Growing Pains

“Growing apart doesn’t change the fact that for a long time we grew side by side; our roots will always be tangled. I’m glad for that.” Ally Condie

Amalia is thinking about her former husband, but more than that...

“Why am I still alive?” Clearly this is her solitude speaking. She is not suicidal, however. Nevertheless, she knows she deserves what happened and admits she’s to blame. 

“I was too focused on my work.”

This observation does not do much to improve Amalia’s mental state. Now that she has all the time in the world to devote to her work, her work has become just air in empty drawers. That’s probably because the other things that surround her - house, the street, the back yard - feel empty, no, are empty. Her daughter Lavinia has a career, a very successful one, at a University nearby, but she is very busy and can’t just call or visit her mother every day. In fact, she’s in Europe on sabbatical right now. Far away. Thus the house is not only empty, it’s silent. In the wrong way, like a tomb is silent. “Oh stop it, drama queen!” Amalia chastises herself because she knows she deserves it. 

The many species of birds that can be heard from the deck or living room or even the kitchen that looks onto the street are trying to help, but it’s useless. Amalia’s husband has moved on. He has taken with him her ability to sit without sound, because his human sound is gone. The house is silent. Silent and empty.

Amalia doesn’t mind solitude, normally. Not as a concept, anyway. A solitary life allows a person to get a lot done, a lot of important things that can’t be accomplished when you’re surrounded by cackling people.

“The best thing on Friday nights is popcorn, butter pecan ice cream, and a four or five hundred page novel.”

She actually said that out loud when she was in college and as a result was often the target of snarky comments. She can’t help the fact that her love of reading has always been stronger than almost anything or anyone else in her life. She knows the reason for that, but it’s a story that seems to bore most anybody who hears it. It has to do with her earliest memories of her grandmother. 

Who knew Amalia would end up marrying Dave, a nice guy, really smart, really sensitive, but more the Patriots or Celtics type when it came to socializing? Who knew they would still be in love decades later? 

“Until we weren’t.” Observes Amalia laconically. 

Now she feels like she is groping along the shadowy, unlit walls of the hallways of her life. She steps carefully, not wanting to frighten or offend anyone. Not a weak or fragile person, despite her appearance and behavior, Amalia feels the need to straighten out a few things, put them in their proper place. Do the work she has been trained to do as an archivist. She takes a few more cautious steps and locates the light switch. She knows this switch and the light it opens onto her is the key to the empty house, the empty yard, the empty bed: the knowledge that her husband is gone, but she does not have to lose him. Only Dave is gone; the rest of him remains.

She has this Ally person to thank. 

The light clicks on and, able to see clearly, Amalia begins to chip away at the suffocatingly empty walls. She knows where Dave is and it’s fine.

We taught each other so much. I taught you the best things of my life and you did the same. Two very different lives before we met, that’s for sure. The two parts of New York we grew up in? Miles apart.. The way each of us talked. One of us less refined (me, of course). The meals our mothers made. Worlds apart, of course. Our love of art and literature. (One of us less refined, I mean really unsophisticated- me, naturally.) All the museums and villages we traveled to when we could get overseas. That should have made us realize right then that we had some roots and that some were bound to get tangled up. 

We have a daughter who is doing fine. Don’t ever forget that, even though she’s all grown up. We know how each of us prefers coffee, or when we prefer beer over wine, or which is the best painted porcelain object for the house. We don’t/didn’t ever fight over which side of the bed each one wanted when not sleeping in our bed. Did you notice every time, for years, how I always waited until you chose your side? I thought you deserved to have first dibs. All I had to do was watch and see where you set your wallet or sunglasses and I knew.

Now this house where I live is my house, not yours or ours, just mine. Nevertheless, when I look around, your eye and voice/approval are everywhere. Don’t get the idea I’m going to break down and cry, though. That’s not where I’m going with this. At the same time, I am fairly sure I will never go to the places where we bought the painted porcelain - often blue and white, other times raucously folk-designed -, wooden carvings, abstract paintings, weavings, nineteenth century prints or books in Greek again. That means I will be taking good care of all I’ve got, really good care. Good care of the objects as well as the auras of us they will always have, corny as that sounds. I probably won’t travel much at all, because if the trip I make now is by car I am likely to get bored by myself and might doze off. On the other hand, since I get panicky in a plane by myself and have to take valium to fly, I don’t plan to dart off on jaunts around the world. No matter. I will look at the lovely plate from Algarve we bought. Listen to music we purchased in Toulouse, read a book on medieval woad trade in France. You are not going anywhere, Dave.

I think I will make some soda bread and colcannon this weekend, because we both say we have Celtic ancestors and we spent many hours visiting and discussing Celtic things, did we not? I am not very artistic, at least not with figurative drawing, but I do know where I put the Caran d’Ache pencils from Geneva. I might get them out and go sit by the window that looks onto the deck to sketch something. A bird, a tree, a bush, the potting shed. It’s a very nice little shed.

