You're Married to Her? by Ira Wood

chance that might ensure her ability to make a living for herself and her child. I could feel her sheer impatience with me, her excitement as weekends approached, when I might visit Marge and leave her to her son, her studies, her new school friends. There was no future for Wendy and me, only her present dependence, and the unspoken but mutual determination to see this mess through to a peaceful end.
    For the better part of that year Wendy had a regular study group with people prepping for the Graduate Record Exams and although I never asked, and she never
volunteered, I began to think she had met someone special. There were unaccounted-for hours in her evenings out, added care in the way she dressed for class, even surprises in our now very occasional lovemaking. One night, after never once having expressed curiosity about the position I have since identified as the reverse cowgirl, she straddled me while turned to face the opposite wall. It was lovely watching her ass cheeks quiver as she stretched forward, placing her weight on her forearms to climax, but of course I was left to wonder where she’d picked up this little trick. And then there was the night I arrived home from a weekend with Marge to find River simply bursting with news. “Well, don’t you look like the happy little guy,” I said.
    â€œOh, yes. Know what?”
    â€œTell me.”
    â€œWhile you were gone there was someone here.” He actually winked. “And he was very nice!”
    But mostly there was a sense of strength and confidence in Wendy that grew in proportion to her distance from me. Sometimes she would actually ask, “How’s Marge doing?” and expect to have a conversation.
    One evening in late April, she sprang from her car and ran up the front steps. The door seemed to blow open in a rush of wind. There was a radiance surrounding her, a shimmering aura of victory and newly won power. Her eyes were wild. She was taking gulps of air and holding her hand over her heart. In her other hand she was clutching a letter from Simmons College. She
took a long slow swallow in order to speak. “I got into grad school,” Wendy said, and she began to weep. It was over. Our ridiculous makeshift family had come to an end.

6.
    That summer River went to visit his grandmother at her cottage on Lake Superior and I attempted to write again, tentatively, for an hour each morning, at the desk I hadn’t used in months, in the room we had turned into River’s. I was circulating the novel I had written and receiving the first spate of many rejections. Marge’s agent, famous as a keen judge of talent, had attempted to be kind, but read it for exactly what it was, an episodic apprentice work seething with self pity, fantasies of revenge and imagined offenses. Wendy spent most of her free time arranging financial aid and looking for an apartment in a good school district. I took a night job as a waiter in a high-end restaurant and spent my afternoons writing something new, tentative sketches about the restaurant’s spoiled and wealthy patrons, its petulant chefs, and the other waiters, artists like myself, unknown and hungry for attention. With River splashing away somewhere on the Upper Peninsula, Wendy living with her new boyfriend, who had been one of her night school teachers, and Marge on the Cape writing what was to become her novel Vida , I was alone, truly alone with my work for the first time in
years, no women to please, no Rubber Ducky ; no goat, no donkey, no cow, no gorilla in the bedroom. Rabbi, I felt like a new man.

IF YOU WANT ME TO BE HONEST
    L ocated in the heart of Beacon Hill, the restaurant didn’t serve food exactly, food you ate at a diner, but romantic descriptions of food, and charged by the adjective. Desert wasn’t called pudding, however much it resembled it, but banana caramel mousse with Maine summer berries. An appetizer that tasted, at least to me, like a sour pickle