Only Stay If There’s More Laughing Than Seething
We bought the condo for the wide open floor plan. The view from the front door was a panorama of the kitchen and staircase to the left, while on the right, after a small step down, was a “sunken” living room, and at the west wall was a sliding glass door leading to the balcony-slash-tiny patio, where in the summer I grilled Portobello mushrooms, Vidalia onions and thick, juicy burgers on my Weber grill. Although the folding chairs were comfortable and the small teak table big enough for the three of us, Marty never finished a meal outside: it was either the pesky wind blowing the napkins, the heat making him cranky, or a looming deadline which required him to take his meal to his office, while our daughter and I enjoyed the fresh air, great food, and sparkling conversation.
We moved into that condo, safely nestled behind a guarded gate next to hundreds of others just like it, on the seventh of July. I took those double sevens as a lucky sign, but it turned out that would be true only if you happen to be a fan of stifling heat combined with unrelentingly oppressive humidity. As I hauled box after box up three flights to the front door, I told my baby that the exercise was good for both of us. She had been baking inside me for the last seven and a half months, and was (obviously) due to join us out here in the brutal heat very soon.
While Baby and I were stepping and schlepping, Daddy was at our last place, scrubbing the bathroom in a futile attempt to get at least some of our security deposit returned. He made this capricious and extremely ill-timed decision right after we loaded the van and sent it off to the condo, which made it impossible for me to wrangle or guilt trip even the most devoted friend or family member into replacing him. Of course, it came as no surprise when he later admitted the predicted outcome: our bastard landlord wasn’t returning even one dollar of the security deposit. All for naught, as I knew it would be, his decision that left me and our yet-to-be-helpful daughter to handle the move without him.
I hadn’t thought about that day for years; why would I? I wondered, sitting on the small step of the sunken living room of the now barren condo, if that event, or more precisely, the move as seen through my eyes, was a microcosm of our marriage, making the eventual dissolution inevitable. The marriage lasted twenty years, or ninety five in miserable wife years. In public, we tried to keep our animosity subterranean, but there were times when it erupted like a geyser: at a party I hosted, Brynne sneezed, and after I blessed her she retorted, “Thanks. I’m allergic to sniping.”
OUCH.
Once again I was handling the move by myself, but this time, instead of floating in my belly, Laura was at school, and her father was living in a dilapidated hovel in Pennsylvania, a new member of a fraternity of bitter, unemployed, divorced alcoholics. No initiation ceremony was necessary, I later learned from his email, as their recent flea infestation was torturous enough.
No more sniping, at least for now. No more attempts at compromise that end in blow ups, at least for now, there was peace. But no sense of freedom yet: there was still so much to do. Our new rental was just a few blocks away; since she was dealing with so much strange change, only some of which she understood, I wanted as many things to remain stable in her life as possible. Same school. Same neighborhood. Same friends. No Daddy.
No. I couldn’t think about that word, that concept: abandonment. NO. Stick to the mundane: the unboxing, the arranging of furniture, the continuous, torturous job search, the Facebook post explaining the change in relationship status, which had been set to “married” ever since I created my profile page. Would people be surprised? Not Brynne.
The chime of my cell phone crashed my pity party. It was Wendy, from Human Resources, offering me the job I recently applied for, was perfect for, and at a salary fifteen thousand dollars more than I had ever made. In Chelsea. I wanted to respond the way I did a million years ago, sitting in Marty’s Honda in front of the Fed Ex drop at LAX when he asked me to marry him: “Yes! Yes! A thousand times, yes!”
“Absolutely,” I grinned. As Wendy droned on about the onboarding process, I was utterly incredulous. It just doesn’t happen like this, I said in my head, even in the movies. If a screenplay had a scene where a woman was sadly reminiscing in the empty home of her recently disintegrated family, and in the next beat the phone rang with her dream job offer, the studio note would be, “Strains credibility. Fix.” Because timing like that — which is exactly how it happened— doesn’t happen in the movies. Only in real life.
