On a Saturday afternoon in winter, when the sun was not shining and hadn’t shone in weeks, we got a babysitter for the girls—now five and nearly two years old—and drove to the new tapas bar in town. We thought tapas might warm us up, but the restaurant, with its black-lacquer tables and bright murals of tropical flowers and fish, felt cold. After we sat down, the waitress brought us sangria and a plate of dates wrapped in bacon. While we looked at the menus, Chris asked, laughing, “Remember how hungry you were in Spain?”
I remembered. The summer before we were married we went to San Sebastián on the northern coast of Spain, and during the week we spent there I invariably became hungry at the precise times of day when there was no food to be found. So I ate bags of cherries on the beach while the shop owners napped the afternoon away; in early evening I ate toasted bread slathered with mayonnaise and anchovies at cheap tapas bars while some of Europe’s finest restaurant kitchens were still hours from opening for dinner.
But my hunger was not what I thought of when I remembered San Sebastián. Sitting across from Chris now, drinking sangria even though it was much too cold outside for sangria, I was remembering the towering statue of Jesus that stood atop Monte Urgull, one of the two small mountains that formed San Sebastián’s crescent-shaped harbor. I could see the statue everywhere I went in San Sebastián, from the beach where we swam without bathing suit tops, from our hotel room, from the streets I walked in search of a café that would serve lunch at two o’clock. I loved the statue more than I could say, and all week I thought: if only I lived here! If only I could look up, at any moment of the day, and see him, robed arms extended, in any light and any season, against clouds or brilliant coastal sun, through rain, through mist, through wet flakes of snow. Then it would be impossible for days—for weeks—to go by in the way they did now, without a single thought of him.
How could we remember such different things? I asked myself, suddenly angry. The real question—the question I didn’t yet know to ask myself—was how could she remember what I had never told her?
I looked at Chris and didn’t know her. She was the far coast, rising to a different dawn, to a view I did not know and had long ago stopped trying to imagine. I want you closer! I wanted to say, but couldn’t. I opened my mouth to speak and faltered. She looked at me expectantly. “What is it?” she asked.
“You don’t do enough,” I blurted out. “I need more help. With the kids, with the house, with everything. You don’t do enough, and it’s making me miserable.”
Chris’s face hardened. “So am I,” she said. “When we get home, I think you should start looking for a job. Get out of the house. That way I could finally work less.”
I was stunned. I hadn’t meant to get us here—oh, how I hadn’t meant to get us here, here to this place where I always got us! But I wasn’t going to back down.
“Good idea,” I said. “Good idea.”
“You know,” she said with a harsh smile, “our life is like that Ethan Hawke line in Before Sunset, ‘We used to be married and now we’re two people who run a childcare center together.’”
I took a long drink, emptying my sangria glass. I hated few things as much as I hated her quoting that line, which she did with infuriating regularity. I hated the line because Ethan Hawke says it to a woman who is not his wife (and with whom he is about to have sex); I hated it because I was the one running the damn childcare, not Chris.
But this time I was so angry I decided to agree with her. “Exactly,” I said. “That’s exactly who we are.” And then I began to cry so hard that it became clear we couldn’t stay in the restaurant. And even if I could have stopped, there was no point in staying—the date was ruined. Chris told me to go wait outside while she paid the check. I bumped the edge of the table as I got up; my drink spilled, my napkin fell to the floor, but I kept walking.
I pushed open the door and pulled on my coat. I had been sweating in the restaurant and now I was freezing and shivery and still crying. I walked across the street to our car and saw that our parking meter had expired. I didn’t know if I should put more money in it—I had no idea where we were going now, or what we were going to do. I started to open my purse, to rummage its depths for quarters. And then suddenly, in one instant, I understood the strangest thing, and I understood it completely: the way to Chris was not toward Chris. It was toward everything I turned away from so that I could love her. And for a moment, a moment that I can only know as grace, this fact didn’t frighten me. And by the time it did, I understood it clearly enough to know that, frightening or not, it had become an entirely inevitable truth.
And then Chris was next to me. “Let’s drive somewhere,” I said, and without waiting for her I got into the driver’s seat and turned on the car. She got in, and I turned up the heat and drove us slowly, on ice-rutted roads, to a neighborhood near the restaurant. We got out of the car and when we were both on the sidewalk I looked at Chris. “I like my life,” I said. “I do. But it’s not enough.”
Chris nodded. She didn’t ask me to explain and I didn’t try to.
“Let’s walk,” I said. And then I bent my head, because I was crying and couldn’t stop and didn’t want to explain why.
She held out her hand for me, and I took it. The sidewalks were snow-packed and icy, and I leaned into her with each step, and for the first time in a long while I relaxed against her solid and unyielding body.
I had been jealous of Chris, jealous, I told myself, of her career, her confidence, her closet full of suits and her good haircut. But what I really wanted was Chris’s wholeness, the way that everything that mattered to her made it into her life and her days. Even the things she longed for but couldn’t have were always in her mind and our conversations; they were in the books on her bedside table and the movies she watched late at night. She was not afraid of what she wanted, even those things she could not have because she had a wife and children now.
It was true that I wanted the things we fought over. I wanted her to take the kids more, and to appreciate all the housework I did, in the same way she wanted me to offer some thanks that she went to work every day. Our arrangement was a risky one, with many faults. But we could weather that. What we could no longer weather was my secret longing, my aging grief over the God I had given up for Chris. We could no longer weather my tired and childish longing for a towering statue to remind me of what I believed. The remembering was up to me.