The First Day of the Rest of My Life Page 3

  By Madeline O’Shea

  Vasectomies and You

  After particular sessions, I ask my clients if I can print what they’ve said to me in order to share a tidbit of women’s wisdom with other women who might need this tidbit.

  My most recent client, we’ll call her Tess, agreed. “If I can help one woman out there deal with a man who’s afraid he’ll never be in heat again like a horny dog if he gets a vasectomy, it’ll be worth it.”

  Tess is five feet one, a hundred pounds, with blond hair that she calls “The Frizz Blast,” and, in her words, “outsized brown eyes. I look like a raccoon with blond hair and the teeth of a cow. They stick out, you know. See?”

  Here is Tess’s story:

  “My husband did not want a vasectomy. It was like trying to get a drunk bull to squish through a tire. I am freakin’ tired of birth control. The pill makes me vomit and dizzy. Diaphragms are gross and condoms are what you use when you’re a teenager rolling around naked in the back of an El Camino. Do I look like a pesky teenager? No, I don’t. So I told him he needed to go in and get clipped.

  “He acted like I’d asked him to give up his whatsits on a plate with a garnish of pickles and relish. I have given birth to five children, two at one time with the twins, and I have never, ever whined like that man did. But I told him no sex until you’re castrated, whack and whack. It took him a week and he finally caved in, but he was pale white, like a ghost, so I trailed after him going, ‘Booooo boooo.’

  “Anyhow, I had to drug him before we even got to the hospital that morning. A double dose. I had to drag him in like a dead dog. If he could have cupped his jewels with both hands without looking ridiculous, trust me, he would have done it. So I hand him over to the doctor and the doctor claps him on the back like, Buck up, man.

  “Honestly, I pushed five kids through something that is normally the width of a grape, and I didn’t moan and piss like that. So I’m in the waiting room and I brought a flask of whiskey with me—I needed it after what I’d been through—and I start reading my romance novel and I’m perfectly happy. His mother, Hatchet Face, is with the kids and I am finally alone for the first time in months. Even when I pee the kids come into the bathroom and fight with each other on the bath mat. Anyhow, I am sitting there hoping the vasectomy takes five hours or there’s some earthquake-sized complication and we have to be admitted overnight. I mean, wouldn’t that be great? I could stay overnight in a hospital! No kids and hopefully my husband would be out cold. But no! The doctor is a man and doesn’t understand. Way too quick, and right when I’m in the middle of a hot sex scene, as if I have the energy to think that sex can be hot anymore, the deed is done, he’s been sliced and diced. The nurse comes to get me. I wanted to cry when she said my husband was “ready.” Darn it, though, I wasn’t ready!

  “So I trudge to the room and there he is, lying down, his face gluey white. And I let this man get me knocked up five times? This coward? This ghost? ‘I think I saw smoke, Tess, and I smelled it,’ he whispers, his eyes staring wildly, like he’s seen the hounds of hell running around his balls gnashing their teeth. ‘There was fire. I think I saw flames. I was on fire!’ That man got teary eyed over his testicles. It’s not like they were removed and put in a jar of formaldehyde.

  “ ‘You had a vasectomy,’ I hiss, pissed off there weren’t complications. I wanted to read my romance! It would have been great if the knife had slipped and we’d had to stay a week in the hospital. That would have been a treat. ‘There wasn’t any fire or flames,’ I tell him real snarky.

  ‘I’m not a man anymore,’ he moans.

  ‘Yeah, you’re a man.’ I roll my eyes. ‘You still got your pecker.’

  ‘I’m not a man. . . .’

  ‘If you’re not a man, you’re not a man, you eunuch, so maybe you won’t pester me so much for sex anymore.’ I have had sex hundreds of times, Madeline. How many more times do I have to have it?

