KELLY HARWOOD

KELLY HARWOOD THIS IS HOW IT HAPPENS

Your husband arrives home from work to find the dog eating a flank steak and potatoes au gratin off the counter and the children watching cartoons in the dark. You are waiting on the front porch, with a bottle of wine and a thick stack of printed emails, twenty-seven pages to be exact. Correspondence between your husband and a woman named Amber, found in an email account your husband kept secret from you until today, when you found it quite by accident, blinking on the laptop screen. One day, we are in the middle of a life and the next moment, we arrive at its crumbling edge, by force or by choice.

“Tell me about Amber,” you say and her name rolls out of your mouth like a grenade. He falls to his knees right there in the front lawn and looks at you in slow motion anguish, as though he is witnessing a car accident.

“It’s nothing. She’s nothing,” he says.

You point out, “Three years is a long time to spend doing nothing.” Then you laugh and you can’t stop because for the first time in the history of fighting with your husband, you have nothing else to say.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” he says, and you wonder if sorry has ever meant less to anyone.

And this is the part that nobody tells you. In that moment, you don’t feel angry or sad or numb, not yet. Just for the moment, you are exhilarated – joyful even. Not because you suspected he was having an affair,

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or that you had even thought about it, but because tomorrow will finally look different than yesterday. That sacrificial life of laundry and coupons and carpools just lurched off the track and you feel, for the first time in years maybe, that what you do next will actually matter. Somehow it doesn’t feel like the end, it feels like the beginning.

Of course, it isn’t really the beginning or the end because matters involving eleven years and three children are never that simple. You wake up the next morning with a hangover. The kids want cereal for breakfast and they can’t find their shoes, and suddenly none of this seems funny anymore. The ambivalence you felt last night has been replaced with fits of anger. All day, you have imaginary fights with your husband even though he is at work. You keep thinking about the vacuum cleaner he gave you for your birthday last year. A fucking vacuum cleaner.

You replay the important moments of your life, but also the trivial ones. You wonder for instance, if the night you danced with the locals and made love on the beach in Mexico was that special for both of you, or if the tears he cried on your ten-year anniversary were tears of love or tears of guilt. You wonder if another woman slept in your bed when you took the kids to visit your parents. You ask yourself if there was a moment you should have known.

You hate him of course, but now you are starting to hate yourself. You examine your body like evidence in a murder trial. The V-shaped vein in your forehead makes you look pissed, even when you aren’t upset. Your breasts, or what remains of them after three kids, fall in resignation against your chest. You should have

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stayed on that diet. You should have worn the lingerie he bought you instead of the sweatpants. Would it have killed you to get that bikini wax?

The printed emails are hidden under the mattress and you study them when your husband goes to work. You memorize each sentence. You deduce that Amber must be simple and uneducated by the way she writes ‘U R’ and ‘tonite’ and ‘luv.’ You find her profile on Facebook. Given the math, she was in sixth grade when your son was born. You find out where she works and park outside her office. You do this for days before you finally see her walking to her car on her lunch break. You follow her to the grocery store and walk behind her in line at the salad bar. She is fatter and less perfect than you imagined; fatter and less perfect than you – and perhaps this should make you feel better, but it only makes you feel worse.

You write a letter to God, because more than being mad at your husband or even yourself, you are mad at God. You always did the right thing. You sacrificed. You loved your husband even when you didn’t like him. You gave everything and now look at you –with your wilting breasts, your angry forehead. What happened to karma? God tells you that the point of loving is not to be loved in return. You tell him that’s fucked up and he tells you that you are not without blame. You stopped trying. You stopped caring. The conversation keeps coming back to you, so you stop talking to God and start smoking because it allows you not to think. Not thinking feels good, so you keep smoking. You splurge and buy a carton of cigarettes; American Spirits because they are healthier.

The holidays arrive and out of indecision, or guilt

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or your desire to please your children, you make believe that everything is good again. You play Bing Crosby, decorate the house, and wake up Christmas morning to presents and laughter and expectations. And just like that, your life begins to look on the surface like nothing ever happened. You haven’t exactly reconciled, but not deciding has created a new normal, one that everyone seems to be settling into quite comfortably. Friends stop asking you how you’re doing. Your husband forgets to grovel. Eventually he gets mad at you for smoking. He doesn’t like the dress you wore last weekend.

One night, you dream about making dinner, but all you find in the refrigerator is plastic fruit and vegetables, the kind sold in toy stores. The pantry is lined with tiny empty boxes of made-up cereal brands. In the freezer, you find a plastic chicken leg, a rubber steak, and a box of peas that squeaks like a dog toy. You pick up a plum-shaped teacup and it fits like an egg in the palm of your hand. You squeeze your fist around it and the cup shatters, blood drips to the floor. But, when you open your hand, the cup is whole and plum-shaped once again. The blood is gone.

At this point, you are very near the end. The trajectory of the last few months resembles something closer to a scribble than a line; but the true end of your marriage, the vortex of this life spinning down the drain, happens in the silence of your private thoughts as abruptly and irrevocably as a light bulb sputtering into darkness. One moment you can’t imagine your life without this person even if that life sucks. And the next moment, you know that staying is actually killing you one cell at a time.

“I don’t see why you are so angry,” he says, “I’ll

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be home in a few days.” Your husband is leaving on a weekend trip to visit his college friends – a yearly tradition and the argument begins in the car on your way to the airport.

He’s still talking when you begin to see your life as a huge pattern of coiling time retracing itself over and over again – a thousand trips like this one, more baskets of laundry than you can count, one sagging body part after another, and all the time in the world to wonder if another young girl isn’t smiling in your husband’s direction. What you loved about your marriage and your life is gone, and maybe it never existed. Now your old routines, your dreams for the future, and even the reflection of your own face in the mirror, feel as counterfeit as a kitchen full of rubber steak.

You turn to face him as he opens the car door, “Just go,” you say, “but I want you to know, I’m done.” You say this not as a threat, but because it is finally and utterly true. You feel exhilarated, joyful even. You have not written the next line, but you can hear its whisper and you can see the blank page in front of you.

“What?” he says. He raises his eyebrows with a shadow of condescension and you know he has no idea. The filament has snapped, the coil of your lives split haphazardly apart.

One day we are in the middle of a life and the next moment, we arrive at its crumbling edge, by force or by choice. Somehow it doesn’t feel like the end, it feels like the beginning.

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