To My Ex-Husband (11 page)

NOVEMBER 11

You must have heard that Harvey and June are getting separated. I'm upset; you don't know how much I've counted on them. They've taught me how to laugh even when it isn't funny—
mainly
when it isn't funny. I've always adored that about the Littles. When they're at their most impoverished, with creditors knocking on the door and making threatening phone calls, that's when you'll find them doubled over laughing because they'd just received an invitation to open up a charge account at Saks Fifth Avenue.

We've been each other's best audience, though I hope I won't have any more of Harvey's telephone solicitations for the home for unwed mothers. He's always so convincing, affecting that soft, angelic voice with the slight speech impediment.
If you could justh contribute a thmall amount, anything at all, it would be thoo much apprethiated
.

And then, when I've made my excuses,
Well, Jesuth Critht, if you can't give anything for God …

How can a couple who has separated three times not be together? I suppose it would shock a lot of people to know that Harvey and June didn't have the ideal marriage. They have that surface dazzle, like two people who've just stepped out of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. She laughs at all his funny routines as though hearing them for the first time; he goes all moist in the eyes when she steps into a room, as if he's thinking,
This is my wife; this remarkable specimen is my wife
. Who would guess that in real life, after the guests go home, they're Alice and Ralph Kramden?

But, to you and me, that mercurial aspect is precisely what gives them their solidarity. What can they possibly discover about this process that they don't already know? After all, it was they who begged us,
Don't do it. It's expensive, and it doesn't solve anything
. I can't bear to watch. It's like going through it again, like looking in a mirror and watching it break into small pieces.

NOVEMBER 17

Another season of leaves has fallen in our backyard. It has not escaped me that when we talk property division, this is our house, our five eighths of an acre, our trees—and my leaves. Right about now, I'd like to put some fine-tuning into our joint custody agreements.

I feel like the neighborhood pariah, rustling around knee-deep in reminders of my slovenliness. A lot of the pressure comes, not from the neighbors, who don't know quite what to make of me, but from Dickens, who has trouble keeping track of his toys. He goes galloping through the drifts, his nose to the ground, trying to ferret out his frog, among other things. When he isn't involved in a project, he seems depressed, a dog in need of something to do. He's not eating. This morning, he was asleep with his ear in his water bowl. It was a dead, unproductive sleep, with little rapid eye movement and squirrel chasing. I don't think he likes this life. It's pointless and disorienting. Dickens reminds me of the Littles' cat, who went on a hunger strike when June changed her job and started commuting to New York, adding four hours to her workday. Remember the vet's report after two weeks of observation?
Will eat lobster if fed by hand
.

I expected, by now, to be headed in some definitive direction—either we'd be getting divorced, or we'd be trying to reconcile. Maybe I'm being arbitrary, but I think that after a year's time, we should have a game plan. I'm not good at holding my life in abeyance. We don't seem to be taking another look at this marriage; nor are we making a commitment to the new people in our lives. How can we? A “trial separation,” we called it. What it is is a long, open-ended recess and, for my part, I've tried to make the most of it. But we've been out on the playground too long. What's happened is that it has become easier to stay out here than it is to face going back inside, where there's work to be done.

Several months ago, I sat on your futon, listening to you tick off the reasons why you began your affair with Esther. It all added up to my fault. I'll take my share of the blame. But I'm tired of being told that I wasn't a grown-up, that I was the child and you were the adult. Because it seems to me, while you're being so grown up, that you might take some responsibility for what you've done. I wasn't so childish way back in the early seventies, when we were busy sitting in circles, passing around these soggy joints and having an “open marriage” in our bell-bottoms, that I didn't realize I needed to do something for myself, and for us, by going into therapy. It would not have occurred to me to list all the reasons why what I was doing was your fault.

If you're paying me back, if that's what this is all about, I'd like to remind you that the statute of limitations has run out on those particular offenses. They have been behind us for nearly fifteen years. We can't change any of that. The point is who we are today, and what we want to do about it.

