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.
No more, she says.
That night, Lina makes dinner as always and puts the children to bed as always and then suggests to Ed that they go out to the hot tub. He says, Sure, perhaps because the way she asks is definitive.
All the while Lina is thinking, This is it. You will grow a pair, Lina, and do what you need to do for yourself. Quit being lonely and unhappy.
Her new body gets in first, and Ed follows. Her head isn’t foggy, she is thinking clearly for the first time in such a long time. You’re thirty-two years old, she says to herself. Your life is going by quickly. If you wait till you’re fifty-two when the children are all grown up, the chances that you will meet someone will be lower.
She’s sick of constantly missing opportunities for joy. She thinks of a growing season, knows that if you miss the month of March for planting mustard greens, you have to wait a whole year to plant them. That you have to buy them in a grocery store and anyway you won’t find them in Indiana, not easily. Many people in her town don’t love green vegetables. They value corn and fast foods and fried things and if they cook vegetables it’s to death.
Think of all the times you have walked around naked and he hasn’t even looked up from his stupid magazine. You wanted to punch him in the face. The bitter rage, so visceral you could taste it in your mouth. How can you not kiss me? You have to do something about this, Lina. You have to, before it’s too late.
She takes a deep suck of the air that is strangling her and then she says, Ed. And as she says his name she knows this is something you don’t do, not here in Liberty Junction, not back on her old street, not in this family, not in her first family. This is not the path the world chose for her but goddamnit, no. She says, Ed.
Ed, she says. I want a separation.
Maggie
For days there is utter darkness. Maggie doesn’t tell a soul. In fact, she cannot tell a soul. She takes all the pain and holds it inside, a long cool piece of obsidian the length and shape of her body. She imagines death as the only freedom available.
Even if she could tell a friend, she knows that nobody would understand. Because with a breakup of this magnitude, others might think there would be a release in it, an escape from the prison of being coupled, of being so obsessed with your partner that you can’t enjoy the mindless organization of laundry day. But the opposite is true. Maggie’s prison is the entire outside world. It’s the largest prison and she may go anywhere she wants. She may fly to Mexico, sleep on the sand, and fuck anyone who comes along. She can win the lottery, become pregnant. The irony is that she wants none of this. She wants to be within the only fourteen hundred cubic inches of bone where she isn’t allowed to go.
She doesn’t question why it’s only he who gets to decide. She understands that now she has no voice.
After the call is over, she vomits