I am driving home. I have just dropped the girls off at D’s still-new-to-me place, just a few minutes’ away.
I turn right on Canal Street. I complete the turn and think Root Canal Street as I turn off my blinker.
This will take time. I feel cored, like an apple.
As I pass the Getty Station, two workers are talking, loudly. I hear one of them through my open passenger side window. He says, “Boy, if they only knew they had it made, hah?”
I wonder who they are talking about, if anyone knows when they have it made.
*****
Sophie is working hard on wiggling out a loose tooth. Last night she came to me in the bathroom, shaking, with bloody fingers.
“I feel all weird,” she said. “All shaky.”
“Your tooth?”
“Yeah. I tried to get it out with a marker.”
“Maybe wash your hands, and get back into bed? Maybe don’t touch it again tonight, if you can? At least not with your fingers?”
She said, “It’s really hard not to.”
I said, “I know. I really know. Just wash your hands, okay?”
The last time she lost a tooth (by her own force) she went deathly pale and began shaking uncontrollably, as if going into shock. My mom and I had piled her high with blankets and a hot water bottle.
It does not stop her from working hard on getting rid of this next tooth in line. This is the little girl who said to me the other day: “Let’s continue our deadly game.”
She does not shy away from the dark side, this one. She is convinced that a tiger is her totem guide, because she is losing only bottom teeth, and she dreams often of tigers. She is sure she is growing tiger fangs.
*****
Life, love — it all seems like a deadly game to me now. I say this without melodrama. I say this simply, with little hope, and equally little fanfare.
There is a divorce epidemic, I am now convinced. It is spreading like wildfire, like the plague. This morning, I bring coffee and donuts and children to his place. The four of us eat breakfast at his counter. When the girls run off to play, D and I talk about this epidemic, about all the couples we know who are splitting. We speak in hushed, amazed tones, although we too have been claimed by this plague.
I want to reach out and touch his familiar stubbly cheek, to say something of meaning, of substance. The words come and go in my head. They chase each other around in circles, trying to form just the right sentence, some gift to offer.
I can’t figure out what is too much. I always feel like I say too much, or too little. I can never find the middle ground I am looking for. Life feels short and painful and bloody, although D and I have a knack for staunching blood before it flows.
There are no words for what I want to tell him. I give up. I find my dirty pink sandals and slip them back on.
We head downstairs, as a family, to the art gallery.
I am proud of the work he is doing. He has made some very beautiful 3D pieces of late, and he and Sophie exhibited their pieces together in a salon of 3D work. Hers: a stuffed abstract bear made from soft floral blue cloth, hand-sewn and stuffed by her. “Clara,” she named her. “NFS,” the plaque reads. His: lovely batik puppets, koi fish and cranes. Also “NFS.” Of course they are not for sale. Who could part with such treasures? These animals will all live in harmony at David’s.
I am proud of them both. I am happy that Sophie is getting this opportunity to be a recognized, valued artist among adults. She is the youngest exhibitor ever at this gallery, and I am thrilled for her. David is not the youngest exhibitor, but I am thrilled for him too, to share this light-filled space and this experience with his firstborn.
Today he will take them to a local pond, and I will not see them for a few days. Today, I will have a phone interview and try to figure out what the universe would like me to do. I will try very hard not to think too much.
I imagine that D wonders what my life looks like now, but I don’t expect him to let on that he wonders. I wonder what his life looks like now. I see some puzzle pieces when I drop off the girls, but there are things I will never know. This is what one gives up, succumbing to divorce, releasing into the wild a love you once were sure you had made.
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