Marius was accepted into the Fiction Writing MFA at Brown University and, in the summer of 2005, we moved to Providence, Rhode Island. It was good news for our family. Not only would Marius be going to graduate school, and on his way to finishing his book in English, we would be moving closer to Rada, who now lived in Connecticut, about an hour’s drive from Providence. Finally, after years of separation, Marius would be able to see his daughter again. We could plan Christmas and summer vacations together. By creating a stronger relationship with Rada, Marius would find peace and, I hoped, our family would be stronger.
We moved into a tiny house on the East Side of Providence, and filled it with the furniture and books and toys we’d left in storage three years before. Once we’d settled in, we put Emma in daycare and Adam in the neighborhood public school. We discovered our favorite places in Providence, made new friends, went to dinner parties and book readings. We were an aspiring literary couple, living for books and the creation of books, placing all bets on the dream that one day we would have literary success of our own.
We were on our way. My first book would be coming out the following year. It was a memoir about my relationship with my father, a book I’d been working on in various forms for many years. When it finally sold, I was ecstatic. Our money problems were profound, and the book advance was enough to make us independent of Marius’s parents. But by the time we settled in Providence, the book money was gone. The advance had paid for our move and for the down payment on our used Toyota. It had been the rocket fuel to get us across the Atlantic and settled in New England, and now that it was spent, we were living month to month.
Marius began classes at Brown. The program was small, and consisted of a collection of young, talented, and primarily “experimental” writers. One student in his program wrote a story in Morse code, for example, and flicked the lights of the classroom on and off to “read” it. Marius came home after class and demonstrated the Morse code short story to the kids, flicking the lights on and off until we were all laughing. Eccentricity was accepted at Brown. In fact, Marius told me, eccentric was the norm. Marius thought the writers in his program understood his work. Whether this was meant as a jab at me, who always encouraged him to edit and rewrite as much as possible, I couldn’t say, and so I ignored it and tried to be as supportive as I could. I read everything he wrote while he was at Brown, making notes of encouragement, placing big exclamation marks near beautifully written passages, underlining sentences that I found funny or smart or compelling. As I waited for my book to be published, I wrote book reviews, and taught as an adjunct writing instructor in Boston, taking the train north after I’d picked the kids up from school.
Marius called Z many times, trying to arrange a visit, but we’d been in Providence for months before we saw Rada. Finally, we were given permission for a short visit at a shopping mall in Danbury. We could see her for two hours, over lunch. She was dressed perfectly when we picked her up, her hair brushed and braided, and although she looked like the same little girl I knew in Sofia, a transformation had occurred. She walked differently. She stood differently. Something in the way she looked at me was different. I didn’t understand it fully until she began to speak in English: In the past years, Rada had become an American child. She went to an American kindergarten and had American friends and watched American television and was learning to read in English. When Marius and I spoke to each other, Rada understood us. Now I could speak to her directly, without Marius or Adam translating.
It was incredible, how quickly she’d changed. How quickly we all had changed. It had been just four years since Marius and I met in Iowa City. Since then, Rada and Adam had been separated from their fathers and given new ones, moved from their native countries, learned new languages, and adopted new cultural identities. Emma had been born in Bulgaria and now lived in the United States. In four years, Marius and I had put our children through changes many people never experience in a lifetime. Our choices—good and bad—had shaped them. We were responsible for these choices. And after all we’d been through, this was what we had: A beautiful family, one we’d made together.
We lived in Providence for three years, just long enough for Marius to finish his degree. These years were hard on us, not because of any sudden rupture in our marriage, but because of the slow, daily erosion of the romantic story that had brought us together. The dream I had of life with Marius did not accommodate the stress of being young parents; the dream did not accommodate the poverty of being a struggling writer; the dream did not accommodate professional rejection or even, when it came, professional success. The very nature of the dream was unreal. And when reality arrived, we were unable to make sense of our love any longer.
It was in Providence that we began to fight. We would argue about housework or money or the kids—it didn’t matter what the subject; we fought about it. Looking back, I see no reason why we should have argued so much. Our problems were like so many other young couples’ problems, and could have been taken in stride. I can’t help but wonder if we fought because the routines of marriage made things too routine, too dull. Maybe we craved intensity of feeling, some conduit back to those first years together. The hours of fighting were now our most passionate moments.
