The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart Read Online Free PDF Page A

bed, oblivious of the time. I remember how shocked I was, when she told me this. You, shaved and dressed, on a moving train, headed for New York City, before ten in the morning? Maybe even before nine? My heart ached for you.
    The therapist wants to know what it is we want from the two-hour session Our Child has arranged for. I wonder this myself. In my case, it is some kind of closure. My mind flashes onthe last brief conversation we had after receiving verification of our divorce. We’d left the federal building in which severance had occurred—whether in Brooklyn or Manhattan, I no longer recalled—and stood, after ten years of marriage, suddenly free, legally, of each other. And, because we were now legally free of each other, I was feeling very close. The humor with which I was able to see so much of our life together, suddenly returned. I smiled at you, gave a sigh of relief and said: “Well, that’s over. Let’s go somewhere and have a cup of tea.” But your face reflected none of my lightheartedness. You were morose. “No thank you,” you said. “I have to get back to the office.” It was a response emblematic of our problem. My face fell. However, still determined to prove to myself at least that divorce need not mean the end of simple civility, I stuck out my hand. You reluctantly, it seemed to me, took it. We shook hands woodenly, like a couple of strangers, and you turned and disappeared down the street. And I must have said, to the emotions crowding around my chest: Get away from me.
    Our Child is speaking. What she wants, she says, is to better understand something that has always puzzled her. She has been the go-between all these years. Eighteen, or so. What she has noticed about each of us when we speak of the other is a kind of wistfulness. We seem to her bemused, often. Puzzled, frequently. Not quite sure ourselves what happened to us. The moment she describes us in this way, I see that it is the truth, and I feel an enormous wave of pity for us, her parents. What did happen to us? It seems now a question well worth considering.
    You are sitting, still smiling, your legs crossed. The therapist is looking from you to me. What did happen? she asks. You aresilent, waiting, as if you’d also like to know. Two hours will go quickly, I know. I decide to take the plunge.
    I tell her about our courtship and early marriage. The sense we both had of finding, and bonding with, a miraculously compatible mate. The long years of trying to accommodate ourselves to a violent, and often boring, environment. The isolation. The racism. The sexism. The slow breakdown of my spirit after I’d finished this novel or that, this story or that, this poem or that, and looked about and found little to amuse, divert or sustain me. Of your retreat into the secluded quiet of your office, night after night. The loneliness. The old conflict resurfacing between loyalty to “other” and loyalty to myself.
    It was the same struggle I’d faced with my mother, I said. I always understood her work was important. She had to be away from home in order for there to
be
a home. It was her earnings that meant food, clothes, a toothbrush. A roof over our heads. I dared not complain. And yet I missed her with every fiber of my being. I died each day she was away. Yet I could say nothing. It was the same in my marriage. Each day my husband went out, often in danger, to slay the dragons of racism and ignorance that proliferated in Mississippi. Many, many people depended on him. More than I did, I sometimes thought. How could I say I also needed him?
    The therapist is a middle-aged refugee from Latvia. She has a thoughtful face and a faint accent. The language of her body says: This is a space in which it is safe to express. Her large Irish wolfhound lies in front of the tiled fireplace, asleep. What a differencesuch a person, such an ear, would have made in our lives all those years ago, I think. And flash on the five-mile bike ride that had