Because I had always tried to live with what I privately called integrity—I’d tried to be honest with myself and in my life. And sometimes I’d even feel a little self-righteous in the face of other women. I knew that Brad had loved me once, genuinely; and that what had changed was that he had adopted a role for himself, and wanted me to adopt the complementary role, and I wouldn’t. I was being stubborn and rebellious and intractable; and even though I told myself regularly that I had the right to be the person and live the life I wanted, I only occasionally believed it. After all, no other woman I knew felt they had such a right. Whatever they’d been, or their husbands had been when they first married, all their husbands had adopted the role Brad had chosen, too; and their wives had gone along and been complements. Who was I to stand out against the whole world? Or what seemed like the whole world.
Brad didn’t want a divorce because he no longer loved or liked me; he couldn’t even see me, so how could he know who I was? He wanted a divorce because I was not playing the role he wanted his wife to play. He wanted a wife who cared about the same things he did. His friends’ wives all acted as if they cared about the same things their men did, whether or not they felt that way. And none of those men really saw their wives as people, any more than the wives saw the husbands as people. They each saw each other as roles.
I didn’t hang out with Brad’s friends’ wives, but when we all went out to dinner together, I couldn’t avoid hearing the things they said in undertones to each other, or reserved for the Ladies’ Lounge while combing their hair or powdering their faces or washing their hands. I would stand there in the pink wallpapered, perfumed, mirrored, satin-chaired Ladies’ Lounge, while they examined their parts to see if it was time for a freshening of the dye, or lamented the appearance of a blackhead, or nearly wept, because they were developing enlarged pores, and listen to them slam Harry and Al and Doug and Len and the rest. And sometimes you could figure out that in fact Lydia must have been getting it on with Eileen’s husband, because whenever Eileen said something nasty about Harry, Lydia would look away. Most of the women sympathized with each other and laughed about the men, and said things like “It won’t matter in a hundred years,” or “What are you gonna do?” and went on jovially as ever.
They simply took their lives for granted. I mean, if they were unhappy, they thought it was because they’d married the wrong man, and that if they had just married a different one, life would be beautiful. They complained about their own men and flirted with all the others, and over the next ten years, many of this group exchanged mates. I wasn’t able to feel that way. No one else’s husband appealed to me that much, to begin with. But for me, it was clear that it was the life itself we all led that made me unhappy. I certainly didn’t want to exchange being one man’s wife just to become another’s. I didn’t want to be a wife at all. But I couldn’t articulate that. In the first place, it was insulting to the other women; and in the second, what the hell else was I going to do, what else could I be? People have to, somebody has to do the laundry and the cooking and the cleaning of the house, and in our world it was decreed that somebody was women. Even if I weren’t married, I’d still have to do those things. There was no escape. So to protest about it seemed ridiculous, futile.
Yet I did blame Brad for my unhappiness, I did! And I wasn’t acting with integrity and walking out on him the way I should. The bar to honesty was—the children. And wherever I went or whatever I did, I’d still have those children. I wanted them, I loved them, they were mine, and I adored them. So what was I blaming Brad for? So now here I was playing the conventional game: outraged wife, unfaithful husband: not because I was outraged at Brad’s infidelity but because I knew that that was the only flaw he was conscious of, the only sin he acknowledged, the only act he felt enough guilt about to force him to treat me and the kids decently after the divorce, i.e., to pay. He had to pay for us. Just as the world had decreed that women had to do the housework, it had made it impossible for women to do the paying.
So there I was despite all my self-righteousness, acting a part when Brad came back from the kitchen with a drink that looked like straight scotch, and sat down across the room glaring at me. He tried once more to get me on the defensive. I hadn’t been all that interested in sex for a long time, he said….
That one I didn’t even let him get out. Me, with my old reputation, my old (oh, Brad!) ardor? I was the one who had a complaint about sex, I insisted, sounding angry. And he should remember how he’d treated me the last time I initiated sex. He fell silent again.
