“No, no, that’s okay. It’s not important.”
“Are you sure? James is a bigger gossip than any woman I know. He’s carried more stories across this county than there are miles on the Bookmobile.”
“Nope. It’s okay.”
I have always loved bus rides. When you grow up in a small town, they really are your ticket to the outside world. I’ve been to Washington, D.C., Cincinnati, Nashville, Memphis, and Charlottesville by bus. Last year, I took Etta and two of her friends to Knoxville for “Holiday on Ice.” Theodore showed us the town, even let the kids run on the football field at the U.T. stadium. Jack stayed home. (You couldn’t pay him to go to an ice show—another one of those facts that surface after you marry someone.) I love ice shows: the cold stadium, the crowd, the smell of carmel popcorn, the pale blue ice rink, the crisscrossing beams of red and tangerine spotlights, and of course, the Stars of the Show, the skaters, lean and graceful, who shoot past in their glittering tulle skirts.
The bus is nearly empty tonight. I’m sitting behind the driver (my favorite seat), with my feet resting on the aluminum bar separating his area from the rest of the bus. As we speed along in the dark, the soft lights of the distant farms fade into the black, creating a hypnotic effect that begins to lull me to sleep. I am exhausted, so I take my duffel bag and place it on the seat next to me. As I begin to stretch out and lie down, a sudden thought causes me to bolt upright. Why did Jack rush me out of town so quickly? Does he have a date with that mysterious blond? The driver must have heard me shift quickly because he looks at me in the rearview. Honestly. Stop this, I tell myself. You’re making things up. I lean over onto the duffel bag. If I sleep, we’ll get to Knoxville all the faster.
“Hey. Sleepyhead. Wake up,” the familiar deep voice teases me.
“Theodore!” I sit up, refreshed from my nap. “God, you look great!” And he does. He is trim; I can see the cut of his biceps through his T-shirt. “What’s with the arms?”
“The beauty of working at a university is the free gym and trainers.”
“Get me a job here. Immediately.”
Theodore takes my bag, and I catch him up on everything as we charge through the bus station. We stop under a crosswalk light so I can show him Etta’s new school picture.
“Hungry?” he asks me as he loads the bag into his car.
“Starving.”
We go to a twenty-four-hour IHOP and settle into a booth, just like the old days. When Theodore lived in Big Stone Gap, we’d drive over to Kingsport after the football games and sit at Shoney’s all night dissecting the halftime show and everything else going on in our lives. How simple it was! How perfect.
In the bright, warm light I can see Theodore more clearly. We talk on the phone a lot, but I haven’t seen him in months. He still looks like the passionate pirate poet who moved to Big Stone Gap from Scranton, Pennsylvania, so many years ago. There is nothing boyish about him anymore, though. He is Lord of the Manor now, his strong jaw more chiseled, character and experience having given him a sort of nobility. His red hair is as full as ever, and there’s some white in it at the temples; the blue eyes are a little more crinkled, but not much; overall, his face is smooth and clear. Theodore looks like a man who loves his life, and that makes me very happy.
“Tell me everything,” he says.
“I’ve told you everything.” I laugh. “Etta is great. Jack started a new business.”
“Everything about you.”
I don’t know why, but that sounds like the strangest thing I have ever heard. I don’t think of myself separate and apart from what I have to do. I think about things that need to be done. Taking care of my responsibilities. Being there for my family. When Theodore asks me about myself, I realize that I don’t have anything to say.
“Come on. Talk,” he says as he punches open a tiny white plastic barrel of half-and-half and dumps it in his coffee.
“Pearl asked me to partner with her at the Pharmacy. She’s opening a new shop in Norton. I didn’t want to say yes.”
“Why?”
I shrug. “It’s hers.”
“Well, good for Pearl for asking you to partner. You gave her a future when you gave her your store. Let her help you now. Are you going to do it?”
“Yes. I signed the papers today. I’ll be the manager and split the Big Stone profits fifty-fifty with her.”
