Same As It Ever Was

by Claire Lombardo

when it hits her; the woman’s face registers in her brain belatedly, clad in the convincing disguise—that invisible blanket—of age.

The power dynamic in their household is not unlike that of a years-long hostage crisis.

The Suburbs, mecca for successful adults with incomprehensible job titles and their disillusioned stay-at-home spouses, oak trees and opulence and artfully disguised despair.

Everyone liked to think their suburb was the best suburb, but really they were all the same, slight variations in proximity to the lake or degree of amorphous “diversity” or “historical significance” but ultimately a wash.

She had long been amazed by the connectivity of rich people, the elite electric grid of Oh my father went to Yale with and We used to summer next door to and My cousin married a man who owned, an endless fount of free referrals and as-yet-unredeemed favors.

marriage—the hugeness of the decision rendering it somehow hollow and playful, easy to commit to because it didn’t seem real.

And it would be less painful for her, too, to know that he wasn’t leaving her just because of who she was by default.

You could get used to not having someone in your life but you could never completely stop wanting them there.

And when you fell for someone, she realized—she had never fallen like this before—you started to fall for yourself a little bit too.

The old Helen Russo impulse again, to entertain your way out of any crisis.

“Well, sure. I mean you finally learned that it’s all an act. You figured out how to play along like the rest of us.”

Nothing scared her more than seeing people who knew exactly what they wanted from life and knew how to go about getting it.

She’d once feared being close to him but now they don’t know how not to be together, even when they want to be apart; this is perhaps different, she sees now, than what she’s always mistaken for intimacy; they have spent so much time, now, in the impenetrable haze of intuition and misunderstanding and willful blindness that is a long marriage, that she can’t remember what it’s like to be anywhere else.

So it doesn’t matter that I love you, and it doesn’t matter whether you love me if the way you love me allows you to sleep with someone else, all right? So I’m trying to look at this from the only angle that makes sense to me anymore, which is the practical one, and from that vantage point I don’t see how it benefits anyone if we split up, unless that’s what you want.”

to stick around for so long when you didn’t give them much to work with, and she simply didn’t have much to give;

“Just because I have a lot of people in my life, Julia, doesn’t mean that I like a lot of people. I liked you a great deal. You were terrific company. It’s a chemistry thing, isn’t it? Don’t you sometimes just feel something for another person? Like you were meant to have found them? That’s how I felt about you when we met. Like I already knew you.”

She will remember them when she realizes that Mark will exist to them only in folklore, as a kindly magical presence, like Santa, someone whose existence is contingent on belief.