by Dana Spiotta
She retrieved the business card from her coat pocket and called the real estate agent. “I want it,” the words coming up from some reptilian (perhaps paleomammalian, limbic, sublimbic) area of her brain, some part of her she never knew existed. “I want to make an offer, I mean. Can we do that today?” It felt easy. She signed the papers and wrote a check for the deposit. Inner life had spilled out and become outer life. She wrote an X in the box to waive the inspection. As is.
What drew her to the house was its nature: the house was a paradox, both rustic and elegant. It was contrived to be functional, but emotionally functional. After all, who needs a built-in bench by the fire? The huge hearth was clearly inefficient. Beauty was its own value, as was the experience of living. It felt hand-constructed, personal. Yet it reeked of artifice, “Arts and Crafts” meant to evoke home and nostalgia through cozy appropriations of English cottages and, oddly enough, some idea of a country church. Also, the state of the house. Dirty, falling apart, empty for too long.
It was wrecked. It was hers.
She got in her car, and she looked back once more at the house, maybe to imprint its image in her heart, the way you might look at a departing loved one. Sam noticed a white bit of paper tucked into the front door’s frame. She got out of the car and walked over to see what it was. She plucked a corner with two fingers, and as she pulled it, she felt a heavier paper stock than she was expecting. Almost like an index card, but smaller and more rectangular, palm-sized. She turned it over. It had letterpress printing, blue on creamy white:
beware: nte is coming
Sam shrugged. What was NTE? Was it an ad? A religious message? Or a sort of warning? But the production values of the message gave it weight and substance, so she tucked the little card into her jean pocket.
She drove back to her home in the suburb, and only then did she realize, as she drove, that she was leaving her husband. Matt. That she would go live in the broken-down house in the city, the unloved, forgotten house with the view of the unloved, forgotten city. Why? Because she alone could see the beauty. It was meant for her. She couldn’t—shouldn’t—resist. And saying yes to this version of her life would mean saying no to another version of her life.
3
As she drove, she held her phone in her left hand, pressed it awake, tapped her password, and tried not to glance at the device as she found her way to the Favorites screen and pressed “Ma.” She touched the speaker icon, and then she looked at the road, once again admonishing herself for driving and messing with her phone. It was a steady beat, that admonishment, and yet it changed nothing.
“Hello?” her mother said, as if she didn’t know it was Sam, as if she didn’t see Sam’s name on the phone, as if Sam didn’t call every day.
“Hey, Ma.”
“Hi, sweetheart.”
“How are you? Are you feeling—”
“I’m fine,” she said, like a warning. Sam’s mother, Lily, was sick but Sam wasn’t supposed to ask her about it; “please don’t dwell” on it, she had told Sam.
“Good.” Sam pushed it off, undwelled. She would dwell elsewhere.
“But are you okay? You sound strange.”
“Yeah, I do,” Sam said. She laughed.
“What happened?”
She told her mother about the house in detail, the words rushing out with infatuated breathlessness.
“You really made an offer? Did you sign a contract?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Does Matt know?”
“Not yet.”
“Sam, you have to discuss this with him. You might have to cancel it. I think you have three days, right?”
“I don’t want to cancel it.” She felt herself getting tearful.
“You can’t buy a house and not tell Matt—”
“You don’t understand. It’s not just a house.”
“—even if it is cheap. It’s cheap for a house, but not cheap like an impulse buy of some shoes or something. Come on, Sam. Are you trying to provoke something?”
“No! Don’t be ridiculous. I will tell him, I’m going to tell him.”
“I’m ridiculous? You’re not thinking. This is silly, irrational.”
“I know it is. That’s the point. I know it.”
“Call me after you talk to him. Talk to him. Do you want me to call him?”
“No! I’ll talk to him myself.”
4
Sam didn’t tell her husband that night, or the night after. She ignored her mother’s voicemail. She instead sent her an email saying everything was fine and she would update her soon. She had planned on calling her closest friend, Emily, but Emily had gotten on her nerves lately. Plus Sam’s mother’s reaction made her hesitate. Not about her decision, but about discussing it. She didn’t need to crowdsource her fucking life, did she?
When Sam woke in the early morning of the third day, she felt her usual weariness about her sudden awakening, and then she remembered the house and felt a strange giddiness, an excitement. That evening, when her daughter, Ally, was at an away soccer game, Sam finally confessed to Matt what she had done. Not the way she had rehearsed it while driving in her car, with calm logic and gentle segues. But like a lunatic, impulsive and incoherent. It was interior monologue made audible. It included an elaborate description of 110 Highland Street. Then:
“I have to leave this house,” she said. “I’m sorry.” As if she were leaving the house instead of him. She had once fallen in love with their large cedar-and-glass, open-plan, contemporary suburban home. High ceilings and new white-pine flooring. Concrete patio with a fire pit. Surrounded by dense woods that made it feel private, no other houses to contaminate the view. They had fallen in love with it. But now she felt the hollowness in the doors, the casual way it was built, which was apparent in the details. Living in it left her cold. (Actually freezing in the early mornings. Baseboard heating in these huge spaces, conceived by some cheap contractor. They did have radiant heat under the floor tiles in the master bath, and she found herself huddling there, taking bath after bath, not willing to leave, all winter long.)
