THIRTEEN
When I was a child, my mother did all she could to make Christmas joyful. She would put toys and clothes on layaway in the spring and summer so she would have gifts to put under our tabletop tree in December. Meals became increasingly creative as we approached the holidays, because she was setting aside part of our budget to buy a honey-glazed ham, chocolate, and oranges—foods that still suggest Christmas to me in a way that eggnog and peppermint sticks never will. On Christmas morning she would watch me closely, desperate for proof that she had not failed to deliver some version of a childhood fantasy she must have longed for when she was young. And in response, I put on a jubilant performance, because anything less would have crushed her.
As an adult, no performance had been necessary. I had all I had ever wanted: a permanent roof over my head, a delicious meal and gifts whose cost did not evoke a secret sadness in me, and above all, my husband and children.
But when I returned from Italy and began to prepare for Jack and Zoe to come home, it occurred to me that I would have to pull my old mask back out.
Just push through until you leave town, I told myself. You made it through the past nine months; you can hold out two more weeks.
It’s not that I thought Ann Arbor would be Shangri-la. But I had begun to see it as a symbol of finished business. When I moved there, the divorce would be final. I would have received my last paycheck and begun receiving alimony. The house in Oak Valley—which Linnea, in a true feat, had rented to a pair of grandparents who wanted to spend six months in the same town as their new grandchild—would be off of my hands, if only temporarily.
True, I had a hard time visualizing what my life would look like in Michigan. But maybe, I thought—just maybe—in a place where I was not reminded of Adam and the life we had shared at every turn, I could find a way to begin again.
“You know you didn’t have to put up a tree, Mom,” said Zoe on Christmas Eve. The kids were dividing the holiday between Adam’s loft and our house, which was now a maze of boxes. The three of us had spent the evening together; they would go to Adam’s brother’s house for Christmas Day, then spend the night at Adam’s. I hated that we were now on a split schedule. Had Adam thought about that—really thought about it—when he left? If so, had he actually decided his own happiness was worth the cost of severing our family unit? It seemed so unlike him.
Then again, I didn’t know who he was anymore—if I ever had at all.
Zoe and I were standing in the kitchen; Jack had fallen asleep on the sofa after dinner, and we had left him there. I looked from the Christmas tree in the living room to my daughter. “Well, this year was strange enough as it is. I wanted to preserve some sort of tradition.”
“Tradition’s overrated. Remember Thanksgiving?” she said, raising her perfectly manicured eyebrows. (How my daughter managed to master personal grooming with a seventy-hour workweek was the eighth wonder of the world.)
“I do, and it was fine,” I lied.
She wrapped her slender arms around me and hugged me tight. “Oh, Mom. It’s okay to not have things be perfect.”
I cringed as I recalled my Italian almost affair and my drunken phone call to Adam. “Honey, if you knew how far I was from perfect, I don’t know if you’d let me be your mother anymore.”
Zoe let me go and poured the rest of the tea she had made into her mug. “Come on. You know that’s not true.” She cupped the mug between her hands and blew on it to cool it. “But humor me: What if your friend’s house is actually a dump, or there’s a serial killer waiting for you when you get there?”
Naturally, a string of ugly what-ifs had already paraded through my mind. I had decided that if Jean’s place was unsafe or awful (which it very well might be), I would return to Oak Valley and seek temporary shelter in the mother-in-law suite above Gita’s garage—this, provided the serial killer Zoe had alluded to didn’t get to me first. “I don’t know, sweetheart,” I told her. “I guess I’ll try to stab him back? As for what I’ll do, I guess I’ll figure that out as I go.”
“It’s okay if you change your mind, you know.”
“Well,” I said, trying to sound chipper, “maybe I will. Life is nothing if not full of twists and turns.”
Zoe looked at me for what seemed like an eternity.
“What?” I finally said.
“Nothing.”
“No, what is it? You can tell me.”
She had set down her mug, and now she pulled at a piece of skin on her lip. I resisted the urge to tell her to stop. Finally she said, “I just know Dad’s going to regret this one day. And I was wondering what will happen then.”