NOVEMBER 30

Now
I can give thanks—that it's over. Even for traditional families, Thanksgiving can be hell. My parents always played hosts to warring great-aunts who, sometime before dinner and after the second manhattan, would square off in front of the stove and rekindle some family feud that had been going on for thirty years.

My mother's mother, meanwhile, would be sitting by the fire in the living room, trying to deflect the tension by giving anyone within hearing distance a tour of her charm bracelet. Between points of interest, we were aware of the muffled growls of dispute that inevitably erupted between my aunt and uncle, who managed never to take the same train home. But with all that, a generous spirit survived. We fell into bed exhausted and amused. When we awoke in the morning, all was well.

For twenty years, you and I carried on this tradition, with all of its attendant generational and culinary conflicts, i.e., the annual canned-versus-homemade cranberry-sauce controversy, over which certain people threatened not to make an appearance at dinner. The house echoes with all those creaky, cranky voices we'd have loved to silence with the wave of a wooden spoon. Today, I'd bring them back in a flash.

Thanksgiving is a time of togetherness. It wasn't meant for people who don't know what to do with their marriages. It wasn't meant for people who have boyfriends over forty, and whose children say things like, “I suppose your
boyfriend's
coming for dinner.” I don't know about you, but while we're keeping our options open, I occasionally glance at my plate to see that there's nothing on it. I think it's time we served up a little decision.

As it happens, my “boyfriend” did not come for dinner. David and Audrey, his soon-to-be ex-wife, are still keeping up the pretense of unity for their youngest son, who is only eight. I don't know if I've mentioned Barney. If not, it's probably because, like David himself, I can't quite believe that there's someone that young in my life. David didn't think it necessary to talk about Barney until I walked into his apartment for the first time and saw the bunk beds. “Who gets the top?” I asked, a sudden, awful realization seeping into my brain.

“The guest gets to pick,” he said. “Those are the house rules.”

“How old is he?” I asked, hearing my voice break. “The host, I mean.”

His face grew serious. “I was afraid to tell you, and then I couldn't tell you, because I hadn't told you.”

Barney's a terrific kid, but I don't know what to say to an eight-year-old anymore, to say nothing of an eight-year-old who's a genius and likes to build telescopes in his spare time and who says he doesn't like school because it doesn't give him time to think.

Barney was brought into this world to save his parents' marriage. He was the human equivalent of a new addition on a house, a new swimming pool, or a tennis court, that second wind, a bellows bearing a banner:
We still have a future
.

It's a mission no child deserves, although if anyone were up to the task, it would be Barney. He's a real sparkler, but I appreciate him from afar, like a newly discovered planet. He stays with David every other week, which means that David has to drive him to school out in Bryn Mawr. And where does that leave me on those weeks? Mostly, shuffling around my office/house, trying to find some delineation between the end of the day and the evening, some sign that work is over and it's time to go home. Usually I wind up celebrating that period of time with a glass of wine and Jim Lehrer and Robin MacNeil on the NewsHour. But now and then, if I'm good, I get invited to go with David and Barney to Roy Rogers!

DECEMBER 18

This might be one of those scenes in which the wife is sitting in a rocking chair with her needles and a ball of knitting, a knowing little Mona Lisa smile on her face. The husband has just come home from work, having plopped his hat on the hall table, and she's about to tell him a joyful little piece of news.

I say
might
be one of those scenes. Except that I have no husband to speak of, no hat on the hall table, no knitting. What I do have are bad vibes brought to me by a wall calendar that is beginning to look more and more like 1963, when I shared my apartment with three other women who were, on occasion, late with their periods. The calendar was so filled with calculations, you couldn't see what day it was, or even what year.

Three little letters tell the whole story. LMP. Remember them? Probably not. It's been a long time. They stand for Last Menstrual Period, or, in this case, November 2.

