You Didn't Have To Go

Phoebe Snow / 1950 - 2011

Beside Myself

My husband never listens to a word I say. Not that I blame him. My dad never heard me either. I was the middle of three girls, sometimes he couldn't remember who I was.

"Did your sister drop one of her kids off again?" he'd ask my long-suffering mother, who'd glance across the table at me and recognize one of her own offspring, although remembering precisely which one was another matter.

I became the three-name kid and holed up in the basement.

"KathyCarriePatty!" my parents would call down to me, combining all three daughterly names, not sure which applied but knowing one would hit the bullseye.

In desperation I made up my own name. I called out to myself over and over, deep into the night, from my spidery hide-a-bed in a corner of the rec room, while the ore trains hummed a distant lullaby and my family slept the sleep of the righteous in the rooms above.

"What a load of crap," my husband says every time I haul out this old story. Meanwhile I'm beside myself with joy knowing he was actually listening.

Just because he grew up with multiple phones and a stereo instead of a Hi-Fi doesn't mean the rest of us had it so good. His mother never put him out on the front porch when he was eight with a packed suitcase and his favorite doll and a pocketful of nickels.

"Good luck, er, you," my mother said, and locked the door behind me.

Her effort didn't take. I managed to weasel my way back into the house and continued to live amongst its inhabitants until I was eighteen, but still. It's the sort of anecdote that sticks in one's craw.

The main irritant in my husband's craw materialized that day twenty-five years ago when he stood in his Valentino suit before a judge down in The City and heard the skinny young broad standing next to him say "I do." Which was probably the last time he ever really listened to me, and it's haunted him ever since.

Then there's the matter of what happened recently in my husband's mouth.

Last fall my husband suffered a mysterious dental emergency, which had several dentists and at least one doctor scratching their heads in dismay trying to determine the exact cause of the intense pain emanating from his craw, er, jaw. I know in my heart he was secretly hoping for an extraction, thinking it might rid him once and for all (if only metaphorically) of the thing that's been stuck there all these years. But after months of painful procedures and false hopes, my husband's tooth -- and possibly our marriage -- was saved by a root canal.

All of which might have something to do with what's been happening recently in my sleep.

The other night my husband took his life in his hands (once again) and shook me awake.

"Who the fuck is Roxanne?" he whispered, dodging a right hook.

"Who-oo?" I gasped.

"Roxanne! All week long, you're all RoxanneRoxanneRoxanne, over and over, in your sleep. It's driving me fucking nuts!"

It took me a few hours to make it to consciousness, but once there, I grasped the situation. By this time my long-suffering husband had given up and gone back to dreamland. Carefully, clandestinely, while the foghorn blatted a distant warning and my husband slept the sleep of the oblivious beside me, I whispered the name over and over, into the dark:

"RoxanneRoxanneRoxanne..."

It was that other name, the name I'd given myself back in childhood. It was my secret, I'd never told anyone, and now after all these years (decades! eons!), I'd said it again...out loud! Not only that...in my sleep! Not only that...someone had heard!!

Except I should've known better (which is what my husband keeps telling himself about that long ago day in front of the judge). Nobody had heard. My husband never listens to me when he's conscious, so why should Mr. Nobody remember some jabberwocky I coughed up in the middle of the night in the middle of a dream in the middle of our marriage bed?

As usual, my worries were dumbfounded, er, unfounded. Next morning he was all,

"How'd you sleep?" and I was all,

"Like a rock...you?" and he was all,

"Out like a light."

And there you have it. A rock and a light. What a load of crap. But as good a metaphor as any to describe this union.




http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2Qad-gaHMg