It’s 11 a.m. and I don’t want to get out of bed. Or, I should say the couch—I don’t want to get off the couch. Ever since my husband-to-be moved out two months ago, I can’t bear sleeping alone in the bed we shared. I pull the crimson red blanket over my head to block out the sun. I want to slide into the deep leather crevices of the couch—so smooth and cool--and slip off into oblivion.
M. proposed to me six months ago. Not long after that, one day we are swimming in the lake on a hot summer day, the clouds high overhead. As we crawl out of muddy lake bottom on our knees and elbows, M. turns to me and says, “So, I didn’t know you had all these mental health issues. I withdraw my marriage proposal…..for now. Let’s wait and see what happens.”
On top of that, there’s the matter of his 12-year-old son, back from New York, who wants to live with M., but not me. Plus, the ex-wife is launching an aggressive campaign to get M. back.
I have never loved anyone as much as M. I think—no, I KNOW--I will die without him. All I do is talk about him, and my friends are sick of it. So sick of it, they’ve stopped calling me and rarely pick up the phone when I call. One day, I gather up my courage and walk over to P.’s house—my best friend of 20 years. “I’m so lonely. I miss you so much,” I say, holding out my begging bowl.
“You’re just no fun anymore,” she says.
It’s not true! I am fucking fun, I shout! In college—at UC Berkely—in my student co-op, I was voted funniest, most philosophical, most interesting, and-- I’m not meaning to brag here-- but best butt! (not best body or nicest smile, but best butt!!) And that’s not to mention what a badass I am—how, at age 24, I singled-handedly chased a group of Turkish boys down the street when one of them ill-advisedly grabbed my butt, or, how I infiltrated the all-men’s softball team in Three Rivers, or how I routinely swim with alligators in the Louisiana swamps.
Of course, I don’t tell P. this. I hang my head and go back home and curl up on the couch. It’s true. I am no fucking fun anymore. Even my own dog thinks so. When I get home from work at night, she acts like she’s seen a ghost, and shoots off into the backyard to hide. My other dog, Brutus, who understands everything backwards, wags his tail, gives me a huge smile, and takes a gigantic piss on the kitchen floor. He’s so happy to see me, I don’t complain as I mop up the warm urine, which runs underneath the refrigerator.
My husband-to-be tries to explain why my friends are blowing me off. In Vietnam, when a soldier got wounded in combat in the jungle, a lot of his time, one of his buddies would put a bullet through his head, “to put him out of his misery… and so they didn’t have to hear him scream all night,” M. says.
I wish M. would put me out of my misery—either marry me or break up with me, but he does neither. I try to be more fun, but it’s no use. One friend says, “You can’t hide how miserable you are. It’s like you’re wearing a wet T-shirt.”
Another one says, “Complaining about M. is your only hobby. You haven’t smiled in months.” They leave me out of more and more things. I understand. I’m difficult to be around. I don’t want to be around me either. But I have to keep on being me. I have no choice. I scroll through their posts on Facebook and see my friends lounging around at the river, eating chocolate cake, laughing and smiling and taking selfies in their bikinis—each friend more beautiful than the next. How did I get to have such beautiful friends, I wonder.
Meanwhile, I am losing weight. Around town, people in the grocery store and post office comment on my new svelte shape. The trouble is I can’t eat. My clothes start to hang off me. and when I walk around town now, people look away, like maybe I have cancer, or I’m on drugs, or I’m dying—or all three. I go to a friend’s daughter’s wedding shower. I take a selfie of myself with my skin sagging off my face.
“I don’t really look like this, do I?” I ask, handing her my phone.
She looks at the picture I took just two seconds ago, squints and says kindly, “No, you don’t look like that.”
Three months later, she’ll stop talking to me, too.
I can barely keep it together. I curl up in the backseat of my car between my English 101 classes I teach. I call my father, the world-famous chemical engineer and sob. He shouts at me, “Lisa, get it together! You think you’re the only one going through this?! Listen to all the country songs on the radio. Everyone is fucking heartbroken!”
One day, M.’s schizophrenic-hallucinating daughter stabs his son with a knife while he’s sleeping, and the boy gets 12 stitches. Two days later, M. decides he does want to marry me after all, because his life, evidently, is too hard to handle alone.
Five years later, M., now my husband, but soon-to-be-ex-husband, is driving me insane. I consider murder, suicide, driving off a cliff. I don’t know. I can’t do this alone. All my friends from the past are gone, so I go in search of another one. I meet N. one day at the river. She’s dressed in black with a slick of purple hair, and is sitting cross-legged on the beach, mediating.
“Do you mind if I join you?” I ask.
“Sure,” she says. “I’m kind of depressed, though, so I’m not the best company.”
My heart leaps with hope. “I place my hand on her arm and lean into her conspiratorially. “I’m thinking of leaving my husband.”
“Yeah, I get it,” she says.
Two months later, I call her one night, and say, “Can I come over and sleep on your couch. I’ve left my husband.”
She and her husband, T. welcome me, and I curl up on their big, purple, velvet-covered couch. The next day, I spot an empty bedroom in their house and ask, “Can I rent a room from you?”
