2007
Alexander
3. Whisper these Words to Me
We’re in bed. Dani rolls over to face me and has to lift her belly with her hands to shift her body to the other side. Today is her due date. Our first child. Dani is beautiful, glowing, truly gorgeous, but her stomach is so huge, it has to be painful.
“Alex?” she whispers. It’s early and she’s still groggy. She’s wearing just a tank top that only covers half her belly and a pair of tattered floral underwear. It’s adorable. I run my hand over her stomach and feel our baby kick. It’s one of the best and oddest feelings in the world. Dani is all belly. It almost seems like the rest of her body is actually thinner, like the baby is taking everything she’s got. If she didn’t still have such a vibrant energy, I might actually be concerned. The baby moves and turns dramatically, it’s hard not think there is at least a three year-old in there.
“Yes, my love.”
“I want to ask you something.” Her eyes are still half-closed. She maneuvers to get closer to my ear. I can feel her breath. Now my mind is on other things. I think she’s going to kiss my neck when she very quietly says, “I think we should insulate the attic today.”
My eyes shoot open. “What?”
Taking a deep breath, she sits up. “This house is cold and the insulation sucks. We should go rent one of those machines that shoots insulation into the attic.”
“How do you know about that?”
“I saw it on an episode of ‘This old House.’ We can get it all at Home Depot.”
Dani is nesting at the moment… quite literally. She wants to blow tons of insulation material into our attic, like an actual nest, and I can’t tell her no.
“I think it’s like a two or three-man job,” I say.
“Man?” she snaps.
“Person,” I reply a little exasperated. “You know what I mean.”
“You and I can do it,” she argues.
“No, Dani! No way. You’re not going up in attic right now.”
She takes a deep breath and calms down. “You go in the attic and I will put the insulation into the machine outside. It runs through a big hose and you’ll just shoot it all around up there.”
***
It’s now the afternoon and I cannot believe I agreed to do this but I knew Dani wouldn’t take no for an answer, and honestly how could I refuse her? She is smiling as she stands in the side yard preparing to dump giant bales of insulation into the hopper machine down below. I’m watching her from the attic opening and through the kitchen window. She has the radio blaring ‘Eye of the Tiger,’ and she’s bobbing her head to the beat. She’s ready. “Go ahead,” I yell and then prepare myself for the onslaught. The insultation comes shooting out with the force of a fire hose.
It’s not slowing down and now I’m about knee high in the stuff. I wonder if Dani will ever stop throwing the bales in. “Stop,” I yell, but she keeps going. The music and sound of the machine are drowning me out.
I finally set the hose down and go over to the opening. The hose is flailing around wildly, but I need to get her attention. She’s covered in sweat and insulation particles and she’s frantically cutting the bales open and tossing them in. I pause for a moment to take it all in. It’s hilarious. She’s so determined.
Finally, I have to scream, “Stop, Dani!”
She looks up, still smiling. “Oh sorry!” she yells.
When I get down from the attic, I check my phone and see there is a message from our neighbor, Carl. It says:
Monica and I are very concerned, Alex. We see your wife across the street frantically throwing stuff around. Isn’t she very pregnant?
I laugh to myself and reply:
Yes. Today is her due date and she decided she wanted to insulate the attic. I love her so much.
PRESENT DAY
Danielle
4. I Haven’t Heard Your Voice in Years
It’s 4:32 in the morning and he’s walking down the hall toward the stairs. I know the time without looking at the clock. The springtime light isn’t yet piercing the horizon. There are no cars on the road; his will be the first. It’s quiet out, but loud in my head, loud in this house.
He’s shifting his one hundred and seventy pounds from one foot to the other, down the stairs…loudly. It feels intentional. He clears his throat. It feels intentional. I can hear him from my bed, far away in my bedroom. What used to be our bedroom. Our bed.
No one is awake at this time in the morning. No one in this house, no one in this neighborhood, no one else in my life. He must know he’s waking the whole house as he shuffles his feet across the travertine floors, down the hall, past the dining room and into the kitchen, where he presses the button on the coffee grinder. We’re up now! You’ve made your point, asshole.
This is how it has been for years. After three hundred and eight thousand complaints, it hasn’t occurred to him that he should grind the beans the night before? It’s not evident to him that no one else in this house needs to be awake for another three hours? Not me, not our twelve-year-old son, not our thirteen-year-old son, not even the damn dog. After so many years of tolerating his inconsideration for the sake of marriage, it no longer feels like a sacrifice…It feels like a crime, one in which I’m victimizing myself by staying.
