Page 4

Madison, Wisconsin

November 2, 2022

Palm Springs seemed impossible to imagine from our Madison driveway. It was a crisp late-fall day. The sugar maple in the front yard had exploded into a crimson burst, and the leaves on the birch trees next to our house were mustard yellow. A squirrel scampered up the neighbor’s white pine, which was still decorated for Halloween to look as if a witch had slammed into it, her broomstick and curled-toed boots strapped around the trunk.

The leaves were just beyond peak. One storm and they’d be gone, a canvas wiped clean. I thought that maybe it was better to leave when our world was still pretty and vibrant, to hold it that way in our memories.

The midterm election was coming, and all the yards in the neighborhood were studded with signs advertising the same Democratic candidates. As everyone here loves to say, Madison is ten square miles surrounded by reality, the border marked by little free lending libraries like Radio Free Europe. Soon Grant and I would exit our liberal bubble and enter an entirely different political landscape.

The northerly wind picked up as if to shoo us away. I shivered in the puffer that Dortie jokingly referred to as my “teacher recess coat.” Just as Polly had insisted towels couldn’t be both absorbent and plush (“You have to choose one or the other”), I’d learned that winterwear cannot be stylish and warm. I was practical to a fault; I chose warmth.

My whole body vibrated with the prospect of change, but Grant stood as though his feet were bolted into the driveway, with his hands tucked deep into the pockets of his baggy khakis. He had an odd love for old T-shirts and sweatshirts, which he wore until they gave out. Most had misshapen necklines and tattered hems. But that morning he wore the new camel-colored alpaca sweater Sasha had bought for his last birthday (I knew Sasha had spent almost two hundred dollars on the gift because she purposely left the price tag on—a jab, I was convinced, at my thriftiness, and to show that she spent more money on Grant than I did).

When Grant was nicely dressed, he could almost fool someone into thinking he groomed himself without needing to be nagged to cut his hair, shave the back of his neck, and tweeze his nose. Recently, his eyebrows had become alarming, like the woolly bear caterpillars that, when especially thick, supposedly foretold the severity of the coming winter. From the looks of it, I thought, it would be a bad one.

Grant had taken special care with his outfit that day because we’d planned to make a stop overnight in Omaha to see James, his old grad school friend. Grant wanted James to help him find a new job, although we both knew that it was virtually impossible for an older white philosophy professor to move into a tenured position; Grant would be lucky to become one of the exploited adjuncts he secretly used to look down on while claiming he was their advocate. As Grant’s career counselor suggested, it was time to “pivot.”

“Pivot?” he asked incredulously. “Pivot to what? An open grave?”

I gave Grant a loving nudge. “C’mon, G. let’s get going.”

“What’s your hurry? We have all winter.”

“It’s Sally. I want to leave before she gets here.”

Sally was on the board of Go Green, and she’d proposed that she and her husband rent our house while they remodeled their mansion in Nakoma. I didn’t like the idea of someone else in our home, but how could I say no? It seemed incredibly wasteful for a house to sit empty for almost half a year—so wasteful it should be illegal. I wanted someone there in case we had leaks or burst pipes. I could tell Sally thought that, with Grant out of a job, she was doing us a favor by paying rent, and she was.

Sally and her husband were also empty nesters. At a time when most of our friends were downsizing or divorcing, the Connors were undergoing huge cost and extreme inconvenience to add to their already-massive house in anticipation of grandchildren. I found this baffling. At this in-between stage of life, I didn’t want more bathrooms to clean, and more unused rooms to gather dust and remind me of how empty our house had become. Our lives were finally manageable. We hardly ever ran out of toilet paper. The sink wasn’t filled with dirty dishes. We didn’t even have a dog to walk anymore. If anything, I felt we should downsize.

I worried that once Sally was settled, she would discover that the house I’d shown her when she came to check it out was a big lie. Before long, she’d notice the cracks in the walls and the dents in the molding. She’d find that the bathroom tub didn’t drain well, the cabinet drawers got stuck, and the fireplace belched back smoke if you didn’t first warm the flue. Would Sally disapprove of my dated choice of paint colors from twenty years ago, back when everyone painted the dining room red, before that dreary, agreeable HGTV greige became all the rage? I suddenly worried that the pillows needed to be replaced. I’d read that an old pillow can contain over a million fungal spores. Was it possible that some of our pillows were as old as some of our spices? And why did I care so much what Sally thought? Didn’t she, too, have old pillows? Don’t we all?

