Separation Anxiety

by Laura Zigman

  “How am I supposed to have options when we still live together?” Gary yells. “If I meet someone, where would I bring her? Home to my family? To my—‘crowded nest’?” He shakes his head. “What good is an open marriage if all the doors and windows are locked?”

  Deirdre looks up from her pad, eager to clarify. “So this is an ‘open marriage’ as opposed to a separation?”

  He waves her away. “I don’t care what you call it. Judy should help me find someone. If the roles were reversed, I would do it for her.”

  “You would help her find a boyfriend.” Deirdre shoots me a little side-eye.

  “Absolutely.” He sits back, crosses his arms over his chest, then turns to me. “You know it’s true.”

  I shrug. “It is true. He would help me. That’s the thing about Gary. He would do anything for me. Even that.”

  Deirdre hugs her mug of tea with both hands, folds her feet up under her long flowing skirt. She’s getting comfortable for the rest of the story. “Tell me about that, Judy.”

  I shrug, then force myself to speak. “The whole thing is just really embarrassing, for both of us,” I whisper. “Our arrangement. Not having enough money to be able to get divorced like normal people.”

  “It sounds like you feel that there’s shame in staying. Shame in not leaving.”

  I blink in disbelief. That’s exactly how I feel.

  “Lots of couples can’t afford to split up right now in this economy,” she says. “Lots of couples with children either stay together, like you, until they figure it out, or they get divorced and double-nest. There’s no single right answer. And this kind of child-centered parenting can buy you some time while you figure things out and everyone adjusts.”

  “But we’re not being child centered. Not really. Gary started sleeping downstairs in the guest room two years ago. Teddy was eleven then, and we told him it was because Gary’s snoring was out of control, which is just a big lie.”

  Gary nods. “Judy’s the one who snores like a barn animal, but she’ll never admit it.”

  I ignore him. “Do you think Teddy knows what’s really going on?” I ask Deirdre.

  “Kids always know.”

  “Do you think we’ve damaged him?”

  “Children are resilient,” she says with a gentleness I’m grateful for, then exhales the way they do in yoga classes to signal a redirection. “I want to come back to Teddy but I need to get a bit more of the big picture. Tell me what kind of work you both do.”

  Gary shifts in his chair. He hates this topic as much as I hate the no-sex topic, but he’s learned to just plow right into his shame. “After I dropped out of law school because of my anxiety, I’ve done SAT and LSAT tutoring; dog walking; worked in a special-needs after-school program. Now I stock snacks in a coworking space for startups. Which is ironic, since I barely know how to use my phone and I hate technology.”

  “What’s the source of your anxiety, Gary?”

  He shrugs, pretending his family résumé is no big deal. “Middle child. Raging alcoholic father. Long-suffering divorced mother. You know, the usual.”

  “It doesn’t sound like ‘the usual,’” Deirdre says. And it isn’t. Both of Gary’s sisters have struggled with drinking over the years (he got sober before we met), and all three of them were estranged from their father, now dead, after the divorce when they were teenagers. But during the years when all our kids were small and we still got together for holidays and birthdays and summer vacations, before Gary had to limit how much time he could spend around his family because it made him too anxious, they were fun: they were loud and angry and volatile, but they were also affectionate and hilarious and inclusive. I was the odd one out—the only child, the lone Jew in a room full of Irish Catholics—always being pulled into a conversation about sports I knew nothing about, or to listen to, and sometimes mediate, a story about some terrible childhood misadventure—near-fatal riptides, sunburns, bouts of food poisoning—that almost felled them all. I loved every minute of it.

  When it’s my turn I tell her that I used to write but don’t anymore.

  “Really, Judy. What did you write before you stopped writing?”

  I feel Gary bristle the way he always does when we get to this part: when the therapist finds out I’m a writer. Or was one. I point to her bookshelf. “There’s a Bird on Your Head. It’s about—”

  Deirdre’s eyes get huge and her voice is full of exclamation points. “Ohmygod! Judy Vogel! The Judy Vogel!” She fans her face with her hands the way women of a certain age do when they’re having a hot flash. “I know it’s highly unprofessional but I’m a little starstruck! You’ll have to sign my book before you leave!”

