Going in Circles

by Pamela Ribon

  I rub my left temple for what must be the hundredth time this morning, still hoping to find a way to crush the pain. “I’ve never been told I grind my teeth,” I say.

  The doctor sits in a nearby chair. He grips his pen like a toddler holds a crayon, as if he’s pretending to write words into my sweaty file. “Well, does your husband notice?” he asks. “Did he say anything about the noise waking him?”

  Every time this happens, I feel like I’m breaking the news of a death. “Matthew and I . . . We aren’t together right now.”

  Dr. Benson briefly looks up and glances at my left hand, to confirm. Like this is the secret test only he’s smart enough to conduct. He points at my wedding ring with his pen, and even though I knew he was going to see it, I still cover my hand, feeling like I’ve been caught lying.

  “We’re still . . . trying to figure things out,” I continue, wondering why I need to give him any explanation at all. “It’s complicated.” I stare at my shoes and kick my feet, knowing I’m way too old for this childlike gesture to be endearing. I silently count the grommets in my tennis shoes, hoping it makes me look lost in thought.

  Dr. Benson runs a hand through his healthy hair, then rests the back of his perfect right hand against his flawless lips. He closes my folder and shoves it back against his ribs, deep into his armpit. “You’ll want to get a mouth guard to use at night,” he says.

  I know vanity shouldn’t come into play when you’re a woman who goes to bed every night alone. But I still have no desire to look like a hockey player when I’m in my pajamas. What if there’s a fire in my apartment building and I run outside and everyone sees me in protective gear? What if one day I get my most recent favorite wish and I do actually die in my sleep? With my luck I’ll get that wish by suffocating on my mouth guard, and I will become famous for having the most awkward accidental death of all time.

  “How long have you been separated?” Dr. Benson asks, laser eyes beaming straight toward my wedding band. I get hopeful for a second, thinking that maybe his “oculoscope” will decide my jaw pain is related to my emotional pain. Then I’d be diagnosed with a devastatingly romantic condition, and I could call Matthew to whimper, “Please don’t worry about me. It’s just . . . the doctor said if we don’t work things out . . . I might die.”

  Then I’d quickly hang up with an air of mystery; perhaps I’d faint and fall perfectly to the floor, and now it would be up to Matthew to jolt into action.

  Unless he didn’t jolt. Unless he let me die.

  “We’ve been going through problems for a little while,” I say. “Living separately for about three months.”

  All the euphemisms used for a marriage torn apart are lousy. The only reason I even try to use gentler words is because most people seem to immediately take some kind of responsibility for my situation. They seem to want to grab guilt from my heart by the handful.

  But in this case, Dr. Benson isn’t taking any responsibility for my pain. He gives a little grunt, nodding. I’m not sure if that means he’s been through this before or if he’s just seen it a million times and he no longer cares. Most likely it’s the latter, and for him hearing someone describe a divorce is about as rare as hearing someone complaining about a sore throat. We could run some tests, but usually with this kind of thing it’s best to just wait and see.

  Dr. Benson stands, finished with the consultation. I’m just about to thank him for his time when he adds one last prescription.

  “You should think about getting a therapist.”

  Diagnosis: Charlotte Goodman has a broken head, inside and out.

  3.

  It wasn’t when Matthew declared he no longer wanted to be my husband that I started losing my mind. It hurt, absolutely, like a train slamming through me, circling back only to slam me again. It wasn’t even how he did it, which must go down in history as one of the clumsiest breakups ever.

  It was six months ago. He had brought home Chinese food, and we were in the kitchen, dropping noodles into bowls, when he said, “I think I’m going to move out.”

  I laughed, knocking into him, briefly resting my head near the top of his shoulder. The soft fibers of his blue T-shirt rubbed against my cheek. “Jeez, so you forgot the hot mustard,” I said. “I’m not kicking you out. This time.”

  He was motionless, holding a paper container over a bowl from our wedding registry, noodles and marriage in mid-drop, when he said, “No, I mean: I’m moving out.”

