by Erin Duffy
“Yes,” I said, pushing the memory from my clouded mind because I couldn’t stand to have it in there for another second. “I’m so happy you’re here,” I said. I sank into a chair next to her. “What am I going to do?”
“You’re going to take some time to process everything, and to take care of yourself. Then, you’re going to start over.”
“That’s a lovely thought for someone who doesn’t have an infant.”
“I’ll take care of him. You take care of you.”
“Okay,” I agreed, because no one else was going to take care of me, and I figured I’d better get used to that. I dragged myself into my room, which was a complete mess, but I didn’t really care. It was my bedroom, and my bedroom alone now, and that meant if I wanted to empty out Owen’s entire dresser looking for someone else’s underwear, and leave the contents strewn all over the floor, I could. I rolled around in the bed like I was a warm donut trying to coat myself in sprinkles. Owen’s side of the bed was usually off-limits; he didn’t even like it if our feet touched while he was sleeping, and now I wasn’t sure how to handle all of the extra space. Was I supposed to just keep my side, because I liked it there? Or sleep on Owen’s side, because I could? Or sleep in the middle so that I didn’t have to decide what side of the bed to sleep on? Part of me wondered if I should get a sleeping bag out of the attic and sleep on the floor, removing the bed from the equation entirely. But I liked the bed. I was positive that Owen and Dee Dee never slept together in my bed because I was incredibly particular about how I made it. My grandmother once worked as a maid in a hotel, and she taught me how to make absurdly tight hospital corners that were nearly impossible to move. I spent no less than five minutes every morning smoothing my fluffy, downy, pale green duvet across the mattress until there were no creases or indentations anywhere. A box-pleated dust ruffle skimmed the floor underneath it, hiding tote bags, photo albums, paperbacks awaiting donation at the library book drive, and what I called my “pre-baby” clothes that would be more aptly called “clothes I will never fit into again.” It was admittedly frilly, and admittedly girly, and I admittedly didn’t care when Owen complained about those things one bit. The bed was my happy place. If Owen so much as sat on it during the day, it was obvious. There was no way in hell he and Dee Dee rolled around in it without my noticing. None. It was now the only thing in the entire house I was comfortable touching without ski gloves.
I couldn’t get the sickening thoughts to stop running through my head. My marriage is over. My family is broken. The demolition expert’s name is Dee Dee. Her hair is blond and in perpetual beach waves, even though it’s not beach season. Owen is with her now. I am alone. There was an empty plastic bag from the dry cleaner hanging on the doorknob of Owen’s closet, and I wondered which shirts he took with him when he left. There was usually a pair of sneakers tossed in the corner next to the dresser, but those were gone, too, as was the red sweater he’d left thrown over the back of the armchair by the window. He’s gone. His dry cleaning, and his sweater, and his sneakers are all with him, and I am here alone in our giant bed to fend for myself and our son. I don’t know how to do this. Plus, I just noticed that the paint is chipped on the wall opposite my bed, down by the floor molding, and a crack is starting to spread up the plaster. I don’t know how to paint. There are lots of things I don’t know how to do. That includes how to get up.
“YOU’RE GETTING IN the shower,” Antonia informed me the following morning as she deftly yanked the blankets off my bed, leaving my lower body exposed. For some reason, I was wearing one of Owen’s blue cotton T-shirts, the one that was so soft and thin you could almost see through it, and a pair of my cotton underwear, the one that was so old and ratty you could almost see through it. I wasn’t sure why I didn’t have on pajama bottoms, or at least a pair of cotton shorts. I assumed it required too much effort to find them, but I couldn’t remember, so that was just a guess. The T-shirt was both torturous and comforting—I wanted to curl up inside of it and at the same time rip it to shreds. At this moment, I couldn’t clearly identify any emotion at all. They were all tangled and knotted like necklaces in the bottom of a jewelry box. I wished Antonia could release them with a safety pin—poke and prod the massive, snarled ball until she nudged one free and untangled the whole mess, but she couldn’t. No one could untangle this. I was pretty sure I was going to stay knotted forever.
