Candle in the Wind

I’m no Marilyn Monroe, believe me, as my husband reminds me, but I think of her, how her life was like a candle in the wind, the Elton John song. ‘You’re gaining weight Katie,’ my husband says. ‘Maybe a gym membership?’

Each night, my favorite part of the day arrives. I slip into the tub at 10:00 p.m. and relish the feeling. A warmth from the hot water rises in my hips, up my back, and into my head, and then I go into a dream and leave my life behind.

Maybe it starts when I am seven. I see us driving to the hospital: myself, my father, and Billy, my little brother. On a cold-gray fall day a castle looking monstrosity looms ahead, tall brick walls border the property. Inside are ragged unkept lawns and in our children's eyes white-coated zombies lounge about on benches. We gather silently in the dayroom with our father. The walls are an institutional green, the smell of urine, disinfectant.

The two of us scrunch down seeing my mother’s eyes in black empty circles. I hold Billy’s hand. It’s sweating, small, and clenching my own. ‘It’s not your fault,' I say. We’ll make sure you change when we get home. Here, hold this magazine so no one sees. Don’t cry.’ 

When our mother comes home the red in her eyes is now white and she silently takes her place, the family room chair by the window. There she stays day in and day out taking her Thorazine, but her ghosts, whoever they are, come calling. I see her mumbling to them. Sometimes they argue back and forth through the window. The drinking begins. With my father at work, us kids at school, a shot and beer place, Hank’s, is just at the corner.

‘God? It's Katie. Not for me, but for my brother. Did you forget?’

My brother and I sit at our assigned places at the kitchen table for dinner while my parents take the dining room. We think nothing of this. How would we know what a household is, or is not? My father works as an editor for a small magazine and my mother lives in the PTSD of her own upbringing, the poverty, and the diseased trauma of whatever it is we never talk about. We never speak, we never hug.

I go to school on the bus, return home, hide in my bedroom. On occasion, I listen to the yelling and crying and agony of whatever lives in my mother rising up through the heat vents to my upstairs bedroom. It’s then I carve with my penknife, ‘I hate you’ on the top of my kid’s wooden desk. Mostly though my brother and I gather at the top of the stairs and listen. Maybe there’s some secret that will make sense, we think. My father comes to me one day. “Should I divorce your mom?’ We are in the kitchen with my younger brother, the snow outside. Billy starts crying. ‘No Dad. No.’  No matter what, kids love their parents.

At sixteen, I have friends in high school. We drink six packs in the park, hard liquor from parent’s cabinets, smoke hash in aluminum foil pipes. I never think about the liquor, how I drink to passing out, the blackouts. Strangely, I also never link my drinking with my mother’s alcoholism. All my friends drink, or at least my crowd does. Someone else’s parents leave town, a hundred teenagers swarm over. My friends step over me to get in the front door. ‘She’s so a crackup, a real knockout,’ they say. ‘’Her head slams about when the front door opens.’ Later, I puke in my bed. Sneaking around, I wash the sheets the next day.

A random book comes to me in high school, a book about a manager of a theater. People ask me. What are you going to school for? ‘Theater Arts,’ I tell them. This answers their question and makes me think I have chosen a profession. Later, the first semester at college, I smoke marijuana and focus on the small TV at the head of my dorm room bed, Days of Our Lives, Robert Barker and Price is Right. ‘Come on down!’ I don’t attend much class. ‘English,’ the advisor says. ‘You can get a degree in English. That’s the easiest with your grades.’ So I major in English, 2.0, it’s easy.

My first job is no more thought out than what to have for breakfast, the randomness of the want ads. I manage a woman’s clothing store, live in my studio apartment, again no friends.

The store is a chain and moves me around the country. This is a lot of work. Six months in this city, six months in another. My social life consists of going out drinking with the employees and screwing the boys after the store closes. I don’t bring them home; I’m not a slut and there aren’t multiple boys at the same time. After fifteen years, there are seventeen; Seventeen boys who I call a long-term relationship. Many others are one-nighters, but these seventeen are each a few months at a time, then six months or a year with no one, then a new boy for six months. I never, not once, think I am in love. The boys think me remote, uncommunicative. I get notes or calls or intense conversations. ‘You don’t talk, you don’t share, but I love you. Don’t you love me?’ These questions piss me off. I quickly cut the boy out. They beg to have me back. ‘Don’t you love me?’ I have a good job. I look good enough, sexy even. I shut them down, no return phone calls. How dare they? Then no one for six months. I know how to relieve any desire. This is easier and a lot less complicated.

When I’m thirty, my mother passes away, and I don’t think it remarkable the only people at the funeral are my dad, my younger brother (who is now an alcoholic), and the priest. My brother? A steel train rips through my heart. If only I hadn’t left, abandoned him to go to school? Who was there to hold him at the hospital? The conductor leans out the window of the roaring train. His angry eyes leer at me, the screeching whistle never stops. The priest mentions he met my mother once. Months later, the three of us take her remains in a slick plastic milk carton. It’s a fall day, the trees barren, and I spread my mother’s ashes at the side of a highway down an embankment. My father and brother stay up on the curb. A dim and blustering day, the wind blows the ashes in my face. We laugh, my face a tight grimace, gray white, a chalk-like taste in my mouth. The ashes spill in a dusting cloud down the hill, chunks of bone tumble like hundreds of tiny white dice, eighteen wheelers roar by in a blur. We don’t mark the spot.

