She had her pen poised, ready to circle again.
The irony here, perhaps, was that all those years ago, when Natalie herself was a fresh-faced student at the University of New Hampshire, she had only majored in education because it seemed like a practical choice. Her mother, a very practical woman from Maine, had strongly advised it. Teaching jobs were always plentiful, and teachers kept sensible hours. Natalie would be able to keep working after she had children. Also, Natalie liked to read, and she’d always been good with the little ones. Perfect. That Natalie had never really dreamed of teaching was beside the point.
“I’m not asking you to dream about it. I’m just asking you to get licensed.” Natalie’s mother had a thick Down East accent, full of a wary pragmatism that could make her daughter’s musings, when she repeated them, sound dumb. “We both know what part of college you like best. But you can’t major in sorority, dear.”
She forgave her mother’s condescension. Her mother hadn’t even gone to college. It was just never an option, not at that time, in that little coastal town, the only income lobsters and tourists. Her mother’s brothers went, but she didn’t. That was okay at first, because she married Natalie’s father. But when Natalie was eight, her father died.
“You want dreams?” her mother asked. “Okay. Dream about being able to support yourself. Believe me. It’s a dream you want to take seriously as soon as possible, whether you marry Danny-boy or not.”
But the real argument for teaching, in Natalie’s mind, was that she didn’t have any better ideas. The truth was, she didn’t really dream of anything when it came to a real job, something she might have to do every day for the rest of her life. Nothing sounded that great. She liked to read, but she didn’t like writing. She liked math until it got too hard. Her favorite courses, no matter what the subject, were always introductory. She hated that about herself, how stupid and shallow it made her sound. But her favorite part of college really was sorority life: She loved the shared meals in front of the big stone fireplace, the charity fund-raisers. She loved the camaraderie, the group projects, and the way everyone came to her for advice.
And she loved Dan. Her mother could call him Danny-boy all she wanted, but he was as smart and funny and warm as Natalie’s father, and he looked at her like she was Helen of Troy. She loved the way he looked at her.
“And it doesn’t hurt that he’s going to make a lot of money,” her uncle Pat had added, laughing. Natalie had been so offended. She loved Dan because she loved Dan. She would have loved him if he’d been a barber. She hadn’t been that calculating, not at all.
“I believe you,” Uncle Pat said with a wink. “But it’s a fortunate coincidence, you have to admit.” He sat up, coughing, seeing her face. “Oh come on, honey. I’m just playing with you. Don’t get mad. Don’t be like that.”
The fifth time the waitress came by to refill her coffee, Natalie apologized. “I’m sort of camped out here,” she said, smiling hard. Minus two quick bathroom breaks, she’d been sitting in the booth for three hours.
Oh good, so there was an option! Natalie kept smiling until the waitress walked away. For the cost of just one bottomless cup, she could sleep in this booth! She would stay warm and dry, and have good service. In the morning, she could splurge on pancakes, and wash her face in the bathroom sink. She wondered what the friendly waitress would do if she really lay down and fell asleep right here, her coat balled up under her head. It might be worth it to find out, and less humiliating than crashing in on her daughter again.
She took another sip, staring out the window into the night. It seemed right to lament her decisions, to blame all her wrong choices. She’d worried they were wrong even as she was making them. Most of her sorority sisters had not gotten married right out of school. They went on to graduate school, or law school, or medical school. Or they went traveling. Or they joined the Peace Corps. She remembered the way some of them had looked at her when she told them she was engaged. Yes, she said, she would take his name. Yes, she was moving to Kansas City. They all smiled and said congratulations and admired her ring, but she saw the judgment, even dismissal, in some of their eyes. Or maybe she was just paranoid and feeling unsure of herself.
“I’ll get a job there right away,” she told them, though no one had been rude enough to ask. “You can get a teaching job anywhere.”
For a recent graduate with good grades, that turned out to be true. Natalie didn’t have any trouble finding a job, even after she moved to Kansas City, or, as the editor of her sorority newsletter had put it: even after she
followed her new husband to Kansas City
. In 1981! One of her “sisters” wrote that! And made her sound like a puppy, just because she wasn’t going to law school, just because she didn’t hyphenate her name, just because she didn’t submit a picture of herself wearing a blazer with huge shoulder pads and one of those blouses with those stupid bow ties. She hadn’t
followed
Dan. Was she not supposed to marry the person she loved because he was moving? Kansas City was where the law firm was. Someone had to give. Someone had to be flexible. And because the person she happened to love would be making approximately five times as much money as she would be making, it seemed reasonable and right that the flexibility might be required of her.
