This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Aug. 29, 2012 - After an erratic and tumultuous courtship, and an around-the-world pre-marriage honeymoon, Gail and Bob Cassilly walked out of City Hall one day as a bona-fide married couple. This is the third of five excerpts from “Saltwater,” Gail Cassilly’s autobiography, which will be published soon.
As a married couple we bounced back and forth like fresh racquetballs – on court and off court – scoring points with passionate gusto on one day and diving into the hard corner wall of daily expectations on another.
My husband found the name Gail a little rough on the ear: the hard G sounded like a gag. He preferred YaYa, the childhood name brother Tim had coined for me decades earlier; it sounded sweet and playful, which was mostly what he wanted from me. Carrying the rhyming theme to a goofy-in-love extreme, he came up with BaBa for himself. BaBa and YaYa became our pet labels: names for the best of times, the most playful of times.
I never called my husband Chainsaw in real life, it’s a book name only, but BaBa was as real as faith for believers. Those two names, however, sit rather well as bookends anchoring a whole lot of everything in between. I may not have made it clear enough that my husband was a seductively attractive man when we married in both a Chainsaw and a BaBa way: He could be heart-stoppingly terrifying and heart-warmingly charming seconds apart. I’ve seen women disintegrate before him, torched by his notorious up and down physical appraisals; I’ve seen women lose sight of their faithful, loving (but boring) mates, overcome by desire for a spark of Chainsaw/BaBa madness in their lives; I’ve seen women glare at me with eyes of envy and livid jealousy; and I’ve seen women look upon me with sincere and heartfelt pity.
BaBa was inclined to workaholic hyper states of activity. Once married, he charged ahead with transforming a section of the house into a gallery/studio area to accommodate the sizable inventory of our combined sculpted goods. Keeping super busy helped him rein in the residential demons of his temperamental nature: shadowy thoughts, which could send him spiraling into dark, hostile, and depressive moodiness with little or no notice. My own moodiness arrived with the clockwork of a womanly, monthly schedule. We both knew precisely what time of month I might take to the neighborhood alleyways howling at the moon when I’d finished howling at him.
BaBa’s insatiable need to be fully and creatively absorbed and charged at all times was both a certified blessing and a curse. If project satisfaction could’ve been purchased in capsule form, I would have stockpiled prescription bottles full of rainbow colored pills to induce shades of relief from his compulsive tempests of activity; I would have ground the pills into his morning oatmeal, or sprinkled them into his cinnamon flavored ice coffee. BaBa, by his own admission, was anti-mediocre, anti-average, anti-rules, anti… He rebelled against the likes of everyday expectations, the need to plan, and the benefits of organization; he idolized opportunity and spontaneity. I was in a bit of a pickle!
Other than pure, honest, and crazy love, I was motivated to marry in order to settle into a suitably traditional and acceptable family life – the kind that had been taken from me at the age of 11, the kind I thought I needed to feel whole. But I was no stuffed shirt, mind you. Most of the time I went along with any number of my husband’s zany escapades, triggering both thrills and chills up my spine. Living on the edge is where he chose to be, so, if I wanted to stand beside him as his wife, then, I’d have to venture out on the ledge with him. I had broken the confines of my own mold by venturing off to Africa, but Bob pushed me further in daring and devilish ways, wakening me to a cornucopia of possibilities that had lain buried under the weight of religious life.
I kept on with the regularity and normalcy of my teaching job, but more and more every minute and every thought of mine wrapped tight around my husband and his reality. With my eyes focused on my students’ needs my mind could still manage to flit off in his direction with twinkling preoccupation.
BaBa pressed me into participating actively in his work, expounding over the beauty of harmonious partnering – working in sync, just like our pet names. But there was more to it than that. His pressure came with a measure of shrewdness tucked in, manipulation even. He counted on my entanglement as a method of securing my blessing and permission for whatever his projects might come to demand of both of us. With veins pumped full of artistic and entrepreneurial ambition, he was ill suited to tolerate obstacles of any kind, including that of a wife.
For me, being on board with him was a way of securing my existence – I wanted to matter. I tended to beat up on myself because I lacked the fire of his ambitious drive; I judged myself harshly, the way I feared he might. Whenever I headed down such a path I tripped up over a mound of insecurity, for the project that captured my deepest interest was that of building a home and a family. I didn’t associate that kind of passion and desire with ambition. Perhaps, I had satisfied my life’s share of raw ambition by leaving Erie, Pa., joining the Missionary Sisters of Our Lady of Africa, and accomplishing a mission in Africa. Compared to the domestic drive of nesting and nurturing that I was experiencing, ambition such as his was not a priority for me.
BaBa was ready to bust out and YaYa was ready to settle in. For him family could wait and for me it could not. He proposed holding off two years before even attempting to conceive children. From my 35-year-old perspective I already feared being too poached for the task, but looking out from his freshly divorced and newly married perspective, he needed a breath of time to acclimate. “Look at you!” he said incredulously, “Anyone can tell that you’re fertile! We can wait!”
Comments like these always threw me for a loop and sent me reeling off in private to analyze my female persona and try to decipher exactly which parts of me looked so assuredly fertile and which parts did not. I wanted to be the type of female that he adored, lusted after, and cherished, although I was not at all certain as to what type of female I actually was, could be, or should be.
He was my six-foot-two-inch male measuring stick. Taking his exterior appraisals deep, deep, deep to heart, I aspired to be the embodiment of what he wanted to see in me.From his every look I guess-measured his pleasure or displeasure, scrutinizing my every surface with a brutally critical eye – surfaces being of great importance in a sculptor’s world – and fretting over the slightest nibble of age.
On occasion I attempted to point out to Bob the pitfalls in judging others by appearance alone. My counsel brought no more than a guilty shrug conceding shallowness on the point. So … I remained preoccupied with my own exterior, devaluing my interior side and re-focusing my worth on thin-skinned wrapping and curly blonde hair. Immeasurably influenced by the power of Bob’s masculine demeanor and control –which I aided in ceding to him –I surmised that all men viewed women in similar fashion. He became my norm for male behavior. He became my definition of the word “male.” But I can’t blame him solely for the ruts I steered myself into. Eleanor Roosevelt had it right when she said: “Remember, no one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”