Polite Fictions

What happens after she (sort of) decides

“There are worse things that can happen to you in life than getting divorced.”

My mother pushes a box of tissues across the kitchen table, waits as I destroy four with devastating blows engineered to take out my frustrated tears, and then leans back in her chair to deliver her state of the potential dissolution of the union address. I can’t help but be reminded of another day she’d found me crying. She walked up quietly, leaned in, and whispered, “You do know you don’t have to go through with this, don’t you?” On that day, I thought about how she’d yelled at me six months earlier that she’d never once heard me say I loved the man I was now, years later, considering leaving. I loved him then. I love him still, truth be told. That’s why reaching this point where trying on an ill-fitting word like ‘divorce’ brings another exhaustive round of tears. I imagine my mother is president of the world’s most depressing fortune cookie company (“Our motto is ‘We told you so!’”), but she’s the only divorced woman I know, and by all indications, her company’s benefits program has helped her live up to her words. Of course, the last fortune cookie I received attempted to temper its horribly stale state by assuring me “It is not in your character to give up,” as I spat soggy remains into a napkin. An ironically fine how do you do for a life now clouded over by anger, exhaustion, and resignation.

Can there possibly be anything worse than getting divorced?

There’s war, of course. No battles waged between two could ever be so great as to compare.

Being ill-prepared for divine retribution? Don’t think I haven’t thought about it.

Finding myself in my early 40s and still looking to my mother for guidance? There are no words for that other than quiet ones of annoyance that I mutter under my breath while thinking about how often she’s right.

Maybe a zombie apocalypse. Yes, in the category of “Well, isn’t this a shitty state of affairs,” a zombie apocalypse might actually trump a divorce. That, or, hey, what about being married to an actual zombie? Isn’t that exactly what my marriage has become? When we’re together, we lumber through the house, shuffling from room to room to escape the other. We’re incapable of saying the words that need to be said, and when we’re forced to address the other, monosyllabic grunts seem to be the only noises we can produce. If I were the heroine of a zombie movie, I’d have by now given up weeping in fear and steeled myself for the fight for survival. The reality, though, is I see only one potential direction to take in my marriage to achieve that, and it leaves me wondering if that’s one of the reasons zombie movies seem to have so many sequels. My only hope now is this man I’ve spent so many years with doesn’t attempt to eat my brain, because, let’s be honest, the bitter thoughts that race through it would likely force him to spit out the chunks.

“There are worse things that can happen to you in life than getting divorced.”

I let my mother’s words race toward me like over-eager acrobats, the “ooohs!” and “awwws!” of a wide-eyed audience below help push them further up, up, up the seemingly endless ladder to their fate. It won’t be until they finally reach the top and rest breathlessly in front of me that I’ll join them, peering over their shoulders to look down into the black space below where the once fearless have now come to hesitate.

This is where I either find the courage to close my eyes to the blinding spotlight and step off the tiny ledge I’ve been clinging to and decide whether to grab hold of the outstretched arms of the one I used to count on, or be suspended, untethered, in mid-air, realizing within seconds that he, too, is as tired of the act as I am. The former still sways me and fills me with hope. The latter means plunging violently to the ground. I can imagine it no other way. Yes, there may be worse things that can happen to you in life than getting divorced, and one of those things may be realizing too late that the safety net that’s always been there has been rolled up and put away when I most need it to be in place, leaving me splattered across the hay-strewn dirt, my heart shredded and dripping off the rim of the ringleader’s top hat.

And what about the children? You think 20 overzealous clowns throwing confetti, tossing buckets of water and honking horns as they spill out of a tiny car isn’t scary? Then what about breaking up a family?

The choice might be easier if the reasons for considering it were stronger. There’s been no infidelity, but there has been rejection. Apathy has settled in to spaces where arguments would have been better served. “I don’t want us to be over,” he sometimes tells me, but he doesn’t want to do the work that ensures the story we started writing long ago has a happier ending. I, on the other hand, want to get angry, to scream into pillows, kick at lines I’ve drawn in the sand, and sink his battleship. Perhaps things would be clearer and decisions less difficult if we lived on a fault line, a ragged, obvious edge where the earth would rumble under us as it split us apart, and blame could come crashing down around us along with the sturdy pieces of Pfaltzgraff dinnerware we’d picked as our wedding gifts. No fine china for us!

There’s been nothing fine about us for a very long time, which brings me to this table, seated among these tears and clotted tissues. Maybe there are worse things that could happen to me in life than getting divorced. Surely I wouldn’t die without him if that’s what it comes down to, but honestly, I’m not sure how I’d live, either.

Perhaps it really isn’t in my character to give up.

What Happens After You Check In

I hate this rug.

