The Book

I said I was going to upload the entire book that I wrote in November for NaNoWriMo.  I said that back in November.  Here it is.  In its entirety.  It's still un-edited, and as such, still quite a mess.  I think the chapter numbers are all off.  I know that after the conclusion of the book, there are additional scenes, written just to achieve word count.  Read those with caution--they weren't really meant to be part of the book.

Family homeostasis.  That’s what the self-help book that my therapist prescribed calls this—the act of my husband being miserable now that I’m finally happy.  This crosses my mind at the exact same minute I realize I’m holding my breath while he fucks me.

Tom.  A simple name.  It wasn’t an accident.  I long ago subscribed to a theory I myself invented—one which describes the irony between a straightforward name belonging to a complex man.  Phil.  Steve.  Dave.  Monosyllabic names given in an ironic gesture to inwardly deep and multifarious men.  If you like your men multi-layered, you’ll choose one with an uncomplicated name.  If, on the other hand, you find yourself with a Joaquin or a Phineus, you better think about taking some night classes to keep your mental faculties well-greased.  Or so the theory goes.  I’d dated a slew of both the simply-named and the simple-minded, and the theory held surprisingly well.  Until Tom.  Tom’s mother, apparently, hadn’t given much thought to my theory.  Or else something had gone awry in the twenty years that passed between his mother’s bestowing his name upon him and our chance meeting.  Tom, for all of his many strengths and virtues, wasn’t exactly a geyser of philosophy, creativity or spontaneity.

Tom has always been, as a rule, content.  I think this is what initially attracted me to him.  He radiated warmth, stability, a sense of stasis—all of which my life had never seen before.  I thought he would stabilize me and keep me grounded.  He is so goddamn nice.  It wasn’t long before I realized that a person cannot be simply plucked out of one set of life circumstances and plopped down into another without fallout.  Spending your troubled childhood dreaming of a nice husband and family does not necessarily prepare you for life with a nice husband and family. Transplants don’t happen without the possibility, the likelihood even, of rejection. 

He grunts with the effort of sex while I wonder if we’re not in the early stages of rejection.  I turn my head to the side to avoid a falling bead of sweat.

I wish he wouldn’t hang onto the crown of my head while he fucks me.  I feel like a piece of furniture, but, in a bad way.  I’m all for creativity in the bedroom, and I certainly don’t need to feel as though our hearts and souls are combining and dancing about the room as one.  I am not afraid of being carnal, but I need him to do it without holding on to my skull.  I understand that sometimes one has to dance a step outside of her comfort zone in order to ensure the ultimate goal, but using my head for leverage is going far beyond what should be considered comfortable by anyone. 

I feel dead under his weight.  No, not dead.  Inanimate.  Like something that was never alive in the first place.  Something wooden.  Something plastic.  Something cold and fixed.  Something that was manufactured in order to be used.

I cannot remember the last time Tom and I fought.  We never raise our voices.  We disagree politely and talk until we reach a resolution.  We share parenting duties and household chores.  We respect one another and share common interests.  We have a near-perfect relationship.  What we do not have is decent sex.  We used to have decent sex.  In the beginning, I would have even described our sex as good.  It’s not the sex that’s changed; it’s me.

People assume, I am sure, that our sex life is more than satisfactory.  When people find out what Tom does for a living, they follow that line of thought out to its natural conclusion—that we have amazing sex.  Tom is the proprietor of a rather large erotic stories website.  On his site, readers can be entertained by all sorts of insane stories, written by desperate people with too much time on their hands.  He does not pay the authors and he does not collect fees from the readers. We make our money from the advertising on the site.  The dirty popups, the filth in the sidebar, the flashing invitations to the barely legal crowd.  All of those exposed erections are feeding our children.  The site does alarmingly well, but the success of our family business has absolutely zero correlation to Tom’s propensity towards lust.  For as much as Tom’s life revolves around sex, he may as well say he’s in advertising.  He does not read the stories, of this I am certain.  Surely one who reads the stories would not grasp onto the top of his wife’s head to steady himself while he makes love to her.

Making love.  I detest that expression, that greeting card mentality.  It sounds so boring.  It sounds like something one does fully clothed, like making your own pasta or making a Sunday roast.  I am of the age now where I am no longer interested in making love.  I love my husband to death.  I can love all day, but at night, I prefer something a bit more animal, I’m afraid.

I fear I have become the type of woman that most people’s mothers would not like.  It’s a good thing, ironically, that I’m already married.

I tend to not learn from a lesson until long after its completion.  I’m not one of those women who catches herself as she’s falling.  I’m the type who falls without realizing it.  The type who looks at scars that are decades old and cannot recall for the life of her how they got there.  I am a casualty.  I am a born-again casualty.

If you believe any of the stories my mother will tell you, I was a fearless child.  I was the one climbing the ladders of slides only to turn around, in rejection of the intended purpose of the slide, and leap from the top.  I suffered my first broken bone, my left arm, at the age of three.  Everyone assumed that I’d be in a fully body cast by the time I hit puberty.  But instead I kind of straightened up; I had to.  I became responsible as a teenager, ironically.  It’s a textbook case of a child growing up too young because she has no other choices if she’s meant to survive the phase.  And now, here I am at the age of thirty-three, an absolute mess.  My friend, Jill, calls me a “red hot mess” but she does it while shaking her head and practically covering the ears of her seven-year-old daughter.  She pretends that she’s jealous of my situation, of my “creative energy,” as she calls it.  She tells anyone who will listen how envious she is of my artistic bent.  But she’s faking.  Jill wouldn’t trade in her pearly white set of morals for my degrading set if her very life depended on it.  She fakes it so I don’t feel bad about myself.  I kind of want to tell her the truth sometimes—that I’m not the one who should be feeling bad about herself.  Privately, I think my friend is going to die at a Tupperware party.  In her own living room.  With a glass of crappy white wine in her hand.  I cannot imagine a more horrific scenario.

I may need new friends.

My therapist tells me I’m reliving my teenage years.  She makes me sound like an out of control high school student.  By doing so, she strips me of the experiences that made me what I am today.  She demeans me, belittling all that I have survived, making me wonder what the hell was the point of it all.  I am not fifteen anymore.  I have had the experiences of an adult.  I have the life skills and memories of someone who has been through a sufficient quantity of life-changing experiences.  I am not regressing; I am simply trying to incorporate some of what I lost as a child into what I am as a woman.  Because I had turned into a fairly boring woman.  What I want to tell her, but I don’t because I think it makes me look bad, is that I am tired, absolutely bored to death, with pathologizing every ounce of pleasure out of my life.  I am tired of seeking out my imperfections and trying to fix them.  I am tired of holding myself up to some caprciously-declared gold standard of the American woman, some shiny Good Housekeeping picture of the steaming shit life I am supposed to desire.  I am thirty-three years old and I am in the process of finding myself and accepting myself.  I thought therapists were meant to help in that process. 

I want to tell my therapist to fuck off, really.  Ninety nine percent of me wants to tell her to fuck off.  That other one percent is scared to death that she knows something about me that I don’t know.  So I stick around.

Tom comes with a final grunt and rolls off of me, an arm over his eyes, rather dramatically. 

He tells me it was good. 

I nod and feign sleepiness.  I am a walking fucking cliché. 

In a few minutes, he will be asleep and I will be left to my own devices.  My bedside table drawer full of my own devices.  I am thirty-three and not only am I finding myself, I’m learning how to take care of myself.

My therapist is very proud of the fact that we have successfully linked my newfound ability to tell people to fuck off with the recent successes I’ve had with my writing.  The therapist claims this discovery as her own personal victory, even though I would bet all my children on the fact that I was the first to say it.  Ah, that’s the beauty of therapy though.  The client never gets the credit.  Even if I were the first to say it, she would take the credit for having led me to the discovery.  No matter, I’ll let her have this small triumph.  She seems to need some reason to pat herself on the back, and really, it doesn’t matter who came up with the idea, only whether it’s true or not.  And I know it is.  My writing, something I had shelved after marriage, came back to me for some reason.  It came back with a vengeance.  It used to be that I was wholly centered on whichever activity I was undertaking, no matter how trivial.  I would be one hundred percent present when chatting with my friends, while creating a finger-painting with the twins, even while cooking dinner for my husband.  Nowadays, I give about twenty percent of my energies to the task at hand, but the other eighty percent is writing.  I am going through the motions of my real life, while constantly creating an alternate universe.  Always writing, mentally writing, physically writing.  Jotting down notes, rearranging sentences, plucking the beauty, the poignancy out of the mundane.  I see a puddle or a stopped train or a child being scolded and suddenly a plot is born.  It’s like those parents we all know who, at Christmas, spend the day videotaping the special moments instead of living them.  I am constantly recording.  The therapist seems to think I am recording in place of living, a form of escape or avoidance.  She cannot be convinced that, by knowing the record button is on, I’m living a hell of a lot louder than I would be otherwise.  And that maybe that’s not such a bad thing.  It may have started out as an act, but it sure as hell is catching on.

My world is different today than it was two years ago, and I cannot explain it.  I was hoping the therapist would be able to help me sort through the changes.  I hired her on in an attempt to bridge the ever-widening gap between my old self and this new me, for there are aspects of my old life I would very much like to carry over to the new.  Like my marriage.  My children.  My family.  But it’s becoming harder to wade through the details.  And I don’t know why.  The therapist, I fear, is more in awe of me than anything else.  I think she’s torn between wanting to institutionalize me and wanting me to take her shopping.  God knows, she could use a hand in that particular department.  I hope I’m not overinflating my sense of self, but I’m pretty confident she wouldn’t last an hour in my world.  I’d have her doing shots of tequila and piercing her nose while her kids wait anxiously for their dinners, I’m sure.  Her husband would leave her inside of a week.

I roll on my side, away from Tom, who is, as predicted, asleep.  Curling my knees up into my chest, I find my imagination starts its rolling and tumbling.  I have decided that my mind works so well these days merely because I allow it.  I don’t censor these thoughts anymore.  I am not afraid of my own brain—what a relief to finally be able to say that.  My creative fires are burning and they have enough people trying to silence them without me standing in the way.  I feel like my only role is to protect this artist of mine from the people who want to quash it.  I don’t know what’s going to come of any of this, but I know I’m enjoying the ride there.

So I let my thoughts run.  And I don’t feel bad about what I’m thinking.  I roll back over to look at the sleeping figure that is my husband.  He’s still gorgeous.  He’s the same man, somehow, that I married nine years ago.  I have had three babies.  I have grown and shrunk, seemingly continually, for the past several years.  Although I ended up at the same weight and of course the same height as I started out, I look different.  I am different.  I’ve had more sleepless nights.  My breasts have been food.  I have grey hairs coming—hairs whose presence I am trying to meet with a blithe acceptance.  My husband seems to grow only more gorgeous.  His grey hairs make him seem mature and knowing.  They’re a turn on, not only for me but for the scads of younger girls who think they want him.  He’s physically fit.  Gravity has not affected him the way it has affected me.  It’s not fair, of course.  But of course the concept of fair is about as arbitrary as a concept can be.

My husband is gorgeous and wonderful.  Our marriage is near-perfect.  And we have mundane sex.  Sex that used to be enough but all of a sudden isn’t even close.  As a result, he falls asleep and I stay awake thinking about Darwin, the guy at the party.

The only foreseeable problem with letting your imagination free to do its own thing is that once you contemplate the absurd for long enough, the power of its absurdity wears off.  You think long enough about that guy at the party, wondering what his tongue tastes like, and eventually it’s going to feel like it already happened so you may as well take it to the next step.  I know this because I am in the process of living it.

I have mentioned being a walking cliché.

Darwin.  Who names their kid Darwin?  It was one of the first questions I asked him, nearly choking on an olive when he introduced himself.  Like, S.S. Beagle, Darwin?  I asked him if his parents were scientists or if they were hippies.  He laughed and replied that he thinks they just liked the name.

I do not like the name.  I cannot decide if it is a simple name or a complex name.  It sounds simple, but its lack of popularity makes it feel complex.  It being tied to the seasick man who rocked the Creationist boat makes it a better fit in the complex group.  Which means, according to the Theory, Darwin is a simple man.  Still, there’s something about the way his ass looks in those jeans that makes me feel like my theory needs some revising.  Or tossing out altogether.

I can still remember the exact moment when I realized Darwin was going to be a problem.  I could, as a matter of fact, tell you the exact date, since I came home from the party and wrote about it like a mad woman, spilling the details of those jeans all over innocent paper, writing until the sun came up, and my children with it.  I was composing the words in the car on the way home.  Once they met paper, it was some of the best writing I’ve ever produced.  So says my editor.  My editor, not surprisingly, is not a huge fan of my well-intended therapist, which is ironic since seeing the therapist was his suggestion in the first place. 

I had met Darwin months before, but the first time I cared about talking with him was at a party, where we found ourselves sitting in the same circle of social drinkers.  I was holding my gin and tonic in a way I felt to appear carefree and confident.  He was sitting across from me, next to his wife.  I had known for months that he found me attractive.  It was a fact brought to my attention by a common friend.  It was, admittedly, a fact that had to be pointed out to me.  I hadn’t noticed it on my own for the simple fact that I didn’t find him attractive, so I wasn’t looking for it. Once my friend mentioned it, however, I quickly realized she was right.  He was too attentive.  Too concerned and too complimentary.  For such a minor player in my social group, he made himself feel like we had connections stretching back through decades.  It threw me, not because a man had never before been interested in me, but because a man had never before been forward about being interested in me with his wife sitting by his side.  The wife threw me.

Yes, I realized as the night wore on, my friend was right.  And, worse, I realized the feeling could very easily be mutual; with the correct concoction of alcohol and witty sarcasm, this man could quickly become attractive to me.  He wore jeans that seemed to fit like the guys in the commercials.  He looked to be as genuinely carefree as I was pretending to be.  He laughed easily, head held in his hands behind him, feet stretching out in front of him.  Shirt beginning to ride up with the stretch.  With the blonde hair and brown eyes, he’s not exactly my type, but I’ll tell you what’s more attractive than dark hair and blue eyes—the feeling you get when you know a guy wants to fuck you.  And that was one thing he had in no short supply.  It was a product I immediately wished I could bottle and feed to my own husband—passion.

Someone at the party said something that was meant to be funny--a comment that fell well short of its intention, burdened with the weight of its effort.  The mood was dampened by forced laughter from the crowd.  I looked up, hoping to see him cringing along with me.  It was a judge of his intellect, whether or not he found this inane comment humorous.  I was struck to find that not only was he not laughing, it didn’t appear as he had heard the comment at all.  While the rest of the group fumbled with the social faux pas of a terrible joke, he was staring straight at me, those hands still cradling his head, a confident, maybe even cocky half-smile on his lips.  Our eyes caught and in a very Harlequin Romance sort of way, the air changed.  I sound like an asshole when I say that, but trust me when I say it’s true.  Those eyes grabbed hold of mine, and I felt an immediate shock run from my head to the ass of my too-tight jeans.  In its chemical form, I suppose this shock was pure adrenaline.  It was akin to that feeling you get when your toddler breaks free of your grasp in a parking lot—fear mixed with an animal instinct to act. 

My husband asked me for my glass, so that he might refill my drink.  I handed it to him clumsily, feeling foolish for being knocked off my guard by this complete stranger.  Wrapping my sweater around my shoulders, I looked up to realize that Darwin was still looking at me, even as he draped a hand around his wife’s shoulders.  She absent-mindedly met his hand with hers and continued chatting with some nicely-dressed, boring-looking women next to her.  A glass of water on the table beside her and a borrowed copy of What To Expect When You’re Expecting in her other hand, it would appear that Darwin’s comely wife was expecting their first.

And so it was that while conversation flowed around us, Darwin and I continued to stare at each other.  Tom handed me a full drink.  Darwin’s wife, Celia, excused herself to the restroom.  The moment passed and the air stabilized.  Talk turned to politics amongst the males and, of course, babies amongst the females.  The specific area of talk within my anatomically-designated conversation concerned the pros and cons of letting a baby scream herself to sleep at night.  One woman cited the age-old reasoning that all of our parents had used the method and we’d survived just fine.  I felt I could debate the use of the term “just fine,” but decided to let it go, given all of the heads bobbing in agreement around me.  Another woman cited the, apparently, growing body of research which suggests the stress hormone, cortisol, released during said screaming interferes with the baby’s ability to properly develop empathy.  If I’d had even one more cocktail in me, I’d have asked her if she were an endocrinologist or if she just played one on TV. 

I’ll tell you what I thought about the whole thing.  I thought, who gives a fuck.  Do what you have to do and don’t expect a community of experts to stand at your right hand and pat you on your back for every parenting decision you make.  I’ll tell you what else I thought.  As I stared at Darwin, a raised eyebrow indicating my disdain for the segregation of conversation, I noticed the slight stubble growing on his chin and lip.  And my only thought then was not of screaming babies, but about how delicious it is to kiss a man with that kind of stubble.  How, if it’s done properly, your face comes away feeling bruised and raw.  In pain, but ready to do it again immediately.  I hadn’t made out with a guy with that kind of hair growth since high school.  I suddenly, desperately, missed the sensation.

Such were my thoughts that evening.

I returned to the conversation of the screaming babies, but with even less enthusiasm than before the discovery of the stubble.  Mostly, I sat there and wondered how all of those women could concern themselves with talk of crying babies when their own, real live, crying babies were at home.  For once, they were free of the crying babies and now all they want to do is talk about them.  We may as well have stayed at home.  And all of this while there was a perfectly good-looking man sitting here with all that stubble.

Women perplex me at times.

And thus I knew that Darwin was going to be trouble for me.  The night continued without incident.  Certainly, no bystander at the party would pinpoint that night as problematic.  Conversation flowed without innuendo.  I played nice with the wife.  And then we all retired to our respective houses.  I just carried with me the secret thought of stubble.  The goddamn stubble.  My husband, while stopped at a red light, kissed me in his way which indicates that our night was not yet over, and the very first thought that crossed my mind was that he was utterly lacking in stubble.  And this is not good.

Fucking stubble.

And I carried home with me a newfound panic.  Though nothing had happened, I knew something had changed.  It is possible that once one begins noticing stubble on the face of a man who is not her husband, everything changes.  This, most likely, explains why of those nicely-dressed women attend so carefully to their discussion of their children.  Maybe we’re all afraid that if we really confronted ourselves, anarchy would ensue.  Enough stubble could overthrow the happiest of unions, I suppose.

I am, alas, not the cheating type.  I could take that thought home with me, at least.  At the same time, I recognize that the process of thinking about my stand-up behavior up until this point says nothing about my ability to behave myself after this point.  My therapist is currently earning her money off of shaming me for my sudden, unexpected behaviors.  My problems with impulse control.  A few months ago, for example, I made the decision to sell the condo that my parents signed over to me.  Their intention was to gift it to me before their deaths, avoiding taxes and holdups.  Essentially, that condo was my inheritance.  But I didn’t want it.  The location was all wrong, the windows faced neither the rising nor the setting sun, the flooring was in a state of disrepair.  So I sold it immediately, investing the money in some microfinance programs in Uganda.  This decision, it goes without saying, was not highly respected amongst my parents, my husband, or my therapist.  I defend it still.  They left me the condo so that I could use the money to make my world more comfortable.  I instead turned it over to people whose lives are uncomfortable in a way I cannot even imagine.  This helps me.  It helps me sleep.  I get frustrated at people who do not understand it.

My therapist’s favorite pastime, of late, is to rub my nose in the Uganda decision, as it seems most of the money I’ve invested is already gone in a way that I’ll never see again.  I don’t mind losing the money. I mind defending my decision to try to do good in the world to a woman who pays the mortgage off of making me feel bad about myself.  I do mind being judged by this sterile woman who comes to work always adorned with some stupid brooch.  Who the fuck wears a brooch?  Every time I see it on her, I am reminded of Girl Scout badges.  I wonder what the Therapist accomplished to achieve this particular badge? Convinced a teenager to stop smoking pot. Made a stoic cry.  I think the Therapist thinks she is very important.

Still, even though the therapist is not ideal, it probably is worth noting that I, without much effort, connected that exciting feeling in my belly that I got when making the condo decision to that excited feeling I got slightly lower when looking at Darwin’s denim-clad crotch.  Impulsivity, lately, feels like an addictive drug.  This is why I have to worry.  This is why that feeling of panic was the souvenir from that party.

The party was two months ago.  Darwin and I have seen each other since.  Each time, the air has been charged with sexual tension, or so I think.  His wife is starting to get bigger.  I’m citing the additional hormones for explanation of why she hasn’t noticed the way her husband stares at me.  Or maybe she’s used to it.  Maybe this is something he does.  I should care more about her.  Mental note: care more about her.  As it is, my only real concern is about how I can insert myself in this man’s world without collapsing either one of ours.  I am convinced that I do not need to leave my husband.  I am convinced that this dance will not end in sex.  I am just as convinced that I cannot give him up.

I enjoy troubling myself with the crisis, if I’m honest.  I enjoy the good mental exercise of debating the usefulness of monogamy, defining the acceptable boundaries of marriage, imagining myself in this situation that is so far removed from my daily experience.  Perhaps my marriage could be saved best by my finding a hobby.

I sigh and decide to abandon the pursuit of sleep.  Throwing an old college sweatshirt over my tank top, I quietly head to the living room.  Never a night owl, per se, I have nonetheless always appreciated a quiet room and the space to be alone with my thoughts.  It happened naturally that, after becoming a wife and mother, those occasions only occurred at nighttime.  Pouring a cup of black coffee, I sit down to write. 

I have recently accepted a position as contributing writer for a rather prestigious college literary magazine, and I am wondering, to be honest, what the hell I was thinking.  I’m wondering if I have what it takes to be as mature as this magazine is going to want me to be.  As centered, focused and driven as academia expects.  As concerned with the details.  Academia does not concern itself, unfortunately, with the matter of who is sleeping with whom.  Nor does it care how long a baby is left to cry.  Academia’s focus is on the potrayal of the husband as oppressor, the cheater as hero, the baby as villain.  It’s all a bit much at times, and I find myself quite fickle about my appreciation or distaste of it.  I was wise enough to hide this fact when accepting the position.

The focus of my current essay is “The Female as Other in South African Literature.”  No, seriously.  I selected my thesis at one of those moments when I was utterly in love with the concept and eager as hell to put it to paper.  I remember feeling manic with the idea, thinking perhaps I was on the brink of something huge.  I have, spread across my desk, no less than six pages of hand-written notes on the subject.  Excited, illegible notes.  Notes that now are incomprehensible to me.  It will take some time for me to find my way back to my initial excitement about this project.  I am struggling, tonight, to remember why I cared about the Female as Other.  I think, actually, that I just enjoy using the word “other” as a noun.  It got me through graduate school, surely it could write this paper.  Another thing about academia: if you can adopt a writing tone that convinces your readers you know what you’re talking about, you are free to say pretty much anything.

I prefer to do all of my writing by hand, on paper.  This is messy and time-consuming, but I love the feel of it.  The heft of the pen, the scratching on the paper.  I cannot fathom replacing that ancient medium with something as impersonal as a keyboard.  The clack clack clack of fingernails on keys makes me feel anxious and unsettled; this is the opposite of how I would like to feel while writing.  When I write, I create.  Computers are, in my opinion, the great passion-suck of the modern world.  I’m no Marxist, but I do believe he may have been onto something with that whole “labor equals value” thing.  We sometimes, I think, get lost in the distances we’ve created, inserted, in between ourselves and our work.   Computers are impersonal and sterile for a girl who rather enjoys the blood that comes from the occasional paper cut. 

Pulling out a fresh sheet of lined paper, I draw columns.  This is, sadly, how I conduct my research.  My hand is wobbly and the unevenness of the lines bothers me immediately.  No matter, I forge on.  At the head of one column, I write Coetzee.  He’s an easy choice.  The middle column earns the name Gordimer, another fairly obvious choice.  I hesitate over the third.  I want desperately to write the name of Doris Lessing, but refrain, as she’s not actually South African.  As I cross her name off the list, I realize immediately that it is her writing, her body of fictional work as it correlates to her biography, that I really want to explore. Perhaps my thesis needs reworking in order to include Lessing. 

Doris Lessing.  She was born in Persia, unfortunately for me.  She’s known for creating a new feminist dogma, a claim which she rejects wholeheartedly.  It’s a title she doesn’t want, which intrigues me.  I am amused by the thought of society foisting a title like “feminist” upon a woman who doesn’t wish it.  Oh, look how far we’ve come.  Which means she’s right, of course, about the troublesome nature of the word.   Which means her critics are also right, of course, in their declaration of her as feminist.  This is the tangled, clusterfuck world of academia.  I sigh, cracking my knuckles against the desk in front of me.  This is what I’m up against.  Thinking down these roads is spectacular exercise, but leaves me no room for diversion.  So long as I keep the straight and narrow, I can complete the essay.  But it almost needs to be done in one sitting.  If I stand up, even, to get a fresh cup of coffee, I lose my way when I return.  I return to the papers and it is as if someone stole in and scribbled notes in a different language.

This phenomenon is due, of course, to the fact that what I am writing is utter bullshit.

