3. Maya
Maya
"Twelve Years of Small Silences"
Priya orders us both the soup without asking, which is one of the many things I love about her.
She has been doing this for fifteen years — absorbing my preferences as her own responsibility, operating on the assumption that I might need someone to take care of a small thing for me.
She would do it for anyone she loves. She does it for me without fanfare, and I have never told her how much it means to me, how alien it feels to be anticipated.
"Tell me," she says, once the server has gone. Not how are you. Just tell me. Like she already knows there's something to tell.
I look at my water glass. "I don't know where to start."
"How about last Tuesday."
I laugh, a little. "How did you know about Tuesday?"
"I didn't. I just guessed there was a Tuesday.
" She settles back in her chair, already pulling off her scarf, already fully here in the way that Priya is always fully here.
She's a family law attorney, which means she has spent her professional life listening to people describe the exact weight and texture of their unhappiness, and she brings that same quality of attention to her friendships.
It is occasionally overwhelming and always a gift. "What happened Tuesday?"
"Nothing," I say. "That's the point. Nothing happened Tuesday.
Nothing happened the Tuesday before that.
We had dinner. He talked about work. I asked about the Eastside project.
He explained it to me — very thoroughly, in detail — and then I asked about the Kowalski family next door and he said mm and looked at his phone.
" I pause. "And then I said that it seemed like Mrs. Kowalski might be having some kind of trouble because I hadn't seen her in the garden in a few weeks, and he said hm and then he mentioned something about the weekend projections for the project, and the conversation moved on, and I just." I stop.
"I just thought: I am not here. To him, in this moment, I am simply not here. "
Priya looks at me without expression, which with Priya means she is listening very hard.
"But here's the thing," I say, "and this is the part that makes it impossible to explain to anyone, or to myself — he didn't do anything wrong.
He was tired. He'd had a long day. He wasn't cruel.
He wasn't even dismissive, not on purpose.
He just." I turn my water glass around in my hands.
"He just wasn't there. He just keeps not being there, and I keep being there, and somehow we've built twelve years on that. "
"The anniversary," Priya says. Carefully. Like she's setting something down.
"He remembered," I say quickly, because this is important, because I'm not telling the story I appear to be telling.
"He brought flowers. Calla lilies, which is what I had in my wedding bouquet, which he remembered, which — he's not.
He's not careless. That's what I'm saying.
He brought flowers and made a reservation at a nice restaurant, and we sat down, and he answered three emails at the table.
" I pause. "Not in a row. Scattered. In between courses.
Each time he picked up his phone I watched his face go somewhere I couldn't follow, and each time he put it down he'd look back at me with this expression, this slightly guilty, mostly fine expression, and say sorry, work, and then ask me something nice — how's your mom, how's the Whitmore project — and I would answer, and we would go on. "
"Did you say something?"
"I mentioned it. Once. I said you've been on your phone a lot tonight. And he said he was sorry, and he put the phone in his pocket, and he asked me about dessert."
"And then?"
"And then dessert came and the phone was back on the table."
Priya exhales through her nose. She doesn't say I told you so because she never does. She said something adjacent to it approximately six years ago, once, and saw my face, and has not said it since.
"There are other things," I say.
"I know."
"The miscarriage."
Something shifts in Priya's face. She was there for that.
She drove me home from the hospital because Daniel was in Denver.
He had a critical site inspection — truly critical, genuinely not something that could be moved — and I had told him I was fine, because I was trying to be fine, because the loss was at nine weeks and I'd read somewhere that nine weeks was early and I kept telling myself that early meant smaller, even though nothing about it felt small.
He flew home three days later. By then I had cleaned the apartment we lived in at the time, had washed the sheets, had returned the What to Expect When You're Expecting book to the library, had cried alone for approximately twenty hours spread across three days, had had a long conversation with Priya, had had a shorter one with my mother, and had put myself back together in the careful, determined way I was already very good at by then.
Daniel held me when he got home. He was tender and present and full of a guilt I could feel radiating off him.
But what he found when he walked in the door was a wife who had already, in his absence, done the work of grieving.
And I think — I know — he took that as confirmation that I was okay, that I had it handled, that Maya was steady Maya and would be fine, and so he let himself stop worrying.
He never asked, in the months that followed, how I was doing with it. Not once. I waited. I kept waiting. I told myself he didn't know how to ask, which was probably true. I told myself I could bring it up myself, which was also true. I didn't bring it up. He didn't ask. We moved forward.
I do not know, to this day, if he knows that I still think about it. Whether it was a girl or a boy. What we might have named it. Whether the light in its eyes would have been his or mine.
"The promotion," Priya says, gently.
"Yes."
"Tell me again. I want to hear you say it."
I know why she wants me to say it. She wants me to hear my own voice saying it.
"Cora Daniels offered me a position at her studio two years ago.
Junior creative director. Not junior in terms of responsibility — junior in title, meaning entry-level for that firm, which is not the same as entry-level in the industry.
It was a real opportunity. A good salary.
Benefits. Work I would have been proud of. "
"And you turned it down."
"I turned it down because it would have meant longer hours, which would have meant Daniel needed to be more available at home, which would have meant asking Daniel to reorganize a schedule that was already very full, and at the time it felt like the more complicated path and I chose the simpler one. "
"Did you discuss it with him?"
I look at her. "We talked about it. He said it was my decision.
He said whatever I wanted to do. He was very good about it.
" I pause. "He didn't argue for it. He didn't say of course, we'll make it work, I'll reorganize whatever I need to reorganize.
He said whatever you want. And when I said I thought it was too much right now, he said he understood. "
"And then?"
"And then he went to work the next day and his life didn't change at all."
Priya is quiet for a moment. Then: "Do you hear what you're doing right now?"
"What am I doing?"
"You're building a case against him out of things that have no villain.
Every single story you just told me, he could tell the same story and have made no objectively wrong choices.
He answered emails at dinner. He was on an unavoidable work trip.
He said your career was your decision." She leans forward slightly.
"And he's wrong about all of it. Not in the way of a man doing something terrible.
In the way of a man who is so absolutely absent from the emotional reality of your marriage that he can't even see the shape of what he's doing. "
I stare at her.
"Maya," she says, and her voice is very careful now, very honest. "Absence is a kind of wound too."
The soup arrives. We eat in silence for a moment.
When I get home that evening, I sit at the kitchen table with my sketchbook open and I write a list. Not of grievances — I've been keeping that list in my head for years and it has never helped anything.
This is a different list. This is a list of things I want.
Things I haven't let myself want, haven't let myself name, in longer than I can accurately measure.
Time that is mine alone. Work I am proud of. To be asked how I am and have the question mean something. To be seen. To feel, in the room I am standing in, like I exist fully in it. To stop making myself smaller. To stop performing fine.
I close the sketchbook. Set it on the counter. Put the kettle on.
I stand at the window and look at the backyard, at the garden I planted three years ago and tend every spring, and I think about the woman on that rooftop twelve years ago, the city spread out below her, a man saying I see you, Maya. I really see you.
I believed him. I think he believed it too.
I think the problem is that seeing someone requires paying attention, and attention is not a thing you can extend in one direction infinitely while spending the rest of your reserves somewhere else.
I think the problem is that I let him stop paying attention and told myself it was fine, and over time fine became the ceiling of what I asked for, and somewhere in the lowering of that ceiling I lost several feet of myself.
The kettle boils. I don't move for a while.