The first slip-up is the scent of cigarette smoke—hand-rolled American Spirits—on my hair and in my scarf. My husband notices. Of course, he does. Mister Detail-Oriented, Mister Business-Owner-Who-Files-His-Own-Taxes, Mister Nothing-Gets-Past-Him. Naturally, this was what attracted me to him when we first met.
Picture me: twenty-nine, a week away from thirty, giving up on my novel (because I was so old back then), sick of writing, sick of going to family holidays and being asked when my book would be published; as if that was something I could whip into existence the way that my future contractor husband would draw up custom countertop layouts and back deck staircases. How many ways could I say “It doesn’t work that way” before everyone assumed that it was I who didn’t do the work the right way to be like James Patterson and J.K. Rowling and Stephen King. They didn’t know the names of any other writers.
I met him at a bar because I’m cliché and, to be frank, so is he. He was thirty-one and had just started his own business and by God, if he wasn’t sick of going dateless to his friends’ weddings and Jack & Jill baby showers. He loved me for being a flitty little writer just as I loved him for being a broad-handed guy with street smarts rather than having an expensive liberal arts degree he didn’t use.
It takes fifteen years for me to tumble out of the life we built together into the arms of another which is longer than I expected, on the bad days, and also shorter, on the good days. I am forty-four now and cheating on my husband with the almost-forgotten novel.
It starts with Bunko. Oh, the woe-some suburban gathering of Stepford Desperate Housewives! What I would give to be the first martyr of a Shirley Jackson satire to get out of my cream-coloured, wide-legged denim jeans and oversized linen button-down with Birkenstocks. Sure, I avoid sweater sets and A-line dresses because I am not my mother’s mother, instead I am my own generation’s mother—a mother who calls it “DIY” rather than “homemade” and rejects the cottage cheese and pineapple gorged to attain a pre-baby body (because what is our life as women if not pre-baby and post-baby) in favor of flowy, comfy, but expensive clothing that drapes us so that we do not have to face this post-baby body and can instead call it aesthetic.
We discuss television, movies, and celebrity gossip. Someone jokes that they’re glad they found a group of women with whom to play a mindless dice-rolling game rather than those people who do book clubs and insist on actually reading.
“When was the last time any of us actually even picked up a book?” she says with a laugh and glugs more of her Skinny Girl cosmopolitan.
My hand shoots up (a reread of The Road because I wanted to be reminded that there are parents who are having less fun than me) like an eager student ready to please. The ladies say that it’s so nice that I have time to read.
And so, when the kids are asleep and my husband is nursing a whiskey in front of the replays on ESPN, I go up to our bedroom and pull out the shoebox in the back of the closet. You know the one. You have one too and if you don’t, you will as soon as you live with another person to whom you claim you have no secrets. This partnership will inspire you to make up secrets that you don’t even need. In the shoebox is my old novel that I gave up to be a wife and a mom.
I smell the pages and risk a paper cut on the nostril with my fervor. Dusty with a hint of the perfume I wore on first dates in my twenties because I did my best writing after dying of boredom over discussion of favorite colours, best concerts, and how many siblings. Writing while bored is, in my estimation, the best approach to the art. I’d be so desperate for stimulation that I’d make up my own entertainment on the pages of a Word Document on my old MacBook with the plastic white keyboard.
Sat down on the floor, I read the first pages. They are not that bad, but I won’t go further than that. A twenty-something protagonist (predictable, yes) and her long-distance boyfriend whom she met on a trip to Puerto Rico rendezvous for a weekend in the hills of Appalachia to decide their future. Calamity ensues, but subtly, because this is a “novel of ideas” and not some psychological thriller, or heaving bosom, or apocalyptic nonsense tornado of cliché plot points. It’s better than that (no, it’s not, but I can’t admit to that in the closet).
