China Farm - Newinli was growing rapidly, with Pete's relentless sales drive building a network of distributorships in eleven states during 1998. We were selling a dozen generators each month to each state, and the money was finally coming in. Every dollar was fed back into the business. Pete's aim was to build it to a value of five million, and we would then sell it and go live on the coast of Spain. He said several times that "I have at least ten good years left." I hated to hear him say that.. he meant he was counting how many years before he died. The shocking idea that he might die upset me terribly and I always told him to stop saying things like that. He had told me before that if something happened and he was paralyzed or unable to live normally, then he wanted to just be allowed to die. That also was out of the question as far as I was concerned. I could not and would not allow the man who was my universe give up his life. That kind of talk was not something to be encouraged; it was too sad for me to think about for even a minute. It was intolerably sad, intolerably painful.
In the fall of '98, Pete was becoming exhausted and pale. As I watched him work, when I came home each day from my teaching, he seemed to be wearing down tremendously. He was coughing constantly and complained that the perfume I wore made it difficult for him to breathe, so I stopped using it. "Please, Sweetheart, go get a chest X-ray", I begged, after he was prescribed inhalers to make his breathing easier. He was using it often as we spent our evenings together, and also shoveling handfuls of sugary candies in his mouth. He developed a serious sugar craving. He kept buying jars of "Sunny Delight", an watered down and sugar loaded orange juice drink. He made an appointment for a chest X-ray in that early fall and told me that they had found nothing wrong. I was relieved, but the coughing and breathing problems continued. I began to lose weight, starting in diet of vegetables, fish, and chicken. I lost enough pounds to go from a size 10 down to a tiny size 4. Pete got inspired by my weight loss and said he wanted to lose weight too, and began to eat less. He dropped a few pounds, but then put on even more as he seemed to become bloated in appearance. His face seemed swollen and puffier than usier.
I was fifty three when he died. That year, that month, January 1999, became the dividing line of my life, the before and after of a tragic disaster. A disaster that shredded all that I had created over many years, and that directed me down a path of depression, grief, and destruction. The magic that had been in my hands flew away, leaving nothing behind but the bittersweet memories. Never again would I find the loving or comfort I had known. Many times, even now as I write this, thoughts of taking pills were in my mind. Could I endure the lonely, destitute years ahead, when my face would wrinkle and sag, my teeth would decay, and my knees ache with the stiffness of age.
My employer, a school district, gave me only three days off to grieve my husband's death. The personnel superintendent, whose wife died a day or so after my loss, took a full two weeks off. Notices were put into everyone's mail box about his wife's death. No notices were given about my husband's death. I drifted through the days f work, teaching with tears held back, but sometimes breaking through to stream down my face. Sometimes I began to lecture using the wrong book for the particular class, and a student would gently point out to me that this was not the book for the class. They were kind, my students. It touched me how kind and understanding they were. One day it occurred to me to ask them how many of them had family members who had died of cancer. About two thirds of the class raised their hands that they had. It was phenomenal to me how many people were dying of this dread disease.
In the mornings, driving to the school, it was hard to see the road because of the tears blinding me. I continued to work, though I was numb, traumatized. I had no choice. He had left me with very little money, which I had to use to have the road regraded, the roof replaced, and other repairs made just to maintain the house on the mountain. I wondered how I would be able to care for myself. He had done the cooking and food shopping. He had taken care of the many things that needed a man's strength to do. I put a chart of the weeks meals taped on the inside of the front door to remind myself what to prepare, and as a notice of the need to eat, no matter how depressed I might be.
I felt it was terribly important to find someone to love me again... that I could not be alone. And I knew that to find someone, I would have to suppress my grief and do what was necessary to make myself desireable to someone. So about nine months after his death, I took what cash I had and went to a dentist to have all my teeth capped, to end the constant gumline cavity repairs once and for all and to make my smile prettier. I also had my tummy liposuctioned and had my nose done, my face chemically burned to rejuvenate it. I had to package myself if I had to re-enter the dating market to find someone so I would not be alone. I was afraid but determined.
A year after the loss, I met J.B. Harris, who impressed me from the first moment I met him. He was charming, well dressed, with the most delightful mouth that curved upward at the outer edges like a crocodiles lips. He had a masters degree in economics from the University of Chicago and had his own corporation. He had lived in Europe many years and was worldly wise and saavy. I liked him. Thus I entered the first half of my fifties years.
