My Ex’s Autofiction Has Me Bouncing Off the Walls

An excerpt from If You Love It, Let It Kill You by Hannah Pittard

Today I am restless, I text my friend Jane from the bathroom.

It’s a Sunday, early fall, the day of my nephew’s sixth birthday party. Yesterday was his actual birthday. I made three varieties of mac’n’cheese from scratch. He informed me—a few hours before dinner and later made good on the threat—that he would be eating none of them. I let his littlest brother pick the pasta shape instead: wagon wheel.

That was last night. Now I’m in the bathroom, my bathroom, mine and the bald man’s with whom I share my bed. It’s on the second floor of our house. I’m watching my father, eighty this year, park his orange MINI in front of the neighbor’s house across the street. My sister and her family live one house down from there. Her backyard is where the party is happening.

One week ago, Jane called to tell me my ex had written me into his debut novel.

“He means to keep it a secret,” she said.

“From the world?” I asked.

“Only from you,” she said.

“Is it bad?”

“I don’t like it,” she said.

“You don’t like the book?”

“I don’t like your portrayal.”

“How am I?”

“Smug,” she said. “Insecure.”

“If I were an angry and unsatisfied man,” I said, “that’s exactly how I’d describe a woman with ambition, too.”

Jane said, “You’ve got the hang of this already. You’ll be fine.”

I explained the situation to my boyfriend, the bald man. I told him that my ex had written me into his novel, one allegedly about our toddler of a marriage and his affair with my dear friend.

“Why a secret?” I asked. “Why from me?”

My boyfriend shrugged. “Maybe because you’ve written a memoir about the very same toddler.”

I shook my head. “But that’s not a secret.”

He said, “Going into this relationship, I thought I was the only one with shared custody.” He is referring to his daughter, the eleven-year-old, who lives half her life with her mother and half her life with us.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Writers,” he said, with not a little bit of disgust, before leaving the room.

There’s a bounce house at my sister’s and lots of booze. I haven’t seen the booze yet—I’m still in a bathroom on the other side of the street—but I saw the bounce house earlier when my boyfriend helped my sister move a tiny desk from her garage attic to the six-year-old’s bedroom. The desk is what? A gift maybe?

There wasn’t supposed to be a bounce house, but my sister caved. Everyone knew she would cave, including the six-year-old, so there were never any tantrums. Earlier this week, my sister sent an announcement regarding the bounce house. When I showed my boyfriend, he said he’d never before seen an amended birthday invite for a little kid. I suggested anticipated attendance must be down, which was a joke, because my sister’s boys have birthday parties that rival your best New Year’s Eve.

I’m sitting atop a small white storage container, inside which are spare razors, spare toilet paper rolls, spare soap bars, spare bandages, spare liter bottles of shampoo, spare bags of cotton balls, and I’m waiting for Jane to respond. I’m lamenting life, I text. Jane’s a Shakespearean and lives one-point-two miles away in a house that gets great light.

Last week, after getting off the phone with her, I googled my ex-husband for the first time in seven years. I was hoping for more news of his clandestine novel. In doing so, I accidentally discovered a story he’d written in which I’d been knifed to death by a homeless man. For several years, I’ve been walking around with no idea! I liked my ending, which was dramatic but without fuss. The homeless man gets in several quick jabs, all of them meaningful. There’s no chance of recovery.

I told my boyfriend that he and I had been turned into characters in a story by my ex. “We’re married,” I said.

“Only in our hearts,” he said.

“Your name is Bruce.”

He nodded. “I like that. Do I still have a daughter?”

“You do.”

“Good,” he said. “And I’m still bald?”

“It’s unstated.”

“I like being bald.”

I did not tell him I’d been murdered, and he did not think to ask.

My boyfriend-husband—I’ll borrow the name Bruce—has been part of my family for only five years. He is still learning our rope tricks. When my mother calls, for instance, I ask her immediately, “Have you fallen off a horse? Are you feeling sick? Have you gotten a diagnosis? Are you trapped in the attic again? Do you have intentions of climbing a tree while tied to a chain saw?” In this family, if you don’t ask the right questions, you don’t get all the information.

Jane texts, Restless how? Lamenting what? Say more. I send her a picture of the spider plant in the corner of my bathroom and several dozen of its babies, whose roots are soaking in jam jars I’ve crammed along the windowsill. Jane, who, like me, is childless by choice, writes, Freudian.

I’d be sitting on and texting from the lip of my clawfoot bathtub if I could, but it’s fiberglass, and I’d dislodge the water supply lines were I ever to put any sort of weight on it. When Bruce and I bought three years ago, we assumed the bathtub was original to the house (1927), which means I assumed the tub was cast-iron and coated in porcelain. You spend forty-five minutes in what will likely be the most outrageous purchase of your life; you have no idea what you’re getting. I’ve spent more time looking at jeans online today than I spent in this house before deciding to buy it.

