Chapter Ten – Louisiana Snowmen

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Chapter Ten – Louisiana Snowmen

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We were awake after the defibrillation.  Penelope and I watched little-league baseball games at the field behind the house.  I envisioned the years ticking up to her place in the batting order.  Ashley was settling in, but Lacey was like wallpaper.  After two years, marital contract jurisdiction could not trump maternal ovarian dibs.

Criticizing Hilton or Lacey was tantamount to blasphemy.  There were doors of potential commentary.  Ashley could travel between the room where she could complain about her parents to me and where Ashley could complain about her parents to her parents.  I was denied access to either podium, even in my own house.

Ashley and I planned to run our own accounting business out our home office.  We had Baker and Baker, LLC filed with the secretary of state.  I was going to use Ashley’s local connections with my public accounting experience.  I was still with Mr. Huckabee.  Ashley was with Mr. Winfield.  

Tracer Robertson was starting his law office.  Every Tuesday night the triad convened: Tracer Robertson, Ben Bastion and Ashley.  Ashley organized the accounting software.  Her grade-school classmates were the new Generation X of Nottoway starting to run the town: attorneys, CPA’s, Insurance, contractors.  Even Buzz Stevens was a local real estate agent with his name advertising the available for sale commercial properties.

Penelope and I went to the library every Tuesday afterschool.  I read stacks of books to Penelope on the sofa.  I cooked dinner, but most nights Ashley ate out with the guys.  I would call.  Sometimes Ashley would respond, others not.  The dynamic was difficult because Penelope was use to Ashley giving her a bath.  I wanted to transition.  Penelope and I would poke our heads through windows of uncertain return times.

The walls were framed and painted in our own palette.  My daughter was dangling.  I felt a lingering hesitation to guide Penelope without checking the hallway for someone to walk in and push me out the way to speak over my words.  I felt like I was back in high school.  I could only speak up when all the other options in the room had declined.

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I sniffed my own familial scent on the blankets each time I went to sleep.  I brushed the texture with my water-logged arms.  I made sure that feeling on the pillow was still mine. No more borrowing fabric from a European stranger.  In time my sensorial locus of control reverted back inside the auspices of my own pruned limbs. 

Ashley and I returned to living on our own terms and routines.  We had a little morning bathroom ritual of shower schedules.  I fixed breakfast for the three of us and packed snack and lunch for Penelope and me.  Ashley would get Penelope dressed.  On the days that Ashley did not skip out early to go into work, we would all eat together. 

I thought the point of living and working out in the middle of nowhere was a five minute commute.  I guess Winfield-tasks had to get done.  I brought Penelope to school.  Ashley picked Penelope up from Lacey’s house.  I usually cooked dinner and Ashley got Penelope ready for bed time while I did the dishes. 

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We had our own married bathroom idiosyncrasies.  I can assure you my refuse stinks within the traditional olfactory repugnance.  There are no fecal anomalies here.  Ashley had a disdain for her own sphincter.  The thought of the process made Ashley tighten up.  I think Ashley’s worst nightmare would be being put on defecation watch in prison. 

Ashley would go on Lenten fasts of giving up bowel movements.  Freudian constipation would boa-constrict Ashley’s bowels.  Ashley detested the aromas and sequestered herself by setting out police-tape decrees of minimum re-entry times to the facilities to avoid the deliberation of computed rank by others into our water closet.

I use to tell Ashley lovingly and half-silly, “You have to love your poo.  Just let it go and love your poo.  Quit being so disgruntled with the process.  Everybody poops.”  I guess some people just do not want to acknowledge how similar we all are.  Everybody shits masturbates, and vomits, even Jesus, Willie Nelson, Margaret Thatcher, Rush Limbaugh, and Bin Laden.  For a while I plopped four prunes a morning in Ashley’s cereal.  Prunes were like liberating nuggets of fixation for control relief. 

Ashley had a similar practice with removing her shoes and stockings until the all-clear was given.  This little piggy got beans at the market instead of roast beef.  The collective flesh strung metatarsals expelled a funky-familiar fetor. 

These stifled scents were the sort of thing Ashley would never divulge in public and only share that side of her being with the mandatory nation of none.  As her husband, I would rub Ashley’s feet, rotate semi-circles on her calluses and soak in the senses of how hard Ashley walked.  The woman paced in her father’s shoes, construction boots to business pumps.  Ashley’s stride was good at pretending in a power suit.  I actually found it endearing.  When I got to rub Ashley’s feet she let go for a moment.  Ashley’s vulnerability peeked out the forest like a doe at twilight and spoke to me with her feet in my hands.  I got to be the green-grass man as her pasture.

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I was cooking sausage and peppers downstairs with the telescopic Jen-Air vent sucking the fumes over the kitchen island.  Ashley was upstairs trying to get Penelope undressed to take an early bath.  Penelope threw a tantrum, screaming, “No!”  Penelope put Ashley in a corner of space no mommy was slender enough to fit.  Ashley belted out down the two-story lobby, “Ethan, can I hit?  Can I hit her?  Ethan!”  I could feel the balance of the meat about to burn in the pan.  The Scovilles in the peppers were counting.  I left the gas on and ran upstairs.  I asked Ashley to step out, “Take a break.”

Ashley and I had a parenting agreement to not use physical punishment to discipline.  We had time out and verbal warnings.  Toys were taken away, but we did not see the ultimate productivity of physical remediation.  Hitting works on tots, but what happens when a child grows?  Does she learn to punch things she does not like in order to cease their presence?  Does she ever plant the seeds for productive discourse for conflict resolution to germinate?  How does a parent usurp the hypocrisy?

