Hilary Fields's Blog, page 5

Monsoonytoons

We had lightning in New York. But it wasn’t something you ever thought about, because in New York you were never the tallest thing around.

In New Mexico it’s entirely possible to be the tallest thing around, even if, like me, you’re just a scooch under five-foot-five. Doubly so if you live in Eldorado, which is about as flat as anything in the Santa Fe area ever gets.

So I’ve gotten up closer and more personal with lightning this past couple years than I ever did in the first thirty-eight of my life.

Last year during that psycho wrath-of-God monsoon, I was driving home in a panic (for one thing, I’d left all the windows open in my house, and for another, it was raining so hard I couldn’t see Old Las Vegas Highway beneath my balding tires), when, just a half mile or so from home, a bolt of the stuff went zapping, Hollywood blockbuster style, right across the road in front of my official-car-of-Santa-Fe Subaru.

Kerpow!

Bright white and jagged, it stitched the air like an angry child’s pen across construction paper, nearly horizontal, no higher than the hood of my SUV. An innocent bush just feet from my front tires disappeared into angry smoke. Moses, I thought, I think I get the astonishment you must have felt. But I was more interested in getting the hell out of Dodge right then than hearing the word of the lord.

I drove home, mopped up the puddles, and smiled to myself at my first true monsoon moment.

This year, I’ve been aching for the rains as do all of us who live here, watching the weather reports, thirsting for something to tamp down the dust and let us know life will be sustainable in the high desert just a little while longer. And last night, as I drove home from the house of a friend in the true darkness you never, ever get to experience in Manhattan, I found myself all alone and electrified as countless flashes illuminated the sky. Again, again, again, while thunder rent the heavens and the wind whipped in all directions. Again, high in the clouds, low on the horizon, seemingly from every corner of the firmament, the sky alight and full of unimaginable force.

I rolled the windows down, smelling ozone, smelling life, and knew again why I moved here.

Tagged: lightning, monsoon, new mexico, rain, santa fe, weather

The Novelist and the Abo Dude: The Things I Do for Verisimilitude

I have never truly been dirty. Ask a few of the men in my past and they may raise a brow at this statement, but I’m talking here about dirt under the nails, twigs in my bra, grit in my ears, and even smoke-blackened boogers.

I’m not the kind of woman who’ll cop a squat on anything but the most manicured grass without a blanket, towel, or jacket between the earth and my bum. I don’t bait fish hooks with squiggly worms, or dream of bivouacking under the stars. Hell, before I took myself out on Cody Lundin’s “The Nothing Course” to learn primitive survival skills, I had never even been camping, except that one time in third grade with my friend’s family in upstate New York, and the time my best friend and I went “car camping” in what amounted to a parking lot in Washington State, complete with coin-op showers and firewood on demand.

I’d never filled my water bottle from a stagnant stream, or seen skeeters and snails in the bottle, shrugged, and dumped in drops of iodine, hoping for the best. I’d never made a tinder bundle, or knapped stone knives, or stripped currant bushes for their barely-ripe berries. I’d never wiped with leaves after a bare-assed piss in the woods. I hadn’t learned to tell time by counting fingers off against the sky, or thought about the rise and set of the moon. I hadn’t been without watch or smart phone since… well, since their invention.

Now I have.

On the Nothing Course, held somewhere in the wilderness near Prescott, AZ, I slept on a litter of leaves, with straw I’d yanked from a meadow stuffed between my shirt and my trusty old LL Bean windbreaker for warmth. A garbage bag filled with more straw and leaves was my only blanket.

It got down to 49 degrees long before the dawn.

I listened to owls and ringtails on that endless, freezing cold night, pressing as close as I dared to the backs of the polite, mostly married men who’d signed up for the course along with me. I would have climbed inside their skins had I not thought it would shock their tender sensibilities. (Aside from Cody, I never heard a single one of them utter profanity. I, on the other hand, was cursing up a storm.) Believe me, by three AM, had a Tauntaun strolled by, I’d have slit that shit wide open with one of the stone knives I’d knapped, and made a nice toasty home inside its guts.

