Crybaby Ranch Read Free Page A

me.
    â€œDon’t get sunburned,” he says and leaves.
    I watch him walk off. He’s dressed as if he were teaching today instead of heading into a lazy Sunday on the sofa. He wears a blazer, pressed khakis, and one of his dry-cleaned shirts with a tie. Erik moves with authority. Women like to look at him. Me, too. He comes across as neat and clean, simple and straightforward. Actually, he’s only neat and clean.
    I turn sideways in line and stare out the glass walls of the terminal where gray concrete fades into gray sky. A sudden thrill twirls through me. I’m heading for Florida. Blue sky, seagulls, and salty breezes. Perhaps the beach is the place to talk to my mother about those late-night phone calls. We’ll walk holding hands like we do and I’ll just tell her they are hard for me.
    Once I secure my ticket, I sit with coffee near the windows. So far I’ve made decisions about this trip the same way I do making jewelry: watch to see what my hands do next. But I’m not used to this method in real life. I prefer thinking in correct grammatical English, punctuated, footnoted, spell-checked. I’m a teacher, after all. This trip must account for more than a response to a strange man’s smile or my familiar husband’s lack of one.
    Perhaps at last I understand that a few new beads each Saturday morning aren’t going to hold my life together much longer.
    In the early years of our marriage, the unity among the three of us—Erik, Beckett, and me—felt like the ideal of a loving family miraculously drawn from three unlikely sources. But that unity demanded a sacrifice from me. My Tampax was the single belonging not borrowed, displaced, or mutually used. Over time I became especially attached to my Tampax, and that sentiment extended to my periods; I drew into my body and its secret rhythms. Erik and I didn’t make love during that week. Also I hid precious things in my Tampax boxes, collected the empty ones for that purpose. Eventually, I acquired fibroid tumors, not a serious problem, but one that ultimately extended my periods to fifteen days of slowed trickle.
    I watch people juggle newspapers, briefcases, and coats, as they make temporary nests in their bolted-down plastic seats.
    I have been buying space and time.
    That’s the way women in my family purchase their personal boundaries, with their bodies. My mother suffered a hysterectomy when my father retired from teaching law at the University of Cincinnati and began teaching her how to keep house instead. Aunt Anne lost her thyroid and a breast before Uncle Roy agreed to attend AA.
    I must learn a better way.
    Next to me a woman struggles with balancing her coffee while trying to unload her tote bag, jacket, and backpack. I set my coffee down, hold her cup for her, and with my free hand, help her shrug out of her ski jacket.
    â€œThanks.”
    â€œGoing on a ski trip?”
    â€œGoing home. Where I live we wear ski jackets everywhere. Weddings, funerals.” She takes a sip of coffee. “I’ve sure felt stupid wearing it here.”
    â€œWhere’s home?”
    â€œJackson Hole, Wyoming.”
    â€œThat’s my dream place,” I say and scoot to the edge of my seat and face her. “We go every June for a week.” I look out the window and nearly have to fight tears at the memory of that isolated valley and the mountains whose icy peaks surround it like a diamond-studded nimbus. “Someday I’ll just up and—” I stop and smile.
    She nods in understanding. “Half the population got there that way, just up and moved. Must be magnets in the mountain slopes for some of us. I was vacationing and didn’t go home when I was supposed to. At work I hear stories all the time about people who saw the valley once, dropped everything, and moved there.” She takes a sip of her coffee. “I mean doctors, lawyers. We have the most educated restaurant servers