And just like that, I’m divorced.
I say things to myself that get me through each day: I loved him for two years; we got married in an ill-advised ceremony; we broke up; I am still sad. I will fold my laundry and get around to sending back the wedding gifts. I will buy coffee and cream and eat oatmeal and cranberries for breakfast.
I say: This is the poster on the wall. This is my kitchen table. This is my car key. I like coffee. It is Thursday.
Then I do what MacGraws do in times of great personal upheaval and grief: I go into full denial mode. I tell my emotions that they are now on stage-four lockdown, forbidden to show up in public.
I am, in fact, a denial warrior-queen, bouncing into the nursery school where I work every day, playing the part of the happy little fulfilled bride with a big smile on her face. I don’t tell anyone what has happened. I go in early and stay late. I smile so hard my face hurts sometimes. I think up approximately seven art projects for the children per day, projects that necessitate cutting up hundreds of little construction-paper shapes. As an added flourish, I make little books—one for each child, with stories in them of laughing cats and turtles that talk.
I could tell my boss, Sylvie, what happened, I suppose. Sylvie would be outraged for me, and she’d take me home with her, and she’d tell her husband, and they would comfort me, and I could sleep in their guest room until I’m healed up. Sylvie is the most motherly person I know. I could fall apart around her, and she would know how to put me back together again.
But I don’t tell her the first day, and that makes it harder to mention on the second day, and then impossible after that. Maybe if I don’t talk about it out loud, it will cease to be true.
But because the universe is in the mood to test and toy with me, the bride talk at work increases exponentially. My life becomes a hilarious succession of Bride Stories: the ones I am begged for by the women I work with (Meatloaf for dinner tonight! Noah just loves it! Yes, we eat by candlelight! And then early to bed! You know how it is!)—and the ones the four-year-old girls insist on hearing. They are obsessed with weddings and need to know every detail.
“Were you like a princess that day?” they want to know, their eyes shining. Oh yes, I was! In honor of my wedding, they wear white paper napkins on their heads at snack time, and walk through the reading corner wearing the nap room blankets like long trains.
“We are your Bride Girls,” they tell me solemnly, and I laugh and help them toss bridal bouquets.
It’s only at night that the bitterness comes for me, laying bare all my failures and misfit-itude. The bitterness has been at home all day long, pacing and waiting impatiently for me, and now it sits on the side of the bed filing its nails and smoking cigarettes. Ready now, sweetheart? it says. My turn!
That’s when I see who I really am, when I know that I will never be all right, that the person who said he loved me and wanted to spend his whole life with me came to his senses at the last freaking minute, and then like some kind of idiot, I still made him go through with the charade of a ceremony.
I’m a misfit who can’t pretend any longer. A dandelion in the lawn. An ugly duckling out paddling among the swans, hoping they don’t notice.
Then after one sleepless night during which I think I will lose my mind, I jump out of bed at five in the morning and find myself punching in Blix’s number on my phone. I can’t believe I didn’t think of this earlier. She is probably the one person in the world who could get him back for me. It’s 8:00 a.m. in Brooklyn, and I somehow just know she’ll be up. And sure enough, she answers the phone with, “Hi, Marnie, my love. I was waiting for you to call.”
I’m taken aback a little. “You were?”
“Of course. I’ve been thinking about you.”
So I just blurt it out. “Blix, it’s awful. I-I need your help. I know you can do things, and so I want you to bring Noah back to me.”
She’s silent, and it occurs to me that maybe she didn’t get the news from his family that he left me. So I back up, tell her about the honeymoon, the fatal hike, Africa, the fellowship he applied for without telling me, Whipple, all of it—even the online divorce.
She says, “Aw, sweetie. I know this feels awful to you right now, but I need to tell you, honey, that this sounds to me like it could be the start of your big life.”
“My big life? Big life? My life has shrunk! I’m here in Burlingame, where I cannot afford to stay, and I’m working at my job, and I’m going crazy, Blix. I just miss him so much, and I know you have insight and connections somewhere, and so I thought that maybe you could help me get him back.” She doesn’t say anything so I see that I need to keep going, to convince her. “Because I’ve thought about everything you said, and I really do need him! He’s the best thing that ever happened to me, and something went wrong, but I want to fix it. That’s going to be the big life, as you call it.”
“You should come to Brooklyn,” she says.
Brooklyn? “I can’t possibly do that,” I tell her. Frankly, nothing sounds less appealing than going somewhere new, heading across the country to a city I’ve never been to. Being a houseguest. Ugh.
“So then tell me what you need.”
“Can you look at whatever it is you look at and see if he’s coming back to me?” My voice cracks. “Would you do a spell for me? To make me less ordinary, or to make him not mind how ordinary I am?”
“Oh, honey. You don’t want him back! Trust me on this. There’s so much—”
“Please. Give me a spell. How desperate does a man have to be to break up with somebody on their honeymoon? How am I supposed to get over that?”
She’s silent for a moment, and then she says in a quiet voice, “Listen to me, sweet pea. Change is hard. And Noah is a high-level entitled brat who forgot to grow up, and I’m very sorry for the pain he’s put you through. But trust me, there’s something so much better waiting for you. You’ll get through this and move on. It’ll take time, but you will. So much better is waiting for you.”
“No,” I tell her. “It isn’t. We were meant for each other. I know it, just the way I knew that Natalie and Brian were meant for each other. You said yourself that I’m a matchmaker, and I know he’s the one for me.”
“No one can read their own stuff that way,” she says. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have had to go through the cockroach and the dead-on-the-inside man. Think about it. And by the way, you are not ordinary, and you need to come to Brooklyn.”
“I’m ridiculously ordinary. I lose my keys all the damn time, and I am opinionated and I get impatient, and I don’t have any ambition, and I don’t make enough money and I couldn’t care less about it, and—and when I was little, I dressed up cats in costumes and I didn’t care when they got mad about it.”
She sighs and says, “Okay, listen. I have to tell you something. When I was eighteen, my father died, and the family homestead I’d counted on inheriting was given to his sister instead. And that’s when I realized that I could either live under my bed and be passive for my whole life or I could do something that scared me every single day. So, being intelligent, I picked being passive. Which was a great decision. Brilliant, in fact.”