Well, okay, he said finally, but I didn’t want to be a wife.
“I am a wife. What the hell are you talking about?”
All of this was in fact making me irritable. Because I hated what I was doing. The truth was, we spoke two different languages, Brad and I, but I understood his and he didn’t understand mine. And while his language had no validity whatever for me, I knew how to use it to his disadvantage. So throughout this scene, I felt I had the upper hand, even though I knew that by now he was fairly well off, and that he wasn’t going to want to share his wealth with me, and that I wasn’t going to try to force him to do that. I had such a sense of superiority, of greater power, in this discussion, that I let everything go afterward, maybe out of guilt.
“Well, you’re not the kind of wife I wanted,” he said with some heat.
“I am the kind of wife you wanted,” I corrected him. “I’m not the kind you want now. But you’re not the husband now that I want either.”
He pounced. “So you want a divorce, too!”
“No,” I countered swiftly, “I want you to change.”
This was the hollowest thing I said that night. Not because it wasn’t true, because if only I could have had my old Brad back, I would have been in joy; but because I knew the old Brad was as dead as if what was sitting there in the room with me were a corpse electronically controlled to appear alive. Because I knew there was utterly no chance of Brad changing, except to become more of what he had already become.
He let himself be caught up in the argument, fatal in a real power-struggle. “Well, I want you to change.”
I stood up. “I guess we’re at an impasse, then,” I said and yawned. “I’m going to bed.”
He panicked. “Anastasia! I want a divorce!”
“You want to marry…what is her name?”
“Fern,” he mumbled. The one who helped him buy all the furniture. Well, that was neatly done at least. I looked around the room meaningfully, and Brad blushed.
“We weren’t…this happened later.”
“You mean you weren’t fucking around when she helped you pick out the furniture for her future home?”
“Will you stop using that word?” He was furious. He hated me to say fuck.
“You can have your divorce,” I said, and the lower part of his face relaxed. His eyes remained wary as he waited to hear how much he was going to be “taken” for. “I want the kids and enough money to take proper care of them. I want a car that is safe on the parkways. You can have everything else.”
His eyes remained wary, as they would until our separation agreement was signed. He knew a good lawyer could make me up the ante.
“You’ll have to have a lawyer. Call Len Watkins, he’s good.”
“Are you kidding?” Len Watkins was a golf buddy of Brad’s. (Yes, he’d taken up golf too. He’d even joined the Rockville Country Club, and he was getting a paunch from drinking so much. He had everything his father ever wanted for him except the right wife, and now he was getting that as well. I’d met Fern, who was a sweet pretty woman with no moral force, no values of her own, and an ordinary mind. She’d go along with Brad on anything he wanted.)
“I’ll get my own lawyer,” I announced with bravado, my mind flicking through everyone we knew. There were lots of lawyers among his friends, but when I thought about mine—well, Mary Sindona’s husband drove a truck, Aline Golder’s made sweaters, and Delilah Abramowitz??
?s was an insurance salesman. Still, my refusal of his choice made Brad very anxious. He was sure I was going to soak him. He eyed me. He spoke through his teeth. I wondered if that was how he looked across the table when he made real-estate deals with people. God! Frightening!
“I’m going to pack a bag tonight,” he said. “I’ll be living over in Garden City until the thing is finished. I’ll write the address and phone number on the pad in the kitchen. But it will be easier if you want to reach me to call the agency during the day.”
That stopped me. I gaped at him. “You’re going off, just like that?”
“Don’t tell me you want me to stay. I noticed how you begged and wept.”
Was that what he wanted?
“What about the kids?”
He shrugged. “Tell them whatever you want. I’m sure you’ll make sure they hate me, just the way your mother made sure you hated your father. You have plenty of time to do it. So what does it matter what you tell them now?”
“You mean you want custody?” I was astonished.
“No judge would give me custody,” he said bitterly.
