by Dawn Davies
“Watch me not,” I said.
That night, I got dressed up, went out with some old friends, and the world rang in the millennium while my mother put my children to bed. As we started the countdown amidst clots of clutched lovers, amidst rockets of streamers, and spilled champagne and crooked hats, amidst sloppy, drunk kissers and donkey horns, it occurred to me that I was out past midnight and my children would be getting up as soon as the first bird squawked in the tree outside their bedroom window. It would be months before I stopped telling people that love was a farce, that I would never marry again, that anyone even thinking of partnering up was a fool.
3. FRATERNIZING WITH THE ENEMY
3.1. Our uncoupling was ugly in all of the ways of war, full of distrust, head games, threats, spies, broken treaties, battles, and roentgens of fallout. I suppose there are other kinds of divorce, but I haven’t met anyone who has had any other kind than this. Perhaps if two childless, wealthy sociopaths without the ability to emotionally attach, or two childless Buddhists with lovingkindness in their hearts, were to get divorced, there would be another kind of divorce, but the only kind I know makes you hurt for a long time, and what’s more, you can see the people who rely on you going down with the ship through no fault of their own. Highlights of my divorce include being evicted from married student housing with three kids under the age of six, moving into a broken-down rental house in a shoddy neighborhood with money my father gifted me, applying for welfare and food stamps, which I was told could take months to kick in, and waiting for the assistance with the sort of pre-panic you feel when you are on the highway and you notice the car is almost on E and you have miles to go before the next exit.
3.2. My newly exed husband was in the process of moving back up north to where we had lived. The divorce was final in April, three weeks before Easter. A few weeks after we signed the paperwork and walked crying out of the courtroom, he had a U-Haul packed and was ready to leave. He came over to have supper with us at our new spooky house before he left, bringing Thai food in the little cardboard boxes the girls loved. We ate together one last time, though we were no longer a family, then he tucked the children in for the night, which must have been confusing. I told them, “Say good-bye to Daddy. When you wake up in the morning he will be driving his truck to Boston. When you wake up in the morning, he will be halfway there.” What I should have said, so they would understand, was, “When you wake up in the morning, Daddy will be gone.”
3.3. While the children slept, we moved to the living room for an emotional debriefing. We listened to music while lying in the dark on the living room floor, getting drunk on an expensive Schorschbock beer made from 30 percent alcohol, almost powerful enough to take the sting out of what we were doing. We talked about music, specialty beers, and anything but the disaster of our marriage, or the children, or our separate futures, topics that felt off-limits in the way they are off-limits during a first date. Not looking at each other felt fine. We went to my room and lay down together for the last time, fully clothed, on top of the covers. My heart, which always had an independent streak, immediately started to beat funny, and later, I would look back on this as the first night I experienced an arrhythmia that would plague me for years.
“Do you feel that?” I asked, though I hated to bring it up. My hypochondriasis was always one of the hardest things for him to take about me. He was behind me, with his arms wrapped around my rib cage.
“Yes,” he said.
“I don’t know what that is,” I said. We lay there in the dark, without words, eyes wide open, feeling my heart gallop wildly until it was time for him to go. Then he left.
In the morning the girls woke up and started running around the house looking for their daddy. My oldest looked out the front window for his truck. My middle girl woke her brother.
“Daddy’s gone,” I said. “Remember?” And all four of us started to cry.
4. BANDAGING THE WOUNDED
4.1. After blowing you up, divorce will run you down. People who say that children are resilient and will recover well from divorce are on the pipe. I don’t know anyone who has gone through a divorce who isn’t fundamentally changed, and my children were no exception. Even as young kids, when they were supposed to be unburdened and malleable, they were affected by the combustion, and I am certain it still affects them. My oldest child became immediately distrustful of anyone’s intentions; my middle child, who barely talked as it was, spoke about half as much; and my baby, who didn’t seem to know any better, somehow knew everything and was sick all the time. In fact, the three of them seemed to be perpetually open for business to every bacterium or virus that floated through their airspace during that first year, and you can’t tell me that their burning fevers and diarrhea and constant runny noses were not a statement of protest, physical proof of their susceptibility to an onslaught of all sorts of attacks, both physical and psychic, rolled up into one ball of nose pus or a virulent enterovirus, or chronic, dry hack of a cough that left their throats hot and croaky, and woke me in the middle of the night.
