Category: Love & Sex

An Impulsive Move and a Pandemic

move
Photo by Gina Easley

By Nina B. Lichtenstein

Suddenly, I found myself living in Brooklyn, in the same building as my twenty-five-year-old son Tobi. His presence there made my move feel grounded and comforting, like it made more sense.

“You framed me!” he joked when I told him I was moving in upstairs from him, and added, “No judging of me, promise?”

“Honey, no judging of me,” I retorted. I was newly single at fifty-four and had fantasies of living it up. Thankfully he laughed.

I was going to live by myself for the first time in my life, and the thought overwhelmed but also excited me. Mostly excited. My twenty-three years-long marriage to the father of my three sons had ended in divorce ten years earlier, and six years later, when the boys launched from the nest, I followed my new partner Tony to Maine, where he had retired. Now I had broken up with him and moved out.

Ours was a relationship that had felt bashert —meant to be—on so many levels, it used to make us giddy. Both Tony and I had emotional and exuberant personalities, and he was a convert to Judaism as was I; he was a professor of French and I had a Ph.D. in French, and we both yearned to live in a more northern climate (he is a native of Maine and I of Norway) than the hot and humid Connecticut where we had each raised our combined large brood of kids, nine in all. We also shared a challenge: neither of us was particularly good at letting go of a disagreement before it spiraled into an exhaustive fight and sour moods that could easily ruin the day or, worst-case scenario, turn our much longed-for Sabbath, a day of peaceful rest and loving, into a period of disconnect and silence. Though we usually managed to rally and turn things around, when the latest storm hit, I felt I had reached my limit, and I wanted out.

When I left Tony, I felt as if I was facing a huge, white canvas: the possibilities seemed endless and thrilling, but the vastness of this unexpected and open space was also scary. I was free, but now what? A text pinged on my phone from my son’s landlord, a family friend: there was another opening in his building. Did I know anyone who might be interested?

•••

Even though the apartment was rent-stabilized, nothing about this made any financial sense, but I wanted to listen to my guts, not shy away from change just because it would be a challenge, wasn’t the “safe” thing. I was in my third semester of a low-residency MFA program and bills ticked in from the university every month, and I was still paying for my two younger sons’ college educations. I knew deep inside that an impulsive move during an emotional upheaval was probably not the wisest path, but I quickly imagined a new beginning and fantasized wildly about how I would re-invent my mid-life from sleepy Maine to hipster Brooklyn. I was going to be a New Yorker, after all! It had been a fantasy of mine since I first left my childhood home in Oslo, Norway, at nineteen and came to America as an au-pair, nearly thirty-five years ago.

“Can we talk about this?” Tony tried, as I packed my personal belongings from our house in the quintessential New England college town where it sat steps from the quaint campus and lush town green. “Please don’t go,” he pleaded, “What we have is too precious, Nina!” But my heart was hardened, and I was exhausted from our latest debacle. I didn’t see all that preciousness now; all I could say was, “No.”

Our Maine house was built in 1865 and had an adjoining, raw barn with cracks in the walls and a two-seater, wooden outhouse; “the honey-pot” Tony called the ancient privy and thought it was the most romantic thing ever. When I moved up from Connecticut, we renovated the barn and turned it into a colorful and glorious AirBnB where we hosted happy tourists during the summer, and family and friends during the year. We’d put our hearts and souls into cultivating the garden where tomatoes, kale, and blueberries thrived, and the vibrant colors in our flower beds brightened our days; Cosmos, Zinnias, Coneflowers, and Bachelor’s Buttons, their heads turned toward the sun on summer mornings, we’d sip our coffee and read the paper in our blue and green Adirondack chairs facing each other, feeling blessed.

Now I was driving the twenty-five-foot U-Haul truck south, filled with odd pieces of furniture I had gathered from the house, a few flea market finds, and suitcases stuffed with my clothes. I made a strategic stop at IKEA in New Haven on the way south and picked up a simple, pine bed frame and a white, round, dining table with four aqua colored plastic chairs, their contemporary design totally out of character for me who normally prefers things showing the imperfect patina of age and use.

I navigated through narrow city streets and completed a gutsy parallel parking stunt under low hanging branches that creaked ominously across the roof of the truck. Tobi and his roommate greeted me from the apartment building stoop. “Hey mamma, welcome home!” he said with grin and gave me one of his delicious bear hugs. They helped me move in to the top floor, one-bedroom apartment with hardwood floors and high ceilings. Located across the street from Brooklyn Botanical Gardens in a once-elegant, pre-war brick building, its old-world charm had dwindled over the decades but was still palpable. I was in love.

I quickly got to know my new neighbors, some whose families had lived in the building for generations. I recognized the faces of the owners of the shabby bodegas on Franklin Street and was on first name basis with Rawl at the Laundromat and Maggie at the coffee shop owned by the Palestinian grocers next door. She called me “mami” and knew I liked oat milk in my coffee and capers on my bagel.

In the apartment, I pulled up multiple layers of grungy linoleum from the kitchen floor and covered the mismatched and crooked floor tiles in the bathroom with soft bathmats.  I splurged on a teal green, velour sleeper couch, and I painted the kitchen wall orange. In a whirlwind I nested like a fervent mammal expecting pups and turned the rundown place into a cozy and colorful lair. Candles flickered everywhere, plants perched on windowsills, and jazz piped from the speakers. I relished living by myself, something I had never experienced before. My son even said he loved having me close by, especially when I cooked dinners for him upstairs and stayed away from his messy den of iniquity downstairs.

•••

After a brief period of separation, Tony came to Brooklyn for a visit. We had been in touch via email, and as days turned into weeks, something softened in me. We were both wordsmiths and romantically inclined, and early tentative exchanges turned warmer until eventually, we agreed to see each other. He said he wasn’t excited about coming to the apartment that symbolized our break-up, but he made the journey anyway. I looked forward to welcoming him and made sure I had his favorite gin in the freezer.

Having him next to me again felt really good, and after four days and a few difficult conversations, we decided to not give up on our couple after all. We agreed on a compromise: I’d keep the Brooklyn apartment and divide my time between Maine and the City.

“I’m happy in my own company,” I told him, as I tried to explain how much I had relished my alone-time. “I’ll need to be able to have some of this, moving forward.” We were going to work on our relationship, and soon I was back north for a visit. We made plans for an extended trip to Israel, where Tony has kids and grandkids.

But then Covid-19 happened, and the trickle of strange information rapidly turned into a deluge of scary statistics, followed by travel advisories, lockdowns, and cancelled flights.

Plans changed for everyone. The young academic couple that was subletting my Brooklyn apartment for the spring returned to Spain, as libraries, universities, and archives closed their doors. This meant I was stuck with the rent. Two of my three sons lost income due to the pandemic and needed extra support from their father and me. I kept knocking myself —see what happens when you act on impulse?—and deep inside, a harsh voice kept telling me the whole Brooklyn idea had been foolish.

Yet, something had shifted between my partner and me since I had taken the apartment, and we had both spent some time alone. The heat of the fights had cooled and our hearts had thawed from the frost that made believing in our couple seem impossible. We were able to recall the reasons we had fallen in love in the first place, everything we shared, and how much we loved all that and each other. So, I stayed in Maine for what we agreed would be “a relationship in process.” We were getting along surprisingly well during the many weeks long shelter-in-place spring.

During New York’s most dire pandemic days, a woman from Bangladesh visiting her son in the City reached out. She needed a place to stay until things quieted down—could she sublet? “Your apartment seems like such a happy, comfortable space,” her son said in our Zoom meeting, sitting next to his mom, translating back and forth from Bengali. I was thrilled to offer his mom the apartment, and he was grateful that she would have a warm and welcoming home in which to stay safe.

I scroll through the colorful photos of the Brooklyn apartment and wonder when I will be able to return. I love the urban dwelling I created as a true “room of my own,” yet back in Maine, waiting out the lockdown, I was a better partner. More patient and compassionate, I held Tony’s hand on our walks beneath the pines, and as spring turned to summer and summer to fall, I sensed renewed hope for a future. I realized that although I’m at home in more places than one, my heart has found its way back to my bashert.

•••

NINA B. LICHTENSTEIN is a native of Oslo, Norway, who divides her time between Maine and Tel Aviv. She has a PhD in French literature and an MFA from University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast program. Her essays have appeared in the Washington Post, Tablet, Brevity, Hippocampus, Lilith, and AARP’s The Ethel, among other places.

 

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Turning Up in a Dream Last Night

Photo by Lenore Edman/flickr

By Abigail Thomas

was a young man I went out with a lifetime ago. Such different days. I had finally left an unhappy marriage and was living with my three kids in my parents’ place in the city, half a block from Washington Square. It was the late sixties, and I was running all kinds of hot. My poor parents were built-in babysitters. I lied about where I was going, what I was doing. I think they were afraid to ask questions.

“Went out with” is perhaps too formal a phrase to describe our meetings, which often took place on the upper bunk of a tired old double decker bed in a crowded apartment somewhere in the East Village. We had met at a big noisy party and exchanged a few words before until somebody else barged in, and I lost track of him. Later, as people began to leave, it was discovered that everyone’s bag had been stolen. We were all upset, bewildered, asking a flurry of questions—Who? Why? How? Nobody knew. And then my bag was returned, dropped off at the front desk of Brentano’s where I worked in the office, keeping a running count of how many copies of which books were sold each day, based on notes from the guys at the register. Everything written on scraps of paper. In those days Brentano’s was on the corner of University Place and 8th Street. Azuma was right next door. Oh, Azuma! Well, missing from my bag was the little bit of money and added to it was somebody else’s bottle of Visine. There was also a short note signed by the young man I’d met at the party, giving me his telephone number which I immediately called.

I forget his name­—he changed it every week to stay incognito. He was one of the leaders of a revolutionary group that seemed to consist of two young black men and a lot of adoring white girls, but I might have made it up about the girls. He was kind and gentle and attentive where my former husband had been curt and cold and abusive, and I was crazy about him. I don’t remember what we talked about, and I don’t even really remember the sex, just that we had a lot of it. At some point he disappeared for a while, ostensibly to go to Canada to learn how to make dynamite. It seemed strange; why Canada? I didn’t give a second thought to the dynamite, which never materialized. I was oblivious to what could go badly wrong.

I have been trying to remember his face, why we lost track of each other. His presence has lingered all day. We were so vulnerable. That’s what I remember best. We were both so vulnerable. And so willing. We actually believed in a better world. I remember I had a tiny red address book, and every time he changed his name, I entered the new one, carefully crossing out the one he’d had before. I wish I still had it. I wish could hold in my hand what I can’t put into words.

Oh god, now I am remembering the young man who worked in the stockroom of Brentano’s. I liked him very much. He had been dishonorably discharged from the army, after the helicopter he was in was given word that no prisoners were being taken, and the North Vietnamese soldiers they were carrying were to be thrown off while still in the air. This decent young man went nuts.

