Sand in My Eyes, page 3
“Juice, juice, juice,” Thomas chanted as he jumped over the black wrought-iron post of my bed, and Will was asking for something, too, but he was grumpy, and his words were more like the sounds of a dying blueshell crab.
“Use your words, Will. Your words are powerful. Mama can’t understand you when you grunt and groan,” I told him.
“Will wants juice,” his brother said for him.
“Mama will get you juice. But first she wants to cuddle,” I told them, but then Marjorie awoke, and I could see from her eyes that she was wondering whether the paramedics really came to see her at one o’clock this morning, or had it only been a dream. Was I really screaming over her as she vomited and jerked rhythmically in my arms?
I reached for the fever-reducing syrup I had hidden under my pillow and poured a teaspoon into her mouth, waiting for her to say something, a single word, “mama.” They promised me simple febrile seizures are harmless and cause no brain damage, but until a mother sees her little one talking and playing, she remains in a worried state, for this is the way we tend to think, tend to think, tend to think. This is the way we tend to think on an early sleep-deprived morning.
There was nothing I craved more than to nest in my blankets forever, cuddling as we were, and not fly around like a frantic bird, but mornings couldn’t care less whether a mother is rested or not, and my boys, playful as river otters, hopped down and took off out of my room—headed, I knew, for the refrigerator. And Marjorie slid down too, usually following her brothers in single file wherever they went, but this time she pushed open the bathroom door, and I could still hear the shower, her father leisurely lavishing himself with hot water. I didn’t feel like stepping foot in the same small room as Timothy, but then I heard the toilet lid open and knew that my daughter, like a mourning dove in a birdbath, was dipping her hands in to play.
I didn’t enjoy waking in the little house on stilts any more than I had in the house back north: touching my feet to the cold floor, shivering like a feeble goose, taking my first throbbing steps morning after morning, laughing at the foot doctor for having told me the only way my so-called “plantar fascitis” would go away was to stretch, ice and massage my feet several times a day (Yeah, right! Like who has time for that?) so, all this time after giving birth last, my feet were still aching first thing in the morning and any time I stood up, and I was a mother dancing in circles, responding to the called demands of three children, hoping the activity might warm me. It didn’t matter where I lived. Mornings then and living there and now living here, on this barrier island down south, are all the same, no longer my own. They belong to my children and household chores.
“Yuck, Marjorie,” I scolded as I grabbed her by the tummy and soaped her hands in the sink. “Again, your father forgot to shut the bathroom door, you poor thing, disgusting. How many times do I have to tell him?”
“Good morning, princess,” Timothy said, poking his head out from the shower, and I knew he wasn’t talking to me. “Daddy is late for his trip,” he continued. “I wish I didn’t have to go, especially after what happened to you last night, but at least your fever broke.”
We both knew well how to play the silent game. Tell the children what you want your spouse to hear. That way you don’t have to talk to each other. Since I found out what he did with that other woman, the two of us had become ghosts, occupying the same house but living on different planes of existence, aware when the other was present, yet making no contact. The boys had witnessed us sauntering past one another in the hallways, and their eyes begged for us to communicate. But even now, as we stood with nothing but a shower curtain separating us, I hardly knew what to say to the man. I had cursed and said all there was to say in the days following his confession.
I wiped the steam off the mirror with my sleeve and took a good hard look at myself. My once brilliant eyes now looked coated in layers of grime—a build-up of pain and disappointment—and my face was covered in the markings of scorn that I feared might never go away. I didn’t know how one removes the resentment from her face, or renews the brilliancy in her eyes and the radiance in her skin.
Resentment does bad things to a person. It was turning me into an ugly woman.
“Who are you?” I shouted at the face in the mirror. “I’m looking for Anna Hott. What happened to her?”
“Did you say something?” Timothy asked from behind the curtain.
