Marshall Law
A couple takes a night trip into a snowstorm, fighting merrily all the way.
For starters, it should be said that driving at night in Western North Carolina isn’t the funnest thing in the world to do.
The funnest thing in the world to do is plummet naked down a hill in early summer on a Slip ’n’ Slide with someone to whom you are sexually attracted. A close second is reaching your destination safely after driving at night in Western North Carolina.
Why we chose that particular night — when snow had been forecast for days, and we could just as easily have done it the afternoon after, when the snow had melted off the roads — was the subject of a dispute between myself and my wife of six months, Fonda. As with perhaps the most furious spousal jousts, this happened in a car, a Kia product whose nickname escapes me at this moment. Perhaps it was a Weaver, or a Swervera. It had served reliably through Fonda’s and my courtship — even valiantly as the site of a salacious tryst on a few occasions of which I’m not proud; I just want to be straight with you. Unlike the insanely circuitous route to Fonda’s parents one night in December.
“Ho ho ho.” That had been my most recent utterance, uttered somewhere near, I want to say Pumpkintown? In northern South Carolina, a stretch of highway, really, that boasts an enormous, deserted nightclub and a gas station/convenience store calling itself FMart?
Okay, Pumpkintown it is. Or, was. The reason I said “Ho ho ho,” a seemingly innocuous statement, was that Fonda had just asked, “Don’t these snow flurries put you right in the Christmas spirit? Isn’t this perfect?”
“Ho ho ho,” I replied, going about forty past the FMart. This trip was seeming, increasingly, to be a really fmart thing to do. It was such genius, I could have fmacked myself in the head.
Maybe it wasn’t the “hos” themselves, on their own faces, that struck such a dark chord in Fonda. Perhaps, rather, it was a matter of intonation. I may well have let the third “ho” lilt, just a bit, imbuing the sarcasm with some extra punch. I do that sometimes; it’s yet another thing that makes me so goddamned special.
But even if I was guilty of the lilt, shouldn’t some allowance be made for the fact we were making a trip to her parents’ house? Parents who, because of our hasty wedding in a courthouse, I’d not yet met? Through a snowstorm that was accurately forecast? Shouldn’t Fonda have been the one conceding apologetically, just a bit, to me? It’s one of those unwritten rules that she, well, both of us, should know well from our first marriages.
I realize now it sounds as if I’m appealing to you — Sir? Madam? — to take my side. I should just let the story do that work for me.
We hit major traffic, oddly, on a straight stretch of interstate between Hendersonville and Asheville, just as the snowfall was intensifying. It was odd to me, because it was Friday night at around eight. Where were all these people going? I would have asked aloud, rhetorically, but we hadn’t spoken since the ho ho ho incident and we were in the midst of an official cold stew.
We’d let the most recent CD, a Jackson Browne album I find contemptible but endure because that’s what good men do for the ones they love, end without the switch to the next album, both of us fearing the other would implicitly criticize the musical choice. I’ll sit in silence, and suffer, because this relationship is all about sacrifice, our respective silences said to each other. Happy?
No, the other would have replied, I am not.
The snowflakes endlessly launching themselves into the windshield had a hypnotic effect. I was hypnotized by anger and snowflakes. In that state, it was hard for me to judge if it was better to run the wipers or to decline to do so. Each had its benefits and drawbacks. Neither brought much of a response from Fonda, so I vacillated back and forth between the two. Now I was hypnotized by anger, snowflakes and my own vacillation.
I also thought of opening the sun roof. That’s because I’ll do almost anything to get a laugh, even during a vicious, silent battle of wills between myself and the one I’ve promised to love the most.
Finally winding through downtown Asheville, I noted what a wonderful place that would be to not be in a car but instead strolling about a quaint neighborhood, wassailing. That’s probably what most of those fuckers are doing right now. But I’ve got in-laws to meet. We left Asheville in the dusty snow.
