Unwifeable

by Mandy Stadtmiller

  “I think I’m just going to go back to my room.” I check out early with a smile and collapse onto the inflatable air mattress that is to be my bed for months to come—until Juanita spies a Craigslist freebie posting about an IKEA wooden-slat queen left on the street a few blocks over.

  I shuffle my body around awkwardly, trying to get comfortable on the balloon-like structure that is my bed, finally give up, and pick up my computer. I need something familiar. Determined to make the kind of connection I didn’t at the party, I email a friend from Chicago a rant to try to soothe the emptiness that lingers in my gut.

  “So these girls are ridiculously rich,” I write, feeling guilty as I covet everything around me, and wishing my hosts’ opulent lifestyle extended to their guest bedroom as well.

  “I mean, whatever . . . I get along with them fine, and this’ll be fine and it’s cool. It’s just like this entire ‘Don’t forget to squeegee the teak in the bathroom!’ lifestyle is pretty bizarre. We all just drank some hot sake. ‘Should we do the sake hot or cold?’ the girls debated as if their lives depended on it. The loneliness, oh the loneliness.”

  I hit “send.”

  But the grossness in my gut is still there.

  I text Scott with the Yacht that I am getting acclimated, and he writes, “Miss you here in Chicago.”

  But I still can’t bring myself to text or call my ex-husband, James, the one person who knows me better than anyone, while also never knowing me at all. How could he? I didn’t even know myself.

  He certainly knew who he was, though. His idea of a hot date was to bring me to an International Socialist conference. The day of our divorce, when the Post job became official, James whispered to me at the courthouse, “Now when anyone asks why we broke up we can just say it’s because you took a job with Rupert Murdoch.”

  James was so angry and so liberal.

  I used to love that about him.

  * * *

  ON THE COMMUTE from Brooklyn to Rockefeller Center the next day, I whip out a notebook and attempt to do what I started doing two years before: writing my stupid morning pages.

  Not stupid, obviously, as it resulted in all of the stream-of-consciousness insights that led to me figuring out that an emotionally abusive marriage wasn’t for me, but it felt so indulgent.

  I have countless notebook pages that just begin, “What do I want to say?” The hardest initial part is getting past the self-hatred that leads your body to nearly seize up in disgust that you do not have a perfect narrative outlined to a T. That you are raw, earnest, scattered, and scared. As I ride on the train, surrounded by sunglasses-wearing strangers, I peruse old pages. The journal now reads like some kind of Mad Libs tale of separation, reconciliation, divorce, and hopefully—potentially—rebirth.

  March 5, 2005

  1. My marriage is ending.

  2. This is a good thing.

  3. My husband is masturbating in the next room.

  May 28, 2005

  Today, I almost died, crashed my car. But then I didn’t. And it was good. I asked James, “Do you want to be my husband?”

  “I am your husband,” he said.

  May 30, 2005

  Ah yes. And then there’s a day like today. Kicked pillows, James knocking over a glass of water, ruining the print I bought him from the girl he fucked when we were separated. I don’t think I can handle this.

  November 13, 2005

  I’m going to look back on these days and wonder. Last night the clouds floating past. So much happening. Man, I’m so glad I took an axe and chopped my life up.

  December 5, 2005

  So here I am in Park Slope. My sister says, “You’re a single woman with a good income and no family.” Except . . . that’s something that I may always be.

  Now I stare at the blank page in front of me and try to plunge in. The feelings are the hardest part, so I attempt to snatch at them, without thinking, as misguided and unformed as they might be.

  December 13, 2005

  Um hi . . . So I’m fucked-up and angry and sad. That’s the only way to describe myself right now. I’m okay but I’m worried about so many things.

  I glance around at the businessmen reading their newspapers. That’s what I should be doing. Not this journaling crap.

  Here I sit on the subway car on the way into work, and it always feels like the battle against the fifteen-year-old me . . .

