I go to a running store and buy proper shoes for running on asphalt and concrete. The tiny woman who works there gives me tips on how to do “ten-and-ones,” which is to run for ten minutes then walk for one, and repeat. I sign up for the 10K online and try not to be overwhelmed by words like corral and best time. I put on some yoga pants and a stretched-out old sports bra and wake up at 5:30 a.m. to run around the neighbourhood before work. I do this a total of six times before the race. To call that “training” would be generous.
On the day of the race, I’m standing in my corral alone. Well, alone in a crowd of two thousand people. I’m freezing, because it’s seven thirty in the morning in early May. I’m wearing my ratty yoga pants and the free T-shirt I got when I registered. Even though it’s extra-large, it feels really tight on me.
I’m not so much afraid as awkward. Everyone is with buddies or in big groups. They’re all wearing sporty clothes that seem to fit them properly. I don’t know why I thought this was a good idea. What am I even doing here? By myself! I put my earbuds in and adjust my iPod, which is attached to my arm on this iPod-attaching thing someone lent me. When the starting gun goes off and the crowd surges, I press play on the perfectly crafted race playlist I’ve made, and I surge, too. Maybe this is cheesy, but, in case you’re dying to know, the first song on the playlist is Kate Bush’s “Running up that Hill.”
I’m not going to lie, it’s not easy, especially considering the most I’ve ever run is four kilometres, and that was only on the last of my six “training” mornings. But I run. I do my ten-and-ones, passing the flags that mark each kilometre, through Kate Bush and Arcade Fire, K’naan and The Clash, Vampire Weekend and Magic System. I’m amazed at the people that line the streets, cheering us on, offering us water. The sun is out in full force now and it’s a lot warmer. I’m sweaty and my lungs feel like they’re going to burst but I push on. The last kilometre is the worst; it feels like another ten for some reason. My legs are rubbery and I feel like I’m looking at the finish line forever, like I will never actually get there.
When I do arrive, I see Birdie in the crowd. She’s two years old now and on top of The Husband’s shoulders, wearing her white sun hat, the one with little flowers embroidered on it. The Husband is pointing me out to her and as I’m running toward the finish line, her voice cuts through the noisy crowds’ shouts and the ringing of bells. “Mooooooooooooooooooommm!”
And I think, Oh my God, I have MS.
I don’t know why, but this is when it hits me most. Everything that has happened in the past two years just pummels me in this moment, the moment I cross the finish line. I burst into tears. Uncontrollable sobs. And the two of them run over, hugging me and cheering. The Husband’s mother is there, too, and, ever the nurse, she starts quizzing me on my vitals. She hands me a banana and a bagel, which I scarf down immediately after I stop crying. I get my participation medal and although it took me an hour and a half to do it, I’m really proud of myself. I just ran 10K. And everything is going to be okay.
Time passes. Mostly I forget I even have MS. I still forget. I mean, other than taking the daily injections and pills, there’s nothing much I can do about it, so I actually don’t think about it that much. We go on with our lives, with this new phase of marriage, the one with a child in it.
I keep up with the running. I get up at 5:30 a.m. twice a week and run for an hour all around our neighbourhood. It’s amazingly quiet, the city at that hour. There are hardly any cars on the roads and even fewer people. I sometimes pass young men, construction workers, sitting on their front porches sleepily waiting for the truck full of other young men to come and pick them up. I like that they always have a giant cooler at their feet, the kind you’d take on a camping trip, but they just have their lunch for today in there.
I also pass women, of all ages and ethnicities, standing at bus stops, going to whatever jobs they’re going to so early in the morning. They hold their handbags close, look weary. I smile at them and sometimes they smile back, but not always. I wonder if they think I must be pretty privileged, to be jogging at this time of morning, instead of already dressed and on my way to work.
These early-morning runs are the only real time I have to myself. Just me and my thoughts, me and the quiet, me and my bursting lungs as I run down streets and through cemeteries and over streetcar tracks. It’s not that I love running at all, or getting up so early, but more that I love the time alone that is so precious when you’re married and a mother with a full-time job and a house to clean when you get home.