“Okay,” I finally agreed. Antonia reached over and gently clasped one of my hands in hers. She wrapped the other one around my waist, and slowly helped me to my feet, like the problem was with my leg and not my heart. We walked together into the master bathroom, and I sat on the edge of the porcelain tub while Antonia turned on the steam shower. I never used this tub, even though it was one of the things that I’d liked most about the house when we bought it. Now, as I sat on it with my head hanging low because it required some kind of superhuman effort to hold it upright, I noticed that there seemed to be a ring around the bottom of the tub, a watermark that hadn’t been buffed away. Was Dee Dee in my tub? I wondered. Were they taking baths in here while I was at the playground behind the elementary school or at the aquarium in Norwalk?
“What are you thinking about?” Antonia asked, as if she knew that my mind had wandered somewhere dangerous and unnecessarily painful.
“If Dee Dee and Owen ever had sex in this bathtub,” I replied, honestly.
“You can’t do that to yourself. This is your home. You’ll drive yourself crazy wondering.”
“How do I not wonder, Antonia?” I asked. “Everywhere I look all I see are Owen and Dee Dee naked and laughing at his stupid wife who didn’t even realize what was happening in her own house. I wonder if they did it on my dining room table, or on my living room rug or on the kitchen counter. Every inch of this house is contaminated. There’s no way to get rid of her—believe me, I tried. I read the labels on every cleaning solution under my kitchen sink, and they promised to rid my house of mold, mildew, grease, grime, dust, dander, ants, roaches, and rust, but not one of them promised to wash away tramps named Dee Dee who ate my waffles and slept with my husband, in no particular order.”
“Okay. So what do you want to do?” she asked.
“I need to move,” I said, the immediacy of the thought shooting currents through my body.
“I don’t think that’s a bad idea at all. There’s no reason for you to stay here.”
“Do you think I need permission to move?” I asked.
“You’d have to ask your lawyer. If his name is on the deed I’d imagine you do. But as long as you stay local, I don’t know why he’d care. You should talk to him. Be rational, and calm, and let him know that you don’t want to be in this house. All things considered, he shouldn’t give you a hard time.”
“I need a new Realtor.” For some reason, the emotional knot loosened just enough to allow me to locate a single emotion: grief. Tears came violently, almost as forcefully as the water that sprayed out of the showerhead and all over the beige tile on the floor.
“It’s okay,” Antonia said, dropping on her knees in front of me and wrapping her arms tightly around my hunched, tired body.
“This isn’t fair. This isn’t supposed to happen like this. I was a good wife,” I whispered, because the tears were choking my words before they could make their way out of my mouth.
“I know you were,” she assured me.
“I wasn’t jealous, or petty, or difficult. I didn’t pick arguments for the sake of picking them. I bought his favorite toothpaste at the drugstore and made him pork chops with vinegar peppers just like you showed me every time he came home from a business trip.”
“And I’m sure they were delicious,” Antonia said.
“Why did he leave us? Why weren’t we enough for him?” I finally had the courage to ask the big question, the same one I’d bet every woman whose marriage ended in divorce asked herself countless times and could never answer.
“It doesn’t have anything to do with you. H
e’s being an idiot. He’s probably about to have some kind of midlife crisis, and is trying to reclaim his youth by dating his high school girlfriend. He’s a cliché. The problem is with him. It’s not with you.”
“I didn’t think he had it in him. I didn’t think he was the type to have an affair, you know? I thought he was too honest, or too righteous to ever do it. How did I miss this? I feel like he’s not the man I thought I married. Who have I been with this whole time?”
“You don’t need to make this into a Dr. Phil episode. It’s simple, bella. He reunited with her, he liked going over all their old times, and she doesn’t have a toddler wrapped around her leg or pulling on her beach waves all day long.”
“I told you about those, huh?”
“Yeah. You did.”
“I wasn’t jealous, Antonia. I wasn’t. I wasn’t worried, or nervous at all. She was just a blip on my radar. I was happy and thought Owen was happy and that that meant there was nothing to worry about. I should’ve known. She helped us move in. I thought she was just being nice. How could I miss that? She came by before we’d even moved into the house!”
“HI, GUYS! WELCOME to the neighborhood!” Dee Dee sang, and I mean sang, as if she were auditioning for a Broadway show. The trip from Chicago had seemed endless. Riding eight hundred miles in a U-Haul one month postpartum now topped the list of things there was no shot in hell I’d ever do again.
“Dee Dee? Is that you?” Owen asked, as he wiped his hand on the back pockets of his jeans and hopped out the back of the truck. “What are you doing here?”
“I wanted to say thank you for the business, and to welcome you to the neighborhood. I knew you drove yourselves out here with the baby, so I thought maybe you could use some help unloading! Claire, the last thing you need to be doing right now is lugging heavy boxes around, right?”
I walked around to the driver’s-side door and eyed the five enormous men standing in the street. “You hired us movers?” I asked. I’d heard that it wasn’t uncommon for Realtors to leave a bottle of wine at the house, or a basket of flowers, or to make some kind of gesture to the new homeowner to say “thank you” and “welcome to the neighborhood.” I’d never heard of someone showing up with a team of large men to help unload your furniture. “This is seriously amazing! All I want in the world right now is for Bo’s room to be ready for him. I don’t want him sleeping in the middle of boxes. I don’t know what to say.”
“You don’t have to say anything! These guys will get your truck unloaded, pronto. Bo’s room will be ready before you know it.” She pushed a piece of her hair behind her ear and it was shiny, and bouncy, and annoyingly perfect. “Now. Let’s get you guys inside. You’ve spent enough time with this truck, so leave this job to the pros. In the meantime, I brought a bottle of wine. How about we go inside and celebrate your arrival back home?”
“I’m down for a glass of wine,” Owen said, rolling his head in circles and kneading the muscles in his upper back. “I’d love one, actually. I’m sure we can find glasses in here somewhere.” He motioned toward the boxes in the truck as the starting defensive line for the New York Giants climbed inside and started lifting furniture like I lifted Twix bars.
“I brought some with me!” Dee Dee singsonged.
Of course she did.
“I’M SO STUPID,” I moaned.
“She’s a knee-jerk reaction to something, and he’s going to wake up one day and realize that he made a huge mistake. He will. You need to show him that you aren’t breakable.”
“How am I supposed to do that?” I asked, even though I had a few ideas. I’d seen this play out in the tabloids a million times. I could do the revenge body thing, like Khloé Kardashian. Get in kick-ass shape, cut my hair, and wear a beautiful, uncharacteristically bright dress to a red-carpet event, or in my case, the grocery store. That was option number one. The second option was to go the Taylor Swift route, and pen a song about him letting him know without equivocation that we were never getting back together, and have it play all over the radio. The third and least likely option was the J.Lo option, where I’d hire a slew of backup dancers who were barely of legal drinking age, and start dating one of them to prove that young, hot, muscular men were interested in me, despite having breasts that looked like deflated water balloons, and a muffin top that barring surgical intervention would likely stay with me until death. All of these options were good. I had no problem with any of them. The problem was that exactly none of them were applicable to my life. I didn’t have a red carpet, or a record label, or a dance troupe available to make my revenge fantasy come true. I was just Claire Stevens, suburban mother and housewife. That sucked.
“You start by showering and get dressed. I don’t care if you want to wear sweatpants, but put on clothes that you could theoretically wear outside of the house.”
“Uh-huh,” I grunted.
“Then you go and take care of your son. It’s not his fault his dad is an asshole. He doesn’t deserve to lose his loving, normally attentive mother to grief. He needs you. You need him.”
“Uh-huh,” I said again, the tears slowing down at the thought of Bo sitting downstairs with his plastic soccer ball and wondering where both his parents had gone. I was thirty-six years old. Owen ruined a portion of my life, but he’d just changed Bo’s entire life. The entire freakin’ thing. I was the only person in the world who could keep him feeling happy, and safe. “Then what?”
“Then you stop avoiding your mother’s phone calls and let her know how you’re doing. If you don’t she’s going to show up on your doorstep next.”
“I haven’t been avoiding her. I just feel too guilty to talk to her. I don’t want her to worry. I need her to believe that I’m okay because if I now have to deal with the fact that I destroyed her dreams for her own child, while also coming to terms with the fact that I destroyed my dreams for my Bo, I will drown in guilt.”
“There’s no reason on earth for you to feel guilty, Claire. You didn’t do anything! Stop taking the blame for this. Call your mother. Let her know you’re okay. Better yet, start working on actually being okay.”
“You make it sound like I don’t want to do that!” I wailed. “Of course I want that but it’s not that easy, Antonia! It’s not like I can snap my fingers and make everything better. Believe me, I’ve tried.”
“You can find yourself again, Claire. I know you can.”
“Right. I’m sure that’s easy,” I said. “No problem.”
“I’m not saying it’s going to be easy, but you’ll never get there if you don’t stop feeling sorry for yourself. One day at a time. One foot in front of the other. That’s what you need to tell yourself every single morning until the day comes where you can do it without needing to be reminded.”
“Thank you,” I said. I wiped my eyes with the hem of the T-shirt and for a second I thought I caught the scent of Owen’s cologne, or his aftershave, or his hair gel, whatever that particular scent came from I wasn’t entirely sure, but it belonged to Owen and therefore made me nauseous. Antonia was right that I needed to figure out a way to move forward, and while I had no idea how I’d do that at the moment, I could figure it out eventually. Before I did anything, though, before I made one single move, I had to get out of his fucking T-shirt. I stood and drew my shoulders back as if having better posture would somehow make getting on with my life easier, and pulled it over my head. I handed it to Antonia. “Get rid of this,” I said. I wondered briefly if I would come to regret that decision, if maybe there was still a part of me that wanted to keep a few things for nostalgia. Before there were bad times, there were a lot of good times—didn’t they deserve to be remembered?
“I’m going to be here for you every step of the way,” Antonia said, wrapping the shirt into a tiny gray ball. “I can work from the East Coast for a while. I’m here as long as you need me to be here.”
“Bo lives with me, you understand that, right? You won’t be able to sleep past six thirty in the morning eve
n once the entire time you’re here.”
“Sleep is overrated,” she said with a shrug.
“Oh my God. You are the best friend in the entire world. I don’t deserve you.”
“Yes, you do. And I know you’d do the same for me.”
“I hope one day I can.”
“What?” she asked.
“That didn’t come out right.”
“I know what you meant. Now go ahead and get in the shower,” she ordered. “Wash your hair. You’ll feel a million times better.”
I closed the glass door behind me and let the water rinse the last two weeks away. I reached for the pink disposable razor I kept on the bottom shelf of the shower caddy and shaved way too much hair off my legs and my armpits. I washed, exfoliated, rinsed, moisturized, plucked, and brushed, and when I was done, I wrapped myself in a soft beige towel, and raked my wet hair into a ponytail. I’d hoped to feel like a warrior when the whole process was over. I didn’t. Instead, I just felt like a really big mess who was very clean and very well groomed. For now, that would have to be enough.
Chapter 5
ANTONIA HAD MOVED in with me almost a month ago, and I felt like I’d made some serious progress since then. Bo and I went on some long walks in the warm May sunshine and spent some quality time together, strolling around the park at the end of town or sitting on benches to watch the dogs play on the grass, and getting out of the house did a lot to help clear my head. I was very proud of this fact. One Monday we went to the playground, and I pushed him on the swings while the other mothers talked to each other and pretended I wasn’t there, but the playground’s not really a place to make friends when you’re a grown-up, because everyone’s too busy trying to make sure that their child doesn’t fall off a jungle gym, or run toward the gate into the parking lot, or eat twigs off the ground. Two women in tunics sat on a bench drinking out of bright-colored thermoses, and most people would assume it was coffee, but I was fairly certain it was booze, because they were laughing an awful lot and seemed to be having way too good of a time considering they were sitting on a bench in front of monkey bars. I’d like to be friends with those girls. I’d get a shiny green thermos and fill it with a weak mimosa, too, and then sitting on a hot park bench wouldn’t seem so much like cruel and unusual punishment, and more like a brunch picnic. That sounded like a lovely way to spend a morning with a baby in suburbia. Another mom stayed on the periphery and barked into a headset, and she had on shoes with a heel and carried a briefcase, so she was probably working from home for the day, and probably couldn’t wait until she could go back to the office and talk to other women with brains, instead of the loner hanging out at the swing set (me), and the drunks hanging out by the monkey bars (women I wished I was friends with). She didn’t seem unfriendly, she just seemed uninterested, but I couldn’t really blame her because the playground wasn’t interesting at all, it was just more interesting than being in my house, and that was the only criteria it needed to meet for me to feel like it was the best place on earth. I promised myself that the next time I took Bo to the swings I’d brush my hair so that I looked a little less scary and a little more friendly, and bring a thermos, just in case the stars aligned and the drunk girls asked if I wanted to sit down with them. I knew this was unlikely to happen, because I’d seen every John Hughes movie ever made, and the outsider was never invited to sit with the cool kids at their lunch table, but I didn’t care. I decided that I needed to set some new goals for myself, and making a mom friend at the playground was currently at the top of my list.