Jessica Mehr

nonfiction

 Copyright Jessica Mehr, 2018.
May not be reproduced without written permission.

the beatles lied to us

2016

At night, we cuddle like nothing has happened. It’s the only thing holding my days together, knowing that Stephen will still be in my bed that night. We cling to each other so tightly that he wakes up numb, my body tied around his, unwilling to let go. Hours later, I wake in a panic, pat his empty side of the bed until I remember that he is at work, or on weekends hear him clanking around the kitchen, realizing that he isn’t gone, not really gone, not yet. Our marriage counselor tells us that we can move into separate rooms when we are ready. We will never be ready. Between Stephen’s sleep apnea and my TMJ mouth guards, we look like senior citizens at bedtime. I have chronic insomnia, and each night I rest my head on Stephen’s chest and am lulled to sleep by the white noise of his CPAP machine, the rhythm of his chest rising and falling. If I come to bed after him, Sleeping Stephen snatches me from my side of the bed and pulls me towards him. “I love you,” he says through his mask, raspy and breathless. Sometimes Sleeping Stephen tries to fight the machine as it forces air through his nose, and I wake to a gurgling sound or snoring, reach up and stroke his hair until he lets out a contented sigh, then resumes breathing normally. These are the things we must relearn: breathing, loving, sleeping.

During the day we carry on as best we can, hug each other constantly and say I love you after every sentence; we cry over little things, like a song on the radio or knocking over a glass. We have four months until our lease ends, 120 days to wean off one another.  Life is moving backwards. Things we worked 12 years to build are coming undone, a Lego city that must be broken down brick by brick, put back in the original boxes and returned to the toy store shelves. After the initial shock wears off, there is a glimmer of relief and excitement. The emotional limbo we’ve been living in for months is finally over. We have futures now, something we’ve never had before. Stephen and I could never move forward together. We lived in a bubble of permanent stasis, existing day by day. We had no five-year plan. We made excuses not to have children.

“You have to start taking your own pills,” Stephen tells me. He has always fed me my nighttime medications, because I can never remember if I’ve taken them or not and he’s afraid I will take them twice. He is my caregiver, my worrier. He divides my pills up into day-of-the-week containers so I can take them myself without error, and each time I swallow them I feel slightly abandoned, like my mother is telling me I’m too old to be carried. Codependent. That’s what the doctor calls us. With one word, everything we do for each other out of love is turned into something sinister, a desire to control the other person, a need to make ourselves dysfunctionally dependent on one another. I take extra care preparing all of Stephen’s meals. I savor the labor of making his breakfast protein bars, chopping vegetables and boiling eggs for his lunch salads. Soon our counselor will tell me I can’t make his food anymore. I worry that once I’m gone he will eat nothing but apple fritters and burritos.

Technically we are no longer in “marriage” counseling, but “divorce counseling,” something I didn’t even know existed 2 weeks ago. Our relationship has been on the edge for years, and when it comes down, it is hard and fast.

“It’s like we bought a puppy,” I tell our counselor. “And it was so young and happy and full of life we didn’t think to feed him. So over time he starved to death and we pretended we couldn’t see it. We left his body in the corner to rot and kept going through the motions of having a dog, giving him kisses on the nose and telling him we loved him. Then he started to smell. So now we’re trying to shove food down his throat and drag his dead body on walks around town. But it’s too late.”

“Stephen,” the doctor says with a mildly horrified expression, “do you agree with that analogy?”

“Yes,” he says. “Except we tried to feed him sometimes. We just never knew what he needed.”

It doesn’t surprise me that Stephen gets my grotesque analogy. We understand everything the other person says. Movie quotes, jokes, trains of thought; it’s like our minds are connected. But life doesn’t run on favorite musicians and dark humor. Our relationship always took more from us as individuals than we produced as a couple. Most of what we share now are vices. At 24 and 22, smuggling a pint of rum into the movies and mixing cocktails in the bathroom was a great time; at 36 and 34, it’s a cry for help. By the time we got married, we’d been living together in Indiana for five years, had supported each other through two degrees, one broken wrist, and constant setbacks. We never took a honeymoon. Our wedding was a weekend trip to NJ; I think some of our guests stayed longer. When we got back to Indiana our problems were right where we had left them. But they were all temporary. Stephen was back in school at Purdue, getting a BS in computer science, and we hated West Lafayette with a passion, so clearly it was to blame. Purdue, Stephen’s coursework, financial stress—these were problems, not us. Never us. We loved each other too much to have real problems.

