by Amy Simmons Farber

 

The slow draw of fury coils into my lungs, so stealth I don’t recognize the flavor against my tongue. My blood warms. Each breath enlivens a plume of rage. I become big in rooms where I feel small.

“This marriage is not a priority for me anymore.” My husband says it in a careful, studied way, as if he had practiced before a mirror. Maybe he practiced with his lover first, deploying that same soft voice, tilting his head in an angle of regret. I was the unwitting matchmaker, inviting her over to our farm because he was kinder when she was around. Her stiletto heels sank into the paddock mud and made us giggle.

He packs his bags and moves out.

I wake with my face on the cold tile of the bathroom floor, panties bunched at my ankles, shampoo bottles and toothbrushes tossed everywhere. I must have reached for them when I fainted. 

At the cardiologist’s office my heart is pronounced in working order. The image of my heart ultrasound is like the silhouette of a wizened old man, kneeling on the ground defiantly shaking his fist at the sky with each cadenced thump.

I hear you, man. I am curled in there somewhere, spooning you, breathing the grassy scent of your scapula and tiny betrayals. I cry in snotty gulps. The nurse turns away. 

Anger is tiring. It’s up to our thirteen-year-old daughter and me to fix broken fence boards with hay twine, feed the pack of beagles my father-in-law hunts rabbits with.

Anger is also funny —I shovel horse manure into the trunk of my soon-to-be ex-husband’s car; swap his Viagra with Altoid mints. A friend sends his affair partner a cat turd nestled in a small jewelry box marked, your integrity.

Anger is the language of the unmothered. My mother napped all day within the opaque haze of a basement spare bedroom, curtains drawn, the stale smell of dirty shag carpeting haunting the collapsing afternoons of my childhood.

It followed me here, to this farm where we married on the lawn, into the empty rooms of the house he built, the clouds he painted on the high ceilings. Mice nest in the walls, gnaw through the wires that make the oven work.

He visits, sporting a fedora with a jaunty feather in the band, and brings tools he doesn’t use. When I speak, the silence after is worse — he goes quieter. More gone.

A broken heat lamp ignites a fire in the beagle kennels on a cold Christmas Eve. I run outside in my nightgown to a wall of flames and burn my hands on the gate locks trying to free them. By dawn the kennel is flattened to smoking debris. The dogs who survived have deep red craters along their sides and backs, flesh curdled into raw hamburger.  Neighbors bring towels to swaddle them. I watch the daughter of one neighbor remove her shirt down to her bra and wrap it comfortingly around a shaking dog. The vet puts down the ones beyond saving.

My husband arrives in an immaculate navy suit with a canary silk tie and pocket square. He stands at the kitchen sink, now a makeshift triage area askew with salves, blankets and towels. I note his stillness, the inertia of an agnostic bystander.

How easily those ghosts of marital history can be summoned — the golden flecks of hair on his forearms wrapped around my waist, the peculiar singsong of his voice when he was happy. Love, love, love, he’d say. I once knew every part of him.

The slow draw of that fury, still coiled, still quiet. My hands are burned. The ash smells like winter.

 

Amy Simmons Farber is a communications professional, writer, and horsewoman whose career has spanned Capitol Hill and public affairs. She lives in rural Maryland. Her essays have appeared in This I Believe: On Love and the Washington City Paper.