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One night I watched Take This Waltz, a movie directed by Sarah Polley, filmed near the street I used to live on. The movie has that feeling of an afternoon when everyone is on their front porches, watching the neighborhood drama and everything that can happen on a residential sidewalk. A marriage e…

Most of the movies that we had both seen were divorce movies. Since my husband had moved out six months before, I had been watching and rewatching anything about breakups, endings, affairs—allegorical or realistic, romances and tragedies, I often described these evenings as though I was self-progra…

Was every married couple two children playing house? Did it just feel that way for us, or was it a pantomime for everyone? There was an endless supply of fictions to choose from, the facts of one not enough to make us lose faith in another. Pretending or daydreaming as a child had had such a prophe…

My husband came back three days later, ashamed and repentant. I forgave him and mostly forgot. It was only much later that I remembered how it had been that third afternoon when I first started to really hear my friend’s voice saying, Maybe it’s for the best, that my sisters and I had walked to get…

There was a bar we loved back then. It was red and unhappy, a dour subterranean neighborhood institution where nothing could stop us from being charmed by it. Not its stubborn insistence on overhead lighting, not the rotting pink bar of soap in the bathroom, not an overtly hostile approach to fulfi…