  “So, after a lot of irritating whining, so bad I wanted to smack him, we went home and he lay in bed with an ice pack on his balls, still moaning, and he reminded me of my childhood dog, Frisky. Frisky ran out and chased down kids and bit them, letting out this terrible howl. He would dart out the door before we could stop him. He even had a girlfriend dog that he would visit every once in a while, even though the girlfriend’s boyfriend dog chewed him up a couple of times. My mother used to have our neighbor’s Saint Bernard chase Frisky down and get him home.

  “Anyhow, as soon as my mother got that dog castrated, the ol’ balls cut off, he settled right on down. No more gallivanting around, no more cheating with the ladies, no more biting kids on bikes. So that’s what I told my husband when he was in bed groaning about the fire and smoke again. I told him about Frisky and said, ‘You two got something in common. Now shut up and quit whining.’

  “He complained for days from bed. By the fifth day, when he yelled my name three times and I walked back to the bedroom, carrying the baby, the toddler hanging on to my heel, and he whined, ‘Can you refill my orange juice? And I need another blanket. I’m chilled. Do you know where my gray socks are? No, not the white ones. I need my gray fishing socks. Can you put them on my feet?’ I let him have it. I told him that I’d given birth to five kids. I’d been pregnant for most of our marriage. He never took care of me when I got home from the hospital, even the time I got sick with the flu after the third kid. Didn’t even take a day off work to help out, but two weeks later he was able to take six days off to go fishing with his buddies. I hadn’t lain in bed for five days after I’d had the kids. In fact, on the second day I was up and taking care of him and everyone else. He never brought me a meal in bed or so much as orange juice. He never brought me socks and put them on my feet. I told him all that and I told him I was sick of his being a baby and I poured an entire pitcher of orange juice on his crotch and told him to get his slack balls out of bed.

  “I kicked him out of the house. I packed his suitcase and threw him out and told him to go home to Momma, the Hatchet Face. I threw an ice pack at his head, too, I was so mad. I felt like years of fury were bottled up in me and they all came out. He works eight hours a day, an hour off for lunch, comes home, lies on the couch, and makes derisive comments about how I, ‘don’t work . . . he’d like to stay home all day and watch TV, too . . . it’s his money, not mine....’

  “I called a lawyer, and the lawyer served him at work, told him what his child support was gonna be for five kids. He came home three days later on his knees after being with his mother, who is a tyrannical dictator. I told him to stay with her for three months because I needed a break from him. The next weekend I dropped all five of the kids off at his mother’s house—thank heavens I’m done nursing the baby. I also dropped off all the crap he has stacked in our garage that he refuses to throw away, plus his beer bottle collection and the lights shaped like beer cans. My daughter said his mother left for a hotel by Saturday morning. By Saturday night my husband was crying because the baby wouldn’t stop crying, my two-year-old kept fussing, and the other three kids were driving him crazy and wanted to come home to me.

  “I had the best three days of my life, Madeline. Can’t wait to drop the kids off in two weeks again. He’s begging to come back home. Begging like a fiend. You know what the lesson here is?

  “If you’re going to have balls in your life, make sure they’re good balls. If I’m going to allow his balls back in my life, there’s going to be huge, huge changes. If he doesn’t want to make them, he’s out. He causes me too much stress. My life is easier, easier, Madeline, without him, no question. He’s more work than my kids, and he never gives back to me. He takes. Sucks me dry emotionally. I need to go ball-less for a while. The kids and I and none of his balls. And, hey, twice a month, I get free weekends, Friday afternoon to Sunday evening, and every other Wednesday I get three hours to myself. Plus, he’s paying through his nose for child support and alimony. Loses more than half his check. Now that I don’t have to pay for his gamb
ling and beer runs, I’m way ahead.”

  Tess left later, and I thought about what she said.

  Ladies, you don’t have to have balls in your life. It’s a choice. Remember that. You can be on your own. You can be very happy on your own. In fact, much happier than you are now if you’re living with a man who sucks the life out of you.

  Think on it. Balls or no balls?

  I hit send in my e-mail program, which flew my article to the magazine I write for, Boutique. It has a huge readership and is growing every day. Good platform for me.