More time passes. The Husband is still so cute to me, even though he’s changed a lot. He keeps his hair really short and spiky now, his shoulders are broader, his chest and body have thickened out with age and the diet of being married to an Italian. He’s had laser-eye surgery so he no longer wears glasses, and when he had dental surgery to fix some damaged teeth, without asking they went ahead and straightened out his fangs, a feature I loved, the way they puffed out his lip. He looks good, but a lot different than when we first met. He still wears nothing but cargo pants and monochromatic T-shirts though, dressing nothing like the cool, stylish guys I work with, but I don’t care. He is still the one I love, cargo pants or not.
Years pass. The house is a lot for us. Always a crack to fill, a carpet to rip up, a faucet to replace. Weeds in the backyard and big disgusting bugs in the basement. We’re tired. Birdie is a handful. Every day there’s a tantrum, a test of wills. We’ve become the stereotypical exhausted working parents. Our lives consist of work, the house, insane toddler, repeat. We take turns going out. He grabs drinks with his teacher friends or I hang with my media pals, while the other stays home with the insane toddler. We rarely go out together, if ever. But when we’re at the house, we are together. There are always people coming and going, neighbourhood children running around, my dad dropping by, or cousins or friends. Barbeques, beer-making, board games, crafts, trivia nights. A house full of life and energy.
And always in the crowd, I hear his laugh, or I catch his eye across the room and he winks at me, or just gives me that smirk. Our relationship like an inside joke between the two of us. I knew we would always be okay. We’d be the couple that would always be okay.
I was wrong.
ON STRIKE
Summer 2011. Birdie is four years old. The Husband and I are thirty-eight and thirty-six respectively. It’s been eleven years since he first grabbed my hand and kissed me hard in the basement of that bar. The lanky guy who is now this man before me, creeping up on forty, with broad shoulders and a beer belly, tiny silver flashes across the night sky of his hair.
God I love him when I look over at him. He infuriates me and excites me, even now, when we are tired and run-down because Birdie at age four is like having three children all screaming relentlessly at once directly in your face. We work all day and she yells at us all night until she mercifully falls asleep. Then we go to bed together and talk in whispers because we’re afraid she’ll hear us and wake up and yell at us more. We add a tiny hook-and-eye lock on our door so we can have sex at night without me worrying she’s going to walk in. We lie together and talk and giggle (in whispers) like teenagers until we fall asleep.
In the mornings I find him less adorable. He sleeps in while I get up and get ready first so I can then get Birdie up and get her ready. I look in our room and see him just sitting there on the edge of the bed, staring at the closet. Meanwhile, I get her on the toilet and wrangle her into clothes and beg and plead with her to brush her teeth and endure the screaming as I try to brush her hair or get her to brush it. I look in and he is still just sitting there, staring. And I want to scream, at him, at her, at everyone. Sometimes we do scream. It’s a terrible way to start the day.
It isn’t perfect, but what relationship is? What marriage is one hundred percent sunshine and roses? I love The Husband and he loves me, in spite of our exhausting hamster-wheel life, despite our differences and diverging interests. There is still plenty of comm
on ground, and the foundation of our relationship is our similar spirit — the way we fight, hard, for the things and people we love. Our weird sense of humour, our own secret language. How he buys me the most perfect gifts for every occasion, a collection of necklaces and pendants that are unique and strange and so exactly me. How we still smirk at one another, still make out all the time and still have sex pretty much every day except when we’re way too tired or grumpy. We are still, after all this time, totally into each other. I feel absolutely confident that no matter how we sometimes argue or annoy each other, we are a team. A dedicated couple who have each other’s backs.
In the middle of July that year, The Husband goes away on a “guys’ weekend” with his old pals from high school, a mild-mannered bunch who like role-playing games and pot-smoking. I love these guys, I consider them my own friends, and I’m glad he’s getting a weekend away from our domestic life.