Grant fixed his gaze on the jagged roofline of our old Frankenstein’s monster of a house that had started out as a hunting lodge at the turn of the century and had been insulated and added on to at various times, most recently (and unfortunately) in the seventies. Aside from the stone fireplace, millwork, and some old light fixtures, little of the original charm remained, and repairs were never straightforward. Still, it was mine. I knew it like I knew my own body. Blindfolded, I could navigate every hallway, light switch, and footfall.

“It’s just a house,” I said, sounding a lot like Polly, who had a gift for flattening emotion. She once told me that the idea of home is really just a fantasy. When I prepared our space for Sally and her husband, I finally understood what Polly had meant. I could see the house for the first time as a jumble of plumbing, wood, electricity, shingles, plaster, and drywall—a space that was incredibly intimate to me, yet someone else could inhabit it or even tear it down and start fresh. The dream I’d had twenty-five years ago when we’d moved in was to raise our children here, and we’d done that. I no longer knew what I wanted from the house, except that it seemed wrong and indulgent for two people to take up so much space.

Grant sucked in a deep breath of the crisp air. “I don’t know why we’re leaving during the best time of year.” Like most academics, Grant thought of fall as a new beginning infused with a fresh syllabus, nervous energy, and an explosion of pheromones. That’s why he especially loved the season (he could make the word autumnal sound natural in conversation). It was plain to see how much it pained him to be away from the Midwest, and especially the college, when the campus almost looked as if it could be in New England.

Like my father, I sometimes struggled with the winter darkness. Burl would slip into brief eddies of depression when the cold weather set in, and the life was sucked out of the camp. He’d despair when it was time to haul the sailboats into storage and pull the canvas tight over the screen windows in the cabins. Fall was the dreaded harbinger of another fallow winter. But summer? That was when all the cells in my body, and Burl’s, exploded to life. I couldn’t imagine anything better than experiencing summer all year long, which, for me, was the promise of Palm Springs.

Our neighbor Trent, a professor at the Nelson Institute at UW who also served on the board of Go Green, rode past on his racing bike, vacuum sealed in his Lycra cycling suit. He waved and shouted, “Yo, Grant! Sorry about the college, buddy.”

“Yo?” Grant said as soon as Trent was out of earshot. “ Buddy? What does he think I am, some little kid he’s going to take fishing?”

I liked Trent, even if Grant did not. Trent had an alarming laugh that sounded like a lawn mower when you pulled the crank. We cracked jokes when we sat next to each other at board meetings, and he’d volunteered to serve as the fast-talking auctioneer at the annual fundraiser at Monona Terrace that I helped organize. At the last event a few months earlier, I’d let it slip that Grant and I weren’t actually married, and Trent’s attitude toward me changed. I could tell that he thought this made me fair game (most people mistakenly assumed we’d remained unmarried because we had an open relationship). He texted the next day to say he couldn’t stop thinking about me. I was flattered and shocked. It had been a while since a man my own age had looked at me with an expression that said something other than Don’t get your hopes up, lady.

I didn’t respond to Trent’s text. I found the thought of an affair interesting, but two men in my life sounded impossible and wrong, not to mention exhausting. Although now that Grant was again pushing to get married, I occasionally found myself idly wondering if I was better off on my own, or if Trent, or anyone else, would bring out a side of me that Grant couldn’t. I didn’t usually indulge these thoughts because commitment is one of my core values. Besides, secrets were things I didn’t want to live with. Grant and I had made it clear from the beginning that we needed to be faithful to each other—with or without a ring. We had a pact to be honest, no matter what. It was bad enough that Grant took off on occasion; I didn’t need to worry that he was with another woman.

Grant squinted at the back of Trent’s colorful cycling jersey until he was too tiny to see. “What a blowhard. He’s always bragging about his ‘well-endowed’ chair.”