  That’s a strange thing to write—the fifteen-year-old me. I didn’t expect that to come up into my consciousness. My memories stop me in my tracks as the train keeps rolling into Manhattan.

  One summer in 1990 I was assigned babysitting duties for my niece and nephew while my uncle was dying of cancer in Portland, Oregon. While I mostly just played nanny, one day a handsome man in his twenties rang the doorbell and invited himself in.

  “Hey, I’m Jake,” he said.

  Turned out we were distantly related, and he’d heard I was in town and figured he’d introduce himself. He said he knew how hard it must be babysitting all day and that maybe one of these days he could show me Portland, and we could have some fun.

  A few weeks later, he showed up again.

  “I’m going to have a few friends over, and Mandy can come,” he told my aunt.

  “I want to go!” I begged her.

  “I might have a beer, though,” Jake said responsibly, “so Mandy should probably spend the night.”

  When I entered Jake’s wealthy suburban home, it was clear this was not just a few friends. The place was overflowing with frat bros and margaritas, and I was never without a drink in my hand. I was suddenly beautiful, desirable, attractive—and so much fun. My face flushed, I flirted and talked to Jake’s friends. Until, that was, they each found out how old I was.

  “You’re fifteen? No way.”

  “Way,” I said, giggling—so excited by their interest.

  I went outside, woozy and laughing as I took a cigar from one of the guys who was smoking, chomping it in my mouth, flopping into a plastic patio chair, swaying forward sloppily.

  “Look at you,” Jake said.

  Look at me.

  Hours later, I stumbled upstairs to Jake’s parents’ bedroom to pass out. I was wrecked. I couldn’t see, nor could I walk. I was wobbling and trying hard not to puke as I threw off my clothes onto the floor. As I stood in only my skirt with my top now off, Jake walked into the room.

  “Oh shit,” he said, looking at me.

  Oh. Shit.

  I don’t remember the sex—except in flashbacks. A hand on his muscular back. The sheets. Going in and out of consciousness. And the next day, his boxer shorts crumpled up at the bottom of the bed like a murder weapon.

  I took a shower, a sense of dread creeping over me. It had happened. I was no longer a virgin.

  Jake drove me home in silence. Why hadn’t Jake said what his friends did? “You’re fifteen? Oh, never mind.”

  And he was family. Why didn’t he take care of me? Why didn’t he bring me back to my aunt’s in the first place? I felt like I had been set up. No longer did it feel like a conspiracy we were both in on together. It just felt like a conspiracy.

  “See you,” Jake said, and I walked into my aunt’s house, sallow and ashen, before heading into the guest bathroom. Finally, I was sick.

  The next afternoon sunlight streamed into the Spanish-tiled white kitchen as I washed dishes and took care of the kids. I heard a car pull up. Then I saw out the window. It was Jake.

  “I need to talk to you,” he said, urgently.

  “Okay,” I said. “I feel really confused about last night.”

  “Listen,” he said, “every family has skeletons buried in its closet . . .”

  “What happened exactly?” I asked quietly. “I was so drunk.”

  “Nothing,” he said, harder than before. “This never happened, and if you tell anyone different, I’ll deny it.”

  I stood there dumbly, my hands still in green neoprene gloves with soap on them.

&n
bsp; “I have to go,” he said.

  The first few days, I told my aunt nothing. I was quieter than usual, though, and I couldn’t stop my obsessive thoughts.

  “I have to talk to you,” I told my aunt the next night after dinner. “It’s about Jake.”

  I told her what happened in a monotone, not crying anymore, just wishing I could go back in time.

  “Mandy, it’s not your fault,” she said. “He shouldn’t have done that.”

  We arrived at the local hospital the next day, and a bald male nurse coldly took my inventory.

  “Sexually active?” he asked, staring down at his clipboard.

  “No,” I said. “I’ve never even really kissed a boy until the other night. It was my first time.”

