My wife Susan had a dark streak. She carried herself like the pampered aristocrat she was but insisted she was a Surrealist. She actually told people that. “What do you do?” they’d ask. “I’m a Surrealist,” she’d say. She made Duchampian readymades. I, myself felt like a writer. Susan made things. I made things up. In `96 we were officially hitched and rented an old ramshackle farmhouse infested with field mice. The house had been built in 1875 and the glass windows were thick and blurry. Some had cracks. There was a barn behind the house with a sagging roof. There was an authentic outhouse beside the barn with a genuine crescent moon cutout on the door.
But back to the mice. We could hear them gnawing and scrabbling behind the crumbling horsehair-plaster walls and it made us both nervous. I bought five wooden Victor mousetraps, baited them with peanut butter and placed them strategically around the house. They worked like a charm. We heard the terminal snap of the traps long into the night.
By morning we’d killed five mice. I’d landed a job with the phone company and left for work, leaving Susan alone with the five dead mice.
When I returned home I found that Susan had made a mobile out of twine, sticks and the dead mice. She hung the macabre mobile over our bed, telling me it was a “fertility totem.”
“We’ll conceive a daughter under it,” she insisted.
Nine months later our daughter was born.
Susan named our daughter. She’d reluctantly indulged my suggestions but insisted on making the final decision herself. She said she was solely responsible for the choice as the woman. If we were having a boy, then I’d be in charge of the name. We (sort of) discussed a few names when the prenatal ultrasound confirmed that our first (and only) child was going to be born female (Susan insisted she could feel the fetus’s burgeoning gender upon conception. From the zygote forward. I knew that such a thing was not possible but kept quiet. I usually stood down against Susan’s rampant Surrealism.
I suggested the name, Elizabeth, after my late, feisty grandmother, Nana Liz, but Susan vetoed the idea. I didn’t bother to argue. She also shot down all my other suggestions: Hannah, Michelle, Sophie, Isabel.
No, no, no and no. It wasn’t up to me. Shut up.
“Our daughter will be named Brockalee,” Susan announced eventually.
So that happened.
Brockalee was born with a minor birth defect. The four fingers of her right hand were fused together. It’s called syndactyly. As a baby, she looked like she was giving the Vulcan salute. Live long and prosper all day long.
I wanted to correct the problem with surgery but Susan adamantly refused. “She was born this way so that’s the way she’s going to stay,” she said. “She can have the surgery or not when she’s old enough to decide for herself.”
I said, “But that might mean years of trauma. She’ll feel like a freak. I think we should nip it in the bud now. She’ll never remember the procedure and there’ll be less scarring to worry about.”
“I said no. Respect my decision.”
“But the doctor recommended we do it early.”
“I don’t care. I said no. The doctor is wrong. Brockalee is perfect the way she is. She will decide.”
And that was that.
But I was proved correct. My survival instinct prohibited me from saying, I told you so, but our little Brockalee was mercilessly teased once she landed in the classroom. She was ridiculed and bullied for her hand deformity and for her deformed name. She came home in tears most days. She started acting up at home. Destroying toys. Peeing the sheets. Screaming herself awake. She grew withdrawn and sullen after a happy, confident start to her life. It was heartbreaking to witness but Susan said, “These minor hardships will imbue her with permanent outsider status.”
“Outsider status” was important to Susan. It was better to be a miserable misfit than a content, well-adjusted conformist.
Finally, when Brockalee turned six, I urged Susan to explain the situation to her and allow her to have the surgery. If Brockalee wanted.
And she did. Desperately.
She spent a couple of days in the hospital having her hand fixed and then stayed home from school for another week. She kept trying to peek under the bandages like an impatient kid on Christmas Eve. She just knew her new hand would improve her life.
Susan told her, “Don’t be so sure. Kids don’t need an excuse to be cruel,” and Brockalee wandered away to cry in private.
That was when I decided to make Susan my ex-wife.
That was fifteen years ago.
Brockalee drove down from New Hampshire last Friday. It was the first time I’d hosted a visit from her since she’d fled her mother’s erratic home for college. I suspected she’d found a bad crowd at school. I also knew she wasn’t fond of my company anymore.
I admit, I have a hard time trying to think of things to say to her. Things were awkward between us and now she’d only made it worse with her visit.
On Saturday, after loading her luggage back into her banged-up blue Miata, she cornered me for a “heart-to-heart” talk. Over coffee she confessed that she’d dropped acid up at school and it had “awakened her spirit.” She was finally finding herself, making important cosmic discoveries. She was so excited.
I confessed that I had tried acid (twice) at her age so I’d feel like a hypocrite if I lectured her about the dangers of LSD. But I told her it was like playing psychological Russian roulette. Especially since mental illness ran in the family. But she just laughed and hugged me and said not to worry. She appreciated the paternal concern, though. Truly.
“Thanks Dad. I love you.”
And then she was gone, headed back to New Hampshire to be with her hippie, tab-tripping friends.
I finished my coffee and forty minutes later, I realized she’d dosed me.
Ten hours, man. I tripped hard for ten fucking hours.
I guess Brockalee had inherited her mother’s sense of Surrealism.
Crumbling Asphalt 