Natalie’s mother didn’t see the problem. “Please,” she said. “Your cousins were in day care from day one, and they all turned out to be decent people. And I know plenty of kids who stayed home with moms who turned out to be wingnuts you’d never want in your house. And no, honey, I am not talking about you.”
“You’re going to so much trouble?” she said, or maybe asked. Leni Von Holten was a short, apple-shaped woman who inflected her voice at the end of every sentence, question or not, so Natalie was never certain if she needed to respond. “You’re pumping the milk? It can’t be comfortable? So you can go to a job that you don’t need, that you don’t even like so much? Dan makes enough money to support you both? You really want to spend your days taking care of other people’s children while someone else takes care of yours? This beautiful girl? This perfect little breadloaf who will only be a baby once?”
Natalie had careful, practiced responses to all her mother-in-law’s questions: she explained that she did enjoy teaching; she shouldn’t have complained so much the previous year, which had been particularly difficult, with more emotionally disturbed children than usual and a few particularly abrasive parents. Next year would be better. Really, she was looking forward to getting back to work. She’d found the best child care available, and she was sure that Elise would be fine.
But even as she said these words, her voice full of conviction, she felt herself wavering inside. Dan
did
make enough money for her not to have to work. Her paltry teaching salary hardly mattered—and next year, much of it would go toward covering child care so she could work. Her life would be a snake, swallowing its own tail. She would make herself miserable out of principle.
Still, in the fall, she went back to work, just as planned. The first time she dropped a wailing Elise off at day care, she steeled herself and tried to think what her mother would say—
You’re doing the right thing! You’re being an excellent role model! She’ll be fine!
and not what her mother-in-law would say—
What are you, crazy?
By early November, she had started to think that her mother-in-law might be right. She felt crazy. She was exhausted. Elise rotated through illnesses: colds, pinkeye, bronchitis, pneumonia, the flu. The day care director said it was typical, with her being around so many other children. Natalie used up all her sick days and family days for the entire year before Thanksgiving. Even Dan took a day off, in the middle of trial, but he couldn’t pull that more than once.
When she wanted to complain about how tired she was, she called Dan’s mother, and not her own; even as she dialed, she knew what this meant, which direction she was already leaning.
“I
wish
I could have stayed home with my babies,” Leni said, and this time, her voice did not rise up at the end, and there was no hint at all of a question. “I never had the option. I had to work. We couldn’t have paid someone to help at the store. But if I could have stayed home with my boys, of course I would have.” She had to set down the phone for a moment—Dan’s father was already shaky on his legs and needed her help to get down the stairs. When she got back on the phone, her voice was curt.
“Natalie, honey. I have to go. And I love you. You’re already a daughter to me. But I have to ask you, why are you doing this? You know? Why make a good life hard?”
Right after the divorce, when Natalie didn’t yet understand just how poor she would turn out to be, she’d paid fifty dollars to go to something called a Career Empowerment Seminar. For her money, she’d gotten lunch, including a salad and dessert, a laminated list of empowering mantras, and hours of advice that pretty much boiled down to the speaker’s favorite phrase:
Do what you love, and the money will come.
All those years, when the girls were little, she had been doing what she loved. She had mothered with passion. She had comforted and dressed and bathed and taught her young daughters every day of the week, because she believed she could do it with more caring than anyone else in the world. And she had loved it all, or at least most of it—the hikes to the park, the winter days inside, the making of snowmen and sock puppets. When the girls had field days in grade school, she volunteered to help hand out water balloons or retrieve Frisbees, and her own girls always seemed so happy to see her there at school that she felt sorry for other kids whose parents couldn’t make it—they either didn’t want to be there or they couldn’t be there. She felt lucky that neither was true for her. In that way, in many ways, her mother-in-law had been right.
And later, there were the days she spent with Leni, and also her own mother, during the years when they both needed help. Natalie wouldn’t say she loved those days the way she had loved the days with her children, but again, she was grateful that she got to be there. No one else would have looked after those two old women as carefully. The workers at the homes did the heavy lifting, and she was grateful for that as well, but she got to sit at her mother’s side for two weeks straight at the very end. You couldn’t hire someone to do that. And she was with Leni at the end, too, which was good, because who could they have hired to keep vigil so many days in a row, and to care enough to go find the nurse and remind her that Mrs. Von Holten really did need more morphine, PLEASE, now?