After I accepted my engagement ring, I joked to Stephen, “I’m not sure I can commit to spending the next 5-7 years of my life with someone.” It was funny because we were so sure that we were going to make it.

The saddest point of my marriage is when I realize that there is nothing circumstantial left to blame for my sadness. Stephen finishes his degree and we move to San Diego. Our lives become palm trees, hot tubs, and cheap tequila; our bank account is always in the black. It’s only now that we can see what should have been obvious from the beginning. We are the problem. We are unhappy because we make each other unhappy. There isn’t enough  therapy in world to make Stephen and I a good couple.  We augment each other’s bad traits and obscure our good ones.  Our relationship is, at heart, just another vice.

One night in counseling, we finally admit that divorce is our only option. Afterward, emotionally gutted, we go out for cocktails and work out our financial settlement on a bar napkin, bum cigarettes so that we have an excuse to step outside and cry. Drinking is the only thing we’ve ever really done together, our only recourse for dealing with stress.

“I need money,” I say, “but I don’t want you living in that lonely-divorced-guy-apartment complex. It’s called ‘Casa de Sadness’ and there will be a dead body floating in the pool.”

“You mean where my bedroom is a pull-out sofa?” Stephen asks, “And my kitchen is a hot plate?” We laugh for a minute, take several deep breaths and pay our tab.

On the car ride back to our apartment, Stephen reaches over the gear shift and grasps my hand. I kiss his right wrist, like I always do, and let our clasped hands fall onto my thigh, staring out the window at the San Diego marina, the harbor that never felt like home.

“The Beatles lied to us,” I cry to him. “They said all we needed was love.”

an american holiday

First Prize, Purdue PEFCU Award for Creative Nonfiction,
2011

MOVING
A procession of flatbed trucks passes underneath my sister’s window, vibrating the floors as jackhammers alternate on and off.  They are hauling chunks of building away, mounds of twisted steel mingled with purses, shoes, and paper.  Every now and then I think I see discernable sections, debris that resembles a wall or a window, like pieces from a Lego skyscraper kit. 

My sister is finally moving.  My job is to pack her bedroom, still dusted in a thin layer of ash that reminds me of fingerprint powder at a crime scene.  It clings, revealing the greasy smudges on her coffee table, the minute fissures cracking through the cushions of her leather sofa.   Jennifer’s apartment was one of the closest residential buildings, a big selling point when she moved here from New Jersey a few months ago.  She left her window slightly ajar at the time, and a pile of laundry below it was ruined, designer sundresses and khaki shorts that I sweep into a garbage bag.  I strip her bed down to the bare mattress, folding her sheets neatly before throwing them away.  The moving men walk in and promptly take away her mattress and bed frame.  They look at me hopefully, as if something is being accomplished. 

Jennifer is locked in the bathroom.  My mother speaks to her through the closed door.  Honey, just let me in, she repeats, but my sister has made a home in there, has been avoiding her bedroom altogether.  For the past two weeks, she has been sleeping on an air mattress beside the shower, an effort to stifle the noise and smell by clinging to the core of the apartment.  She stuffs a towel into the crease below the bathroom door.  It keeps everything out but her dreams.  In them, she is surrounded by things that spontaneously explode.  She tiptoes around land mines disguised as sidewalks, cars, and bicycles; she looks out windows for fiery objects hanging in the air.  She wakes up thirsty and sore from constant movement, as if she is running on a hamster wheel, a rush of smoke behind her that clouds the streets and nips at the back of her shoes.  She stretches her arms out forward, grasping for the clear, sunlit city in the distance.

My mother looks tired and daunted as she paces, clutching a Styrofoam cup of Chardonnay.  It took over three hours for the National Guard to let the moving van through, and I don’t think she has given any thought as to how we will leave the city.  Outside the Holland Tunnel they wait, trigger-ready, their guns pointing at no one and everyone all at once.