Part 2

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

(Page 2 of 3)

Jesse puts his big arms around you and the baby, gets in the bathtub, the three of you, and nobody cares that the mat is soaked from the overflow. He rubs your underarms with a French crystal that keeps your sweat from smelling. He lets the boy sleep between you and never crushes him. You can see Jesse's face in the blank bedroom, animated, lit up like he's telling stories when he sleeps.

Life is happening, man.

Everybody comes to stay at your duplex, pulled in by your husband's growing reputation as a spunky spiritual guy teaching at Naropa in Boulder, Colorado. With their special diets, they come. The head of the Sufi Order, Sikhs, dervishes, calligraphers, Buddhists, Hopis, Robert Bly, Paul Reps. You hand Ram Dass a cup of chamomile tea but are too shy to mention his book. You go to parties and get served the first piece of cake.

When the girl baby is nursing, the boy patting your breast, trying to slip in a turn, you ask Jesse to take out the garbage.

"Could you?"

There is a point when a marriage is over, and every woman can tell you precisely that point. Yours is garbage.

One woman tells you she was packing her husband's socks for a business trip, brown to brown, navy to navy - when she notices his socks are wet and digs three times into his drawer before she realizes they are wet with her tears.

Another says her husband was doing the dishes, and she asks him a question. "You want me to talk to you and do the dishes?" was her moment.

"Hey, guess what. I've transcended the garbage," Jesse said.

"What?"

"Alhumdulillah! We should talk."

You haven't talked for months, though secretly you've been worrying about the marriage. No money, no laughing, no "You cook and I'll do the dishes." You don't take vacations or go to Scott Carpenter Park or eat together anymore. Little things. Like that.

You think of marriage as a mystery illness they're on the verge of finding a cure for.

"Could we talk after the garbage?"

"I'm a guru." He scratches a spot on his pant leg, smiles with that lit face of his.

The baby pops off the nipple and laughs, milk running sideways out her mouth. Daddy was a man, now he's a guru. Oh that daddy.

You smell old bananas, or maybe the diaper pail or lentils in the Crock-Pot. There are a lot of smells to be dealt with, but Jesse was never a man with a plan. And with the famous lacto-intolerant coming and going, drawing crowds for their evolved lectures, demanding top sheets from you, who needs plans? Boring plans.

Your husband suddenly has ideas typed on paper, compiled into a notebook. He will teach, they will pay. If the lactos can do it, why not him? Somebody gives him a house. Give the teacher a house. It's only four blocks away; the wife is welcome anytime. Get a babysitter. Come on down.

It's remarkable, the size and girth of unseen truths we share our beds with. Like lemon writing that only appears in the sunlight, they were waiting for you the whole time.

You do not give up on family in a day.

You sit in on his classes and want to break the spell, scream things out. Listen you people, he doesn't pick up his underwear. You can't stay with the program and besides, something more worrisome is going on.

He's calling your son Judah Buddha, wants to take him on the road. A road show. He says in Tibet, they know by the time a kid is three or four if he's the next incarnation of Pooh Bear. He doesn't say Pooh Bear, but your ears are mixed up with mothering. You say your son is two and has an ear infection and over your dead body.

It's Thursday. Valentine's Day. You wake and know the boy is gone.

You go through the motions, look in the closet for his clothes, call the disciples. They're disciples now. Everything has a name as if a huge spiritual corporation landed in a day, mission statement intact. Nobody will tell you where your son is.

You say the word kidnapped. It's the most negative word you've said in years. The baby pats your chest like you finally got something right.

You saw West Side Story thirteen times and still know the songs and most of the lines by heart. There are three or four days in your life you remember like that. This becomes the Thursday you cut your long hair, shave your legs, threaten to choke a disciple named Allah or Eeore if he doesn't tell you where the boy is. You are not coming from your feminine side when you say this. Your hands are squeezing his neck till you get "Alabama" out of him.

You hire a cowboy lawyer who finds another lawyer in Tuscaloosa, where the boy is. This second lawyer hires a private plane to get you there with your best Irish girlfriend who says, "a Jew alone in Alabama?" And she cuts her hair for you.

"Are you married to him?" the cowboy lawyer says. "'Cause I can't take the case if you're married, it isn't technically a kidnapping."

"Then divorce me," you say.

See? How easy?

© 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.