The Fixed Stars Read online

  From a different book in the stack I would soon learn that the strategy we’d used to present our separation to June is often referred to, scornfully, as “the real estate explanation.” The complaint is that it’s not an explanation, that it obscures what it seeks to clarify. But we didn’t want to obscure the truth, I silently insisted: we wanted to be clear, and also age-appropriate. June was a month out from her fourth birthday. She didn’t yet know that there was anything abnormal about her family’s living arrangements. She didn’t know the words separation or divorce. We would create this experience for her, and it would not be accomplished with a single conversation. We would take it one step at a time, explain with greater depth and sophistication as she lived into it, asked questions, observed. We agreed that we would not lie to her or refuse her questions. If she was sad or upset or missing one of us, we would not try to paper over it. Planning our end, we sometimes felt like a we.

  We divvied up the furniture and June’s clothes and toys. Our friends helped Brandon move. He told me he plied them with good beer. Did anyone offer a toast? I tried not to imagine what the day looked like. Brandon’s parents had sent a play kitchen for June’s “room” at the apartment, and my cousin shipped a box of Playmobil hand-me-downs. The apartment had old wood floors and a bank of windows at one end, and even with furniture, it echoed. I gave him two philodendrons I’d propagated the previous winter. Whenever I visited, I watered them.

  There was never a question as to how we would handle custody. We would share it jointly, fifty-fifty. I had been the primary parent—had put June to bed almost every night, had bought the clothes and made the appointments and knew what was happening when—but Brandon was her father, and I knew he was a good father. He just worked a lot. He had never meant for me to be the primary parent, and now he—we—had an opportunity to change that. He wanted a fuller relationship with June, and I wanted him to have it. I wanted her to have more of him, not less. Now we had at least a shot at equal time and responsibility.

  The corollary: if we were going to co-parent the way we wanted to, we would have to confront our crap. For two people who rarely did conflict well, we set lofty goals. We were both perfectionists of long standing. Brandon had spent years obsessing over making the best pizza, and I had spent years obsessing over everything.

  I know it sounds dumb, he said one day in therapy, but I think we can have the perfect divorce. Then he laughed, a little too hard, so I would know he was joking. I knew he wasn’t, though, not really. I rolled my eyes, but I wanted it too.

  We had shimmering daydreams about how it might turn out. We said we’d hold on to what was good about our marriage, even as we undid it. We went to therapy together for a couple of months after our separation, and after that, I continued on my own. I racked up a small mountain range of credit-card debt on therapy. Our daydreams slowly lost their sheen, but we kept trying, and arguing, and trying some more. Put June first, everyone said, and she’ll be okay. I hoped they were right.

  When Brandon moved out, Dino’s had been open for six months. He could start to pare back his hours, staying home on the nights that he had June. We planned the custody schedule accordingly and made a calendar online. We each had her three days of the week, and we alternated the remaining day. Since June wasn’t used to this much time away from me, we planned the ramp-up carefully: the first week we were separated, he had June for one night; the second week, two nights; and the third week, three.

  We went to the bank and opened a joint checking account for June’s expenses. Our income at the time was roughly equal, so we would contribute equally to her clothes, health and dental insurance, and school costs. Whatever we bought for her that would not go back and forth—food, books, toys, an afternoon ice-cream cone—we would pay for ourselves.

  Brandon and I are both white Americans from upper-middle-class families. We live in an affluent coastal city, and we both work. Our privilege made every aspect of separation and divorce—finances, custody, housing, mental health, and the list goes on—significantly easier than it is for most. According to studies of gender differences in the impact of divorce, women face disproportionate losses in household income when a marriage ends, as well as an increased risk of poverty.31 Both parties in a divorce will deal with short-term consequences to their well-being, but the strain on women is frequently dire and lasting. My financial security—not to mention my skin color, which, because of the systemic effects of racism, underwrites much of that security—granted me agency and autonomy that few women are permitted. This truth is ugly to me, but I do not want to hide it.

