The Fixed Stars Read online

  No one says you have to, he says.

  I have this daydream, I say. It’s me and Brandon, a couple of years from now. We’re sitting in the shade somewhere. We’re talking, maybe eating something. We’re just two friends, normal friends, catching up.

  From the corner of my eye I see Matthew’s lip curl into a mild smile. I amuse him.

  I know it sounds dumb, I say. Like I’ll burst into song and Brandon’ll do a tap dance and then the credits will roll.

  Ha, Matthew blurts. It does, a little.

  But I really want us to get there.

  You maybe can do it someday, says Matthew. But it’ll be a lot of work.

  I know.

  Well, he says, then go do it.

  22

  The next day was a Wednesday, still late September. Brandon and I had a meeting with our CPA, and then with a corporate attorney. We had to decide what to do with the restaurants, whether we would continue to own them jointly. Between meetings, we got falafel for lunch and leaned against his car to eat it. It was windy, and I was wearing a blue skirt, I remember, because it was whipping around my calves when he said that he could see it now, that we hadn’t been real partners, romantic partners, for a long time. Maybe not since he moved from New York. We’ve just been best friends, he said.

  I nodded, swallowing.

  I’ve missed my friend, he said.

  Me too, I said. I couldn’t look at him, not sure of what my face would do. I watched a bee crawl along the curb.

  I made a list last night of everything I need in our relationship, he said. And I think it’s probably impossible to fix it all. It would make us both miserable.

  I think so too, I said. I could feel the molecules between us rearranging themselves.

  Nora met me like an enzyme, and she catalyzed a reaction. Now I studied the fine print. Catalyst: a substance that increases the rate of a chemical reaction without itself undergoing any permanent chemical change.34

  In our reaction, I was the one changing. That was never her role.

  I asked Nora to meet me that afternoon on a bench in the park where we’d had our first date. I said I couldn’t do it anymore. I was livid and empty, like a blister that’s been popped. I said I couldn’t be with someone who didn’t actively support—support and encourage—my having a good relationship with the father of my child.

  But I do, she said. I do.

  Maybe you do, I said, but I can’t feel it. That time in bed, when you said maybe we weren’t a good match, I think you were right. I looked at her face, the red of her eyes. I’m sorry, I said. You were right.

  My mouth was dry, like moving my tongue around a cardboard box. As we said goodbye, a breeze picked up the dead leaves at our feet and threw a lock of hair against my front teeth, where it stuck.

  Back at my car, I found a crater in the windshield, a dense web of cracks with fissures running in all directions. I spun around, looking for Nora, but she’d left by a different exit. She wouldn’t have done this anyway. There was a faint smear at the center of the crater, as though a bird had hit it, or a dusty baseball. The point of impact was directly in front of the driver’s seat. I swept the flecks of glass from my seat and drove home.

  23

  Now I took the dog out before bed, a chore Brandon used to do. Each night, while she did her thing, I studied the sky. I would see how far up and behind I could look before I staggered backward on my heels. The rainy season had begun, and most nights there were no stars. But when it was clear enough, I’d look for Orion’s Belt, follow it to Sirius, then back the other way to the Pleiades. I measured time that way, one day into the next, one month into the next, watching the giant hunter stride across the sky.

  Before that fall, I had never lived in our house alone, as its sole adult resident. Brandon and I had had big plans for the house, but we hadn’t had the money to see them through. He’d left without complaint. You know me, he said. I’ll have fun finding a new house someday. You know I like a project.

  I threw out his expired prescriptions and the ominous-looking earwax-removal kit he’d never used. I got tired of seeing the garden hose lolling next to the driveway like a diseased reptile, so I went to Fred Meyer and spent $29.99 on a plastic caddy on wheels. No one has so triumphantly coiled a hose.