Ashley smacked Penelope on the buttocks during my interim assent.  “I hit her.  I told you to come,” poured out of Ashley’s behind-closed-doors confessional booth.  Penelope was kicking, screaming, and refusing to abide by the fashion-changing instructions of her mother.  I gave Ashley a minute.  Ashley kept muttering, “I warned you. Sometimes..”  Penelope was an inconsolable Id of her three year-old self.  Ashley stepped out the room.

Penelope was not hurt.  The butt touch must have been pretty mediocre.  I think Penelope was shocked and then reverted.  I sat on my knees about three feet away from our toddler.  I let Penelope wail and thrash on her butterfly rug.  I sat silently in-wait like an emperor penguin.  After two minutes I told Penelope, “Calm down.  Everything is all right.”

After a minute of speaking with my arms outstretched in case Penelope was ready to come to me, I scooted over to her.  I gripped Penelope in my arms.  At first Penelope wriggled like a king mackerel on a line trying to break the setting.  Eventually Penelope assumed a fetal position in my arms.  I talked to Penelope about breathing, about slowing down.  Penelope kept saying, “I can’t.  I can’t,” in huffing little-girl chest-heaves and tears.  I rocked Penelope back and forth.  A few minutes later Penelope found the strength, but attributed the stabilization to an external nexus. 

The sausage and peppers downstairs burned.  The casing burst and the verdant green flesh scarred to a carcinogenic black.  Ashley came back.  Ashley apologized to Penelope and gave her a bath.  Ashley was asking for help, but not really asking for help.  We were not hungry after the distress.  We fell asleep to the sound of the Amtrak train.

There was this space with Penelope and me where my being a man precluded me from operating optimally: dressing, hair tangles, and bathroom rituals.  Ashley completed certain segments of routine with Penelope exclusively.  I guess Ashley horded the tasks, but I rarely protested.  I figured Ashley gave the kid a bath.  I did the dishes and other tasks during that slice of time.  We each had our productive complimentary role.  I could pretend like a restricted Boomer-dad.  “Mom’s handle that” role was acceptable in parts.  Dad and mom Gen-X’ers have to wield both sides of the sword, even if some don’t want to let go of the hilt.

In my gut, I did not know how to ask Ashley to step out the way and give me a shot.  I never put in a requisition for a, “Hey can you give me a few pointers?  I never had a sister.  I am not so sure what to expect the nuances of girls in bathrooms.”  It was a domineered foreign landscape.  I was just dad, more patient statue than dervish.  Ashley’s sense of asking for help was buried in a sock drawer with her vulnerability.  With all the months Ashley had just spent around Hilton, I was going to need my best oyster knife.

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In the heat of the summer we started planning Penelope’s “Dora the Explorer” party.  No more Oma pool.  We had our first big excuse to invite everybody over and celebrate.  Penelope was turning four in July.  Penelope was into Boots, Tortuga, and Dora.  I read on the internet about treasure-hunt Dora parties.  I planned one for Penelope.  Ashley was in charge of invitations and food.  I was in charge of game management activities.

I made a poster board map the kids could follow in a trail around our porch, front and backyard ending at the secret treasure chest.  I made up a ruse.  Uncle Jeffery would dress up as Swiper and steal the number four candle off of Penelope’s cake.  Kids would adventure to retrieve the waxed digit.  There was sleepy bear Uncle Tim, Pin the Boots on Boots, a rainforest animal puzzle, the gummy berry tree for a snack break, crocodile lake, safari search in the garden for little toy animal figures, a magic key, and finally Swiper’s treasure chest with a replica green candle planted behind the garage.

On the day of, rain gave the roofed porch pertinence.  Penelope held up the number four candle in a giant smile like she had the Golden Fleece.  Penelope and I played upstairs.  Ashley was entertaining, but took a moment to come up and partake in our pantomime.  Penelope loved little inch-long animals that she could “talk” and move and create pretend worlds.  We had that in common.  Ben Bastion came up to say goodbye to Penelope and Ashley.  Tracer could not come by, but he had sent a Fiesta Dora doll with Ben. 

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After the party Ashley informed me many of the families in our neighborhood including Clay Robertson had a golf cart.  They were especially useful come blueberry festival.  Ashley expounded on the golf cart like it was just what you did here.  I imagined this pimped-out thumping big-rimmed golf cart to ride back and forth to Ashley’s parents.  Ashley would have a carriage to ride the streets of Nottoway.  I reminded Ashley of the giant mortgage on this over half-a-million dollar house we just built and the college debt we still owed.  A golf cart for two people who do not golf was tabled.

We did not even have a lawn mower.  Ashley walked down the street and borrowed Hilton’s riding John Deere.  God forbid I even broach purchasing our own for a man to cut his own grass.  One Saturday morning I was inside watching cartoons with Penelope.  Ashley was out doing donuts on her father’s lawnmower over our acre. 

Penelope decided it was mommy time.  Penelope’s temperament vacated her sense of order.  The need for the omnipresent mommy was paramount.  Penelope was not interested in ponies or figurines or power-point presentations with Noggin-based characters of Moose A. Moose or Zee explaining dad palindromes.  Penelope wanted Ashley and, “Mommy is cutting the grass” was not a comprehendible discourse. 

Penelope ran towards the Dutch door.  I pointed out Ashley mowing.  Penelope scampered to the edge of the steps with her arms reaching out as if mommy could be lassoed with Penelope’s finger tips.  Penelope’s wails were drowned out by the green Deere’s engine.  Ashley saw us and cut the ignition.  Ashley gave Penelope a hug.  We talked about how mommy had to cut the grass.  Penelope had difficulty grasping this non-availability concept.  Her mother would drop everything to meet her whims.

Penelope and I went back inside.  Three minutes later Penelope repeated the cycle.  Children upon discovering a boundary or an avenue for attention test it, prod it, and provoke it to develop empirical evidence to move forward through unknowns better prepared.  During the second iteration when Ashley came back I grabbed a stick from the garden.  I told Penelope, “This is your flag.  If you need mommy, wave it around and mommy will see it.  When mommy has time and it is safe, mommy will come.”  We practiced the flag in a one act play with Ashley demonstrating recognition for Penelope’s curiosities prior to reconvening grass decapitation.  Penelope never ran out again. 