  It was very, very late by then, the whole city snoozing, but I was starving so I ate a bunch of fruit, including a mango, an apple, and two bananas, and macaroni and cheese out of a box. I then dug through a pile of mail stacked up in the tray of the black metal man with the octagonal head that freaks me out.

  I flipped through a few utility bills, and saw a manila envelope.

  It looked so benign, so normal, so boring.

  It was not benign, normal, or boring.

  I opened it up and stared at the contents, my hands shaking so bad I thought I’d been stricken by palsy. Inside was what I had been expecting, and dreading, and fearing, for a long, long time.

  It had found me. It was here.

  I dropped all the mail on the floor and ran for the bathroom, my head soon slung over the toilet.

  3

  “The black ghost is flying in soon. He’s coming for us. All of us.” She tugged on my arm, frantic, eyes wild, her French fast and desperate. “We have to get out of here. We must save the children from the black ghost’s wrath.”

  I stood near the butcher block kitchen table on The Lavender Farm, the morning light pouring through the French doors, as Grandma clutched me. I gave her a hug and answered in French. “Bonjour, Grandma. Sit down. I’ll make you some lavender tea.”

  “No!” she said, grabbing my hands, holding them tight. “No time for tea! Other people are already in their secret rooms and climbing into their teapots. No time for sugar! They’re putting lavender in people’s mouths until they suffocate.”

  It is awful to watch someone lose their mind, and Grandma was no different. She would sometimes run from our home screaming, or panting, trying to drag us with her, trying to get us into our pantry where the “secret door” was, or to turn off all the lights and be absolutely silent. She wanted to sleep in the barn. She wanted to sleep in one of the sheds or outbuildings or underneath the apple trees in the orchard. She wanted to hide from “the black ghosts.”

  Her sleep was sometimes shattered with her own screaming, and she would burst into tears at odd moments and call out in a voice raw and desperate the names of people I didn’t know: Avia, Esther, David, Gideon, Goldie—and there was Ismael, who came up often. “Where is Ismael? Is he hiding? I feel him!”

  “The black ghosts are gone, Grandma,” I said, trying to calm her, knowing her mind was erratic, confused, diseased. “It’s okay.”

  I smiled at Nola, a most wonderful Hispanic woman who worked in my grandparents’ grocery stores, named Swans, for thirty-three years, most of it in management. She left as a vice president and now takes care of Grandma, full time, as a favor to Grandma and Granddad, their long-standing friendship, and our family. She lives here at the farmhouse in her own suite. We all love Nola.

  “Good morning, Madeline,” she said.

  “Good morning, Nola.”

  “Sister,” Grandma said earnestly, as she flipped her silk scarf behind her shoulder, “they’re using sticks to beat the stars and the violin was dented in the secret room, and they’re packing all the cows in tight until they can’t breathe. We have to go.”

  “I have all the sticks, Grandma, and the cows are okay. They’re in the field.”

  She hurried to the window to stare at a couple of cows in the distance. Beyond the French doors lies a land quilt of hills and valleys and forests, and beyond that the blue-purple mountains of the Oregon coast. I don’t go to the coast. I don’t go to the sea. Neither does Annie.

  “The black ghost will tear off our arms and use them for firewood.”

  Honestly, sometimes Grandma’s words are terrifying. “The black ghost is locked away. He’s gone.”

  Grandma put a hand out and ran it through a ray of sun, her jeweled bracelets from Granddad tinkling. She switched to German. “He’s locked away?”

  I nodded, answered in German. “All gone.”

  I had arrived at The Lavender Farm an hour before. I couldn’t sleep, anyhow, so I left my home at dawn, traveled down the freeways, out through the suburbs, and into the country. My grandparents’ white, old-fashioned farmhouse is filled with nooks and crannies and window seats, Grandma’s skylighted painting studio, a modernized kitchen with a long granite counter and open shelving, and an island painted blue. A grand piano in the living room takes up a corner, but Annie never plays anymore, though she knows how to make that keyboard sing.

