Resilience Page 16
“Jess,” he replied, “come home.”
My aching throat began to instantly feel better.
I hung up the phone, packed, and drove to Sandy’s apartment, where I dropped off my ficus tree. I had no idea why, but my brain was telling me that the tree needed to be with him, not me.
Gucci and I began driving west, and as soon as I saw men in cowboy hats and boots again, I felt jubilant. We made the 2,100-mile trip in thirty-two hours of nonstop driving, and when I pulled into the driveway, Gucci and I both burst from the car to inside the house to see Tom.
He was sleeping and was not nearly as excited to see me as I was to be home with him. For a moment, I thought, What have I done? I should’ve stayed in Greenwich. But I pushed that unwelcome thought out of my mind.
“I’m home,” I said, crawling into bed with him. “I’m not going to run away ever again.”
He hugged me and fell back asleep.
When I began pestering Tom to propose, he dutifully drove to Jackson, where he bought me a beautiful ring. Clearly he was smitten, so he overlooked my erratic behavior. Or maybe he felt he could change me. We were married in February of 1980 at my parents’ new house, with a few dozen friends attending. A local woman made my dress from champagne-colored satin sent by Glennie. It was winter, so my bouquet was a bunch of artificial flowers, but it was beautiful just the same.
The local minister, a Reverend Calvin Elliot, spoke the classic lines “in sickness and in health, until death do you part.”
There was no doubt in my mind that I was in love with Tom, but when I heard those lines, I realized there was another reason why I was marrying this man.
I was certain Tom would keep me steady, keep me grounded, keep my uncontrolled moods in check. All I had to do was listen to Tom and stick by his side until death did us part. If I did that, the irrational thoughts and exhausting mood swings would be put into a box and locked tight.
Now that I was Tom’s wife, I would be normal.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I was about to meet several of my girlfriends at the Water Hole #3 when Tom confronted me.
“I don’t want my wife out drinking in the bars,” he said.
I was shocked. “I thought we promised we wouldn’t ask each other to change,” I replied.
“What you’re doing is just not right,” Tom replied. “I don’t want you out there, period.”
Secretly, I was pleased. This was the man whom I had harnessed to keep me in check. Just the same, I rebelled—I actually cried and screamed. But he held his ground, and I stopped going out and curbed my drinking after we were married.
I got pregnant as quickly as I could. We both wanted a baby, and I swapped booze and weed for vitamins and exercise. Most days, I felt great, and when I became moody, Tom and I blamed my pregnancy.
Because of Tom’s job we moved from Big Piney to Newcastle, Wyoming, a sleepy town along the South Dakota border on the southwestern edge of the Black Hills. I hated it. I hated leaving my mom; it seemed a cruel situation because of my pregnancy. To me, Newcastle was nothing but a dirty little town. We checked into a motel, where we would live while we found a house to buy, and that first night I climbed into the shower and began sobbing. I didn’t want Tom to hear me. After my crying session, I decided I would become the best wife, mother, and homemaker I could be.
Tom found us a place, and I quickly made friends with a woman who also was pregnant. She could cook up a storm. I learned how to make bread from scratch and would take loaves to her house, where we would butter the warm slices and eat an entire loaf. Then it would be her turn to bake, and we’d eat another warm loaf at my house. I cooked, cleaned, shopped, and washed and ironed Tom’s shirts and pants. I even watched soap operas while ironing. Once in a while I’d wonder how this had happened to me, this life of wifely servitude, but I didn’t dwell on it. I loved being pregnant and developed a silent dialogue with my baby. I thought my child would be so special that he or she wouldn’t ever give me any trouble or heartache.
One night Tom and I were lying on the couch watching a western movie about Jesse James on television. The young boy who played Jesse James’s son was named Kalen. I liked the sound of it, and Tom did, too, so we decided to name our baby Calen if he was a boy. We changed the K to a C because Tom’s father was Charles Thomas Pick, and we wanted our son to have the same middle name and initials.
