We participate in a world where social media occupies a portion of our day. Keeping up with appearances and unnecessary updates of our lives has priority over more meaningful contributions. Your attention is valuable. Quit being a sucker.
She gets frustrated when we talk on the phone, and I ask her to repeat words so I can fill missing syllables. To comfort her, I blame “shitty cell service,” or accrued wax in my ears, and I remain without comfort. Sometimes I just accept reality, and ask her to clear her throat so I can hear a brief restoration of the voice I wish I had bottled.
I put up with plenty of harassment as a waitress and never said a thing — I needed the tips. I didn’t report that internship supervisor who tricked me into a night out alone with him, and then into his bed. I donned a terribly misogynistic costume for a TV pilot—basically, thongs and an apron—as men on set snapped photos of my butt. I wanted to be on TV, didn’t I? Who was I to say “No”?
A few months after adopting Roz, on a particularly stressful day of coordinating schedules and time for dog-walking, he casually said “I think that having children is, maybe, not for us.” Steve sat at the kitchen counter eating a sandwich, his back turned to me.
I cannot trust my love. Everything about my husband pisses me off. He doesn’t do chores. Or he does chores but not the way I want them done, or when I want them done. This is the guy with whom not more than a month ago I celebrated 25 years of marriage.
I was wearing pink undies with a pink bra. I hate the color pink. He told me to straddle him and I couldn't because my pants were around my ankles and it wasn't physically possible. He told me it might be easier if I took my pants off. I felt impaired, I couldn't think straight.
But when I arrived in September 1988, the intellectual paradise I had naively expected shimmered out of reach. I was wait-listed for creative writing workshops. I floundered in philosophy classes I took instead. I drank cheap beer, discovering a drunken hookup culture my mother didn’t know had replaced dating. I was so unhappy, I nearly dropped out.
I could trace my own bindings back to that moment. And farther still, to my helpless reflection in the cabinet windows encasing fragile family heirlooms. My own paralysis had been a limb, that had simply needed cutting.
I’d been so obsessed with proving I would be a great cop, and so desperate to show Mom my choice had been right, the prospect of also finding a relationship at the academy had never crossed my mind.
Although the Jade, and its various locations, are all gone, and the only remnants now are morsels of conversation on nostalgia websites, our ritual continues. To enact the ceremony, all one of us has to do is contact the literal Sisterhood and say, “I’m calling a Bot Bo.”
When I turned fifty, I still appreciated my husband, who enjoys plucking lemons from our tree to bake rich, buttery, French tarts and who knows how to wake up my waning libido. But less than twelve months later, I no longer tolerate the hot-topic buttons in our marriage—where to live and how much Judaism to observe—and I fantasize not about another man but about another place, trying to pinpoint when the balance shifted, exactly who or what the culprit is.
Depression runs in my family. My dad’s mother committed suicide when she was 59. The last time he saw her alive was 1956, before he boarded a freight ship from Taiwan to study in America. Thirteen years later, he flew back to his homeland for her funeral. After the service, he learned she killed herself. His sister had discovered her body in the bathroom along with a suicide note.