One evening, after a fight, I told him I wanted a divorce. Divorce. The word was uttered in the way the word bankrupt is said at the board meeting, the way terminal is said at the doctor’s office. After I asked for a divorce, we stopped cold, scared to death of the very idea. We tried to forget that I’d said it, retreating into a stunned silence, as if the word was more than a collection of consonants and vowels—it was a demon I’d conjured into our lives.
This demon terrified me. It brought back memories of the instability of my parents’ divorce. When I thought of divorce, a sensation came over me that I hadn’t felt since I was twelve years old, a kind of low-grade anxiety that kept me from sleeping at night. When my parents had separated, I felt that the picture of my life had been cut up into small pieces, thrown into the air, and put back together into a surreal new image, one that had recognizable parts—my father and mother and sister and brother—but didn’t make sense any more. I didn’t want that surreal image to be my family.
To keep the demon away, I learned the art of avoidance. I avoided talking to Marius about sensitive topics (sex, his work, his childhood, my childhood, his first wife and my first husband). I avoided friendships with happy couples, finding it difficult to be confronted with other people’s marital successes. I avoided the present moment and imagined the future. In the future, we would laugh more. In the future, we would make love twice a week. In the future, we would be happy again.
But the future seemed a long way off. I threw myself into my work and into taking care of the kids and into managing the house and our careers until I was too tired to think about the sad state of my marriage. Marius, in turn, retreated into himself, becoming more silent and sullen. He stayed up late in front of his computer, playing chess or World of Warcraft, slipping into an alternate reality while I collapsed into bed at ten o’clock, exhausted. At three in the morning, when he came to our bedroom, he would make noise and wake me up, so that I lay awake for hours, tossing and turning under the sheets. Eventually, I asked him to sleep on the couch. And so he started sleeping in the living room and I slept alone. This may have allowed me to get through the night, but it also guaranteed that we did not touch each other anymore, not even accidentally. There was not even the slightest brushing of skin between us in the half darkness. The demon that had scared me so profoundly had come to live in my house.
Eventually I suggested that we go to marriage counseling. While many things had changed—our careers were going well and the kids were older—the fissures that began in Bulgaria had only grown deeper.
Neither of us liked the idea of therapy, but things were becoming so tense that I saw regular discussion with an objective observer as a good solution. Marius didn’t want to go, but finally he agreed, so long as he went alone, to a therapist of his own choosing. And so we each found counselors at different practices. I began seeing someone on Wednesday nights, while he was home with the Adam and Emma, and he was scheduled to go on Thursdays, while I stayed home with the kids. Marius saw his therapist twice and then, for some mysterious reason, stopped going.
“What happened?” I asked one Thursday night, when he was supposed to be at therapy.
“Hmmm?” Marius was playing online chess, and it was hard to get his attention.
“I said: Why did you miss your session? Don’t you have an appointment now?”
“What session?” he asked, glancing up from the monitor.
“Therapy? You know, we agreed to go talk to someone about… this?”
“Oh, that,” he said, as if I’d just reminded him of the Batak massacre of the Bulgarians by the Ottoman Turks. “Therapy. What about it?”
“I gather you’re not going tonight?”
“No,” he said, clicking his rook into a corner and protecting it with a pawn, a maneuver he called castling. “I’m done with that.”
“Who is done with therapy after two sessions?”
“I am,” he said. “My therapist told me I don’t need therapy. I’m done.”
My therapist told me I don’t need therapy. I couldn’t get this line out of my mind. I repeated to myself, even as I stood there watching him play online chess. My therapist told me I don’t need therapy. Why would a therapist dismiss someone after two sessions?
“Don’t you think you should find another therapist then?” I asked at last.
“Why would I?” he said, clicking on his knight and moving it to a square he called H7. “I tried. It didn’t work.”
“Isn’t the point of trying therapy to help our marriage?” I asked, growing frustrated.
He just sitting there, playing chess, without even looking at me, as if I weren’t even in the room. “Don’t you think you should at least stick with it for more than two sessions?”
“Is it really that important?” he asked, glancing up at me.
“Yes,” I said, feeling like the very stereotype of a disgruntled wife, my arms akimbo, my voice pouty. “It is really important to me.”
