The Push

I watched Violet put marshmallows on the ends of the kids’ sticks and show them how to make s’mores. I felt you looking at me. I turned to meet your eyes and you smiled. You finished your wine. I got up to break another chocolate bar into small squares and gave them to the children. I joined you on the Adirondack chair, on the lap in which I used to spend long stretches of child-free time, and slipped my hands up your shirt to warm them. You kissed me on my lips. I watched the woman watching us from across the flames. Things could be so easy, if only I could let them.



56



A long, exasperated pause before an answer that should be easy to give. Closing the bathroom door when you had always kept it open. Bringing home one coffee instead of two. Not asking what the other is going to order in a restaurant. Rolling over to face the window when you hear the other person begin to wake up. Walking just that much farther ahead.

These slips in behavior are deliberate and noticeable. They eat away at what once was. This turn plays out slowly, and it almost doesn’t seem to mean anything at all; when the music is just right or the sun slips into the bedroom just so, it can almost mean nothing at all.

On the morning of your thirty-ninth birthday, I went down to the kitchen and made myself breakfast. You had suggested the night before (you said it twice, in fact) that you’d like to go to the brasserie down the street for eggs.

But I wanted you to wake up in our bed and smell that I was toasting a bagel. You hated bagels. You would realize that I wouldn’t be going to the brasserie for breakfast. I wanted to hurt you. I wanted you to think, Maybe she doesn’t love me anymore. I wanted you to be so disappointed that you rolled over and went back to sleep and felt like you were not the kind of husband whose wife wanted to make him happy on a morning that should have mattered.

You came down the stairs twenty minutes later, dressed in the sweater I hated. The wool was pilled and ratty. I was rinsing the cream cheese off the knife. It was nine o’clock by then and you said you were going out for the newspaper. We subscribed to the Times, and I tossed it on the counter in your direction. You said you wanted the Journal. I didn’t think you liked the Journal anymore. You came home after an hour and a half and said nothing. You didn’t eat anything until we heated up bowls of leftover spaghetti well past lunchtime. And so you must have gone for the eggs without me. We never spoke of it and I never regretted doing that to you.

Three days before that you asked me the name of the flowers I had bought for the kitchen table the weekend before, the white fluffy ones. They were dahlias. I asked you why you wanted to know, and you said you were just curious, that you liked them, that I should buy them more often. This was strange. You never seemed to care about flowers before. You had never asked me about the name of a flower.

The week after that you sat in your reading chair and you had my phone in your hand. I had left it on the table. You were looking at a photograph of yourself that I had taken the month before. I was not in the photo with you, and neither was Violet. This was just a picture of you, handsome, grinning, two days of facial-hair growth, one elbow leaning on the table at a restaurant. Later that night in bed, I thought, Maybe he was wondering how he looked to other women; maybe he was imagining the kind of first impression he might give to a woman who might find him attractive. Maybe he was trying to find a different version of himself in that photograph.

But looking at a photograph of oneself is not proof of an affair. And asking a question about a type of flower is not proof of an affair. These are, though, the kinds of things that fester in a person’s mind until she no longer feels loved; they are the happenings that took us from a place we could have survived, even in the grave face of a death that nearly killed me, too, to the place we simply could not come back from. These things became too heavy and too hurtful, habitual abuses in what once felt like the safest place in the world.

That’s why I didn’t go for breakfast with you on your thirty-ninth birthday.



57



You poured yourself a cup of coffee and slid the resignation letter toward me. I’d just come back from dropping off Violet and hadn’t expected you to be home.

“But why?”

You sat back and crossed your legs. I noticed then that you hadn’t shaved your face in a few days. Maybe three or four. There was so much about you I didn’t see anymore.

“I want something more forward thinking. Maybe something focused on sustainability. There’s no room for creativity there anymore. Wesley’s got his hands in everything.”

I watched your fingers rap slowly on the wood table. My eyes shifted to the letter and your signature. The note was brief. A few sentences. Dated the day before.

“We should have talked about this, don’t you think?” I didn’t really know how we were doing financially, or how much we had saved. My mind raced back, trying to remember the last bank statement I’d seen. You paid our bills. I didn’t keep track of what we earned and spent. I felt the foolishness rise inside me. “I mean are we okay financially? This is a big decision.”

“We’re fine.” You liked to keep me out of it. You tapped the table again. “I didn’t want to bother you with this.”

“So what now?”

“I’ve got some opportunities lined up.”

You stretched back in your chair and bounced your heels. You seemed restless. And maybe relieved. I couldn’t quite place it then.