I'm Sorry You Feel That Way Page 4

  What’s (Not) Simple

  Dogs love Karl Bennett. When dogs see him, they quiver and flail, they wiggle and whine. They throw themselves at his feet, showing him their soft bellies, stretching out their necks.

  My dog especially loves Karl Bennett. A border collie-German shepherd mix, my dog terrorizes most people, but when Karl’s white pickup pulls into my driveway, Bobby’s tail wags hard, his tongue lolls, his lips curl into a goofy smile. Just this morning, Bobby strained at his leash, attempting to get to the passenger’s seat of Karl’s truck. Bobby wanted to lick Karl’s face, his hand, his boots.

  But when Karl flicked a cigarette lighter at him and told him to go lay down, Bobby, in a fit of obedience quite unlike him, obeyed. Bobby’s enthusiasm for this man irritates me. Because Karl Bennett is my ex-husband, my dog’s attitude seems disloyal.

  Karl Bennett isn’t tall. He stands about five-feet-seven; his chest is broad; his hair, once dark, is now a wispy gray. He’s a sweet-looking guy, handsome, with green eyes and bushy eyebrows and a neatly trimmed moustache. During hunting season, he grows a beard.

  Karl Bennett doesn’t like to see people cooing at their dogs or murmuring sweet nothings into their floppy ears. When he pets my dog, Karl extends one finger and touches, just barely, along the top of Bobby’s head. Karl doesn’t like for people to sleep with their dogs. He doesn’t like knowing we put our cereal bowls or dinner plates on the floor so our dogs can lap up the remaining milk or tongue off the bit of mashed potatoes and gravy we saved just for them. Karl Bennett doesn’t like dogs in the house, period.

  When I want to annoy him, I tell Karl that I fried up four eggs for breakfast: two for me, two for Bobby. When I want to disgust him, I tell him how I believe Bobby’s emotional problems stem from his being taken from his mama at too young an age. “Bobby suffers from separation anxiety,” I say.

  When I’m really looking to get on Karl’s nerves, I coo at my dog, asking him does he love his uncle Karl. “You’re simple,” Karl says. “You’re simple in the head.”

  There are other things Karl doesn’t like. Angela Lansbury is one. For reasons he cannot explain, Karl intensely dislikes Angela Lansbury. If he hears her voice or even a voice that sounds like hers on television, he changes the channel. Karl doesn’t much care for Hillary Clinton, either, but he believes the reasons for this should be obvious, and thus require no explanation.

  More than once, Karl Bennett has informed me that he doesn’t hate women. He may believe that women can be spiteful, yes, and they can also be sneaky and shrill. According to Karl Bennett, women are frequently impulsive, manipulative, underhanded, untrustworthy, fickle, impossible to please, confusing on purpose, and full of contradictions, but he doesn’t hate women.

  “Quit asking me if I hate women,” he says.

  When he was seventeen years old, Karl Bennett lost his virginity to a gorilla girl. It happened the summer he spent working the saltwater-taffy booth with the traveling carnival, and since then women have played an important role in his life. Karl Bennett has found jobs and quit jobs because of a woman, he’s built houses and bought houses and sold houses because of a woman. He’s started his life over from scratch, and he’s made and kept promises, and more than once, because of a woman, Karl Bennett has been disappointed, despairing, heartsick.

  He’s been married three times to three different women, and he has three children, a daughter and two sons, nineteen years separating the oldest from the youngest.

  Though his freezer is full of elk and mule deer, Karl does, on occasion, have salted peanuts for supper. Sometimes, he’ll pull open a tin of sardines. Sometimes, you can talk him into turning down the television and playing a hand of rummy. Karl has just turned fifty-three, and the last few years have been the longest stretch he’s ever lived alone. He says he’s come to prefer it.

  Karl Bennett can’t hold his liquor. Scotch makes him mean. He faints at the sight of his own blood. He’s never surfed the Internet and he doesn’t own a dictionary. He doesn’t have a suit, he doesn’t have a passport. Karl Bennett doesn’t like looking up numbers in the phone book. He doesn’t like Ed Bradley’s pierced ear, women who wear a lot of makeup, or little boys with long hair.

