condescending retort. Then his grin returned. “Who are you?” he asked, emphasis on the “are.”
“My name is Brigid Quinn,” I answered.
“We should speak of this over dinner, Brigid Quinn.”
Most of the students tittered. Tube Top only looked chagrined to have been trumped by an older woman.
“I hardly think that’s appropriate in the middle of class,” I said.
“What the hell,” he had replied. “After this term I’m retiring.” He was a lot more aggressive with me in those days. I was a lot more honest with him until I fell in love on our first date. I’ll recall that date later if I’m feeling a little stronger.
Within the year, I married Carlo DiForenza and moved out of my apartment and into his house north of the city. With a view of the Catalina Mountains out the back window, the house itself had been decorated by Carlo’s Dead Wife Jane in the style of my crazy aunt Josephine—that is to say, red-fringed lamp shades and faux Belgian tapestries with depictions of unicorns. The large backyard had a life-size statue of Saint Francis sitting on a bench. That was all right; I had never decorated any place I’d lived and this fit the kind of person I wanted to be like ready-made slipcovers.
The house came with a set of Pugs, which are sort of a cross between Peter Lorre and a bratwurst. The dogs were given to Carlo by Jane just before her death from cancer five years before; she figured caring for them would give his life purpose after her death. We kept intending to name them.
But the best part of the deal was Carlo.
It, the marriage I mean, all happened so fast I could hear my mother whispering one of her platitudes, “marry in haste; repent at leisure,” but I knew what I wanted. What I actually had I wasn’t quite sure even now, but that meant he hardly knew me, and as I’d never known another way to live I was comfortable with that. One may say this is not the basis for a good relationship, but I’d learned my lesson: keep the violence in the past and focus on learning how to be the ideal wife. Ideal Wife was the woman I would be now.
Carlo took his time as well. He learned not to sneak up and hug me from behind and would place his palm ever so gently on my cheek so I would lean into it instead of tighten. He never tried to pry out of me the reasons for my fight-or-flight behavior, and I was certain he agreed it was best not to know. I was slowly relaxing, learning to trust him, and life was perfect except for those times in the middle of the night when I was overwhelmed by anxiety, when my heart would start to pound in habitual terror that he would leave me, that I would lose everything I had at last found.
That first year we made love, walked his Pugs, seduced each other into our favorite cuisines (him sushi, me Indian), watched movies (I discovered an appreciation for indie mind benders, he for things blowing up), and collected rocks.
I particularly liked the rock hounding. Besides being pretty, rocks don’t change, and they don’t die on you. My best local place for rock hounding was a quiet wash about a half mile down the hill from our house, under a bridge where Golder Ranch Road crossed it. The summer monsoon season, a flooding rain that brought the desert all of its yearly eleven inches within a few short months, tumbled the rocks from the surrounding mountains to gather there.
On the day I’m recalling, in early August, I had walked to the wash by myself, filled my backpack with twenty pounds of anything that looked unusually colorful, and trudged back up the hill, feeling a little woozy with the hundred-degree temperature but glad for the workout.
Soon I sighted our backyard at the eastern edge of the Black Horse Ranch subdivision. We’re a recent anomaly, surrounded by the real desert dwellers. People with horses. People cooking meth in their trailers. When it rained you could smell horse manure, and sometimes trailers blew up.
Does that sound critical? After spending most of my life in urban apartments I actually loved this rural area the way you love a sloppy old uncle who tells good stories from the war. I loved the smell of horse manure, and the occasional bray of a donkey coming from an unknown