“Today I am lamenting life,” I said to Bruce first thing this morning, when we woke up yet again before sunrise.

He said, “Is this an all-day activity?”

I said, “Intermittent, I think.”

Then we had a quick fight about his early departure from the mac’n’cheese dinner. Dishes had been cleared. Monologues had begun. He slapped his knees, popped up from the table, and said he was tired and therefore going home.

Bruce’s daughter also popped up, declaring her own fatigue. She didn’t clear her napkin or her water glass, and I didn’t notice until after she and her father had already left. I didn’t want to stay at my sister’s house and hear any more monologues, but even less did I want to leave as some sort of family unit in which groupthink and joint decisions might appear the dominant mood.

My ex wants to keep secrets, and I want to confess:

I have never been pregnant.

I do not like children.

I am surrounded by family.

I often lie awake in bed at night and think, When they are dead, I will . . .

I have an oral fixation.

I dislike most people.

I am tired of men.

I am fascinated by the simplicity of erect penises.

I am haunted by my childhood.

I am living too much in the iterative tense, I text Jane.

The iterative what? she asks, playing dumb for my benefit.

The tense of routine, I write.

She responds with a picture of her entryway. The sun across the floor is disgusting.

Outside, my father is still in his MINI, the driver’s-side door wide open. I consider taking a picture then decide against it. He’s on a call. This—parked car, door open, speakerphone on—is his preferred mode of doing business. I send a text to my mother, saying that her first ex-husband is already here and that she should stop by my house for a quick glass of wine before heading to the party.

My sister and I (and our mother and our father)—we all live in Kentucky now. It’s a long story, but I moved here first—years ago and with my ex. We never intended to stay. But now he is gone, and my family is here. “FOMO,” my mother said when she heard of my father’s decision to move to Lexington last year. “I divorced him forty years ago and moved out of state, only to have him show up in my backyard, not a mile from the place I’ll likely die.”

Bruce has spent the better part of the morning grumbling about my nephew’s shindig. He’d rather stay home and reread Beloved, which he’ll be teaching next week. Like me, Bruce is a professor of English (Americanist). Jane is also a professor of English, as is her husband, Teddy (another Shakespearean).

I zoom in on Jane’s entryway. I text, That’s a gorgeous rug. Is it new?

My immediate neighbor, a professor of mathematics, is walking down his driveway whistling. I’m watching him and am thrilled to witness the precise moment when his whistling stops, and he becomes aware of the giant man in a cowboy hat sitting in an orange MINI parked in the wrong direction on the opposite side of the street having a loud conversation. My neighbor is north of seventy himself. I see my father see my neighbor. If there is a standoff, my father will win. His entitlement isn’t just willful, it’s pathological. “Entitlement” is the wrong word anyway. Better to say that he is notably undeterred by the environment around him.

I’ve always been an inquisitive, even nosy, person. Eavesdropping on the conversations of strangers is among my favorite hobbies. But it wasn’t until Bruce and I moved into this house—and I began paying very special attention to the math professor, his wife, and their four adult children, all of whom still live at home—that I purchased a pair of binoculars for outright spying. Actually, I purchased two pairs. Bruce sometimes joins me. The fact that he will occasionally turn off all the downstairs lights and call quietly up to me in my attic office and tell me to come down fast because the neighbors are acting curiously; the fact that he will crouch next to me as we skulk from window to window trying to get a better view of them . . . Well, that he tolerates, even encourages, this proclivity speaks volumes about our relationship and the reasons it persists.

Plus, there is the house. We are each separately in love with its brick walls and wraparound porch. We have more columns than anyone else on the street, including my sister. Last week, Bruce’s students told him that he talks about me a lot. A student we share, Camille, told the class that I did the same. This delighted his students. He told them we talk about each other so much because we still like one another, which can’t be said of all couples. I asked him if his assertion amused or terrified them. (There’s a steep learning curve for students in Kentucky between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two. Some seem as though they’ve known since childhood that life is an unkind joke to be fretted over dusk until dawn, while others appear to believe their parents have never regretted a single decision.) By way of an answer, he said, “It’s the Faulkner class.”

I text Jane, I’m desperately looking for small secrets to distract me from this brewing unhappiness. Yesterday it was a pair of Spanish leather boots that, when they arrive, I will tell Bruce I’ve owned since boarding school. Today it’s indoor plants, which, when he notices them a week from now, I will say have been inside since June.

She texts back immediately, Boarding school strains credulity.

