Split-Level

by Sande Boritz Berger

  “I’d hoped to get the most out of this time together,” I say, feeling my mood plummet.

  “Hey Al, we’re here to work, remember?” Donny says, scooping up reading material from an ornately carved banquet table. I shake my head in agreement, hoping we get off to a positive start. I should be thrilled Donny’s this focused, but I’m not. Maybe a trip to the Wheatley Heights Motor Lodge to screw under their mirrored ceiling would have been a better idea—cheaper for sure.

  Later that evening during the bland filet of sole, or chicken and boiled potato, dinner held in a hot, stuffy hall, we are introduced to the team: a cherubic priest named Father Doyle, and three married couples who have already experienced the retreat. The Father explains that the weekend should be thought of as a getaway from the necessary distractions and daily routines of everyday life.

  “Ladies and gentleman,” he begins, in a tone not unlike the late Ed Sullivan, Tonight we’ve got a really big show! “This weekend is designed to provide you with an opportunity to pause and reflect—invaluable time to refocus your attention on one another.”

  An interesting challenge since we will hardly see one another.

  Endorsements pour readily from couples of varied ages. A husband stands and comments: “I discovered that my wife is a beautiful mystery. Now loving her has become a lifelong process.” There are loud applauds and strained smiles. A wife speaks: “I was searching for a way to share the real me with my husband—all my longings and needs. Now through my daily dialogue, I’ve found a way.” The third couple, dressed in matching Marriage Mountain navy blue T’s, pop up like two jacks-in-the-same-box and say: “We have fallen in love again after twenty, miraculous years.” I pull at my ear. I could swear she said miserable. Donny claps and hoots with the rest while my mouth suddenly feels parched. Broccoli gurgles above my ribcage. I remind myself this retreat was my idea.

  While we eat our angel cake dessert (with gold paper wings), each of us is handed two black-and-white spotted notebooks like the kind we used in second grade. Inside these books we are to write passages to one another—an open dialogue of our deepest thoughts and feelings. We are reminded there are no TVs, radios, or phones in the rooms, no distractions from our writing. I tug at Donny’s shirt, embarrassed, when he raises his hand and asks Father Doyle, “Is it okay, Father sir, if we write on both sides of the paper?” I avoid eye contact with some guy mumbling “asshole” under his breath. No one else dares ask a question. And Donny hasn’t stopped gaping at a cute, pixie-haired brunette with sumptuous (DD) breasts whose husband has dozed off at the table.

  When I awaken Saturday morning, I can’t wait to see Donny. Last night, when I wasn’t writing or dreaming, I sat propped in bed staring at the mighty cross over the door, made from twisted grape vines. After a breakfast of plasterboard pancakes, Donny and I, clutching our notebooks, search for a quiet place to read. It occurs to me that here there are only quiet places. No laughter, only an occasional sneeze or chair scraping the floor. We sit opposite each other on a crackled burgundy couch. The smell of the leather is surprisingly comforting. We nod, grin. Ready, set, go. We really are like children. Donny raises his hand, offering to read first.

  Dear Alex,

  I’ve said most of this already, but I wanted to write it down, here and now, so you’ll know, once and for all, how truly sorry I am. I wish you never had to suffer the embarrassment of that awful phone call. When our sitter (see babe, I’ve already forgotten her name) said she was terrified about learning to drive, I became a little too eager to help her. I think it had something to do with feeling fatherly toward her. No doubt it turned out to be a really stupid move, especially late at night. Dumb and careless! Please know I will never let anything like that happen again. I don’t want to jeopardize our love or make you lose respect for me. I couldn’t bear that, Alex. I need your respect. God knows I don’t get much at work. I spend so much time trying to please my father lately, but somehow always come up short. He seems to have a knack for uncovering all my fuck-ups. Lately, I’ve been thinking that it was a grave mistake taking him up on his offer. I should have listened to you when you urged me years ago to go back to school. It’s just that his offer came when we learned you were pregnant with Becky, and we certainly needed the money. At the time it seemed like the right thing to do. Who was it that said you learn by your mistakes? Not Richard Nixon. Will you forgive me? Please?