It was hard for Grant to live in a town that housed the same world-class research institution that had turned him down for a full-time job after he’d finished his postdoc there almost two decades earlier. That’s how he ended up on the faculty of a liberal arts school with an unfortunate name: College of the Mounds. Even though it was less prestigious than UW and the commute was over an hour from Madison, it turned out to be a better fit because Grant was the kind of person who thrived on being, as he put it, ‘a big whale in a small cog.” Mounds was one of the oldest colleges in the Midwest, and he loved it there, although he felt he needed to make excuses for the school, describing it to his University of Chicago grad school friends as “the Harvard of the Midwest,” leaving out that it sat downwind from a massive livestock facility. He often touted its rankings in the U.S. News “Best Colleges” issue, where it had been recognized in minor categories, such as “social mobility” and “undergraduate creative projects.”

I’d always dreamed of having a family all in one place after shuttling between Burl and Polly, but when Grant was offered the job at Mounds, we decided that it would be best if he avoided the daily commute and spent most weekdays during the school year in a modest apartment. Time and time again he pushed for us to relocate with him, but I refused, arguing that I loved Madison, and I didn’t want to uproot the girls. The truth was, I found the central part of the state depressing, as though a permanent cloud had settled over it. Mounds had never fully recovered after getting its teeth kicked in during the Great Recession. The biggest business was a feed mill. There were some nice old houses left over from its glory days, a few cute shops, and a farmers’ market, but Grant saw the place through his pink lenses, referring to it as the Bedford Falls of the Midwest.

I suppose I could have learned to love Mounds, too. But I couldn’t bring myself to relocate for a man who might up and leave. To be fair, it had only happened a handful of times, but a handful of times is all it takes for you to know, on a gut level, that the rug can be pulled out from under you when you least expect it.

The girls were blissfully unaware of these blips in our relationship. They were used to Grant being away at the college; it was all they knew. With the constraints of domestic life lifted during the week, Grant approached his “professoring” with gusto. He advised students and attended colloquia and lacrosse games. He went to concerts, dance performances, talks. He chaired committees and organized the annual philosophy symposia. Once he became more involved in the administration, he attended evening fundraisers and met with donors, alumni, and the board. He ditched his big sweaters and wore a pullover embossed with the college’s quirky mascot, the spiny hodag, a fictional animal from folklore that was supposedly formed from the ashes of cremated oxen.

While Grant was in Mounds, I worked and took care of the house and the kids. I attended band rehearsals and forensic debates. I packed lunches, shopped for groceries, wiped up the spills, and taught the girls to be resilient when their friends were mean. Grant would return home for the weekends like a king sitting at a buffet, the girls out of their minds with excitement. He’d say, “It’s good to be home,” and although I was always glad to see him, his chaos made me also want to scream.

I was naive to think that our nontraditional relationship would level the playing field; instead, I found our division of labor was just as uneven as it was for my married friends. Grant got to be the fun parent, while my “shift” (I knew I shouldn’t think of it as a shift) was bogged down with logistics and chores.

By the time the weekends rolled around I was exhausted and handed everything off to him. Grant loved being a dad. He took the girls to campus to see films and talks. He’d espouse wisdom on walks through the Arboretum and sometimes surprise Dort and March with a trip to the indoor trampoline park he loved to hate. I was freed up to take yoga, go to book club and meditation groups, and see friends who were jealous of our arrangement. In their eyes, I’d figured out the hard stuff: I had the commitment of a marriage and the freedom of a divorcée.

I’d visited Grant at the college many times. There, I felt lucky to bear witness to the most fully realized version of the man I’d fallen for. Grant was completely at home among all the historic and severely neglected buildings. He was full of purpose, doing what he loved, surrounded by his people. Although the politics of academia frustrated him, his work was generally filled with variety, rigor, and challenge. He walked around campus in his battered suede shoes, waving at adoring students and stopping to chat with his colleagues under the scraggly oak trees. He’d occasionally look skyward at the Cooper’s hawks in their nests and lift the binoculars that perpetually hung around his neck to get a better view. It was quaint, though I found it odd to obsess over a species you wouldn’t want to see near your bird feeder. Hawks can be vicious. They hunt songbirds and small animals and snap their skulls with their sharp middle talons.

Dortie had been a student at Mounds to take advantage of the free tuition benefit extended to the children of faculty members. Unfortunately, March was not as practical as her sister; she went to Vanderbilt, where she would have racked up college loans if Grant’s mother hadn’t stepped in to help with tuition. March joined a sorority and began to fancy herself a Southern belle. She wore white gloves to football games, her hair hung in Utah curls, and she started to speak with a fake accent that made us cringe, saying y’all and referring to trucks as eighteen-wheelers.

