Long before I settled in this part of the world, I was a guest, and everything was so unfamiliar to me that I had to be led: here is how to buy the Metro-North ticket, and to find your train. Here is where to sit if you want to see the river. My friend Claire convinced me that we should visit her parents, largely because we were sick of the campus salad bar. I was unprepared for how much I would covet the house I was about to enter, where some of the windows were stained glass and there was a fireplace, snapping with flames, in the dining room. The family served Pernod before dinner and played charades after dessert, which was a bowl of walnuts and clementines, the shells and peels left all over the table, because the cleaning lady was due at eight the following day.

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When I came downstairs in the morning the lady was there, Claire’s mother beside her, one washing, one drying, NPR on the radio. A cigarette burned in a pink saucer on the windowsill. Hip-to-hip, the two women chatted like friends. “This is Zuzu,” Claire’s mother said, introducing me. I didn’t want to get too close to their maid. I saw that we used the same kind of bobby pins, although hers were at her temples, where her curls were gray, and mine were anchoring a loose twist. Instead of a handshake, I offered a nod and took my coffee outside, where I picked ivy out of the birdbath while I waited for Claire to wake up.

When I think of that evening – the tumbler glazed with Pernod, the sting of clementine juice on my chapped fingers, the way Claire and I cheated at charades – I recall feeling a smug certainty that I could have that life, inhabit a house like that one, with wainscoting in the kitchen and parents who delighted in their children. I believed that life was easy enough to find.

I believed this until we skipped Friday classes and took another train, this time to the city. We sat across from Claire’s father, who bought us buttered bialys before he unfolded The New York Times. I’d never had a bialy before, and I devoured mine while Claire was inspecting hers for “too much onion.” Until that point her father had left no meaningful impression on me, other than his general tidiness: he’d had his shoes polished while we waited for the train, and I could smell his aftershave. When he put on his glasses I saw that the case was old, its gilded letters mostly rubbed away.

As we approached Grand Central, he told us he’d have to run to his first meeting, several blocks from the terminal. He stood, briefcase in hand, and Claire tilted her head back. I did the same; I thought we were looking for something. In fact, she was waiting for her father to kiss her forehead, which he did, after which he kissed mine, a gesture of fairness and kindness, a good man’s goodbye.

The kiss was chaste, dry-lipped, paternal, and brief; it had nothing of lust in it. It had nothing of my father in it, either. The kiss promised me nothing, nothing, at a time when I wanted everything. The kiss said, you can always visit, and I did not want to be a visitor. When I opened my eyes I found my friend loathsome and spoiled. I saw that a comfortable life awaited her, that she would cycle out of this phase and into the next, that soon she would stand hip-to-hip with her cleaning lady while her husband rode the train. Everything she needed had already been gathered for her like a basket of kindling.

Claire and I lost touch decades ago, and her family moved away. If I ran into her now – say, at Grand Central, bialy in hand – it might surprise her to learn that I spent years in the town of her youth, that I chose it as the place to raise my son. I doubt she’d recall that moment on the train – that kiss she was used to receiving, a kiss she was happy to share. She couldn’t know how it followed me; how, for some reason, every time I passed a shoeshine stand, I felt a warm blooming of my own potential; how, even after I married Agnes Blair, part of me wanted to know how it felt to have a husband who read the paper on the commuter rail.

*

I did know what it was like to have a wife who took the day’s first train into the city. I knew what it was like to assemble the exact salad she’d asked for – to boil the eggs and slice the tomatoes, to fry and crumble the bacon, to whisk the olive oil into the lemon juice, to wash and spin the lettuce; to hear her say “I’m too tired to eat that, I’ll just have toast”; to watch her leave the bag of bread open on the counter overnight, crumbs everywhere, twist-tie lost.

I knew what it was like to become someone who cared, perhaps too much, about the lost twist-tie on the bag of sourdough.

It turned out that even though I had chosen the house, and the particular green of its newly painted shutters, I could still pace inside it, wondering why I was the only married woman on the block who ate alone every night. Agnes routinely texted from Grand Central as she ran to catch the 8:33. The firm reimbursed her for car service at that hour, but she preferred the train, which was bright and cold and better for work than a warm, private car, which would have allowed her to sleep.

A fair question might be what I was doing with the time Agnes spent on the train.

She never asked me, and I never had to say that after the things I was proud of – quizzing Gideon on his beloved dinosaur facts over spaghetti; heating towels in the dryer for him while he was in the tub; lying in the top bunk, as he liked me to do, while he fell asleep below – that I spent the remaining hours of the night tending to habits she rarely saw. At thirty-seven years old, I’d established an evening routine. I ate cinnamon toast and drank chocolate milk with lots of ice in the glass; I watched Sex and the City episodes I had fully memorized; I texted back and forth with James Cashel, my friend from college, who went by Cash, and whose wife was almost as busy as mine.