I write, grad school then.

She writes, You had money in grad school?

I write, credit cards and debt. I send her a link to the Spanish boots.

Bruce and I have been married in our hearts since last year, about an hour and a half before his first colonoscopy. Because we aren’t legally married, the kindly young man at check-in was resistant to my status as emergency contact. (The state of Kentucky takes its marriage laws and hospital forms quite seriously.) Things got heated, and Bruce—tall, broad shouldered, originally from Decatur, Illinois, and not a little un-scary when he’s nervous or angry—declared loudly: “Sir, we are married in our hearts.”

After a beat, the young man (he was wearing mascara) blushed and pushed the clipboard in my direction. “Just write wife,” he whispered.

While Bruce stared coldly at the wall in front of him, I wrote Wife next to my name and tried for an air of contrition. It’s my fault we’re not married.

Several years ago—after my divorce, after my husband, then still a colleague, cheated on me with the woman, my dear friend, who’d originally introduced us—a graduate student of mine suggested that if things ever got serious again with another person, I ought to keep it weird. My student hadn’t kept it weird: she was married with a daughter. But she seemed to have a firm and honest grasp on her situation as wife and mother, as well as on the incongruities of the world. (She once handed in a story to workshop in which a mermaid was roasted over an open fire and served to guests as a delicacy.) I was very much in the market for advice from interesting, clear-eyed, and absurd-minded women; I adopted hers with fervor.

About the time my ex was killing me in his fiction, I was explaining to Bruce that I did not want to be married to him, or anyone else, ever again. I wanted to keep it weird.

About the time my ex was killing me in his fiction, I was explaining to Bruce that while I wanted to buy a house with him and was even willing to help raise his daughter, I did not want to be married to him, or anyone else, ever again. I wanted to keep it weird.

By keeping it weird, I assumed—naively—that I could skirt the official role of stepmother, a title I’ve despised ever since my father married a deeply sadistic architect when I was ten years old. My hope was that, despite living with Bruce’s daughter half of every week, despite making extravagant dinners for her and cutting out giant hand-stenciled letters on her birthday and at the end of every school year, I’d somehow continue to exist merely as the eccentric childless girlfriend who happened to own fifty percent of a house with her father.

All semester I have been pestering my students about the perils of abstraction, but now I text Jane, It’s not a desire for infidelity or even something romantic outside the relationship, but it’s parallel. When I’m not writing, I feel udderless. Instead, my brain is lustful for Otherness without feeling actual lust and honestly despising, even fearing, the actuality of Otherness.

I reread my text. Then I add, *r*udderless.

She writes, my Freudian hackles are up, up, up!

I write, Basically I am aware of my domestication and would like one week as a wolf caterwauling at the moon, after which I’d likely be happy as a quokka for several more years.

Before she can ask, I send her a screenshot of a smiling, pint-size marsupial with the hashtag “quokkaselfie.” She sends me a picture of her guest bedroom/office. The sunlight is obscene. I search my archive, then send a photo of our new dining room table. She writes, talk about strong rug game. Is THAT new? Then she says, Teddy likes it too, and I wonder if she is signaling that we are not alone.

I know about signaling via text. Jane and I are not lovers. We just have a sympathetic view of life’s illogicalities.

Jane knows that my lamentations have at least something to do with my ex and his book, but neither of us is tedious enough to say so. I send her a picture of my attic office, which I’ve recently rearranged. In a single photograph, there is a stuffed barracuda, a zebra rug, several skulls, a seventeenth-century rug, an art deco mirror, the skeleton of a piranha, and a ship captain’s chair—all of it inheritance from my mother, who, about five years ago, decided to stop buying gifts and start giving away her possessions.

Jane writes, you’re a bohemian!

I write, In my heart I am a mid-century minimalist.

She writes, Can anyone with a child in her life be a minimalist?

I write, Can anyone with any kind of person?

Early on, things with Bruce’s daughter were fine. If I was, say, standing behind her when the UPS man knocked and she opened the door, she’d shove a thumb over her shoulder in my direction and say, “That’s not my mother.”

I’d say, without hesitation, “And that’s not my daughter.”

When her father wasn’t in the room, she’d sometimes sidle up next to me and whisper, apropos of nothing, “I’ll never kiss you. Never ever.”

“That’s good,” I’d whisper back, “because I don’t want to be kissed by you ever ever.”

But now, three years later, she seeks me out while I am in the kitchen cooking dinner. She kisses my arm. She hugs my waist. She smiles whenever I make eye contact. She plays my favorite Guy Clark songs and sings along with me, especially during “L.A. Freeway.” She beams when I go loud about the landlord: “. . . sonaBITCH has AL-WAYS BORED ME!”