At thirty-five, I meet my husband in a Holiday Inn bar during happy hour. Why not? He’s as good as another. Soon I’m pregnant, we’re married, a new baby girl. I work now as a supervisor for a different woman’s clothing chain. Nannies, daycare. I love our daughter.

Ten years fly by. I am now in the C-Suite, a corporate exec, and the clothing store chain hits the market, big time. I come home one day and tell my husband, ‘We have a little money now. Going public means we get fifty-thousand per month.’ Soon after, my husband comes to me. ‘I always wanted to be an actor. Local theater has an opening. It pays zero, but we’d be giving back. It’s my dream.’ I think, with the extra money, we can somehow make it work. He has his dream. How can you hold your husband, who you love, back from his dream? I love my daughter and I love my husband. But my working sixty to eighty hours a week means traveling the country and leaving the house for a flight I breathe relief. While traveling, men suggest we have sex. I remain loyal to my husband. I don’t have sex because I’m scared of getting caught; I don’t have sex because looking at myself as an adulterer would mean I am pretty much scum. You have your honor, I tell myself.

My husband makes sure I don’t have any girlfriends he hasn’t vetted as the husband of those friends would likely cheat with me. I can’t conceive of being friends with a male friend, married or not. My husband won’t permit this. He cuts out unmarried female friends also; they might lead to another man. With my work, I am mostly exhausted, but also don’t fight his picking our friends. One less thing I have to worry about. Plus, this adds a lot of drama I don’t need. Why fight my husband? Bury yourself in your work.

I feel I’m a strong woman, independent. And I am strong too, a corporate exec, hundreds of people working for me. But my husband reminds me how stupid I am, how he is the only one who can manage a social life, how selfish and lazy I am. ‘I have to travel to San Francisco next week,’ I say. ‘Of course,’ he says. The subtext is I don’t care about him or the family. Maybe he’s right, I think to myself. ‘Who’s going?’ he asks. ‘Who are you meeting?’

Shouldn’t I understand and accommodate the person I love? And I love him most because he needs me. I can be strong for us both.

After my company goes public, the country club membership begins. The expensive gourmet dinners ramp up, houses git bigger, vacations further. ‘This is going to bite us in the ass,’ I say, but then I think, ‘Don’t make waves. It’s not worth the drama.’

A funny thing. Even confident people I’ve noticed, to my surprise, when told they’re stupid for decades, eventually start believing it. I didn’t use to think this, but I do now because my husband has convinced me.

A good day arrives, a new couple. And they are more interesting than the self-satisfied entitled assholes at the country club; the ones with their country club homes and smug expressions, measuring each other’s cars and houses and second homes and exotic vacations to Hawaii, all to see whose is bigger.

I like the new couple; they possess a grounded mindset rather than entitlement and wealth. ‘I saw you flirting,’ my husband says. The couple is out.

On business in New York, I meet with a fashion designer for an account my company is consulting with. Myself and the fashion designer work together, laying out thin paper templates of dresses, suits, ladies’ fashion. Quick sketches with pencils. The process of the design world enthralls her and soon me as well. The creativity is fascinating. Can people really have a job like this? Over two years, I return many times to the company and with the woman’s help, I submit my own designs, rough, and no more than amateur work. The design firm loves them. “You’re good, really good,” they say.

I have an epiphany. For your whole life, I hear from my most inner self, the winds have simply blown you in different directions. You never knew this job existed. You never knew people did this because you were too busy, neck deep in marketing and sales. But this fashion design; you are new at it and you need to learn a lot, but you are talented and you love it and you know your place in the world, finally. The random winds of your life at long last have brought you to a shore where you know you should be.

My husband and I sit together and watch Netflix while my daughter texts her friends in her bedroom and more and more has a life of her own. I love her very much but I don’t understand her world and we’re not close. She will soon be at university.

As for my husband, how can I ever hurt him? I just don’t have it in me. We work together on his memorizing lines for the local theater. I’m proud he’s living his dream. For me to live my dream in New York means living there, moving from here. My husband has been very clear he loves this town, will never leave. He loves this house and I love it too. The fifty-thousand per month, though, is long gone and the house owns us as much as we own it. 

So I sit here in my pink robe, with Netflix on, thinking there will be no New York. No fashion design. No doing what I know I was born to do. More than the expense of a divorce to leave my husband, I love him. He needs me and we have a child together. I cannot destroy another human being. I can’t have any more steel trains ripping through my heart.

The mail comes and the company has sent a letter wanting to hire me as a fashion designer. Thank god I caught this before my husband sees. I rip up the letter in small pieces and bury it in the trash.

I have a dream. Just over a hill is the pink and blue lights of paradise. I run up the hill but my legs are moving slowly in a molasses water. No matter what, I can’t get over the hill. Crows laugh in the trees.

Where does it end? I slip into the tepid water of my bath at 10:00 p.m. and relish the feeling, leave all this behind. Not to live in dreams, but a great unconsciousness simply lasting forever. When I turn on my side, I imagine lying in my mother’s lap. She holds me in her arms and strokes my head, her hand warm and gentle. ‘It’s ok Katie darling,’ she says. ‘I’m ok now and I love you.’