FOR THE NEXT 39 years, we lived as wife and husband, as the mother and father of four kids (Sarah, Rachael, Francis, and Joshua Marvin) who suddenly grew into adults and became wives and husbands and mothers and fathers. During our long marriage, Sharon and I buried her mother and father and my mother, and all of our grandparents and many of our aunts, uncles, and cousins. I covered sports and reviewed movies for the local alternative weekly while Sharon ran her own coffee shop and wrote sonnets she never published. We paid our taxes, owned a modest home, and made love an average of three times a week. We didn't have nearly as much money as our parents, and that could be viewed as our failure, but we felt successful. We weren't triumphant, by any means, but we lived a good and simple life, and I often wondered if I deserved it.
And all during those years, at every house party, group dinner, family gathering, and company picnic, Sharon told the story of the lost cat.
Robin Laananen
"My husband, the liar," she always called me. At first, she told the story to hurt me, then she told it out of habit, and then she told it because she'd turned it into a wildly funny and exaggerated adventure: And then he fell in the creek! She loved to make people laugh, and so they laughed at my small sins. I wanted the laughter to absolve me, but I'm not sure if that was its purpose. I never asked to be forgiven; Sharon never offered her forgiveness. We never talked about the lost cat in private; it was our most public secret.
For my 50th birthday, Sharon and the kids all pitched in together and gave me a T-shirt that read "LOST CAT" on the front and "DO YOU KNOW WHERE I AM?" on the back.
I laughed and wore that shirt as pajamas. For two years, Sharon fell asleep next to me wearing that shirt.
"Oh, Lord," I said to Sharon on the day I finally tossed that ragged T-shirt into the trash. "With every new day comes a new ceremony, a new monument to our love and pain."
"Who wrote that?" she asked.
"I did."
"It's free verse," she said. "I hate free verse."
We laughed and kissed and made love and read books in bed. We read through years of books, decades of books. There were never enough books for us. Read, partially read, and unread—our books filled the house, stacked on shelves and counters, piled into corners and closets. Our marriage became an eccentric and disorganized library. Whitman in the pantry! The Bront렳isters in the television room! Hardy on the front porch! Dickinson in the laundry room! We kept a battered copy of Native Son in the downstairs bathroom so our guests would have something valuable to read!
How do you measure a marriage? Three of our children still lived in Seattle and taught high-school English, history, and Spanish, respectively, while the fourth managed a homeless shelter in Portland, Ore. Maybe Sharon and I had never loved each other well enough, but our kids were smart and talented and sober. They made less money than we did, as we made less than our parents did. We were going the wrong way on the social class map! How glorious!
Every Sunday night, we all gathered for dinner (Joshua drove up from Portland with his partner, Aaron, and their son) and told each other the best stories of our weeks. We needed those small ceremonies. Our contentment was always running only slightly ahead of our dissatisfaction.
Was it enough? I don't know. But we knew enough not to ask ourselves too often if it was enough. We knew to ask ourselves such questions only during daylight hours. Oh, Lord, we fought hard for our happiness and sometimes we won. And over the years, we won often enough to develop a strong taste for winning.
AND THEN SUDDENLY and mortally, Sharon and I were old.
On her 61st birthday, surrounded by her husband, daughters, sons, and six grandkids, Sharon blew out the candles on her cake, closed her eyes, and said, "I want to be happy 51 percent of the time!"
One year later, after chemotherapy, radiation, organic food, acupuncture, and tribal shaman, Sharon lay on her deathbed in Sacred Hope Hospital. Our children had left their children to gather around Sharon, and it was goodbye, Rachael! Goodbye, Sarah! Goodbye, Francis! Goodbye, Joshua! She asked our children to give us some privacy. They cried and hugged her and left us alone.
"I'm going to die soon," Sharon said.
"I know," I said.
"I'm OK with it."
"I'm not."
"Because I love you so much," I said, "I would fist fight Time to win back your youth."
"You're a liar," she said and smiled, too tired to laugh.
"I lied to you once," I said. "But I haven't lied to you since."
"Is that the truth?"
"Yes," I said, and it almost was.
Sherman Alexie is the writer and director of the highly independent The Business of Fancydancing, which is playing in four or five theaters at any given moment. He's written a bunch of books of stories and poems and two novels. He lives with his family in Seattle.
