Love yourself first, and everything else falls in line. You really have to love yourself to get anything done in this world.
—LUCILLE BALL
A seventy-year-old Israeli woman was feeling me up. I’d been applying the Dead Sea’s curative mud gingerly to my arms and feet with delicate pats and circular motions.
But I was doing it all wrong. Clearly I was doing it all wrong, because two elderly women approached me and, without asking, scooped up a pile of the mud and patted it directly onto my breasts above my bikini top. I looked up at the “beach” above us. It was more of a swamp filled with loud families with coolers and faded umbrellas. Dads and grandpas all wore Speedos, with their hefty guts protruding toward Jordan across the sea. Empty potato chip bags and plastic Coke bottles clung to the shoreline.
According to the many companies that sell products made of Dead Sea mud, the murky, salty mixture is a kind of panacea, curing everything from respiratory diseases to acne to arthritis. I only wanted to coat myself in enough of it to take that obligatory picture of myself floating in the Dead Sea with mud on my face so that I could send it to Nick. It would be a picture that clearly conveyed a sense of relaxation. I’m floating. I’m muddy. Look how untroubled and peaceful I am.
“Good for your skin,” the bigger of the two women, who had the sturdy authority of Bea Arthur as Dorothy in The Golden Girls, said in Hebrew, allowing the sludge to drip through her pruney fingers. A nearby English speaker translated for me. “You’ll glow. You’re young. You should have nice skin.”
I’d taken a bus across the ancient Judaean Desert, below the Ha-He’etekim cliff and past the Qumran caves, where the famous Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, to end up here, the lowest point on earth, the Dead Sea. I’d been expecting to recline and float in the dense, salty water, surrendering the stress of the past few months to one of the holiest places on the planet or, at the very least, to take a picture that conveyed this. I hadn’t been primed for a chat, and so at first this intrusion into my space was irritating.
I want to not feel my body! I screamed in my head. I want to pretend it doesn’t exist for just an hour. I want to not worry about it. I wanted my sadness and fear and pain and worry to sink into the biblical lake. But these women would not be deterred. Plus, they were kind and gentle and reminded me enough of my big Irish grandma that I let them pat mud into my armpits and the ticklish creases between my thighs and hips. Both of them were covered from head to toe in the brown gunk, which was now drying, cracking, and turning lighter in some places, giving them the appearance of creatures who had emerged from the depths of a swamp. Their teeth took on an anomalous whiteness within their wide smiles. Each of them wore a shiny gold wedding ring that managed to catch the sun despite the layers of mud.
Since we’d become so intimately acquainted in such an expedient manner, I thought it was only polite for me to make small talk, and so I asked if they had any advice for a long and happy marriage.
The bigger one of the two laughed. Her whole body shook and flecks of mud flew off her shoulders as they rocked back and forth. She looked at me and grabbed her substantial belly, one hand on each side of it, shaking it up and down. When she said something in Hebrew, my new translator friend chuckled.
“She says to make sure you feed him.” This was a common refrain from the older generation in most cultures, a demographic of women clearly worried that no one was properly cooking for men anymore, fearful that all of the men were about to waste away due to women who used their ovens for shoe storage. I reassured her.
“I recently learned how to cook beer-can chicken, and I took a cheese-making class in Denmark.”
The stout woman screwed up her face and made a rocking motion with her pelvis. My friend sniggered and translated again. “She says her advice is better: Don’t stop having sex with your husband, even when you get really old.”
The first woman lifted up my ponytail to make sure I had enough coverage on the nape of my neck. “Take care of yourself, neshama.” Neshama, I’d learn during this trip, translates loosely to “my sweet one” or “my darling.” “Take care of yourself.”
“I’ll try,” I said and walked off into the sea to float alone. On my flight over to Israel I’d been caught off guard by the flight attendant’s safety announcement. Safety announcements are usually just the soundtrack to the turf war with your seatmate over the shared armrest. But, for some reason, this time I was listening. “In the event of a decompression, an oxygen mask will automatically appear in front of you. Place the mask firmly over your nose and mouth and breathe normally. If you are traveling with a child or someone who needs assistance, secure your own mask first before assisting someone else.”
Why did I feel like this flight attendant was speaking directly to me?
Secure your own mask first before assisting someone else. Take care of yourself. If you don’t take care of yourself, then what use are you to anyone else?