But when he returns, something is wrong. He’s completely different, and I don’t know why. He’s sullen, a lot, and quick to anger. His jaw is tighter and it seems like everything I say is the wrong thing to say. He insists on enrolling Birdie in full-time daycare for the summer, even though he’s a teacher and off, and even though it costs a lot of money and makes no sense. This makes me really angry, and we argue about it. I’m just supposed to go to work all day to pay for super-expensive daycare so he can stay home and do whatever he wants and not even hang out with his own kid, the kid he wanted so badly? But he doesn’t budge. And so I reason that at the very least, he’ll get some of the stuff around the house done — pull up the embarrassing weeds in the front yard, replace the screen door at the back of the house, paint the spare room.
He does none of it. He does nothing. All day long Birdie goes to daycare. All day long I go to work. All day long he … I don’t know. I don’t know what he does. He plays video games, I can see that. He drinks a lot; the recycling bin tells me that. It’s like he’s on strike. He’s become remote and absent even though he’s right in front of us. He is done. And it’s making me an angry, nervous wreck.
Summer turns into fall. The Husband turns into someone else completely.
It goes on like this for months. His jaw tighter, his eyes dull. Birdie and I chat at dinner and he’s there, physically, but not there at all. I start taking her everywhere without him because he doesn’t want to come to the park anymore, or to people’s houses, or kids’ birthday parties, or any of the other things we used to do the three of us, together. Birdie and I do art projects on the big dining table while he watches TV. We carve jack-o’-lanterns just the two of us, wrap Christmas presents without him, make a million valentines for her class. All while he sits there staring at the TV, beer in hand. (I guess I was being primed for single-parenthood. Funny to realize that now.)
During these six months, there are also good times. There are days when he is lovely and goofy and sweet and into me and into being a dad. There are days when we feel like a family. But mostly, things just get worse and worse between us. There are times when I look at him and it’s like he’s looking through me. We argue a lot, because I don’t know what the fuck is wrong with him and he won’t talk to me about it. Not knowing makes me angrier. I don’t like him a lot of the time, even though I so desperately love and miss him.
He stops coming to bed at the same time as me, preferring to stay downstairs and watch hours and hours of TV. I start to take food to bed with me. Food fills the gaping holes of knowledge, the things I don’t know, the questions he won’t answer. I feel dismissed and invisible and I eat to quell the gnawing pain in my gut that isn’t hunger, unless you count the hunger for a different life or the yearning to be seen again. Night after night in our bed alone, I eat cereal and toast and cookies and crackers, writing endlessly into my notebook: What has happened to him? Where has my husband gone? Why did I ever agree to get married? This is such bullshit!
As I put on more and more weight, he starts working out. He gets trim and fit and buys a bunch of new clothes — pants without cargo pockets, nice shirts, and shoes that aren’t sneakers. He starts wearing a tie to work every day. He styles his hair for what seems likes hours every morning. He looks good.
I know what you’re thinking, because in hindsight it’s obvious and probably at the top of the “Top 5 Things to Look For If You Think Your Spouse Is Cheating” list. But I wasn’t looking for clues because I didn’t think he was cheating. I didn’t even consider it. I mean, not seriously.
One morning, he’s painstakingly choosing his outfit for the day (who is this guy?) and I half-jokingly say, “You’re such a fucking dandy all of a sudden! Are you cheating on me or something?”
He spits back, “As if. When would I even have the time?” which seems as true a thing as he could say. Our lives are so busy, when would anyone have time to have an affair? I feel sheepish for even suggesting it. Of course he isn’t cheating on me. Everything is falling apart, I know that, but this all must be a phase, a normal phase of marriage. Or he’s just having a mid-life crisis or something. I mean, at least he hasn’t bought a Ferrari.
Love as Torture
I grew up thinking love was torture. Love was passion, love was drama. I watched my parents fight in spectacular, telenovela fashion. I saw my aunt and uncle throw plates and punches while my little cousins and I hid under the kitchen table.