“What are you talking about?” Matt said, barely looking at her. He was reading something on his phone; he didn’t have time for this. That made it easier on Sam, much. Out it fell.
“I can’t stand it here, in this house.” Sam’s voice trembled; the intensity of her emotion surprised her. She touched the door of the small bath off the kitchen. “Who puts a bathroom off a kitchen, you know? And this door—” She pounded on the wood and the hollow, shallow sound disgusted her. She turned the button knob. “I could break down this door. It’s cheap and ugly. I can’t bear it.”
“You want a new door?”
“Yes. I mean, no.” Why should she have to explain herself ? She started crying. “I hate this awful house. Us. You. I have to leave, I can’t stay with you,” she said. Now she had his attention.
“What’s happened? What’s wrong?”
“Our marriage is over, I think. I know.”
Matt started laughing. She glared at him.
“Sam, what are you talking about?”
“I’m leaving.”
Matt raised his eyebrows and lowered his chin to indicate disbelief. And irritation. The irritation came through in his voice as well, that familiar tone of his: weary, impatient, unenchanted. “What is this really about?” he said. He was standing at the counter, making some kind of post-workout smoothie. He didn’t stop what he was doing.
Usually when he got home, she would tell him what happened to her that day. Who came to Clara Loomis House, where she worked (volunteered, practically), and what questions they had asked. (“One woman asked me if it was true that Clara invented abortions! I was like, most def! Sure! Like no one ever thought to terminate an unwanted pregnancy before 1895.”) Sam would exaggerate the lameness of the questi
ons to amuse, or try to amuse, Matt. He might laugh, but he would be distracted, occupied with his phone and finishing his post-workout branched-chain amino-acid supplements blended into his stevia chocolate-and-whey protein shake. That was her idea, these enhancing supplements, something she had heard about or read about and bought for him. He used them, and at least he didn’t tell her she was being ridiculous, which she sometimes felt when she explained something she was excited about. Since the election, and certainly since the inauguration, when he came home from work she would go on about the president and the latest related drama. As she spoke, she lost her urgency or she increased her urgency as she realized how she would seem to him: like a person who had spent the day on the internet or watching cable news or listening to podcasts. She herself had done little all day; instead she reported from the edge of an unlived life. He would give her a polite nod, respond, but he was not really interested. He treated her the way someone would treat a talkative child or a needy dog: doling out just enough attention to be acceptable but not enough to encourage her to keep going. He tolerated her. Patronized her. Which she resented but also couldn’t blame him for. She agreed with him, she was pathetic, she felt it as her words spilled out. But now, in this moment, she understood something new. His workouts, his distant looks, and his phone fondling aside, all those seemingly tolerant expressions served only one purpose. He was caring for himself, taking care of his needs, and it had nothing to do with her. She was the air to be got through.
“You’ve been gaslighting me, that’s what this is about,” she said quietly.
“What does that even mean?”
“What does it mean? It’s a movie with Ingrid Bergman, Gaslight, in which her husband is trying to make her think she is going crazy.”
“I know it’s a fucking movie.”
“He keeps dimming the gas light and when she notices, he lies about it. Tells her it’s all in her head, her problem.”
He had finally stopped making his smoothie. Oh how she hated that smoothie in this moment. The impossible-to-clean heavy grooved glass container and the whey-crusted blades. And that word, “smoothie,” my god, how could anyone use that word, ever? The blender was full, but he stopped before he pressed the “pulse” button. Even he, the relentlessly efficient multitasker, knew that making a blender noise as your wife was leaving you would be tacky.
“You don’t care about me. You aren’t interested in me or what I think or feel or have to say. And you pretend this is okay, normal, a marriage.”
Matt said nothing, looked at her. Really looked at her. Unnerving, that look.
“You don’t love me,” she said. “You put up with me out of loyalty and habit.” Her voice cracked.
“You know that isn’t true,” he said. “You know that can’t be true, Sam.” His voice lowered.
“And maybe that is all I deserve. Maybe. But I don’t like it,” she said. He watched her carefully. She grabbed a tissue and held it to her eyes. Hot, swollen, the tears streamed down her face and stung her cheeks. The emotion seemed to build as she spoke, the anger (anger, that’s what it was!) overwhelmed her. She was on the verge of fainting all of a sudden. She inhaled deeply, and on the exhale, she sighed. “I don’t like you.” The act of saying it made it so. “Not anymore.”
“What happened? I know you aren’t happy, but this is over the top.”
