CHAPTER EIGHT
The Forgotten Wife
POV: Sharon ? The present
She called the number on a Tuesday, which she only realized was a second Tuesday after she'd already dialed, and she took that as either a sign or a coincidence and decided she was too tired to tell the difference anymore.
Margaret answered on the second ring like she'd been waiting six weeks for the call, which, Sharon would learn, she more or less had.
"It's Sharon. From the farmers market. The tomatoes."
"I remember the tomatoes." A warmth came into the voice, unhurried. "I wondered if you'd call. Most people keep the card a good long while before they use it. I kept mine eight months."
"Kept it in a drawer that sticks."
"That sounds about right." A small sound that might have been a laugh.
"We're at the Presbyterian church on Fremont, the little room in the back, not the big hall, they let us have it because the pastor's sister is one of us.
Two o'clock. You don't have to say anything.
First-timers mostly don't. You can just come and drink bad coffee and see if it's a thing for you or not. "
"What is it. Exactly. You never said."
Margaret was quiet for a second. "It doesn't have a good name.
Somebody called it the Forgotten Wives once, as a joke, and it stuck, which tells you something about the mood.
It's women who love men who won't put them first. That's the whole membership requirement.
You already qualify, or you wouldn't have kept the card. "
Sharon stood in her kitchen holding the phone and looked at the closet door down the hall where a blue dress hung, and did not correct her.
The little room behind the Presbyterian church smelled like burnt coffee and radiator dust, and there were folding chairs in a loose circle, seven of them, five filled, and Sharon stood in the doorway for a second doing the thing she did in any new room, reading it, and what she read surprised her.
She'd expected sad women. She'd braced for a room full of the particular defeat she was afraid of becoming.
Instead there was laughter going when she walked in, real laughter, a woman mid-story with her hands up, and it stopped when they saw her, not unkindly, just the natural pause of a room making space, and Margaret stood.
"This is Sharon. Be normal. Don't scare her."
"We're never normal," said a woman in scrubs, maybe fifty, "it's why we're here," and the laughter came back, and someone moved a coat off a chair, and that was it, that was the whole initiation, a coat moved off a folding chair, and Sharon sat down in the Forgotten Wives.
She didn't talk. Margaret had promised she wouldn't have to and she didn't, that first day. She drank the bad coffee and she listened, and she did what she'd done her whole life, which was learn a room by watching who deferred to whom and who was lying and who was about to cry into their styrofoam.
There was Denise, the woman in scrubs, an ER nurse, married to a surgeon who'd promised for nine years to leave a practice that ate their whole life and never had.
There was Carol, older, quiet, who Sharon would learn had been the unofficial second family of a state senator for two decades, a man with a public wife and a public smile and Carol in a condo across town he paid for and visited on Thursdays.
Thursdays. Sharon had flinched at that one and hoped nobody saw.
There was a younger woman, Priya, newer than Sharon to all of it, who didn't speak either and kept her coat on the whole time.
And there was a woman named Robin who talked too much and laughed too loud and made a joke every time the room got too honest, and Sharon recognized her immediately, because Robin was her, Robin was what she did, deflect and deflect and keep the room warm so nobody looks too close at you, and watching someone else do it was like watching herself in a mirror she hadn't asked for.
"You've got a face," Margaret said to her quietly, near the end, while the others were gathering coats. "You're seeing something."
"That one." Sharon nodded at Robin, laughing by the coffee. "She's the funny one. She keeps it light so nobody asks the real question."
"Yes."
"I'm the funny one. In my life. I'm the Robin."
Margaret looked at her with the kind eyes and the hard mouth, and didn't soften it, which Sharon would come to understand was the whole gift of Margaret, that she never once softened it.
"Then you already know the thing it took the rest of us years to learn," Margaret said. "The funny ones are the ones who've decided not to be a burden about it. Which is a lovely way to be. And it's how you disappear."
POV: Sharon
She went back. That was what she hadn't expected, that she'd go back, but she went back the next second Tuesday, and the one after, and by the third she'd started talking, and it came out of her sideways, the way real things did, in the middle of a story about something else.
She'd been telling them about the pancakes, actually, doing the funny version, Jackson and the scared face and the millions of dollars and no ability to flip, and the room was laughing, Robin loudest, and Sharon was riding the laugh the way she always did, and then she heard herself say, still smiling, still in the funny voice:
"He introduced me as a family friend. At a party. To a reporter. It's in a magazine now, you can go read it, my husband of six years called me a family friend and it's printed."
And the room didn't laugh, and it didn't gasp, and nobody said the wise thing, and that was when Sharon understood what the Circle actually was.
It wasn't a place that fixed you. It was a place where you could say the true thing in the funny voice and the room would simply not laugh, would hold it in the silence exactly as heavy as it was, and let you hear it out loud at its real weight for the first time.
"There it is," Margaret said quietly. "That's the one you came to say."
"I didn't come to say anything."
"No. Nobody does." Denise, the nurse, leaned forward, elbows on her knees, the posture of a woman who'd delivered hard news in hallways her whole career.
"Can I tell you the thing nobody told me?
You don't have to do anything about it. That's not what this is.
Half of us aren't leaving. Carol's not leaving.
I'm probably not leaving, God help me. This isn't a place that talks you out of your marriage. "
"Then what's it for?"
"It's for not being crazy." Denise said it flatly.
"You spend years being told the thing you're feeling isn't happening.
He loves you, so it can't be what it looks like.
You start to think you're the problem, you're too sensitive, you're ungrateful, look at everything you have.
And then you sit in a room with six women who got told the exact same thing by six different men, and you realize you were never crazy, you were just alone.
That's it. That's the whole medicine. You were right and you were alone, and now you're right and you're not. "
Sharon sat with that.
"But some of you leave," she said.
"Some of us leave." Margaret's voice. "And I'll tell you the part that's not on the brochure, since we don't have a brochure. The ones who leave don't do better than the ones who stay. Not on average. Leaving isn't the happy ending any more than staying is. Robin left. Ask Robin how it went."
Across the circle Robin, the funny one, went quiet for the first time all afternoon, and when she spoke she wasn't funny at all.
"I left," Robin said. "Four years ago. Best thing I ever did and I cry about it every week.
Both. Nobody tells you it's both." She turned her coffee cup in her hands, and Sharon thought of Jackson lining up the handle, and pushed the thought away.
"I'm not sorry I left. And I lost things I'm never getting back, and my kids have two Christmases now and hate it, and some nights the quiet in my apartment is so loud I call my sister just to have a voice.
It's both. Whatever you're deciding, honey, decide it knowing it's both.
Anybody promises you it's only one, they're selling something. "
The radiator ticked. Somebody refilled the bad coffee.
And Sharon, who had come in three Tuesdays ago braced for a room of sad women who'd tell her to leave, sat in a folding chair and understood that they'd given her something much harder and much better than permission.
They'd given her the truth with both hands, staying is a loss and leaving is a loss, and no one in the room was going to carry the choice for her, and that was the most respect anyone had shown her in six years.
POV: Sharon
Carol found her in the church parking lot after the fourth meeting, which surprised her, because Carol almost never spoke.
"You remind me of me," Carol said. "Thirty years ago.
Before I got comfortable." She said comfortable like a word she'd stopped trusting.
She was maybe seventy, elegant in an old contained way, and she stood by Sharon's car with her keys in her gloved hand and looked at her with an expression Sharon couldn't place until she realized it was envy.
"You still think it's a crisis. That's the tell.
When it's still a crisis, you can still leave. "
"And when it stops being a crisis?"