To My Ex-Husband Read online

  Barney was brought into this world to save his parents’ marriage. He was the human equivalent of a new addition on a house, a new swimming pool, or a tennis court, that second wind, a bellows bearing a banner: We still have a future.

  It’s a mission no child deserves, although if anyone were up to the task, it would be Barney. He’s a real sparkler, but I appreciate him from afar, like a newly discovered planet. He stays with David every other week, which means that David has to drive him to school out in Bryn Mawr. And where does that leave me on those weeks? Mostly, shuffling around my office/house, trying to find some delineation between the end of the day and the evening, some sign that work is over and it’s time to go home. Usually I wind up celebrating that period of time with a glass of wine and Jim Lehrer and Robin MacNeil on the NewsHour. But now and then, if I’m good, I get invited to go with David and Barney to Roy Rogers!

  DECEMBER 18

  This might be one of those scenes in which the wife is sitting in a rocking chair with her needles and a ball of knitting, a knowing little Mona Lisa smile on her face. The husband has just come home from work, having plopped his hat on the hall table, and she’s about to tell him a joyful little piece of news.

  I say might be one of those scenes. Except that I have no husband to speak of, no hat on the hall table, no knitting. What I do have are bad vibes brought to me by a wall calendar that is beginning to look more and more like 1963, when I shared my apartment with three other women who were, on occasion, late with their periods. The calendar was so filled with calculations, you couldn’t see what day it was, or even what year.

  Three little letters tell the whole story. LMP. Remember them? Probably not. It’s been a long time. They stand for Last Menstrual Period, or, in this case, November 2.

  How, you might ask, does one get into such a situation at this, uh, mature age? I don’t know. “I didn’t think I was very fertile anymore,” doesn’t sound like much of an answer, does it? And yet it’s the truth. “Very,” however, may be the operational word. At any rate, it’s a highly humiliating position I’m in. Besides which, having falsely presented myself as a responsible, intelligent person for the last twelve years, I can hardly go to my regular doctor.

  Time was when our doctors were the priests of our lives, pillars of the community. That trust, for many, has eroded; but not for me. If Dr. John Altar of Boston still lives, I would sooner die than return to him in the same nervous condition that first took me to him in the early sixties. I had found his name, as one might guess, in the yellow pages. What a boon to his practice his name must have been.

  I had never been examined by an obstetrician/gynecologist before. But his office, far from imposing, had at least some superficial warmth: wooden filing cabinets, cheerful curtains on the windows, prints of old Boston. Lurking in the corners, though, were these things, plastic models in an angry Pepto Bismol pink, drawings of fetuses, shiny metal instruments, stirrups. I thought I might be sick. I didn’t know how my body worked, didn’t want to know, didn’t want anyone else to know. All those things that my mother used to store in her night table—rubber disks, a long black hook shaped like a small spine with ridges, petrolatum-based jellies. The mere word “petrolatum” was disgusting, like “unguent,” and brought to mind unsavory substances. You couldn’t pay me to walk into a drugstore and say, “I’ll have a tube of this rectal unguent.”

  I didn’t even really know what sex was, not yet. It had nothing to do with children. I was still learning how to be womanly. Dr. Altar was a grandfatherly sort of man who kept his judgments, if he had any, to himself.

  What a shame, he said softly, that it takes only once. Was I planning to marry the young man?

  We had talked of getting married, “the young man” and I. But not in those last few weeks. In those last few weeks, I had been a woman ahead of her times, doing all the pursuing, all the telephoning. From the minute he said hello, his disappointment was palpable, his conversation monosyllabic and awkward. The more he seemed to withdraw, the more I advanced, piling humiliation upon humiliation. My face still burns from the memory of that time.

  Dr. Altar sat me down after the examination and reassured me as best he could. He did not believe that I was pregnant, though it was too early to be sure. I went back to my apartment and waited to prove him right.

  Three days later, I bled richly, triumphantly, onto the back of my camel-hair skirt. I was at work, of course. But the gods had been kind, and such is the sort of price one pays for the small, reckless prayers, the deal of a sinner, whispered on her knees at a desperate hour.

