“True, that,” said Valka. “You have to own your issues. They are yours and no one else’s. But, my dear, darling friend, I am just trying to understand here. Why you can’t feel.”
“I don’t know,” I told her. But that was a lie. I had more secrets to tell. It is just that they were not my own.
11.
I did not marry Thomas for his money or his looks. I married him for his heart and his sense of humor, and the way he looked at me and made me feel like I was more precious than gold. But I will say this: it was nice to be rich. First thing Thomas did was hire someone else to run the farm. Thomas would still go out on his tractor because what man doesn’t love a tractor? There he was whooping it up all over the farm, cowboy hat on his head, straw in his mouth, little legs dangling over the sides. But the day-to-day stuff he handed off to someone else. “I’ve got more important things to be thinking about,” he said. “Like making my bride happy.”
Then Thomas set to fixing us a brand-new home on the land. He tore down the farmhouse he had lived in practically his entire life and brought all of his friends into our home. (“They’re the biggest construction company in town,” he told me. “They’re the only construction company in town,” I said.) He bought a satellite dish, and a gigantic plasma flat-screen TV, and a five-piece leather couch, and he put a hot tub in the backyard though we hardly used it. I quit my job. We hung out all day watching television and eating bacon. The construction guys were in and out and around the house every goddamn day banging their tools and blaring the country station and smoking out back in the spot where we would someday have a sundeck. I suspected they sneered at our laziness, but I did not say a thing. I did not mind all of the dust and noise so much, only I wished it were just me and Thomas all the time.
At sunset we would take a walk through the field. He would ask me if there was anything he could do for me.
“What can I buy you? What do you need? What would make my bride’s life complete?” he would say.
“Just you,” I would say, and then he would hold me and kiss me and then we would go home and watch soft porn on cable and do it on the living room couch.
A FEW MONTHS AFTER the construction started I went to my mother’s house for a visit, and when I came back everything had changed all at once.
My mother and I had eaten an entire bag of microwave popcorn and had two cans of beer each. We were both bored. Not working is boring. My dad had gotten a job as the general manager of the Walmart off the interstate in York. There was a picture of him, bald with a gray rise of hair around the base of his head like rings around Saturn, which was framed and posted in the front of the store, next to the picture of the employee of the month. My dad had asked my mom to quit her sales job in Lincoln years back, and even though she loved that job for some reason she had said yes. And I never had to work again if I did not want to, and my husband was busy turning the farm into his playland. So some of us were busy, and some of us were bored.
We had taken to drinking a few times a week in the afternoons, me and my mother. Just a can or two to take the edge off of nothing in particular. Beer just made everything a little funnier. My sister’s hickeys racing like a forest fire down her neck. My father’s hazy greetings when he came home from work. The way my husband would whimper late at night, sometimes for his father, sometimes for his nub, sometimes just because he was fragile and needed to cry. The fact that I could not feel my husband between my legs. Not that I cared.
It was all so hilarious after two Coors Lights. Even funnier for Mom, because she drank an entire six-pack.
“Oh God, I don’t know what I’m going to do with that girl,” said my mother.
“I think Jenny’s just having fun,” I said. “She is a smart girl.”
“Smart or not, she’s wilder than you ever were. You just wanted to settle in right away with Thomas, and that had its own set of problems, but at least I knew who you were with at night. That girl has a new boyfriend every week.” My mother shook her head, tilted her head back, and drained the last of her beer. “I don’t know where I went wrong. I gave her the same sex talk I gave you. Nothing can slow her down though.”
All of a sudden, I shivered. I wrapped my arms around myself. I felt myself fall down deep inside. There was nothing to stop me, nothing to hold onto. I just kept falling. I was empty in there.
“I have to go home to my husband,” I said. I stood up and bumped the table. “He will be waiting for dinner.” I pushed the chair back and it fell over. I did not pick it up.