Improbably, a German from Saxony once wrote fables about the American West spun largely from his overheated imagination. Karl May barely set foot in the New World, but he wrote about it thrillingly for decades. Millions of Europeans consumed his books, and later sat on the edge of their seats as Western movies—filmed with German and Yugoslav actors in the mountains of Europe—brought his stories to life on screen. Cowboys and Indians, nonexistent in Saxony, came to inhabit the European lexicon. One such youngster, Edna, grew up, moved to Texas, and lived with me for several years. I had hoped she wanted Curt the Texan. Likely, she was only fleeing Tom, the Hoosier.
I was living in Dallas in 1997 when Jeanne, my wife of 25 years, left. Having had no dating experience in decades, I feebly got on one of the newfangled dating sites. I met many single women whose first meeting with me was also their last. But I also started exchanging messages with Edna, 800 miles away in Indiana. Sparks flew, and shortly she was on a plane to Texas. Little did I know what love for the Lone Star State Karl May had instilled in her. A few months later we both moved into our own personal ranchette in Austin. Texas it seemed was where we were destined to live happily ever after.
As we got to know each other fully, I got a blow-by-blow account of Edna's marriage to her Tom, an American serviceman she had met in her hometown of Frankfurt am Main. She went from being a carefree Fräulein in Sachsenhausen to being a miserable hausfrau cooped up in an Indiana backwater called Hartford City—Tom's own barren hometown. She minced no words: Tom was a brute. Sex on demand, on Tom's schedule, for one. Edna learned English by watching American television and submitted to her autocratic husband completely, for 30 years, until the children were grown and she had quietly taken bookkeeping classes and saved enough to leave. It was a marriage made in heaven for Tom, and one made in hell for his wife.
What I did not understand then—what took me years to see—was a woman who has spent 30 years not saying what she thinks does not simply stop doing that because she moves to Texas.
Whatever I wanted, it seems, Edna was more than happy to oblige. Not that I wasn't good to her. First, thousands for dental work to put a sparkle in her smile. Then, trips to Las Vegas, Belize, New York, Boston, Minneapolis, Hong Kong. Dresses to keep her fashionable. Only the best for her home—though when it came to decorating, it was I who set the stage. Tom had spent 30 years grooming Edna to be deferential. As it turned out, that worked for me as well.
We used to rollerblade together in Lady Bird Johnson Park, south of town. One afternoon Edna came rolling toward a spider who had draped its web across the path. She had a profound fear of spiders—the kind that bypasses reason entirely. She lost all control and went down hard on the asphalt. Road burn on both hands, both knees. We had a trip to Europe two weeks away and she came within a hair of cancelling it over a spider web she could have ducked under. I said nothing. Some things you file away.
Once, out for a drive, I handed Edna the map and asked her to navigate. She went silent. Deer in the headlights is the expression, and it fits. I waited. Nothing came. It took me a moment to understand: Tom had never taken Edna anywhere. Hartford City was her world for 30 years. She couldn't read a map because she had never needed one. There was nowhere to go.
Late in our relationship, the tables began to turn. When once had I lead the way, Edna pointedly refused to let me drive. She, not I, was to have the wheel. I had not had an accident in 30 years and very few tickets. I considered myself a safe driver. She did not. I have thought about that since—a woman who froze when handed a map, who had never been taken anywhere, who had no frame of reference for roads beyond Hartford City—insisting on being the one to lead the way.
My contracting career took me away for months at a time, but I always returned to Austin and to Edna. What I failed to see—what I was perhaps too comfortable to look for—was the tension Tom had created during their 30-year marriage had never really left. It had simply found new furniture to rearrange. One morning, as she readied for work, the words spilled out of her mouth. It was over. She wanted me to leave.
As the old country song goes, silver threads and golden needles could not mend the rupture—not the dental work, not Hong Kong, not any of the material goods in the world.
Edna and I had both come to love Lyle Lovett's "That's Right (You're Not from Texas)"—the song that insists Texas wants you anyway, no matter where you started. It turned out Texas didn't want Edna quite that badly. A contract in Australia took me out of the heart of Texas—and, coincidentally, into the heart of my now-wife Beth, a native Australian. On the internet I watched what became of Edna from a comfortable distance. She posted she could do anything she wanted with anyone she wanted, which clarified several things. After living monogamously all her life, she found all sorts of freedom. She lived in Texas for many more years—Karl May's dream, more or less realized—before retiring to Indiana to be near her grown children. She is in assisted living in Fort Wayne now. You can take the girl out of Hartford City, it seems, but Hartford City has its own ideas about the girl.
Edna deserves her due. She was the one who got me into the gym. I wasn't flabby, but I wasn't exactly buff either—Tom, she once told me, had backed down three soldiers in Germany with nothing but his presence, which gives you some idea of the standard she was used to. Whether she was trying to close that gap or simply thought it would be good for me, I cannot say. What I can say is I have been working out regularly ever since 1999, and at 84 I am competing in the weight throws. That is Edna's doing as much as anyone's. Whatever else Tom planted, she grew something useful in me.
It took me many years to understand what Tom in Hartford City had raised up for me. He had spent 30 years teaching Edna to swallow her feelings, smile, and say nothing. She brought all of that to Austin, and I mistook it for contentment. The resentments piled up where I couldn't see them, because I wasn't looking. When she finally had enough, I was blindsided.
I shouldn't have been. Tom had been in the room the whole time. I just never introduced myself.