We slept together once. I didn’t know I had the clap until he broke it to me gently, because he had it now, and he had slept with no one but his girlfriend for years. I didn’t know where I had gotten it—by then I was sleeping with any man who could fog a mirror, but it wasn’t a toilet seat, which is where my friend told his girlfriend he had gotten it. He wrote down the address of a clinic that had just opened and told me I needed to go. I recall a long walk west, and a room full of sheepish-looking people waiting their turns.

But now dozens of memories are falling like confetti into my consciousness, and my friend Paul has arrived, and we get to waxing nostalgic about the city we loved, in the days when you could live on a shoestring. That city is long gone, a kinder, more tolerant town, or so I am thinking now. Also vanished are most of our old haunts—even The Riviera closed down, for god’s sake. That was the last straw. And although my memory fails me (where exactly was the Ninth Circle?) I’m experiencing a physical rush that my body remembers better than I do, and it’s 1969 again.

If I close my eyes, I’m back in Washington Square, sitting barefoot on the rim of the fountain with all the other ragtag and bobtails. I’ll probably sleep with somebody I meet here today without even knowing his name. We will wind up in the East Village, or Harlem, or somewhere on West 4th Street. Trust defined my youth back then, trust and hunger for what I didn’t know, and sex felt like a nutrient we released for the planet. The times that were a’changing have changed, but for a little while I’m going to ignore what went off the rails and let myself remember what innocence and hope felt like.

•••

ABIGAIL THOMAS has four children, twelve grandchildren, one great grandchild, eight books, two dogs, and a high school education. She is eighty years old and prefers this to any other age for its simplicity.

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The Wicked Stink

Photo by James St. John/Flickr

By Larissa Kosmos

The smelly ordeal was almost over. Holding the trash bag, I stood inside the front door of our small apartment, peering through the peephole. I waited for our neighbor Gladys, the friendly older woman who lived across the hall, who was working her key in the lock, to disappear. I didn’t want her—or any of the neighbors on our four-unit floor—catching me with this particular bag of garbage. The stench of it was embarrassing. I would’ve felt obligated to explain. And it would not have been a brief explanation. I’d have said that we’d eaten fish for dinner and that Jim, my husband, had dropped its moist packaging—the white wrapping paper and Styrofoam tray—into the trash without first sealing these items in a separate bag.

But saying that much merely prefaced our story of stink. It wouldn’t have justified the intensity of the odor, so naturally, I would’ve been forced to admit that the fish dinner was several nights earlier. Of course, this revelation would’ve raised judgmental eyebrows and prompted the obvious question: Why hadn’t we taken the garbage out sooner? Dominoes.

This story makes sense only if I back up to its very beginning:

Every week of our life in New York City, we walked our daughter and son to school and later, we walked them home. My husband moved the car for street cleaning; when the street was cleaned, he parked it; three days later, he did the parking cha-cha again. I bought food at the store; I took food out of the fridge; I did things to make the food edible; what was left of the food I put away. Over and over.

Not much happened to alter these rhythms. After working, figuring out which mail to read or ignore, helping with homework, and hunting down beloved, wayward blankies, neither of us had the capacity to plot a political demonstration or found a charity. And we didn’t get invited to swanky social events. The parties we attended began at two o’clock on Sunday afternoons with colorful balloons and our children’s friends as the guests of honor.

Hence, once in a while, to make things interesting, we invited a distraction: A day after a nice family dinner, when Jim and I realized that the fish packaging in the trash was beginning to smell, we tacitly established a game that consisted of tolerating the odor. Taking out the kitchen garbage—it was understood—meant defeat. It would be a match of endurance, one that would separate the human from the superhero.

Well, I love a challenge. Besides, the smell was lousy, but not terrible. As I lifted the lid to dispose of one thing or another, I’d wince at the pungent fumes, but I’m no wimp, and I was determined to outlast my husband.

We’re both freelancers who work from home—he is a videographer and film editor, I’m a writer—so we were equally exposed to the fish stink. Jim worked at the desk in our bedroom as usual, headphones on, plugged into his computer, piecing together footage, seemingly unfazed by this test of strength. I was down the hall, seated with my laptop at the dining table, our kids’ cereal crumbs on the placemats and on the floor beneath my feet, trying to think of something worthwhile to write.

Meanwhile, trapped under the lid of our garbage can, the odor grew increasingly foul. To clarify, there was not one bit of fish flesh in the trash. The smell rose from the wetness which had seeped through the white packing paper. (What was this moisture? A wee puddle of the ocean? A splash from the bucket that held the doomed tilapia on the deck of a fishing boat?)

Ironically, in a see-through plastic box in the fridge, the leftover baked tilapia reclined with a polite lack of smell, which befitted this type of fish. Tilapia. You hear promise in that name. Unlike mackerel, which is sneaky, or tuna, which is dim, or sea bass, which is pretentious, tilapia is friendly and bright. Well, apparently we had entangled ourselves with a gang of tilapia—angry outcasts—which had launched post-mortem revenge on us, its consumers.

After a couple of days, I had to hold my breath when lifting the trash lid and devise strategies for coping with the stench. For example, to minimize the number of times I opened the garbage, especially while making dinner, I clustered items on the counter to dispose of all at once—an onion peel, the wrapping of ground beef, a tomato stem, an empty sour cream container. Like some sort of forest animal, I scrapped together little piles.

As opponents, Jim and I didn’t discuss strategy, but I noticed that he would open the can as narrowly as possible to deposit something and then flee the kitchen. I often dashed out, too, because the smell had gained a staying power. Bursts of fish stink piggybacked on air molecules.

Complaining would be an admission of weakness—Jim and I both knew it—so we remained mum. Our kids, however, did not hide their reactions. Infusing her every word with drama, my seven-year-old daughter demanded, “What’s that awful smell?” My son, then four, was diplomatic, as if he were breaking bad news. “That garbage smell is not good, Mom,” he said, adding, “I think I’m allergic to it.”

The odor had become rancid, but still, I would not break down and take out the trash. I had the fortitude of a samurai warrior. (Apparently, so did my husband.) Instead, I found more ways to manage. One afternoon I brewed coffee, knowing its aroma would fill the kitchen, at least for a short while. Later, it occurred to me that dumping the wet coffee grounds on top of the fish odor might suppress it. To bolster the stink-quashing mission, I deployed my orange peel into the garbage.

Well, this strategy backfired. The fish juice got angry and retaliated with a more noxious smell. It was unimaginably bad. Putrid. If you bottled this horror, you could use it to disperse crazy mobs or elicit confessions from high-ranking Russian spies.

Yet my husband and I were unflinching in our game. Each of us wanted the satisfaction of prevailing over the other, so we kept this festering abomination in our home. Although I tried not to show it, the stink was making me cranky. (Couldn’t we amuse ourselves like normal couples did by watching a reality series or a crime show?)

Now several days since our civilized tilapia dinner, the smell emanated from the garbage even when it was closed. I couldn’t stand to open it any more. After giving each of our kids a yogurt, I walked the foil lids over to the wastebasket in the bathroom. I would go out of my way to dispose of a tissue. When traveling around the apartment with rubbish in hand proved impractical, I set a plastic grocery bag for trash collection atop the kitchen can.

One morning, when the kids were in school, the wicked stink found me in the living room where I was trying to write. I was distracted to the point of being annoyed. Smelly fish cells had crowded my brain cells. Finally, I couldn’t take it any more—the odor, the silence, everything.

“Did you open the garbage?” I shouted to Jim down the hallway.

“About half an hour ago,” he replied.

Enough. Dead fish gas was destroying our oxygen. Decidedly, I pushed back my chair, marched down to our bedroom, and stood at the desk until Jim noticed and removed his headphones.

“How long can we go on like this?” I demanded, desperate for the game to end.

He acted like he didn’t know what I was talking about.

“The garbage,” I said impatiently. For crying out loud, what else would I be referring to? “That god-awful smell.”

“It just smells like garbage.” Oddly, it sounded as if he meant what he said. “When the bag is full, we’ll empty it.”

At this bizarre moment, looking at the alien imposter who perfectly resembled my husband of ten years, I might have blurted “What?!” Or maybe it was, “Are you kidding me?!” Whatever the words, they did not adequately express my shock.

As he reiterated his message, I could not orient myself in the new reality, having believed—for days—that we were engaged in an olfactory nerve wrestle. Weren’t we?

“No.” The Jim-looking alien shook his head and, after listening to all I said, replaced his headphones.

Stunned, weirdly disappointed, I made an about-face toward the kitchen. For the record, not participating in the game is not the same as winning the game. My husband is not a superhero. In fact, there is obviously something wrong with him—he must have a damaged sense of smell.

Holding my breath, I popped up the lid, lifted the bag, and tied it tight. Very tight. Avoiding having to explain why my garbage smells the way it does—some things are nobody else’s business—I watched through the peephole, waiting until Gladys entered her apartment and until there was, without a doubt, no movement near the doors of our other three neighbors, before stepping out and pressing the elevator button.

Riding eight floors down to the basement, alone, I clenched the top of the bag in case the criminal smell tried to escape. In the garbage room, I dropped it into one of the ten large pails lined with black industrial-strength bags. Game over.

Back in the apartment, I opened the trash receptacle, spritzed inside with grapefruit-scented cleaning solution, wiped around, and left the lid propped so air could enter. With the cheerful-smelling spray, I also scrubbed the counters. Then I vigorously mopped the floor. You’d think my kitchen had been the site of a heinous crime. (Out, damned stink! Out, I say!)

Finally, after washing my hands, I opened the fridge and faced it—the remaining tilapia, which had been keeping up the innocent act and which, over the last few days, we hadn’t had a taste for at lunchtime (surprise, surprise). I slapped a piece of masking tape on the clear plastic lid, I.D.-ed the contents with black marker, opened the freezer, and—without remorse—I put that tilapia away.

Its slick white flesh, moist and delicate, would contract in the arctic surroundings, and with every passing hour, as I continued with my comings and goings and this-and-that-ings, it would grow increasingly cold and hard, eventually gathering a coat of white frost, with the see-through lid resembling the windshield of a car left outdoors in a blizzard. It got what it deserved. I, meanwhile, could reclaim my kitchen, return to my writing, and forget about that fish for a long, long time.

•••

LARISSA KOSMOS’s essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, Women’s Health, Real Simple, Cleveland Magazine, on Babble and elsewhere. She now lives in Cleveland, where she works as a writing consultant at Cuyahoga Community College and waits impatiently for half a year of winter to pass. Find more of her work at www.larissakosmos.com

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Cannonballs in Brazil

Photo by Robin Ulset/Flickr

By Scott Gerace

He watched me float on my back naked in the pool, ignoring bar patrons a hundred feet away, sipping vacation cocktails. My new Brazilian friend, Alex, ten years my junior, hesitated after removing his shirt and shoes. He debated whether to finish disrobing and dip his toes into the aquatic path to passion I’d charted for us.