Recently, as if to spook me, she said, out of nowhere, “You’re basically my mom.”

With fear in my heart and a knife in my hand, I said, “No. You have a mother, and it’s not me.”

She said, “Yeah, but basically.”

Three kids tumble out of a giant SUV that’s pulled momentarily into our driveway. A mother scuttles after them. The driver, presumably the father, backs up and pulls away. Is he looking for parking? Or going home? I tag the picture of Jane’s spare bedroom and write, Such a gift, which is a joke between us, a nod to our students who traffic in canned language and hackneyed expressions.

My mother texts, Can I park in your driveway? I give it a thumbs-up. Then I snap a quick photo of the street below, crowded with my sister’s guests’ cars and my father’s MINI, whose driver’s-side door is shut now. How did I miss him shambling inside? He’s had two hip replacements, but he still walks four miles every day. My mother still runs. I come from a family of akathisians, which is a fancy way of saying we can’t sit still.

A few days ago, my father called me, weeping. He wanted to talk about my mother and their divorce, now four decades in the past.

“I’m sorry for everything,” he said.

“No more talk of the divorce,” I said. “No more childhood, no more apologies. You promised.”

“I feel things,” he said. “I feel things more than most people.”

“I’m busy,” I said.

“I hate days like this,” he said. “I didn’t sleep worth a turd last night. I’m an emotional guy, you know?” 

“I’ve got class,” I told him. “I can’t do this right now.”

“Do you think I could hurt myself? Your sister thinks I could hurt myself. I left my guns with her this morning.”

“I’m hanging up now. Is that all right?”

“Criminal,” he moans. “This is criminal.”

In the background I heard the slosh of water. “Are you in the tub right now?” I asked. “Are you taking a bath? Are you calling me from the bathtub again? We talked about this.”

“I can’t get the water hot enough. I’m creaky all over, and I can’t get it hot enough. My regular masseuse isn’t answering.”

“I have to go,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

Before I could disconnect, my father hung up on me, which is how he ends every phone call with anyone ever, and he texted my brother: Your sister is a heartless woman. My brother sent me a screenshot of the text with a thumbs-up emoji followed by a winking smiley face. I sent him the middle finger. My brother lives in Denver and runs hundred-milers and says things like, “My body is my temple.” He is universally adored. He’ll never move east.

I open the door to my bathroom slowly, as though I am an intruder, as though I am up to no good and desperate not to be discovered. The sensation of sneaking—of pretending to sneak—is infinitesimal and divine. The bedroom lights are off. There’s a mountain of laundry needing to be sorted and folded that’s strewn across the bed, my bed, our bed, the bed I share with the bald man. The laundry makes me want to throw myself onto the rug and bang my fists against the floor until there are bruises. Instead, I burrow facedown into the pile of clean clothes and throw a quiet make-believe tantrum. This, too, offers a sliver of ecstasy. I am not alone in this house, but there is no one in the world who has any inkling about my immediate whereabouts and activities.

“Don’t let the cat out of the bag,” I say to myself in a gravelly voice.

“Joke’s on you,” myself says back. “There is no cat.”

Last night, when I finally came home from my sister’s, Bruce and his daughter were in the basement watching a show, and I embarked on a one-sided cold war in the kitchen. I ground the morning coffee beans, finished the dishes, put away a few of the heavier pots and pans, then started the dishwasher, which sometimes produces a loud whooshing sound through the pipes closest to the television’s speaker.

Later still, in bed, Bruce asked me how mad I was. “On a scale of one to five,” he said.

“Mad at you?” I asked.

“Yeah, how mad at me are you?”

I said, “Not mad at you. Mad at life.” I had to look away so he wouldn’t see me smile.

Even later, I pushed him onto his side and curled up behind him. In the morning, I informed him of my restlessness.

My mother texts, Can you please unlock your side door and let me in? Glass of wine?

I’m still upstairs, still buried in clean laundry, so Bruce beats me to the door. But I’m in the kitchen by the time he says to her, “One good fact: What insect produces milk more nutritious than a cow’s?”

She hands me a bottle of white wine. “Open that?” To Bruce, she says, “An insect?”

Bruce pulls out her regular chair—she lives a half mile from us—and says, “A roach!”

She says, “That’s vile. Your street looks like a parking lot for the Keeneland racetrack.” As of this morning, more than seventy people had RSVP’d for this kid’s party.

I hand the unopened bottle of wine to Bruce. He swaps it for one from our Sub-Zero. For the next thirty minutes I clean and chop vegetables while Bruce and my mother argue politics and Shakespeare. (My mother was once a high school English teacher.) We finish the bottle.

