
Pumping my legs higher, higher, my feet scrape the painfully blue October sky. As the day gathers itself down, my shoes slice through the gnarled crowns of pines now brushed with gold. The swing’s momentum carries my body upward, rising weightless, the smell of the rusted chains filling my mouth with a tang like fresh blood. Then I am free-falling, my arc yanked back from flight by the chains. The scents of seaweed, salt air, and ripe fish rise up from the harbor, settling in the air between us. I look over. He swings next to me, slightly out of sync, a discordant note in our movement.
His eyes are sea green flecked with gold, and my breath hitches as I hold his gaze, a quick sharpness in my chest as I inhale. A single gold band cuts into my finger as I grip the chain links, and my heels gouge the sand to slow my next ascent and check the next wild fall.
A curtain of hair conceals my eyes as they linger on him, on the ragged tear in the side of his sneaker with its sole unevenly worn and yellowed, and I muse that his soul seems old, too. His feet skitter and grind the sand, digging fresh scuff marks in old ruts, reshaping our rhythm until we drift freely together. Until, slowly, all movement ceases.
I turn toward him, resolving to leave before any lines are crossed. I see only gold flashing in sea green as he leans forward, tentatively touching his lips to mine. I fall.
I kneel before the toilet in the church’s basement. I feel the cool concrete through my silk stockings, now snagged on a few rough edges. I hike up the billow of white satin and tuck it behind me before retching again, the taste of bile like goldenrod in my mouth. A ring of rust lines the porcelain bowl; I force my eyes away from the swirl of gall, settling on the pitted plumbing fixtures, musing that something as soft as water can slowly eat away at materials once so hard and white, stain them forever a dull, dead red.
The smell of stale coffee wafts from the fellowship hall, reminding me that this is a holy place, where people repent then drink bitter fluids together. The stink of coffee and bile intrudes on notes of flowers, amber, vetiver: White Linen, his favorite perfume, a perfume which doesn’t suit me, but I wear for him, for today, and then, my GOD, another wave of nausea crests and curls inside me. I clutch the sides of the bowl, my knuckles white.
My older sister hunches behind me, single-handedly keeping the parachuting gown off the floor without pitching us both into the toilet. She keeps her impatience mostly in check, except for her quick, sharp huffs. I know that sound, our mother’s sound. She holds my dress, but not my hair; today, its wildness is pulled back and twisted, pinned into a French knot at the back of my neck, errant strands tamed and crunchy with shellac. With one hand, she absently soothes the baby’s breath in my hair with there-there pats.
Beneath the unforgiving fabric, my corset pins everything where it should be, but my lungs can’t expand, and suddenly I can’t draw enough air into myself. I am panting, my breaths shallow. Rivulets of sweat trickle down my neck and collarbone, and collect in the valley between my breasts. A neck he had loved to touch, to smell, before the White Linen. I hear the first gentle strains of Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” and pray the organist plays it on loop while I devise an exit strategy.
I push away from the bowl, rocking onto my heels in my slippery satin pumps, and raise my eyes towards the dropped ceiling, covered in irregular brown stains. One patch resembles a rabbit, and I want to become the rabbit, to flee this basement, this life. Squeezing my eyes shut, I scan my memory for a door that won’t lead me past our friends and family quietly suffocating in the stark white nave above.
Grieg’s “Wedding Day at Troldhaugen” will soon follow Bach, then I will hold my father’s arm and step-pause-step-pause down an aisle festooned with flowers, bordered by expectant faces (some joyous, many skeptical), all gathered to behold my unlikely metamorphosis as I submit, committing myself to this existence as Wife. Again.
And I will vow to set him as a seal upon my heart, a seal upon my arm, and I will promise not to be a noisy gong or clanging cymbal, but angel-tongued, even when I am right, and I know that I am right more often than he allows.
And I will wear this perfume that does not suit me for all the days of my life. And yea, though I am left unsated in a sticky puddle, forsaking all others, I will become a vessel for his well-mannered spawn, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end, Amen.
Yes, I will say these words, I think, but I know my vows are more… aspirations. I lunge forward to heave one last time, then drag the back of my hand across my mouth, belatedly remembering: lipstick.
I hoist myself and my voluminous skirts off the floor, and my sister half-embraces me, her ever-busy arms enveloping me in protection, and a kind of blessing.
I step around her to pause before the chipped mirror hanging above the sink, inspecting for damage – eyes clear, mascara intact, lipstick now smudged around the edges. I twist the spigot and let the water run until it is cool. Then I slurp a handful into my mouth, washing away the lingering taste of gall.
