Liars

by Sarah Manguso

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. Every day there are dishes and laundry. Sweep the kitchen floor, take out the garbage. Every day get the mail and sort it. Every day read and answer email. Every day wash the body. The bathroom gets dirty; clean it. Vacuum and wipe the floors and the furniture. Clothing gets outgrown and tattered; barbers and dentists and doctors must be visited. No time for deep attention, just a thousand tasks.

impossible to reconcile with my insistence that I was happily married, so I refused to acknowledge it.

I couldn’t change that. The book said that I could change the way I reacted to John’s contempt, and in that choice I was absolutely free.

He still shitted like a bachelor, whenever and for however long he liked.

Those days, when John ignored and dismissed me, my mind told me I felt bad because I’d gained weight, or because of a bad book review. I refused to look at the real reason.

John didn’t just need to win the fight; he needed me to agree that it was my responsibility never to say anything that might make him feel as if he’d ever done anything wrong. Feeling that he’d done something wrong really threatened his sense of entitlement.

I feared he’d insist we move, that he wouldn’t consider the toll a fifth move in six years would take on my health, that we would indeed move, that I would never recover from the stress and depression and rage.

I hadn’t experienced uncontaminated time—time unoccupied by vigilance to the child’s health, feeding, elimination, education, safety, entertainment, development, socialization, and mood, and the care of the house, including food shopping, meal planning, cleaning, cooking, tossing old food, scrubbing bathrooms, making doctors’ appointments, labeling toys for show-and-tell, planning play dates, maintaining contact with grandparents, planning holidays, paying bills, dealing with two tax audits and an identity theft (all John’s), and usually most of these things at once—outside an airplane in years.

My time, which is to say the time that was mine, for me alone, had disappeared.

But qualified women aren’t likable; likable women aren’t qualified. The only way to get the job is to be ten times better than the best man and likable, which means willing to absorb any amount of misogyny in any form from anyone with a smile on your face, forever. You must be attractive but not too attractive; men don’t want to look at an unattractive woman all day long, but they won’t feel comfortable working with a woman much more attractive than their own wives.

Living on this knife edge will ruin your health, and once that happens they’ll be able to fire you and hire a man to do the job you couldn’t quite manage.

I was in charge of everything and in control of nothing.

I became an ocean of calm for him, but once he was in bed I felt as if I’d been through a woodchipper.

I’d been persuaded to live off the fruits of his late-stage capitalist privilege. I’d chosen to have a child with him, and then I’d chosen to stay because I’d thought we were a team. Because I’d wished we were a team.

John and I both caught the child’s cold. John stayed in bed for two days; I took the new kitten to the vet and bought groceries and did dishes and laundry and planned all the meals and took the child to school and so on. I took one nap but otherwise kept everything up. And that is a mother’s cold.

the word of a liar is meaningless.

Back then I’d thought that John was working ten hours a day. After we separated, he was suddenly available to fetch the child from school and do all the errands and chores for his own new house that he’d never had time to do when we lived together. Surprise.

I’d thought the marriage would improve, somehow, if I just improved myself. If I could sufficiently better myself, the fumes of my betterment would form a medicinal cloud that would surround and improve my husband.

I felt deeply that I wasn’t meant to have a partner. But I’d had a partner for fourteen years. But he wasn’t a partner.

But dying alone, cradled by the universe, continuous with the rest of its energy, wasn’t something I dreaded anymore. Worse things had already happened.

It’s time to stop finding deficits endearing,

A husband might be nothing but a bottomless pit of entitlement. You can throw all your love and energy and attention down into it, and the hole will never fill. A nuclear family can destroy a woman artist. I’d always known that. But I’d never suspected how easily I’d fall into one anyway.

So I wasn’t mourning an experience of being that wife; I was mourning a romantic image of her, walking with her beloved and adoring husband, who had never existed.

I was good at absorbing abuse.