Lessing’s real claim to fame, the thing that most interests me anyway, is the way she summarily up and left her children because she found the act of raising them to be a bit tedious.  I flirt with the idea of trying to understand this concept, but cannot help but find it revolting.  Even I resist this particular claim.  I understand the concept of abandoning one’s children about as well as I understand why it is that hamsters, on occasion, eat their young.  Some people, I suppose, were simply not intended to reproduce.  Lessing once stated that she left the children because she didn’t wish to become a “frustrated intellectual.”  This, I think as I pour a second cup of coffee, is the reality, Lessing.  This is the tradeoff.  This is why it’s not for everyone, and this is why we call it a sacrifice.  The challenge, someone needs to explain to her, is to fulfill the intellectual side of your self without leaving your children in South Africa.  I’m of the opinion that she probably didn’t have to leave the children at all.  The type of person who calls herself an intellectual while simultaneously referring to herself in the third person for the benefit of her toddler who does not have the maturity to grasp the concept of pronouns is surely not letting her mental faculties decay in the rot of motherhood.  Or at least this is what I have been telling myself.

Nonetheless, I am both troubled and intrigued by the existence of a woman who receives countless accolades for characters she manufactured out of nothing and cajoled into being the stars of her moving plots.  Her characters, her babies, the fictional beasts that propelled her to stardom in the literary world.  Lessing’s list of achievements is almost laughable, it’s so comprehensive.  And yet, yet, in order to do it she left behind two of the very real people she actually did create.

I turn then from the mountain of illegible scribblings to the mountain of unfolded laundry.  Housework, while certainly not something I enjoy doing, does have the benefit of being a tidy, uncomplicated activity.  This is probably why I don’t find myself frequently engaging in it.  I save the housework for when I get stuck writing.  I think, as a housewife, it is probably meant to be the other way around.

There are a lot of clothes to fold.  I have three children, none of whom I ever contemplated leaving on the southern tip of a faraway continent.  Michaela is six.  A gorgeous, leggy, long-haired six.  Her twin sisters, Jasmine and Cora, will be four in a few months.  The twins only recently grew hair long enough to tie back into any kind of ponytail.  They are toothy, dimpled, and in my mind fairly irresistible.  They are the children their mother doesn’t quite understand—I think most families have those.  They are spunky, sassy, and independent.  In their own way, all of my children were surprises.  Michaela was a surprise in that we thought, up until a few moments after her birth, that she was Michael.  Jas and Cora were surprises in several ways: one, we did not necessarily plan to have more children and two, we certainly did not plan on having two children at one time, after so recently having had our first.  It seems as though Tom and I are fertile.  This is evolution’s way of signing off on the validity of our union.  A woman’s belly button is forever changed after bearing children.  Particularly twins.  My bellybutton gives a giant middle finger to evolution’s signing off on our union.

My children, it astonishes me to see, are more and more becoming their own people.  For so long it seemed they didn’t change at all.  For several years my life was all about attending to their needs, and enjoying what I could from the process.  But now they have become true players in our family.  They say things that surprise me.  They have the voices of individuals,.  It is a new phenomenon—being surrounded by real people instead of human parrots.  The parrots were often annoying, but at least they were predictable.  I know now that we are entering a new era with our family.  All baby fat has been shed in this house, and there will be no more.  I know, from reading the occasional forwarded message that comes through my inbox, that I am meant to feel profound sadness at the passing of the stage of babyhood.  I enjoy very much being a mother.  My daughters are amazing people.  And yet I am not the one who clings to the idea of another child.  The moment I found out we were expecting twins, I asked my husband if he was interested in getting a vasectomy.  He was.  We are no longer fertile.

Michaela is in the first grade.  The twins just started preschool.  For the first time in six years, I have time to myself during the day.  It maybe is worth noting that I first noticed Darwin right about at the same time my daughters started school. Perhaps I need to look into volunteering at the school.  Or being more timely with the laundry.

Darwin, Darwin, Darwin.  For a name that initially made me choke, it certainly does roll trippingly off my tongue nowadays.  Darwin is, apparently, an artist.  Discovering this information very nearly sealed the deal for me.  I about drove off the road when my husband mentioned this to me.  Is there anything sexier than an artist?  Messes are hopelessly and predictably drawn to other messes.  Artists are nearly always a mess. Tom is the antithesis of a mess, which is, of course, why he fathered my children.  But I have never quite relinquished the idea of being with another artist, another creator.  I absolutely delight in the depth behind the eyes of a fellow artist.  I love the deconstruction of the world around them.  I feel like artists live in a metaphor and it’s often a fairly sexy place to be.  A messy, sexy place to be.

In college I took exactly one science class.  And from that class, about the only thing I can recall is the mating behavior of chimps.  (This is why I became a writer.)  Female chimps are promiscuous.  They, apparently, will try to mate with many of the male chimps in their group, and if the group is a bit wanting in terms of desirable mates, the female finds another group.  She doesn’t live with the other group; she just mates with them.  I like this about the chimps.  Once pregnant, however, the female chimp tries its hardest to convince the dominant male chimp from her own group that the baby is his.  I adore this about the chimp.  When it comes to babies, it is best to find a solid chimp.  When it comes to fucking, any chimp will do.  This, I think as I fold my daughters’ clothes, should be a bumper sticker.

As I pull out the ironing board and plug in the iron, my mind turns from the chimps back to Darwin.  There aren’t many professional artists in the world today.  Computers took care of that vocation as well.  Fine artists turned into graphic artists.  Musicians turned into sound producers.  Photographers turned into charlatans who use prepackaged software programs to fool the world into thinking a sky could ever be as blue as they’ve made it appear.  It ought to be illegal, this tampering with our reality, this setting us up for disappointment.

Not so with stubbly Darwin.  Darwin, thanks in no small part to his wife’s handsome income from her real estate business, is a throwback.  Darwin spends his days splashing honest-to-god paint onto honest-to-god canvas.  He has a studio.  I learned of this studio when I attended an engagement party at his house last month.  Engagement party.  I didn’t even know there was such a thing as an engagement party—there certainly wasn’t back when I got engaged.  And yet, the good folks at the party supply stores seem to have convinced the American people that when a couple declares their intentions to share a mortgage and fuck only each other for the rest of their lives, it is a time to bust out the cutlery and crepe paper.  I wonder what the whoring female chimp would have to say about that.

Tom and I went.  The woman accepting the diamond ring, Marianne, works for the web site.  I wonder what her betrothed thinks of his wife-to-be working for a porn site.  I don’t pretend to know all of the inner-workings of the adult male brain, I don’t even pretend to want to know, but I have to think on some level he thinks it’s kind of hot.  It’s not information that he’s comfortable sharing with his mother, probably, but I bet all of his friends know.

It was interesting being inside of Darwin’s house.  It is interesting, nowadays, to be inside the house of any adult who doesn’t have children (yet).  They live so differently; they may as well be a different species.  They have glass knick-knacks—things which are not meant to be played with or even touched, things which are not useful—at toddler-eye level.  All of their books have not only their front covers, but oftentimes an additional paper jacket.  My children always ate the jackets first.  There is, ideally, no vomit on the floor.  Ever.  The twins both had serious reflux issues; the lack of vomit in one’s house is still something I notice.  When the girls were still very young, I used to eye houses like these and enjoy pointing out to their owners all of the various ways my children could kill themselves.  A glass coffee table?  Because that’s safe.  The huge, spiky, ornamental brass whateverthefuckitis on the coffee table?  Unnecessary, first of all, and a missing eye waiting to happen.  The houseplant is poisonous and the decorative marbles covering its soil—choking hazards and again unnecessary (plants, it appears, thrive in soil.  This is not something to be ashamed of).  Now that my children are older, now that there is no more baby fat, I just enjoy being in a clean house.  I’m jealous that they can keep their alcohol in an unlocked pantry.

Celia hosted the party.  Apparently, this is how I know Darwin.  Celia is Marianne’s best friend.  Somehow Celia started coming to work functions back in the day.  Now it appears that Darwin has snaked his way onto the company baseball team.  I think that this year we, as a family, will start supporting the porn site’s baseball team.  Seems a good way to bond.  Baseball players wear the most ridiculous, revealing clothing.

Darwin, for whatever reason, does not seem to have a problem flirting openly with me.  I know that some men, women too, simply have flamboyant, coy personalities.  These are the people who know how to schmooze their way to the top of whichever corporate ladder they’re scaling.  They tend to do well at work because they are continually greasing the wheels by laying on the flattery.  These are the men who will comment on your blouse with a wink and then ask you to pick up sandwiches for the next board meeting.  These men are not going to fuck you, but they do want you to think that maybe it’s a possibility.  Your thinking it’s a possibility makes it more likely that you’re going to come back with the sandwiches.  And then you have men like Darwin.  Darwin comments on your jeans while looking at your tits and rolling a cigarette.  Darwin will not climb the corporate ladder because he doesn’t give a shit about this definition of success.  His particular ladder involves paintbrushes and canvas.  Darwin, I think, may very well be the guy who shamelessly fucks around on his wife.  I’m not sure if I’ve ever met one of those before.  I know, for a fact, I’ve never met a guy who made the whole prospect seem kind of attractive.  Darwin is trouble.  Darwin is trouble that makes me smile.

Whatever his motives, he is interested in talking to me and he is amused by me.  I am not immune to this level of flattery.  This aspect of the attraction has very little to do with the way his t-shirt clings to his chest and then falls away from his taut abdomen.  This is something else entirely.  I have been married for nine years.  I have been with Tom since I was in college.  When a woman is with the same man for so many years, she begins to define herself as part of a whole.  She thinks of herself in relation to her husband, I’m not sure there’s any escaping that.  She unconsciously grows and changes in the ways that will seem palatable to her husband, because he has become a part of her.  She is pleased by the same things that please him.  Not only does she fail to grow organically, she fails to grow at all.  She forgets, sometimes, about cultivating those other aspects of her personality, because she has the thing that it seems all women crave—contentment.  There is no need to change because she has found acceptance in someone else.  Some women even fall into the trap of thinking that not only do they not have to continue growing, they can let themselves depreciate.  These are the women who scored their husbands with lingerie, fine wine and adventurous sex and yet ring in their fifth anniversaries in sweat pants with a lukewarm Budweiser and quiet missionary-style love-making.  It’s horrifying, really.

It has been awhile since I have been admired.  My husband loves me, I know.  But when you’re with someone for so long, you start to wonder if they love you because you can make a decent omelet and you’re a relatively cooperative roommate or if it’s because you are truly amazing.  Humans, I think, never outgrow wanting to be amazing.  So for a veritable stranger to come in and offer not only acceptance but admiration for who I am, for all of me, it opens up another door.  It reminds me that I am a sexual being and that men still find me attractive.  It reminds me that I am attractive and that I am more than whatever it is I most often bring to the table in my marriage.  All of those little pieces of me that got left undeveloped when I got married?  Those might be the pieces that are the most attractive.  There are parts of me that Tom doesn’t even know.  With all the busyness of marriage, I have not had, no I have not made, time to develop them.  Sometimes it takes someone different to remind you of who you could be.  If everyone really sat down and thought about that, the world would become a much scarier place.

At the time of this engagement party, I was convinced that my husband could and would reap the benefits of this self-discovery.  I would grow into this amazing, different, creative, passionate woman and he would look at me through newly appreciative eyes.  Tonight, as I fold and iron my daughters’ clean clothes, I am significantly less certain.  I think that what has happened is that I have changed into someone Tom does not know.  I think he feels threatened.  I think he feels lost.  I think I have unwittingly shamed him for staying the same while my entire world turned on its head.  I have made Tom think of himself as boring.  It seems abundantly clear now that Tom ought to have been aware of my so-called attempts to spice things up, if in fact he were to reap the benefits.  The act of self-improvement, in this fashion, probably ought to be declared outright to one’s spouse.  The fact that I know it is impossible to tell him now reminds me that this is not a lily-white situation.  Darwin is not, I guess, merely a marital aid.  Darwin is something else altogether.

At the engagement party it was as though Darwin did not see my husband at all.  My husband is a striking-looking man.  He is hard to miss in a room.  He is not meek; he doesn’t hang out in the corners, fiddling with an empty glass.  To watch Darwin ignore Tom’s presence entirely amused the hell out of me.  I didn’t know whether to defend Tom or to just feel bad for him. For my part, I now know what I should have done.  I should have ignored Darwin and treated him as the creep he was acting.  I should have been wary of a man who behaves like a bachelor in front of his pregnant wife.  I ought to have questioned his motives, and I ought to called him out on his behavior.  The entire situation should have disgusted me.

But I think I might just be a whoring chimp.  Because no matter what my brain is telling me, every other molecule in my body is responding to those eyes.  Because it sounds so pathetic, I laugh at myself when I try to justify it.  And when I try to explain it, to Jill or to my therapist, I always preface my comments by saying, “I know this sounds terrible.”  I know it sounds terrible that I want to fuck Darwin, but it is what it is.

The engagement party was the first time I knew it wasn’t all in my head, that Darwin was in this as much as I was.  I still don’t know if he does this at every party and I just happened to be the common denominator or if I presented a special problem in his life, but I do know that when we are in the same room, he gravitates towards me.  As my husband pulled out the chair for me to sit, Darwin exhaled a cloud of cigarette smoke and came in from the patio.  His eyes were on me, even as he whispered in his wife’s ear.  They both headed towards the table.  I was struck, again, at how put-together Celia looked.  She looked like a magazine.  She is one of those women who order clothes straight off the mannequin, with the jewelry to boot.  She is the woman who throws down the credit card, demanding to look like the dummy doing the advertising.  That night her hair was pulled back into some kind of complicated-looking bun.  I wondered if the entire thing was removable, like some kind of decorative shelf affixed to the back of her head.  I wondered how long it takes her to get undressed at the end of the day.  I wondered, too, if this wasn’t part of the reason why her husband was staring at my ass.

Darwin pulled out the chair closest to me.  And there it was.  If I needed any proof, I tell myself, this moment would be it.  At a table full of better seating options, Darwin chose to position himself closest to me.  I felt giddy, like an unintelligent schoolgirl.  And then I immediately felt stupid for the giddiness.  When did I become such an adoring fan of average-looking men with questionable values?

I am starting to get to the point, tonight, with all of this laundry, where I hate myself for spending so much of my day thinking on it.  This is the way it goes though.  When I am with him, it makes sense that I act the way I do.  It only feels foolish when I re-think it later.  It makes me want to pack a bag and drive away.

He smelled that night as he smells now, though I have now gotten used to the scent.  It no longer brings me to my knees.  Cigarette smoke mixed with some kind of amazing cologne.  It’s subtle.  You have to be close to him to smell either.  I should not be, therefore, as accustomed to his smell as I am.

The meal, and Darwin’s physical proximity to me during it, required a third cocktail.  I was half-afraid to ask for another, worried that perhaps instead of relaxing me, the extra vodka would dissolve that last shred of dignity I had and lead me straight back to Darwin’s bedroom.  I wondered if the entire bedroom smelled like him.  I decided it probably didn’t.  Most likely, Celia was fastidious about cleaning agents and personal hygiene.  The room probably smelled like lilacs or babies or some Glade Plug-In chemical combination of the two. 

It makes no sense that I don’t like Celia.  She seems perfectly nice, even in the face of my checking out her husband.  Just lacking edginess.  Women without edginess frighten me.  They make me feel sad, too.  I feel like they have somehow escaped the pivotal, traumatic experience that would have coaxed them into their true potential.  Maybe they escaped the heartache that would make them crave the dirty life.  All that contentment just makes them seem so underdeveloped.  I want to envy their complacency, and part of the time I do.  But mostly I just think that they are under-prepared for the realities of life. 

And they tend to not like me either.

Since the engagement party, Darwin and I have found, or perhaps invented, excuses to be with one another.  The baseball team is doing well this year, or so I gather from the frequent clapping on our side of the field.  I have approached Darwin, foolishly, to volunteer his time with the university charity with which I am involved.  The charity aims to strengthen the presence of the arts in inner-city schools.  I head up the writing program.  Darwin, thanks to my craftiness, is now leading the visual arts program.  And I still have no idea what I am doing.  I watch myself flirt with this guy and it is like I’m watching a sitcom on TV.  I know, faintly, what is going to happen, but only because the storyline is so trite, not because I have any say over any of it.  It’s pathetic.  I cannot stop hating myself for it.  I cannot stop doing it either.

I called Jill after the engagement party.  I am not sure what I was hoping to achieve by confessing my feelings for another man to my friend who already obviously judges some of the other less savory decisions I have made in life.  But I felt the need to unload on someone, and I suppose, for some reason, I was looking for validation. 

I shocked myself, at first, with the amount of work it took to get those words out.  I stammered.  I tend to not stammer, so to listen to myself doing it threw me further off my guard.  The first time I heard myself say the name “Darwin” I realized that to talk about the problem of him likely only compounds the problem itself.  To hear myself, a married woman, whispering the name of another man felt like betrayal.  It was not enough, however, to make me not say what I had called to say.

I started explaining how nice it felt to be noticed by someone again, how invigorating it was to select an outfit that I knew would entice a male.  It has been so long, I heard myself saying to her, since I have been so deliberate and intentional with my dress.  It has been so long since I really cared.

Jill tried; I’ll give her that.  She tried to be supportive and understanding.  She tried empathy, which I knew was a struggle for her.  She adores her marriage, loves her husband first, and generally subscribes to the theory that family is everything.  It’s the same theory I used to lean on to validate my own marriage.  I knew that Jill’s trying to understand my situation was a stretch.  Her initial response was one of validation.  “Of course you feel that way.”  It’s her patented response because she wants to be liked.  I don’t care if she likes me or if she thinks I like her; I want to discuss my situation.  I try breaking it down for her into simpler terms.  High school lingo.  “He turns me on.”  “Leandra,” she says, “you can’t beat yourself up about that.  It is perfectly normal to feel attracted to other men.  You are an attractive woman, and marriage doesn’t mean you’re dead, honey.  We can still look!”  I know, as soon as she says this in her happy voice, that she has missed the point altogether.  She assumes mine to be a crisis of guilt over enjoying the company of another man.  She thinks she can offer me some hackneyed saying, something you would see on a freaking refrigerator magnet, about how marriage doesn’t equal death, and I will feel relieved and go on my merry way.  This is not it at all.  As soon as Jill committed the error of including herself in the “we” she used to describe my situation, I knew I was not going to find whatever it is I called her looking for.

Mine is a crisis of wanting to fuck another man.  Of wanting his smooth chest under my open mouth, of wanting his legs pinning mine to a hard surface underneath me.  Mine is also a crisis of not feeling the appropriate amount of guilt in that realization.  I don’t imagine Jill to be suffering from this same crisis.

When I tell her that I want to fuck him, the line goes quiet.  A few seconds later, I hear her draw her breath in and suggest counseling.  Marriage counseling.  It’s the go-to response.  I think our society has created the occupation of counselor to absolve us regular people of the guilt we feel when we do not know how to handle a particularly difficult social situation.  I tell my closest friend that I want to fuck someone else, she tells me to see a counselor.  If I were to see another counselor for this, there would at least be a list of rules and codes under which the counselor is meant to act.  Counselors tend to not offer refrigerator magnet advice, but only because they have been properly trained to avoid giving advice altogether.  Perhaps we could all be saved some time and money by just photocopying the rules that counselors get and passing them out to everyone.  Cut out the middle man.  Nobody would feel any better about their lives, but we would all save a lot of time and money.

I tell Jill that I’m not interested in marriage counseling and that I know Tom would be less so.  She reminds me that my children are worth the effort of trying to figure it out.  I sigh.  This is not what I was after.  It feels like she is trying very hard to not reprimand me.  I understand that what I have said is worthy of reprimand, but I hate that she doesn’t trust me to be able to do that for myself.  I know that the situation is complicated.  I know I am out of line.  I know I am in too deep, feeling the wrong things, saying the wrong things.  I know it’s filthy and complicated.  I know this.  I told her this.  I don’t need for her to parrot it back to me.  I need for her to weigh in.  I need for her to do her job at being a woman.  I need for her to break it down with me.  I need a friend, not a pastor.  I am frustrated that she is so locked into this role of wife and mother that she is unable to view the whole thing philosophically.  It’s not hard.  I need for her to get outside of herself for a moment.

But I know she won’t.  I know that she finds the entire conversation more dangerous than interesting.  I know she is looking for a lull in conversation so that she can interject something vanilla, change the topic entirely and get out of the whole thing.  I know she wishes I hadn’t called her with this information and I can imagine her scanning her room nervously, hoping her husband or daughter can’t hear even her side of the conversation.

It makes me want to shock her.  I’m not sympathetic to whichever needs she’s playing to right now.  I don’t care that what I am saying doesn’t fit in with her moral code.  I have my own moral code and I just need for her to be honest, be open, accept that there may be something more complex than just right or wrong going on here.  I want her to accept the position of “gray” in her black and white world.  I think it would kill her.  I’m like that though.  I like to force people into situations I know they do not have the life skills to get themselves safely out of.  And then I want to watch them squirm.  I do it because I have paid my dues.  Watching other people struggle in situations I would handle with ease is return on my investment.

The laundry is done and if I am to get any sleep tonight, I should attempt it now.  The girls will be up in just a few hours.  It is ironic, now that all of my children sleep happily through the night and in fact well into the morning, I am getting less sleep than ever.  I have become addicted to late nights and caffeinated mornings.  I use coffee to fuel myself when I feel manic enough to keep writing all night.  I don’t care that I’m missing sleep because, for the first time in years, I am doing it on my own terms.  There are no children who are calling me, only my thoughts.  The children, oddly enough, were easier to get back to sleep.  Oftentimes, it is too late to even climb into my bed.  My bed will feel too much like eight hours of sleep, when all I have time for is three.  So I sleep on the couch, away from my husband.  Although it feels like it, I know none of this is an accident.  I am starting to think that there are no accidents. 

It feels as though I’ve just closed my eyes and then suddenly there is the warm smell of Cora’s tiny body on me.  Cora is my snuggler, the quieter twin.  She climbs in under the blanket I threw over myself a few hours ago and wraps my arm around her own body.  She closes her eyes and lays perfectly still, her breath becoming more regular.  I breathe in the clean smell of her hair and marvel at my good fortune.  Beautiful, healthy children.  A successful husband.  A nice house and the luxury to come and go as I please in it.  No intelligent woman would jeopardize this.  There is no stubble worth it.  I vow, for the fifth day in a row, to cut it off immediately before it gets worse.

And then Jasmine comes down the steps.  She wants Cora’s place next to me.  Cora is asleep.  I just want for Cora to stay asleep and for Jasmine to keep quiet.  Cora and Jas might be twins but their sharing the space of my womb does not mean that they are willing to share anything else.   It’s draining to constantly be refereeing.  It is draining too  to have three little bodies clamoring for your physical presence.  Not to mention the large, adult male body who seems to need it as well.  I love my role as mother, but if I’m honest I would have to admit that my body is tired of being climbed upon.

A minute later, Michaela comes downstairs, fully dressed.  She asks me, as she does most mornings, for a cup of coffee.  She needs it, she says, because she is tired.  She is six.  I consider myself an early-bloomer in the dysfunction department, and even I was not damaged enough to want coffee before I was thirteen.  I sigh and explain, as I do every morning, that only adults drink coffee and that if she is tired, we can easily adjust her bedtime.  She defends her perceived right to coffee because Tracy at school drinks it.  I bet she does, I think.  I know Tracy’s mom.  I would bet this month’s mortgage on the fact that Tracy drinks coffee at six.  Michaela, however, will not drink coffee at six, no matter how bad things get around here.  A six-year-old coffee drinker in the home is sure sign that mommy’s getting some on the side.  Kids shouldn’t crave caffeine to get through their days.

Mommy, the maker of waffles and the denier of coffee, is not getting any on the side.  Mommy, however, is so preoccupied with the thought of getting some on the side that she now feels guilty in bed with her husband.  In a moment of self-doubt, I convince myself that Michaela has picked up on this, thus the request for coffee.  I vow to reign it in.

I bid the husband goodbye and drive the girls to school, waving at all of the shiny mommies in the car line.  I wonder how many of them are fucking around on their husbands, in body or spirit.  The divorce rate in America is atrocious.  The statistics regarding infidelity are downright horrifying.  Fifty percent of American men report having cheated on their wives.  That’s half.  And those are the ones who are confessing.  We can conclude, therefore, that the guy who doesn’t cheat on his wife is a diamond in the rough.  Perhaps this statistic should make me feel nauseous.  Instead, it comforts me by offering justification for the thoughts I am having about Darwin.  I’m not a cheater; I am a symptom of an underlying social problem.  I am proof that humans aren’t meant to be monogamous.  I am following a social trend. 

But mostly, I am an asshole.

Predictably, after Darwin and I started working together on the Arts Collaboration Project, the flirting intensified.  We went from merely saying clever things to amuse one another to saying slightly dirty things to arouse one another.  It doesn’t take much.  We have an ongoing joke about us spending more time with one another than with our respective spouses.  There is no joking about it, really.  I have decided that until I know what is going on in my own little brain, I cannot tolerate spending much alone time with Tom.  It seems unfair to him.  I feel guilty, which is ridiculous because I have not done anything.  So I avoid Tom altogether, spending more time with Darwin, waiting until I do something for which I should feel appropriately guilty.  The entire thing feels so sophomoric.  I should be so embarrassed.

I drop the twins off and I am alone.  I love driving alone.  Lately, it’s the only way I can complete a thought. And even then, even with the windows down and the scenery flying by, it seems I can only think when the music is blasting.  I hope there are no emergencies this morning, because I would never be able to hear a siren behind me.  As soon as the effect of the music begins to dull, I increase the volume.  I need to feel the music in my bones.  It needs to be loud.