Pressing my damp hands to my neck and chest, I smooth everything back into place. My sister pumps the paper towel dispenser, passes me a rough square, then unexpectedly pulls from her bra a tube of dusty-rose lip gloss, still warm from her body. I apply it in silence, cleaning the edges of my lips with the side of my pinky, then wipe the excess onto the mottled paper towel.
In the mirror’s reflection, I see her as she fluffs the white train of my gown back into shape, steps away to survey her work, then nods in approval. As the first notes of Grieg begin, she turns without speaking and steps towards the stairs leading up to the nave, then pauses expectantly when I do not follow. She does not look back. I bow my head, expelling the contents of my lungs until I am empty. Drawing myself upright with a deep inhalation of musty air, I raise my eyes to the stiff figure of my sister as she ascends the stairs. I follow, a hint of White Linen in my wake.
A wave of vertigo, of teetering on the edge of a precipice before surrendering to freefall, only to be yanked out of the dream. Drafts of messages, deleted too many times. A verified address and phone number, methodically cross-referenced over too many years, tracing him from location to location. Do, or do not. You don’t get credit for the try, do you?
The glass glows amber in my hand. The small-batch bourbon offers initial spice but settles into a vanilla that doesn’t suit my taste, or the lingering burn that lies just beneath the surface. A memory surfaces of a Millay sonnet I once read to him. “We talk of taxes, and I call you friend…” I consider commenting on the distillery, taxes, anything to fill the silence. But I sense Millay’s subtle weeds in my head as I struggle to stay in the moment, so I redirect. I imagine a fault line in the glass, an imperfection that will react to the heat of my hand, causing the glass to break: failure mode and effect. Not a dramatic shattering with razor-thin shards flying out, but two or three distinct chunks, still sharp enough to slice into my skin and merge into a rivulet of blood pulsing down my wrist and into my sleeve. Will I let myself bleed out, or cut and run as I usually do? Anything to escape this scene mostly intact.
I must appear calm, even nonchalant, but I place the glass on the table between us with a little more force than I intend. I fidget with the paper napkin anchored by the bourbon, corners curling as I absently rub them into organic shapes, curling until there is no natural oil left in my fingertips. My heart is beating too fast. What if it explodes and I die right here, after waiting for so long to see him again? He is close enough that I can hear his breath, smell that same shampoo, and I stifle the urge to touch him.
This was a mistake. I never imagined he would answer, and since he would never answer, perhaps I could finally put it all to rest. At least I had tried (and you get credit for the try, don’t you?) But he is here, and what now? I didn’t think that far ahead, never formulated a plan, or an exit strategy, just as I didn’t have one then. For someone so familiar with leaving, I never seem to manage a graceful exit.
“I’ve never stopped thinking about you.” I don’t know why I say it. I could swear I’d only thought it, but it is out there in the world. Any hope of casual conversation about the origin of the whiskey, or talk of taxes, or what have you been up to these past few decades since I broke your world, is gone. We are set on a trajectory I cannot alter.
“Three husbands and how many years, and you can still say that with a straight face?” This is what I assume he has said, if not something more damning, but I’m not actually listening. I’m too horrified at having spoken at all. Inside, I beat my breast and chant, “Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.”
I remember burrowing my face into his neck and his hair, hair always in need of a trim, drunk on the scents of his hair and his sweat and the salt air. Later, I ask a lover to find a new shampoo when its scent brings me back to those stolen months so long ago. Ocean waves curl and break in a muted green, green like his eyes, and I will never be with another man with eyes that color because I will weep to remember him.
I see again the childlike joy on his face as I put the final stitches to a smoky grey wizard robe, just in time for Halloween. The next day, his eyes shift from golden green to grey in the harsh fluorescent lights of the classroom as he playfully casts a spell over me. The origins of his garb are just another secret we share, how he had used the silken rope of the belt to bind my wrists only yesterday. Counterpoint to his mage, I am done up as a vampire, restored to some semblance of life by his blood and magic, hungry for the rush that has awakened in me.
Waves of wanting carry me through countless lovers, yet even now, I feel a sharp twinge when I think of him. Flashes of limbs entangled in my basement apartment, both our time and the space overtaken by the whispered words of Millay and Neruda, my wedding band tucked out of sight. A semester of trysts, my eyes scanning every hallway yet increasingly unable to meet his gaze in class, sensing that others are aware, though they never say.