Tom was with me when my water broke. Gucci had been sticking uncharacteristically close to me for hours. My loyal dog must have sensed what was up. Tom took a snapshot of me as I was getting into our Subaru to go to the hospital. I looked so excited. If I had known what an arduous experience I was about to have, I wouldn’t have been quite so happy. I went into labor slowly, then hard. After twenty-one hours, the doctor said I still hadn’t dilated enough to give birth. When a heart monitor showed our baby was in distress, the doctor performed an emergency C-section. The umbilical cord was wrapped around our newborn’s throat, and if we’d waited any longer our baby most likely would have died. The date was June 19, 1981. We just missed the gifts the hospital would have given us if Calen had been the first baby born on Father’s Day.
Holding Calen for the first time was magical. He’d come from me, and I was determined to be the best parent ever. I quickly learned that being a supermom wasn’t going to be easy. Calen was a fussy baby at nighttime who cried incessantly and for no apparent reason. Because Tom needed to go to work in the mornings, I would get up at night when Calen began crying. I would walk the floor for hours, but nothing seemed to comfort him; it was as if he had a storm raging in his head. Some nights I would become so exhausted that I would put Calen in his crib and switch on classical music. I would crank up the volume so loud that it would drown him out and I could fall asleep.
Newcastle simply wasn’t for us, in part because I had become so homesick. Tom resigned so we could return to Big Piney. Calen, who was then ten months old, was just the right age to make packing a nightmare; I would stuff a box, then he’d come along, supporting himself on the box, his little feet on tiptoes, and pull everything out.
My parents still owned their mountain retreat, and Tom suggested that we turn it into a guest lodge for tourists. My parents agreed. I knew our new project was going to take a lot of work. What I didn’t know was that I was pregnant again. When we discovered my pregnancy, I was determined to not let it slow me down.
Neither Tom nor I knew anything about operating a dude ranch, but still we jumped right in and put what we did know to good use. As an outdoorsman, Tom knew a lot about fishing and hunting and offered packages to guests that featured both sports. He was a hard worker and good with his hands. I took charge of overseeing the four guest cottages and turning the ranch into a business. I also cooked and cleaned the main lodge.
I have never worked harder in my life. By 5:00 a.m., I was up preparing breakfast for guests; the first of them arrived in the summer of 1982. I made all the bread from scratch, using my Newcastle training. My specialty became pies, and every night I offered our guests slices of warm homemade pie with ice cream.
Some guests became friends, as often happens in these bed-and-breakfast-style ventures. Julia and Robert Van Nutt of New York told me much later that they were horrified to see me down on my knees, scrubbing the kitchen floor, while pregnant. But I was proud that the state health inspector always gave our ranch a score of 99 percent: he said he always deducted 1 percent because on principle he just couldn’t give us a perfect score.
We didn’t get to bed until close to midnight each night. With only four cabins and the main house, we needed to rent every bedroom we could, so Tom, Calen, and I slept in an old Airstream camper that was tucked up in the woods next to the laundry house. Tom brokered a deal with our neighbor, Phil Marincic, an old-time Wyoming cowboy, to rent us horses so our guests could ride through the mountains.
I quickly discovered that Tom was a worrier. Unlike me, he became easily tangled in details. We were in the kitchen fi
xing sandwiches for our guests one morning for a picnic when cowboy Phil came in and overheard us arguing about how to prepare the meal.
“What the hell are you two jawboning about?” Phil asked. “Just slap some bologna between two pieces of Wonder Bread with some mayonnaise. Tell them that’s what cowboys eat, and they’ll love it!”
Tom just couldn’t do it. He fretted over each sandwich.
The tension began building between us. Tom became short with me. Being pregnant and working as hard as I could brought me to tears. We decided that the next summer, we would hire a cook and a maid.