  I was lucky, then. So much luckier than Margot, my office crony, whose friends all chipped in so that she could travel to Newark to see a nurse, a woman whose name was known by a woman who was known by another woman who had once needed an abortion. The procedure was simple. And very nearly deadly. On the plane on the way home, she began hemorrhaging. Her parents, a crusty, fragile couple in their sixties, were summoned to Boston City Hospital. What had happened to their daughter was incomprehensible because Margot, the baby of the family, had always been such a good girl. From then on, Margot was treated with polite indifference, as if she were invisible. And she was never able to have children.

  Twenty-two years later, a woman can escape. I’ve had my children. I’m acting within the law. The long-term consequences are small. I don’t know what it is, then, that makes me unspeakably sad.

  1986

  JANUARY 17

  The doctor had a middle-European accent and an unpronounceable name with lots of y’s. I was obstinate in my refusal to learn it, spell it, own it in any permanent way, as part of my memory, my life.

  He was an attractive man, and polite, but to the point. I was, he said, about six weeks pregnant. I was forty-four, with two grown children. Probably, I did not wish to have the child, was that correct?

  Correct, indeed. I had heard that he was not a hand-holder. That was okay. This was not a difficult decision; I would not grieve for what might have been. What was difficult was accepting in myself the failings that had brought me to his office in the first place. I didn’t know what to call them, specifically, but I had been careless, possibly even defiant. And let’s not forget stupid. Pregnant is something one’s adolescent children become by mistake. Besides which, abortion, however you feel about the right to choose, is ugly, demeaning. Both of us found it personally abhorrent, so you and I were exceedingly cautious after we had Annie so as never to be faced with that decision.

  I wanted to get it over with, that minute, if I could. Knowing there was something in my body that I didn’t want, and that it was growing, was making me crazy. But it would be nearly a week before anything could be scheduled. Unfortunately, Peter and Annie were still at home. I wasn’t exactly at my best, falling asleep at about seven-thirty at night, and gagging over the butter melting on an English muffin in the morning. Sometimes I’d succeed in fighting it back, swallowing waves of black bile. I’d have done anything rather than face the revulsion Annie and Peter would have felt if they’d had any inkling that their mother was pregnant.

  Another thing was that my editor wanted a column about laughing in bed. We tossed this around on the phone one afternoon as I was chomping on a stack of Saltines. She wanted a supportive, funny piece about a sudden, stabbing leg cramp, say, while trying a new position. I was blocked on the subject. The one position I envisioned with any clarity was dry heaving over a toilet bowl.

  All this while making preparations for my “procedure.” David was going to take me to the hospital, wait for me, and drive me home when it was over. He’s a problem-solver, a doer. And he was doing all the right things. I needed him, and he wasn’t going to let me down. But he’s not a talker. I was having trouble getting an accurate reading on how he felt about this, or anything else, for that matter. The relationship was interesting, puzzling, because of what wasn’t said. I knew how I felt. I felt that there was something important missing; that I liked him; that I loved many
things about him, his complete and uncompromised love of children, his boyishness, his spontaneity, his imagination, his humor, his lustiness. It was a sexy relationship in that it worked. David was a good lover, technically; he had been a good student of sex. But there was a feeling, overall, perhaps because of our history together, of two children at play. We made love the way we ate, with appetite but without passion. It filled us up temporarily, like a really good bowl of creamed soup.

  I was about to say that we were like brother and sister, but it was less personal than that. Brothers and sisters have a loyalty that abides. They understand each other in ways that no other person can. The truth was that I had been so eager to be reconnected, so eager to make my life whole again, that I didn’t notice the lack of intimacy. Having someone to love was a salve rather than a solution. To David, I could just as easily have been any other woman that he found attractive. I was but one of numerous works of art. With little inconvenience to him I could be replaced.

