laughter, and that was that.
I sat down, my shoes glued to the floor.
I was back to the marriage counselor’s office in Bar Harbor. The smell from the forsythia bushes in the parking lot. I held the card up to the light and reread the line about Sara hitting her mother.
How had I gotten that wrong?
If two people have the same experience, but remember it differently, what does it say about their respective minds? But obviously I hadn’t experienced it. Sara had been in high school at the time, fighting with her drunk mother after she threw up at the school play. For Sara, it was a memory. For me, an anecdote.
Dazed, I pulled out the other cards and set them aside. I picked up the book, a Dashiell Hammett novel. The price sticker on the back was from a bookstore in Culver City.
Los Angeles.
In the fall before her accident, Sara had convinced me to attend a marriage-counseling appointment with her therapist, Dr. Carrellas. It did not go well. Like many neuroscientists, I wasn’t a big fan of psychoanalysis. For me, anything occurring in the brain was biological, a case for pathway analysis. Huntington’s and Parkinson’s had their own neighborhoods; someday we’d discover that mental illness did, too. None of us were the product of blockaded mommy dreams.
Carrellas gave us a writing assignment at the end of the appointment for homework: to select five changes of direction in our marriage, and describe each one on an index card. I remembered fighting about it afterward in the parking lot: I was shouting at Sara about why our life together should conform to this schoolmarm’s diagram, some diagnostic manual?
Soon afterward, Sara moved to Los Angeles. A trial separation lasting six weeks, though it never was named as such. Sara simply left. She didn’t call from California, never e-mailed. I thought she was gone forever. I was waiting for divorce papers to arrive. When she returned, she told me about her idea that we’d take a second honeymoon in Italy; then she died in the car accident two weeks later.
One night after the funeral, I wrote out a letter: Dear Dr. Carrellas, My marriage went in a single direction, and then it stopped.
I wrote it, but I never sent it.
Five changes of direction, five cards. I counted: there were fifty-four cards on Sara’s desk.
Victor and I caught a movie, then we drifted back to my place. But what movie? I stood up, scooped up the cards, took them upstairs, dropped them on my bureau, and weighed them down with my keys.
two
Change of direction two , and I don’t know where to start. Well, that’s not true. I knew as soon as you proposed this idea what my first three turns would be. But right now I’m parked outside a CVS, I’m sitting in my car, I just bought a package of index cards like they’re Kleenex. Like I’m about to break down.
Perhaps I am about to break down.
Victor’s voice is still ringing in my ears from the parking lot outside your office. That was just twenty minutes ago.
Between this card and the first one, when Victor and I met, there’s a gap of twenty years. Two decades reduced to a thirty-second montage, a flip book of cities, apartments, friends, vacations, birthday parties. Marriage as a product of mass and velocity, traveling in a single direction forward. Of course, though, with peaks and valleys. My mother passed away from cancer. Victor’s father died from a stroke. I miscarried. September 9, 1978. We named her Elizabeth, after my grandmother. Victor and I went to Puerto Rico for a week and decided not to try again. We talked vaguely about adoption, it was something we might do someday, like a safari we’d take when we had the money.
Twenty years of motion. Each time Victor wrangled a new appointment, we moved. And we were young, we had fun. There were wonderful weekend trips, outdoor concerts, and long city walks. It felt as though society were shifting, but as a team we were grounded. It was the two of us moving across a moving world,
I sat down, my shoes glued to the floor.
I was back to the marriage counselor’s office in Bar Harbor. The smell from the forsythia bushes in the parking lot. I held the card up to the light and reread the line about Sara hitting her mother.
How had I gotten that wrong?
If two people have the same experience, but remember it differently, what does it say about their respective minds? But obviously I hadn’t experienced it. Sara had been in high school at the time, fighting with her drunk mother after she threw up at the school play. For Sara, it was a memory. For me, an anecdote.
Dazed, I pulled out the other cards and set them aside. I picked up the book, a Dashiell Hammett novel. The price sticker on the back was from a bookstore in Culver City.
Los Angeles.
In the fall before her accident, Sara had convinced me to attend a marriage-counseling appointment with her therapist, Dr. Carrellas. It did not go well. Like many neuroscientists, I wasn’t a big fan of psychoanalysis. For me, anything occurring in the brain was biological, a case for pathway analysis. Huntington’s and Parkinson’s had their own neighborhoods; someday we’d discover that mental illness did, too. None of us were the product of blockaded mommy dreams.
Carrellas gave us a writing assignment at the end of the appointment for homework: to select five changes of direction in our marriage, and describe each one on an index card. I remembered fighting about it afterward in the parking lot: I was shouting at Sara about why our life together should conform to this schoolmarm’s diagram, some diagnostic manual?
Soon afterward, Sara moved to Los Angeles. A trial separation lasting six weeks, though it never was named as such. Sara simply left. She didn’t call from California, never e-mailed. I thought she was gone forever. I was waiting for divorce papers to arrive. When she returned, she told me about her idea that we’d take a second honeymoon in Italy; then she died in the car accident two weeks later.
One night after the funeral, I wrote out a letter: Dear Dr. Carrellas, My marriage went in a single direction, and then it stopped.
I wrote it, but I never sent it.
Five changes of direction, five cards. I counted: there were fifty-four cards on Sara’s desk.
Victor and I caught a movie, then we drifted back to my place. But what movie? I stood up, scooped up the cards, took them upstairs, dropped them on my bureau, and weighed them down with my keys.
two
Change of direction two , and I don’t know where to start. Well, that’s not true. I knew as soon as you proposed this idea what my first three turns would be. But right now I’m parked outside a CVS, I’m sitting in my car, I just bought a package of index cards like they’re Kleenex. Like I’m about to break down.
Perhaps I am about to break down.
Victor’s voice is still ringing in my ears from the parking lot outside your office. That was just twenty minutes ago.
Between this card and the first one, when Victor and I met, there’s a gap of twenty years. Two decades reduced to a thirty-second montage, a flip book of cities, apartments, friends, vacations, birthday parties. Marriage as a product of mass and velocity, traveling in a single direction forward. Of course, though, with peaks and valleys. My mother passed away from cancer. Victor’s father died from a stroke. I miscarried. September 9, 1978. We named her Elizabeth, after my grandmother. Victor and I went to Puerto Rico for a week and decided not to try again. We talked vaguely about adoption, it was something we might do someday, like a safari we’d take when we had the money.
Twenty years of motion. Each time Victor wrangled a new appointment, we moved. And we were young, we had fun. There were wonderful weekend trips, outdoor concerts, and long city walks. It felt as though society were shifting, but as a team we were grounded. It was the two of us moving across a moving world,
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