With the past year’s focus on learning to be married, building a home, building a future, thinking about planning a family, and taking care of an ill parent from afar, it had been easy to slip into crisis-management mode all the time, automatic pilot where I fell asleep due to exhaustion and woke with a pit of angst in my stomach over what needed to be accomplished next. It made me feel a certain kinship with my mom. Over the past decade, as my dad had gotten sicker and been increasingly confined to the house, I’d watched my mother place everyone else’s needs ahead of her own. I was certain this was one of the things that had contributed to her having a nervous breakdown in the months before our wedding.
The last time I’d been home to see my parents had been a particularly painful visit. It was right before I’d been diagnosed with the muscular dystrophy, and my dad’s doctors warned that his health was deteriorating more quickly than usual. His liver had failed. Nick and I both flew out to Philadelphia to see my parents and try to help my mom figure out how to manage their dwindling finances. A few years earlier, my father had taken a second mortgage on their house without telling my mother. The money was gone and he couldn’t remember how he’d spent it. My mother’s mental health was so bad she could no longer work. They had no income coming in and mom knew nothing about their savings or investments. My dad was only awake to talk about it for a couple hours a day. At my parents’ house I sat in an armchair next to my dad’s hospital bed. He couldn’t lift his hands to feed himself, so my mom sat on the other side of the bed, spooning soft cheese into his mouth. He stuck his tongue out to receive it like a small child. Most of his teeth had fallen out because his gums could no longer hold them. His entire body was so swollen, he looked like he was covered in a blanket of himself.
My mother’s hands shook from nerves and anxiety as she lifted the spoon to my father’s mouth. It was as though I were watching a performance that took place several times a day, one in which the actors had long ago ceased to put in the effort to pretend. For my mom, caring for my father had become like caring for an infant—frantic, uncertain, exhausting, and often gross—but with none of the unconditional love a mother has for her child.
I always loved the story of how John and Tracey Piazza met. It’s the one story of my parents as a couple where it sounds like they were truly happy. My mother was a striking debutante from Denver with corn silk–blond hair cascading down to her butt. She grew up riding horses imported from South America and hiking in the Rocky Mountains. She went to Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, with no ambitions beyond finding a husband, preferably a doctor or a lawyer. My dad was the scrappy and brilliant son of a truck driver and a nurse from Scranton, Pennsylvania. One of five kids, he hitchhiked his way to college, also at Drake, and paid his own tuition as a bartender at the campus bar, the Doghouse.
He met my eighteen-year-old mom in the bar on her very first day of college, fresh out of a Delta Gamma sorority meeting. Dad was very handsome, like Al Pacino in The Godfather, with a hippie vibe, black hair, mysterious eyes, and a serious jaw—nothing like the boys back home in the Rockies. He said she was the prettiest girl he’d ever seen. My mom later joked that was because his hometown, Scranton, wasn’t known for pretty girls. As family legend goes, he charmed her with dirty jokes and plied her with strong margaritas before convincing her to come back to his apartment to go swimming in his pool. With a flick of her silky blond hair and a giggle, she agreed.
Only once she was in the water did she realize my dad had brought her to trespass in someone else’s pool. When I first heard the story, I loved the fun and frivolity, but looking back, I saw it as a metaphor for a forty-year marriage based on half-truths, paper cuts that became gashes, and broken promises.
At home with me four decades after that first date, my mother sat on their back porch with a faraway look in her eyes. This bout of depression had transported her to a place that felt very far away from me.
I tried to hold her hand, but she winced. This wasn’t the mom I was used to.
Before she got sick and before I met Nick, Mom would take the train from Philadelphia to New York to visit me for a few hours almost every Sunday. We’d have lunch at a grungy diner across the street from my apartment. She was my biggest cheerleader back then, particularly on the mornings where I was slightly hungover and nursing a bad breakup. “I’m not worried about you,” she’d say, shoveling eggs and home fries into her mouth, her diet of the month always put on hiatus when she visited me. “You’re going to find the perfect person for you one day, Jo. I know it in my bones.”
Now I had found the perfect person, but my cheerleader had misplaced her pom-poms. She was deflated. I wanted to tell her I was still disappointed that she hadn’t been a bigger presence at our wedding. She was the one thing missing from that day. In the weeks leading up to the wedding she was bedridden with depression and wasn’t sure she’d be well enough to make it to the ceremony. I didn’t see her until I walked down the aisle. It was Nick’s mom, Patsy, who came to see me in my bridal suite, hugged me, wished me luck, and gave me a pair of earrings she’d asked the jeweler to make me just for my wedding day.
