In preparation for packing up the house, I started going through all our belongings, a task that quickly became overwhelming, stifling. Where had all this stuff come from? So many things I’d really cared about had been destroyed by this house—like my precious “shoe archive,” a duffel bag in which I’d stowed shoes I no longer wore but couldn’t part with, like my black Justin cowboy boots (1990–96), my thigh-high flat suede boots (1992–94), my six-inch-wedge platforms (1992), and my ivory suede sample-sale Manolo Blahniks (so very 1995), which had been destroyed by mold after the basement got wet. We’d had to toss out a dozen garbage bags’ worth of toys and clothes and tools that had been ruined before the basement renovation, so I couldn’t understand how there could be this much left. There were pots and pans of every kind and serving platters and wine coolers and cheese knives and ice buckets and at least a dozen vases and a seashell-themed cheese plate and an asparagus steamer and a fondue pot with its color-coded skewers and other equipment for entertaining. Everything that was left seemed to mock the security I had thought these items represented, the grown-up life in which I would be safe and happy. Many of these items were wedding presents, which made my heart ache. I felt I should return all the gifts with a note of apology; the givers had offered me and Chris all their love and faith (and a piece of cookware) and we had squandered it.
Why hadn’t we registered for video games and a big television set and video cameras, items Chris would have loved? All this gleaming stuff of dinner parties felt like a reproach, archeological evidence that I had expected Chris to step into my dream of what our life would be.
I became a whirling dervish, shedding belongings as if they were tainted with anthrax. I dropped off fifteen bags of clothes and tablecloths and shoes and random household items like board games, two ice chests and all sorts of other things at the Salvation Army store. I kept searching for things Chris would want. In the end, I gave him our collection of everyday plates and cups and glasses—which had been given to us a wedding gift by my dearest friend, Eric—because I wanted Chris to have something from our life together. I deflated the AeroBed that, propped on cardboard boxes, had made the third-floor guest room look real; I gave away the cheap furniture I’d bought to dress up the house. I set almost-new stockpots and omelette pans out on the sidewalk in front of the house with a hand-drawn sign that read PLEASE TAKE. I needed to get lighter, have less, want less, need less.
But the past kept making its presence known. Chris got news about one of his best friends who’d disappeared from our lives some years before: Matt, Chris’s best friend from college, and my boyfriend just before I had started dating Chris, had committed suicide in California.
We hadn’t even known that Matt had been living in California. Dynamic, hilarious, gregarious, good-looking, Matt had been at the center of what was happening in a room. He loved music and being cool, and he was really good at being cool. But he had been struggling with depression and drugs and alcoholism and threatening suicide for years; he was furious at the world for not handing him the life he wanted to live. Chris and Matt’s other friends had done everything they could to help, but Matt was too in love with being dark.
Matt had been the best man at our wedding, and he had been Chris’s best friend for a long, long time. Matt was the first person Chris had met at NYU; an oft-told story about the two of them on the rooftop of the city dorms and something about a sandwich one of them was eating always made them laugh. A big group of us ran around in a pack in the East Village for years, spending Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday nights out together, going to see bands, drinking too much cheap beer. At our wedding, Matt had made the only toast, a twenty-minute saga that kept everyone in the room enraptured, earned long and lusty applause, and silenced anyone who would have spoken after him. His toast was the benediction for our marriage.
I was standing in the dark purple living room of our house when Chris got the call on his cell phone; he’d been on his way out the door after spending an evening with Zack. Before he had even hung up, I knew what the news must be. I sat down, suddenly heavy, and my legs shook. When he put the phone back on its cradle, Chris turned to me and said, “Matt,” nodding his head slowly.
I stood up and went to him and we held each other, wrapped up in the memories of everything we had shared with Matt—the youth that was gone, the dreams that we’d all had of what our lives would be—and the strange confusion of being so close and being apart at the same time. I pulled back and looked up at Chris and his sad eyes and said, “It feels like the end of something, doesn’t it?” He just nodded, and we held on to each other some more.
We planned for both of us to go to the memorial service, but at the last minute I cancelled the babysitter. Matt had belonged to Chris; Matt still belonged to Chris. I didn’t want the memorial service to turn into a eulogy for the end of our marriage, too. I hadn’t seen any of Chris’s friends since we broke up, and I couldn’t bear the thought of marking two deaths on one day.
Out of the blue a few weeks later, after Zack and I had come back from Thanksgiving in Illinois, Chris decided to take Zack home to see his mother over New Year’s, a surprise move that would have him traveling with Zack alone for the very first time right smack in the middle of the holiday crush. I chalked it up to his feeling alone after having spent Thanksgiving by himself in his apartment with a bottle of bourbon. So I said sure and seized the opportunity, planning a weekend ski trip over the New Year’s weekend with two friends. I was thrilled Zack was going to be with Grandma and all the cousins; I knew that he would have a great time. Chris and Zack left town and I hopped in my friend Patrick’s car and made the five-hour trek with him to Vermont; Alix would meet us there the next day.
