The house weathered two hurricanes: one blew away, and the other, my mother-in-law, lived there. Last summer, she and my father-in-law readied the house for sale, and they invited my husband Anton and me to sift through the books in their library. I could not help but compare the process to the emptying of my parents’ home, which had been maintained as a jumbled mausoleum to my childhood. During that bargaining rodeo, my parents parted with things only if I promised to take them. Months after we began that task, my husband Anton and I drove away with a plaster imprint of my five-year-old hand, my first trowel, and the moth-eaten Achoo.
Neither my in-laws nor their home harbored such sodden sentiments, which came as a relief. “You don’t need to knock. You’re family,” Anton said, opening the front door of the sturdy colonial and heading for the library.
My mother-in-law Crista, a tiny woman who stood so straight she looked three inches taller, waved us in, pointing to the floor-to-ceiling shelves of books: “Take whatever you’d like. Start with Proust and Spark Joy.” Her thick, graying hair was braided and pinned to her head like an emergency rope, her skin scrubbed into perpetual pinkness.
“These are for you,” I said, offering a baggie of rudbeckia seeds I’d collected, a test of wild hope to see how she would react to something I had nurtured.
“Thank you, Emma. They’re a little too cottagey for us, but I appreciate the thought,” she smiled.
“Of course,” I said, feeling foolish.
Crista left to spray countertops. We’d shared pleasant holidays and summers, when we floated on the lake, passing one another on our pink inner tubes without collisions, though I knew I wasn’t a natural fit. Two years into the marriage I was still finding my way, neither willing nor able to be remade, but wanting to keep the peace.
I heard Crista and my father-in-law Mark arguing in the kitchen. With the regularity of a metronome, he repeated, “It’s fine,” and she responded, “No, it isn’t.” Anton wanted to see what they were fighting about, but I wanted to stay put, inhaling aromas of covers and pages, running my fingers across the golden letters of ancient spines. “We should give them some privacy,” I said.
“They’ve been together thirty years and raised six kids,” Anton said. “Now it’s just bickering. Let’s grab a piece of stollen before she puts it away.”
Anton never criticized his parents, though once, after an afternoon of Sangria, he said that his mother always told deli clerks that every pound of ham should have twenty slices, and then she counted as each slice fell off the blade. After that, I avoided eating cold cuts at their house, wary of salivary retaliation from the clerks. Anton offered no advice about getting along with Crista, saying only, “stick to your guns.” I wondered if he ever considered what would happen if I did. I was the child of a landmine family, where the smallest disagreement could detonate hostilities that lasted months.
I followed Anton into the kitchen. Crista was pacing in front of the sliding glass doors overlooking the gazebo she and Mark had built. She turned to me. “Aha! Here comes Reason. Emma, help me. What’s wrong with this picture?” she asked, pointing outside.
Mark smacked his forehead in frustration. “Would you tell her, please, once and for all, that nothing is wrong?”
Although it was June in South Carolina, I froze. I looked at Crista, I looked at Mark. She was giving me my chance. I stared out at the landscaped lake. Plastic Adirondack chairs, scrubbed and aligned to maximize viewing. Orange globes of marigolds six inches apart. Insects sizzled by bug zappers; a vinyl mat at the door. What could I say? I could side with my father-in-law, in messy solidarity, pronounce it all ship-shape. Or, I could lose my mind, follow Anton’s advice, and confess that the sterility unsettled me. It needed dragonflies and a dirty sock, chairs askew, as if their occupants, seduced by the lake, had leapt up and jumped into it, flabby naked. “Life!” I would cry. “It needs life!” And then Crista would advise Anton to divorce me.
It is hard sometimes to be both a whole person and a good wife, harder still to be a good daughter-in-law. I hesitated, for a very long while, imagining our future. I will never know which of my thoughts my beloved Anton heard that day, or what, exactly, motivated him to look out the window, put his arm around me, and declare, “Neighbor’s flagpole is crooked.”
“THANK YOU!” Crista said. War averted. I remained a good daughter-in-law.
There, across the lake, a white pole with its American flag flapping, leaned gently to the left, surrounded by crimson cannas, edged with purple alyssum giving way to manicured lawn.
“Ruins the view,” I offered righteously.
“Emma and I will straighten it,” Crista declared.
I said, “I just need to take a nap first.”
“We can’t go until dark anyway,” Crista replied, brushing pastry crumbs from Anton’s shirt. “I don’t know the owners.”
Another chance to bond with my mother-in-law, who rowed us across with the strength of a crew team and directed as we heaved the neighbor’s flagpole into straight submission.
Surprisingly, nothing in me broke. After we returned from our mission, I bid her good night and snuck back out, my pockets filled with rudbeckia. With the abandonment of Demeter, I scattered black slivers of seed across the lawn and into the beds. Long after Crista and Mark were ensconced in tidy Arizona, the seeds would push up into uncontrollable golden, waving derangement, petaled faces turned to the bees, later lying down, to touch the earth with the scepters of their centers, petals succumbing to fading and mildew, the winds and the birds scattering their seeds further still, a picture increasingly random, the place exponentially more wild. They say that men marry their mothers.