I drive the long way home.  I am in no rush and I know that the music won’t feel as invigorating if I listen to it on my stereo in my house.  I need movement.  I take the back roads so that I can drive fast.  When I was a child, the feeling of being in a fast-moving vehicle would frighten me.  It felt out of control, almost angry.  And today, for the exact same reasons, driving too fast is one of my favorite pastimes.  I am not, no matter how it may appear, out of control.  I am a good driver.  I have no accidents on my record.  I do not become anxious in the rain or when traveling through construction or when on major highways. The darkness of country roads at night is comforting to me. I do not worry about getting lost.  My sense of direction is fairly fine-tuned, and I am not afraid to try to find my way back home on my own.  I hate that many women give up driving when they have a man in their lives.  They’re resigned to the passenger seat.  I don’t know how they feel comfortable with the metaphor.

I have been accused, in the past, of seeing metaphors where they do not exist.

I turn the music up.  It’s Radiohead.  You know a group has talent when a falsetto voice can make you simultaneously angry and exhilarated.  Angry falsetto.  Who would have thought?  I love it.  I need it louder.  I wonder what will happen when I get too old to listen to angry music.  I wonder how many years ago this should have happened.

I grip the wheel tightly and turn onto the street before my own.  This street will, if I continue on it, take me out of the city.  It is also the long way to Darwin’s studio.  I am trying, very hard, to not end up in Darwin’s studio.  I have been invited and thus far I have resisted all temptation.  My having taken this turn is probably not a good decision.

I feel angry, for some reason.  I am angry with the situation in which I have found myself.  I’m angry that I am so desperately attracted to this man who, three months ago, I would have never noticed.  I am worried about what that could mean.  And I am scared of my inability to figure it out.  I like to congratulate myself on my self-awareness.  I like to think I am ahead of the curve and understand why I am doing the things I am doing.  Darwin has thrown me completely, and I am lost.  For a person with as many responsibilities and connections as I have, I feel as though I am floating out in some nebulous, other-worldly place.  I feel alone.  It does cross my mind that a married woman should never feel this alone, and this, I think, is what drove me to this mess in the first place.  Even as I think it, I know it’s not true.  But it’s a tidy answer, and it will do for now.

At the same time, I feel giddy with the messiness of it all.  Part of me shrugs a shoulder and raises an eyebrow and thinks, fuck it, life is complicated.  There are no simple situations, if you’re living honestly.  In a way, I have fallen in love with the heavy complexity of it all.  The messiness of my situation confirms the dark theories I have always held about the world.  Part of me feels angry with Tom for being who he is.  Part of me wants to blame him entirely for this chaos.  What the hell was he doing, picking me for a wife?  All of my damage didn’t send up the red flag?  He really thought he could tamp down all mess that I came with?  He proposed to me when I felt crazy with my own head.  He proposed to me when I was drinking too much, angry too much, feeling too much and not knowing how the hell to get out from under any of it.  He proposed to me when I was broken and part of me thinks he liked me that way.  Part of me thinks that as long as I was damaged, he came out looking like the good guy.

But I started writing and turned that damage into art.  And it is a damn successful art.  I now have a book deal in the works and a regular column in a prestigious magazine.  Tom must be thrown to see that the world rather likes me messy.  That I’m not his fixer-upper project.  It must bother him to his core to see a usefulness, a beauty even, in my dysfunction.  It certainly calls into question the truthfulness of his own neat and tidy life.

And that makes me angry.

Tom does not know how to deal with my artist, and this, more than Darwin’s abs, will be our undoing.

Still, there is the question of Darwin’s abs.

I put my blinker on and turn, away from Darwin’s studio.  Today is not a good day to test myself.  Today I shall think on Doris Lessing and how I can effectively work her into my thesis.  I gave up prematurely last night, perhaps.  Darwin forced his way into my head and Doris crept out ashamedly.  I am momentarily upset with myself for letting Darwin abet my attempts to evade work.  But then I realize that I was not in the frame of mind to write anything convincing anyway.  A good writer, I think, has the confidence to know she can tell the story competently.  At the same time she is familiar enough with, and therefore sufficiently humbled by, the process of writing to know that it comes on its own terms.  Without sounding too hokey, there is a magic to writing that either is or isn’t there.  I never understood creative writing classes—either one can write or one cannot.  A great disservice is done when we convince a non-writer of her ability to write.  Not only is she fooled into thinking she has found her innermost form of self-expression thereby likely failing to develop her true potential, but also the rest of us then have to be subjected to her bad writing.

As I pull into the driveway of the blissfully quiet and empty house, my cell phone rings.  It is the therapist, calling to ask whether I can see her today instead of tomorrow, as scheduled.  This immediately irritates me.  Counseling is something I am trying to undergo with some level of maturity and dedication, though I admit to struggling with this.  As such, I have completely compartmentalized the physical act of attending counseling.  I need to know when it is going to happen so that I can pretend, all week long, as if it didn’t happen last week and will not happen again this week.  I do best when I think about therapy for the first time all week in the ten-minute slot before my appointment.  Being reminded of it a day early is bothersome.  Being asked to completely rearrange my schedule for it is inconsiderate.

Still, I don’t have much of a come-back.  There is no reason why I couldn’t be at the therapist’s office right now, or in an hour, or even in three hours.  My day is open, and I suppose I may as well get it out of the way.  We make plans to meet in one hour.  I hang up the cell phone and start the engine again, without ever having left my car.  My neighbors must think I’m bat-shit crazy.  Wait until they see Michaela on the front stoop nursing a cup of joe in the morning.

In the hour I have before my appointment, I head to the library to see what I can discover about Doris Lessing.  Predictably, my small public library has nothing to offer.  They own three of her fictional works and no literary commentary on her whatsoever.  It is children’s story hour at the library, apparently.  I cannot believe that this event happens for one hour out of the entire week and I have managed to catch it.  I don’t understand why my tax dollars haven’t paid for a proper partition between the children and adult sections of the library.  I know that Horton heard the hoo.  That was thrilling when I was four.  Now I’m thirty-three and I need to know why Doris Lessing felt it impossible to meld the life of an artist with that of a mother.  I need to know enough about her biography to see if I can lump her in with my South African writers or if I need to throw the thesis out entirely.  Horton doesn’t really fit in, charming though he is.

I know I need to head to the university library, but first I need to have my brain checked by the therapist. 

I first attended counseling when I was in middle school.  My family and friends didn’t know, and I entertained myself by making creative excuses for why I got to miss gym once a week.  I understood, vaguely, what a guidance counselor’s job was, and I decided that perhaps she could help me sort through the wreckage of my pubescent emotional life.  Today I am awestruck by the faith I used to have in the people around me.  I met with her once a week, every week that school was in session, for three years.  Sometimes I think I would like a copy of my school file.  I would like to know what that counselor thought about me.  I wonder how many eleven-year-olds sign themselves up for therapy and then actually go.  In middle school, I wanted to talk to someone who could confirm for me what I believed—that my family was severely dysfunctional.  The therapist did this, and my adoration for her kept me coming back.  When you’re eleven and an adult tells you that you’re right and your parents are wrong, you don’t give that up easily.

When I moved into high school, I had to stop seeing the guidance counselor.  I never sought out another counselor for my high school years.  In my mind, this woman wasn’t a hired professional; she was a trusted confidant.  I just assumed that that I was sufficiently fixed; that the “Leandra goes to therapy” stage of my life was over.  And so it was, at least through high school.  I re-entered therapy in college, when an inexperienced teacher’s assistant laid a copy of The Feeling Good Handbook on my desk, along with an admittedly contorted essay on Holden Caulfield.  Holden Caulfield was then, and remains today, something of a god to me.  I think, probably, I should have written the essay with less adoration and understanding and at least a hint of disdain.  Or perhaps I just shouldn’t have followed it up immediately with a similar paper about Sylvia Plath’s Esther Greenwood. 

I find it difficult to believe I was the only depressed student in the English department.  I find it astonishing that my essays bought were so markedly different from those of my classmates that they earned me a ticket to the university counseling center.  I wonder what would have happened if they’d gotten a hold of one of my journals.  The Student Services decided they had the right to force me into attending weekly sessions if I was to continue living on campus.  Something about my being a liability.  This, obviously, was the start of my distaste for psychotherapy.  It was like someone was putting a gun to my head and shouting at me, “Get better!”

I absolutely abhorred the very sight of that counselor.  Just the thought of her today floods my mouth with the taste of bile.  I stopped attending sessions the moment I was allowed to.  In the two semesters I was forced go, I don’t think I ever disclosed a single personal fact about myself.  I toyed with the idea of making up stories to tell her, but even that was more effort than I cared to expend on the situation.  More or less, I sat in her office and created interesting back stories in my mind about the other students in the waiting room.  The ridiculously-thin girls were easy targets, but not much fun to think about.  Anorexia, after you get past the number game, is pretty boring, really.  I was always scanning the room, looking for singed hair that would indicate electroshock therapy or bandaged wrists or lolling tongues.  I tried to pinpoint diagnoses, but to be honest, everyone kind of looked like they were holding their own.  Some more apathetic.  Some visibly anxious.  But none looked destined for the morgue any time soon.  My university just wasn’t that interesting, I guess.

You would think that with this less-than-desirable experience of therapy under my belt, I would have never signed up for another go.  And yet here I am today, driving myself to the office of my brooch-clad therapist, on my own accord.  I wonder which bronzed animal will be pinned on her today.  Some days this surprise is all I really think I’m getting from these sessions.  Maybe I need to think about terminating.

I have been seeing this therapist for the past six months or so.  I called her when my agent got in touch with me to let me know that a publisher had picked up my book.  Instead of being overwhelmed with joy, I felt immediately lost and hollow.  I couldn’t explain my feelings because I didn’t understand them at all.  I should have been elated; my dream was coming true.  Instead, I was immediately consumed with dread.  If this is happening to me, then the struggle is over.  If the struggle is already over, what was the point?  If it’s going to happen this easily, is it worth having at all?  Mentally-sound people, I have been told, do not have these types of thoughts.

My therapist has not been overwhelmingly helpful in sorting it all out.  She referred me, on our third session, to a psychiatrist for medication.  I wonder what percentage of American women are just allowed to be depressed these days, without a doctor interfering?  It bothers me that the world has changed into a place that operates under the assumption that we should all be happy.  When did we get so entitled?  So self-righteous?  Isn’t the experience of being uncomfortable, of being sad, a symptom?  Isn’t it meant to be a motivator?  If things continue in this manner, art will die a certain death.  Art eats misery.  And it does a damn better job of it than Prozac.

I took the drugs though, because I thought maybe they actually could help me, and because it would not be the first time in my life that I have turned to drugs to fix my mind.  I was feeling a bit tired of all the crying and carrying-on.  It was getting old even to me, and my writing was suffering.  Within two weeks of starting the prescription, my world kind of changed.  Yes, I stopped crying every day.  But the drugs didn’t prevent me from knowing I ought to be sad.  I just couldn’t properly feel the emotion.  It was like standing at a window and watching it rain.  You know it’s cold and wet as hell out there, but you’re separated from the experience of it.  In my opinion, if it’s going to rain and I’m going to know it’s raining, I may as well be out there rolling around in it.  I gave it a few more weeks and then, when I realized I was no longer able to achieve orgasm, quit cold turkey.  The ability to properly experience an emotion I will sacrifice.  Orgasms are a different story.  Don’t fuck with my orgasms.

I pull up at the building and let out an unintentional sigh.  Here we go again.  The therapist, I notice immediately upon entering, is wearing her swan brooch.  The swan is settled on top of some sort of green gemstone.  I don’t know if the stone is meant to represent an egg or a nest or if it is merely decorative.  I do know that I will likely spend the next fifty minutes daydreaming about gouging my eye out with the pin of said brooch.

The therapist launches into it by asking if I’ve thought any more about the connection between the publication of my novel and my feelings about my sister.  She’s so goddamn blunt.  I hate this about therapists—where the Christ is the metaphor?  She has not learned the fine art of saying one thing and meaning something entirely different.  There is no dance in her speech.  There is no flirting about a sensitive issue.  There is no art, I have decided, in her discourse.  And I’m afraid that artsy, veiled conversation is the only type I want to have these days.  Darwin knows how to talk like this.  I imagine that most men who fuck around on their wives are skilled in speaking in code.

Without premeditating it, I take control of the conversation.  I am sure that either next week or perhaps even later in this session, if conversation gets stale, the therapist will accuse me of employing some defense mechanism that requires me to control a social situation.  She will use my changing the topic of discussion as her example.  But I think about that only after I tell her that I don’t want to talk about my sister; I want to talk about Darwin.  I see her wanting to call me out on evading the sister talk, but I know she’s about desperate as hell, for all the wrong reasons, to hear about this boy-toy problem I’ve recently added to my already-fucked up life.  She nods and tells me to go on.

I start talking—the type of talk that comes without thinking.  This is one benefit to not really caring for my therapist; I don’t often try to sugar-coat my thoughts.  I open my mouth and the words fall out, because they don’t care a lick about their audience.  I tell her that I cannot stop thinking about him, that Darwin has consumed my mind entirely.  I think immediately of the analogy to fire—how you know it’s dangerous but you can’t really speak to the danger of it before you fall in and realize that your hair is on fire.  I don’t use the analogy because it’s not that original and because the therapist is too dense for extended metaphors. 

Instead I tell her that the secret of him makes me feel whole.  That sometimes, when I’m weighed down by the monotony of every day life, when I’m cooking for my family or washing dishes or reading children’s books and I want to die from the boredom of it all, I think about the fact that I have this secret man who adores me and it makes me smile.  The conflict of the situation propels me through that final painful verse of Dr. Seuss, allows me to whistle through the dishes. 

The therapist asks me what it is that I think I want from him.  And even though it is not one hundred percent true, I answer immediately with the words “his cock.”  I do it to mess with her.  I do it, mostly, because of the fucking brooch. 

It’s not sex, really, that I want most from him, though I am absolutely certain that it would not be terrible.  I don’t know what I want from him.  I think it’s probably that I want to want to have sex with him.  I think the sexual tension itself is delicious to chew on.  Even I realize that if we were to have sex, it would complicate itself beyond the level of entertainment.  So I guess I want what I already have with him.  But when what you most desire is the very act of wanting, things get complicated.  I think what I want, since she’s asking, is to push this thing right up against its boundaries.  To steal from it every morsel before it blows up in my face.  To have fun with it and then let it go.  Catch and release—like fishing.  I know myself though.  I know I will be unable to do this.  I will see that boundary when I am standing in front of it and I will lie to myself and convince myself that it’s further off.  I will do this until I am naked in front of him, because it feels terrible to leave a task half-complete.

These are the thoughts that I should be exploring with my therapist, of course.  But “cock” is such a nice, short word.  All of those hard c sounds make it feel dirtier than it otherwise would, and I get a kick out of making her squirm.

She does squirm.  She even forces out a fake cough, which will probably be the highlight of my week. 

 She asks me how things are with my husband.  When did we stop talking about cocks, I wonder.  I shrug, suddenly and completely uninterested in continuing this session or even this conversation.  I am tired and I want a nap.  I imagine the cool sheets of my bed, still tangled with last night’s sleep.  I visualize turning the fan on high and climbing in, leaving the dishes a mess and mentally ordering the takeout we’ll have to eat when I don’t prepare dinner.  I kind of kick back in my chair so I can get a better look at the ceiling.  I tell her that things are okay with my husband, that he has no idea about Darwin, and I have done nothing for which I should feel ashamed.  It would make more sense if I told her that sometimes I am angry as hell with Tom for not noticing the way I look at Darwin.  That in my mind I am tinkering with the idea of giving him up altogether and that this thought, one which used to make me break out in a cold sweat, now seems to have no effect on me whatsoever.  I have gotten past the emotion of the possibility and moved onto the logistics—what about the girls?  The house?  Tom, more and more, seems like a casualty of our lives together.  I think I outgrew him.  I don’t want to be around him because I don’t want to be reminded of the whole mess.  It slows me down, trips me up.  If I were being completely honest, I would admit to her what I haven’t even really admitted to myself—that sometimes I wish he would just go away.  Maybe my flirting with the thought of Darwin’s jeans is an attempt to get him to leave me.  If it is, I am failing miserably.  Maybe this is why I am so goddamn angry at him.

I don’t tell the therapist this.  I ask her, instead, what she thinks will happen if Darwin and I sleep together.  You’re not really allowed to ask therapists questions like these.  They never, ever answer them.  It’s some therapist-code that they’re not supposed to be real people with real thoughts and opinions.  Their job is just to help you sort through your shit, not to interject shit of their own.  I find that incredibly boring.  Sometimes I just want the opinion of someone who seems to have their own shit together.  I imagine most of the world probably has friends who fit this bill.  I don’t even know how to talk to my friends anymore.

Predictably, the therapist turns the question around and asks what I think will happen.  I shrug.  This conversation is so goddamn tedious.  If I were at a bar, on a bad date, this would be the point when I retire to the restroom and come back saying my father’s appendix has just burst and I need to leave immediately.  Another thing you can’t do with your therapist—leave a session early.  It’s not worth it because she’ll never let it slide.

I stall long enough in answering to promote her changing the question altogether.  She asks me if Darwin wasn’t in the picture, would I still be unhappy in my marriage.  I raise an eyebrow in annoyance.  Darwin is in the picture because I am unhappy in my marriage.  This is obvious.  A third party does not just suddenly crop up in one’s marriage. 

I am smarter than my therapist and this fact makes me want to flip her desk over and light it on fire.

Instead I, more intentionally this time, regain control of the situation.  I remind her that she is the one who had to reschedule our appointment today and that since this time isn’t exactly convenient for me, I am going to have to leave a few minutes early.  I even offer up a half-hearted apology and tell her that next week we should try to stick to our regular time.  She sits in her chair and basically watches me go, wordlessly.  For once, she has surprised me with more than the animal of the day brooch.  I expected her to try to end the session on a tidy, happy note.  I had believed this to be another rule in the therapist-code.  Instead she is the amused audience as I fumble to collect my stuff and get out of her office.  For the first time in awhile, I am left with the feeling of being awkward.  Nobody enjoys feeling awkward, I’m sure.  But I feel absolutely self-destructive with the emotion.  When I am the person who cares more about the turnout of a specific situation, when the see-saw of power tips out of my favor and I am left wanting, I tend to feel enraged.  And then later, when the anger dies off, I feel dangerously out of control and deficient.

I get back in my car and sit for a minute, my head on the steering wheel.  I want a drink, or fried food, or sex, or all three but not in that order.  I want something that will fill the void immediately and make me feel complete.  My much-ballyhooed self-awareness means that I understand that this kind of thinking is flawed and unhealthy, but knowing it does not change the fact of it.  I am lately of the impression that one can never do away with her innermost fears and gut reactions.  She can learn to temper them, to not act on them, but she’ll always feel them.  This is why Prozac is shit; you can’t change it.  There is no exorcising of the demons that crawled into your brain when you were a child.  And so you may as well find a way to live with them.

I have learned a way to live with them.  I write.

I begin driving again.  I feel hungover from the seemingly inconsequential act of walking out on my therapist.  The day is impossibly bright and clear.  The air is starting to turn cold.  It ought to feel amazing, but once again my overzealous brain has gone and fucked the whole thing up.  I look up into the leaves of the trees in front of me and marvel at all of the different shades of green.  I wish I could paint; I wish I were a photographer, because words would never be sufficient to describe this beauty and I am not content to leave it alone.  I wish I could take those trees with me everywhere.

It makes me think of Darwin, of course, to see these different shades and wonder how all of those thousands of leaves come together to form the shape I recognize as a tree.  How all of the many trees then come together to form the scenery.  I’m thankful for it and I do not understand it.  Darwin, likely, understands it. 

I have a copy of the updated curriculum for our project in my car.  This manuscript is meant to find its way, eventually, to Darwin.  I am very close to his studio.  I could easily drop it off.

By the time this thought enters my mind, it is already a foregone conclusion.  I have one hand on the steering wheel while the other digs through my bag for my cell phone.  He answers on the first ring, confirming he is at the studio and inviting me to drop by.  On one hand, I have no intentions for the afternoon’s activities, I just know that I don’t want to be alone.  On the other hand, I am grateful for the fact that I am wearing good underwear and cute jeans.  I don’t think about what my driving over there means because at this point the damage is done.  For me to be seeking his company when I am feeling so damaged and vulnerable says all there is to say.  He came into my mind involuntarily, and that is the real crime here.  The rest, the fucking if it is to happen, that’s just the details.

Experts say that the real damage of affairs lies not in the fucking, but in the interpersonal, emotional connection that one seeks outside of his or her marriage.  People can recover, it seems, from the fact that their spouse is getting their rocks off with someone else.  I think they understand it, so it’s forgivable.  A one night stand is horrible, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s not always the deal-breaker you’d think it would be.  The factor that tends to end marriages and destroy families is the closeness, if there is any, between the cheating spouse and the lover.  Some people say that kissing is worse than fucking, in this regard.  I get it.  And because I get it, I know I’ve already done it.  So the fucking?  The fucking either will or will not happen, and it won’t matter a damn bit.

And that thought, that singularity in my mind, is what essentially drives the car to his studio. And it is the thing that will allow me, no matter what happens when I step out of this car and into his world, to sleep tonight.

He’s sitting on the steps of his studio, smoking a cigarette.  I am not a huge fan of tobacco, given its propensity to kill people and everything, but this man makes it look sexy as hell.  Carefree, not giving a shit about the state of his lungs.  That is the beauty of an affair—you don’t have to live with the cigarette smoke stinking up your house and visions of changing his breathing tubes in thirty years.  You get to fuck him and leave his wife to deal with the tubes.  It’s a disgusting thought and I shake it from my head.

He’s barefoot.  I notice this immediately because I am unreasonably lured by these small evidences of humanity.  He is a feet-in-the-earth type of guy, and it makes my head go a little fuzzy.  He’s wearing jeans and a blue t-shirt which fits rather well.  I typically think men who wear tight clothing are pretentious and shallow.  They tend to be concerned with all of the wrong things in life.  Darwin’s tight little blue shirt has splatters of paint on it, and I am surprised that this is all it takes to turn a pretentious shirt into a perfectly acceptable one.  Don’t let the Gap find out.

He stubs out his cigarette and stands up to greet me.  Taking the curriculum from my outstretched hand, he ushers me inside the building, apologizing for the mess.  This mess, I think when I enter the room, is precisely what I need right now.  I could not have played this any better.  The room is such a guy’s room.  For all the art in this space, there is no frill.  There are canvases everywhere, lining the walls, stacked one on top of the other.  Some are complete; some are in an obvious state of flux.  This is how it would look, I think, if someone were able to commit my writing desk to canvas.  Some beautiful, some obviously not.  Some worth the struggle of improvement.  Most a disaster. 

There is a long countertop lining one entire wall, cluttered with containers of water and brushes, some pen and ink sketches.  I see a coffeemaker and a small refrigerator.  A mattress on the floor in another corner of the room is covered only with some messy sheets and a solitary pillow.  There is a tiny MP3 player, pumping out some kind of unexpected classical music.  And that is about it.  The rest is art.  It pleases me to know that even with all of the time he spends here, he has done nothing to make the space feel like a home.  It is a place to work, and his work so entrances him that he occasionally has to work through the night but this isn’t cause to put down a rug or frame some posters.  I like that for some reason.

I have never seen Darwin’s art before and I am not really surprised to see it is a postmodern mess.  A lot of his pieces are built around one central word, spelled out in different manners.  I am enthralled by the different fonts he has utilized in his art.  I recognize most of them, but there are a few I don’t know.  Despite my purported rejection of the computer, I have a minor love-affair going on with typeface.  It delights me to know that there is still some art left to the modern, technological world.  I am just as impressed by the fact that people were creative enough to dream up all of these different letters as I am amused by the fact that most people, almost everyone I think, misses the distinction entirely.  It’s like commando-art.  People think they’re just reading the newspaper for the news, but they’re really reading it as a reflection of the values and ideas held by whichever typeface the printer chose to use.  Somewhere in that process there is an artist who is smacking unwitting folks up the sides of their heads with art that affects them in ways they don’t even perceive.  I think that discussing typeface with Darwin could easily chew up an entire day.  And that is another signal that one is in pretty goddamn deep.

I am immediately in love with his style.  His work is good.  I could sit and look through these canvases for hours.  I want to know what they mean.  I want to know how he describes them and which ones are his babies.  I want to know what he looks like when he paints.  It is remarkable, really, how quickly the therapist falls out of significance.  In this room, at this moment, I feel as if I were put on this planet solely to produce art.  The idea of my having ended up with a man who sells advertising slots on a pornographic website is so absurd in the face of this beauty, I don’t even feel guilty for my thoughts of betrayal.  It is nobody’s fault.  I have no idea, suddenly, why I have subjected myself to hours of the therapists’ interrogation.  Why did I feel the need to apologize?  This, I think, looking around, is what matters.  My thesis, the thought of the woman as Other, suddenly comes back to me.  Only a tiny part of me wishes I were at home to write about it while I see it so vividly.

Darwin comes in behind me and laughs at the look on my face, asking me if I’m very familiar with art.  I am, in fact, very familiar with art.  I adore art.  I sink to my knees in front of a particularly moving piece.  It is some kind of experiment with lithography.  It must have taken him countless hours to produce.  It is amazing, and it is the only one of its kind in the studio.  He runs a hand through his hair and is visibly moved by my appreciation for this particular piece.  I have found his baby.  He leaves my side for a minute and returns with a cold beer.  It is just now noon on a Tuesday and I am a mother of three, but I go ahead and accept it anyway.  Fried food may well be the only ingredient in my triumvirate to go missing this afternoon, I think, as I take a sip.

