But You Seemed So Happy Read online

  - I am one good, or possibly bad, offer away from having an affair and have been for some time now. Where is everyone? I thought that part would be easy.

  + He cleaned and decorated the house for my birthday and ordered my favorite cake from the best bakery in town, even though three weeks from that date we would be telling our kids we were separating. Even though we had agreed a year before to get a divorce. He wrote me a thoughtful card, even with everything that was unraveling between us.

  - He is not curious about my work, I am not curious about his. In general, we stopped asking each other how we were, what we thought, and what we wanted a long time ago. We stopped being curious about each other, period. You cannot spend your life with someone without curiosity. It is as devastating as infidelity, yet somehow working in a slower, gentler, more insidious way. It is being unfaithful to your own life.

  + He is kind. He is a good man. These two realities kept us married twice as long as they should have. Because the message I’ve internalized since the beginning of our relationship is that I am a bitch and he is a gem. I am lucky. I am the only one who is lucky here. I will clearly never get this lucky again. I already have more than I deserve.

  - He does not talk, which is a sweeping generalization. Of course he talks. He talks and is gregarious in a crowd. Slap your back, get you a drink, give you a big strong hug, and cook a meal with and for you. For over twenty years I mistook these actions as a form of reflection and connection. For over twenty years I have essentially been having circular arguments with myself where I posit a problem, weigh the pros and cons aloud, and come to a conclusion. All on my own. He is often there only as an audience.

  + At my lowest and most anxiety-filled, he will tell me he believes in me. He tells me I can do it, I can do anything. I have grown accustomed to this. He has carved out a pool of empathy in the world only for me. A pool I am able to wade through whenever I need it.

  + I trust him with my life.

  + We are good partners in just about every way that doesn’t include marriage, which I understand sounds ridiculous. Being there for our kids, taking care of our house, throwing fun parties, tackling mundane shit, and sticking together when life or the world gets especially rough. Not bad for two people who mostly just text each other about what to pick up at the market.

  - I want to be alone.

  + But what if I’m alone forever?

  - But I just said that’s what I wanted? I can’t imagine doing this again, this whole relationship thing, this whole marriage thing. But isn’t that exactly the type of sentiment the Vows section of the New York Times is littered with?

  - I don’t think I care about being alone forever.

  + But the devil you know, et cetera and so forth.

  Here I am, adding, subtracting, and checking our balance. But he is handsome, but he is good, but he is imperfect. And why is it only about him anyway? There are two people in this relationship. When have I not been there for him? What have I not asked? What have I not done? What have I missed? How does my ledger look? And, honestly, do I even care?

  I am so tired of questions.

  I am so tired of wanting to want to make it work.

  What do you do when there is no drama? There is no screaming or phone-throwing. Not much fighting at all, come to think of it. No one was fucking someone they shouldn’t. Hell, no one was fucking someone they should. It was not miserable. It was not wonderful. Well, it was wonderful once. But now it just . . . is.

  I do not have an ex-husband. We do not even live in separate houses, not yet. We are still sleeping in the same bed for God’s sake. We still parent our kids together. He makes dinner every night and I decide whether to join him. We are roommates. Which is what we were before, but now everyone knows. We attend school events together and go to friends’ parties. I am no longer wearing my ring. He is still wearing his. It is not because he is in love with me, nor is he heartbroken. He doesn’t like change and I have been chasing it.

  When I was in my twenties I thought I knew everything about everyone. I thought I knew myself. And I certainly thought I knew what was going on in the romantic relationships around me. Just as no one can truly know what has gone on in my marriage other than Jon and me, I can’t begin to fathom what is happening in anyone else’s. I thought I knew who would last (and is “lasting” even the point?). I thought it would be easy (it was so easy in the beginning). I thought if your marriage was hard that just meant you didn’t love each other enough (who knows, maybe it does?). I thought there could be nothing worse than divorce.

  Even though I thought I was more than ready, when I finally slipped off my ring and wiggled it into the velvet slit of a ring box, I was indescribably sad. I had just turned fifty. I was a cliché. I thought, the first person to refer to me as “a woman in transition” is getting a knuckle punch to the nipple.

  I tell anyone who will listen I am not worried about a man who has a full head of hair and a smashing smile, who would never hurt the proverbial fly, who is actually handy for a living and loves to cook. I am not worried about that man finding another partner. He will do just fine. He will probably trip and fall backward into a fresh thirty-year-old vagina. But what about me? Then I pause and think, excuse me ma’am, what exactly do you mean by “what” “about” “me”?

  So I write you now from this honeymoon, and this is all I know for sure:

  It was not my fault.

  It was not his fault.

  It was my fault.

  It was his fault.

  It was the fault of two people who believed in marriage but had little idea what they were in for. Which, come to think of it, is true of most everyone. I didn’t know myself. He didn’t know himself. We didn’t know each other. Unbelievably, startingly, this is the truth.

  And, somehow, twenty-five years later, it still is.

  And, somehow, it still worked for a long time anyway.

