Chapter 2
Chapter
Two
I gave it forty-eight hours. The casseroles started Thursday.
I knew they were coming, because I had delivered roughly four hundred of them in my time.
I had, in point of fact, built the spreadsheet the neighborhood meal-train runs on — tabs for allergies, delivery windows, a color key for bereavement versus new baby versus procedure we are not discussing.
So, to open my own door to a foil dish of my own system was a peculiar experience.
It felt a little like being read my own rights.
The first came with Marguerite Past, who presented it two-handed, wearing the face.
You know the face. The head tips one degree off vertical, the eyebrows draw together in the middle, the mouth makes the small sympathetic crumple that means I have heard, and I have driven over to witness your collapse from the front row.
“Brooke,” she said. “How are you. Really.”
There is no answer to how are you, really when the true one is lighter than I’ve felt since before Sophie was born.
You cannot say it. Say it, and Marguerite’s whole operating system goes down; she has come over here with a chicken divan and a script, and the script contains no branch for the wife being fine.
So I gave her the thing she’d driven over for.
I let my chin do a small, brave wobble. I said it was a process.
I said I was taking it a day at a time, and that the children were being so strong.
Marguerite exhaled, restored, having successfully witnessed a collapse, and drove home to report to Pam Reuther that I was “putting on a very brave front” — which, in our zip code, is the highest grade the board awards.
Over the following week, I received eleven casseroles, four just checking in texts with a single heart, two invitations to lunch from women who wanted to watch me cry over a salad, and one frozen lasagna from Pam Reuther herself, delivered in person so she could see the inside of the house and assess whether I’d “let things go.” I had not let things go.
I have never let one single thing go in my life, which was, I was beginning to suspect from a great distance, the whole of the problem.
Not everyone came to mourn. One of them — Lindy Marsh, two cul-de-sacs over, married to a man who chews with intent — caught me at the mailbox, took both my hands, and told me with shining eyes that she thought I was being so brave.
Then she lowered her voice and asked how I had known.
As though I’d received a sign. As though leaving had been a thing I’d done, rather than a thing done to me on a Tuesday over a brined chicken.
I didn’t have the heart to tell her I’d known nothing, that I’d been the last to find out, that the bravest call I’d made all month was not throwing the bird.
So I squeezed her hands and told her these things have their own timing, which means nothing, and sent her home radiant — already, I suspect, mentally drafting her own.
The casseroles, at least, were sincere. The committees were another matter.
Within the week, with a delicacy I had to admire even as it filleted me, the neighborhood began quietly reassigning my life.
Diane Coffey didn’t want me to “worry about the fall gala, not with everything.” The Landscape Committee, which I had run for six years and which could not have told a boxwood from a felony without me, suddenly “had it handled.” By Friday, I had been thanked — gently, thoroughly — for my years of service to roughly everything, in the warm valedictory tone you reserve for a woman who is either dying or moving to Florida.
I understood the logic. I’d used it myself.
You don’t leave the heavy committees with the compromised, and a divorce is grief’s tackier cousin.
They were being kind. They were also, with the brisk competence of an organization I had personally trained, replacing me.
Cleanly. Without a hard feeling anywhere.
In under a week. I’d spent my whole adult life arranging never to find out whether they could, and now I knew.
I performed beautifully. That is the part nobody warns you about.
I had spent twenty years performing — the wife, the mother, the chair of the thing, the woman with the label maker — and I was so practiced at it that I could perform a heartbreak I didn’t feel without a single rehearsal, on demand, to a rotating audience, between loads of a laundry that was now, I noticed, exactly half its former volume.
I was good at it. I got notes. And every night I’d close the door on the last sympathetic face, stand in the front hall in the enormous new silence, and feel absolutely nothing — which was starting to frighten me considerably more than grief ever could have.
Whit called twice that week, both times about logistics, which was the only dialect we’d had left for some years.
The lake place. The good cars. Whether I wanted the Eames chair, which neither of us liked but both of us had paid too much for to simply hand the other.
He was unfailingly, maddeningly civil. And near the end of the second call, into a pause, he said, “You seem... good, Brooke” — and it was not a compliment.
It was the precise note my mother would hit two days later: the suspicion that a woman taking the end of her marriage this gracefully could not have been holding up her end of it.
