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could be. And sure, we hardly spent any time together anymore. But isn’t that what happens in a marriage? You settle in. The newlywed phase fades, and real life begins.
The truth is, I wasn’t sure. I watched the neighbors to find out.
All the while, I continued reporting back to him. Until he started calling it my little obsession. He was playful about it at first. But once, I overheard him on the phone with his mother talking about “my little obsession” and I confronted him about it.
He said I was paranoid. He tossed out words like schizophrenia and obsessive compulsive disorder. He accused me of forgetting things, normal things, like grocery shopping and his mother’s birthday. He accused me of not wanting to leave the house for fear I might miss something. That part, I’ll admit was true. I hate his mother, and as for groceries, I figured what’s the point, if only one of us is around to eat them?
But that night, the night that things got really bad, the night they took a turn for the worse, along with his accusations, he threw in an ultimatum. The final straw. Either I get happy—either I go to the gym—or we call it quits and go our separate ways.
I hadn’t expected him to take such a strong stance. The truth is, I hadn’t realized my appearance was that important to him. He said he hadn’t realized it might become so unimportant to me. Before that night, I thought I had time. I thought everything would work itself out. I should have known better.
That was the night he gave me the book—Ann’s book. He’d met her husband. They were renovating the house down the street. What are the odds, he wanted to know. How lucky we were, he said. He’d heard good things about the book from someone at his self-help meet-up. The book would help me, he said. No matter what happened between us, he said, he just wanted me to be happy. He said we could still be friends. He said it as though we were children, not grown people with a mortgage and plans for the future.
Suddenly, I was suffocating under the weight of his words. He was serious, I could see. Not only that—he’d just put a deadline on our relationship—on how I should behave, how I should think, on who I should be. The walls were closing in, and I’d just learned that the one good thing I had wanted to go away, too. Just like my career. Just like my father. Like my mother. Like everything.
He wanted to fix me. I wanted time.
I was naïve. I didn’t have an exit strategy.
Clearly, he did.
My husband is a lot of things, but he is not a person who makes empty threats. When I told him I couldn’t give him an answer on the spot, he tried to play his game and gifted me twenty-four hours.
All I could think in that moment was that I needed a drink or a hit of cocaine— something, anything—to take the edge off.
I had the feeling I’d landed myself in one of those choose-your-own-adventure books, the kind I adored as a kid. I always read both endings, even after I’d made my choice. In real life, that wasn’t an option. You can’t have it both ways. In real life, neither adventure seemed all that enticing.
I knew there wasn’t any alcohol in the house, save for champagne, and that’s not exactly the drink of choice when one is at the end of their marriage and their rope. So I grabbed my keys and stormed out. He thought I couldn’t leave the house. Well, I’d show him.
To be clear, I’m not a drinker. It just sounded like something that might help in the moment.
It’s not that I was oblivious to the fact that I should be able to give my husband what he wants. I practiced that form of magic my whole life. I can fake it, but eventually, even that gets old.
This was supposed to be easier. I love Ethan. I think he loves me. But when it isn’t easy, it’s hard. So I pretended everything was fine, when it so clearly wasn’t. Just give them what they want. Men are very simple. Food, sex, and enough compliments to continuously stroke their ego. It’s that easy. My mother used to say that. Housekeeping is a tough business, she told me. Her work, she believed, was keeping families together. You had to be careful about it. You never want to make another woman feel inadequate, Sadie. Women are far smarter than we’re given credit for. Walk the tightrope, she used to say. Wave your white flag, if you have to. But keep your mouth shut and don’t overstep your bounds.
I figured that’s all I had to do when it came to marriage, too. Although, by the time I needed that kind of advice, my mother was long gone, and I was no longer sure I had it in me to be so compliant.
I worried that Ethan was right. That I’d lost my edge. In the old days, back in college, we used alcohol to solve fights. It was how we started them too. Good ol’ Stoli.
I realized it probably wasn’t the way to fix things anymore, not now that we were grown adults with real problems, the kind of problems the kids we were back then couldn’t even fathom.
I wish my mother had warned me that love isn’t enough. I wish she’d explained more in words than with her life that someday I, too, might want more and yet not even be able to put my finger on what that thing is.
I wish I had known that my husband would only desire me when I was thin(ish), when I was climbing the corporate ladder, when I was like him. I wish I had known that the reasons he fell in love with me would be the very things he’d set out to extinguish.
But I hadn’t known, and liquor seemed like the next best thing to dealing with the truth. It was suddenly blatantly clear. Unless I did something bold. Unless I made a drastic course correction, it was over.
Where are you going, Ethan had texted me. He’d accused me of acting irrationally. He worried I’d do something stupid, something irreversible. He forgot one thing.
I’m not him.
I didn’t respond. Not even when he called. I wanted to make him pay. I wanted him to understand what a bad decision he was making. I wanted him to see how out of control I could be. And if I couldn’t succeed at any of that, at the very least, I wanted to fix it like we used to.
The pathetic part: I didn’t even know where the closest liquor store was; I had to search on my phone.
Unfortunately, luck wasn’t on my side when it came to being a good wife or fixing it when I was a bad one. In Texas, liquor stores close at 9:00 p.m. I made it to the register at 8:58.
Only it turned out the woman in front of me was paying for her hooch in nickels and dimes, shaming the rest of us for our purchases by mere chance.