In the last several years, there hasn’t been a single morning I’ve woken up on my own, or even by an alarm I had set myself. No mornings lying naked, languid, exposed…. wrapped up in a lover. Wrapped up in him. I have entertained such phenomenon, I have revisited that life in my mind many times. The life I used to know. I shimmy out of my tattered sweats and T-shirt at dawn. I run my hands across my breasts, my stomach. I feel what I might feel like to someone else…someone who isn’t in such a hurry.
I imagine a man being awestruck, telling me he doesn’t want to leave. I remember that feeling, which is now so far away. He asks me to stay… in bed… I imagine sleepy morning sex while listening to Chet Baker croon quietly from the speaker in the corner. Later we amble directionless around the room until we’re dressed, teeth brushed. Strolling to a café, sharing a meal, drinking our coffee, kissing and saying goodbye. Realities I no longer experience.
I’m alone. I feel the scars he calls “marks” like they’re tattoos chosen from a wall off the retail store of my youth. Drunken mistakes? A tramp stamp, as it is so terribly referred to? No! These are stretch marks from pregnancy…scars. Four pregnancies in all. My two beautiful sons and the two horrific second-trimester miscarriages I endured alone… my daughters. He doesn’t see them every day the way I do. He doesn’t imagine the women they would’ve become every time he looks at his own body in the mirror.
The grass isn’t greener, it’s gravel on the other side. This is what I have told myself for years and this is why I’ve stayed, but now my imagination has become too wild. The grass isn’t greener, it’s a vitamin-rich waterfall oasis with magical, golden baby goats and Adonis angels feeding me calorie-free chocolate ice cream.
It’s Sunday and I’m awake at four forty-five in the morning, but I won’t go downstairs until at least seven. I will not give him the satisfaction of knowing he woke me up, yet again.
He’s completely deaf in his left ear, according to the world-renowned audiologist he saw–– his words, not mine. He can hear a mere twenty-percent in his right ear, but it’s enough, and it’s why I automatically walk and sit and eat and instinctively move to a person’s right side when interacting with them regardless of their aural-apparatus capabilities. You evolve after twenty-two years of adjusting your frustration levels, speaking up, enunciating, shouting, “How was your day?” Eventually, you just move to the right side.
I’d think it contemptuous to be annoyed by his deafness if I didn’t believe it was partially selective on my behalf. He seems to have much better hearing when anyone besides myself is speaking. It’s that insolent wife joke about how obnoxious her voice is. I can’t believe I used to laugh along to jokes like that, as if to say I’m too cool, too easygoing to be offended by a joke about how women in general are annoying and my own voice is grating or off-putting. The voice I used to soothe our children, night after night, the only voice that could soothe our children is somehow raucous to Alex and to others? Is that what I’m supposed to believe?
He had just gone deaf the year I met him and was monumentally struggling with his balance, among other issues that present when your hearing in one ear suddenly goes out. It was an inner-ear infection, the first world-renowned audiologist had said just before closing the book on Alexander— no amplification possible. He’d have to get a cochlear implant, which at the time was a devastating idea, even to me. Yet now, after twenty-two years of people shouting at him, he still refuses to look into cochlear implants? Part of me thinks it could have saved our marriage.
In the beginning…I pitied him, and I know it doesn’t make sense to resent a person for pitying them…but it is possible.
I tap the screen on my phone. It’s now seven-fifteen in the morning. Today is a big day. Moving day. I realize I’ve been lying in bed, awake, listening to the clanking, tinkering, shuffling, shifting for almost three hours. In my head I imagine making three tally marks on top of an old chalkboard. The screeching chalk in my mind coincides with the sound of Alexander slamming the vitamin cabinet above the trash can. He’ll take the trash out next and when he does, he’ll lift the trash bag out and let the heavy plastic trash can liner slam back down into our overpriced SimpleHuman stainless steel trash can. It’s made for simple humans after all.
I glance at the clock and add another tally mark to the chalkboard. The thousands of lines represent the hours I’ve wasted being unhappy.
Regardless of how many aspects of my life are predictable to the point of soul-murdering boredom, one thing is, ironically, predictably unpredictable, and that’s the fact that I never know when Alex is going to leave the house or return. Even though he wakes up at the same time every day, some days he says he has to be at work at seven a.m. Some days he’s home at two or four, and others not until eight p.m. He’s a physical therapist with his own practice, and his hours vary greatly. If you ask him to try and give you a heads-up, he’ll act like you’re somehow taking away his autonomy when the reality is, by virtue of his own recalcitrance, he has eliminated any autonomy I could possibly have.