These couples loved each other fiercely. I’d sit at the top of the basement stairs, long after I should have been asleep, watching them dance close and call each other darling. A spark in their eye, an affectionate pinch of a bum, a laugh like a teenage girl.
So that’s what love’s always been to me: wild and sweeping. Changing from intense anger to soft care at any moment. Of course, my parents and most of my aunts and uncles all got divorced eventually, but by then it was too late, I’d sponged it all up. It’s part of my very blood. Love is infuriating but worth every fight.
Which brings me here, to a place where love is only real if it can rage like a bonfire and also comfort like a fireplace. It’s both, at once, the pain and the warmth.
It’s why my heart is always cranked to maximum.
HE’S COME UNDONE
I just threw a vintage ashtray across the room in his general direction. It was made of glass, and when it hit the wall it sprayed everywhere, millions of tiny pieces all over the room. Some pieces even made it to the kitchen somehow, skidding across the floor.
I am howling, crying, begging him to stop twisting words. We’ve been like this before, but it’s been worse these past few months, these months where something has happened to him and I don’t know who he is anymore. It feels like he’s a ghost in this house, a ghost that stares infinitely at the TV. It makes me sad and then angry. And then, angrier. The more confused and angry I become, the more it leads us here, to a place where I throw a glass object clean across a room.
Suddenly, there’s a tiny voice. “Guys?” the voice says. It’s Birdie. She always calls us “guys” which is usually the cutest, but right now it is 1:00 a.m. and she is four years old and in her pyjamas in the kitchen, possibly standing right on top of tiny pieces of glass.
The Husband springs up like a saviour, shouting at me, “Look what you’ve done!” and scoops her up, cooing to her gently. He whisks her upstairs, comforting her like World’s Best Dad, leaving me here, World’s Worst Mom, I guess. I can only guess. I don’t know why we are fighting like this, or what’s happening. I’m so unhappy. I miss him and us, and I hate him and us, and I feel trapped, but not in a way that makes me want to break free. No, just in a way that makes me want to understand and fix, a trapping we can somehow transcend, together.
So I sweep up the glass. I sweep and sweep. He comes back. He holds the dust pan. He explains the properties of the glass to me, by way of explaining how something so small could shatter into so many pieces.
And then, we sit on the kitchen floor and talk. We stare at each other across this floor that only a few years earlier we put in ourselves w
hen I was pregnant, tearing it up to reveal layer upon layer of linoleum in every pattern imaginable, decades piled on top of one another, an excavation of another family’s life.
On this night, like all the others before it, neither of us storms off. Instead we talk. We talk and talk until we are calm again. Until one of us laughs. Until one person reaches out to the other and we are in each other’s arms. Until one of us says, Sorry, I’ll do better, and the other answers, No, no, I’m sorry, I will do better.
And so, like every single argument we have ever had, this one turns out okay. Exhausted, we go to bed together. We tangle our bodies up purposefully and kiss goodnight. We fall asleep pledging things will be different.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE BOMB
THE UMBRELLA
The umbrella is bright green, like a neon lime. I climb into the passenger seat of our car one morning when The Husband is driving me to the subway, and there it is, sticking out from under my seat. Clearly it’s a woman’s umbrella. But whose? And why? I lean over to get it, but it’s jammed under the seat. You might even say purposefully jammed, in hindsight, but you just don’t know, do you? I question The Husband and he seems unfazed, saying it must belong to a male colleague of his that he drove to a football game. I point out it’s a pretty fancy, feminine umbrella but he just shrugs.
All I know is there’s a woman from work he told me about a few weeks ago. It came out of nowhere, that revelation, like a scene in a David Mamet play. Something we were just speaking about, as an idea, not actually talking about, you know?
INT. BEDROOM — NIGHT
The HUSBAND and WIFE are lying in bed. They have just had sex and are looking up at the ceiling, legs in a tangle.
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