Dear Cary - Dyan Cannon [85]
“Dear girl, when you put it that way . . . All right. I know I may sound unreasonable at times, and maybe I’m being unreasonable. But it’s only because your safety and the baby’s mean so much to me.” He held me and stroked my hair.
Another crisis averted. Whew.
“I’ll call Charlie Rich and get you set up at the Dunes,” Cary said.
That night, when we were settling in for bed, my sweet tooth was whining for some chocolate. When Cary had gone to the kitchen for a glass of water, I remembered the stash of Picnic bars in his nightstand, and I took one. He walked in just as I was taking my first bite.
“What do you think you’re doing?” His voice was so cold and metallic I could almost taste it.
“I wanted something sweet.”
“And you took one of my Picnic bars? I don’t care if we’re married. I don’t care if you’re pregnant. I don’t care who it is. You have no right to go rooting around in my personal drawer without permission. No one does.”
I took a breath. I looked at the candy bar and suddenly felt deeply ashamed, literally like the little fat kid whose stepmother catches him with his hand in the cookie jar. “I . . . I didn’t know that drawer was off-limits. I’m sorry . . . Honestly, I didn’t. I’ll put it back.” I started to rewrap it.
“So you’re going to put a half-eaten Picnic bar back in my drawer?” He was truly enraged. “Give me that.” He plucked the candy bar out of my hand and flung it into the wastebasket.
“How am I supposed to live like this?” he railed. “I can’t find anything in this house since we’ve moved. And you’re like a poltergeist, always moving things around. How am I supposed to live like this?”
But was it really about the candy bar? I absolutely knew one of us was crazy. I just couldn’t decide who. “Cary, it’s just a candy bar.”
“No, Dyan, it’s got nothing to do with the damn candy. It’s about respect. You’ve got such a weak sense of self that you turn me into an authority figure, and then you intentionally do these things to rebel.”
“I do?”
“You see what I mean? I try and try and I can’t explain anything to you.” With that, he got into his side of the bed with his back to me and turned out the light.
Despite my candy-plundering ways, Cary followed through with his promise to call Charlie, who gave Mom and me a beautiful suite at the Dunes. She arrived before I did and was hanging her clothes when I got there. She hugged me, moved back to look me over, and asked, “So what’s going on?”
“Did Dad lose his marbles when you got pregnant with David?” I asked.
“Not more than half of them,” she answered.
I had told Mom a fair amount about Cary’s tragic—there was really no other word for it—family life, but we went over it again in vivid detail. “Your husband has a very big scar on his heart,” Mom said as I sat beside her while she fed a stingy slot machine nickels. “He really wants things to be different for his child, but he’s also really scared.”
“I feel so helpless,” I said. “I wish there were something I could do to heal it.”
“Honey, you’ve got to swallow a lot of words to keep peace in the family, but there’s a point where you have to put your foot down. You can’t let him run over you. I don’t know if a wound like that ever completely heals, to tell you the truth. So when he acts up, ultimately you have to draw a line in the sand . . . ahh, all I’m getting is lemons . . . Okay, let’s get some dinner. Lady Luck is not smiling at me.” She turned and looked at me. “It’ll all settle down, honey.”
I wasn’t sure.
When I got back home, I did my best to put Mom’s advice into practice. Being with Cary was still like trying to read by a lightbulb with a short in it—every time you’re about to give up and turn it off, it comes on strong.
I did make a resolution to get a little more serious about cooking, not that I thought that would fix any or all of our problems. One morning when he was leaving, I promised him a home-cooked meal. That made him smile. I spent a couple of hours that afternoon making a lasagna recipe I’d been meaning to try, and trifle, his favorite