Last night, after pushing Bruce onto his side, I didn’t sleep. I concentrated on my pillow, which is foam and has two cutouts for either ear depending on which side I’m sleeping. It resembles the head of a hammerhead shark. Without the pillow, I get earaches. At first, we tried a mouth guard. By “we,” I mean my dentist and me. But this was also in the era of my ex. He and I had just moved to Kentucky. In Chicago, where we used to live and teach, the earaches had gotten so bad that there were tests, then X-rays, then MRIs. The Kentucky dentist was amused that no one in Chicago had considered a solution so simple as a mouth guard.

For the first few months, the months when my ex and I were our happiest, which preceded the months and then the years when we were our unhappiest, I’d wake up, having slept like a kid koala, only to realize I’d dislodged the bite guard sometime during the night. Mornings, I’d search the bedroom to find it. Sometimes it was under the bed, sometimes it was on the bathroom counter, sometimes it was between the mattress and the box spring, often it was under my pillow.

One night, I didn’t dislodge the mouth guard and that was the last time I’ve ever been able to sleep without wearing it. The earaches didn’t go away. Eventually my husband did.

About the time Bruce and I bought this jewel of a house, I discovered the online world of TMJ pillows.

My mother says, “You know how when you’re surfing the Web, you sometimes get a pop-up and the doctor in the ad asks if you want to cure your toe fungus?”

I sputter, and wine escapes my nose.

Bruce says, “What are you talking about?”

My mother says, “I’m going to have all my toenails removed.”

I leave the room, and Bruce, as I am making a note of my mother’s exchange on a legal pad, says, “You know she’s writing this down, right?”

My mother calls out, with real panic, “If you give me toe fungus, I will never forgive you. I will leave the Rolex to your sister.”

I walk back into the kitchen and give my mother a look to indicate that I have no idea what she’s talking about. My sister, with the sixth sense of a platypus, texts, I can see Mom’s car. Where are you guys???

Here are three things I am envious of—Jane’s sunlit entryway, her box beam ceilings, and the fact that there is no child in her life.

Bruce says, as I moodily clean up vegetable debris, “You’re milking your life’s lament.”

My mother says, “Oh, is she depressed?”

I say, “I guess I think I’m sad,” which is something one of Bruce’s students said, an expression that floored us both for its vulnerability. Now, a year later, we say it to each other as an inside joke. There are lots of inside jokes between us, sayings whose origins sometimes predate our status as a couple. Last week, what did I say as we accidentally ran the red light? I said, “We don’t have time to obey the law!” Bruce echoed me, laughing, then said, “What’s that from?” And I told him about my first boyfriend who once ran a stop sign on his way back to our apartment, and I said, out of nowhere, my voice a high-pitched cartoon, “We don’t have time to obey the law!” The phrase stuck. We used it together for six years. Maybe he and I share its custody.

My mother tells us she is looking for her soulmate. Or someone to take her for a glass of wine.

“We’ll drink with you anytime,” Bruce assures her. “Have wine with us.”

“Yes,” my mother says mildly. “But you drink in sweatpants. I’d like someone to get fancy for.” Currently, she has three boyfriends, but they are all online, and they are all in different states.

The ski instructor is pushy, she says, and I encourage her to cut him off. To the retired army man she texts a photo of the bottle of Haut-Médoc Bruce opened. His reply is instant: I don’t like Medoc. I encourage her to cut him off, too. There is also a Canadian, but my mother says little about him, and I haven’t yet asked.

My father is also looking for his soulmate. He placed his ad in the newspaper, print edition, old-school style: Adventurous Tall Dapper Gentleman Seeks a female companion. My father was proud of the ad and shared it with me eagerly. I shared it with my brother, who was intrigued by his approach to capitalization. I noted that “female companion”—the ostensible purpose behind the ad—hadn’t measured up.

My mother remarried first. When she finally introduced us to the man—dinner at a restaurant—he opened his mouth to reveal a chunk of bright orange cheese he’d pressed against his tongue. The second time we met him—lunch at the same restaurant—my mother told us they were getting married. I was eight. He had thinning blond hair and was overweight. His younger sister had been the first Jewish debutante in Atlanta. I was skeptical that this doughy man with a penchant for soft cheese could have anything to do with a debutante, much less with my mother.

The man who would become my stepfather hated two things: people who hated Jews and the fact that he was Jewish. “Jewish by birth,” he’d say to me when I was older, “atheist by the grace of god.” He’d been married once before. They’d had no children. He didn’t drink. I met his father on a handful of occasions. He’d been an extra in Driving Miss Daisy and before that, in real life, an important and prominent lawyer. He’d had several wives. He was a man who didn’t especially like children. By the time I met my stepfather’s father, he was already dying of cancer. From my stepfather I learned to be observant and dismissive, cynical and dishonest.

