We ate outside facing the lake on a clear night with a slice of moon. Halfway through the meal, John ventured tentatively, "You know, I think something's missing. A spice, maybe?" I could tell he was afraid of pissing me off, because I have a firm rule that nobody complains about dinner if they haven't made it.
"Yeah, this dish is really bland," I said, bitterly disparaging the magazine I tore the recipe from.
A few minutes later John began clearing up, and informed me he had put the extra beef in the fridge and that it might even make a second meal for tomorrow. Normally I only half-listen to him, because frankly he tends to mumble a lot, but this time my ears perked up.
"Extra beef?" I asked. "There was no extra beef at all-- I gave too much to Sean, so I barely had enough."
It was then I realized that the "something missing" in the meal was the beef. I had made a beef stir fry without the main ingredient. And neither of us could manage to identify that missing item throughout the entire meal.
We have been a couple of dummies lately.
The morning I took the dinners to Sean, I stopped at Starbucks for my chai tea fix. I got into a rousing conversation with the well-dressed woman next to me about men. I told her I was taking dinners to a son who had not felt it necessary to communicate with me more than once since he had moved, and that I thought he could probably go a year without noticing we hadn't talked. We chatted about the differing communication styles of girls and boys, and then moved on to the mystery about why men rule the world. She was a female CEO, and she noted that phenomenon was going to change soon, because more girls are going to college, they are getting their acts together faster after graduation, and the trend is toward more female CEO's.
She was so intelligent and engaging that the conversation really energized me. We gabbed so much that the Starbucks barista assumed we were together. I was in a hurry to get on the road, though, so I paid for my banana and drink and walked out the door. It was only as I was getting in my car and taking a sip from my cup that I realized I had grabbed her coffee and not my chai. It was a particularly stupid mistake, becauseI should have gone to the pick-up counter to wait for my chai. Everyone was gracious about it, but my cheeks were burning.
"Why am I so stupid?" was the refrain in my head.
That same week, John made me feel better about myself when he did something stupid of his own. Our boat wouldn't start one day, so we had to jump the battery off the boat lift. The next day, it wouldn't start again, but this time the jump didn't work. We waited a few days for the mobile marine repairman to come. But when he did, I spent more time chatting to him in the kitchen than it took to fix the boat.
As he and John re-emerged from the boat just a few seconds later, I asked, "Wow, how did you fix it so fast? What turned out to be wrong?"
John sheepishly hung his head. "Um... the boat wasn't in neutral," he confessed.
In analyzing all this, I have to conclude that it feels so good to feel healthy enough to tell embarrassing stories again, instead of playing The Tragic Figure. I have always enjoyed laughing at myself. I hated the fact that people didn't feel comfortable enough anymore to tell me the normal dross of their lives, and that The Horror was my only topic of conversation. I felt so excluded from the ebb and flow of life, so freakish. I was no longer a person anyone could relate to. My problems were too strange and unusual.
I used to be the woman known for her idiotic stories: the time I locked myself out of the house naked and had to hop to the front door in broad daylight wrapped in a sleeping bag from the garage. The time I only realized that I had bypassed the check-out counter in the grocery store when I was piling un-bagged items into the back of my car. The sunny afternoon I was hosting a pool party for John's office when the sales manager's wife asked in hushed tones, "Um... is that white string supposed to be hanging from your bathing suit?" Or the memorable morning when I went for a swim after my jog, and whipped off my shirt in full view of everyone at the pool before I realized I had forgotten to put a bathing suit underneath.
Now I know how Bill Clinton felt. He will never get rid of the stench of having sex with "That Woman," and it overshadows anything else he ever did or will do in his life.
I refuse to let The Horror define me. I refuse to let it be our family's legacy.
Maybe that, among other things, is why I stayed. I want to give John a chance to rebuild his character, so our house has a new foundation. I want to be part of the restoration and the redemption, so the last 30 years won't be in vain.
Yes, I still feel sick inside at everything that has happened, but hope still blooms in me.
I am holding out for the "new normal," when we can again laugh about silly, inconsequential things. I am hoping the restoration has already begun.
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