The Pioneer Woman (19 page)

I would add this to the growing list of things I still needed to figure out.

O
NCE THE
wedding gift was out of the way, Marlboro Man and I had to check one last item off our list before we entered the Wedding Zone: premarital counseling. It was a requirement of the Episcopal church, these one-hour sessions with the semiretired interim priest who led our church at the time. Logically, I understood the reasoning behind the practice of premarital discussions with a man of the cloth. Before a church sanctions a marriage union, it wants to ensure the couple grasps the significance and gravity of the (hopefully) eternal commitment they're making. It wants to give the couple things to think about, ideas to ponder, matters to get straight. It wants to make sure it's not sending two young lovers into what could be an avoidable domestic catastrophe. Logically, I grasped the concept.

Practically, however, it was an uncomfortable hour of sitting across from a sweet minister who meant well and asked the right questions, but who had clearly run out of juice in the zest-for-marriage department. It was emotional drudgery for me; not only did I have to rethink obvious things I'd already thought about a thousand times, but I also had to watch Marlboro Man, a quiet, shy country boy, assimilate and answer questions put to him by a minister he'd only recently met on the subject of love, romance, and commitment, no less. Though he was polite and
reverent, I felt for him. These were things cowboys rarely talked about with a third party.

“What would you do if Ree became gravely ill?” Father Johnson asked Marlboro Man.

“Well, sir,” Marlboro Man replied, “I'd take care of her.”

“Who's going to do the cooking in your household?”

Marlboro Man smiled. “Ree's a great cook,” he answered. I sat up proudly in my chair, trying not to remember the Linguine with Clam Sauce and the Marinated Flank Steak and whatever other well-intentioned meals I'd massacred early in our relationship.

“What about the dishes?” Father Johnson continued, channeling Gloria Steinem. “See yourself helping out there?”

Marlboro Man scratched his chin and paused. “Sure,” he said. “Honestly, these aren't really things we've sat down and talked about.” His voice was kind. Polite.

I wanted to crawl in a hole. I wanted to have my gums scraped. I wanted to go fight that huge prairie fire from a while back. Anything would be better than this.

“Have you talked about how many children you'd like to have?”

“Yes, sir,” Marlboro Man said.

“And?” Father Johnson prodded.

“I'd like to have six or so,” Marlboro Man answered, a virile smile spreading across his face.

“And what about Ree?” Father Johnson asked.

“Well, she says she'd like to have one,” Marlboro Man said, looking at me and touching my knee. “But I'm workin' on her.”

Father Johnson wrinkled his brow.

“How do you and Ree resolve conflict?”

“Well…,” Marlboro Man replied. “To tell you the truth, we haven't really had much conflict to speak of. We get along pretty darn well.”

Father Johnson looked over his glasses. “I'm sure you can think of something.” He wanted some dirt.

Marlboro Man tapped his boot on the sterile floor of Father Johnson's study and looked His Excellence straight in the eye. “Well, she fell off her horse once when we went riding together,” he began. “And that upset her a little bit. And a while back, I dragged her to a fire with me and it got a little dicey….” Marlboro Man and I looked at each other. It was the largest “conflict” we'd had, and it had lasted fewer than twelve hours.

Father Johnson looked at me. “How did you deal with that, Ree?”

I froze. “Uh…uh…” I tapped my Donald Pliner mule on the floor. “I told him how I felt. And after that it was fine.”

I hated every minute of this. I didn't want to be examined. I didn't want my relationship with Marlboro Man to be dissected with generic, one-size-fits-all questions. I just wanted to drive around in his pickup and look at pastures and curl up on the couch with him and watch movies. That had been going just fine for us—that was the nature of our relationship. But Father Johnson's questioning was making me feel defensive, as if we were somehow neglecting our responsibility to each other if we weren't spending every day in deep, contemplative thought about the minutiae of a future together. Didn't a lot of that stuff just come naturally over time? Did it really serve a purpose to figure it out now?