“What does Jack think?”
“He doesn’t know yet.”
“Oh,” Theodore says casually.
“It just happened today. I haven’t had a chance to talk to him.” Boy that sounds lame—and it sounds lame because it is lame. I hold everything in, and not for any good reason I can think of!
I want to tell Theodore everything. I want to tell him that when the mines closed, I was afraid Jack wouldn’t find a job; how he laughed when I suggested he take some engineering classes; how he looked at that woman at the Halloween Carnival. And how I get scared, every day, that I am going to lose him. How can I explain it to Theodore? Months after Joe died, Father Rausch came to see me. He told me that most marriages break up when a child dies. I couldn’t imagine losing my son and then losing my husband. What good would that do? And Etta needed us. I still worry about her and the way losing Joe affected her. I want to tell Theodore every detail. But I can’t. I want everything to be just fine. It has to be. What have I worked so long and hard for? Besides, isn’t this life? Aren’t things hard? Doesn’t the romance come and go? Don’t children take precedence over everything else? Don’t all husbands stop looking at their wives instead of drinking in their beauty? Don’t they learn to see past the exterior and right into our brains, where necessary facts and schedules are stored? Don’t all marriages become routine? Spats? Silences? Weird open-ended arguments? Sex on the porch? Sour milk and burnt toast? Dirty laundry? Isn’t money always a problem?
“What is going on with you? Your face looks like a Picasso, for Godsakes.”
Looking distorted doesn’t worry me. “Do I look old?” I ask him.
Theodore laughs.
“Do I?”
“No.”
“Thank you.”
“Why did you ask me that?”
“Because I live in Big Stone Gap, where people have seen me every day for forty-two years and don’t really look at me.”
“What about your husband?”
I can’t answer. Instead, I start to cry.
“Jesus, what is wrong?” Theodore says as he yanks napkins out of the holder on the table and shoves them toward me.
“I’m scared.”
“Of what?”
“That it’s over.”
“What’s over?”
“Everything.”
“What are you talking about? Are you sick?”
“No. I’m fine.”
“What’s over? Your marriage?”
“Yes.”
“What’s going on?”
“Jack is looking at other women.”
“So?”
“Strange women with tans.”
“Tans in November?” Theodore tries not to laugh.
“I know. It makes me sick.” The word “sick” makes me weep harder.
“Who is she?”
“I don’t know her name. She wears tight pants.”
“You don’t know her name but you’ve checked out her ass?”
“I can’t help it. I had to watch them. They didn’t see me. It’s not like I stalked them or something. I just watched them fall all over each other at the Halloween Carnival.”
“Your husband is madly in love with you. He’d be crazy to even think of another woman.”
“You say that, but you didn’t see her. She was working it! She was patting his back. Low. She’s one of those predators. One of those women, and you can just tell, who only wants a married man. They’re in it for the thrill. For the pain it causes people like me. She looks like one of those women who has all day to fix a strand of hair! And look at me. I barely have tim
e to put on lipstick. I’m starting to look like Ma Kettle, for Godsakes.”
“Have you asked Jack Mac who she is?”
“God no.”
“Why not?”
“Because in every Bette Davis movie I have ever seen, when the woman asks the man that question, the man always says, ‘I’m sorry, yes, you’re right, you’re so intuitive, yes, I love her. And I don’t love you anymore. So set me free so at least one of us can be happy.’ ”
“Don’t base your real life on bad melodrama,” Theodore says, rearranging the sugar packets in their plastic holder.
“Do you have a better idea?” I ask him as I blow my nose.
The waitress comes over to take our order. She doesn’t even look concerned. She just picks up my wad of tear-soaked napkins and dumps them in the trash on the way back to the kitchen. I guess a lot of people face their demons in the middle of the night at the International House of Pancakes.
“Why would your husband call me and brag about you and how hard you work and what a great wife and mother you are and how you need a weekend away because there isn’t enough he could do to ever thank you, if he was leaving you?”
“I don’t know.”
