Raw Edges: A Memoir

Wedges

: : 215 : : I found wedges for leveraging my way out of the marriage to David. The first was Ivan the beautiful, Ivan the handsome, Ivan the tricolored Australian shepherd. When my friend Susan asked me to dog-sit for the weekend when I still lived at the condo on Dahlia, my first home in Denver after leaving the mountains and my family behind, I fell in love. Susan had one too many dogs. Ivan needed a home. This devoted creature didn’t have any theories, and, if I fed him, he wouldn’t betray me. I had to have that dog. A yard. My own front and back door. The upstairs condo where I’d been living had become an empty space marred with memories of my loneliness and Spinner’s drug dealings, and if Ivan walked from room to room in the night, every paw scratch could be heard in the unit below. When the ancient radiators cranked up the heat too hot at night, making the building into a sauna with a broken temperature gauge, I knew it was time to start over. David told me he’d heard about a 1927 Victorian in Washington Park. We checked it out. It was perfect. In a show of good faith, he offered to help with the financing and the increased monthly payments. The second wedge was Spinner’s repentance after the marble statue fiasco. “I’ll do anything to make amends,” he’d told me. “I’ll paint your new house inside and out. I’m going to do better, and I won’t steal again. I promise.” I wanted to believe in this surge of good works—the way he :: Wedges :: 216 : : r a w e d g e s painted high eaves with a rope around his waist, the way he scoured bricks, scraped old paint from the windowsills, painted the detail on the front and back porch. He even attended aa and ca meetings. Gradually, his long days of painting turned into long nights of talking into the wee hours, of rekindling possibility. But even as I pressed David to finalize the divorce, I ignored something essential happening inside myself, something like a black crow of caution flapping its wings in my head, its raucous voice cutting through the smoke signals. Being a Taurus and too bullheaded to listen to anyone or anything, however, I was sure I was done with David forevermore. I invited Spinner and his basset hound, Lucy, to move into the Clarkson Street house with Ivan and me. These became my wedges between me and my former life. But on this narrow street, leaves on the tall trees sponged up all the sun in the mornings, and leaves on the backyard trees soaked up what was left in the evenings. It was a house of indistinct light, and there were Spinner ’s cigarettes, his eternal pot of coffee, at least three joints a day. Smoke filled the bedroom and the house, and I, the woman who had no desire for cigarettes or pot or coffee and never had, not really, didn’t protest as smoke curled into the air and obscured the light in the house even more. My old Mormon ways hadn’t worked, so why huff and puff over the small things? I needed a change. Something different. Watching Spinner’s favorite soap opera with him in the afternoons, I, the woman who never watched tv, fell under the spell of the twenty-oneinch screen, this salve, this placebo called Days of Our Lives. For a while I became a sort of zombie who forgot my belief about Divine hands scooping me up like clay from a table and shaping me into something better if only I asked with sincere heart and mind. I forgot my dignity. I pretended not to notice Spinner’s relapses when he pawned my vcr and acoustic guitar, almost as if this routine were a ceremonial dance where we performed our parts—him stealing, me demanding a payback, him complying. Out the door. Back in the door. His daughter, Maggie, now nine years old, came to live with us again for the last few weeks of her summer vacation. The three of us played house together, enjoying a sense of family, me with a daughter for the first Wedges : : 217 time. We walked the dogs, bought beads for making necklaces and tools for papermaking...