Despite the hardships, living high in the mountains, with all that majestic beauty and vastness, lifted my mood. I didn’t find myself getting as depressed as I had been in Newcastle. Instead, I began getting increasingly manic. Tom enjoyed my mania because it fueled a sexual frenzy on my part, but he didn’t enjoy the irritation that came with it. I was irrationally irked by him—how he wore his cowboy hat, how he wanted everything perfect for the guests. I got so angry one day that I jumped at him, ready to punch. He stopped me by grabbing my arms. I felt awful afterward. I couldn’t understand why I was behaving the way I was, and that frightened me. Although Calen was little, he would later remember seeing me throw a glass at Tom while screaming at him during an argument. Calen couldn’t have been more than two years old! I would emerge from those violent moods deeply ashamed of myself and would always beg Tom’s forgiveness for my moodiness.
“We have an accordion relationship,” Tom complained one night, adding, “Sometimes I think I’m living with two different people.”
“What are you talking about?” I snapped.
“I can’t seem to ever do anything right. I’m either too possessive or too distant with you. You’re either sad and angry or happy and angry.”
I didn’t know how to respond, because I knew he was right, but I had no idea how to fix my mood problem.
Our goal was to make the ranch profitable enough to be self-supporting, leaving me time to focus on writing and allowing Tom to go fishing and hunting during hunting season and do the building projects he enjoyed. I already had one remodeling idea in mind. An abandoned cabin several hundred yards from the main house would make a wonderful writer’s cabin, I told Tom. It would be a place where I could write during the day without being constantly interrupted.
On January 6, 1983, I gave birth to another son, whom we named Sander. We chose his name because it was similar to my brother’s nickname, Sandy, yet different. Sander got my father’s name for a middle name, William. Back in the early 1980s it was said, “Once a C-section, always a C-section.” I didn’t go into labor with Sander but went straight to the operating room. Tom drew a dotted line with orange disinfectant across my existing C-section scar and wrote “cut here.” The doctors got a good laugh. An avalanche on the road from Big Piney to the hospital in Jackson kept my parents, who were taking care of eighteen-month-old Calen, from coming to see their new grandchild when he was born. When Tom and I and our new arrival did get back to our little house, Calen greeted his new brother by telling me to “put him back” into my body. I told him I couldn’t do that, to which he replied, “Get da hamma!”
Because of the hard work that we’d done the first season, we were booked, and our second season started off well until I sensed that our new cook had a crush on Tom. The two of them would sit in the dining room guffawing with guests while I fed Sander and watched Calen in the kitchen. She was a great cook, but I wouldn’t hire her again.
When hunting season arrived in the fall, the tourists left and the outdoorsmen arrived. Tom guided them to what was called a spike camp. The Forest Service allotted permits to qualified hunting guides, and Tom was one of them. He and his fellow hunters would hike into the mountains, leaving the boys and me back at the lodge. When Tom was away, I began having horrible nightmares about a strange man, his silhouette darkening my doorway; he meant to kill us all. My body would shake itself awake. I decided to buy a handgun in case my nightmare was a premonition. Tom and I had both heard stories about hunters ransacking unoccupied houses that were used only in the summer. The local newspaper fueled my fears by reporting that some cattle had been found, their throats slit and their tongues cut out for sport as the meat wasn’t harvested. I didn’t see any point in owning a gun if I couldn’t reach it quickly, so I bought a holster and began wearing a sidearm whenever Tom was away from home. My nightmares stopped, but I still felt uneasy living thirty miles from the closest neighbor.
One night I knew someone was watching the boys and me from the woods. I couldn’t shake that feeling, and the next morning I called Mom, and she talked me into bringing my sons to Big Piney for a visit. I had just finished packing our truck when Calen said, “Mommy, who dat?”
“Where, honey?” I replied.
He pointed to the woods.
“It a man.”
My heart practically stopped. I didn’t see anyone, but I hurried the boys into the truck and sped down the mountain.