  Once, after we staggered into a gas station after last call, Karl Bennett stumbled up to the counter with at least two dozen individually wrapped condoms. The lady at the register said, “You may be good, but you ain’t that good.”

  There have been several dogs in Karl’s life. There was a red heeler named Jingles. There was Butch, the Yorkie he had with Ex-Wife Number One, and Bandit, the beagle he had with Ex-Wife Number Two. Over the course of our marriage, Karl and I had two dogs: both red heelers, both named Jack. When Karl was twelve years old, he had a dog named Sandy, some mangy muttly thing that he loved a lot. The problem with Sandy, though, was that she had a taste for the neighbor’s chickens. After she’d killed one too many, Karl’s father told him a chicken-killing dog is only good dead, then handed over the .22. “You know what you need to do,” the old man said, and Karl did what the old man wanted: he took Sandy into the woods and shot her, but he had neither the heart nor the stomach to bury her. The next morning, Karl found Sandy alive, but barely, crawling out from under the porch to lick his hand. To this day, Karl Bennett believes that’s an example of love, pure and true.

  Out of all his sad stories—and Karl has quite a few—the story about Sandy is, for me, the saddest. I remember the first time I heard it, early on in our courtship: how Karl kept his head down, his hands fidgeting with something in his lap—a piece of twine, maybe, or a twig. His voice was soft, but flat, his brow furrowed. I felt so bad for him. Looking back, I don’t think Karl Bennett told that story to seduce me, though that was the effect it had.

  When I first met Karl Bennett, he and his red heeler, Jingles, lived on forty-three acres in western Pennsylvania, land he was just about to lose in the divorce settlement with Ex-Wife Number Two. His house was pretty much a shack, but with help from the Amish, he’d built a beautiful barn for his Appaloosas. Karl stretched a hose from the barn and through the window in the shack’s bathroom to fill the toilet with enough water to flush it. Squirrels nested in his attic. His refrigerator held beer, pepperoni, and jugs of milk in various stages of souring. He took his laundry to his mother. Karl drove a red pickup then, and Jingles rode shotgun, growling at everyone everywhere they went.

  Karl Bennett has a friendly smile. If you saw him standing in front of the freezer section at the grocery store contemplating ice cream or standing in line at the convenience store to pay for his gas and buy a scratch-off lottery ticket, you wouldn’t feel shy about saying hello. I’ve seen women give him sidelong glances; I’ve seen women bite down on their lips to redden them, fluff out their hair, and widen their eyes as they moved past him.

  “No one can say any of my wives were ugly women,” Karl says. “At least not when I married them.”

  Ex-Wives Number One and Number Two still live in western Pennsylvania, and as Karl tells it, they like to call each other up and swap stories about him. Neither of them has ever called me.

  Karl Bennett and I both live in western Colorado, where we moved in 1996, separated in 1997, tormented each other in 1998, and officially divorced in 1999. I live in Grand Junction, in a house on Main Street; I live with the son Karl and I share custody of; and the man the State of Colorado says is my common-law husband; and of course, Bobby, my dog.

  Karl lives just outside town in a shabby little duplex that doesn’t allow dogs. Once a month, when his child support check is due, Karl Bennett tells me he’s broke or something close to it. No woman in his life, no dog, no money, Karl also doesn’t have health insurance. He hasn’t gone to the dentist in some twenty-odd years, but even when he had insurance that included dental, he never got around to going, and though he’s a drinker of coffee (cups and cups, all day long, each with a splash of cream)—and though he’s a smoker of cigarettes (Salem Lights, a pack a day, sometimes less
, but more often more) and he’s an eater of junk food, especially sweets (I once watched him do a shot of maple syrup)—Karl Bennett’s teeth are beautiful, immaculate: white, straight, his own. His arms are long. “Monkey arms,” he says, “buggy-whip arms.” Karl Bennett is long-backed and short-waisted; he has no butt. It’s hard to find pants that fit him. Karl Bennett has a solid-looking belly pushing over the top of his jeans, and he has a lock-box containing family photos and spare keys that unlocked pickups he used to drive and doors to places he used to live. Our son tells me there are bars of gold in that box—Karl confirmed this, though he’s vague about how much—bought during the Y2K scare.