It wasn’t my mom’s fault. She was sick, but I resented her for it all the same. I wanted her to snap out of it, to be the mom in the diner, my cheerleader, my friend, and then I felt selfish for not having more compassion.
“I’m sorry you’re going through this,” I said. I looked at her matted hair and the dried skin peeling off the backs of her hands. The truly unfair difference between my dad’s disease and my mother’s was that his was so apparent, so physically imposing. Because everyone could see he was sick, they treated him like a sick person. But mental illness takes cover inside a normal-looking body. No one tended to my mother or treated her with kid gloves, because it was easy to dismiss her depression as a choice, even for me.
“Are you happy for me?” I asked her, regretting the words the second they left my lips. What if she said no?
“I like Nick,” she said in a remote voice. “Your father and I were children when we got married. We didn’t want the same things. We fought all the time. We fought so much.” I could see the tears welling up in her eyes and I reached out to put my hand on her arm as gently as I could.
“You made a better choice than I did. I lost myself in our marriage and I don’t know how to get it back,” she said. It was the first real thing we’d talked about in more than a year. I don’t want to end up like you, I thought, feeling terrible that the words had even entered my brain.
I traveled to Israel to work on several assignments, some of them light and frothy (“The World’s MOST IMPORTANT Hummus!”) and some serious (“Is Israel Safe for Tourists?”). And when it came to marriage advice, I knew I was looking for something; I just wasn’t sure what it was. I was fascinated by the Jewish laws that governed a husband’s and wife’s behavior in a marriage. I also wanted to understand how wives and mothers managed to stay strong and keep a family together in the midst of such a chaotic world, living in a country constantly rocked by violence and political tension.
I was having a hard time keeping my shit together in the midst of my incredibly safe and privileged life. Granted, our first year of marriage was more difficult than I’d expected it to be. I hadn’t expected to find out I was sick or for my parents to fall so ill. But Nick was the best husband I could have asked for, better than anyone I could have dreamed up. I had no reason to complain, and yet I was worn down. On my flight to Israel, I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror. I hadn’t gotten a haircut since our wedding, and my eyes were bloodshot, with deep navy circles indented beneath them. I looked exhausted. I looked like crap. Something had to change.
After a long day floating weightlessly in the Dead Sea, I arrived in Jerusalem, a welcome antidote to the previous night I’d spent in Tel Aviv, a city that reminded me too much of the worst parts of New York and Los Angeles—the crowds, the lines at nightclubs that seem like they never close, the muscle heads working out on the beach in as little clothing as possible, and the residents’ obsession with telling me they were the best at everything.
Despite its being a city mired in a perpetual state of flux and often violence, the people in Jerusalem were much kinder, more soft-spoken, and more welcoming to foreign visitors than those in Tel Aviv, and I never once felt unsafe in the ancient city. I spent hours strolling the labyrinthine stalls of the Old City. I bought a rosary for my dad, who was raised Catholic, and had it blessed in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the site where some Christians believe that Jesus Christ was crucified. Most shops in the meandering alleys of Old Jerusalem don’t have proper names. The stalls, no bigger than closets, are filled with precious stones from the Red Sea, frankincense, Stars of David, wooden rosaries, T-shirts with Hebrew words that say curses when viewed upside down, rip-off Hard Rock Café paraphernalia, bobble heads of every famous Jewish person ever, prayer shawls, and holy water. They trip over one another down the dim and dank alleys of the sweet-smelling old market.
That night I was going to meet Chana, an Orthodox Jewish woman who counsels secular women on the intricacies of Israeli marriage laws and teaches them how those laws can actually improve and strengthen any marriage, even one between two people who aren’t religious. I was raised Catholic and Nick, Episcopalian, but neither of us had been to church in twenty years. We adhered to a shared moral code of being kind to your fellow man, doing the right thing, and resting on Sundays.
Israeli law doesn’t allow marriages between Jews and non-Jews, or between Jews by birth and converts to Judaism, to take place within the state. In order to be legally married in Israel, the bride and groom must perform traditional Orthodox Jewish wedding rites and rituals and be married by an Orthodox rabbi (the vast majority of whom are men), even if they aren’t particularly religious.
The Israeli system for marriage is wildly complicated and controversial, even for practicing but non-Orthodox Jews. I had friends from college who lived in Israel for years but left the country to get married in Europe (Cyprus was a pleasant sun-drenched option) or even on a boat out at sea, just to avoid the hassle of having a religious wedding.