It's just so round. I hate most things that are round, now that I think about it. There's an abject hopelessness in circles that gnaws at my insides. Everything should have an end point; a place where it just stops. Circles refuse to stop. I hate circles.

And this rug is going to sit here staring me back in the face for I don't even know how long. 

*wiggles in seat* This chair. They could have at least given me a new chair, one that didn't spin around in circles. I have no idea how I'm going to do this every day. 

*paces around room* Even the freaking walls make a circle. And these windows! What's the point of big open windows that look out onto big, manicured courtyards if I can't open the fucking windows? I get that they have to lock me in this room, but do they have to rub it in my face that they're locking me in this room? A little bit of fresh air never killed anyone, seriously.

Well, except John Kennedy.

I really should have thought this through.

It sounded like a good idea at the time. I thought it would help. I thought I could make everything better. I thought it would mean a better life for everyone I knew if I just said yes but now I'm here and there are circles everywhere and this room is too big and the silence is going to kill me and why won't someone knock on this door and talk to me?

*knock at door* Your lunch has arrived. 

Turkey and cream cheese bagels. With cucumber slices. OF COURSE. Round, round, round, round. It's all a circle. Ev. Er. Y. Thing is a circle. 

A HA. That's the point! That's it's all a big circle and I can't do anything about it so I might as well get used to it. Well, that's not very inspirational. No, I'm not buying it at all! That's not why I signed up for this shit, to lay back and resign myself to a world full of hopeless, soul-crushing circular patterns, oh no. I came here to make change. I came here to break cycles. I came here to do something, and my first order of business is going to be to make this bagel sandwich a square so I can eat it.

Anyone got a knife? *crickets*

Oh, of course not. Don't give me a knife, oh no. You know what? I'M HERE VOLUNTARILY, PEOPLE. I can have a goddamn knife if I want one. I have to CHANGE THINGS.

*glances over to change jar on desk* The change is even round. This is going to be a lot harder than I though.

I just don't understand why no one is here to talk to me yet. I have been listening to people tell me what to do for months. Everyone kept yapping about how much I needed to go, how much they needed me to make everything better, how important it was that I do this.

Opinions are like blogs, man. Everyone has one.

And you know what? I still have twitter. They can't take that away from me. *pulls out cell phone* c-h-a-n-g-e c-h-a-n-g-e - send. That could be a whole blog post actually. We can't change anything until we change change. Until we get rid of change, the world will never be a better place. I'm totally onto something here. CHANGE IS THE ENEMY.

*0 replies*

Where the fuck is everyone? Was there a fucking zombie apocalypse this morning and no one told me? Goddammit, zombies are gnawing at my mother's brains and I'm trapped in a round room and the circular rug won't stop staring at me and there isn't even anyone on TWITTER to comfort me? Fine, I'll do it myself.

*lights cigarette*

*door opens* I'm sorry, sir, there's no smoking inside. 

Now someone talks to me. What, do they have this room bugged? I'm going to find the cameras and I am going to crush them right here in the middle of this big round rug and then they'll see. Then they'll know who they're messing with. It would take a nation of millions to hold me back! HAHAHAHAHA!

*knock at door* Mr President, it's time for your first address to the nation.

Can you make sure the camera lens is a rectangle?

This Is What Happens After: To Anabel, Anti-Hero

In the months after I turned in my lover, a large cosmetic company offered me my own nail polish line. My father’s lawyer declined that and also the 64-ounce Guzzler or something or other that a mini-mart in Pennsylvania wanted to use my image on. He declined another fifteen other things, maybe more. Once, when the requests were at their height, my mother slammed her wine glass on the table so hard it shattered: “We will not make a mahk-ery of this fahmmily’s name evahhhhrrr,” she wailed.

After TK was sentenced and my information-for-innocence deal settled, I did every interview I was asked to do, because I wanted to and also because my dad’s attorney couldn’t say squat about it. I wasn’t ashamed to do it, but I let my guilt linger. I held onto it not because I had him busted, and not because of all the trouble I caused my parents, and never about my role in the robberies. (Sorry? Yes. Guilty? Not really.) I agonized because I knew with each tape-recorded magazine feature, with every live taping for television, I was lying through my chomping-at-the-bit teeth.

Too many people believed me. They all believed me. They wanted to. They needed to find a reason good enough to explain why it happened and how it ended, and so I became everyone's field hockey player, everyone's Brownie, every mother's baby girl gone bad who did right. I entertained them and relieved them and was worshipped and forgiven.

Tomorrow, I will give my first interview in over eleven years.

It’s been that long since Thomas Kentwell Livermore, son of those Livermore’s, went to jail, and in two months, he will be released. I never tell the story anymore, not because I don’t think people will care (I know they want to ask), but because it’s too awkward to tell that dirty tale in someone’s stainless, perfectly perfect suburban kitchen. When the journalist called from Manhattan, I obliged immediately.