I sat down again. I thought. Maybe the reason he was the way he was with them was because he felt they were mine; maybe if he felt he could have them to himself once in a while, he’d be loving.
“Maybe we could share them,” I began.
“You mean you don’t want to be a mother either?” he burst out. “How the hell can I take care of them? You know I work, I don’t have time to play tag and blindman’s bluff all day!” He made those games sound like occupations of an idiot. Maybe they are.
I backtracked fast. I hadn’t really wanted to share them with him. I’d offered because I knew they longed to share him with whatever else mattered to him. But he must have thought I didn’t really want the kids, would welcome some respite from them, and thought his new wife should provide it, because he added, very defensively,
“And Fern already has a child of her own, a little girl. She’s a widow,” he added hastily, lest I think her fallen, like me. “And we…we thought we’d like to have one together.”
He stood up then, having delivered the coup de grace. He left the room and was very busy writing me notes, packing some clothes, finding papers he wanted to take with him. I was still sitting in the same spot, in the same position, when he stood in the archway of our fancy wall-to-wall-carpeted living room and said, “Well, I’ll be seeing you.”
I didn’t answer him. I hated to let him see he’d gotten to me, but so deeply had he that I couldn’t conceal it. He turned to leave, and my bitterness burst out.
“Leave your car. I’m going to have to be doing a lot of driving in the next few weeks, and although you clearly don’t care about your children, I presume you don’t hate them enough to want them dead. You can take mine.”
He was horrified. Drive my Rambler! But if he had the emotional last word, I had the economic one: he was too full of guilt to argue. He took the Rambler. I’m sure he traded it in the next day, but at least I didn’t have to drive it anymore. I could ruin his Caddy with the things I transported: kids with muddy shoes, groceries that occasionally seeped and leaked, seedlings from my mother’s garden, sharp-edged equipment like my tripod, and whatever else I could think of. Dirtying up that car was the only satisfaction I derived from the entire process of getting divorced. I didn’t keep that car, I didn’t want it. He got it back and bought me a used Chevy two-door. But he was brokenhearted when he saw it. He cared more about that car than he did about …
That was what had silenced me, and continued to silence me. That was what made me cry when I told the children about our getting divorced. They deduced that Daddy didn’t like us anymore, even though I tried to make it sound like a mutual decision. Billy wasn’t surprised: he knew Daddy had never liked him. But Arden, who had felt moments of affection from her father, concluded that it was me whom Daddy didn’t like anymore, and therefore it was my fault he was leaving. This didn’t show right away, not at all. It took years for her to say it. I don’t know what Brad’s abandonment of them meant to the children, really. I only know what it meant to me.
That’s what broke my heart. Not his leaving me—we’d left each other long ago, and who knows who took the first step? I had no right to feel sorry for myself about that, and anyway that kind of damage is reparable, or at least it can heal. But his not caring about them, his dismissing them the way he did, his easy talk about starting another family (whom he would probably treat the same way) as if families were like houses you can discard, replace, sell, buy, live in, and leave: well, that about finished me.
I sat there late into the night, that night, after turning off the lights and making sure the doors were locked, and turning down the thermostat. I pulled an old torn blanket around my knees and sat in a chair by a window in the room I called the porch, and I smoked. And through the darkness an image kept appearing to me—Brad, years ago, before we were married. He was standing in light, in the circle of light that illuminated the group he was playing with, and he was doing a solo. I had lost sight, over the years, of that side of Brad, the way he looked when he played, the way he was when I fell in love with him. Brad played the sax as if he were having a dialogue with it. His face was always screwed up in pain, in anguish, and as he played the notes, he seemed to be listening to what the instrument was telling him, as if he were its instrument for the expression of pain translated into beauty. He had more anguish in his face when he played the saxophone than he had had just now when he discarded his children—and me.
When I saw that image, I was able to squeeze out a tear or two. My heart generally felt frozen. I told myself I was crying for my children, or maybe for the child I had been. For me, now, there was no need for tears. After all, I had what I wanted, didn’t I?