Chana makes it more pleasant for secular Jewish women to have their weddings in Israel by meeting with them and talking them through the actual meaning of the ancient Jewish rituals. Her philosophy is that understanding the rituals makes things less scary and awkward.
“No one should dread their wedding,” she explained when I met her. “That’s just not fair.” I’d expected Chana to be older, like the women I met at the Dead Sea, but she was my age, thirty-five, and already had six beautiful children. Chana was twenty-two when she got married, an old maid in Jerusalem’s Orthodox community. Her husband had been twenty-eight.
With pale skin and a lace-embroidered beret, Chana’s face conjured a Vermeer painting. She met me in her eighth-floor apartment and led me to her balcony to admire the view of the Old City before we settled easily onto her couch. Her oldest daughter brought us a plate of macarons, the French kind, not the Jewish kind. Her husband took the kids out for a few hours, which made it feel like we were old friends talking marriage.
Secular marriage comes with a lot of shoulds and shouldn’ts. You should love your husband or wife. You shouldn’t have sex with other people. You should cherish your spouse and protect them. You shouldn’t sneakily read their e-mails while they’re in the shower. But Orthodox Judaism comes with a very specific set of rules, and not just for the wedding but for the actual marriage.
Chana began by complimenting me on putting so much effort into my first year of marriage. “The first year is so important. That’s when you see the most divorces,” she added. “If you make the first year work, then you’re in a good place.”
“Thank you.” I paused. “So, what are the rules?” I jumped right in, ready to take dictation.
Chana let out a twinkly laugh.
“Where do I start?” she breathed excitedly. “Getting married is a journey into the unknown. But I should tell you about the mikvah first. That’s the thing that can be stressful for nonreligious women here when they get married. You have to have a mikvah here before you’re allowed to get a marriage certificate, and I think it’s a good thing. Most people don’t understand it and they don’t like it because they don’t understand it. I worry that secular people hate religion because they’ve had a bad experience with it. I want to fix that. A mikvah should be wonderful.”
A mikvah is a ritual bath undertaken by both men and women in which you immerse yourself in running water from a lake, a sea, or a natural stream. Israeli cities like Jerusalem and Tel Aviv have bathhouses specially designed for this purpose where at least some of the water is supplied by rain. You enter the water naked, with your arms and legs spread so that every inch of skin and hair is exposed to the water. As you duck under the water, you say a blessing. The most common one for brides and grooms is the shehecheyanu, which thanks God for preparing the bride and groom for their marriage: “Blessed are you, Lord our God, Ruler of the Universe, who kept us alive and preserved us and enabled us to reach this season.” For women the mikvah is overseen by an attendant, often an older Orthodox woman. Chana admitted that they can be a little harsh as they physically inspect a woman’s body before she is allowed to immerse herself in the water. No one really wants to be inspected when they’re naked. I thought back to the women on the shores of the Dead Sea, carefully moving their hands along my body in places Nick hadn’t even explored.
The mikvah is a cleansing ritual, plain and simple, and in some ways it reminded me of the temazcal in Mexico, a way of purifying your body before you enter a new stage of your life.
Most nonreligious women go to the mikvah once, get their marriage license, and never go again. Chana goes every single month seven days after her period. She loves it.
“It’s a time just for me.” Of course she needed a time just for her. She has six children!
For Chana the mikvah is her time of self-care. It gives her a sense of renewal, of finding herself again. She doesn’t just go to the bath. This is like a monthly spiritual spa day. She immerses herself in the water, does her nails, moisturizes her entire body, and trims her hair.
“You spend one whole day focusing on your own body,” she says. “Think of it like a reset button. I don’t know for sure if that was God’s intention, but I think it was. I think that’s the reason we do it, to give women a time to take care of themselves. It’s very easy to forget to do that in a marriage.”
“I think I had a mikvah in the Dead Sea. It felt like a mikvah.”
She peered at me with curiosity as I explained about surrendering to the water and the old women with the mud.
“Sure, maybe,” she said with the right amount of skepticism.
Chana’s insistence on self-care made sense, here of all places. I thought back to the safety briefing on the plane. Secure your own oxygen mask first. This part of the Middle East was roiled with uncertainty, and keeping a family safe required a wife and mother to remain strong, to take care of herself so she could ultimately take care of everyone else. Taking care of herself was something my own mother had never been good at, especially in times of crisis.