  “So you are sexually active,” he said.

  “I guess,” I said.

  “History of STDs?” he asked.

  “I—no, that’s why I’m here,” I said. “I want to make sure I’m okay.”

  “Well, you might not be,” he said, looking up.

  I’m sure he thought he was doing a good deed by scaring the shit out of yet another slutty teen, but I was not his target audience. I didn’t need any more scaring.

  “Am I going to die?” I asked.

  “We’ll find out,” he said. “You just don’t know if you have AIDS until we test you. You can’t just go around having sex without consequences.”

  He walked away, leaving me shell-shocked.

  Meanwhile, my uncle was actually dying of cancer. My dumb teenage conception of death was proving to be as brilliant as my conception of sex. It happened. There was no going back. He was forty-one. He was gone.

  Returning home to San Diego after that awful summer, I didn’t tell anyone until I found myself in therapy—with a hip thirty-something woman named Janet. Filled with plants and copies of Sunset magazine, her office felt so safe, and she was so kind to me. I asked Janet if I could tell her a secret, but I made her promise she wouldn’t tell anyone. It had to be just between the two of us. She agreed.

  “Something happened to me,” I said, “this summer when I was in Oregon.”

  I described in detail how I’d lost my virginity. It felt so good to get it off my chest, and I felt protected. But our next session, Janet was more serious than usual.

  “Listen, Mandy, I know what I said, but one of the bounds of my profession is that when something illegal happens, it’s my duty to report it, and I’m not going to tell the police, but you absolutely have to tell your parents,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  I felt the wind knocked out of me. I cried. I begged her not to make me. I was so angry. Opening up had been a mistake.

  That night, I told my parents what had happened. I couldn’t stop crying. I wanted them to see how bad I felt.

  “Were you drinking?” my mom asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  They were both silent.

  “Say something,” I said. “Say something, please!”

  “I’m disappointed in you, Mandy,” my mom said.

  My dad was just silent.

  I felt so sick. So unprotected. So unworthy of protection in the first place. I ran into my room and hid underneath my comforters. I wanted to disappear. Just vanish from the earth and not ever have to deal with anyone’s judgment again.

  That event, and the butterfly effect around it, set off a sneaky domino-like psychological course that affected the rest of my life—and even my career.

  Do you disapprove of me?

  Do you think I have something to be ashamed about?

  I’ll give you something to be ashamed about.

  All my fears felt confirmed. I was bad. I made men do bad things. I should be sorry. It was something I needed to destroy about myself. I should be able to see that.

  There is a certain comfort in destruction. You know the outcome at least.

  “Rockefeller Center!” The subway conductor’s voice pulls me out of ancient history.

  The F train jerks to a stop. The battle will have to continue another time. No time for fighting the demons of the past. Time to be someone else entirely.

  * * *

  OVERWHELMED WITH THRILLING stimuli everywhere, I take in my new normal: human rush hour on crack, in the form of people speed-walking through the underground tunnels of Manhattan’s nerve center. I make my way up to the tenth floor, drinking my coffee, determined to make new memories. My Post ID is swinging around my neck; I realize no one else wears them around the office, but I don’t care. I’m too proud of the Lois Lane fantasy I am now living.

  “My friend!” I cry with glee at seeing Katherine hard at work in our shared office/coat closet.

  “My friend!” she says back.

  Katherine helps encourage me that working for a daily is like riding a bike: You just have to climb back on. (Even though it feels like ancient history to me, I know that my clips from working at dailies—the Washington Post, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, and the Des Moines Register—aren’t so long ago.) She also gently tolerates my not-very-well-contained near-constant freak-outs about my body, my health, and my life in general. You see, the Divorce Diet is great for guys fetishizing me as somewhat approximating the shape and feel of a model, but it is not great for my actual health.