But the winter cold with which Chris had boarded the plane turned into a full-blown sinus infection when he was in Illinois. He started to slide into a crisis, and the two- and three-times-daily phone calls from him—theoretically about giving me updates on Zack’s doings, actually about how Chris was so miserably sick and so unhappy during the visit—started to drain me. He complained about the flight, the hell of travel, and the horror of having inane, stupid humanity all around him; he complained about his mother, his sister, the way his mother and his sister talked over the television, and how his sister’s husband just kept turning up the volume until Chris couldn’t tolerate the din; he complained about his sinus infection, his boss, his company’s Web site, and all the work he was being asked to do remotely. All the while his anger, his anger, his anger was pressing into my cell phone and pounding into my skull. This time, though, he wasn’t mad at me; his anger wasn’t my fault. But I still felt that he was asking me to help him carry it.
These repetitive conversations with Chris made me feel that I was living my own version of Groundhog Day. They were conversations we had had—or, more honestly, monologues I’d been captive to—when we were married. As his wife (still his wife), I could read all the signs that he was starting to nosedive: The amped-up energy, his cyclical arguments to himself, his pressing need to talk to me at great length. I guessed that the initial elation of being freed from our marriage had started to wane but not much else had changed in his life. He was overwhelmed by hating his job, a job I had assumed he would quit when he left me, the same job he’d been suffering miserably for eight or nine years now. He was still trapped in the cycle of needing enough money to live but then not having enough time to work on his movies, his company, his dreams. And now he’d sacrificed one of his release valves for this stress because everything that he hated in his life couldn’t be my fault anymore.
I knew Chris was trying to puzzle his way out of feeling trapped in his life, but I didn’t want to help him with that, dammit, because he’d puzzled his way out of our marriage! I understood that Chris was missing me, since this was the first time he was visiting his family since we’d broken up. I had missed him when I was at my parents’ house, too; I’d felt his absence when I needed someone to commiserate with
after the holiday dishes had been washed and put away and it was time to take stock of the ways the people you love most make you crazy. It was good to have a partner to remind you who you were as an adult when you found yourself facing your teenage self.
But I felt like I deserved a break. To be caught in these very same circular, solve-nothing conversations with him while I was skiing with friends and flirting with my cell phone boyfriend was more than I could take. I did my best to be polite, but I could feel anger come flooding back. I didn’t want to comfort him or console him or commiserate with him. I wanted to punish him, though I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I retreated into monosyllables, but Chris didn’t even notice; here he was, needing me and erasing me at the same time.
Every time I hung up with him I was angry, and hurt, and trying to hide both feelings from my friends. I was ashamed that I didn’t know how not to make room for him in my new life. My friends were confused, as everyone always was, by the way Chris and I still seemed connected. “Cut him loose!” one of them said in a joking way, trying to make light of my mood as we drank our wine over a fireside dinner. I was going to try. There was my New Year’s resolution.
When we returned from our respective vacations, I decided to act as if Chris didn’t exist, and the blur of preparing for the move out of the house and into the new apartment made that possible. I felt like I was holding my breath for three weeks straight, waiting to get the house packed up so Z and I could start over again in our new home. I took Zack over to see the apartment a few times, to prepare him for the idea that he would be living somewhere new. He took to the place instantly, pumping his little two-year-old legs furiously as he ran up and down (and up and down) the long hallway that stretched from the foyer to the still-empty bedrooms in the back of the apartment, his footsteps and laughter echoing off the high ceilings. I felt the tingle of anticipation, of moving into a place that had never been a home to the three of us, of claiming something as just mine.
It was so important to me to get this transition right. I had typed up a long list of every single renovation and repair I’d had done on the house, with the name and phone number of the workmen who’d completed it, to hand over to the buyers. I was disclosing everything, even tasks and work I didn’t need to, because I was afraid that after I’d moved out, I’d find myself lying in bed awake on rainy nights, waiting for the phone to ring.
Just around this time, as luck would have it. I ended up at a business meeting with a feng shui healer and lifestyle guru, Ellen Whitehurst, and we talked through a range of ideas for possible partnerships with Redbook. At the end of the meeting, I couldn’t keep myself from asking Ellen for advice, since she is an expert in the ancient Chinese practice that believes your home and your luck are intertwined: “I think I’m cursed by my house, and I’m getting ready to sell it. What can I do to make sure the house lets go of me? I’m afraid I won’t be free of it.”
Ellen asked me a question or two to understand just what I was talking about, and my whole story came tumbling out in a torrent of words, as it always does. Ellen just calmly looked at me across the table and said, “We can take care of this. We can fix this.” I almost swooned with relief.
She sent me an e-mail a few days later with two different “cures” to help break my ties with the house. I read the e-mail and loved her suggestions, their poetic nature and elegance. One was a visualization, which I practiced every night for two weeks: me imagining the house whirling away from me, like Dorothy’s house in the tornado before she lands in Oz. But I particularly loved the way Ellen recommended that I bless my new home: On the first night in the apartment, fill a basket with a box of coarse salt, a loaf of bread, a bottle of red wine. Then, pour some salt in a dish and put it in the basket. Pour a glass of wine. Tear off a piece of bread, dip the bread in the salt, eat it, and drink the wine, all while walking from room to room with the basket on my arm, carefully and potently envisioning the new life I wanted to see unfold in each room, down to the most minute detail.