I finally felt comfortable enough to tell Chana I was curious about the Orthodox rule about when women could have sex with their husbands or, more specifically, when they couldn’t. I’d heard that Orthodox couples were forbidden from having sex during specific times of the month.
Chana raised a very well-manicured eyebrow in amusement and lifted her hand to stop me from saying something embarrassing.
“You’ve got it all wrong,” she said. “According to Jewish law, sexual relations between a man and a woman are sacred and holy. But sacred and holy in a very positive way. Sex is a really good thing to Jews. You can only have sex within marriage and only with your wife. And then, after you are married, you can only have sex at certain times. That’s true,” Chana explained.
She caught me making a face and gave me a look that said, Stop being a judgmental twit. “We aren’t supposed to have sex during our period or for seven days after our period.”
“Because that ensures you have sex when you’re most fertile, right?” I responded. As a woman over the age of thirty-five, I was now well-versed in the science of fertility. “You want to maximize the opportunity to make babies.” I regretted the words as soon as they’d left my mouth. I could feel how I was reducing her spiritual beliefs to biological imperatives.
She shook her head and leaned into me as if she were revealing a great secret.
“People think these rules are all about having children, and that’s just not true.” As she sighed, I remembered the basketball team she was raising in this apartment. “That’s when sex is better for the woman. We believe that sex needs, seriously needs, to be good for the woman. During the times we have sex is when all of the hormones are right for sex to be very enjoyable for the woman. Your libido is great if you wait until seven days after your period.”
I chewed on my macaron longer than necessary to consider this.
Chana continued. “Now also imagine not being able to touch your husband for that time. Imagine how great that is when you can finally touch him and release all of that pent-up energy.” She told me that Orthodox Jewish marriage comes with a special bed. During the two weeks when a couple are not allowed to touch each other, it splits apart. Then it comes back together during the two weeks when they can touch.
“Wait.” I stopped her. “I understand about the sex. But you can’t touch for those two weeks? You can’t hug or kiss or tickle or squeeze?”
She shook her head. “You can’t touch. It makes it so much more exciting when you can. It’s easy to lose yourself in a marriage, especially when you become a mom. The two weeks apart lets you connect with your body, return to your womanhood. You learn to love your body again. The two of us move apart in order to get to know ourselves better and then come back to each other more complete. It keeps the passion in your marriage. Everything is lining up during that time, your hormones, your libido. Everything is great,” Chana said. I felt like I was reading Cosmo.
I thought about Chana’s advice. When did Nick and I have the best sex? It was usually after I came back from a long trip, having built up all that desire and anticipation for days and sometimes weeks at a time. This trip was a prime example of that. I’d only been gone a week, but it was evident from his texts that Nick had started to miss me like crazy. “I was bouncing up and down in my chair at work thinking about picking you up from the airport,” he’d written. “I was looking at our wedding pictures last night. I’m a lucky guy.”
I’d come into our talk with plenty of misconceptions. One was that Orthodox Judaism was inherently antifeminist, turning women in baby-making machines. I hadn’t expected to get enlightened and progressive advice on how to care for yourself, your satisfaction, and your relationship.
“Take some time apart,” Chana said. “For me, it’s like getting to have a whole new wedding night every single month….You know, Jo, it’s the relationship between the husband and wife itself that is seen as sacred and holy in the Bible. God dwells within each couple if you choose to let him in.”
“But what does that mean?” I asked like an impatient child. Since Nick and I are not particularly religious, saying that God was dwelling within our marriage made it sound like we’d invited a complete stranger to come over and watch us have sex.
She considered it thoughtfully. “When I think about letting God in, I think about the little things. I think about being nice to my husband at the end of a long day. I think about smiling at him when I don’t want to smile. It is so easy in our world to think about me, me, me. But now you need to think about the two of you. It is about those little things.”
I nodded.
“In Jewish law we talk about the marriage covenant. It’s something so much bigger than a contract. It’s about a desire to create good things in the world together. To have the same desires about goodness and changing the world together. When you’re focused on these shared rules, then you truly focus on getting through the little things and the big things together.”
Still trying to wrap my head around the meaning of the laws, I’d later talk about it with an Orthodox scholar back home in the States. Alissa Thomas-Newborn is the first Orthodox female clergy member in Los Angeles and one of only a handful in the entire country. She echoed Chana’s ideas, telling me that the Orthodox rules truly did allow time for a woman to take care of herself, to feel renewed and refreshed each month, and for a couple to reset their relationship on multiple levels.