I am not looking for my soulmate, in part because I have Bruce and in part because I disagree with the category, akin as it is to vampires or talking kittens, both of which are favorite subjects of my undergrads every fall. I regularly assure Bruce that I am like neither of my parents. When he is gone (as in dead), I will not be looking for someone to replace him. “You’re it,” I like to say. “Never again after you.”

“Please stop imagining your life when I’m dead,” he says to me, and so I do not tell him of all the improvements I make each night as I lie awake in bed next to him and fantasize about my life in our house alone. I do not tell him about the plunge pool or the mudroom or the tile roof or the slate-floored entryway. I certainly do not tell him about the Saarinen table in Verde Alpi or the Wishbone chairs he’d find so uncomfortable.

I do not tell him of all the improvements I make each night as I lie awake in bed next to him and fantasize about my life in our house alone.

Also, there is Theo, the mailman, on whom I’ve developed a crush in the three years since Bruce and I have lived together. I could say it is a platonic crush, but that would be wrong and serve only the purpose of protecting Bruce’s feelings, and he is perfectly aware of my own toward the mailman.

Theo is somewhere between six and a half and seven feet tall. He is Black and has a beautiful bald head. There is another mailman, Oscar, who is also Black, also bald, and classically more beautiful than Theo. But Oscar is not my crush. It is not Oscar who honks the horn of the U.S. mail van and waves at me when he sees me running and far from home. It is not Oscar who compliments the smell of my cooking as he wedges the day’s catalogues into the mail slot. It is Theo.

Last month, while I was replacing a hinge on the front door, Theo stopped to admire my handiwork. “Damn, girl,” he said, shaking his head. “Is there anything you can’t do?”

It is hard not to consider Theo.

Bruce and I didn’t have sex last night. I was tired. Also, I was mad.

Now I show my sister’s plea for our company to my mother and Bruce.

He says, “When my daughter was little, there weren’t random family members hanging around at the birthday parties.”

My mother says, “Speak it, Othello.”

I go upstairs to tell the eleven-year-old, who’s reading a book while sitting up in bed, that we’re heading to my sister’s. “You look like Alice James,” I say.

She primly tucks an edge of blanket under her thigh. “I resemble that remark,” she says.

Sometimes, offhandedly when talking to her friends, the eleven-year-old will refer to me as one of her parents. Sometimes, to my face, she’ll flat-out call me her stepmother, and I will remember all over again how wrong I was to imagine that marriage has anything to do with the love a child feels toward a grown-up. At the same time, I will look at her with absolute dread, worrying at her large and open heart, wondering at her capacity for and willingness to be vulnerable. When I was her age, I locked myself in the bathroom because I didn’t want to go to the court-mandated psychiatrist. I tore lines in my skin with a ballpoint pen to distract myself from the headaches I got from crying so hard. I kept a packed bag of my favorite stuffed animals shoved under my bed—one at my mother’s house and one at my father’s—ready to be grabbed in case of a fire or a pop-up kidnapping or the eventual and unavoidable arrival of the evil thing I knew with unreserved certainty was lurking, at all times, just around the corner.

Attendance for the eleven-year-old is optional, so we leave her to her voluntary bed rest, and my mother, Bruce, and I walk across the street. My father spots us immediately and pulls me in for a hug. Now my face smells like Polo.

He says, “Your sister reinvented motherhood. You look terrific, kid.”

Next he grabs my mother by her upper arm. He says her name. He says, “How are you, girl? You’re a sight. You working out?”

If she wasn’t already intending to wash that sweater tonight, she is now. Not because she thinks my father has cooties or anything. It’s the Polo. My father buys the stuff by the gallon. That isn’t a joke. Just like it isn’t a joke that my father installed a full-size fiberglass bathtub inside the shower stall at his apartment, which is a rental. It’s an exact replica of my bathtub. If I’d known he was going to buy one and put it in his bathroom, I would have offered him mine for free. Except for watering the upstairs and attic plants, we never use it.

My father also lives a half mile from us, but in the direction opposite my mother.

Nodding at Bruce, he says, “How’s your roommate?” My father has called every man I’ve ever lived with, including my ex-husband, my roommate.

I would like not to be bothered by the news of my ex’s debut. I would like for Bruce not to have looked over my shoulder this morning only to find me reading an early review. I would like for him not to have said, “You’re obsessed,” and I would like for the obsession not to be true.

In my ex’s book, the ex-wife character is a commercial hack of whom he and his more intellectual friends make much fun. In his book, I am wildly successful and dull.