“We are not happy,” she said.
“Is this about the election?”
“No!”
“It is the election. You aren’t the only one in the world who is upset over the election, you know.”
“You think I want a divorce because of the election?”
“You do seem deranged. You took it very personally. But I’m stressed by it too. I think about it every day.”
5
It was true that on election night they both were upset, but at some point during the unfolding disaster, he shrugged it off. She spent the night on the couch, actually cowering under a blanket, peeking at the TV. He drank beer and then scotch. She closed her eyes, tried to hide; then she opened the blanket enough to watch John King on CNN. He was pressing counties on a magic map of Florida, looking for unreported precincts full of Democratic voters. Michigan was too close to call. Pennsylvania was too close to call. She finally fell into a raw, fragile sleep as she watched. She woke up a few hours later. He was still sitting there, still watching CNN, no longer drinking.
“What happened?” she said.
“It’s over,” he said. “They are waiting for her to concede. And he’s about to speak.”
She stared at the TV for a minute, at the ecstatic celebrants. The feed underneath reported his electoral votes. Then she got off the couch and went to bed.
They were no comfort to each other. For days she woke in the early morning, ready to begin her normal routine, and then she remembered what had happened and felt the world shrink into a new, weird shape. It was very close to how she’d felt right after her father died and she would have some kind of sleep-propelled respite from her grief. What she realized—as the weeks went by and it sank in, until finally she woke knowing what the world was—what she realized was that the world had moved against her more than it had moved against Matt. To him it was the equivalent of watching his beloved Mets lose a closely contested World Series. To her it was much more than that; what exactly it was, she did not yet know.
On Facebook, shortly after the venting and the disbelief, she discovered that an online but also in-real-life protest group was forming. A Facebook algorithm suggested it to her, and she read the group’s page:
Don’t give up. Don’t just vent on Facebook! Take action IRL. Resist! Refuse! Organize! (Henceforth referred to as RRO!) Women Won’t Wilt! (Henceforth referred to as WWW!)
Then she discovered the Syracuse offshoot of the national effort. One of the people she knew from her daughter’s school posted about the local event. The description:
Syracuse WWWers!
Come talk strategy with other like-minded community members. We will begin with writing letters to our congressional representatives. We will not take this lying down. We will resist. Wine and light refreshments will be served.
The event took place in a beautifully restored stone farmhouse in one of the wooded and wealthy enclaves between Syracuse and Ithaca. The host was a Cornell professor. Her husband taught at Syracuse University, so they lived among farmers in this commutable-to-both area.
The professors’ house stood on a hill with panoramic views in two directions. A large matching barn stood to one side, and Sam could see a wide, rocky stream behind the house at the bottom of the hill. She stood on the porch and listened for a moment. A sign was taped to the door:
WWW GATHERING
No need to knock. Come right in.
The large living room was filled with women, mostly her age. Already the mid-range New Zealand sauvignon blanc was being passed around, which she had to admit she appreciated (finally chardonnay and pinot grigio had become cliché and déclassé even in Syracuse). Crudités, cheese, and crackers as promised. The vibe was bright and cheerful as the women buzzed around, chatting and commiserating, each reporting her blow-by-blow election night story with the same boring annotated specificity with which women report their labor narratives after giving birth (“I sat on the sectional, incessantly switching between MSNBC and CNN, like that would make the news change. I finally went to bed at eleven after they called Florida. Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania were still too close to call, but I knew by then it was a disaster and I couldn’t stand to watch any more. When I woke up in the morning, my daughter came in and said, ‘I am so sorry, Mommy.’ It was then I burst into tears. We were supposed to have a woman president. I practically promised her. But she comforted me, can you imagine?”)
After some mingling, the host shushed everyone and invited them to sit in a circle. She was tri
m in a blue wool sheath dress, sleeveless to show off her age-defying, sculpted shoulders and upper arms. Her bobbed hair fell to a face-framing point; it had been angle-cut from her ear line to just below her jawline. When she stood under the chandelier (antique stamped brass with bare incandescent bulbs), Sam could see her expertly balayaged highlights, the same gray-disguising ash-blond most of the women in the room had. The living room was very warm from all the people and a fire burning in the glass-windowed, cast-iron stove. Sam peeled off her black ribbed turtleneck. She already felt sloppy in her jeans, and now she wore a tank top that said “No Sleep Till…” in purple letters, which she had bought in Brooklyn for Ally, but Ally had never worn it, not once, so Sam wore it sometimes as an undershirt.
They were going around the circle, introducing themselves. It was then that Sam noticed two women sitting at the edge of the room. They were young—early twenties—and exotically beautiful. One had vivid cobalt streaks in her shoulder-length, thick hair. The other had a platinum buzz cut, her pretty skull shapely beneath the stubble. Both had copious tattoos and piercings, and they were clearly a couple.