She and Joe Musler had been married for roughly a decade, but Michelle always maintained that the relationship had steadily disintegrated before its official end as the sixties gave way to the seventies. Even during comparatively stable times, her husband wasn’t around much, she said, chasing business opportunities and other interests, returning for brief reconciliatory periods. In the marriage’s latter stage, when she knew he was having an affair with a neighbor, tragedy struck: The other woman’s husband died suddenly. Michelle and Joe divorced soon after. He and the widowed woman eventually married and left town. Of the four adults involved, Michelle was the one who’d had to deal with the public fallout of two fractured families, the ensuing gossip, the lingering mystery and questions that could not definitively be answered.
It took a few years before she shared these unpleasant details, and the hardship that followed, with me. It was over drinks in Charley O’s after a game; I don’t recall how or why it came up, only that she explained it all without emotion, matter-of-factly, as if it had been part of a past life and the person sitting across the table from me had been reincarnated. As her friend, I was saddened to hear what she’d had to endure. As a journalist, I was fascinated, intrigued. Knowing what she had done with her life in the ensuing years, empowering herself to a corporate perch, I blurted out, half-kidding, “Your life is a book!” She laughed, but I could tell that the wishful journalist in her was intrigued by the thought.
Unsure of how much she wanted me to probe, it took me a while before I could work up the nerve to ask more specific questions about what it was like to live in what sounded like the plot of a soap opera. “Wherever I went, I could feel people looking at me and thinking, Poor woman,” she said. But she had little time to feel sorry for herself, because if it was one thing to raise five young children in a marriage going bad, it was quite another to do it alone.
“What am I supposed to do with these kids?” she recalled pleading with her husband as he descended the stairs for the last time, suitcase in hand, Michelle less frantic about the end of the marriage than she was about the specter of parenting solo. “How am I going to take care of them?”
“Whatever you do,” he said, “it’ll be better than what I can do.”
When Michelle recounted this conversation, she was willing to give her ex credit for having been right about something: She had survived. But not without a painful, epic struggle. “Most days, I wanted to just lock myself in that bedroom and lay there all day,” she said.
Nights were worse: one insomnia-fueled stare-down with the ceiling after another, with daylight bringing another round of dread, first and foremost with financial despair. All the while, she tried to keep up the appearance of holding it together, digging deep for humor in her 1970 holiday letter:
The Muslers are alive and well and still living in the Land of Oz. In contrast to the burgeoning population explosion, though, we’ve reduced our numbers by one. In addition to alimony, I’ve acquired the kids, the dogs, the cats, the house, the car, the bills, the overflowing septic tank and the psychiatrist twice a week . . .
Just like that, at least for public consumption, Joe Musler was stricken from the script, though Michelle’s predicament was much worse than she had let on. Her visits to the psychiatrist—Dr. Simon Goldfarb, “who kept me functioning”—were a major stretch for her shrunken budget. Her ex had worked in the business world but was guided, she said, by an entrepreneurial spirit that could produce—and exhaust—copious sums of money. In the most harrowing of times, before she could begin her career ascent, the alimony she desperately needed to keep her household afloat dried up. Even child support could be sporadic. She had to get by with whatever he sent, some help from her family, and what she earned teaching.
Given the size of her brood and the number of bills, it was never enough. Corners and coupons were cut. Her shopping list amounted to food rationing. Clothing for the kids tended to be hand-me-downs and castoffs. Finances became so dire that Michelle considered going on welfare. She researched the possibility of moving the family to Israel or Australia in hopes of receiving resettlement assistance.
Ultimately, she stayed, deciding that her children, innocent of their parents’ dysfunction, needed stability, familiarity, their neighborhood routines. She reasoned that they at least were young enough to move on, to reap the benefits of a community’s sympathy. But for Michelle, remaining in Stamford was like reliving her post-tuberculosis period in high school; she was the popular girl turned social orphan. Some friends abandoned her. Even worse, others pitied her. Couples would insist on paying for her at the movies when she agreed to go along as a third wheel, or put on their sad faces when they bumped into her there on a night out by herself. She was struck, even haunted by moments of pure humiliation. Invited to a holiday gathering of what she later would call the “two-by-two people,” she found herself in conversation with a neighbor’s husband. Within seconds, she was brushed backward by the wife barging in between them. In short, she said, “I didn’t fit there anymore.”
That was the night she decided she wouldn’t have to. She had already survived her working-class childhood, her family’s dysfunction, the plague of tuberculosis. She was determined not to let herself wallow in self-pity, to be that “poor woman.” She defiantly recommitted herself to raising her children in Stamford and to meeting the challenge of lifting them