The “freaks and geeks” vibe of Mounds was a better fit for Dort, with her bleached pixie-cut hair and nose ring, and she was always happiest when she was close to her dad. Because Dort wasn’t far from home, I was able to see her often, going to her dance performances and improv shows. I helped Dort move from her dorm room into a series of musty off-campus apartments so run-down that I literally cried at the thought of my child living in squalor, with centipedes crawling up the shower drain and mice brazenly scampering out of the heating ducts at night, while March lived in a plantation-style sorority house that smelled like Kate Spade perfume.

The last time I visited Mounds, I witnessed how much the place had changed. Enrollments were low and Grant’s colleagues were tense, which is what happens when people operate in an environment where everyone fights over scarce resources, a situation I was familiar with after working for fledgling organizations over the years. Vacated positions were left unfilled. The supply cabinet was empty. The department’s admin assistant had been let go—all that remained of Cherise was the Post-it note she’d left hanging on the mirror in the copy room that said PROFESSORS: CHECK YOUR TEETH.

The college had changed, and so, too, had the world. Grant was desperate for his students to experience the magic of his own formative undergraduate years, but many were too glued to their devices to want to stay up into the small hours talking about the meaning of life. He was fond of the Socratic teaching style, which revealed that students didn’t know what they thought they knew. This didn’t appeal to the newest generation of young adults. He wasn’t afraid to call out his colleagues, who he believed shared the same basic political views but split hairs over the finer points of their ideals. What was once inoffensive, even expected, now could get him into trouble with the department chair and the dean.

Grant often complained to me about the latest campus dustup. When I accused him of being difficult in order to get attention, he said, “Why does everyone want me to just be the guy in the corner reading Aristotle?”

And now the college was shuttered, and Grant was home all the time. We weren’t comfortable with each other. I began to feel as if we needed to choose between two options I found equally hard to fathom: to be fully together—or apart.

A red leaf from the maple landed at Grant’s feet. He looked as if he was about to cry. His nostalgia made him sad, and too much sadness, or too much of any emotion, could be destabilizing. I tried to coax him with my smile. “Honey, we’re going to have the best time. I just know it.”

He walked to the driver’s side of our Prius and hesitated before getting in, a meaningful pause before our big adventure. I liked to think we were different from everyone else in Madison, but the bumper revealed how we fit in. Each family member had carte blanche to attach any stickers to it that they wanted, just as I’d allowed the girls to color with crayons all over the basement walls when they were little. I wanted to offer them freedom of expression. Now, the bumper was plastered with the names of every liberal presidential, judicial, and senatorial candidate from the past decade, stacked one on top of the other like annual vehicle-registration tags. We had stickers that said RECALL SCOTT WALKER, “COEXIST,” a magnet from my yoga studio, the local theater, Go Green, and every organization I’d ever worked at. Grant contributed the Darwin fish feet, and he’d made sure that the College of the Mounds decal strategically overlapped the Vanderbilt logo. The Prius was part of our family, a visual history of our personalities, causes, and the dents and scrapes from when the girls learned how to drive. Because it had been Grant’s trusty commuter car, it had some cracks in the windshield and a ton of miles.

In Madison we might have fit in, but would we drive into Palm Springs like a modern-day version of the Clampetts? I worried we could be wrong for a fancy and glamorous town—from what I could tell from my research deep dive, it was a retreat for boho chic TikTok girls and rich fun-seekers like Basil, who flitted from place to place. He owned homes in New York, San Francisco, Majorca. I was no stranger to feeling like an outsider, only this was far outside my usual life.

Once we were in the car, Grant said, “I still don’t know why we’re spending the winter in Palm Springs.”

“I don’t know why we wouldn’t. Basil’s offer to stay in his place is incredibly generous.”

Grant groaned. “Why do you pronounce his name Ba-zille ? It’s Basil, like the herb. You’re still hung up on him, aren’t you?”

“Look at you and Sasha! You call each other a hundred times a day.”

“Not anymore. Now she has Matthias. Besides, Sasha is just Sasha. But Basil, he’s so famous, he’s so talented, he’s so funny, he’s so successful. Let’s watch the Tony Awards and—wow! There he is! Baaz-uuul Underwood. ”

“Grant, we were married for about five minutes. He’s my dear friend. He’s your friend, too. He loves you.”

