NELL FREUDENBERGER
It started a few weeks after we separated for good. In this line of work, the symbolism wasn't lost on me. But to call it "flying" might be to misrepresent it. It wasn't as if I were soaring above the housetops, gliding west over the wide boulevards to see the sun setting over the Santa
Monica Pier. If it was anything, it was a hovering: a little lift, when I least expected it.
You'd think it would have happened when I was feeling most free. Jogging around the tar pits
early on a clear morning, which is something I do to get myself out of the house on the very quiet weekends when Jack is with his father. Or even sitting at my computer, as I am now, looking at the flat roof below my window, where the wind rolls a basketball, bleached white, back and forth across a damp depression in the tar paper. But this isn't the case. Instead, it's during the times I am doing those jobs I used to complain about to Drew: cooking or laundry or sorting the recycling, tasks I had imagined would be shared in a contemporary marriage and which automatically fell to me because I was the one whose work yielded a smaller and more erratic income, and who was home all day.
I was standing over the stove, a quick-cooking grain like bulgur or amaranth that requires constant stirring---something my mother would never have bothered with---when I noticed that I had to bend to reach the pot. And then that the stove seemed to be receding as well, and I remember thinking that the floor was collapsing under our feet, and that a stove that fell away would surely explode. I lunged toward Jack, who was sitting at the kitchen table, eating cheddar-cheese crackers shaped like rabbits, and my feet, without traction, simply pedaled the air before I landed with an awkward stumble. My son looked up in mild surprise---I am always asking him not to stomp because it's a duplex and there's a single woman below us---his mouth edged in brilliant orange.
"Amy," he said, which is the name of the other tenant.
That was the first time.
IT'S TRUE THAT I'VE BEEN doing yoga for the past three years. In fact, the yoga was one of the things that bothered Drew, something about my enthusiasm for something that everyone else is enthusiastic about, too. Well? Yoga is good for your body, and it calms you down, and maybe the herd is sometimes right. On the other hand, even I have to admit that I enjoy talking about it more than I actually like doing it, and that I'm not one of the shining stars of the class---not the worst, certainly, but somewhere in the bottom third. I have trouble getting myself from chaturanga dandasana back to downward dog, and so it seems unlikely that I have learned to levitate, which rules out the only vaguely plausible explanation for the thing that started happening to me since we agreed to a divorce.
I can't help feeling that other people had better reasons for their breakups than we did. (This characteristic of me, Drew would say, the way I am always comparing. How can you be happy if you're constantly measuring your life against the lives of others? And not even examining, he would say. Inventing...fictionalizing! How can you know what anyone else's life is like?) I think of Helene, a woman I used to teach with at the Y, who married a Czech architect she met on vacation in Prague. Life in the United States didn't suit him and he moved back after eighteen months. Or Drew's old friend Jim, whose wife left him for her high school boyfriend with whom she reconnected through social media soon after the birth of their second child.
With Drew and me there was nothing so concrete to explain it: one night last spring we sat down in the living room after dinner, looked at each other and knew.
"When was the last time you were happy?" he asked me.
I was indignant. "Just this afternoon," I told him. "Jack asked if I wanted him to zip or button my jacket for me."
He shook his head. "Not with Jack," he said, and it was one of those moments in an argument when you know it's very important to respond quickly, but you don't respond, and the length of the pause makes the question irrelevant.
"Well, what about you," I said, and he just shook his head. One of the things I've always liked about Drew is that he doesn't have any trouble crying, and his crying then made me want to take him in my arms and promise it would be fine. I did do that, with the predictable result that we had sex, and it was so clearly the last time, even while it was happening, that I cried, too.
Please see issue 207 of The Paris Review for the rest of this story.
It started a few weeks after we separated for good. In this line of work, the symbolism wasn't lost on me. But to call it "flying" might be to misrepresent it. It wasn't as if I were soaring above the housetops, gliding west over the wide boulevards to see the sun setting over the Santa
Monica Pier. If it was anything, it was a hovering: a little lift, when I least expected it.
You'd think it would have happened when I was feeling most free. Jogging around the tar pits
early on a clear morning, which is something I do to get myself out of the house on the very quiet weekends when Jack is with his father. Or even sitting at my computer, as I am now, looking at the flat roof below my window, where the wind rolls a basketball, bleached white, back and forth across a damp depression in the tar paper. But this isn't the case. Instead, it's during the times I am doing those jobs I used to complain about to Drew: cooking or laundry or sorting the recycling, tasks I had imagined would be shared in a contemporary marriage and which automatically fell to me because I was the one whose work yielded a smaller and more erratic income, and who was home all day.
I was standing over the stove, a quick-cooking grain like bulgur or amaranth that requires constant stirring---something my mother would never have bothered with---when I noticed that I had to bend to reach the pot. And then that the stove seemed to be receding as well, and I remember thinking that the floor was collapsing under our feet, and that a stove that fell away would surely explode. I lunged toward Jack, who was sitting at the kitchen table, eating cheddar-cheese crackers shaped like rabbits, and my feet, without traction, simply pedaled the air before I landed with an awkward stumble. My son looked up in mild surprise---I am always asking him not to stomp because it's a duplex and there's a single woman below us---his mouth edged in brilliant orange.
"Amy," he said, which is the name of the other tenant.
That was the first time.
IT'S TRUE THAT I'VE BEEN doing yoga for the past three years. In fact, the yoga was one of the things that bothered Drew, something about my enthusiasm for something that everyone else is enthusiastic about, too. Well? Yoga is good for your body, and it calms you down, and maybe the herd is sometimes right. On the other hand, even I have to admit that I enjoy talking about it more than I actually like doing it, and that I'm not one of the shining stars of the class---not the worst, certainly, but somewhere in the bottom third. I have trouble getting myself from chaturanga dandasana back to downward dog, and so it seems unlikely that I have learned to levitate, which rules out the only vaguely plausible explanation for the thing that started happening to me since we agreed to a divorce.
I can't help feeling that other people had better reasons for their breakups than we did. (This characteristic of me, Drew would say, the way I am always comparing. How can you be happy if you're constantly measuring your life against the lives of others? And not even examining, he would say. Inventing...fictionalizing! How can you know what anyone else's life is like?) I think of Helene, a woman I used to teach with at the Y, who married a Czech architect she met on vacation in Prague. Life in the United States didn't suit him and he moved back after eighteen months. Or Drew's old friend Jim, whose wife left him for her high school boyfriend with whom she reconnected through social media soon after the birth of their second child.
With Drew and me there was nothing so concrete to explain it: one night last spring we sat down in the living room after dinner, looked at each other and knew.
"When was the last time you were happy?" he asked me.
I was indignant. "Just this afternoon," I told him. "Jack asked if I wanted him to zip or button my jacket for me."
He shook his head. "Not with Jack," he said, and it was one of those moments in an argument when you know it's very important to respond quickly, but you don't respond, and the length of the pause makes the question irrelevant.
"Well, what about you," I said, and he just shook his head. One of the things I've always liked about Drew is that he doesn't have any trouble crying, and his crying then made me want to take him in my arms and promise it would be fine. I did do that, with the predictable result that we had sex, and it was so clearly the last time, even while it was happening, that I cried, too.
Please see issue 207 of The Paris Review for the rest of this story.