“Divorced, actually. Well, separated.”
Simon’s eyebrows raised. “Ah.”
“It takes a while to make it official, like a full year and then some,” I said. “Still kind of . . . serving my time. The good news is we already cashed everyone’s checks.” I smiled weakly.
The woman behind the counter looked confused. “The shirt says 2016 . . . How long were you married?”
“Like five seconds, basically,” I said, too high and too quickly. “Thank you for asking!”
“No need to get defensive,” she said, busying herself with a pile of old bathing suits.
To avoid yelling at her, I refocused on Simon. He looked curious but not angry. He looked kind.
“I don’t know why I didn’t tell you,” I said. “I was having a really nice time and didn’t want to be a downer, but it is a downer, there’s no way around it, and then I felt weird about not telling you, so I didn’t—”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said, seeming to mean it. “Divorce is, well . . . that’s a spicy meatball.”
I didn’t know how to respond to this, so I suggested we get a drink.
Reasons I Cried, November 12–23
Bus too full and too hot
Neck looked busted
Dogs, generally
Took a taxi home from a date’s house late at night, and the window was open and the city looked empty and beautiful, but I knew it was full of people, and I felt connected to them all, and also I was incredibly drunk
Tried five times to remember my password for the App Store, couldn’t do it, tried to reset it, couldn’t do that either, and eventually remembered it was my own name with an exclamation mark
Jiro saw me open a granola bar at work and witheringly asked if I was “treating myself,” and I was
Thought about how much effort my parents put into teaching me how to read
Had sex with Simon and it was lovely and caring, and the tears surprised us both
One of my students called me “tall” in a charged way
Saw pictures of an ancient mosaic floor, discovered four feet under an old Italian woman’s backyard, perfectly preserved, waiting
Had sex with Simon and cried again, and then he asked about it, and I cried more
Watched a documentary about how many kinds of animals are extinct now
Someone stood me up during the wrong bit of my cycle
R. Kelly came on the radio in Clive’s car, and I said the song reminded me of high school, and Amirah said it reminded her of “the prevalence of sexual assault in the music industry,” and I felt like the rest of the car was judging me, and also Jon and I used to dance around the apartment to “Ignition （Remix）” all the time before we knew a） that R. Kelly was a rapist and b） that we were no longer in love
Used one of those calculators to determine how soon you can retire if you make X amount and save Y amount each month; found I could reasonably begin retirement in 238 years
Steve from Sex and the City yelling, “There’s good stuff here!” at Miranda, who cannot yet accept his love
This description of tomato sauce, in a magazine: “The genius of Hazan’s sauce lies in the fact that, although it’s basically a convenience food, made of only inexpensive, shelf-stable ingredients, it can’t be improved upon. Add fancy olive oil or fresh Genovese basil if you’re moved to; they won’t make it any better. The sauce is already as good as can be.”
Thought about running into Janet in the street the way you might encounter an ex-lover and try to maintain a distinguished distance while telling them they “looked well”
Found a postcard Jon sent me from Florida with a big pair of tits on it that said fake boobs & real attitude
Read all my Facebook Messenger chats from July 2014, when Jon went to Florida
Sex with Simon
Sex with Simon
Remembered everyone I love will die someday, many of them before me; that I will either know their deaths or hurt them with mine, and no matter what I do, the end is coming for all of us at a time we cannot know; that in the meantime my body will rot around my bones, getting creased and mottled and less efficient each day, and that this moment, right now, is the youngest and healthiest and most beautiful I’ll ever be, and I don’t feel that young or healthy or beautiful—I feel, actually, like I am losing a war with my own posture, and is it worse if my sister dies before me, or if I die before her, and what will I say at my father’s funeral?
A Tim Hortons commercial where some gay dads bring doughnuts to their daughter’s hockey practice
Chapter 12
The futon frame Merris had provided broke almost as soon as I moved in, but Ikea was backed up with holiday orders, so the SKURNSK I’d sent for was not scheduled to arrive until Christmas Eve. I used its delivery to justify skipping a large family event on the twenty-fourth and promised to take the train up the next morning.
Friends, loved ones, and popular wisdom had suggested that the holidays might be difficult this year, that every “new first” without my husband would be gut-wrenching in its own way, but things had been alright so far: Simon and I had gone skating at city hall like middle-aged tourists, campus had taken on a yuletide glimmer, and the group chat Secret Santa had gone down in classic style, with Clive over-boozing a traditional plum pudding and nearly singeing an eyebrow when he set it alight. There had been a potluck at work, to which Olivia brought “protein snickerdoodles,” and the ladies upstairs had decked the house in nondenominational holiday decorations.
Exam season meant less trekking to my office and more sitting in bed wearing a floor-length turtleneck, eating stew from the pot and writing “SOURCE???” on tenuously ecocritical readings of The Revenger’s Tragedy. Though Betty’s foot was getting better, I continued walking Lydia most mornings. It got me out of bed and outdoors, and it was gratifying to have a big, silent buddy who was always excited to see me.
Lydia was an ideal companion, a peaceful being whose only interests in this life were being fed and scratched on the head—I related. Sometimes the old gals wouldn’t hear her barking at the upstairs door, and she’d saunter down to my entrance, scritch at it with her paw, and whimper until I let her in and gave her a bite of whatever I was eating. I liked our hangs—me working or dyeing my eyebrows or noodling around online, her sprawled across my lower half, farting. I had so far not succeeded in convincing her to sleep in my bed overnight, but I was working on it.
On the twenty-third, Amy took me for a festive manicure. We drank cheap eggnog, flipped through magazines, and talked about whether we had the bone structure for those big hats women were always wearing in California. Amy was in a great mood. She had recently been promoted to charge nurse on her floor at the children’s hospital and was seeing someone new: a therapeutic clown from the juvenile oncology ward. “He took off his nose and the whole floor flipped out,” she said. “It was pandemonium, girls falling all over themselves, but competition brings out the best in me, so.”
They’d been on three dates in two weeks, including one where he’d packed a winter picnic, complete with a hot water bottle for each of them. He’d serenaded her with gentle acoustic covers of popular R&B songs while she sipped mulled wine from a thermos.