Marriage for Beginners
by Sharon Bailly
Do you know, I still comb my hair with the big-tooth comb I used at twenty as if my hair were still thick enough to break the teeth of lesser combs? Small delusions.
Marriage, you know, requires delusions. My first two husbands might or might not have loved me but I loved them all, finding conversational depth in the one who knew no English and believing in every recovery of the alcoholic, who was startled when I finally went for a divorce—that was his delusion.
When I fell in love with Allen, my third husband, everyone said: Wait. But Allen had been my first true love back when I was twenty and my hair was thick. I needed to bring back those years, so I ran off with him, or whatever we call running when we’re leaning into our sixties.
Allen cares for me but he never seems to be around when I need him. Or maybe I need him most when he isn’t around. I lost weight for him, then gained it all back, and then we settled.
I told him what the doctor said: “You’re doing pretty good for someone your age.” That’s what they start saying when all you want is to bring back the years.
I met Allen after I left my therapist—you’ll need a therapist too if you’re ever thinking about divorce. She had put together a group of women who were all in various stages of distress about men. There was Susan who mourned her husband even though he left her after twenty years of marriage. But mostly Susan was angry that she had to take out the garbage herself. She said, “That’s men’s work and a woman shouldn’t have to do it.”
There was soft-spoken Evie who believed in romance and happiness ever after. She couldn’t have children, however, and couldn’t find a man who didn’t want children—or when she did, she rejected him because what kind of man doesn’t want children?
Fran had both husband and daughter issues: their daughter drove them into bankruptcy and her husband refused to speak to their daughter. Paula the talker had a quiet husband who sort of disappeared into himself. Paula excused this by believing he was going deaf, although it might have been a selective sort of deafness. The more Paula talked, the less any of us heard.
Then there was me, two husbands behind me and the third just ahead, wondering why I couldn’t live with the men I chose because, after all, I chose them. I had an uncle, my father’s brother, who married and divorced twice. My father said, “He couldn’t keep even one wife happy.” I guess I couldn’t keep one husband happy.
We all gave each other empathy, and some of us actually ended up liking ourselves better. One day, driving into a session, I saw my hands on the steering wheel and thought, “These are the hands of a grown woman, a capable grown woman.”
I left the group. I left behind discussions of how much love you should expect from those you love, how children help or harm a relationship, whether you can ever talk anyone into anything.
What would have happened long ago if someone had told me, “You idiot, stop marrying these men”? You know I wouldn’t have listened. Maybe I was afraid that any man I rejected would be the last. So I married again and again. But if you want to couple with anyone, listen to me now, you have to give up your fear of again and again.
My friends helped me pick out the white wedding dress for the first wedding and plan the party for the second. I did nothing for the third marriage, not even exchanging a ring; we just made a pledge that we were, if not in fact then definitely in agreement, married. It seems to be enough for doctors and lawyers.
In case you’re wondering, the last I heard, Susan married a bristly little man who found fault with everything at the reception: soup too cold, coffee too hot, waiters too slow, waiters too fast. She’ll stay married to him, you know, and the garbage won’t pile up.
Evie found a widower with three adult children who like her. Evie and her widower married in city hall, then went into the woods and called up the fairies and fauns to bless their union, with the three adult children throwing rose petals and reciting poetry.
I expect Fran and her daughter get together every once in a blue moon, but you can bet she hasn’t told her husband. As for Paula, I’m sure she’s still talking. You’re welcome to inquire if you have the patience.
Here’s the moral: if you try enough times to add one and one, no matter how numerically obtuse you are, eventually you get an answer you can live with. Or maybe that’s another of those small delusions. How much do you care?
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Sharon Bailly is a New Jersey native transplanted to New Hampshire. She has published stories in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine, Space & Time, Analecta, and The Boston Review, among other magazines. Her nonfiction children’s book was published by The Millbrook Press. After a long career as a technical and marketing writer, she has returned to creative fiction.
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