“You have got to get a grip.”
Theodore’s exasperation soothes me. Maybe I am crazy. “I know I sound totally irrational—”
“Listen to me. This thing, this blackness and doom you feel, is just a tiny storm cloud of feelings passing overhead. You are at a crisis point. I don’t think it’s about Jack Mac and Etta. It’s about Joe.”
“I’m dealing with Joe.”
“Joe isn’t here to deal with. That’s your problem,” Theodore says tenderly.
“I hate myself. I was a terrible mother to him.”
“You were not!”
“Do you know that I yelled at him every day? Do you know that he got spanked? And I swore to Jack I’d never spank the kids. But he turned on the water in the tub and left it and it overflowed and ruined the ceiling and I went crazy. I took him to sit in Etta’s time-out chair. He laughed at it! In fact, he never sat in it. The thing had cobwebs on it!”
“So you spanked him. What else?”
“I was so busy trying to make him behave that I missed everything. I was chasing him all the time. Correcting him. Begging him to sit still. Whatever it was.”
“He was a demanding kid.”
“But I didn’t appreciate him. I wanted him to be more like Etta. And he wasn’t. He was a tornado. Even the way he got sick in the end. Etta gets a cold, and it takes her half the winter to get over it. I see bruises on Joe one morning, and six days later he’s dead. Don’t you see? He was this unbelievably vibrant color, this amazing shot of purple that flew in and flew out, and I was too busy trying to make him into something else. I blew it. I totally blew it. And now, three years later, I just want to apologize to him. To tell him I’m sorry for not seeing what he was.” I’m stunned that I am not crying. Theodore looks at me.
“Feel better?”
“I sort of … do.” The waitress refills my coffee and dumps some more half-and-half onto the table. “Really, yeah, I’m fine,” I tell Theodore and then the waitress, who ignores me and checks her reflection in the window of our booth.
“No, you’re not. You wouldn’t be here. You wouldn’t be asking me if you look old. Somehow Jack knew you needed a deeper conversation. One that cannot be had over the phone.”
“Did he say something to you?” I rise up in the booth by my chin like a rattlesnake peeking out of a basket.
“No. He did not,” Theodore says calmly. His tone of voice makes me sink right back down into the booth.
“How do you know so much about men?”
“I’ve been one for a long time.”
“Right.” I stir my coffee. I don’t care if it’s my second cup and it’s the middle of the night. “You should thank God you’re not married.”
“I could never be married.”
“Good thinking.”
“It’s not for me.”
“You’re smart.”
“No. I’m gay.”
The IHOP becomes very quiet. It’s almost as though I can hear the pancake batter pouring onto the griddle through the swing doors.
“You are?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, when?”
“Since I can remember.”
The thoughts kick up in my head in a thousand different directions. Questions pop up: How? Why didn’t you tell me sooner? Is there a special man in your life? That’s why we couldn’t take our friendship any further so long ago! I wasn’t crazy! You just weren’t available! “Couldn’t you have told me thirteen years ago?”
“Why? I wasn’t going to date men in Big Stone Gap.”
“Good point.”
“And we had each other.”
“Yes, we did.” Boy, did we have each other. For so many years, that was all I needed. Why does my single past seem so perfect now, so uncomplicated? Was it? “When did you know?”
“I guess I knew all my life. But I wasn’t out all my life. I guess I thought I was a loner, and that I would never become attached to anyone because I didn’t need it. I have a creative life, and it makes me whole. I wasn’t unhappy. I was and am very fulfilled. I never saw that people in couples were very happy, so I assumed it wasn’t for me. And when I met you, we had such a mind meld.”
“Yes, we did.”
“You never made me feel bad about being a loner. You were one too.”
“I know. It explains a lot, though.”
“Sure. Everything. It was that missing piece of information that made all the facts fall into place. I was fighting my instinct to be who I was—that’s always a bad idea.”
“Do you have someone special in your life now?”