*

It turned out I could count the days since Agnes and I had touched each other. When I reached sixty I saw it was better not to count. To remember what it felt like to lie next to someone who wanted me, I passed over Agnes entirely, even the first few years in New York. I resorted to earlier parts of my life, to the pre-Agnes window: the guy who stole limes from his neighbor to make me a gin and tonic; the one who hid my shoes in the sink when he wanted me to stay longer.

Cash, the first time and the second time.

I happen to know that I was thinking about this somewhat compulsively in the first week of February 2019. The texts are still on my phone. I initiated them after months of silence between us, attributable to being busy, and to not having much to say. I texted him after three glasses of Riesling and a hot shower. Agnes was working in our bedroom. Gideon was asleep.

ZUZU: how much do you miss me, scale of 1-10

CASH: who is this

ZUZU: very funny, what are you doing

CASH: emptying the dishwasher

CASH: for the first time in six years

CASH: according to Molly

CASH: who is sitting on the couch

CASH: also for the first time in six years

ZUZU: feeling sad for Molly

CASH: calm down I’m kidding

It was the first time he’d ever hinted at anything other than joy between them. I took a screenshot and tried not to read too deeply into it. I tried not to imagine, for instance, Molly hauling cardboard boxes full of her belongings down their narrow Colonial staircase. I tried not to imagine him setting his wedding band, rather precariously, on the windowsill over the kitchen sink.

In the following weeks, I tried to get more out of him. I texted how are you and Molly, which was perfectly innocuous, but I also texted you’d better load that dishwasher and are you in trouble today. On February 5, 2019, I sent a message: bored bored bored bored bored. Only Cash would understand it, not because it was clever, but because it was the complete text of the first email I’d ever written him, twenty years before.

That night, he had ousted me from his room because he was trying to focus. I had a paper to hand in, too, at three the following day. I told him I was determined not to “waste time” grappling with deconstruction when I could do just as well if I wrote my essay five hours before it was due. I urged him to write his own essay tomorrow; I told him it would come out the same either way. “I don’t think you understand how time works, Zuzu,” he’d said.

Upstairs, in my room above his, I sent the email – bored bored bored bored bored – and an hour later he slid a mix under my door, a kind of apology. We had already established, by October, that he was perpetually in debt to me. At the time I found it flattering.

*

On February 5, 2019, he was perhaps not as charmed by my claims of boredom, and he didn’t respond. I was cutting up a squash to roast for soup. I didn’t want to finish cutting it, didn’t want to sweep up the glistening seeds all over the board, didn’t want to dig the immersion blender out of the cabinet. It was nine-thirty, and Gideon was still awake upstairs, occasionally kicking the wall as he shifted in bed. I read a text from Agnes – still at client dinner – and set down the knife and the squash and lay on the kitchen floor.

I thought, I hate this, then waited for guilt. I was good at guilt. Lying on a hardwood floor I owned, under the glow of organic squash, was not a tableau that left room for much sympathy. I felt self-pity anyway, dirty and sweet. I felt it while I scraped the butternut squash seeds into my open palm. I felt it while I tried to remember the last time I’d had sex. The memory was of haste and quiet, not out of urgency, but out of obligation.

Upstairs, I checked on Gideon – finally asleep, green stars of light wheeling across his ceiling – and went into our room and sat on the edge of our bed. Agnes’ nightstand held four empty water glasses and a stack of sealed envelopes, addressed only to her, that I had been adding to for weeks. She had recently claimed she didn’t have time to “handle” her mail. I kept track of the bills and made the payments, but to manage her correspondence from bar associations and alumni groups, the occasional birth announcement, catalogues from stores she liked – this I refused to do.

I flipped back the duvet and settled against the pillows. I reread my last text to Cash – my “bored” sequence – and wondered if I was the only one who remembered that evening. I tried again: By the way, I totally understand how time works. He didn’t respond to that either, at least not right away.

Dennis Braeburn Visits the Vegetarian House
January 26, 2002

My father visited me at college once, my sophomore year. I decided to host a dinner party in his honor, mostly to show him that I ate things like quinoa and hummus, and that I had managed to collect a handful of good-looking friends. I mopped the kitchen floor twice. Molly brought me flowers in an empty milk jug and Cash came to the table with comb-tracks in his wet hair. He called my father sir. Everyone shook my father’s hand.