Sure, they say. I live with them for the next year-and-a-half. They take me in like family. I am not too strange or too sad or too skinny for them. I am just right. We go through the pandemic together. We smoke lots of pot, cook meals, watch movies, and with a group of friends make our own pandemic movie. We cheer when we watch the BLM people on TV burn the Minneapolis police station down on live after George Floyd gets murdered
I am at home here. Their two dogs adopt me as their person Even their chickens make friends with me. One of them comes outside my room, lays an egg every day, which I boil and eat. I plant a pandemic garden on their property—beans, beets, tomatoes, lettuce, eggplant, sunflowers, potatoes. I won’t harvest any of it. Like most everything else in my life, these optimistic, buoyant plants will wither and die. But I am happy here. I am where I belong.
When the pandemic first struck, I have to admit I was a bit ecstatic. I drove home from school, and in my momentary moment of madness, shrieked to my housemate, “This is the best thing that’s ever happened to me!”
I was elated—for the moment. It was my chance to cast aside disappointments of failed romances, soured friendships, failed attempts to teach students how to seamlessly integrate quotations into essays—or, more importantly, to teach them the difference between their, they’re, there; and two, to, and too. None of this mattered anymore. All that mattered was trying to stay alive.
With all the excitement of a new love affair, I leapt out of bed in the mornings, and tore up the grassy hillside outside my bedroom door. The ground was moist and supple and ready for me. There was no pressure now to go out to make new friends, to find a new boyfriend, to create a newer, more exciting life. This WAS my life. Just like the patriotic Americans who planted victory gardens in WWII, I farmed like my life depended on it, because maybe—just maybe—it might.
The best thing about weeding is that there aren’t many ways to do it the wrong. With weeds, you just pull them up by the roots and they’re gone. I spent most of those initial weeks of the pandemic on my hands and knees in the dirt, carving my hillside into glorious terraces for planting. I’d lie in the freshly dug dirt at the end of the day, staring up at the billowy clouds in the sky. My dog would lie beside me. I’d reach for him and feel his wet nose and his warm breath on the back of my palm.
I thought of my hero, Anne Frank, hidden away in an attic for years at a time. I thought to myself how lucky am I to be out in nature with the mountains, the trees and the clouds to keep me company in my new found isolation.
My garden kept me going. I amended the soil with bags of compost. I bought dozens of tomato plants. I planted green beans, potatoes, eggplant, yellow squash, kale seeds, and lettuce. I’d do most of my planting in the late afternoons and tuck each plant into the soil like a baby, covering it with warm, rich soil.
In the mornings, I’d rush down to the garden and greet each plant like a friend. I’d lie on my side and count the flowers on the tomato plants. I’d examine the tiny, purplish green leaves on the eggplants—oh so delicately-- beginning to unfurl and whisper to them, “Yay! You can do it! You are doing it!”
When the sun set, I’d carry my book, reading light and a bottle of wine and sit among the plants. Life was just about as perfect as it could be. As the cold weather turned warm, I’d cut the tops off the kale and make salads for dinner. I picked the ripening cherry tomatoes, popping them into my mouth like candy. It was a quiet kind of joy.
Then, one day the heat struck. The kale turned bitter overnight. The tomatoes went on strike and stopped producing. The green beans which had promised to become giant beanstalks in the sky, crashed to the ground. The zucchinis stubbornly continued producing fruit. The squirrels came out in droves and attacked what was left.
The sunflowers continued to flourish. They shot into the air, six feet tall, their golden, reddish petals defying the summer heat. Ah, the irony of it all. I had spent hundreds of dollars on the garden and here I was—a $2 packet of sunflowers laughing in my face.
I became depressed about my failed garden. All the time, effort and love that went into it. I thought of what my uncle used to say. “It doesn’t matter what kind of life you’ve led. It almost always ends ugly.”
I thought about my paternal grandfather--the kindest, gentlest, most athletic, handsome man—both in his youth and well into his older years. He died of Alzheimer’s. One day, when he realized what was happening, he clutched my arm and said, “I never thought this would happen to me.”
I thought of my ex-husband and how we first kissed on a cold winter day in front of my fireplace. I felt then like I had a won a $5 million lottery. I thought of us picking out furniture, bed sheets, buying our first house together, and painting our bedroom walls. Years after that first kiss, I came home and said, “I can’t do this anymore” and it was over.
What had gone wrong? Was it him? Was it me? It didn’t really matter anymore than it mattered what had gone wrong with my tomatoes or my kale. It was gone.
So what does one do in the face of such devastation and death? I think of my ancestors in WWII who watched their family members go up in ashes in the Nazi concentration camps.
I think, too, of all the Central Valley farmers who I’ve written about and admired for over 20 years--how they’ve faced droughts and freezes, and how—sometimes in the space of a single day—all their hard work comes crashing down.
So, what is there to do? With the farmers, the answer is always the same: Plan next year’s crops. I will also plan for next season’s crop, because really, what else is there to do?
In the meantime, amidst the wreckage of my garden, there are still tiny signs of life among the mint plants that refuse to die. I’ll water them and coax out whatever bit of life they have left.