Trying to Be a Wife

“I used to think that the worst feeling in life was to end up all alone. It’s not. The worst thing in life is ending up with people who make you feel all alone.” —Robin Williams

Kevin came home one day and said he’d been offered the job of bureau chief in Dallas. I had been to Texas. I had been drunk off my ass in Houston and picked up the scion of a hotel family, telling him I was Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s daughter which I’m not but then again he didn’t believe me. He met me in a Denny’s where I had ended up after a long night in a cowboy bar. Otherwise, I had no clear impression of Texas.

“You’d hate it,” Kevin said. “There’s nothing but malls and football and driving. Nothing you like. Also, it’s really, really hot.”

Here was my chance to be the supportive wife. I said I’d be happy to go to Dallas. I said it was an opportunity to expand my experience of America. After all, I didn’t know where Kansas was when I’d met him. “How bad can it be?” I asked, summoning up every wife-like expression I could, invoking the ghosts of all those sitcoms, ignoring the fact I had always preferred women like Mrs. Peel, Honey West, Annie Oakley, witches and widows and women without male protection.

My mother had been a confusing role model between her ability to design a house, stain a deck and produce a delicious, locally sourced and healthy meal seven days a week. She had graduated from Harvard architectural school and had three children, sewed our clothes and was beautiful. Yet, she was in a marriage that tolerated physical abuse and a hierarchy that somehow meant she was beneath my father. It was a tough act to follow so I chose to believe it would be possible to live in Dallas and be happy because my husband had been given a promotion. I would be the boss’s wife and find some way to ignore the culture.

I didn’t expect to feel grief when we left London. While I loved my friends there, none of them had children yet and my job was underwhelming. Yet, it was a sweet life, walking around with Luke attached to me in his baby carrier, taking buses and trains, accepting compliments on his beauty, going to Covent Garden for Banoffee pie, hanging out with the other mothers who had given birth at the same hospital. Although it sometimes seemed hard to have no family close, no grandparents to babysit, sisters or brothers to offer advice, we were also left alone to become parents.

This resulted in situations like the time Luke cried all day and I told Kevin we had to take him to the children’s hospital even though there was no fever nor sign of anything wrong, except for the crying. We took a very costly cab ride to Kensington and by the time we arrived Luke was sleeping, even snoring a bit. The kind Indian doctor held a stethoscope to his chest. “He is a lovely boy,” he said. “Listen.”  I listened to my son’s strong heart and there it was again, horses galloping.

I was a child who had stayed home with a rupturing appendix while her parents went to a party, whose alcoholism had been apparent as a teenager but her parents wanted no part of such weakness. From the age of seven, Kevin had delivered newspapers in an open truck in the freezing dawn of a Kansas morning. I did not know how to be a mother, I thought. We took the tube back to Islington surrounded by drunken football players; Luke awake and beaming at strangers.

London was special because Kevin needed me. He wasn’t comfortable with the British and both of us were away from our families. We were an intimate unit and I must have known Dallas would change everything because it felt like my heart broke when we said goodbye. Everything, our misty swims in the lagoons at Hempstead Heath, our long walks to the supermarket, my baby-and-mum swimming classes, my circle of old friends, suddenly seemed priceless. As the plane circled over the city a woman in the seat next to us smiled at Luke and me. “Holiday?” she asked, her face pretty despite the mask of makeup. I shook my head. “No, we’re moving here.”

She nodded. “Oh, you’ll love it,” she said. “Everything’s bigger in Texas.”  What’s so great about big, I thought.

I hated it there. I hated the heat, the lack of public transportation, and the way waiters and people in stores asked you how you were before they rang you up forcing you into intimacy with a total stranger. Walking out of the terminal, my makeup slid off my face and it felt like an oven door opened even though it was only March. We went to dinner in a place with an outdoor café overlooking a parking lot. All the cars were SUVs or pick-ups or Hummers and had gun racks. I felt lost.