When the whispers begin, he takes a girlfriend as a cover, and I am wild with jealousy when I see them kiss in the hallway outside my classroom. How do I reconcile this rage with the ring I still wear? Then the conversation that begins the end: No, this is ridiculous, I cannot be your date to a school dance, how do you not understand the stakes, there is danger in this. I plead with him, this is wrong, and this is inappropriate, and I will lose my job and every job after this. In desperation, I speak in the voice of an adult as to a child, and I tell him firmly we are done but MY GOD every word I utter brings gall to my tongue, because it is all a lie and I need him so much that I would cast aside my career and my marriage and my entire world just to be with him.
After this, he ditches class often (I never write him up), and he passes with a respectable grade (I am the responsible one). He meets my eyes with intention before he kisses his girlfriend in the hallway outside my classroom, and I look away in shame and despair. She looks at me with a smugness I would not imagine in a teenage girl. And when I meet with a therapist many years later, the only question I ask is, “What are you obligated to report?” Yet it takes a full year of fifty-minute sessions before I can talk about it. Then I breathe again, just a little, because FACT: he had reached the age of consent in the state where these events took place and (although it was total mess of unprofessionalism) IT WAS NOT ILLEGAL (so I will not be arrested, though perhaps running for public office is now off the table) but that doesn’t make it much easier for me to sleep.
Some years after our ending, we find ourselves working in the same building, two adults riding the same train into the city, and the chasm between us seems narrower. We could almost span a rope bridge between the edges and cross over. I am divorced now, but not single: I am planning a wedding, and my life is… uncomplicated. The embers begin to catch, but our lives are out of time with each other once again. When his National Guard unit is called up, his only request is this: “Promise me you won’t marry him until I come home.” I promise, of course I promise.
Months pass and I have exhausted all reasonable excuses for delay in setting a date. I cave under the pressure, and my wedding day finds me paralyzed with dread and hope in equal parts. Before the ceremony, I kneel in the church basement with my sister holding the train of my gown as I vomit. She assures me it is nerves, all brides are nervous, she’d been nervous, too, what’s all the fuss? I have never told her – or anyone – about him, so she would never understand my despair. She doesn’t have secrets like mine, good people don’t. Does he even know that I am getting married today? Small town gossip, everyone knew we had been lovers against all odds and against all sense of propriety, and surely someone would have told him, or was I supposed to do that myself? Is he already in the church? When the pastor asks if anyone objects, will he stand up from my side of the congregation? Or will he burst into the nave at the very moment when that challenge is uttered? Is that what I want? I wait patiently for the proceedings to be interrupted. He will come, he has to come. And yet, he does not. I think of Buttercup, bemused that Westley had not appeared to stop her marriage to Prince Humperdink, but no, we saw that movie together, huddled in a dark theater out of town and hoping not to be seen (we were seen, of course we were seen), so he must remember what his part is. But he does not come, and so he does not speak out and claim me as his alone. I don’t know whether to feel relief or despair.
As I kiss my new husband before God and family, I sentence myself to my new life in atonement for my sins. I begin the work of methodically deconstructing myself, compartmentalizing the bits that are at risk, quarantining them for later review like suspected nonconforming product – that is, until I can no longer bear the growing void inside me. Then I know I will run again.
“How could you marry him? You said you would wait for me.” His words of reproach jolt me back to the present. How, indeed? Hadn’t I promised?
Now we sit in this dim bar, considering our next move. I want to cling to the darkness where I can’t see the ocean in his eyes, but we step outside, down into the cooling sand below. A wave of despair wells in me, and I try to apologize, for not waiting, for the long years of wishing I had never run. Of faithlessness, hopelessness, and love, these three, which is the greatest sin for my confession?
We find ourselves trudging through the sand again, as we had long ago. “I miss being in love. I miss the madness of it.” The madness of it – I feel it along every nerve in my body, the madness that makes me forsake all others in my heart. The years of scanning every crowd looking for him, searching every corner of the internet, following his trail from one base to another till I finally see a home. Yet we are here now, and the electricity remains, facing the wind and the water in this golden October sunlight under a sky so blue it hurts to look at it for too long.
I reach across the void, and my fingertips brush his cheek. He didn’t have that coarse stubble back then. Of course he didn’t, he was hardly a man then, and I have chased a ghost across seas and time. His eyes are edged with fine lines, but the golden green of the sea is still there. He doesn’t recoil at my touch, but places his hand on mine, pressing it to him as his fingers slip into my hair and cup the back of my neck.
Still consumed by memory, I consider unmaking my carefully curated world. I search for him in the ether and find a few traces: brief mentions of his service in the Gulf War. A current photo in a baseball cap, the hometown logo nearly eviscerating me. A residential address in a southern state that may or may not also include a woman several years my senior, marital status unknown. A phone number.
I wait, and I yearn. But I do nothing.
Sebastian Garat CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons