The Damage Done
Deirdre Mendoza
Word Count 1051
In a valiant attempt to triage the marriage, you and your husband take off on the Vespa to Barbrix, the local spot in your LA neighborhood. You order some small plate delights, and share a bottle of Malbec. You feel light and amorous as you laugh and reminisce about adventures you’ve had over the past seventeen years. Remember when we went down to Baja for your show and we got stopped by the federales…
In those moments, the two of you are transformed. You become the young, unstoppable, creatures you loved, trusted, and married. But you finish the evening in a late-night row, blaming each other for being yourselves. You’re not sure if your husband is as frightened as you are by the realization that you’re actually going to separate and eventually divorce, until he says: Of course I am, I’m losing my best friend.
You never threw Cinzano ashtrays, or took digs at each other at dinner parties, like your parents. Your battles are more arthritic than anything else. Flare-ups became increasingly acute. Arguments over money, always money. Oh, and broken promises—some imagined, some not. You feel worried and anxious. There are moments when the marriage and the kids feel like a weight you must carry alone.
Your low-cost lawyer greets you with donuts and coffee in her office, off the 101 Freeway. She’s pert, dressed in leggings and a leather jacket. She has shiny hair, smells of perfume and cigarettes, and makes it clear she’s there to fight for women. She says she’ll fight for you.
“My husband and I have stopped fighting,” you say. “We’ve also stopped talking. So we’re not really in a fight. I mean, are we?”
The attorney tells you your options like she’s reading from a playbook. “You can go after his wages or restrict his passport if he doesn’t pay child support.”
“Thanks,” you say, shutting down. “I just want it to be over.”
So you and your husband sign the papers, work out a deal, and try to inch forward like two shell-shocked people who’ve convinced themselves there must be something better on the other side.
You don’t ask for it, but you get full custody of the kids, with weekly visits from the ex—and a Los Feliz home mortgage you’ll never pay off. With the help of a contractor friend you drywall and paint, turning a former art studio into a tiny guesthouse. Soon you have additional income.
The wound inflicted by the divorce is so big that for a while there is nothing else but the wound. It feels like a bomb went off—because it did—and you tried to flee. But there was nowhere to go. The life you had in the house on the tree-lined street, the one with the Beatles on the stereo and the kids jumping on their beds while the mom and dad are talking in the kitchen, is no longer yours.
You decline invitations to social events and duck down the aisles of Trader Joe’s, trying to avoid putting sad faces on everyone you know. You go from crying every day to crying once a week when you visit your late stage-Alzheimer’s-mother. On Tuesday, you told her you got divorced, but now it’s Thursday, so you have to break the news to her once again.
In those early years after the divorce, you and your ex each find pain relief with no-good partners. You force each other to tolerate awkward introductions and you offer fake approval. She’s how old? you ask. Yeah, seems…nice.
You forget what being single looks like. It's often a smirking ghost sitting in the empty chair beside you. You didn’t think you’d ever be a single mom of two teenagers. You didn’t think you’d fly the freeways teaching at multiple colleges, relying on carpools to the Valley, and pleading for financial aid, but here you are, patching a new life together with as much grace and gratitude as you can muster.
Your ex needs reminders that the place that had once been your family home is, by mutual agreement, no longer his. You tell him it’s time to surrender the key. You need reminders to keep your own boundaries: You don’t have to invite his rebound girlfriend for Thanksgiving left-overs; or lend him your car when his stops running.
Two years pass and you finally get your ex to move the remnants of his stuff out of your garage, including thirty large paintings. That’s when you start to notice a shift: you publish more fiction, create a web series, start a blog, and write some teleplays. You focus on the kids, lean on your girlfriends, find a new therapist, and meditate daily.
One day you notice that the wound is shrinking. You’re no longer preoccupied with how to boost your husband’s career. You don’t have a husband.
Six years have passed since the divorce and now you talk weekly with your ex. You spend some holidays together, and it goes pretty well. You share a Netflix account, and compete with photos of your pets on a family group chat. Sometimes you talk about the world, or relay stories about your now adult kids. Other times, you laugh about a sighting of an old friend, a book you’ve read, or an historic joke that’s taken a dark twist. You used to laugh all the time together. You’d think that might have been enough. Laughter and forgetting is a kind of glue in a marriage, but it wasn’t strong enough to hold the center.
When your basement floods during LA’s only week of rain, you call your ex in despair. He puts on his boots and heads right over. He climbs up on the roof to sweep the leaves and clears the gutters.
In exchange for his help, you make him a bowl of soup and you sit together, talking at the kitchen table. You can tell he likes the soup because he rubs his stomach and goes for seconds. It doesn’t feel like old times; it feels like new times.
You doubt he sees your wound when he looks at you, but it’s still there. You can run your finger over its purple edges. But now you call it by another name: your purple heart, or simply, your scar.
Deirdre is the author of the story collection, Real Lives of Married People (8foldOccasional Press Feb., 2022). Her arts and culture writing has been published in Ms.com, The L.A. Times, WWD, Variety,Thebeet.com, and Miami New Times. She teaches writing at Woodbury University and Glendale College.
