Page 2 of F*ck Marriage

Tina’s stylist chair doubled as a therapy chair my first year home. She probably knows more about my failed marriage than my own family.

“That’s the plan,” I say.

She frowns. “I hope you know what you’re doing, Wendy. Be careful, okay?”

Careful? That’s what I will not be this time. Careful is what got me into this mess in the first place.

“Sure,” I say, and Tina frowns. “Wish me luck?”

“Luck? You don’t need luck for revenge. You just need balls.”

Chapter Two

The guest house. It’s seven hundred square feet with a wall of windows and an attic bedroom that faces a nature belt. Not a bad place to hide out when you’re shamefaced with a broken heart. Other than a bed and a cracked leather sofa, I don’t have a lot of furniture. The lack of space in New York taught me to be a minimalist. What I do have is exercise equipment. A treadmill, a rowing machine, weights, and a Pilates machine. It started with the treadmill a few months after I got back. I was in the middle of the second and third stages of grief: anger and bargaining. I looked at myself long and hard in the mirror (naked) and decided that my husband left me because I was fat. If I were thinner, fitter, more toned—I could surely lure him back. Prove my worth. I wasn’t fat. But you can’t deal with your big issues first, you have to gradually work your way up. If anything, I was curvy. Okay, maybe a little chubby. So, I bought a treadmill and a pair of running shoes and took out my anger on that human conveyor belt. As soon as I was sober enough to notice the results, I got addicted to exercising. Now, where there used to be layers of fat, there are layers of muscle. I’m not even sure I like being this ropey and hard, but when you lose control of your life, you seek to regain control in some other area, and so here I am.Oh hey! You left me, but I can probably beat you up now. Oh sure, you have a younger woman, but can you bounce a quarter off her ass?

I sell my equipment on Craigslist, and by the time I’ve packed up everything I’ve accumulated in Washington over the last two years, it fills one measly suitcase. I stand over the zipped and ready-to-go luggage feeling largely pathetic. My father finds me there, hands on my hips.

“This is it,” I say. “I’m thirty years old and this is the sum of my life.” I kick the side of it disparagingly.

I say it more to myself than to my father. Any type of emotional proclamations make my parents uncomfortable. As a result, I was a largely silent kid. My father chuckles like I’ve just delivered the punchline of a joke and then hauls my suitcase to the car without a word. Once he’s gone, I give the place a final look over. I don’t know that I’ll miss it. It was a good place to rest…I enjoyed being naked without worrying someone could see me. I sigh deeply and head for the door.

“Bye, little house. See you.”

Ilost my virginity to Carter Benini when I was sixteen years old. This was after he handed me a melted Snickers bar and told me in that too-cool-for-school voice of his that he loved me. The truth is Carter and I had only been dating for a month, but he was captain of the football team and the type of guy who said, “Hey girl, you so fine,” while biting his bottom lip. The biting of the lip thing had done me in; slimy attention was my favorite aphrodisiac. I was living in the moment, or at least I believed I was. Carter, unfortunately, had only lasted a moment before collapsing on top of me, and after we did the deed he pulled off the condom and proclaimed he was hungry, asking if he could have my Snickers. He took my virginity and he took my Snickers, and a week later he broke up with me. So cold. I found out I was part of a year-long commitment he had to de-virginize as many sophomore girls as he could. Talk about trust issues; I’ve always had them. I was devastated, of course. Teenagers can deliver lies but seldom have the stomach to take them. I took a whole year off from dating, dyed my hair black, and listened to my homegirls—Fiona, Meredith, Stevie, and Alanis—on repeat. I finally caved when Philip Von asked me to be his girlfriend my junior year. I told Philip that under no circumstances would I sleep with him before we’d been dating six months (the agreed amount of time my friends and I decided was appropriate to judge if a guy was a douche).

“It’s cool,”he’d said. I was worth the wait.

And he had me believing it until my best friend caught him at a Halloween party with a girl dressed as Vivian fromPretty Woman. It was a week shy of our six-month anniversary. Saved by the ho. It still hurt and I cried for two weeks. There was a string of relationships after that. I went through a brief slutty period in college when I slept with frat boys with R-letter names: Ryan, Ross, Rick, and Reid. And then during my senior year of college came Woods: sexy, unassuming, self-deprecating Woods. He always smelled like Juicy Fruit and he had a big head. It was impossible to find a hat to fit him. I loved holding his head between my hands, running my fingers through the thick brown curls. It was a solid head, you couldn’t miss it in a crowd, and it was mine. Real talk: I’m the girl who always believes the newest set of words. Brandon’s ... Philip’s ... Woods’…

No matter how flimsy they are, if you dip them in some delicious lie, I’ll gobble them up.

On my first date with Woods he told me that I was too trusting.

“What makes you say that?” I’d had a visceral reaction, jerking my head back before sluggishly feeling the weight of insecurity.

We’d closed down the restaurant where we had dinner. After mutually deciding we didn’t want the date to end, we walked twelve blocks searching for a place still open to get another drink. We found a dive on First called American Trash, and I took off my shoes as soon as we sat down at the bar. My hair at the time was blonde, short and shaggy, and he’d reached up to tug on a piece near my cheek while the sleepy-eyed bartender mixed our drinks.

“Let me see your feet,”he’d said.

Without question, I’d put my feet in his lap and he’d started rubbing them.

“See. You barely know me.”

“They’re just feet,”I’d pointed out.

“If I’d asked for your wallet you would have handed me that too.”

He was probably right. He talked about it like it was a novelty to find someone who wasn’t jaded and so I believed myself special. At least to him. To the guy with the soft chocolate curls and the easy smile. That should have set off alarm bells in my head—a guy who was looking for a girl to trust him probably wasn’t getting an A+ in the honesty department.

Turns out Woods got a big, fat F. When he said he was going to the gym, he was really having dinner with the lifestyle editor of our blog, a girl I’d hired myself. The perfume on his shirt that smelled like candy: hers, even though he claimed it belonged to our sixty-year-old client. He came home one evening just a month after we celebrated our third wedding anniversary and told me he wasn’t happy and wanted a divorce. I laughed. Laughed, like he was pranking me. Life was pranking me, love was pranking me; Woods, he was completely fucking serious.

Anyway, we’re divorced now. But for eight years, that man massaged my feet any time we were in a bar together. As it turns out, the most painful experience of my life was laying those eight years of a relationship into a grave I was forced to dig myself. The person doing the leaving hands you a shovel and you bury something you once lived to nurture.

That’s the way it goes during the death of a marriage: the denial, the anger, the grieving, and then the inevitable purging of soul.

Chapter Three

New York bulges in front of me, splitting her city seams across the horizon. Excitement crackles in my belly as I watch her come into view. I’ve been ridiculed for my love of this city back home, but I don’t care. She’s testy, ambitious; everything about her pulses lightning fast. She’s easy on the eyes and hard on the nose. Warm wind blows through the open window and I crinkle my nose at the smell of exhaust fumes and piss.Weak, Billie. You leave for two years and now you’re wrinkling your nose like a tourist. I smile, leaning my head against the back of the seat. It feels so good to be back.

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