“I wasn’t talking to you,” I told him and, when the younger, happier, more beautiful me would not appear, I stared back at the exhausted, overwhelmed, joyless thirty-six-year-old telling me what I didn’t want to hear, that I was no longer the fairest of them all.
Then I reached for my toothbrush but could hear the boys bickering toward me, and Marjorie was opening the drawer with the razors, pulling them out. I redirected her to the drawer with the cotton balls, and because there wasn’t time for brushing my teeth, I quickly pulled my dark, shoulder-length hair into a ponytail at the nape of my neck, noticing three gray hairs growing from my head. I tugged on one until there were two gray hairs growing from my head. I pulled on another, and then there was one gray hair growing from my head. That one I left exactly where it was, hoping that Timothy would spot it and know what the last several months had done to his poor wife.
By now the boys had come in, and Thomas was angry and hounding, and Will was pathetic and whining, “Where’s our juice?”
“Who do I look like, a superhero?” I asked. “Because I’m not. I’m one mommy, two hands, that’s all I am. Now go into the kitchen and wait for me. I’ll be right there.”
I looked at my primly petite lips in the mirror, wanting to use them as weapons, wishing they had the power to tell my husband how nice it must be to be him, to be taking a ridiculously long, hot shower, and then to be going off like he was on a flight, another business trip, one more lavish hotel, and a cocktail reception, followed by a dinner, feasting on more than cereal and corn dogs like us. But he was numb to my words and would only shut me up, scold me for complaining, remind me that we live on a tropical island in Florida, and that my life isn’t so bad.
“Would you hand me a towel, dear?” he asked, turning off the shower, and I rolled my eyes at the way in which he attached the word “dear” to whatever he said to me. Guilt does that. It brings out the superficial best in husbands. But he no longer held my hands, looked me in the eyes, bought me flowers, or desired date nights, so being called “dear” meant nothing.
I reached down and pulled a damp, smelly towel off the top of the pile of dirty clothes lying on the floor, then opened the curtain a crack and, turning my head away, tossed it in.
“A clean one would be nice,” he said.
“There are no clean towels,” I said, letting out a wretched groan. “No clean anything. Maybe if I had someone to help me, if we hired someone to help with the laundry …” I stopped there, sounding more like a wicked witch than I intended.
“Well, by the time we pay the rent, car payments, insurance, and buy groceries, we’ve got nothing left, which reminds me. Don’t spend a single penny for the next four days, or things will bounce.”
“You always say that.”
“I’m sorry your life is miserable, dear,” he said, but there were no harps playing, no trumpets blowing, and I know he didn’t mean it, didn’t feel an eensy-weensy bit sorry for my woes.
“You’re the one who has to grow old with me, with the woman I’m becoming.” I pulled a bar of soap out of Marjorie’s mouth, wanting to go further, tell him I was at a crucial age, where I could either age gracefully and with an elegant look to my face—given a little help around the house—or begin to deteriorate and grow into an ugly old woman thanks to overexertion, stress, and resentment.
But he wouldn’t get it and, because I didn’t want to stick around longer and see what the other woman saw—his naked body, thick around the middle from all those hotel happy hours—I picked Marjorie up and stormed out.
CHAPTER FIVE
IT WAS A STRESSFUL stop-and-go commute toward the kitchen, with traffic, toys, and my disturbing thoughts dangerously in my way, causing me to trip and swerve.
“I don’t know how the house is always a mess,” I told Marjorie, who was riding on my hip down the hall. “It’s not like I dilly-dally. Mama doesn’t stop, doesn’t sit. She runs from one disaster to the next all day long.”
My home was gruesome enough for a wildlife documentary, and if there were a narrator, she’d have said, “This is a habitat in distress, in which a bird has been trying to create a nest out of chaos.” But I was no bird in distress. I was an overwhelmed mother, wondering whether one too many crazy mornings mixed with lack of sleep might have a tragic cumulative effect, like one too many huffs and puffs and the house falls down.
