She knew that it could have been worse. The evidence was all around her—a friend’s husband who’d been hiding a meth addiction; another friend whose husband had drained their bank accounts during a year’s worth of secret late-night online poker sessions; a third marriage that had ended after the wife had an affair with her spin instructor, which, in addition to being shameful, was a total cliché.
Sarah remembered how when Dexter was in kindergarten, a wave of divorces had swept through his class, almost as if marital discord were a cold that was catching. Sarah would hear about one couple after another after another being in counseling, or “taking some time apart,” or separating or divorcing. One little boy or girl after another would become the owner of two separate backpacks, one for Mommy’s house and one for Daddy’s, and go trudging stoically between two domiciles, usually, at that point, with a therapist of their own. It broke Sarah’s heart, even though Dexter thought those kids had won the lottery. Two bedrooms! Two doting parents, or sets of parents! Two holiday and birthday celebrations, with twice as many gifts! In a plaintive voice, Dexter would ask why he couldn’t have two birthday parties like Madison or celebrate Christmas and Chanukah, like Taylor S., or go to Florida like Taylor Z. and her dad and her dad’s new girlfriend. Sarah had felt proud, even the tiniest bit smug, about her own marriage.
It was a version of the same pride she’d felt, starting seven or eight years after her own wedding, when all the friends and colleagues and classmates who’d asked if she was sure, really sure, about Eli, if she was positive about becoming a stepmother, if she’d thought about what she was getting into; all the women who’d told jokes that weren’t really jokes about how Sarah was a child bride and how she’d be the Wicked Stepmother, no matter how kindly she behaved. By the time they were in their mid-thirties, all of those women had ended up scrambling around, as Marni put it, like the very last shoppers at the Filene’s Basement semiannual sale, only instead of grabbing at discounted wedding gowns they were snatching up any presentable, employed, marriage-minded man who hadn’t already been claimed. Who’s laughing now? Sarah had thought as friend after friend had walked down the aisle with her own Mister Not Quite Right, a man who looked or sounded or behaved like clearance merchandise, the dinged or damaged goods you’d find on the shelves at Marshalls or TJ Maxx; the imperfects. Sarah watched, sympathetic but unsurprised, as some of the marriages wobbled unsteadily forward and some imploded after a year or two. Meanwhile, she had been a decade into her own marriage. She and Eli had two gorgeous babies, her beautiful boys, and Ruby had stopped hating her and had become one of Sarah’s favorite people.
Staying married, she’d decided, was a choice; one that had less to do with love and more with forbearance. You recommitted yourself to your spouse every time you overlooked a pair of sweat-soaked boxer shorts in the corner of the bathroom; every time you swept, without comment, toenail clippings from the bedroom floor; every time you’d pick a different coffee shop after finding yourself buoyant and flushed and a little too eager to see that one barista with tattoo sleeves and the large, capable-looking hands. Every day, at least once, Sarah would find herself looking around her beautiful kitchen, with the skylight she’d added, or at Ruby as she came bounding through the door, and she would think, I made the right choice. I did the right thing.
But all those years of tamping down her annoyance must have had some effect, nibbling away at her patience. When the pandemic hit, and Eli went from spending his days out of the house to being inside with her, all the time, staring into his patients’ mouths on his computer screen, lecturing on oral anatomy for the course he taught at Columbia’s school of dentistry via Zoom, Sarah found that whatever tolerance she’d cultivated over the years had frayed to the point of nonexistence, and whatever reserves of goodwill she’d stored up had been drained. Just the sight of a bowl crusted with the residue of cereal around its rim, or one of those sweaty Tshirts she’d spent years ignoring, could make her murderous; just the sound of his orthopedic flip-flops slap-slapping up the stairs made her incandescent with rage.
“Maybe it’s perimenopause,” she said to Marni as they finished their last lap and slowed their pace. “But it used to be I’d only want to kill him maybe once a year.” She considered. “Maybe twice a year. Only now, it’s like weekly. Sometimes daily.” She felt herself scowling and did her best to relax her face, not wanting to end up prematurely wrinkled. It was a warm spring morning, the trees all glowing gold and green, the air sweet and clear, and Sarah couldn’t enjoy it at all. Between her stepdaughter’s ill-conceived plans and the husband whose life she wanted to end, she’d lost the ability to notice the weather, or to appreciate a beautiful day.