Tom thought it was just my imagination, but from that point forward I never felt truly safe at the ranch without him around.
When winter arrived, we all had to move to lower ground. The snow and temperature drops were just too brutal, so we’d shut down the cabins and lodge and move into Big Piney. During the off-season, I would focus on building up our clientele. I got an editor of a popular travel magazine in England to publish a flattering feature story about our ranch in exchange for our purchasing an ad.
I felt our second season had been a huge success, but Tom began stewing.
“Jessie, this business just isn’t working out,” he announced one cold winter day.
I hadn’t seen this coming.
He said, “I can’t see myself spending the rest of my life trying to make this place work.”
“I think we’re doing great,” I replied cheerfully. “We’ve only had two seasons, and now we should be getting guests from England. That will be fun.”
“We’re not doing great,” he replied. “To make a decent living, we’ll have to increase the capacity here to at least fifteen or twenty guests, and that’s going to require us to spend money we don’t have to really fix this place up and build more cabins.”
Tom’s worrier side was coming out again. I realized why, and also realized why I wasn’t a worrier. I had grown up with a trust fund. It wasn’t huge, but it was enough so that I never really had to worry about being without any money at all. Tom had not had that advantage.
Continuing, Tom said, “We’re busting our butts and we don’t even own this place—your parents do. We need to move on in our lives. We need to close this chapter.”
We argued all that night about the ranch, and the next morning Tom stayed with the boys at home while I went for a long walk in the snow. I didn’t want to abandon our ranch. I felt grounded there, despite my worries about being alone with the boys when Tom was gone. The more I thought about it, the more I decided that I could run the ranch by myself if necessary, as long as I kept my gun handy.
As I trudged through the freshly fallen snow, I thought about one evening at the ranch when I was carrying Sander on my hip and Calen was holding my hand. Calen stopped me and said, “Mommy, wook at de tars!”
The three of us looked upward at the stars, and they seemed so bright and close—it was almost as if we could touch them from our mountain lodge. There was nowhere else I could go to be so close to the stars.
I loved Tom, but for the first time in our marriage I thought maybe I should divorce him. Having planted that seed, I began thinking about what might happen if I did. My boys were still little. Tom was a good dad, and they wouldn’t lose him if we shared custody. Still, we would become a “broken home.” I hated that term. I thought about my parents. They had stayed married, but our home certainly had been filled with cracks and regrets. What to do?
By the time I returned from my walk, I’d decided divorcing Tom would be a mistake—at least for now.
“We’ll quit the ranch,” I said. “We can talk to my parents about it.”
A friend suggested we move to Bozeman, Montana, because it would be easier for Tom to find work there and it was a “happening” place. There was a vibe that set the community of just under twenty thousand people apart. Our friend told us that Bozeman was how Jackson Hole had been before the jet-setters and celebrities discovered it.
Tom went to check it out and returned home gushing about how the community had a vibrant downtown with family-owned boutiques, not having succumbed to the Walmarting and malling of America. He’d already been offered a job selling cars there, which, along with my income, would give us enough money to get settled until he could find something better.
Selling cars? I thought. That’s better than running our ranch? But I kept silent. Once again, I was walking away from a business that I had helped build and loved, just as I had done when Brad and I had operated our renegade radio station.
I packed up our belongings and, with Calen and Sander tucked safely in their car seats, began the seven-hour drive to Bozeman. We arrived on Halloween in 1984.
I was leaving behind my unfinished little writer’s cabin and the mountains that I so dearly loved. I kept telling myself that I wouldn’t resent it. I was doing the right thing.
Wasn’t I?
PART THREE
MONTANA APRIL, A FETAL-POSITION MONTH
MYSELF
You were holding something of mine,
Something in a closed, grey box,
And I couldn’t see what was inside until
I took it from you and
Laid it on the table.
The light from the window
Illuminated the box on the
Dark wood table—