“He says I’m quirky. Right to my face, he says that.”

“But you are! Look, you’re wearing one brown and one black shoe.”

He glanced at his feet in front of the pedals, smiled, and shrugged.

California was two thousand miles and thirty hours away. We’d need a car, and we couldn’t fly such a long distance since Grant was prone to blood clots. After a rare trip to Mexico a decade earlier, he’d ended up in the hospital with a pulmonary embolism the day after we returned home. Since then, we hadn’t ventured much farther than Nashville to visit March, Chicago for “museum vacations,” and a bus trip to visit every Great Lake within twenty-four hours as part of a fundraiser for Go Green.

I overpacked because it was hard to anticipate our needs for that long a stretch, and because we come from a place where layering is second nature. It is not unusual in the Midwest for the temperature to swing forty degrees in a day, so I never trusted the weather or that we had the right kind of (or enough) clothes. Because we didn’t travel much, the giant suitcases Melody and Vandyke had given Basil and me for our wedding over thirty years ago were in almost new condition. Grant set them on the bottom of the trunk, with duffel bags on top for our overnight stays. My clothes were neatly folded into packing cubes, while he’d packed his duffel so carelessly that it wouldn’t shut. His journal poked out of the top.

The back seat was a jumble of pillows, a cordless back massager, sunscreen, and trail mix I’d bought at the Willy Street Co-op, where, every Saturday in the summer in the parking lot, the staff used to act out the comment cards with sock puppets. Grant didn’t care for healthy snacks; he insisted we should stop on the road. He loved any excuse to eat junk, even though he was getting a dad belly and his doctor said his cholesterol was “concerning.”

Our bushes scratched the sides of our car as Grant backed out of the driveway. Before we got to the street, I saw Sally and her husband in their Tesla, waiting to pull into the driveway.

I rolled down the window, waved, and shouted, “Enjoy the house!” in my most cheerful voice, suddenly finding it hard to think of home as a thing to be enjoyed.

“Did you hear about Vic?” Sally asked.

“Another bike accident?” The executive director of Go Green was Madison’s version of Ralph Nader. The organization ran mostly on Vic’s reputation as a youthful, feisty and ferocious campaigner for the environment. He biked everywhere and was famous for his frequent accidents. His office was decorated with what he considered badges of honor: bent bike wheels with spokes sticking out in all directions and a twisted handlebar mounted to the wall like deer antlers. He staged dramatic protests at the capitol, where he behaved like a teenage boy, jumping on the table during legislative meetings, undercutting the important and serious work we were doing. He was what we called an “idea hamster,” coming up with a million things for us to do but lacking the patience and commitment to follow through. After six years at Go Green, I’d had enough of Vic, and my job, and, frankly, the idea of work in general.

“Google it,” Sally said. “It’s the lead story in The Cap Times. ”

I was officially on sabbatical. What happened at the office was no longer of concern to me.

Grant was a good, if absentminded, driver. I always loved the sight of his strong hands on the steering wheel, and I liked his face in profile, even if it was marred by the thickness of his glasses. Without his eyewear, it was easier to see the features that had drawn me to him initially. He had a confident nose and a clean, if softening, jawline.

When we’d first fallen in love, I’d reach over and nuzzle him as he drove, grab him, try to make him crazy enough to pull over and find an abandoned parking lot or a remote dirt road where we could screw around. I wanted to absorb him into my being, merge into a single entity. My attraction to him was still there, but it felt much less urgent.

I settled into my seat, connected my phone to the car stereo, and scrolled around for something we could agree to listen to. Grant liked podcasts with conservative philosophers, not because he agreed with them, but because he found their ideas challenging and provocative, and he wants to flex his arguing skills by understanding how other people think. That was fine for his commute, but I’d heard enough about Hegel. I also didn’t want to listen to the old jazz Grant liked—not because I didn’t enjoy it, but because Grant wanted everyone to appreciate his knowledge of the form. He’d snap his fingers, hum along, and make funny noises with his tongue. March could do a great Grant impression. “That sure is some refined articulation of the snare,” she’d say.

I loved dance music, but Grant made a point of disliking anything popular, and he insisted that he hated the sound of the synth. I hit the preset button for WPR instead, and we listened to Simply Folk.

“Octavia thinks this trip will be good for us,” I said.

