a very different light—but they had found a way of making it work.
While she was married Daff would have told you they had a great marriage, but she knows that Richard would not have looked for someone else, would not have been able to fall in love with another woman, if that had been the case. Partly she thinks they got married too young—neither of them had had enough time to sow their wild oats, and partly they had become complacent. They took one another for granted, and she can admit now that she missed affection. Intimacy. Sharing things.
She and Richard had never had the sort of relationship where they would kiss, or cuddle, or hold hands. It felt, she can see this now, more like a business relationship that worked, even sex becoming a transaction.
What had happened to the loving, excitable, affectionate girl Daff had always been? She told herself, while she was married, that this was a real relationship, this was what grown-ups did, this was how she was supposed to behave, and it was only afterward that it began to occur to her that she had simply been with the wrong man. A man she liked enormously, but a man who wasn’t her true partner in any way.
Dating. The very word filled her with dread. She didn’t think she would ever be ready for dating, but almost as soon as she was single, people started wanting to fix her up. Good Lord, she thought, who are all these single men supposed to be in my town, where everyone seems to be married?
Some of the married couples she and Richard had known were still friends, but many of them were not. She had always assumed, while married, that newly divorced women were a threat, which is why they always complained that they had been abandoned by their still-married friends, but now she understands that she is a threat for different reasons: if her own marriage, her marriage which appeared to be so perfect, could come apart so easily, what did it say about theirs?
The dissolution of her marriage seemed discomforting for many, raising uncomfortable questions about their own relationships that they weren’t ready to ask, so when she stopped being invited to events she would always have been invited to with Richard, she accepted it.
During those early months she had often felt lost, hadn’t wanted to go anywhere, see anyone. She remembers a newly single divorcée at work saying the hidden blessing of divorce was she got to have every other weekend off from the kids, and one night a week to go out and have fun.
Fun? What does that mean? Daff didn’t know. She would go to bed and sleep away her depression—sleeping pills prescribed by her concerned doctor knocking her out until midday.
The weekends when Jess was away were the hardest. Not easy when Jess was there, with Jess already blaming Daff, but when she was with her father, Daff had no idea what to do with herself. She would drive over to friends’ houses, the lone single woman, and the husbands tried to act as if it were normal that Daff would be there without Richard, without Jess, while their own children—many of whom had grown up with Jess, were friends with her—played in swimming pools and followed their parents’ advice not to ask Daff about Jess.
She spent the entire weekend in bed a few times. Watching television, gossip shows, home-decorating shows, the food network, over and over, drifting in and out of sleep, unable to answer the phone or the doorbell.
She doesn’t know when she started to feel normal again, but at some point she did, and finalizing the divorce gave her closure, enabled her to truly move on. She had heard of some people throwing “divorce showers,” celebrating when the decree nisi came through, but she felt a deep sadness on the day of her divorce, sitting in the courtroom with Richard, both of them having shared so much, having created a life, a child, both of them now feeling like strangers.
The train rumbles along the tracks as Daff buries herself in her book. She loves this journey, has started coming into the city once every couple of weeks, to see a play, go to a museum, visit friends. All the things she used to love doing before she got married, before she got buried in suburban life—being home to get Jess off the bus, PTA meetings, school plays.