'Mismatched' — a Short Story
What is left of a woman’s identity when her marriage breaks apart?
With her back to the empty marital bed, Celia was concentrating on nipping the excess skin around the nail of the ring finger of her left hand. She manicured her nails every single Saturday morning, an activity that was part necessary hygiene, part basic beautifying. She did it at her vanity desk in the bedroom, which was pushed against the wall next to the window. Celia was using the cuticle nipper so swiftly, moving from one nail to the next, one could mistake her for a professional in a nail salon.
The skin between her thin brows was folded in thick waves from both the frown of concentration on the task and that of surviving 34 years of marriage to Al.
After finishing the cleanup, she inspected her ten nails at once in the morning sunlight and, satisfied with another job well done, she moved on to the next step. With her right index finger and thumb, shaped together like a clothes peg, she extracted a bottle of seashell-white from her manicure organizer bag. That Saturday morning chore slowed down her constantly spinning mind, which proved vital for her sanity, especially for the past many weeks. She had lost track of how many.
The king-size bed behind her had been left untouched on the right side for the past seven months. But she ignored that detail, fluffing the right-side pillow every morning as if her husband had squashed it with his heavy head the night before. A bouquet of dead and dried out flowers was standing hardened in a vase, a reminder that she, too, had once been loved.
After the seashell polish dried on her nails, she put on her usual jewelry. A golden ring with emerald stone, a gift from her husband when their son Marcus was born; another one with the golden metal shaped into a flower, from her mother for a long-forgotten occasion; and her wedding band. She unconsciously put on the wedding band not just by habit, but because it was the mark of her identity — that of a married woman. That was how her local community had known her for the past 34 years, and she wasn’t about to give everyone something to talk about.
Celia almost had let it slip the previous afternoon when she had run into a former colleague who asked her how Al was doing. She could not have said she hadn’t heard from him in weeks, and that his side of the bed had been untouched ever since. That was nobody’s business but theirs. Downplaying the question with a gesture of the hand, she had answered he was just fine, buried knee-deep in his drawings and acrylic paints, as always.
One doesn’t go about deconstructing a 34-year foundation without even having all the pieces of why Al suddenly decided to move out without a word.
Once her Saturday morning nail ritual was finished, Celia would go downstairs and pour herself a second serving of coffee for that day. Taking her mug into the living room she would turn on the TV to watch an episode of the newest soap opera she followed. Day in and day out she would repeat the same domestic routine like the broken vinyl player she kept stashed in her basement storage, which always skipped to the beginning.
She liked soap opera love stories. They were the idealized version of the marriage she had tried to build. She took all the steps she thought would ensure she’d have a happy life. She did the marriage thing and the homemaking thing, she had a child, she had mortgages, thankfully paid off. But it didn’t seem to matter. It had been all so exhausting and she often felt she was suffocating.
And now Al had disappeared.
She would watch those series, with intricate and improbable romantic twists leading to a happy marriage, as entertainment. But, for her brain, they were like reading the textbook lesson again and again to understand where you got it so wrong that you failed the test. Leaving her unhappy marriage never occurred to Celia, that was not in the manual. When Al did it, she took it as an insult to the hard work she had put in for the better part of her life.
Oblivious of the cage she lived in, Celia thought she didn’t want a divorce because she didn’t want to lose the house. She poured her entire self in that house, and she wasn’t about to lose it for a trivial detail called happiness. She put so much of herself between those walls, that if she had to split the house in two, it would be like splitting her own body in two. And a body split in two cannot survive. When Al left tacitly, she was content to notice that meant she got to keep the place.
After 34 years, she kept the house, but not the marriage.
The living room looked like it came out of a ’90s movie, put on pause on the DVR, waiting for the family members to jump back on the couch and blow life into it again. The stereo player, which had filled the room with pop music once upon a time, was now tucked away in a corner of the bookcase, stripped of its function. Tacky souvenirs from all the European capitals they had visited together hid the spines of the classical books aligned on the shelves. Old, plastic glass coasters piled over newer ones, another indication of how the past was throwing its weight on top of the present. She kept an empty box of chocolates, a reminder of some Easter celebration. If life was like a box of chocolates, her box was empty, but she refused to throw it out. Even the ever-accumulating dust under the furniture was part of the story of her life, so much so that she wouldn’t wipe anything off.
Tomorrow it would be 7 months since Al left her, but that was not an anniversary Celia kept.
To her, he just went to the flat they had downtown that they never got around to renting out. They would talk on the phone from time to time, mostly logistics about the time she wasn’t around so that he could come by and retrieve even more of his things.
She never dared to ask him what he was doing, what all that meant. If she uttered the words she would make it real. Like that, it was a nameless thing, and nameless things did not exist, everybody knew that.
He didn’t dare say it out loud either, to avoid any additional arguments he knew she would gift him with. He was releasing himself, and her, of the pain, but she rejected the new privilege of being free. She simply waited for his mid-life crisis to end and return home.
Every time Al would come by and pick a few more folders full of sketches or old books, Celia felt robbed. Robbed of her marriage, like Al was taking bits and pieces of it with him. She could not have known that the acid remarks they had exchanged throughout the years would prove prophetic. Celia would always mock that he could take his damned blue glasses with him when he’d finally leave. The set of six cobalt-blue stained glasses was one of his few possessions when they moved in together. He left, but without the blue glasses.
