To My Ex-Husband Read Free

any of those things. Frankly, I didn’t want to be linked with the Victims. That wasn’t the way I saw myself, as somebody to feel sorry for. They were all running out and buying The Road Less Traveled , whereas I got more out of Miss Manners’s “Advice to the Rejectee.” “… A broken heart is a miserably unpleasant thing,” she writes, “making one feel ugly and unattractive, an enormous disadvantage when courting others.”
    That was the next step, wasn’t it? Courting? One day, I might be ready. In the meantime, if I felt ugly and unattractive, it was only in your presence. When you said you were leaving, that was when my modesty returned. I was suddenly shy getting dressed. My body cast me in shame, as it had when I was thirteen and nothing seemed to be growing according to the normal plan. The horrors of the girls’ locker room returned, and, once again, I became deft at sliding one garment out from under another. The nightgown was over my head before the shirt slipped off my shoulders.
    There were the three months before you actually left, three months in which I never let my body out from under cover, never let you see all that had turned unlovable. I was still your wife. But I was diminished by being naked in a room with a man who no longer wanted me.
    Now you insist on coming to pick Annie up every day. You walk in the house, play with Dickens, pick up your mail. You’re all shaved, showered, and dressed for work, smelling like Gilette. I’m in the kitchen, cooking French toast, wearing a flannel bathrobe, my hair pressed to my skull as though I’d been sleeping in a sock. I look like a George Booth cartoon. Every morning I think, This man must be looking at me and saying to himself, “Boy, did I ever do the right thing.”
    What I want is a chance to be seen through new eyes, to regain my equilibrium and confidence. To see myself through new eyes. I like what Betsy said when her marriage broke up: “It’s as if Ted was green and I was blue, and then we got all mixed up for twenty-six years. Now I want my blue back.”
    And there we have it, the real common denominator at Isabel’s. We were all searching for our blue, that pure, undiluted strain of the people we used to be.
    Picture it: Six women on the verge of estrogen drain, whose husbands had all departed for greener pastures, getting together for dinner on a Saturday night. The first thing I thought of when I walked in was that line of Lily Tomlin’s: “We’re all in this alone.”
    Isabel seemed a little nervous in the beginning, a hostess accustomed to functioning in concert with a host. She lit a fire—her first. She was admittedly shy about this, apologetic for having maintained such stereotypical roles throughout her marriage—during the Women’s Movement, yet. Most of us were chopping wood just to make a point. But who was I to comment? I was already worried about Thanksgiving, when, in front of the children and my mother, I would have to carve the turkey.
    Still, there was an air of conviviality at Isabel’s, as if we’d gotten through the worst, and now each of us could sit back and appreciate the situation for what it was—a great story. A few bottles of Folonari, a touch of drama, and we were off.
    I should preface this by saying that it had been an interesting few weeks. It seemed that everyone we knew whose first child had just gone off to college was getting separated. I’d be in the market, buying the “small family” loaf, when suddenly someone would seize my upper arm with a white-knuckled grip and say, “Get this. Reed comes home from the hardware store on Saturday and announces to Libby that he’s leaving. He’s in love with someone else. In twenty minutes he’s gone. Can you imagine?”
    No, I really couldn’t imagine, and I know you couldn’t, either. We were always incredulous hearing