I didn’t know a single soul in Dallas and soon my friends, my closest friends, would be the ladies at the gym who ran the daycare, one a huge black woman who called Luke “pudding” and asked him for “sugar” and made me feel less desperate. I was desperate, desperate for meaningful work, for friends, for a place to feel normal. Driving was the only way to get anywhere so we bought two cars. Kevin bought himself a pick-up truck, which was very weird for a journalist but I thought he was having some sort of cowboy crisis so I shut up. I picked out a Neon because it was small and curvy and I saw a picture of it in Vogue. With Luke strapped into his car seat in the back I drove around trying to locate an outside place to swim that wasn’t a pool.

One day I circled a blue spot on the map and set off for a place called “Joe Cool Lake.” The name should have warned me but I wanted to immerse myself in water with my baby. We ended up driving down a dirt road that ended in a dead end where a small body of water was located giving no indication it was swimmable. Undeterred, I waded in after stripping Luke of his diaper, my sweet baby laughing and grabbing my hair. We waded in and I looked down at the beer cans on the bottom and accepted that it was a bad idea to go any deeper.

One of Luke’s first sentences was, “Mommy, are we lost?” because of these crazed, depressed drives to nowhere. He would sit in his car seat swigging from a bottle, twisting his blonde hair with one finger while I drove muttering about how much I hated Dallas. Occasionally he’d uncork himself and laugh at something and I would start to feel better. Finally, I got a job. I found out the name of the chair of the English department at SMU, a poet called Jack Myers, sent him my resume, and was invited in for an interview.

“How are you?” Jack asked. I burst into tears.

Luke was crawling around his office because the only time Jack could see me was late afternoon when day care ended and Kevin was still at work. I blubbered about hating Dallas, hating Texas, and how I felt like an alien. Jack was incredibly kind especially since I was insulting where he lived. I was given two sections of creative writing to teach and felt a little less like a failure.

Failure was something I dreaded more than death. I had left New York City aware that I probably wasn’t going to be the next great literary sensation but no one had to know that. I could be one of those women who had a baby, which ruined her chances of being on the cover of Vanity Fair. Writing novels was a ridiculous activity. My father had written a half dozen exquisite books yet never felt like he could enjoy success from what I’d witnessed as a child. He was a wonderful teacher, a respected and acclaimed literary figure, he had three daughters who adored him, a talented, beautiful wife and yet he was still the little boy who had been left behind in the awful orphanage and I was still the little girl who tried to make everyone stop yelling and hurting each other when they drank too much.

I prayed to a god I didn’t believe in for everyone’s happiness. I prayed to god not to let my best friend be dead but she was and I prayed to god to let my sister live but she didn’t. I had reached a terrible place in my drinking, my first husband’s hand tattooed across my face, gotten sober and wrote a novel that I dedicated to my lost sister and best friend, a novel that some people said was very good. But I felt like a fraud, an imposter and a failure. I felt like a bad mother and a lousy wife. And I hated Dallas.

A popular activity was to get your hair dyed blonde so I did that but fingernails eluded me. A woman called and said, “You don’t know me but your husband says you don’t have any friends.” This was very embarrassing but I also had no pride and agreed to have lunch. She was a nice person into shopping and rodeos but it wasn’t a great first date. “Where did you meet her?” I asked Kevin. He had met her in the supermarket and I had a moment where I imagined him approaching strange women in the condiment aisle to beg them to befriend me.

One day when I was feeling better about myself and looking forward to teaching he looked at me and said, “Can you give me an estimate on how soon you plan to lose the baby weight?” I handed him Luke, got in the car and drove to the only AA meeting I knew about, a woman’s meeting that had just started. When I repeated what he had said to me after explaining I had been in labor for seventy-two hours there was the sound of dozens of women hissing and groaning. The woman next to me with the face of a beauty queen, leaned over and whispered, “I just ate a stick of butter.” Somehow, this was comforting.

photo by i yunmai

Being fat in my family was a crime as serious as being stupid. Fatness was a sign of weakness, of a lack of awareness that your fat was offensive. One of my mother’s famous, oft repeated stories was about how she had helped my father’s sister, an aunt I had never met, lose thirty pounds. “I wrote out a diet,” my mother said. “She had never been able to lose weight before.” This was the only solid information I had about this lost aunt. She had been fat and my mother had cured her. My mother’s mother pretended to hug you but she was really checking to see if you were fat. My mother did her own version of the pat down whenever you were gone for any period of time, away from her healthy cooking and her no candy ban. I had been my thinnest after my sister was killed. Eating ceased to make sense. Happiness tended to make me pudgier.