“Think of it as a time to work on your communication muscles, to talk without thinking about the physical aspects of the relationship,” Thomas-Newborn told me. “Look at it as an opportunity, a wonderful one! It can be a time to explore the relationship in different ways.”
Chana also told me her theory of bricks, which is not in the Bible but is wonderful advice all the same. Every married couple should think about the theory of the bricks.
“Every crisis, big or small, is a brick. It’s up to you to decide what to do with that brick. You can use it to build a wall between you, or it can be a brick in building the foundation of your home together. You can choose to let that brick tear you apart or make the relationship stronger. Anytime I reach a low point in my marriage I try to think about how that crisis will eventually get us to a better place.”
Her husband came home with the children soon after, and amid the glorious cacophony I could see why Chana equally cherished both her family and her time alone. She hugged me warmly as I left and whispered in my ear, “Take care of yourself.”
I thought we’d have days of great sex when I returned from the Middle East. We’d moved apart, so we could come back to each other more complete. Right? Instead, Nick and I got into a fight, a really shitty fight.
It started small. We couldn’t figure out how to set up a bank account that would automatically pay the mortgage. Then we finally set one up with Wells Fargo, but it locked us out because we entered the wrong password too many times.
The obvious way to mitigate this marital stress was to do something simple and relaxing together. And so we decided to assemble some Ikea furniture. As we searched for lost screws and Riktig Öglas we began wondering if we should put the mortgage on a credit card, which led the conversation to my desire to get rid of most of our credit cards. Nick, on the other hand, wanted as many credit cards as possible to maximize our frequent-flier points. This made my stomach tighten and my breath get short. The thought of looming plastic debt each month gave me an anxiety attack. But we somehow got back to the matter at hand and logged on to our credit card account to see if we could link it to the bank to link it to the other bank to link it to the mortgage. The Riktig Öglas were now nowhere to be found and tensions were running high.
I perused the last month of charges. “Why do we eat out so much?” I asked. “Do you hate my cooking? The beer-can chicken wasn’t any good?”
Our talk grew more and more heated as we quarreled over how we spent our money. Did we even need this crap from Ikea?
Nick thought we could get rid of our car. We lived in San Francisco; why did we need a car? I loved the freedom of having a car to escape the city for the wine country or to buy toilet paper in bulk at Costco.
“We wouldn’t need a car if we lived in New York, but we definitely need it here,” I said. Before I knew it, I began listing all of the things I hated about San Francisco and reasons why living there was making me miserable—being yelled at in the grocery store for not bringing my own bags, getting disapproving stares because I’d never been to Burning Man, the fact that everyone looks down on you if you don’t work at Google or Facebook, the chilly fog that seeps into your bones and never lets you truly get warm.
I wasn’t completely miserable on the West Coast. Sure, I didn’t have any friends and the hills made my glutes constantly sore and I felt like a pariah for not composting my own garbage, but San Francisco wasn’t as terrible as I was making it out to be. I was looking for things to attack with. I was tense. I grew up believing that married couples fought every day. I’d watched my parents wear each other down with constant bickering. In the past I’d imitated them. I’d needle boyfriends with the same perverse pleasure I’d get from popping a particularly ripe zit, becoming calm only after a huge release of tension. But until now I hadn’t done this with Nick. He was the first human things had felt normal with. The inertia of this argument catapulted us into a darker and darker place, bringing long-forgotten tensions to the surface. I’d shifted into a danger zone where sharp words came too easily.
“Why do you always have to be right?”
“Sometimes you’re such a fucking snob.”
“Why do all your female friends hate me?”
We’d recently had one of Nick’s friends over for dinner. She sat next to me, pecking away at her phone for an hour and a half. When I looked over at her screen, wondering if she had a work emergency, I saw she was playing Words with Friends. She was the least hygge dinner guest I’ve ever had.
“And speaking of your female friends, why’d you have coffee with your ex-girlfriend and not tell me?” I broke the rules Bobby Klein had taught us in Mexico, bringing up long-resolved issues, the kind that rot a marriage if you keep mentioning them after they’ve been put to rest.
“Oh my God, I don’t have to tell you everything. I forgot! Why do you get weird and jealous when you’re mad about other things? Also, did you stick your fingers in the Brie cheese and eat it again?”