  Gary shakes his head. “Here we go.”

  Deirdre ignores him. “So what happened after Bird that would make you stop writing? Can you trace the source of your writer’s block?”

  I shrug. “After the PBS series, I wrote two more books, but they both sank without a trace. So I guess I figured I should just stop.” My mind flashes back to an empty chain bookstore: I’m sitting next to a giant sign promoting a signing for my second book, then my third book, somewhere, in another city not my own, fondling a cup full of black Sharpies and staring into space as people walk by without stopping. I’m alone but for the bird on my head.

  Gary shrugs. “I told her to do a sequel.”

  “And I told him to keep playing gigs.”

  “You’re a musician, Gary?” She checks her notes, as if she’s missed something.

  “I was a musician. A bass player. Before and after I tried law school.”

  “His band opened for Aerosmith. Right after college. Before I knew him.”

  “Once. And it was all downhill from there.”

  I ignore him. “He’s really talented.”

  Deirdre looks up, impressed. “Really! So why did you stop, Gary?”

  He folds his arms across his chest. “The venues we played were terrible.”

  I sigh. “They weren’t all terrible.”

  “I’d say The Barking Crab and The Lobster Claw were terrible. Although they had great clam rolls.” He turns to Deirdre. “I like a grilled bun.”

  “Maybe if you’d agreed to leave the state once in a while you might have found some venues you didn’t hate.”

  “I didn’t want to abandon Teddy.”

  “Working isn’t abandonment!”

  It’s when we start fighting about money that Deirdre makes the hand gesture for a time-out. Then she leans forward and clasps her hands together solemnly. She’s either going to tell us our time is up or ask us to leave and never come back.

  “Lots of couples fail in their careers, but it doesn’t mean the marriage has to fail, too.”

  Gary and I look straight at each other and then back at Deirdre. She’s now the one with a giant bird on her head.

  “Wow. Okay,” Gary says, trying to collect himself.

  Deirdre looks at him and then at me. “Did I say something wrong?”

  “Kind of.” He’s vibrating as if he’s stuck his finger in an electrical socket. “I wouldn’t exactly say Judy ‘failed’ in her career. No one works harder than she does, and she’s had some bad breaks. And I’d hardly say three books is something to be ashamed of.”

  Now I’m nodding. “And Gary didn’t ‘fail’ in his career, either. It’s not his fault he has these mental health challenges, and despite them he couldn’t be a more supportive spouse or better father.”

  Deirdre tries to apologize but Gary shrugs her off. “We’re used to it. Everybody says the same thing. ‘What happened to Judy’s career?!’ ‘You should have just finished law school!’ There are no guarantees. Life doesn’t owe you anything. That’s why ‘failure’ is such a big topic for us.”

  “Very big,” I confirm.

  “It’s kind of our hot button.”

  “Very hot.”

  “We could explore that,” Deirdre says, with equal parts hope and desperation, glancing at the sec
ret clock partially hidden behind the box of tissues. “We still have twenty minutes left.”

  We nod politely, but when we look at each other again a spark jumps between us. My hands are already underneath the dog sling and Gary is already reaching for his jacket.

  * * *

  Out on the street, on a stretch of Harvard Square where, when I was growing up, there had once been three record stores, two bookstores, four coffeehouses, and a revival house movie theater but where now there’s just a big stupid CVS and yet another bank chain I’ve never heard of, we walk toward the car. There is an unmistakable bounce in our step, which wasn’t there an hour ago. Escaping someplace we don’t want to be has always given us joy. It’s the happiest we’ve been in a long time. It’s almost unseemly how elated we are.

  “I’m so glad we left early,” Gary says.

  “I know, right?”

  “I mean, why stay? She wasn’t going to help us. She’s no Marriage Whisperer.”

  “Is there even such a thing?”