But Father Johnson's interrogation continued:

“What do you want for your children?”

“Have you talked about budgetary matters?”

“What role do your parents play in your life?”

“Have you discussed your political preferences? Your stances on important issues? Your faith? Your religion?”

And my personal favorite:

“What are you both going to do, long term, to nurture each other's creativity?”

I didn't have an answer for him there. But deep down, I knew that, somehow, gravy would come into play.

I had nothing against Father Johnson's questions. And they were good questions—for a late-night game of quarters with a room full of friends looking for deep conversation, they were great. But there was just something about them that didn't seem applicable to Marlboro Man and me, or any couple who loved each other and was willing to jump into a life together and take a chance. Some of the questions seemed obvious—things we already knew and really didn't need to formally discuss. Some of them seemed premature—things we shouldn't necessarily already know but would figure out as we go along. Some of them were painfully vague.

“How much do you know about each other?” was Father Johnson's final question of the day.

Marlboro Man and I looked at each other. We didn't know everything yet; we couldn't possibly. We just knew we wanted to be together. Was that not enough?

“Well, I'll speak for myself,” Marlboro Man said. “I feel like I know all I need to know in order to be sure I want to marry Ree.” He rested his hand on my knee, and my heart leapt. “And the rest…I figure we'll just handle it as we go along.” His quiet confidence calmed me, and all I could think about anyway was how long it would take me to learn how to drive my new lawn mower. I'd never mowed a lawn before in my life. Did Marlboro Man know this? Maybe he should have started me out with a cheaper model.

Just then Father Johnson stood up to bid us farewell until our session the following week. I picked up my purse from its spot next to my chair.

“Thank you, Father Johnson,” I said, standing up.

“Wait just a second,” he said, holding up his hands. “I need to give you a little assignment.” I'd almost made a clean getaway.

“I want you both to show me how much you know about each other,” he began. “I want you both to make me a collage.”

I looked at him for a moment. “A collage?” I asked. “Like, with magazine pictures and glue?”

“That's exactly right,” Father Johnson replied. “And it doesn't have to be large or elaborate; just use a piece of legal-size paper as the backdrop. I want you to fill it with pictures that represent all the things you know about the other person. Bring it to your session next week, and we'll look at them together.”

This was an unexpected development.

I made the mistake of glancing at Marlboro Man, who I imagined had never felt more uncomfortable in his life than he did once he faced the prospect of sitting down and working with paper and glue in an effort to prove to someone else how much he knew about the woman he was going to marry. He tried to keep a straight face, to remain respectful, but I'd studied his beautiful features enough to know when things were going on under the surface. Marlboro Man had been such a good sport through our series of premarital training. And this—a collage assignment—was his reward.

I put on a happy face. “Well, that'll be fun!” I said, enthusiastically. “We can sit down and do it together sometime this week….”

“No, no, no…,” Father Johnson scolded, waving his hands at me. “You can't do it together. The whole point is to independently sit down and make the collage without the other person present.”

Father Johnson was awfully bossy.

We shook hands, promised to bring our assignments to the following week's appointment, and made our way to the parking lot. Once out of the church doors, Marlboro Man swatted me.

“Ow!” I shrieked, feeling the sting. “What was
that
for?”

“Just your Tuesday spanking,” Marlboro Man answered.

I smiled. I'd always loved Tuesday.

We hopped in the pickup, and Marlboro Man started the engine. “Hey,” he said, turning to me. “Got any magazines I can borrow?” I giggled as
Marlboro Man pulled away from the church. “I could use some glue, too,” he added. “I don't think I have any at my house.”

