maintain them. Finding neutral conversational territory is a killer, especially when they’re out in the world working and your biggest problem is finding drapes that complement the new sofa. Plus, I couldn’t help but feel that my working friends judged my staying home, particularly when we didn’t have kids. The last time I had lunch with my friend Katie, a preschool teacher with three boys, she asked me what I did all day. I rambled on about appointments and meetings for about ten minutes before I realized I didn’t have a very good answer for her. We didn’t have lunch again.
I sat at the counter bar, toying with an apple from the crystal bowl we’d bought on our honeymoon in the Bahamas. I hated that stupid bowl. I’d wanted to buy a painted ceramic one I saw in the straw market, but Mike insisted on something from the duty-free shop near our departure gate. He promised it would be something we’d use for years, a story we could tell our children.
Because nothing says romance and adventure to kids like tax-free breakables bought in the airport.
I didn’t want the bowl. In fact, when I looked around the kitchen, I saw a lot of things I didn’t want. Hideous pink rosebud china that had belonged to Mike’s great-aunt. Copper-bottom pots that I was afraid to use because they weren’t dishwasher safe. Champagne flutes that we hadn’t used since our wedding toast, but were kept displayed proudly in the china hutch. I ambled into the living room and saw more that I could live without. And in our bedroom, as well as Mike’s office and my closet. I didn’t need any of it, never needed it, rarely touched it. I could walk away from all of it.
I didn’t even want the house. I knew that some divorcing women plant their feet like Scarlett at Tara when it comes to moving out of their houses. But I really didn’t care. It was a horrible irony that I’d spent years decorating and redecorating the house and still didn’t like the way it looked. Don’t get me wrong; it was beautiful. Thanks to the help of expensive, dedicated decorators, everything matched, everything coordinated, like something from a magazine. It looked like I’d bought rooms from a catalogue called Earth Tones Your Mother Will Approve Of. And I hated earth tones. I always wanted to paint the walls Caribbean Turquoise or Lemon Meringue Pie. Mike said it would make the house look like a preschool. So we went with Terra Cotta and Spanish Moss. And I hated it. If I wanted earth on my walls, I would have lived in an adobe hut.
There was a small matter of pride, the fact that the house had been purchased with proceeds of selling our first home - the down payment for which came from my family. But I wouldn’t want to live there, even if Mike handed it to me in the divorce. I didn’t think I’d be able to sleep there again. I could force Mike to sell or to get him to buy me out, because if my leaving him didn’t hurt him, the loss of equity certainly would. I wasn’t afraid of living in an apartment. Singletree actually had a very nice complex out on Hartson Road called Pheasant Hollow, despite the fact that the only wildlife in that direction was possums. It was the cleanest, newest housing available for the town’s unmarried set, though most singles had to have several roommates to afford the pricey units. Of course, Beebee lived there. Alone. On what Mike paid her.
I had a feeling I would be kicking myself for years to come over the signs I missed.
I didn’t want the bowl, the china, the stupid unusable pots. But I did want the little watercolor Mike had bought me for our first anniversary. It was probably worthless, but I liked the way the blues and greens flowed together. And the quilt my aunt made for me when I graduated from high school. I wandered from room to room, clutching the items to my chest. While Roy worked on the back door, I boxed up everything that belonged to me or my family. I took all of the pictures that made me look thin. I took the clothes that I wore for me. None of the gowns I’d worn to the country club formals, nothing I’d worn to ass-numbingly dull state Financial Advisors Association’s dinners, nothing Mike’s mother had bought for me. This left a lot of clothes in my closet.
I didn’t break anything. I didn’t even throw anything out of place. I thought about leaving my vibrator in the middle of the bed, because Beebee was going to need it. As pointed and clever as that would have been, I’d worked too hard to get that thing to leave it behind.
Did you know that because Aphrodite’s Palace has a strict no return policy, they give the merchandise a test buzz before you leave the store? I didn’t.