“Yes, you do have to tell me! That’s what marriage is about—telling me everything! Maybe I did. So what? It’s Brie. That’s how you’re supposed to eat it. And yeah I have a bee in my bonnet about your ex-girlfriend. I’m sorry,” I said. “Even though she’s awful.”
“When you apologize like that you sound like Donald Trump. Maybe it’s your fault you have no friends here. Look at how you’re acting.”
Nick’s words trampled me. Exhausted me. Enraged me. He couldn’t unsay them.
“Fuck it. Leave me alone.”
Nick called me a spoiled brat. I called him a word I’d prefer not to repeat.
We retreated to separate rooms, the silence heavy with defeat. Lady Piazza paced up and down the long hallway, refusing to take sides. “I rescued you from a trash bin,” I reminded her. “He’s brand-new and he doesn’t even let you sleep in the bed!”
I seethed in the living room and distracted myself by eating a brownie and watching the scene from Casablanca where Rick puts Ilsa on the plane. I thought, for the hundredth time, about whether she was better off with Victor Laszlo. Victor Laszlo would never have coffee with his ex-girlfriend. He knew something about loyalty. I opened Skype. The little green dot blinked next to Nick’s Skype photo, the one I keep trying to get him to change because he looks like a twenty-year-old German exchange student in it. So he was online. Why is he on Skype? I thought. Who is he talking to? Is he talking about me? Should I Skype him? No, I decided. I was not going to Skype my husband from the same house.
I grabbed my purse, left the house, and headed to the yoga studio down the street. An hour of stretching and breathing with strangers who neglected deodorant would do me good. As I bent over to touch the floor in the crowded vinyasa class, I noticed my toes looked gross, gnarly, and ragged with only the tiniest chips of red polish still clinging to the cuticles.
“Ewww,” I said out loud.
“Are you okay?” The teacher rubbed my tailbone and moved her own perfectly pedicured turquoise toenails next to mine.
“Ahhhh,” I said. “Just relaxing into this pose. Ahhh Namaste!” My answer satisfied her, and her perfect little blue toes moved on to help the woman next to me correct her downward dog.
I hadn’t gotten a manicure or pedicure since we’d moved to San Francisco. I blamed this on not having any friends to go with me. Nail care back in New York had been a communal activity on Sundays with my girlfriends, a time to catch up and gossip and bitch about our significant others. Going alone to the nail salon felt stranger than eating out by myself. Yoga has taught me a lot about myself over the years, and in that moment it taught me I needed a pedicure.
I chose one of the many nail salons on Divisadero Street and indulged in shiny pink fingers and toes. The stress melted out of me and into the green tea–scented porcelain toe tub. Why had I stopped doing this? Taking the time to take care of myself had been such a priority when I was single and living in New York. Since I’d been married my time had been increasingly filled with “us” time or “having awkward dinners with other couples” time. In an attempt to feel less lonely I began texting with my friend Sarah, who was going through a nasty divorce. Before filing for divorce, Sarah and her ex were one of those couples who constantly posted goofy selfies of themselves in exotic locations with perfect hair with invented hashtags like #BestHusbandEver and #ArentWeCute. Sarah was one of those people who made me feel like every other married person had already been let in on the secret of having a perfect marriage. Those goofy selfies were hiding the truth. Now they only talked to each other through their lawyers.
Sarah began detailing the demise of her marriage through clipped sentences and descriptive emojis over text message while I waited for my nails to dry.
It turned out that there wasn’t a single bombshell that ended their marriage. They began fighting over the little things. He wanted to get Yankee season tickets. She thought they were a waste of money. She put the toilet paper roll on wrong. He wouldn’t stop eating cereal in bed. She thought Silicon Valley sucked and he thought it was a masterpiece. He wanted a Hamptons share house. She thought he just wanted to fuck teenagers.
“He can’t stand my friends,” she texted. “Including you. Sorry. We fought once a month, then once a week, twice a week, every day. The resentments got bigger and bigger. I had a dream I set him on fire. Then we stopped having sex…which was good because his balls smell. Seriously.”
A divorce in your circle shakes your own foundation and makes you reconsider the things you can and can’t live with. Maybe I didn’t need a car so I could drive to Costco to get thirty toilet paper rolls to store in the closet.
I stared down at my rosy toes and felt a sense of happiness and accomplishment that was clearly not in proportion to either the expense or the amount of effort I’d put in.
