A castrated horse! That was unexpected. The picture in my mind changed completely. Now I envisioned my father as a gentle dray horse, docilely pulling a cart driven by my mother.
“Why a gelding?” I asked.
“I’ve found that life is just easier that way,” he replied. “Trust me.”
And so life has been easier for him. In exchange for the almost castrating constraints that marriage has clamped on my father’s personal freedoms, he has received stability, prosperity, encouragement in his labors, clean and mended shirts that appear as if by magic in his dresser drawers, a reliable meal at the end of a good day’s work. In return, he has worked for my mother, he has been faithful to her, and he submits to her will a solid 95 percent of the time-elbowing her away only when she comes a little bit too close to achieving total world domination. The terms of this contract must be acceptable to both of them because-as my mother reminded me when I phoned her from Laos-their marriage now endures into its fifth decade.
The terms of my parents’ marriage are probably not for me, of course. Whereas my grandmother was a traditional farmwife and my mother was a feminist cusper, I grew up with completely new ideas about the institutions of marriage and family. The relationship I’m likely to build with Felipe is something my sister and I have termed “Wifeless Marriage”-which is to say that nobody in our household will play (or play exclusively) the traditional role of the wife. The more thankless chores that have always fallen on women’s shoulders will be balanced out more evenly. And since there will be no babies, you could also call it “Motherless Marriage” I suppose-a model of marriage that my grandmother and mother obviously never experienced. Similarly, the responsibility of breadwinning will not fall entirely on Felipe’s shoulders, as it fell to my father and grandfather; indeed, the bulk of the household earnings will probably always be mine. Perhaps in that regard, then, we will have something like a “Husbandless Marriage” as well. Wifeless, childless, husbandless marriages… there haven’t been a whole lot of those unions in history, so we don’t really have a template to work with here. Felipe and I will have to make up the rules and boundaries of our story as we go along.
I don’t know, though. Maybe everyone has to make up the rules and boundaries of their story as they go along.
Anyway, when I asked my mother that night on the phone from Laos whether she has been happy in her marriage over the years, she assured me that she’d had a really nice time of it with my father, far more often than not. When I asked her what the happiest period of her life had been, she replied: “Right now. Living with your dad, healthy, financially stable, free. Your father and I pass our days doing our own thing and then we meet at the dinner table together every night. Even after all these years, we still sit there for hours talking and laughing. It’s really lovely.”
“That’s wonderful,” I said.
There was a pause.
“Can I say something that I hope doesn’t offend you?” she ventured.
“Go for it.”
“To be perfectly honest, the best part of my life began as soon as you kids grew up and left the house.”
I started laughing (Gee-thanks, Mom!) but she spoke over my laughter with urgency. “I’m serious, Liz. There’s something you have to understand about me: I’ve been raising children my entire life. I grew up in a big family, and I always had to take care of Rod and Terry and Luana when they were little. How many times did I get up in the middle of the night when I was ten years old to clean up somebody who had wet the bed? That was my whole childhood. I never had time for myself. Then, when I was a teenager, I took care of my older brother’s kids, always trying to figure out how to do my homework while I was babysitting. Then I had my own family to raise, and I had to give so much of myself over to that. When you and your sister finally left for college, that was the first moment in my life I hadn’t been responsible for any children. I loved it. I can’t tell you how much I love it. Having your father to myself, having my own time to myself-it’s been revolutionary for me. I’ve never been happier.”
Okay, then, I thought, with a surge of relief. So she has made her peace with it all. Good.
There was another moment of silence.
Then my mother suddenly added, in a tone I’d never heard from her before, “But I do have to tell you something else. There are times when I refuse to even let myself think about the early years of my marriage and all that I had to give up. If I dwell on that too much, honest to God, I become so enraged, I can’t even see straight.”
Oh.
Therefore, the tidy ultimate conclusion is…???
It was slowly becoming clear to me that perhaps there was never going to be any tidy ultimate conclusion here. My mother herself had probably given up long ago trying to draw tidy ultimate conclusions about her own existence, having abandoned (as so many of us must do, after a certain age) the luxuriously innocent fantasy that one is entitled to have unmixed feelings about one’s own life. And if I needed to have unmixed feelings about my mother’s life in order to calm down my own anxieties about matrimony, then I’m afraid I was barking up the wrong tree. All I could tell for certain was that my mom had somehow found a way to build a quiet enough resting place for herself within intimacy’s rocky field of contradictions. There, in a satisfactory-?enough amount of peace, she dwells.
Leaving me alone, of course, to figure out how I might someday construct such a careful habitat of my own.
CHAPTER SIX
MARRIAGE IS A BEAUTIFUL THING. BUT IT’S ALSO A CONSTANT BATTLE FOR MORAL SUPREMACU.-Marge Simpson
By October 2006, Felipe and I had already been traveling for six months and morale was flagging. We had left the Laotian holy city of Luang Prabang weeks earlier, having exhausted all its treasures, and had taken to the road again in the same random motion as before, killing time, passing hours and days.
We had hoped to be home by now, but there was still no movement whatsoever on our immigration case. Felipe’s future was stalled in a bottomless sort of limbo that we had somewhat irrationally come to believe might never end. Separated from his business inventory in America, unable to make any plans or earn any money, utterly dependent on the United States Department of Homeland Security (and me) to decide his fate, he was feeling more powerless by the day. This was not an ideal situation. For if there is one thing I have learned over the years about men, it is that feelings of powerlessness do not usually bring forth their finest qualities. Felipe was no exception. He was becoming increasingly jittery, quick-?tempered, irritable, and ominously tense.
Even under the best of circumstances, Felipe has the bad habit of sometimes snapping impatiently at people he feels are either behaving poorly or interfering somehow with the quality of his life. This happens rarely, but I wish it would happen never. All over the world and in many languages I have watched this man bark his disapproval at bungling flight attendants, inept taxi drivers, unscrupulous merchants, apathetic waiters, and the parents of ill-?behaved children. Arm waving and raised voices are sometimes involved in such scenes.
I deplore this.
Having been raised by a self-?composed midwestern mother and a taciturn Yankee father, I am genetically and culturally incapable of handling Felipe’s more classically Brazilian version of conflict resolution. People in my family wouldn’t even speak this way to a mugger. Moreover, whenever I see Felipe fly off the handle in public, it messes around with my cherished personal narrative about what a gentle and tender-?hearted guy I have chosen to love, and that, frankly, pisses me off more than anything else. If there is one indignity I shall never endure gracefully, it is watching people mess around with my most cherished personal narratives about them.
What’s worse, my yearning to have everyone in the world be best friends, combined with my near-?
