Pulling up to a stoplight, she pressed her fingers against her temples. “So you’re not going back to Phillip. Is that what you’re saying?”
There was a rawness and honesty to her voice that made my guilt crescendo. She didn’t want me to get a divorce. Everyone would know. Everyone would know I had failed, she had failed. But I couldn’t stay with him. I couldn’t live that way anymore. I hardly knew how I had managed for so long.
“I guess I am.”
She didn’t reply. She unfolded her fingers from around the steering wheel, pressing her palms flat and spreading her fingers wide for a moment before taking hold again.
I spoke to fill the silence, to try to explain, the words tumbling out over themselves. “I was so lonely, and you wanted it so badly, and I thought—I thought it would be my only chance. I knew it was important to you, it was embarrassing I was the only one left. I know you wanted me to get married.”
“It wasn’t an embarrassment. I was worried about you, yes. I’ve always worried about you, Madeleine. You’re so . . . different. And different can be painful.”
I had started to cry, and I was trying hard to control it, keeping my jaw tight, blinking my eyes quickly. Being different, if she had just let me be different, if anyone had let me be different, would have been so much less painful than this, than trying to live up to some impossible standard, to become someone I literally could never be. “I was happy. I think I was happy. The only thing that made me unhappy was that I knew I was letting you down.”
“You haven’t let me down.” She paused for a moment, flexed her hands on the wheel again. We were driving, as my mother did no matter the speed limit, at a steady thirty-five miles per hour, winding through the leafy streets. The houses, grand and quiet, problems hushed and hid away behind hedges and money, sat quietly observing us. “I just don’t think you’re really giving things a try, here, Madeleine. You can’t just give up. You need to see Phillip again. Give things a chance.”
I clenched my jaw, wishing she would listen to me, hear me for once. Clearly it was impossible for my mother to imagine what my life would be like if I divorced Phillip. The women she knew, no matter how miserable they were, didn’t divorce their husbands. Which is how you ended up with someone like Betsy Lynn Chivers, who had spent so long in misery, waiting for her awful husband to die, that she honestly couldn’t remember any other way to be. But I couldn’t picture a different path for me either. Would I move back here, go to committee meetings at Ashley Hathaway’s house, while everyone steered politely around me, giving me just enough berth to know they suspected divorce might be catching? Would I go back to work at Country Day, drafting politely guilt-inducing letters to people who received dozens of those fundraising appeals every day?
Or would I do something new? Would I dive into the Magnolia I had just discovered, this entire world that had existed beyond my peripheral vision for so long, where there were artists and musicians and people who didn’t care what I looked like or whether or not I ate my dessert at lunch and wouldn’t have blinked if I had told them I was going to art school and I didn’t want to get married at all? Would I fall in love with someone like Henry, someone who wanted to feed me rather than starve me, someone who wanted me to paint and dance and be part of things I cared about?
That seemed like a terrifying leap to make without a net.
Because what if I were to leave Phillip, the world my mother had promised would keep me safe, and there was nothing out there? What if no one fell in love with me and I spent the rest of my life alone? What if no one wanted to look at, let alone buy, my paintings? What if painting didn’t fill the hole inside me? What if, without having Sharon or Henry by my side, no one wanted to know me, and I ended up just as lonely as I had been? What if I took a risk and where I landed was no better than how I had been living?
The devil you know, my mother always used to say, is better than the devil you don’t. And what I was thinking of doing was completely unknown. It was the social equivalent of closing my eyes and taking a step off a cliff. But now that I knew what it felt like to be surrounded by life, by laughter and good food and art and the people I wanted to be with, how could I go back to the way things had been, the way I had been?
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