone else tell you what to want."
"Or who," he said.
"What?" I answered too sharply.
"Who you care about. It's not always about things."
5
I stopped reading the stories to him. Instead, I made a scrapbook. When I was in junior high, I cut out every picture of Andrew McCarthy I could find and pasted them into an oversized book with newsprint pages. When I was at summer camp, my mother cleaned out my closet and threw it away, a crime I never forgave her for. For my new book, I bought a newsprint binder at the craft store.
I organized it into sections by type of disaster—fires, floods, freak accidents, wars—those were the things I was interested in. It's amazing how much of people's lives are controlled by these outside forces, by things which we have no control over. I had a vague feeling that I would organize all these small stories, these little narratives that seemed to have no pattern, and suddenly find something, like some kind of gestalt pattern. The only thing I found was that the poor tend to build houses in places prone to acts of God. I couldn't even decide if they did this because they were poor or they were poor because they did this.
It took a month to fill the book, then I left it on the dining room table until Tom noticed it. "Still doing this?" he asked. I'd just come in from grocery shopping. He was leaning on the table, flipping through the book. I put the bags on the counter.
"Oh that?" I said. "No, I'm done." I took the book from him and threw it in the garbage.
"OK," he said.
"Yep," I answered.
6
That same night, in bed, I squeezed as close to the wall as I could fit. Tom placed his hand on my stomach, just below my breasts. The tip of his thumb brushed against the bottom of my right breast every time I took a breath.
I placed my hand on the thickest part of his forearm, next to his elbow.
"Are you awake?" he asked.
I began crying because what else would I be.
7
Every night he came home, Tom smelled of grass and gasoline. I made him shower right away. He had to strip by the back door. I gave up trying to keep that area clear of those bits of grass and leaf and whatever else it was people put on their lawns to make them unnaturally green, to match what they see on television.
Tom accused me of being petulant when I said that, but then he claimed he was only joking. "Why do you have to take everything so seriously?" he asked. I didn't like the condescension in his voice and I told him so. "Excuse me for not meeting all your expectations," he said and stormed off to the bathroom in his socks.
I continued with dinner. I had become petulant. Maybe. I'm not sure because I was not even sure I knew what it meant to be "petulant."
"At least I'm not stinky," I said under my breath. My pettiness felt good, like placing something extra salty very carefully on my tongue. Just as I thought that, I cut the smallest finger on my left hand. The watery blood mingled easily with the tomato pulp on the cutting board. "Damn it, Tom," I said, "That hurts."
I walked into the bathroom to grab a Band-Aid. My husband was sitting, eyes straight ahead, in a pool of weakly colored brown water. Miniature oil slicks floated on the surface, throwing off their metallic rainbows. Small clumps of grass formed rafts and swirled around his body, powered by the mysterious currents of the water. "What are you doing?" I asked, forcing some laughter behind my words.
I startled him and he shook himself back. He'd been staring at the faucet, or somewhere behind it. "Nothing," he said. He turned his head to me and smiled. His face was still smudged with textured soil on his left cheek. I imagined him rolling around in the gardens of strangers to get so dirty. His smile was boyish and the word that came to mind was "fetching." I took a step over and tousled his hair. The ends were sun-bleached and stiff and dried out from heat and sweat. He had a bar of soap in his right hand and began to absently run it up and down his left arm, staring past the faucet again.
"What are you thinking about?" I asked, managing to squish the question into four syllables to hide my emotions.
He looked up at me and smiled again. "Just our life," he answered. The water lapped at his back and made wet, arched pyramids. "It's good," he said. I couldn't tell if it was a question or a statement. The water was slowly, slowly draining away. His bath had a leak. His knees began to stick up through the water. The head of his penis floated up between his legs. I could see the sharp line of white skin where his pants cut the sunshine from reaching his lower back. The tan line cut across a lumpy bone in his vertebrae. I'd never seen that bone before, the way it had a small indentation on its underside. It was an essential part of him.
"Well?" he said. I'd begun to stare at the faucet as well, my hand resting on top of his head.
"Yes, of course," I said. I leaned over and kissed him lightly where my hand was resting. He still smelled of grass and gasoline. "Your water is draining," I said.
"Yeah," he sighed, "I think I need some clean water."
I knelt beside the bathtub and took the bar of soap from his hand. He leaned forward and turned on the water, gurgling and hot. I forgot all about the small cut on my finger. I soaped his back.
I wondered if this was communicating.
8
I thought we were fighting more, but Tom disagreed. Sometimes I just wanted to give up. Giving up was the greatest form of simplicity, wasn't it? It meant lying down and letting life wash over you. I wondered if this was depression, or cynicism, or enlightenment.
I had conversations with myself too often; if it was good enough for Shakespeare…I reasoned. I argued with myself that if I was still fighting with Tom, I still cared because once you stopped caring, you just drifted away. You stopped talking altogether and you had another life separate from the other person. That's why we got married in the first place, so that our lives would never drift apart. I suppose you could see that as being chained to someone, like a prisoner, or being chained to them because the honest truth was, even if we didn't like to admit it, that if we weren't constantly reminded that we needed to think about someone else, all we would ever think about was ourselves.
That's really why I wanted us to live simply. To live simply meant, all those distractions, like clothes and work and noise, wouldn't take up all the time I would have to think about someone else, Tom. His otherness, and what it meant, to me, to him, to us.
At least that's what I had hoped. But now that I had all this time, my mind wandered, and I had conversations with myself about what I really wanted; what it was I really cared about. Then I stopped talking altogether. Simplicity became slipping into silence because conversation involved explaining something I never understood myself. If I had to explain, it meant I was not communicating very well. Everything I said was off from what I meant, and I could never find the right word, and I never will.
So, one night, last night or this night, Tom and I stand in the kitchen and I want Tom to hand me a glass off the shelf. My brain has a hiccup, and I can't remember the name; I can't remember the word for "glass." My tongue is frozen, and while I picture the object I want and try to send that image to Tom, the word won't come to me. I try to force him with my mind to move his fingers and put them around the glass. I imagine how it will feel cool when he picks it up. I imagine what it will be like for him to grab the thing and hand it to me. How the tips of our fingers will touch just a bit as he hands it over. But I can't say the word. It is gone from me.
And suddenly I'm frozen. I can't move. I think back to where this all started. What we were supposed to be working toward. And I see something I could have never seen when I was at that book sale: simplicity is a single line, a sculpture, the absence of movement. Tom cares for me now, because he understands me, sees what I need. If I change, there may be parts of me that move out of his view, that shift behind somewhere where Tom can't understand. Or, possibly, I will become something Tom doesn't care for. As I fumble for that glass, I'm unable to move, to change, to push against any part of my life or his or ours, because I am afraid that whatever part of our life changes inevitably creates division. Because, even when I tell myself, repeating it over and over like hypnotism, that love isn't about what someone does but who they are, all I can see is the space between what I want and how I am going to get it. And no matter how many things I move out the way between the two of us, no matter how much clutter is gone, there will still be space between us.
But then, right then, Tom looks at me expectantly, waiting for me to untie my tongue, and instead of saying "glass," which is just something I want, and the word Tom has already guessed I am searching for, because I see his hand reaching for the one on the shelf, I say, "Thank you." And then, because it is the same thing as asking for help, I say, "I love you." Tom turns his body toward me and crinkles his eyebrows. I reach up, and with my thumb, I press flat the confused creases that appear on the bridge of his nose. I think, what comes next? But I say to my husband, "Trust me, everything else is going."
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