Penelope was still transiting from always having her grandparent’s around to being on our own.  It had only been two months.  Penelope’s fits were tot-tyrannical, yet understandable given she was just a kid who had four years in four different houses. 

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Ashley, Penelope and I were at the dinning room table eating lunch.  Penelope began over a peanut butter and jam of impossible to locate de-escalation.  Penelope would get worked up like a roller coaster.  If she started, she had to finish the ride, but somebody had to unbuckle her.  Otherwise Penelope would keep flailing limbs or clawing at other passenger’s faces. 

Ashley and I put Penelope in time out, which was supposed to be sitting in a designated spot quietly in the living room.  Penelope bucked under eight seconds.  Ashley and I began to use the half-bath under the stairs as a corral when Penelope got into her biting and hair pulling.  The bathroom was tiny with no certain instruments of injury readily available.  There were only towels under the sink. There would be no running away from mommy or punching daddy in the face.  The same sort of fencing-in would happen within the upstairs hallway on the border of Penelope’s old pink Disney-princess room when we lived at Hilton’s house. 

One of us put our back to the bathroom door, because the door opened out into the den.  The other held the handle, because Penelope would act like you might imagine any caged mammal that did not wish to be caged might act.  Penelope would kick the door repeatedly, so we learned to remove her shoes prior to entry.  Penelope would hang on the handle with all her weight.  We learned to counter balance the opposite side with opposing pressure to avoid breaking the door’s hardware. 

This time Penelope resorted to picking up the lid of the commode and dropping it.  The lid cracked in two like a stone tablet.  We had to order a new lid to the toilet because we imprisoned our four year old and Penelope went Ultimate Warrior on the guest pisser.

All of this led me to feel like we were failing Penelope as parents.  Penelope needed a way to process her feelings of anxiety and authority that came out as rage in an age appropriate context.  I tried to parallel play with Penelope.  I occasionally conveyed my character’s pretend frustration as if my toy elephant hit the other toy dinosaur.  I asked Penelope to fill in the blanks of what would happen to that elephant.  How did the elephant and the dinosaur feel?  I guess that is part of parenting and growing with your child, you do not know what you do not know.

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Ashley’s Opa and Oma in Holland were celebrating their fiftieth wedding anniversary in August.  Going was not a Hingle-question.  I felt like we had just gotten back from Disneyworld.  Three months being in the house, we were traveling with Ashley’s parents and housing with Ashley’s relatives.  Oh the orange joy!

We took a week and a half to make the oceanic voyage worth while.  We wanted to venture out over Europe around the olds’ activities.  The second day there we got word of hurricane Gustav heading for Louisiana.  Excursions were put on hold. What we thought was a family vacation had become an enacted evacuation plan. 

The delta scrambled to not have a repeat of the big K.  Governmental evacuation routes mobilized.  Property was nailed down.  All we had was Ashley’s brother Jeffery to look after our house and maybe throw a party for his friends with the meat in our freezer. 

Holland has a massive system of dykes and water-walls to keep the North Sea out after a flood devastated the Netherlands in 1953.  It took the Dutch until 1998, to finish their Delta Works system.  How in the hell was New Orleans going to get it “right” in three years?  We were in below sea level Holland with our faces glued to CNN again.  Reminders of touchdown replays of Katrina played over European television.  Somehow we had just left the center of the world’s attention. 

I remember the happiest moment of the trip for Lacey was when Sarah Palin got picked as John McCain’s running mate.  Lacey expounded on how Palin was a strong ball-busting female candidate.  As soon as Gustav sprung, Hilton was planning his ticket back to Louisiana.  The repair man made return fare in due haste.  The global slash local news on a personal level was not too bad.  Gustav flexed over Haiti and Jamaica, but it was only a category two once Gustav hit Cocodrie, Louisiana.  Category two, ‘Ha that is just a flesh wound dear knight!’  Which faces count?

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After the anniversary party on a double-decker boat and Gustav passing, Ashley and I planned a trip up to Amsterdam with Penelope.  Lacey tagged along, which was partly pragmatic to have another hand for Penelope, a semi-tour guide and a definitive translator.  In our planning for the trip I researched some age-appropriate activities we could do with just the two of us and with Penelope.  We rode a boat around the canals of the Amsterdam.  Penelope could not keep the night watch and fell asleep on my shoulder in the Rembrandt museum. 

Our last night there we finally made time for just Ashley and I to go to this restaurant I found with opera singers called Pasta y Basta.   Could we have one night alone away from the kid or Ashley’s flaccid penis inducing relatives?  Could we have something that was ours as a couple as if I could pretend we found it on our own, not Ashley’s swarming-hen mother?  Penelope ended up coming.  That morning Lacey shipped back to attend to needs with her parents. 

Wandering the streets of Amsterdam we passed a plaque on the building where John Adams stayed when he borrowed money from the Dutch to fight the British to solve debt issues during the American Revolution.  The restaurant had a grand piano and six singers belting out arias and Don Giovanni spectacles.  The entrails of the piano were the antipasto bar.  The wine was dulcet, the pasta succulent.  I was happy for the moments I had with my wife.

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On the flight home I remembered the frustrations of living with Ashley’s parents.  I recalled Hilton’s drunk “still a drummer in a band at forty” friend Randall with his bat-shit girlfriend fighting in the backyard.  The police were called.  Penelope got a Bratz doll from Lacey.  I threw the twisted-figure in the closet.  I did not want a distorted body image big-eyed-lips STD-magnet tits voodoo doll in my daughter’s environment. 