“Get in. The water’s so nice,” I urged.

“I come to you,” Alex said, with a heavy Portuguese accent.

Since arriving in sun-soaked Key West for ten days of escape from the dating doldrums of New York City, I’d exploited all my bad behaviors—excessive boozing, random hookups, and eating with abandon. But in the chlorine-saturated, clothing optional pool, I started to unravel the rules I often let dictate my adventures in dating.

It had been almost eighteen months since I’d severed a two-year relationship that failed to ignite beyond glorified dating. My ex-boyfriend was a digital journalist, six years younger than me, who’d had only one long-term boyfriend in his thirty-eight years. I toiled away as a financial corporate communications writer, amassing few boyfriends myself by my mid-forties.

My ex Ernie and I met cute via an online dating app. Our first meeting turned one cocktail into three and one date into one month. Dinner dates and flirtation followed. I easily let passion be outplayed by hand holding and perfunctory making out. Soon we were introducing one another as boyfriends at social functions. I met his parents visiting from Costa Rica.

“You must learn Spanish,” insisted his mother.

“I know a little from high school and college,” I responded.

“Good. Then you will come to Costa Rica.”

That trip and my Spanish skills never materialized.

We’d quickly moved from make outs to old married couple, and like many hopeless romantics before us, we soldiered on like dolls controlled by unseen hands acting out romance and contentment.

In our second year, New Year’s Eve served as our final act. Nothing during the celebratory night camouflaged my discomfort as I darted from friend to friend with declarations that I was finished—it must end. I deserved a different ending in love, and this wasn’t it.

When Ernie leaned over to kiss me the next morning, I said, “Don’t … I want to talk to you. I’m not happy with our relationship.”

“Okay,” he muttered, then silence. We both lay half-dressed under my covers within inches of each other, clutching our pillows as barriers against an impending war that never materialized. Ernie wanted time to process. Within fifteen minutes he left my apartment for the last time with an agreement that we would be friends. I gave my boyfriend back to the world, and I gifted myself singlehood during a time in my life when being alone seemed freeing.

After a week of binge-watching Netflix shows and endless dinners by delivery, I embraced the new solo me—searching for love, again—in cinematic New York City where tripping over gay men was as easy as finding a slice of pizza at four in the morning.

Except it wasn’t.

An English teacher in Brooklyn seemed like a safe choice until he revealed that his only two great loves, besides his cherished French bulldog, were smoking marijuana and nightly porn viewings. A promising drink with a quiet and cute Buddhist turned into four dates debating how to deal with his third kidney transplant.

Most recently, I forced myself to stay out until 3 a.m., going home with an eager thirty-year-old who I specifically informed was not getting in my pants.

“I’m trying a new approach. No sex the first night,” I said.

He agreed to meet the next Wednesday, even asking if I had any dietary restrictions before he selected the restaurant. Then he went AWOL, disappearing into the Bermuda Triangle of men, before resurfacing days after the date that never was.

“What are you up to this weekend?” the thirty-year-old texted.

“Still wondering what happened to Wednesday,” I texted back.

“I worked later than expected, so no need to wonder.”

I refused to respond.

That’s when the argument with my close friend Kel right before the Key West trip bubbled up my unseen rules.

“What did you expect?” Kel said when I described the man who conveniently disappeared on the day of our planned date. “He only wanted to sleep with you.”

“He sounded eager to go out and began picking out a restaurant,” I said.

Apparently I misread dinner as code for doing it. I started to bemoan my lonely fate.

“Your problem is you have too many rules!” Kel declared.

Hot tears formed at the cusps of my eyelids. I demanded to know my “rules.”

“You tend to nix people who embrace their bodies or who expose too much skin in the daylight,” he said. “It’s like you discredit others for being themselves.”

He had a point. It was an approach borne out of my own body image issues, having been an overweight kid who struggled with my weight most of my life. Now as a slimmer adult, the lingering remains of my “yummy tummy” had me quick to resist those who showed real confidence by throwing off their shirts at gay pride events or sunbathing at the beach.

“You refuse attention from men, who, let me say this delicately, aren’t from the U.S.,” Kel continued.

Ouch.

“That’s not quite an accurate assessment,” I protested.

Yes, I did steer clear of the sexy, foreign men I longed for from afar. My personality was self-deprecating at times, and my wicked sense of humor often caused miscommunication. I recalled countless occasions talking in a loud club or even on a quiet date, saying “No, that’s not what I meant” to no avail, as I tried to make a point or crack a joke past language barriers.

“You just don’t let yourself go. You eliminate so many possibilities by wanting things to be perfect,” Kel said. And then to toss a bit of humor into his harsh, judgmental assessment, he added, “And then there’s the ‘no sitting on your duvet’ thing that drives everyone crazy.”

This was well known and true among my circle. I lived in a nice but cozy Manhattan studio, so with the bed as part of the room I demanded it stay maintained like a fine piece of furniture. No getting on top of the duvet cover was a standard rule.

I walked home battle-scarred, sad to think even my friends were looking at me and “tsk tsking” failure they felt I brought upon myself. Back at my apartment, I hovered over my pristine bed until I jumped on top of it in an act of defiance, letting my tears dry on the now crinkled pillow cases I’d want to iron in the morning. Waking up later and seeing what I’d done, I pulled the duvet tighter around me, believing it took baby steps to loosen the grip my unwritten rules had encased around me.

Brazilian Alex became my giant step.

We met at a dark bar midway through my vacation. He brought the brawn and the affectionate smiles. I responded with humor that made him laugh and an openness to letting him put his big hands on the small of my back as he seduced me. Electricity traveled through my body as low rumbles of distance thunder and lightning burst through pockets in the starry night sky.

When I suggested we try the bar across the street, he gleefully followed, taking my invitation as a sign of genuine interest. Confronted with the nude swimming pool at our destination gave him pause and me heart palpitations. No one was more shocked than I when I pulled off my shorts, shoes, and socks. Following a brief hesitation in removing my tee-shirt, I took a plunging leap into nude swimming at this men’s-only establishment.

Soon Alex slid off his shorts and underwear in one stealth motion. I turned and swam to the other side. Eager to check out his goods, I felt it was more gentlemanly to give him privacy and leave his manhood reveal as a second act surprise.

“Now!” he yelled.

Out of the corner of my eye I watched Alex tuck his stocky frame tightly in the air and crash into our small oasis like a thrill-seeking cannonball out to cause trouble.

The force of his explosive entry sent a pool tsunami over the back of my head, and I dove under the water to escape. Like a heat-seeking missile, Alex pulled me back up from the deep end, wrapping his beefy hands around me and pressing against my back. My second act surprise was rising from the deep as well.

“Where you go?” he said.

“I’m here … with you,” I said, turning around as he cupped my face and kissed me.

“Yes, you here and I no let you go.” And he kept his word.

In order to dry off, I needed to get out of the pool and go to the bar for towels … naked. While I stood there dripping wet amid the clothed people, modestly trying to cover up with my two hands, he smiled at me from the water, mouthing sweet sentiments on how great I looked.

Once we slid half dry back into the security of our everyday attire, we stood at the bar to get a drink as that late night thunderstorm blew in, showering our Technicolor vacation postcard moment in shades of muddy gray. The tiny awning around the bar did little to shelter us from the driving rain, and I started to feel uncomfortable with a wet tee-shirt sticking to my body.

“It’s okay. I protect you,” he said.

I wasn’t sure what rules I had left to break that night, from the naked swimming to my own wet tee-shirt contest, to finally allowing Alex, this stranger from Brazil, to come to my rented condo, giving into his advances. Taking a chance on him without any hesitation and misplacing my silly mental checklist of dos and don’ts paid off. Somehow he got my sour sense of humor and my body, and I slept soundly amid his light snoring with his husky body tangled around mine.

Afterwards we met one last time for a drink before departing from our island adventure. I told him, “No sex,” and he said, “No problem, I just like to see you.” A rule, yes, but one we both wanted to follow.

Back home, instead of talking to men on dating apps, I chatted with Alex on Whatsapp. It was how we maintained a daily connection from our respective countries. Our vacation romance remained suspended by memories of moonlight swimming, thunderstorms, the Atlantic Ocean—and over seven thousand miles.

Alex recently sent me links to photos of gorgeous Brazilian beaches dotted with tiny cliffs. People leapt into the teal and bright blue sea. He also reminded me of our time in Key West. “Was like a dream there to me,” he texted. “You are my special crazy American guy.”

He promised to come to the U.S. to visit me soon. Maybe he would. While I can’t quite contain this unexpected excitement, it’s the hardest rule to break—expecting things to be so perfect instead of taking a leap of faith, even if this dream of joining our hearts might never materialize. I’ve leapt into love before and drowned in the process.

“I’m still talking to Alex,” I announced to my friend Kel recently, our tense conversation packed away like many uncomfortable moments among good friends.

“The guy from Brazil who you met on your vacation? Where’s that relationship ever going to go?”

“Who knows?” I responded. “Anything’s possible.”

And in my dreams, it’s more than possible. It becomes reality. When I close my eyes at night, I picture myself perched on the edge of a tiny Brazilian cliff. “Come. The water so nice,” he yells. Alex is waiting there for me, floating in the bluest of oceans. I run and jump high into the warm, heavy air, tuck my legs inside my arms, hold my breath, and wait for the big splash.

•••

SCOTT GERACE currently resides in New York City. His essays have appeared in Full Grown People, Purple Clover, and The Washington Post. Scott is currently at work on audio recordings of his essay collection and a full-length play. Read more at www.scottgerace.com.

Read more FGP essays by Scott Gerace.

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Where There’s Smoke

Photo by Adam Parrott/Flickr

By Matt Jones

This is a couples’ vacation. Just the four of us.

In New Orleans.

In August.

The drive coming from Tuscaloosa should only take four and a half hours, but Jess and I are arguing because she thinks she forgot her birth control back at the house. Forgot is the wrong word, though. The problem is that I rush her. This is my thing when we travel: I hurry her out of the house at a speed beyond her comfort level. I pace up and down the hall and stand hawkishly over her shoulder wondering just what on earth could be taking so long.

She tells me that procrastination is her form of rebellion. She discovered this through self-motivated psychoanalysis, by reflecting upon memory after memory of family road trips in which her father woke her when it was still dark out and insisted they be on the road before the sun was up. Now, at twenty-seven, she says she dawdles as a form of dissent. Ambles in revolt. Climbing into the car and then needing to get out to use the bathroom just one more time is all part of the revolution.

We’re halfway to Louisiana, coming up on Hattiesburg, Mississippi, when I pull off the highway into an empty truck stop and Jess rummages through our luggage.

“It’s not here,” she calls, annoyed, from the back of the car.

“You forgot it?”

“You rushed me,” she says.

We’re in love. This is not in question. What is, however, is whether or not we want to risk bringing a child into the world. The risk is small, of course, but Jess and I are in our last year of graduate school. We have many reservations, so on the side of the road in southern Mississippi, we do the math.