  At one time, there were photos of a woman in that box, one of Karl’s ex-girlfriends. They were naked photos. Back when I knew where Karl kept the keys to that box, I came across those photos, I wrote a nasty note, something about here’s some trash that looks like you, I stuck the note and the photos in an envelope, and I mailed them to her.

  When he graduated from high school, Karl Bennett was almost twenty years old. He wasn’t stupid—staying in school was a good way to avoid the draft—but he also just didn’t like school, preferring to play hooky, sometimes with his buddies, who were in fact stupid, but more often by himself. Karl liked to hunt and fish and sit in the woods eating the egg salad sandwiches his mother had packed for his lunches. He daydreamed about what most kids in rural western Pennsylvania daydream about: leaving.

  He came close to not graduating. The only reason he did was because he and his mother and the principal of Laurel High reached an understanding: Karl would show up to school every day during the last three months of his senior year and he’d take two swats every morning before homeroom. His high school commencement was in June 1970—a month before I was born.

  Even back then, in 1970, Karl Bennett was thinking about the places where a man could live off the land, off the grid, with a woman and some kids, away from cities and their people and noise. Places with no telephones. The barter system. Wild places where the sky is big and the mountains are big and the nearest neighbor is miles and miles away. Western places where a man could build a toolshed without a permit from the government giving him permission or dig a hole in the ground and call it a toilet.

  But nineteen years later, Karl Bennett was still in western Pennsylvania. I was a sophomore in college, waitressing in this little diner where Karl, recently divorced from Number Two, came every morning for breakfast (a ham-and-cheese omelet and whole-wheat toast) and every afternoon for lunch (a cheeseburger with lettuce, mayo on the side).

  Karl Bennett never tapped his spoon against his coffee cup when he wanted a warm-up. He didn’t blow his nose, then leave wet Kleenex scattered across the table. Karl Bennett was not one of the men who wiggled a finger at me, then after I walked over, coffeepot in hand, said, “I just wanted to see if this finger could make you come.” Unlike the other men—old farmers, a veterinarian, a blacksmith, a physician, and a shareholder in Heinz, all of whom were perverts—Karl Bennett was a gentleman. He was patient when the diner was busy, empathetic when other customers were assholes. He was a generous tipper, never leaving less than twenty percent.

  What wooed me was the pretty way Karl talked about the places he daydreamed about. He brought in his Rand McNally atlas and traced his finger along those places: Montana, the Dakotas, Wyoming, Colorado. (At the time, I was taking French Lit, where I read about Emma Bovary doing the same sort of thing with a map of Paris.) Karl especially liked the places on the map that weren’t rashed with little red population dots. He described the cozy little log cabin he planned to build; did I think it should have a wraparound porch? I did.

  “Then we’ll have one,” he said.

  We could have horses, he said, and chickens. We could have dogs. We’d never have to chain them to a stake, and they could nap on the porch next to our rocking chairs. Karl said something about how we’d snowshoe into the woods and saw down our very own Christmas tree. He mentioned something about rigging up a clothesline in the yard so we could let our bedsheets dry in the sun. He held my hand under the table and told me I was pretty. He said words like “paradise” and “fresh start” and “new beginning.”

  I knew this guy was twenty years older than me. I knew he was twice divorced, and I’d heard his ex-wives hated him passionately. I knew his daughter was three years younger than me. I knew he lived in a dump, and I sort of suspected he had some weird ideas about what a woman’s place might be. After hearing the sad story of Sandy the dog, I should have guessed that Karl Bennett had some screwed-up ideas about love.

  Karl Bennett spent years working as a logger. He’s worked the woods; he’s owned a skidder, a loader, a dump truck, a pallet shop. He can eyeball a tree and tell you how many board feet it has. He can whittle a block of wood into a jewelry box; he can conjure a nightstand out of a stump. He snaps his fingers and that shabby old desk you would’ve chopped into firewood becomes beautiful. Here in Grand Junction, Karl is the foreman of a sawmill, overseeing a crew that includes men with felony convictions and Mexicans without green cards. The ex-cons aren’t worth a shit, Karl says. The ex-cons are simple, and for Karl Bennett, simple is the worst thing a person can be. Simple means lacking good common sense, but it also applies to people who are obtuse, stubborn, or illogical. Simple people are those unwilling to accept or unable to recognize that their intelligence has limits.