Al never told her to her face that he was leaving her, he let his actions speak. He was never much of a talker, and even less in front of her outbursts of rage. He would retreat in his study or find a pretext to go to the office downtown, escaping from her rage rather than staying to fight it.
He was a runner, she was a screamer.
The following Thursday would be the anniversary of their only son’s wedding. That was a date Celia was sure to mark and keep and would send Marcus a remember-the-old-times message.
As she sat on the couch in front of another soap opera episode, Marcus watched her, all smiling and happy on his wedding day, from the framed photo on the cabinet. The photo seemed to be glued to the furniture, despite the fact that her son had already been divorced for three years. But the wedding had been a highlight of Celia’s accomplishment as a mother, marrying off her only offspring. That photo sitting on the cabinet was proof of that. She chose to keep only the good memories of her life, only the good stuff. Just like one kept only the plump, red cherries from a 2-pound wooden crate, discreetly trashing the less fortunate ones.
Lunchtime would find her standing in front of the wide, empty kitchen island, for a quick bite. Celia had never been much of an eater and it showed on her silhouette and her caved-in cheeks.
The tense silence of dinner tables when their son was young, made Celia associate eating with domestic fights, followed by a sense of loneliness so heavy that she felt she had lead in her stomach. Eating became almost a painful activity, as her constant stomach pain reminded her. She had found a way to minimize it by getting in quick bites standing up at the kitchen island. It gave her a sense of getting over with an unpleasant but necessary chore. Like getting a pap smear test.
The last time she sat through an entire lunch was a few weeks before, at Al’s flat. Had it been two weeks or three? She couldn’t remember. Ever since she retired, the distribution of time became meaningless, now an endless rolling field of days on end.
Marcus had come to visit and he wanted to see his father’s new place. He offered to go by himself, but Celia insisted it was fine, she would join them. She was holding on to her family unit, no matter the battered shape it was in, if it was the last thing she’d hold onto in this life. It felt better to have a damaged family than no family at all.
A damaged family was a chance for improvement, something to look forward to mending, like a ripped blouse worth salvaging. Because she had never wanted to be alone, despite all those times when she’d hissed if only you’d leave.
Marcus thought that was the price to pay for his sporadic visits, watching his mother pretend they were still a family, and watching the father put up with it without a comment, like he had done his entire life. Al was content to welcome them both, out of respect for the mother of his son.
Celia stood in the door of Al’s flat, a stern expression on her face with her lips pressed together, like a wife who had to put up with the presence of the mistress entertaining her own family. She looked at the place with the unease a woman would look at another woman, partially naked, with see-through underwear, making her husband happy with her carefree sexiness. She was polite but felt like the third wheel. She was replaced by the very walls of the flat he now stayed in.
The open space living room looked mismatched, just like his old marriage.
It wasn’t your usual bachelor pad, with a huge sofa, oversized TV, and an empty fridge. It rather looked like a 40-year-old virgin’s new student den, whose numerous family members helped him get installed. Celia recognized the mid-century inherited furniture, now lumped together with the latest tech computer and an IKEA-style ordinary carpet. A mix of styles, each belonging to a different life. Very old next to ultramodern, stylish on top of basic, tacky near traditional.
Al invited them to sit down, make themselves comfortable. Comfortable was the last of Celia’s feelings in the new, tawdry flat. He served them lunch and as she held up the cutlery to part the pink carpaccio, her wedding band shone in the sun filtering straight through the bare windows. Like a lightbulb coming on by itself, making it clear as a well-lit room that they were connected. Forever.
At first, the walls of the flat had been blue. A boyish blue, the color Al never got to choose in their home, simply because he wasn’t allowed to choose. Celia always had the last word, which always differed from his. Then, the boyish blue had been covered up with an optimistic pink but thin enough that the boyish blue was still visible from underneath. The past always had a way of peeking its head into the present.
Celia thought it was ridiculous he preferred to live in that small, jarring hole in the wall rather than in their spacious home where they had gathered all their comforts. She failed to realize how much Al saw their house as a build-up of wounds rather than comforts and how much his flat looked like peace. Like having escaped a life where his opinions were gagged and he could never choose the color of the walls or that of the couch. Now that he was free to pick either, he went nuts on them, ignoring any aesthetic common sense.
Her house — their house — had a much nicer color palette, it was maybe homier, but covered with a fine layer of dust, like a fine sheet of plastic dead bodies were covered with.
Her house looked like the long-gone glory days of their life.
Piles of old objects, from decorations to tableware, seemed frozen in time, while Celia was the only one around who aged. In 34 years she had threatened countless times to escape their conflict-ridden marriage. But she never thought Al would leave her all by herself, and frankly, she didn’t think he’d be capable of it. On her part, it was just letting off steam.
Now that the unthinkable had happened, she held onto the past as much as she hung on to her worn-out velvet angel-themed pillowcases. She couldn’t let any old object go. If she had, she would let parts of her marriage, parts of her identity, go.