The Fixed Stars

by Molly Wizenberg

Maybe this is dumb, he said, but do you want me to let you go in, like, two months, or do you want me to let you go right now? I sob-laughed: I want you to let me go right now.

If she was sad or upset or missing one of us, we would not try to paper over it. Planning our end, we sometimes felt like a we.

I gave him two philodendrons I’d propagated the previous winter. Whenever I visited, I watered them.

He wanted a fuller relationship with June, and I wanted him to have it. I wanted her to have more of him, not less. Now we had at least a shot at equal time and responsibility.

Brandon had spent years obsessing over making the best pizza, and I had spent years obsessing over everything.

In thirteen years, I’d never worn it. I didn’t want the smell to go away. But the day that Brandon moved out, I unfolded it and pulled it on, held the fabric to my nose until I was sobbing. I wanted company, and grief was it.

Are you allowed to grieve if you’ve caused the death? Is that something that can happen? I had ended my marriage, but I had also ended a life that I had, at one time, loved. What exactly was this grief? The loss of him, of us? I wanted it to be, but I wasn’t sure. We’d started to lose each other long before. I’d missed him for years.

I know I am this husband, but I feel for his wife.

My life was ungainly, unwieldy. Surely it was impossible to love. If I could barely handle it, how on earth could Nora? Nora told me she felt like a homewrecker. Am I? she asked. No, no—you’re absolutely not, I said. I’m leaving my marriage for me, I said. No one is responsible but me.

“The trouble with letting people see you at your worst,” writes Sarah Manguso, “isn’t that they’ll remember; it’s that you’ll remember.”

He arrived with June in tow. Surely it couldn’t have happened any other way but this: on short notice, so no one had time to get anxious, and with June around, a healthy distraction.

I could see the effort behind his high spirits, and a tender sting rose in the back of my throat. When I walked him and June out to the car, his eyes were wet, unspeakable.

We’d listened as we poured the concrete tabletops and painted the ceiling, as we polished silver and stacked plates, the two of us hacking away at a project that I wished I’d wanted.

Stop, stop! I begged, grinning. Turn it off, or I’ll cry! Don’t make me do it! We laughed, and he put on something else. I could hear that laugh for hours. It was a relief to recognize who we’d been to each other and to not pretend we were still the same.

You maybe can do it someday, says Matthew. But it’ll be a lot of work. I know. Well, he says, then go do it.

We’ve just been best friends, he said. I nodded, swallowing. I’ve missed my friend, he said. Me too, I said. I couldn’t look at him, not sure of what my face would do. I watched a bee crawl along the curb.

In our reaction, I was the one changing. That was never her role.

Each night, while she did her thing, I studied the sky. I would see how far up and behind I could look before I staggered backward on my heels.

I got tired of seeing the garden hose lolling next to the driveway like a diseased reptile, so I went to Fred Meyer and spent $29.99 on a plastic caddy on wheels. No one has so triumphantly coiled a hose.

I sat in bed one night and wrote a list of people who had been kind to me in the previous year. I wondered why they had. I wondered if I deserved it. I wondered what I did deserve, after what I had done.

I felt bruised and embarrassed, and unsure of how else I could have done it. At any given moment, I had acted the only way I knew to act. At any given moment, I knew only what I knew. The limits of my judgment, of my own good sense, humiliated me.

I just wanted practice. I needed practice at being whatever I was. I didn’t want to think about love. I wanted to be fucking someone.

Separated with fifty-fifty custody, I was set loose for half of each week, my tether reeled out as far as it could go. I knew I shouldn’t tell my married friends with full-time children how great this was; that would be cruel. I had a feeling I shouldn’t tell anyone how much I liked being a childless mother. As a mother, I was supposed to grieve every hour I was without my child.

I got half of my own life back, with the added perspective of parenthood to throw it into brilliant relief. I could see what I had and appreciate it.

On an episode of Dear Sugar, Cheryl Strayed posits that wanting to leave a relationship is enough reason to do it. You have to be brave enough to break your own heart, she says. What about my child’s heart? I want to shoot back: What if I break that too?