  Several paintings of Grandma’s swans were hung throughout the house: white swans in boats on a pond playing violins, black twin sister swans twirling parasols, swans crying into lace hankies, swans gathered for picnics of chocolate cake and pears, swans chasing a naughty fox wearing a black burglar mask, swans in tuxes and silky dresses in an orchestra. And, always, sparkling marbles, glittering crystals, mischievous elves, grinning grizzlies, laughing caterpillars, tea-sipping mice, and kiteflying gnomes hidden throughout the paintings, which young readers loved to find.

  “Grandma,” I said gently. “Look outside. Did you see the lavender? It’s going to bloom soon.”

  “What? Who will bloom?” She tugged at her cashmere sweater. “Who will bloom?”

  “The lavender.” I turned her away from the cows. Grandma could sometimes be distracted by the lavender. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

  I saw her blue-green eyes soften. “So beautiful. Anton planted those for me. Do you remember?”

  “Yes.” Anton was my granddad. I didn’t remember him planting them. He’d sowed them when my momma was a young girl, replacing plants as they died. The lavender was just always there.

  Grandma’s eyes teared up and she whispered, “I love you. You are a wonderful sister, Madeline, and I hope you can forgive me for what I did. It was love, love did it to me. It was after the Land of the Swans, I promise. Don’t forget your violin.” She gets confused about whether I am her sister or her granddaughter. She does not have a sister. She thinks that Annie is her niece. She does not have a niece. We don’t correct her anymore. “You must take it with you. It’s our history. No more crying. You must be brave or they will stick a spear through your heart and hang you on a wall of fire next to the ogre and the dragon.”

  I took a deep breath. See, terrifying. “Okay, Grandma, I won’t cry.”

  She patted my cheek. “We will have a new life. The black ghosts can’t follow us there. Ach. This life. So much pain.”

  I settled Grandma down, then watched my hand tremble as I poured the hot water over Nola’s and Grandma’s lavender tea bags in pink-flowered teacups. I often don’t breathe right, which causes the trembling. It’s not panic attacks or anxiety problems, it’s like my breath is stuck in my body behind organs and inside bones. It’s been that way since the weather was furious.

  Nola, Grandma, and I stared at the rows of lavender in the distance, precise, rolling highways of plants that would soon bloom into brilliant fireworks of blue, pink, purple, and white. Grandma abruptly stood and drew a finger through the condensation on the window. I knew she was drawing a swan.

  “There was so much blood that day,” Grandma said, her words floating, reminiscing. “Blood. So many other violin people were turned to blood.”

  I breathed in deep, told myself to be calm.

  “And the swans were murdered.” She used her fist to make the swan disappear. “They were all murdered. Dead.”

  I tried to breathe like a normal member of my species. It did not work.

  “Play your violin, my sister. Don’t mind
the scratches from the mountain,” Grandma said, her voice still tight, worried. “It always calms me down. Please? It’ll calm Ismael down, too.”

  I didn’t know what Ismael she was talking about, but I went to the foyer and grabbed my violin. I played Beethoven’s Romance in G major, then I played Massenet’s “Méditation” from Thaïs.

  My grandma closed her eyes and listened, swaying back and forth.

  When I was done, I bent to kiss her wrinkled cheek, her gaze off again, lost somewhere, floating through her past, jumping from here to there, helter-skelter, one vision after another, the circuits fried, or closed, or blocked, or dead, her brain slowly killing her.

  “Bloody swans,” she breathed in French, then swore in German. “Bloody and broken. Their wings sliced off.”

  My grandparents flip between speaking English, which they were taught by their English governesses from the time they were each three, to French, and German.

  And in between all those languages lay their lies and secrets.

  I sucked in air like I was drowning.

  About thirty minutes later, I saw Annie striding up and over a slight hill toward my grandparents’ farmhouse. She’d had a busy night. On one of her calls she helped deliver a foal. I know because she called me on the way home at 1:00 in the morning. She hardly sleeps, like me. It is more comfortable, and we are in more control, when we are awake.