It was a holiday weekend, Columbus Day

It’s so humiliating When you are wanting to enact your role as part of a “recently married couple” And instead, you find yourself in a different kind of drama altogether

Two nights at an inn in New Hampshire

A splurge for a newly married couple of limited means

We had our wedding in August 1981

She was finishing a MSW

I was director of an afterschool program for elementary school children

Our first time traveling since our honeymoon in Maine

Spectacular fall foliage surrounded the inn

Where was it? What was it called?

tt contained the word cloud

On the Internet, I find “Castle in the Clouds” and also “Lakes of the Clouds.” Each located in the White Mountains

So, yes, one of those locations.

It was as beautiful as we had hoped

Our room had a nice view.

That’s about all I remember

Did we go hiking?

Shopping?

Stop somewhere to look at crafts?

What were the meals like? (I think they served breakfast and dinner on-site at the inn).

What made Pam angry?

Probably more than one thing. But I don’t remember any of them.

It’s so humiliating

When you are wanting to enact your role as part of a “recently married couple”

And instead, you find yourself in a different kind of drama altogether

Angry outbursts

Silences

Threats

Insults

Fortunately, almost entirely walled away

My brain, phenomenal in its capacity to recollect so many details, even from life’s episodes much more distant in time, has nothing for me here

Nothing more about Castle in the Clouds or Lakes of the Clouds

A hazily lit scene comes back to mind from before we were married.

Before we lived together

In my apartment in the Dorchester section of Boston

We had a bunch of those small disposable plant containers, the ones that you grow seeds in when you are going to transplant them, that are made of some kind of pliable cardboard-like material

The seeds had only been growing a few days.  I’m pretty sure they were flowers, not vegetables.

There was a disagreement that became an argument

And then Pam got angry. I don’t remember why.

She let out a furious shriek and upturned the tray of seedlings in their little disposable pots.

I was on my hands and knees, cleaning up dirt that was spilled on the pinewood floor

It wasn’t a fancy place

I lived upstairs from a father and son who were plumbers, and the wife of the father. They were my landlords.

I was happy there. It was right around the corner from the Shawmut stop of the MBTA.  I had been there during the blizzard of 1978. Everyone had been so friendly during that extended shutdown of the city. So long as you didn’t try to take a parking space that someone else had cleared out for their car or truck.

There I was, on my hands and knees, cleaning up the dirt.

Why had she taken out her anger on these tender growing flowers?

Was Pam still in the room when I was cleaning up the dirt? Maybe she left and drove herself back to Cambridge, where she shared an apartment with another woman? Or did we somehow make up and she stayed?

I am unable to make myself remember.

The mind flits to a time when we had been married at least a year.

We sat in our car near a therapist’s office because we had arrived early.

Pam was demanding that I not talk about certain things that had happened between us. But isn’t that why we go to therapy, to talk about the difficult interactions?

“If you do talk about it in today’s session, I will divorce you.”

She had started using that threat within the earliest days of our marriage.  It was a verbal dagger each time she said it,

I described how this relationship came to an end after four years, in a story called, “A Walk on the Beach,” https://www.myretrospect.com/stories/a-walk-on-the-beach/

The title sounds as though it could be a comical or sarcastic characterization of the relationship.

But the title was not metaphoric.

I had sought help from a hypnotherapist

Observing my painful state of ambivalence

His advice was to take a walk on a beach. Not figuratively. Literally.

There he suggested, I might find myself able to resolve the ambivalence one way or the other.

I did take that walk.

I am able still to picture so many details of the day I went walking along the beach. My brain has not walled off any of them. It was on Patriots’ Day in Massachusetts. I know because I discovered they were covering the Boston Marathon when I turned on the radio as I drove down to Cape Cod.  I remember the seagulls. I recall the look of the beach, the feel of it on my feet after I removed my sneakers. I recall the look of the Cape Cod Bay in Yarmouthport.

No spectacular waves.

Just calm, pretty, peaceful waters

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR ON THE FEATURED IMAGE:  I did not want to adorn this story of trauma with wonderful illustrations.  I settled for a photo of the winner of the 1985 Boston Marathon, Lisa Rainsberger. The others in the photo are the First Lady of Boston, Cathy Flynn (spouse of Mayor Ray Flynn) and the Governor, Mike Dukakis.

Dale Borman Fink
Dale Borman Fink retired in 2020 from Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in North Adams, MA, where he taught courses related to research methods, early childhood education, special education, and children’s literature. Prior to that he was involved in childcare, after-school care, and support for the families of children with disabilities. Among his books are Making a Place for Kids with Disabilities (2000) Control the Climate, Not the Children: Discipline in School Age Care (1995), and a children’s book, Mr. Silver and Mrs. Gold (1980). In 2018, he edited a volume of his father's recollections, called SHOPKEEPER'S SON.

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