  I remember the night of the day that he moved out. By the light of my bedside lamp, I dug out an old T-shirt of my father’s from the bottom drawer of my dresser. It was from a diner in Oklahoma City whose corned beef hash my mother once loved, royal blue cotton jersey with the restaurant’s logo on the back. I’d taken it from my father’s closet the year after he died, and it still smelled like him, a high-pitched musk. In thirteen years, I’d never worn it. I didn’t want the smell to go away. But the day that Brandon moved out, I unfolded it and pulled it on, held the fabric to my nose until I was sobbing. I wanted company, and grief was it.

  I was free from the labor of our marriage: the tidying up after him, the keeping-track, the constant doing. After he moved out, I made a mess of the place. I left dirty dishes in the sink, threw my clothes on the rug. It was a relief to stop trying to set a shining example, to stop hoping he would follow suit.

  You’ve been begging the wrong person to see you, my therapist says. You don’t have to do that anymore. I nod, not entirely sure.

  Alone in our house—my house—I was defiant and furious. How had I put up with it, with how not-right we were, for so long? And then, picking up June at his apartment, I’d look around the room and nearly choke, guilt filling my mouth like a wad of gauze. June’s toys were strewn everywhere, and the laundry too, and here was all this furniture that used to be ours, in this alien, half-finished place. I was the one who’d landed him here, us here, June here.

  Why can’t you stay married and just date girls on the side? a friend asks.

  It’s not like that, I say. I’m not who I was before. I couldn’t be who I am and stay where I was. We tried.

  I drove around a lot that summer, to Brandon’s and back, to Nora’s and back, to camp drop-off and back, to the restaurant and back. In the car I played the same song on repeat, “The Swimming Song,” by Loudon Wainwright III. I wondered if June would remember it years later, how much I played it that summer. That summer I was always swimming, even when I wasn’t. I could have drowned at any time, and often I thought I might.

  If I spend enough time feeling guilty, I decided, things will be okay. If I feel guilty enough, he will stop being angry with me.

  Three weeks into our separation, I woke up with a patch of itchy welts on my torso, the size and hue of pencil erasers. Hives. By night the spray of pink dots had joined together, the way droplets of rain make a puddle: my entire chest was covered, and my groin, my arms, the backs of my hands. Hives streaked down my legs and marched across my scalp. When June tried to climb onto my lap, I yelped. My skin pulsed and crawled, like it wanted to get away from me.

  Are you allowed to grieve if you’ve caused the death? Is that something that can happen? I had ended my marriage, but I had also ended a life that I had, at one time, loved.

  What exactly was this grief? The loss of him, of us? I wanted it to be, but I wasn’t sure. We’d started to lose each other long before. I’d missed him for years. This lament was not that. June’s parents aren’t together anymore: the phrase came out of me as though someone else were speaking it, as though I were eavesdropping at the playground. I ended a life that had been not only mine, but ours.

  Brandon gave me some dirt: an acquaintance had recently left his wife of two decades for another woman. We knew little of this couple and nothing of their marriage, but this feels great: the distraction of someone else’s drama
. I pore over the acquaintance’s photos online, images and emoji-filled captions from a trip with his girlfriend. I know I am this husband, but I feel for his wife.

  I think of the public radio host—a woman in her fifties, an interviewer of philosophers and poets—the one whose show I’d listened to for a long time before I learned she was divorced. When I found out, I was disenchanted. How can she lead conversations about the meaning of human life when she doesn’t even have her shit together? She can’t even stay married! As though the ability to stay in a marriage were irrefutable evidence of character, the kind of trait you might boast in a job interview. As though staying married weren’t just as often motivated by fear, financial insecurity, religious codes, inertia.

  The ability to leave a marriage that no longer works: What kind of character is this evidence of?