If that wasn’t passion, what was?
And yet, look where she was now.
It was hard to know what Leni, if she weren’t dead, might say if she could see Natalie parked in this booth with the decaf and the classifieds. She might have some sympathy. During the last years of her life, she was closer to Natalie than she was to her own son. And she seemed to sense that something was wrong. Her dementia varied from day to day, and sometimes she would ask, over and over, if Natalie was happy, if Dan was a good husband, if the marriage was still strong.
And then one day, in the middle of that aching year after her own mother died, she came home from the grocery store and asked Dan if he thought of her as a separate and complete human being. She wasn’t sure what made her do this—what, exactly, set her off. Her mother’s death had left her restless, ready to say things as soon as she thought them. And on the drive home from the grocery store that day, it occurred to Natalie that Dan didn’t really listen to her when she talked. He liked to talk to her about his work—the funny thing a client had said, the arrogance of some judge. He was a good storyteller, and she was a polite and interested listener, so this was how most of their conversations worked. But when she tried to talk, and tell him about her day—about her conversations with repairmen and dry cleaners and nursing home attendants—she couldn’t keep his attention. His gaze wandered. He would start reading something, anything—the back of a cereal box on the table, old text messages on his phone. If she called him on it, he would apologize. And then he would do it again.
When her mother was dying, she’d noticed all this, but she’d been too preoccupied to really think about it. And then her mother died, and she had some time to think about it, and it started to really bug her. On that particular morning, coming home from the store, she was thinking about it. When she got home, Dan was right there, coming out to help her with the bags. Veronica was at a friend’s house and thus unable to overhear. And so she asked.
“What?” He had on an undershirt and sweatpants, and the bifocals he needed when he read. He squinted at her over them, as if he were having trouble seeing her, though she stood only a couple of feet away. She held a paper grocery bag in one arm. Her purse was still slung over the other.
“Do you think I’m interesting?” She switched the bag of groceries to her other arm. She focused on keeping her voice neutral, no judgment at all. She wasn’t trying to pick a fight. She really just wanted to know. “Also, when you think of me, when you picture me in your head, do you see me as a separate entity? Or do you only see me in relation to you?”
He took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. And he said absolutely nothing. It was, in twenty-six years of marriage, the only time she’d caught him speechless, too stumped even to nod or shake his head.
“I’ll get the rest of the groceries,” he said, as if that were the question she’d asked. “Don’t let the dog follow me out.” He walked past her, out into the garage. She stood where she was, still holding a bag of groceries, a stalk of celery just under her nose. When he came back in, holding four bags, two in each arm, he made a big production out of having to walk around her to the counter. Bowzer hurried behind him, head raised, sniffing the air.
“What?” he asked. He looked at her only briefly before he set the bags on the counter. He took a box of ice cream out of a bag, holding it up in front of his glasses, checking the ingredients perhaps.
“I asked you a question.” Her voice was quiet, no threat at all in it. But she held the bag of groceries like a shield in front of her, ready and waiting. His reluctance seemed a bad sign.
He bent down to pet the dog. When he looked up at her again, he sighed. He stood and leaned on the counter, one hand on his hip, and just then, he looked so much like his mother. It was more than just the shape of his face, the wide forehead, the thin lips. It was his eyes, his expression. Just that morning, when Natalie had walked into Leni’s room at the nursing home, she had given her that exact same look—disoriented and a little frightened, fighting to understand.
She wanted to simplify it for him. She was ready to spoon-feed it to him, in fact. “Dan,” she asked, still calm, neutral. “Do you think I’m smart and interesting?”
He seemed nervous.
She looked away and laughed.
“Sure,” he said.
She looked back at him. “Sure what?”
“Sure you are.” He rolled one hand in circles away from his chest. “And of course you’re a separate person.”
“Do you still love me?”
He didn’t have trouble with this one. He nodded thoughtfully, his bottom lip sticking out. It was the expression of someone who had just been asked if a certain meal at a restaurant was any good.
He saw the way she was looking at him. He rolled his eyes. “We’ve been married a long time,” he said, shrugging a little, as if this were something she, too, might shrug off as well. “Oh Nat,” he said, his annoyance now tempered by pity. “What do you want from me?”