At some point, in the planning of this trip — the start date of which I was not made privy until practically, like, an hour before departure — we had decided to take 251, which winds along the French Broad River, from the interstate northwestward to Marshall, our destination. That was probably more my call than Fonda’s, and I stand by it. It’s a pretty drive. I had taken it a few times with friends with whom I’d laughed and joshed all the way up to our secret camping spot, where we’d drink, smoke and laugh and, as the fire died, talk. Just me and my friends.
Mason married a psychopath, and no one called him now. Dave was living at Key West. (Or is it on Key West?) Tad died in a hurricane, on his rooftop turning his antenna so he could watch the local weather forecast.
Knuckles glowing in the light of the dashboard, I wondered if Fonda even cared what had happened to my friends. Save for Dave, she was probably glad about the tragic twists in their fortunes.
She probably suspected I chose 251 (okay, it was me, okay?) for its nostalgic qualities. Her suspected suspicions were correct. However, there’s no guarantee 25 would have been any better. It was probably teeming with logging trucks with drivers hoping to drop their deliveries in Marshall before midnight. One, rushing back to I-26, its driver tired and drunk, probably would have hit us head-on.
As we wound along the river we could not see, but were merely aware of (at least I was), the snowstorm intensified in not only size of flakes but velocity. Fonda was probably out of her mind at this point. Perhaps me, too. If only we’d had had someone to confess it to, to talk things through with. Such is the plight of married people.
To my credit, I plotted a way for us to emerge from the silence, each with his dignity intact. I almost pointed out a few things — a quirky road sign here, a good ole hairpin turn there — that may have broken the ice with us. But because the falling snow completely obscured the road sign and hairpin turn until we were actually passing them, I remained mute. There really wasn’t anything of note to talk about except for the snow and our impending deaths. Fonda, however, didn’t seem like she wanted to talk about either.
Studying a roadmap just yesterday, I’d memorized the series of small roads we were to take once we hit Marshall town limits, so there went the chance to ask Fonda which way to go. A car, swerving a little in the snow that had begun to accumulate on the road, almost hit us. Fonda, stalwart as ever, didn’t flinch gasp or even criticize my driving. As someone who, when I was too slow (for her taste) to react to a red light or a squirrel, was known to splay out her limbs like a hockey goalie guarding against a slapshot from close range, I had to admire her restraint. She was evidently ready to die for her right to remain silent.
The last time it had snowed we enjoyed a snow day without children. They were at the houses of the ex-spouses. To fill the void, we became the children. We pulled a sled up to the package store, bought a package, then detoured back through a cemetery, sledding and laughing all the way. (“Ho ho ho,” but with the final “ho” rising tonally upward with gaiety.) Fonda rode my back, a position quite fun and sexual at the time, but, in retrospect, an ill harbinger.
We drank, we laughed, we made love, we napped. Now that was a day. Yes, Fonda’s son, Harper, saw me in an open robe when I crept postnap to the kitchen to make some afternoon coffee and the door flung open and there he was, smirking that smirk. Yes, Harper and I haven’t really made eye contact since. (Why was Harper suddenly coming over? It wasn’t Fonda’s day to have him. What happened to texting first? And what kind of name is Harper Hopper anyway?) But back then we didn’t let things like that thwart us.
Did Fonda’s relatives even own a sled? Even if we arrived in that sort of mood, would we have to use trash can lids and inner tubes? Turkey roasting pans? Would we even feel like sledding?
If the appeal of sledding is about loss of control and proximity to disaster, we were getting our fill of that now. The accumulation of snow on the road, ten miles outside of Marshall, was pushing toward two inches — enough for tires to tire of gripping, often when you needed gripping the most. Fortunately I had gotten the two front tires of Fonda’s Kia replaced a few days before the trip, and my confidence in them was such that I could drive upwards of 20 mph and know we were inured from a skidding, a tumbling, and a crawling out of an overturned car at the bottom of a bank.
If she was thankful for my foresight, she didn’t say so. Her breathing, I noticed, had increased perceptibly in its tempo, so I knew she was still engaged in what was happening. She wasn’t capable of just shutting down and regarding this drive as a kind of walk in a park.
