The Size of the Leaves

My mother was visiting when she once spotted a coiled rope at the foot of my bed and assumed the worst. This was her habit with me, her oldest, first in college and to experiment with men; then a marriage she disapproved of with her downturned lips and a glare that was nothing less than menacing.

But my mother, the former smoker, loved when other people lit up around her, including my first husband. She loved to watch shapes the smoke wrought; ripples and cables that could support buildings. Construction, institutions, banks and libraries, universities and schools: imagine if you had built such things, she used to say. You could drive by and know that you had produced something lasting. Unlike the smoke she tracked, where all creations collapsed.   

My mother looked over the rope and said, “Must you be so obvious?” She did not buy my husband, an aspiring actor, was learning rope tricks for a role. Something from Sam Shephard, produced at the local state college where he was studying. He wanted to get a degree in something practical. If his auditions for repertory theaters and television commercials fell through, he wanted something to fall back on. Even if he could, as he claimed, sell ice to the Eskimos.

He sold me on nothing more than a trick he played with mirrors, like full-length mirrors in department stores that make you look thinner, so you’ll buy the outfit. They filter your perspective so that you suddenly become the stunning creature you had always wished you could be. He also told me I was beautiful, although that was likely in comparison to his ugliness, the scars that held his skin together. One ran in a straight line from his sternum to navel. It was a bright red and I had never seen anything like it, until many years later when I was in physical therapy for a problem with my arms and hands. I had lost all strength in my upper limbs due to age and repetitive strain injuries. The woman next to me at the therapy sessions had the same problem, but she had been burned. The scars on her hands looked as though she had been attacked by a swarm of loud and fiery insects.

Because of his scars, my first husband said he wouldn’t or couldn’t take movie roles. No director could or would work with his body. In addition to the scar that ran down the front of his chest and stomach, there was one that connected his navel to his back where his kidneys began. This is where the doctors opened him up after some kind of epic crash he was involved in: in one telling, it was a plane mishap. In another, a car accident. He was a victim of a drunk driver. Or maybe the perpetrator was drying out, which made me think of tobacco leaves, hanging from rafters.

Eventually, we—my mother and I; all my first husband’s friends and employers; and the family court of the state where we lived—discovered it was his want to lie about everything. Which means it’s possible there was no role, no play, not even an elective acting class at the state university I dutifully dropped him off at every morning. There were no auditions or television commercials. There was just a rope that scandalized my mother and a lot of smoke from cigarettes. It’s the size of the leaves, I’ve heard  experts pontificate, taking in so much radiation from the sun that makes cigarettes addictive and dangerous, like building castles in the clouds; setting out the embattlements, turrets and drawbridges without regard to the volatile nature of creation itself.