Going in Circles (9 page)

If only Matthew had known what I was going through, the things I didn't tell him. Would that have made him reach for me? Could that have broken through his pride?

I'm in my car now staring up as the house looms above me. I grip the steering wheel, convinced I can't handle finding out what my home looks like without me.

Never mind. I'll get a Fuck You Sewing Machine. And maybe while I'm at it, a Fuck You Weight Bench.

Or, more accurately, a Fuck Your Fuck You Weight Bench.

P
etra has incense burning that I can smell from the sidewalk outside her apartment. She cheers as she opens the metal gate that guards her front door. “You're here! Thanks for coming.”

“I couldn't miss it,” I say, accidentally telling the truth.

She's wearing a paper party hat with a too-tight elastic band that's sure to leave marks on her fleshy cheeks. The corners of her mouth are stained in little dashes of purple. Clearly for Petra, this party started some time ago. She's in a flirty red dress that makes her look ten years younger. A tiara crowns the long brown hair that flows over her shoulders, down toward her tiny waist. Petra has a hot coed's body attached to the face of the girl who hates what she sees in the mirror. You can see her past sadness mapped across her skin; how she became one of those women who spend a lot of money to change anything that once made others judge them. There are acne scars under her jawbone, the tip of her nose angles in a way that tattles on her plastic surgeon, and the space between her eyebrows hasn't moved a centimeter in the past three years. Petra is trying to freeze an image of
herself that exists only in her head, and unfortunately she is losing the battle.

This birthday party is not a celebration but her defiant rebellion against turning thirty-one.

“How are you?” she asks, tilting her head in that way people do when speaking to those in mourning.

I don't have an answer she's going to like, so I nod while swallowing, pulling my lower lip into my mouth. I find this gesture gets me off the hook. People prefer to project their own feelings onto my face, anyway. Right now, no matter what I'm actually feeling, Petra has her own opinion of how she would feel if she were in my situation, and therefore she'll treat me the way she thinks she'd want people to treat her if she were me.

“Let's get you drunk,” she decides, putting a heavy hand on my shoulder. It seems it's less in support of my emotional state and more for supporting her determination to stay upright.

If there's one thing that everyone in the world seems to agree on, it's that I have license to be a complete lush, pretty much twenty-four hours a day. I'm sure that won't always be a good thing, but for right now I'm happy about it. That means if I end up sobbing in a corner, people will assume I've had too much to drink.

Within a minute, I'm holding a glass of Merlot, compliments of Suzanne, the boisterous girl in sales who only talks to me when she thinks Petra's watching her. She's both impossibly tall and impossibly blond, shiny all around, not just in her hair but in her twinkly spark-blue eyes, sheen glaring from her taut, tanned skin. Her beauty is so shocking that every time she looks at me, I feel I'm reacting as if a police
man's flashlight is in my face. I'm squinting from the intensity.

“I've decided my job tonight is to make sure you keep drinking this,” Suzanne says, all
twinkle, twinkle
. “Don't let it get empty or I lose two points.”

“Two points where?”

Suzanne floats her free hand into the air as her eyes close. “In the game of life.” As her hand passes in front of her face, I see the sparkle of her diamond. Even more twinkle. I forgot Suzanne recently got engaged, but I know she's about to remind me, as she finds a way to work her wedding plans into just about every part of every conversation.

Sure enough, she asks, “Do you like this wine? Because I think we might have it on the table during our wedding dinner. Do you think this wine would go with fish? Does fish need white wine? Because the fish is red. Well, pink. It's salmon. Maybe that's boring, but it's the one thing that doesn't seem to conflict with all the food issues everybody has now. You know what I mean? Oh, of course you do. You're married, you've done this.”

I nod, smile, and gulp my wine, pretending it's filled with all the words I'm swallowing.

Suzanne's whole face changes, and it's like a supernova. It's stunning. She goes from twinkle and shine to a black hole of remorse. I know she's trying to move her face into a shape she recognizes as grief, but since she's never had one bad day in her life, she's only mimicking the pain she's seen in others. It looks painful, as if the muscles a face would normally use for sadness have atrophied due to lack of use, and are now twitching and writhing in useless confusion.

“God, Charlotte, I'm sorry.” She clamps her hand down on
my arm too tightly. “I shouldn't be having these conversations with you, when I'm getting married and you're getting . . . going . . . what you're doing . . . through.”

That's kind of the best thing I've ever heard. That's exactly what it feels like. I'm
getting going what I'm doing through.
My failures force others to think of themselves as more fortunate, and therefore they need to choose their words carefully as they talk to me, as if I'm a
c-h-i-l-d
who might
u-n-d-e-r-s-t-a-n-d
what they're really saying.

“It's cool, Suzanne,” I say.

“You're better off without him.”

Eventually that statement was coming, but it still drives me nuts every time. What a terrible thing to say to anyone who is going through a separation or a divorce. It's as bad as the opposite clichéd phrase people fling at me all the time:
“If you're meant to be together, it'll work out.”
What Disney fairy godmother came up with that twisted logic? If you can even buy into the concept of “meant to be together,” which implies that people are destined for one another, paired off in the future beyond their own control, abandoning the idea of free will and reducing us to molecule bundles bouncing around until we bang into the other fated atom ball. To me, that isn't romantic. Taking out the element of choice means that no matter what happens, no matter what anyone does in life, there's only one way things can be, all because some other thing or being or force or whatever declared it to be so. We're all just human puppets dancing on the invisible strings of an unknowable creator. How depressing.

What I really don't understand is how anyone can look someone in the eye and say it'll only work out if you were meant to be together. Why would anyone dare to sound that
ominous with someone's heart? It seems cruel to make such whimsical predictions that could go horribly wrong.