An itch had quietly made its presence felt behind my left scapula since before Asheville, and periodically I attempted to scratch it against the seat- back. It gradually worsened in spite of my wrigglings, and was starting to affect my driving. (Yes, we snowdroplaned a few times; luckily it didn’t cause Fonda to cry or even talk out.) Under normal circumstances — say, being with someone who did not wish for me death or worse — Fonda would have noticed my discomfort and, without my asking, scratched around the problem area until, triumphantly, rapturously, zeroing in on the itch’s ground zero.
Five miles outside Marshall (I could barely make out the sign saying so) the itch had gotten so intense I could think of little else, even as the onslaught of snowflakes made visibility a pipe dream. I thought of stopping, stripping to the waist and finding relief on the road right in front of the car, in full view of Fonda, making a kind of tortured snow angel, then wordlessly returning to my seat and continuing our drive. It would have made a strong statement of some kind.
Instead, I suffered, and in a way, that felt good. Everything sucked, so why shouldn’t I be tormented by an unscratchable itch? I thought of people without arms and how they dealt with the issue. They probably arrived at a point where they said, “See, this proves the universe is an awful place. I was right all along.” Perhaps the armless have a point.
But now, arriving in Marshall at last, I needed to put all that aside. I needed to focus on the directions I’d memorized, and get us to the place without Fonda’s help. (Somehow I’d come to a point where, if I had to ask for directions from Fonda, I was a complete failure as a human being.)
I am not proud of how proud I was of myself that I aced the test. A left on Jesse Ford. Go two miles. A right on Jacob Ridge, then a quick left onto Bumpkane. The house was the second on the left. We pulled in.
The dad, or someone who seemed just like him, but more childlike, came bounding out of the house and almost slipped (he was wearing slippers) and fell trying to get to us. I was hardly out of the car before he gave me a big, slapping hug that, while a tad unnerving, scratched my itch. I fell in love with him at that point. A big, strapping St. Bernard of a man, with a wooly mustache and shaggy hair he didn’t seem at all aware of, he seemed to need a little barrel dangling from his neck, hopefully filled with something alcoholic.
Fonda gave him a teary, fierce but quick hug, said something about being too tired to talk, and walked into house, a converted tobacco barn. “That hadda be some kinda trip,” said Bernie, his real name.
“Yeah,” I said. “That was something.”
The light in the kitchen was dimmed, thankfully, and I met Fonda’s mom, Jan, a handsome woman wearing a pink kimono and black pants that ballooned oddly at the thighs. “So glad you made it,” she said. “Thanks for driving.”
“It was no problem,” I lied.
I heard Fonda’s footfalls, already headed upstairs.
Then I met Roman. I’d heard about Fonda’s brother and had been a little nervous about meeting him. He was a smaller, more compact version of his dad, hairy and energetic. “Our weary sojourners!” he cried, emerging from a dark room off the kitchen. “In from the cold!”
“It’s…” I began, a little overwhelmed at the hospitality, especially with Fonda already upstairs and out of the equation. “It’s so great to be here.” I meant it.
“Where’s Fonda?” he asked, arms outstretched.
“She went up to bed,” said Bernie. “We lost her.” He laughed.
I somehow found that funny as well.
“That was probably a good idea,” said Jan. “It’s after midnight, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” said Bernie.
I was wanting a drink so badly I actually asked my in-laws for one.
“Oh!” said Jan. “Of course! Help yourself to whatever. And the wine cellar is downstairs. Roman will show you.”
Roman beamed. “C’mon, man,” he said. “Come on down!”
The interior layout of the converted barn, oddly, was that of a suburban split-level circa 1975. (How had they done that?) Thus the basement did not feel completely removed from the rest of the house. I sunk into a deceptively soft couch and looked around.
It was the sort of world a brilliant, misunderstood thirty-something who had failed to launch might create.
A large, wall-mounted TV, whose speaker emitted soft reggae, displayed a constantly changing kaleidoscope. The lighting was low, and a few candles burned. I couldn’t make out the numerous paintings hung on the walls. An effigy of a Fonzie action figure dangled from the ceiling. Roman placed a can of St. Theresa Ale in front of me, and I resisted lunging for it and draining its contents.