The spoiling, the smoking, the drama, the relatives impinging and Ashley’s ignorant blame of me was numbing.  I was asked to live in an anesthetized reality trying to meet budgeting obligations.  A man is supposed to leave his family and go with his wife when he gets married.  At least I had a biblically sound formula for success.

I did not own the creaking floors, the Dutch flower duvet, the black and white sweet pea bathroom tile, or the hot-pink princess bedroom.  Even my three-foot measure of closet space was obstructed by Lacey’s stored cotillion hats.  Nottoway was a pre-owned piece of monopolized real estate that for however long we lived there I would always be renting on Baltic Avenue. 

Sex was put in this “we better not have a second child while we are living here” night watch.  Ashley refused to go on birth control pills or acquire a diaphragm.  We had, “Ethan get it out your one drawer, because you have no nightstand contraception” over regular menstruation cycles.  My horse studded from inside the barn every month of our marriage absent one predetermined October cycle it took for me to get Ashley pregnant. 

Telling a man to sit quietly for such internments for twenty-three and a half hours a day solitary confinement exudes its own criminal nature.  Why ask a man to wear a full sleeved and legged rain coat in that brief segment to exit outside?  He will never feel the warmth of the sun’s ray on his skin or the cooling touch of the rain.  No, there is always a barrier and an appendage of guilt for not wearing it.  

Why should a man have to try to explain cycles of ovulation dates and thirteen day staggered menstruation and approximate five day fertility windows in each twenty-eight to his wife to overcome such internments?  Why is science preempted by caution at the expense of wanting to feel more human?  Why at thirty does a man have to try to make buffered love to his wife in her parent’s house? 

Every moment linked back to that storm.  The evacuated wind and black mold-spore circles invaded our former bedroom that we worked so hard to build.  At least now we had constructed a sanitary habitat.  Our bed had come out of storage.  Maybe the horse could come out the barn and a colt could come in spring.

Maybe the airplane ride was getting to me.  Maybe I just wanted to go home on my own mattress and make a baby.  Maybe have a son to pair with our Penelope.  I was horny.  I wanted to be a daddy.  The time had come.  I was tired of all this being held in the fenced pen.  So Ashley and I talked and decided to start trying for number two.

Ashley insisted she be on prenatal vitamins for three months prior to staring.  Ashley was all about the research.  Every rationalized action was predicated by “well it is what is best for the kid.”  Precautions for ones procreated progeny are difficult to counterpoint.  Sometimes I just wanted to let go and live in the immediate.

Ashley and I talked about number two a few times over the past year or two, but aside from living with Ashley’s parents.  Ashley’s career obsession was affecting the bedroom.  Modern American career-obsessed women; hey Tyler Perry, “What kind of man has to make an appointment to sleep with his wife?”  These are the allowances of testosterone versus estrogen with money and power fluxing in a relationship. 

I could handle Ashley making more money.  What I could not handle was Ashley’s trampled Gen-X feminine side.  Ashley’s vulnerable flower of a woman wilted in the keg party she went to work in every day.  I could see Ashley change when we moved to Nottoway.   Ashley bathed in this old world of revived no longer just-Facebook friends.  With her new job Ashley was whisked into this masculine dominion, but we were finally home.

Ashley procured a cache of pink boxes of Neevo prenatal vitamins.  Ashley was back in the stirrup starting-gate of a professional pregnancy to prepare her body for the derby. 

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Thanksgiving came.  We had our first turkey dinner together in our home since 2004.  We had forty plus place-settings.  The autumn porch had a television showing the Titans roll the Lions.  Jeffery and I played this Nottoway homemade mix between horseshoes and ski ball called Holy Boards.  I shook hands as I dispensed Abita Ambers.

I prayed over our hand-held circle.

Thanksgiving 2008- A swan hovers over old waters.  A nesting ground of yesterday is in sight.  She sees feathers from her father, nestling a young one.  Drawn in she descends.  The fog over the pond dissipates like rain drops into faces reappearing.

An uncle, a cousin, a mother, a brother and a niece she never knew materialize out of the expanse of white, huddled together like an overcoat from the late November winds.

Sometimes storms distract us from where we ought to be.  We travel paths to isolation.  We forget the gifts that God has given us.  In these moments we reclaim our identity by holding our bearing.

In his hand, making our way back to the family, he has made us a piece of His whole.  A family expands, it does not contract.  For in God there is a nesting ground.  All are welcome to return. 

The circle went around the room starting with Ashley and ending with me.  Ashley smile was Granny Darling.  Ashley was bubbly and attentive with a harlequin grin.  Rented tables were set with centerpieces and matching white dishes.  Ashley procured the settings for this annual ritual back in 2004.  No Chinet, Ashley’s sets of silverware gleamed between her whitest white-teeth.  Penelope was dressed as a miniature doppelganger of her mother in her matching brown hair and my blue eyes.  I saw Jeffery with his pregnant fiancé. 

My turn came.  I thanked everyone for coming.  I thanked Hilton and Lacey for their unending magnanimous hospitality for having us in their home for so long.  I thanked the Lord, the cooks and finally, “I am most thankful for my beautiful wife.”  I gave Ashley a kiss as I gripped Ashley’s hand in mind.  I felt like I had just given a commencement speech to my graduate degree in adult education.  The oyster dressing was hot.  The venison back strap was ready.  The Abita was iced down. Thanksgiving was on.

I spent most of the day running beers and tea to revelers.  By the end it was my parents and some of my cousins in the almost-empty living room with a few chairs left to pick up.  I do not think Ashley sat down once.  The woman had to set an appointment in her cell phone to breathe sometimes.  All the exhaustion was well spent, we had our graduation party. 

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Before Thanksgiving was over, Ashley was giddy about decorating for Christmas.  The day after Thanksgiving was Ashley’s Christmas tree day.  No six a.m. mall.  It was ornaments and wreaths, snowmen, swaddled Christs and red suits for Ashley.