In the first six months after Pete died, my tears flowed so much it was as if some endless river was streaming from my eyes. On the drive to and from work, it was difficult to see the road ahead through my tears. When the radio was playing, and songs were being sung, often fresh crying would erupt. When I gave lectures to my classes, sometimes I began with the wrong textbook and one of the kind students would gently tell hand me the right one. Yan Jun Li told me not to worry about the business, to just teach and he would take care of it. The months passed and then school was let out for the summer. I did not go to work at the warehouse. Instead, I set about to repairing the house and installing cabinet doors and a new roof on the house. I had the Mission Inn armchair reupholstered. All of these things cost me quite a bit, in the thousands. By the middle of August, I was digging a 100 foot long trench in the hard granite and clay soil, from the house to the power building, to bury a new electric line from the new solar panels I had bought through my husband's son in law. I used a pick axe, a big and heavy one, and it made bloody blisters on my hands. The temperature was a hundred and over, and I wore a wide brim hat. I dug for several days, swinging the pick for hours. The trench I was making had to be about a foot and a half deep and about a foot wide. I completed it. Doing the work set me free from thinking too much, so that was helpful. I was making myself a hard laborer to forget my troubles.
On one visit together, Yan Jun suggested I adopt a Chinese baby. I did not react to that suggestion, stunned. The very idea, that at past fifty I would take on the care of a baby. During this time I was desperately afraid of being alone. I felt that I must find someone as soon as possible.
I had lost some weight in all the grief, and was a size four. My looks were still very good, but I was getting older and I knew the odds were against a woman past fifty in finding a new relationship that would last. I started to date as often as possible. I threw myself into it obsessively, frantically, trying to find someone who would care about me. I dated an Armenian stockbroker, a professional baseball player, a chef who owned three restaurants and who had recently lost his wife, a French philospher/yoga master, an army sargeant, a real estate investor from Reno, and a realtor from Scottsdale. The realtor from Scottsdale reminded me too much of my father, and he had a scary past. His wife had allegedly killed herself by shooting herself, and he was at home when it happened. It took place at two in the morning. He showed real rage on several occasions, both times about just conversations over things in the news. I felt that he had probably killed his wife, so I never dated him again. I encountered him by chance at the bookstore several times, and was glad I had stopped seeing him. I heard he had remarried and I felt afraid for the woman who had made that mistake.
By September of 1999, some half year after the tragic loss, I had taken possession of the Sun City house. It had belonged to Pete's mother Katharine Abiah Harris. She was a jewess who had come from a family of vaudevillians from England. Her mother and her mother's family entertained in the theaters of London. She met Pete's father, Norris Sr., when she was just 16. They married and bought a house in Taft, California, where Norris Sr. worked as an oil field engineer for one of the big oil companies. The couple had three children, two boys and a daughter, Shirley. The oldest boy was my husband Pete, his younger brother was Andrew, and the little girl was the baby of the family. The family lived a simple life in Taft, during the years of the Great Depression. Then they took a train trip back east to visit his family in Ohio. On the train trip, the little girl got sick from the cold and died. Katharine never got over it. She now had lost her little girl. I am sure it broke her heart. His father was a member of the Technocrats, a group that was seen as subversive by the government. It had some of the same flavor as the communists or socialists. In those years of depression, many groups looking for another way of government proliferated. The family had gone through many hardships through the generations. There was the story of Uncle Henry, Henry Peters. He owned a large parcel of land in Ohio. The railroad put a rail line through the area and one of the railroad managers forged a deed on his land and recorded it. They blatantly stole Henry's land. There was no way to prevail in court; the courts favored the big corporate rail company. So Henry took care of it himself: he dynamited one of the small station buildings put along the rail way, killing a few of the rail workers. They put Henry in prison for seven years and when he got out, he was not the same man. He had eaten the bitter injustice and tasted the evil nature of the capitalist system. The land was gone, and he lived out his days with a new jaded outlook on life. I have the original letter he wrote to the courts in his initial effort to get justice done. It is somewhere in storage.
How like my situation it is ! I too have lost all, and I too am a different person than I was just 15 years ago. No longer is there a bright future nor trust nor a feeling of good will from my own country.
I began to see JB regularly. He took me to Paris and to London. It was heavenly. I adored Paris. We walked the entire length of the Champs d'Elysee and dined at the Pie du Cochon and in restaurants in the Latin Quarter. We took the metro to a flea market out of town and toured the Palace of Versailles. It was a great experience to walk the halls of Versailles where Marie Antoinette had run screaming for her life, trying to escape the soldiers who had come to arrest her. She was executed and her children sent outside of France to protect them. I believe she was still in her twenties when she died. We went to the top of the Eiffel and spent another day in the Louvre and the museum where the impressionists works are displayed. I had the chance to see up close the most beautiful Manet painting. In London, we watched a session of Parliament from a balcony overlooking the members as they debated human dna and cloning. We spent a day at the British Museum, enjoying exhibitions on Agatha Christie, the Roman gladiators, and the Orient Express train which was actually there. On the upper floors we saw all the fine Egyptian antiquities and we ate sandwiches in the restaurant on the upper balcony, watching the visitors below amble about. Those experiences I am most grateful for. JB gave me something wonderful by taking me. On these travels, I had moments when I was able to use my French and Spanish speaking skills. It was delightful. I will always remember the delicious pureed vegetable soup and crusty bread we ate at a sidewalk cafe, and the milky hot coffee we savored.
No comments:
Post a Comment