I know I didn’t show much emotion when you told me you were leaving after all these years. I only teared up a tiny bit. I didn’t yell at you or accuse you of being a monster or an adulterer. I simply un tied your moorings. I asked if you wanted a divorce or if you preferred to just to drift apart. At first you said we didn’t need to bother with legalities, we could just go our ways. That was harder than the news you were leaving: the news that you felt the marriage ties weren’t worth even cutting because they were no more than a formality, a legal matter. Ties of years and years, though. How could you have given them so little value? Finally you chose the first option. You understood my need to see marriage as something, a structure that lasted until no longer wanted.

You are completely untethered, but the minute I read the quote at the top of the page here, I knew your dream of Never-never Land was not to be. That’s because I wouldn’t even have to break a sweat to keep you from your dream. You see, we really have grown up together, you and I, and you’d better believe our roots are more entangled than my grandmother’s yarn box after the kittens found it that time.

Yes, I was silent when you confessed there was another person in your life, maybe it was selfish of me and I apologize. Even so, it still surprises me that I don’t call you up at 3 am and scream until you can hear the silence as loudly as I do. I just cast you off even though everything you couldn’t see in me while you gave me the news you were leaving was running mangled and bloody through my heart. I shrunk down so far that even now I’m not back to my former size. However, I will be. My lack of anger then and now is such a mystery, right?

No, there’s nothing really mysterious here. Now to understand our situation, or our condition, you need to understand the significance of those roots I’ve mentioned first of all. Roots refers to something that goes way back and way deep. That means they are not coming out of the ground with the first hurricane that comes along. 

You need roots to grow up. We knew that when we met. Now we both know there is the matter of when growing up starts. It’s not always the day we arrive on earth. Some of us lead limited - not poor, just limited - lives, and we take a while to get used to the growing up idea. We might think we’re grown up at eighteen, but some of us might not get our minds cleared until we’re almost thirty.

That’s more or less what happened with us. We started to grow up a bit late, but we grew up together and grew together. This is your predicament, Dave. Those roots I mentioned? We got ‘em. I’m just not sure yet if you’ve realized that this thing isn’t coming apart. You have all the space in the world and you choose now not to live with me. I am not asking you to do anything differently, not hoping you’ll return. Actually, I don’t need you to return. You see, we can’t have spent all that time together without having learned how not to trip over the other one’s feet. Now that we’re no longer married, no longer together, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear you’ve been tripping a lot on your new path, the one you’re walking on without me. That you’re not totally steady on your feet. Please take care of yourself. I am fine, by the way.

So in case you missed it the first time, here’s the quote from Ally Condie again:

“Growing apart doesn’t change the fact that for a long time we grew side by side; our roots will always be tangled. I’m glad for that.”

(I’m leaving it justified to the right like an epigraph, necause I like epigraphs and think it’s very appropriate for my story.

Growing apart can never change the fact that for years and years we - you and I - were growing side by side. That guarantees our roots will never be separated. Who do you think we are? Stones with no feeling? Idiots. I’m glad for that growing-together time and for the damn roots. Ours are probably like the invasive Asian bittersweet vine. The one you spent hours one hot August wrenching off trees and chopping to pieces. Your efforts were useless. It all grew back.

I know what I love about this quote from a writer I don’t know anything about and from something she wrote somewhere. Those last four words are the ladder (another sappy image, maybe, like the roots, but I like it, sorry) I will use to escape, to avoid shattering myself when I collide with these silent walls. Maybe as I am climbing out, I can toss a few other words into my pocket from the random quote above: Roots - always - tangled. Roots - forever - together….. Rooooots.

Amalia realizes where she is - in her house (hers, not his, not theirs) and suddenly thinks that tea sounds perfect. She goes to the small kitchen they both happily painted a mustardy gold, chooses a teabag of hibiscus over matcha, heats water and drops it in. Then she goes to the window that overlooks the deck. She recalls what she has just said to Dave and worries that she might have sounded like a jealous wife or some resentful woman who has been abandoned for another. Should she apologize for being cranky? She has essentially threatened him, saying he will never get rid of her, even though she had been trying to be funny, not trying to tell Dave off.

After all, it was possible that he really had left for good, that he and she did not have tangled roots strong enough to last forever. Those were her ideas, probably, not his. He had had a right to leave, since she of course had never paid enough attention to him when they were married. She was the author of her own loss, she had (metaphorically, of course) written the walls, the empty walls, that encased her now, in her house that was not theirs. 

Amalia has been holding the cup of tea in both hands in order to steady her thoughts. She shifts the mug, a beautiful creation from a potter in Arrowsic further up the coast, to her left hand. Then she runs her right hand down her shin without thinking. The thinking starts, however. She notices an unlikely or maybe an impossible tree root coiling delicately over her ankle and into her shoe. Agreed, it is barely visible and some people might not be able to see it. Amalia does, though, and she smiles. Not because the idea that finding part of a tree running down your leg is a foolish fantasy of a jilted wife, but rather because she’s certain Dave has another one like it on his leg. Maybe on both legs.