I could never feel good about myself after Kevin asked that question. I kept recalling times when I’d worn a bathing suit and felt pretty and how fat I must have looked. I didn’t want to be naked in front of him anymore. I appreciated how healthy he was and the Christmas gift of a trainer but I also felt awful. That was when I came up with my secret title, “Fat Texas Housewife.”

Luke was limping instead of walking and the pediatrician confirmed my worst fear when he said there was a tumor on the bone of his shin, a tumor that would have crippled him in the past, made him that little boy in the background of medieval paintings leaning on a crutch. My son was Tiny Tim. I absorbed this information and the fact that it could be cancer although it seemed unlikely by forgetting every detail the doctor provided, buckling Luke into his car seat and driving in the wrong direction ending up in Fort Worth, hysterically crying while Luke slept in his car seat.

I finally pulled over and called my mother from a pay phone to choke out my terrible news and fears. “You just wanted to drive so far your baby wouldn’t be sick anymore,” she said. Kevin was extremely calm and kind. He asked a number of important questions, none of which I could answer. “Why didn’t we know?” I kept asking him. I knew the answer to that. I knew something was wrong but I couldn’t bear it. I decided toddlers walked funny and since Luke was always laughing and running it seemed as if he was fine. My go-to scenario for those I loved was death. If someone I cared about got hurt, they died. Thus, my baby couldn’t be sick.

Luke was operated on and it was relatively bearable. He was only eighteen months old and they broke his leg to remove the bone spur. When he woke from surgery he was barking like a seal because of the breathing tube and panicked, thrashing, tying to remove the IV. For a second, I wanted to run away. Then the nurse said, “Talk to him, mommy. Smile and talk to him.” I looked deep into Luke’s eyes that were the exact match to my own and I sang Suzanne which I sang to him every night. He stopped barking and smiled a little, entwining my hair in his fingers. I smiled through my tears and sang and thought what a terrible mistake it had been to have this child, this boy, who held my heart in his careless hands and whom I could not protect. Luke stroked my cheek and smiled while I slowly worked my way through Cohen’s beautiful lyrics.

Later, leaving the hospital finally, Kevin and I leaned against each other in the elevator and I realized how long it had been since I’d felt so close to him. He loved Luke as much as I did and that was comforting. It was a sad truth that we had grown far apart since London and I didn’t know whether we could change our marriage to make it possible to be each other’s best friend again.

The first neighborhood we lived in was in a section of Dallas called Oak Lawn. For Dallas, it was diverse and the houses were older. I could walk Luke in his stroller although I was often asked if I was lost or if my car had broken down since walking was a rare occurrence. The neighborhood was also gay-friendly, which made me feel less homesick for New York with galleries and cafés, bookstores and good restaurants. But Kevin thought we should buy a house, something I had never considered an important goal, probably another sign of my fiscal stupidity. I agreed to start looking and went straight to the barrio. There were houses still within the city limits that were very cheap, with lots of character and charm. It didn’t occur to me that a lawn was important. I had grown up surrounded by grass, trees, and miles of rolling farmland. The only thing I knew about gardening was that it was labor intensive and I sucked at it. I had even managed to kill a collection of cacti when I was housesitting for my sister’s landlords in Brooklyn by overwatering them. The fact that these houses had dirt backyards had no effect on me but Kevin saw things very differently.

“How could you choose this neighborhood let alone a house with no grass?” he asked. I liked the neighborhood. I wanted to live with people that didn’t look like me, that were artists and immigrants and struggling. But, I had married an upwardly mobile professional and he wanted to live in a place that demonstrated his success. “What would you like?” he asked me as we were being driven towards a suburban development near White Rock Lake. “A swimming pool,” I said. I didn’t expect him to listen to me.

We bought a house with a swimming pool, a two-car garage, a huge kitchen and living room and three bedrooms. The landscaping was nice but those plants would not survive my neglect. In the nearly two years we lived there not a single neighbor spoke to us except once when I was locked out of the house and needed help to climb the fence around the pool. I hated that house. It made me think of all the books and movies I had ever read where housewives drank or took drugs or slept with some random workman or committed suicide because they were so bored, lonely and angry. I listened to Aimee Mann sing about alienation or Marianne Faithfull rasp The Ballad of Lucy Jordan and realized how terrible I felt. But I had married the handsome, successful man and had the beautiful baby. Everything should have felt good but it didn’t.