We had our house, our porch and new spaces to fill.  The Balsam Hill boxes for the devastator-transformer Christmas tree came out the garage ready for construction.  I never even lugged the elephantine-trifecta of boxes into the attic knowing the relative proximity of May and the end of November.  We assembled this faux-pine Frankenstein in four or five tiers of mechanized Yule tide.  I got on the top of the stairwell to set the crowning angel below the bottom of the second-story chandelier.

We pulled out ornaments from years ago formerly sidelined for Lacey’s decorations.  We made new ornaments with Penelope’s Crayola accents.  Penelope’s face paraded in a gallery over the tree in little photographs mixed in with Ashley and me.  I took photos of Ashley’s shinning moment standing on a stepstool like Ashley was cutting the nets down at the NCAA college basketball tournament.

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Making our house a home was a childlike passion for me.  Amongst the Christmas decor I got into making photo collages from digital internet downloaded .jpg files in a menagerie of images.  My first was our Earth in a visual map.  I wanted to see our world in its grunge and beauty: a Canadian mountain, the Nile, Chinese masses, a New Zealand paradise, a spiraled staircase at the Vatican, a Kansas wheat field, a bike leaning against a bridge in Amsterdam, an African refugee camp, the remnants of the Berlin wall, the Notre Dame, the Statue of Liberty, Matsu Picchu, and Bourbon street. 

In the center was the Earth at night with the electric lights shining on the populated areas to orient the viewer.  I made a thirty-six picture set of four by sixes.  I placed Canada on the top left with North to South America.  Europe and Asia were on the right.  I may have lived in nowhere America, but I wanted to stay connected.  I had so many ideas in my head, plans for all the walls and nooks of our porch-hugged frame.

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I wanted to get Ashley something special for Christmas.  In line with my new home and my craft store frame-apalooza hobby, I called up our wedding photographer.  Ashley and I had always wanted to get this print from the choir and organ loft at Mater de la Rosa.  The lights gleamed in yellow glared x’s in front the dome with a Vatican-style scene of heaven.  Father William presided below.  Ashley and I stood between Michael and Ashley’s fill-in cousin.  Our family lined the front three rows in tuxedos and dresses.  We had never had a wall worth hanging the moment in permanence until now.

The canvas was around a thousand dollars.  So Ashley consented on the purchase via a work-email digital review.  Married money is one lump.  Spousal gifts are juggling.  I surprised Ashley after work.  Ashley smiled from ear to ear with the bronze wood frame on the crimson dining room wall. 

For Christmas day I had one more frame in my magic hat.  Around Thanksgiving I took a few pictures of Ashley and Penelope on the front porch zoomed from the street.  Ashley had on a green sweater, scarf and blue jeans.  Penelope wore a pink jacket with her hair fixed just like her mom.  The American and Louisiana flags flew on the porch posts with stars and pelicans.  Orange Thanksgiving pumpkins sat on the red brick steps.

I found Ashley’s porch advertisement torn out from the builder’s magazine, unchanged bordered in yellow.  I found the two-page centerfold in a memory tin when we were moving in that Ashley kept next to Hallmark cards.  I set the pages as the backdrop and put two pictures of Ashley on her porch at the bottom next to the silhouette family huddled with the kids at dusk.  I wrote a card, “Some dreams really do come true, Love Ethan.”  I framed the piece and wrapped it under the domestic redwood.

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The Wednesday night I brought the canvas home we had the Nottoway Rotary Christmas Party.  All the local captains of Nottoway industry were there:  Crazy Steve the Carpet King, Insurance magnate Spooky Walls and his understudy Ben Bastion, Wanda Mason the Antique Dealer, Barry Mills the town Dentist, Tracer Robertson with his politico-lawyer smile and amongst assorted others Ashley, my wife the shinning corporate-controller star.  Rotary was designed to be a mod squad.  Each member brought his or her own skill set.  This night was about getting a little liquored-up and handing out awards for the educational and health work the organization conducted.  Rotary was a lot of nice people giving of their free time.  I was proud of Ashley. 

Penelope was with Oma.  Afterwards we walked over to the Nottoway Pub with Ben and Tracer and a few of Ashley’s long-time friends Greg, Chad, and Buzz.  The Archie Comics gang was hanging out, some with wives, others not.  I was the only non-rotary male.  Ashley was the only in-rotary female.  Beers and slaps on the back abounded.  I remember Ashley joking that Ben was her rotary husband, because of being the only girl at these things in a conversation over dinner.  In that bar I kind of saw why with her being the only vagina in a machine full of men.  I had my suit on hanging out in the generic, yet foreign Nottoway Main Street bar.  I felt underwhelmed with what Nottoway night life must be like growing up in this non-New Orleans chugging a Coors Light.

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Ashley’s corporate Christmas party was two nights later at the Royal Sonesta on Bourbon Street.  The night was a black-tie and heavily-boozed affair.  In all our transitions I never bothered to get a tuxedo.  In one last decorative penance of ignominy I borrowed Hilton’s oversized tuxedo, which had probably been worn less than a handful of times.   

We drove down on the night of the SEC college football championship game.  Ashley was oblivious to such matters of manhood.  Ashley was focused on how she might appear to the Winfield family.  Logan, Pierce and Barb would be fully armed in coy “you better laugh and get drunk enough so I do not feel strange for the variance in our sobriety level” smiles.  Everybody in the Gulf South region, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and the panhandle of Florida was coming.  Hurricane Alley was downing hurricanes.

