She Curmudgeon

The church base­ment was cold.  The chairs were fold­ing.  The cush­ions looked like some­thing from your grandmother’s 1980s kitchen, if she’d gone crazy with ruf­fles and coun­try decor.  The cof­fee was perced.  All the treats con­tained sugar and gluten.

For three hours, though, it was Vegas, a gar­den of delight in its way, because every­thing that was said there, stayed there.  Pretty much every separation/divorce story, every sad tale, every expres­sion of shitty self-esteem or rage at the ex-, every twitch, every snif­fle, every flat affect, every deep belly laugh, every “fuck that, no way!” expressed on the teller’s behalf?  It came out in the wash of voices inside the cir­cle, sev­en­teen strong ear­lier on tonight.  My first meet­ing.  Turns out they call it AA for divorced peo­ple, too.

No mat­ter that one of the folks is some­one I know from my work because they use it as a loca­tion for their cus­tody swap.  (I knew I knew them from some­where, that jolt of recog­ni­tion and jar as you read­just peo­ple to put them in con­text.)  No mat­ter that the group of peo­ple skews widely on gen­der ori­en­ta­tion, class back­ground, cur­rent sources of income.  No mat­ter that some peo­ple have been divorced and done for years, and other peo­ple have just made the deci­sion that they might need to leave.  Kids, no kids, alimony/bitter child sup­port bat­tles v. “keep­ing it clean,” still friends or bit­ter hatred–  cut this meeting’s tree open and you can see the whole life­time of a mar­riage– really, all of the pos­si­ble mar­riages in all of the pos­si­ble worlds, includ­ing the best ones before they declined, or why would we have mar­ried in the first place?

I have “in real life” friends I’ve known for a long time, all of whom know my hus­band and still care about and worry for him– I have the many won­der­ful yous– I have friends and col­leagues at work who have been through divorces– I even have my own par­ents– to talk this through with and tell me this too shall pass.  There are peo­ple who mean well to whom I’m not close who find out (the world is cov­ered by a huge grapevine, either that, or we’re all still in high school) who offer me coun­sel, and that’s always inher­ently awk­ward, because if I wanted to talk aloud about it, I would, but I didn’t, so why on Earth would they bring it up?  They mean well, how­ever, so I sti­fle the impulse to tell them to fuck the hell off whether or not they’ve been through it them­selves– my response is always partly a lie because there’s no way to shrug off an inquiry into the state of your mar­riage or emo­tional health with­out shad­ing the truth.  (What?  They want me to say “Of course I’m not fuck­ing okay, I left the love of my life because our issues were unre­solv­able and I worry that I’m too crazy to ever find any­one else if I ever feel up to that task and I worry that I’m inca­pable of being happy, ever, and I worry that I’ve hurt him irrev­o­ca­bly and he won’t ever be happy either, not that I was doing any good at that toward the end?”  Yeah.  I don’t think so.  “Hang­ing in there,” will suffice.)

I dead­pan respond to the peo­ple who flirt with me when they find out I’m sin­gle because often I don’t know they’re flirt­ing or even when I sus­pect they might be. I don’t know if I want to flirt, much less date (at the moment) and any­way, I don’t know how (it’s been 14 years, after all) to respond, except to stut­ter and blush because the atten­tion isn’t some­thing I’m used to, so while a lit­tle atten­tion is nice, some is quickly too much.  Plus, I’d just fuck it up, at least now, pos­si­bly always.

But in this ver­sion of Vegas, I can pre­tend like there’s no ulte­rior motive, and every­one is there for the pur­poses of sup­port and vent­ing, per­haps even friend­ship.  There’s some­thing about hear­ing the things you tell your­self you’re not crazy for think­ing (the same things your friends who know you tell you, but they know you, so maybe they’re just being kind?) from a new group of strangers, or some­one who’s only known me in pass­ing to look up a book for their chil­dren and pass polite con­ver­sa­tion– I knew it.  It’s some­thing to know, in a gen­eral sense, that I’m not alone in this expe­ri­ence of doubt­ing, of feel­ing stu­pid, of feel­ing wor­ried and guilty and all the other parts of my story– and another thing to roll the dice, go to Vegas, and be in a room full of peo­ple in a crappy church base­ment who are all hav­ing totally dif­fer­ent and yet at the end of the day totally sim­i­lar prob­lems, even as your legs get tired and you twitch and cross and re-cross them and try to make inter­ested noises and faced at the less inter­est­ing speak­ers because– every­one has a story, and every­one has their turn to tell it, then be told that even if things stink in the mean­time, some­time, hope­fully soon, it gets bet­ter, and they will be okay,  even if some days are rough, some weeks are shitty, and some­times you just have to rough it through on your own.

“The light at the end of the tun­nel isn’t a train,” one of them joked, about their slow but real climb out of Shit Self-Esteemville.

Jack­pot.

Espe­cially if you like per­co­lated coffee.