  While I futzed, I listened to podcasts. In an episode of On Being, Krista Tippett mused with Franciscan friar Richard Rohr on the nature and necessity of suffering. It’s a simplistic metaphor, Father Rohr explains, but, “Picture three boxes: order, disorder, reorder. . . . If you read the great myths of the world and the great religions, that’s the normal path of transformation. What I always tell the folks is there’s no nonstop flight from order to reorder. . . . Yeah, that disorder is part of the deal.”35

  This was around the time that the sewer backed up onto the old cherry-red carpet of the basement bathroom. The sewer pipes under the yard had eroded and split and would have to be replaced, at substantial cost. This work would not be covered by homeowners’ insurance. Because we still owned the house jointly, Brandon and I split the bill, both pillaging our savings. I cried a lot, made calls to a contractor acquaintance, and scoured Yelp reviews of sewer companies. Water mitigation, asbestos abatement, trenchless sewer replacement: I would learn to use these terms correctly in a sentence.

  I sat in bed one night and wrote a list of people who had been kind to me in the previous year. I wondered why they had. I wondered if I deserved it. I wondered what I did deserve, after what I had done. I had developed a feverish obsession with someone who was not my spouse; had ended my marriage of a decade, thereby stripping my child of a home with both her parents in it; and had meanwhile spent five months riding the chaotic sea of a relationship that sent me pitching with lust, self-loathing, and confusion, in that order, only to end it. I felt bruised and embarrassed, and unsure of how else I could have done it. At any given moment, I had acted the only way I knew to act. At any given moment, I knew only what I knew. The limits of my judgment, of my own good sense, humiliated me.

  When June makes mistakes, my therapist observed, you don’t stop loving her, do you? Even when she acts in a way you don’t like, you never assume she’s “bad.” You separate her actions from the essence of who she is. What if you could do that for yourself?

  But did I deserve it?

  One afternoon while June was in school, Brandon came over to pick up something, and when he walked into the living room, he burst into tears. He threw himself face-first onto the sofa and wailed. He was taller than the sofa was long, so his sneakered feet hung off one end, shaking with each sob. I didn’t know what to do, so I went into the kitchen and started to scrub at a smear of something on the counter. I wanted him to leave, to go do it somewhere else.

  Did I deserve love? Did I deserve pleasure?

  I wanted to learn how to date. Compared to women I knew, I had dated little in the years before I married. Mostly I was in a relationship, or I was not.

  I just wanted practice. I needed practice at being whatever I was. I didn’t want to think about love. I wanted to be fucking someone.

  A friend pressed into my hands a copy of Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, and I covered it with Post-it flags. “I can remember, early on,” Nelson writes, “standing beside you . . . completely naked, . . . as you asked me to say aloud what I wanted you to do to me. My whole body struggled to summon any utterable phrase. I knew you were a good animal, but felt myself to be standing before an enormous mountain, a lifetime of unwillingness to claim what I wanted, to ask for it.”36

  I wanted to live on my own terms. My terms were this: I was a newly queer woman and also a mother.

  Separated with fifty-fifty custody, I was set loose for half of each week, my tether reeled out as far as it could go. I knew I shouldn’t tell my married friends with full-time children how great this was; that would be cruel. I had a feeling I shouldn’t tell anyone how much I liked being a childless mother. As a mother, I was supposed to grieve every hou
r I was without my child.

  I got half of my own life back, with the added perspective of parenthood to throw it into brilliant relief. I could see what I had and appreciate it. And I would have to hang on tight to that feeling when it shimmered over me, because each time June cried and clung to me as I buckled her into Brandon’s car, each time she asked why we had to have two houses, I knew I was the cause of her grief.

  On an episode of Dear Sugar, Cheryl Strayed posits that wanting to leave a relationship is enough reason to do it. You have to be brave enough to break your own heart, she says. What about my child’s heart? I want to shoot back: What if I break that too?

  When I was a teenager in my parents’ house, there was a chair in front of my bedroom window, but I never used it. The only time I remember sitting there was the day before I left for college, as I folded a pile of clean laundry. My father stood in the doorway of my room, one shoulder against the frame, keeping me company while I packed. I was tired and on edge, anxious about leaving, though I wouldn’t say it out loud. Instead I heaved a series of showy sighs.