  I love you … Don

  Dear Donny:

  Here’s my truth. Nobody knows me better than you, and yet after all this time together, I am still so hesitant to share my deepest thoughts and worries with you. Why that is I am trying to figure out. To feel safe and be happy, I need to trust you completely. I want to believe that your daily mantra is: you would never intentionally hurt me or our family. I’m not sure why but I am scared a great deal of the time, feeling as if I’m walking under rain clouds that are about to burst. I try but can’t seem to shake my chronic worrying about the girls, my crazy fear about dying and being replaced—what haunts me at times, making me vulnerable and so insecure. I hold on to these fears as if they are part of an incurable disease preventing me from being happy and free. There I said it. I feel better, but just a little.

  Alex

  I share tiny glimpses of the agony I often put myself through: my daily endless struggle for perfection, and the naïve belief that I can control our future. Writing it down, as though confessing, seems to loosen those chains of anxiety. I hear myself take deep sighs while my tears drop and blur the letters. This notebook exchange happens three times a day, so we can read what the other has been afraid to say—ruminations each has been harboring. Many of the couples here appear at the family-style meals with their eyes red-rimmed, cheeks streaked from tears. Yet, most of the time, we, the Pearls, are as cheerful as our hosts Father Doyle and Brother Mac and the three happily encountered couples headlining the show.

  On Saturday afternoon, after a quick trip to the outside (I’d actually gasped taking in the fresh autumn air), we have our first Creative Touching Workshop led by Father Doyle and Brother Mac. They sit side by side, Father Doyle dangling his cloaked arm affectionately across Brother Mac’s shoulder.

  “Touching,” the holy Father says, “a simple act, and yet we either lose or pass on the opportunity many times each day. It is the first step in intimacy, the most important part of communication.” Father Doyle asks us all to stand and circle the room a few times, then change directions. I get mixed up and walk in the wrong direction. He tells us to reach out and grab the hand of the person passing us, right now! I try to catch up to Donny, but he’s already tapping the shoulder of the pixie-haired, DD woman in front of him. His eyes never scan the line to find me. It’s as if he’s forgotten I’m here. Though I’m trapped in a familiar feeling, the veins in my head begin pulsing and my mouth becomes parched. I am six or seven again, and my father is walking toward a crowded parking lot. We’d been at the beach all day, and now I’m lingering, as usual, digging my toes in the warm white sand, searching for one last sand crab. When I look up and see my father, he seems miles away—unreachable. I run to catch up, my heart about to explode inside my fluttering chest. But I can’t cry; my tears are stuck beneath squeezed-shut lids. I am furious at my father but don’t know how to tell him. Finally caught up, I lean against the burning car trunk and vomit my hot dog and fries across my bare feet.

  Donny seems intent on following directions, pleasing the Father, pleasing himself. See Donny touch; see Donny having fun. Some couples have broken the rules and walked paces ahead, seeking each other, to embrace or share a smile. Not us. With peaked interest, Donny observes the other couples. And filled with fresh melancholy, I observe Donny, wondering what he’s really thinking.

  Later, during dinner, Donny tells a complete stranger that the two of us have made this investment as a way of warding off “the seven-year itch.” I had forgotten there was such a marital prediction and recall the entertaining movie starring Marilyn Monroe. Wa
sn’t it a comedy? The paunchy, bald stranger glances over at me but quickly returns to slurping his tomato soup, which makes his lips blood red. Just minutes later the skin across my belly is attacked by a case of hives. It occurs to me we will be married seven years come May.

  When I stand and say good night, Donny takes my hand and pulls me aside. “These people have bigger problems than us, Alex. Trust me.”

  I flinch, annoyed by Donny’s nonchalance and the easy comparisons he makes to the other couples. Yet, at the top of what I label my Bitchin’ list is his obvious attraction to the pixie-haired wife of the big dozer.

  “How can you be so sure? We don’t know a damn thing about these people. Besides Don, I care about us, not anyone else.”

  “Al, nobody looks at one another. Have you watched the way they sit and do nothing but move the food around on their plates?”

  “Some people take this very seriously. It takes a hell of a lot of courage to talk about certain things, to really delve,” I say, my voice quavering.

  “Yeah, that’s part of the problem,” Donny says. “We make things worse if we take them too seriously.”

  “Do you mean me, the one who brought us here hoping to make things better?”

  “Shush … calm down. I’m referring to people in general.” When Donny pats my shoulder, I’m aware of the lightness of his touch, as if I were a figurine on a mantle admired on occasion, like while dusting.

  “Donny, do you realize you often do things, which makes it hard for me to trust you?”

  “Yes, and I’ve said I’m sorry. Do you want to hear it again? I’m sor-ry, sor-ry, sor-ry!” My husband of almost seven years mimics a vaudeville act, bending on one knee. Other times, I might have laughed, but all I can do is whisper a good night, before walking down the dark hallway alone.

  Back in my chamber, I’m convinced the crucifix on the door has tripled in size. I recall the time my best friend, Stacy Keenan, and I snuck into her church to steal the special wafers she raved about, making me envious I hadn’t been born Christian. When Stacy informed me that they were symbolic for the body of Christ, I was certain I’d committed a horrible sin and spit the rest into a tissue.

  My reliable Bulova reads ten after nine, and I realize, except for illness, I haven’t spent a Saturday night alone since high school. I wonder if Donny is sorry and misses me, if he’s writing to me this very moment to say, once again, he acted like a complete and total ass. The pen rolls out of my throbbing fingers onto the floor, and I stand up and stretch my arms toward the ceiling. I open and close my bedroom door, then open it again to peek into the gray cave of the hallway. The place is funeral-home quiet. A stale, musty smell lingers in the air—the aroma of thrift shop clothing. I turn the latch so not to lock myself out and walk in the direction of the male-only wing, toward Donny’s room. What can they do to me? Throw me out into the woods, banish me from the grounds? Forgive me father for I have sinned—something I’ve always wanted to say anyway.

  “I had a headache,” I’ll say, if caught, and “my husband had the drugs.” Surely that would be acceptable, despite the double meaning. A rare excitement takes over my body as I move quickly down the hall. I am ready for a confrontation in any shape or form. I stop to listen. Is that laughter I hear up ahead? I can barely make out two figures several yards in front of me: one leaning against the doorframe, the other standing just inside a room. I hear a deep, husky laugh, followed by a duet of whispering men. There’s Donny, half in, half out, of what I imagine to be his room, wearing plaid pajama bottoms and a white undershirt. He is talking to the husband who proudly announced the first night that he and his wife have been married twenty miraculous years! Sporting a dark green Marriage Mountain T-shirt, the guy looks around before handing Donny what appears to be a large red envelope or portfolio. Whoops, I think, danger, danger, no reading of outside materials. But I am curious, not to mention bored out of my Marriage Mountain mind. Squinting into the darkness, the men turn from their friendly exchange to focus on the slightly disheveled apparition moving toward them—me, a female, intruding upon their budding kinship.

  “Al, hon, what-cha doing?”

  “Don, I was just about to ask you the same thing.”

  “Well good night, you two lovebirds. I hope you have another great day tomorrow. It only gets better Mrs.?”

  “Pearl, my name is Alex Pearl.”

  “I’m George, nice to meet you, Alex. I’m right next door to your hubby so you better keep it down in there.” George smacks Donny so hard on the back that Donny drops the portfolio, then bends quickly to retrieve it. Maybe George gave Donny some back issues of Playboy to keep him occupied; George did have a familiar guilty expression that I often associate with sex.

  “Hey, Don, don’t forget what I told you,” George whispers loud enough for me to hear. “It’s all there between those pretty little pages. You want to know how to make it to twenty years? Read it, share it, then do it!”

  The instant George shuts his door, I turn to Donny. “Hey, I thought we were told no distractions. I’ve been sitting in my mouse hole of a room since dinner writing my fingers off. Show me what he just handed you. Come on … pot or porn?”

  More energized than I’ve seen him in months, Donny raises the mysterious red portfolio above his head and out of my reach. I jump up high to grab it and miss. This becomes our exercise of the day—a childish, yet laughable game, which miraculously dissolves the tension.

  The next thing I know we are spread out, side by side, on Donny’s mattress, under which I saw him tuck the mystery read, but I’m almost too tired to care.