  It wasn’t just a lack of intimacy that bothered me; there was a lack of complexity. David doesn’t like to dig, or speculate, hypothesize, or analyze. He has a black-and-white way of translating his world. Happy, unhappy. Good movie, bad movie. Fun, not fun. I could just see him pinning the latter label on dealing with my abortion and tacking it on the wall of his brain for future reference.

  Friends who have had abortions tell me they didn’t know what grief was until then. They cry on the way home. They cry for a month. Two months. Three months. You’ll get over it, they’re told.

  I did not cry on the way home. I was a good sport, bleeding cheerfully, resolutely, into a sanitary pad the size of a mattress. But it was just that: being a good sport, not being complicated, not letting all the gray show, made me feel lonely when I was with David.

  Babies had been coming and going through the lobby when I was waiting to register at the outpatient desk. I didn’t want a baby. What I wanted was the certainty that I saw in the young mothers’ faces as they carried these bundles in their arms: This is what I want, my baby, I have what I want. I had been one of those mothers, once, I was certain. I had what I wanted, I had Annie and Peter. They were like the sun. Now I don’t know what I want.

  I know only what I don’t want. I don’t want a husband who doesn’t want me. I don’t want a husband who lies, a husband who has a problem for which he then finds a solution that he then keeps secret.

  Nor do I want to be with a man who’s only there for the good times. I want to be cared for, nurtured. Everything in David’s life shows signs of neglect. If I bring flowers to put on the table, they are left until they die and the water turns green. The blossoms drop over the edge of the vase as if they’d been shot in the back. I don’t want to be just one more flower that dies on the table without notice.

  I don’t want to be with someone who knows how to eat, but not how to dine. David doesn’t cook; he heats. Leftover pizza, frozen dinners, stromboli, and ravioli.

  Nor, much as I like Barney, do I want an eight-year-old boy for an alternate-week companion. I think my Little League days are over. And while I’m busy with the elimination process, Dr. Bloom reminds me that if I don’t want a, b, or c, I’ll get something else. I’ll get what’s left over.

  So here I am, in a spanking-new year, feeling a bit sober, empty. The abortion was, literally, a purge. My insides have been sucked out. “You’ll feel a tug,” the doctor had said. “A cramp.” I pictured the wall of my uterus being pulled, like the hem of a bedspread, into the hose of a vacuum cleaner.

  Now that I’ve been hollowed out, I need to put something back, something wholesome, that will feel good. You can’t pick up where you left off. You can’t just get rid of the baby and go back to being lovers, not unless you want to use the experience as something unfortunate but necessary between you, not unless you want to smooth it down and build upon it, like a foundation. We were not building. We were sidestepping, a day at a time. I knew that it was over, but I was grateful to David since, though he didn’t realize it at the time, he taught me something important.

  It was one of the first nights we had the house to ourselves. Barney was with his mother that week, and Annie was with friends. I remember that it was a Thursday, because we were going to get in bed and watch “Hill Street Blues.” David got into the bed and spread his arms out wide, as if to circumscribe his territory. “This,” he said, “this is the first thing you have to learn to do when you get separated. You have to learn to move to the middle of the bed.” All the while as I lay there for the next hour, as people ran in and out of the police station and telephones rang and I got caught up in these parallel dramas, I was smiling to myself with the simplicity of that notion: Move to the middle of the bed. It was a metaphor so obvious that one might almost be embarrassed to mention it out loud.

  JANUARY 31

  The other day, when the space shuttle Challenger and its crew scattered into eternity, I was practicing the fundamentals of cross-country skiing out on the golf course. When I learned it had happened, I was seated across from my mother in a restaurant, going over the luncheon menu.

  “I suppose you’ve heard,” she said in a disheartened way. But I hadn’t heard. She gave me a look, at once amazed and appalled.

  I thought, then, without words equal to the moment, of all the postponements, of all the times I had stayed tuned, knowing that with that kind of meticulous attention, that kind of caution, nothing could go wrong. “Her children were watching,” my mother said, referring to Scott and Caroline McAuliffe. The waitress came to take our orders. She was cheerful, engaging, efficient. If she knew anything that happened at Cape Canaveral, there was no sign of it.

