Letting Go

I want to give you a heads-up that I’m getting engaged this weekend, Aaron e-mails me one night at the end of May.

I had known from the kids that he was dating someone, so I’m not surprised. As strange as this all feels, I’m glad for him. I want him to be happy. The complexities, I know, will continue to multiply. Now there will be many families our children are part of, their family trees always multilimbed. It will not be simple, with all the changes still ahead, but a more complicated life carries its own rewards.

With this news replaying in my mind, I drive down the street we used to live on and stop in front of the old house. All this year, I’ve avoided driving down this street, afraid of the house that had been both cocoon and cage, but now the past is starting to feel less daunting. I can look at the house, at the grass that is neatly mowed and the pink azalea bushes in bloom as they were every spring. The new owners have painted the exterior and taken care of the much-needed repairs on the roof. The house sits innocently—just another blue-shuttered, black-roofed New England home.

The next week, I’m in New York City to give a book talk, and with a few free hours, I walk uptown to the 110th Street apartment where Aaron and I lived when we first got married. A decade has passed since I’ve been in this neighborhood, but on the corner is the same grocery store where I once shopped. On the blocks nearby are some of the same small restaurants I’d never entered because they weren’t kosher. There are newer places too, ones that are cleaner and brighter, distorting the images I’d held on to of these gritty few blocks that were not quite the Upper West Side, not yet Columbia. I walk to what had been our building, set back from the street, with its wide courtyard and green shutters, peeling now as they were then. Gazing upward, I count five flights to what had been our floor. The same wooden, mullioned windows, the same kind of white shades—almost, almost making me feel that if I were to peer in, I could catch a glimpse of that young married girl cooking in her kitchen or lying beside her husband in their new married bed. Like a play that is performed over and over, two figures in a window acting out their happy scene again and again.

So much of the past feels like it has been ravaged in a fire, but is it still possible to rescue any intact memory?

It’s easier to think about the years of sadness and loneliness that came after, but this apartment is a stone-and-concrete reminder that here inside these walls, we were once young and innocent and only at the start of our married lives together. It’s this fact that has been the hardest to face. There existed a time before the anger and the disappointment and the feeling of entrapment. A time when I wouldn’t have believed or wished for this ending.

When I return home to Newton, I finally unpack that old box of photos, read the cards Aaron gave to me over a decade of birthdays and anniversaries. I make myself look at the wedding photos that I’d so long avoided, at the cascading flowers and my bridal whites and the bright smiles on our shining faces. The line between then and now doesn’t need to remain as fractured. Yes, I had been young, and yes, we had been in such a hurry, and yes, we hadn’t known each other, or ourselves, nearly well enough, and yes, it had ended so terribly and so painfully, but some of these memories can still be salvaged. The end doesn’t have to erase the beginning. There is no avoiding the fact that on our faces, in that moment, there is unmistakable happiness.

 

In the middle of June, I turn forty-one. In celebration of my birthday—and in belated celebration of my fortieth, which had passed almost unnoticed in the chaos of the divorce—William and I go to the Berkshires for the weekend. We’re staying next to a lake, and on Saturday morning, we sit in rickety beach chairs along the shore. The water is so cold that only a few brave adults have waded in. Kids, seemingly impervious to the temperature, swing from a rope tied to a tree branch, soaring into the lake, immune as well to fear.

We decide to brave the water, which is so cold it stings, but even so, I swim out to the middle of the lake, where I float on my back, staring up at the sky domed above me and the trees circling all around—here not to cleanse myself or purify myself but to open myself as much as I can be. Inside my chest, there is a widened, no-longer-knotted feeling, as though more space has been created between my ribs. I didn’t know until this year that there is comfort to be derived from being inside not just a community of people, but a body of water and a ring of trees. I didn’t know that you could belong to a lake, to a forest, to an expansive vista. Is beauty enough of an alternative? Can you trade the rules of so many books for the green of so many trees?

William swims toward me and I swim toward him and his arms wrap around me. I keep expecting the exhilaration I have when I’m with him to fade, but it has yet to. There is still that urge to pull him closer. This man, whom I love, so different from me and yet with whom I feel entirely intertwined. The life ahead of me is as roadless and unmappable as the water we’re swimming in. Nor is there any path back to a pristine, innocent state, even if I still wanted that.

I move in toward him, my arms around his neck, his arms encircling my waist. He brings his face close to mine, my eyes staring forcefully into his. I try to hold on to him without putting all my weight on him, try to keep treading water even as he holds me, in order to keep myself afloat. And this—it always comes down to this—is the answer between us as well. To know that this is who I am, and this is who he is, this is how we are connected, and this is how we will each remain ourselves.

 

The summer is passing quickly, too quickly, when Aaron and I stand in the empty parking lot of an office building, lit only by a few street lamps, and talk beside our two cars, which are pulled up next to each other, like reunited members of a herd.

We’d come here to meet with a school counselor, seeking last-minute advice about where Josh should go for this upcoming year. Inside, with the help of the counselor, who talked about the ways she thought public school would be beneficial, we came to the decision that this was what Josh would do

With the meeting over, Aaron and I stand in the dark parking lot, and we talk tentatively about the kids. Until now, e-mail has been the primary way to communicate, but in e-mail, it’s easier to be cold and sharp. In person, the mood has become softer, resigned. After our years of fighting with a fierceness that I don’t think either of us knew we possessed, the feeling between us is one of being used up. I wish there were some way we could laugh as we once did about the funny things the kids have said, exclaim over how they have grown, and share with each other how proud we are of them. But any departure from this stilted practical conversation might pierce the protective layer that has been set in place.

