Because people in my family didn’t get divorced. My parents’ marriage hadn’t been any great love story, but they had stuck it out together. I couldn’t think of anyone who had gotten divorced. The apocryphal stories I had heard always involved some dramatic circumstance—a mistress, a secret bank account in the Cayman Islands, a gambling addiction, alcoholism. No one else gets to upend their entire life just because they are unhappy. Why should I?
Anyway, I didn’t know where I would go if I left. It would be better, I thought, to stay with him, to have him leave the bathroom scale pointedly in the middle of the floor when I let myself slip, to continue to wear the disguise of the perfect society wife I had put on to impress him. It would be better than whatever lonely uncertainty lay out there.
After all, it had been my choice to marry him. It had been my choice even though my reasons weren’t the best: because I was tired of being lonely, because I wanted to please my parents, because life looked like a gigantic game of musical chairs and I was sure the music would stop at any moment and everyone would see I didn’t have a partner.
And, at least at the beginning, I had seen so many other advantages to marrying Phillip. For instance, I had always wanted a sister. So when Phillip told me he had two sisters, I was absolutely over the moon. Here it was. Here was my family. Here were my sisters. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way. Phillip’s sisters were cool-weather versions of the women I knew in Magnolia, the same frozen hair, in black instead of blond, the same sleeveless shift dresses, in muted solid colors, not summer prints, and they knew I was not one of them.
There was a bond among the three Spencer siblings that felt like a force field; whenever I tried to approach it, I was thrown back. They followed their mother’s example in doting on Phillip to distraction, and there was a sibling connection that I, as an only child, would never understand; the three of them were best friends, so close it would have been impossible to separate them. At the engagement party with Phillip’s family (there were two of everything except the wedding, which meant many, many presents and many, many thank-you notes), a sister clung to each of his arms, accepting the congratulations on my behalf, laughing with the relatives and friends I should have been meeting, basking in the warmth of the family I knew, with growing certainty, I would never fully be able to join. For my part, I spent the majority of that party, ostensibly held in my honor, hiding from Phillip’s mother, drinking far too much red wine, and making sweet, sweet love to a garlicky plate of hummus. But I got to keep all the presents, so I guess I won?
After the wedding, when the photographer’s proofs arrived, there was a whole series of Phillip and his sisters cuddled together in an armchair, laughing, a matched set of dark-haired beauty. Somehow, his sisters’ dresses had remained perfectly unwrinkled. Personally, I had been so terrified of crushing my own dress that from the moment I had put it on, I had refused to sit down, and I had nearly fainted during the receiving line from keeping my knees locked for such a long time.
“When did you take these?” I asked him when we looked at the pictures, running my finger along the edge of the page, as though I could join them by touch.
Phillip leaned over and peered at the page. “In the groom’s room. Before the ceremony.”
“Oh,” I said. At the moment Phillip and his sisters had taken this picture, I was standing silently in the bride’s room, my dress stiff and uncomfortable, my hair pulled back too tightly, the combs of the tiara pressing against my scalp, my mother looking at me critically, the rest of the bridesmaids gathered in a corner drinking a bottle of champagne and laughing.