And so I am the default parent…the mother. He is the man who deserves autonomy.
Cases in point, more than a thousand times over the years we will be headed to a destination we’ve both agreed upon, Alex driving, of course, because I’m a woman, when, without warning, he will turn in the opposite direction than the agreed-upon destination, at which point I will say, “Where are we going?”
In the more recent years this question has become increasingly agitating to him. “I’m stopping at the gas station to get a Lotto ticket. Is that okay with you?”
I’ll usually respond with something like, “Sure, it’s just nice to know where my body is being driven.”
Almost every time he looks at me and rolls his eyes.
Just last week, many months after we had already decided to file for divorce, we chose to ride together to the mediator’s office. We were naively optimistic, and also… we pretend we’re progressive. On the way there, Alex decided to take a different route.
“Where are we going?”
“To. The. Mediator’s. Office.”
“Why are we going this way?”
“Because I decided to go this way and I’m driving.”
“Well, then let me drive,” I said without condescension.
“No, this is my car, I’m driving and I am going this way because I want to go this way.”
“Alex, do you see how this conversation started as a simple question and now it’s turned into a battle over whose damn cookie it is?”
He glanced at my crotch. “Well it’s not yours; we know that.”
Shocked, I said, “Now that we’re getting a divorce you’re a sex-crazed, deluded, misogynist man from 1805, calling my vagina a cookie? Well, that definitely makes things easy for me.”
“Lighten up.”
“No, I will not lighten up. You lighten up. I just asked where we were going, and now you act like I was the one overreacting. If you’re not stonewalling me, you’re blatantly gaslighting me.”
“Well I’m glad the thousands of dollars we spent on therapy has improved your vocabulary. Anyway, it’s never just a simple question with you, Danielle. I can always hear something in the underlying tone.”
“You’re projecting.”
“According to you, I’m everything in the goddamn psychiatric bible!” he yelled.
“You said it. In this instance, I really did just want to know where I was going. I’m not your property, not along for the ride. You’ve been doing that to me for what feels like a millennium… And by the way, Alex, I’ve always had a stellar vocabulary.”
“Leave it to the writer to exaggerate everything and then to brag about her word prowess on top of it.”
“Let me explain something to you––”
“Dani, just stop talking.”
“No, I’m pissed now.”
“You’re always pissed.”
“Listen to me, there is a difference between exaggerating like, ‘My dress was nine hundred dollars when it was really seven hundred,’ and, ‘My dress was a million dollars.’ It’s beyond the scope of possibility or likelihood and it’s simply for effect. Furthermore, I haven’t written in a year. For some reason I am no longer inspired to write.”
“Don’t blame me for your writer’s block.”
“Stop saying everything I do is because I’m a writer. You always do that. You knew me before I was a writer.”
“You said yourself you were a born writer, a storyteller, which makes you a born liar.”
“Oh, screw you.”
“You won’t let me.”
“You’re a pig. Why would I? Your jealousy about my career has made the fact that I am a writer the enemy of this marriage.”
At this point, we had looked up to realize we were in the parking lot of the mediator’s office. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m not jealous of you. I have my own career. Are we gonna go into Kevin’s office yelling and screaming at each other like last time?”
“I’m not yelling. I have to talk this loudly so you can hear me, remember? How come when you yell, you say it’s because you can’t hear, but when I yell, I’m a bitch?”
“Are you ever going to shut up, Dani?”
“Are you going to start showing me some base-level respect by telling me when you decide to take a different route, or stop at a convenience store while I am the passenger?”
He sighed. “This is ridiculous. It doesn’t matter because you’ll never have to be the passenger again.”
“Fine by me. I can’t believe we thought we could actually ride together. And for the record, Alex, this cookie is closed––to you anyway.”
“Well that’s settled. Let’s head in. Now, get the hell out of my car.”
Under my breath I said, “Your car that I paid for,” which isn’t entirely true, but I do know how to push his buttons.
That was exactly three seconds before I unbuckled my seat belt and got out. It was exactly five seconds before Alex jammed the car into reverse, backed up, almost running over my foot, and took off down the road while I looked on from the parking lot completely dumbfounded.