  All afternoon it was like that. In Florida and elsewhere, those who had watched the launching, either live or on television, were coming out of shock to mourn; I ate a platter of chicken salad and fried oysters. My mother and I had no further discussion about Christa McAuliffe and the astronauts and their families. On the way home, I stopped at the dry cleaner’s to pick up a blouse and was told to have a nice day.

  Minutes later, I was watching Dan Rather and replays of the liftoff. I heard the countdown—and the silence. Then, tearfully, Ronald Reagan began to speak. Before he had finished, the phone rang. It was the receptionist in my gynecologist’s office, confirming my appointment for the next day.

  Vaginas, I thought. How could she be thinking about vaginas? How could I have eaten a platter of chicken and oysters and remembered to pick up the blouse?

  Yet, in a funny way, it was reassuring that there were these ordinary things to consider. I remember what Lydia had said, in Disturbances in the Field, after her two youngest children were killed in a bus accident: that she kept thinking a time would come when she could look at a chartered bus without feeling sick; when she could look at snow falling, or pass a school group on the street, when all these ordinary things would resume their rightful proportions and places in a universe of ordinary things.

  Perhaps, at a time when a tragedy is the last thing we think of before we go to sleep and first thing we think of when we wake up in the morning, the ordinary is our refuge.

  Occasionally, in the last couple of days, I’ve thought about what must be going through the minds of the eleven thousand other people who had applied for Christa McAuliffe’s position. But mostly I’ve done what I’ve always done—talked with friends about the flu and about the movies and parking tickets. I shoveled the walk. I thought about us, and about Peter and Annie; I wished they weren’t so far away. I read “Doonesbury” and “Cathy.” While across the country flags fly at half-mast, Cathy’s been busy accusing her best friend, who’s getting married, of desertion.

  On Wednesday night, the MacNeil/Lehrer News-Hour devoted its entire program to Challenger and to events nationwide following the explosion. Among the numerous people interviewed was a former astronaut by the name of Deke Slayton, who said flatly that if something happens, “You can’t fix it. Get on with it—that’s the right stuff.�
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  Certainly it’s the message of the hour, that beyond these events something abides. We do get on with it. We let ordinary things resume their rightful proportions and places in a universe of ordinary things. It’s both the amazing thing and the sad thing that we do.

  FEBRUARY 11

  It seems whenever a man leaves a woman, the first thing she does is join an exercise class. I’m no exception. I sign up for ten weeks, go to a few classes until I feel a little better, and then I stop. I’m there just long enough to remember why I quit, which is that I hate working on my body, and to find out what the current fashion is in the fitness world. Leotards and leg warmers are out, as I learned yesterday.

  I’d have sooner died than have you know this at the time, but back in 1984, when part of my game plan was to make you regret what you had done by metamorphosing into a perfect 10—and not incidentally, to improve my marketability—I joined a serious exercise class that was full of serious people who knew that old T-shirts and sweatpants were passé. So I bought a pair of aerobic shoes, tights, a leotard, leg warmers, and a pair of warm-up pants. There was a problem, however, when I got up to go to class the next morning: I seemed to have an excess of clothing. Or, looking at it another way, too few legs. I didn’t know whether to put my leg warmers on over my tights and under my warm-up pants, or put my warm-up pants on over my tights and put the leg warmers on last. Fortunately, there was a certain adolescent on hand for critical comment.

  Annie was trying to be patient. “Mom,” she said, “if you have leg warmers, you don’t need warm-up pants.”

  I was crushed. Not need warm-up pants? They were the most serious item of all. I had to wear them; I’d spent all this money. I was committed. “Well, Moom,” she said. “Go ahead and wear them, then. And carry the leg warmers over your arm.” In all my years of watching people run and dance and do exercises, I had never seen anyone carry her leg warmers, but I was too late to argue. As I remember, the class was half over before I got the shoes off, the leg warmers on, and the shoes back on again. It was like trying to get into your snowsuit while everyone else is out at recess already. You’d think I’d have learned something.