“Ok. I’ll find someone else.”
“Really?” I asked, and I could hear the hope in my voice (the sound of hope not yet being pathetic to my ears).
“Sure,” he said, turning his back as he made another move. “I’ll take care of it.”
It took Marius months to find a new therapist, and when he did, it happened a second time: He began therapy and then, two sessions in, he stopped going. When I asked him again what had happened, he said the same thing he’d said the first time. My therapist told me I don’t need therapy. Now, it was two therapists who had told him he didn’t need therapy, two therapists who had assessed him in two sessions and, finding that he was perfectly normal, with no problems and nothing to talk about, told him to stop coming. It was incredible. Marius was so mentally healthy that his therapists refused to work with him. He was beyond mentally healthy. He was enlightened.
Despite my husband’s resistance to therapy, I continued. I didn’t exactly like therapy. I found it too disruptive to the alternative narrative of my marriage I was trying to create. After a therapy session, it was difficult to go back to my life—my increasingly damaged and broken life—without feeling like I’d opened Pandora’s box and let out all varieties of discontent. I also found the process abstract. I wanted concrete, practical advice like: Make pizza on Friday and have sex on Tuesdays and everything will be fine. I was frustrated with the therapist’s method—she would listen to me self-analyze and theorize about my marriage for fifty minutes and then, at the end of my monologue, affirm that it appeared that I was truly invested in working on my marriage, smile consolingly or hand me some tissues, and show me the door.
And yet, these sessions forced me to look at my feelings systematically. They forced me talk to someone for one hour once a week about my marriage, forced me to examine myself, forced me to look my own significant faults—my bossiness, my need for control, my anxieties about money, my perfectionism, my stubbornness, my insecurities, my restlessness. I wasn’t easy, either. I had my own problems to work through.
Marriage is not easy for anyone, the therapist once said, and I understood for the very first time that I wasn’t alone—my therapist saw hundreds of patients, each miserable in her own way. Take things slow, she told me. Be forgiving. Give yourself space.
Like how much space? I wondered. A continent?
“How would you describe the state of your marriage now,” my therapist asked during one of our last sessions.
“How would I describe it?” I asked, wondering how to translate all the mucky emotional confusion into a clear visual image, a metaphor, a symbol.
“Try the first thing that comes to mind,” she added, smiling slightly, as if she’d heard everything before and I could not possibly surprise her.
“Well,” I said, trying to think of what might describe the tangled, confused feelings I had about my husband. “A knotted up pile of yarn.”
“Good,” she said. “Why?”
“Because we’re so tangled up in each other—we share a home, kids, even our careers—that every time I try to untangle a problem, another knot appears.”
“Hmmm,” she said, thinking this over. “Any other images?”
“Quicksand,” I threw in. “A huge expanse of quicksand with small islands of actual earth scattered through it.”
“You feel like you’re sinking?”
“For awhile, I’m on solid earth, and then I take a step in the wrong direction with Marius, and I’m stuck. Like going to Bulgaria. I never even questioned his motives for going, but obviously he knew that he had to go back, and his J-1 visa requirement would keep us there, and he didn’t tell me the truth because he was afraid I wouldn’t come along. I was stuck there for nearly three years. It’s a terrible feeling, to be stuck like that. It is as if the mud is squeezing and you can’t breathe.”
It sounded promising: My marriage was a knotted ball of yarn sinking in quicksand.
“I have a suggestion,” she said. “Why not try to start thinking of a positive image of marriage, an image that pleases you, that makes you feel good about your relationship? Picture it in your mind and maybe you will find that you begin to feel that way about your relationship with your husband.”
For a long time, I couldn’t find a positive image at all, but then the image of an orchid, that most fickle of flowers, came to mind. The orchid is most beautiful when it is full of lush waxy blossoms, but when the petals fall off, there is nothing but two awkward green stems and a pot full of ugly roots. With water, sunlight, and occasional repotting, pods will grow and luscious flowers will return. There are some orchids that flower for several decades, and there are others that—for no discernable reason—die after their first bloom. I imagined my marriage as an orchid heavy with flowers. I imagined a miraculous orchid, whose pods regenerated every day, whose blossoms grew back more beautiful, more brilliant, more healthy than before.