  We make big smug faces now, like we’ve just cut our losses by leaving a shitty restaurant without ordering dessert. Which doesn’t make sense: If we’re so in sync about leaving things we hate, how bad can our marriage actually be? Wouldn’t we both have already left if it were really that bad?

  We step off a curb and a silent Toyota Prius comes out of nowhere and almost runs us over. Gary pushes me out of the way just in time. “Stupid Priuses with your stupid silent battery-engines!” he yells out after the car. “Why don’t you make any fucking noise?”

  The driver rolls down his window, sticks his head out as far as it will go. “The plural of Prius is Prii, asshole!”

  Gary runs into the street after the car, giving the Prius the finger. Breathless, he walks back toward me. “Massachusetts drivers. They almost kill you and then correct your Latin.”

  Inside the car, I pull the harness strap of the seat belt gently around the dog and me until it clicks while Gary yanks on his seat belt and flips up the visor. In the short time inside Deirdre’s office, the sun had moved, coming in sharply now between two gorgeous maples and bathing us in an orangey-red light. “Not to mention the bad shoes,” Gary adds, an endnote to his rant. “Another fifty minutes we won’t get back. Or, actually—” He looks at his phone screen. “Twenty-four minutes. A new record.”

  As Gary starts the car and slowly pulls into traffic, I stare out the window, hugging the dog like a big stuffed animal. Autumn, my favorite season, has always made me sad—the brightness of the sky and trees, the promise of hope and renewal always feels like a trick, an invitation for disappointment, instead of a gift. Now I feel the creep of regret. Maybe we made a mistake leaving early. Maybe, this time, we should have stayed. I think of Deirdre’s fuzzy clogs and remember the similar pair I bought my mother when she first got sick, when everything became about comfort and softness and compassion. There was so much pain, so quickly; even the skin on her feet hurt.

  The Bird on My Head

  For most of my life, I had trouble describing the signature look my mother gave me. Which was strange, given that my unofficial hobbies were recreational psychoanalyzing, conspiracy theorizing, and watching serial killer documentaries. In short: human behavior. Every child’s first science project is mapping and analyzing their parents’ emotional DNA, and while the official Human Genome Project took thirteen years to complete, figuring out your mother—or trying to—is a never-ending farce. It requires decades of data collection, the patience of Margaret Mead, and the skills of an FBI profiler. All I did was whine and complain and make mental notes. No wonder I failed to crack her code.

  Proof of my efforts exist, though: there’s an anthropological field guide the size of the old New York City phone book inside my head, filled with all the “faces” and “looks” she made over the course of my lifetime, and hers: dog-eared, with Talmudic-length interpretations and annotations scrawled in the margins, it’s the homemade version of Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Like the real one, my collection of deconstructed facial-muscle contractions and gestures had expressions universal enough to make labeling easy—especially the negative ones: the “majoring-in-art-history-won’t-get-you-a-job-with-benefits-but-a-teaching-certificate-will” face; the “what-will-become-of-you?” face; the “I-don’t-understand-why-you’re-still-not-married” face; and the “I-don’t-like-your-husband” face, to name only a few. But while monkeys and humans use the same muscles to laugh and show rage, I’d bet my door-stopper-size tome that monkey-mothers are physically incapable of the faces human mothers make when their daughters’ lives don’t go according to plan. Expressions of maternal disappointment are luxuries of domestication, not the wild, and their variations are infinite. There isn’t a book—real or fake—big enough to contain them all.

  For years, I opened mine to the same page and pointed to the one unidentified, uncaptioned look I could never get past: my mother, head tilted, brow furrowed, facial muscles a patchwork of bemusement, confusion, and disapproval. Sometimes she just gave me the look; other times she added a verbal component: “You’re so weird!” But whatever the delivery, I always got the message: no matter what I said, no matter what I did, my mother didn’t “get” me. Anyone who reads or watches the news these days knows that there are far worse things to overcome than not being completely adored by your mother, but being told you’re weird at a young age almost certainly guarantees you’ll feel weird as an adult. Some children grow stronger in the broken places, like bones; others grow sadder. I did both.