“Quite a formal gang we have, here,” he said, as if manners surprised him. He was the one who had taught me how to shake a hand.

I placed, just north of his plate, the recent copy of the student paper that featured something I’d written: a profile of a visiting writer. I’d used words I was proud of knowing – dichotomy, peripatetic.

“Well, someone likes to see her name in print, doesn’t she?” he said, moving the paper out of the way to make room for his glass of wine. Cash looked at me the way he sometimes did, to confirm I was okay.

My father winked at me – to take the sting out, I thought – but it didn’t work. I looked at the candles I had lit for him in all of my eager, stupid hope. The conversation shifted to television, and my father told the only story about me he shared that evening: how I had campaigned ceaselessly for cable, how I had claimed to “need” MTV, starting in second grade. Molly made an impassioned declaration of love for PBS, even when it was boring, and this led to my father’s exhausting description of a nature series he’d watched.

Dessert was out-of-season strawberries and a box of canelé. My father made his only joke of the evening – “I’m sure none of you have ever tasted rum before” – and everyone laughed too hard, too long, to push us closer to the evening we’d wanted, the evening I’d wanted.

*

After dinner, I walked my father over to the campus art museum. I should have known better; it was late, and he had a two-hour drive ahead of him. He held the glass doors open for me with quiet forbearance, and I realized that I had mapped one of Molly Pierce’s stories onto my poor father’s body. Molly Pierce’s father had brought pink champagne, even though she was nineteen, and macarons, because she loved them, and they had a picnic on the quad, just the two of them, and then they walked arm-in-arm through the museum galleries, and they had a code word for “overrated,” which they whispered frequently, and which caused them both to laugh .

I hurried us through the rooms. I couldn’t remember what I’d thought would impress him.

“You don’t have to run,” my father said.

I did have to run. We were back outside in fifteen minutes, standing by his car, which had one of those anti-theft locking bars on its steering wheel. He asked me where to stop for a coffee on the way back to the Taconic. I named a gas station and watched him buckle his seat belt and adjust his eyeglasses before he rolled the window down.

“Congratulations, Susan,” he said. It was the first time I’d heard the word and felt sorrow.

The Rupture
December 9, 2003

The first time my ear drum ruptured my junior year, I didn’t know what it was. All day I was aware of a slowly building pressure that burst as I crossed the quad. At the campus infirmary I received a prescription for antibiotics, foaming ear drops, and something for the pain. It hurt too much to drive, and I called Cash from one of the nurse’s phones and asked him to pick me up. Waiting for him on the sidewalk, I beheld our old home, the vegetarian house, across the street. The shingled face hid behind a network of construction material. The school had concluded that it was too dangerous to allow students to live there until, among other items, the roof had been repaired. Molly lived off-campus, but Cash and I had both retreated to the dorms.

In his Jeep, on the way to the pharmacy, Cash reached across me to open the glove box, wadded up a napkin, and held it against my ear, steering with his left hand.

“What are you doing?” I said.

“It’s dripping.”

The only other people I could think of who might have done that for me were my mother or sister. He loves me, I thought. Really, he does.

He might have loved me, but he was spending the second half of the year abroad, a fact I was still struggling to absorb.

“When you’re in London, who’s going to handle my assorted emergencies?” I said. “What if have appendicitis?”

He made a clucking sound.

“I’m not your only friend. Also not an ambulance service.”

“You kind of are, though,” I said.

At the counter, the pharmacist confirmed that I was on the pill, then delivered a lecture about how my prescriptions would  compromise the pill’s efficacy. “You’ve got to use a backup method while you’re on these. “

“Okay,” I said.

“You should both be aware that a backup method’s a must.” The pharmacist nodded at Cash, who was looking at water bottles.

“Okay. I’ll tell him.”

“Tell me what?” Cash said, glancing up.

“It can wait,” I said, knowing he would forget to ask.

There were sheets of stick-on earrings near the register, and I bought them. I wanted to cover my body in tiny little hearts. I wanted to cover Cash’s body in tiny little hearts. That guy thinks we’re together, I wanted to say. Also, why aren’t we, I wanted to say.

*

The better thing would have been to take the antibiotics and eardrops and gone to bed. Instead, I joined Cash at Molly’s twenty-first birthday party. She answered the door in an apron, pointing to two pans of brownies: pot on the left, no pot on the right. A few minutes later, she stood on a chair to remove her apron and to issue an apology – it was no pot on the left, pot on the right. Everyone laughed. I couldn’t remember which one I’d eaten from anyway. I felt as if there were pieces of broken glass in my ear, but I didn’t want to miss out, so I sipped a beer on the couch and watched people dance.