I told him I was handling things. He said that was “just like me.” He was right.
I got off the phone before either of us could notice that the most honest conversation we’d had in ten years was the one taking the marriage apart.
My mother called on the third day. She did not say she was sorry.
My mother has never been sorry for anything in her life; she regards apology as a posture adopted by people who lack other options.
What she said, after a silence engineered to make me fill it — a silence I recognized intimately, because she is the woman who taught it to me — was, “Well. I assume you intend to keep the house.”
“Mother.”
“Because the woman keeps the house, Brooke. That is not pride, that is real estate. Your aunt Sister gave up the house in ’88 and spent the next decade in a condominium explaining herself to people.”
I told her I wasn’t worried about the house. There followed a pause of a quality I can only describe as geological.
“You sound calm,” she said. It was an accusation.
In my mother’s catechism a woman whose husband has left her is permitted exactly two conditions — devastated, or plotting — and calm belongs to neither.
Calm suggests you didn’t mind. Minding is the rent you pay on a marriage; stop paying it, and people begin to wonder what you were doing in there all those years.
“I’m handling it,” I said, which is the family word, the one she raised me on.
We do not fall apart, in my mother’s house.
We handle. I had handled my father’s funeral, the announcement of my own divorce, a dead dog in February, and every Thanksgiving since I was nineteen.
Handling is the family trade. She taught it to me at the kitchen counter the way other mothers teach a daughter to make a pie crust — except what my mother taught me to make was a surface.
Flawless. Weight-bearing. With absolutely nothing visible underneath.
“Well,” she said, when she’d run out of house. “Whatever else, be seen. Go to the club. Hold your head up. Let them all watch you carry on exactly as before.”
I sat there in my flawless, weight-bearing kitchen and thought, with a clarity that genuinely startled me, that I would rather die.
Carrying on exactly as before was the one thing I had ever truly known how to do, and the prospect of a whole season of it — the club, the committees, the casseroles, the face — made me want to drive straight into the sea.
Fortunately, I knew where there was one.
So I did what any woman raised to handle does when handling is finally all she has left.
I made it a project.
I packed for Sugarberry the way I pack for everything, which is to say as though for a minor military incursion.
Packing cubes, labeled. A laminated card of the week’s forecast set against three contingency outfits per day.
The good sunscreen, the backup sunscreen, and a third sunscreen for other people, because someone always forgets theirs, and somebody has to be the person who didn’t.
I was zipping the second bag when it landed on me that I was, for the first time in eighteen years, packing for exactly one person.
No one had handed me a list. No one had asked whether I’d seen the phone charger — the navy one, the one that lives in the kitchen drawer, belongs to nobody, and is therefore everybody’s.
The bag was light. I stood in the bedroom holding a bag that was light, in a house gone quiet in both directions, and a light bag is its own small grief.
Then I zipped it, because grieving a tote bag is beneath me, and I had four hundred miles to cover.
Sophie walked me to the car. She was nine days out from Athens herself, from her own enormous unwritten life, and we stood in the driveway in the July heat doing the thing this family does instead of saying things, which is discussing logistics.
She asked whether I had cash for the tolls.
I asked whether she’d finalized her meal plan.
Neither of us mentioned the house being empty now from both ends, because we are her grandmother’s people and we handle.
Then she hugged me, hard and fast, the way you hug someone you actually mean it with. She said into my shoulder, “Go be a person, Mom” — getting it exactly backward and exactly right, as she does — and went back inside before I could arrange a face at her.
I drove south. Out of the development, past the club where my mother wanted me seen, onto the interstate.
And somewhere around the Georgia line the strangest thing happened, which was that the day opened up in front of me like an unscheduled afternoon.
No casseroles. No face. No committee. Four hundred miles of nobody, anywhere, needing a single thing from me — and in place of the void I’d been bracing for, I felt the clean click of a seatbelt and something dangerously close to glee.
I told myself it was the drive. I am very good at telling myself things.
What I did not tell myself — though it rode shotgun the whole way down, like something I’d packed without meaning to — was that I was driving toward the one person I knew whose life was a glorious, half-built, falling-down mess, and that some small, ravenous, freshly unemployed part of me could not wait to get its hands on it.