I still have the wish, futile as it is, to make my story understood, as though it were only a matter of finding the right words in the right combination. I wish there were some way to lay aside the old questions about good and bad and look back and say, This is who we were and who we became. This is what happened between us and this is who we now are. This is how we were the same and this is how we were different and this is what we each needed and this is how we failed each other. I know that there is no agreed-upon story between us—it’s as though we’ve constructed entirely different albums, as though we lived inside different marriages and different divorces. We will look back at our shared past in our own ways, learn our own lessons, carry our own stories and our own truths. One more separation that I need to accept.

Before getting into our own cars and driving off to our separate lives, Aaron and I linger for a few minutes more. Tentatively, we talk about how we hope this upcoming school year will be a good one for Josh. This is what we both want more than anything. Even long after everything we once jointly owned has been divided, these three children belong to us both. In this way we remain part of each other as well.

 

On one of the last Sundays in August, I drive the kids to the beach. William is spending the day with his own kids, who are home for the summer. I’ve met his kids and am slowly starting to get to know them. This too will be part of what comes next, more people to whom we will all be connected, more parts of an ever-changing and expanding story.

With the car packed, I pull out of the driveway, still cautious, as though newly piloting a 747. Each time I enter the highway on-ramp, preparing to merge, I feel the specter of fear.

“Do you remember that time,” I ask Noam, who is in the front seat next to me, “when I had to pull over because I was too afraid to keep driving?”

He sifts through his memories until he comes up with that night. He was seven, maybe eight—an age when he would have assumed that the mother in the driver’s seat was as steady as an autopilot.

“I didn’t understand what was going on but I knew something was wrong,” he says.

I think of the young mother I was to him, my first child, and the intensity of my urge to shield him from any uncertainty. I think of all the times I pushed him in the stroller up and down the streets of New York City, barely aware that I was only at the beginning of what I would come to know as a mother. I tell him now, as I drive, that I was once so afraid and now I am not. I tell him you can conquer fears, you can make changes when you need to, you can take action, seize control of your life.

“Okay, Mom,” he says.

“Really,” I say. I’ve strayed into Mom-offering-valuable-life-lessons mode, but with him on the verge of starting high school, I want to pack in all these moments while I still can.

“Very interesting,” he says and gives me a look of exaggerated deep focus, his head nodding in faux deep contemplation. I laugh and he laughs, and Josh and Layla in the back seat want to know what we are laughing at, and even though we can’t really explain, they laugh as well.

I change lanes and merge onto Route 3, where the road narrows, becoming less of an interstate and more of a country highway. Soon the Sagamore Bridge gleams ahead. There is the Cape Cod Canal and the boats sailing past and the vastness of the bright sky and the water on both sides that widens and leads to the ocean.

A few miles across the bridge, I get on Route 6A, the scenic highway, even though it will take longer. Along this road is a small art gallery with a nature walk behind it that I once loved.

“We used to do a small hike near here,” I tell the kids.

“When?” they ask.

“Every summer, this was the first stop we made on the way to the Cape,” I say.

“I remember,” Noam says. “There’s the really muddy part, and then the high grass and the rickety bridge.”

“All of us went there?” Layla asks. She is the one least likely to remember any time before; for her, all of us together will be a story she hears about a seemingly mythical past.

“All of us,” I confirm. “Daddy and I came here for the first time when Noam was four and Josh was a baby—I read about it in a book and we decided to stop here, and we loved it. So we came back the following summer, and then every year after that.”

“I miss the way it used to be,” Josh says.

The rush of guilt and sadness rolls across me and I let it inside me, able to hold this pain, as though my heart has grown an extra chamber. In making more room for my happiness, there is also more space for the sadness—the two don’t cancel each other out but exist side by side.

“Tell me what you miss the most,” I say.

“We were all together,” Josh says.

I take in his words, hold them, mourn them.

“I miss it too,” I say and think back to that young family we once were. I held Noam’s hand as we walked behind the gallery, Josh snuggled into a baby carrier against me as we passed through the sculpture garden where the ground was covered with iridescent stones, blues and purples and greens. We kept walking as sculptures and statues were scattered among the flowers and grass and trees—as though trees could bloom with metallic flowers and host hammered-silver birds. Farther out, the grass grew taller than the kids, some years even taller than Aaron and me, and we stepped across the slats of a boardwalk, stopped at a covered wood bench, then walked across the rickety hanging bridge.

Each summer, I took pictures of the kids in the same spots. Soon another baby was added to the pictures, Layla in the same carrier I’d once used to hold the boys. In different photos, my hair was shorter or longer, I was heavier or thinner, my face a little older and more worn, Aaron’s hair beginning to be flecked with gray. I’d imagined we would come here every year until the kids were grown. I’d planned a decade’s worth of these pictures hanging on the walls of our house to mark all the ways we had changed.

Now, as we near the gallery, I consider stopping the car—I could once again walk through with the kids, take pictures as I always have; a return visit to a place that has stayed the same, though we have changed.

The gallery comes up quickly, and I slow but don’t stop, preferring to let this one place remain as it exists in my mind. Let the grass grow ever higher, let the gates remain sealed so the inhabitants can fall into a protected hundred-year sleep. I keep driving, to the Orleans rotary where the highways merge and onward to the outer Cape, to Coast Guard Beach. Under the bright sun, we lay out our blanket and sand toys and sandwiches, and the boys and I grab the Boogie Boards and run into the ocean, while Layla plays in the sand.

A huge wave is coming. Noam points, grinning.

“Should we try it?” I ask.

It’s far enough away that we can still balk, either by rushing forward to safety or going under to avoid its impact. We do neither. The water is rough and smashes against us, but instead of being toppled, we are lifted up and over the waves.