  I saw his words written out in front of my eyes, complete with punctuation.

  No

  comma

  I mean

  colon

  I’m moving out

  period

  An announcement. Meaning it wasn’t spontaneous. After the colon, there’s information. I had thought my night was going to consist of Chinese food and backlogged television programming. New information. COLON.

  I was being left.

  “What are you talking about—‘moving out’?” I asked.

  He started arranging everything on the counter, aligning objects at right angles, all of his attention directed at the white origami boxes of chow mein and tofu. Someone who didn’t understand my husband’s obsessive-compulsive disorder like I did might have thought he was being flippant. How can a man announce he’s moving out and then immediately dive into what appears to be a rather serious scientific experiment to determine exactly how far from the edge of the counter the packets of soy sauce should be? But in truth, his distraction was crucial information. His obsession over the placing of objects, the need for control over the things that couldn’t control themselves, was tattling on him. I knew that no matter how rehearsed and cool he appeared to be on the outside, inside he was freaking out.

  Finally he said, “I don’t think this is going to work.”

  And then he lowered his hand onto the counter, splaying it from wrist to fingertips, like a wave, a presentation.

  I placed my hand on top of his, letting him know I knew what the outstretched fingers meant. A signal that inside he’d just said something the way he wanted to say it.

  What I’d just done was so absurd I had to laugh. Matthew was the one leaving me, but yet I was trying to make him feel better, wanting to ease his inner turmoil by letting him know I understood the secret language his body used to speak to me. I should have been screaming with fury, on a rampage, but instead I was taking time to communicate with both sides of Matthew, the two parts of his brain—the half that used his mouth to make words that didn’t match the situation, and the half that used his body to make movements that didn’t match the situation.

  I made myself scoff, trying to get angry. “You’re breaking up with me?” I asked. None of this felt real.

  “I should have said something earlier,” he mumbled, sliding his hand out from under mine, holding it against his stomach protectively. “Things haven’t felt right since—”

  “You can’t break up with your wife.” I went back to the Chinese food, needing my own sense of order. I clenched a wad of noodles between two chopsticks and tried to toss them into a bowl, but they slid out of my grip, splashing me in sticky brown sauce.

  “I’m sorry,” Matthew said.

  I kept attacking the noodles with those useless sticks, stabbing a meal I wasn’t going to eat. “No, it’s too late,” I said. “We got married. End of story.”

  “I thought I could get through what I was feeling. But I still feel it.”

  “Feel what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  This is when I learned that chopsticks most definitely do not look cool when you throw them for dramatic effect. They flipped uncontrollably like I’d finished a wicked mini drum solo, one bouncing back to hit me square in the face. I knew it looked hilarious. That’s why I knew it was bad when Matthew ignored it. It was the one moment when maybe everything could have eased up. If he’d laughed, we could have taken a breath, taken a step back. But he was determined. Rehearsed. He said, “Please just underst
and that I’m sorry and I’ll do everything I can to get this over with quickly.”

  This. Over with. I was a this. He wanted nothing instead of this.

  “Can’t we talk about it? Don’t I get to be a part of this decision?”

  He left the kitchen and kept walking, grabbing his keys and wallet from the coffee table. Just as he reached the front door, his hand on the knob, I said the only thing I could come up with at that moment that I knew would hurt him.

  “You’re really going to leave instead of staying here to talk about it like a real man?”

  I thought it would get him fighting, keep him in the room a bit longer, just so I could fully grasp what was happening. It didn’t work, and my husband of five months walked right out the door with a slam. I didn’t hear from him for a week after that. He called only to let me know that he was staying somewhere, and he was fine, and he didn’t want me to worry.

  I guess it happens every day, probably much like that every day. Probably the other people don’t end up smacking themselves in the face with chopsticks, but maybe they have similar awkward moments. That would make me feel better, I think, to know there are people other than me who can’t have a dramatic moment without a comedic twist. I can’t be the only one who trips, spills, flops, and drops through all of her most important moments.