I was at a place where I desperately needed to do something “I’ve never.” I needed newness, and challenge, and to meet people with whom I had nothing in common. (Two of our tribe, including the only other woman, were Doomsday Preppers, decked out in full hunting camo.) I needed to be away from Facebook, and the phone, the stock market, my own obsessive ruminations. On this course I certainly got that, and I didn’t miss them for a moment. I had more immediate concerns, a clear purpose – learn the skills I need to get me through the next thirty-six hours, and work with my fellow humans to achieve success – ie, basic survival.

In this, I had a fabulous instructor.

Cody Lundin is just like he seems on TV on Dual Survival (except that final “behind the scenes” episode, which was a total, feeble hatchet job.) I’m pretty sure I’ve even seen him wearing the exact same outfit on the show, down to braids, bandana, and ankle cuff bracelet (how does that not chafe when you walk?). And yeah, his feet are as gnarly as they’d need to be to take him all over the world unshod.

Cody has such a dearth of bullshit he is, effectively, a bullshit vacuum, sucking the crap from everyone around him. He tells it like it is, tells you what you need to know, and boy, does he know what he’s talking about. Before we left he went over everything from our greatest enemies (hypo-and-hyperthermia) to where and how to poop in the woods. (Thank god our trip was less than two days so I didn’t have to put that knowledge to the test.) He and his fellow instructor Mark, an immensely kind and competent man, taught us everything from tinder bundle techniques to selecting the right switch of willow for our hand-drill fire kits.

I went in with the knowledge that I would be physically uncomfortable and mentally way out of my element. Both of these were accurate. And honestly, up until the last couple hours when my body started to give out in earnest, I didn’t mind at all. I lay in the dirt cheerfully. I let ants and beetles crawl on me and didn’t cringe at every rustle in the brush. (I was, however, grateful to the guy next to me who plucked away a caterpillar that had encroached upon my sleeping area overnight.) I didn’t cavil or complain about what I was asked to do, and I pitched in enthusiastically (or at least as enthusiastically as one can when running on a two-day sleep and calorie deficit, plus dehydration). After all, I was paying for this experience. But it wasn’t just that. I simply didn’t give a flying fuck about all the little discomforts. Dirt under the nails? Eh, whatever. I’ll get a wash soon enough. Nothing to eat? I’m sure there’s a Denny’s back in Prescott, and I can hold out a while longer. No Diet Coke?

Okay, that was a little tough.

I gravitated to the more traditionally feminine tasks (crafting a tinder bundle, making the “ash cake” patties for breakfast), and that bothered me not at all. It did bother me that by the end I was so enervated that I couldn’t stay alert for some of the skills training Cody and Mark offered, no matter how willing my spirit was. I started drifting off during a demonstration of making cordage, which, as a person with a strong interest in the fiber arts, is actually really up my alley. I also couldn’t muster the energy to go on the final activity, a botanical walk where Cody demonstrated the native plants and their uses. I really would have loved to learn that, considering this adventure was for book research, but by then the 95-degree heat, the lack of sleep and food, my tired muscles and the raging headache I’d developed made that inadvisable. (I was, by the way, by no means the only one passing out, or opting out of these last activities.) I mean, I was telling my body to get up, pay attention, go that last mile, but my body simply said “nope!”

I learned that in the zombie apocalypse, I would probably be among the first to go. But then, I knew that already. I’ve accepted that, and it’s really A-okay with me. I wasn’t expecting to be the next Jane in a Tarzan movie. I took the course to learn some things I needed to know for my new novel, but also to feel so far from my element I couldn’t even see it on the horizon.

Was I happy to wash my hands (six times) when I got back to the world? Oh yes. Was I delighted the shower at my cruddy motel was practically a water cannon? Oh hell yes. But I did okay when I had to suck it up. Yes, I was pretty glad when the experience was over, and I could finally have my Diet Coke. But I was even more glad I’d come.