  • We had sex the night before.
  • She didn’t take her birth control then.
  • It’s August, more precisely, mid-August. If she were to get pregnant, then the baby would gestate for nine months inside her body and enter the world in June.

“We’ll have our degrees by then,” I say.

“But no jobs,” she says.

We both nod.

We’ve talked about children many times before this. We love the freedom of just each other. We’re worried about the state of the world, about the climate, rising seas, violent conflicts. Our general consensus is that we will not procreate intentionally, though this, in the here and now of rural Mississippi, would be one of those unintentional times.

“Would you hate it if we drove back to the house to get it?”

“No,” I say.

“What if we just drive home and don’t go? Would that be so bad?”

I smile. We are both iffy when it comes to couple’s vacations. They’re traumatic. The only other one we’ve been on together took place three years earlier on Lookout Mountain in the Northeastern reaches of Alabama where Jess shared a room with her then-husband, and my then-girlfriend and I took the bedroom upstairs. At one point during a long night in which the University of Alabama football team barely eked out a win over LSU, we all took our clothes off and climbed into a hot tub that faced a sea of moonlit pines.

The thing about being in love with a married woman is that you can never rush her. There is so much waiting involved. So much patience. If I perform that same level of self-motivated psychoanalysis on myself that Jess is so adept at, then I determine that this is why I rush her out of the house now. I’m sick of waiting. I have waited. I was patient. I don’t like to think about the first couples’ trip we took, when Jess was married to someone else, though there is a moment from that night after her husband and my girlfriend stumbled out of the hot tub and back into the house when Jess reached her bare foot through the water and parted my knees and then we just sat there staring at each other through the steam while sweat gathered on the back of my neck.

And so now, sitting on the side of the road in Mississippi trying to decide whether or not we are okay with having a child in nine months, it’s best not to hurry important decisions. Take it slow. Painfully slow if necessary. Turn the car around. Drive back. Pick up the birth control. Turn a four-and-a-half-hour car ride into ten. When she parts your knees in the dead of night, don’t move. Don’t even breathe. Just be still and know there is still yet a great distance to travel before you arrive anywhere.

•••

We meet Rex and Kelly in New Orleans. Rex is a friend of mine from college and Kelly is his girlfriend. For my birthday, Rex has rented us a duplex in the lower ninth. Down the street, there’s an urban kale farm and chickens running loose and houses with the letter X still spray-painted across the siding.

On our first morning, Rex and I walk through sticky heat to the nearest coffeeshop and he tells me about wanting to become a firefighter. The year before it is a muay thai fighter and a year later it will be a carpenter, but for now it’s a firefighter.

He’s in the midst of crisis of masculinity. I suspect he doesn’t love Kelly, and if he does, it is a love I am unfamiliar with. For as long as I have known him, Rex has tried to exhibit the calm coolness of James Dean or maybe even a young Steve McQueen or Robert Mitchum and he can often manage the performance for a short amount of time. But then he cracks. The cracking is inevitable. I expect this trip of ours is built upon the foundation of a crack.

Over the years I’ve determined that it doesn’t matter if I am conciliatory or confrontational—either way, Rex will do what Rex does—so once we get to the coffeeshop, I just come right out and ask, “So you’re not applying to graduate school?”

And here we go with the firefighter talk again. Rex has spent the last six months telling me over the phone in hushed tones while Kelly is in the other room that he is going to pursue a graduate degree, that he is going to devote his energies to writing. At the coffee shop, we pick up drinks for “the girls.” Already, I don’t like this, this couples’ trip lingo of “girls” and “guys.” There’s too much performativity involved in the couple’s trip. There are the things Rex reveals to me man-to-man and then there is the man he reveals in the company of “the girls,” and I think why must we have these moments of tenderness and intimacy followed by such emphatic exaggeration and denial and deflection? Don’t you know I can’t handle this kind of dynamic? Don’t you know I have couples’ vacation trauma? But of course he doesn’t.

Rex tells me that becoming a fireman will put him on the sure path to a nice home, a better body, kids, a family, a red Corvette.

“A red Corvette?” I say. “Who are you, my uncle?”

He tells me firemen have a lot of downtime to do bench press in front of the firehouse.

I nod. My shirt sticks to my body. The coffee is too hot. Just holding the cup makes my hand sweat. I wait for Rex to ask about my life. Not just a question meant to segue into something he is dying to talk about, but a real inquiry into the quality of my being. It won’t come. That is fine. I’m practiced in the art of waiting and nodding along.

Our conversation reminds of talking to Jess’s husband, how the morning after the hot tub, he and I drove down the mountain and into town to buy breakfast and he said, “Jess doesn’t really know what she wants. She likes to think she does sometimes. Things will get better once we leave Alabama. Once we go somewhere else.”

Nod, nod. Right, right.

When I first met Jess’s husband, he said we should open up a mobile dog grooming studio together. He said maybe he’d go to law school. When I first met Jess she told me, “He said things would get better when we came to Alabama.”

Sometimes I want to grab Rex by the scruff of his shirt and slap him. The world is full of violent conflict anyway. What is all this firefighter business? This obsession with muay thai? I thought you were trying to write? I know the answer, of course. I suspect Rex does too. I think he knows, but he won’t say. Can’t relationships go on forever in the cramped space of what is known but goes unsaid? Who wants to live in that space? I could never go back there, back in that incommodious box. Neither could Jess. We have spent countless hours talking about that space. For her, it was a marriage, for me an affair, a long weekend in a North Alabama rental cabin.

“I think I could get a lot of writing done at the firehouse. They’ve got a lot of downtime, firefighters.”

“Good, good,” I say. I am conciliatory in the heat of August. I don’t have the energy for argument. I haven’t had a sip of my coffee yet. I’m spent from the ten-hour drive that should have only been four and a half.

When we get back to the house we’ve rented for the weekend, Rex pushes open the front door and says, “Let’s see what the girls are up to.”

They’re in the kitchen sitting across from each other at a small table beneath a spice rack. The whole trip is deja vu already. I think of the cabin just outside of Fort Payne, Alabama. Lookout Mountain. The changing of the November leaves. Of my then-girlfriend and Jess sitting there talking to each other while me and her husband unload groceries. All of us together in this incommodious box.

In New Orleans, I’m only happy that there’s no hot tub. There is no need for one. The duplex itself is feverish, built shotgun style so there the four of us will stay trapped in the barrel for two whole days.

•••

Late afternoon we all head over to the French Quarter. Rex and Kelly drink more gin and tonics than I can count. I have never had a beignet but everyone else has and they tell me I’m not missing out on much. So amongst other things, this weekend will also be a beignet-less one. Again, it is fine. I can deal with the lacking.

In our alone time, Jess and I laugh about the birth control incident that took place on the highway. It’s already funny. The two of us in the tight confines of my little hatchback, debating in the span of a few minutes whether or not we want to alter our family planning. We’re good at those kinds of situations. Maybe good is the wrong word. Practiced, though. In my car. In her car. The library stairwell. The graveyard behind the football stadium at midnight. Empty classrooms on the third floor of the English building. The kitchens of rented country cabins while our significant others are asleep down the hall and up the stairs. Give us a cramped space and something impossibly large to discuss and we’ll work it out. We’ll tiptoe around it. We’ll attack it head on. We’ve got a trophy room full of “should I leave my husband,” “do you love me,” “quick describe our future together while he is in the bathroom.” When other couples come over for dinner or drinks, they see the heads on the wall, the furs on the floor. Our house has a kind of enigmatic funk to it.

But then again, whose doesn’t? The New Orleans rental, after a full day of drinking and sweating and stale cigarettes, gets kind of fetid. There’s brooding in the air. Rex is about two drinks past young Steve McQueen and heading into old Marlon Brando territory. And Kelly, you can tell she’s got things on her mind. Things she wants to say. What better way to do it than with a game of Scrabble?

We all sit down at the tiny kitchen table and spread the board out, set ourselves up with a set of seven letters each. I love words, but I don’t care for Scrabble, for the limitations. Back on Lookout Mountain, the four of us played Taboo. Jess was on a team with my girlfriend. Us versus Them. Tensions were high not because anyone cared about winning but because the whole weekend was Taboo. The entire couples’ trip was guessing what someone was trying to say without them actually saying it.

While we play Scrabble, Jess and I lock ankles under the table. I’m in last place and Jess is in third so the real contest is between Rex and Kelly. Rex has always wanted to be a writer. This game means everything to him. I can see it in his eyes. And if it doesn’t mean everything, then it means next to everything, whatever is adjacent to it. And for Kelly, I can tell that winning is important, not winning in its own right, but Rex letting her win. Jess and I tap this out in morse code on each others’ thighs under the table. We are far past words. Masters of secret communication, we are. Of the coy glance. Of the hand brush. We used to text each other in acronyms that all began with the same three letters: RTR. Roll Tide Roll. The rallying cry for the Alabama football team.

RTRIWYSBRN (Roll Tide Roll I Want You So Bad Right Now)

RTRIWTFU (Roll Tide Roll I Want to Fuck You)

RTRIWYIM (Roll Tide Roll I Want You Inside Me)

Rex wins the game. The board is a collage of nonsense we’ve all had a part in creating. Kelly grabs her wine glass and storms off either because she does not like losing or because she does not like Rex winning. Then a literal storm rolls in. Rain patters the tin roof and fills the duplex with white noise. Jess and I climb into bed, and because we are renting a shotgun house, Rex regularly marches through our room and out the front door and onto the porch where he chain smokes.

“What is he doing out there?” Jess asks.

Lightning flashes. We can see Rex’s silhouette. Rain pelts his face and the front half of his body. His hair drips. His cigarette glows. In the shadow of the porch, in the right light that is, he does sort of look like Steve McQueen a la The Towering Inferno, at least a little bit, perched there as he is, exhausted, grim, both drenched and aflame. Yeah, I think, you go on and fight your fires.

•••

On Sunday morning Rex and Kelly are out of money. Out of gas. Jess and I pack our things while Kelly makes calls to her mother’s boyfriend to see if they can have some cash wired over. Until then, they are literally stuck.

I load our things into the car, then we pace awkwardly up and down the sidewalk while Rex and Kelly take turns calling different people, explaining the situation, and snapping at each other.

Jess pulls me off to the side.

“Do you think they want us to give them the money?”

“Maybe,” I say.

Maybe we’re back to the performance. Maybe they’re too embarrassed to ask us directly. They should just ask, though. They should just come right out with it. I have stood in front of Jess on a cloudless night with tears welling in my eyes pleading, “Pick me. Please, pick me.”

In the darkness of my room I have begged her, “Just divorce him. Don’t wait. Just do it.”

In the hot tub on the back porch of a house that didn’t belong to us, I let her part my knees and then just look at me.

I shouldn’t judge Rex and Kelly, but I do. If they need help, I want them just to come right out and say it. But I also understand not being able to.

