It’s Sunday and I’m awake at 4:45 in the morning, but I won’t go downstairs until at least seven. I will not give him the satisfaction of knowing he woke me up, yet again.
He’s completely deaf in his left ear, according to the world-renowned audiologist he saw—his words, not mine. He can hear a mere twenty percent in his right ear, but it’s enough, and it’s why I automatically walk and sit and eat and instinctively move to a person’s right side when interacting with them, regardless of their aural-apparatus capabilities. You evolve after twenty-two years of adjusting your frustration levels, speaking up, enunciating, shouting, “How was your day?” Eventually, you just move to the right side.
I’d think it contemptuous to be annoyed by his deafness if I didn’t believe it was partially selective on my behalf. He seems to have much better hearing when anyone besides myself is speaking. It’s that insolent wife joke about how obnoxious her voice is. I can’t believe I used to laugh along to jokes like that, as if to sayI’m too cool, too easygoing to be offended by a joke about how women in general are annoying and my own voice is grating or off-putting. The voice I used to soothe our children, night after night, theonlyvoice that could soothe our children, is somehow raucous to Alex and to others? Is that what I’m supposed to believe?
He had just gone deaf the year I met him and was monumentally struggling with his balance, among other issues that present when your hearing in one ear suddenly goes out. It was an inner-ear infection, the first world-renowned audiologist had said just before closing the book on Alexander—no amplification possible. He’d have to get a cochlear implant, which at the time was a devastating idea, even to me. Yet now, after twenty-two years of people shouting at him, he still refuses to look into cochlear implants? Part of me thinks it could have saved our marriage.
In the beginning…I pitied him, and I know it doesn’t make sense to resent a person for pitying them…but it is possible.
I tap the screen on my phone. It’s now seven-fifteen in the morning. Today is a big day. Moving day. I realize I’ve been lying in bed, awake, listening to the clanking, tinkering, shuffling, shifting for almost three hours. In my head I imagine making three tally marks on top of an old chalkboard. The screeching chalk in my mind coincides with the sound of Alexander slamming the vitamin cabinet above the trash can. He’ll take the trash out next and when he does, he’ll lift the trash bag out and let the heavy plastic trash can liner slam back down into our overpriced simplehuman stainless steel trash can. It’s made for simple humans after all.
I glance at the clock and add another tally mark to the chalkboard. The thousands of lines represent the hours I’ve wasted being unhappy.
Regardless of how many aspects of my life are predictable to the point of soul-murdering boredom, one thing is, ironically, predictably unpredictable, and that’s the fact that I never know when Alex is going to leave the house or return. Even though he wakes up at the same time every day, some days he says he hasto be at work at 7a.m.Some days he’s home at two or four, and others not until 8p.m.He’s a physical therapist with his own practice, and his hours vary greatly. If you ask him to try and give you a heads-up, he’ll act like you’re somehow taking away his autonomy, when the reality is, by virtue of his own recalcitrance, he has eliminated any autonomyIcould possibly have.
And soI am the default parent…the mother. He is the man who deserves autonomy.
Cases in point, more than a thousand times over the years we will be headed to a destination we’ve both agreed upon, Alex driving, of course, because I’m a woman, when, without warning, he will turn in the opposite direction from the agreed-upon destination, at which point I will say, “Where are we going?”
In the more recent years this question has become increasingly agitating to him. “I’m stopping at the gas station to get a Lotto ticket. Is that okay with you?”
I’ll usually respond with something like, “Sure, it’s just nice to know where my body is being driven.”
Almost every time he looks at me and rolls his eyes.
Just last week, many months after we had already decided to file for divorce, we chose to ride together to the mediator’s office. We were naively optimistic, and also…we pretend we’re progressive. On the way there, Alex decided to take a different route.
“Where are we going?”
“To. The. Mediator’s. Office.”
“Why are we going this way?”
“Because I decided to go this way and I’m driving.”
“Well, then let me drive,” I said without condescension.
“No, this is my car, I’m driving, and I am going this way because I want to go this way.”
“Alex, do you see how this conversation started as a simple question and now it’s turned into a battle over whose damn cookie it is?”
He glanced at my crotch. “Well, it’s not yours; we know that.”
Shocked, I said, “Now that we’re getting a divorce, you’re a sex-crazed, deluded, misogynist man from 1805, calling my vagina a cookie? Well, that definitely makes things easy for me.”
“Lighten up.”
“No, I will not lighten up. You lighten up. I just asked where we were going, and now you act like I was the one overreacting. If you’re not stonewalling me, you’re blatantly gaslighting me.”
“Well, I’m glad the thousands of dollars we spent on therapy has improved your vocabulary. Anyway, it’s never just a simple question with you, Danielle. I can always hear something in the underlying tone.”
“You’re projecting.”
“According to you, I’m everything in the goddamn psychiatric bible!” he yelled.
“You said it. In this instance, I really did just want to know where I was going. I’m not your property, not along for the ride. You’ve been doing that to me for what feels like a millennium…And by the way, Alex, I’ve always had a stellar vocabulary.”
“Leave it to the writer to exaggerate everything and then to brag about her word prowess on top of it.”
