AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE
OCTOBER 21, 2011
– Diary entry –
Nick’s mom is dead. I haven’t been able to write because Nick’s mom is dead, and her son has come unmoored. Sweet, tough Maureen. She was up and moving around until days before she died, refusing to discuss any sort of slowdown. ‘I just want to live until I can’t anymore,’ she said. She’d gotten into knitting caps for other chemo patients (she herself was done done done after one round, no interest in prolonging life if it meant ‘more tubes’), so I’ll remember her always surrounded by bright knots of wool: red and yellow and green, and her fingers moving, the needles click-clacking while she talked in her contented-cat voice, all deep, sleepy purr.
And then one morning in September she woke but didn’t really wake, didn’t become Maureen. She was a bird-sized woman overnight, that fast, all wrinkles and shell, her eyes darting around the room, unable to place anything, including herself. So then came the hospice, a gently lit, cheerful place with paintings of women in bonnets and rolling hills of bounty, and snack machines, and small coffees. The hospice was not expected to fix her or help her but just to make sure she died comfortably, and just three days later, she did. Very matter-of-fact, the way Maureen would have wanted it (although I’m sure she would have rolled her eyes at that phrase: the way Maureen would have wanted it).
Her wake was modest but nice – with hundreds of people, her look-alike sister from Omaha bustling by proxy, pouring coffee and Baileys and handing out cookies and telling funny stories about Mo. We buried her on a gusty, warm morning, Go and Nick leaning in to each other as I stood nearby, feeling intrusive. That night in bed, Nick let me put my arms around him, his back to me, but after a few minutes he got up, whispered, ‘Got to get some air,’ and left the house.
His mother had always mothered him – she insisted on coming by once a week and ironing for us, and when she was done ironing, she’d say, ‘I’ll just help tidy,’ and after she’d left, I’d look in the fridge and find she’d peeled and sliced his grapefruit for him, put the pieces in a snap-top container, and then I’d open the bread and discover all the crusts had been cut away, each slice returned half naked. I am married to a thirty-four-year-old man who is still offended by bread crusts.
But I tried to do the same those first weeks after his mom passed. I snipped the bread crusts, I ironed his T-shirts, I baked a blueberry pie from his mom’s recipe. ‘I don’t need to be babied, really, Amy,’ he said as he stared at the loaf of skinned breads. ‘I let my mom do it because it made her happy, but I know you don’t like that nurturing stuff.’
So we’re back to black squares. Sweet, doting, loving Nick is gone. Gruff, peeved, angry Nick is back. You are supposed to lean on your spouse in hard times, but Nick seems to have gone even further away. He is a mama’s boy whose mama is dead. He doesn’t want anything to do with me.
He uses me for sex when he needs to. He presses me against a table or over the back of the bed and fucks me, silent until the last few moments, those few quick grunts, and then he releases me, he puts a palm on the small of my back, his one gesture of intimacy, and he says something that is supposed to make it seem like a game: ‘You’re so sexy, sometimes I can’t control myself.’ But he says it in a dead voice.
Quiz: Your husband, with whom you once shared a wonderful sex life, has turned distant and cold – he only wants sex his way, on his time. You:
a) Withhold sex further – he’s not going to win this game!
b) Cry and whine and demand answers he’s not yet ready to give, further alienating him.
c) Have faith that this is just a bump in a long marriage – he is in a dark place – so try to be understanding and wait it out.
Answer: C. Right?
It bothers me that my marriage is disintegrating and I don’t know what to do. You’d think my parents, the double psychologists, would be the obvious people to talk to, but I have too much pride. They would not be good for marital advice: They are soul mates, remember? They are all peaks, no valleys – a single, infinite burst of marital ecstasy. I can’t tell them I am screwing up the one thing I have left: my marriage. They’d somehow write another book, a fictional rebuke in which Amazing Amy celebrated the most fantastic, fulfilling, bump-free little marriage ever … because she put her mind to it.
But I worry. All the time. I know I’m already too old for my husband’s tastes. Because I used to be his ideal, six years ago, and so I’ve heard his ruthless comments about women nearing forty: how pathetic he finds them, overdressed, out at bars, oblivious to their lack of appeal. He’d come back from a night out drinking, and I’d ask him how the bar was, whatever bar, and he’d so often say: ‘Totally inundated by Lost Causes,’ his code for women my age. At the time, a girl barely in her thirties, I’d smirked along with him as if that would never happen to me. Now I am his Lost Cause, and he’s trapped with me, and maybe that’s why he’s so angry.
I’ve been indulging in toddler therapy. I walk over to Noelle’s every day and I let her triplets paw at me. The little plump hands in my hair, the sticky breath on my neck. You can understand why women always threaten to devour children: She is just to eat! I could eat him with a spoon! Although watching her three children toddle to her, sleep-stained from their nap, rubbing their eyes while they make their way to Mama, little hands touching her knee or arm as if she were home base, as if they knew they were safe … it hurts me sometimes to watch.
Yesterday I had a particularly needful afternoon at Noelle’s, so maybe that’s why I did something stupid.
Nick comes home and finds me in the bedroom, fresh from a shower, and pretty soon he is pushing me against the wall, pushing himself inside me. When he is done and releases me, I can see the wet kiss of my mouth against the blue paint. As he sits on the edge of the bed, panting, he says, ‘Sorry about that. I just needed you.’
Not looking at me.
I go to him and put my arms around him, pretending what we’d just done was normal, a pleasant marital ritual, and I say, ‘I’ve been thinking.’
‘Yeah, what’s that?’
‘Well, now might be the right time. To start a family. Try to get pregnant.’ I know it’s crazy even as I say it, but I can’t help myself – I have become the crazy woman who wants to get pregnant because it will save her marriage.
It’s humbling, to become the very thing you once mocked.
He jerks away from me. ‘Now? Now is about the worst time to start a family, Amy. You have no job—’
‘I know, but I’d want to stay home with the baby anyway at first—’
‘My mom just died, Amy.’
‘And this would be new life, a new start.’
He grips me by both arms and looks me right in the eye for the first time in a week. ‘Amy, I think you think that now that my mom is dead, we’ll just frolic back to New York and have some babies, and you’ll get your old life back. But we don’t have enough money. We barely have enough money for the two of us to live here. You can’t imagine how much pressure I feel, every day, to fix this mess we’re in. To fucking provide. I can’t handle you and me and a few kids. You’ll want to give them everything you had growing up, and I can’t. No private schools for the little Dunnes, no tennis and violin lessons, no summer homes. You’d hate how poor we’d be. You’d hate it.’
‘I’m not that shallow, Nick—’
‘You really think we’re in a great place right now, to have kids?’
It is the closest we’ve gotten to discussing our marriage, and I can see he already regrets saying something.
‘We’re under a lot of pressure, baby,’ I say. ‘We’ve had a few bumps, and I know a lot of it is my fault. I just feel so at loose ends here …’
‘So we’re going to be one of those couples who has a kid to fix their marriage? Because that always works out so well.’
‘We’ll have a baby because—’
His eyes go dark, canine, and he grabs me by the arms again.
‘Just … No, Amy. Not right now. I can’t take one more bit of stress. I can’t handle one more thing to worry about. I am cracking under the pressure. I will snap.’
For once I know he’s telling the truth.