After enduring so much that was hard this past six months, I needed to do something that was hard. I didn’t want to dwell anymore on the horrors of hospice and watching my father lying in the bed groaning for morphine and Valium as the cancer killed him; didn’t want to remember the sheepish but resolved expression in my husband’s kind blue eyes as he asked me for the divorce. The empty house, the mistakes I’ve made in the months since – they all went away for a small space in time. In their place, there was only me, learning to be self-reliant.

Tagged: adventure, book research, camping, Cody Lundin, Prescott AZ, primitive skills, survival skills, wilderness

The Gravity of Grief

In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (more precisely, in Life, the Universe, and Everything), the great science fiction humorist Douglas Adams had a bit about flying that I love for many, many reasons. In my experience, it speaks to the process of writing, and, quite frankly, to just about everything important in life. I paraphrase here, so forgive me if I don’t get it exactly right, but in essence it is this:

“There is an art to flying,” he says, “or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.”

(If you Google around, or, better yet, take the time to read these spectacular novels, you’ll find the longer explanation of this, which is both hilarious and poignant.) Here is a link to the author reading it live. http://youtu.be/W_gz3YHYmMU

What helps you to miss, he says, is to be distracted at the crucial second so thoroughly that you completely forget to hit the ground, and gravity, in turn, forgets about you. Adams’ protagonist, Arthur Dent, discovers the knack of it when, as he is being chased across the hellscape of a desolate planet by a vengeful creature he has karmically wronged, he suddenly, impossibly, catches sight of the tote bag he lost a decade earlier at the Athens airport, back on an Earth which no longer exists.

Today, for me, that glorious bit about flying applies to grief, and the avoidance thereof. Just when I was supposed to hit the ground, bottom out on loss after my dad died and my husband and I split, something came along that was so surprising, so compelling, that instead of smashing face-first into the dirt as was right and proper, I swooped up to dizzying heights, “bobbing and floating,” as Adams put it, “floating and bobbing.” I forgot the ground entirely.

It was amazing. I felt like I could soar forever, dizzyingly happy. I felt I’d got hold of something so giddy I could just spin with the air currents, and laze about on clouds, and laugh at earthbound mortals.

I tried really, really hard to ignore that this was, patently, impossible. Because the problem is, the minute you start to believe in gravity again, gravity believes in you. And you plummet back to earth.

Yeah, that happened.

So now I’ve finally taken the splat I should have taken two months ago. There’s dirt in my teeth, my elbows and knees are raw, rashy scabs, and the wind’s all knocked out of me. I have landed in an unfamiliar country and I don’t know the landmarks. I’m still feeling my limbs to make sure nothing’s broken, and I’m not 100% sure nothing is.

I’m angry at myself for taking this detour when what I needed was to slog through the grief like any sane human. Had I done so, by now I might be in a headspace to write the rest of my novel, or go on cautious, careful little coffee dates, laugh and pull rueful faces and enjoy twilight barbeques with friends on a long summer night.

Or maybe that’s not the way grief works. Maybe the mind, all mischief, deposits that bag you lost on holiday in Greece ten years ago – the bag filled with cracked sunglasses, and crusty swimsuits, and that tin of good olive oil you bought at the airport – onto the ruined wastelands of a planet on the opposite arm of the galaxy (and quite possibly in a parallel universe) from the place where you actually lost it, just at the moment when you’re about to crash-land astoundingly hard on the surface. Maybe it knows you can’t cope with the gravity of grief all in one go, and it gives you the gift of distraction so you’ll have a little respite, some hope, a glimmer of happy things to come.

For Arthur Dent, once he learned the knack of flying, he got better and better at it, until at will he could take to the skies. He learned to come down gently. He even taught his girlfriend Fenchurch the trick of it, and they had many pleasant adventures.

For me, right now in this winded moment, I fear I may never savor that sweet dizzying pleasure again. I may never achieve such another extraordinary uplift. I fear I’ll be this heavy-shod, earth-shackled creature forever.

