By Laurie Barton
Zoe got so excited on Thanksgiving when she found a picture of me in my 30s. We didn’t have phones back then, and I hated cameras, so Zoe had never seen me at a younger age. In the picture, I’m slim in a flowy pink dress, but my short gray hair makes me look a little tough. At the time, my husband loved the short hair. He thought I looked edgy and cool, young with a glint of silver. Since then, I’ve gone red, the poetic in-your-face kind of glow, so Zoe was fascinated with my natural color.
“That was 1996,” I told her. “Short hair was kind of a thing back then. Princess Diana. Demi Moore in Ghost.” Zoe pulled up an image and saw the resemblance. She showed me a glossy-headed picture of Demi Moore, and I thought of how my Japanese students used to squeal that I looked just like her, almost. That was their discreet way of complimenting my haircut, while joking that I did not have her pretty face.
“Look at you, Mom—eight years before you had me!”
Zoe’s math was correct, and it shocked me. That edgy woman in the picture would never have guessed that in eight years she’d be having a second daughter with a new husband. That would have blown her mind. In 1996, everything was peaches with hubby number one, until November, when he got entangled with an intern, kind of like Bill Clinton. That ruined everything quickly.
I survived the divorce and married again, giving birth to Zoe Noelle on Christmas Day, 2004. Now I’m legally separated from her dad, a move I made since he was lazy and made me do all the breadwinning. Messy, too. I stopped using the washing machine in the garage since I
couldn’t stand seeing all the lumber and junk stashed in there. I dragged everything to a laundromat every week before filing for separation and moving out. It seemed that a bold move might wake him up and motivate him to become a better husband. Somewhere on this planet, I know there are men who plead for you to return, who try to make things better, who send you flowers and swear they just want you back in their lives.
Not Danny. He pushed for all the money he could get and then never called me again. I kept waiting, but weeks turned into months and months of silence. At first, Zoe would meet him for lunch at Firehouse Subs and report back to me that he was down in the dumps, but then, she started saying how he seemed to be in a much better mood. That meant he was happy without me, swimming in cash. No job was needed, so his idleness continued. What changed was the new location of his sofa and TV.
After Zoe said Danny was happy, I started missing him, fighting the impulse to call him with an old sobriety mantra: not today, but maybe tomorrow. Then, Christmas lights appeared on every hedge and balcony, and all that twinkling made it easy to picture couples snuggling by the fire, the way Danny and I had cuddled with gifts on our first Christmas together.
Was there any way to get the cuddling back?
Was I insane for wanting it with him?
When I finally broke down and called him, I didn’t use the word cuddle. Instead, I told him I was open to being “friends”—but he would have to take the initiative. That sparked a round of assurances as Danny said he appreciated my reaching out.
“We’re still married,” I told him.
“I know. And that’s important to me.”
Good old Danny—he always talks a good game. That’s how he snagged me, always making promises in his soft-spoken voice, rubbing his stubbly cheek against mine as we embraced and he repeated, I love you. I care about you.
Somewhere, the sun is shining on a man who really means it.
This time I knew that Danny wouldn’t follow through, that he’d be taking no initiative. Sure enough, when Zoe had lunch with him at Sergeant Pepperoni, he introduced her to a new friend, Alina from Ukraine.
“She’s younger than you, Mom. Very tall and she sounds like a vampire.”
“I vant to drink your blood.”
“Exactly.”
I’d just sold a condo to a couple from Ukraine and I knew how they swapped v for w. It was charming, really, like Alina would be as Danny bought her little diamond earrings and flew her to Hawaii, flush with the million he’d legally stolen from me. How sweet it would be as she loosened her string bikini, Danny thumbs up as he loved me and cared about me.
Down in San Diego, where I was helping a new client, I fluffed my red hair in front of the mirror and saw how exhausted I looked. I needed a little tequila to perk me up, so I headed to Old Town, where I would flirt with the wooden Indian in front of the cigar house. I remembered him from visiting Old Town back when I looked like Demi Moore, whose movie Ghost included a stray reference to an Indian head penny from the 1890s, one hundred years before my pink dress. Before the intern, before Danny and Zoe, before the Japanese students who explained that
undesired women were called “Christmas cake” in Japan, a treat nobody wanted when the holiday was over.
That stoic Indian would help me forget about Danny. He would welcome me, help me put things in perspective, remind me of the cartoon arrows I’d seen in a meme illustrating the concept of a “trauma bond” that keeps you attached to someone who hurts you. The arrows were plunged into the back of a woman like me. She was clinging to an indifferent-looking archer, whose bow was ready, whose quiver held more arrows, sharp and deadly, prepared for launch.
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Laurie Barton is a Pushcart Prize nominee, Best of the Net finalist, and winner of the New Southerner Literary Prize in Poetry. Her work has appeared in juked, Glass, Bending Genres, Lunch Ticket, Jabberwock Review and Snakeskin UK. She holds an MFA from Antioch University Los Angeles and received a scholarship to attend the Disquiet International Literary Program in Lisbon, Portugal. Her chapbook, Coco Sinatra, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.