I hold the pages close to me and cry. I cry for my youth, my naiveté about a career unrealized, hopes unfulfilled, and who I have become. I put the pages back in their box and underneath a pile of overstretched winter sweaters. In the bathroom I wash off my runny makeup, take a shit, and put in my nightguard before my husband comes upstairs so he knows there won’t be any sex happening.
When it’s time to fall asleep, I am restless. My thoughts do not whir in a mechanical, productive sense but instead, clatter around like an earthquake at a Bed Bath & Beyond so that all the kitchenware and organizing bins crash into each other. It is… nice? I don’t know the last time my heart beat this fast outside of Zumba (I hate it so much, but my friends love it, and I don’t quite hate them). Not from my husband or from pride at something the children have done. Not even from the young cashier at Trader Joe’s who tells me that she also loves the crispy chili oil I’ve picked out and causes me to wonder if I perhaps should have experimented more in college with a nose-ringed, cropped-haired pixie like herself.
I escape down to the basement where we have an in-law suite that is occupied by my parents during the Thanksgiving holiday weekend and by my in-laws during Christmas, which has become our standing tradition. The large bedroom has two twin-sized beds because we don’t like the idea of our aging parents having sex under our roof any more than they once cringed at the idea of our underaged selves having sex under theirs. I crawl into one of the beds under the damask-printed duvet and start to touch myself. I lean into my heart rate. My clattering mind organizes itself into a symphony; the Bed Bath & Beyond showroom is now catalogue-ready. Images of my manuscript, my characters, a book deal, choosing covers, an interview on a literary podcast, enough money in royalties that the kids can go to boarding school and give me more time to write more books that become more pages. I climax and sit up. I smile, roll over, fall asleep, and in the morning tell my husband I had heartburn, no doubt from the cheap snacks served at Bunko.
***
I start spending my time with the manuscript when the kids are at school and the husband is at work. The margins are filled with notes, ideas, and doodles. Words are changed once, twice, seven times. I take up smoking because I like having something to fiddle with when I’m thinking of how fast the characters should talk or whether I want the cabin to feel too hot or too cold. The husband notices I’m in a better mood at home and the children are more forthright with details of their day. We are so happy. I don’t care about any of them.
***
On a Thursday, I claim a girl’s night out that will keep me late. I drive an hour away to the boutique hotel on the coast where we got married. It’s symbolic, maybe. At the desk I check-in for my reservation for two under a fake name, Delores McCartney, the first name being my mother’s mother and the surname because my husband had picked out “Maybe I’m Amazed” as our song after we slept together the first time.
In the bedroom, the manuscript and I are alone. Technically, that’s not true; the day before, I made a copy at the library so we could have a threesome. The copy and I go into the shower together where I lie on the tiled floor letting ceramic edges dig into my back while the pages lay on top of me and the hot water beats down on us both, so the pages disintegrate into a pulp on my skin. I rub my arms and legs with these remnants of my thoughts and feelings. The ink smudges on my fingers so I lick them clean and when that doesn’t work, I use the cucumber and aloe-scented soap provided by the hotel to wash the remains away. Back in bed I read my words out loud, and laugh, and touch myself, and cry, and hold the pages over my eyes. At 10:05 pm it is time to return. I smoke on the whole car ride home with all the windows up so the scent will linger and make my kids cough on the way to school in the morning.
***
The next night, after they go to sleep, the husband confronts me about the cigarette smoke and the girl’s night. He tells me he went out to get dinner at Chick-fil-A and saw my best friend there and since I don’t have a life outside of the one tied to my neighborhood mom-friends, he has caught the lie.
He says other things, too: why have I been so quiet at dinner? He’s caught me talking to myself while doing housework about “a wedding in San Juan or an elopement in Anchorage,” a plot line that I was pretty proud of. He wants to know if I’m okay…you know…with my…like…mental health? The care with which he asks this question makes me laugh. Once again, he is too good for me and it’s not ironic, just pathetic, but that makes me laugh. What else am I supposed to do? Then he asks the question he’s actually dying to ask: is there someone else? Another man? Would he be more upset if it was the Trader Joe’s girl or my manuscript? I take a risk with the truth. I’ve been writing again, and it’s made me happier than I’ve been in years so we should probably get a divorce. That one strikes a nerve. “Divorce?”