  How’re you holding up? my father asked, taking the bait.

  This is too hard, I moaned. There’s too much to do.

  You mean packing? he asked. But you’re almost done.

  I mean everything. I don’t know how I’m supposed to do this! I slumped over my thighs, really going for it.

  Now his voice came out stony and strange: You’d better get used to it, he said. This is how it is. Life is hard.

  The change was so abrupt, I thought surely he was ribbing me. A humming quiet filled the air. I looked up, expecting a smile. Instead he shoved off the doorjamb, walked across the hall, and shut his door.

  I was about to turn nineteen, and I had a plane ticket to Northern California, where I would in theory start my life. My father was sixty-eight. He was in good health, though probably, unbeknownst to all of us, carrying around the cache of faulty cells that would kill him five years later. He was still seeing patients in his oncology practice, living in the house that he and my mother had always dreamed of. He was happy. But the man wasn’t young. Born in 1929, my father was the oldest son of a family of Jews who’d recently immigrated from Poland to Canada. As a teenager, he watched the Holocaust from an ocean away, witnessed the German government kill six million people like him, including his extended family. He dragged around all the aches, sorrows, and piles of personal garbage that a human accumulates over seven decades of living. When Schindler’s List came out, he took me to see it. Afterward, in the orange light of the cinema hallway, I noticed that his eyes were a paler shade of blue than normal, like shallow sea-water. He was crying. That was the only film I ever went to with him; he said he didn’t like going to the movies.

  The thing he said that day in my doorway stayed with me. I wondered at it sometimes, tugged at it like one of June’s tiny hair ties in my pocket. What would he say to me now? About Brandon, about my falling in love with a woman, about divorce, or climate change, white nationalism, bump stocks, the audacity of Donald Trump running for president? Given everything—my life as it now looks and the world we live in, the abyss of which my father seemed to peer down that day—do we get to be happy? How often?

  I want to know what he would say about June, in whose face I now find his eyes. I want to know what he would say about the mess I’ve made of her family, about how to help her survive it, about how to be her mother and also myself. I want to know if my father would tell me what I have begun to suspect: that I couldn’t have done any of this without her.

  I think a seismic shift started in me, millimeter by millimeter, when June was born. Having a baby, having her, softened me. It broke me a little. It gave me intimate knowledge of the emptiness that is clinical depression, and it also gave me access, on the other side, to a rounder fullness of joy. Having her made me value my body, and femaleness, in a new way. Becoming her mother grew me up. It committed me to becoming the kind of person I want her to know, remember, be proud of. It committed me to becoming the person I want her to have as a parent.

  24

  In October, we drove east to go apple-picking. Friends had chosen an orchard from a list online and invited us to come along. We took my car: me, Brandon, June, and my mother. But when we got there the apples were picked over, and those that remained were covered in brown scabs and scales. June began to pout, stomping around with an empty basket. I wanted to leave everyone by the side of the road, go home and back to bed.

  In an attempt to recover the afternoon, someone suggested a picnic. We found a spot by a river nearby. I cut slices of salami and managed to chase the kids around, and June’s spirits rose. Her cheeks were pink in the cool air, and for once, she didn’t trip or fall down or skin some body part or other. We played hide-and-seek behind a stand of wilting anemones. But I stayed vaguely grouchy all day, outside of myself, as though my skin were too tight. I glared at our friends, the couple who’d hosted June’s birthday party two months earlier. They were so good, their marriage purring along like a sleek new coupe in a car commercial. I wanted to be with my own people, whoever they were.

  The last winter that Brandon and I were together, three couple-friends came to us with a proposal for a new tradition: What if, one night of each week, our four families got together for dinner? We’d rotate houses, each only hosting one out of four weeks. It might be a lot of work, but we’d be building a chosen family of sorts, an extended family for our kids. Once a week seemed ambitious—and potentially overwhelming for me, an introvert of long standing—but I wanted it for June. It might be good for all of us.