“So, how much of a bitch was my sister on the way up?” asked Roman, and burst into the hearty laugh of a man whose lungs have endured much smoke.
I smiled, which gave it away, but said, “Oh, she was all right.”
“Yeah, good,” he said, about to burst again. He suppressed it.
“I mean, we didn’t really…talk,” I offered.
This outburst surpassed his first one. “Oh-oh-oh-oh maaaaan,” he said. “So you’re gonna need this.”
Like a pilot in a well-worn cockpit, he reached behind him and pulled out a bong from the back of his padded rocker. A majestic, coral blue device, it was already loaded. Had he been about to smoke when we arrived? I think Roman noticed my still-shaking hands as they took the bong from him. The lighter sat amongst several lighters on the coffee table at my knees.
I’m not a regular smoker by any means, but I wasn’t hesitating, not tonight, not after that drive. I couldn’t just sit there and drink all of Roman’s St. Theresas. (I had already worked this through in my head.) Life was hard and I needed relief.
After I had drawn in the smoke and realized it was way too much for me, blew it out the mouth-level window into the snowstorm and suffered a coughing fit that lasted well over a minute, I began to see things a bit differently. Even in my dazed condition I hoped Roman would not blurt the tired, “If you cough, man, you get off.”
He didn’t. I was starting to really like this guy. “You okay?” he asked, concerned.
I wasn’t sure. “I’m not sure,” I said.
“Well, let me know when you are.”
“I’m just…oh, man.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s not….”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
“No.”
We looked at each other and laughed. It felt good. Too good. At the end of my laugh, the guilt emerged, threatening to set in. Fonda was upstairs, miserable in her own parents’ house. I, her mortal enemy, was having a blast with her brother. If she knew, she, well, she should feel good about it, right? That’s the goal, isn’t it? Of this god-forsaken trip? That I bond with her family. But maybe it wasn’t happening the right way.
We talked, we laughed. It was getting late.
“I feel like I’d better get upstairs and see what Fonda is up to.”
“Right, man. I get it.”
I got up, a bit unsteady, and moved toward the staircase. A voice called from the top: “What’s going on down here?”
It was Fonda’s mother! She was still up! Oh, no!
“Hey, ma,” said Roman, seemingly unperturbed.
I realized I was, in effect, lurking under the staircase. I was not sure what to do. It occurred to me, for some reason, that I could totally freak Fonda’s mother out by suddenly thrusting my arms through the stairs and wiggling them around creepily. Fortunately I had the presence of mind not to do such a thing.
I could hear Jan sniffing. “Are you guys getting stoned down here?” she asked. A reasonable question. One that horrified me.
“Uh-huh-huh,” chuckled Roman.
“Without us?” continued Jan.
I laughed, probably a little girlishly. I was just so surprised.
“Milton?”
My mother-in-law was addressing me. Luckily, before I could divulge my location, Bernie intervened.
“Hey, what’s the buzz?” boomed Bernie, my father-in-law, also from the top of the steps. “Tell me what’s a happening!”
I got the Jesus Christ Superstar reference immediately, and responded: “Why should you want to know?”
“Don’t you mind about the future,” added Roman.
“Don’t you try to think ahead,” sang the duo from up the stairs, on which they danced downward.
I wheeled around and looked at Roman. He was looking at me, urging me to provide the next line. I couldn’t think of it. So, panicked, I sang, “I don’t know how to love him,” and that made everyone laugh, and we all sat down around the coffee table.
All thoughts of Fonda melted away then. If her brother, and her own parents, for god’s sake, didn’t care, then why should I? The people that knew her best, and for the longest, thought she was being ridiculous in the car back there in the snowstorm. Who was I to question their judgment?
Roman put on a Grisman and Garcia album, we talked and laughed, then played a board game, Balderdash, I believe. Roman won. I’m not sure I ever fully grasped the rules.