“Nothing,” I said quickly. “Nothing will happen then. Everything will be like it is now, only I’ll be in a better mental place.” I had envisioned so many scenarios by that point that I understood it was not in my best interest to entertain the one Zoe had just posed. I was finally starting to get on board with the idea that Adam would never have a change of heart. I could not go back to treading water in my sea of grief.
Yet Zoe’s comment stayed with me as I spent a teary Christmas afternoon at Gita’s and made it through the next couple of days with Jack and Zoe before driving them to the airport, kissing them goodbye, and collapsing into a puddle after they disappeared from sight.
Well, I hope he does regret it, I thought angrily as I sat in a corner, sipping seltzer while dozens of my closest acquaintances rang in the new year. Gita had convinced me to join her at a friend’s party so I wouldn’t spend the night alone, but it turned out that the only thing worse than being by yourself on New Year’s Eve is being surrounded by inebriated couples.
Two minutes after the ball dropped, I said goodnight to Gita and our host, grabbed my coat, and walked the ten blocks home. I was not one for resolutions, but as I trudged through the snow, I vowed to send Adam away if he actually returned to me (which, given his confession on Thanksgiving and my foolish phone call from Rome, seemed highly unlikely).
Because even after everything, I wasn’t sure I could summon the strength to tell him no. And that uncertainty made me feel like I had already failed a mission that I had not yet begun.
Just after the new year, a moving company arrived to deliver my boxes to a storage unit. The house would be rented out from February until the end of July; through our lawyers, Adam had agreed to take care of maintenance during that time and revisit the idea of a sale when I returned from Ann Arbor.
On the sixth of January—just two days before what was to be Adam’s and my twenty-eighth anniversary—I arrived at the courthouse to finalize what my husband had set in motion almost a year earlier.
I expected it to hurt. To be honest, I expected to be racked with pain and maybe even weep quietly into my lawyer’s blazer before throwing a shoe at Adam. But when I saw Adam standing beside his lawyer in the courtroom, I felt an almost clinical detachment toward him. Then I turned and stared straight ahead, saying yes to the judge each time I was asked to confirm that I agreed with the terms of our divorce. Adam’s responses were identical to mine, but I refused to look at him again.
Eleven minutes later, we were legally unwed.
Therein lay the trickery of it all. Divorce was a legal guarantee that you were a free agent—but where were the guarantees for marriage? One day your husband would claim you were the love of his life; the next, he could decide he was done with said life, and you as his wife.
My lawyer led me out of the hall ahead of Adam and his lawyer—apparently there was some sort of etiquette to these things. I thanked her for her time and effort, which had cost a tenth of our savings. Then I fled to the bathroom, where I sat in a stall, trying to stanch the thoughts rushing through my mind.
Nine months had passed since Adam had left me. That was longer than I had gestated Zoe, who was born two weeks early; it was time enough for three seasons to pass, and roughly three hundred days in which to wrap my mind around life sans spouse. But now I had the paperwork to officially declare me the very thing I had spent my whole life trying not to be: alone.
I don’t know how long I sat there; it must have been a while before I decided to find somewhere other than a courthouse lavatory to ruminate. I had almost reached the front of the building when Adam called my name. I spun around and saw that he and his lawyer were standing against a marble-paneled wall.
I shook my head vigorously, but Adam began walking over anyway. “Maggie,” he said again.
I gave him a chilly stare.
“Hi,” he said, slipping his hands into his pockets. When he first left me, he looked younger than he had in years. But beneath the unforgiving fluorescent lights, the years were etched on his face, and he looked exhausted.
Not your circus, not your clown, I reminded myself. Just because your instinct is to care doesn’t mean you have to.
“Did you mean what you said?” he asked quietly.
My face grew warm.
“When you called from Italy,” he added, like my flaming cheeks weren’t indication that I knew exactly what he was talking about.
I could neither confirm nor deny that I had meant what I had said, as I had no memory of our conversation. But I was not about to further humiliate myself by telling him this. I tilted my chin up. “Of course I did.”
