One of the unexpected bonuses of divorce, Kit
Hargrove realizes, as she settles onto the porch swing,
curling her feet up under her and placing a glass of
chilled wine on the wicker table, is having weekends
without the children, weekends when she gets to enjoy
this extraordinary peace and quiet, remembers who she
was before she became defined by motherhood, by the
constant noise and motion that come with having a
thirteen-year-old and an eight-year-old.
In the beginning, those first few months before they
worked out a custody arrangement, when Adam, her
ex, stayed in the city Monday to Friday and collected
the children every weekend, Kit had been utterly lost.
The house suddenly seemed so quiet, the huge new
colonial they had moved into when Adam got his big
job in the city, the house they thought they had to have,
given the entertaining he now wanted them to be doing,
the investors he wanted to invite over to dinner.
She still blames the house for the ending of the
marriage. A huge white clapboard house, with black
shutters, and a marble-tiled double-height entrance, it
was impressive, and empty. Much the way Kit felt about
her life while she was living there. The ceilings were
high and coffered, the walls panelled. Everything about
the house shouted expense, and it never felt like home.
There was nothing cosy about the enormous Great
Room, the expansive master bedroom suite complete
with his ’n’ hers bathrooms and a sitting room attached
that no one ever sat in.
There was nothing comfortable about the formal
living room, with its Persian rugs and hard French
furniture, a room that they used perhaps three times
a year, although no one lasted longer than twenty
minutes in there before moving into the kitchen and
crowding round the island in the one room in the house
that felt welcoming and warm.
The kitchen was the room that Kit lived in, for the
rest of the house felt like a mausoleum, and the day
they moved in was the day it all started to go wrong.
Adam started commuting into the city during the
week, leaving on the ‘death train’ at 5.30 a.m. to avoid
the crowds, getting home at 9 p.m.
From Monday to Friday he didn’t see the children,
didn’t see her. She rattled around in that huge house,
growing more and more used to being on her own,
resenting his presence more and more when he was
back for the weekends, feeling like he was invading her
space, attempting to mark a territory that, without her
knowing, or wanting it to, had undoubtedly become
hers.
They became like strangers, ships that pass in the
night, not able to agree on anything, not having any
common ground, other than their children, and they’d
make dinner plans on the weekend and beg people to
join them, so they wouldn’t have to sit in restaurants
in silence, looking around the room, wondering how it
was they had nothing to talk about any more.
When they separated, then talked divorce, Kit knew
the house had to be sold. And she was glad. There
was nothing in the house that felt like hers, no good
memories, nothing but loneliness and isolation within
its walls.
During the early days she felt, mostly, lost. For so
many years Adam had been her best friend, her lover
and, even towards the end, when they barely saw one
another, she still knew he was her partner, she still
always had someone to phone when she needed an
answer to a question.
After the separation, during those first few days,
when Adam and the kids pulled away from the house
in his Range Rover, Kit would stand in the driveway
watching them go, not knowing who she was supposed
to be without her children, what she was supposed to do,
how she was supposed to fill two whole days without
mouths to feed and small people to entertain.
She lost her partner, her lover and her identity in one
fell swoop.
She didn’t have the energy to go out, although her
social life shrank to almost nothing anyway. A single
woman, it seems, doesn’t have quite the same appeal
in suburban Connecticut. Their couple friends initially
invited her out, feeling sorry for her, or wanting to hear
what had happened, but the invitations petered out,
and she quickly realized that the friends she and Adam
shared, their friends, would not necessarily remain her
friends, because the chemistry just wasn’t the same.
And she couldn’t even think about dating (although
it was extraordinary how many people offered to set her
up on blind dates, within what felt like minutes of her
separation), so she went to bed.
Days would pass when she barely emerged from the
comfort of her cocoon in the grand master suite on
the second floor, aided by Ambien at night and pointless
reality shows on the television during the day.
She once watched almost eight hours straight of Project
Runway, even though she wasn’t the least bit interested
to begin with – but by hour three she was desperate
to know who was next going to be auf wiedersehned off
the show by the glamazonian Heidi Klum.
And then, when they finally agreed a custody
arrangement, she had the kids every other weekend,
but by that time Adam had agreed to sell the house and
split the proceeds, and the resulting house-hunt was
like a well-needed injection of energy.
They were lucky. Their house sold quickly, and Kit
found a small cape on a pretty street behind Main
Street, that was easily big enough for her and the
children, and Adam rented a small farmhouse on the
other side of town.
It took the best part of a year for Kit to start feeling
like herself again after the divorce. And at the end of
that time she was not the self she was during her
marriage – the wife she had tried so hard to be – but
the self she was before her marriage: her true self, the
identity she lost in her quest to be the perfect wife.