But maybe, just maybe, when the time is at hand, I might step off exactly the right ledge, in just the right frame of mind, and find myself bobbing gently, tenderly, a few inches above the ground.

Tagged: Arthur Dent, Douglas Adams, flying, grief, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, writing

Happier Trails

Today was the first day I woke up and didn’t want to be carried out of my situation. Didn’t want to be distracted, stultified, or seduced away from what is – and what isn’t – in my life right now.

Didn’t want inappropriate boys, or social media, season finales on my DVR or house listings on Zillow to send me swirling away from the unquiet, restive core of me.

I’ve been making anything and everything my higher power; any chance delight, siren song, or sultry promise – and why not? When all is lost, all crumbles and stumble-stutters to silence, any faint-heard tune sounds like direction, whether it’s new, or all-too painfully familiar.

Today I didn’t want to dance to any old red-shoe ballet. I wanted to look dead-on at the truths I know right now. To wit: my sangfroid has been smashed, and what was light and firmly armored in me during the years of my marriage is all unraveled now. And at the core, the things I liked, loved, made daily bread of – all mean so much nothing.

But that doesn’t mean I spin out of all reckoning, all recognition of my self and self-love, and the smarts I worked so hard to secure over a decade of dedicated recovery. I don’t lose my wits, nor what is deserving in me of care and comfort.

I don’t toss myself into the wind.

I step into it, instead.

Today I took myself out into the sunshine so abundant here in Santa Fe. I let my fair skin freckle and weather brown until my watchband demarcated both time and seared skin against paler, protected flesh. I let the bees buzz in my ears and told Facebook to fuck off, it didn’t need to tell my tale. I drove with windows down and hair whipping stinging strands across my eyes and nineties-era mystery tunes shouting out my car stereo from mix lists made in days I no longer recall even faintly.

I trod trails that, two years prior when I carted up them forty pounds of swallowed sorrow and two hundred twenty of equally unhappy husband, seemed arduous and sere. Today they were full of holiday hikers with grey-muzzled dogs, muscular mountain bikes, modern, moisture-wicking miracle fiber windbreakers and sun hats and Merrell boots and every kind of right to be there. The earth was rich-saturated red with the early monsoon rain that rescued us two days running, the clouds still swollen and piggish with the promise of possibly more.

I felt myself just partly present; my legs strong and lungs up to the task that once winded me. My nose sniffed the strong juniper and piñon scents with gratitude, my eyes touched tenderly upon the agave blooming with rude and robust once-a-year sex spears as my feet sank spongy into that still-giving earth. My mind registered what great good fortune it was to occupy this particular place on earth, yet all the while remained full as well of things I wished it wouldn’t – of people and possibilities and emotions I don’t control.

Still. It was better than I’d hoped for, and a blessing I’ll not forswear for being small.

And when the little electronic iPhone chimes pinged to tell me my diversions still waited, still teased, still threatened to steal what little I do yet know of myself, I wasn’t quite so eager as before to leap upon their call. I wanted to hold on to my center, small and scared as it is.

It may yet be some time before this little life, this solo life, seems good and right and proper; ‘til it has savor and I crave nothing more. I may not want to write lighthearted fiction for a while to come. I may find myself easily bruised, or distracted, or yearn for the false comfort of low-hanging but forbidden fruit.

I will certainly make mistakes.

But today for the first time since the divorce I didn’t feel a panic at being in my life. I felt that empty was okay; not shameful, and perhaps even, eventually, a gift.

Tagged: divorce, healing, hiking, nature, santa fe

A Day of Blessed Little Nothings

I woke up this morning thinking, “I want to be able to say I turned a corner today.”

I wasn’t sure I was actually feeling corner-turny, but I got a notion like this was something that maybe, in the woo-woo way of Santa Fe, I could “manifest” if I wanted it badly enough.