And on that subject, there's one more seemingly optimistic line of bullshit people keep giving me.

“At least you don't have kids.”

Let me go ahead and expand that to any sentence that begins with:
“At least you . . .”
I don't need to hear people say how it could have been even worse, or rate my “luckiness” in this terrible situation. Whenever someone says to me with that wistful, patronizing squint, “At least you don't have kids,” I want to look her (always a her) right in the eye and say, “We tried for years. It's because I'm barren. But thanks for reminding me of another reason why my husband might have left me.” I just want to watch them suffer.

I'd rather they said,
“At least you were never in a car accident in which you lost your legs.”
That sounds like something I should be giddy over. But being grateful over the lack of having a child with someone I love sounds twisted. I understand splitting up would be harder on everyone if there were children involved, I do, but there would be children, which sounds much more . . . I don't know,
hopeful
.

If I never go back to Matthew, there will never be a family. Our family. He'll slip away, wander off, and someone else will find him. Someone else will love him. Someone else will start a family with him. Which means one day she might whisper into his ear,
“At least you never had kids with her.”
And right then no matter where I am or what I'm doing, I will feel those words like bullets through my stomach.

So now I try to stop listening the second anyone begins a sentence with: “You're lucky . . .” They are going to finish it up with something so insulting I will feel smacked in the
forehead with their shortsighted observation that minimizes my life decision into something as trivial as the voting-off of a reality show contestant.

There's really only one sentence someone can say in this situation that is 100 percent accurate and appreciated. It takes only two words, but they go right to the heart of the matter, and while they can't heal, they can at least empathize.

“That sucks.”

It's the only sentence that's appropriate.

I'm afraid Suzanne thinks I've blacked out or gone into some kind of schizophrenic personality shift, so I rejoin the conversation by changing the subject. “I like your new hair color,” I tell her.

Her hand flies to her locks, and she pulls. “I hate it. It's all wrong. Robert hates it, too, although he's too nice to say it.”

“Where is Robert tonight?” I ask. “You got him at home stamping invitations?”

“I wish,” Suzanne laughs. “He's off at some poker game with Pete.”

“Ah,” I nod. “Probably with my husband.”

And then we stand there enjoying the thirty or so seconds of awkward silence I've just accidentally created.

The funny thing is, I never call him “my husband.” Never. Not to people. I always call him Matthew. Because that's his name.
Matthew.
Not Matt or Matty. He's not into nicknames, and he doesn't care for the baby talk of sweethearts, so he's not Babe or Honey or even Sweetheart. He was Matthew. He
is
Matthew. But I didn't mean to bring him up in front of Suzanne. It's just the truth. Robert plays poker with Petra's husband, Pete, and therefore plays poker with Matthew. So if there's a poker game going, odds are they're together right now.

Abandoning the job she so recently assigned herself, Suzanne finds a reason to be in any other room in the apartment immediately. I step outside for some air and silence. I decide not to speak for the next twenty minutes. It's the least I can do to help these other people.

Squished onto the tiny back porch, smoking a cigarette like it needs her full attention, is the Goth girl from work, Francesca. Her tiny fingers are pressing a closed cell phone to her lips; her nails are flecked with bits of red nail polish. She's peering through her dark bangs into the back window of the neighboring apartment. I follow her gaze to see she's watching their television. Letterman is interviewing someone I don't recognize. For some reason I find Francesca's presence to be very comforting, like that of an old dog napping on a porch.

It's good I'm in the middle of a twenty-minute vow of silence, or I might have just told her that. She nods at me, but that's it.

I roll the stem of my wineglass between my thumb and forefinger as I think about Suzanne's ridiculous conclusion.

“You're better off without him.”

It's as if suddenly everyone feels free to tell me I've been making a terrible mistake all this time. Were they all thinking that when they raised champagne glasses at our wedding? Did they take bets in the bathroom between dinner courses?

Every time someone tells me that Matthew isn't good enough, I can't help but worry that at that moment someone, somewhere, is trying to talk Matthew into believing the exact same thing about me. Someone is saying monstrous things about me, confessing their utter contempt and disdain for my personality, my voice, my figure. Do they tell him he's lucky he didn't have kids with me? That I would have made a lousy mother? Do they rip me apart and dismiss me with
Matthew the same way some of my friends act as if I'd broken things off with a casual fling?

When those words come at me, someone else's judgment of the kind of man Matthew is, I want to stomp them, deflect them. I find myself defending Matthew's actions, even the things that drive me crazy, things that upset me or hurt me. I don't want to be told we outgrew each other, like one of us is stunted, malformed.

No matter what, he's still my family. He put a ring on my finger and became my family. Nobody gets to talk smack about my parents, so why do they think they have the right to talk about my husband in such a manner? These women say kinder things about my hips than about Matthew, and my hips have done way more damage to my self-esteem over the years than Matthew could ever achieve.

From inside the apartment, Petra's yelling for everyone to gather. “You have been ordered by the birthday girl!” she adds.

“Shit,” Francesca mutters, flicking the cherry off her cigarette before jamming what's left of the butt into the front pocket of her jeans. She then holds the door open for me. “Hey,” she says. “You really don't have to be here, you know. You've got this free pass. I don't know why you aren't using it. I'd be as far away from this mess as possible.”

One of the million things that's supersensitive on me right now is my Bullshit Detector. I can spot insincerity in the slightest inflection, the tiniest of twitches.

The flip side is that when someone is being legitimately compassionate, it goes right to the core of me. Francesca wasn't just trying to convey empathy; I felt it. It's real. Empathy is my Kryptonite. I can't even thank her because it'll make me break down like I did with Andy in the kitchen. Instead I nod.

“Feel free to tell me to shut up,” she says. “I just figured if you're hiding on the porch with me, you're rethinking being here. You should bolt.”