So it was that for the next five months, Marisol refused to go to bed with her husband. The weather grew warmer, the days so long it was like the sky had gone bald. Right up until the summer solstice, she held out.
When he told her he couldn’t stand it anymore, she folded her arms and sighed: “Leave me, then.”
Crazy with lust, Georgie loaded up on secret food. He bought so much that it couldn’t be hidden anymore. He took some to work and packed it in a bar fridge. The rest he stashed at home, bellowing and smacking at anyone unfortunate enough to be caught eating it.
The children no longer knew what was theirs or his. Marisol stopped eating altogether, but stole his food to feed them. The kids stole food from anywhere when neither parent was looking. Charlie ate so much that he ballooned to twice his size. Keanan took it out to give to his friends. Bonnie let it moulder under her bed. Ellen brought it out to a cache in the Slimes, which she’d built from rocks and small logs.
The family no longer ate very many meals together.
Rumours about the Rompers and their food problem circulated around Howey Bay. Townsfolk shook their heads, clucked, tutted, and fell silent when Marisol entered the post office, where Pammy’s mother worked. It was as if the family’s trail of food led right to the doorstep of Marisol and Georgie’s divorce.
“I heard it was on the night of the solstice,” whispered Pammy’s mother.
“Yes, the solstice. The lights were on inside the house even after the sun went down,” murmured another while sorting mail.
“I know the neighbours heard arguing for hours.”
“Apparently he was begging her! Just begging her to . . . sleep . . . with him.”
“Goes to show.”
“Oh, absolutely. I don’t care what anyone says, a marriage is nothing without sex.”
“You’ve never had a dry spell with Roger?”
“Well, gosh, of course, for a month or so, once in a while!”
“A month is understandable, totally understandable.”
“With the kids, and the housework, and everything.”
“But it was something like eighteen months with them!”
“You don’t know that.”
“Who can say, really? That’s what I’ve heard.”
“Anyway, when it’s over, it’s over. There’s no mistaking the end.”
“There isn’t. Shh! Here she comes. Poor thing.”
Howey Bay was a place of extremes, like any small rural society. In its unpredictable fist, the town clutched the seeds of both pious austerity and utterly craven chaos and discord. There was nowhere to go – so absolutely anything, and nothing, could happen there.
Most folks who ended up settling in Howey Bay did it for the lifestyle, which was challenging, rough, unaffected. They were simple, hardworking people who enjoyed the stark outdoors, hunting, fishing, snowmobiling. Mining jobs paid well, too, for those willing to give up city lights and amenities in exchange for the hard work of a rural life.
In spite of – or perhaps because of – the inherent quiet of Howey Bay, the townspeople tended to gossip. They couldn’t stand it if things got too quiet. Everything was up for discussion: marriages, divorces, religious practices, words spoken or unspoken, mistakes, good deeds, newcomers, long-stayers, pollyannas, and naysayers. The townsfolk sniffed out secrets with the speed of truffle pigs.
The break-up of Marisol and Georgie Romper caused a stir, not because divorces didn’t happen in the community. They did, all the time.
But the Romper family was known for standing apart from the rest of the townsfolk with their high morals and clean-cut standards. Neither of the parents drank alcohol or smoked pot, and the children, save the eldest, went about like little preachers and prophets trying to convert their friends.
“We’re saved,” the children would say loftily. “You should get saved,” as if grace were something you could buy in a box at the grocery store, like washing soda or breakfast cereal.
Indeed, the family was above Howey Bay and its scrabbling, day-to-day existence. Sort of like those Mennonites who lived on the north end of the bay, keeping their own gardens and buildings, never mingling, except to give charity to the Natives. The Romper kids even associated with all those Mennonites up there, going to their youth group volleyball nights and saltwater taffy-pulling parties.
Very wholesome stuff. All praise and glory on Sundays and Wednesdays; the townspeople noted, They even attend not one, but two evangelical churches! Not the stuff of divorced families.
Now look at them: Georgie and Marisol, good Christians all messed up and falling apart. They weren’t so saved after all, were they, murmured the locals; so much for high-brow ideals. They can’t even keep their food in their own fridge.
After all, what’s this salvation stuff all about, anyway? What does a person need to be saved from in this place? We certainly laugh a lot more than they do with their gloom and doom. Bet we’re getting laid more, too. So what if we like to bury ourselves in alcohol and cigarettes, sports, bingo, television, falling into bed wreathed in the foggy haze of inebriation? So what if we don’t care to consider the so-called deeper aspects of life? Life is for living, that’s what! To heck with all that talk of sin and repentance! If they’d stop wailing on about hell for a minute, they’d notice that heaven’s wealth is right here in our own back yard.
And so on.
In some ways, I suppose, they were right. Georgie and Marisol would have done better to stop putting so many restrictions on their enjoyment of each other and the world.
If there’s one thing I’d like for y’all to do, it’s put a few less restrictions on each other! You’d think you’d have figured it out by now.
These two ex-hippies lived like two simple clumsy accidental islands in a half-frozen boreal stream, be-swept by the winds and snows of addiction, abuse and dysfunction, in an isolated town on the edge of a stunning wilderness.
It’s not as if friendships were hard to come by there; people’s only recourse was to socialize with one another. Natural beauty, community events, and sporty diversions were also on offer a-plenty. Even if it was forty degrees below zero, it was a Garden of Eden – like everything else I have placed upon the good earth. No, as tempting as it would be to blame their challenging location for their dissolution – the surroundings, however remote, did not kill the marriage. I gave them everything they needed, those two.
What kills a marriage is a lack of love. That simple knowing that old Marisol had felt all along. My spouse does not love me. And so, the thing fizzled.
And everybody felt it. The ripples of understanding – what it would mean, how everyone would have to move, and the dog would have to find a new home, and maybe Marisol would move to a different town again – flowed through all the loved and the loveless in the whole town. The complexity of it, and also its bareness, swirled around everyone’s ankles like a spring flood. Everyone felt it, and did a double take, and checked their sandbanks.
The hearts of all the sinning miners then bulged with all the love they’d ever felt for one another when they caroused on Friday nights and sang drunken nostalgic karaoke in their basement bars while the frostbitten winds howled outside in the frigid night. They felt it so keenly they made extra passionate love to their wives. Some of them might get divorced, but not right now.
The hearts of the all the Mennonites and Pentecostals bulged with the love of sadness at disgrace, at brokenness. And their hearts shone even more bright with the knowing that they had the love of Christ and the promise of hope in their hearts, and most of the answers in between about good relations and peace on earth. They wouldn’t get divorced, most of them.
The heart of Georgie bulged secretly, shamefully – horribly glad, in a way, to blow this pop stand and make his way to a better life, even if it did mean truncating the one he had already begun in that haphazard, stupid fashion when he was such a dumb kid. That was then, this is now, said Georgie to himself as he packed his suitcase. It’s either me or the highway.
The heart of Marisol did a frenzied dance between relief, hope and victimhood. She didn’t know how she would do it, but she would get on with her life. There were plenty of opportunities. She’d always been destined for more than this. She’d always known that Georgie didn’t love her, had always known that her marriage would fail, and now she had been proven right.
The heart of Ellen swelled and nearly burst with intuitive knowing. She could see the future and the past, and knew she’d seen it all along. Especially since the big knife incident between her parents. Now, years after that fight, the two ragged halves of her heart had somewhat healed up back together – but the memory made the scars grow hot and itchy.
Meanwhile, everyone moved forward with this new plan. It was a new way to be saved, divorce. You could start a whole new life with a whole new set of beliefs.