by
Lisa Taddeo
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I’m married, Maggie.
Whatever that means. It could mean a million things. One of those things could be, I am married so we make out all the time and of course when the ball drops I deposit my tongue deep in my chosen one’s throat even if our kids are clawing at our ankles. Or it could mean, I am married and so everything that is sexual between us is clinically dead. It’s hamburger meat at the restaurant where you work. Our passion would not be roused if you stepped on its tail in your prom heels. We pay bills together and occasionally share a late-night talk show, if the mood strikes.
Oh, she writes; then she looks around the room, though she doesn’t necessarily wish for anything to be different at all.
Like any young girl who has a crush on someone older, she doesn’t know what she wants to happen. She doesn’t know if she wants sex or no sex or to undress in her room while he watches from the sidewalk. Mostly she just wants a small suggestion of excitement. An anonymous bouquet left on a doorstep.
Later that night, after the cookout, Lina and Ed were lying on the living room floor, talking. Everyone else was asleep around the house or in tents outside. After a bit, she pretended to be asleep because she didn’t want to do anything with him. He bent over and said, Good night, and kissed her forehead. He didn’t know anything about her. When she got up to leave the next morning there was a Post-it on the windshield of her car. On it was Ed’s phone number and a note saying to call him if she wanted.
She’d been asked out only twice in college. Not by anyone she liked. Nobody at Indiana University knew about what had happened to her in high school, but it must have been that the stink was on her. Certainly, she could smell it on herself. That day was sunny and bright, school was letting out, and she was moving out of her house and into her friend’s place for the summer, so she felt free and the promise of a date was inviting. She tucked the note into her pocket and drove home.
The engagement came easily, without fanfare. Lina went from barely having had a boyfriend to having a husband.
ooof
Everyone thinks, you lose weight, you are going to have a ton of sex. Yes, the trainer said, your sex drive spikes. But there’s something else that happens that’s basically the inverse. It’s almost an epidemic.
He said he can see it coming immediately. For the women especially. They lose all this weight. Their husbands are either jealous or nonplussed. The woman gets all dolled up for the one date night she manages to scrounge out of the man. He forgets to tell her she looks beautiful. Monday, she goes to the gym. Five guys are like, You look great! Holy shit. Amanda. You are smoking.
You can almost do it by the numbers. You lose twenty pounds, you get ten compliments a week, that’s nine more than your partner has given you in a month. It’s the high-five moments from other people that break down the relationship. The trainer says he could have a checklist and predict the day the woman decides to leave.
Then one night Ed with his scientific face rejects her for the hundredth time and she looks at her calendar and she sees that the last time they had sex was about a month and a half prior. Forty days of nothing, not kissing or touching. If it had been near Lent she might have hoped it was a quiet Christly sacrifice. But it was October and he had not touched her for all of that month and most of September. But the house went on and the chores went on and the doctor’s appointments went on. Everything else went on. She felt life slipping. She felt that her body was being wasted, that her heart was resting like a steak on a cutting board. And that’s when the panic attacks began. She started to have about two a day. One right when she wakes up when she feels she can’t breathe, and the second at lunchtime because it means there’s a whole second part of the day to live. She started to pick at her face. She would have a nervous moment and walk into the bathroom and press her torso up against the Corian lip of the vanity so she could get her skin up close to the mirror and she would excavate tiny moon craters on her soft, pretty face.
Lina has lived an entire lifetime between her first kiss with Aidan and this kiss with Aidan. She has gotten married and had two children and more than one golden retriever has died and she has peeled four thousand garlic cloves. But the whole time it’s as though she has been a sleeping beauty in between these two kisses.
[...] It goes on for a long while and she loses her self-consciousness not completely but enough to enjoy sex for the first real time ever. She cannot believe how good it feels, how much even as she is losing herself in the moment she is concurrently feeling every inch of her soul waking up and smiling up at God, for the very first time grateful to be alive.
Now Lina gets these pains, and she believes in her clearer moments that the pains are the heartaches of the past, of being lonely for eleven years. Of being raped. Of being lonely her whole life. She knows there are women out there whose husbands don’t want to fuck them or French-kiss them. And they will understand her. But a lot of people will tell her to shut up, to be happy with her children and her nice house. She and Ed even have a generator in case of storms.
:')
In the car he’s cockier than usual. As a teacher, she decides, he’s far nicer. He’s never entirely tender—even at his warmest, he exudes the pale sweetness of a cashew—but now he is armed and cool. Getting into the car has triggered an acute shift; she goes from feeling half woman and half child to feeling like a toddler. They’re talking and there’s no music on. The roads of Fargo are flung ahead like foreign airstrips. Maggie experiences a distinct feeling of doom. It’s normal, when you’re this close to thrall, to worry over losing it. This is nothing like what she felt for Mateo. With Knodel, it’s this thing that’s been building—has it been building since she was a freshman?—so it’s that much more important because of its history. Also, because of the quality of his person. He’s top-shelf. Being with him, she feels her own stock rise. She visualizes an actual accumulation of wealth. At the same time, she feels that she isn’t good enough.
:(
The best part of her whole life happens next. He slows to a stop on a quiet street, parks his wife’s car at the curb of a house with no lights on, and just looks at her. He does it for ten seconds, maybe less. In those seconds, every bad thing she has ever thought about herself is erased, and she feels like a supermodel.
[...] Why am I living this life? What’s the point of lying down in that bed every night? And I said if it gets to three months, I’m leaving.
And then it was three months, and Lina became—not overnight, because it had been coming for years, but overnight it rose from under her flesh up to the surface—a woman who wasn’t going to be forgotten. She wasn’t going to be her sisters, fading into the shit greens and browns of winter Indiana. She wasn’t going to be every woman who has children and then cares for them and the house and has hobbies like pottery but nothing that feeds her otherwise.
So as in a fairy tale one morning she wakes up and her skin is a different tone. Like the chicken stegosauruses in the clean oven, she has gone from yellow to brown. She is possessed of self. All the pain from growing up, of being told she wasn’t good enough, followed by marrying a man who felt like a cylinder, something to pass a life through without any accumulation of wisdom or inspiration. All those evenings watching him and his friends drink beer and talk about nothing and not touch her so what is the damn point of throwing all those beer cans for all those useless men into the garbage. What is the point of anything. What is the point of washing all his underwear. For a man who makes no decisions. For a man who does not even decide on the route of his day. All of that was shedding off like the weight she lost. Pounds of years. Pounds of desperation.