* * *
• • •
Was I saving my life or throwing it away? I ran to CVS for Huggies GoodNites and a bottle of Smirnoff and took selfies sitting in the parking lot, trying to locate myself in the blurry, murky darkness. Looking at the shameful curve of my nose, which always seemed enlarged by the camera, unless it really just was that big, my still-luscious mouth, uneven teeth. I snapped photo after photo, scattershot attempts to reclaim something, find something, come up with something to say about who I was and who I wanted to be. Like all girls, like everyone, I wanted to be known and seen, but I couldn’t hold still long enough, stay open enough, to let it happen. I began to feel that it simply wasn’t possible within my semi-suburban, heteronormative marriage. But it hardly seemed likely that K and I were going to reimagine traditional gender roles together. Wouldn’t I simply be leaving to take care of him?
* * *
• • •
Both my husband and K hated me intermittently. They grew frustrated with my promises and my indecision. They decided to get together. To size each other up, or to talk, or maybe so that my husband could pass the baton? I didn’t know why they wanted to meet and it made me sick with fear to think about the two of them alone together, but I had forfeited any right to object by causing these circumstances in the first place.
They agreed to meet one weeknight on a street near campus in Berkeley. I was at home with our son. I let him fall asleep on our bed and lay a knit blanket over his sweetly splayed form, over the dark blue pajamas dotted with spaceships and aliens. The dog jumped up, too, and, bordered by their heavy breathing, I halfheartedly watched a movie on my laptop. How could I possibly focus knowing K and my husband were—what? Driving around together? Sitting on neighboring barstools comparing notes? I texted Claire at ten o’clock, then eleven-thirty.
still no word? she texted at midnight.
nothing, I wrote back.
think they’re fighting?
i think they’re drunk
oh they’re absolutely drunk
i just imagined them doing karaoke…?
ha that actually seems like a real possibility. are you okay?
i don’t know what i am, I wrote.
My husband stumbled in in the middle of the night, dropping his keys noisily as he bumped into the tall dresser in our cramped bedroom. Hi, I said, waking up, remembering suddenly in my body the grinding anxiety of the previous night. Are you okay? I asked. I could hear the slur in his voice before he even spoke; just the way he opened his mouth was drunk. I’m fine, he said, with sarcastic you-should-see-the-other-guy emphasis on the word “I’m.”
What about K? Is he alive? I asked.
He is alive, my husband said, taking off his T-shirt and arranging his body over our sleeping son to pick him up as gently as possible and carry him to his crib. But—he is in jail, he added as he scooped up the limp toddler and headed across the hall.
Seriously? I asked. In bed, I covered my face with both hands.
He came back into the room and snickered. Yeah, seriously.
They’d gotten very drunk very quickly and taken a walk together while drinking more. When they paused to take a piss, a cop drove by. My husband threw a beer bottle at the police car. The cop ran their licenses and K, who had failed to appear in court for some prior traffic infraction, was taken in.
Like into the back of the cop car and everything? I asked.
Yeah. Quite an end to the evening, he said. I told him I’d get him tomorrow. It was my fault.
What did you guys talk about that whole time? I pressed.
Everything, he answered. A lot of things. You, obviously. That we should probably both leave you.
In the morning, my husband got up and dressed, groaning through the initial encounter with his hangover. I heard the familiar sequence of toilet flushing, shower running, and coffee brewing that ushered him into the morning, and then his phone buzzed in the kitchen and he checked the message and laughed. The boisterousness of the sound erupted into the dull morning. I walked in to find him smiling, engrossed in crafting a reply to whoever had just cracked him up.
Who’s that? I asked.
It’s K, he said. I guess they gave him his phone back. I’m going to pick him up and take him to the train.
What did he say? I asked.
