I'm Sorry You Feel That Way (6 page)

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.

“It wouldn’t look like this if you were here,” he’d say.

The last year we were a couple was our first year in Grand Junction. Karl Bennett and I fought, often and a lot. We fought loudly enough that the cops came. We fought silently, sleeping in separate rooms and ignoring each other when we passed in the kitchen. We fought about money—our lack of it. Karl reminded me I was the one who said money can’t buy happiness.

We fought about things that happened years before: how those naked pictures of his ex-girlfriend came to be mailed back to her, for example. Apparently, she’d been upset and called her attorney, who called Karl’s attorney, who called Karl. When my involvement came into question, I denied everything, but Karl knew better.

“You’re simple,” he said. “That was a simple thing to do.”

We fought about Jingles, shot and killed by the neighbor; Karl’s fault, I thought, for allowing the dog to run loose. We fought about why we gave away Jack Dog Number One: I didn’t trust him around the baby. We fought about why we gave away Jack Dog Number Two: off the leash, he bit a guy. We fought about the mean, horrible things Karl Bennett had said that I still remembered even if he didn’t, and we fought about the mean, horrible things he was sure I must’ve said even if he couldn’t remember what they were. When I pointed out that everything wrong was his fault because he was the one who said, “I’m moving to Colorado with or without you,” Karl said I was the fool who believed him.

We fought about how much I hated western Colorado, the unbearable desert heat, the bizarre canyon landscape, the rednecks in pickups with gun racks who hooted at me as I walked down North Avenue. We fought about the fact that the closest woods where he could find work were in Utah’s La Sal Mountains, too far away to commute, so Karl lived there, in a tent on the job site, a little too contentedly, coming home only on weekends. We fought about if I was happy to see him when he came home on weekends. We fought about his growing suspicions concerning the man who would become, according to Colorado state law, my common-law husband, and we also spent a great deal of time fighting about which one of us was simple.

Karl would tell you that from the first moment he laid eyes on every one of his wives, he never once took notice of, or even for a moment fantasized about, another woman, not even a supermodel or movie star. He’s told me that, and though I pooh-poohed it, saying that it seems a little unbelievable, not to mention unhealthy, I really do believe him. When Karl Bennett tells his wife she’s the most beautiful girl in the world, when he holds her hand and says to her for-better-or-for-worse, he means it. Things just don’t always work out the way we mean.

I harbor grudges against Karl Bennett. There is my bad credit, for example, and that getting involved with him meant my father wouldn’t speak to me for almost a year, the old man literally turning his back when I stepped into my parents’ house. There’s also the rice steamer my uncle gave us for Christmas in ’95 that I know Karl took when he moved out.

But I owe Karl Bennett. He replaced the brakes on my truck; when I broke down in traffic last week, he was the one I called. When I wanted mulch for my garden, he brought me bags and bags of it from the sawmill. When we go out of town, I don’t have to kennel my dog: Bobby goes and stays with his uncle Karl. When our son is behaving in ways that I find especially obnoxious, Karl Bennett is the only one I don’t get pissed at for agreeing.

I will always admire the things Karl Bennett knows: how to skin a buck, break a horse, sew a button. He knows that duct tape, WD-40, and Neosporin are the only emergency supplies you’ll ever need. He knew that when his father died, he wouldn’t have much to say, and that when his mother died, he’d weep. Karl Bennett knows he doesn’t do well in a crowd, but one-on-one, he can be quite charming.

Once I got it in my head that I wanted a dog, there was no changing my mind. My son and Al, my common-law husband, and I had been living together for not quite a year, and since I’m set firm on no more babies, it seemed to me that what the three of us needed to bond as a familial unit was a dog.

I got us Bobby.

But my son and Bobby didn’t connect as I’d hoped. Bobby was high-strung and high-maintenance and he had alpha issues. Bobby was a very destructive, very humpy puppy. Bobby was a hairball with sharp teeth. It was during a weekend with his father, a Friday night, that the boy admitted to hating all dogs in principle and Bobby in particular, and for Karl Bennett, a boy who hates dogs is an example of tragedy, pure and true.

On Sunday, when the boy returned to my house, he was carrying a large wicker basket. In that basket, there sat a tiny trembling black puppy, a sweet, cute puppy, some kind of Yorkie-poodle mix, no bigger than a grapefruit, with curly hair, shiny black eyes, and a teeny pink tongue.

Karl Bennett is lucky he wasn’t standing in my living room that Sunday night. He wasn’t there to see his son cradling one puppy while fending off the humpy advances of another. He wasn’t there to hear me, Ex-Wife Number Three, explain—gently at first, then more vigorously—that we would not/could not have a second puppy.

It’s lucky because Karl Bennett is not crazy about sobbing children or heartbroken children or his own child’s sadness. Karl is a softy for children, and he will invent ways to make them feel better.

He can’t much deal with furious women, either; he says one thing he knows for sure is that a furious woman ought be avoided.

Sometimes Karl knows how to act, and sometimes he doesn’t. On my twentieth birthday, he sent me two dozen long-stemmed red roses. On my twenty-first birthday, we conceived our son. On my twenty-second birthday, he gave me a set of four green plastic cereal bowls.

My ex-husband also knows that some things are never simple. That Sunday night he backed that white pickup of his out of my driveway fast, even before our son and that puppy-in-a-basket came through the front door. Karl Bennett hightailed it out of there before anyone could accuse him of any wrongdoing—impulsive, manipulative, or otherwise—and that night, all night, when his phone rang and rang and rang, he didn’t answer it.

G
rowing up in my house, there were the things a boy did: Mow the lawn. Take out the trash. Be home by breakfast, and grunt when asked how was the movie he supposedly saw.