I mourned the idea of us. Like Orion’s Belt, like all the shapes we see fixed against the sky at night, our marriage was a perception dependent upon belief. I had stopped believing, but something solid remained. Brandon only lived on the other side of town. I had a key to his apartment, and he had a key to my house. We took June out together sometimes for soup dumplings and dry-fried green beans. He sent text transcripts of funny things she said. I sent photos of her crossing her eyes.
You know, my therapist said, you can leave a relationship healthy. You don’t have to destroy it. I remember he paused, then added: And you don’t have to destroy yourself.
30
I wrote a list in the notes function of my phone and titled it “2 things to not compromise on.”
Item 1: Do not marry someone who will not go to therapy, both on their own and with you. Refusing to go to therapy with your partner is like looking the other way when they’re drowning.
Item 2: Do not marry someone who does not take active steps to have an egalitarian domestic relationship. Daily tidying of the house, keeping track of grocery needs, buying dog food, etc.
Maybe interesting, more than anything, that I even thought of marriage.
Another list from that time: big happiness, big unknowns, big fatigue, big everything.
I ran into Nora one February morning. We hadn’t seen each other since the previous September, the day we broke up. I was standing on a street corner, waiting to cross, when I heard someone call my name. We exchanged the usual pleasantries. I had something I wanted to say and wasn’t sure if I should say it. My chest was tight.
You know, I said, I don’t believe anymore a lot of the things you told me. It really confused me, that stuff you said about what queer sex is and isn’t. It really messed me up.
I know, she said. I’m really sorry.
I’m good in bed, I said. I figured that out: I’m actually very good. A man passed on the sidewalk behind us.
Can I give you a hug? she asked. I said sure. The back of her sweater was cool and rough under my hands, like the face of a cliff. Across the street, the walk sign flashed. Gently I pulled away, waved, and went on.
In King County, Washington, if you are divorcing with children, you must attend a fluorescent-lit seminar called “What About the Children?” It provides information that every parent divorcing should think about: what hurts and helps children during family transitions, how parental conflict affects a family, how to best communicate with co-parents, and the nuts and bolts of drafting a parenting plan. But the pointed title of the seminar made me livid. I felt scolded by it, as though I could possibly forget to think about my child.
In the essay “The Bathroom,” Zadie Smith writes of her mixed feelings about her father’s deferring of his own ambitions for the sake of his family. “For the sake of the children was a phrase I especially detested; it seemed a thing people said to get out of the responsibility of actually living out their own desires and ideas.”55
The data I encounter most often—in the seminar and in the media—insists that kids of divorce will have it harder than kids whose parents stay married. This truism is obviously true for many. But a lot of us believe nowadays that divorce is no worse for kids than a prolonged unhappy marriage. Is that true? And is it denial or healthy skepticism that makes me want to ask?
Much of the early research around divorce was published in the 1960s and ’70s. Much of it measured the well-being of a group of people who were dealing with tremendous social stigma—and whose marriages must have been so bad that the stigma of divorce was preferable to staying. Back then, courts often awarded sole custody to mothers, who were both single and earned little, so children were left with few resources.56 My divorce, too, would present some financial hardship. I have had to lean regularly on savings; to budget closely, slashing items that once mattered to me; and to accept less stability than I previously had. But my divorce has not left me impoverished.
More recent studies comparing sole-custody and joint-custody arrangements pull up more nuanced findings: that having close relationships with both parents is “the best predictor of future outcomes for the kids [of divorce].”57 In other words, if you’ve got to get divorced, yes, there will be pain and loss for everyone involved. But that’s not the final word, so long as we let the pain motivate us to love our children—and to let their other parent love them too.58
“It’s in the nature of the beast that no one gets out of a family unit whole or with everything they want,” writes Zadie Smith. “[T]he truth is ‘the family’ is always an event of some violence. It’s only years later, in that retrospective swirl, that you work out who was hurt, in what way, and how badly.”59
Of course, this looks good on paper, but it doesn’t stick, keeps sliding off.
I brought June into this. I brought her into a marriage that had cracks early on, but we ignored them and had her anyway. She is now a child of divorce.
But what’s the alternative? That she didn’t exist at all?
My therapist gives me homework. Look in the mirror, he says. Really look at yourself. Make eye contact. And say, “I forgive you.” Do it every day until our next session.
It’s like a prescription: take one tablet by mouth daily for fourteen days. Except that when a doctor writes me a prescription, I follow it exactly. This, I only manage to do twice, furtively, when no one else is around to hear.
The morning of May 25, 2017, was a “parent tea” in June’s class at school. Brandon and I both went, and the three of us sat together at a low table in the classroom. There was a bud vase in the center of the table with a single too-tall stem flopping jauntily from its mouth. June had arranged it for us, and now she would serve us cups of lukewarm peppermint tea that sloshed a little as she walked. We’d received an email the week before, saying that her teacher was leaving at the end of the year to get a degree in child psychology. When she stood to thank us, a sob rose in my throat like a cough and I mashed my lips together so hard, they kept aching even after I stopped.