It feels incredible to have a beer at noon in this studio.  It is as if I have been transported out of my real life and plunked down into a fairytale.  This is a stay-at-home mom’s ultimate fantasy, I suppose.  <>

He apologizes for his lack of seating, explaining that he doesn’t typically have visitors.  What about Celia, I ask.  His face darkens for a minute before he shakes his head and says she doesn’t often visit.  It is not a carefree answer, and I am free to deduce from it that all is not well in the home of Darwin and Company.  The matter is as good as closed in my mind.  I feel as if, by even mentioning her name, I have done the work of reminding him he has a wife.  The rest is on him.

My seating options are the mattress, the floor, the counter or a drafting table.  The mattress is obviously out--too illicit.  The floor looks pretty uncomfortable and the drafting table, I’m afraid, may collapse under my weight.  I hop on the counter.  The instant my ass hits the granite, I realize that a countertop is no less illicit than a mattress.  Not when you’re thirty-three and showing up to the art studio of the man with whom you’ve been shamelessly flirting for the past few months.  It’s too late now; I’d look like a complete ass if I hopped off.  So I tuck my feet up into a casual, cross-legged position and take another sip of beer.  I want him to tell me about his work.  He moves around the room, explaining a few of his pieces.  As he’s talking, I realize that I probably would never be so forward with anyone regarding my own artistic creations.  I cannot imagine walking someone through my poetry, for example.  You either get it or you don’t, I think.  I wonder why he’s giving all of this away.

As this thought crosses my mind, he turns to face me and says a bit sheepishly that he doesn’t really want to talk about his work.  I nod, understanding.  Chitchat ensues, nothing memorable or out of the ordinary.  We talk about the Arts Collaboration Project; we take easy digs at the head coordinator.  My expectations for the afternoon may have been grossly inflated, I think, since Darwin is behaving rather standoffish.  It occurs to me that perhaps this really is all in my mind.  I should go.  This is ridiculous.  I finish my beer and put it on the counter next to me.  I have uttered the first words that will lead to my leaving the studio, something like, “Well, thanks for. . .” and then his lips are on mine.

Having mentally rehearsed this moment for the past half year has failed to prepare me in any real way for the moment when it does actually happen.  For a minute, I am too surprised to react.  My eyes are open and my lips unresponsive.  The initial feeling of kissing him does not send fire through my loins or whatever it is meant to.  It actually reminds me instead of my first real kiss.  I didn’t even like that first guy, though I was certainly meant to since he was a hotshot football player who graciously let me be his girlfriend even though I was still in middle school.  He met me at the bus stop one afternoon and in front of all of my friends demanded that I kiss him.  I had been dreading this moment ever since he first asked me to be his girlfriend five days previous.  I didn’t know what I was doing, and of course I wasn’t really attracted to him at all.  The idea of kissing him was equally frightening and disgusting to me.  Still, I liked the part about being someone’s girlfriend, and I understood that this was part of the job.  He leaned in, parting my lips with his tongue, and I nearly vomited with the physicality of it all.  I was only a kid, but the feeling brought up images of those posters detailing the life cycles of amphibians, digestive systems, biology.  It seemed so. . .visceral.  His wet, soft tongue flopped around for a minute in my mouth before I pushed him away and told him the truth—that I didn’t want to be his girlfriend anymore.  This is how my love life started out.  Is it any wonder that I am thirty-three and struggling with it still?

Darwin’s kiss reminds me of this first one only because it comes as such a shock to me and because for months now the idea of kissing this man has been just that—an idea.  I don’t know that I really thought, before this moment, that his hand would ever be holding my chin like this.  And now suddenly here we are.  This kiss is just as corporeal as that first one.  In the past twenty-something years, however, I have learned to enjoy, in fact crave, the carnal element.  It may just be a reaction of having been denied it for so long, but I am happy to accept my role as animal.

True to my character and in honor of the months I have spent in fantasy of this moment, it doesn’t take me long to recover.  A half-second later and I am kissing him back, relishing in the feeling, finally, of that stubble grating against my face.  It hurts.  There is nothing soft about him; there is nothing feminine about him.  This difference, this distinction, is what I am after.  His movements are rough, urgent.  If I were not such a willing participant in this, I would be frightened by it.  It is obvious now, finally, that Darwin has given at least as much thought to my jeans as I have given to his.  I am relieved by this.  The idea of him wanting me for as long as I have wanted him makes me feel entirely out of control with desire. 

He tastes faintly of smoke and beer.  On his neck and chest, I smell his cologne.  There is no hint of Tom anywhere in the room.  I may as well be doing this for the first time for as much as it relates to my recent experiences.  My mouth opens over his taut skin and I realize that this is the first time in over a decade that I have kissed the skin of another man.  Each new freckle, each tiny little scar excites me for that reason alone.  I could do this, I reason, probably all day long and come back tomorrow to do it again.

I do not mind, in the slightest, letting him take control of our situation.  I am tired of being in control; I am worn out with it.  This surrender feels exquisite.  I spent all of my twenties campaigning for equal rights for women, demanding that Tom treat me with respect and dignity.  Who would have thought that I’d hit thirty and just want to be fucked?

I think briefly, as he pulls my jeans off my hips, of suggesting the use of a condom.  But this thought is ridiculous.  His wife is pregnant; he is no more likely to have a condom in his pocket than I am.  I give no more thought to this issue.  Problems like these are precisely the thing I am trying to avoid.

I am out of practice in the art of spontaneous passion, but it seems to not matter for two very good reasons.  First, Darwin doesn’t initially leave much room for interpretation on my part.  He is swift, sure, and determined.  I am nearly passive in the experience.  The first time.  Second, there are two more opportunities that afternoon alone to work through the glitches.

Shadows are starting to fall across the mattress, and I know it must be time to collect the girls from their after-school program.  I sit up, finishing the last sip of the last beer.  He is lying down, a sheet pulled up to his hips.  There is a square of light falling on his hip bone, and it’s a sight so lovely I think it’s frameable.  His eyes are closed, but he is not asleep.  He’s gorgeous in that afternoon light, and I would like very much to continue into the night with what we’ve started.  I kiss him on the lips, thinking it odd that just a few hours ago this was a new sensation for me and now it feels like I have always done it.  I am the clichéd schoolgirl.  I am lost in that hip bone, blinded by the feeling of newness, and completely deaf to all of the voices that once kept me in check.

Walking out to my car, the only real thought in my mind is an awareness that for once my mind is quiet.  Without any conscious effort on my part, the voices are gone.  I am all motion and movement and action; the rest is silence.  This is the self-confidence a woman carries with her when she knows she is desirable and capable and passionate and sexual.

In my car, I turn the music up and drive to the girls’ school without a single word in my head.  The girls get into the car and my space is filled with chatter.  I can go on thinking nothing.  The children require less and less of me lately.  I know this affects how I feel about them, but I still haven’t decided whether it makes them easier to love or more difficult.  This is not a time for the big questions.

I suddenly realize that I am not ready to go home.  Tom will be there already, and while I’m not afraid to be around him, it is definitely something I would like to avoid for as long as possible.  I have not sorted this situation out in my mind just yet.  For as much as I contemplated the possibility of being with Darwin, none of this was planned.  By thinking about it so much, I suppose, I created the space for it to potentially happen.  But I never thought it through to its completion.  I never wondered what I would feel like after it.  I never wondered what I would do with the problem I created.  And now I’ve the problem is here and I have no idea how I feel about it or what to do with it.

It doesn’t take much convincing to get the girls to agree to a fast food dinner at the park.  In the drive-through line I recall how Michaela didn’t have so much as a French fry before she turned three.  Cora and Jasmine, I think, came out of the womb with a coke in each hand.  Sometimes it feels like these concessions are egregious parenting errors and sometimes it feels like it’s simply preparing the children for the world which awaits them.  If I had only had Michaela, I am sure I would have ruined her.  I was so careful with that child.  So mindful.  I remember learning, when I was pregnant, that the baby could hear my voice at fourteen weeks gestation.  From week fourteen up until those twins were born a few years later, I didn’t utter so much as a “damn.”  Michaela was never exposed to any kind of conflict.  She listened to classical music in the womb and then every day for at least an hour.  I began using flashcards with her when she was just a baby.  She slept in organic cotton pajamas that were washed in Dreft.  I checked the smoke detectors every Sunday night. 

Jas, on the other hand, routinely says the word “shit” when she has difficulty completing a task.  The twins know that if they’re hungry, they can slide the kitchen chairs over to climb onto the counters and get some Goldfish out of the cabinet.  They listen to the Strokes, Feist, RJD2 and (if I’m really eager to intentionally expose them to quality music) Bob Dylan.  They can operate the DVD player and they know how to access the shows they’ve DVR’ed.  And the mind-boggling thing?  I don’t have to worry about the twins.  The twins are fine.  They socialize normally, cry only when seriously injured, make friends, and boss other kids around occasionally.  Michaela doesn’t.  Michaela is sensitive.  I know there are too many variables to make this turnout statistically significant, but I have to think that by being such a conscientious parent, I totally fucked her up.

The kids eat their processed fried sugar and run off to play.  My phone rings.  It is Jill.  I decide not to answer because I’m not sure what to say to anyone right now, least of all Jill.  The call goes to voicemail and I don’t even bother to check it before I delete it.  I sit on a picnic table, looking at my sneakered feet on the bench seat in front of me.  I think, finally, about what I have done.  Darwin.  I am not at the point, which will undoubtedly come eventually, where I wish I hadn’t done it.  I can still taste him and smell him on me.  This smell, this taste, it is complicated.  Yesterday it wasn’t.  Today it is.  This complication, this process of making the fantasy concrete, will be the thing that makes me feel regret, eventually.  For now though, I feel content, sated.  I feel how the man must feel after eating Thanksgiving dinner.  I feel full, content and tired solely from the effort of enjoying myself.  I want to take a shower and go to bed.  I need sleep before I am to think about what needs to happen with my marriage.

I replay it in my mind with a smile on my lips.  I don’t even know how old Darwin is, but I’d have to guess he’s several years younger than Tom, probably younger even than myself.  His body is tight and lean.  I bet he plays soccer; he’s got the build for it.  It is hard to imagine him becoming a father in a few months.  He is one of those people who give the illusion that he has no family at all.  Almost as if he arrived on the earth as a product of budding rather than sexual reproduction.  I cannot imagine him with parents or sisters.  And even though I’ve met her, I struggle to think of him as having a wife.

I remember, suddenly, how none of our three escapades today involved any form of birth control.  It seemed passionate and spontaneous, at the time, to push that worry aside.  Now it is starting to wiggle back in.  I have not thought about birth control in many years.  The idea that what I just did could result in a tiny human life is preposterous to me.  When you’re having sex with your husband who has had a vasectomy, sex has very little to do with babies.  When you’re having an affair (I guess that’s what this thing is now called) with someone whose wife is toting ever-expanding proof of her husband’s fertility, sex can potentially have everything to do with babies.  I would rather have a rabid raccoon in my house right now than a newborn, no matter who fathered it.  There cannot be a baby.

I call the girls in and get them all buckled into the car.  On our way home, we will hit the pharmacy.  I am certain, in the past five years, they must have manufactured some kind of contraption or pill that will help me out of my situation.  On my drive to the store, it does cross my mind that this is not a good situation for a married mom to be in.  I am about to take my three daughters into a drug store in hopes of finding some product which will prevent the fertilization of my eggs from another man’s sperm.  No, not good.

There is, however, a pill which claims it can solve my problem.  Common side effects include vomiting, diarrhea, breast tenderness.  So long as they don’t include bastard children, I’ll go ahead with the purchase. 

I come home and call upstairs for Tom, dropping the mail and my keys on the counter.  He doesn’t answer, and this immediately strikes me as odd.  I call again, wondering if he is even home.  He then snakes his head around the corner and calls out, “up here.”  His voice is flat and absent of the emotion he usually reserves for this time of day.  It is his ritual to meet the four of us at the door, asking how his beautiful ladies are doing today.  I note the difference and feel my face go white.  He knows.  Somehow, already, he knows about Darwin.  My heart lurches and my immediate thought is one of “how can I undo this.”  There needs to be an explanation for my behavior, an excuse.  There needs to be some way to justify this so that I can right it.  I imagine myself pleading my case to him.  I imagine finding the words that will take the edge off, give me a place to stand.  There are very few words one can throw at a situation like this.  We have drifted.  You work too much.  I’m lost in my art.  The strain of motherhood.  The unrealized dreams.  The feeling, deep inside, of being ugly.  What it is like to have been with one person for so long.

I am shocked that my immediate thoughts involve the question of how I can make this seem okay and forgiveable and passable in Tom’s eyes.  My instinct is to protect our marriage, even after I have gone out of my way to destroy it.  Why?  Why do I want to shelter the thing that I am trying to destroy?

Because I don’t want it to change.  If I were interested in change of that sort, I would have divorced Tom before sleeping with Darwin.  I did not.  I don’t want to divorce Tom.  Or I do, but I want the entire thing to happen while everyone, including myself, is asleep.  I want for there to be no evidence of it, no scars.  I want to just wake up one day and have him gone and for everyone to be okay with that.  I don’t want to have to say the words; I don’t want to divide the assets.  I have no interest in hurting him and I am more than a little reluctant to open myself up to being hurt by him.  I don’t want to admit that we screwed up.  I don’t want to become a statistic.  I don’t want to change.  I just want everything to be different.

I dream of him dying.  I don’t want him dead, because I do think he is a good person and he is the father of my children and he is the person I deemed worthy of loving for the past decade.  But if he were to die, I would escape condemnation.  I would get out of it.  It would be a tragedy and I would be allowed to grieve the loss of my marriage.  As it is now, I have to pretend it isn’t happening.  I shake my head in disbelief that I am thinking these thoughts.  It is repulsive that I could simultaneously wish for someone to be dead and pray that he doesn’t know that I’m being unfaithful.  I am of weak character.

Maybe he doesn’t know for sure, I think.  Maybe at this point it is still just a hunch, something that is easily proven wrong, in which case I know it is best to pretend I know nothing.  If he has a hunch and I appear suspicious, I have confirmed his hunch.  If he has a feeling and I act normally, he will eventually start to see himself as the ridiculous one.  Although it should not be my goal to force my husband into feeling ridiculous, I cannot deny that this is my desired outcome.  It is better for him to feel stupid than for him to confront the fact that I am having sex with Darwin.

It is also possible that he is just in a bad mood, though he is not typically in anything other than a neutral mood.  If he is just in a foul mood, my best bet is to pretend I care why.  If he is just in a bad mood and I don’t show concern, he may easily conclude that, for whatever reason, I don’t care about his feelings.  If I do show concern, but not too much concern, he is likely to feel supported and loved.

I had no idea an affair would be so goddamn troubling.

Chapter Two

The bar is dark, poorly lit.  It takes a minute for my eyes to adjust.  I like this about a bar.  I like to think of a bar as some kind of refuge from the bright lights of the outside world.  I enjoy that in my mind it’s always dark in a bar.  I can’t imagine anything more depressing than a well-lit bar.  Well-lit places remind me of Waffle Houses.  I despise Waffle Houses.  It should be illegal to have to confront the people who cook your food.  Why go out?  Why not just stay at home and make your own scrambled eggs?  When I leave the house for food or drink, I like to pretend those things materialize on the table in front of me as if they were brought by fairies.  I don’t want to see the overweight, undereducated people who actually make them.  I want to be transported, or else what am I paying all that money for?  I make an exception for bartenders, however.  I know that most bartenders are working second jobs or else putting themselves through school.  Plus, most of them are young and a lot of them are attractive.  There’s nothing wrong with this.

We see Tom’s colleagues at a table outside and I immediately note Darwin’s presence.  The night might be interesting after all, I think, as we walk over and I catch the subtle smell of his familiar cologne.  Darwin is wearing a green shirt and I realize he looks good in green.  His sleeves are rolled up and I wonder if he did this to make himself feel more comfortable or because he imagines it looks good.  It does look good, but it would break my heart to think it was deliberate.  It’s ridiculous that I want people to look their best without any determined effort on their part.  This is not, of course, sustainable.  But it is the beauty of an affair, I think.  An affair, by definition, only involves the fun parts and the beautiful parts.  If you spend little enough time with someone, you can be led into believing they are effortlessly perfect.  Perhaps this explains why marriages fall apart, typically, after about seven years in.  After seven years together, you have pretty much been exposed to every single one of your partner’s flaws.  You’ve seen the work that goes into making them beautiful.  You’ve seen what happens when they fail to put forth said effort.  And worst of all, your occupation in their lives, the comfort your relationship entails, only ensures that they are less likely to put forth the effort on any kind of regular basis.

I should write wedding cards for a living, I think.

Space is made and chairs are pulled up to the table for us.  I order a beer and am pleased to see that my bracelets (carefully chosen) slide up and down my wrist with each sip I take.  It occurs to me that this jangling sound is downright obnoxious.  If the woman sitting next to me was making this type of sound, advertising every move she made, I would want to hit her but for some reason, I’m rather enjoying making the noise tonight.  I feel a bit flamboyant and I enjoy having something besides the people around me for entertainment.

Conversation is flowing all around us, light, fun banter about the baseball team.  I see Darwin’s teeth as he laughs.  He looks effortless and sexy as hell when he laughs.  I watch Tom laugh, hoping I can convince my loins to respond in the same way to the man to whom I am legally committed.  His laugh, I am disappointed to realize, fails to inspire any sexual longing whatsoever.  I have seen it too many times.

I watch Celia absentmindedly stroking her belly, while all but ignoring the social scenario around her.  She is not, of course, drinking.  And I remember this from my own pregnancies: being the only sober person in a social situation where everyone else around you is drinking.  How at first you feel the odd person out, wish you were able to have a bottle in your hands as well.  If not for the liquid inside then just for the act of holding something and putting it to your lips.  Something to hide behind, something to do while you wait for your turn to speak.  But then as the night progresses, you tend to feel like the only intelligent one at the table, as the rest of the conversation slides into the drink.  You catch people tripping over their words, staring too long at one another.  You’re aware when jokes are missed or comments misunderstood.  You’re aware of how often this actually happens.  The problem is that by studying the behavior of the drinking people around you, you then realize how you yourself act when drunk.  And that’s rarely a happy conclusion to come to.

Tom is relaxed, but making a big deal out of trying to include Celia.  He’s like that, always striving for inclusivity.  I don’t know why he doesn’t feel a rush from being exclusive.  I know it’s not nice, but I have to think that it’s one of the more powerful feelings in the world.  I relish in a secret joke.  As a kid I liked the secret handshakes.  I liked having superlatives amongst my friends—this is my BEST friend while this is just a regular friend.  I have always taken a certain pleasure in capping the invitations at parties.  While I would like to be able to invite everyone, I would say, I cannot.  I could have, but I learned at a young age the rules of supply and demand.  If you invite ten people, thirty will wish they had been able to come.  If you invite fifty, people start to wonder if the party is even going to be that great.  It’s not difficult.  Our nation has built their entire economy around the principle.  I’m hardly creating something new.

Several minutes pass and I can’t even catch Darwin’s eye.  It annoys me for some reason to see Darwin in this social context.  That his wife is on his arm doesn’t bother me at all, disturbingly.  The first time he took my jeans off, he made that choice.  It doesn’t bother me to see him doing what he needs to do.  I am more upset that he seems to take my presence in stride, acting as if we have no connection to one another at all.  He gave me more attention before we started sleeping together, I realize.  I don’t expect him to gaze longingly into my eyes or announce to the table that he’s washed the sheets on his bed at the studio, but I don’t think I’m being unfair in expecting some kind of effort to be made.  A look out of the corner of his eye would be nice.  A nudged knee under the table, perhaps.

It’s boring, if nothing else.  The night, which was supposed to be thrilling and erotic, is boring.  Thank god for my bracelets and the alcohol.  Celia excuses herself early, saying she will leave Darwin to catch a taxi home.  Two of the three other remaining women choose to go home with her.  It’s not surprising.  Women tend to travel in herds.  They like an even balance of men and women at an event and once the numbers start to tilt, they seem to do whatever it takes to right them again.  Women will walk away from an exciting social situation just because there are no other women in sight.  I don’t understand this rule and I don’t follow it myself.  From my experience, things only seem to improve when the numbers start to tilt in that particular direction.  It may not be surprisingly at all then that I am having an affair with a married man.

I think that once the room is cleared of all that estrogen and white wine, things will improve, but they do not.  Darwin, even in the absence of his ever-widening wife, still fails to throw me the proverbial bone, and I am left again to the task of ordering more drinks and admiring my bracelets.

I decide to have one more drink and then leave.  After all, it is getting late and we are paying a babysitter by the hour for me to not have fun.  I head to the restroom on my way to the bar.  I am the person who goes to the restroom for something to do.  It’s a different room, a closed-away space.  I’ll use it when conversation starts to go flat.  I’ll use it when I want to quickly check my email or voicemail.  I’ll do it just for the sake of being able to walk away from the table, in hopes that the social climate will have changed by the time I return.

It’s a nice bar and I enjoy using their luxury hand soap, real linen towels and scented hand moisturizer.  I take my time, and upon exiting, I am surprised to see Darwin standing in the hallway.  “Anyone else in there?” he asks.  I don’t have time to process the possibilities of this comment.  For all of my life experiences, my brain is not really hardwired with those that would properly lead it to conclude that a man wants to take me into a public bathroom for sex.  As such, I kind of shake my head in an awkward way.  He grins a sly little smile, knowing I am caught off my guard, and pushes me back into the door, forcing it to swing open.  And just like that, I think, my night improves.

He kisses me and somehow the smell of his cologne turns into something I can actually taste.  I have never found the bathroom to be a particularly erotic place and yet the taste of his cologne is suddenly overpowering any other association I have ever had with any restroom. Somewhere in the back of my mind is the niggling preoccupation with the possibility of being caught, but this thought is rather remote.

Darwin’s solution for the opening door is simple: he pins me up against it.  For the briefest of moments, I am impressed with his strength.  It is not a comfortable position, but this thought will not occur to me until tomorrow, when I wonder how I got those bruises.  Another beautiful thing about sex with someone else’s husband—comfort is never really a concern.  I don’t know him well enough to expect comfort.  I am not so bored yet that it is comfort that I want.  No, the hard door behind my head and back will serve just fine.

Nobody knocks on the door, but this may be because the entire affair lasts under ten minutes and there are not that many women in the bar anyway.  When we are finished, Darwin pulls his jeans up and hands me my underwear.  “You might want these,” is all he says as he opens the door and walks out confidently.

I scurry into a stall to rearrange myself and get myself dressed.  And to ask myself what the hell I am doing.  It’s not guilt that I feel, but whatever the emotion is, it’s not necessarily positive.  It may well be simply that the knowledge that I have turned into the type of woman who has illegitimate sexual affairs in public restrooms doesn’t sit well with me.

Looking in the mirror before I leave the bathroom, I realize I am flushed in a way that will not resolve itself in the next few minutes.  It is the flush of sex, in particular the flush of sex with a married man up against the bathroom door of a bar.  I have no choice but to leave the bathroom, reddened and all.  I detour to the bar on my way back to the table, chatting to the bartender for a minute after he hands me my drink, trying to compose myself further.  I should not have bothered because when I get back to the table, it is clear that Tom is not paying any attention anyway.  Darwin probably could have bent me over the table in front of Tom and he would not have raised his voice about it.

This is another problem with being too nice, I realize.  Tom always assumes the best of people.  Often, he is right.  But sometimes, obviously, his rose tinted glasses obscure the truth.  I think that most women in my situation would be relieved that their husbands did not notice their prolonged absence from the table and then find their necks smelling of another man’s cologne.  I suppose I am probably alone in feeling slighted.  I have the ability to twist any situation.  It is a gift of mine.

Chapter Three

As soon as I see Darwin’s car swerve off to the right, I know that I will hit whatever it is that he is trying to avoid.  I am predictable like that.  And indeed, a fraction of a second later, I feel the telltale bump and look in my rearview mirror to see the truly disgusting carcass of what once was a cat.  I cannot help but think about which parts of that cat ended up where on my car.  I am predictable like that, too. 

I am following Darwin back to his studio, after my therapy appointment.  He is coming from the university.  These clandestine meetings have become a part of our lives, not the least enjoyable part either.

It has been over a month since our first meeting, and the novelty has yet to fully wear off.  Darwin, thanks probably to the brevity of our encounters, is still something of a mystery to me; I am still wholly entranced by him.  The sex we have is still amazing, passionate, wordless.  He is almost brutal with his lust and I relish in the attention.  With Darwin, I am able to behave in the way I want to today, without the nagging reminder of the past ten years of history.  If I want to be a new person, and lately I very much do, I am free to change because he does not know me.  What would invite an hour’s worth of questions with Tom is accepted as intrinsically mine with Darwin.

We both come to the studio now, I think, in order to meet our own needs.  I come to remind myself of my beauty and sexuality, which had somehow gotten lost in the shuffle of motherhood.  I come for passion and lust.  Darwin comes, my guess is, to avoid the reality of his life at home and of course for the gratuitous sex.  It just so happens that this one activity serves us both.

