RECIPE FOR A HEALTHY MARRIAGE AFTER LOSING IT ALL
White Audi station wagon cocoons me on the freeway.
Autopilot to Santa Barbara at 70 miles per hour, no traffic. Infinite gaze of the blue Pacific Ocean in December. Nearly flat today, quiet ripples, small waves like my husband’s love. Seven years together and five years of marriage. Small things. How Dylan pulls the chair out for me at restaurants and dry-cleans my jackets without asking. Special pencils he buys for me on the internet. Dark roast coffee from Hawaii made and brought most mornings. Shoes lined up and dirty clothes tossed in the laundry. Prescriptions filled. Messages taken carefully. Dishes, every dish, he washes without complaint. He is action-oriented.
A man of movement, a foil to my current sloth, utterly still.
Stagnant, until today.
Like a switch turned on by my baby girl’s absent vision.
Understand this: we stuck together, despite it all. Touch gold engagement ring, humble and distinctly mine, like all the best things of my life. He gave them to me. What woman can say she loves her husband perfectly or absolutely? No one. But I love Dylan. For now.
Drive or watch the sea, both calming. Like as a kid, hovering on my boogie board in the breakers, waiting for the next wave to carry me in. Distinctive shade of today’s blue ocean haunts me. Giant rolling swells, until the freeway veers just inland.
Pass the bluffs behind Summerland and aim towards downtown Santa Barbara. Drive straight for the corner of Cota and Anacapa, parallel park the Audi, and wade through masses of holiday shoppers toward my farmer.
Search for my cheeseboard guy amid vendors selling California’s winter crops: grapefruits, dates, goat cheese, oranges, Santa Rosa Plum jam, tangelos, tangerines, the first cherimoyas from Goleta, orchids grown in greenhouses, walnuts and pistachios, olive oil and lavender, holiday wreaths woven from eucalyptus branches and pine and protea blossoms. A manic overabundant ecosystem of farmers, buyers, plants. Overwhelm.
Fog drifts in now, clogging the sky, diffuse light bouncing off the farmer’s blue tent. Found my guy. A chalkboard sign reads, “Last Chance Farms.” Piles of Eureka lemons cover two burlap tables. Between the hills of lemons, slabs of polished boards are stacked together. From here, they just look like regular cutting boards. Walk up and the farmer is straightening a sign: “Handmade Walnut Wood Cheese Boards $105.” Find one for my mother-in-law, Dylan’s mom. Barely left the house for months, but here I am, near Christmas, shopping.
“Really? $105?” I ask the farmer. Up close, his face is handmade, too. Cobbled. Hammered. Slight redness to his skin, forced cheekbones, whirls of brown hair and lots of stubble. Jeans and a blue t-shirt with the farm’s logo of skull and crossbones, with a pitchfork and shovel, instead of two bones.
“Really. I know it seems high, especially compared to 50-cent lemons. But they’re a nightmare,” he said. “50 hours for each one.”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“I mean it’s a shit-ton of work. I make them with spare wood from the walnut orchard my father-in-law cut down two years ago. The only power tool I use is a bandsaw to cut the rounds. Then it’s all handwork. Sanding. Oiling. Rubbing. I make them year-round to get ready for the holidays.”
“And in two days, they’ll all be gone?” I ask.
“Hopefully. That’s the plan. Until next year.”
“This is it,” I say, holding one up. “Can I pay you?”
“Why that one?” asks the farmer.
Lull between people buying lemons, boards, chatting.
“The soul feels right,” I say, for no reason. The farmer leans hard on the table, sucking down his coffee.
“I know what you mean. Some cultures believe the heart of a tree contains a ghost,” he says.
“Really? Which one?” I ask.
“Well, me. I believe that, at least,” he says.
“Who was in this tree?” I ask, holding it in front of my chest like a plate of armor.
“A child. Sad, I think. Look, here,” he says, pointing to a warp and curve in the tree rings. “Doesn’t that look like a rattle?”
I frown and glance to my side. The tingling begins again, deep inside my crown and now the nape of my neck, beginning to burn. For once, I don’t feel sad. Just hot. I know this time it’s you, my love. You, coming into the physical world and trying to touch me. But I’m not ready for you here in public. I close my eyes and take a deep breath.
