To My Ex-Husband (12 page)

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.”

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.

Not so. Now I'm back to getting purple in the face and pretending that a pulse of two hundred and eighty beats a minute is normal, that I'm not going to drop dead while wearing the obligatory long old T-shirt, as opposed to the short old T-shirt, and these sexy leggings that end at the ankles. In every manner of speaking, I can't keep up.

FEBRUARY 18

Heartbreak is when you get a handmade valentine from the child of the man you're no longer seeing. I was okay until then. I was okay until Barney let it be known that he was part of this thing, too. Nina said, “You mean he didn't know that you'd broken up?”

“It was worse than that,” I said. “He knew.”

It also happened to be one of the most beautiful valentines I'd ever received. It was a collage, a black cardboard heart on which he'd pasted half of a smaller heart made of perfectly gorgeous shiny wrapping paper, silver on one side, red on the other. He'd folded it down the center, so when you open it up there are all these little pieces, like washers and nuts, that look as if they're from the inside of a faucet glued on in the shape of a heart. On the bottom, he'd written, “You make things come together.”

I had been so self-absorbed that I had not considered how this would affect him. I don't know about David; but Barney certainly deserves better than that.

Nina, eager to keep me from self-destructing, recruited me to help her with a restaurant review. “Would you mind?” she asks. Would I
mind?
Who's she kidding? Since when have matters of the heart ever interfered with my appetite, especially at one of what is known in the business as a “deep-pocket” restaurant?

I have to finally concede, however, that this job isn't all about eating. It's about adjectives. How many different words can one find to describe the flavor of a dish? Nina, at least, does not resort to words like “honest,” nor pay tribute to veal stocks that have “integrity.”