Chapter Thirty New Old Home
Thirty
New Old Home
Running toward love is not easy for grown-ups with full lives. I didn’t want to pull Nate out of his final months of high school and move him to another state. David didn’t want to abandon his tenured job and move in with me, jobless and dependent. We decided we would stay long distance for a while.
This would allow us to consider exactly how we wanted to construct our new life. Was seeing our names together on a mortgage or marriage license necessarily the ultimate fulfillment of what we had? Was the revelation I’d received nothing more than that I should become a wife again, this time as a faculty spouse? If we were going to treat love as a verb and not as a noun, what would that entail?
My parents had recently moved out of my childhood home, and so Nate and I took it over. Except for the days he was at his father’s, he slept in what had been my old bedroom. I slept in what had been my parents’. The walls were in the same place but the furniture was new, cobbled together from various basements and websites. The return gave me an uncanny feeling, as though it were several different eras at once, and I was various ages.
Strolling through the neighborhood, I was cast back to times I walked around to get out of the house when I was a teenager. I remembered different incarnations of myself and my parents, the kinds of things we ate, how we’d all been dressed. I saw, out of the corner of my eye, my childhood pet rabbit hopping around, gnawing on baseboards.
Unused to having so much space, I felt like a cat hiding under a couch. My father’s former office I left empty. I worked at the kitchen table until finally one day I got up the courage to buy a desk and put it in the room that had once been his. It took weeks but eventually I was able to work in there without feeling like I was going to get in trouble.
I found a stack of old photos. One showed me at age seven with my mom smoking in the kitchen—where I now made breakfast for Nate. Another was of my father smoking next to his dictionary, in which I looked up words as a little girl, in the office where I now tried to make a living. When I was sixteen, a burglar had come in over an air conditioner and I’d scared him off coming home from my job at one in the morning. That window was right there by my head as I slept. When I heard a noise in the middle of the night, I checked the locks.
I tried to make the place my own, to create new and happy memories there. I returned from walks with flowers to set out on the table, new lamps for the living room, and food to make for Nate. I felt more like myself living on my own, even if I was technically still married.
Paul and I stayed in therapy to try to figure out how to split up in a way that would be easiest on us and on Nate. For the Zoom session we appeared on the screen in separate squares because we were each in our own apartments. When he waved his hands to make a gesture, I noticed something.
“Are you not wearing your ring?” I said.
“Oh, I’ve been taking it off for dates,” he said. “I forgot to put it back on.”
“I was leaving mine on because I assumed we’d have a conversation about it before we did.”
“This is a moment ,” our therapist said.
“No, I’m actually relieved,” I said. “I thought it was going to be a hard conversation when I asked if you were okay with me taking mine off. Now we don’t have to talk about it.” I pulled my ring off and held up my hand. The jewelry that had been put on my finger in a ritual before witnesses, then stayed there for so many years, now had been taken off without ceremony, and with only Paul and the therapist there to see it happen.
“How’s Paul going to support himself?” Veronica asked me the next time I talked to her.
“He’ll take half of whatever we have now and then I think he will figure it out,” I said.
My mantra when asked about the reasons for the divorce was: “There are no bad guys here.” Though my lurking fear was that if you were saying that, it was likely that you were the bad guy. For whatever it was that Paul did wrong, the fact was, I was the one who left.
Paul came over for family dinners every Sunday and I liked him much more once we were separated. Once we were no longer romantic partners I was able to love him as Nate’s father and as a member of my family. In so many ways, we’d raised each other. He got a full-time office job he loved and a sweet, pretty girlfriend. Interestingly, it was not Sarah. That had fizzled out quickly. But it was someone he adored and who adored him. They took Nate and his friends to basketball games. With her, Paul became a more grounded and happier version of himself. If he’d been holding me back, I’d clearly been doing the same for him.