I hope you’re alone for the rest of your life, said my mother-in-law, in a letter she sent me when she learned I was leaving Mark. I believed that I would be, because her son had done nothing but fail to put a stop to my wanting. Her letter put a stop to my writing. I couldn’t work for months. Every sentence was stained with the selfishness, her word, she’d seen and deplored.
Let me get this straight, said my mother. There’s nobody else. You’re leaving for some idea you’ve cooked up.
She’s unhappy and she doesn’t like the guy anymore, said my father. Leave her alone.
Other people said things like Well, at least there aren’t children involved or Well, at least you didn’t own a house together, and I was offended by the assumption that divorcing without having to divide up these assets meant that the trauma was less of a trauma, and the ordeal was less of an ordeal. I couldn’t tell whether these people thought that it really was lucky that I did not possess children or property, or whether it was suspicious, my lack of these anchors, and my unwillingness to stay.
They’re jealous, said Rose. End of story.
No, I think they’re glad they’re not me, I said. Jealousy can’t always be the motivating force behind people telling you things you wish they’d kept to themselves.
Details I would be keeping to myself: the muscle twitching in the middle of Mark’s cheek when I told him I no longer wanted to be married. The two of us, in those last weeks before I moved out, sitting like blocks of marble in restaurants filled with other people’s almost raucous affinity for the friends and lovers they’d met up with. Mark sitting next to me on the edge of the bed the morning I left, wiping soundless tears from his cheeks. Crying so hard in the car on the way over to my apartment in Ditmas Park, so hard the car-service driver pulled over on the BQE, thundering with traffic on a windy, white-hot summer morning, to ask me if I was okay. The undeserved kindness made me cry harder. Over the friends I would lose and the gossip I would become.
Before I left, Mark made me promise that I would still go with him to a wedding we’d been invited to in Texas—the second marriage of one of his best friends. Of course, I told him.
It’ll be hellish with you, he said, but it would be even more hellish without you, and I don’t want to have to spend any time explaining where you are. Something like sorry, she’s dead in a ditch somewhere.
Which is where you’d like me to be, I said.
That’s not funny.
I wasn’t trying to be funny.
But yes, I wish you were dead in a ditch.
Would you believe me if I told you I wished I were, too?
Oh yes, he said. And I wish it made me able to forgive you.
On the plane I popped the Dramamine I’d bought at Hudson News and washed it down with a tiny bottle of Sutter Home chardonnay—a cocktail for air travel self-erasure passed down to me by Rose. Mark, reading a very long book beside me, gave off a chill when I ordered a second.
The wedding took place outside Austin, in a green field, with mountains in the distance. Bright riots of wildflowers stood like heralds in mason jars. All of the bridesmaids wearing pale blush gowns the very color of tenderness; all of their faces framed by long loping blond curling-iron curls, all of their crowns showing roots. All blond, all self-tanned, all big of eye and heavily mascaraed. They blurred into one girl and I tried to imagine what it was like to be their kind of compliant. Their kind of dumb, I would have said at a different time. Life must certainly be easier if all you wanted from it was a handsome man who thought you were beautiful and who could bankroll a bunch of renovations, vacations, and educations. As the bride made her way down the aisle, the sunset bled through the leaves of colossal trees whose branches ran like brooks, like elephant trunks, out to the side and down to the ground—live oaks, which I would never have known if I hadn’t met Mark, whose childhood home sat in the shade of two. I spent much of the ceremony staring at those trees, because it was difficult to watch another woman—a woman ten years younger than her husband, ten years younger than me—float serenely, joyfully, and blamelessly toward happiness.
After the ceremony and before dinner, some guests sat on a porch that looked out at a lawn full of people laughing, the grass glinting with what seemed to be hundreds of gold wedding bands. I drank primly but steadily, nodding and smiling at whatever was said to me. I left when I heard someone say I think people who divorce just don’t try hard enough.
At dinner, no one would have ever guessed that I’d thrown my suitcase against the wall while we were getting dressed in the hotel room, or that Mark had called me, as I threw it, a spineless ass. Or that the night before, in the restaurant at the hotel, the bartender, who’d been watching us try not to have an argument over dinner, served us with a check whose dot matrices identified us as Seats #3 and 4: Couple Doloroso.
Just before the cake arrived, Mark had taken someone’s small boy on his knee, and a silver-haired woman who had been sitting next to me watching leaned over and from within her cloud of gray linens and flaxes said, Honey, where did you find him?
I stole him from another woman, I said, and headed toward the bar.
You’re going to dance with me, Mark said, standing over me and my fifth glass of wine, after fireflies had started to spark their way through the bushes and the hired band was a few songs in. We did not dance so much as sway in place with my face buried in his chest and his lips pressed into my hair. You are so stupid, he whispered.
I hear those words nearly every day.