I threw the vibrator, or as I’d come to think of it, Old Reliable, into the last of my boxes and toted them to the car. The locksmith was waiting for me at the front door, new keys in hand. “Ma’am, I know this is none of my business, but we see a lot of this sort of thing in my line of work,” he said, accepting my check. “I’m sorry you’re going through a rough patch, but it’s company policy to tell you that unless you can show us a court order barring another occupant of this home from the premises, we will provide them with a key if they can show current picture ID listing this address as their residence.”
“That’s fine with me,” I said, looking across the street to Mrs. Revell’s front window, which was empty. “I can’t lock him out of the house, but I can make it more difficult for him to get in.”
Roy did not smile as he extended a clipboard toward me. “Can you sign this release stating that I have informed you of this policy?”
“You’ve had to give that speech a couple of times, huh?”
Roy nodded and handed me a copy of my receipt. He gave me a fatherly, somewhat condescending smile. “Whatever he did, I’m sure he’s sorry”
I handed Roy a twenty-dollar bill as a tip for speedy service. “Urn, no, but thanks for playing.”
You know that feeling you got when you had a bad report card and you were waiting for your parents to come home to sign it? Time seems to go by too quickly, but drag on interminably at the same time? Well, waiting for your husband to come home so you can tell him you’re leaving his cheating ass works pretty much the same way. I just sat on the couch and watched the minute hands move. Around six, I was sitting in the kitchen picking at a sandwich when Mike called and told our answering machine that he had to work late to prepare a proposal for a new client.
By eleven, I’d figured out that he wasn’t coming home for the night. He’d had to work through the night several times in the last year, what with being so busy and all. But I stupidly had believed he was actually working. I’d felt sorry for him, packing him little care packages with clean shirts and a little shaving kit and Tupperwared meals. Mike was so touched he actually sent me (correctly addressed) flowers. White tulips, my favorite. Of course, now I suspected that they were guilty “You made me dinner while I was boning my secretary at a cheap motel” flowers. And the fact that I would question every single nice thing Mike had done for me over the last few years was not exactly conducive to sleep.
I was exhausted, but I couldn’t bring myself to climb into our bed. I had no place there anymore. And I wouldn’t lower myself to sleeping on the couch. It’s hard to be a vengeful warrior woman when your husband comes home to find you cuddled up under an afghan watching infomericals.
Bored and restless, I sat down at the computer, fired up the internet browser, opened up E-mail Expo… and we all know how that turned out.
I was never going to sleep now. My house felt like a tomb, which was oddly appropriate because when Mike came home, he might actually murder me. So I drove to my parents’ place. Never mind that it was 2:00 a.m. Never mind that it was highly likely that Mrs. Ferrell next door would call the cops and tell them someone was breaking into my parents’ house. (The woman believed television was evil, but watching her neighbors through binoculars was perfectly okay.) Never mind that when Mike eventually did arrive home, he wouldn’t be able to get into the house and the angry phone calls would begin. I wanted to be somewhere I could sleep, somewhere I could hide.
After climbing up the darkened stairs, I dropped my bag in my old bedroom and flopped back on the white canopied bed Mama couldn’t bear to replace. With my shoes and clothes still on, I pulled the old pink sheets back and pulled the covers over my head. Unwilling to think about what the morning would bring, I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to sleep.
I woke just before noon feeling oddly hungover. For a second, I wondered why I was in my old room at my parents’ house before it all rushed back.
It wasn’t a nightmare. I’d actually sent the thing.
I sat up and winced at the pain in my neck from sleeping in a nonorthopedic twin bed. If memory served, I had given up on sleeping around 4:00 a.m. and spent the wee hours of the morning signing Mike up for magazine subscriptions ranging from Hustler to Knitters’ Digest. I called telemarketing agencies and left them messages to call Mike’s number. Under a slightly less legal heading, I placed classified ads on Craigslist, Freecycle, the