  Our friends Natalie and Michael threw June a birthday party. They had a son whose birthday fell a month before hers, and for the past two years, we’d teamed up to throw a single party for both of them, halfway between the dates. This year Natalie and Michael did it all. They had a backyard barbecue one weekend afternoon in mid-August, with a tent full of balloons and a plastic kiddie pool. I don’t remember much except how hot it was outside. I remember watching Natalie and Michael, thinking how easy they made it look, thinking, Their son will grow up with both of his biological parents under the same roof.

  A friend was in town from New Orleans that weekend, someone Brandon knew better than I did. This friend was a photographer, and he took a picture of Brandon and June at the birthday party. In it they were laughing, their cheeks flushed with heat. I noticed that our friend did not take a picture of me. I spent most of the afternoon sitting by myself in Natalie and Michael’s dining room, trying not to notice anything at all.

  20

  Nora had a nephew and two nieces. They were her brother’s children, and they lived on the East Coast. She told me about them on our first date, said she loved kids. She wanted to know: What was June like? What were her favorite toys? What did June know about where I was, on nights like these? Nora was eager to meet her and appropriately nervous. She deferred to my sense of timing, and I was grateful for that. I didn’t know what to do. I needed time to figure it out.

  Nora met June a couple of weeks after Brandon moved out. She came over for dinner, and I made soup. Nora had brought June a hamburger stuffie the size of a hatbox, and June was thrilled. Nora watched us quietly. I explained to June that Nora was a new friend, but that night she didn’t seem like a friend, or like my girlfriend. It seemed like she’d never met a child before, like she’d showed up for dinner at the wrong house. We were all terrified.

  I was a mother, but I felt like a virgin—an identity with notable precedent, but not what I was going for. I wished I were more like Athena, fully formed from the get-go. My life had so many complications: that was the word that came to me. My life was ungainly, unwieldy. Surely it was impossible to love. If I could barely handle it, how on earth could Nora?

  Nora told me she felt like a homewrecker. Am I? she asked.

  No, no—you’re absolutely not, I said. I’m leaving my marriage for me, I said. No one is responsible but me.

  I met her mother once. She was visiting from the East Coast, and she wanted to meet me. She offered to take us to dinner, chose a steak restaurant. I liked the idea of being brought into the fold, and I dressed up for the evening. Nora’s mother asked about June. She asked about my mother. She couldn’t wait to know them. The next afternoon, we all met up at a playground. Nora’s mother had stopped at a toy store and lavished June with gifts, a brand-new flower-print backpack full of them. She was trying hard, and it touched me. June was reticent, quiet in her excitement. She had no idea who this woman was, and I barely did either.

  June didn’t want me to talk with the other grown-ups; she wanted me to join her on the playground equipment. Nora hung back with our mothers, made periodic visits to me and June on the swings. I wanted her to stay with us, to join us in our play, swing high like we did. She leaned on the steel supports, hands in her pockets, and stared out at the lake. She walked with our mothers down to the water. I dragged June’s doll and new backpack over the grass toward them, sweating and irritated and sad. None of us knew what to do in this scene.

  Recently my mother reminded me about that afternoon. God, remember that? Doesn’t it seem like ages ago? She thought we could laugh together about its awkwardness. Instead I cringed. I had wanted things to work out with Nora, wanted it enough to introduce our parents. But it hadn’t worked—not that afternoon, not really anytime.

  “The trouble with letting people see you at your worst,” writes Sarah Manguso, “isn’t that they’ll remember; it’s that you’ll remember.”32

  Brandon and Nora met only once, the morning of Labor Day. She had come over for dinner the night before, and he texted early, while we were still in bed. He wanted to grab a tool from the garage. Nora’s here, I replied, but you can come if you want. She says she’d be happy to meet you.