I’m getting a blowout, I decided.
I texted Glynnis about the fight, my pedicure, and whether I should ask the hairstylist for beach waves.
“You know you’re dealing with a lot,” she texted back. “It’s OK to take a breath and take care of yourself, you know. Your toes look perfect! Yes on beach waves.”
I felt better. This was what it felt like to reset. All the marriage advice I’d gleaned so far had been about us. But keeping us strong was also about keeping myself strong and healthy and happy. I thought about an interview I’d seen recently between Oprah and Michelle Obama. Former FLOTUS + Oprah was like the “Be your best self” equivalent of crossing the streams in Ghostbusters. Michelle described moving into the White House and realizing that in order to be a good wife and mom she had to make sure she took care of herself. “If you do not take control over your time and your life, other people will gobble it up,” the First Lady said. “If you don’t prioritize yourself, you constantly start falling lower and lower on your list.”
I’d stopped making myself a priority. For years I’d been disgusted with my mother for losing herself in her marriage and her role as constant caretaker, and yet here I was, married for less than a year, completely losing myself.
My calm was short-lived. The moment I walked back into the house, my anger returned, triggering a physical change in my body, like when a hyena smells a kill, a celebrity senses a paparazzo, or Lady Piazza gets a whiff of pizza. All the lights were out.
Did that fucker leave?
If anyone was going to leave, it was going to be me, but he up and did it first.
He’d left.
I’d made him leave.
Shit.
Every married friend I have (even the happily married ones) has their own unique marriage escape fantasy. When her marriage was still about taking goofy selfies, Sarah told me she’d go back to school to be a large animal vet if she ever broke up with her husband. Erin always told me that if she left her husband she’d go to Taos, New Mexico, with her two daughters and live in an adobe house and make jewelry out of feathers. Eliza would become a bartender in Bali. Annie would join me in San Francisco and become a lesbian. I didn’t have an escape fantasy yet. Nick and I were still so shiny and new. I wondered, where would I go? The image formed almost instantly: I could go to Paris, sublet a flat in the Marais, get bangs, start smoking again, and buy a pink cashmere coat.
But the fantasy made me sad. Paris would be really lonely without Nick. Who would spout off obscure facts about the construction of the Eiffel Tower or tell me which side of the plane to sit on when we landed at Charles de Gaulle?
As I fumed in the living room, my shiny pink toes looking a little dimmer in the lamplight, I thought about what to do next. Talk to Nick? Or just go to sleep, because frankly I was exhausted. When you get married, everyone will give you the same advice: Never go to bed angry. That felt like bullshit to me. Sometimes you need to sleep to clear your damn head, right? One of the best pieces of marriage advice I’d gotten during my journey around the world actually came from Hollywood, from the actress and writer Jenny Mollen. I fell a little in love with Jenny when I was interviewing her for a Forbes story on how to succeed in life by failing miserably. The story was fine; talking to Jenny was wonderful. Jenny had been married to the actor Jason Biggs for five years, and her two New York Times best sellers talk a lot about surviving their marriage and having their baby, a little boy named Sid. Jenny’s marriage advice was the refreshing opposite of “Don’t go to bed angry.”
“You know,” she said, “I think it’s normal to hate each other from time to time. You can’t be afraid of not liking each other. Sometimes you’re going to roll over in bed and wish he was someone else. Girls grow up with this idealized version of what their marriage should look like, and the reality is that it does ebb and flow. As much as I want to murder Jason sometimes, I know we’re not getting divorced and it’s not ending. There are times when you want to fuck them and times when you want to fuck anyone but them.”
I walked toward our bedroom.
Lady Piazza jauntily trotted next to me down the dark hallway. If she had any awareness at all that Nick and I had had a fight, the only thing she cared about was whether that fight gave her license to sleep in the bed. I walked past the framed photo we’d blown up from our second date in Joshua Tree, right before the thunderstorm rolled in, the sky bruised purple but the desert calm and still.
Nick had turned on the reading light on my side of the bed. He hadn’t left after all. I listened to his long, low snores.
I thought about what Chana said back in Jerusalem. Nick and I had had a fight. It was a brick. We could build a wall or we could keep building our house. We would fix it in the morning. For now, I was angry, and that was okay. My husband was still here, at home, in our bed. I combined the advice of the Hollywood actress and the Israeli Orthodox Jew.
I sucked in a deep breath, took an Ambien, and went to sleep next to Nick.