“In my defense,” she’d say, when she was telling the story—and Marni told the story a lot—“I was hormonal. And exhausted. Jonathan wasn’t helping with the girls. And Jeff was promising to marry me at the time.” Eventually, Jonathan surrendered and agreed to the divorce. And then, to no one’s surprise, once Marni was single, available, and seven months pregnant, Jeff had reconsidered. When Marni emerged from that terrible whirlwind of a year, she had no husband, no boyfriend, a new baby, and barely any job, because when the magazine’s publishers learned of the affair, they’d reassigned Jeffrey and demoted Marni, changing her status from staff writer to freelancer, lopping thirty thousand dollars off her salary, and taking away her benefits, too. Jonathan, meanwhile, lost fifteen pounds, acquired a wardrobe of dark-rinse jeans and V-necked cashmere sweaters, and began dating beautiful women in their twenties. Five years later, Marni, now the single mother of three girls, was still struggling to rebuild her life, her savings, and her self-esteem; trying to get back to where she’d been before Hurricane Jeff. She loved her daughters, but she was transparent about how hard it was for her to do alone, and her example was never far from Sarah’s mind: End your marriage and you and your children will suffer.
Sarah had taken that lesson to heart. Ever since her wedding, she had never come close to thinking about walking away. Eli was a good man. He’d never cheated, or done any of the other objectionable things her friends’ husbands had done, like quitting his job and announcing he wanted to become a rodeo clown, or gambling away all of their money, or getting fired and not telling his wife and continuing to put on a suit and tie and leave the house every morning at eight a.m. so she’d think he was still working. Eli had been the foundation upon which she had built her life and her family. And now it was like learning the foundation was made of soap bubbles, like an anchor that had looked substantial so was really just Styrofoam painted to look like iron. The pandemic had been awful. She’d hoped things would change once the vaccines were available and the world went back to something that looked like normal. But nothing had changed. Eli was still distracted and distant. He barely listened when she spoke. When they gathered in the family room to play board games or watch TV, he’d have to be reminded when it was his turn, or he’d get up after twenty minutes and go drifting through their house like a ghost. A ghost on noisy flip-flops, Sarah thought.
She’d held on for as long as she could, telling herself that marriages went through rough patches, and that the one she and Eli were currently enduring would end. But finally, in January, during a stretch of days where it felt like the sun never came out after she’d had to listen to Eli give a lecture on the anatomical structures of the tongue, delivered while holding his phone and flip-flopping up and down the hall, she’d decided that she had to do something.
She would have called her brother, who’d already sensed that something was wrong, but poor Sam had troubles enough of his own, and she didn’t want to sound churlish or petty, complaining about her husband to a man who’d lost his wife. If her father had been alive, she might have asked his advice, and the idea that she couldn’t, that he wasn’t just away or unavailable but gone, forever, had hit her again and left her red-eyed and sniffly. So, instead, one morning right after Eli had left the house, Sarah had reached for the bat phone and called her mom.
“Hello?” Veronica had said, sounding slightly out of breath. When the phone had been ringing, Sarah had pictured her mother rooting through one of her tote bag–sized purses, groping for her phone. Sarah and her mother spoke every Friday night, after Shabbat dinner, and two or three afternoons a week, Sarah would dial her mom’s number as she walked the boys home from school and let them tell their safta about their day. She never called Veronica first thing in the morning.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Sarah? What’s wrong?”
She hadn’t been surprised that all she had to say was hello for her mom to sense that there was trouble. Sarah imagined she’d be the same with her own children, when they were grown and gone.
“Nothing, nothing. Everything’s fine,” Sarah had said. Her mother waited. “It’s just—well. I’ve been thinking about renting a studio. Just to have a little space.”
“A room of one’s own,” her mother had said, in a noncommittal tone.
“The house is fabulous. I’m so grateful. I’ll always be grateful. But, with Ruby and her boyfriend here, and the boys doing virtual school, it’s just feeling a little crowded.”