31st May 2007
Post Script: Impromptu Interview With Marlboro Man
Date: Yesterday
Place: The Pioneer Living Room
Pioneer Woman: Honey, in ten words or less, what do you remember about the first meal I cooked for you?
Marlboro Man: I really hated it. But I really liked you.
Black Heels to Tractor Wheels: A Love Story. Part XXXIII
Apr. 25, 2008
We spent the morning driving, my Marlboro Man and me. We drove around the hidden places and the far reaches of his family’s ranch: through rippling creeks, across innumerable cattle guards, over this hill, past that thicket of trees. All of this in search of the ideal spot for us to start our lives together. Marlboro Man liked the house in which he’d been living, but it was far removed from the heart of the ranch and he’d always planned to set up a more permanent spot somewhere. That we were now engaged to be married made it the perfect time for him to make the transition. I always liked his house; it was rustic and unadorned, yet beautiful in its simplicity. I could live there. Or I could live in another house. Or I could live in his pickup, or in his barn, or in a tee-pee in a pasture…just as long as he was there. But he wanted to drive and look together, so we drove. And we looked. And we held hands. And we talked. And somewhere along the way, in the bright morning sunshine, Marlboro Man stopped his pickup under the shade of a tree, crossed the great divide between our leather bucket seats, and grabbed me in a sexy, warm embrace. And we sat there and kissed, like two teenagers parked at a drive-in. A drive-in in 1958, though. Before the sexual revolution. Before Cinemax, though my mind remained very much in the 1990’s. It was hard to practice restraint in the pickup that morning.
We did, though, ending our make-out fest within minutes instead of hours, which would have been my choice. But we had a lifetime ahead. Things to do. Cattle guards to cross, and we continued our drive, checking out some of the more obvious locations we might one day call our home. We started at the Home Place—the quaint, modest homestead where his grandfather used to live back when he was a newly married rancher just beginning to raise a family. The well-maintained road on which we drove wasn’t always there, Marlboro Man told me, and when any amount of rain would fall, his grandmother would find herself trapped at the Home Place for days because of the roaring, impassable creek. His grandmother had been a city girl much like me, Marlboro Man said, and had resisted living on the ranch at the beginning. But because she wanted to marry his grandfather, she’d bitten the bullet and made the move.
“How sweet,” I replied. “Did she eventually wind up liking it?”
“Well, she tried to,” he said. “But the first time she got on a horse my grandpa laughed at her.” Marlboro Man explained. “She got off and said that was the last time she was ever riding a horse.” Malrboro Man chuckled his signature chuckle.
“Oh…hmmm,” I said, smiling nervously. “Well, how long did it take her to get used to it?”
“Well, she never really did,” Marlboro Man said. “They eventually moved to town and bought a house.” He chuckled again.
I looked out the window, twirling my hair. Something about the Home Place didn’t seem like the best fit.
We continued our drive, not making any permanent decisions that day about where we’d live. We’d been engaged less than 24 hours, after all; there was no huge rush. When we finally returned to his house, we curled up on his couch and watched a movie. Gone With the Wind, of all things. He was a fan. And as I lay there that afternoon and watched the South crumble around Scarlett O’Hara’s knees for what had to have been the 304th time in my life, I touched the arms that held me so sweetly and securely…and I sighed contently, wondering how on earth I’d ever found this person.
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Meanwhile, word of our engagement had begun to spread through my hometown of 35,000, thanks in no small part to My Retarded Brother, Mike, and his patented Bullhorn Approach to announcing our engagement at the mall the day before. My return to my hometown after living in Los Angeles had been somewhat noteworthy, since I’d always given off the air—sometimes obnoxiously so—of someone who thought she belonged in a larger, more cosmopolitan locale. The fact that I would now be hanging up my L.A.-acquired black pumps to move to an isolated ranch in the middle of nowhere was enough to raise a few eyebrows. I could almost hear the whispers through the grapevine.
“Ree? Is getting married?”
“Seriously? She’s marrying a rancher?”
“She’s going to live in the COUNTRY?”
“I can’t picture Ree…riding a horse.”
“She’s the last person I would ever imagine in the country.”
“Whatever happened to her California boyfriend..?”
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When he walked me to my car late that afternoon, minutes after Scarlett declared tomorrow another day. Marlboro Man backed me up against the driver side door and rested his hands lightly on my waist. He caressed my rib cage up and down, touching his forehead to mine and closing his eyes—as if he were recording the moment in his memory. And it tickled like crazy, his fingertips on my ribs, but I didn’t care; I was engaged to this man, I told myself, and there’ll likely be much rib caressing and forehead touching in the future. I needed to harden myself to its deathgrip, I told myself. I needed to toughen up, to be able to withstand such onslaughts of romance without my knees buckling beneath me and without my forgetting my mother’s maiden name and who my first grade teacher was. I needed to practice now, I told myself, to desensitize myself to its power. Otherwise I had lots of years of trouble—and decreased productivity—ahead. So I stood there and took it, closing my eyes as well and trying with all my might to will away the ticklish sensations. They had no place here. Begone, Satan! Ree, hold still.
My mind won, and we stood there and hugged and kissed and thumbed our nose at the reality that we were two separate bodies…and the western sun behind us changed from yellow to orange to pink to a brilliant, impossible red—the same color as the fire between us.