Maybe it wasn’t a 90-degree corner. Maybe I just kinda-sorta oodged around a very slight bend. Maybe tomorrow I’ll sigh, and say, “I haven’t gotten anywhere at all.” But today was one of those warm, quiet, singularly Santa Fe days, where nothing much happens but just being here still feels like balm for the soul.

I paid some bills. I worked on my day job. I got a perfectly lovely haircut, and looked at a perfectly cozy little house I don’t think I want to buy after all. I ate some uninspiring leftovers, and drank way the fuck too much Diet Coke out of a tall, tall glass with lots of lovely ice.

And my heart didn’t feel breakish at all, the whole day.

Tagged: divorce, healing, santa fe

Of Gertrude and the Llamas

Since the divorce I’ve felt so much more alive. I’m not sure “alive” is any good thing, however, since so much of what I feel is sheer pain, and uncertainty, and groundlessness and fear. But it feels like art, somehow. My fingers channel ferocity when they beat the keys.

They do not, however, channel humor. These last ten years, I’d become a woman who can chuckle at herself, look askance at agonizing, give a great big “meh” to melodrama. Four decades on the planet seems enough to know we’re all just fucked, and who fucking cares anyway, as long as we lap up the good times while we can, and eat dim sum every chance we get. So why am I now thrown backward into angst, deadly seriousness, e-fucking-mergency all the time?

It wasn’t a place to which I wished to return. And yet… so seductive, that urgency, that tight-clawed fist that says, Goddamn you, life, why you gotta bring me to tears with your savor?

I’ve gotten caught up in all this retrogressive slaver, when forsooth it becomes me not, not anymore. I’m reminded of Hamlet’s words to his mother:

“You cannot call it love, for at your age

The heyday in the blood is tame, it’s humble,

And waits upon the judgment.”

At my age, indeed. What does it mean to be forty? What does it mean to be newly single when you thought you’d be a wife forever? Is life full of promise and sweet-tangy tastes still? Anew? Or is it best not to lose what staid sensibility I’d gained from matronhood? Is there a third thing, half wisdom/half recklessness, that waits beyond the corner of this wobbly period of adjustment?

I really wish I knew. I may no longer be placid, but I’ve not gained back my taste for unbridled adventure either. And the clock is ticking on those llamas.

Tagged: divorce, drama, Hamlet, love, middle age

Willy-Nilly

I have been writing, I swear. It’s just that what comes out won’t please, won’t make you laugh and lollop with llamas and fit into the mold of lighthearted fiction. What I’m writing wakes me in the morning and makes my fingers fly, roars forth, rips tears from my makeup-from-the-night-before eyes.

I’m expelling, I’m sure. Vomiting forth grief, and shock, and bemusement and fear for the future. I thought this grief would be quick. I thought the horridness of my father would make for a smooth transition to fatherlessness. I thought the equanimity of my divorce, the already-deadness of the marriage would mean I wouldn’t feel the loss.

But I guess not.

Mother’s Day approaches, and I remember how Mom liked flowers as much as any woman, and probably more. How she’d point out every bulb bursting forth from every tree planter on our block from Third to Lexington, every first forsythia cascading yellow over the grey-brown walls of the Central Park transverses, and ooh over the roses in the Conservatory Gardens.

I thought I dispelled my grief for her over months and years and therapy and trips to Kripalu to cry and commiserate and breathe deep yoga-scented breaths. But by damn, a little dose of Mom would go down smooth right now.

What to do, Mom? Buy a house and settle here, alone? Make no sudden moves, stay in my less-than-special rental, or move back to the city you loved and a love of which you instilled in your kids ‘til neither of us could imagine an identity other than New Yorker?

I still get Dad’s subscription, forwarded on to Santa Fe with the rest of his estate-of mail. And I still let it pile up, too precious to dump, and only read it for the cartoons or not at all, shameful I know. I suspect the New Yorker is the most shame-inducing, least-read periodical of all time. Even you were backlogged three issues on the nightstand, Mom.