The refrigerator was open when I got to the kitchen, and I could see from the puddle on the floor that the boys had pulled out the gallon of juice and drunk what was left.
“I swear I’m on the verge,” I muttered as I saw from the corner of my eye that Marjorie had taken her diaper off and was peeing on the couch. “On the verge of what, I don’t know, but the verge.”
“I’m hungry,” cried Thomas, and like Old Mother Hubbard I went to my cupboard to fetch that poor boy a bone, but it was bare, except for a can of beans, and I hated being that mother, always out of food, feeding her children boiled beans and butter.
“Aha! An egg,” I announced, opening the carton and discovering one left. “I’ll make us all an egg!” But then I noticed the sink, full with yesterday’s dirty dishes, and there I spotted the frying pan sticking out from the heap. It needed a good scrubbing, but I had no soap, nor clean sponges, nor rags, and because I had nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide, I let my eyes wander to the window above my sink, and there I peeked out.
The world outside my kitchen was lighting up, and I caught a glimpse of the lady who lives next door moving around like a shadow in her yard, filling her birdbath with water. This was the elderly woman I saw out there all those mornings when Timothy was out of town. I watched her then through the windows, digging holes in the soil, and later in the day taking bundles of roses from buckets and putting them into the holes. And when I was pacing the halls with whining children in my arms, she was out there spraying, pruning, or tying cans in arched positions to stakes. And as I sped away in my car to the pediatrician’s or the store, I pretended I didn’t see her watering flowers on the side of her house. What is wrong with my life, I’ve wondered, when I can’t find it in me to wave to the cute old lady living next door?
But as I watched her now through my kitchen window, pulling weeds from the base of the birdbath, I felt a tugging from within me, a craving to write. Seeing someone passionately at play did this to me—made me wish I had an ounce of time to myself, to pursue a passion of my own! But no one had told me it could be so hard, that motherhood would give me indescribable joy in exchange for who I was as an individual, and that the accumulation of it all, of worrying, caring for my children, responding to their every whimper, oh, and all the housework and grocery shopping, the cooking and cleaning, would turn me into this woman who has no time for waving or smiling or getting to know neighbors, and certainly no time for writing!
I had always wanted to write, but life got in the way. The jobs I had at bookstores intimidated me, while my stint at the library overwhelmed me, and my work as a publicist for a publishing house, with all those doggone authors, exhausted me to the point of hardly being able to write a word of my own. And when I did, writing through my lunchtime, I struggled with the way an English literature major like myself critically examines and hates every sentence she constructs, how she can hardly write a paragraph, and this results in all those unfinished stories, haunting the drawers of her desk.
And back to life under the domestic big top, I thought as I turned from the window to find the boys climbing around the stovetop like daredevils, reaching into the candy cabinet, leaving me no time for selfish pursuits.
“Boys,” I shouted. “You could have been burned! Had mommy been cooking, had the stove been on, you could have been burned.”
“Mama don’t cook,” said Will. “She microwaves.”
“True,” I said, “but I was about to fry an egg.”
They were hungry. I hadn’t fed them a cooked meal in two days. I put Marjorie down, helped the boys off the stove, and grabbed a piece of scratch paper, then rummaged through my drawer for a pen, wondering how I might go about getting us all dressed and out the door to the pediatrician’s, let alone the store, and when all I could find was a crayon, I scribbled, “to market, to market to buy a new … “Oh, what did I need from the store: a crispier, more colorful life; a fresher brain; a more lean-body; easier-to-care-for children; a healthier husband; a larger house?
“There once lived a woman,” I wrote in crayon on the scratch paper, “who lived in a little house on stilts.” But then Marjorie let out a shriek, and when I looked up she was standing on the center of the kitchen table. I flew through the air like a flying trapeze, hurrying to catch her before she fell, but once in my arms all she did was paw at my face like a hungry bear.