After the tea, Brandon and I drove separately to King County Superior Court. The attorney was waiting for us upstairs, at the end of a grim marble-lined hallway, and he led us into a room with pews, an unlikely chapel, that faced a long counter at the front. We sat down in a pew at the back, and the attorney offered us sticks of gum. When an attendant called our names, we filed up to the counter where the judge flipped through our file. He asked us to confirm our names, and we did, and then he asked, Is your marriage irretrievably broken? In unison we said yes. Then the judge signed something, or stamped something, I don’t remember, and handed the papers to our attorney. Out in the corridor, the attorney slid the file into a slot in the wall. It was done. We all shook hands, and that was it. But it seemed wrong to go back to the world; we were tender as newly molted crabs. So we walked through downtown, along streets we’d crossed on our first date twelve years earlier, and wound up at a friend’s restaurant, where they bought us a noontime glass of Champagne.
31
A week and a day later, Ash had top surgery. They’d thought on it for more than a year, and less actively for decades; breasts had never seemed to belong on their body. Ash wore a sports bra for the compression, the way it flattened their silhouette. In the short time we’d been together, I had noticed their discomfort with wearing even that—not because it dug or pinched but because it pointed to the fact that they had breasts at all.
I was nervous when Ash told me they wanted finally to do something about it. What do you think? they asked. I love your breasts, I said. To be honest, I want more time with them. But I also want you to have your body.
I went with them to a consultation at the plastic surgeon’s office. We didn’t mention that we’d been together for only seven months. I sat in the waiting room while Ash was in surgery, then brought them to my house to recover. When June joined us the following day, she and I promptly came down with fevers, and the three of us spent the weekend at various degrees
of supine, lined up against the headboard of the bed like a display of broken-down dolls. I was exhausted; it was too much. I was angry at myself for taking this on a week after our divorce. I should have let Ash recuperate at their own apartment. But then there would be moments. June was fascinated by the surgical drains, the grenade-shaped bulbs that hung from skinny plastic tubes draped over Ash’s shoulders. She wanted to watch Ash empty them, an event that sent me hiding in the living room.
Why did you have your boobs taken off, again? I heard June’s voice from the bathroom. We’d talked casually with her, a few times, about how some people are boys, and some people are girls, and some people don’t really feel like either, and some people feel like both.
Well, replied Ash, having boobs just didn’t seem like me. Have you ever put on a shirt, or maybe pants, that didn’t feel like “you”? And that you wanted to take off, because you didn’t like how you felt in them?
I sat on the sofa and grinned, listened to them chitchat like old friends.
One morning I left early to teach a workshop. June was kneeling on the floor in front of the kitchen cabinets, pulling out a ziplock baggie to fill with coins she’d been collecting. She and Ash were going on an adventure: the pancake house, then the zoo. June was excited to buy something from the gift shop with her money. Later in the afternoon, we’d work in the yard, and I’d water Fairy Meadow, June’s name for the still-bare patch of dirt where the sewer guys had dug to access the line. We’d scattered some wildflower seeds there, though I realized as we did it that I hadn’t prepared the soil. We were dumping seeds on dry, baked dirt. But June was very protective of Fairy Meadow and didn’t want anyone to step on it, not even the dog. Sometimes when she was asleep I wanted to go outside in secret, work the soil properly, and replant it, make it all work out for her.
I thought often about what I wanted June to learn or take away, if anything, from those months. I remember thinking once that the most important thing I wanted was for her to understand what it meant to empathize, to be truly kind. Then I changed my mind; that wasn’t quite it.
As a child and a young adult, I had watched my mother grieve many deaths. I’d felt panicked when she cried, when she had “sad attacks.” But I got to see real human feeling in grown-ups, got to practice that kind of discomfort, got to see that we would survive. When my turn came to be a grown-up with feelings, I had not forgotten. I don’t think I ever fell apart in front of June, not apart-apart, but I was grouchy, weepy, tired. When I had the energy, we talked about it, and I tried to explain what she was seeing in me, to put words to my emotions and actions. I wanted to metabolize the grief for both of us, to offer her what she needed—no more and no less—to comprehend what she might feel. I hope she’d understand, as I was coming to understand it, that things might feel groundless, but she was safe.
The weekend of the Fourth of July we went on a camping trip to Lake Wenatchee—me, Ash, and June, with a couple of the Thursday-night dinner families. We didn’t have our own tent or sleeping bags, so we borrowed them, and when we arrived at the site, I saw that we were out of our league. The other families had fancy tents and cots, bins full of dedicated cooking equipment for camping, and comfortable, well-designed chairs that folded into stuff sacks. I knew they’d been camping multiple times a summer for years, but it didn’t help; they also had intact marriages, which was even worse. I woke up in the night, pinned between June and the nylon wall of the tent, and started to cry. I tried not to make any noise, but Ash reached over and touched my shoulder.
You okay? they asked.
I hate all of this, I squeaked. All their perfect lives.
Shhhhhhhhhh, they whispered, rubbing my arm. We’ll get through this. We will.
I wrote this down in a notebook. Happiness : joy :: sadness : suffering. The difference is in intensity and duration.