“You guys can head out,” Rex says. “We’ve got it worked out.”

Nod, nod. Right, right.

So Jess and I climb into the car and pull away. We wave through the window. The rain follows us out of the city but stops by the time we cross Lake Pontchartrain.

Jess says, “You remember Rex last night? Smoking his cigarette in the rain?”

We both laugh.

The drive back doesn’t take long. The road we’re on is well traveled. We’re used to it by now, and before we know it, the weekend is behind us, so too is the storm, the sticky heat, the brooding, the performance, the cramped box. All of that, behind us now.

•••

MATT JONES is a graduate of the University of Alabama MFA program. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Southern Review, The Atlantic, Post Road, Ruminate, The Journal, and various other publications. More of his work can be found at www.mattjonesfiction.com.

 

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In Plane View

Photo by Gina Easley

By Wendy Fontaine

There are airplane seats in my living room. A row of five, straight-backed, with navy-blue and charcoal upholstery, canvas seatbelts with silver buckles that still shine. They must have come from a big plane, a 747 perhaps, something that flew over international waters. Bulky and awkward, like nothing you’ve ever seen in a Pottery Barn catalog or a Living Spaces commercial, the seats are not my taste. I’d prefer they weren’t in our apartment at all, but they belong to my husband, James, and predate the beginning of our relationship. Over the years, I have tried to ask as few questions as possible about the seats, as if my disinterest could somehow make them fade into the background.

When guests come, the airplane seats are the first thing they see. “Are those from a real plane?” they ask. I roll my eyes. James smirks and nods. The guests search for appropriate responses, which vary from shock to envy, depending upon their gender.

No one ever sits in the seats, but if they did, they’d feel the scratch of polyester against the backs of their thighs. They’d notice a hard metal frame pressing into their shoulder blades. If they closed their eyes, they might hear the deep hum of the engine or the sharp rattle of a beverage cart. They might even feel the bounce of turbulence no longer there.

•••

Fifteen years ago, when he was working as a production assistant on television shows around Los Angeles, James found the airplane seats in a heap of gear outside a studio in the San Fernando Valley. After a show wraps, crewmembers tear down the set, separating scrap materials from furniture and other items that can be reused. The seats were either on their way back to a prop warehouse or bound for the trash. But James and his roommates, who were also working as PAs and stuntmen at the time, snagged the seats and brought them back to their shared, three-bedroom apartment in the city.

The guys, most of whom came to LA from the rugged streets of Boston, were just getting started in the business. They worked long, entry-level shifts and pooled their earnings to cover rent, booze, and cable TV. Back then, much of their furniture came from the curb. A large couch, swayback and gray like an old mule. Kitchen chairs. End tables. Even a futon that would later become my daughter’s bed.

James and his friends put the seats on a wooden riser in their living room to create movie-theater seating, an optimal arrangement for watching Super Bowls and Stanley Cups. A projector transformed the opposite wall into a giant screen. I didn’t know them then, but I imagine them also watching the shows they had been working on at the time, scanning the credits for their own names.

•••

One day, while vacuuming the space around the airplane seats, I see what appears to be a serial number stamped on the back of the chairs, along with a date: Sept. 25, 1992. An internet search of the serial number proves fruitless, but the date makes me smile. That’s the year James and I graduated from high school. We went to the same school in western Maine, though we were hardly friends at the time. He was the captain of the football team who dated the head cheerleader. I was captain of the basketball and field hockey teams. The titles were mostly honorary; I was a hard worker but a lousy athlete. With only sixty kids in our graduating class, we knew each other’s names but never had a single conversation—not that either of us can recall, anyway.

After graduation, he studied advertising at Florida State University, then moved to Los Angeles to find work in show business. Along the way, he was the life of every party, a distinction he earned with excessive drinking and risky decisions.

I wouldn’t know about it until much later, but when he was in his twenties, a drunken car wreck nearly severed James’ right arm just below the shoulder. Doctors said he’d never regain full use of it, but after surgery and physical therapy, he proved them wrong. He even played football again, as a fullback with a semi-pro team that practiced three nights a week and competed on the weekends. More than once, he was the team’s most valuable player.

•••

After high school, I went to the University of Maine and got a degree in journalism. James never married, but I got hitched right away, mostly to escape the paper mill town where we grew up. My first husband was in the military which meant we moved every four years. In each new town, I got a job as a reporter at the local newspaper, covering everything from tedious school board meetings to gruesome homicides. Through work, I found a way to belong.

After ten years of marriage, our daughter Angie was born, and I quit my job to take care of her. While her dad was away on short deployments, she and I went to mommy and me yoga classes, story time at the local library, and swimming lessons for infants at the YMCA. I nursed her and made her baby food from scratch. Our days were smooth and peaceful, easy and predictable. But then the clouds rolled in.

When Angie was two, her father and I split. He had an affair with a woman he had known back in high school, who now had kids of her own. After that, Angie and I left our family home and moved back to the paper mill town, where I got a job bottling pills in the supermarket pharmacy, rented an apartment and filed for divorce. Money was tight, so we furnished our new place with things from yard sales and thrift stores. Mismatched dishes. A faded pink rocking chair. A kitchen table that wobbled, no matter how I attempted to fix it.

After a year of court hearings, the judge granted me full custody of Angie, meaning all the decisions about caring for her were up to me. There were doctors’ appointments and tantrums, nightmares and fevers, potty training and time-outs. I was her mother and her father, never feeling as though I was doing either job well enough. The hardest part, though, was focusing on Angie when my own heart was broken, when I was afraid of what each new day would bring, when I couldn’t imagine a time when things would feel normal again.

Instead of being home with my daughter, making her meals from scratch and teaching her the alphabet, I dropped her off at daycare in the morning and went to the pharmacy to hand out Vicodin and Viagra for eight dollars an hour, then warmed up macaroni and cheese for dinner in the afternoon. Each evening, I bathed her, read her bedtime books, and cuddled her under the covers, wondering if this was it—if this was the life we were meant to live, in this small town, where everything was bumpy and rough. I missed our old life, our sense of stability. Sometimes in the middle of the night, I’d wake up and, just for a moment, forget where we were.

•••

For two years, Angie and I juggled work, daycare, and life in our little rental apartment. We celebrated birthdays and Christmases and made a few friends. But the paper mill town never felt like home. When she was four, we had a yard sale of our own. We sold the dishes and the furniture, then drove south to Boston and boarded a plane bound for Los Angeles.

During my divorce, James and I had begun an email correspondence that turned into friendship. I wrote to him, at first, because I was lonely and talking to adults kept me from going stir crazy. He wrote back, maybe, because his roommates had all moved out and he needed someone to vent to about work. In our emails, we told each other what we had been doing since high school. I shared the details of my breakup and the struggles of parenting. He wrote about the parties, the accident, and the day he decided to quit drinking. I admired his resolve, his self-control, and discipline; he appreciated my tenacity. Our friendship turned into intrigue, and intrigue turned into romance. He started sending Angie and me little gifts, playful things to keep us smiling: a red-and-white cowgirl lunchbox for her, a coffee mug shaped like Buddha for me. Then he sent plane tickets.

The trip marked Angie’s first time on an airplane, and she spent most of the five-hour flight looking out the window at a blanket of clouds, mesmerized by how soft the world looked from high up. I passed the time imagining what things would be like in California and wondering if James could handle being around a demanding preschooler. The visit was a test that I suspected we would fail. It was easy to romanticize a relationship from three thousand miles away. Being together every day might be a different story.

That week, James took us to all the usual tourist spots. The Hollywood sign. Venice Beach. In-N-Out Burger. Angie liked him instantly. She sat next to him at dinner, asked to hold his hand when we crossed streets, and pretended to be his pet dog—her favorite game of make-believe. But it was the quiet evenings at his place that hooked me, when he and Angie curled up on that old swayback couch to watch superhero movies, her forehead resting on the jagged scar along his bicep.

After Angie and I returned to Maine, the paper mill town felt even less like home than it had before. I knew that no matter how hard I worked or how long we stayed, the town would never be where we belonged. James invited us to live with him, and I spent several months waffling about whether moving was the right thing to do—for Angie and for myself. I was afraid of making a huge mistake, of giving up our safe haven. But I also knew that if we didn’t go, if we didn’t at least try, I would always wonder what life might’ve been like for the three of us. So Angie and I had our yard sale and went back to California. For good.

•••

In the years before our arrival, most of James’ curbside treasures had disappeared—taken or disposed of by various roommates as they moved up in the world and moved on, into their own places or in with girlfriends and wives. James had moved up, too; no longer a production assistant on television shows, he had become a computer engineer on blockbuster movie productions, the kind that involve the most famous actors in Hollywood.

The airplane seats remained, though, along with a Scarface poster, the beer-stained carpets and a shelf of half-filled liquor bottles. His party days were behind him. No more drinking, no more reckless behavior. But the bottles and other trappings stayed—reminders that good times can be good, but they can also go bad.

Of course, I had my own attachments. After two years of single parenting, I drew imaginary lines around my daughter and myself. When I went grocery shopping, I bought only the things Angie and I liked. When I cooked, I made enough for two. I kept our laundry and our money separate. At night, I crawled into bed with my daughter instead of the man who would eventually become my husband. Some of it was habit, but most of it was fear. How could I trust someone again, not only with my heart but also with my daughter’s? Sometimes it’s hard to let go of the past, even when you know that letting go is the last step before flying free.

James never questioned my hesitancy or complained about feeling left out. He simply waited to see how things would evolve. Then one day, while he and Angie lounged on the couch, it suddenly became clear: if I kept my guard up, if I continued to hold him at arm’s length, then so would Angie. Love doesn’t live inside imaginary lines. It is big and risky. It is the whole sky or nothing at all.

•••

Now Angie’s ten years old, and James and I are married. In time, he took down the Scarface poster, tossed the liquor-bottle mementos, and replaced the carpets. I learned how to shop and cook for a family of three and started sleeping in my husband’s bed. We bought a new sofa, brown suede with cream stitching, and put that old swayback couch on the curb for someone else.

The airplane seats, however, are still here.

I would love for them to disappear one day, perhaps go to a storage facility or maybe into the trash. But the chances of that happening are slim. James wants to hold onto them, even though they no longer go with the décor.

I understand the seats are part of his past, a part he isn’t ready to relinquish just yet. They hold memories of the fun he had with a particular group of guys and how hard they all worked to make names for themselves. Maybe they also remind him of his retreat from alcohol addiction, when he sharply and decisively changed the trajectory of his life.

If that’s the case, then the seats remind me of something too: that it’s all right to put my flaws in the middle of the room. I can struggle with the past and feel insecure about the future, and James will love me anyway. I can be hesitant and fearful, territorial and overprotective—it won’t matter. Love is also staying in the room with another person’s imperfections. It’s sitting with their undesirable elements without making demands or asking too many questions.

Even though I hate the airplane seats, this apartment feels like home. Angie and I have finally landed where we belong. So I’ll keep the silly seats forever if I have to, if James wants them. I’ll keep dusting them, keep vacuuming around them and dressing them up with throw pillows. I’ll even sit in them for a movie or two, scanning the credits for his name.

•••

WENDY FONTAINE’s work has appeared in Compose Literary Journal, Hippocampus Magazine, Passages North, Readers Digest, River Teeth, the anthology Turning Points: Stories about Choice and Change, and elsewhere. In 2015, she won the Tiferet Prize for Creative Nonfiction. Wendy lives and teaches in Los Angeles and is currently seeking representation for her memoir, Leaves in the Fall. www.wendyfontaine.com

 

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Train Wreck

Photo by Mehmet Pinarci/Flickr

By Tanisha Wallace Porath

“You are a train wreck!”

“I’m a train wreck?”

“Yes, a total train wreck.”

“Why? Why am I a train wreck?”

“Because you can’t let go of Peter.”

I’m the fucking train wreck, I’m the train wreck? You… your ex-wife is a macadamia, a certified borderline personality and you picked her, and you always talk about her—she left you six months ago and I can’t let Peter go?

The last sentence only travelled as far as my head. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings or bring up the memory of his ex-wife. I sit quietly on the passenger side of his oversized truck, wondering if what he had said was true. Am I still a train wreck? Will I ever be normal? Will anyone ever see me as normal or am I destined to be “the young widow” for the rest of my days? He grabs my hand and kisses it twice in quick succession. He thinks I’m upset with him but really I’m just lost in thought. We’re headed to a faraway destination, a cabin on a lake and I have two more hours in the car with him, so my decision is clear. Create a box and put his statement into it, open later. My plan falls apart about nine seconds after I create it. I want to talk to him if we are going to be in a relationship. I want to be open and honest but am I too honest? I fear my mouth will betray me and hurting him isn’t an option. When I was married, I could crush Peter’s soul with one or two well crafted, cruel, and just timely enough sentences. I no longer want to be that person. I stay quiet. Oh here we go, I’m talking about Peter again.

He starts asking me question after question, sensing that I’m anywhere but here in his truck. He’s right—the last thirty minutes of this ride have been me obsessing about if people are ever the same after trauma. Do we show our scars forever or do we get an amazing concealer from MAC and cover them? At what point does my inability to let Peter go put a damper on my ability to move forward with another man? This man.

I start to drift off into a spiral of “What ifs”—all pointless but all very relevant to this particular spiral. The worst part of the shame spiral is that I am miles away from a cell tower, headed to a cabin in the middle of nowhere, so I can’t even reach my best friend and her calming, logical words. But since I am in the middle of nowhere, deep in the valley of Idaho, her calming words are out of my reach.

We stop at a lookout point because he wants to show me all of the things he loves about where he lives. We get out of the truck and he comes over to my side. I jump out of the truck and before my feet barely touch the gravel path, he grabs me by my waist and kisses me square on my lips. My mind panics, but when our lips are together I can no longer remember what I was panicked about. I am now panicking because I can’t remember the first panic. Dear God, I am a train wreck. He grabs my hand and walks me over to a steep cliff. My hand start to sweat and he tells me it’s okay, he’s got me. I realize he does have me but more importantly, I have myself. I’m no longer a scared fifteen-year-old that needs to be protected. I am also no longer the scared thirty-eight-year old that needs my husband to stand up for me. My scars are showing but so is my strength. In my head I start to sing that Alanis Morissette song about how she is sick but she’s pretty. Perhaps I am all of the things not just one. As we stand above the vastness of where he lives, among the trees and cliffs, I turn and face him.

“I am a train wreck.”

“So am I,” he says.

He squeezes my hand as we stand together, silent. My last decision before I decide to stop making decisions is to accept my scars, show them to the world, and try my best to avoid fancy concealer.

•••

TANISHA WALLACE PORATH was born a poor black girl in…well actually she had a pretty middle class existence in Anchorage, Alaska, where she was born and raised. She studied photography at an art college in Seattle. Soon after she graduated, she moved to Portland, Oregon, with her husband and started a career as an editorial photographer.  Some of her clients have included: Willamette Week, The Oregonian, and several other periodicals. She began writing professionally the spring after her husband died in 2013. Her work has appeared in several online periodicals, including Full Grown People. She has two roommates—her daughter Bronny and her son Duke. Currently, she’s writing her first memoir and pitching agents.

Read more FGP essays by Tanisha Porath.

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Make America Date Again

Photo by silkeybeto/Flickr

By Laurie Graff

“Well, I can see this afternoon’s going steadily downhill,” said my online date.

We were but twenty minutes in, and he happened to be right. I mean that, literally. What were the odds, but there I was in Riverside Park with a Jewish man from the Upper West Side, in publishing no less, and he turned out to be for Trump.

Our email exchange had been sparse. He just asked to meet. I didn’t ask questions. I just wanted to go. I used to kiss a lot of frogs. Then dating moved online. I now delete a lot of toads. Yet I felt all flushed when his face popped up on my screen. His profile, smart and to the point, matched the twinkle in his eye. He was a reader. Someone curious. Creative. He liked riding his bike and long summer drives. It would be a plus if he had a car, but I was just psyched to see he had hair. I wrote right away. He didn’t write back.

A week went by. I tried him again.

Hi! Are you playing hard to get? If so, I’ll play too… just tell me how! I can’t stop thinking about you. Okay, so maybe that’s not true but I do want to know you, and I would love to hear back. We’re both Upper West Siders, the river’s a favorite spot and the weather might actually be getting nice….

We made a plan to meet Sunday. He suggested one-thirty at the river. My class at the gym ended at one. I thought we could walk down together. Swing by Zabar’s café and get something to eat at the picnic table, on the new dock. He agreed. That morning, before heading out, I checked my email.

A slight change of plans… Instead of meeting at 1:30 on Broadway, I’ll meet you at the dock at 2.

All through the class I wondered what was up. On the one hand it seemed insignificant, but online dating was like a chess game. Every move meant something. Perhaps he planned to ride his bike, or maybe he knew wouldn’t be hungry. But I was, and made sure to eat before I arrived which (uncharacteristically) was precisely on time. At 1:59 I cut through the Boat Basin where, from the top of the patio, I saw him in the distance. He was leaning over the wood railings, looking out at the river, contemplating the cloudy Hudson. My heart and head connected as I thought, oh my, he’s cute.

That hardly ever happened, and I dropped my concerns rushing past all the people down to the dock. “Hi,” I waved. “It’s Laurie! Hello!”

“Hi!” He shook my hand. He smiled. “How was Pilates?”

We began chatting away as we checked out the boats and each other. It was always strange to come face to face with the live, 3-D person ordered up online. It was kind of like unwrapping a package from Amazon on an item whose size and color you gave an educated guess, and hoped would work in person.

“You want to walk?” he asked, pointing north on the promenade.

We were walking and talking. Getting-to-know-you talk. Trading questions with snapshots of answers. Conversation was easy, and he was easy on the eyes. I liked his black tee shirt and North Face pullover. He looked nice. He was warm. I’d go as far to say he was a mensch. Could I have met somebody?

“So where’s your office?” I was really happy to hear he still worked. Besides which, it was interesting to have met a man on the production side of magazines. “You know, there’s a Chinese place in a brownstone right across the street from you, seems very Mad Men-esque. White linen tablecloths. Art. I always wanted to go there. Maybe we could meet for a lunch special?”

Just so you know, for me that was a big deal. To signal, early on, I hoped to see him again. That I wanted to. He, meanwhile, was scrunching his face giving thought to the Chinese food. I recalled his profile saying he was a simple burger and jeans type guy.

“You should go if you want to try it,” he finally said, taking the lunch date off the table. But he continued to ask all about my work and he was attentive, so I resisted reading beyond the moment. Maybe he didn’t even take lunch, I thought, and bulleted through my years as professional actress, freelance publicist, and published author.

“So how do you get your health insurance?”

After saying I’d written three published novels you’d think the next question would be, “What are they?” But we were dating in the twenty-first century and, considering my chicklit titles, I actually figured this to be the safer question.

“Obamacare,” I said. “Fourth year. I was covered for twenty-three years through actors’ unions, and then through the Author’s Guild,” I explained, because it sounded substantial. “Then all the groups were disbanded so everyone’s on their own. It’s been good, but who knows what’s going to happen now. It’s all such a mess, right?”

I thought he’d jump right in. Only he did not even answer.

“It’s all like a mess, now. Don’t you think?” Gosh, people in steady jobs really had no clue what it took to freelance and find a plan every December. “Don’t you think it’s all like a big mess?”

He stopped walking to plant himself before he said, “I voted for Trump. I’m with him 100%. No resistance, no regrets. Behind him all the way.”

He whaaaaat?

His face deadpan, he rattled off that speech like an actor in a play. He had to be pulling my leg.

“Are you serious?”

“Yes,” he said. Seriously.

“Why?”

“Anything’s better than eight years of Obama,” he said, while I neglected to point out that Hillary, not Obama was the one who’d been running.

“I’m just… shocked.”

“Why would you be shocked?”

“Did you ever hear him speak?” I asked. I could practically see the air letting out of my balloon. “I just don’t ever meet anybody that’s, uh… for him. Especially here,” I pointed to Riverside Park as proof positive of the Democratic society I knew to exist on the Upper West Side where like-minded folk commiserated in the gym, in stores, on the subway and the streets. What in the world possessed this guy?

He resumed walking, so I followed. But now I could not look him in the eye. Instead, I looked down at the pavement, processing how this was about to change everything. From that moment on it was just a countdown to the end, and I passive-aggressively decided to let him take us there.

“Obama single-handedly destroyed the entire medical industry for the five percent of people who didn’t have health insurance.”

Obama? Again? The five percent didn’t count? Was that number even accurate? I’m the worst when it came to having data at my fingertips. Sometimes I memorized one stat, just to have something to pull out in these situations. I knew that 88% of the Upper West Side voted for Hillary. How’d I wind up on a date with one of the12% that was acting like the one percent?

“The problem’s with the insurance companies,” I said. “The problem is the greed. And people can’t navigate it alone. We need the groups so it’s easy for everyone to buy. Then there’ll be more people participating and costs will go down.”

“The insurance companies want to do it but —”

“But what? The government won’t let them?”

“That’s right.”

Fiddle dee dee, I thought, and rolled my eyes, remembering the first time I saw Gone with the Wind. Scarlett only wanted to have fun at the barbeque, but all the men could discuss was war, war, war!

“Do you read?” he asked.

Do you? I wondered. But he thought I was reading fake news. And I knew that he was.

“Okay, healthcare aside,” I said, intent on staying calm, channeling my inner Erica Kane, the vixen from All My Children whose mere tone could sweeten the saltiest of statements. “What about guns? What about LGBT? What about the planet? What about women’s rights, immmigra—”

“Well I can see this afternoon’s going steadily downhill.”