We don’t talk about it.  We don’t talk much at all, actually.  A relationship which started out as nothing but flirty banter has turned into nothing but sex.  This is not to say we’re disengaged from one another.  On the contrary, I consider Darwin one of my closest confidants.  I trust him to provide for me the things I need from him.  He always delivers and he does it in a way that validates me.  He thinks I’m gorgeous, for whatever reason.  He lacks the knowledge of my history and it makes me more appealing.  I have to think that it’s also the art that connects us.  Our ability to create is our common denominator.  The unfortunate reality of us having ended up with partners who do not is the factor that threatens both of our marriages.  He enjoys being with me physically.  Maybe that’s not meant to be the compliment I’m taking it as, but I would be lying if I said I wasn’t flattered by it.  He likes to fuck me; I don’t need anything more from him.

And for him?  What do I provide for him?  I like to think I’m just a soft place for him to fall.  He doesn’t need to be anything when he is with me.  I want nothing from him other than this.  I don’t need him to be a successful artist.  I don’t need him to man up to his duties as father or husband or friend.  I just need him to continue proving himself capable on the mattress in his studio, and so far we are doing well with that.

It is ironic maybe or at least just humorous that we meet immediately after my therapy sessions.  It feels good to dispel that pent up energy, to counter all that intellectual movement with all that physical play.  The therapist knows that we have started sleeping together.  I announced it boldly in our first session after the fact.  I laid it down as the gauntlet I thought it was.  I expected shock, squirming, fake-coughing.  I said it casually, expecting a big reaction.  The therapist threw me when she gave a cursory “of course” type of nod.  I don’t think she was surprised at the turn of events in the least.  This makes me almost hate her.  Her lack of surprise means, to me, that she was always convinced that this is where it would end up.  If she was so certain, why didn’t she warn me or try to stop it?  If she is so sure about my flagging morals, why isn’t she trying harder to fix me?  I feel like instead of providing me a service, she’s bought a ticket to a film.  I wonder if she enjoys the train wreck.  I wonder if she’s afraid that if I get better, she’ll lose a client.  I wonder why it is that the people I trust most in my life seem to have a vested interest in keeping me from being happy and whole.

In her favor, the therapist has come out and decided that we have officially and “by necessity” changed gears in our sessions together.  The focus has shifted away from why I feel what I feel about my recent successes and onto my marriage and Darwin.  I cannot help but think though that this topic was not of my choosing.  Darwin is not particularly something I’d like to explore in therapy.  Darwin, ironically enough, is the one area of my life that seems to be working just fine right now.  What I really need is someone to talk to me about Doris Lessing.  My editor, I fear, is growing increasingly frustrated with this topic altogether.  He needs for the woman to either fit into my thesis nicely or else disappear entirely.  I am profoundly fixated on her, obsessive really, and yet at the same time completely unable to fit her in.

The therapist is not interested in Doris Lessing.  She is interested in the goal, her goal, of rectifying the discrepancy between my decade-old marriage vows and the twenty-nine (yes, twenty-nine) year old man whose tongue is frequently in my mouth.  I can’t believe she’s wasting the effort.  For my part, I am holding to my original goal of doing this until it self-destructs.  I expected such an outcome weeks ago and, having somehow avoided it, I am now kind of operating under the assumption that it’s never going to happen. 

Tom and I are moving in our own separate spheres lately.  I am blaming work for my increasingly frequent absences from home and the bed that we share.  Interestingly, I have become more tender towards him in the past month.  It’s not that I feel sorry for him, per se, though I suppose in a way I do.  It’s just that I’ve come to respect him in a completely different way.  I feel as if, a month ago I was frustrated with Tom’s inability to be who I needed him to be.  I viewed him only in terms of how he related to me.  Since finding Darwin, though, a man who satisfies the part of me that Tom had neglected, I am able to see Tom as a person in his own right.  Tom is a good guy.  He is a nice guy.  This is what originally attracted me to him.  It hasn’t changed, I realize.  He is a very nice guy and in a perfect world he could remain my husband and the father to my children, while I get the rest of my needs met elsewhere.

The therapist reminds me that this is not the function of marriage.  She is constantly throwing my vows in my face.  I sit in her uncomfortable chair and think it is somehow important that my wedding vows mean more to her at this moment than they ever did to me.  If the chairs were reversed, if she were on my dissecting table, I would not let this observation pass.  She keeps asking me how I would feel to find out that Tom has been having an affair.  I am not even angry when I respond by telling her that I would feel nothing other than relief to know that Tom was fucking around.  It would confirm for me my belief that Tom and I are no longer compatible.  It would ease whatever guilt I am feeling.  And most of all it would provide clear direction for where we need to go and what we need to do.  She thinks she can scare me with all of these pretend scenarios she creates for me.  But her little lessons do no good because the reality is always scarier.  I suppose this is why she thinks the time has come to terminate.  Maybe she’s not wrong.

I was once very critical of couples who stayed together for the sake of their children.  It made no sense to me and I immediately judged the reasoning as a complete cop-out; children don’t want two unhappy parents.  They would rather be from a broken home than in a broken home.  The entire matter used to be so black and white to me.  I realize now that the only reason it ever seemed so simple was because I was viewing it from the perspective of the child, not the parent.  The child does prefer to be from a broken home.  Kids want things real; they can tell when you’re lying to them.  Kids would rather have all the dirt and mess right out there on the table than to feel the sensation of the world shifting underneath them.  We don’t fail our children by making mistakes.  We fail them by pretending that we haven’t.  It’s the parent who struggles with calling a thing by its proper name.  It’s the parent who wants to continue acting as if nothing has happened.  The parent is the one who has to admit to and then wade through all of those messy emotions, and most of the time, they’d rather avoid it.  This is why people stay in unhappy marriages.  Because to admit something is wrong and then to set out upon a different path, an unknown, is terrifying.  It only gets scarier as you get older.  Couples who have been together for fifty years, I think, aren’t successful.  They’re petrified.

I think about sharing custody of my children and it is a notion so haunting I simply am unable to move on to the next logical thought.  I cannot and will not spend every other weekend apart from my girls.  I will not give up two weeks out of our summer.  And more importantly, I cannot deny my children the right to grow up in the same house as their father.  My heart physically hurts when I imagine Tom moving out, coming home at the end of a workday and being by himself.  He is an exemplary father and I don’t think he would be capable of getting through the day without his children.  It just can’t happen.

My therapist tells me that this ought to be sufficient motivation to break off my affair with Darwin.  My therapist clearly has never spent a minute sandwiched between that mattress on the floor and Darwin’s tight smooth skin.  And this is where the problem of the brooch reenters.  How can I trust the opinion of a woman who is so sterile, so carefully adorned, so practical?  Of course I ought to leave Darwin and reinvest in my marriage.  This deduction does not require an advanced degree.  But Darwin’s bottom lip tastes like coffee and the side of his chest smells faintly like fire and wine mixed together.  Trust me, I have told the therapist, I would give him up if I could.

Still, the therapist persists.  Today she told me, for the first time, that if I am unwilling to give up one of the men in my life it makes no sense for me to continue in therapy.  This is my second big surprise from the therapist.  Surely, I think, this ultimatum breaks the code of the therapist.  As far as I know, it is her job to work for me so long as I am willing to work.  I have never heard of a therapist giving up on a client, and yet this is what she is threatening.  She has given me a deadline of two weeks to decide what I am going to do or else, she says, we will begin the process of “termination.”  She says that in the absence of change, our sessions have become unproductive.  I think it’s interesting that she chooses to use therapy-speak even while she clearly deviates from therapist-code.  I wonder if there is some sort of governing body to which I can report her.

If the contest is between the therapist, my husband of ten years and the twenty-nine year old man whose skin tastes like fire, I am not afraid to tell the therapist that she hardly comes out on the winning end of things.

A fire engine comes hurtling down the opposite side of the street.  Darwin, in his car in front of me, quickly signals and moves to the shoulder of the road.  If he were not in front of me, I probably would not have done the same.  I got my driver’s license at sixteen and have not read the rule book since.  I can never remember if I have to pull over if the fire truck is on the other side of the street or just if it is behind me.  I don’t really see any compelling reason to stop driving for someone else’s fire, if I’m not in the way.  But Darwin either has recently read the book or else is just the type of guy who gets out of the way for other people’s fires.  I don’t know but my attraction for him instantly grows.  I can picture his slender fingers on the steering wheel and I am excited by how quickly he reacts.  This is how I am though.  I chose my best friend in high school simply because of her impossibly thin ankles and how cool I thought she looked with an anklet on.  Some guy I dated in college earned his way into my bed, if not my heart, because of the look of concentration he held on his face before he dove off the diving board during swim meets.  I am decidedly impressionable.

We show up at Darwin’s studio and he opens a beer for me.  At the same time it became a habit to have sex with a younger, married man, it also became habit to drink beer in the middle of the day.  These are not the changes I anticipated from my thirties, though I cannot admit to being unhappy with either of them.  Sitting ourselves down on the mattress, I slide my hand under his t-shirt.  He leans back and smiles but makes no effort to encourage my exploration.  It is a tiny distinction but one that I note immediately.  This is the first time it has been left up to me to initiate sex.  I remove my hand and take another sip of beer.

“Celia is being induced tomorrow night,” he says in a less-than-enthusiastic tone.  He slinks down lower on the mattress and covers his eyes with an arm.  Darwin is about to become a father.  Apparently this is the point at which our weekly escapades have become troubling.  I am quiet, because there is nothing to be said.  Or rather because there is an awful lot to be said, but not by me.  He sighs and says simply, “I can’t do this.”

And so, I think, this is where it ends.  I am, all at once, resigned to the reality of the situation.  What did I think was going to happen?  How long did I honestly believe we could continue on as we’ve been?  If it is not marriage (and even if it is marriage, most of the time) it will eventually end or change.  This was never meant to be forever; it was meant to be a distraction from the forever’s that we already had.  I nod and shift my weight away from him, my body already making the decision to sever ties.  Darwin surprises me by taking the beer out of my hands and then pushing my hands up over my head and my body down onto the mattress.  He holds me firmly in place and kisses me strongly.  I feel myself growing more aroused even as I will myself not to.  If it is to end, let it have ended the last time he fucked me.  There doesn’t need to be a repeat, now that I know the outcome.  I can handle the leaving; I cannot handle being used one last time before he goes.

I break away from his kiss and am about to tell him to stop when he whispers, “I left Celia.”

This is meant, I can tell from his husky tone of voice, to arouse me.  Instead, it makes me feel like vomiting.  I am, for once, without anything to say.  My eyes are open as he kisses down the length of my body.  He kneels over me to take his shirt off and instead of concentrating on that first glimpse of his naked body, as I have every other time this has happened, I am instead concentrating on the fact that he is kneeling on my jeans, forcing them to constrict painfully around my thigh.  I would like for him to stop, but because our relationship has turned virtually wordless, I don’t know how to tell him this.  I know how to say the word ‘stop’ but I don’t know how to follow it up.  I don’t know what I think about him leaving his wife and I don’t know how I feel about his hand on my ass.  I have lost my voice.

And so I submit to it.  I turn off the questioning part of me and I try my best to respond the same way I would have if he’d kept his mouth shut.  I go through the motions because I don’t know how else to behave.  I sigh at the appropriate times, raise my hips when called upon to do so, and clutch his back as if I am in a state of exhilaration.  Women have been doing this since time began and while I never anticipated having to do it with Darwin, I know that it is somewhere in my genetic code to be able to fake this in order to survive the moment.

He rolls to his side, pulling the sheet up to his chest at the same time I begin fumbling for my clothes.  It has got to be, by this point, abundantly clear that there is a problem, and yet he seems fairly unaffected by the change in my behavior.  His eyes are closed.  Last week the fact that he drifted in and out of consciousness after sex was endearing.  I imagined it a commentary on the all-consuming passion involved in the act.  I felt worn out too and would enjoy snuggling in his arms until one or both of us was moved to do it again, as many times as was possible in the time allotted to us.  Today his sleepiness irritates me.  I tell him I have to go and that I will call him later.  I kiss him once, square in the center of his chest and stand to leave.

Pulling the studio door closed behind me, I step out into the sun and feel, finally, completely lost.

Chapter Four

Darwin’s daughter is, by now, two weeks old.  I know this only because I have kept track of the number of therapy appointments that have passed since he told me about Celia’s induction and that he left her.  Needless to say, I have not sent a gift.

The therapist, as it turns out, was right when she told me I’d have to choose between the men and herself.  My deadline is today, in one hour.  If I do not decide, in therapy today, to do something in the way of ending one of these two relationships, I will be forced to end my therapy sessions.  I am driving to the appointment and still at a loss for what I will do.  I hate feeling cornered like this.  I hate that, without my even knowing it was happening, the therapist has inserted herself as some type of major player in my life.  I thought her job was to empower me; instead I feel like a dog begging at her heels.  I hate this.

Darwin and I have both spoken on the phone and met in person since he left Celia.  Our conversation is halted and unproductive.  We are better at fucking.  We are struggling under the new guidelines for our relationship.  Suddenly, it is meant to include serious discussion, and I am almost certain that our foundation is not strong enough to support such a tedious activity.  Nor is there enough shared enthusiasm for the project.  This was never meant to be complicated.  Never meant to be difficult.  This was supposed to be just sex; my head spins when I try to dissect where it went wrong.

Darwin has moved out of the home he shared with Celia and is sleeping fulltime at the studio now.  The space is taking on more and more aspects of a home, as it is now filling with his clothes, a filing cabinet, a laptop, even furniture.  The mattress is less and less the focal point of the room, and I am justifiably cross at this development.  Part of me wants to shake myself loose from Darwin.  He has become messy and attached.  In his sudden independence from the roles of husband and father, he is not exactly reverting to bachelorhood.  He seems, instead, to be channeling his energies in my direction.  I have enough people who need something from me.  This affair with him was supposed to be mutually selfish; we were each meant to take from it what we lacked in our real lives.  And yet here I am again, in the position of feeling needed.  In the position to either give more or else to appear a bitch.  This was never meant to happen.

For once I am honest with the therapist.  I have nothing to lose at this point.  I feel, in a lot of ways, as though I’ve already lost a good chunk of what I came here with.  Perhaps this is the real process of therapy: examining your life in such a scrutinizing fashion that it ceases to continue to develop in an organic way at all.  Thinking on it until you ruin it.  Studying your natural reactions away.  At this point, however, I am out of options.

I sit rather humbly in my chair today.  I notice her brooch right alongside the acknowledgement that it really doesn’t fucking matter.  How childish was I to write off an entire person because of a single piece of jewelry.  I am awestruck by the fact that just two weeks ago I paraded about like someone who knew something and today I have been knocked to the ground with the knowledge that I know nothing.  This is what happens, I realize, when you get what you want.

I say this aloud to my therapist.  I tell her that for as much as I wanted Darwin, I never expected to get him.  I was in love with the wanting.  It wasn’t difficult to make the leap to the sexual nature of our friendship.  Our bodies get on famously.  But the actual person?  The actual character and being of Darwin?  I never knew him, and so I can’t really say that I ever wanted him.  I wanted from him.  I never wanted him.  That is a subtle yet important distinction, one I wish I had known a few months back.

I tell the therapist that this is the result of getting what you want.  You are left with options and sometimes none of those options is very palatable.  Or sometimes, worse probably, all of them are.  And then the responsibility is on you to choose.  Choose wrong and you have to be held responsible for your own unhappiness.  This is why it is better to want.  Christmas, after all, starts to suck the very second the gifts are unwrapped.  The expectation is dead.  The waiting is over.  You’re just left to pick up the garbage and find a way to incorporate all this new, unnecessary shit into your life.  The therapist asks me then, almost gently, what connections I can see between wanting Darwin and wanting the publication of my book.

I am silent for a minute.  For as crafty and wily as I have come to understand the therapist to be, I never honestly thought for a minute that she had a bigger picture in mind.  I have been viewing each of our sessions as individual events, with no line connecting the dots.  I didn’t think she was smart enough for the line.  The therapist, it seems now, has been waiting for this moment.  The moment when she could liken my inappropriate reaction to the publication of my book to the reaction (an appropriate reaction to an inappropriate situation, I suppose) of finding out Darwin has left Celia for me.

I cannot decide, immediately, whether the therapist is very smart or just very lucky.  I privately think that she backed into this turn of events.  But the not knowing makes me raise my eyebrows, widen my eyes and let my jaw go slack.  The idea that someone else not only foretold these events while I was left to live them out but then actually connected them to other events in my own personal history disturbs me at a fundamental level.  Without thinking, I stand and collect my things.  I walk out of my therapist’s office for the second time in as many months.

I am not foolish, I tell myself, for wanting things to just go back to the way they were last year.  There are worse things, after all, than having a mediocre sex with one’s husband.  Of if there truly is nothing worse, then surely there is a neater solution than the one I have sought.  Consider this a learning curve, I tell myself to calm my mounting anxiety.  It is the human condition, I think not for the first time, to want what we cannot have.  When we do finally get that which we sought, we tend to discover that it isn’t really that great anyway.  And then the wanting begins again.  I don’t think that this is something to be condemned.  I think it merely has to be understood and accepted.  If you accept it, maybe, you can train yourself to reap the benefits from the want without ever having to succumb fully to the desire.  Maybe.

I get in the car and tune the iPod to my current favorite song.  The guitar chords have been, for the past year or so anyway, powerful enough to bring me to back from whichever ledges I happen to find myself teetering on.  When my head is a mess, listening to this song never tames the chaos, but it certainly always validates it.  I can always cry out with the vocals and feel comforted by the fact that I am not alone with my confused head.  I am a part of something larger, an entire group of people who struggle to get to the bottom of the conflict in their lives.  The world is rife with problems—social, political, emotional, interpersonal--and I am beholden to the people who are talented enough to commit the whole disaster to music.  I turn the music up and roll the windows down.  Driving past Darwin’s studio, I am relieved to see he is not on the steps with a cigarette.  I don’t want to face him right now; I just want to drive.  The noise in my head is deafening.  A week ago I would have sought the comfort of that mattress.  Now the mattress only contributes to the unnecessary background noise.  What a shame that I have destroyed my solace.  I am more surprised than I should be.

The music starts to take effect at the moment the vocals give way to heavy guitar.  In a minute, the rock guitar noise will surprisingly (yet successfully) fall away to a jazz violin and I will be able to taste my heart in my throat.  This is when, typically, the confusion in my life begins making sense again.  No problems are solved, but instead they are all simply put into perspective.  The music helps these tangled little bits find their place in the long line of fucked up events that have shaped me.  They file in, make me a tiny bit more complicated, and we sit back to anticipate the next one.

I wait for it, bobbing my head and drumming the steering wheel in time to the guitar.  And then, predictably and magically, the world falls away with the violin.  It’s thrilling.  It’s thrilling that someone produced it at all but then it’s even more amazing that it continues to have the same effect on me time and time again.  This song is my Prozac.  The therapist and I could go into business peddling it, I think.

I realize that I’m crying.  I am not a person who is easily given to tears.  As a matter of fact, I cannot actually recall the last time I felt this wetness on my face.  I am the person who has to fake the action of crying at a funeral because the tears fail to come on their own.  But here they are, uninvited, creeping, slick passengers.  I am so far removed from myself, I realize, that I cannot even put these tears into words.  Some people can construct entire musical pieces to accompany their difficult emotions.  I can’t even pinpoint the difference between “sad” and “devastated” anymore.  It seems a slippery slope anyway.

These unexplained tears remind me of a therapy session I had a few weeks back.  The therapist was hounding me to explain how I felt about my sister.  “Yes but how did her leaving make you feel?” she’d ask.  I would respond, “I think. . .” and she would cut me off and ask the same question again.  Apparently, it is incorrect to answer the question of how you feel with describing what you think.  Thinking and feeling are not the same thing, the therapist assures me.  I had no idea.  It never crossed my mind to care, but now that it’s been pointed out to me, the inability to differentiate between what I feel and what I think seems a glaring personal defect.  And it reminds me, once again, as if I needed another reminder, of the myriad ways I am failing my own children.  Whatever it is that a parent needs to do to ensure that their children grow into adults who can correctly identify their emotions, I am certain I am leaving undone.  My children may well grow into emotional impotents like their mother.

I know what I think about my sister.  I think she is a product of her environment, the same as I am.  I think that she is selfish and damaged.  I think, really, that she was fucked the minute she came into existence and the best any of us can do with her is to manage our reactions to her dysfunction.  That’s what I think about my sister.  I think it is just as well that she ran out on me because eventually I would have likely had to do the same to her.  She is not the only child in our family to have grasped the fine art of self-preservation.

What do I feel about my sister?  I still struggle to see the distinction, but this is where the therapist would hand me a list of words that describe emotions.  I can feel sad or hurt or excited or depressed or confused or any one of another thousand words to describe that strange experience of your head telling you words and that empty space in your chest sending either the feeling of hot or cold throughout the rest of your body.  That is an emotion.  This is how I would describe it anyway.

How do I feel about my sister?  Given the list of feeling words, I would circle resigned, bereaved and empathetic.  I’m not sure if any of these would get the nod from the therapist, however; they feel a bit too much like “action words.”  Still, these are the three words that best describe the sense of loss I feel when I think about the failed opportunity of my sister.  And that is exactly how she feels to me: like unrealized potential.  She is the only sibling I have and yet I have been raised, because of her, as if I am an only child. I suppose, if the therapist were to hand me the list of feelings again, I may very well circle “angry” as well.  There is still some residual anger, though most of it has died from lack of tending.  Part of me, I suppose, will always be a little bit angry that my sister left me to fend for myself.  She ought to have protected me.  She ought to have attempted, even if just for a moment, a bit of selflessness.  But this anger is diluted.  The older I get, the more I understand the concept of self-preservation.

My sister, Julia, is seven years older than I am.  It is a well-known fact that I was a surprise pregnancy.  This felt a lot more sinister to me before I ended up with a twin surprise pregnancy of my own.  Now I understand that these things just happen, and most of the time there is actually a space left in the life of a couple to allow for such accidents to happen.  The inability to decide, for sure, if a couple wants children can sometimes lead a couple to not fully protect themselves against the possibility.  I get that because that’s what happened to me.  And that’s a good theory, and it’s one that my parents like to support now that they’re much older.  But really, when you look back at how our parents chose to raise us, it is abundantly clear that my parents didn’t ever want any children; they just forgot to protect themselves against them.  Or they forgot to protect us from them, depending on your perspective.

Nobody escapes unscathed when her parents are a disaster, but for some reason Julia was affected by the whole thing a lot more than I was.  Again, maybe this is simply a matter of perspective and it is possible, particularly in light of my current situation, that my head is more of a mess than Julia’s ever was.  It’s possible that she was just worse at hiding it.  I’m not sure.  I read somewhere that no two children have the same parents, meaning that people parent their children differently depending on the temperament of the child, their own age, and what they have going on in their personal lives.  I can definitely say this is true for myself.  I followed very few of the rules I’d laid down with my first when I attempted to parent numbers two and three.  It is likely then that my sister had a very different experience growing up than I did, particularly given the age difference.  I guess I can’t judge; nobody can, though of course I am the one who is most able to approximate it.

I get my thoughts and feelings about Julia mixed up because there is no present tense with her.  I have not seen Julia since I was ten years old.  I have not spoken to her in over a decade.  She is a memory and although I understand I am supposed to have thoughts and feelings regarding her, at times it is difficult to draw those to the surface.  Sometimes I forget that she is a person altogether, and I think she is just another thing that happened to me.

I have turned the car’s engine off before I realize that I am at home.  I didn’t intend on driving here, but this is where I end up.  I walk inside the empty house, throw my bag on the table and sit down with a sigh.  The house smells like my children.  I have told my husband in the past that if he were to somehow capture this scent and sprinkle even one drop of it in an auditorium of 100,000 people, I would pick up on the smell.  I don’t even understand the smell.  It’s a combination of frequently-laundered clothing, fresh air, cupcakes and Christmas.  And a little bit of dirt and play. 

I look up from the table where I am sitting and I am confronted with the most recent photos of the girls.  I look at their sweet, unlined faces and think for the hundredth time today of the ways in which I am failing them.  I was committed to this useless practice long before I ever started sleeping with Darwin, so I can’t very well blame the affair.  Rather, I think I just know what it is like to feel letdown and powerless, and so I’m sensitive to others who may feel the same way.  My own family history did not prepare me for parenthood and yet I foolishly jumped into it with both feet.  I don’t know when exactly the fear of failing them turned into the knowledge that I am doing so, but that’s where I live these days. 

I am not proud of this.

These are the thoughts that are so dark I do not air them for anyone.  All of the fantasies I have about what my life would look like without children—it’s never about me sunbathing nude on the beaches of Tobago.  Instead it’s about me doing my grocery shopping without being bitten, being able to complete a thought, going through life without the constant reminder that I am destroying three innocent people. 

The times when I noticeably balk at a wet, gummy kiss on my cheek.  Getting caught wiping it away in disgust.  The times when the endless questions get to be too much and I just walk away from it.  The times when I am intentionally mean to the girls, when I am sarcastic with them or cold to them.  The times when I invent things to do just so that I don’t have to be surrounded by their bottomless need.  All of the projects I research because they would be excellent learning and bonding opportunities for us, but then they sit unfinished because it is easier to park the girls in front of a movie or send them to a friend’s house so I can escape the noise.  The times I have broken down in front of them, disreguarding their feelings entirely.  The things for which I have blamed them.  Verbally.