  Thankfully, I am very busy. Work assignments come just as quickly as they go, twelve and twenty inches filed here and there on end-of-the-year best-of lists, new hot spots to visit in the city for the holidays—all of which I treat with the importance of Watergate. That is, in between making light conversation with Katherine about the excruciating details of my divorce/parents’ remarriage/new city/new roommates/new job/hypochondria.

  “I don’t look like I’m dying,” I ask by way of small talk. “Right?”

  “Nope,” she says cheerily. “But if you do die, could you file that New Year’s Eve roundup beforehand?”

  She makes me laugh hard, the one thing in life that has always made me feel sane and whole.

  “Just tell me if I’m freaking you out,” I say. “I realize I can be a bit much. Like if you need me to tone down the ‘Do I look like I’m dying’ questions to once an hour.”

  “Not at all,” she says. “I think everyone pretty much feels like they’re dying their first few weeks in New York. It’s kind of part of the city’s charm.”

  The mental turmoil of all my coinciding life changes has caused my body to shut down and the effects are showing. Every day, some mysterious new skin problem emerges. I haven’t had my period in months, which has never happened to me before.

  Honestly, when I got off the birth control pill a few months earlier—since I figured I’d be using condoms from here on out—I didn’t anticipate the havoc that the change would entail. Huge clumps of cystic acne started appearing on my chin, small white dots appeared on my stomach, discoloration marked my forehead. And month after month, no period in sight. I began praying for blood spotting.

  I spent thousands on doctors and specialists, and I finally had to accept that maybe there might be something to the “extreme stress” diagnosis I kept receiving. One doctor practically shoved antidepressants down my throat, but I googled the side effects and flushed them down the toilet.

  “The worst part is I’m all skinny and hot now,” I prattle on to Katherine. “But I have to put on like a pound of clown makeup to cover up my face.”

  “Yeah, but that’s just a pain in the ass,” she says. “You look totally fine. I bet you’ll be dating some new guy in no time.”

  “Are you seeing someone?” I ask.

  “I was seeing this one guy,” she says, as she hands me some faxes to see if there is anything worth pursuing. “But he told me he wanted to ‘branch out.’ ”

  “Oh God,” I say. “I hate that. I’ve just given up on men entirely.”

  “That’s good,” she says. “Giving up on men will help you file this hot breaking story on Christmas Web Santas.”

  “Oh definitely,” I say. “By the way, you k
now who loves Web Santas?”

  I open my email and click on a picture of Scott with the Yacht, who is now talking about flying me out to Arizona to take in the Fiesta Bowl. “This guy.”

  “Yeah, that guy is definitely all about Web Santas,” she agrees. “Is that your boyfriend?”

  “Hardly,” I say. “But I might spend New Year’s with him.”

  Before too long, Christmas is upon us at the office.

  Katherine offers me a seat at the dinner table at her parents’ home in Connecticut in case I get lonely, but I spend the day collapsed on the yuppie lesbian couch in Park Slope instead. I call twenty gyms near me because I figure since I don’t have a boyfriend, I can at least work on a potentially tight body for the benefit of one— because I have awesome priorities. But all of them are closed.

  “I think most people are with their families,” one man says.

  Yeah. I got that.

  I hang out with Jonathan Ames a few more times, but I notice something. I don’t enjoy it as much when I’m not tipsy. He’s fine, of course. But there’s no real connection. I hate that about daytime sobriety. It just makes you feel so present.

  The only thing I have is my career—and I am determined not to screw that up, too. Which, by the way, a tip: If you suck at dating, you’ll be aces at writing about it.

  At work, I pitch a story about some new dating site that specializes in catering to hipsters and nerds. I find out that the Dungeons & Dragons contingent populating the user base is anathema to the most popular girl on the site. She is a textbook normal—like a Pumpkin Spice Latte–drinking, Delta Gamma kegger–level normal.

  I interview her, write it up, and then share with Steve the story so far by putting it in his “basket,” as we call the different file folders on our shared server.