  But most often, simple means you have no claim to dignity. For example, an ex-convict who slices off his own finger because he’s too busy giggling about the wonders of eating pussy to pay attention to his finger’s proximity to the saw blade is being simple. But it’s not the man’s carelessness alone that makes him that way. An accident can happen to anyone. It’s that the man was giggling about pussy-eating when it happened.

  The Mexicans are not simple. Karl likes and respects the Mexicans: they put in a hard day, they don’t bother anyone. Karl doesn’t speak Spanish, and it’s fun to hear him say their names: José, Ernesto, Juan, Jesús. It’s fun to see them smile and nod while Karl Bennett rants about how trees are our only renewable natural resource. Karl doesn’t think much of Earth First!ers and Mother Earthers. “The toilet paper they use to wipe their ass?” he says. “Where do they think that comes from?” Karl can talk about God’s green earth in a way that doesn’t sound dopey. Though his politics are undeniably liberal—he’s all for labor unions and a woman’s right to choose, paying schoolteachers what they’re worth and taking care of old people and the poor—Karl Bennett votes Republican. He says it’s because the Republicans get it: trees are our only renewable natural resource.

  But it’s also because Karl Bennett is a supporter of the NRA, a payer of its dues, a believer in its mission, and a buyer of its collectible commemorative coins.

  On January 25, 1992, in Wampum, Pennsylvania, I married Karl Bennett. Held at Pauline Isaac’s Wedding Chapel and Motel, our wedding was a small ceremony, just the four of us: me, Karl, the preacher, and the preacher’s wife. I was six months pregnant.

  Afterward, we went to his mother’s house and ate pot roast with carrots, celery, and potatoes. Karl Bennett seemed happy. “We’ll make it,” he said. “For better or for worse.”

  I was a prudish pregnant woman, and as far as I was concerned, a traditional wedding night was out of the question, and anyway, Karl was tired. “Sleep well, Mrs. Bennett,” he said.

  But I was wide-awake. We lived so far out of town that we couldn’t get cable, so my television-watching choices were limited. I remember The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas was on at three that morning. I remember watching an infomercial for the Incredible Sweater Machine, and an infomercial where Cher was hyping some anti-wrinkle cream. There was also one about a device that cut hair: the clippers were somehow attached to a vacuum cleaner, making the hair-cutting process tidy.

  Karl woke up for that one; he said he’d had that same idea twelve years before, and he told me about another idea he had. Did I realize that a man has
these bones in his shoulders that prevent him from getting lotion on his back? A woman, though, doesn’t have that problem. A woman can get lotion on her back unaided. But what if you got one of those paint rollers with a hollow tube handle, you filled it with lotion—“Cocoa butter, vanilla, aloe, whatever you like,” he said—and you attach it to the bathroom wall, you press a button, and the man just stands against it.

  “I can put lotion on your back for you,” I told him.

  He said he would appreciate it, and in that moment, I thought maybe this marriage could work.

  Later, I wouldn’t be so sure. Karl Bennett was rolling down the window in his pickup, he was pulling one of our baby’s dirty diapers out of a plastic bag. He was going to hurl it out the window and over the top of the truck and into the neighbor’s yard. He did this because the neighbor shot Karl’s dog Jingles three years before, and Karl Bennett can hold a grudge. Every time we went out, we drove past this particular neighbor’s so Karl could throw a dirty diaper into this guy’s yard. I don’t know what Karl planned to do once we had our son toilet-trained, though it wouldn’t really matter. We’d be separated by then.

  From the outside, where Karl Bennett lives looks like the residence of any normal person: a driveway, some green grass, a front door.

  Inside, in Karl Bennett’s living room, four deer heads hang mounted on the walls. There is an assortment of animal skulls bleached white from the sun, that he found while hunting and hiking over the years, rowed neatly across his mantel. There are animal bones; he told me one is a mule deer’s pecker bone. There are skins: deer hides and a black bear’s coat, the result of a hunting trip in Alaska. Its head is still attached and my dog Bobby eyeballs it with some anxiety and barks at it nervously. If you tell Karl his living room looks like a killing field, he’s defensive. If you tell him it’s lucky the two of you are divorced, because there’s no way in hell you’d accept such a living room, he’s hurt.