I know I am supposed to cherish these years.  Heaven knows I asked for them.  But I struggle.  When the girls were very young, I was fairly open with my friends and family about how difficult I found motherhood.  People were supportive and empathetic, to a point.  And then it seems I crossed that point and instead of getting support, I got inquiries, offers to take the children for the weekend, the names of places that offer parenting classes.  Somewhere along the line, I realized that my reaction was not typical.  That is when I stopped sharing how I really feel about being a mother.  And since being a mother is most of what I am, that is pretty much the point when I stopped sharing.

I hate myself as a mother, and worse, I hate knowing that there is no undoing it.  I hate knowing that each day they get older and need me to be better for them.  I hate knowing that one day they will be able to verbalize the damage I have done to them.  I hate failing them.  I hate acting like I’m not even when I know I am.  I hate that I don’t see any other options.  When people say motherhood is hard work, I do not think this is what they’re referencing.  This hatred.  It consumes me and I live with it because I have to.  I hate hurting the people I love most.

If the therapist were to hand me the feeling chart about this particular situation, that of letting down my own children, I could easily write in the word “self-loathing.”  I can forgive myself for fucking around on Tom.  I can even forgive myself for the way that transgression negatively impacts my children.  I think I can forgive this because I feel as though it is in my power to change it.  But failing my children is something I have probably been doing since the moment they entered this world, and I honestly feel like I simply do not have the skills to behave differently.  And I abhor that impotence.  It makes me realize the darkest possibilities about myself.  When they are grown, my children, I know from experience, will not care that I didn’t purposely set out to treat them this way.  Intentions don’t matter a damn when it comes to parenting.  But it’s something you can’t fake either.

I am no Doris Lessing.  There is no walking out on my children.  I cannot imagine turning my back on them; it’s not that I desire a life without them, it’s that I wish I could somehow incorporate them seamlessly.  I wish I could have them without sacrificing absolutely everything there is about me.  This inability to parent effectively is not something I toy with.  It’s not something I make jokes about.  It is not something I chose.  These difficulties, I really do believe, were foisted upon me.  They are my heritage, my lineage.  Still, I am as likely to open a vein as I am to leave my children in South Africa.  Both would have the same result.  Both would be me admitting I have failed in a way that no longer permits me to live.  My children are my struggle.  My family is my struggle.

I honestly think the children would be better off without me.  My insistence on staying around and attempting to fit the role speaks more to my needing validation and occupation than it does about my level of commitment to their wellbeing.  That is my darkest truth.  I could be in therapy for the rest of my life and never approach being able to say this aloud.

I put my head in my hands.  It is time to make decisions.  It is time for action, in one direction or another, because all of this time spent inside of my head is not getting me anywhere.  I have read enough great literature to believe, if only half-heartedly, in the “a-ha” moment.  The breakthrough.  The windows springing open and the flock of doves bursting forth.  I am in need of an epiphany.  Let this moment be it, I think, as I wipe the tears away.

I need a break from all the drama, I decide.  I need a break from all the introspection that is slowly breaking me down.  I need action.  I decide at this exact moment to dedicate myself wholly to my thesis.  It is time to work Doris into the equation, write the damn essay and be done with it.  My first step is to call the therapist.  I leave a voicemail telling her that I am taking a break from therapy for a bit.  I thank her for her hard work, assure her that I’m fine and promise to call again in a month or so.  I wonder if this sort of behavior is allowed and then I laugh at myself for all the importance I have placed on this counseling gig.  I need to remind myself, frequently, that I am the one paying her.  She works for me.  If this were a real relationship, one that would justify my feeling guilty for bailing out on it, I would not have to pay for her time.  But no, this is a construct, and as such, I owe her nothing.  Ironically, I need to get out of therapy so that I can change my life.  Sitting around and reflecting on the ways in which I am screwing up is not really helping anyone.  It is possible, I think, that being under the “care” of a therapist has allowed me to act like a child.  I have been operating under the assumption that if my behavior was truly immoral, the therapist would have stepped in.  She has not and my conduct has spiraled out of control.  It’s time to take back the reigns maybe.

Moving on, I call over to the university library and ask for help in collecting information regarding Doris Lessing.  This is another virtue of academia.  If you can convince those in control of information that you are worth the effort, they will dispatch minions to assist you with the real work of your project.  The woman on the line advises me to stop by in the morning to collect whatever they can find.  Perfect.

I think about Darwin and wonder what to do about the problem he has become.  If I sever ties with him, I honestly fear that I may once again lose my thesis.  Something about the way his hair falls over his eye or the way he lights his cigarette is intractably linked to my being able to concentrate on the topic of Lessing.  The secret of him still motivates me through the better half of my day, even with how difficult he has become.  The tension has eased but that there is still this incredibly sexy man who wants to spend his days in bed with me is enough to keep my creative engines running.  He cannot go just yet.  And he may not need to.  I still need time, I tell myself, to sort through the wreckage of these relationships and determine what needs to happen.

In the meantime, I tell myself, I will force myself to talk to Tom.  Even without disclosing the information about Darwin, there are still ample topics for discussion.  I need to talk to him about the growing distance between us.  The sexual issues.  My desire to change myself into more of an artist and my perceived resistance from him on this.  I need to get inside his head for a minute, find out what he’s thinking, before I can make any decisions regarding him or Darwin.  Maybe that’s not the way decisions like these are supposed to be made.  I don’t have the luxury of acting as an independent though.  I have three children to consider.

And finally, motherhood.  This simply has to be the point where I change as a mother.  It’s not too late, I tell myself.  There are still the teenage years, the latter half of childhood, to consider.  I have not completely failed them, I convince myself, until the moment when I decide it really is too late to change.  Today I will change.  Today I will do better.  This will be the day that my children cite as the day things turned around for them.  Especially if something is to happen to the marriage of their parents, I will need to be better for them.  I turn on the computer and go hunting for parenting books.  I read the pregnancy books, but I have never read a parenting book.  It is ironic, since I knew from the start that parenting would likely not come to me naturally.  I should have been reading these all along, I realize as I scan through the titles.  I select three and order next-day shipping.  Just clicking the “order” button makes me feel as though I have accomplished something.  Isn’t there something about how admitting you need help is the first step to change?  Is that just with alcoholics?

Chapter Five

He is not meant to be in my house.  He wasn’t exactly invited over and now that he’s here, I’m not sure how to get him to leave.  Seeing Darwin on Tom’s side of my bed catches me off guard.  Still.  Even though he has been here all afternoon.  He’s wearing nothing but a pair of boxers and he’s eating potato chips.  In the past ten minutes alone, I have seen him drop at least two chips onto the sheets.  I imagine their grease permeating my white Egyptian cotton and I have to consciously think whether or not I am bothered by it.  I decide I’m not.  Tom has relatively few rules in life, but separating the actions of eating and sleeping is a pretty big one for him.  No matter how many times I wash the sheets, I imagine Tom finding a crumb of fried potato and wondering what has suddenly come over his wife of ten years.  It rather makes me smile.  Having Darwin over here is like inviting a puppy into the house.  Or like having a child in bed with me.

Except not.  And this is why he ends up here without a real invitation.  This is why I tolerate the chips in bed.

This, I think as I pop a potato chip into my own mouth, is not exactly what I meant when I declared that a change was underway.  This isn’t what I was going for.  In the three weeks that have passed since those parenting books showed up at my doorstep, a lot has changed, but none of it changed in the ways I anticipated.  It’s just another sign that life does its own thing.  The only thing we can do is prepare ourselves with flexibility and acceptance.  Making plans is highly overrated.  The same with the making of promises.  It’s best to just be honest about our inability to predict the future and brace ourselves for the fallout.  This is reality.

I have read most of what the parenting books had to offer.  And I am honestly trying some of the techniques.  I have a new personal rule about counting to ten before I speak when I am angry.  I try to divide my time purposefully—when I am with the girls, I try to really be present with them.  I lower my music, answer all of their questions, ignore the ringing phone.  I try to relax my jaw when I notice I am clenching my teeth.  I reward myself for this by scheduling time each day where I don’t even have to think about them.  I even made a reward chart.  With stickers.

And I think that these changes are helping, but not in any huge way.  I still struggle to get through the day, if I’m honest.  I guess the main thing that has changed is that I am now parenting deliberately.  Having punished myself with the act of reading through all of that parenting advice, I am now making more of an effort to act my age and control the situation.  I threaten myself with the thought of having to read more books if I can’t pull it together.  But all of the books advise me that if I am not happy in my own life, this unhappiness will spill over onto my parenting.  My children will pay for my discontent., which means I will suffer twice.  No fear, the parenting books have a solution for this as well.  I am told to be happier.

Clearly, if I knew how to make myself happy I would not be buying parenting books in the first place.  I don’t know how therapists and people in the business of writing garbage like this sleep at night.  Their arguments are so circular and redundant.  It doesn’t take a savant to figure out that this redundancy is due to the fact that there are no real answers.  There is no real advice to be given or sought.  If there was a right way to do things, I believe we all would have figured it out by now and we would all be doing it.  When I’m reading those books I feel as if I am in the presence of a community of people who are better off than I am.  And they’re laughing at me.  And trying to get me to buy more of their books.  Their plan for how I can be happier with myself and in my marriage is to. . .wait for it. . .go to counseling.  This is because the book was written by a counselor.  I would love to know what is going on behind the doors of all of these other counselor’s offices, because I went for the better part of a year and ended up sleeping with a young father-to-be who then left his family for me.  Maybe all of this counseling isn’t quite the answer, yeah?

So I read the books and then I discarded the books.  Life is difficult.  My children could have it a hell of a lot worse.  At the end of the day, they are way ahead of the game in a lot of regards.  They are healthy, financially-secure, enrolled in good schools, properly dressed kids who perform at or above their grade level.  And I am trying.  This is more than a lot of people can say.  This is more than my own parents could have said.  So my new motto is to stop holding myself and my family up to the standards outlined in self-help books. 

I feel better already.

Likewise, I am making big changes with Tom. I talked to him the same night that I ordered the books, the day of my supposed epiphany.  I came clean with what I have been feeling though it was certainly not easy for me.  The boat showed no signs of rocking from his angle.  Either he was not aware of everything I felt going on or else he was content with the growing distance between us.  My decision to intentionally upset the balance and call attention to the elephant in the room required a strength I didn’t even think I had in me.  I was stomach-ache honest with him when I told him that I don’t feel close to him anymore, that the hollow-ness and emptiness of his career is bothering me, that my art is bothering me, that I am struggling with the children.  I even went so far as to mention that lately I am finding myself attracted to other people, other artists.  I broke down in tears because it was hard to say and I wondered if any of it was necessary or would be helpful.  Had he responded differently, I may have come clean with the details of the affair I’ve been having too, such was my motivation to level the playing field.  But as it was, the conversation stopped dead in its tracks when he gave a dramatic, exhausted sigh.  He turned away from me, held the kitchen counter in both hands, bending his head over it and said, “If you are so bored and have so much time to be looking at other men, you may try finding yourself a career that can actually pay the bills.  And then we’ll talk about me quitting my job.”  And with that, he went upstairs.  The conversation, apparently, was over.  And there I was, with my heart just out there, bleeding all over the place.

I should have probably left him then.  It was shock that held me rooted in place after those words were spoken.  I had no idea.  He had never once in our entire lifetime together mentioned ever feeling angry or disappointed or burdened by my career choice.  To bring it up now that my writing career is actually taking off, of course, is a slap in the face.  He’s using it as a leash.  He’s reminding me that he supported me on my rise to where I am today.  He’s challenging my feelings, using our history as his pawn.  I suppose he’s forgetting about my dual roles of maid and nanny to his three children, but no matter.  He’s forgotten, I guess, who it is that washes the clothes that still fit squarely over his unchanged body.  The whole thing is bullshit, of course.  It’s interesting that I am angry at him for being angry at me, even while I carry on with Darwin.  Once the argument grows this many layers, the whole thing turns is ridiculous beyond repair, obviously.  It becomes no longer worth the energy.

But, still, at times the issue becomes less clear, and I am left wondering.  Tom is not typically like this.  He is not usually given to anger or resentment.  He is not the deep well of hidden emotion that suddenly explodes forth.  This isn’t the man I know, so it takes some work on my part to remember the way his face looked when he said those hurtful things to me.  It’s a lot of work to remember, so most of the time I file it away in a little box and just keep on the way I have been.  Part of me, apparently, is pretty comfortable with just towing the line.  I definitely should have left him the exact moment those words left his mouth.  Because even a minute later, my memory had softened them, made them easier to swallow.  And now?  Three weeks later and I’m laughing at Darwin’s potato chips on Tom’s side of the bed.  The only thing that has changed is that I no longer feel any guilt or any impetus to change courses.  Life is messy.

Should have left him then.  There is no doubt that I have it in me to do it.  I come from a long line of people leaving each other.  Our family crest should be a picture of a suitcase.  I think though that long ago I decided that Julia would be the one in our family to carry on the legacy of walking out on people.  And now that I’ve let her fill that role, and then gone ahead and hated her for it, I can’t very well follow suit.

Julia walked out on the family when she was seventeen.  She moved in with her boyfriend who was a few years older.  It was not a bad decision, moving out of our house.  If I’d had a boyfriend to run to, I would have happily done the same.  The problem was in the choices she made after the fact.  Instead of continuing on in school, she dropped out.  Instead of trying to be the All-American success story and working her way up at the restaurant where she waited tables, she got fired.  She started using heavy (heavier?) drugs, got pregnant, lost custody of the baby, spent some time in jail, and basically followed that stereotype out to its natural conclusion.  I lost touch with her when I got married, and to be honest I have never really spent a lot of time trying to find her.  There are some people who don’t want to be found, and likewise there are some people who will simply always be lost.  She could be sitting on my kitchen floor, and I would probably still feel like she was missing.

For all of the bad choices Julia made, I really can only fault her for one: the one that affected me, of course.  Before she moved out, she was the person who took care of me.  She is the one who fed me.  She was the one who made sure I had decent clothes.  She was the one who made sure my homework got done and that I stayed healthy.  After she moved out, she pretty much cut ties with me.  Life got harder after she left.

It doesn’t make sense for me to feel angry with her because she stopped doing something that was never her job in the first place.  I know she did what she did because she had to take care of herself, too.  But I can’t stop hating her for it.  Not for what she did to me, but for what she didn’t do for herself.  I shake with inappropriate anger when I think of all that sadness and emptiness and ineptitude.  Nothing makes me more enraged than seeing a woman give up on herself.  When I think back to how I essentially raised myself in that house and came out with a college degree, a husband, and kids I actually get to see, I curse her for being so weak.  I wouldn’t change the way I grew up now if I could.  What I learned was more than how to feed myself and get myself dressed.  I learned the real truth—that people leave.  That it is hardwired into everyone to take care of themselves first.  It’s great to have companionship with others, but at the end of the day it really does boil down to everyone needing to get their own needs met.  I can thank Julia for that lesson.  Learning it has made me a lot less fearful.

Especially now, I think, watching Darwin brush the crumbs off his chest so he can roll over and kiss me.  Whatever.  Life is complicated.  He rolls onto his back again and lights the joint he’s kept behind his ear all morning.  I laugh and eat another chip.

Chapter Six

I have brought my work to the public library with me.  I intend, fully intend, again, to sit and write about the topic of Doris Lessing.  She continues to evade me at home, so I thought the issue might respond better to a change of scenery.  So far, it has not.

Instead of writing, I find I am watching people.  That the library is busy does not mean people are reading, much to my chagrin.  I rather like the idea of a world full of people high on information, minds stuffed full of good literature.  But the reality is that most of the activity in this bustling place is taking place amongst those on computers.  I look at all of the books on the shelves and wonder how often each one is checked out.  I wonder how many have never spent a minute outside the walls of this library, or even off their shelves.  I give myself thirty seconds to feel bad for those inanimate, unloved books and then I move on.  I’ll check out three today, just so that they see some action before they’re retired.

The entire perimeter of the library is outfitted with PCs and all but three of them in my eyeshot are being used.  Because I can, I look at the screens.  I want to see what people are doing.  Are they reading?  Is the internet just the new book?  I see a lot of Facebook.  I see some questionable YouTube videos.  I overhear a video I myself have seen—that of a baby laughing hysterically.  I remember chuckling when I first saw it.  To know that it is some kind of cult classic completely robs it of its humor.  Poor baby.  It seems wrong that the kid never got any choice in his rise to stardom.

The internet is not the new book, despite what the ivory towers will have you believing.  It is easy to say that the internet has replaced the book, but I think the truth is that the book never really was much of a competitor anyway.  Which is sad, because the paucity of real readers forces some kind of elitism that the world would be better off without, but I can’t do much about that.  I’m just happy to have come out on the winning end of the matter.

I would say at least half of the people in this library right now are here because they have nothing else to do.  There are a handful of people sleeping upright in chairs.  They smell.  I try to avoid looking at them because I have found that if you stare at a sleeping person long enough, they tend to wake up.  I do not want these people to wake up.  There are older-looking teenagers on their own laptops.  They are playing games.  Why leave the house to play games, I wonder.  I like computer games.  I like to play them in my underwear, in bed, before I doze off.  I do not feel the need to join society in a physical way only to detach from it intellectually to play games with myself.  I don’t understand it even for a moment.  Surely this means I am old.

There is, suddenly, a woman screaming so loudly at the man she is with that she is asked to leave.  She does, but not before spitting on the floor.  Because I am hardwired to do so, I immediately withhold judgment of this woman and presume her to be mentally ill.  I cannot imagine a mentally-healthy person behaving like this.  I believe her rage cannot be classified as normal.  So I give her a diagnosis and instead of feeling letdown by humanity, I feel sad that she is unmedicated.  Or that the medication she does take doesn’t control the impulse to spit on the floor in anger.  For as angry as I have been, and my anger has, at times, reached Biblical proportions, I have never once been tempted to spit on the floor of a public library.  They ought to put that as a criterion of mental illness in those books they use to diagnose people, I think.

My mother is bipolar.  It’s a fact I never bothered bringing up in therapy because I didn’t want to have to deal with the stigma.  No matter how progressive our culture thinks it has become, there is still lingering stigma.  Even, or perhaps especially, amongst mental health professionals.  If I were to tell that therapist that my mom is profoundly mentally ill, the entire focus of our sessions would have shifted away from me and back towards my mother.  I have given her enough, I decided.  I didn’t want all of our sessions to revolve around the woe-is-me childhood I endured because of the illness.  Most of all, I didn’t want the therapist constantly questioning whether I have it or not.  I do not, alas, have bipolar disorder.  At times I almost wish I did.  It would likely make writing easier.  And I have to think that manic depression beats out the regular type.  At least they get a break.  I have to pay for my breaks with the skin of young, married men.

There are two distinct phases to my mother’s illness.  There was the time of medication and the time of no medication.  When I was a very young child, I remember our house as being pretty much decorated with the orange pharmacy bottles of pills.  She was constantly on trial for another drug.  She took mood stabilizers, antidepressants, antipsychotics, anticonvulsants, benzos.  She struggled to remember to take them.  She struggled with the desire to take them, particularly when she was feeling manic.  Her manic phases always started out fun, even to me, and so she could never quite convince herself of the need to drug herself down from them.  And by the time she realized she needed to, it was too late to prevent the damage.  At least it was repetitive and predictable. 

Her doctors struggled to find ways to keep her compliant, and then, even when she did take them, to find the correct dosages to keep her sane.  In the end, she stopped taking them.  This is when Julia moved out.  It is not the great tragedy it may seem, which is another reason why I never felt the need to disclose it to the therapist.  I am not convinced that everyone around me doesn’t have a similar story.  Maybe it wasn’t bipolar for them.  Maybe it was some other form of neglect or abuse or disease.  I just don’t know that anyone escapes their childhoods unscathed and I think maybe instead of trying to fix everyone’s boo boo’s maybe we’d be better off accepting that everyone has them.  Learning from them.  I am sick to death of people whining over their perceived losses.  I want to vomit when I see another paperback on the shelf, detailing how so and so’s daddy used to touch them.  I’m not saying it’s okay that it happened.  I’m just asking why the hell someone wants to write a book about it.  In my opinion, if you are old enough to write about it, you’re old enough to find your validation elsewhere.  If you make it your life’s ambition to keep disclosing, I wonder if you ever really moved on at all.  What the fuck got broken inside of the person who needs to keep trumpeting their greatest disappointments?  Seriously.  Didn’t your own mother’s inability to give a shit teach you that nobody wants to hear it?

That kind of thinking does not make me popular in many groups.

My mother is not medicated now, I believe.  I keep tabs on her from a distance, mostly through my father who, as one can guess from his choice of life partners, has limitations of his own.  She is not allowed to see my children.  I have no role whatsoever in her mental upkeep.  She will either be well or be unwell, but it is not my responsibility to see that she is fed or clothed.  I know people who are able to do it: to care for the parent who never cared for them.  I don’t think them saints or bastions of patience and love.  I think they’re self-defeating assholes.  I think they enjoy the feeling of being kicked in the face.  I think they were so fucked up by their parents that they take the next closest proximity to the emotion of love.  I think that what they latch onto is something called codependency, and that they caress themselves to sleep at night by calling it love.  It was never a conscious decision of mine to not take care of my mother.  It was simply never in me to do so.

Part of me wonders what happened to Darwin to make him who he is.  It probably takes a special concoction of flagging family values, heartbreak and disease to turn out a guy who leaves his wife the day before she is due to birth his child.  I love him for not talking about it.  Let the damage be done.  And now he’s already given his daughter a similar story.  And so the world turns.  He has his art, and I have mine.  This is what makes it possible for us to continue on, I’m sure.  My favorite part about Darwin is that I don’t care enough about him to judge him for what he’s doing to his family.  It is not my business at all.  The tidiness of this situation makes me happier than I could have ever predicted.

I turn back to my work.  I crumple another sheet of paper and toss it into the bin next to me.  At least I am working on my hand eye coordination, I tell myself.  It’s not all a loss.  I am sure my editor will be happy to know this. 

Doris Lessing’s list of works is typically divided into three categories: those that deal with social issues, those that confront psychological issues and those that deal in science fiction.  You would think that her feminist works would be lumped in with the social issues, and yet they came about during her exploration of science fiction.  If you are a woman, perhaps this is not surprising after all.  What I want to explore, of course, is how Doris Lessing, a woman capable of such extraordinary literary genius, was unable to reconcile the roles of artist and mother.  And then, to take it a step further, I want to think about what the role of woman is, and whether or not the role of mother is intrinsically tied to it.  Does a woman who does not reproduce somehow escape the full definition?  If not, then what is it, again, to be a woman?  I want to understand why it is, in this day and age, Doris felt she had to be physically removed from her family in order to create.  Why not hire a nanny?  Is the nanny the new solution for the frustrated intellectual?  Would a nanny have saved Doris’ family?  Would a nanny have spared me the experience of Darwin?

I am tired of Doris Lessing.  I have spent the past eight months being alternately enthralled and exhausted by this woman.  She does not fit.  I try to change.  I try to return to my original thesis, only to find that the motivation for it is gone.  I try to change again.  I suggest an exploration of Virginia Woolf from a fictional standpoint.  My editor laughs and reminds me how recently this was done.  Do I want to try to be the next Michael Cunningham?  Not really.  I just want to write something that is pertinent.  I want to say something new in a voice that has not been heard before.  Perhaps what I need to say is how difficult it is to say anything at all about Doris Lessing.  I wonder if that has been said already.

At this rate, I will lose my place in the literary magazine.  I simply must produce something but absolutely nothing is coming.  It is interesting or sad, or both, that I have kept Darwin around as my muse and now even he is not working.  Part of me wants to just give up, admit defeat, move on.  This summer I will begin a book tour, the sound of which makes even me roll my eyes.  Book tour.  Seriously.  But apparently it is my job to show up at bookstores across the southern United States and try to convince people to buy my book.  Whoring, basically.  I am not excited by this, but apparently if one is not already a huge name in literature, one cannot declare herself above this type of nonsense.  As such, I am not above this type of nonsense.  It will happen because, apparently, it needs to.  I have not yet sorted out the details.  Originally, I was fearful of what was going to happen to my family while I was gone.  Lately I am thinking that we could all probably use a break from one another.  Tom will do his work from home, and I will take my work on the road.  Darwin may think himself a part of the equation but as of today he is not.  Likely, my starting the tour will provide a good stopping point for our behavior.  I am at the point where I know we need something like this, a physical interruption, or else I am likely to let this continue on for as long as it can.  I show no ability to control myself.

I believe that I am finished with Doris Lessing.  I cannot fit her in.  I cannot make her work.  I need to abandon her.  If it means losing the job, then so be it.  I will forsake this job, I decide right now, so that I don’t have to think of the wretched woman again.  I take my notes and lay them flat on top of the garbage can.  I pack up my pens and books and head out to the parking lot.  I am no longer interested in Doris.

The phone rings on my way to the car, and I see that it is the therapist calling.  I am torn as to whether or not I should answer it, and it gives me anxiety to think I only have another three or four seconds to make this decision.  I decide yes and press the appropriate button.  She asks me how I am.  I think for a moment and decide to answer honestly.  I tell her that I feel okay.  I tell her that although I am making some decisions that she would judge harshly, I feel as if I’m living on my own terms, within my own psychological means, if that makes sense.  She chuckles and says that it does make sense and that it sounds like something I would say.  And then she says that she thinks the only area where we ever really disagreed was when it came to my limitations.  She tells me that she feels as if I over-inflate the list of things I cannot do.  That I give my past too much credit for its ability to determine my future.  She says that she wishes I would find the strength to overcome whatever must have happened to me when I was a child.

