Quiet Mountain Essays
Copyright ©, 2005
The Year Apart: Notes on a Long Marriage
by
Stephanie Powell Watts
The alarm from his Palm Pilot went off at 5:00. I wouldn’t get up. What could I do anyway?
Watch him take his last things from our house—his beer mugs, shorts left in the dryer, the book
he means to read? Should I watch him make and unmake his mind as he reaches for objects in
the dark, trying to remember the things he promised not to forget last night? My husband was
leaving, but we weren’t separating, not really, except in the most literal sense.
I moved to PA for a job in creative writing while he stayed for his own job in Memphis, TN. This is
my first tenure track job. To the uninitiated that means that this is my first shot at a permanent
job in academia, where the pay is not especially high and the jobs are harder to find than hen’s
teeth. And that’s hardly an exaggeration. For every job advertised, at least a hundred people
apply, regardless of the school. For a good school in a good area with a decent teaching load,
double and triple that application number. All of which means you might find yourself in a huge
job pool with major award winners and big-time publishers. The point is if you get a good job,
you have to go. I had to go
The summer went by like chaff, making the day come too quickly, too early for me to register it.
Was I really going to live alone? Was I really going to be all by myself, in a new state, a strange
house? If I stayed in bed, then it wouldn’t be August 25, and I wouldn’t have to believe that my
worst fear had come true.
I have four younger brothers, living parents and a grandmother, a step-parent, and god-knows
how many cousins. Yet, the belief I needed to have about family—real connection in the world—
was a fiction. My family is estranged: distant parents, cousins I wouldn’t know to see them on the
street, I’m sure; brothers (at least a couple), I haven’t seen or talked with in years. And now I am
to be without my husband.
We have been married over a decade now. We are veterans, survivors, of all the marriage wars
that destroyed the marriages of our friends and acquaintances. Many of whom with marriages
that started when ours did - when the Clinton administration was a bright shining promise - are
now long divorced and on to lives with other people, their former romances an occasional
interruption, a wisp of hair in the periphery, of their lives.
My married girlfriends jealously picture single girls as skinny with effortless bedroom hair,
making what they want for dinner - the theater tonight, a best-seller tomorrow - grown girls
arranging all their own things in clever rows. In regards to my new 'status', both my single and
divorced friends tsk, tsk, marvelling at my strength, “you are a brave girl,” they say. But I feel
something under their admiration, something deadly and waiting, ready to announce, “I knew
there was something bad wrong with that marriage years ago.”
Still, I think I am doing okay. All except for the guilt. He’s not in the house. I know this is not as
profound or serious a loss as a death; I’m not kidding myself. But it is not only death that
wounds. Separation is different and still sad in its own way. Perhaps it is the realization of time
lost. I’m old enough to know that days pass and you don’t get them back. I’ve been around the
block once at least, seen the sights, enough to know that there’s not much to it without the
certainty of someone who cares to share the tale.
I know this is not death. But it is a kind of ending. He can (we can) know if life would be better
apart—a secret that the long married fear to discover. I can know once and finally if my regular
and right condition is alone. A possible truth I’ve always been terrified to realize.
Today is my first day teaching at a new school. My first day of living alone in a new state. I have
finally become the woman I dreamed about—with my own money, house, car, still young enough
to throw my hat to the sky, an eager smile on my mostly unlined face. I’ve wanted this. I’m sure
that I did. But the nag is there--does everything you want come just the second after you’re not
sure you needed it at all?
Contributor's Notes...
Stephanie Powell Watts is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Lehigh University. Her work
has appeared in Mangrove, Obsidian III, the African American Review and other journals.