  He arrived with June in tow. Surely it couldn’t have happened any other way but this: on short notice, so no one had time to get anxious, and with June around, a healthy distraction. He knocked, and I answered, Nora waiting in the hall. Brandon bounded in, extending his hand. I could see the effort behind his high spirits, and a tender sting rose in the back of my throat. When I walked him and June out to the car, his eyes were wet, unspeakable.

  21

  One Monday, I was at the restaurant, calculating tips for payroll. June was at the dance studio next door, taking her first pre-ballet class. Brandon was in the kitchen, doing prep for the next day. It was late September.

  Do you have time to make a vanilla ice-cream base? he asked. I did. I found the milk and cream in the walk-in, cracked the eggs. At his station, Brandon chopped shallots for vinaigrette. June’s class ended, and she sat at the counter in her gossamer skirt with a blanket tied around her shoulders. It was like old times, old times we’d never really had.

  On the stereo, the first notes of an Elvis Perkins album kicked in. It was one of a dozen songs I associate with the opening of Delancey, songs we listened to over and over. We’d listened as we poured the concrete tabletops and painted the ceiling, as we polished silver and stacked plates, the two of us hacking away at a project that I wished I’d wanted. Elvis Perkins in Dearland had become the soundtrack of that feeling, a preemptive nostalgia as one phase of our lives slid into the next. For years after Delancey opened, when I needed a good cry, I’d play that album like a musical ipecac, to shake loose and expel a feeling.

  Now, this Monday afternoon, Brandon put it on the stereo. So he noticed too, I thought, the way this afternoon was a kind of echo, an ideal echo, of times we’d had before.

  Stop, stop! I begged, grinning. Turn it off, or I’ll cry! Don’t make me do it!

  We laughed, and he put on something else. I could hear that laugh for hours. It was a relief to recognize who we’d been to each other and to not pretend we were still the same.

  Nora and I talked on the phone on the nights when we didn’t see each other. That night I wanted to tell her about the afternoon at Delancey, but I hesitated. I worried that it wouldn’t land right. But she’d wanted to know about my day, hadn’t she? I wanted to be able to tell her about the things that matter to me. So I told her about it.

  Gosh, she said. It’s kind of hard to hear that.

  Why? I asked. I’d play dumb.

  Sometimes it seems like you’re going to get back together, she said.

  He’s the father of my child, I said. I want a good relationship with him. That’s not the same as wanting to stay married to him. You can understand that, right?

  It’s just hard to hear about the two of you together, Nora said.

  Something hot surged in the back of my throat. I had brought her a positive event, but to her it wasn’t good news. I had come to her with light; she took it in and became something dark.

  W
hen clouds of space dust form so densely that light rays cannot pass through, they appear in the night sky as black patches, shapes even darker than midnight. Astronomers call them dark cloud constellations.

  I’ve got to be able to talk about my life, I said, without us falling apart over it.

  When Nora and I talked, I didn’t like who I became. Every conversation was a mirror, and I didn’t like the person I saw in it. This person wriggles uncomfortably in her seat, can’t seem to stay here or there. This person can’t do it right. She wants the wrong things.

  One version of the right thing: this person should have stayed in her marriage. She should have held fast to her commitment. She should have thought of her child first—her child’s need for security, consistency, an intact home.

  Another version of the right thing: this person should have left like a snake sheds its skin. She wanted to be free, right? Wipe off the dust and go.

  Interview your character. Ask her what she wants.

  “But now,” writes author Andrea Long Chu, “you begin to see the problem with desire: we rarely want the things we should.”33

  This person wants neither.

  Being with Nora was like riding a teeter-totter with someone much smaller or much larger than you are. This is what I tell my friend Matthew. Nora and I were always each at the mercy of the other, either floating up or thudding down, never at the same time. We were both afraid of being left up there.

  I think I’m homesick, I say to Matthew. It’s like I can’t get comfortable anywhere. It’s like I’m homesick for a comfort I don’t have anymore.

  He nods.

  I can’t stay in my marriage, I say, but I don’t want to burn it to the ground either.