  One day, when I still lived in New York and worked for Black Bear, after a meeting with a boss who didn’t get me and couldn’t stand me, Glenn followed me back to my office and poked me.

  “Did you see that?”

  “See what?”

  “The way she looked at you!”

  I shrugged. The boss had looked at me like I was incredibly weird. So what else was new?

  “She looked at you like you had a bird on your head!”

  I looked at Glenn like she had a bird on her head. Because I finally had a caption—the “there’s-a-bird-on-your-head” face.

  No longer would I strain to describe the look to therapists—the people I paid never to look at me like I had a bird on my head. No longer would I think feeling like I had a bird on my head was all in my head: my mother had looked at me that way my whole life. And who, frankly, could blame her? At four, I’d admitted to a fear of clouds; at seven, to a fear of carbonated beverages. Her face worked overtime during my teenage years: at fifteen, I’d convinced my parents to let me spend a semester at a friend’s high school—in Holland; at seventeen, I was still taking—and trying to get gym credit for—weekly pantomime classes. By the time I reached adulthood she could have used a face-making double: Gary and I got married two years after having Teddy instead of before he was born; I waited until my children’s books were out of print before finally getting an author website and blog to promote myself. Nothing I did made sense to her, which never made sense to me.

  * * *

  To be fair, sometimes nothing I did made sense to me, either. Like when Gary and I moved back to Boston, where I’d grown up, and where my parents still lived before they both got sick. Though it was initially Glenn’s idea because of her transfer there, and though Gary had agreed—he’d loved Boston when he went to Berklee and always wanted to return to New England eventually—the secret fantasy of living close to people who didn’t get me was wholly mine. Sure, it would be great to move someplace where a friend was already waiting, but it was more than that. Facing your demons was what emotionally secure people did, and in a strange case of mistaken self-identity, I thought I was one of those people: I’d survived a lifetime of my mother’s “what-will-become-of-you?” looks and somehow managed to couple and procreate; I’d earned a living without the teaching certificate she’d always urged me to get as an insurance policy against failure; an animated PBS series had been based on my first book.
Hadn’t I earned the right to take my L-shaped fingers off my forehead? Freud said there are no accidents, and my move home proved him right: for all my weirdness, for all my insistence on doing things my way, it turned out that I was completely normal at my core:

  I wanted to make the bird on my head disappear. I wanted my mother to like me.

  The Forehead

  I’ve been friends with Sari Epstein, a creativity-life-coach-guru with a national following, for less than a year. And by “friends” I mean only on the Internet. But it’s been an important friendship to me—and by “friendship” I mean me following Sari Epstein on social media—reading every word of her creativity-life-coach-guru updates, taking screenshots of every one of her creativity-life-coach-guru photos so that I can creep on them for extra details you just can’t get without the creeping. My feed on each social media platform is full of active creative-types, constantly and shamelessly self-promoting themselves, posting about their daily output: their word counts, their book deals, their bookstore appearances, their downward facing dogs and yoga handstands. I would be doing this, too, if I had any creative output, or could do yoga, but nothing ever happens when I open a new notebook and uncap a pen. Whether it’s in the morning, or the afternoon, or at night before bed; whether I’m home alone with a few minutes in between Well/er pieces, or out at a coffee shop, happily eavesdropping and people watching for inspiration; the same paralysis sets in. My mind goes blank. It seems I am closed for business up there, too.

  Maybe that’s why I become secretly obsessed with Sari Epstein: her workshops and weekend retreats promise those who attend will magically rediscover their creative spark. Could this be my answer? I’m still not sure.

  What I am sure about is that something is off with Sari Epstein’s appearance. I’ve known this for a while, but it isn’t until I show a certain picture of her to Glenn—who knows everything about everything—that the mystery is finally solved and it all falls into place. We’re at our favorite restaurant, Shepherd, in Harvard Square, sitting near the windows, when I show her Sari Epstein’s luminous Ali MacGraw–like head shot on my phone. Glenn puts her hand over her eyes and squints like we’re on a beach at high noon.