Fates and Furies

by Lauren Groff

“Are you drinking because you’re sad, or are you drinking to show me how sad you are?” she said.

Men can do that, become more handsome as they grow older. Women just age.

There’s a nobility in making life smooth and clean and comfortable.

“But she lied,” he said. “Please. Marriage is made of lies. Kind ones, mostly. Omissions. If you give voice to the things you think every day about your spouse, you’d crush them to paste. She never lied. Just never said.”

Somehow, despite her politics and smarts, she had become a wife, and wives, as we all know, are invisible. The midnight elves of marriage. The house in the country, the apartment in the city, the taxes, the dog, all were her concern: he had no idea what she did with her time. It would have been compounded with children; thank goodness for childlessness, then.

[Grief is pain internalized, abscess of the soul. Anger is pain as energy, sudden explosion.]

It occurred to her then that life was conical in shape, the past broadening beyond the sharp point of the lived moment. The more life you had, the more the base expanded, so that the wounds and treasons that were nearly imperceptible when they happened stretched like tiny dots on a balloon slowly blown up. A speck on the slender child grows into a gross deformity in the adult, inescapable, ragged at the edges.