WE DECIDED TO DRIVE INTO Great Barrington the next day and have lunch at this pizza place we heard was great, Baba Louie’s. Post-vegetarianism, Tobias had decided to see if the gluten-free lifestyle would suit him (it didn’t), and they made a wheatless crust there. Plus we wanted to enjoy the town—walk around, shop, take advantage of the fresh air and the fact that there wasn’t yet snow on the ground. We were still buoyed by the previous night, by the closeness we felt being alone together.
“Do you want to eat or walk around first?” Tobias asked me.
“Eat,” I said. We had forgotten breakfast food on our grocery list, and I was starving.
They didn’t open until eleven and we got there at ten forty-five. We huddled outside the door, Tobias rubbing his hands up and down my arms even though it wasn’t that cold out.
“Should we get coffee?” Tobias asked me.
“Need sustenance,” I said. “If we stand here, maybe they’ll open sooner.” There was no one in sight and the lights weren’t on, but I didn’t want to miss our window. Tobias laughed, then obliged.
Finally, a stout man in a white apron came out from the back, flipped on the lights, and let us in. We claimed a table by the window that had a stencil of a pizza pie in it. I felt déjà vu come on the moment we sat—the calm, funny memory of being here before, right like this. We’d never been to the Berkshires before together. I’d come once with my mother, when I was a kid, and once while Tobias was gone, with Paul. But I loved it here, I decided. Forget the beach—this was our place. My mind started to sprint. Maybe we’d even change our plans and get married here. I had this image of me at the Wheatleigh, dressed in a pale lilac dress, a flower crown on my head. Summer. Our friends seated in white wooden chairs as I floated down the aisle toward Tobias.
“What are you thinking about?” he asked me. It was something he asked frequently at the beginning of our relationship, almost never anymore. I took this as a sign that he didn’t really want to know, but here, now, it felt like salvation.
“That it would be really beautiful to get married here.”
He sat back in his chair. It was a sign of withdrawal, but how big I couldn’t tell.
“I thought we were doing Park Slope with just the six of us?”
We had decided on: Tobias, me, Jessica, Sumir, Matty, my mom. Tobias didn’t want his parents there, so I didn’t press. He wasn’t particularly close with them, but he never had been.
“I know,” I said. “I was just thinking it’s really beautiful up here. And there would be room for so many more people we love.”
“I thought Park Slope was our compromise,” he said. He was a little irritated, a little agitated. “I told you I wanted to elope.”
“And I told you I don’t,” I said. His irritation beckoned a response from me. It was like all I had been burying, suppressing, came rumbling to the surface—a rupture, a fault line.
“Right. That’s why we’re doing the church.”
The waitress came over then. She had large holes in her ears from piercings and purple hair and looked to be about twenty. I wondered if she was in high school or college and whether she lived at home. At that moment, I thought of my dad.
“Are you guys ready to order?” she asked.
We asked for a minute. Maybe we shouldn’t have. Maybe we should have ordered our pizza. Maybe she would have brought it at just the exact right time to prevent what happened next.
That’s the thing about life—these moments that define us emerge out of nothing. A missed call. A trip down the stairs. A car accident. They happen in a moment, a breath.
“So you want a big wedding?” Tobias asked. It wasn’t an accusation, not exactly, but I could hear the bubble of animosity under his question. A big wedding. It was like wanting tax cuts for the rich. More than frivolous—a show of privilege that was not only unnecessary and gaudy, but detrimental.
“Yes,” I said. “I want a big wedding.” I was challenging him. It wasn’t even true. I didn’t want a big wedding. I didn’t even have that many friends and barely any family, but I wanted to expose his mentality to the light. I wanted to point to it and say, See? This is why we’re here. It’s not me, it’s you.
“Okay,” he said. “Fine. We’ll have a big wedding. We’ll do it up here. Can we have lunch now?”
It was what I had wanted to hear, but it was all wrong. We were sacrificing ourselves in order to one-up each other.
And then I saw the truth: We didn’t know how to make each other happy.
I thought he knew what I needed. That I wanted to believe we were moving forward, that we’d grow up and out of this stage, that we’d build a life together that had some stability—but he didn’t. Or maybe he saw it but he couldn’t give it to me. All our fights, all our snips and groans and frosty mornings were over this simple fact. He wanted to make me happy, and I wanted him to be happy, and the two weren’t compatible.
“No,” I said. “I don’t think we can.”
“Jesus, Sabrina, what do you want?”
“I want us to be on the same page. And we’re not. We haven’t been in a long time.”
“So this is my—”
“No,” I said. “It’s not. It’s not anyone’s fault. But we do this all the time. We just keep poking and poking and poking each other. We don’t want the same things. We have never even talked about kids.”
“We haven’t even figured out how to get married,” he said. He ran a hand over his face. “Why can’t we ever take one thing at a time?”
“Because we don’t. We just stand still, and we resent each other for it.” It cut my heart right in two to say it out loud.
He got up and walked outside. I followed him. The sun had moved behind a cloud, and it was freezing. My coat was inside, looped over the back of my chair.
“I hate feeling this way and I hate making you feel this way. It’s fucking powerless.” He put his hands up to rest on the top of his head. “I’m not sure it’s supposed to be this hard.”
I felt my world come crashing down. I swear it was like the sun fell straight out of the sky.
“We can’t keep doing this to each other,” he said. I saw how much pain he was in. I saw the sting in his eyes. “I can’t keep doing this to you.”
I could feel the desperation in him, and I felt it, too. It began to mix with anger, flooding my fearful veins with rage. “Do it, then,” I said. I crossed my arms in front of me. I was shaking. “End it.”
“Sabby…”
“No,” I said. I was seeing stars. I knew the sadness would be too big, too wide—I didn’t want to feel it. The anger was shorter. Let me burn there.
He started to cry. “Maybe we just need to take some time apart,” he said.
I looked at him, dumbfounded. It felt like he had stabbed me with a sword and taken out my heart and lungs in one clean swipe. I said nothing. I looked down at my hands. On my finger was the ring. The beautiful, sweet, subtle ring. The one that was supposed to carry us through decades, not months. I reached over and with shaking fingers took it off. I couldn’t keep it. I couldn’t even look at it.
I handed it back to him. “Pawn it,” I said, my voice shaking. “You need the money.”
I walked back into Baba Louie’s, grabbed my coat, and walked out. We went back to the cabin, packed in silence, and then we drove back to the city. I stared out the window, my feet tucked up into my chest on the seat. I was too numb to cry.
“This isn’t a breakup,” he said. “It’s just some time. I just think we need to be alone for a bit. Don’t you? Sabby?”
I was scared of being without him, of course I was. But what terrified me more was him being without me—what he would find in that quiet. Whether it would be his happiness.