It sounded lovely, and just reading the e-mail and telling all my friends about how the idea conjured a sense of calm in my head was comfort enough. I intended to do it, but then the labors of packing up my entire life with a two-year-old underfoot got in the way.
Moving day arrived on a brutal, bitter-cold day in January, the temperature well below freezing for the second week in a row. My family—Mom and Dad, both brothers, and Scott’s wife, Kelly—all trooped up to Brooklyn to help me get unpacked. After three weeks spent packing up the house while trying to take care of Zack and do my job, I finally just gave in and paid the movers to pack the rest—easily the best $500 I have ever spent. And despite everything I’d given away in my panic to shed my past life, I still had nine or ten extra-large boxes of glassware and kitchen stuff. It was a nice reminder that no matter what had happened to me in the past year, I was now and forever the daughter of a Southern woman who really knows how to throw a party. Scott and Kelly started tackling the kitchen and my father took on the most important job of all, which was to get Zack’s crib set up in his bedroom so he could come back home to me that night. After Dad was finished, he called me into Zack’s bedroom, which I’d painted a beautiful, bright spring green, a color I believed would help my son keep growing into his naturally sunny personality. I was startled when I walked into the bedroom to see that the crib took up most of the space in the little room. I knew the room was just a little over eight feet by six feet, but suddenly it seemed too small.
I felt panic light up in my chest. Oh, God, this will never work.
As my head spun, my father drew my attention to the heat riser in the corner of the room, saying that the crib couldn’t be too close to it because it was blazing hot and Zack might burn himself. But if the crib wasn’t going to be close to the riser, then it would have to be in the middle of the room, and that meant the dresser and the rocking chair wouldn’t fit. I couldn’t not have the rocking chair that I’d rocked Zack to sleep in every night since he was born. We needed to keep our rituals in place! He needed to feel safe here. I needed to feel safe here.
I started to cry; I couldn’t help it.
My mother had come into the bedroom as this was happening. My father steered me to the windowsill to sit down and my mother came over and laid her hand on my shoulder and said, “There, there. Everything will be fine after a time. You just need to get adjusted is all. This is a beautiful apartment and you and Zack will be very happy here. The room is plenty big enough and we’ll figure out how to make it all fit.”
I gulped a few times, and just drank in the feeling of my parents standing there wishing for things to be better for me. I’d believed myself to be the “strong one,” in the family, the one they counted on to get things done and do the right things. But it felt so, so good to be small and sad and be allowed to be just that.
Again, I was surprised to feel the bad in the good. This was supposed to be my day of beginnings, but the truth is there would be no Here and There, no Before and After. I needed to continue to find the way to make peace with the challenges of the way every day contained a little sad and a little good, the way the grief was a constant undercurrent to my moving-forward life.
Much later in the afternoon, Chris came by to drop off Zack. Zack tumbled in the front door, thrilled to see my family and delighted with all the commotion, all the boxes and paper. Just seeing his beaming face was enough to take my blood pressure down a notch. I dropped to my knees to catch his running hug, which nearly bowled me over.
As my family and I continued our furious unpacking, Zack went to look out of the three big windows in the living room. He spotted my friend Kim approaching the building and called out her name: “Kimmmmm! Kimmmmm!” She’d come to see the new place and congratulate us, and she was carrying a bunch of tulips, a basket, and a shopping bag filled with a bottle of red wine, a box of coarse salt, and a loaf of bread. Here she was again, helping me keep my life moving forward, just as she had rescued me and Zac
k on Chris’s moving day. I was touched beyond words, a lump in my throat.
Hours later, when my family had packed themselves back up into their cars and driven home to Philadelphia, and my sweet, happy son was asleep in his crib in his brand-new room with its bright, happy paint—and the rocking chair and dresser in place, after my father and brother did some finagling—I went into the kitchen and started my ritual of blessing. Because Kelly and Scott had unpacked my kitchen, I was able to find a wine glass and a little bowl for the salt. I walked down the hall with the basket on my arm and started in Zack’s playroom, imagining him making ever-more-complex arrangements of track on the big train table in the ocean blue room, with his dad’s help; and then I imagined turning the room into a place for him to do his homework and play video games as he got older, with a built-in desk and bookshelves. I went into my bedroom and envisioned it all furnished and finished, with a cozy warm-gray color on the walls, and an aqua ceiling that I could gaze at every night as I lay in bed. I looked at the bed and dared to think about sharing it with someone again someday; this made my heart race not from titillation but from anxiety, but I just held the image in my mind. I went through every room this way, pausing to conjure all the good moments I hoped to create there with my son, letting myself conjure my best-case scenario for what my life as a single mother could look like.
Falling Apart in One Piece Page 19