I have not told my husband. I marked the date on the kitchen calendar with a message only I could understand – the words all strung together so that they said nothing. It doesn’t really matter, my sneakiness, because he never reads the thing anyway. I face weekends of yard work, talk radio and all the typical non-drama that makes up a child-less marriage out here in the Everyday. I make the plans now, buy the groceries, pick the paint colors, worry about the money and spend most of it. He complains about never getting to control the remote, about his gut getting bigger, about the market this and the politicians that. We make love every Tuesday, sometimes Saturday. I think I always knew this is how my life would play out.

I have decided this interview won’t be like all the others, though I will start the way I always do, because, frankly, I like best that part of the story I made.

“We shot nine ball at the bar like pros, drank like pros. I’d hear a song on the radio and buy it at the record store; he’d come home singing it,” I’ll start. “We hid out in our walk-up on the lam from school and expectations. We’d hover over Indian food for hours making our ridiculous, hilarious plans.”

(I have it so memorized that sometimes I think maybe I read this whole thing somewhere else and didn’t actually say it the first time, out loud on my own.)

I will crank out the facts for her. TK got the costumes from a friend who distributed programs at the repertory theater downtown: velvet cloaks and plumed hats and belts so heavy with fake jewels they hurt. I’d quote real lines I remembered from Shakespeare or Ovid or event Mamet and TK would improvise. Sometimes, the people in the mini-marts or gas stations we’d hit would throw us tips. When TK would politely, and always in some horrible accent, demand the cash, the attendant always gave it up, kind of smiling, kind of bemused maybe. We never used weapons; we never even scared anyone; we blew the 50 bucks (or less) on restaurant food, French cigarettes and cheap beer. We’d make love for days on that high. We told no one.

The interviewer will ask me vague questions, but I will know already what she wants: our blue blood, my dreadlocks like dirty snakes that fell around me, his mother’s Persian carpet where he lay when the cops came. She will then ask me to tell how I turned on him, so righteously flipped on him, when things went so horribly violent. I will take a deep breath at this part, a breath so deep I might never exhale: I will hold on to it so long she might think I am no longer on the line. I will hold my breath until every last ounce of oxygen is absorbed and swallowed and drowned in my own regular blood. And then I will tell her the truth. 

I turned in my lover for one reason alone: I was jealous.

If he hadn’t snuck out on his own, hadn’t ditched me that day while I showered, hadn’t taken the wooden prop pistol that I had banned from the get go, then maybe it would have been obvious that fools like us swaddled in velveteen capes and hideous pantaloons, part Penzance part wizard, did not carry real guns. If I been with him, if he hadn’t taken my keys and left me home and alone, then maybe the man behind the counter wouldn’t have fired his real one: the bullet hurtling from his shaking hand, smashing through the window, busting the cage of propane tanks and shattering the belly of one.

I heard the explosion all the way on the East Side. Three cars were filling up; one was mine. Three people died. In the confusion and smoke, TK got away and ran all the way home, past my car that had burst, past the burning bodies he must have seen; he ran miles.

When I saw him in our kitchen, I knew right away that he’d done it and I gagged -- not just from his shedding skin but from my own pitiful knowing: I’d been rejected.

He lay on the ancient rug of his mothers and I covered his face and shoulders in water-soaked paper towels – my final gesture of good will – and then split to call the cops from the payphone outside. The swat arrived, vested and armed, and without any rebuke, carried him tenuously down the stairs.  

I stood on the sidewalk, detectives at my side, lights flashing, noise everywhere, and I stared at him in the back of the cruiser: even then when he knew what had happened, what I had done, he had this look of peace on his scorched face, his face still so crisp, alive, unafraid, and beautiful. I just stared. I stared and stared until I could see him no more, until he was no more to me. My dear Thomas, who lived his life under columns with buildings that bore his grandfathers’ names, would soon be as drab as those pillars, costumed by his family in the suit and ties he hated, muffled forever. 

I have an old table in my kitchen and it’s the best place in the house.  I sort the paint chips here, read mail here, put my left foot on the chair and inject the hormones in my ass here.  I’ll probably be in the same spot when the interviewer calls from New York.

I’ll explain that I never did one thing that was just or right. I will confess that I am a wicked, scarred woman like any other. I ruined him because he ruined me. I will tell her what I have been wishing to tell all along: that great love affairs are like petty crimes. They are selfish at best and despite all good intentions, they get terribly ugly and eventually catch fire, then burn, then melt and finally, disappear.

But anger, grief, envy? Those things stay, and they turn a person to stone.