“I see,” he said. He rubbed his forehead for a minute. Then he looked back up at me. “Maggie? I’m sorry.”
Yeah, well, that made two of us. But I could not—would not—slip back into the role of someone who grasped for what was long gone. “Save it for someone who cares,” I said, sounding more tired than unkind.
His eyes searched my face. “What are you going to do in Ann Arbor?”
Learn how to go through life without you, I thought. But I owed him nothing—not my plans, not my motivation, not a single thought in my head. So I turned and walked away.
“I wasn’t expecting you!” said Rose when she opened the door to her apartment the next day.
Her skin was like rice paper as I kissed her cheek. “I’m sorry, Rose,” I said, trying not to let my spirits sink. I had called again that morning to remind her I would be stopping by on my way to Ann Arbor. “If it’s a bad time—”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “It’s always a good time for you. I was wondering if you’d visit sometime this century.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again, even though I had been to see her just before leaving for Rome. “Things have been . . . hectic.”
“You don’t say.” She motioned for me to follow her to the living room and then sat across from me on one of the identical velvet sofas.
“Did Adam tell you our divorce was finalized?” I asked her, staring at the bowl of white Jordan almonds on the coffee table between us.
“Goodness, no!” she said.
“Yes, yesterday. I figured he would have told you . . .”
“Well, he didn’t.” Her hands looked like tiny bird claws as she wrung them in her lap, and I wondered if mentioning the divorce had been a mistake. “I begged him not to do this to our family. Where are you going?” she said woefully.
I had already told her about going to Ann Arbor, but I told her again. “I’m really sorry to be leaving. You’ll still have Adam and Rick, of course, and we’ll talk on the phone like we always do. Six months will pass before you know it.” I wanted to promise I would return to Chicago or at least visit, but I wasn’t sure if either was true. Adam had said he was done planning—but for the first time since perhaps high school, I also had no plans and had seemingly lost the ability to make them.
I asked Rose if she would be okay.
“I’m always okay. You and I are alike that way, Maggie.” She sighed and looked out the window. “I do miss Richard, though,” she said. “It’s very hard to be alone sometimes.”
“Yes, it is,” I agreed.
“We fought like cats and dogs, you know.”
I nodded; Adam had told me as much, and I had witnessed it on several occasions before Richard’s death.
“Yet he and I stayed together,” she continued, “and in the last ten to fifteen years, we were very happy, your father and I.” She had begun speaking to me as though I were one of her sons, and I couldn’t bring myself to correct her.
Nor was I about to point out that as long as I had known them, Rose had regarded Richard like a bothersome man-child, and he had treated her as someone who was constantly in need of correction. This dynamic had not changed during the last years of their marriage. But the only people who can truly understand a marriage are the ones in it, and perhaps this had fit Rose’s definition of happy.
“Sometimes it’s easier to be alone, not having to explain yourself to another person,” she added. “Most of the time the pain is worth it if you love each other. You and Adam could still work things out.”
I had a divorce decree and a broken heart that said otherwise, but at least she was no longer addressing me as though I were Adam or Rick. “I think it’s a little late for that,” I said quietly.
She gave me an incredulous look. “Oh, dear, that’s not true at all. It’s only too late if one of you is dead.”
I had no response to her remark, so I gave her a sanitized recollection of my trip to Rome. This triggered Rose’s memory, and she told me about her parents, Polish immigrants who had met after settling in Chicago and had found success in a series of small businesses. They were loyal to their roots, attending the Polish service at their Catholic church, making sausage, sauerkraut, and pierogies for meals, and dutifully sending money back to the old country every month. But they never returned to Poland, even for a visit. “I always meant to go there myself, but it was such a long trip and it simply never happened,” Rose said, staring at her hands. “I wish I would have.”
Her resignation seemed like proof that sometimes it really was too late, even if you were still alive. But when we said goodbye, Rose clutched my arms so hard I wasn’t sure she would let me go. “I’ll miss you, dear girl,” she said. Then she whispered, “Remember—there’s still time.”