The Lost Place
Kimberly Lawrence Kol
At first it was just fantasies. In a surge of anger, I’d imagine hitting my husband over and over with the small, aluminum bat my father kept at his bedside in his basement apartment in Queens. I’m not sure why that bat came to mind, but whenever I reached some peak of disgust or contempt or whatever that feeling was that our former couples therapist called one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse for marriage, it would be there in my hand, ergonomically perfect for smashing over his head. I could hear the satisfying ping of contact, feel the vibration through the rubber grip. It was practically weightless.
I had wielded this bat before, of course. When my sister and I spent every other interminable weekend lounging in my father’s waterbed with the mirrored ceiling, my father watching television or endlessly shitting or otherwise puttering around the apartment ignoring us, we’d brandish it at each other as a joke. When my father wasn’t hogging the television we’d sometimes watch the warped six-hour extended play VHS of three bootlegged Disney movies, which he stored in a cabinet alongside Debbie Does Dallas and his other porn because the category of VHS tape somehow subsumed other ones like good for children and not good for children. We were brain dead and irritable by the time we got to Dumbo.
Sometimes we’d go out to dinner where we all stuffed ourselves, desperate for a sensory experience. My father always let us have dessert and more than one soda, but on our way out my sister and I would still take handfuls of mints just to prolong things. When I think of those mints now I just think of hepatitis, and how my own children sometimes won’t even touch the flusher in our house. They sneak flushing it with their feet so I won’t see them and take out on them my anxiety that I’ve transmitted that craziness already, even though when I was their age I used to touch everything and never worry about it, not even after I had worms. The windowsill on my side of my father’s waterbed was thick with layers of lead paint I used to pick at, slipping the flakes between the wall and the pleather edge of the bed.
Those weekends every outing was a victory, even when it was just to go to the store. I liked the hardware store best, fondling the racks of spooled chains, standing in the fertilizer aisle breathing in the terrible smell. My sister liked to rub her fingertips on the sanding disks, to touch the points of the circular saw blades. The plant store was the worst, where my father would examine each and every plant while the humid air made my skin itch. As a gift to my children I try not to drag them on errands if I can help it, and when I can’t, I’m clear with them up front if it’s a quick beeline for something or if I plan to lay eyes on every single object on the shelves. I don’t mind if they’re bored, but that drifty, greyed-out feeling like they’re indefinitely on hold is not something I want for them. Whenever my father got a new plant, he’d bring it home and rearrange the potted jungle he already had, spending hours watering and spritzing and murmuring encouragement.
It’s plants that let me know I have some violence in me. After college a friend mentioned that our apartment needed greenery, it occurred to me that though I did seem like the type to have plants, I really didn’t want them. Invariably I’d be given some random one as a gift, sometimes on Christmas which I don’t even celebrate, as if a fondness for plants and Christmas were universal. Upon receipt I’d immediately set to work depriving it, relieved as the days passed and I could pluck yellowing leaves and brittle stems, bit by bit until the thing was either gone or dead. I’m not sure why I didn’t just politely rehome them, or even put them directly in the garbage, except that it felt too explicit. Instead I’d feel resentful until they died at whatever rate was unique to their species. I didn’t yet understand that I was rivalrous with plants.
Very rarely my father would take us out to Long Island in the late afternoon where we’d wait for him to schmooze with the guys he knew who ran the party boats before heading out with them to catch bluefish. I hated the awkward wait on the dock, the scruffy men who had no children and didn’t know how to talk to little girls, the setting sun in my eyes. But I loved being out on the water, my rod feeding me signals from the depths, the surge of a panicked bluefish through the moon spattered water, the bloody gaff.
The bat, my father said, was there for intruders, but it was made to land fish, to knock them out when they were unruly and close to the boat. I never saw anyone strike a bluefish, and I never saw an intruder, just the stream of male babysitters my father hired who locked themselves in the bathroom with his stack of Penthouse, or who brought girlfriends and put us to bed early, or who otherwise didn’t know what to do with us. Before the bat there was a length of narrow metal pipe, the end wrapped in masking tape, but it was heavy and aesthetically inferior, and I was glad when it was replaced.
It was only once I started fantasizing about my own divorce that it occurred to me my father could have just stayed in our town, picking us up after school or coming to recitals, though I imagine he needed the Whitestone Bridge traffic to blame for how he showed up late to anything important, so late we’d wonder why he came at all. It also occurred to me that he could have opted to wait until the weekends he didn’t have us to go out on dates with the women he met by lying in his New York Magazine personal ad. You’d think the women would understand, given his ad described him as a renaissance man with two daughters at the center of his universe. When I learned in school the definitions of both renaissance and universe, I was pretty surprised.
Before the bat reveries I’d just mouth “I hate you” at the back of my husband’s head, when he was at the sink doing the dishes or getting something from a cabinet. When he went away for business, I’d glory in how well-rested I was without the annoying puh sound he made when he slept, how good the room smelled without the sundry nighttime aromas he emitted. I’d fix the kids breakfast, do their hair and lay out clothes for the little one, prodding them along without losing my cool, remembering to be playful instead of shoving them though their routines, all the while reflecting on what a good job I was doing, that I was doing it all on my own, that my husband served no purpose. It was always disappointing when he came back.
A while ago when my friend got divorced, it was obvious. He was mean, a drinker, he couldn’t do the laundry. She left when she had tried everything else. This made it harder to complain about my husband. I watched them divide things up, settle their kids into their new life, move on. I approved, but it wasn’t for me. Instead I grew interested in disaster. When he was late coming home, at the core of my usual worries about highway accidents was a vein of silver lining. When he coughed in the winter, I bought herbal remedies and imagined chemo. I wasn’t actively wishing him dead, just opening myself up to whatever the universe had to offer.
