Merris tutted. “They’re fine eggs.”
I told her I’d liked the idea that marriage was hard to get out of at the time—had even found it romantic. It seemed like it should be hard to leave, because it would probably be hard to stay at points. An aunt had jokingly said, “The best marriage advice I can give you: make sure you each want the divorce at different times.” I had assumed that challenge would come later.
“Seems like a tremendous idea in the moment, doesn’t it?” Merris said. “And look, it probably was. I’m sure you loved each other then, and it’s not a crime to change your mind. I won’t patronize you by suggesting you learned everything you needed from each other. Sometimes a relationship just loses its way.”
I told Merris she was right. I did feel lost. And stupid. The whole thing was embarrassing. And demoralizing, and hopeless, and, and, and. I said I felt too old to move on and too young to be divorced, like I’d stranded myself in the gap between experience and maturity.
Merris sat us both up straight. “One day,” she said, “and it will surprise you how soon this day will come, but one day you will wake up and feel good. It won’t last long, but then you’ll have another day where you barely remember this abjection, and another, and another, until that’s just your life. But for now, it will be hard. This is the part that’s hard.”
I smiled weakly: “God, you’re wise.”
“I’m old,” she said. “And a divorcée and a widow . . . you certainly came to the right place. Now go home, you’re not fit. Get some sleep, down some triple sec or what have you, and come back tomorrow, better. And maybe leave the man alone.”
I squeezed Merris’s arm and looked away, wanting to spare her any further emotional displays. Though we were relatively friendly colleagues, this afternoon had demanded more intimacy from her than the entirety of our relationship to this point. She stood and smoothed the linen of her shift dress.
“I’m going to forward you an article,” she said. “It’s a compilation of autocorrect mishaps. People texting ‘nipple’ for ‘dimple,’ that sort of thing. Bit of light humor might take your mind off it all.”
After Merris left, I gathered my things and stepped into the oppressive haze of another too-warm September. I walked along College Street, serene enough to get through five minutes of a fifteen-minute “mindful walking” meditation. Listening to it was awful, but clicking on it felt transformative, the first step on the path toward meaningful growth. I turned it off when the too-soothing voice asked me to notice the way my toes felt in my shoes.
Merris’s advice had been thoughtful and mature. How lucky, I thought, to have access to such a generous model on which to base my way of thinking. How sad, that her words meant nothing to me, that I was filled instead with a white-hot rage that would not be sated until I had won this divorce and reduced the man who hurt me to rubble, razed his cities to the ground and salted the earth so nothing would ever grow there. Merris had been correct in every way, but that was not the way we would proceed.
Rather than mindfully noticing the leaves on the trees, the smells and sounds of the street, I meditated on how much I despised my husband, his intensity and pretensions and taste in music, the bump on his nose from a high school hockey injury. I hated his back hair and his mother’s cooking and how he was too tall to be technically short but not really, actually tall, and certainly not “close to six feet” as he claimed. I recited like mantras my pet hates, lingered over every time he’d disappointed me, hurt my feelings, expressed anger. I thought about moments I’d looked at him and felt, Jesus, this person?; times he’d humiliated me at the grocery store, broken a mug in anger, cut someone off in traffic. I ran through my twenties thus far, blaming him for every negative experience, paving over birthdays, trips, Saturday mornings, dinners and movies and Christmases with family. I reshaped our happy memories until they were revealed for what they truly were: false moments of hope concealing the truth. This was a man who would promise to love you and lie about it. This was a man who would steal your cat.
I got drunk and had sex with Calvin.
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Chapter 9
When classes began again, I promised myself I’d stop thinking about Jon. This turned out to be surprisingly easy; all it required was 100 percent of my energy, 100 percent of the time. I stayed busy with work and meetings, going to friends’ houses to gossip and text through movies, and obligatory calls to my family to tell them that, yes, I was okay, no, I still did not want to move home for a while to “sort some things out.”
I avoided thinking about him on my commute to work, crammed onto the bus with my headphones in, occasionally looking at attractive strangers with an expression Lauren called “Missed Connection eyes.” I barely thought about him while trawling sublet listings in my office or fielding students’ half-assed questions—more comments than questions, really—about Spenser or whomever. I did not think about him during long weeknights alone, sitting on the living room floor marking papers, or doing probably unhelpful facial tightening exercises, or lighting my one fancy candle for an allotted thirty minutes before blowing it out again.
I didn’t know exactly what the plan was; all I knew at this stage was that staying occupied meant staying distracted and therefore something close to happy. If I emerged from this period with a better body, cooler life, cuter face, and incredibly hot, possibly famous new partner, so be it. In service of those goals, I started a “squats challenge” and made a resolution to cycle more and possibly save up for preventative Botox. I stopped crying all the time—in fact I hadn’t cried in weeks—and made jokes online about my fabulous, wild life, spending my weekends drinking and dancing and dating. Because it provided the most instant distraction, I focused most heavily on the dating.
My friends feared I was moving too quickly, warning that my first time with a new person might feel messy and emotional. It had actually been alright—minus a few instances of erectile dysfunction from Calvin—though I had resolved not to tell anyone about that particular life choice. Having a sexual secret felt kind of fun and soapy, but I was also fairly ashamed of myself. So I feigned interest in their advice about taking it slow, while secretly hoping to take it as fast as possible, to push Calvin swiftly down the scroll of my sexual history. I was impatient, too, because being excited or nervous or horny was better than being sad.