Anyhow, I thought I’d be better by now. Ready to date, ready to commit, ready to write lovely llamas and hot tub hippies and heroes with a twinkle in their eyes. And I’m trying, I’m doing it by drips and drabs, though damn the work is slow. Only forgive me, gentle folks, if I need a moment still to let the “what the FUCK?!” flow. I’m still in it, whether I wish or no. And I guess that’s how it’s gonna be a little while yet.

My friend Pam asked me to describe my writing process. At this moment I’m in my living process, and what I write won’t be bent to my will. It just needs release, so that’s what I’m doing, whether or not the rage and pain and sadness ever see the light of day. Bear with me, friends. The llamas will come.

Tagged: death, divorce, grief, llamas, writing, writing process

On the Cusp

A few years back, someone asked me what my goals were. I said, “By the time I’m forty, I want to publish a book and get back to the weight I was on my wedding day.”

Well, I accomplished both of those goals with six months to spare. But then a lot of things happened in those spare six months that I didn’t expect – the death of my father, my divorce from my husband – which shook me up and perhaps didn’t allow me to revel in my success the way I’d have liked. Now, on the cusp of turning forty, I’m looking around asking myself, “What next? What matters to me? To what am I looking forward?”

The truth is, I’m not sure. Right now I’m heart-wounded and tumbled upside down, and the everyday routines that formed my life are all unnecessary. I don’t need to cook anything for anyone, or pick up dry cleaning, or remove my dirty socks from the poor unoffending floor. My father’s long crisis is over, and there’s nothing to be done for him.

I’m free. But is free a good thing?

In the wind

I’ve been told more than once that I’m an object of envy. This is a deeply uncomfortable thing to hear. I’m definitely conscious of how lucky I’ve been in my life. I’m healthy, stable, and have been given many opportunities, while others I’ve managed to carve out for myself. I’ve accomplished a lot in 39.99 years. Yet I can’t say that now is a very good time for me. I can’t call myself happy, or secure, or serene. Three months after my last parent’s death, one month after my husband and I split, I don’t feel safe, or optimistic, or raring to go. I still feel that sense of shock, that inner earthquake, and all I want to do is dig all ten claws into the dirt and hold on for dear life.

I’m grateful for many things – my dear friends, the new leaves on the aspens slapping softly together outside my window, the whistling hummingbirds’ return. I take delight in the little pink-padded feet of my rascal orange tabby as he shovels them into my face at five a.m. I’m fortunate to spend springtime in stunning Santa Fe, and for excellent books to read in my wildly unkempt backyard under endless cloud-strewn skies.

And yet, the sense of not belonging to anyone, or owing myself to anything urgent… it’s unnerving. I’d like to come to appreciate it, and I hope that I soon will. Until then, I’m untethered and in search of I know not what.

Tagged: death, divorce, gratitude, life changes, mid-life crisis, turning forty

The Things I Didn’t Expect

A shadow of my former self…

I didn’t expect to ever check “divorced” on a form, or wake up realizing I’m on my side of the bed only out of habit.

I didn’t expect to change the high light bulbs myself, or roll the trash down to the end of the dirt road each week.

I didn’t expect to shop for one, or constantly catch sight of the dent on my fourth finger where my wedding band withered the flesh over the course of nearly seven years.

I didn’t expect to find myself on the cusp of my fortieth birthday, single, in a town two thousand miles away from the place of my birth.

I also didn’t expect to be happy.

And I am. I am fucking HAPPY.

Like, listen-to-80s-dance-music-and-writhe-around-the-living-room-in-my-skivvies happy.

Wha? How?

I don’t know, but I think it started with the last blog post I wrote. I cracked wide the fuck open as I wrote that; heaving sobs and spitting tears as the words just flowed out of me without need for craft or correction. I wrote, and I broke open all the way to my core.

I’ve started feeling so awake I’ve had to check my caffeine intake – but no, I’m still drinking decaf.

I’ve started singing along to the radio in the car – hell, I started digging up all my old CDs (yes, I still have all my music on CD – I’m nearly forty, damn it, now get off my lawn!) and blasting the music of my youth on the rather nice Bose system I inherited from my dad.