A reprieve came with work on a film. A producer I had written a spec script for called from London and said we needed to pitch the screenplay to the BBC. The sort of funding we were looking for was called a Europudding, because it was composed of numerous arts funding organizations from a number of countries. The idea of flying back to London, babyless, to work with other professionals on a movie was very seductive. Names were starting to be mentioned like Meryl Streep and Ralph Fiennes.

Returning to London with my dyed blonde hair and my lack of self-confidence was a challenge. It felt wonderful to be working with dedicated professionals but I felt like a fraud, like a fat, Texas housewife. The pitch was a disaster except Judy, the producer, was able to provide backup when I kept repeating, “It’s set in Ireland.” I couldn’t recall a thing after that. We went to the Groucho Club and sat between a famous director who had just won an Oscar and an actor whom I recognized from a movie I had just seen. We were eating with Martha Fiennes, Ralph’s sister and during dinner, Ralph rang. It was all very heady and confusing. People kept telling me how fabulous I was and how my entire life was about to change. I rang Kevin and he was terse, “Luke keeps crying for you,” he said. “I’m glad you’re having a good time.”

Well, I wasn’t having a good time. I felt overwhelmed, underdressed and inexplicably angry. I already sensed things were going to turn out badly and I wanted to enjoy the moment but I couldn’t. It was just like how I felt with my two novels. The more people praised my writing, the worse I felt. I bought Luke a Union Jack t-shirt and flew home to my swimming pool.

Now, that pool was an obsession. While we purchased the house we did not purchase a pool person so I was responsible for trying to keep it clean. There was something called “shocking” and this weird robot thing that sucked up the algae and chlorine and testers and somehow it was always murky or over-chlorinated or just weird. Chemistry was involved in pool maintenance and I had never gone beyond algebra. I began to hate the pool as much as I hated the rest of the house. Swimming was out of the question as I spent all my time testing the pH levels and trying to understand the directions in my pool manual.

I was summoned back to London one more time to meet the new executive producer who had made a movie I had seen called Copycat. We met in Mark’s suite at the Savoy. He barely touched on the script but told stories instead about various actresses and their plastic surgeries and infidelities. At one point we ended up in the shower with Mark demonstrating the amazing performance of the Savoy showerhead, telling me it only cost about $5,000. He thought I was someone who could spend that kind of money on a showerhead. It was a typical movie conversation with everyone saying how great everyone was. It was clear to me he hadn’t read my script. I had been warned that a Hollywood producer would bring in his own writer.
“He adored you,” the producer said.
“Why does he think I could spend $5,000 on a showerhead?”
“He thinks you’re brilliant.”
“He didn’t read the script,” I said. “I’m getting fired.”
“We’d never fire you,” the producer said.

They sent a fax to Kevin’s office. No one even had the decency to call me. I threatened to sue everyone involved but my agent in New York had warned me that if I agreed to the contract they could throw me under the bus. I returned to being a fat, Texas housewife who had been fired from a film project. A few days later a manuscript I had sent to a small publisher was returned to me so swiftly I imagined throwing it over a wall and having someone on the other side catch it and throw it back.

I sat in the kitchen of our Dallas house and tried to remember who I was. My writing life seemed doomed while my marriage was less and less happy. We went to see a couples counselor and said unforgivable things about each other. I used terms like “abandoned” while Kevin described me as “insatiable.” We were both lonely in our stupid house with the un-swimmable pool. The only happiness was Luke. One night driving home from a meeting I had a brief thought to crash the car into a retaining wall. I thought Kevin’s mother would be able to help with Luke and Kevin could find a wife who was more grateful. I pulled the car over and got out, trying to breathe. I prayed to my dead sister to help me hold on. When she disappeared her son Henry never stopped hoping she’d come back. I couldn’t do that to Luke. Wanting to crash my car into a wall was not a good sign.

— Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach

FOLLOW AND READ MORE: