by Kim Perel
When I went back to New York City that fall to teach a weekly class at NYU, I walked the maze of Village streets crying. Just as my cells had settled when I moved there, they now were all a jumble again. In Providence, I tried in vain to find a ballet class, a restaurant I loved, a supermarket that sold canned chipotles. No one looked like me or dressed like me or seemed to want the things I wanted. In fact, my life began to feel very much like the one I’d had as a young girl, the one where I was a misfit and longed to get away.
But it wasn’t so easy this time. Here was a man I loved—loved! Here was a son I adored. Ten minutes away were my parents, delighted to have me back and grateful to live so close to their grandchild. Before I knew it, I had another baby, a daughter we named Grace. Before I knew it, my son was already in nursery school. Before I knew it, my father was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. Now I was the grateful one, able to be at the hospital in a matter of minutes each time they called to tell me he had taken a turn for the worse. I knew these roads. Like kinesthetic memory, I drove them without having to think about anything except being at his side. For the last week of his life, I slept on a chair in his hospital room, knowing that my own little family waited just down the road.
In 2002, the unthinkable happened. My funny, smart five-year-old daughter, Grace, died suddenly from a virulent form of strep. Although in the days that followed, friends and family came from Oregon and California, North Carolina and Virginia, within hours, our home was full of friends and family who lived nearby. They arrived with pink flowers, single-malt whiskey, shoulders to cry on, and arms opened for hugs. They arrived, and they stayed until I could once again boil water to cook spaghetti, drive Sam to school, read a book.
In those terrible months after Grace died, I took comfort in the familiar: the sunlight on the tree outside my bedroom window, the sounds of my friends’ voices, the safe refuge I found in my local coffee shop or at a friend’s kitchen table. Routine and ritual got me through each day. I didn’t answer the phone because I didn’t know who waited at the other end. I stayed at home at night because my family’s faces made me feel secure. I had spent my lifetime rejecting the very things and places that now buttressed me.
That first year of my marriage, I had trembled not in the face of routine, but in the face of change. I faltered at the challenge of finding my way when things lined up just right. I don’t regret my resistance to a routine life. In that resistance I learned a lot about myself, about my own stubbornness and narrow-minded views about what mattered and how to achieve it. But of course I realize now that things are never lined up exactly as you hoped. Life keeps shifting no matter where you live or where you place your furniture. People break your heart. They die, no matter how fiercely you love them. But they hold your hand when you need it. They feed you. They walk beside you on both familiar and unfamiliar paths.
In this marriage I have stayed in for almost twenty years, I painted our walls royal blue, marigold orange, lavender. Our sofa is purple. Our windows are lined with ropes of hot red peppers. But at night, on our well-worn sheets, the hand I hold as I drift off to sleep is one I know as well as my own. The last thing I hear is his breathing, predictable and soft. The last thing I smell is the faint scent of Irish Spring soap. The last thing I think, happily, is Home.
The First Fight
AMY WILSON
I may have been in a little bit of a bad mood, too. It was hard to ignore the slight sense of deflation. After throwing the best party we’d ever attended, with long-lost friends and tears and dancing till the hotel shut us down; after twelve days of lounging on a beach where drink-with-umbrella service started at noon; after the UPS guy stopped visiting each day, his dolly loaded with gifts, only the bills were left, plus a few piles of bubble-wrapped china we hadn’t yet figured out where to store.
Still, we were newlyweds. We were supposed to be blissful and giggly. So why was David stomping around in the hallway, throwing down his attaché case with considerably more aggression than was necessary? We knew getting married wouldn’t be a thunderclap of change—we’d already been living together in this very apartment for almost three years. We walked down the aisle calm and certain. While engaged, I had felt some smug superiority to those who wed barely knowing each other, who had never had a conversation about how many kids, or if kids, or what they wanted for the rest of their lives. I’d hear those women call in on talk radio, so disappointed and confused that their loved ones hadn’t magically changed into different men after they were married. Somehow, to their wives’ chagrin, these men had stubbornly remained the same assholes they always were. I thought those women were idiots, thinking marriage could solve everything. Or anything. But I was equally certain that we were different. In our case, marriage really was the solution: the very thing that would mean we never had to fight again, since all we ever fought about was whether we were going to get married.
“Are you mad about something?”
My husband (there it was, that word—still so awkward and formal) paused in his sorting of the day’s mail on the kitchen counter. He closed his eyes, as if this question required far more patience than he had to give. As if he had to remain silent lest he scream something hateful. Not that he ever had—he was an almost maddening paragon of restraint. But I felt the silence was worse. It had been three days since he had initiated a conversation with me, three days since he had smiled or patted me on the rear while I was brushing my teeth. Three days since he had acted like he could even tolerate my company.
We had been here before; it happened a few times a year for as long as we had been together. The books all said that it was totally normal male behavior, and that when a man is In His Cave, the last thing a woman should do is stand in the mouth of that cave and yell inside, asking just when he’s planning on coming out. The books said I should wait it out, not take it personally. Take a walk, call a girlfriend. And so I would, for three days, five days, a week, and then completely negate all that if-you-love-something-set-it-free claptrap by becoming angry and needy, self-righteous and desperate. I would become the very things most likely to drive him further underground.
“Are you even listening to me right now? Because you’re not even acknowledging that I’m speaking. So, uh, it’s kind of difficult for me to tell.”
Sarcasm! That was sure to help. But I could never stop myself. Despite all David’s after-the-fact assurances to the contrary, I was sure these sojourns inward were about me, a weighing of whether he was committed to me for the long haul. He was testing what life without me might be like by acting as if that’s where he already lived. And it seemed to be so easy for him to shut me out, even if I was right there in the room with him, puffed up with hurt feelings and pretty hard to miss. The books all said that if I could just patiently wait out these times in my man’s life, our relationship would be the better for it, since my man would eventually reemerge more firmly committed than ever. Maybe they were right; I wouldn’t know, since I was never able to be that patient.
Of course, some would say I had been plenty patient, since we were together for three and a half years before we got engaged, four and a half before we were married. My boyfriend (like most men) could be totally psyched about his sister getting engaged, and his roommate, then his other roommate, without noticing that they had all started dating their intendeds well after we had. We got some good-natured teasing about this from family and friends, but deep down I was sure they didn’t think it was funny. I was sure they were all looking at me for the reason he still hadn’t proposed. It had to be my shortcoming that was keeping us on the sidelines, keeping me single at the blasphemous age of almost-thirty. David, on the other hand, didn’t see what the hurry was, and all my tears and upset did not exactly hasten his yearning to yoke his future to mine. As long as I didn’t focus on when—or whether—we would have a wedding, we had an easy, happy relationship. But when David went into his cave, sooner or
later I would panic. And we would fight.
“Can you not even look at me? Jesus Christ, what is the matter with you?”
But none of that was going to matter now. My husband wouldn’t need to withdraw! Our public commitment would ipso facto render any waffling moot. We were married; we were never going to have this fight again. We had walked down that aisle free of second thoughts or cares, so excited, so ready to be married at last.
Yet three weeks after the wedding, here we were.
“You promised you wouldn’t push me away! You promised! How can you do this to me? I’m your wife!”
David really had promised not to do this anymore, because he hated how upset it made me, he didn’t want that—and what guy wants another where-is-this-relationship-going all-nighter, anyhow? But after thirteen days out of the office, the pressure at his already extremely stressful job was no doubt considerable. He had also recently considered switching jobs and, throughout our honeymoon, fielded increasingly frantic calls from the human resources departments on both sides of that decision. (In the end, he decided to stay where he was.) It was probably all of this, not second thoughts about having married me, that was consuming him. If I had had a day like that, I would come home, flop next to him on the couch, turn off the TV so that I might have his undivided attention, and then keep up a one-sided conversation until bedtime. I could not conceive that he might do things differently.
“Will you just say something? Anything?”
Still leaning against the kitchen counter, David stayed silent. He probably figured that any protest he made that it wasn’t about me would only bring a smackdown accusation that he was lying right to my face. But if he was intent on not fighting with me, I was equally intent on flushing him out into the open, on saying whatever I needed to say to make him mad enough to yell back.
“I can’t live like this. I’m not kidding! If this is how things are going to be, I want a divorce!”
I didn’t mean it, of course. I was trying to make a dent in his armor. Being ridiculous on purpose, lobbing a grenade no one could ignore. There it lay between us. I saw David’s eyes widen, but only for a half moment—then he lowered them again, that practiced look of indifference that so infuriated me. He said nothing. Now I really was scared.
“Is that what YOU want?”
He wouldn’t answer. Even though I was the one who had brought it up, I was sickened with the sudden certainty that I had hit it on the head. I could see it all laid out before me: returning the presents. Telling our family members, who would be shocked. Shocked! What could possibly have changed in three weeks? And it would all be my fault (even if it was David who wanted it) because I was the one who had said the word in a moment of melodrama, a carelessly powerful word that felt like it couldn’t not take shape now that it had been uttered.
Before a couple is married, ultimatums can be bandied about in rocky times: “Maybe I should move out,” or “I just need some space.” And while they’re upsetting to hear, they are also, on some level, permitted. It is discourse within the bounds of reason for a couple who has not yet made a solemn lifetime commitment in front of all their relatives and loved ones. Standing there in the kitchen, I saw that this was different: Now we were either in or out. The time for equivocation was over. Saying the word divorce carried such a weight of finality and pain that I felt it must have damaged our newborn marriage even to have said it out loud. “Divorce” was not something one said unless one meant it. I understood that. Now that it was too late.
I had expected David to play his part, say that was ridiculous, there I went again. Now neither of us knew what to say. I turned and walked out of the room, gingerly, lest I say or do something that would make things even worse. We retreated to opposite corners of our not-very-big apartment for the rest of the evening, neither one of us sure what had happened, what the other person thought, what would happen next.
By the time I got into bed, I was shaking.
“I don’t want—what I said—to happen,” I whispered to my husband’s turned back, trying not to cry.
For a few moments, nothing.
“I don’t either,” David murmured, already mostly asleep.
I lay awake for a while, trying to remember just what it was that had been worth fighting about.
We were extra polite to each other for a while after that, the memory of the word lingering in the air long after it seemed politic to mention it. Some couples can fight and say things they don’t mean and then laugh about it, years later—or even days. Just a funny story to tell at parties. “Paul! Remember when you burned the Thanksgiving turkey and I threw it right at your head? You should have seen yourself duck!” But I live with a certainty that the hurtful things said and done to me are the most truly and deeply meant. I think my husband is the same way. Our hurt feelings do not have a sense of humor. We need to be more careful.
And we are. We have never fought like that again. Perhaps it was only after that fight that we really were married, with a new and tacit understanding that our lives together might go further if we did take our relationship for granted, if we never argued the fact of its existence no matter how angry we were. Marriage might not have changed my husband’s moodiness, but it could change my insecurity about it. His occasional trip to Eeyore’s Gloomy Place wasn’t about him deciding whether he wanted to be with me or not. It was just something he did—and something I had known well about when I pledged to spend my life with him. Being married means accepting that your life partner can be in a really shitty mood every once in a while and it might have absolutely nothing to do with you. Except when it’s exactly totally about you. And that’s okay, too.
The books were right, by the way. Thirteen years later, I can’t even remember the last time David went on caveman retreat. I know it still happens, but these days when I can tell my husband is in a bad mood, I stay out of his way. Let him catnap in front of SportsCenter. Wait for him to feel like talking, and sooner or later, he does. Maybe my not needling him actually helps him come back to me more quickly; maybe he’s just learned to brood more efficiently over the years. But things are easier now. There is a security, a safety, a filing of the edges that comes with marriage—just not with three weeks of marriage. We hadn’t earned it yet.
Today our marriage feels safe as sweatpants, blessed in its calmness. But when we hear about people getting divorced, whether friends or friends’ parents or people we met once seven years ago, we lie in bed and wonder how it happened. We are human, of course: we always search for that one difference, a forgotten unlocked side door, that proves we can still consider ourselves safe from such intrusion in our own lives. I have never totally lost the fear of divorce, the sudden understanding I had the night of our first fight. There is something about divorce that can come in unbidden through the keyhole, taking away the one you love right in front of you, a little bit at a time. It’s the leaver who sees it coming; afterward, it seems, the left swear they never had the slightest warning. By the time one smells the gas, it is already too late.
Marriage is two people promising to keep that danger from the doorstep together, or at least to say they see it coming, even when (especially when) their loved one doesn’t. It’s a balance between knowing when to give your loved one a break, or space, or time, and knowing when you really do need to speak up. That part is something we are still figuring out. But after thirteen years, our worst trials would seem risible to some, and even though we have never taken the bubble wrap off our wedding china, life without each other has become unthinkable. That means we are very lucky. Maybe that first fight needed to be fought—but it was also, in some ways, our last.
Love in the Time of Camouflage
MARGARET DILLOWAY
One evening, not long after we were married, my husband did not come home from work.
I waited. Dinner grew cold. No phone calls came in. I gre
w anxious. Was he lying by the side of the freeway someplace? Had he been called away? Or was he simply inconsiderate? I had no idea.
I was alone in Tacoma, Washington. My family and friends were down in San Diego.
The day after my husband and I met, which was New Year’s Eve, 1996, standing on a wall in Las Vegas, drinking cheap beer out of plastic token cups, he told me he wanted to marry me. I thought he was nutty. I’d just gotten out of an ill-advised young marriage, I was twenty-two years old, and I had plans.
We spent a few months apart, writing letters, calling, visiting when possible. I loved his single-minded devotion to me, his long letters filled with cartoons, poetry, and odd short stories. If the world ended, he’d be the one I’d want around. I decided to ignore just about every Dear Abby advice column I’d ever read. Keith had only enlisted for a total of three years, and perhaps had only two more to go, but it seemed too long. I moved to Washington and we married in October 1997, in a ceremony only our parents knew about.
Finally, three hours later, Keith arrived home, still in his camouflage military uniform. His battle-dress uniform, or BDU, daily wear, they called it; starched so stiff it could almost stand alone. “Where were you?” I asked.
“Being punished,” my husband said, taking off his black Ranger beret. “My platoon sergeant said you made his wife cry.”
I was confused. I’d never met the sergeant’s wife. I hadn’t met any of the wives except for the few in my husband’s immediate small group, or squad. “I did not.”
“Apparently you yelled at her.” My husband smiled wryly. “The sergeant said, ‘Dilloway, I had to listen to my wife crying about your wife, so now I’m going to punish you.’”