I’ve started to lollop along on my treadmill each morning to Concrete Blonde and the Clash, slinging sweat and singing harmony when breath allows.

It might seem lame, this half-crazed, greying girl listening to Nick Cave and the Psychedelic Furs at all hours of the day, barbequing alone in my PJs after dark. It might be lame. I may be every cliche in the book, but I have to say, I haven’t felt this amazing, this vital in more years than I care to count.

I’m not missing the man who was my partner for the last nine years. At all.

I feel ashamed of this.  Don’t I owe him more than to simply blank him out of my consciousness? Yet, while I wish him well, I don’t, right now, really want to know what he’s up to, or tell him little things about my day. I just want to have my own damn day and keep it for myself, a pleasure I savor to myself. I don’t feel his absence the way I expected to, or feel lonely. I just feel like me.

I suppose that says a lot about the rightness of the divorce. I’d no idea our relationship had died; I thought it was sick, yes, but that perhaps that was normal for a marriage after several years. That boredom and malaise were part of the package.

Now I see so many possibilities. I’m not stymied trying to accommodate someone who simply couldn’t want the same things I wanted. He’s not trying to please me, and making himself miserable in the process. Now it’s okay to want the things I want. It’s okay to enjoy Santa Fe, and listening to the Smiths, and to think about maybe making a permanent home here if I want.

I don’t know exactly what my next adventure may be. Maybe I’ll adopt an alpaca, or visit the Amalfi Coast. Maybe I’ll even learn to like green chile. I don’t need to know just yet. But the unexpected is beginning to feel more like a delight than a dread, and that’s progress.

Tagged: divorce, happiness, writing

Fastest Divorce in the West

It was windy. Springtime in Provence, mistral windy.

I’d worn a new, almost mini-length skirt, an insufficient black leather jacket, and my knee-high black leather boots. Belatedly I realized they were the selfsame boots I’d worn on our first date, eight years, three hundred and sixty-one days earlier.

Then, I’d been a size four, in a silkier skirt, a slinkier attitude. Now, bigger, greyer, older, I marched grimly down what passes for sidewalks in Santa Fe, headed toward the courthouse, the wind molesting my bare legs, slapping up dust into my carefully made-up face, and making my hair so much less good than I’d intended.

The man who didn’t want to be my husband anymore walked behind me, in silence.

I’d wanted him to eat his heart out. But the heart had gone out of our relationship a long time before.

The courthouse was so new it squeaked. There were five crisply dressed security agents grouped around the metal detectors, and not another soul in sight. I put my purse through the belt, put myself through the bracket of the machine. I beeped. The guard told me I was okay.

I wanted to believe him.

The man who didn’t want to be my husband anymore pointed the way to the first of the rooms that would process us, like so much hamburger, into discrete entities. He’d researched it all and knew exactly what to do – this, a man who couldn’t so much as research where we might go on vacation together without three weeks of my prompting.

For the first time in our marriage, I followed.

We entered the most beige room in the universe. So beige I wanted to scream, splash the walls with red, or purple, or any kind of sunshine, just to deny the fluorescent banality, the clean, clean countertops and new-from-the-packaging ergonomic chairs.

I didn’t scream. And I didn’t look at the man who no longer wanted to be my husband.

The clerk gave us a form, and before the ink could dry, we were ushered through to the next, even more unbearably beige room. A second clerk took our papers; un-stapled them, shuffled them around, re-stapled them, licked her finger and checked through the pages once again. And off to the next room.

This one was the color of coffee with too much half-and-half, and even cleaner, if possible. There had never been a fingerprint on the glass.

Take a number, said the sign.

The man who did not want to be my husband anymore took a number. “Nine-oh-eight,” he mumbled, not looking at me.

“Six-eighty,” called the clerk behind the glass.

There was no one else in the room.

“C’mon up.”