  We kept at it after the separation, adding a fifth house—Brandon’s apartment—to the rotation. I loved and hated Thursdays. One family had begun renovating a house. Another was pregnant again. These families were making steady forward progress, while mine had slipped off track. We were moving backward. You’re not seeing the whole picture here, I tried to coax; you have no idea, not really, what other people’s marriages are like. But watching my friends’ families blossom brought pain as real as a headache.

  I thought of a friend who, after her young business fell apart, had disappeared from our lives. We’d known each other through a lot, including the opening of Delancey. But when her own project ran aground, though we had no connection to it, she cut us off, along with most of her friends from that period of time. Brandon and I were miffed: She divorced us! Now, at the Thursday night dinner table, I could hazard a guess why: it must have been hard enough to struggle as our friend had, but to let us see her struggle would have been worse.

  “Theirs is a happy marriage, a joint creation of great delicacy and skill,” writes Rachel Cusk in Aftermath, a memoir of her divorce. “I have always admired it, have liked to look at it and be in its presence. . . . But things are different for me now. My admiration has become a kind of voyeurism. . . . I’m not equal any more with the people I know, and what is friendship but a celebration of equality?”37

  I saw endings everywhere. As I read aloud to June from Mo Willems’s Goldilocks and the Three Dinosaurs, the end of the book winked with a moral: “If you ever find yourself in the wrong story, leave.”

  About six weeks after Brandon moved out, I was keeping June company in the bathroom one evening when she asked what happens when we die.

  I don’t know, I admitted. I took a breath. Maybe anything we want can happen? We won’t have our bodies anymore, so we could probably do whatever we want, I said. Maybe we can fly like birds or swim like fish.

  What do you want to do? June asked.

  I think I might want to fly, I said.

  I want to be a fish! she said, sitting up straighter on the toilet seat. I’ll be a pink fish! And you’ll be a pink fish too. And Daddy will be a purple fish.

  I lowered myself onto the wooden stool that my second cousin had given us when June was born, with her name and birthdate spelled out in puzzle letters.

  We’ll all swim around together. Right, Mama? She l
ooked at me, waiting. I nodded, not sure if I was happy, or sad, or some third thing.

  We swapped June on Mondays usually, sometimes Tuesdays. The first day without her was disorienting, as though I’d misplaced something terribly important, left my wallet at the store. But now I had time, gaping stretches of time, wide-open rolling meadows of it.

  I searched online for information about sexual orientation in women, trying to understand what had happened to me. One book kept coming up, so I ordered it. It was called Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire, by a psychologist named Lisa M. Diamond. When it arrived, I put it on my bedside table. Then I piled a bunch of other books on top of it. I caught up on the New Yorker. I went to IKEA, bought June a big-girl bed and assembled it. I started my first quilt. I’d learned to sew a couple of years earlier, when Brandon bought me a sewing machine for Christmas. Now with evenings to myself, I drank beer and watched YouTube videos with titles like “How to Stitch in the Ditch” and “Easy Improv Quilting.” I splashed around in my free time like it was an Olympic-size pool, all to myself.

  While prying loose a clump of dog hair stuck under a baseboard in the front hall, I got a splinter under my fingernail. The splinter was tiny, but I couldn’t get it out, and it leaked pus when I pressed on the nail. I called the doctor’s office, got a last-minute appointment with a nurse. Waiting in the exam room, I noticed the cover of a magazine on the chair beside me. It was a giant photo of a beaming Hollywood blonde, and next to her face, hot-pink letters shouted: 45 AND SINGLE! AND FEELING GREAT!

  Along came a fresh kind of dread. I took a picture of the cover and texted it to Matthew.

  Is this going to be me? I wrote.

  You’ll meet someone, he replied.

  How? Where?