It burns.  To hear these words burns me, and I cannot believe the gall of this woman.  I have never once given her a reason to think my upbringing was anything other than textbook.  I never mentioned my family, and I never found my failure to mention them noteworthy.  She is talking out of her ass, if you will.  She is guessing at my past and she is getting lucky.  I won’t let it happen again.  I tell her that I don’t really know what she’s talking about.  I tell her again that life is messy.  This is my new motto, afterall.  Life is messy and I am done sorting through the wreckage.  It is time to move on, I tell her.  Please don’t contact me again.  Those are the last words I tell her before I hang up.  As the phone goes dead in my hand, I feel a sense of resolution.  I recognize, on some level, that I have summarily closed myself off to the opportunity for real change in my life.  At the same time, having fewer options means that my course is a bit more defined.  In deciding to stop seeing myself as some do it yourself, personal improvement project, I am accepting myself as I am.  I am not perfect, but perhaps the time has come to take who I am and move on with it all.  I am not getting any younger.

I feel a bit damaged and a bit naked and vulnerable.  I feel stripped away and part of me wants to cry about it, if I’m honest.  But this is reality, I decide as I start the drive home.  I am sure the lepers on the streets of India don’t waste time sitting around and thinking about the ways in which they could improve their self-esteems and their relationships with their children.  They spend their days surviving.  And guess what?  The people who don’t spend their days surviving, the people who instead root out their imperfections and read the books on how to become more perfect?  They die right alongside the lepers.  Fuck it, I’d rather be a leper.

Today will be a difficult enough day, and I don’t know why I am wasting my precious little energy on a novel that is not working and a therapist who never worked.  Today is the day of Marianne’s couple’s shower.  A couple’s shower is somewhere in between the outrageousness of an engagement party and the boredom of a baby shower.  Men are invited, so at least we don’t have to spend the entire time talking about diapers and vaccinations, but there is still the social obligation of wearing appropriate clothing, forking over another gift, and celebrating another marital union that has greater than a fifty percent chance of ending up in the gutter.  Mazel tov.  I hope they don’t expect me to give a toast or anything.

The thing that makes it difficult to attend this party, of course, is that I will have to attend with my husband.  And Tom and I are not really speaking lately, much less celebrating other people’s marriages.  We have not attended a social engagement together in weeks.  We don’t talk about the fact that we are living as roommates.  We have not had sex since I told him how I was feeling about our marriage.  We have not had a conversation that has lasted for more than four minutes since that day, actually.  I don’t know where we go from here.  It is obvious that our marriage is either completely over or at least on the brink of being so.  If it is merely on the brink, and not completely dead yet, then Tom’s refusal to look me in the eye is probably the final nail in the coffin.

Also, I can pretty much guarantee that Celia will be at the party.  I have not seen Celia in months, and she is not high on my list of people I would like to run into.  Because the party is an afternoon barbecue, I very much stand the chance of having to confront Darwin’s baby.  Confront the baby.  That makes the poor child seem like she will attend the party with explosives strapped to her back.  As if a baby could be dangerous.  This baby, however, may as well come with explosives.  I am not looking forward to the party.  Or the baby.

As I walk into the house, I realize that I am sad about Doris Lessing.  My writing about her is never going to happen.  It upsets me more that I will never speak about her, give voice to all those thoughts in my head, than it does that I am losing an important job.  Maybe I am not as great a writer as I sometimes envision myself to be.  Maybe I have written some decent pieces, but only on a lark.  Maybe I am unable to carry the project through to its completion not because Doris doesn’t fit but because I lack talent.  It’s a sobering thought and it makes me fearful of my upcoming book release.  The hardest part about becoming successful is knowing that at any minute the success could be stripped from me.  It’s better to never get it at all than to have it and lose it.  This is why I reacted so strangely when I first found out my book was being published.  This, I realize now, does not require a year’s worth of therapy to sort out.  It probably just needs a stiff drink and some perspective.  People, myself included, always underestimate the power of perspective.  It only takes one leper to make you feel ridiculous about yourself.

It is time to start getting ready for the couple’s shower.  It rather makes me ill to think about.  I wish I could show up in jeans and a t-shirt, but I suppose I need to class it up a bit.  I find a pair of capris that fit well and pair them with a simple, fitted white top.  I’ll round the whole thing out with some outrageous jewelry and call it a day, I think.  The more important issue will be wrapping the gift and fixing myself a pre-social engagement cocktail. 

The gift is a pasta dish.  If I cared more about the event, I would be mortified to be showing up with this as a gift.  Not only is the giving of a single pasta dish tacky as hell, but this particular dish shows absolutely no artistic endeavor whatsoever.  It is merely a large, white bowl.  I chose it in a rush, with the three girls in Pottery Barn with me.  I think I actually liked it when I bought it but now it seems fairly obvious that my subconscious was telling me to buy the plainest thing in the store in order to blend in with the crowd.  Or perhaps my subconscious was a little peeved to be forced into buying a gift for one of Tom’s coworkers, when Tom himself, the person who best knows the couple, has given no thought to the gift whatsoever.  Maybe the very institution of marriage, the thing that decides that the woman shall buy the gift no matter if she knows the recipient or not, is what forced me into selecting the white bowl.  We’ll never know.

The thing is, I think as I grab some wrapping paper, is that most likely nobody will even notice how horrible the bowl is.  That is the kind of party I am expecting this to be—the type where nobody notices a thoughtless gift.  We may as well be buying Tupperware.

The gift is ready, the babysitter has arrived, and I am waiting for Tom.  I pretend to be busy in the final acts of preparing for the party, applying lip gloss I never wear, tidying the house, but the truth is I am trying to assuage the awkward feeling I am having in the presence of the babysitter.  Amy is a sixteen year old highschool student who lives down the street.  We have known Amy since she was a little girl and it still rather boggles my mind that this little girl has grown into someone we trust to watch our little girls.  This means there is something akin to three generations going on on this street.  And if there are three, I am among the eldest.  And this does not make me pleased.  Grandma Leandra is decidedly unhappy.

Amy is attractive.  If she dressed more decently, she would probably be extremely attractive, but as it is her trashy dress makes her seem extremely ordinary.  She’s a couple of buttons and a few inches shy of striking.  I don’t know that men would hold this same opinion of her, but I know exactly what a group of women would say.  They’d call her a whore before they called her cute.  Maybe she’ll grow into attractive, as soon as she gets used to her body and stops feeling the need to flaunt it like she does.  From my experience, one only stops feeling the need to flaunt it when the whole thing starts its inevitable decline.  I give her ten years.  Tops.  Fewer if she doesn’t start wearing sunscreen.

The kids all bound downstairs to see Amy, their favorite babysitter.  For a quick minute I think of the influence this young, scantily clad woman could potentially have on the developing self esteems and sexualities of my daughters.  And then I remember that I am fucking a married man and decide to leave that mind game for another day.  A day when I can properly tackle the issue without all of this clouding guilt.

Amy is sweet with the girls.  She always seems patient.  I watch her interacting with the girls and wonder how it is that she is able to handle their annoying questions and constant pawing.  I count silently to myself all of the times I would have personally raised my voice with the girls, if it were me they were playing with.  I stop counting when I hit seven because clearly I have gotten the usefulness out of the exercise.  The babysitter is a better parent than I am.  I remind myself that it is a job for her.  I was better at waitressing than  I have ever been at delivering food to my own kitchen table for my own family.  It is different when there is a paycheck involved.  And a definite stop time. 

Amy helps the girls get out some Play Doh.  Play Doh is one of those activities that can entertain my children for hours on end.  The only time they stop playing Play Doh is when I intentionally put the Play Doh away.  I ask myself now why it is that I would ever want to put the Play Doh away, if it so effectively captures their attention.  I know the answer, and worse I know that it is yet another ugly truth about me.  Sometimes I intentionally deprive the kids of the things they enjoy just to piss them off.  Sometimes I get into struggles that are not worth the effort.  Sometimes I let them suffer just a tiny bit—saying no to another cookie when really it is not a big deal, refusing to let them watch the last ten minutes of a television show just because I can.  I tell myself now that I do it to build their characters, prepare them for the reality of life, which is, of course, that we cannot always get what we want.  And that often there is no rhyme or reason why we have been deprived of the stuff we want most.  Sometimes it just is, and that has to be good enough.  It is better that they figure this out now, surely.

The girls sit down at their play table and pull out the brightly colored dough.  Jas reaches first for the purple, which makes me smile.  Purple was always my favorite color as a child, too.  I like that she strays away from the obvious choice of pink.  Not so with Michaela and Cora though, who both reach for the single canister of pink at the same time.  I know a fight is going to ensue and to be honest I just do not want to have to deal with it.  I turn and start climbing upstairs to intentionally avoid it.  The babysitter doesn’t know what I am doing, I tell myself.  She doesn’t know my children the same way that I do.  She isn’t able to predict their every move like I can.  I go upstairs and into my room just before I hear the predictable screams from Cora.  “My pink!”  Ugh, I think as I roll my eyes.  It is so goddamn tedious, this cycle.  I think, not for the first time, that all humans are born ultimately selfish.  It is only through constant correction and reminding that we are able to share at all.  And most adults still struggle.  I wonder why we bother.  I wonder what would happen if we were to just let them fight for the pink.

But I hear Amy intervene calmly.  She suggests dividing the dough into two equal pieces and I smirk.  This is not going to work.  Michaela would go for it.  Cora would never back down.  And she doesn’t.  And it makes me happy to know that I have successfully predicted her behavior.  Amy doesn’t quit though, whereas I probably would at this point.  I can imagine myself throwing an adult sized temper tantrum to match their child sized ones.  I imagine myself complaining about how they are always fighting.  I imagine myself screaming that if they can not get along, I will simply pack up the Play Doh and they can go outside to play.  Instead of acting like a child, Amy states firmly that they will take turns with the pink.  She tells Michaela that the color is hers first, as she is the oldest.  She will have the pink for five minutes and then is expected to hand it over to Cora.  I wait for the screams of protest, but they don’t come.  A minute later I hear laughter.

I am, on the one hand, relieved to know that my daughters are all in good hands with the babysitter we have chosen for them.  On the other hand, it irritates the hell out of me to watch some bratty teenager walk into my home and tame the lions that keep me on the brink of insanity pretty much around the clock.  Talk about disempowering.

It’s a strange thing to have a babysitter in my house.  I still, even after six years of practice, feel like I am the babysitter, and I’m still awkward with the role of employer.  I make apologies for the untidy state of my house, as if the sixteen year old is about to perform the white glove test on my furniture.  I try to keep teenager-friendly food in the pantry and attempt an attitude of lenience that falls just this side of lax.  Yes, you may talk to your boyfriend on the phone while the kids are asleep.  No, you may not smoke pot on my leather sofa.  I know, even while I’m doing it, that I’m trying to seem cool.  And I also know, from my own experiences, that there is nothing less attractive to a teenager than an old woman trying to appear cool.  I would like very much to stop behaving like this and just behave in an age-appropriate way.  But I don’t know how.  I am in a state of arrested development.

It’s a good thing Amy is a nice kid.  I know if she ever challenged me on any issue, she would win.  If she told me tonight that she needs an extra $4.00 an hour, I would be unable to formulate an appropriate, assertive response.  I would just give her the money.  I can’t help it.  I just feel so defenseless against these young, pretty girls.  They frighten me.  I just don’t know when I got so old.  I didn’t realize until I became old that my beauty and my youth were my armor against the world.  It was only when they were stripped from me that I began the task of finding a sustainable way to get through life.  Thus far that search has yielded a sexual relationship with a married man.  I may not yet be on the right track.

I look down at my shoes.  Twenty seconds before Amy walked through that door, I was congratulating myself on having a pair of attractive yet age-appropriate shoes that actually matched my outfit.  And now here she is in her casual flip flops and jeans, and I am hating the wedge sandals I have on.  They make me look old.  I should have gone with flip flops if I was trying to appear nonchalant, which of course I always am.

Men have it so goddamn easy, I think, as Tom opens the door and heads upstairs.  He descends a half-second later wearing khaki shorts and a standard-issue short sleeve collared shirt.  He is wearing flip flops.  He looks amazing.  All he has done is traded one uniform for another and sprayed on another splash of cologne and he looks incredible.  It doesn’t matter what I wear, I think, because nobody will notice me anyway.  Tom will get the attention, because I am a mother.  Mothers do not get attention.  They get asked about their children.  And later, when a woman says to her husband in the car ride home, “Darling, did you see what Leandra was wearing?” the answer will always be “no.”  He did not see what Leandra was wearing because Leandra has three children and is therefore dead to him.  I wonder if most men don’t equate the idea of any mother with the idea of their mother.  I wonder if they see all mothers as interchangeable beings.  It’s depressing as hell, really.

I remember the first time I realized that men no longer found me sexually attractive on the scale to which I had become accustomed.  I was walking from the car to a store, holding baby Michaela in my arms.  There was a team of construction workers in the parking lot of the store and I braced myself for the comments I had come to expect from a group of unchaperoned males with tool belts.  “Hey?  Hey!”  They called to me and I stuck my nose a little higher in the sky and pretended I didn’t hear them.  I was not being snooty; I was following code.  This is how women respond to catcalls.  To behave in any other way violates a slew of other codes.  If you answer them back nicely, you’re stupid and gullible and the men will laugh at you.  If you answer them back angrily, you’re a bitch and the men will say even worse things to and about you.  And worst of all, if you respond to their flirting with flirting of your own, you’re a barely-contained porn star in waiting and any physical advances made by the men will be judged as appropriate to the situation.  I didn’t make the rules.  I just abide by them.  Ignoring is really a woman’s only option.

“Ma’am, your kid lost her shoe!”  Ma’am.  Six months previous, the men would have whistled, cat-called, laughed amongst themselves while watching me from the car to the store.  I would have felt embarrassed, harassed, objectified.  I would have felt indignation.  On that particular day they reminded me of my daughter’s shoe.  And I don’t know why it happened all at once, but from that moment on it became clear to me that men, on average, no longer found me attractive.  It is a hard thing to let go of.  I had always considered the cat-calls from strange men to be an annoyance.  Until they stopped doing it.  Now I know I would blush and smile if they were to call to me.  They do not.  I’ve resigned the entire affair, the construction workers themselves, to the stuff of youth.  Gone.  This, I thought at the time, should be the official declaration of adulthood.  When the catcalls stop coming and you realize that you kind of rather miss them.

I wonder what truly old age will look like.  I wonder what is left to a woman who has been stripped of every ounce of her sexuality.  What is there to look forward to?  How does an elderly woman define herself?  She must be resigned to live, almost entirely, in the past.  I can handle the lack of catcalls because I happen to have a twenty nine year old man in one bed and a thirty (oh my god, how old did I say Tom was???  I have completely forgotten) year old man in another.  But eventually my physical relationships with both of these men will die off.  I will be left alone, sexually.  I cannot imagine that animal side to me just ebbing away.  I cannot imagine not wondering what my ass looks like in jeans when I walk past an attractive man.  I can’t picture a world where I don’t care about sex.

Suddenly, I want to interview the women at the local nursing home to find out when it happened, how it happened, what the hell they do to get through their days in the absence of physicality.  I imagine all that withered flesh.  I imagine not finding any beauty when I look in the mirror.  I imagine being stripped of that master status of woman and I know, without a doubt, that I would be, am going to be, utterly lost without it.  I never used to understand plastic surgery, but if this is it—if it is a last ditch effort to hang onto the feeling of being relevant in world which is ruled by sexuality, where science has enabled us to live longer and healthier but where our sexual relevance, where our animus, dies off at the same age it always has—then I get it.  Finally, I get it.

This, of course, is why people get married in the first place.  The goal is to find yourself someone who will promise, when you are young and beautiful and sexual, to love you forever.  And then when you’re old and withered, you’ve at least got company.  Ideally, you have grandchildren.  People put a lot of stock in the concept of grandchildren.  There must be something to it.  And this, I realize with a sudden emptiness, is exactly what I have tampered with.

Tom walks out the door again without so much as a nod in my direction.  He slides easily into the car, unencumbered.  I watch as he turns the key in the ignition and drums his fingers on the steering wheel, waiting for me.  I almost hate him when I see him look in the rearview mirror to fix his sunglasses.  I am left fumbling with my bag, the poorly-wrapped gift, and some hastily constructed directions for the babysitter.  This will be fun, I think sarcastically.  There is nothing more entertaining than taking your grouchy husband to a social event where you are likely to meet your boyfriend’s baby for the first time.  I am a Lifetime movie.

Boyfriend?  Is Darwin my boyfriend?  Can married women have boyfriends?  I have to admit that I rather like the term.  I like the word “boy.”  It reminds me of the catcalls of my youth.  I decide that from this moment on, I shall think of Darwin as my boyfriend.  It is rather nice to apply a label to the person itself instead of the relationship.  I just made the jump from affair to boyfriend in my mind.  Just the idea of my having a boyfriend gives me the energy to say goodbye to the babysitter and head out the door.

This drive will be awkward, I know with certainty as soon as I get into the car.  Tom is obviously angry about something, and if he behaves as he typically does, he will prefer sulking about it quietly all day, rather than fighting about it and getting past the matter.  Tom and I are different like that.  If I am going to make the effort to show people how I am feeling, I am also going to grant them the opportunity to change whatever it is that they are doing to piss me off.  Not so with Tom.  Tom does not believe he has the right to influence other people’s actions.  He is all about accepting people for who and what they are.  That makes him sound fairly honorable and decent, but the reality is that with all of this supposed acceptance, Tom has lost his voice.  He doesn’t feel he should influence people or outcomes or social situations.  So if he is unhappy with a thing, he feels he has no option other than to accept his unhappiness.  It is disempowering; it is emasculating.  It’s a bit ridiculous, and if other people are like me, they fail to respect him for it.  They wonder instead why he does it.  They wonder where he lost his voice.  I am sure they blame me for it, even as I am just as irritated with the character flaw.  Women, wives, always are blamed when their husbands act like little bitches.

Nobody ever talks about how sometimes being nice is one of the most dangerous things you can be.  All we’re ever told is to be nicer, share more, give more, be more present.  Somewhere along the line we all forgot that sometimes you just have to be an asshole to get the job done. I am certain that the skill of being an asshole is something that is never purposely taught.  Nice families certainly don’t teach it to their own children, whereas the kids of crazies learn it by default. Tom has a nice family.  And once again, I don’t regret my upbringing.

We drive on in silence and I find myself with the feeling that I am just about completely over the problem of Tom.  He is certainly not giving me anything to work with.  He is refusing my attempts at communication, and he is hiding in his shell.  I have had better fights with the twins.  I feel more lost from him today than ever before in our lives together, and I wonder why I spent any time beating myself up about this at all.  I am starting to see Darwin as a symptom, not the problem itself.  Tom’s complacency and then acceptance of defeat makes him suddenly completely unattractive in my eyes.  I wanted, I realize then, him to fight for me.  That he is not rising to the challenge means that I am fighting by myself.  It means I can safely give up the fight altogether, I suppose.

When I make an impulsive decision to act in a big way, I experience a physical sensation not unlike that of falling.  I feel the world rushing past me.  I am deaf to any noise.  I find it difficult to see.  I taste adrenaline.  I feel absolutely out of control with the fact that I am completely in control.  The confusion of the paradox provides whatever fuel I need to do what I am about to do.  I feel powerless over the innate power inside of me. 

I will never forget the first time I felt like this.  I was a child, at the dinner table with my family.  My mother was medicated, my father was around, Julia had not yet left us.  Things were actually going rather well in the house, but there was a noticeable anger growing inside of me.  I was consciously resisting, sometimes on an hourly basis, the urge to scream.  It was barely contained, though my parents were unaware of the tempest brewing inside of me.  And then that night, my father asked me why my math teacher had called him at work to talk about my poor test scores.  There were a thousand different ways to handle the situation.  He could have followed the fine examples set in the after school specials I watched.  He could have looked at me with concern and asked whether anything was bothering me.  He could have admitted to having raised me in a veritable shit storm that should have produced behaviors far worse than a lousy grade in math.  Instead, he said, with his mouth full of chewed up food, “What the fuck is wrong with you?”  And that’s when I first felt it—the overwhelming feeling of internal chaos that I have come to associate with the experience of my body doing something that my mind has not yet worked through.  Without my permission, my mouth opened and I responded, “Shut the fuck up.”  It, in hindsight, is exactly what I should have said.  He deserved at least that.  But fathers, no matter how they choose to raise their daughters, are apparently deserving of better language than my less than carefully chosen words.  Apparently, no matter what the circumstances are, little girls are never to tell their fathers to shut the fuck up.  It makes me want to tattoo the words across my skin. 

I told the story once before.  I told it to Tom.  When I told it to him, I closed it by saying, “And then he slapped me.”  Because slap is a nicer word than punch.  Slaps sting whereas punches deaden.  Slaps do not tend to draw blood.  Slaps rarely even bruise.  So I said “slap” because I learned my lesson that night about choosing my language carefully.

This feeling, this precursor to telling my father to fuck off, is akin to what I feel one half-second before my mouth opens and I hear myself telling Tom, “We need to think about getting a divorce.”  I say it as if I am discussing the option of canceling our daily subscription to the newspaper.  I say it without regard for the three children tucked in our nest.  I say it without having thought about how I will pay my bills.  I say it loudly, finally, because I have been whispering it now for months and it somehow has not been heard.  I say it, mostly, because Tom has failed to.

I hadn’t thought about the prospect of divorcing Tom before I said the words.  Not really.  Not in a practical way.  But once the words are out, I realize that probably that is exactly what needs to happen.  For some reason, the idea of change no longer frightens me.  I don’t much think about it, to be honest.  I think that the period of time which elapsed in between my first thinking about leaving Tom and this moment right here was the only thing I really needed in order to be okay with the change.  I did not, in the end, need to sort out any complicated feelings.  I didn’t need to think about income, housing arrangements, what his parents would think.  I just needed time to have lived with the thought in my head.  I needed time to incorporate that thought into my daily routine.  And now, I realize after the fact, it is in there.  And now there is no getting it out.  There is no going backwards.  Of this I am sure.

I can live without Tom.  Part of me will be sad as hell to think of him, this person with whom I have so much shared history, wandering apart from me.  It feels like a broken union, which of course is what it is.  It feels like the other half of me will be gutted from me.  That feeling, that truth, about having to leave one entire half of who I am is the very reason I realize it must be done.  I need to be whole without him.  I need to feel complete on my own.  I need to grow back into a whole, all by myself.  This feeling of anxiety that I get when I contemplate leaving a man I obviously no longer want to be with is the only proof I need.  One shouldn’t feel anxious about getting what she wants. 

The therapist would be proud.

I don’t know what a life without Tom will look like, but I am certain of its possibility.  I did it once before and I can do it again.  I’m not thinking of Darwin, I realize.  He is not a consideration.  For as much as his entering my life appears to have culminated in my leaving Tom, he is not a factor at all.  I think that the therapist would likely congratulate me for not thinking about him.  I am intentionally not replacing one man with another.  I think I may be doing away with them altogether.  I have spent my entire adulthood, I realize, growing in context of someone else.  I have no idea who I might be on my own.  And while this may be okay, preferable even, for some people, I cannot face it anymore.  I know that I will die alone, ultimately.  I was born alone and I will die alone.  Why on earth should I try to comfort myself with the presence of someone else in the interim.  Why would I not figure this thing out on my own.

Suddenly, the entire institution of marriage seems a crutch, a construct manufactured to stave off the effects of the natural aging process.  The only reason for being with one person for so long, I think, is to have someone around to provide validation.  Validation may well be the greatest stumbling block in between a person in need of change and the change itself.  Maybe if we didn’t intentionally seek out these little cheerleaders, we would be more apt to grow and adapt.  Maybe we would confront middle age and then our final years on earth with a bit more grace and acceptance.  Maybe if we were always alone, we would feel less alone when it really counts.  I think these thoughts as I’m clutching the white pasta bowl, holding it safely on my lap.  Tom is driving, staring straight ahead, probably imagining himself to be wounding me with his silence.  He doesn’t know that inside of my head there is a maelstrom.  He doesn’t realize that I have already left him.  He thinks he is on the winning side with his silence and his anger.  He doesn’t know that I already have the one thing more powerful than all of that anger—indifference.  He can’t shock me if I don’t care.  I can no longer force myself to care.

These decisions I’m making lately, I know a lot of people would consider them failures.  I wonder why it is that they don’t feel as such.  I wonder what I am doing different, wrong.  I wonder, not for the first time today, why I don’t really care too much.

Tom is quiet.  I can tell from the subtle change in his facial structure that he is clenching his jaw.  When you have been with someone for this long, you notice these things immediately.  To me, the change is as striking as if he removed his shirt.  I even know what it means.  A clenched jaw means that Tom is angry and is taking some time to calm himself down before he speaks.  I wish he would just fucking say whatever it is that is on his mind.  I hate these waiting periods.  I don’t mind the waiting.  I mind getting the watered-down version of his emotions.

While I wait for him to talk, I imagine the scenario where Tom just blurts out whatever is in his mind.  I imagine him screaming in rage, driving too fast.  I imagine him pulling the car over so that he has a free hand to slap me.  And then, though it is a significantly less rewarding enterprise, I imagine him sobbing.  Again, the car is pulled over and his head is cradled in his arms.  He is weeping.  I am not sure how I would react to the sobbing, but I know for a fact that if he were to react to me in a rage, I would likely fall back in love with him.  It is an explosion of passion that I am lacking.  It is the sign of giving a shit that I am seeking.  It is this ennui that I am consciously fighting.  I don’t know why he struggles to see this.  It’s not difficult.  Women are drawn to outbursts.  We are encouraged by passion.  We are, at the end of the day, complicated beings who are motivated by simple emotions.  I want him to scream at me, I realize.  I may very well have spent the past few months in bed with Darwin, hoping that Tom would scream at me.

And at the exact same time, I know that he will not.  It is not in his character makeup to do so.  He has too much of whatever it is that stands in between a person’s will to air their ugly truths and their actual ability to do so.  He is too goddamn nice.

At this minute, I cannot think of a single description that is more cruel than “nice.”

I watch him clenching and relaxing his jaw and I wait for it.  I wait for his measured response.  I know that I am in control because I have visual evidence of Tom trying like hell to maintain his own control.  It is this that I have had too much of.  Too much control.  I don’t want to feel like I am in charge of this relationship.  I am already a mother to three.  I want a partner.  I want to feel either the sensation of equal commitment or else the hopelessly, carelessly lost feeling I am getting from whatever it is that I am doing with Darwin.  I want to be out of control.

Tom’s voice is even.  “It sounds as if you have given this a lot of thought.  And I hope like hell that you have.”  This is his response.  No passion; no flare ups.  He hopes I have given thought to the matter.  I have not, but I do not bother telling him that, since it likely will have no effect on the outcome of our situation.  I nod.  I finger the wrapping on the pasta dish.  He hopes I have thought about the matter.  This implies that he feels I will be a little lost without him.  I likely will be; he may not be wrong about that.  I just don’t care anymore, and it is this aspect which he is underestimating.  Lost sounds pretty fucking good right about now.  I, after all, have years of experience in taking care of myself.  I know I can do it.  I’m not interested in having someone do it for me now.  Likewise, I’m not interested in taking care of anyone else.  It’s a struggle.  It requires of me more than I ever had to give.  This is why I can’t parent.  This is why I can’t be a proper wife. 

I get the sense, suddenly, that this situation is not nearly as inflammatory as it likely needs to be.  I am on the verge of cashing in ten years of marriage, and I get the sense that unless I do something drastic here, the entire thing will end with merely a whimper.  I could handle it.  I could handle the anticlimax, but if it’s in my power to do something to force out a bang, I ought to.  The dissolution of our marriage, I know, will be easier and tidier to replay and understand if there is some kind of action associated with it.  If it is nothing but words, it will linger forever in my mind.  I know this.  I know from experience that the more vague a memory is, the longer it sits around to haunt you.  If you don’t understand this, you need to spend more time around people who have been damaged.  You need to ask someone who has lived through both a single paralyzing gunshot and the experience of having been locked in the trunk of a car and you’ll find out that they’re still trying to get out of the trunk long after the stitches have been removed from their gunshot wound.  The human brain appreciates a concrete start and finish to the tragedies it is expected to make sense of.

I’d rather be shot than suffocated.

I tell Tom to pull over.  He does.  Still clenching his jaw.  I begin to feel sorry for him because I know he is bracing himself against my perceived assault, and I hate that I have this control over him.  I think of the caged tigers at the zoo.  Pacing, pacing, pacing.  Products of their environment.  Stripped of their power.  Impotent.  This is Tom.  Tom is the caged tiger, which puts me in the role of zoo keeper.  I never asked to be zoo keeper.  It’s not exactly the job I signed up for when I got married.  I have unwittingly emasculated my husband.  You can see why this entire affair needs to end, sooner rather than later.  I refuse, though, to take the blame for his emasculation.  If I was too overbearing, if I was too confident, if I was too anything, he had a responsibility to tell me.  I never asked to be in charge.  Honestly, I think I went into it expecting to be the tiger.

It is not my goal to hurt him, but at the same time I have to admit that I want to inspire some emotion in him.  Part of me wants to tip him over the edge so that he can leave this mess behind him neatly.  If he hates me, he will move on and be okay.  Anger is a gift, I remind myself.  Right now it is likely the only kindness I can give him.

“I have been fucking Darwin for the past three months.”  This is what I tell him.  This is the ammunition I choose to use.  It is not premeditated.  Nothing I have said or done today has been rehearsed.  I am simply speaking.  It is true that I enjoy the sound of the words “fucking Darwin” probably much more than I should, but this is not why I say it.  I honestly say it so that Tom will be angry with me. 

I wait for his face to change.  It does not.  I am staring at his chin, at his eyebrows, at the corners of his mouth.  I am waiting for evidence of surprise, shock, anger.  I get nothing.  And then I realize that he already knows.  He has known before this conversation, before this car ride.  Perhaps he has always known about my fucking Darwin.

“Yeah,” he says, “About that.  I wanted to ask you how that’s been working out for you.” 

Chapter Seven

I am unsure what to say, so I concentrate on the scenery going by.  We drive over a bridge and I am surprised to see a blonde girl holding a fishing pole.  She’s nineteen, maybe twenty years old, fishing.  I was under the impression that fishing was an activity for older males and for children.  I wasn’t aware of the twenty year old woman demographic.  Because my mind is eager for any activity but the one at hand, I contemplate on designing an advertising campaign for the twenty year old female fisher.  I spend a few minutes wondering what that would look like. 

Half of me is concentrating on the female fisherman (??? Fisherwoman?  Fisherperson? —seriously, why do I choose to write about shit like this?  Who does that?) and the other half of me is reeling from Tom’s reveal.  I could not be more surprised if I tried.  I am not even conscious of the shifting power dynamic because I am so caught in the surprise of his knowledge.  He knows and has said nothing.  All this time, I thought I was the one with the secret.  Tom has surprised me.

“You’re a fucking embarrassment.”  This is what he says to me next.  My head physically draws back in surprise.  I feel my eyes widen.  It is as if I have been struck. 

He says it in a voice devoid of anger, seemingly absent of emotion altogether.  It is not like Tom to use this kind of language and this is the only clue to whatever emotions might be percolating underneath that veneer he paints on so well. 

Something about that statement. . .there’s something about it.  I can’t quite put my finger on it, but there’s something not altogether unpleasant about it.  After I take a second to work through the initial implied barb, I think there is something deeper to the comment.  I think that there is an implied ownership in the remark.  As if I am a cross he must bear.  I am his dirty little secret.  He has endured me because he felt he had to.  Or he wanted to.  He was aware of my being a mess and he tolerated me.  It may be a stretch, but that is how I choose to understand the remark.  As such, I raise my eyebrow.  I appreciate this from Tom.  I appreciate that he has feelings about what I have done.  I appreciate that he feels embarrassed by me.  It shows he is human and in a way it rather elevates the situation.  I have not, in the end, been fighting all by myself.  There was another real human involved. 

Was.

I wonder why he is still driving to the party.  I wonder why, if he knew about me and Darwin all along, why he agreed to attend the party at all.  Why is he sleeping in our bed?  Why has he not mentioned Darwin?  How have I been led to believe he knew nothing?  I wonder what Tom was getting out of it all.  It is a basic assumption of human behavior—we do not tend to act in ways that do not directly benefit us.  Not for the long haul, anyway.  Tom was getting something out of my affair with Darwin or else he would have ended it.  To ask what that something might be, though, would imply that I cared enough to work on it.  I do not.  I know our situation is over.  Our marriage is over and I am not interested in sorting out the details.  Darwin is a symptom.  And I’m not interested in trying to solve the underlying problem.  That doesn’t make me weak, I remind myself.  It makes me real.  I am not interested in trying to solve the problem of my marriage.  I am only interested in getting out.

The car is silent.  It’s the type of silence that is so quiet I can hear the blood rushing through my body.  For a minute, it seems as though the entire world is frozen in time.  I know that in a moment, the light will turn green and we will go.  If I give this one more minute, Tom will turn to me and ask me why I did it.  He will either be angry or sad or stoic.  I will be forced to say things I haven’t even thought.  If I give it another minute, I will have to ask him when he found out.  I will admit to things he may not even know for certain.  I will have to either feign a renewed sense of commitment to our marriage or else hurt him with the truth of my indifference.  One more minute and the walls will come crashing down.

As such, I balance the pasta bowl on my knees and carefully unlock my seat belt.  I hand Tom the pasta bowl with one hand, with the other I collect my purse off the floor.  Tom, sensing my impending departure, says to me then, “I will fight you for full custody of the girls.  I don’t want them in the same house as a guy who leaves his pregnant wife for a married woman.  I will win.”  I turn to face him then.  His is not the look of a man who is making empty threats or ultimatums.  He is just merely stating what is most likely the truth.  It is another thing I hadn’t considered, but I immediately realize that even this threat is not enough to keep me rooted in place.

I open the door and step out.

***************
(What follows are additional scenes, written after the conclusion of the book, still not worked into the book, just to get to the word count.  Un-edited.  Except for the erotica, which has been pared down.  If you can believe that.)

Although I cannot seem to formulate even a single sentence on the topic of Doris Lessing, her family, her creative genius, her inability to be everything that everyone needed her to be, I am still struck by the need to write something.

I pull out a blank sheet of paper and sit in front of it.  I pick up the pen and as soon as it hits the paper, I am off.  As a writer, I know I have to take advantage of these times, the days when the words flow without even the slightest encouragement from me.  I have done nothing in the way of preparing myself for the words that are about to exit my hand and yet here they come. 

I have started to realize that my ability to write what I consider to be decent prose follows a cyclical pattern.  A monthly pattern, if you will.  Before the girls came along, the only thing this time of the month meant to me was that I was fertile and able to make babies.  Now that we have made all of the babies we intend to make, it is almost as if my creative energies have been turned inward.  I still feel the predictable pull towards the bedroom.  I still find myself taking more care with my appearance on those days.  I definitely find myself a bit more of a slave to my music and creativity.  But I no longer run around trying to smell babies and fawn over adorable newborn clothes.  Instead, I write.

Once a month I am granted about two days of writing magic.  I sit and write without proofreading, without editing, without notes.  The words tumble out of me and I am almost always pleased, later, with how they turned out.  It is a force which is not under my control.  It just happens.

Today I sit with a cup of coffee and some music and I write.  I am not writing about Doris.  I am writing about an experience from my childhood.  It is not often, anymore, that I pull from my own history for my writing.  It’s not intentional, this neglecting of my past.  It’s just that I think maybe I have previously said all there is to say.  Or else I feel whiny and full of self-pity when I go there.  Coming from a house full of mental illness and rejection should provide me with all of the writing prompts I’ll need for the rest of my life.  But I try to not lean on them.  They’re predictable and easy choices.  Instead, I try to let the things I learned from my experiences guide me into developing new scenarios and characters. 

Besides, I have only recently learned to extract the good from my past, and I am not rarely in a place to be able to speak with any intelligence on the matter of my childhood.  So I don’t.  Why torture myself with it?

But today I think first about specific memory and then secondly about writing it down.  This order of operations strikes me as somewhat genuine.  Typically, I go searching for a writing prompt and then, when it crops up, discard the idea of writing about my own personal history.  For some reason, the fact that the memory was there before the will to write about it makes the undertaking seem more wholesome.  More able to be completed, anyway.

I was seven, maybe eight years old.  I was a gangly kid, never quite sure of where I fit in socially.  Social situations were difficult for me.  When I spoke out loud, I could hear the words echoing around in the silence beside me.  I imagined the internal dialogue in the heads of my friends.  I imagined them judging me harshly.  I imagined them calling me stupid.

When I would run, I would feel my skinny legs trying to push against the earth and I was embarrassed of the effort.  When I sat, I would look at my knees and wonder why my knee caps stood so much higher than the girls’ next to me.  My hair was never right.  I never wore the right clothes.  I was forever a season or three behind in terms of fashion.  Sometimes I was dirty and I knew I smelled. 

My backpacks were always old.  I held together the seams with tape when they began to give.  I was always losing things.  I grew up thinking it was my fault.  It makes me angry enough to hurt someone.  I should not still be this angry.

I played mostly with the younger kids in my neighborhood, since Julia seemed to have claimed all of the older ones for herself.  Hanging around with a younger crowd helped me feel more confident and in control.  They were not yet old enough to care about fashion.  They ignored my dirtiness.  And as it was relatively easy to convince them to go along with whatever ideas I had planned for us, my confidence grew. 

On that particular day, the day of my story, my plan was that I would help the younger children in my neighborhood to write letters, seal them inside of bottles, and toss them into the river behind my parents’ house.  I had read about the concept of pen pals in a book I borrowed from the library.  Something about the idea of someone on the other side of the planet holding evidence of my existence appealed to me in a huge way.

I gathered my friends and the materials out back and set everyone to work.  We envisioned, or at least I envisioned, that the person who found our letters would rush to contact us.  We would create fast friendships with children who lived on the other side of the planet.  We would exchange ideas, learn new languages, and eventually travel to meet our new friends.  I don’t know why I never imagined anyone other than a child finding the bottle.  It makes more sense that an adult would find it, I suppose.  But as it was in my mind, only children were stumbling upon our messages.

I wrote my letter carefully, in the cursive writing I was just starting to master and make my own.  I have long forgotten the words, but I remember the gist of what I wrote in my message.  I wrote about school, how we were doing chapter books in reading, about Mrs. Lyons, my second grade teacher whose door was decorated with a large cut out of a lion’s head, mane and all.  I wrote about my pet hamster, Gracie, about how we had to move her cage out to the living room because her squeaky exercise wheel keeps me awake at night.  And then I remember, as clear as it was yesterday, that I wanted to say something about my family.  I thought it was appropriate to include a mention of the people I live with in an introductory note to my future friend.  And I struggled with the task.  I was able to mention Julia in a relatively easy way but I got stuck in talking about my parents.  I didn’t think it would be appropriate to include that my mom had just gotten out of the psychiatric hospital again and that while she was in there, my dad decided to leave, again.  I didn’t know how to say that it took a few days for the people at the hospital to find my Aunt Marcie to come stay with us, so that in those few days we had to go to a foster family.  I didn’t know how to say any of that, so I remember writing in my childish script, “My mommy and daddy are doing well.”  It was what my teacher had told us to write in a letter.  She told us that we could always open by asking how the reader was doing and by saying we are doing well.  I was not doing well, and my parents were doing significantly less well, but that was the age of my being a nice child, so I thought it wise to not mention these tidbits.

We rolled up the tiny letters, secured them with short pieces of string, stuffed them into old beer bottles and threw them into the river.  We let them go on a count of three and then stood there on the shore, fixed, waiting to see what would become of our messages.  Most of the bottles bobbed for a few minutes before turning over onto their sides, swallowing water and sinking to the bottom.  My own bottle did not hesitate.  It landed on its side in the river and sank immediately.  I remember watching it from the shore, in awe of the quickness of its descent.

The littlest girl in my entourage, a girl named Ginger, began to cry.  Watching her bottom lip struggle with the effort of trying to remain staid, I wanted to cry too.  All of our hard work and all of my careful cursive was at the bottom of our shallow river.  It was never going anywhere.  I wanted to weep with frustration, but because I was the oldest and because it was my stupid idea in the first place, I realized that my role was to comfort the littler ones.  I gathered Ginger to me and hugged her.  I told her that the crabs on the bottom of the river bed would see that the bottles got to where they needed to be.  They were the messengers and it was all planned.  Ginger bought it and the rest of the kids were quiet enough in their disbelief.

I sent the children on their way and when they were all gone, I climbed into the tree that hung out over the river.  There was not a proper fort in the tree, but I spent enough time there for me to have a small collection of trinkets and found items tucked into the branches.  I climbed up, straddling a limb, looking down into the water below me.  I was looking for our bottles in the flat line of uninterrupted water.  Unable to see them, of course, I hoisted myself back up into a proper sitting position.  My plan was merely to sit in the tree and pass the hours in thought.  This was how I typically spent my days.  Alone, in thought.  But as it was, on this day because of how I was sitting, I felt something sharp digging into my thigh.  I felt in my pocket and retrieved a piece of glass I had found earlier that day when looking for bottles for my project.  The glass was green and dirtied.  It was from a broken beer bottle and it was sharp.  I don’t know what had possessed me to put it into my pocket in the first place.  I held it in my hands, intending to toss it into the water below me.  Let it join the other bottles on the floor of the river.

But then, without really thinking about it beforehand, I found myself dragging it across the tender, tanned flesh of my inner thigh instead.  Looking back even now, I can’t say what it was that prompted me to cut myself.  Perhaps it’s just something about how everyone knows that a sharp piece of glass can cut you.  It is the only role of broken glass—that potential for pain.  Maybe I just wanted the glass to be useful.  Or maybe it had something to do with the newness, then, of seeing my own blood.  Maybe I simply had a child’s curiosity about the cause and effect of cutting.  Or maybe it had something to do with all that disappointment at the bottom of the river.  I don’t know.

I drew the glass across my thigh once and gasped as tiny droplets of blood popped to the surface.  It was nothing more than a scratch.  Not even as deep or painful as a cat scratch.  It wasn’t even one uniform cut, but rather a series of unconnected dots where the glass had barely broken through the surface of my skin.  And so I drew the glass back a second time across the same scratch.  I was frustrated to see that instead of widening the first scratch, my actions had merely produced another identical scratch alongside the first.  Already at this age I was cursed with the self-determination that continues to haunt me today.  I dug the glass into my leg then, indifferent to the pain, and dragged it sharply, swiftly, and deeply across my flesh.

And a hole opened up in my leg that, for a few minutes, petrified me with its ability to bleed.  The blood ran freely, quickly out of my thigh and onto the tree limb underneath me.  I covered the wound with my hand, trying to block out the sight of it.  A panic raced through my body.  I felt immediately embarrassed and ashamed of what I had done.  If I could have rewound the clocks, I would have played the entire thing differently.  But I couldn’t.

I watched blood drip into the river underneath me and I wondered what to do.

After a few minutes, the blood started to clot on its own.  I knew then that I would be okay, that the cut wasn’t so deep that it would require stitches.  I was going to be fine.  If I was careful enough about the stupid thing that I had done, nobody would ever know.

Except that I wasn’t fine at all.  That afternoon started a decade-long love affair with the practice of ripping myself open only so that I could fix myself back up again.  It was never an attempt at suicide.  I didn’t want to die.  I don’t know what it is that I wanted.  It wasn’t attention; nobody ever knew this shameful little secret of mine.  Half of the appeal was in my attempts to conceal my behavior.  If you were to tell my mother that I did this as a child, she would refute it.  I never asked for help, though there were times when I had cut too deeply and probably needed help.  I became skilled though, even at such a young age, with taking care of myself in that way.  I started keeping a small stockpile of bandages and antibiotic ointment in my room.  For as much as I craved the pain, I never wanted my injuries to become infected in a way that would require real medical intervention.  I was definitely not looking for attention.

The books and therapists all say that cutting yourself like this is just an alternative, maladaptive way to express pain.  It’s something like that.  For once, I honestly think that the books are falling short in their explanation.  Most of the time I think they are trying too hard to sound clinical and make sense out of something that ought to just be left alone.  With cutting, however, I think they’re missing something.  But I am, too, so I can’t very well help them out with that.

At thirty three, the insides of my legs are still lined with the long white scars, the evidence of my self-injury.  I wish I could say that I hate that about myself.  I wish I could admit to being ashamed.  The truth is that first of all nobody notices them.  Nobody is doing that much looking at the inside of my thighs, I suppose.  Darwin asked about them and then ignored my deliberate changing of the subject.  Tom has never asked.  And besides nobody noticing, I have to admit to kind of liking them there anyway.  They are my scars.  They are the things that made my body my own.  They are the way I adjusted my physical presence in the world.  My parents gave me my body.  I made it my own in the only way I could.

I don’t do it anymore and I don’t know how to explain how or why I stopped.  I stopped when Michaela was conceived.  I stopped the minute I found out about her.  I didn’t want to be that person for her.  I did not want my daughter to have a mother who was so damaged.  I wanted to be better.  I didn’t, however, feel better.  I wanted desperately to cut myself.  I often still do.  I wanted that feeling of slack relaxation when the wound is safely bandaged again.  I wanted the shock of seeing the blood.  More than anything, I wanted the pain on the outside. 

It may well be what we all want.  We want the pain to be on the outside.

But I stopped.  I stopped like I imagine an alcoholic stops drinking.  I just stopped and then I found a way around the urge to continue.  I busied my hands with other activities.

This is the memory I want to commit to paper.  This is the thing, the bright darkness that is burning behind my eyes.  This is one of the truths about me, one of my secrets, one of the many angles that make me a complex, unique being.  I don’t hate it about myself, though I certainly get the sense that I should.  With my writing, I have shared a lot.  Even when writing fiction, of course, a writer has to draw in some way from her own subconscious, from her own experiences and thoughts.  Even to write a character who is a polar opposite from the writer’s own personality involves borrowing, in order to force the contradiction.  I have written at length about myself, from myself.  I have never written about my cutting.  I have never talked about it.  I have never written about it.  And in thirty three years, nobody has ever asked.

It is time to write about it.  I feel as if I am on some kind of threshold anyway.  This thing I am doing with Darwin, this affair or this sex or this whatever the hell it is, it is changing me into a different person.  Or rather, it is documenting the change that was already happening inside of me.  It is as good a time as any to exorcise those demons.

I don’t feel sorry for myself, though I think my audience may.  It is this reaction that I am trying to avoid.  I don’t want pity.  I don’t want congratulations either.  I don’t want or need any reaction at all from my readers.  I just want to say it.  I want to speak this truth about myself.  I want it out there.  It is a part of me and I want to say it.

I bang the lined papers on the table in front of me to straighten them and I set my pen to the surface.  Predictably, the words come without my beckoning.  I remember myself as a child.  I see myself so clearly I feel as though I could call to that girl and she would answer me.  I am tender with her, in my descriptions.  I see her as a loving mother might.  I explain away her bruises, love away her awkwardness.  I surprise myself then with tears I didn’t know I even had for this situation.  They are coming down my cheeks in neat little lines.  Completely unbeckoned.  They are there and they are coming for that child.

I want to reach back in time and pull her out of it.  I want to save her then and there.  I want to prevent the years of pain that she will endure.  If she is a character in my writing, I want to write for her a completely different future.  I have no idea what that future would entail.  I think I’d have to turn her into something other than human.  I think I would have to make her someone who could fly.  Someone who was deaf and blind to her surroundings.  I would have to change her completely.  Because if I leave her as she is, she will grow up to be me.  She will grow up to seek the arms of another man.  She will grow up being alternately afraid of and enslaved by her children, the things she wanted more than anything.  She will be thirty three and she will struggle just the same as she struggled when she was seven.  But worse, she’ll struggle to make sense of the process.

It’s too much.  This is why I haven’t written about it.  It’s not, after all, because I am too great a novelist to lean on such easy crutches.  It is because I am a weak, scared woman.  It is because I am a person sewn back together over the years and it is because I know how easily those seam can be torn back apart.  I don’t go back there, I tell myself as I push my chair back from the table, because there is nothing to be gained from doing so.

**************** 

I had a friend once who complained that parents always worry about the wrong kid.  Specifically, she was talking about how the world seems to worry after it’s daughters.  My friend argued that girls turn into women who, for the most part, tend to be equipped at birth with all they will need to get through the day, their lives.  She was speaking, specifically, about a woman’s ability to raise hell, subtly influence people, make friends and ostracize others all under the radar of anyone on the look out for such behavior.  She told me that she worries more about her teenage son than she does her teenage daughter.  She said that it was hard to watch him begin developing so much later than the girls in his class.  She said he didn’t know what to do with himself when in the company of all these she-vixens.

I want to call bullshit on the whole thing.  I want to say that it’s not as easy as deciding which sex is more worthy of concern.  I want to say that genitalia has nothing to do with it. 

But I look at Tom out there in the car, fluffing his hair and playing with his goddamn sunglasses, and I have to wonder.

I remember seventh grade.  I remember how sixth grade ended and we were all in training bras.  And then seventh grade started and we were all in real bras.  I remember our little kids’ backpacks traded in for purses.  Purses loaded with maxi pads and tampons and eye liner.  I remember expecting the boys to have undergone a similar transformation over the summer.  And I remember being at first disappointed but then ultimately relieved to see that, by and large, they hadn’t changed at all.  They noticed our changes though.  And that little pendulum tipped, for the first time it seemed, in favor of the girls.  It didn’t matter any more who ran faster or who could kick the ball farther.  Over the summer, the girls changed the rules. 

We changed the rules so much, it seems, that our boy friends were no longer even contenders in the race.  It was about seventh grade, I think, when we all began looking to the older boys.  If the seventh graders were happy to be snapping our bras and making fart jokes, we would just turn our attentions to the ninth graders. 

Before my friend mentioned this about her son, it never occurred to me to think about what became of the seventh grade boys we left behind then.  I mean, we all caught up eventually, didn’t we?  Look at me, I think.  Thirty three and carrying on an affair with a twenty nine year old.  He would have been in fourth grade when I was in seventh.  I think I’ve paid my dues.

As for my own girls, I have a few years to figure it all out, thankfully.  I don’t really think about their teenage selves yet, but I do know that when we finally get there, it’s going to be scary as hell.  I think of all the ways a kid, boy or girl, can screw themselves up and it’s terrifying.  Another vote for the dysfunctional childhood.  I was busy surviving.  The bumps and bruises along the way seem pretty happenstance.  They’re not nearly as bad as they could have been.  My children will not have this luxury.  It’s what I have worked all my life for.