Someone has put a glass of cider in my hand. (Cider is the family business; as in, my brother-in-law makes cider for a living.) My nephew sideswipes me. The cider sloshes but recovers. He runs the length of the yard, then hurls himself against the bounce house. There are squeals. He’s dressed as a police officer—baton and hat and everything. My nephew is beautiful and blond. I have thoughts about his costume. His little brothers are dressed up the same way.

I whisper to Bruce, “Am I high or are a bunch of the kids dressed as cops, not just my nephews?”

He says, “You might be high. That might be one of your little secrets. But there are, separately, at least a dozen officers.”

I say, “Is that weird?”

He says, “It isn’t Halloween.”

I say, “Am I high or are my nephews’ costumes really well-made while the other kids’ costumes look like they’ll ignite in direct sunlight?”

Bruce says, “I’m beginning to think you actually are high, but if you’re trying to figure out whether or not your sister shelled out extra money—”

My mother interrupts: “Does anyone want my cider?”

There was a time, just after Bruce and I bought our house and began living together for the first time, when I wouldn’t have sex with him if his daughter was home. Not even if she was fast asleep in her bedroom with its door closed and we were in our bedroom with its door closed and it was three in the morning. I would not have sex. Her proximity inhibited my ability to move outside myself, which is something I need to do to enjoy sex, and I enjoy enjoying sex.

By “move outside myself,” I mean to not be aware of or in contact with the version of me who chops vegetables or folds clothes or bakes bread or pays bills. I do not like to be “Woman making love with Man because he is the Man she loves and on whom she can depend.” I prefer to be “Body having sex with Body that happens to fit well and please well and anticipate well and tease well, this wellness having been established over years of satisfying practice.” Hearing myself think these things, I am dumbfounded by the fact that I was ever married.

When we fight—which isn’t often—if I cry, I always tell Bruce to ignore the tears. “That’s not me,” I say. “That’s just society’s conditioning.”

And he says, “It’s okay to have emotions.”

And I say, “Please don’t use that word with me.”

I am like this—willful, stubborn, withholding—until there is a morning like this morning. Suddenly, I announce my lament. I am deadpan and dry-eyed. It’s astonishing there are two sets of binoculars. 

A chintzily dressed officer rushes past and shouts to another kid, not dressed as anything, “I told you there was no piñata!”

It’s true: I am a little high. I wanted to tell Jane, but I didn’t want her to judge me. In general, I don’t get high, but I recently ordered some gummies advertised on Bon Appétit’s website. I thought the gummies sounded useful—tiny sugary pathways with expensive flavor profiles that might lead me out of myself for a few hours here and there.

The gummies, just as Bruce suspected, are in fact one of my petite private confidences, though I won’t ever admit it and he’ll never know, since I have a credit card set aside for just these trifling purposes. He does know about the credit card. Our finances are combined. My one request was that we never get married. His one request was that we join our accounts. All this to say, we’re knotted together as good as the next couple. But I like it that I can say to the eleven-year-old’s Kentucky-raised friends that her father and I aren’t married. So far, not one of them has cared. One day, I comfort myself, someone will surely be bothered, and it will be as spectacular as the sunlight across Jane’s entryway rug.

Wag the dog, I tell my freshmen, is an image that houses an idea. Irrelevant circumstances are dictating our actions is an idea without an image. Give me images, I tell them. They give me images by way of clichés—as in, My mother’s love was a gift. I say, yes, an image, readers love images, but can you make the image your own? They describe the gift’s wrapping paper. Better, I say. Still wrong, but better.

One book review goes into some detail about a plot point in which my ex lets an undergrad teach his class so he can have sex with his mistress. Knowing my ex, this likely happened. I bet he wrote the scene well. I wish I could read it without reading the book. I wish I could move it outside itself. I wish I could divorce it. I’m not trying to be punny. This is my brain on drugs.

I know a poet who wrote a beautiful book about her divorce. In the book, she asks herself something along the lines of, “What if I’d been watching the relationship instead of living in it?” I read that question and gasped. I said aloud to no one, “What if I had been in my marriage instead of watching it?” Then I clasped a hand over my mouth and felt very scared.

The bounce house is shaped like a castle. Because Bruce and I are fundamentally flawed people with big hearts, we have both done quick Google searches on how much my sister and her husband are paying for this party. We don’t yet know about the mutual googling, but later, lying in bed, the lights out, each of us separately wondering about sex—me: too tired? not too tired? interested? penis? him: sex sex sex sex sex boob boob boob boob—we will admit to having earlier in the day stepped away from the party to find the number. Maybe I go first, maybe he does. But our research renders matching results: in the state of Kentucky, four hours costs ninety dollars; for 20 percent more, you get the whole day; or, tack on 60 percent and you can make a night of it. I love the use of percentages in lieu of hard-and-fast prices.