“But we’re not even married yet,” he says.
I pause, then ask what he means.
“Our wedding isn’t for another six months. We can’t be divorced.”
“Are you saying this for the sake of the children?” I ask.
Now he pauses.
“What children?”
I sigh.
“The boy and the girl. The ones you’ve been trying to act all gung-ho to protect! It’s okay that you care more about protecting them than me. I get it, I’m not the same twenty-nine-year-old you fell in love with. I can’t help that I look a little different at forty-four after two children.”
He pauses again.
“You just turned thirty a few weeks ago. We’ve only been together for a year and a half.”
I try to convince him that divorce is still the right option.
“Okay, hear me out,” I say, “if I upend my life wholly and completely, well, then I go back to being twenty-nine. I’ll need to date myself into boredom to entertain myself with stories. With my own house to look after by myself, I’ll need to manage all the dishes and think of new character names while I load the dishwasher. Without the kids, I can stop asking about their days and stop acting like I care because I know I’m supposed to. It will be good for them to build character and develop some personality. They don’t have enough of that, do they?”
And at this, the husband balks.
“What children?” he asks again and starts to cry. “You said you wanted this house. You said it would be fine to move out of the city to the suburbs where I wanted to live. Why are you saying all of these things just three weeks before our wedding?”
“It’s time. I need to fuck up my life, our lives, so that I can write.”
“What happens when you abandon the book again?” My husband asks.
Where did that come from?
“I, I won’t,” I start to say, and he cuts me off.
“Yes, you will. Just like the last one, and the one before that, and the stories on Post-It notes I find around the kitchen drawers, and the grocery lists with scenes halfway through…” And he goes on and on.
I have not been discrete or careful.
“I never wanted you to stop,” he tells me.
“I know,” I say, “that’s why I did.”
“Is this my fault no matter what?” He asks.
“Yes!” I exclaim.
I am the victim of my own story, just like every other human out there. Doesn’t he get that? Doesn’t he see that we are all my characters? That my irony is contrived, and my sense of humour forced? That I change the décor in our house to change the font? That this is all made up?
“It’s not made up,” he says, and I realize I’ve been talking out loud. “I’m real.”
He knocks a fist against the kitchen countertop. “The house is real. The kids aren’t real. Not yet, anyway. We said we’d wait a few years into being married. Why are you saying all of these things?”
He walks over and places a hand on my shoulder, “This isn’t some ghost story.”
He still doesn’t understand. One person’s marital drama can be another’s ghost story. For the elder child, this will be a black comedy, and for the younger child, an introduction to a self-help book on managing a difficult childhood (although his childhood has not been difficult and 50% of marriages fail so there are a lot of children of divorce out there, which will fund the success of the book and is ultimately quite clever).
I go to sleep that night in the guest room, again, with the manuscript on the second bed. We play pretend at being an old married couple. I say goodnight and blow a kiss in its direction and its peaceful silence of a reply guides me to sleep. I don’t know what it will be when I wake up: a tragedy, a sitcom, or a coming-of-age opening scene for the elder child.
There will be rave reviews among the mom-friends for the surprise twist. My mother will respect the feminism in it as an idea, but not in practice. The husband will say it was unrelatable, but that would be wishful thinking. Book clubs of women will say it changed their lives and pundits will call it an important novel. A teenager might swipe it from her mom’s nightstand and share it with her friends who will remember it when they reconvene at thirty, but are themselves confused at forty-four, losing their sense of reality.
I will be remembered for not a moment too long and will fade into obscurity where I’m left alone to craft boredom into stories with the alchemy of my own will. It will be everything I never could have accomplished in this present state, and I will love every moment resenting the future that I have yet to build.