It turned out that Mary Sindona’s brother-in-law Steve was a lawyer; it also turned out that I liked him and felt I could trust him. Which should automatically have kept me from hiring him. He was too sweet to be a lawyer. But the way things worked out was partly my fault. I didn’t, I really didn’t, want any part of Brad’s wealth. I wanted a decent percentage of his income until the kids were finished with college, and a car. I didn’t want the house in Rockville Centre. It was too big, somehow, for the kids and me. Funny how the existence of one other person makes a big house justifiable. It was expensive to keep up, and it was old and in constant need of repair. And besides, I didn’t like it so much since it had been fancied up. And I didn’t especially want my kids growing up in that town where I had suffered so much as an adolescent; I didn’t want them to be snobs, money snobs, spoiled suburban brats. Better to grow up on the Lower East Side, I thought. Of course, I’d never lived on the Lower East Side.
But I thought that would be where I’d move. To Manhattan, anyway. Brad hit several ceilings when he heard that. He yammered and yelled, he said he’d remove them from my custody, he threatened everything he could imagine, using every legal term he knew. In the end, I didn’t do it, because after seeing the places I could afford on the settlement he’d given me, I decided it would be nothing short of a criminal act to take my children to such neighborhoods. But I mourned that: why wasn’t there someplace decent for poor people to live in cities?
For I was now a poor person. Brad had agreed to give me $7,500 a year. That sounded like a fair amount to me. Steve said it wasn’t enough. But I was still feeling guilty about how I’d maneuvered Brad into the divorce; and I have to confess now that I was very busy at the time proving to him my contempt for his materialistic values. So I insisted on taking it.
So if I was poor, it was my own fault. For years afterward, I heard that it was my fault, from one person or another. And then, when women started demanding divorces and getting them, I heard about the typical female divorce role, in which women allowed themselves to be dictated to by their men, and acted passive, guilt-ridden, unworthy: oh, all that. All of us ended up poor, anyway, and everyone agreed it was our own fault.
>
But what I want to know is, how come no one said it was Brad’s fault? He knew what things cost far better than I did. He’d kept me ignorant of all financial affairs. I didn’t even know what our electric bill amounted to. So he knew what he was offering was shit, not enough to support two kids. How come he wasn’t concerned about their welfare? Maybe he expected me to come back with some outrageous demand, and was prepared to come up, but when I didn’t, how come he didn’t say, Stahz, you really can’t live on that. I’ll give you…whatever. Even if he felt some bitterness toward me, as was likely, how come he wasn’t worried about how the children, his children, would eat and be housed and clothed and educated?
I suppose I could have sued for more, but I was passive, just as I’d been when I let Fern decorate our house. I can’t explain why. I just wanted to get shut of all of it, of Brad and money, money, money, of that whole world. I found us an apartment in Lynbrook. It was the top floor of a big old house, and had two small bedrooms for the kids, a medium-sized one for me, a living room, kitchen, and a tiny closet of a room that I could use for a darkroom. I loved it, it was just my size, our size, I felt. And Mrs. Nowak, the widow who owned the house, lived downstairs; she loved children and wanted them to use the yard and offered to baby-sit for me. What more could I ask? I didn’t have to walk through her place to reach my own: the front door opened onto a center hall, where the stairs were, and Mrs. Nowak’s apartment was closed off from it. She had a washer and dryer in her basement, and said I could use them. And she was Polish, and reminded me of my grandmother. I moved happily, except I had no furniture, since obviously I left Fern’s Furnishings behind. It was back to the relatives’ attics, and to old pieces that had remained in the upstairs rooms of Brad’s and my house. That was okay. At least now I wouldn’t have to be anxious all the time, reminding the kids not to scratch Brad’s tables, tear the upholstery on his chairs, or bang their toys into the wooden fronts of his imitation Sheraton.