He snorted. “What does Octavia know? Didn’t you say she’s at that nudist colony in Viroqua? And poor Brian has become that divorced guy straight out of central casting. The Apple Tree condos are so depressing. He eats Hungry-Man dinners now. His freezer is stuffed with them.”

“He’s a big boy. He can learn to cook.” I sounded just like Polly when I said that.

Octavia had left Brian a year ago and embraced singleness with frightening zest. She got a boob job, froze her muffin top with CoolSculpting, and told me about a torturous facial she’d had called microneedling. Octavia was pro-collagen, pro-vagina, pro-sensuality. She’d slept with a twenty-two-year-old Pakistani graduate student, then started up a “thing” with her UPS driver. Her latest love interest was a jujitsu teacher named Greta, whom she’d met at karaoke night.

Octavia was suddenly like a teenage girl, her appetite for intimacy and adventure so voracious that her numerous exploits became almost boring to listen to. But among all her talk of ritualizing sex and the perfect lube (she was obsessed with all the various properties of the product—sticky, wet, slippery, tacky, smoothing, cooling, heating, lubricating), Octavia said something that really got stuck in my brain: that the only thing worse than letting a good relationship die is letting a bad one go on forever.

I said to Grant, “If we’re going to get married—”

“ If? What’s with the supposition?”

“Okay, when. ”

“Is this a winter test that I have to pass before you’ll marry me?”

I wasn’t prepared to answer that question head-on. “I just think we have some work to do, Grant. We’re not exactly in the best place.”

“Peaks and valleys.” This was the sum total of the philosopher’s thoughts. He didn’t want to try counseling. He believed our relationship had its own velocity—that we’d been in valleys before, and we’d somehow powered our way back to the peaks. As far as Grant was concerned, we were a constant. Our relationship didn’t need work; the trick was to wait out the rough spots. “We’re basically married anyway. Nothing will change, except I’ll be on your insurance.”

“Are you listening to yourself? That’s the problem, Grant. I don’t want us to be basically married. I want us to be better. We’re not used to being together all the time and it’s… weird.”

“You know what this is really about?”

“What?”

“You’re afraid.”

“Afraid of what, exactly?”

He looked at me and grinned. “Me.”

He wasn’t wrong.

“We don’t have to be like Polly and Burl, you know. We can live in the same city, the same house even. We can be a normal couple. We can finally be us. ”

That was the problem—I wasn’t sure what us meant after so much time apart. I said, “We’ll be together all winter. I think this adventure is going to be amazing.”

“Does this really qualify as an adventure? It’s fairly conventional to spend a winter away. If you can afford it, that is. We pretty much know exactly what to expect. Sun, palm trees, a pool, old people in golf carts…”

“Warmth.”

“The cold reminds you that you’re alive.”

“So did my broken ankle, and my bunion. And my dislocated shoulder.” I said the last part with extra emphasis.

“Isn’t it shallow to want to go somewhere just because of the weather?”

“Shallow?” I groaned. “I’m tired of shoveling and scraping ice off the windshield with a credit card. The wind feels like rocks in my face.”

“I like the cold. I mean, I don’t just like it, I love it. My spirit animal is a Siberian husky.”

“My spirit animal is a lizard, basking in the sun.” We’d just left home, and already I felt an argument coming on. “Grant, I hate winter. I mean, I really, really hate it. Doesn’t it matter to you that all these years I’ve been miserable?”

Hadn’t he seen me walking around the house in my fuzzy wearable blanket? Hadn’t he seen my face lit up by my happy lamp in the depths of February? “It’s not safe. Remember your accident? The Civic looked like an accordion. It’s a miracle you survived without a scratch.”

“That was a long time ago.”

“You know what?” I was feeling more passionate about this subject than ever. “I’d be fine if I never saw another snowflake for the rest of my life.” I tried to put a positive lilt in my voice so we wouldn’t fight. “Maybe you’ll discover that you like escaping the cold. Look at all the celebrities who go to Palm Springs. Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt…”

“Ooh, Brad Pitt. Whoop-de-doo.”

“I’m just saying.”

“And I’m just saying that I don’t know why you’re making me go to the desert.”

“You could have stayed back. It was your choice to say no.”

“Not if I wanted to be with you.”

“That’s how I ended up in Wisconsin for the last three decades, to be with you. Is it really such a big sacrifice to spend one winter away?”