______________________
On the drive home, my whole torso felt warm, tingly, right. Like you’ve awakened from the most glorious dream you’ve ever had, when you’re still half-in, half-out and you still feel the dream and it’s still real. I forced myself to think, to look around me, to take it all in. One day, I told myself as I drove down that rural county road, I’m going to be driving down a road like this to run to the grocery store in town…or pick up the mail on the highway…or take my kids to cello lessons.
Cello lessons? That would be possible, right? Or ballet? Surely there was an academy nearby.
We’d casually thrown some wedding dates around: August? September? October? When the weather was cool again. When shipping was over. When we could relax and celebrate and enjoy a nice, long honeymoon without the pressures of cattle work. Our wedding would likely be months and months away, which was fine with me. It would take me that long to address enough invitations for his side of the family, what with the cousins and uncles and aunts and extended relatives, all who seemed to live within a fifty mile radius, all of whom would want to celebrate the first wedding in Marlboro Man’s immediately family—a family who’d been rocked by the tragic death of the oldest son some twenty years before. And it would take me that long to break away from my old life, to cut the cord between my former and future selves.
Just then the phone in my car rang loudly. It was my sister, Betsy, who’d been visiting our parents’ house for the past 24 hours.
“Mom just saw Carolyn at the gift shop,” Betsy laughed. “She said she’d just heard about you getting engaged and she could not BELIEVE you were actually going to be living in the country…” We both laughed, knowing this was going to become a regular thing.
I couldn’t blame anyone for their judgments. And actually, I heartily agreed. I’d been the quintessential country club kid; Throughout my seventh-fairway childhood, I’d scampered across the golf course at will, jumping over rolling golf balls, just to take a dip in the pool. I’d used just about every sand trap on the golf course as my own personal sand box, sometimes even leaving my toys sticking through the surface for golfers to find. I’d been voted Best Dressed in seventh grade, and didn’t think it was the least bit strange that the junior high school I attended would even sanction such an award. (I won Class Clown, too, but tried to downplay it as much as I could.) And once I’d hit eighteen, I’d fled that place, my hometown of 35,000, at the earliest convenience, bailing on my lifelong friends in favor for Los Angeles, which seemed oh, so large—large enough for me to find what I was looking for.
So I couldn’t blame them for having their doubts. And the truth was, I still didn’t even know what it would all mean. Country life? It was still The Big Unknown to me. I closed my eyes and tried to reconcile my future—a future in an as yet unidentified house, likely at the end of an as yet unidentified dusty gravel road far away from restaurants and shops and makeup counters—with my citified, self-absorbed past. I just couldn’t see it; I had no idea what even to picture in my mind. What would I do every day? What time would I have to get out of bed? Would there be chickens involved? Though I’d dated Marlboro Man for some time, I’d never really spent the night with him…I’d never woken up to his schedule and watched how it all played out once his feet hit the floor. I couldn’t imagine what I’d do with him in the morning. Would I eat Grape Nuts in front of him, or wait ’til he left for the office? Wait—he didn’t even have an office. Would I go to work with him, or would I have to spend the day scrubbing clothes on the washboard…and hanging them on a clothesline? Where would Bounce come into play? If I sat still, my mind wandered and eventually, took over. And all the stereotypes I’d ever heard about country life swam around in my mind like a school of a million tiny fish. For some reason, I was completely powerless to shake them.
I finally arrived back home and entered my house. Betsy had gone out with friends from high school and when I walked into the kitchen I saw it—the elephant in the room: The door leading to the family room was closed; my parents were on the other side. The air was thick and suffocating and oppressive. I could actually see what normally would be intangible: tension, strife, conflict, pain. And just like that, I was split in two—giddy and fizzy and ecstatic about my future with Marlboro Man…and simultaneously, devastated and filled with doom and dread over the knowledge that the very fabric of my soul—my stable, normal, happy family life—was being ripped to shreds before my eyes. How could this perfect, shiny house have spiraled downward into such a den of death and destruction? That it happened to coincide with my finding the greatest love of my life had to be a joke.
Dragging up to my room, I kicked off my shoes and curled up on the soft chair next to my bed. I so wanted to leave, to avoid the whole godforsaken mess altogether. It was my parents’ problem, after all; I certainly had no power to reunite them. This should have liberating, but instead all I could think about was how on earth I’d be able to negotiate the next several months of my engagement. I could see it all in front of me—a never-ending, schizophrenic cycle of euphoric highs from being with my beloved…and abysmal lows the second I walked back into my parents’ house. I didn’t have the intestinal fortitude to withstand the contrast.
Suddenly, he called. He called as he always did after we’d spent the day together. He called to say Goodnight, I had a good time today, What are you doing tomorrow, I love you. His calls were a panacea; they instantly lifted me, reassured me, healed me, made me smile. Tonight’s call was no different.
“Hey, you,” he said, his gravelly voice reaching new heights of sexiness.
“Hey,” I said, quietly sighing. Feeling instantly better.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Sitting here,” I answered. “And thinking...”
“What about?” he said.
“I was thinking…” I began, hesitating for a moment. “I was thinking…that I want to elope.”
Marlboro Man chuckled at first. But when he realized I wasn’t laughing, he stopped. And for what seemed like an hour, we both sat on the phone in utter silence.
To be continued…