How, you might ask, does one get into such a situation at this, uh, mature age? I don't know. “I didn't think I was very fertile anymore,” doesn't sound like much of an answer, does it? And yet it's the truth. “Very,” however, may be the operational word. At any rate, it's a highly humiliating position I'm in. Besides which, having falsely presented myself as a responsible, intelligent person for the last twelve years, I can hardly go to my regular doctor.

Time was when our doctors were the priests of our lives, pillars of the community. That trust, for many, has eroded; but not for me. If Dr. John Altar of Boston still lives, I would sooner die than return to him in the same nervous condition that first took me to him in the early sixties. I had found his name, as one might guess, in the yellow pages. What a boon to his practice his name must have been.

I had never been examined by an obstetrician/gynecologist before. But his office, far from imposing, had at least some superficial warmth: wooden filing cabinets, cheerful curtains on the windows, prints of old Boston. Lurking in the corners, though, were these things, plastic models in an angry Pepto Bismol pink, drawings of fetuses, shiny metal instruments, stirrups. I thought I might be sick. I didn't know how my body worked, didn't want to know, didn't want anyone else to know. All those things that my mother used to store in her night table—rubber disks, a long black hook shaped like a small spine with ridges, petrolatum-based jellies. The mere word “petrolatum” was disgusting, like “unguent,” and brought to mind unsavory substances. You couldn't pay me to walk into a drugstore and say, “I'll have a tube of this rectal unguent.”

I didn't even really know what sex was, not yet. It had nothing to do with children. I was still learning how to be womanly. Dr. Altar was a grandfatherly sort of man who kept his judgments, if he had any, to himself.

What a shame, he said softly, that it takes only once. Was I planning to marry the young man?

We had talked of getting married, “the young man” and I. But not in those last few weeks. In those last few weeks, I had been a woman ahead of her times, doing all the pursuing, all the telephoning. From the minute he said hello, his disappointment was palpable, his conversation monosyllabic and awkward. The more he seemed to withdraw, the more I advanced, piling humiliation upon humiliation. My face still burns from the memory of that time.

Dr. Altar sat me down after the examination and reassured me as best he could. He did not believe that I was pregnant, though it was too early to be sure. I went back to my apartment and waited to prove him right.

Three days later, I bled richly, triumphantly, onto the back of my camel-hair skirt. I was at work, of course. But the gods had been kind, and such is the sort of price one pays for the small, reckless prayers, the deal of a sinner, whispered on her knees at a desperate hour.

I was lucky, then. So much luckier than Margot, my office crony, whose friends all chipped in so that she could travel to Newark to see a nurse, a woman whose name was known by a woman who was known by another woman who had once needed an abortion. The procedure was simple. And very nearly deadly. On the plane on the way home, she began hemorrhaging. Her parents, a crusty, fragile couple in their sixties, were summoned to Boston City Hospital. What had happened to their daughter was incomprehensible because Margot, the baby of the family, had always been such a good girl. From then on, Margot was treated with polite indifference, as if she were invisible. And she was never able to have children.

Twenty-two years later, a woman can escape. I've had my children. I'm acting within the law. The long-term consequences are small. I don't know what it is, then, that makes me unspeakably sad.

1986

JANUARY 17

The doctor had a middle-European accent and an unpronounceable name with lots of y's. I was obstinate in my refusal to learn it, spell it, own it in any permanent way, as part of my memory, my life.

He was an attractive man, and polite, but to the point. I was, he said, about six weeks pregnant. I was forty-four, with two grown children. Probably, I did not wish to have the child, was that correct?

Correct, indeed. I had heard that he was not a hand-holder. That was okay. This was not a difficult decision; I would not grieve for what might have been. What was difficult was accepting in myself the failings that had brought me to his office in the first place. I didn't know what to call them, specifically, but I had been careless, possibly even defiant. And let's not forget stupid. Pregnant is something one's adolescent children become by mistake. Besides which, abortion, however you feel about the right to choose, is ugly, demeaning. Both of us found it personally abhorrent, so you and I were exceedingly cautious after we had Annie so as never to be faced with that decision.