“I didn’t run over your foot,” I said.
“When you decided to gun-it in reverse, nearly running me over, I stumbled back and rolled my ankle. Would you like to see how swollen it is?”
“Why don’t you take your shoes off?”
Silence.
Danielle is not a malicious liar, at least not that I can tell. She actually prides herself on being morally sound, a do-gooder. However, she is a habitual exaggerator. There’s a difference. Her melodrama makes her stories sometimes appear unlikely, which, to people who don’t know her, makes her seem erratic or unstable. Danielle is the most stable person I know. She’s just emotional and has a flair for telling a story. Her emotions are exhausting to me now after so many years. She’s just…a lot.Not high-maintenance, just a walking broken tooth, exposed nerves, sensitive to even the slightest breeze. Your mere existence in a room, shifting the air, can aggravate her. If you blink for one second longer than you normally do, she will instantaneously come up with three scenarios for why your blink was unusual, and most of them have to do with her being personally attacked.
Ironically, despite Dani being so hypersensitive, she has no problem serving her own assaults up to me on a platter of sarcasm and snark, sometimes blatant cruelty. But…the majority of the time, when it comes to other people, her exaggerationsand energy are completely appropriate and will turn an otherwise boring conversation or activity into a theatrical presentation. Her friends welcome this side of her. It breathes air into a room. Sometimes, calling her a liar is all I have to match her quick-wittedness. It’s the one thing I know for a fact that she’s insecure about.
“Are you just going to stand there and stare, Dani?”
“My shoes aren’t the problem.”
“So you told lies to the mediator thinking it would help us? You were basically accusing me of trying to kill you?”
“Who’s telling lies now?”
She was unwavering. Stoic. This is how I knew she was really pissed.
“All I’m saying is, when you dishonestly say or even just insinuate that I’m trying to hurt you to our divorce mediator, it doesn’t look good.”
She blinked, then set her purse down on the counter and walked to the refrigerator as I watched. She took a half-empty bottle of chardonnay out of the door, popped the cork out with her teeth, and drank directly from the bottle.
“It’s two in the afternoon. Are you not picking the boys up?”
She turned on her heels. Daggers! Slowly and deliberately she said, “Are you not picking up the boys?”
“I’m saying it because you always pick them up.”
“Yeah, I do!” she sneered. “Maybe you can today. How about that?”
“You’re so bitter, Dani.”
“So obtuse, Alex. We’re getting divorced because we arebothbitter. Resentment has festered like a plague.”
“How poetic. You deliver your word diarrhea with such great panache that it sounds like a Broadway musical.Panache,there’s a word for you, smarty-pants.”
“We can no longer fake it till we make it. There is nothing funny about this situation.” That’s when the waterworks began. Her face scrunched up, tears rolled down her cheeks. I couldn’t help but smile. It was a knee-jerk reaction. “You’re smiling? You condescending, fucking ego-monster. Look at you. Nothing. Emotionless, heartless vessel,” she said.
I laughed out loud even though I knew things were escalating for Dani. By this point, she was sobbing. She shook her head, tears pouring from her eyes.
“We didn’t make it,” she said, barely able to speak. And that’s when I actually…finally…felt a modicum of sadness. I could see the despair on her face, yet I still didn’t react. “We didn’t fucking make it, Alex!” she cried and then stormed out of the kitchen with the bottle in hand.
“Does this mean I’m picking up the boys?” I said to the empty kitchen.
I liked to end arguments with moronic statements like that because that’s the way she makes me feel. Like a moron.
6
you’ve murdered the best parts of me
Danielle
Inside my large walk-in closet, I slithered down the wall, gripping the chardonnay to my chest like it was a dying friend. Alex always gave me a hard time for hanging out in my closet even though it was the size of a small apartment. I would joke that I was a closet drinker because I liked the peace and quiet inside the closet while enjoying a glass of wine here or there, on the floor no less. For years, it was simply a mommy break, and then it became a safe place. A place to imagine. A place to explore myself. A place I didn’t feel judged or critiqued by everyone in my life, including the strangers who saw the television shows I wrote.
When you begin the divorce process, which for us started years ago, you immediately look for the answers. In the beginning of the disintegration all you have is “why?” Nobecause. At the stage we are at, everything is abecause. Because he exists and I am stuck co-parenting with him until the end of time. That’s how it feels. Because he has brown hair and sharptoenails. Because his mom smoked while she was pregnant with him.