Even now the main deterrent to getting divorced is how we’d deal with iTunes. The rice cooker, which my father bought us as a combined birthday gift for $350 he didn’t have in order to prove he had it, would be mine. The iron and silver chest that I insisted we lug home from our honeymoon in Morocco, and that I alone polish every seven or eight years when I alone notice it’s tarnished, would be mine. The dogs would stay with the kids, making their sad little commute from one parent to another en masse. But the kids and the dogs and the appliances are discrete and individual. I can draw a neat circle around them, imagine them happily settled in with either of us. It’s the pre-digital photo albums, the kids’ art, the college friends that seem impossible. For better or worse, my entire adult life has been intertwined with my husband, and parsing out what is whose is insurmountable. I can buy another Cuisinart, but I want my life intact. I want the world to close up around him, not to rend in two.
Despite my longings, an aluminum bat isn’t practical. There’s no fishing store near us, and we share an Amazon account. If I were somehow able to procure one, I’d have surprise on my side, but I’d nonetheless lose in hand-to-hand combat. I tend to get flustered and would be easily disarmed, my unseemly intent laid bare, and after that I’d have to endure the interpersonal aftermath. Even if I were physically capable and could keep a level head, the idea of him knowing I’m murdering him doesn’t sit right with me; I want to kill him, not hurt his feelings.
The back way to the town next to the one I grew up in ran through a verdant residential neighborhood with grand and mysterious houses set far back on their lawns. An enormous rock on a grassy mound stood at the center of a five-way intersection, and whenever we approached it my mother would say, “Uh oh.” My sister and I, Greek chorus that we were, would respond with awe, “It’s the lost place.” By the time I learned to drive, thrilled and alone in my car, I’d pass that rock the only way we ever went, mostly forgetting that once there had been options, that once the way had not been so clear. Though I was wistful to know where the other roads led, I never took any of them; the exhilaration that I could drive in any direction eclipsing whether or not I actually would.
Though I’m certain the tangle of chargers at the head of his side of the bed is giving him cancer, the pace is intolerable. Hiring an intermediary feels cheap and unfeminist; I vowed at our wedding to see things through. For years we had a set of blank greeting cards with drawings of various female murderers, and on the back were chirpy blurbs explaining their crimes: one who axed a series of loggers, another who brained her husband with a bowling ball. I used the entire box on birthday wishes and thank you notes, though about my enthusiasm for them my husband seemed lukewarm. When I was young, a woman on our street was rumored to have fed antifreeze to two neighborhood dogs. We were lucky: my dog, a springer spaniel prone to incessant barking, turned up wandering on the far side of the parkway, frantic and panting after her abduction, but unharmed. The animal control man who brought her back explained that antifreeze dripped and dogs lapped; intent was hard to prove. At the time I assumed the woman was crazy, but now I think she just reached her threshold for rambling dogs.
My mother-in-law once asked me what we wanted for Chanukah. I requested an ice cream maker attachment for my Kitchen Aid; she got us an espresso machine. I don’t drink coffee, and my mother-in-law wishes I were smaller. I know this not because I’m unusually paranoid about my body, but because for years she only displayed two photos of me, one from my wedding, when I was underweight after an engagement year wracked with doubt, and the other from a friend’s wedding, when I was standing farther back and slightly downhill from my husband. Eventually I bought the ice cream attachment for myself. The kids want only the creamy flavors, even if the chunks are cookies or crumbly ribbons of fudge. My husband will eat almost anything, and especially likes when I use some liqueur, a splash to add depth to the flavor, to keep it soft and ready to serve.
Regrettably, no one but me likes a cool, green pistachio. Instead I do a dark Rocky Road, testing the recipe and spitting it into the sink. My husband goes wild for it, my children content to eat the smooth vanilla. I know he’ll have another serving before bed, and over the dishes I let the hot water burrow a hole through the vanilla, then push it in chunks down the drain. I tuck my children in, reading them stories with my pulse thundering. I kiss foreheads and shut closet doors. I move nightlights just so. I can hear my husband in the kitchen, the break of the freezer door vacuum, the chime of the spoon against the bowl.
We brush our teeth side by side, and when he’s flossing I see a tiny beige blob land on the mirror. I use a disinfectant wipe to clean it. I wipe the chrome of the faucet until it gleams. There’s the pee-splattered underside of the toilet seat, the rim with his two pubic hairs like springs on the white porcelain. I have the unlucky ability to notice the style and whereabouts of every pubic hair in a bathroom, and after we have a party I can tell which ones are my husband’s and which ones are not. When I used to go to the gym, if someone sneezed I tracked their progress through the equipment as if they were covered in fresh red paint. On airplanes I obsess not about crashes but how the air moves out of strangers’ lungs and into mine. The pubic hairs are the least of my problems.
I lie awake listening to my husband breathe. I can’t make my pillow right, and I cycle through all the relaxation exercises I’ve ever been taught, breathing and focusing and tightening muscles. Someone needs a glass of water, someone else heard a weird noise, and eventually the children are asleep. I step out into the hallway so I can hear their soft, snuffling sounds, and I sit with my back against the wall, my arms around my knees.
When my husband wakes up dying, his breathing raspy and erratic, I flip on the light. He is wild-eyed as he grasps at my hands. In his eyes I see him years ago, when he disappeared into the frozen woods to find our lost dog. It was fourteen years after she arrived as a puppy, so much our child we called her our dogter. The forested hill behind our house is steep, and as I stood calling her beloved name, steeling myself for what was coming, imagining her lost and surrendering in the too-deep snow, my husband appeared. He rose from the woods a superhero, our dogter limp but alive in his arms, and I ran through the ice-crusted snow to cover them both in kisses, my heart as full as it has ever been.