Living in Madison had been our first big compromise; I’d always dreamed of leaving the Midwest, believing there was a different life for me somewhere else. But then I met Grant at a party, and we were one. I didn’t hesitate to follow him to UW–Madison when he got his postdoc, and besides, what was I going to do? I was pregnant. My only stipulation came a few years later when he was offered his job in Mounds. That was a bridge too far.

“You made a voluntary decision to come to Palm Springs. Would you please stop talking about me like I’m a dominatrix?”

“Dominatrix? Talk dirty to me.” He grinned.

“Why can’t you be more open to this?”

“What do you mean? I’m open enough. Look at me, I’m driving halfway across the country because you asked me to.”

“And complaining the whole time.”

He grabbed my hand and gave it a squeeze. “I’m sorry.” Grant was like our dog Milky, who would cover his eyes with his paws whenever he did something bad; it was impossible to stay mad at him.

I said, “Don’t you think we deserve this? We’ve worked our whole lives. You’ve devoted yourself to education, and I’ve devoted myself to every good cause imaginable.”

“Nobody ‘deserves’ anything. Listen to you, spouting off like Herbert Spencer.”

“Herbert Spencer?” I was afraid to ask because his explanation could become long-winded, but then again, we would be in the car for days.

“He famously coined the phrase survival of the fittest and championed laissez-faire economics. With your ideas about your right to pursue happiness, you’re well on your way to becoming one of the libertarians you despise.”

I hated being lectured by him and he knew it, but he couldn’t help himself. Grant’s mother had doted excessively on him as an adolescent to make up for the horrible mistreatment he’d suffered from his father as a child, and the guilt she felt over her own problems with neglect and addiction before she cleaned up. Mitzie set her mind to making things right. She married Stew, the wealthiest and most bland second husband she could find. Once she had the means, she determined that the right way to raise a boy was to make sure that he became a great student and grew up to be successful at school and work. Everything else was taken care of for him. She loved to show Grant off to the new friends she’d made when she’d become a country club wife. He wasn’t afraid to look adults in the eye and challenge their ideas. He had a terrific memory and could banter about any topic, often taking controversial positions just to get a reaction.

He said, “You know, helping Basil’s mother could be a pretty significant catch. Friendly reminder: you called Melody a ‘walking migraine.’ Your words.”

“Grant, I think we need this change.”

“Oh, man, there’s been enough change in my life.” He shifted into his professor voice, as he was inclined to do when he was emotionally uncomfortable. “Besides, we change our reality by changing our mind.”

“Please don’t quote Plato.”

“How about Shakespeare?” We were passing Verona, a town Grant could never go through without saying, in his loudest, most dramatic voice, “‘Two households, both alike in dignity, / In fair Verona, where we lay our scene.…’”

“I knew you were going to say that.”

He reached for my hand. “And I knew you were going to tell me not to. I love you, Kimmy. Marry me.”

“Maybe.”

We were heading into the hilly Driftless region, the only part of the state that hadn’t been flattened by a glacier during the Ice Age. Grant was originally from the northern suburbs of Virginia. He came to love rural Wisconsin in a way that only someone who wasn’t from there could love it—he was always taking photographs of quaint red barns and cropping them to hide the political signs, manure piles, and ugly lawn ornaments. It was as if he were trying to convince himself that it was okay, and even cool, to live in a place that people from the coasts considered insignificant.

He continued, “We’re too young for Palm Springs. That’s the kind of place you go when you retire.”

Retirement? That wasn’t a thing for him; he’d never thought much about what old age would look like, planning instead to limp along with emeritus status until his demise. “Old professors never die,” Grant would joke. “They just lose their faculties.”

A jolt of fear ripped through me when Grant said that word. Other people retired. Old people retired. We were still young, weren’t we? Then I felt a surge of pain at my surgical site and wondered if Grant had remembered to take his blood thinner.

Young ish ?

The landscape flattened. The cornfields were reduced to stubs. We passed cars and trucks, on-ramps and off-ramps, budget hotels and truck stops, joining the miasma of people who were between here and there.

For years, I was made to feel guilty if I wasn’t at home taking care of the kids and the house. I had to remind myself that at this stage in life, nobody would really care that much that we were gone. Lots of people do this. It wasn’t against the law to leave, but it sure felt like it.