ONE
I am one of those women with a high IQ, a good education, scads of arcane data in my brain, yet I seem to have no common sense when it comes to making personal decisions. I aced my college courses, with a double major, no less—but in philosophy and world literature, subjects so broad I came out with no practical knowledge except that I could never know anything for certain. Hello? Who would hire me? It didn’t matter, because, being me, I dropped out of college three months shy of graduation to marry Georg with no e. Maybe God the mother of us all remembers why it seemed so urgent to get married; I don’t. In hindsight, I think I did it to hurt my parents, fulfilling their low expectations of me, blowing all the money they had spent on my tuition while smugly letting them think I was knocked up.
Pregnant? Ha. I was so not pregnant, and after marriage it became apparent that I was going to have to work hard to get that way. Georg lacked a lot of normal attributes besides an e, as I found out over the next two and a half decades. Perversely, he turned out to be so much like Mom and Dad that they took him to their bosoms, giving him their unconditional approval even when he dealt with midlife by dumping me.
Divorce did nothing to improve my judgment. I dyed my hair ridiculously red. I thrust cherished possessions into the Goodwill bin. Pausing only to retain a lawyer, cutting off all communications with Georg, I moved far away in search of long ago, to a place where I had been happy visiting my grandparents as a child, a place Georg would have loathed, short on culture but long on snakes and alligators: the Alabama border hinterlands of the Florida Panhandle.
All this against the advice of the friends I left behind along with anything else familiar and comforting except my dog.
“Schweitzer,” I told the dog a week after we had moved into a rented shack wreathed with mimosa trees, “Grandma and Grandpa are so not here anymore, and this is not even their house, just something in the general vicinity, and I am so not a butterfly-chasing child anymore. I’m almost fifty. You’d think by now I would have a clue.”
Schweitzer, an animal shelter graduate with a double major in dachshund and something else, kept gnawing on his teddy bear’s nose. Schweitzer scorned all designated dog toys, preferring stuffed animals.
“But trust me to screw up. I go and move south at the beginning of summer, never mind global warming,” I continued, “to the Bible Belt, where there’s nothing but church open on Sunday, and ‘church’ does not include Universalist Unitarian.”
Already I regretted my impulsive and idealistic retreat to my childhood Eden. Sure, I still loved the mimosas, the live oaks furred with ivy, ferns, and Spanish moss, the flocks of white ibis flying, and the wildflowers everywhere—but those reminders of childhood happiness made my heart ache. I was an adult now, and in the mood for extensive retail therapy, thanks to all the weight I’d lost. There’s no diet as effective as divorce. I was a hot mama with my new red hair, but a lot of good it would do me here in Maypop, Florida, where the nearest shopping mall was up in Alabama, eighty miles away. Ten miles from my shack, Maypop had a Piggly Wiggly but not much else, and Maypop County was mostly a wilderness.
Schweitzer started sucking on his teddy bear’s nose rather than gnawing it. I refrained from sucking my thumb. In every corner of my small house stood stacks of cardboard boxes I had not yet unpacked, but I felt too bummed to work. This was, of course, on a God-it’s-a-hundred-’n’-three-degrees-in-the-shade Sunday as I sat in front of the huge old window air conditioner while my personal ghosts floated in its blast. I had tried shopping online, but this was slow-modem country, where the Internet was like Chinese water torture. The only thing I succeeded in purchasing was a set of bug-proof storage containers for the kitchen, not very satisfying emotionally.
I had called both of my sons, twentysomethings busy in the Big Apple or vicinity thereof, probably at a Yankees game. I had left Hi-this-is-Mom messages on their voice mails requesting that they call back, but I knew that neither of them would. While unlikely to admit it, they were both traumatized by the divorce, and running away from it just as I was.
“I didn’t want to be a clinging vine,” I told Schweitzer, “so now I’m rootless.”
This was punny. My parents, Deborah and Gerald Clymer, had named me Liana Clymer because they thought it was clever—subtle enough that only smart people would get it, and sweetly feminine. Our relationship had gone pretty much downhill from there. I could not phone them, could not get past the knowledge that Georg was likely at their Pennsylvania George-Washington-slept-here fieldstone home for Sunday dinner, and probably Mom was doing his laundry for him.