Better Food for a Better World. Erin McGraw
when she got a grin out of the girl. It was Sandy’s bad luck to catch Cecilia when she was worrying about her husband, a man who would have cheerfully told Sandy to play what she was good at, not what she loved. Trained as a botanist, he believed in practical goals: If corn didn’t thrive, plant beans. If tobacco failed, try berries. So Cecilia studied her husband and tried to figure out what harvest he had missed, that he was so ready to plant a baby in its place.
She had come up with no answer yet. She should, she knew, bring the issue up at Life Ties, but every time the thought occurred she let it slide away again. She wasn’t ready for the glare of interest, the advice on everything from baby-raising methods to her and David’s sexual positions, the frank stares that would fix, week after week, on her meager belly. The group’s basic rule was members could bring their problems to meetings, not that they had to. Cecilia clung to the distinction.
Normally, so long as she stayed safely out of the fray, Cecilia liked Life Ties. The group was loosely allied with a Unitarian church that half of El Campo more or less attended for its good youth group and monthly wine-and-soup suppers. One of the church’s many outreach organizations, Life Ties was a support group for married couples, meeting weekly in the church’s fellowship hall and using the church’s Xerox machine for its mailings. Dimly based on AA, the group had rules and goals and slogans, but mostly the meetings were just talk: disappointments, surprises, betrayals, the occasional triumph. People talked, and then the others gave feedback. Somehow, amazingly, the talking helped. Husbands and wives discussed and revised and recommitted themselves to their marriages. They explored their difficulties. They found new solutions. “Cheaper than divorce,” somebody always said. “The weekly news,” somebody else would add.
The group met on Sunday nights, sometimes twenty people or more, sometimes only six. All the Natural High partners came at least sometimes. Vivy and Sam often slid in late. Other couples showed up with a rough regularity, new members appearing when old ones decided they’d had enough.
The couples Cecilia liked best had been long married. They told stories of domestic savagery both ornate and inventive. By their standards Cecilia and David’s five years of marriage, so considerate, so mannerly, hardly constituted a marriage at all. In five years Cecilia had never had an affair, never squirreled away money from the checking account or hit David, never—to take a recent example from a doctor’s wife—spread resonant rumors about his personal hygiene until patients refused to shake his hand.
Other people stole, they whispered, they destroyed. Their lives struck Cecilia as remarkably full of options. Sometimes, after hearing about slashed upholstery and mangled hard drives, Cecilia felt abashed at the puniness of her own actions. Then David would speak up with reassuring clarity about sharing, communication, and the importance of a united effort, and Cecilia would sit up straight again. The meetings renewed her pride in him, an emotion she suspected would slip away if she didn’t have Life Ties to remind her of it.
Lately, he had been listening to the happy couples, the joyful ones who sailed together through tribulations. At home he quoted them, his face alight with glaring hope. Cecilia couldn’t help herself—the more David talked about uplift, the harder she listened to the squabbling couples, the ones going over and over some worn-out patch of discord. She liked the peculiar self-possession of people who could quarrel weekly and with heat about who deserved the good parking space beside the house. The night a couple married twenty years came into the meeting already growling, Cecilia made sure to sit close, so she could hear.
“You want that boat,” said the man. “Don’t say you don’t.”
“I want a life,” snapped the woman. “I want to come home at six o’clock and take off my shoes.”
“You have to sacrifice a little to get the life you want.”
But do you have to sacrifice bare feet? Cecilia wondered. And who gets to decide?
“You get paid for overtime. I don’t,” the man said. “And you like to fish. You like it more than I do. You have to look ahead.”
“Do I? Thank you for telling me. What else, if you don’t mind saying so, do I have to do?”
“You’d cut off your own arm to spite me, wouldn’t you?”
The woman paused. “No,” she finally said. “I like my arm.”
When the laughter—nervous, short-lived—sputtered out, that week’s group leader stepped forward to make the speech about conflict’s deep roots, and asked the man and woman to come back next week with new plans for their future. “Who else?” he asked, and Cecilia kept her eyes on the soft blue linoleum until a pair of newcomers, married not quite a year, came to their feet, the man pulling the woman up beside him. “He,” the woman said, jerking her chin at her scowling, straw-haired husband, “he thinks coming here is a good idea.”
“What ideas do you have?” the husband asked. “Buy some cocaine, go out to a club, buy some more cocaine?”
“He thinks I’m his problem. He’s his own problem. A big one.”
“You don’t want a husband. You want a playmate. Somebody to sit in the sandbox with you.”
The woman—short, broad, her forehead high under a helmet of shiny black hair—laughed, a sound like tearing cloth. “You’re right. I’d like a playmate. But instead I’ve got the goddamn nursery school teacher checking to make sure I pooped on time.”
Even Nancy, two seats down from Cecilia, looked uneasy, although she usually welcomed confrontation and stout talk. David was the one who said, “Come on, you two. The fact that you’re here together means you’re willing to find some common ground.”
The man said, “The fact that we’re here together means I forced her into the car.”
“He shoved me into the front seat,” the woman said. “I could get him for assault.”
“You can start this if you want,” the man said, his voice winched tight. “There are lots of crimes we can talk about.”
“He loves to threaten me,” the woman said. “He loves to tell people that I’m a whore and a jailbird. Like he’s the angel Gabriel. Where do you think I met him?”
“Where?” Nancy asked.
“In detox.” When the woman smoothed back her ridge of glossy hair, Cecilia could see the fan of acne over her temple. “But I don’t tell people that.”
“Why not?” the group leader asked.
“Look at him. Isn’t he better than God? Nobody would ever believe he was hopping around a room, clawing at his T-shirt.”
“I believe you,” David said. So did Cecilia. The man’s face, which had been bright with anger, had gone chalky, his lips gray. Cecilia thought he might claw at his T-shirt any second.
“He doesn’t like me to tell people,” the woman said. In the room’s hush she sat quietly, then rested her hand on her husband’s arm. He looked at her hand until she moved it away again.
David said, “The important thing is to finish what you start. Once you make a decision, stay with it. Even if you find out it isn’t turning out the way you expected. Keep going anyway.”
Cecilia nodded. The next day she would realize David’s words weren’t quite in line with the Life Ties philosophy, but for now the man and the woman nodded too, and the group leader proposed they all take a break. Vivy headed for the parking lot, Sam stayed for tea, and David hastened to the new couple to give them his phone number.
Sandy McGee squealed up three more notes, then lifted her bow from the strings. Cecilia glanced at her watch: ten minutes left.
“Can I play my second piece now?” Sandy asked.
“Good idea.” Cecilia cranked her smile back into place. “Think for a second before you begin. Remember: you want to sound like trickling water.”