4.2. During the Fourth of July weekend, my middle child developed a wet cough and told me her chest hurt.
“Where, baby?” I asked.
She pointed to her heart, and while I had melodramatic thoughts of both pericarditis and the metaphoric emotional pain of having her family ripped apart, logic said it was a simple virus. I pulled her onto my lap and put my hand on her breastbone. It was summer, too hot for a fever, yet she had one.
“I’m going to call the doctor.”
“Dust put a Band-Aid on it,” she offered, with her little lisp. “Band-Aids make it better.”
This child was Band-Aid obsessed. She put them on her baby dolls, she put them on bruises, she put them on me when I was napping, she put them on her little brother. Once I found one on the wall, covering some crayon scramble she had surreptitiously drawn. She could go through a box a day like an addict, if I left them within her reach. I got out my stash, peeled a neon green one, and asked her where she wanted it.
“Wight here.” She pointed to a spot where there was already a Band-Aid. I pulled the old one off and pressed the new one gently into the middle of her chest. During this year, I put Band-Aids on anybody who wanted one, wherever they wanted them, no questions asked.
4.3. All three of them fell sick with the virus on the Fourth of July, which was also my birthday. I made some red, white, and blue cupcakes while they barfed their guts out. At dusk, I propped them up in the side yard with some sparklers, then put them to bed. They were asleep before sunset, the fever riding through their dreams like a dark horse, while Kurt Vonnegut and I ate cupcakes alone in my room. I read until the sun came up because I was afraid someone would break in through the sliding glass door in the bedroom and murder me in my sleep on my birthday.
5. RATIONS AND DELIVERY OF MRES
5.1. It is hard to get a job in a college town, especially when you are one zombie in several thousand shuffling around with a useless BA tucked under your inked-up arm, advertising your tutoring service on Craigslist or competing with undergrads for all the part-time Starbucks and Home Depot and FedEx jobs. I had finished college in a hurry while pregnant with one, two, then three kids, once I saw the marriage circling the drain, but now that I had the degree in my fist, I could not find a job, as my only work history was in the restaurant business and in baby making. My children were also so physically and emotionally needy that I couldn’t seem to make it to an interview. Every time I landed one, a kid would magically get sick right about the time I was putting on lipstick and giving final instructions to the sitter, with whom I had to barter housecleaning because I had no money. I rescheduled one interview so many times they told me I had used up all the sick days allotted to an e
mployee for a year simply trying to make it to the interview.
5.2. We spent our days drawing and coloring, reading library books, splashing in a baby pool I set up in the carport, and hanging laundry on the line so I could keep the electric bill down. On windy nights, the old, untrimmed oak trees scraped the sides of our house and my oldest daughter, who was six, would run crying into my bed, afraid that someone was going to break through her bedroom window and murder her in her sleep. I knew where she got it, but I couldn’t tell her that I had similar worries. I had to pretend her idea was ridiculous.
5.3. I knew we had hit bottom when we started eating soup I made from Ramen noodles and hot dogs that we got from a food pantry, possibly the least nutritious thing you can feed to a child besides bark and roots. The children called it “bird’s nest soup,” and I sliced the hot dogs sliver-thin so the baby wouldn’t choke on them.
5.4. We made our own Halloween decorations. We cut out pumpkins from the comic pages of the Sunday paper, and put faces on them with old buttons and other bits of cutout paper, then taped them all over the house. We made ghosts from tissues and dental floss, and hung them from the walls until they frightened my middle child and we took them down. On Sunday, two nights before Halloween, right after dark, there was a knock on the door.