  I have come to this understanding: None of us will ever truly know the people we think we know so well. Our best friends. Our siblings. Our parents. Our partners. People are fundamentally unknowable. Even our children, people we have made. When all is said and done, we tell ourselves a story about who we think we are. We tell ourselves a story about who we think other people are. Their flaws, their motivations, their innermost thoughts and desires. We prefer our versions. We understand our versions. But all that aside, what we all have in common is this:

  Please see me, please care about me.

  This is what we are mewling into the universe from the minute we are born. From the second we can reach out, swiping the air with a vulnerable open hand, hoping to grasp comfort. Please care about me. Please care for me.

  Please hold me.

  Please love me.

  Never leave me.

  Why are you leaving me?

  I thought marriage was the last place.

  Instead it is just one place.

  I have no idea what is ahead. I don’t know how this book ends. I don’t know if by the time I finish writing it we’ll be living in separate houses or separate states. Or will we be living upstairs and downstairs from one another, sitting together at meals? Will all four of us still go to Maine in the summer, as we had planned?

  I only know what is behind me and smack right in front of me. Nothing has changed and everything has changed. So I write you from this honeymoon, where I feel free. Where, like twenty-five years ago, I have no idea what happens next. I’m no better at predicting my future now than I was back then. I am not here to sob all over these pages; I am (mostly) done with crying. I am here to tell you that divorce, even in its baby stages, is not the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.

  I’m happy to be here.

  Me

  Ambition: To go to college, meet and marry the perfect man (but party it up first!), live in Maine, and stay in touch with the best friends I’ve ever had!

  —High school yearbook, 1986

  Maiden

  It would be odd t
o begin the story of my marriage without sifting through the years that went into making me, me. I was not born then engaged. I didn’t go from the cradle to the altar. I kept my last name, my maiden name, without ever thinking twice about it. I had spent so long (it had felt so long, back then) becoming this person. This engaged about-to-be-married person. I had worked so hard to become her, no way was I giving her up that easily. I remember saying half to myself and half to Jon, “Kimberly Hughes? I don’t even understand who that person is. Who is that?” It was not a battle. It had never even occurred to him that I might change it.

  I thought I was leaving my childhood and adolescence and everything doofy about my life behind when I got married. I thought marriage would make me good and serious. I thought adulthood replaced childhood, and marriage replaced whatever the hell it was that I had been doing, like an upgrade in the machine.

  It is not my place to speak to how Jon came to our marriage, his childhood, what he thought marriage would do to or for him. I could probably riff a little on it, but I won’t. If I knew how he felt or how he thought, this would be a more balanced book and his name would be on the cover, after mine, in alphabetical order.

  Besides, being me has always taken up more than enough of my time and attention. Being me has been both my greatest and dumbest project, like watching a baby discover her own hands repeatedly. Entertaining to watch, as if from outside myself, but also, wow just look at that dummy go.

  Marriages are made of people. And whether we like it or not, how we became those people is where our marriages begin.

  Say Thank You

  Maybe my brain doesn’t work correctly. Maybe I retained all the wrong memories from childhood. Maybe that’s the problem.

  I have managed to forget an entire vacation to Disney World when I was twelve but with crystalline recall I can remember pulling into our driveway when I was around five and seeing one of our Great Danes standing on the roof, wagging his tail, covered in blood. He had gone through our second-story window, on purpose, as he did most things. He seemed pretty happy about it. Forty-five years later I can still feel the sway of the car as it made a right turn onto Sidney Avenue, the headlights sweeping the trees, then our house, then oh my God.

  Even after we moved far from that house I returned often to Rhode Island, staying with my grandparents who lived next door and palling around with my best friend, Maria, who lived one street over. We’d go swimming in the ocean with no supervision whatsoever, not even a teenage lifeguard. Without warning one of us would pretend to be jerked under the water, like in Jaws. The other would giggle nervously and yell stuff like “cut it out!” while her mind raced, what if this was a girl who cried wolf situation? What if there really were great whites in Greenwich Bay?

  When I would be down at the beach alone I’d capture baby jellyfish in a jar and bring them home. I’d sit and stare at them, pondering how neatly they had been designed. They hid nothing. I would watch their little urgent bodies propelling through the salt water until they inevitably died, becoming still flat circles.

  I built my personal mythology on vivid details like these—moments of horror, grim comedy, beauty I was convinced existed only for my eyes—and seem to have forgotten much of what happened between those extremes.

  One summer, the peak Jaws reenactment summer probably, Skylab was falling back to Earth. The thing was, Skylab wasn’t designed to return to Earth in any sort of controlled or safe fashion. It was just built to become irrelevant. On the day it was in the process of disintegrating and predicted to imprecisely crash back down, Maria and I decided it was the perfect day to walk five miles round trip to get a slice of pizza. We were ten. I spent most of our walk looking down at the grass for small treasures and directly into the sky, awaiting catastrophe.

  I felt my job as a child was to be vigilant. I wore old beat-up no-name tennis shoes into the ocean to protect my feet from pinching crabs. On our walks home from the beach or to the store to buy candy I assumed any man driving too slowly intended to kidnap us. And as we walked alongside a busy road to get pizza, I thought I would be capable of getting out of the way of a 77-ton piece of space trash disintegrating through our atmosphere.