We checked into our room with two hours to spare.  Ashley passed through the bags and garments, jewelry and makeup.  I laid down on the bed, thought for a minute about Alabama versus Florida on the television, and set the remote down.  I closed the curtains over the doorway to the pool in the inner courtyard.  I gave Ashley the carnal-tunnel vision look 

At first Ashley held the bobby pin she was about to put in her hair to start the launch procedures women do in their varnishing and polishing pre-outing preparations.  Ashley bunny-hopped a smile and an “Ok” as she retrieved a condom out my shaving bag.  The vitamins were not perfect yet.  I thought we were close enough, but Ashley never really kept me up to speed with the cycles of her body.  So no son conceived in New Orleans.

Ashley road me cowgirl style.  I flipped Ashley with her face to the sky like a man back on his home turf.  I was ready to party in this captured moment.  I at least wanted to have some fun, before hanging out with a bunch of Scotch-slurping salesmen, as the candy-dish husband of the woman who printed their paychecks.  I may have been too into the illusion, because after the dresser in my head cleared from the sex I realized I had forgotten my tuxedo shirt.

There was no time to go back to Nottoway so a purchase was in order.  The usual time computations of more than sufficient allotments that Ashley made like mandates in her regular day to day life were disrupted.  Ashley must have been a bit more Diana than Wonder Woman to allow such distractions blip into the radar of the possible.

I walked like a Mescalero down Bourbon Street with a wide-straddled gate to keep Hilton’s pants from sliding down my ankles.  All I had time for was to slip on the baggy pants, shoes and jacket with my white undershirt.  I hoped I could find a shirt down at the Canal Place Mall on the foot of the Mississippi River and Canal Street.  I made it past drunkards of every breed in my half-penguin suit: pissed-off LSU fans at whomever they despised more Saban or Tebow in their concurrent title game, the usual beaded tit-fiends and inevitable two a.m. slurred nipple-flashers ratcheting up their inebriation. 

I banged on the outer glass door of Brooks Brothers’ street entrance like Dustin Hoffman in the graduate.  My wife’s embarrassment was at stake.  The clerk was in the process of bolting the bottom lock.  The guy looked up at me with a, “who the fuck do you think you are, but I have to be nice” high-end-retail grin.  The clerk opened the door.  The staff muttered a “fuck.”  I told the salesman I needed a tuxedo shirt for a party.  For one-hundred-twenty dollars plus tip the shirt was mine.  I was elated to pull off this midnight-hour gambit and preserve my wife’s decorum.  I did not want to make Ashley’s Christmas party like a professional version of my junior prom.

I tipped some kid with bottle caps on his shoes tapping.  I showed up late with a dizzy-head from the sex and ran like an herbivore escaping a predator.  The party was in dinner setting stage.  Ashley had a conspicuous open seat and explanations under a tense smile holstering her tongue.  We ate.  We drank.  We played secret Santa with some big and pot-shot prizes.  Ashley did not want to dance or talk very much. 

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The catered portion of the evening ended.  The members-only bar moved to the Winfield’s private corner suite overlooking Bourbon Street.  Salesmen packed in, bestowed beads and imbibed in three sheets.  Ashley was into the intricacies of her worker-bee pheromones attentive to the perceptions of the hive.  Even at sometime past midnight Ashley was always on, always aware.  I was kind of done with the kingdom of mop and bucket janitorial sales people.  I wanted to go lay down with my wife, but the legion of brooms was headed for karaoke on Bourbon at the Cats Meow. 

No self-respecting NOLA-raised son elects the Cats Meow as his bar of choice.  New Orleans has so many hole-in-the-wall bastions of after midnight sweat-beading passion.  This is where these mannequins wanted to go?  I had made it this far in my life of not going in there.  Tonight was not going to break the streak. 

You want music? Le Bon Temps, Tipitinas.  Are you dressed up as Elvis? The Kingpin.  Are you homeless with a tag-along dog as your drinking buddy? St. Roch Tavern.  Are you in high school?  Friar Tucks, Bruno’s, Madigan’s.  Are you Irish for the evening? Fin McCool’s, Molly’s, Tracey’s.  Do you want to pay ten dollars a shot mixed with a medicine dropper? Cure.  Do you want a membership card only entrance?  The Foundation Room. 

Open to passing crack dealers blocks from mansions?  Snake N Jakes.  Are you into sweaty dancing?  Republic, Circle Bar, Howling Wolf.  Are you a tourist or want Hurricanes or to do blowjob shots at your own private party with whip cream and banana liquor? Pat O’Brien’s.  Do you want to overpay to see boobies?  Rick’s Cabaret.  Do you want girls on a swing?  Big Daddy’s.  Are you plastic-pop anywhere in America?  Then go to Fukin’ Razzoo or the Cats Meow on Bourbon.   The Dragon’s Den, D.B.A. the Maple Leaf; these were my bars.  Some Karaoke den for Rohypnol and over-made Bratz doll-faced Brittany Spears American Idols was not. 

Ashley and I talked for a grocery-cart bump of truncated sentences as she was about to head out from Logan’s suite.  I headed for the pillow of our empty hotel room.  I asked Ashley to come with me, but her boss and his son were calling.  Ashley came in around four a.m.  Her Girl Scout-honor excerpted near-dawn braggadocio, “I’m not drunk and these guys were hitting on me.  You should have been there. Caroline sang Sweet Caroline, Uh ha..” 

I could not go out in that cigar and whiskey crowd of boorish, obnoxious, spread the pat on the back laugh at bullshit mingling.  This world takes all kinds.  I had nothing against them, but that feces-buffet was not me.  Ashley was molting or she had morphed.  Karaoke on Bourbon Street with her drunken coworkers as a nightcap at two a.m., I’d rather lick cow manure than fake interest for a Winfield. 

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Santa was coming in the fortnight.  Ashley sent out our Christmas cards.  The card was a D.I.Y. photo-shopped cropped picture of us clicked by my Army-friend Joe, who was in from Iraq for the holidays. 

