Hotmail‘Happens Every Day’ a memoir of heartbreak
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There was a large silver framed picture of me and Josiah walking down the aisle on our wedding day. We got married at Christmastime. I wanted the wedding to feel like a New York Christmas party, so there were paperwhites everywhere. We ate chicken potpie and coconut cake. And then there were many, many photographs of our three boys. Josiah had a son, Ian, from his first marriage, whom I met when he was three. Ian lives in Texas with his mother and is the spitting image of Josiah, dark curly hair and almond eyes that remind me of a sparrow. My favorite picture of him is in black and white and was taken on a pristine beach in the South. It's almost annoying it's so beautiful, but he is wearing a T-shirt with a fierce shark on it that makes the whole thing palatable. Josiah and I have two boys, Wallace, age three on the day that Josiah was bathroom decorating, and James, who was sixteen months old. Both names were in our family trees, but Wallace we came to because we were watching Braveheart while I was pregnant. Like I said, I am Scottish. The boys are fair, their coloring more like mine. Josiah is dark. I think of Wallace as the sun: bright, vibrant, and warm and James as the moon: round, steady, and funny. James even likes colder baths. Wallace, like me, wants to be scalded.
We had been hauling all these pictures around with us in boxes. One reason for that was because Josiah was an English professor and we had moved from one college town to another for a number of years. The other was because we were both pretty big WASPs and in our worlds it was looked down upon to have too many beautiful pictures of one's own family ostentatiously displayed in frames around the house. My mother said it was okay to have small framed pictures on your personal desk (she gets everything printed in 3 x 5), but anything more than that was showy and, as she would say, "too much." I always felt sort of sad about this, that there wasn't more evidence of our happy family around for people to see — but I never questioned it. Most of the advice and direction my mother gives I take, but there are a few things I have thrown in the garbage. The picture thing I followed like a good girl, but my mother also thinks cars should be spotless; I like mine to look like my purse. She has shoe polish in brown, black, cordovan, and white and all the brushes and flannels to use them. I have never bought a can in my life. Josiah felt the same way as my mother did about framed pictures. He thought it was embarrassing and silly to take up space with big goopy silver frames filled with frozen happiness, so that he did what he did in the bathroom was mind-blowing.
I am from New York and Josiah is from Florida, where his mother and stepfather lived, and Georgia, where his father and stepmother lived. And although he feels like a northeastern guy, mostly because he went to boarding school in New England at age thirteen, actually he is 100 percent southern.
We were living in Oberlin, Ohio, because Josiah was teaching poetry at the college. Oberlin is a funky, tiny, political, young hot spot in the middle of northeast Ohio that vibed New York City to me a lot because most of the students who went to Oberlin College were from the East Coast if not New York City itself. But it was in Ohio — and it was rural and it was minuscule. A faculty member said that in the summer, when the students were gone, it felt like living in Central Park with no people — and that was kind of right. For the record, I absolutely loved it.
We had gotten the job (in academics you end up saying "we" even if it actually isn't "we," because you move around so much together from job to job that one person slowly loses his or her identity) right after I gave birth in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to our son James Thacher. Because of our chaotic life with a two-year-old, a newborn, a dog, and two cats, I ended up not going out to Ohio to check it out before we moved. I had faith in my dream of a bucolic, happy, secure, academic life. It's a great, great dream if you have it in your head right. Here's what was in my head. I had married a very good-looking (think Gregory Peck), brilliant (most people hate the word brilliant to describe a person, but I frankly can't think of any other word to do it — at our wedding Josiah's best friend described his brain as a cathedral) childhood friend that I had re-met at his sister's wedding in Maine. As six- and seven-year-olds we had sailed in little bathtub boats on the Penobscot Bay together, but at the time of his sister's wedding he was getting his Ph.D. in poetry at Harvard and I was being a New York girl in New York. I had not seen him in fifteen years. He was Heathcliff with an earring. It sounds romantic to be married to an actual poetry scholar, but truthfully he never recited poetry to me much or wrote me a poem. It's hard to admit, but I don't really like poetry or jazz. I just don't get it a lot of the time. If someone (and Josiah once in a blue moon would do this) teaches me through every line of a poem I can get it, but it's rare that it hits me in the gut the way a Rolling Stones song does, or the unfinished Pietà that I saw in Florence when I was fifteen. Right at the start of our love affair he did give me one of the only poems I do recognize as sublime, a John Ashbery poem called "At North Farm."
We fell in love in two hours at that wedding on a rare night so foggy it felt like when I was a girl in the 1970s, when it seemed to be foggy all summer. Maine has lost a lot of its fog.
Excerpted from “Happens Every Day” by Isabel Gillies. Copyright © 2009 by Isabel Gillies. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc, NY.
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