“I did. A biochemist who was at UT on a grant, studying some kind of cells to cure some kind of something. He was terrific, but he lives in Boston, and I’m not moving, so it didn’t work out.”
“I would have loved to have met him.” And I mean that. We sit quietly for a few minutes, but I’m never troubled by long silences when I’m with Theodore. That’s just our rhythm.
“By the way, you didn’t turn me gay.”
“I like to blame myself for everything from laundry mistakes to the failure of world peace, but I won’t take on that I turned you gay.” I pat his hand.
“Good.”
“It’s a good thing you figured it out while you’re still young.”
“Yep. I figured it out in the nick of time.”
“Maybe that’s what I’m scared of. I feel like my life is ice in my hands. It’s going by so fast, and I’m not any smarter. I don’t have that peace that I read about in magazines. I’m old enough to be wise, and I’m not. I don’t want to get old, though. I feel like I’ve never been young. Maybe I thought love was going to make me young.”
“Before we go down this road,” Theodore says, “let me say that aging is worst for two groups: women and gay men. Straight men are told they’re potent all their lives, they can be ninety and have kids, and so on. I know what you mean about feeling old and stupid. I’m not a professional psychologist, so don’t hold me to any of this, but I think what’s going on here, apart from your communication problems with your husband and your grief for your son, is even more personal. It’s about you. You woke up one day and realized that you were halfway through. You’re middle-aged.”
“I am not! Fifty is middle-aged.”
“Okay, now we’re squabbling about numbers. Here’s the fact of the matter: there’s a lot behind you. You’ve got some miles on you now. You’re not a sweet young thing anymore.”
“I was never a sweet young thing! And don’t think I don’t resent that!”
“Stop whining. Let me finish. Getting older is tough. It’s depressing. But it happens to all of us. Look at me. I’m lifting barbells sumo wrestlers won’t touch because I want pecs of steel, believing that muscles will hold up my youth like
those pillars hold up the Acropolis. Well, they don’t. The only thing you can do is accept it. Do the best you can. But accept it.”
“Am I that shallow?”
“We’re all shallow. But you’re luckier than most. You don’t really look forty-whatever-you-are. You can be one of those timeless beauties with the good skin. You can wear cardigan sweaters and a little lipstick, and no one will know if you’re thirty or sixty. Okay?”
“I feel so stupid.” I swing my legs sideways in the booth and sink down.
“Vanity will do that to you.”
“I am vain, aren’t I?”
“And a little paranoid. You had to take a three-and-a-half-hour bus ride to have me tell you that your husband is not having an affair. Look at yourself. You’re letting one woman in tight jeans derail your entire life. You have earned a glorious marriage, because you and Jack have gone through the worst and come out the other side. And you still have your daughter. You are still a family, even though Joe is gone. And you love each other! Stop. Think. What are you doing? This woman who has no name has taken your self-confidence and run off with it. How can you let a stranger do that to you?”
Theodore’s guest room is simple and comfortable. There is an old, rich chocolate-colored four-poster bed, a matching dresser, and a small Tiffany-style lamp. There’s a luggage rack for my duffel bag and a full-length mirror behind the door. The walls, the linens, the rug—everything is white. I pull back the coverlet and climb under the cool sheets. This is the first time I have been alone in a bed since I married Jack MacChesney. I’ve never gone anywhere without him in all this time, nor he without me. I wonder if he is thinking the same thing at home in our bed. I stretch my arms from edge to edge in the double bed and my feet as far apart as they can go. I stay in this snow-angel position until sleep comes.
Big Orange does not begin to describe the University of Tennessee Football Experience. It should be called All Orange, All the Time. Thousands of fans descend upon Knoxville wearing the theme color, and many of them have painted all exposed skin to match; their devotion seems to begin on a cellular level. I have never seen such football mania (and I went to Saint Mary’s College in South Bend, Indiana!). Painted people aside, Knoxville is a genteel Southern city famous for its Dogwood Festival and debutantes. You get a sense of times gone by when you walk the streets here.