She un-stapled our papers. Shuffled them. Shuffled some more. Extracted a few and threw them away. Rubbed ink over the notary seals, licked her finger and ran it and her eyes across the sheepish remains of our shared existence. She stapled them again in a different order. “One-thirty-eight,” she told us. The cost of our mistake.

“I’ll pay,” I said.  “Take a check?”

“Cash only.”

We didn’t have cash. The man who no longer wanted to be my husband remembered there was an ATM down the block. I told him to take it from the joint account we’d be closing before his lunch break ended. It was all my money anyway. I waited in the untouched, coffee-with-too-much-creamer room, playing with my phone as if Siri could tell me something that made sense. I considered updating my Facebook status with a check-in at the courthouse and a caption, “Getting divorced!” Decided the moment deserved more solemnity, or at least less tackiness.

He returned, clutching money. He gave me the receipt. The machine had charged us $3 for the privilege. I’d always hated that — how he paid the fees instead of finding our own branch. But what did it matter now.

We’d waited too long. Now we’d have to see a different clerk. The only one not on lunch was helping a mother explain to her daughter that she’d have to file the papers hiding her from her abusive father in another jurisdiction. The mother was translating the news into Spanish for her daughter, and they were making the best of it. Turned away, unsaved.

We were called.

Clerk number four took our papers. She un-stapled them. She arranged the copies into stacks. She rearranged the stacks, and rearranged them again, and again, in a swift shell-game whose sense only she could see. Stack, staple, un-staple. Riffle, re-sort. I dared a glance at the man who no longer wanted to be my husband, and humor was in it before I could recall that we didn’t share humor anymore. We didn’t bond over ridiculous pencil pushers.

His smile died too. We looked away.

“You’re missing pages on two of the copies,” she told us. “If they’re not all the same, the judge might not accept them.”

“Those are the pages the other clerk threw away,” said the man who no longer wanted to be my husband.

“Well, they’re not here, and they all have to be the same. I can copy them for you, but it will cost you thirty-five cents a copy.”

We gritted our teeth. This was not the moment.

“Whatever, just charge us.”

She stapled. Un-stapled. Stacked and sorted. Then she got out her stamp.

This was progress.

Thump. Thump. Thump. Three copies marked submitted.

There was some more writing of numbers and sorting of papers. If I were those papers, I thought, I would be queasy, dizzy, bewildered.

“Okay,” she said, and handed me my change. “We’ll call you when the judge has made her decision.”

“And that’s it? That’ll be the divorce?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Do you have any idea how long it might take? Like, a week or a month or a couple of days?”

“No, ma’am. I couldn’t say.”

Three hours later I was driving down I-25, going ninety while the wind pushed my silver, official-car-of-Santa-Fe Subaru Forester around. My phone rang. And, despite knowing better, I answered.

“You can come pick up your papers now, Ms. Fields.”

It was April Fool’s Day, but this lady was a courthouse bureaucrat. She wasn’t paid for pulling pranks.

“I’m divorced?” I asked, and tried not to let the wind carry me off the highway into the blue, blue, blue.

“You’re divorced.”

I drove faster. Back to what, I did not know. Back to whom; just me.

Home, I threw the mail on the dining table I’d wanted and he hadn’t. It was all bank statements and ugly-shirt catalogs for the father I no longer had. Cable bills for the mother who had predeceased him. And a Crate and Barrel coupon for me, should I wish to feather my nest.

I turned on the stereo I’d listened to so infrequently these past years. Somewhere along the line I’d stopped being the woman who poured music into her ears and out her throat. I turned it up, and up, and up until the cats left the room in mincing, furry huffs. And I danced. So badly. I danced like Elaine from Seinfeld, in jerky, rhythmless twitches, trying to find the groove that had been so natural for me in the days of my sexiness, the days when I knew I was desirable and a glance from my knowing blue eyes was enough to rouse a man.

I danced.

And I didn’t let the tears smear the liner I’d so carefully applied to remind him that those blue eyes had once roused him too.

Tagged: divorce