She explained it as best she could. She put the bag of groceries down on the counter so she could use her hands. She wanted her life to mean something. There had to be something it was about. Veronica would be leaving for college soon, and then it would be just the two of them, and if he didn’t love her anymore, what did she have?
“I didn’t say I didn’t love you,” he countered.
She shook her head, though she understood what he meant. Of course you could love someone without being in love. You could settle into comfort, into friendship, even routine. Of course that happened in marriage over time. She would have been able to accept all that, if that was really what was happening between them. But she was suspicious of the way he had phrased his last claim:
I didn’t say I didn’t love you.
He was avoiding saying that he did. Something else was going on here. This was not comfort or friendship or routine.
And yet he was trying to convince her. She couldn’t think. She had to sit down. She walked into the dining room, leaned on the table, and sank into the closest chair—Elise’s, when she was home.
“Honey,” he said. He followed her halfway, leaning against the frame of the dining room’s entry. “Come on. Can I get you something to drink? Do you want some tea?”
She shook her head. Bowzer’s cold nose nuzzled against her limp hand. He circled twice beside her chair before he lay down, his head resting on her feet.
“We have a good family,” he said. “You’re a wonderful mother. And you’re being so good to my mother. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate all you do for her.”
She shook her head. She wanted him to stop talking. “We should get a divorce,” she said.
“What?” He had a double chin when he pulled his head back. And still,
still,
even now, even in this horrible moment, she still could love him if only he would try to say the right thing. He looked at her over the bifocals. “What are you talking about? Why do you want a divorce?”
“Because you may love me, but you don’t find me interesting. And you don’t think I’m smart enough to notice.”
He started immediate damage control. He hurried over to the table. He sat down next to her and tried to hold her hand. She wouldn’t let him.
“Oh come on,” he said, as if she were being petulant, a child making a fuss. He sat up and tapped his forehead with his finger. “You know what? This is silly. I
am
in love with you, Nat. Of course I am.”
She moved her hand across her face. It came back wet. She was crying. She hadn’t even known.
He shook his head, resolute. “I don’t want to get a divorce.”
“Why not?”
He laughed—just briefly—a short, hard exhale through a smile of disbelief. It was as if she had asked the stupidest question in the world. When her face didn’t move, when she didn’t even blink, he realized he had to say something. And that’s when she understood. Because he hesitated, and because he seemed so certain, and because she understood him well, she knew, she
knew,
that he was thinking about money.
“What about the girls?” He tried to take her hand again. “You want to do that to them?”
She jerked her hand away. He’d gone right for her weakness. Of course he had. He knew what he was doing. But after Veronica left for school, it would be just the two of them in the house. And what did it matter to him if they were more or less roommates? He had his work. He’d always had his work. She’d had the girls. Next year, he would still have his work, and she would have nothing.
“They’ll come home for holidays,” he said. “What? You want them to have to go to different houses? Thanksgiving with me? Christmas with you? You want that for them?”
She shook her head, looking away. She knew she was crying now.
“I am dedicated to the marriage,” he said, and the way he said it surprised her so much that she turned back to look at him. He was sitting up straight, his face solemn. “I have never been unfaithful. I will never be unfaithful.” He sounded very tired, as if recalling years of great sacrifice. “And I love our family. I love the girls. We have a comfortable home. If we just stay steady now,” he made his hands into blades and pointed them down the length of the table, “we can get through this bad time and still have a decent retirement.”
It took her a moment to understand that when he said “this bad time,” he meant the way they were stretched financially from Elise’s wedding and tuitions and the nursing homes and the falling stocks, and not “this bad time” in their marriage, which apparently, for him, didn’t seem all that bad.
And then, a moment later, she did a curious thing—she pretended, even to herself, that she had not understood this at all. She pretended that she had heard a promise of improvement, of a future full of conversations in which he actually looked at her when she was talking and seemed interested in what she had to say. She pretended all of this because then it did not seem so strange for them both to get up and put the rest of the groceries away, and for him to go to work on his laptop, and for her to take Bowzer for a walk. Because really, what else was she going to do?
She had to be pragmatic.
The next time she went to the grocery store, she found herself gazing at the tabloids in the checkout line; she felt superior only for a moment. Celebrities got divorced and remarried all the time, she realized, not necessarily because they were shallow, or fickle, or quick to throw in the towel.
They got divorced because they could afford it.