It says, “Wear something pretty. Daddy’s had a long night,” my husband said, cracking a broad smile again, the slightly deranged, irreverent, recognizable smile of a person who’d fallen under K’s spell.
chapter seventeen
We tried some more, my husband and I. We went to a couples’ therapist who made us sit at a tiny table and act out our childhood traumas with dolls. It was imperative, he said, that we understand that healing our marriage was contingent upon revealing to each other the wounds of our youth. After the session, we sat in my husband’s truck and laughed about how much more traumatic the therapy had been than anything either of us had experienced as children. That one doll with the crazy eyes, he said. I will never be able to unsee that. We found a different couples’ therapist, who told us we were too much in the habit of using gallows humor to deal with our situation and perhaps we should take it more seriously. This is, uh, no-nonsense stuff, guys, he said, in that stern-but-kind counselor tone. It’s pretty grim what you’re going through. I wanted to ask him: Are you trying to scare us into staying together? My husband and I were used to having fun together, it was what we did best, but even we found it strange that we sometimes caught a case of irrepressible church laughter while our marriage was falling apart. The therapist was probably right to chastise us, and it did bond us—perhaps that was his aim—because it made us feel like kids getting into trouble together. When we quickly sketched our personal biographies for him, the same therapist suggested that I was trying to exert control over the central scene of powerlessness in my youth—my sister’s heroin addiction—by falling for a heroin addict and hoping I could fix him. My husband thought he might be onto something. I found the suggestion patently absurd.
I left these sessions feeling stigmatized, pathologized. I protested to my husband that the therapist didn’t know enough about me to make these proclamations. But surely I also wanted to squirm away from the subtext of all that he was saying, which was that a healthy person would likely try to resuscitate a true, deep love that feels lost. A codependent like me—and here, I mean codependent in the sense of a manipulative martyr, a selfish, wounded victim, a pungently simmering pot of gnarled, gristly ham hock resentments about to boil over—simply casts that love aside in favor of a new love. And then looks upon that new love, that new external source of validation, thinking maybe this is the one that will heal me, fix me, fill me up. “[O]ur wanting to love, our yearning for love, our loving itself becomes an addiction,” Robin Norwood writes in Women Who Love Too Much.
It began to feel like K was ruining my life. I tried to swear off him. I did swear off him, went for weeks without seeing him or even texting, collecting my would-be messages to him in a single document, soothing myself by telling myself I would soon be able to email him the choppy, aphoristic pages, a digest of my worries, my every thought. I looked at his social media and wondered whether certain posts were coded messages to me. I pictured him picturing me looking.
In the midst of this, trying to be a normal couple, my husband and I and our son went to visit friends in L.A. and on that trip I got pregnant—I could feel it happening. I googled “Can you feel yourself getting pregnant?” and found the same answer the Internet gives for any number of women’s health concerns: basically that some women say they can feel it, but they’re probably crazy.
I wasn’t crazy. While my son was at preschool, I took a test and greeted again the ghostly pink stain of a plus sign.
Hello, life.
First came panic, a pulsing NO-NO-NO that chased
itself around inside my body like a strobe light. Before I could think any more, I threw on a sweater and walked out the door and around our neighborhood, heart racing, humming quietly the way I do on an airplane. A low, almost imperceptible sound to ground me, remind me that I am alive, I am real, I will be okay. The sun beamed down through the latticework of leaves and made shadowed patterns on the sidewalk squares and I stepped on each one.
This couldn’t be happening now. But it was happening. Of course it was happening. Was there any way it could be K’s? The timing made that impossible, and cancer had left him sterile. But what if he wasn’t really sterile? What if I was forgetting something? What if I had this baby and then it turned out that it—it! he, she, a whole squalling person—was K’s? I wouldn’t survive that, the humiliation. I’d have to end myself, Karenina-style. Maybe that’s what I should do anyway. But no: my son.
