Photograph: George Marks/Getty
After almost fifty years of marriage, I didn’t even leave a casserole for Sterling in the freezer, just a note, that’s all. I took family photos with me, but none of Ethel and me. I also had to leave behind my greatgrandfather’s Oriental rug, my grandmother’s couch, my favorite rocking chair and of course, my morning sunlight, but I knew I needed to go.
I glanced over towards my nosey neighbor Delia’s as Nancy and I loaded up the car, hoping Delia would see me leaving and alert Ethel right away. I asked Nancy, as we pulled out of the driveway, if she’d ever driven a client four whole hours to a new apartment. She said no, she never had, that in fact, she’d had to argue with her boss about it to receive permission. “You did that?” I asked. “You argued on my account?”
“You’re an amazing woman,” Nancy said, which made me feel guilty deep down; she didn’t know the half of it.
Two weeks after I left, I made my first call back to Woodville. My friend Louise answered on the first ring; Sterling had told her I was gone and she’d been frantic with worry. But she hesitated to tell me the news she must’ve thought was my worst nightmare, that a week before, Ethel had moved into my house with Sterling. I smiled to myself, though I can’t say it didn’t pain me.
I can imagine it, my face, still catching light through my morning window. My face, surrounded by auburn hair, sitting atop a leaner, infinitely more flexible body. That had always been the thing I feared most, ever since I was a child, that Ethel would find a way to step from her life to mine and stay there. But by now, I believe what Nancy told me that first day that we met. That courage isn’t fearlessness, it’s looking at what you’re afraid of and moving towards it.
And besides that, I’d actually started wanting out of my own life. But as badly as Sterling had been treating me, I was still his wife and knew I couldn’t leave him all alone, not with his mind going and him not even really admitting it yet. Then I started to realize I could walk away and be almost certain Ethel would rush right in. That she would think she was finally getting what she deserved, finally getting some kind of revenge for having to share a childhood with me, for the fact that I was our grandmother’s favorite. She doesn’t know Sterling’s true character, not the way I do after fifty years of marriage, but she’ll find out soon enough.
I knew if I didn’t go when the apartment came available I’d never have the strength to leave; it was only a matter of time before someone noticed Sterling’s mind was going and expected me to be the dutiful wife. I made myself remember the rage I saw in his face, the threats, the awful things he did to me at night, the pills he took to enable him to break our wedding vows. I thought of those things in order to harden my heart against the memory of the look that came over his face when he couldn’t remember the name of a familiar street or the day of the week.
After my dad passed, I swore to myself I wouldn’t take care of another dying old person. It may sound selfish, but seven years of my father the invalid–it would be enough for any woman. And Ethel, during those years when I changed hundreds of our father’s soiled diapers, was off in gay Paris with Francois, eating egg pancakes. It’s her turn, I say. Let her take care of Sterling in his old age. He may be strong now, but I can see that his new forgetfulness, his fresh rage, are portents of a terrible decline. Let Ethel be the one there with him, come to take my place for the last time.
I don’t know what I was expecting from this Paris; certainly not little cafes serving quiche and croissants; certainly no wide boulevards or spoken French flowing around me like an invisible river, but that’s okay with me. I wouldn’t know what to do with such things. This Paris–Paris, Texas–is quiet and my apartment building full of other old men and women. They love to air their physical complaints and encourage me to do the same, so that I no longer try to pretend that my body is still capable of what it once was. My neighbors in the Assisted Living Apartments have never seen me young, so don’t fault me for growing old. They’re people who don’t even know I have a twin and have never met my husband, so that when they see me coming slowly, stiffly down the hallway to the community dining room, they call out “Hey, Ellen, how are you doing?” as if I am worthy of being asked after for my very own sake.
THE END
Wouldn't it be nice to just step out of our lives. Walk away from our failures and mistakes. Leave behind our small victories that even in their glory trap us like shiny shackles, beautiful and binding. I feel the call of other worlds, unexplored places, different lives. When I crack the window on my minivan, the whistle of the wind almost drowns out the whining kids, the devastating news on the radio and the grinding gears in my head and I can faintly hear me in another life.
At this point, things are Thomas Sabo schmucklooking
rather bleak. Countries need to cap theirthomas sabo
ringe emissions by 2020 at the latest. That is to say, this is when peak emission levels are reached. It
should all be downhill from there.“Butthomas sabo
ohrringe Mother Nature doesn’t care about what we emit in any particular year. What matters is cumulative
carbon emissions,” says Oxford University Thomas Sabo
verkaufatmospheric physicist Niel Bowerman, quoted by Science News.