Molly had a French bulldog, Cornelia – this was one of the reasons she lived off-campus – and everyone else was so in love with Cornelia that I also put on a show about wanting to feed her treats from a jar. After a while, Cornelia settled by my feet, and I understood it, how good it felt to have that warm and loyal weight. I rubbed her ears and let her lick potato chip salt from my fingers. When I scanned the room to see if Molly were watching me, I saw that she was, once again, standing on a chair, but this time her hands were on Cash’s shoulders, and she was talking while he nodded, his face serious.

I already had an excuse – my ear burned, and the cotton ball I’d stuffed into it was increasingly wet. I gave Cornelia a parting rub and stood up. I stepped over someone who muttered that I was interrupting his nap, and waved away the chunk of brownie someone else stuck in my face. By the time I was on the front steps I could hear Cash following me. I moved faster, to give the impression that I wasn’t waiting for him. He had taken a beer, and he swigged from it with exaggerated pleasure as we walked down the middle of the road.

“You could get a ticket for that open container,” I said.

“From who? You?” Cash slowed to a stop, gesturing at the houses around us, duplexes with shallow front porches and two front doors. Molly’s was the only one full of noise and light; her neighbors probably wanted to sleep. The street itself was empty, and I kicked a pebble in front of me. He walked me all the way back to my dorm and watched me unlock the main door.

“What’s going on with you and Molly?” I said.

“Nothing,” he said. “How’s the ear?”

“It hurts.”

He hadn’t bothered to zip his vest, and it hung open.

“Don’t you ever get cold,” I said.

“Nope.”

I held the heavy door open. He was still standing there.

“Are you coming up?”

“Just for a minute,” he said.

*

How this was different than the other countless times he’d been in my room, I couldn’t

say. The way he closed the door and took his shoes off had a kind of finality to it. I put on Yo La Tengo and turned on my lamp, then debated what would happen if I brushed my teeth. I feared that he would leave if I left the room, so I squeezed toothpaste directly into my mouth. It seemed that the only logical thing I could do was offer the tube to him, which I did. He rolled the paste around in his mouth, scowling.

“What kind is this?” he said.

“Spearmint.”

“Well, it burns.” He tightened the cap and set it down on my desk.

I was afraid of frightening him. I sat on my bed with my hands behind my back. When he said “Move over,” I pulled my shirt off and slid far under the sheet. He lay parallel to me, looking at my bare shoulder. We listened to half of a song.

“You sleep with a skirt on?” he said.

“No,” I said. “Do you?”

“Ha.” He got out of bed and finished undressing, swift, matter-of-fact, without looking at me.

Having built up the idea of sex with Cash for years, I found that I was scrambling too hard to remember it as it happened. I had too many questions – did he kiss every girl’s eyelids, or just mine? He moved so quickly that I struggled to keep up. It crossed my mind that he just wanted to get through it, to reach the other side. He had a condom, which meant that he always had condoms, which meant that I just happened to be the person beneath him. At one point the cotton ball fell from my ear and he put it back in.

“Is this too gross,” I said.

He shook his head.

He asked if he were hurting me, a standard question that struck me as an immense kindness, and I felt my eyes welling, and I shook my head no. I kept thinking of something I’d overheard at a party our sophomore year, a drunk guy talking to Cash about me. Zuzu’s vibe, the guy had said, is missionary with her eyes closed. Cash said, “Wouldn’t know.” I’d  pretended not to hear.

The guy might have been right. I feared that I was disappointing Cash somehow. Then I worried that the fear itself would be disappointing, and I made some theatrical sounds to convey how happy I was. The fact that I was happy seemed almost irrelevant.

I wanted to hear my name come out of his mouth; instead, I got one deep sigh from him, then he let his body drop onto mine. I rubbed his back. His head was on my chest, and I was an efficient and quiet crier, but he must have known. He asked if I was okay, and I said yes. He asked again if he had hurt me, and I said, emphatically, no.

*

I woke at the sound of him pulling his shirt over his head around four in the morning. He was careful with the door, trying not to disturb me. In the hallway, I heard him exhale. He was leaving for London in two weeks.

His presence, I discovered as the sky began to grow light, had kept me from noticing the ruptured ear drum. The pain was hot and sharp, and I took two painkillers without water, even though their bitterness stayed on my tongue.

__________________________________

From The Other Wife by Jackie Thomas-Kennedy. Used with permission of the publisher, Riverhead Books. Copyright © 2025 by Jackie Thomas-Kennedy.