Amirah left at midnight, to catch Tom at the end of a work thing. The rest left an hour or so later, when the candles had burned to their wicks and the bedsheet on the table was covered in crumbs and wine stains and the remains of an aborted group effort to roll a joint. Billie Holiday crooned from the kitchen, where Amy sang along as she clanked away at the dishes. I picked at a piece of wax on the table and tried to avoid what I knew was coming: the Sudden Turn. When I realized there was no fighting it, I put on my shoes and told Amy I needed to grab something from the twenty-four-hour drugstore.
“Ah,” she said. “Tummy troubles? I’ve noticed you and dairy have a tumultuous relationship.”
I told her no, it was a gynecological thing—annoying.
“Ugh, so annoying,” she replied, empathizing incredibly hard without any specifics to hand. I thought, not for the first time, how lucky I was to live with someone so invested in my emotional, digestive, and sexual health.
“Thank you so much for tonight,” I said. “The food, the table . . . everything was amazing. I’m glad I gave you my number too.”
“Oh god, my pleasure!” Amy said, smiling. “Now go fix your pussy.”
Chapter 22
I did not need pussy medication. I needed to have a big, unpleasant cry. Not a cute, tender one like I’d done with my friends—a cry I could only do alone, in a specific place I had designated for precisely this type of tears. I had discovered this spot shortly after moving in with Amy, when it became clear she could hear everything I said or did in my room, even if I hid under the duvet to do it.
“I’m not a doctor, but your vibrator is on its last legs,” she’d said on our first Sunday afternoon together, when I’d finally emerged from a long morning alone with a series of videos where two women wrestled and the winner fucked the loser. I didn’t mind Amy knowing about this; I had heard her and Sam’s entire protracted negotiation regarding whether he meant it when he asked her to sit on his face. It was fine, people had sex. But Amy was too sweet to know about the Sudden Big Cries—she would come in with mint tea and an awful, thoughtful expression, ready to tell me how Jennifer Lawrence coped with the “Sunday Scaries”—and they were happening too regularly for me not to have a place for them.
Embarrassingly, this place was a graveyard. Well, a churchyard with a few graves in it. There was a certain spooky appeal to the headstones, sure, but mostly it fit my purposes because the church and grassy lawn around it were surrounded by a high stone wall and next to a busy road, so a person—any normal, mature person in need of a bit of privacy and emotional catharsis—could enter the yard, duck behind the barrier, and let ’er rip. Passing traffic drowned out any sounds, the wall was cool to the touch and hid you from sight of anyone walking past, and I did not have to risk anyone coming into the church, because as a society we had just about fully lost God.
I had been going to the churchyard a lot, despite being sick to death of crying. How was there more of it to do? I was feeling better and better! This actually seemed to be the issue. Lately, whenever I perceived something beautiful or felt pleasure or experienced joy, I was hit with an instant, aching sadness. My throat would constrict and my face would flush, and I would need to go somewhere private very quickly, to be alone and bawl.
I walked down Dundas and the bars were emptying out: clusters of people showing off conspicuously new outfits bought in anticipation of summer; pairs deciding shyly, finally, to kiss; a group of women trailing behind one shoeless, sprinting friend, all yelling, “Tiff, come ON!” and agreeing they hate it, they hate when she does this; men slapping each other’s backs as though they’d triumphed at a difficult challenge instead of sat together drinking beer for six hours; beleaguered bartenders kicking people out as they lit post-shift cigarettes. Inside a bakery that sold nine-dollar cookies and nothing else, an old man wiped down racks of trays. He caught me looking, and his jokey little wave made me jump, startled, and run off.
I turned left, heading down a curved and quiet residential street. It was leafy and dark and deserted, and my big, weird sandals slapped the sidewalk too loudly. A raccoon skittered across the road and dove into a garbage can, tipping it over. Farther ahead a car passed, an incredibly popular song about tonight being the most important party of our lives blaring from its windows. Eventually the church loomed in front of me. Seeing it quickened my breath and tightened my chest, Pavlov’s dumbest baby. I passed under the churchyard’s stone archway, trying to remember if it was in through the nose and out through the mouth or out through the nose and in through the mouth. Whichever it was, I seemed to be doing the opposite.
I leaned against the rough surface of the wall and felt the damp from the soil seeping through my skirt. I rolled my eyes and gritted my teeth, but it didn’t matter, the tears were coming. How silly, I thought. How unnecessary. I had survived the big, bad thing—more stressful than moving, only slightly less stressful than death, people said—and was doing my little therapy sessions and getting my steps in and drinking my endless glasses of water. I was experiencing delight and seeing beauty in life. The good things were back! And yet they were happening—now would always happen—without the person I’d hoped to share them with. Tonight was merely another in an endless parade of birthday parties he’d miss, news he’d never celebrate, gossip I couldn’t come home and tell him after expressly promising not to tell a soul. I had worked so hard to get my head above water, only to look around and discover I was in the big, freaky ocean, alone.
A truck rumbled past, leaving silence behind it. I stuffed the collar of my T-shirt into my mouth and sobbed. In the interest of speeding things up, I lay down on the grass and tried to think about positive things. I was healthy and safe. A new career direction was emerging, and the carnations on my dresser were still alive. Tomorrow I would have a late lunch with Merris at a Polish place she liked where everything tasted like cabbage. After that I could do anything: lie around, read, walk down to the lake and just look at it. The weather was supposed to be beautiful all week, and until we ran out there would be cake for breakfast; I could even eat it in bed, if I wanted.
During my marriage I had taken to calling our bed “The Restaurant” because I liked eating in there so much. Jon thought this was disgusting and appointed himself city councilor, always trying to shut The Restaurant down for health code violations like crumbs or spills. As time passed, I knew, little details like this would fade from my memory; I would fixate less often on our relationship and the low-grade horror of its ending. One day I would climb into bed with a sandwich and think, I used to have a name for this, and not know what it was. I snorted at the idea of pulling this off for a day, even a few hours. It was taking so long. It would take so much longer.
I sighed at the thought of all the unsexy time ahead: nights in with my thoughts and feelings, earnest efforts at knowing and possibly （ugh） loving myself, the utter hassle and enormous privilege of deciding what I wanted to do with my life, my weekends, my heart. The karaoke fantasies and app-based mania of early divorce days were giving way to the reality of it: a quiet, slightly undignified plod toward . . . what? Eventually pulling my head out of my ass and realizing there were other things to worry about? I knew that already. It had been driving me to distraction all year.