Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation Read Online Free PDF

families I feel our stigma, our loss of prestige: we are like a gypsy caravan parked up among the houses, itinerant, temporary. I see that we have lost a degree of protection, of certainty. I see that I have exchanged one kind of prestige for another, one set of values for another, one scale for another. I see too that we are more open, more capable of receiving than we were; that should the world prove to be a generous and wondrous place, we will perceive its wonders.
    I begin to notice, looking in through those imaginary brightly lit windows, that the people inside are looking out. I see the women, these wives and mothers, looking out. They seem happy enough, contented enough, capable enough: they are well dressed, attractive, standing with their men and their children. Yet they look around, their mouths moving. It is as though they are missing something or wondering about something. I remember it so well, what it was to be one of them. Sometimes one of these glances will pass over me and our eyes will briefly meet. And I realise she can’t see me, this woman whose eyes have locked with mine. It isn’t that she doesn’t want to, or is trying not to. It’s just that inside it’s so bright and outside it’s so dark, and so she can’t see out, can’t see anything at all.

EXTRACTION
    The day my husband moved his possessions out of our house I had toothache. It was raining, and all morning the door to the street stood open. The wet air gusted in and the dim hall lay like an opened tomb in the grey daylight. I stood at the bottom of the stairs, my hands over my mouth, like a mime artist pantomiming dismay.
    The dentist recommended extraction: the X-ray photograph showed that the tooth was beyond repair. Theoretically, he said, it ought to be possible, but the idiosyncracies of the case were what counted here. The crooked shape of the root made it inaccessible to the long, fine instruments that would kill the nerves. They, the instruments, could not turn corners. And the root, as the X-ray showed, had grown at a right angle to itself halfway down.
    Why had it assumed that shape? It was difficult to know, the dentist said. It may have been bent by the pressure of other forces, but there appeared to be an aspect of fate to it too, the response of its own nature to the available conditions. To an extent it had simply chosen to go in that direction. One could not entirely blame the positioning of the other teeth, the spatial properties of the jaw, the condition of the gums; no, the tooth itself would have to answer
for its doomed character. It had been in some ineluctable sense wayward, and now it had put itself beyond reach. A straighter root, however diseased, could have been redeemed. Superficially the condition of this one was not so bad, but form is destiny; form, not content, that which is shaped and therefore shapes its own fate.
    While the X-ray was taken the dentist and the nurses stepped back, as one, reflexively turning away and crossing their arms over their chests. Their soft-shod feet were noiseless as they withdrew in this synchronised gesture of self-protection: in their white overalls they stood like acolytes at the ceremony of blood. The dentist, a tall and broad-shouldered Greek, wore beneath his overall a richly patterned floor-length robe. The wan nurses were silent as they moved dimly among the white and chrome cabinets at the back of the room, forever recessed, like figures in the background of a painting. Was the pain more or less constant, he asked, or were there still phases of normality in which one could do and think of other things? Had we reached the point of crisis where our only experience was the experience of suffering, where our only need, our only desire was the desire to end it? It is terrible to desire the end of something, the absence of something: desire should belong to life, to presence and not absence. One should be careful not to live in this inverted state too long; nor, he said,