“No hit Mommy,” I told her as I put her safely to the ground, trying not to give her kicking, screaming act the attention it wanted, and when her tiny body came rolling my way, I hopped over it. Someone was calling me from the bathroom, in need of a wipe, while the other had broken the button on the water cooler, which was flooding the floor. I spun like a top, trying to recall what I was doing in the kitchen in the first place, tired of starting, stopping, and restarting tasks, phone conversations, and thoughts, all of which lately had become like race cars taking off, hundreds a minute, only to be sidetracked or rammed into, and none of what I attempted was making it to the finish line.
All I wanted was to finish an act from start to finish without interruption, so I set the egg I wanted to fry on the counter and steadily walked to the sink, trying hard to block out the noise hitting me from every direction. To an ordinary person, washing a pan is simple. But for a mother, who is also like a ringmaster in a three-ring circus, doing dishes is more hair-raisingly difficult than swallowing fire.
And then I spotted Marjorie, from the corner of my eye, dumping something all over the floor—my jar of dried basil; red pepper, too. I could hear Thomas screaming at the top of his lungs. I think he fell down and bumped his crown. “No, no,” I told Marjorie, who had abandoned the spices and was now lying on her tummy in the puddle of spilled water, sipping it like a cat. She shook her head back at me, her nose up in the air, and I pulled out plastic bowls with mismatched lids, hoping they might lure her away.
“You can do it,” I chanted under my breath, trying hard to be the little engine that could. “You can make it through this day.” At least I thought I could, thought I could, thought I could. There was nothing I wanted more this very moment than to become an escape artist and disappear, but then I saw from the corner of my eye the egg I was going to make for my children’s breakfast, the only egg in the house, the extra large one sitting on the counter, roll to the edge and take a great fall. I dropped to my knees, trying to save old Humpty, but hard as I might, he slipped through my fingers.
It was the broken egg that made me cry, made me drop to my knees, nose to the ground, buttocks in the air. Had I been in a better state of mind I could have turned it into a yoga pose, but I was in a tizzy, breathing too fast, and when I rested my cheek on the floor, the only positive thing I could think was that at least egg whites were good for my skin—the closest thing I’d had to a facial in years!
“Why is Mama sad?” my son asked, parking himself beside me.
“Mamas can’t always be smiling,” I told him. “It wouldn’t be natural.”
“Why is Mommy stopped?” my other son asked.
Pulling my face from the floor, I looked at their little-boy faces, wondering how I should answer, whether I should tell them that a mother never stops, even when it looks like she has stopped. When it looks like she is resting, she is not. “I’m idling,” I said, “simply idling.”
“Why is Mama crying?” they continued, and I wanted to explain that when a mommy goes long enough without routine maintenance, or ignores all her problems, that then she begins to cry and shake. But they were too young for that, or to understand that their mother had expectations for happiness and believed marriage, career, a house, and children would be her driving fuel, not her exhaust.
CHAPTER SIX
ARE you ALL RIGHT?” Timothy asked when he got to the kitchen and found me sitting on the filthy floor, my head now on my knees, the boys still beside me and Marjorie lying on her tummy nearby.
“It’s what happens,” I told him, “when a woman pulls too heavy a load.” Up hills and down hills. “Without fixing her weak spots. She tries making it farther.” She thinks she can, she can, she can. “But then she stalls, then she breaks down.”
“You’re scaring me,” he said, towering over me.
I looked up with resentful eyes at his freshly showered, damp hair, stainless starched business shirt, pressed pants, and his big, white teeth, the ones he religiously flossed morning and night, not knowing how to get my feelings across, to say that I didn’t have time for any of that, for ironing my clothes, flossing my teeth, or swishing around mouthwash like him.
“Anna,” he said, “I need to know, are you okay?”
“I try,” I cried, wanting to tell him that all I needed was a simple “timeout”—thirty-six minutes to myself with my nose to the wall during which no one was allowed to look at or talk to me. “I try and try, but I can’t.”
