Winter 2016

A story is emerging, a continuation of last month’s, The Woman I Once Was; it is a look back at the essential fault line in my life. I have been taught to ask myself when writing, Why now? The simplest answer may be that this year marks the point where the two halves of my life are of roughly equal length. Or perhaps the spiral’s turn has brought me around again to discover something in the experience that I overlooked. When the events recounted here were happening, I was told to lie in the bed I’d made. I wish someone had said, instead, that change is not a sin, that mistakes of the heart can be forgiven.

I am compelled to set down what I know now. If you have made a bed you cannot lie in, toss back the blankets. Shake the pillows from their cases. Strip the sheets off the mattress and upend it. Split the box spring in two if that is what it takes.

Do not stay where you are not wanted.

Winter 1986

The truth came to me in the shower of the black and blue bathroom on an iron-cold morning in mid-January. The yearning that had seeped into me a few nights earlier in the Pittsburgh airport had begun to crack my heart open. I was thirty, a few months past my eighth anniversary. Since the fall, I had been introspective and melancholy, pondering my desire to be a mother. My husband would finish his chef’s training in a few weeks, but the long nights in the restaurant had magnified the space between us. His intimate circle no longer included me. Wrapped in a towel, I stood in the center hall of our second floor apartment, gazing past the belfry and the evergreens that bordered the cemetery across the street. I wanted to have a baby and it was time to get a divorce.

I knew from experience that leaving would not be easy, even when it was necessary. This time, I would have proper help. We went to a therapist. I don’t remember what we said to him in the beginning. Afterwards, I wrote in my notebook, “At the end of the first session, I was told it’s basically up to me [whether we stay married]. In some ways I welcome the control; in other ways, I resent the amount of responsibility it places on me.”

Neither of us had been honest about our marriage with the counselor yet. I wasn’t sure I could be the one to decide. Before the next appointment, I interrogated my life, examined my conscience. I paced away the weekends while my husband was at work. One Sunday afternoon, I went to the library, intent on unearthing a poem I remembered reading in the college class where we had met.

Winter 1974

Watergate indictments had been handed down and the oil embargo that began during the Arab-Israeli War was coming to an end when an 18-year-old girl met a skinny boy with sad brown eyes and dark, shaggy surfer hair in English Comp II. The class was assigned Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold. The beginning lines of the final stanza, “Ah, love, let us be true to one another,” summed up what I wanted from him as we fell in love: someone to stand with me against the world.

Winter 1986

A dozen years later, while I copied the poem into my notebook. I thought only of the ways that my husband made me feel alone. I was not yet ready to face my own mistakes, although that time would soon arrive. The poem reminded me of what I once meant when I said the word love. By the end of the afternoon, I was certain of one thing. I had to reclaim that fierce sense of commitment. If the marriage was beyond repair, I would free myself to forge a bond with someone new.