  I was still getting used to calling him my husband. My wedding gown was still hanging in my closet. I couldn’t get over the feeling that he would walk back through the door with that grin of his that took over half of his face, shaking his head, saying, “I can’t believe you fell for that!”

  Instead, what happened was one month later Matthew came back from what turned out to be a motel hideaway to announce that he’d changed his mind. He did want to be my husband after all.

  Ta-da! Who wants cake?

  I’m sure this is when “good wives” are supposed to leap into the arms of their spouses, covering them with kisses and gratitude. The woman has been deemed worthy, and that means the marriage will never, ever suffer any more strife. How lucky, friends would say, to have such a big test early on in the relationship. How common, family members would say, to have the relationship strained in its early years. How fantastic that we survived it, and of course Matthew would never really leave, and, “Are we back on for Game Night on Thursday? Yay!”

  And at first I did celebrate. Who wouldn’t be relieved to find out she wasn’t being abandoned after all? I think it lasted about as long as a weekend. Two days of snuggling and nice dinners in restaurants as familiar to us as the feeling of our fingers intertwined. After that, I supposed we were expected to just go back to normal, but I didn’t know what normal was. In my defense, I didn’t know things weren’t normal to begin with. Following that logic, at any moment I could be left again.

  Matthew didn’t want to talk about what had made him leave. He said only that it had been a mistake, and that he was sorry. Over and over again he said that, like he’d read somewhere that it was the way to fix what he’d done. That’s what I got for marrying a lawyer. He knew how to answer only the questions that would get him off easy. My cross-examinations were a complete failure.

  “Did you stop loving me?”

  “No. I’m sorry.”

  The words were real. They were what people were supposed to say. But out of his mouth they seemed remorseless, mechanical. Computations devised to soothe me. It was like picking a fight with an ATM: you get only so many responses.

  “NO. I’M SORRY.”

  “Did you want someone else?”

  “I AM HERE NOW. THAT IS NOT IMPORTANT.”

  “Do you think you might change your mind again?”

  “I WANT TO BE HERE. LET’S LOOK FORWARD. WOULD YOU LIKE AN ACCOUNT BALANCE?”

  At night Matthew would be happily snoring beside me, but I’d be spinning with panic, my eyes raw like sandpaper from staring at the ceiling, as I wondered why, why, why.

  Why did he go? And why did he come back?

  The only way I can sufficiently explain what happened next is to say that I cracked. I cracked right in half.

  Yes, he wants me.

  No, he doesn’t.

  I felt both of those thoughts, and I felt them both equally. Relief and anger. Security and panic.

  He wants you now.

  Yeah, but he didn’t.

  One night I couldn’t take the wondering anymore. He was asleep next to me, happy like everything was fine, and all I knew was that somehow it wasn’t. “Hey,” I said, pushing him to the point of an actual shove. It wasn’t nice, but I wasn’t completely in control of myself.

  He rolled toward me, opening a groggy eye. “You okay?” he asked. “Bad dream?”

  I could have curled up into the crook of his arm, snuggled my cheek against his warm skin, and thanked him for being there for me when I needed him. Thanked him again for coming home to me. I could have slid my foot between his calves and called him my Snugglebutt. I could have rewarded him for coming home, for being in my bed again. For making it our bed again. I could have chosen to make this moment a loving one.

  But I was cracked, so I couldn’t do that. Instead, I said, “This is the bad dream.”

  A side effect of being cracked is that you say lines that would get cut from even the cheesiest of films.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Matthew.” I had to say his name even though he was the only other person in the room because again, I was living a cliché. “Matthew, did you come back for me or for you?”

  When living a cliché, always make sure to repeat a person’s name at the beginning of every question.

  Under the cover of darkness he thought I couldn’t see him think through all the possible answers, his eyebrows furrowed as he feverishly narrowed down the possible responses, searching for exactly the right thing to say at this hour, in this situation.