At the thought of him, at the thought of another one like him—siblings! my heart exploded—there was joy. There is nothing in the world I love the way I love babies. Their gummy mouths and kicking feet, their early Buddha calmness, the brilliantly complex alien wiring of their thread-thin veins, which you can even see inside their heads. I thought of a sleeping newborn’s head tipped back into my palm, thought about it waking up, its extraterrestrial eyes boring hypnotically into mine, and I wanted so badly to be in that heart-melding dyad again. Yes—I would have a pregnancy. Maybe this was the universe intervening to make my decision for me, to yank me out of perpetual questioning and put me back where I belonged, in a body that wasn’t flooded with selfish, contradictory desires but was merely a vessel, devoted to the care of another, carrying innocent life safely, snugly into the world. I would keep it. We would keep it. Maybe I could make good—become good—after all.
I learned that K was dating a new woman now that we were “broken up”—a phrase that meant nothing, seeing as I was married. I wished it meant something. I wished I could give him and my husband and my son all what they needed and that they could simply love me. How much could K possibly love me anyway if he had already taken up with someone else, I thought, a small blonde whose online presence I also compulsively researched in the hopes of seeing her clothes, her apartment, of understanding the precise nature of their attraction, of glimpsing in the background the toe of his sneaker. It started on social media, but ended up, as these things do, in related Google searches and other sundry cyber ghettos. A link to a link to a link to a link; it went on and on. I tumbled down dark virtual holes and came to in others’ electronic neighborhoods, friends of friends of friends of the girlfriend. Clusters, galaxies, all the people she knew, their abundant, cheerful thumbnail worlds somehow there to be both apprehended and misconstrued. I hopped miserably from link to link to link, uncovering something and nothing. She was like the rest of us. The rest of us were like the rest of us. We were nothingness—what were we? Breasts, legs, and thighs. Ten billion pictures of other women’s manicures traveling through fiber optic cable at the bottoms of the oceans.
* * *
• • •
Pregnant, I recommitted to my marriage. Then one day, in a Target parking lot, my husband told me he’d slept with one of my closest friends. My body went numb. He had confessed to a retaliatory act of infidelity a couple months prior, an event I let him wave away as just a vengeful, drunken error, which was what he claimed it was. I thought I deserved it so much that I’d mostly nodded through the conversation, accepting it as obvious punishment. I should be punished.
Now, it hit me like a cannonball to the gut that it had been with her. I asked him and he nodded. The information settled on me with an almost satisfying weight. I had never been betrayed like this before. I had actually spent a fair amount of time discussing his first infidelity with this friend—how I felt about it, what it meant, all the while not knowing that she was the other party. How small and stupid I was.
Are you at least in love? Do you have to be together? Because that’s the only explanation I can understand, I said. Then, I suppose, I would have to understand.
No, he said, no. We were very, very drunk, he added, as though it helped.
I could see that it pained my husband to say all this. I still recalled frequently the revulsion I’d felt in the moment he found out about K. Maybe there was something useful, something productive, in him feeling it, too. Would this neutralize things? An eye for an eye? Would he, too, settle into the discovery that you could love someone deeply and still betray them, and would it prompt him to actually, finally forgive me?
I’d always imagined that darting nerves would accompany such a revelation, that I’d want to slither out of my skin in a moment like this, but I felt dumb and heavy in my seat. Motionless. I don’t remember what I said. I marvel at the way my memory has been gently scrubbed in places. The blankness seems like an act of evolutionary benevolence ensuring there are things to which we can never return. This is one. I try to recall the words that were spoken and there is simply nothing there. I remember that my hands, draped limply over my knees, grew clammy. I wasn’t showing yet but I had gotten immediately bigger around the middle—I’d “popped,” as the motherhood books distressingly put it—and was doing that makeshift maternity jeans trick, wearing my pants unbuttoned with a hair elastic threaded through the buttonhole and around the button. As my husband, shaking a bit, revealed the details he was willing to, I thought about the triangle of skin above my underwear, the panel of stretch-marked flesh that was exposed by my open fly and soon would stretch farther to harbor this poor child, to nurture her, that she might be healthily born—lucky girl—to reckless, degenerate parents who fucked each other’s friends. I thought about the unmarred sweep of my friend’s body and wondered where he’d lingered. It was not a mother’s body. It was not like my body, like Sector Sixteen, once smooth and tan as coffee with cream, which now looked like it had sustained mortar fire.
