I came to my position against the right of divorce in a roundabout sort of way.
It is not a spiritual position, such as the kind that extends from the indissolubility of marriage, as instilled by the Catholicism into which I was born. Nor is it, strictly speaking, a moral position, such as the kind that extends from the primacy of the family with two parents and children in one household. Nor is it still more a pragmatic position, such as the kind that extends from thinking over the knotted logistics of shuffling children between two households each with one parent, and all the setbacks that emanate concentrically from them over time. Not that these are small matters, and they each give a certain heft to my cause, but the cause itself is rooted in none of them. It came at me sideways, or rather after a series of cycles, passing by the same place enough times, as the epiphany got closer and closer.
I grew up in a good home. It was, I want to say, three or four stories. It had three bedrooms when we moved into it in 1987 from Connecticut. In time, my parents extended the back of the house to accommodate a wider kitchen, a sunroom, and an outdoor deck, all of which were built over a concrete storage area that everyone hated going into because it was poorly lighted and crawling with spiders, crickets, spider crickets, centipedes, and other of God’s children that disgust me to this day. There was also added an additional floor to serve as the new master bedroom, wide enough to accommodate its own bathroom and sitting area with a couch, a chair, and a television.
The laundry room, at the bottom of the stairs leading to the family room and adjacent to the garage and the basement and playroom corridor, had a toilet just sort of sitting there, as if it was leftover, and of which I thought nothing until very recently.
When I take stock of the immensity of my privileged upbringing, I think not of the expansive yard space in which my brothers and I had to run around, nor the safe and well-connected neighborhood surrounding it. Not even the scores of decidedly nonlocal Marias who came to clean the house, or the older black man who came to wax the kitchen floor, whose name might have been George, but who I mostly remember as being very kind and patient when we were clearly in his way and undoing his good work; or the working-class families who were somehow friends but somehow also service providers.
No, it was that extra toilet that was just there, as a treat.
The home was a two-parent household for about the first six or seven years. Then, on what I remember as a beautiful Saturday, my parents sat us down at the kitchen table and told us that Dad was moving out. We saw little of him for a few weeks because he moved to a boarding house in the next town that didn’t allow children. And in the brittle-seeming Victorian aesthetic it didn’t look all that inviting to children anyway. Whatever. He eventually moved to a cramped and out-of-the-way condominium, with a downstairs neighbor named Bruce who complained about us often; it was both literally and symbolically tormenting. Sometimes I think about Bruce. I never saw his face because his mere presence at our door terrified me, so I have to build a new one. It’s a house-face, with broken glass eyes, cracked plaster skin, and teeth of bent pipes and crooked lattice. I sit and wonder what a man with that kind of face does with his time.
We remained generally in the big house for another decade until my mom decided to sell it in the summer following my freshman year at college, to make a new one with a then-soon-to-be-and-now-former stepfather, whose role in this narrative is in equal proportion to the role of a headless mannequin on the floor at a deserted Sears, or an eye-pecked scarecrow in a blighted field.
It was not the best portion of that year1. I split my time between Pizza Hut and a deli, both now gone; I was taking Spanish at a two-year college2 because I dropped it in defeat during the four-year spring semester. On top of that, we had to keep the house in pristine condition to be shown to potential buyers, and be invisible when they came around, which was any time, and seemingly all the time.
It was sold later that fall to an older couple who were somehow related to another family down the street. The latter homeowners had done considerable remodeling to their property: a new white brick façade and a white brick driveway. My brothers and I feared they would do the same to our home. They did more: adding a large fountain in the center of the front yard.
I sometimes walk by the house, slow my pace, and stare at it for a less than comforting duration. I look at my old bedroom right above the garage and imagine the atrocities committed against it. I imagine a sewing room, piles and piles of throw-pillows and tacky fabrics. I have sometimes fantasized of walking up to the door and ringing the bell, and meeting whomever answers with a well-rehearsed ghostly visage. Or I could just walk into the back yard, surrounded by a very fake plastic white picket fence that replaced our immediately rotting log fence that our dogs found any number of ways to circumvent. My pace quickens back to normal speed as I reach the now-white stone driveway. Sometimes I wonder if someone inside sees me. Sometimes I hope they do.
Hate-watching a house is hardly productive or cathartic. The creative urge in me cannot be forced into dormancy for very long before I boil over into anxious euphoria. At least an imagination-rooted euphoria. I could, I think, engage in life sculpture, with any number of materials at my disposal: paint, a hammer and chisel, gasoline, mounds of silly string. Fantasies parade through my brain in garish formation, each more elaborate and extreme than the previous one. Followed by their logistical debris: the resources, budgetary demands, energy demands, the cornucopia of legal consequences. I do not know how people look at the requirement of “detail orientation” on a job listing and not immediately develop chest pains.
Some of us never reach an age where vandalism loses its cathartic impact, that crossroads where thrill runs right through justice. But thankfully not all vandalism needs to be literal, physically taxing, or in legal tall grass. Some vandalism can emit from the mind and streak itself across the collective psyche. There is nothing nearly as demanding nor unlawful, for the time being, in having opinions on divorce; antagonistic opinions specifically, achieve a higher, maybe more lyrical ideal of vandalism. Few have cause to find its damage unsightly or inconvenient, it may even by quite beautiful. But once tagged or struck, it is the most difficult to clean off or rebuild; and may, after a time, simply be a part of the landscape to the point that it eclipses whatever it destroyed.
Okay, so it wasn’t entirely barren. I did see The Mars Volta at Irving Plaza with my dad that summer. That doesn’t sound all that great upon reflection, but our balcony view of the band playing De-Loused in the Comatorium from start to finish, and with few breaks between songs, was a sight to behold by now-antiquated rock standards. I remember specifically a really nice kid from Texas stood next to us and kept calling my dad “Sir” every time he asked if he was enjoying the show. I’m pretty sure he did.
Do not let Dan Harmon or embittered gifted kids get you twisted: underestimate the community college rigors at your peril. Especially if your Spanish professor is a stern Norwegian woman who makes you sit at the front of the class.
This is really good.