Joe knew what it meant to be homeless.  Joe ran away from home in high school and to some Iraqi sandbox for a flawed-structure salvation.  He knew what it meant to eye the electronic sensor door in a Kroger like an Indiana Jones penitent-man pass trap to escape with groceries.  Joe knew what it meant to piss in a re-sealable Pepsi bottle to excrete toxins from his body when hiding in a friend’s closet to have a roof to sleep under for a few nights. 

Joe also knew the comfort of cardboard and the respect culture of a gutter.  That letting go feeling of no wall or locked door to segregate a passer by from obliterating a man’s remaining dignity as he attempts to sleep on cold concrete.  Joe had usurped the temperatures and the trials. 

Joe was out near Fallujah.  Now he was here taking pictures of our family instead of aiming a rifle scope at some poor bastard defending his own trials as a youth fending off invaders.  He once shot three insurgents in a day.  Two because the third had a gun and their flesh got in the way. 

(These roles we play.  Hold the placard up so I can know who to label victim.  Rewrap the box.  America is grateful to have men like Joe, who do the deeds that need doing.  Peace is beautiful, harmonic, but there will always be those that choose death, destruction, pestilence, which require commensurate confrontation.  So in turn the flowers need thorns.) 

(How we convince men like Joe to choose to do these things, is another quandary all together.  Tobey Keith, skewed definitions of justice, faith in God, convincing polemics all, but without them what would rich men do?  What better pawns then the dirty South, Republican fox-holes mirroring the history of the civil war, beguiled by Jesus, poverty, chivalry, and the awe of an echoing firearm.  I may have appalled war, but in my gut there were parts of me thankful for men like Joe, willing to do what we dare not speak.  )

Joe took the picture.  Ashley, Penelope, and I were at the Audubon zoo sitting on top of a lion statute at the summit of Monkey Hill with a software super-imposed Merry Christmas background.  Ashley signed them all: “May your family be blessed with all the joy and love this Christmas season brings! Love, Ashley, Ethan, and Penelope.” 

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December 11, 2008, it snowed an unprecedented Louisiana blizzard or what you would call a mild Thursday in Massachusetts.  The snow came in the early morning and kept fluttering until noon.  Every lawn was a sea of white.  This bayou-raised boy saw falling snow for the first time in his life in such girth.  Even in New Mexico the powder only fell while I was sleeping.  This was no dream.  Pockets were building up, no elephants, but suitable mounds of ant hill powder. 

Ashley started bragging with the cock-crow a half hour before she looked out the still-dark window, “I am staying home today to play in the snow.”  Ashley’s words were like a self-insulated argument escaping out into the temperature vacuum of the room.  All the warmth inside the house, with all that cold out there, some pressure had to give.  Ashley was trying to nudge away impulses that called her to attend to the Winfield men. 

The mathematics of the pipes and tubing of thought comingled.  If Ashley could emit these words before she knew if work was cancelled or not the syllables would become true speech.  It was the sort of discourse humans find infinitely credible like when a subject of a conversation overhears himself being discussed from the alcove of a doorway and the speaker is engaged in a private conversation with her back facing the entry point.

Pierce would have to wait today, mother Baker was staying home with Penelope and Ethan.  We were going to have a little winter wonderland.  We got Penelope up with the solstice sunlight.  Penelope’s eyes were like saucer plates ready for syrup, pancakes and snowballs.  There would be no “here we go to school today.”  Today was our first ever cancelled school snow day. 

We bundled up in Louisiana winter fare, which was a mix of gardener’s and handyman gloves, rain boots, and exoskeletons of sweaters and breakers.  We were layered in basically whatever we could find for a culture unaccustomed to such Canadian-normality.  Penelope was in a red four-year-old sized to the knee trench-coat with matching hat and yellow bumble-bee boots.  I had my Saints fleece and a fleur-de-lis Santa cap.  Ashley wore a gray sweater, black and white scarf wrapped up like a mother penguin ready to waddle out to feed off Antarctica.

Penelope and I built a three-foot snowman in the front yard with Penelope’s red garden boots, Ashley’s straw hat, rock eyes, a carrot nose and my Spiderman neck tie.  Ashley wandered around the yard taking pictures of the alabaster porch and the frosted house.  Finches and wrens huddled under roof porch-feeders.  The birds scattered seed over the white boards with no regard for the fallout of attracting rodents underneath with the spider webs or their black-pellet feces specking the ivory paint.  

Penelope’s lower body soaked past a threshold of shiver tolerance.  I suggested that we venture inward for breakfast.  I made pancakes with Steen’s sugarcane syrup.  Ashley made a few crepes with thinner composition of the same batter. 

Within a half hour Lacey’s Ford Expedition pulled in the driveway.  Ashley and Lacey nuzzled into a conversation on the expanse of white Nottoway.  We ventured out to the backyard.  Jeffery came over with his Labrador and his pregnant fiancé.  The dog was bopping up and down in the snow on instinct.  Jeffery took a picture of Ashley, Penelope and I with the porch in the background.  The ferns and palms in the garden frosted like powered sugar beignets.  Penelope was in her second outfit with a brown and pink checkered Eskimo-hood.  The adults simply changed socks.

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Before I could get back in the house Ashley decided to venture off with Lacey to explore.  Penelope and I built more snowmen, chucked snowballs at the far end of the backyard into slush ponds.  I pitched cannonballs at tree branches and watched the clumps plummet in magnificent splashes. 

I could hear cracking branches in the distance from the built-up snow.  The wood rotten or weakened inside and normal on the surface or just hanging in there since Katrina or Gustav, absent of excuse to just let go and fall started cascading all over the neighborhood.  The electricity went out around ten a.m. from limbs dropping on lines.

Ashley phoned and asked, but really did not ask, if she could get a few things done at work.  Some how Ashley’s fieldtrip turned into a controller grocery-list of must do’s.  Penelope and I hung out in the turnstile of changing socks and pants.  The light poured in through the windows bouncing off the yellow-hued porch with the power down. 

