Thursday

The Honeymoon's Over; True Stories of Love, Marriage, and Divorce
by Andrea Chapin, Sally Wofford-Girand

Isabel Rose saw red flags before her marriage, but everyone thought she'd made perfect match. Ann Hood's relationship with her husband had the usual bumps, until the tragic death of her young daughter forged their bond for life. When Terry McMillan went through her public divorce, the trauma affected everyone in her life. While Joyce Maynard cared for her dying mother, her children's babysitter took even better care of her husband.

Andrea Chapin, after years of money battles with her musician husband, realized she had to become the mogul in the family. Annie Echols found her marriage on the rocks when an unexpected pregnancy upset her family's delicate balance. In The Honeymoon's Over, women candidly discuss the good times, the bad times, and what makes or breaks a marriage in essays that will resonate with readers- married, single, or divorced.

Daniela Kuper

It's 1971 and Ram Dass has recently come out with Be Here Now. You read it in the Chevy to the sound of sweat plopping on plain brown pages in the unbreathable southern Illinois summer. You read the whole thing without stopping, easy because it's mostly pictures and thoughts you've never seen words for.

This is what you take from the book: Underneath this life, which is mostly ego and lies, sits another life that smells like sweet peas - a dormant life that smells like Dad when he was in one of his good moods doing magic tricks for the family. He could take his thumb apart, wiggle both halves, and make cousin Johnny cry till he cemented it back together. He could put the lit part of a cigar inside his mouth and puff. Sometimes he'd make it disappear. He was a traveling chocolate salesman, who once gave his paycheck to an Indian with a sad story. He brought home two gifts you remember: a box of Sputnik bubble gum that turned your tongue aqua, and silk days-of-the-week panties. Your mother takes the panties. She says they'll give you an infection, then bawls out your father in Yiddish. You steal Thursday, though. Thursday will be yours forever.

Dad says when you're good enough, there's a present waiting in the vault of Harris Trust and Savings Bank on La Salle Street in Chicago. He says it's a ring of truth, a band with so much light coming from it, they had to put it in a sealed box for dangerous substances.

"When you get it, you won't need electricity and strangers will come to you," he says.

You have no idea what he's talking about, but you want the thing bad.

"Aw, you'll know when you got it. I had it a coupla years. Sold everything I lugged around. Stillicious syrup, Eskimo pie coating, Kayo by the truck. Guy tried to buy my hat off me once. I was a big ball of everything they ever wanted. Get it, kid?"

Sure, Dad.

You're eight. You want to know more. Rubies? Opals? You don't give up on that ring till you're fourteen and tired of his mercurial Ten Commandments. Thou shalt not wear Maybelline. Thou shalt never read dirty books including the poetry of that Russian, Yevtushenko. If God wanted you to sleep over at Judy Cohen's, he wouldn't have given you a decent bed.

You don't go to basement parties with the kids on Friday night, you go to B'nai Zion temple wearing Mom's black coat, her stand-in, waiting for something to happen on that pulpit. But nothing happens, and nothing will happen until college when you're reading that Ram Dass book, a relic now with its clunky drawings of big-hipped women, that fringe-shirted man running down the church aisle yelling, "Listen to those words you're saying" to a stupefied congregation. A cult joke, that book, if you can even find it anymore.

You're nineteen and perspiring on words that read like the godmother who never showed up. Yes dear! Yes dear! Here's the life. Smell those sweet peas. Come and get it.

After college, you sell the Smith Corona, winter coat, anything to get to the Bay Area and meet people like in the book. You work as a secretary in the Law Department at Berkeley, go Sufi dancing, meditate, grow out your leg hair.

Sufi dancing is where you meet Jesse. He's tall with a good body and hair thick to his shoulders. A stunning blond man on stage with a stunning blonde woman. It's not clear what they're doing up there looking more like kingdoms than people, but Jesse is holding the room. Right then you want to marry him and become a kingdom. He takes you camping by the ocean in Bolinas, stars falling into waves. You can see his face in the dark. You can see his face when it isn't there. He smells like sandalwood and tells stories with the intensity of a dying man. His voice is Alabama homeboy, and it touches you down there.

Strangers ask him personal questions. He takes as much time as they need; that's how giving he is. He gives and gives. You get pregnant on your third date, but you're still your mother's daughter. You buy day-old bread and would never give your paycheck to anyone.

Things come easily to you and you never question this. As a kid, you read everything. Archie. Rally Round the Flag, Boys. You read whatever you could sneak from their headboard. Carpetbaggers. Kinsey Report. You make grades without studying, write plays involving can-can skirts and tropical themes that get performed in bored sixth-grade classrooms. The school visits your parents, tells them to put you in Francis Parker, a fancy Chicago private school for creative kids with money. Your parents take this as a death threat. They don't want you to be different. Different is the evil eye. Different is death. You don't hear about the Francis Parker business till you almost flunk out of high school, having spent four years doodling another planet. You could name every river, battle, and monarch.

They give you a name. Daydreamer. Bed wetter would be preferable. Ass kisser. Daydreamer means you're someplace else, missing in action - and they know you're gone. Daydreamer will be your tar baby until you meet Jesse, who doesn't care. He tells you this world is all illusion anyway. He calls you Mahakali, Radha, the Divine Mother, and all the little Gopis rolled into one. Tells you creation stories as he rubs almond oil on your nipples, which are sore from nursing the baby and, though it's technically impossible, because you're pregnant again.

"But I never got my period."

"This girl is coming from the heavens to us," he says.

You don't question this. What you question is if you have enough calcium to produce more bones. You've been dreaming of losing your teeth and hair.

© 2007 by Sally Wofford-Girand and Andrea Chapin

About the Author

has been an editor at art, movie, theater and literary magazines, including The Paris Review, Conjunctions, Translation and The New Theater Review. She has lived and worked in Mexico and Spain and acted professionally in Germany in a thirty-six city tour of Edward Albee's Seascape. Her fiction has appeared in literary journals, and her articles and essays have appeared in magazines such as More, Self, Redbook and Martha Stewart Living as well as several anthologies, including The Day My Father Died and Kiss Tomorrow Hello: Notes from the Midlife Underground by Twenty-Five Women Over Forty. She teaches writing at New York University and lives in New York City with her husband and their two sons.

Sally Wofford-Girand is a literary agent and founder of Brick House Literary Agents. She worked on Wall Street before seeking refuge in book publishing. She is a member of the international rights committee of the AAR and a board member of Ledig House, an international writers colony in New York State. She lives in New York City with her husband and their three children.