  “I came back for us,” was what he landed on. The right answer on paper, as long as that piece of paper was from the cheesy movie script being written in my head.

  I wished I hadn’t asked, because the answer didn’t ultimately matter. I was the one who had to be able to live with it. And Matthew didn’t realize, couldn’t realize, that when he had come back, he’d created an invisible monster that grew inside me. Like those little gummy toys that get larger from adding water, I’d swallowed a tiny dinosaur. It mixed with my stomach juices, poisoned by anxiety, frustration, unanswered questions, and abandonment, and now a T. rex was roaring inside me, ready to burst.

  For the next couple of weeks, everything Matthew did drove me crazy. The most innocuous act could set me off on a mental tirade. He could flush a toilet, and my cracked brain would rant, “That man has the nerve to just come waltzing back here and flush that toilet like he didn’t just dump me a few weeks ago?”

  I’m pretty sure my head was involuntarily bobbing on every fifth word that went through my mind. I must have looked like a pigeon, swiveling my neck around, wobbling and weaving with indignation.

  “As if I were someone you could just leave without warning and then come back here and just ask me if I wanted to eat Chinese for dinner tonight? Like we can ever have Chinese again when the last time we tried to eat it you walked out on me? Like anything will ever be normal again? As if I’m someone you just ask questions of and then wait for an answer—as if I have answers instead of a thousand questions? Like: where did you go/who did you see/did you sleep with someone/did you sleep with someone and decide you’d rather sleep with me?”

  That’s another thing. Once Matthew left me, I imagined he did everything he could do while being away from me. It didn’t matter if he told me the truth or not. In my mind, there were women. Lots of women. Naked, glistening, horny, dirty women who did everything I didn’t want done to me. These hot women would cook for him and then beg him to do illegal activities on them, all of them. Giant hordes of whores and skanks wiggling all over Matthew. That’s what I saw. And for some reason, I saw this happening in Cairo. Everything
’s hot and beige and cannot be duplicated by me. I am nothing compared to what Matthew could have Out There. I will never be as good as Hot Sex in Egypt. I know that, but now he must know that, too.

  So why had he come back? There had to be a catch. Trying to figure it out was ripping me apart. If he couldn’t get everything he wanted from me, then what was it he was getting from me that he couldn’t get anywhere else? What did I do for him that even the dirtiest of girls was saying, “Oh, hell, no” to? Maybe I needed to be more like one of those Cairo orgy girls. Make some boundaries that didn’t involve sex acts.

  Sometimes I marvel at what the female body can endure. We can create life, giving our bodies up to grow another human being, one who takes things from us we need, like vitamins and nutrients. We become a host, a vessel of life-giving blood and shelter, only to be torn practically apart by the childbirth process. Afterward, we are never the same. Our bodies change, stretched and worn, scarred. We can never go back to the person we were before we were two.

  My body might not have just gone through the miracle of life, but grief can create the same internal split. Sometimes you can be hurt so deeply, so badly, that there’s another thing that lives inside you, beside you. A monster of anger, of regret. One that breathes and grows and feels.

  And so, about a month after Matthew had come back home, I left.

  People have asked why I didn’t fight to stay in the house. I couldn’t. I was leaving. Not for a day or two during which I could hang out in a hotel, ordering from room service and reading magazines until I’d decided to go back to domesticated life. Not long enough to have the lady version of the pornfest I imagined Matthew had had. I knew that I was getting out of there for a while, possibly forever. Once I felt I couldn’t live there anymore, it was as if I’d accidentally seen the last page of a novel. I knew what was coming. I had to go.

  I knew it would be hell on everyone. I thought about all of the people who had been involved in the uniting of our lives—everybody from our families, to the attendees at our wedding, to the country’s legal system. Everybody was going to have to make a change in how they saw me, how they treated me. Or at the very least, where they went to visit me. I couldn’t live in the house-minus-Matthew again. It had been too hard the first time.