I answered it to find seven or eight brown bags lined up on my porch without a human in sight, nor a set of brake lights on the road. I was frightened. I imagined a prank involving clowns, of which I was phobic, or rabbit carcasses, which, frankly, we would have eaten, but would have initially spooked me nonetheless, but when I peeked into one of the bags, I saw two boxes of cereal and a bag of apples. Another one had cans of tomato sauce and dried pasta. Groceries. The girls helped me carry the bags in, and we unpacked fruit, a gallon of milk, a bunch of carrots, frozen hamburger, juice, Bisquick, peanut butter, and frosted windmill cookies. I remain grateful to this day for those mystery groceries. I wouldn’t have made it the rest of the month without them, but it was embarrassing to know that other people, to whom I had not spoken about our poverty, could recognize it.
6. SUBURBAN OPS FOR CLEARING A BUILDING
6.1. When we drove to my mother’s house for Thanksgiving, it was a relief to sit in a room with other grown-ups and watch the children play. I had help. My generous family had extra laps, extra hands for diaper changes and for screwing on sippy cup lids, and enough patience to read aloud Go, Dog. Go! many more times than is psychologically healthy. We watched Holiday Inn, which was our family’s official start-the-holiday movie, and the girls swirled around the living room in baggy T-shirts and panties, copying Danny Kaye and Vera-Ellen by gliding across the tile in their socks, while my son toddled around in his diaper, weaving in and out of my mother’s lace curtains, which were willowing out from the windows in the South Florida breeze.
Thanksgiving Day was a blur. There was cooking, and kid minding, and a houseful of family and friends, and unusual foodstuffs to navigate. One of the girls demanded extra pumpkin pie after dessert, then vomited it right up onto the tile, where the pie held the shape of her esophagus for a brief moment before one of the dogs ate it. After we put the kids to bed, I slumped at the table and picked the turkey carcass clean of meat, then gave it to my mother to boil for soup. I was too exhausted to go to bed. My mother pulled me up out of the chair and led me to my room, as if I were a child.
6.2. On Sunday night we left for home, though I wasn’t ready to go back, and my mother drove behind us to the gas station so she could pay for my gas. It was dark and chilly, and the kids were bathed and in their jammies and ready to sleep in their car seats, so when we got home, I could transfer them easily to bed after the long drive.
The lights of the gas station were unforgiving and bright enough to make me squint. I saw my own future face in the wrinkles around my mother’s eyes. While we were filling the tank, she put her hand on my arm and said, “Why don’t you come home for a year? David and I talked it over. We want you to. You can save some money, start over. We can help with the kids.”
“I have a lease, Mom,” I said. “I can’t.”
“Think about it,” she said.
6.3. On the drive home, we rolled down all the windows and yelled out of them for “fun.” I was trying to keep the children awake until close to their regular bedtime, so they wouldn’t start their day at four the next morning, which is what happened after long road trips and disrupted sleep schedules. The cold air blew around the car and made the children frisky, even though they were locked inside their car seats and could only move their hands and their feet and their heads. We sang “The Fox” by Burl Ives twenty-seven times until I nearly screamed the last verse. After the children fell asleep, I thought about moving back home to South Florida, with its traffic, and ugly, flat landscaping, and rude people. I can’t do it, I decided. I had already escaped it once, and I doubted that, with its viney, gripping tropical plants and ferocious climate, one could achieve that kind of thing twice. Besides, I liked our little college town. We almost had seasons. My oldest was in school. My food stamps had just kicked in, and I had a business idea brewing. The landlord might sue me if I broke the lease, and I didn’t have any money to withstand a lawsuit. Besides, I believed that moving home to your parents’ house after a divorce was a certain sign of failure.