No wonder he didn’t want to swing by Zabar’s. Why spend time and money on a lunch that would never get eaten once the political views had been unpacked? Who could he possibly date in this city? More importantly, whom was I going to date?

“I just don’t know how you can get behind someone so stupid?” I asked, the cracks in the pavement deepening as I kept my voice light, and deliberately dug in. “He’s ignorant, coarse, he doesn’t read, he doesn’t understand The Constitution, God, those tweets—”

Boy, I detested online dating. People shudder when I say that, and it frightens other women who feel compelled to meet that way. So let me modify. For me, online dating never works. No matter how promising it seemed there was always some insidious thing I’d have never imagined that appeared when we met in person. I could never love a man whose ideology, to me, so lacked compassion.

Maybe if we’d met during Obama… no! Maybe Bush? Maybe not. Perhaps pre 9-11? I think if we’d met at a happy hour during Clinton we could have had a good fling.

We walked in silence, little more than a few feet, when he saw an opening to the park at 90th Street.

“I’ll walk you out,” he said, but a moment later changed his mind. “Better yet, I’ll leave you right here.”

I did a pivot, quickly walking out and away.

“Nice to meet you,” I heard behind me.

Now, there’s an alternative fact.

•••

LAURIE GRAFF is the author of the bestselling You Have to Kiss a Lot of Frogs, Looking for Mr. Goodfrog, and The Shiksa Syndrome. A contributor to columns and anthologies, the former actress is also a produced and published OOB playwright. Laurie lives and works in New York City. Her new novel, Licked, is up for sale. Visit her website and ‘Like’ her on Facebook.

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Titanic

Photo by cea+/Flickr

By Susan Goldberg

Rachel and I told the kids that we were separating on a Saturday night—also known in our then-household as Family Movie Night. Family Movie Night was pretty much exactly what it sounds like: we each took turns picking a film, and then the four of us hunkered down with pizza and popcorn in the basement and watched it together.

Family Movie Night was about as democratic as it gets, which means that if I had to sit through Soccer Dog: European Cup and suffer the unrelenting vulgarity (and grudging hilarity) of Dumb and Dumber, then in turn my sons had to put up with my fondness for classics like Annie, School of Rock, and Beetlejuice, and with Rachel’s fascinating but maybe slightly off-base pick of Beasts of the Southern Wild.

We’d decided to separate a couple of months earlier, in an eerily calm conversation, one of us at either end of the living room couch, an afghan covering our feet in the middle. “Decided,” perhaps, isn’t entirely accurate; I, at least, had decided weeks earlier that I was done, that there would be no more couples counseling, no more trying to fix what was irreparably damaged. More precisely, then, we acknowledged that the marriage was over. If I’d had any lingering doubts, they were dispelled when Rachel excused herself from the conversation to use the bathroom. As she walked up the stairs, the thought that rose, gleeful and unbidden, in my head was, “Now I can renovate bathroom exactly how I want it.”

Since that day, we’d been white-knuckling it to get through the winter school break, through Christmas (and an accompanying, weeklong visit from my mother-in-law), through the regular school/music lessons/soccer/swimming/meals/homework routine.

It was a surreal, slightly desperate time, punctuated by the confusing beauty of occasionally lovely family dinners and moments of pure joy with the boys, moments when Rachel and I looked at each other across the dining room table and shook our heads in disbelief that we were undoing this, even as we both knew exactly why. Ending the marriage was the right decision, and the much more frequent moments where we seethed silently, argued in whispers, retreated to our various corners of the house—or left it altogether, shaking in anger and grief—confirmed that.

Before we told the kids, we had needed time to figure out some basic facts — who would move out (her), how we would divide our time with the kids (50/50), how much the house was worth (I called an appraiser), how we would create a separation agreement and what it might look like (we hired a mediator, engaged our lawyers), how we’d handle living arrangements until she found a new place (we’d alternate spending time in the house with the children and staying with friends).

In focusing on those details, we were also making space to let the enormity of our decision sink in, to shift from envisioning a future together to a future apart, its unknown possibilities both exciting (bathroom!) and terrifying (money, loneliness). In figuring out schedules and valuations, we began the process what it would mean to let go, to be able to stop trying to work things out as a couple. In my better moments, it occurred to me that at least the problems we were dealing with now with had solutions.

And now, we had to figure out how to tell the boys.

On this particular Saturday evening, our seven-year-old son got to choose what we’d be watching for Family Movie Night.

“He wants Titanic,” Rachel texted me that morning. “It’s a metaphor.”

“I’ll miss your gallows sense of humor,” I wrote back. It was true.

Is there any good way to tell your children that their parents are splitting up? We’d been putting off the conversation until we could give them some credible information about why and how and where and with whom they’d be living, at least in the shorter term. We’d rehearsed the basics of what we needed to say — that it wasn’t their fault, that we loved them both deeply, that we’d tried really hard for a long time, that no one hated each other, that we’d still see lots of each other even on the days we weren’t all together.

Still, I felt entirely unprepared for the conversation, my dread mounting as the day (soccer practice, diving lessons, Pokémon club, playdates) wore on. I will admit that I dropped by a friend’s house in the late afternoon and took her up on her offer to share some of her clonazepam stash. In the end, I didn’t take any of the tiny pink pills that she’d carefully cut in half, but their very presence, in a baggie in my jeans pocket, felt like a talisman, warding off the worst.

Plus, we had a three-hour, sinking ship of a movie to watch. Subject matter aside, the sheer length of Titanic meant that we had to get the conversation over with quickly if we had any hope of actually watching the movie and getting to bed at a reasonable hour, putting the day and its challenges behind us.

Looking back, my focus on the logistics of the evening seems misplaced, a minor technicality in the grand scheme of what we were about to unleash on our kids. But so much—perhaps most—of parenting is about seemingly minor technicalities, details around snacks and screen time and who sits where and the right socks. In the midst of chaos, these details took on, at least momentarily, as much weight as housing appraisals and custody schedules. Or maybe it was simply that I had some control over them, could use them as a roadmap for the conversation, for the evening that would follow it.

We called, as planned, a family meeting. What we didn’t plan was our younger son insisting on having a tickle fight with Rachel immediately beforehand. On, of all places, our bed, the bed that we both, often, still slept in together, if awkwardly and chastely. (We didn’t have a spare room; the couch was uncomfortable; many nights we were simply too exhausted to bother contemplating other arrangements.) Eventually our ten-year-old joined in, as did I—because things were already strange enough, because who knew how many more moments like this we’d ever have, this family, together?

So there we were, the four of us, wrestling and giggling, the two of us with a secret and the two of them with no idea that their mothers’ marriage had hit its own iceberg.

Finally, I looked at my watch, and then at my ex. “We have something we need to talk to you about,” Rachel said, cutting short the tragic, gleeful puppy pile.

“What?” asked our firstborn.

“About a decision that Susan and I have made about our partnership,” she said, carefully.

“What about it?” asked his younger brother, utterly jovially. “Are you gonna get a divorce?”

Rachel and I looked at each other, and then back at them. “Well,” she said, “yes.”

I watched the expressions on their faces change slowly, identically: from open, tired delight to cloudy confusion, to fear, and then shock, then disbelief. “Really?”

“Really.”

Both kids looked from each of our faces to the other’s, scanning our expressions for some sign that we were joking, that this was just some warped continuation of our previous frolicking.

We launched into our prepared talk. There were tears, and hugs, and, eventually—because my children are children—talk of new kittens at the new house, “and maybe an Xbox!”

And then we ate pizza and watched Titanic, the hockey game dialed up on the iPad as well.

For days afterward, our younger son would repeat, “That was weird, the way that you told us.”

“Yeah,” I would say back. “It really was.”

“I wish you could’ve told us slower,” he’d say. I didn’t know how to answer. How could I explain that I’d been carrying around the news for so long that the weight of it was almost unbearable? That the months of that secret felt like the longest, slowest ones of my life?

“I was having a really good day until you told us that,” our older boy kept saying. “I won my soccer game, I won at Pokémon, the Blackhawks beat the Canadiens the night before, and then you told us you were getting divorced.”

“Yeah,” I finally answered. “It wasn’t a very good way to end the day. But, what if you had a really terrible day, and this was just the icing on the cake? And then you’d be all like, First we lost at soccer, and then I lost Pokémon, and the Habs won, and to top it all off, my parents told me that they were separating.” I managed to get a smile out of him.

“Maybe one day,” I said to him, “maybe one day, the way we told you will be one more story that we can tell about our family. Maybe one day, we’ll be able to look back on this and laugh and say, Remember when Rachel and Susan told us in the middle of a tickle fight that they were getting separated, and then we all watched Titanic together? And it will be strange and a little bit sad, but it will also be funny, and it will still be our story. All of ours.”

As we watched Titanic on that final Family Movie Night, Rachel and I looked at each other, often, over the heads of our sons. Once, we touched hands, nodding to each other silently: We got through this. We’re going to get through this.

Our younger son loved the film. His older brother was indifferent.

And Rachel and I?

We agreed, wholeheartedly, that it was a disaster.

•••

SUSAN GOLDBERG is a writer, editor and essayist, and coeditor of the award-winning anthology And Baby Makes More: Known Donors, Queer Parents, and Our Unexpected Families. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the New York Times, Ms., Toronto Life, Lilith, Today’s Parent and Stealing Time magazines, and several anthologies, including Chasing Rainbows: Exploring Gender-Fluid Parenting Practices and Here Come the Brides! Reflections on Lesbian Love and Marriage. She is a regular contributor to several websites, including CBC Parents. Susan lives with her sons in Thunder Bay, Ontario, where she is one of approximately thirty-odd Jews.

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The House That Lies Built

Photo by Gina Easley www.ginaeasley.com

By Gina Frangello

My three children slept on mattresses on the floor, in the office adjacent to the master bath, pretending not to hear their father sobbing and pounding on the shower walls. This had become a morning ritual. How long had it been going on—two weeks, three?—on the morning when one of our twins woke to find a beetle in her ear. She’d become so inured to this strange new life of ours that she, who had once wept theatrically upon any insect sighting, simply flicked it across the room and slept on, later to see it on her brother’s mattress.

Sometimes, after the weeping, there would be shouting behind the closed door of their father’s and my master bedroom. Sometime near the end of that period of weeping and shouting, my son would come to my husband and me and beg us to “stop crying, stop yelling, stop closing the door to have talks.” My heart flipped and cracked and shredded itself apart with guilt. Even though it was my husband emitting the noises, my body pulsed with I did this. I did this.

We were confined, all five of us, to the upstairs of our two-level home, one proper bed between us all, extra furniture heaped in piles around our emotional chaos. Downstairs, the first floor of our apartment was gutted, everything draped in plastic. We were in the early stages of an extensive home renovation project we had been planning for a year—the first in fifteen years for our hundred-plus-year-old house. The renovation was, as such things always do, going more slowly than intended.

