[25]

You’re the reason men break down, 1987

Mary sang. The house was empty except for her and the dog.

“I think I saw you in an ice cream parlour, drinking milk shakes cold and long, smiling and waving and looking so fine, don’t think you knew you were in this song …” In the kitchen she twirled, her red A-line dress opening like a flower. She tapped her heels against the floor tiles. She loved her job.

She did not have to work. Rowan was incredibly wealthy, having developed fourteen different cigarette additives for Atkins and Thames, none of them as lucrative as his first additive, QR66, but he was financially set for life, and John Saltz, Mary’s lawyer, made sure that she and Becca saw a large chunk of Rowan’s fortune. There was no disputing his extramarital affairs. Mary had known from the onset that Rowan wouldn’t raise the issue of fidelity in a public courtroom. He wouldn’t have his name dragged through the mud. The settlement was weighty and quick.

Slipping her heels off, Mary settled in an old recliner. She tapped the points of her shoes together. She’d found her niche: It was teaching poetry—her first love. It was Browning, Keats, Byron, and Ginsberg! It was Auden and Ashberry! It was wonderful. Leaving her shoes in the den, she sashayed to the garage. Digging through cardboard boxes of college textbooks, dusty paperbacks, and literary essays, she remembered Dr. Carver telling her, “You know your stuff, no doubt about it” and “Even if you sometimes come across as ditzy, it doesn’t matter because you’re smart. You’re the reason men break down.” She remembered liking herself, telling her father she was leaving Prospect and she never wanted to see him again. Late at night, she’d applied to one college after another, paying the application fee with money she’d saved and stashed beneath her bed. She remembered, having earned a full scholarship, taking the bus from Farmville to Chapel Hill. She was seventeen.

Among her books, Mary found her first publication, an essay on Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. She’d been so proud, fruitlessly sending copies to her parents—who didn’t call or respond. What had she expected?

Dr. Carver had commented, “You don’t go home for holidays.”

“My parents died.”

Dr. Carver was three times her age, and she loved him. There is solace in poetry. There is solace in art. Mary was nostalgic. She felt happy—an unusual and wonderful thing to be.

Then she found an old notebook, the pages yellowed and scrawled with black ink. She had her father’s handwriting.

She was sixteen, attending Prince Edward Academy. (There was no public school, as to avoid integration.) She’d been to see the movie It Happened One Night at the drive-in. She’d gone alone. She loved Clark Gable.

When she got home, her father was waiting with his belt. Mary felt for the buckle scar on her lower back.

She turned the pages in the old notebook, remembering the poem she’d written that night, wanting to read it again but not wanting to remember the rest—her father in pursuit, shouting, “You broke curfew!”; hearing the leather slip from his belt loops and the clack of buckle against the plaster wall; feeling the buckle strike her back, the burn of blood rising to the surface. Her room wasn’t close enough. She wasn’t going to make it. She fell, and the buckle had come down again, but the first hit had been the charm.

She turned the pages. There was nothing to fear. Not anymore.

She smiled, remembering how she nightly wished him dead. He never got the best of her.

Mary’s mother lived in that space between Mary and her dad. Her hands had smelled like baked pears and Mary swore she could smell those hands now—just a whiff.

Mary remembered her dad pressing one boot on the back of her thigh, pressing her chin into the floor with his left hand. She’d stifled the tears. Without her permission, some fell anyway—a response to pain, but she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing her cry.

He said, “This is my house. My rules. You break curfew, you pay.”

There was no point in trying to explain that she couldn’t miss the movie’s happy ending. She adored Clark Gable: so charming and suave.

An hour later, her mother had knocked at her bedroom door. It was late. Mary’s father was asleep. Her mother brought baked pears and warm milk.

“I’m not hungry,” Mary had said.

“He doesn’t mean it.”

Mary took her notebook into the kitchen, the pear aroma staying with her. She fixed a Jim Beam and Coke. Her hands were aged now; brown spots mingled with freckles. It was funny to see them this way, reminding her of her mother.

My mother loved me. Mary sipped from the sweating glass and cried.

Her mother would say, “There’s no sense crying over spilled milk or bourbon and Coke.”

Craving a jar of her mother’s pear preserves, Mary fixed a grape jelly sandwich. A lot of the women at the Dogwood Estates retirement center, where she now taught poetry, were like her mother—stubborn and ornery, remembering their lives as well lived, as good, and hell, Mary thought, they ought to remember them that way. She sipped from her glass. Who wants to be old and full of regret? Who wants to be old and sorry for the life she’s lived? Who wants to be eighty and thinking “I shouldn’t have done that. I wish I could take that back.” Her mother would say, “Regret the things you haven’t done, not the things you have. Learn from life. Live every day as though it’s your last.” God, she thought, my mother was full of clichés. Mary finished her drink. Smoothing a page in the old notebook, she wrote: It’s never too late to make peace with the world.