The thing he said that day in my doorway stayed with me. I wondered at it sometimes, tugged at it like one of June’s tiny hair ties in my pocket. What would he say to me now? About Brandon, about my falling in love with a woman, about divorce, or climate change, white nationalism, bump stocks, the audacity of Donald Trump running for president?

I want to know what he would say about June, in whose face I now find his eyes. I want to know what he would say about the mess I’ve made of her family, about how to help her survive it, about how to be her mother and also myself. I want to know if my father would tell me what I have begun to suspect: that I couldn’t have done any of this without her.

I cut slices of salami and managed to chase the kids around, and June’s spirits rose. Her cheeks were pink in the cool air, and for once, she didn’t trip or fall down or skin some body part or other.

We kept at it after the separation, adding a fifth house—Brandon’s apartment—to the rotation. I loved and hated Thursdays.

I saw endings everywhere. As I read aloud to June from Mo Willems’s Goldilocks and the Three Dinosaurs, the end of the book winked with a moral: “If you ever find yourself in the wrong story, leave.”

I went to IKEA, bought June a big-girl bed and assembled it. I started my first quilt. I’d learned to sew a couple of years earlier, when Brandon bought me a sewing machine for Christmas. Now with evenings to myself, I drank beer and watched YouTube videos with titles like “How to Stitch in the Ditch” and “Easy Improv Quilting.” I splashed around in my free time like it was an Olympic-size pool, all to myself.

“YOU HAVE TO BE WILLING TO BE BAD AT IT IN ORDER TO GET GOOD AT IT” The last was a quote I’d pulled from the book In the Company of Women. It was from an entrepreneur named Mary Going, intended as advice about work and business. When I stuck it to the mirror, I was mostly thinking of going down on a woman.

I think I like softer men, I said, and harder women. I liked how this sounded in my mouth.

She was beautiful, but not like a girl. She looked like the lead singer of a boy band. Oh, I snorted. Yeah, I’d totally fuck her. Her name is Ash, my friend said. I used to work with her at my old job. Want me to see if I can set you up?

He was the same one who’d bought me and Nora a round on our first date, but at a different bar. I tried not to read into it. At the edge of my vision I saw Ash walk in and felt my heartbeat thud, ca-su-al, down the length of my arms.

She whispered into my teeth, threw her head back, and laughed, did a giddy soft-shoe.

I didn’t want to cede the very tentative feeling that I would be all right on my own, that June and I would make it.

But now the story I have to tell seems to undo all the ones that came before, the ones people have come to know me by. How does a person write truthfully about their life, when it isn’t finished?

Our separation was my fault, and I would announce this culpability by outing myself.

It seemed easier to pawn my privacy, to flay myself next to the playground sandbox, than to let someone make assumptions.

But I could practice, and I wanted to.

Brandon was there with someone he’d been seeing. I hugged him en route to the dance floor, and his date whispered in my ear: You two look so beautiful. Ash is like a tiny shiny Bieber lady.

That’s not the case with Ash. Ash is clear: they are telling you who they are and what they want. Ash met your ex-husband at a dance party, and Ash still wants you. Maybe they even want all of you, what about that? Maybe they even want the parts you don’t want them to see.

Upon our arrival I broke out in hives. At least by now I knew which antihistamine to buy.

I remember thinking that night that our marriage hadn’t failed. We were succeeding, if on different terms from the ones we’d set out with.

This is my friend Ash, I said, and June looked up from the screen. She was sleepy, couldn’t be bothered. Ash waved and grinned and said, Whatcha watching? June shook a piece of seaweed in greeting. In the hall Ash squeezed my arm and beamed. I’m so excited, they whispered. Thank you.

On January 11, 2017, five months after Brandon moved out, we had our first and only meeting at the divorce attorney’s office. I wore my favorite pants. We carpooled.

This is not my business, said the attorney, but you two get along so well. Are you sure you want to get divorced? We were stupidly proud of his strange compliment.

I had stopped believing, but something solid remained. Brandon only lived on the other side of town. I had a key to his apartment, and he had a key to my house. We took June out together sometimes for soup dumplings and dry-fried green beans. He sent text transcripts of funny things she said. I sent photos of her crossing her eyes.

it. But it seemed wrong to go back to the world; we were tender as newly molted crabs.