“I lost my—” I begin, just as a woman in a pink cowboy hat trimmed in fake fur and matching fake fur boots shoves her way next to me and pushes seven separate hundred-dollar bills out.
“I’ll take six boards,” she says, dropping her bills near the farmer’s cash box. “I’m shipping these all over. To relatives, friends.”
I watch him wrap each board slowly in three sheets of newspaper then tape it with masking tape. Finally, the farmer stacks the covered boards on the table.
“Enjoy!” he says, handing her change.
Walks back to me and I hold out my cash for one board. Instead of taking it and walking away, he pauses. The crowd thins out for a moment. He takes a few more quick sips of coffee.
“Our farm does retreats, you know,” says the farmer, sorting lemons, stacking bills in his cash box, picking up discarded coffee cups. He putters around the space between the pick-up truck, back open, and the folding tables. “Yoga, meditation, cooking. Seems like you have an open mind. Weren’t you just about to tell me something you lost?”
I feel myself blush.
“My baby,” I say.
Just like that. Wham. Heat all over. Burning. I don’t tell most people about, Jeanette, you, just like that. To most strangers. I don’t serve them my sinking ship, foist my dense, inelegant tragedy onto their lives. The farmer drops all his lemons and rushes over. I shove my hands and cash in my pocket, fold my hands in front.
“Holy shit. I’m so sorry. Recently? Oh, no,” he says. He glances behind, looks up to the sky, his hand at the back of his neck. “Please just take the board. No charge.”
“No, no,” I say. But my hands white-knuckle the wood, palms hot. “Do I look that bad off?”
“No, it’s not that. I make them myself. That’s the beauty. I can do this. Shit, I’m such an idiot. About the rattle. So insensitive,” he says.
Are those tears fleeing the far corners of his eyes? Or are they just watering randomly from dust or a caught eyelash?
“Can I give you a hug?” I ask.
Without a word, he throws his stringy, taut, tree-branch arms around me. I’ve been on the receiving end of this annoying invitation for a hug too many times for the last ten months. It feels good to extend myself instead. He pulls me close, no words, and two things happen. First, I close my eyes and feel you, my love, my little Jeanette, wash over both of us like energetic lava, doused in a healing rush of fire. Second, for no apparent reason, I hiccup. Again and again. After the third, the farmer releases my body and stands back. Then, I hiccup and sneeze almost at the same time and the spasms stop.
“You okay?” he asks.
“Sorry,” I say.
“No worries,” he says. “My sister-in-law miscarried their second baby.”
“That’s terrible. What’s your name?” I ask, just as a mob of tourists speaking Italian stop by, holding up lemons, gesturing and talking.
“Frank,” he says. “Frank Chance. As in Last Chance Farm? Ha. Let me know if you’d like to get tea sometime, at the farm. Or the retreats. Seriously. Look them up. I’m really sorry about your child. Really.”
I take his business card and try, again, to pay for the board but he shoves it towards me, gaping almost, just as the Italian tourists began fumbling with $20 bills to buy lemons. He goes behind his tables quickly, keeping eye contact.
“I’m Tribute. Bye. Thanks,” I say.
“Tribute? Okay. Bye, Tribute!” he yells, then I hear him address the tourists, “Ciao! Buon giorno!”
Jogging back to my car, my mind churns: Mama, give it all away.
My mind spins back to Dylan.
“Is there a recipe for how to improve my marriage?” I think.
Yes. I’d take a good night’s sleep and add sex. I would even add a dash of something spicy.
Next, add a child.
Add a healthy, beautiful girl child. Sift before adding the child to the dry ingredients and then look for lumps and other problems. Do not blend for too long or the whole thing will get tough. I’d bake us together for five, already five, now 10, 15, 20 years more, sorting things out occasionally over long beer-soaked discussions about severing all ties.
Never discuss divorce. When it’s too hot to sleep, don’t bother. Return, instead, to the beginning, to this recipe. I want to start again, where we first met. Have sex, repeat, add spice.