There’s something going on at this party with all these cop uniforms that isn’t right.

“Old lady, push me,” says a neighbor boy to someone’s grandmother. I scan the crowd for the kid’s father. It takes me a few minutes to locate him because I’ve been looking in the wrong place. I’ve been looking for him anywhere not within hearing distance of his kid. Instead, he’s leaning against the swing set. He’s right there. The kid says it again: “Old lady.” The father hears. I can see that he hears even if his face registers nothing. (I know a thing or two about faces registering nothing.) I am seconds away from diving onto the lawn, pulling up grass by the fistful, shouting, I know you can hear him. I know you can hear him. Why won’t you do something? when Bruce edges near me and says, “There’s a lid for every pot.” He gestures with his chin in the direction of the alcohol tubs, where my father has cornered my mother.

My father, a tall man, is wearing his large-brim, custom-made cowboy hat, a white turtleneck, and a yellow bandana.

“That,” I say to Bruce, “is an image that contains a thought.”

He says, “I want to strangle that kid on the swing.”

This conversation must have happened earlier or later, because here is where my mother, smelling distinctly of Polo cologne, breaks in with her unwanted cider and says to Bruce, “I looked it up. Only one type of roach gives live birth and nurses her offspring.” To me, she says, “You look green.”

It must be the gummies. I say, “Roach milk makes me want to barf.”

She says, “Doesn’t everything make you want to barf?”

“Ouch,” I say. She is referring to my decades-long eating disorder. Think of it as an inside joke between two women who know and love each other to excess.

“Oh, is she feeling ill?” my mother sings in a halting falsetto. “Her face is eau de Nil!”

“What’s that from?” I ask.

“Word of the day,” she says. “Bruce turned me on to it.”

Bruce, pointing at my sister’s neighbor’s chimney, says, “That’s an adverse possession.”

I ask him what he’s talking about and if he’d know such a term if his ex-wife weren’t a tax attorney. He explains that the chimney is on my sister’s property but obviously belongs to her neighbor.

“So, whose adverse possession is it? My sister’s or the neighbor’s?”

He says, “The neighbor’s.”

I say, “Huh.” Then I add, “There’s a metaphor there.”

We drink more cider and watch the officers attack one another with plastic batons, which are leaving visible welts.

Toward midnight, while Bruce and I are in bed, possibly having had sex, possibly not, my phone lights up.

Bruce says, “Must be your boyfriend.”

I unlock the screen. My sister has written, R u ok?

I write, What kind of question is that?

She writes, Yr face looks sad.

I write, YOU CAN SEE ME?

Our blinds are pulled; our lights are off.

She writes, At the party, your face looked sad . . .

I write, Not sad, just high!

She writes, Fun!

Then she writes, Cocktails soon?

I thumbs-up the invite, then screenshot the exchange and send it to Jane.

In the middle of the night, Bruce jostles me awake.

“Who are you?” he asks.

I tell him I am me. But my mouth is still asleep, and so I hand him the thought with my mind. He does not hear me.

“Who are you?” he asks again.

There is a ten-year age difference between us, but it is too early for early onset.

“If I’m Bruce,” he says into my ear, “who are you? What’s your name?”

A motorcycle thumps down our street, its single cylinder pulsing into the late-night air. We listen as it passes.

“I’m Angela,” I murmur. “He named me Angela.”

“Angela,” he repeats quietly. His daughter is asleep in a bedroom down the hall. “My wife, Angela.” In his voice, there is a funny suggestion of relief.

Bruce squeezes my thigh once, then turns away from me and onto his side, pulling most of the blankets with him. Within minutes, his breathing relaxes. His shoulder rises and falls in rhythm with his breath. He leaves me awake and alone with my thoughts. I slip out of bed and tiptoe down the stairs.

I creep along the walls of our home, moving back and forth between rooms. I avoid the windows, stay in the shadows. I am terrified by my own silence, by the distance I can travel in this dark house without making a single sound. I imagine myself sleeping in the room above me. I imagine my boyfriend beside me. At the end of the hall is his daughter. We are so vulnerable up there—our sound machines purring, our fans whirring—all of us unknowing. I creep and pretend to be someone else, someone sinister, someone out to invade a home for no purpose at all except that I can.

Who am I?

I am a reluctant stepmother.

I am a selfish sister.

I am a very private person.

I am addicted to transparency.

I am frightened by infants.

I live the majority of my life in my head.

I want to confess.

I am trying to confess, but there are so many secrets.