I wanted Penelope to remember this day, because I had never had one like it in my lifetime.  Penelope was four years old with a first Christmas snow and now this deluge of four Louisiana inches.  Around six-fifteen Ashley came home, after not answering her phone.  Ashley thanked me for letting her work, like work was some kind of medicinal prescription warding off detox. 

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I had a trip planned to take off of work and go to Memphis the next day.  I was going to a gaming convention with my friend Conrad.  I played Magic the Gathering with him sometimes.  Magic is a card game of spells and wizards, monsters and angels, mostly played by teenage, college and adult guys for fun.  The game is like chess with cards printed with comic-book character-style art in thousands of potential interactions complete with a global fan-base and professional league. 

That weekend in Memphis also happened to be the world championships of this global dork-stock.  Conrad and I were competent in our goldfish-pond Louisiana.  We were going to hang out and play in the side tournaments to see friends in the community.

Conrad drove up from New Orleans to Nottoway for breakfast.  Ashley made blueberry pancakes and sausage.  Penelope was off of school so Ashley was staying home.  Ashley gave me a hug and a kiss and a good luck wish. 

On Friday morning the roads were glazed like Belarus for my Saints-gold Chevrolet Impala.  I navigated north parallel to the Mississippi River.  Conrad was originally from Pittsburgh and down in NOLA working on his PHD in linguistics and an avalanche of debt at Tulane.  Conrad gave me a few ablative pointers on how not to slide into side ditches.

After two hours on the road rocking out with Metallica and the Ramones, we were back to a Bambi-spring-like thaw.  No more slipping hoofs.  The sun peeked out behind Hilton’s Tom Tom navigation GPS Ashley borrowed. 

A Wal-Mart truck kicked up a rock.  The Goliath slung the stone at my windshield.  The glass pressurized under the suction cup holding the G.P.S. navigation display, emitted a ray of ride the lightning crack from the circle that descended towards my steering wheel.  The line was something to fix when I got home.  The strike was frustrating, but fun was afoot.  Snow or rock, the odyssey to Memphis was in tact.

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Conrad and I found the hotel, I called Ashley.  We walked to the convention center of the assembled congregation of goblins, paladins, chancellors, plainswalkers, dragons, and vampires in a grand birthing pod of mana, cardboard and a collective deodorant-application-deficit.  The bathrooms were operational.  Magic has an online and live event universe of people who dedicate a substantial portion of their non-sleeping endeavors to manipulating a defined set of resources under a defined set of rules to navigate play-skill, luck and innovation to making a top eight at events like these. 

Those people were off behind ropes with numbered tables fighting for a forty-thousand dollar top prize, plus another seventy-five for the top team with descending money going out through the top sixteen.  This was not ESPN poker, but it was not four geeks in a basement either.  The globe was there: Brazil, Germany, Japan, Australia, and the U.S.  I just drove from Nottoway.

Conrad and I played an event and met up with Conrad’s girlfriend Dana, and this other guy in the linguistics program that drove up with Dana to do things other than Magic while Conrad was occupied.  We hung out with a native of Memphis that Conrad knew from a while back. 

We had drinks and ribs out at some place other than the Rendezvous, because the native said that was where the tourists go.  If Memphis was anything like New Orleans, the best places are the holes in the wall.  Sure tourist Mecca’s have their finer points, but often adapt to a pre-biased audience that will salivate in Pavolvian-fixation based on reputation regardless of what is presented to the table.  Predisposition leads to complacency.  Local denizens ubiquitously have divergent biases to assert individual humanities.  That yearning fosters a universally relatable creativity. 

We drank.  We ribbed.  We laughed.  Saturday rolled into Sunday morning and packing up.  The BBQ shop provided a savory “Sure Lisa, a wonderful magical animal,” Homer Simpson pulled-pork penult for lunch on Saturday with a drive by the Loraine motel after dinner.  Dana came by Conrad and I’s room and slept over in Conrad’s bed. 

Before watching Conan O’Brien on the hotel television, I told Dana about my engagement story when Conrad ran down to the lobby for something, because guys never want to hear that shit.  The morning brought hotel eggs, gaming and a six p.m. departure. 

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Around eight p.m. Ashley called while I was driving home from Memphis.  In a sheepish-soft voice Ashley said, “I think we need to talk.  What time do you think you are going to be home?” I said, “Probably around eleven p.m.”  Ashley said, “Well we can just talk after work tomorrow.”  I could tell immediately something was wrong.  I said, “Well is everything ok?  Can we talk for a little bit now.”  “We can talk tomorrow.  I will be asleep when you get home.”  Ashley must have just put Penelope to bed.  I wondered if Ashley was upset about the trip resenting me for this time in Narnia.

I came home crawled into bed on my side.  Ashley did not say a word.  I wanted to talk to Ashley the next morning before work.  There were curlers, makeup and power suits to adorn.   

I went to work.  After nine hours I came home to an every-light-off dusk-house around five-thirty.  About ten minutes later Ashley came bustling in, “I brought Penelope to my mother’s so we could talk, but I need to bring her something.” 

I sat in one of the rocking chairs my parents purchased for us from Cracker Barrel as a house-warming present on the dusk-lit back porch.  I got an Abita Amber out the fridge as I waited for Ashley to return from Hilton and Lacey’s house.  I looked out at our acre lot.  Our grass was finally growing with the elevation filled-in dirt compacted.  There were two jays flying around mimicking each other in the oak tree by the fence line.  A crow swooped-in and scared them off and sat on the electric wire with the sun drowning behind.

Ashley came back, sat in the other rocking chair and proceeded to tell me, “I can’t live like this anymore.  I am not happy.  I haven’t been happy for a really long time. I don’t think this is fair to you or me.  I want to separate.  Tonight either you need to go to a hotel or I am leaving.” 
Continue to Chapter 11 part 1