  It’s never too early to believe in your ability to control absolutely everything.

  I was left alone from a shockingly early age and nothing bad happened because of it. I didn’t hurt myself or burn the house down. No one molested me. I was a quiet, responsible, independent kid. A moment stands out to me now, maybe I was seven or nine and quite shy, and I was introduced to someone in my father’s office. I think this person had either said something nice or given me a piece of candy and I said nothing. And my father, a little embarrassed, said, “Say thank you.” I remember thinking, but you never taught me to say thank you.

  It was as if my parents just expected me to know things.

  And eventually I learned some things.

  We moved for my father’s job twice, from Rhode Island to Wisconsin for a year, then finally settled in the western Massachusetts town where I’d start third grade and eventually graduate from high school.

  My memories of Wisconsin are few. I have a brief flash of my first day as the new kid in school, standing out on the playground completely alone. I don’t remember anything else about school that year, not my teachers nor any friends I might have made. But I must’ve made some because I know we rode bikes together and stole milk crates from the alley behind the grocery store. I remember tornado sirens and one beautiful, catastrophic ice storm that knocked the power out long enough to kill all the expensive fish in my dad’s saltwater tank.

  I remember biting into a tomato thinking for some reason it would taste like an apple and that ruined tomatoes for me for years. I remember smelling a tuna fish sandwich and throwing up. I remember that an elderly woman died on a street corner in downtown Marshall, but I don’t remember whether she fell or was hit by a car. I did not know her, and this was not a death I witnessed firsthand. But I found myself at that intersection shortly after it happened and couldn’t stop staring at the stain where her blood had seeped into the concrete. A woman had been here. This is where her head hit the sidewalk. And now she was gone. Even after the blood washed away, I was never able to stand at that spot without thinking about how it had pooled there.

  Our house had a sunken living room with lights sunk into the ceiling. It felt like the glamorous future compared to our two-story cottage in Rhode Island. For a time my aunt Janet, with her long straight sheet of sandy brown hair, lived with us, too. She also seemed like the glamorous future. She would go on to hitchhike up Big Sur and live in Aspen. She once met John Denver when she worked at the Aspen airport before Aspen was a big deal and it’s her I think of whenever I hear “Rocky Mountain High.” I remember her being asked if she was dating anyone; my grandparents seemed to be especially preoccupied with whether or not she would ever get married at the rate she was going. But to me, her life seemed exciting. Her life seemed like freedom.

  Monson is a small town in western Massachusetts that was founded in 1760 when people got tired of traveling over hills to Brimfield. That attitude feels fitting. It was originally home to granite quarries, a hat factory, and woolen and cotton mills. But by the time we moved there, all of that was long gone and had been replaced by plastics factories and Zero Manufacturing. I was led to believe Zero made toilet seats and only now am I questioning whether that was a rural legend. In a bit of cultural foreshadowing, Dan Wesson Arms manufactured revolvers in a former school building at the edge of town. Tambrands, the maker of Tampax, was located in the next town over and some of my classmates would go on to work there when we were in high school and during summer breaks from college. My town was a real firepower and pussies type of place, awash in maturity and sophisticated jokes, as you might be able to tell.

  Summers in a small town buried in the woods were of course different than those spent near the ocean. We had a bug zapper that attracted a Las Vegas–showgirl array of moths t
hat would linger on the trees long after the sun came up. Grand Luna moths with translucent lime-green wings. Small white moths that looked like they were sporting ermine coats. I would coax them onto my finger and stare at their crabby expressions. Rosy maple moths striped hot pink and bright yellow, very ’80s.

  I’d play Charlie’s Angels with my best friend next door and if I didn’t get to be Jill then I would simply go home. I’d meander around the woods picking wild blueberries or digging into the dirt with my bare hands looking for arrowheads, any triangular-shaped rock would do. By the time I was a teenager I’d often eat dinner alone in my room, watching my little black-and-white TV.

  My mother bred and showed Great Danes, so she was away at dog shows most weekends. My dad and I would spend most Saturday mornings washing his car then go out for donuts. Or we’d play catch or T-ball in our yard and end up at the mall at some point, getting slices of cheese pizza. We saw some pretty girls walk by on one of those trips and as we munched on pizza he said, “One day you’re going to be a knockout just like them” and I thought, yes, I think I should be. I was likely wearing Toughskins and a western shirt, had buck teeth and a Kristy McNichol haircut and probably hadn’t bathed in a week, and still I thought, yes, that sounds about right.

  I had always assumed I would be famous and spent a great deal of time draping sheets around me to replicate evening gowns. I would stay up late and watch The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and feel like sitting on that couch was my destiny.

  It’s never too early to believe you deserve the world’s attention simply for being you.

  I rarely heard my parents fight, but I also didn’t think of them as being in love or even being friends. They seemed to be bloodlessly ticking through a list of life tasks with almost no emotion to show for the process or one another. They had married only a couple years out of high school and I was born shortly thereafter. Needless to say, those were terrible ideas. Although, let me state for the record, I am grateful to exist.