As we talked in Balderdash’s wake, I marveled at how different Fonda was from the nuclear family with which she was raised. Had her super-cool family shared genes with her? Could she really have come from such a cool womb as Jan’s? It was then the thought that she’d been adopted crept into my head, and stayed there. She’d never mentioned it, which made it more disturbing; I was privy to crucial information and was tacitly sworn to secrecy.
It made so much sense now. My incisive, sarcastic takes on societal flaws; my keen senses of humor and timing; my unwavering competence and penchant for drawing meaningful fun from any situation — no wonder she couldn’t appreciate me. She didn’t appreciate her own hilarious, warm and adopted family. Why else would she have marched up the stairs to bed like a tired SS officer after a long day of being mean?
I vowed to never tell her. It was best she learned about her roots on her own. What right had I to spill the genetic beans, as it were?
Bernie fell asleep, snoring peacefully with his head tilted all the way back on the headrest of the couch, his arms helpless at his side. Jan, at some point, wordlessly went up the stairs, maybe murmuring g’night or something, leaving her prone spouse to find his own way.
Roman clapped me on the back as I got up, and said, “Goodt’hav’y’ere!” It really was just one word. He turned and disappeared into a dark room and was not seen again until dinner the next day. Before going up, I looked at my father-in-law and reasoned it was best to let him sleep where he was. Again, if no one else cared, why should I?
When I got upstairs, the only light illuminating the house of whose contours I knew next to nothing was that of the dishwasher, duly churning the waters around the dishes we’d be using the next day.
My phone long dead, I didn’t know what time it was. The one was clock I consulted, on the microwave oven, merely blinked at me, “12:00.” Perhaps it was best I didn’t know.
Upstairs was even darker — pitch black, in fact. I didn’t know what was what. I stood in the hall for a few minutes, contemplating my options.
I had the use of three, maybe four senses. I could rule out sight, and then, begrudgingly, taste. (I’d had only two beers and didn’t know where the rest were.) Feeling around for a door, I put my ear to it and heard Fonda’s muffled snoring. Bedtime! Opening the door as quietly as I could, I stripped to my underwear, felt around for the bed, and slipped in. I reserved for myself 1/5 of the mattress, assumed my sleeping posture and tried to quiet my mind.
Fonda sighed, and rolled away from me. Thinking what the hell, let bygones be bygones, I moved closer and placed my hand on her shoulder. She let me. All was well.
She made that sweet, sexy sound that’s so hard to describe. I guess it’s like an owl on morphine. My reservations about physical intimacy — this soon, in a house I didn’t know, in proximity to family members I just barely knew — were quickly eclipsed by an urge for make-up sex.
I slid close to her and moved my free hand down her front, saying, “I’ve missed you,” or something conciliatory like that.
Her body stiffened, and she threw off my hand, saying something like, “What are you doing?” It was more like a croak than speaking.
Thinking I had made a terrible mistake, an unthinkable one at that, I rolled out, saying “sorry” or some such repentant plea, and ran out of the room into the blackness of the hall, feeling around for the other bedroom door. It took a while, but I found it. I entered. Horrified that I’d made a blatant pass at my mother-in-law, I yearned for the security of a bed with a familiar person, a wife, waiting in it.
“Hey darling,” I said, kissing her shoulder.
Instead of returning my greeting, this figure stiffened just as violently, if not more than the previous one. Had I been mistaken? Had I opened the very same bedroom door? Though this bed seemed like it was in a different part of the room, I knew I wasn’t at my best spatially. If this was the same figure, what kind of monster was I? And if it wasn’t, then why was Fonda so committed to her resentment toward me?
Where did I belong? I knew I wasn’t the first to ask that timeless question, but I was feeling especially unmoored. Indeed, if not for the snow, I might have found my way back to the car and bunked there (inside it). I’d have certainly felt more welcome than I had been in either upstairs bedroom. Instead I returned to the hallway and its inky and unpredictable blackness.
In more ways than one, I was untethered and forlorn in the dark. In my underwear. And now, footsteps were making their way up the stairs. I felt around frantically for some alcove or nook in which to hide, settling on a stretch of wall near the top of the steps. At least it felt like a wall; I know at least it was vertical and hard.