 

W
EDDING PLANS
moved ahead at a rapid pace. I decided on the cake, bought my wedding shoes, firmed up the reception menu, sent the country band its deposit, and pulled my mom away from her marital crisis long enough for the two of us to meet with the flower people so we could firm up the orchids and the daisies. I attended showers thrown by friends of my parents—none of whom had any idea that their longtime buddies' marriage was a shambles. I began packing my belongings in preparation for my move to my new home on the ranch, much as I'd packed to move—permanently, I thought at the time—to Chicago. It felt surreal, knowing I'd soon be living with the man of my dreams, and that I'd soon be leaving my childhood home for the last time.

I resumed Tuesday-night dinners with Ga-Ga, Delphia, Dorothy, and Ruthie, soaking up their small-town conversation as if my life—and my eventual survival in my new locale—depended on it.

I loved those dinners.

Chicken-fried steak had never tasted so good.

In the meantime, Marlboro Man was working his fingers to the bone. To prepare for our three-week honeymoon to Australia, he'd rearranged the schedule of many goings-on at the ranch, compressing a normally much longer shipping season into a two-week window. I could sense a difference in his work; his phone calls to me were fewer and farther between, and he was getting up much earlier than he normally did. And at night, when he did call to whisper a sweet “good night” to me before his head hit the pillow, his voice was scratchy, more weary than normal. He was working like a dog.

In the midst of all of this, the deadline for our collage assignment
loomed. It was Monday evening before our Tuesday get-together with Father Johnson, and I knew neither Marlboro Man nor I had gotten around to our respective collages. There was just too much going on—too many cows, too many wedding decisions, too many cozy movies on Marlboro Man's tufted leather couch. We had way too much romance to take care of when we were together, and besides that, Father Johnson had explicitly told us we couldn't work on the collages in each other's presence. This was fine with me: sitting upright at a table and cutting out magazine photos was the last thing I wanted to do with such a fine specimen of a human. It would have been a criminal misuse of our time together.

Still, I didn't want to show up for the meeting empty-handed, so that night at my parents' house I holed up in my room, resolving not to come out until I completed my Father Johnson “How Well Do You Know Your Fiancé?” collage. I dug around in the upstairs storage room of my parents' house and grabbed the only old magazines I could find:
Vogue. Golf Digest.
The Phoebe Cates issue of
Seventeen
.

Perfect. I was sure to find a wealth of applicable material.
This is so dumb,
I thought just as my bedroom phone rang loudly. It had to be Marlboro Man.

“Hello?” I answered.

“Hey,” he said. “What're you doing?” He sounded pooped.

“Oh…not much,” I answered. “What about you?”

“Well…,” he began, his voice sounding heavy…serious. “I've got a little bit of a problem.”

I didn't know everything about Marlboro Man. But I knew enough to know that something was wrong.

 

W
HAT IS IT
?” I asked, pasting a magazine photo of a football—found in an old
Seventeen
magazine spread—on my beloved's collage.

“Well, a bunch of cattle trucks just showed up,” he said, trying to talk over the symphonic mooing of cows all around him. “They were supposed to get here tomorrow night, but they showed up early….”

“Oh, no…that's a bummer,” I said, not quite sure what he was getting at.

“So now I've got to work all these cattle tonight and get 'em shipped…and by the time I get done, the store in town will be closed,” he began. Our appointment with Father Johnson was at ten the next morning. “So I think I'm just going to have to come over there really early tomorrow morning and do the thing at your house,” Marlboro Man said. I could hardly hear him through the cattle.

“Are you sure?” I asked. “What time were you thinking of coming over?” I braced myself for the worst.

“I was thinking around six or so,” he said. “That would give me plenty of time to get it done before we go.”

Six? In the morning?
Ugh,
I thought.
I have only one more week of sleeping in. After we're married, there's no telling what time I'll have to get out of bed.

“Okay,” I said, my voice dripping with trepidation. “I'll see you in the morning. Oh, and hey…if I don't answer the door right away it probably means I'm doing some weight training or something.”

“Gotcha,” Marlboro Man answered, humoring me. “And hey—don't pull any muscles or strain yourself. We're getting married in less than a week.”