Liars

by Sarah Manguso

I tried to understand that first ferocious hunger and couldn’t. It came from somewhere beyond reason.

Next to him, I was brilliant. Next to me, he was beautiful, charming, and initially capable of hiding all the things that, in my wrinkly little heart, made me consider him inferior.

I didn’t want to go. We’re a team, he said, and then went without me.

My screaming heart told me that John had pretended to try to reach me but really just wanted to hurt me. I spent three hours worried sick, and then the restaurants all closed and I had nothing for dinner.

On the day before we flew home, after a steamy walk back to the villa in the height of the Athenian summer, John and I quarreled. I accused him of contradicting everything I said just for the sake of it. As after every quarrel, we then examined and speculated on our friends’ relationships, describing lovingly to each other their myriad flaws.

grew up half crazy, living with people who were more than half crazy, and I left home and paid for ten years of psychotherapy and chose the wrong people, over and over, and if they were any good I left them because I thought I deserved only ruined people, and that to be alone was my destiny, and I never shared my home with a partner until I was thirty-four and moved in with a man who’d said he would propose to me by Christmas, and I believed him because we’d been together two years, and I loaned him eight thousand dollars for a film and he didn’t propose to me by Christmas, and then I turned thirty-five.

wanted this part of my life to be over already, and I was so glad that it finally was.

We swept up the broken glass. When we finished, John said, Being an adult is really annoying, trying for levity. Had he never swept a floor?

It would be like having two lives.

I needed him to share in the housekeeping, to have one date with me per week, to have two intimate sessions with me per week, to socialize with friends biweekly, and to pay me back the seven grand that he still owed me.

When I was young, all that fathers ever had to do was sit in offices, eat at restaurants for lunch, do whatever they wanted wherever they went, and then come home and appear hardworking and loyal. Loyal, just for coming home to eat food and enjoy a clean and well-run house that a woman maintained just so a father could do whatever he wanted inside and outside of it.

wrote to Hannah, Tonight I learned why my mother always squealed and shrank away when my father tried to touch her: She was a fortress. And inside that fortress was rage, and in the center of that rage was the pain of the insult of being treated like a stupid maid. My fortress is the same, with smaller hips, surrounded by a corona of migraine.

John said he would do the dishes and be in bed by eleven to fuck. At eleven o’clock, alone in ...

Then John said that he wouldn’t be able to put his share in the joint account that month, after all. I took a deep breath; at once my back seized up and I understood why people divorce.

feared that, after we moved west, John would divide his time between Cloudberry and his art, and I would be a lonely wife with no support system, maybe saddled with a baby, unable to write or teach—a real wife, the one thing I’d sworn to myself I’d never be.

But by then I knew that John was often the one who arrived late to a party, overstayed his welcome, and forgot the gift. When I asked him if he’d be better off with a servant-wife than a human wife, he said, I get up and shower and have breakfast waiting for me, and nine times out of ten you do the laundry and think about dinner and remind me to mail things and make phone calls…I can’t imagine anyone being more helpful. He gave me a look of love. I felt wonderful. Then I felt trapped.

When he got home, he said he’d been stewing about some slightly belittling thing I’d said to him in front of someone else. He tossed his head like a teenager. What he failed to remember was that I’d said the slightly belittling thing mere moments after he’d stopped flirting with a messily drunk woman while I sat alone and ashamed with Hannah and her new boyfriend. Agreeing to be someone’s wife should be done only if you can’t help yourself, I thought, but of course no one can help herself.

Was he demonstrating that he knew more than she did, or that he knew more than I did? Did he need her attention or mine? The reality I wanted didn’t include this event, so I stepped around it and continued on.

After I sent the final email to confirm the housewarming party I’d been planning for a month, John said, Wait, I’m going to be in Calgary that night.

I’d

thought I was trading the last thing for the other two, but in reality I’d just been giving everything up.

By noon I’d showered, dressed, tidied the house of John’s shoes and clothes, put away laundry, swept the floor, watered the garden, moved boxes to the garage, cooked breakfast, eaten, done the dishes, taken out the recycling, handled correspondence, and made the bed. John had gotten up and taken a shit.

There should be a word for the feeling that comes when your most neurotic friends bear children before you do. Surprise. Confusion. Shame.

had two friends whose lives seemed palatable, who had jobs befitting their intelligence and education. Both of their husbands were dying of impotent rage.

I thought, If I had the energy I’d leave him, and then I folded up that little thought, wrapped it in gauze, and swallowed it.

He was the main character, and I was his wife.

Instead of saying that to your exhausted wife, you should be thanking me for all the things I do for you, the baby, this family, and this house every day that you take absolutely for granted. And then he apologized. He truly apologized.

John said that he had nothing to give me because he knew his life was harder than mine.

He told me I was acting like a spoiled child, that the postpartum period was so much easier than his life, working at the bank instead of being an artist.

I wanted neither a divorce nor a disdainful partner, so there I was, hopi...

On the first Mother’s Day I spent as a mother, John was in a daze. Flowers? A card? As far as he was concerned, the only mother in the world was his, and she was dead.

We’d fallen into a groove: John made art on the weekends because he felt entitled to, and I did errands and chores on the weekends because I felt responsible.

At a party, while answering my question about her own marital troubles, a woman cut herself off by saying, But you’ve been through so much. Suddenly she needed me to have suffered more.

All the mothers I knew were in awe of how little we were able to do, after all our education, after having been told that we’d be able to do anything, after having children in America. We’d all assumed we’d continue our lives as before, and that the only difference would be a child or children

silently napping in bassinets or playing with toys while we worked. We hadn’t known we’d be holding grimly on to screaming, incontinent, vomitous creatures twenty hours a day. Breastfeeding made me very thirsty, as people had said it would, and it

My personality and life had been swallowed by motherhood, and every few days, my husband threw the fact that I didn’t have a full-time job in my face. The work of caring for the baby was invisible to him.

Why are you so angry? My husband frequently asked me why I was so much angrier than other women. It always made me smile. I was exactly as angry as every other woman I knew. It wasn’t that we’d been born angry; we’d become women and ended up angry.

It was like housework, which consists of tasks that, by design, get undone every day.

I’d initially started doing more of the housework because I was at home more, because I earned less, and the housework became a sort of penance, or a way to prove my value. Soon I was doing everything, and John accused me of trying to control everything, but his accusation, though correct, failed to acknowledge the reason it was happening.

The child scribbled with a crayon while John sneaked into the kitchen and ate the food I’d made the child for lunch.

John watched me prepare food, clean, and keep house all morning, then said, Just so you know, I was planning on getting a massage during naptime today.

In lieu of crying, I explained that instead of getting a massage he would buy gas for the grill and load the playpen and infant car seat into the car to bring back to Hannah.

The next day, John spent the whole day at home. I ran the house while he watched the child, and we traded off and each got a bit of work done. At the end of the day I said with perfect candor, This is the best day I’ve had in a long time. Do you know why? Because I spent it with you. I didn’t even know I was going to say it until I said it.

My love for the child had become incapacitating. It was hard not to go into his room and watch him sleep.

The child and I played inside in the afternoon and I realized I enjoyed spending time with him, that he was my favorite person, that I had nothing left for anyone else, and I felt ashamed.

told him he had to find a stable income source by winter or I’d leave him, but I had no plan, just fighting words.

John came home and I couldn’t believe how lucky I was to have such a happy family. It wasn’t happiness; it was the temporary cessation

of pain. But I wouldn’t know that for another seven years.

Things would never settle down.

I was so desperately, furiously unhappy, and I never even knew it unless my mother was listening.