In the sixth week, my husband finally packed his bags for a solo trip to Colorado and informed me, while this time I wept hysterically on the floor of his closet, that I was to have had all his things moved to an apartment we co-owned with friends by the time he returned, and that he would never spend another night with me in our house. He had to walk past the children on their mattresses, to get to the stairs that would lead him out. Our fourteen-year-old twin daughters pretended to sleep and ignored him, but our nine-year-old son leapt up and rushed to the closet where I was howling like an animal and took me in his arms saying, “It’s okay, Mommy.” I had never, to my recollection, cried in front of my children before, even mildly. My son kissed my face and I tried to calm myself down, to not be That Mother, whose children have to parent her, the way my own mother, depressed in a back bedroom, had often been. Now, however, I was a broken thing with no control of the noises coming out of my body. I had wanted to be so many other things, but instead I was this: a bad memory my children would never be able to get out of their heads.

•••

Don’t feel sorry for me, hysterical on a closet floor, a woman left behind. It isn’t like that, some Elena Ferrante Days of Abandonment descent into rejected grief and madness. I am the Asshole in this story. What they never tell you is how much being the asshole hurts too.

•••

Three days into a home renovation my husband of twenty-two years and I were planning for our duplexed apartment, where we lived with our three children—my elderly parents in a separate downstairs unit—I confessed that I had been having an affair on and off (but mostly on…say it clearly: mostly on) for nearly three and a half years.

My husband and our children and I were in the Wisconsin Dells when I told him, at a horrible water park resort, in exile of the most invasive stage of the renovations: things being demolished, air thick with dust. My husband and I had left our teen twins in charge of our son and gone to dinner at the swanky restaurant inside the hotel, where we had several cocktails each. Though I’d never been a big drinker, lately—by which I mean at least the past two and a half years—I had more or less required a couple of drinks in order to have what passed as a fun time with my husband, to whom even saying “hello” had become a guilty lie.

I was stewing in a toxic, complex brew of my own guilt and duplicity, combined with longstanding marital resentments, anxieties, and almost unbearable boredom. That night, however, was a good night. It was a night—the first in at least a year—in which I could see the glimmers of why I had once fallen intensely in love with my husband and how we had ended up married to begin with. I felt moved by the way his smile was higher and more creased at one end; I could remember how once upon a time he had made me laugh, had been the confidante with whom I casually shared inside jokes that meant nothing to anyone Not Us. Even though he had told me several months prior, at a friend’s wedding, that he knew I didn’t “love him anymore” and that he feared I was just waiting for the children to go to college and then we would become “a clichéd empty nester divorce,” I could see he was still trying—that he wanted to fix whatever it was that had been broken for years before my affair. He still believed in me, even if it seemed years since we had made each other happy. He trusted me, even though it had been years since I’d been worthy of trust.

Was it my ability to glimpse our former love, that night at dinner, that allowed me to finally see—really see—how grotesquely entitled I had been, thinking it was in any way acceptable for me to lie so blatantly? To confuse kindness and tact with cowardice and manipulation—to tell myself stories about how “the Europeans” don’t make a “big deal” about infidelity, as though all I was guilty of was some vague Francophilia?

During the long night of wandering the resort in search of private spaces, my husband and I sobbed and fought, bargained and despaired, in the wake of my announcement. He kept saying, “It’s him or me” and telling me I could never speak to my lover again if I wanted to stay in our marriage. I knew what the Right Answer to such a demand—when you have three children together and elderly parents in the unit downstairs and nearly a quarter century as a couple under your belt—was supposed to be, but I couldn’t give it. I couldn’t promise to cut out of my life the man I had fallen passionately in love with and “rededicate myself to the marriage,” and I realized all at once that if I had been able to do such a thing, which my husband had every right to demand, I would never have had an affair in the first place. I had walked away from other flirtations or borderline-emotional-affairs with a fair amount of ease over the years, knowing they were not worth the risk, knowing where I wanted to be at the end of my story, and not to mess that up for some momentary rush.

The second I actually started my affair, the decision had already been made.

I had withheld that decision—from both my husband and myself—for more than three years.

I had no Right Answers anymore.

•••

This is not about whether I had a “right” to leave my marriage. Of course I had a right. The fact that my husband never cheated on me or that he was a good provider or that he didn’t abuse drugs or alcohol or didn’t beat me has nothing to do with whether or not I was obligated to stay. No one is obligated to stay. We live in a society in which women are no longer chattel, in which we are permitted to choose our relationships, in which divorce is painful but common and legal. My guilt isn’t for knowing that I was never going to love my husband the way I needed to again—the way I believe people should love each other if they are going to use up all the days of their fleeting lives on each other. I don’t feel guilty for the fact that I could already glimpse the picture on the other side of our full-throttle “parenting years”—our children busy with their own lives, heading off to college and out-of-state jobs, our retirement years alone together—and knew I could not stay stagnant inside that frame. This is not about whether or not my husband also made his share of mistakes in our marriage or what they may have been. My leaving my husband was not retribution for any fault of his, but rather—and I believe this in every core of my being—that we each have the right to choose what ships to go down with versus when to get into a lifeboat and save ourselves emotionally. Promises made at the age of twenty-five can feel like words uttered by someone else entirely by the time we are forty-six. There is no one who doesn’t have the right to leave a consensual relationship between adults: no marital atrocities required.

Rather, this is about living, quite literally, inside the toxicity of a lie that had the power to knock down walls. If I did not owe my husband an Until Death Do We Part I no longer believed in, I still owed him a common decency and truth that I did not deliver. Our demolished house became a too-obvious metaphor for the ways I had literally blown our house down. How had I even become a person who would commit to an extensive and costly home renovation, paid for by my husband’s salary, when I was desperately in love with another man? After I shocked myself by confessing, I still held fast that my husband and I could live together “as friends” in our home and raise our children together, each having our freedom—I believed this so completely that I nearly convinced him of it, as he rushed out on a dozen Match and eHarmony dates, then came home either sexually keyed up while I hid awkwardly in the bathroom, or tearful in his grief. This was the livable solution I was selling? How do we become so blind to ourselves? How do we come to believe we have the right to know more about the narrative of someone else’s life than they do, to manipulate that narrative behind the scenes for years, and then believe they actually owe us a friendship?

By “how do we,” I mean of course “how did I?”

“…people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes,” wrote Joan Didion. “If they choose to commit adultery, they do not then go running, in an access of bad conscience, to receive absolution from the wronged parties.” I was trying to force my husband to forgive me, to still think well of me somehow, to avoid having to look at myself. I no longer wanted to be married to him, but after twenty-five years together, I was selfishly unready to surrender using his eyes as a mirror for my own vanities.

To say he was furious about the timing of my confession would be an understatement. But likely it was my very guilt about the renovation—about all that money spent—that finally drove me, after years of Sphinx-like secrecy, to leave hints that night at dinner until my husband at last asked me point blank, “Have you had sex with him? Are you in love with him?” Ultimately, it was the astronomical renovation costs that shook me out of my three-year era of spectacular rationalizations and made me understand that the only thing I had left to give him anymore was the truth.

•••

I still live in the building my husband and I once shared. Within six months of our separation, he had already come to find being in our home unbearable, even when he was alone with our children—he had moved in with another woman and her three children and had no desire, by the time of our finalized divorce, to ever set foot in our house again. He made moves in our divorce proceedings to try to sell the house, but with three children who have lived here their entire lives, and my elderly parents who were too sick to move anywhere else besides assisted living, selling the home would have punished all the wrong people. I was determined to keep our physical home intact, choosing it above the far more lucrative “permanent maintenance” to which every attorney and every friend told me I was entitled after twenty-three years of marriage, even though at the time of my divorce I had just finished chemotherapy for breast cancer and had no reliable income. “Divorce law is not about atonement,” my fatherly attorney kept telling me anxiously, but in my mind, if somehow I could keep the kids and my parents safely in their longstanding home, I could contain, at least to some small degree, the wreckage I had wrought.

During the weeks of our marital cleaving, our shattered and tarp-strewn house was a painfully literal metaphor for so many things gone wrong. Now, the beautifully restored home in which I live with my children and my widowed mother, where the man I love writes at an orange desk in the spot where my children’s floor-mattresses were strewn during those terrible weeks, where our three cats curl up with us and we have dinner parties and Game of Thrones marathons with friends…now this place carries enormous contradictions. It is a less volatile, more fun, and more transparent place than it was. Yet this space is also a constant reminder of my worst regrets and shame. Though my once double life is now whole, the dark wood floors of my dining room and restored vintage door (thicker and more soundproof than the flimsy former one) on my bedroom still remind me daily of the casual cruelty of which I was capable and of the privileges—even with my tax return only a couple thousand above the poverty level the year of my divorce—my ex-husband provided in buying and paying off this home he expected to grow old in. Here in what should have been a safe and sacred space, but instead became a site of violation, I wake up every day trying to live authentically, with truth and ethics, trying to be better than I was.

This is about and not about regret. It is possible to both not be sorry that a marriage is over, yet to be grotesquely sorry for the ways in which I ended it. It is possible to be incredibly more myself now, and yet to understand that other people paid far too high a price for my pursuit of freedom and happiness. I love my house, and I do not feel deserving of my house, even though I am trying to be, in the way I parent, the way I daughter, the way I hold to honesty in my new relationship; in the ways I work to care for and manage this household, responsible myself now for its bills and upkeep. Someday, maybe I will sell this beautiful shell that contains so much history, both luminous and sad. Until then, it is a walk-in model of my heart, capable of ruin and beauty, of pain and reinvention. I don’t know if these walls would ever forgive me, but I am trying, every day, to forgive myself.

•••

GINA FRANGELLO’s fourth book of fiction, Every Kind of Wanting, was released on Counterpoint in September 2016, has been optioned by Universal Cable Productions/Denver & Delilah, and was included on several “best of” lists for 2016, including in Chicago Magazine and The Chicago Review of Books. Her last novel, A Life in Men (Algonquin 2014), was selected for the Target Emerging Authors series, was also optioned by Universal Cable Productions/Denver & Delilah, and was a book club selection for NYLON magazine, The Rumpus and The Nervous Breakdown. She is also the author of two other books of fiction: Slut Lullabies (Emergency Press 2010), which was a Foreword Magazine Best Book of the Year finalist, and My Sister’s Continent (Chiasmus 2006).  She has nearly twenty years of experience as an editor, having founded both the independent press Other Voices Books, and the fiction section of the popular online literary community The Nervous Breakdown. She has also served as the Sunday editor for The Rumpus, the Executive Editor for Other Voices magazine, and the faculty editor for TriQuarterly Online. Her short fiction, essays, book reviews, and journalism have been published in such venues as Salon, Dame, Ploughshares, the Boston Globe, BuzzFeed, Role Reboot, the Chicago Tribune, the Huffington Post and in many other magazines and anthologies. www.ginafrangello.org

 

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