6.4. By the time we hit Fort Pierce, all three children were sleeping deeply, and the coffee I had drunk to stay awake had metabolized to my bladder. We had hours left to go and I knew I was in trouble. I was going to have to hold it unless I wanted to wake all three children and drag them into a rest stop. I was too afraid of being hit by a car to stop and squat by the side of the road, so I held it. By around ten-thirty, I knew I had a few short minutes before I blew, so at the next rest stop, I found the darkest corner, under the biggest tree, cut my lights, and silently, like a thief dancing through a series of laser lights, crawled past the children in their car seats, past a stray arm cast into the air, past splayed feet, and toys, and a box of food, to the back of the minivan where the luggage was. If those kids heard a car door slam or felt my skin on theirs, they would wake up for the rest of the trip, and it would be no fun for any of us. People without children should know that parents will go to ridiculous lengths to keep their kids from waking up once they have gone to sleep for the night. We will pay money, we will compromise ourselves in many ways, we will lie, we will do whatever it takes, which is why I pulled out one of my daughter’s size-five night diapers from her bag, unfolded it, pulled down my jeans, and urinated into the diaper while squatting in the backseat of the minivan. It was a relief until the diaper reached maximum capacity, and I ended up spraying the remaining quart of wee everywhere, soaking the luggage, the laundry basket of clean, folded clothes, the carpet in the minivan, and my own pants and panties. I crawled up and drove the rest of the way home, wet and stinking of urine.
6.5. When we pulled into the carport at one in the morning, I gripped the baseball bat I kept in the car, my neck and arm hairs pricked up in fear, pushed open the front door of our shoddy, low-rent house, and cautiously looked around, prepared to bash out the brains of anything that moved in the dark. I checked behind all the doors and curtains, the shower curtain, and inside the closets and the toy box. It was terrifying. When I was sure the place was clear, I carried my children in one by one, laid them in their beds, my oldest daughter waking briefly in my arms to say, “I smell pee,” before falling back to sleep. I stood in the kitchen and realized how empty and dark and ominous things felt. How alone I really was. I changed my pants and then called my mother, who was always up at one in the morning. I thanked her again for her offer, and said that we would be glad to take her up on it. We were moved in two weeks later, just in time to put up the Christmas tree.
7. USING PROPAGANDA TO MANIPULATE CIVILIAN EMOTIONS
7.1. My mother and s
tepfather set the children up in my old bedroom. It was large enough to fit three twin beds, bookcases, and a variety of low shelves for toys. It was tiled, which was good for cleaning up the kinds of messes their little bodies were able to produce: vomit, retched-up red Robitussin, or purple Dimetapp sneezed through the nose at the wrong time, diarrhea leaked through the elastic of a night diaper. The emotions of what we had been through were coming out of their orifices, like shrapnel working its way out of the skin.
My mother had given up her home office for my own room. I pushed the bed into the corner to create enough space for my desk and computer and fifty-pound tubs of lye and oils for the handmade soap business I was trying to start. At night, I would put the children to sleep and make soap until late, before collapsing on the bed and trying to fall asleep myself. Despite being surrounded by little souls who held their arms up for hourly hugs, and a family who rearranged their lives and took my children and me in, I felt like a discard, like a lonely cat, especially after midnight, when my mother’s own cats cried forsaken night songs into the sky, and then fought each other against the back-fence line outside my bedroom window.
7.2. Things have to be done after a divorce, no matter how inert you feel. For instance, you need to wake up in the morning and get out of bed. You need to continue to speak to the children, who, despite their confusion, have extraordinary levels of energy and require constant interaction. You hold one child on your hip while you help the other down the slide, then you put one down to push another one on the swing, then you leave that one swinging to help the second one brush his knees off after a fall, then you help the first one back up the slide. You clap and fake-smile. You say “wheeee!” You answer all the questions, you wipe all the noses, you fill all the cups, you give all the baths.
Also, you must manipulate their emotions by telling them how much fun it will be to do things you have no interest in, such as eating a meal, or going to the grocery store, or decorating the Christmas tree. You must lie often in those early months. There is nothing I could ever say to make a newly divorced parent feel better. The first couple of years are the worst.