The obvious thing to do in such a situation was drink—a long anesthetic dip in a salty swimming pool of vodka martinis sounded like the only remedy—but I could not imperil the baby, my little houseguest, with whom I felt in that moment a burgeoning sense of collusion. There are two of us and only one of him, this stupid fucking idiot, I thought, as I laid a hand on my belly. We were symbiotic.
So desperate was I for something to take the edge off that I started going to AA meetings and got a sponsor. My home group was a roomful of middle-aged lesbians who showed me a kindness so disarmingly pure that it made me cry each time I saw them. They nodded sagely as I spoke. They told me they had been there. I read from the Big Book about piecing the family back together in the aftermath of alcoholic disasters.
During this time, I went to Al-Anon meetings, too. At one of the only good ones, K’s girlfriend was there, holding court. She looked right through me. I felt like a girl in the school cafeteria with nowhere to sit and never went back. I found another Berkeley meeting, smaller, with a more hushed and well-heeled crowd but there, too, I felt out of place. I don’t know exactly why. Either because I thought everyone else was more together than I was, or because I didn’t really want to get better yet, or both.
* * *
• • •
At least I was no longer the only bad one in our household. I sampled the dual smugness of being sober and having recently been wronged and found it was a potent brew. I arose exhausted but with righteous vigor.
Pregnancy was a trap, a curse, and also the greatest gift. A protective measure that ensured I stayed rested, well-fed, that I always in some sense had company. “I feel alone, but I am never truly alone, as I grow this cantaloupe of a person,” I wrote in my diary. My son, beached on my body—his possession, his island—talked incessantly of the baby in Mommy’s belly, what we would name it, how he would love it and play with it, how he would be gennnntle, he whispered, and wouldn’t jump on Mommy so much because there was, he said, pointing conspiratorially, tapping at the globe
of me, a teeny tiny baby in there.
Rachel was visiting when we found out the baby was a girl. It was a sunny day. She came with us to the appointment in a dreary one-story medical building on Telegraph. Days like that, with beloved company in the house, my husband and I allowed ourselves a vacation from the pain we’d caused each other. We casually had coffee together in the morning as though nothing was amiss. We held hands, and grabbed Rachel’s hands, too, in the darkened examining room, and the three of us cried at the cantering of the impossible little heartbeat, the intergalactic whooshing of the ultrasound.
By autumn, I was a house. At the secondhand store I bought swaths of black cotton and a black wool cape, the only garment I felt I could hide in. On a website, I read about pregnant women getting dry eyes, but I cried in the bathrooms of university buildings and in the library stacks. I bought a French twist the size of my forearm at KingPin Donuts on Durant and cried in my car while eating it. I started making a lavender cardigan for the baby, and I cried knitting and purling in front of the television. Pining for New York one day, I found the recipe for Veselka’s cabbage soup and ate it in the middle of the night. It was briny and marbled with beef fat and tasted so sweet and sour, so Jewish, conjured so precisely the smell of my grandmother’s bustling house at the holidays that it, too, brought tears to my eyes.
The day before Rosh Hashanah, I squeezed my fat ass into a small blue plastic chair at my son’s preschool, dipped apples in honey for a sweet new year, and sang songs as he leaned, somehow both shyly and proudly, against my knees in his brown corduroys and a construction-paper crown. Ooh, yummy! What a good baker you are, I said as I nibbled the salty stone-like hunk of challah he had made himself, and he threw his arms around my neck. Did you ever make challah in your class, Mommy? he asked. I’m sure I did, but it wasn’t this delicious, I said, kissing him on the head.
Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls Page 16