I should have thought this through. It is not uncommon for a sleepy, drunk and stoned 60-something guy to use a wall for support when traversing a dark hallway, even one he’s used many times. Bernie was no exception to that rule. As he neared the top of the staircase and I was able to use his heavy breathing as a way of assessing which side of the hall he was likely to use, I thought about darting across to the other wall.
Instead, I froze, and his hand brushed across my chest, then pressed firmly into it, as if to confirm what he’d suddenly, to his horror, suspected. “Whaarrump!” is the closest spelling I can summon of his exclamation as he fell backward down several steps and came to rest on the landing halfway down.
A door opened, a light came on, another door flew open, and two women — my wife and my mother-in-law — paused only briefly to behold me standing at the top of the stairs, in my underwear, looking down at my father-in-law, who was prone and writhing in pain. “Bernie!” yelled Jan, and quickly she was down the stairs and kneeling at his side.
Fonda stayed at my side, wide-eyed, looking at me, then her father, then me. Back and forth like that.
“What happened?” cried Jan, addressing me, I’m assuming, because I was the one in his underwear looking like he’d done something bad, while Fonda was wearing a nightgown, attire more appropriate for the situation.
“I, I, I, I, I, I,” I stammered.
“Is he okay?” asked Fonda. “Dad! Are you okay?”
Bernie looked up the stairs at me. “I hit my head,” he said. “And my back. I might need help getting up.”
I started down the steps, and Fonda said, not kindly, “Will you please put something on?”
I went back up the steps and walked to one of the open doors in the hall. “I…,” I began, then paused. “I don’t know where my clothes are.”
“Jesus Christ,” Fonda sighed, and she brushed past me, turned on the light, and I saw my clothes on the floor. The mystery had been revealed to me. It was in fact my wife, Fonda, to whom I’d paid my first bedtime visit. She’d been the one inquiring what I thought I was doing.
That meant I had caressed, kissed and murmured sweet nothings to my mother-in-law as she lay in bed trying to sleep so she could cook my breakfast in the morning. I may have touched her breast.
In her mind — and maybe even Fonda’s as well — I had come up from a friendly gathering in the basement and promptly gone on a lecherous rampage, first attempting to rape her, then flinging her husband down a flight of stairs.
She had me all wrong.
However, there was the wrecked body of my father-in-law with which to deal first. I emerged from the bedroom fully clothed, albeit disheveled, and said, “I’ll drive him to the hospital.”
“I don’t think so,” said Fonda, chuckling ruefully.
“I’m all right,” groaned Bernie. “No one’s going anywhere.”
As I descended the stairs to him, Jan quickly stood up and ran from me. She evidently figured I wasn’t finished with my attempt to rape her. “Please forgive me, sir,” I said, instantly regretting the “sir” part because it sounded pandering and insincere.
He motioned me closer to him. I knelt. “What were you doing?” he whispered.
“I,” I began, wanting to get it right. “I was lost. I couldn’t see.”
“Why didn’t you turn on the light?”
“I couldn’t find the switch.”
“You could have asked for help.”
“But everyone was asleep.”
“Not everyone,” said Jan from the living room. “I was sure as hell awake.”
“And I am so sorry about that,” I said, turning to her. “I thought you were Fonda.”
“What did you do?” asked Fonda.
“I accidentally got into bed with your mother.”
Fonda couldn’t suppress her laugh.
“It’s not funny, Fonda,” scolded Jan.
Bernie struggled to his feet with some clumsy help from me. “No blood?” he asked. We all shook heads. “No harm, then. Let’s just go to bed and forget about all this.”
“Please know I am so sorry about what happened,” I said, now perfectly sober. “It won’t happen again.”
Bernie held out his hand. I reached for it, and he pulled it back and slapped me slightly on the cheek. “That’s for sexually assaulting my wife.”
Jan was a bit distant with me for the remainder of the trip. Bernie and I became closer, if anything. Jan made the best biscuits, and then a superb beef stroganoff for dinner.
I have the best in-laws.
Fonda and I have our first couples counseling session this coming Tuesday. We’re both committed to getting through this rough patch.