  “So, what the heck was that about?” Donny blinks in sync with my question. “Don’t tell me the guy signed you up for Amway? He sure sounded like he was trying to recruit you.”

  “Now that you mention it, I guess, in a way. Though I assure you it was not Amway. Now, come here, you,” Donny says.

  “What? Are you crazy?” Why is Donny always so eager to break the rules? And why can’t I say no and mean no? I lie stiff as a statue on his lumpy bed, while Donny peels off my jeans. I’m aware of a vague stirring, something old and buried, excavated from a mountain of mud. Marriage Mountain.

  Donny kisses my nose, my eyes; he wiggles his tongue inside my ear, which he forgets I hate. Then his face deserts my face, and before long his warm tongue is circling my navel, then the slight curve of my hips. I lift my neck to look down and see only a patch of Donny’s wavy head; it’s as if he’s disappearing into the depths of a cave. The skinny red portfolio flops to the floor. I no longer care what’s inside. I’m surprised by what he’s doing and how assuredly he’s maneuvered us into position. For the very first time, Donny goes down on me—an expression I have always disliked because it sounds so very Travel and Leisure. I try concentrating on my body and all its delicate parts, on what will ultimately give me pleasure, but I am captured by a faded print of Mary Magdalene, which hangs lopsided on a poorly lit wall. I assume she is Mary because of her potato sack gown, the halo, and how tenderly she cradles the cherub of a naked child, which reminds me of what I truly want to do: to leave this place … now, go home where I belong—with my girls.

  It’s a week later and we’re out eating Chinese food with Rona, Hy, and all our kids. I have just shared how our retreat weekend culminated with a chamber music ceremony and us renewing our vows, when Rona, the neatest human I know, spits a mouthful of fried rice all over the starchy white tablecloth. “You did what?”

  “Oh, you think that’s funny?” Fuming at her smugness, I lean over my plate. “I thought, Rona, you might say, how nice!” Our children’s chatter halts at my piercing voice. Ethan picks up a limp, lonely shrimp and pops it in his mouth. Rona cringes and grabs the tail before he swallows the creature whole.

  “Alex, it’s their problem,” Donny whispers, while he dives in for the last fatty sparerib. Something in the way Rona glances toward Hy infuriates me.

  “Oh, so wait! You two have it all figured out, no
surprises ever in your perfectly blissful union?” Though my heart gallops, I feel strong.

  “Sorry, Alex,” Rona says, through a tiny smirk. Her eyes dart like guppies to connect with Hy, and I can’t help but think they are the only couple I know sure to stay married forever.

  On Monday morning, seconds after Donny leaves for work, I find myself crawling on the floor again, this time searching for the mysterious red portfolio, which I’d nearly forgotten about until witnessing the smug look on Rona’s face—a look telegraphing the message that she knows something even I don’t know about my own marriage—specifically Donny.

  After an hour of searching each drawer, closet, even the stinky oil burner room, which I’d never even seen, I give up. I decide I no longer give a damn. Yet, for the rest of the day, I battle with both detest and pity for this new pathetic version of me.

  FIVE

  Our attachment to Donny’s folks intensified as a result of my own parents’ absence from our daily lives. Miriam and Nathan Shore moved to Florida two weeks after I returned from my Jamaican honeymoon. They had planned my wedding and their escape from Brooklyn, simultaneously, as if telegraphing the message: life was on hold until their only daughter got hitched.

  It felt peculiar to rush back home, soon after I’d left, to immerse myself in the sifting of childhood memorabilia. Just when I’d made the gallant attempt to try out the new me—Mrs. Donald Pearl—I was whirled down memory lane, swept up in a tornado, the funnel holding all my dashed hopes, needless fears, and follies. I spent hours sprawled on the floor rummaging through milk crates of old 45s and scrapbooks bulging with browned, crumbling corsages that reeked from mold and prom night photos of boys all shorter than me. Forced back in that chilly pink room with its faux fireplace, I mourned the youth of a painfully thin, nervous girl—a girl who shoved fingers down her throat each morning to try and vomit because she awakened nauseous and desperate to feel some relief, even if only stringy phlegm rising from her gut.