I went around and around: Could I have done this all, all these months, differently? But really, could I? The merry-go-round was more palatable than what I’d started to suspect: that I would suffer, and that I’d probably make other people suffer too, because I couldn’t avoid it. The best-case scenario, then, might be a safe place to do the suffering, and a witness to keep me company. But Jesus, who would agree to that? Who would possibly accompany me? Because if someone agrees to be my witness, then I will have to be theirs too.
32
Marriage had been complicated. Not being married was complicated too. Brandon and I still worked together at Delancey: he was sort of the heart of the place, and I was the head. This arrangement, in fact, was much like our marriage, with all its upsides and downs, affirmation and infuriation. And without the smoothing, binding action of our vows, we got mean, angry, righteous. That summer we were both so tired.
One month, then two, past our divorce, a thought came to me, started to thicken like ice cream on the paddle. It’s like we’re still married. We were trying to be friends, co-parents, and business partners. I couldn’t do all three. I would keep “co-parent,” and hopefully “friend.” But I wanted to leave the business. I didn’t want to co-own the restaurant anymore. I wanted to be a writer again, only a writer.
We talk-yelled about it; then we settled down and began to really talk. We sorted out a plan: I would stay another year at the restaurant. I’d train my replacement, help pave the transition, save some money to see me through. We’d noticed years before, as crucial staff members left and moved on, that after the upheaval of losing them, the restaurant was strangely okay, often even better. I hoped, and I had to believe, that this would still hold true.
The next week we flew separately to Memphis, where our friend Ben was getting married—remarried, this being his second marriage. Brandon and I were tentative with each other, skittish as deer, but we were trying. The day after the wedding, a bunch of us converged on Ben’s house to eat reception leftovers. Ben and his wife were leaving the next morning for a honeymoon, and the interior of the house was to be painted while they were gone. They asked for our help in moving the furniture away from the walls, and we broke into teams. I wound up in the master bedroom with Ben, Brandon, and a couple of others.
I like this bed frame, Brandon said, rapping his knuckles on the headboard.
Right? IKEA, said Ben. Not easy to assemble, let me tell you. Putting this thing together was a real testament to our relationship.
Man, I know how that goes, I chimed in from across the room, where I was holding Ben’s desk chair. Ash and I assembled an IKEA bed frame over the winter, and I came away feeling like I was married already!
Well, said Brandon. Technically, you were.
There was a beat, and then the three of us boomed into laughter.
When I got home from Memphis, I found a juror summons for Brandon in the mail. I snapped a picture of it and texted it to him.
Maybe I’ll meet someone! he texted back.
Brandon’s father, June’s grandfather, taught her this endearing thing: walking down the street, in the car, or anywhere, he’d reach for her wrist and squeeze it gently, three times. I. Love. You. Now we all do it, Ash included. Three squeezes: I love you.
I read a profile in the New Yorker of the novelist Elizabeth Strout. After her daughter left for college, Strout moved out of the house she’d shared with her then-husband. “I know that one piece was a desire to really just focus on her writing,” her ex would tell the New Yorker. “A desire to not have to be responsible for anybody else.” He and Strout eventually divorced.
“They like each other so much—that made it confusing,” said their adult daughter. “My takeaway is that love itself is not enough.”60
33
The ghosts are sneaky. Making coffee one morning that fall, not long after Ash moved in, I heard a new but oddly familiar sound: chick-a-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee, it went. It was the song of a black-capped chickadee perched on the lichen-coated branches of the plum tree outside. I’d read the syllables of the chickadees’ song years earlier in The Taste of Country Cooking, by Edna Lew
is, a book Brandon and I loved so much that, when we were newly married, I’d read passages to him out loud. But I’d never heard the real song, or not that I noticed, until that morning. I’m haunted, I told Ash.
In the winter, Ash took a work trip to Portland, and I drove down to join them. Walking to the restaurant where we planned to meet, I passed a hotel where Brandon, June, and I had once stayed. Now I was the ghost in the scene, lurking on the sidewalk outside, beneath rooms where my life used to be. June had been four months old when we’d stayed here, and I was newly emerged from postpartum depression. As she slept in her Pack ’n Play, a noise machine humming beside her, Brandon and I had sex for the first time since her birth. I knew it would be good for us, and it was. It only hurt for an instant as we started, and I even came. It was fun. I went to use the bathroom afterward, and in the low blue light from the window, I looked at my reflection. Remember this feeling, I told myself. Sex not only felt physically good, but it made me feel close to him. I was proud of us, proud of the act itself. In showing up with Brandon this way, after such a hard time, I’d done something not only beneficial for us but also prudent, advisable, like maxing out my Roth IRA contributions for the calendar year.
A friend sent word from amid the trials of her winter: her new baby hadn’t been sleeping, and she’d gotten a horrible cold. Her husband took a day off to be with her, and they snuggled in bed. “Marriage is hard,” she wrote, “but marriage is also transcendent.”
I touched my hand to the hole where my marriage used to be. I peered down the fissure. We were married for ten years. Does it count for anything? Is the counter zeroed now? Who decides if it is? I want us to be the ones to make the call.
The Fixed Stars Page 18