Matchmaking for Beginners(19)

“You’re not just some—”

“I said, shut up! You don’t have the right to talk to me about what I am or what I’m not. Listen, you idiot, I’m willing to give my whole heart and soul to you, and work together on our dreams! We have to sacrifice! Nobody’s happy all the time! Look at my parents. They have a very successful, long marriage, but do you think they were happy every single day? No one is happy every single day. And work is called work because that’s what it is. That’s what you do!”

“No,” he says, and his eyes are shiny with sadness. “No, your parents definitely aren’t happy, and neither are mine. And that’s just the point. I’m not going to do that.”

“Fuck you,” I say.

He gives me a sad, knowing smile, and then he lifts his hand in farewell and walks away. Our surroundings have gone berserk, the heavy wet air filled with screeching and hollering, animals taking sides, flinging leaves and nuts at each other, raucously arguing, probably over the meaning of work versus love. I abruptly turn off the trail and go a different way down the mountain, and I walk furiously with my head down, not caring if I ever see the hotel again, or him, or the airplane that’s going to take me back to California.

I want to throw myself off the cliff into the ocean.

Oh, stop already. You’re going to be okay, a voice says.

I say back to it, I am never again going to be okay.

But it laughs and says again, No, you’re absolutely going to be okay. You have a big life coming. A big, gigantic heart song of a life.

And I say back to it: What the hell does that even mean?

He moves out as soon as we get back to our apartment in Burlingame, the place we have shared for six months. He feels it’s best that he stays with a friend because—get this—he feels too guilty to look at me across the room. He needs to punish himself for hurting me this way. I hate the way he’s almost getting off on all this suffering—how it makes him seem so heroic in his own head, the villain with the hangdog look, the guy who bows down and closes his eyes out of such sweet sorrow with his own bad self.

Before he leaves me for good, backpack and suitcases overflowing, he tells me about all the decisions he’s made without me. The one about how he and Whipple are flying to Africa in another month. Then the one about how he’s not going back to teaching. Ever.

He looks at me with his new tragic expression and says he’ll be in touch if I want him to be, which makes me laugh a high-pitched, maniacal laugh and fling the butter dish across the room. I think of how proud Natalie will be when she hears that I’m not putting up with being treated this way, that I am actually throwing crockery.

And then I start to cry, because I know that I am supremely unlovable in a very deep, unfixable way.

With great sadness, he picks up the pieces of the butter dish, sweeps up the shards, drops it all in the trash can. He tells me he’s paid his portion of the rent for the next three months so I can keep the apartment without having to take in a roommate. He even leaves me the recipe for his secret six-layer dip—the one with four kinds of melted cheese, red onion, and avocado, the dip that he never, ever would tell me how to prepare. I rip it up in front of him while making hyena noises. He flinches, and I get louder.

So this, this is what I’ve come to: being thrilled I can screech loudly enough to possibly scare him out of his mind.





SEVEN





MARNIE


Three weeks later, I come home from work to find a letter from an online divorce site. I drink two glasses of wine, turn our engagement picture toward the wall, and then I sign the papers that say I promise not to love him anymore.

Soon after comes a copy of the decree.

And just like that, I’m divorced.

I say things to myself that get me through each day: I loved him for two years; we got married in an ill-advised ceremony; we broke up; I am still sad. I will fold my laundry and get around to sending back the wedding gifts. I will buy coffee and cream and eat oatmeal and cranberries for breakfast.

I say: This is the poster on the wall. This is my kitchen table. This is my car key. I like coffee. It is Thursday.

Then I do what MacGraws do in times of great personal upheaval and grief: I go into full denial mode. I tell my emotions that they are now on stage-four lockdown, forbidden to show up in public.

I am, in fact, a denial warrior-queen, bouncing into the nursery school where I work every day, playing the part of the happy little fulfilled bride with a big smile on her face. I don’t tell anyone what has happened. I go in early and stay late. I smile so hard my face hurts sometimes. I think up approximately seven art projects for the children per day, projects that necessitate cutting up hundreds of little construction-paper shapes. As an added flourish, I make little books—one for each child, with stories in them of laughing cats and turtles that talk.

I could tell my boss, Sylvie, what happened, I suppose. Sylvie would be outraged for me, and she’d take me home with her, and she’d tell her husband, and they would comfort me, and I could sleep in their guest room until I’m healed up. Sylvie is the most motherly person I know. I could fall apart around her, and she would know how to put me back together again.

But I don’t tell her the first day, and that makes it harder to mention on the second day, and then impossible after that. Maybe if I don’t talk about it out loud, it will cease to be true.