The Divorce Party

Brooklyn, New York, 69 years later

Maggie

This is the truth, as far as she can see it: there are some things you should never talk about, and money is definitely one of them. Maggie is starting to understand this, in the way she often comes to understand the things that she wrongly believed she already had a handle on. No one wants to talk about money— whether you have very little or have a lot and feel slightly guilty about your lot in life, especially when it has been handed down to you, like bright red hair or childbearing hips, or the awful midnight disease that keeps its inheritors up all hours thinking about money and love and every other thing we, as human people, have never really meant to get to the bottom of.

Here’s the point. Maggie doesn’t sleep. Not since she and Nate moved to Red Hook, not since they plopped down every penny they have (and many that they don’t have) into this fifteen-hundred-square-foot apartment, and—more critically— the two thousand square feet beneath it. The two thousand square feet that will be the home of their restaurant. She has never done anything like this—never made such a commitment to staying in one place. It isn’t her strong suit. She knows this about herself—knows that a stranger would know this about her—just from looking at how she has organized her life: becoming a journalist, a food writer, straight out of college, living in eight cities in the eight years since. Spending time in well over thirty.

And while she really wants to open this restaurant—has dreamed of having a restaurant the entire time she has been writing about other people’s—they don’t go away all at once: money fears, fears of sitting still. She has thirty years of experience keeping those fears close to her. And now, in spite of herself, they are fighting to stay close, every time she tries to close her eyes.

So what does she do instead? She stares out the window. She plays her guitar. She reads Mediterranean cookbooks and waters the plants on the fire escape. She hums. She cleans. She imagines.

She thinks about Nate, lets the image of him in her mind wash over her, calm her. And though she has significant proof that her fiancé doesn’t share her proclivity for sleeplessness— or endless worrying—she never suspected that he was so far on the other end of the money spectrum from her until now, when she comes across a pile of envelopes marked CHAMP NATHANIEL HUNTINGTON, in the middle of tonight’s extensive, very unsatisfying cleaning spree.

Gross. It’s gross to talk about money. But try to imagine. Maggie is sitting cross-legged in a white tank top and her Hello Kitty underwear in the middle of the living room floor surrounded by every paper and newspaper and old file and receipt and tax return that she could get her hands on. She is throwing it out, all of it out, and listening to Neil Young’s Harvest on the reco

rd player and feeling like she is getting somewhere with her life. She is learning this is another side effect of her newfound insomnia: you often feel like you are getting somewhere with your life, until you rub your eyes, force yourself to focus, and realize you aren’t at all far from where you started.

Maggie takes a deep stretch and reaches two feet in front of her, and there they are: a pile of envelopes with the CITIGROUP SMITH BARNEY logo on the front addressed to Champ Nathaniel Huntington. She removes the rubber band holding them together, and gets ready to open the first envelope. It doesn’t occur to her to do otherwise. She isn’t looking for information. She is looking for the opposite of information. She wants to find out that the Citigroup stuff is junk mail, and add the envelopes to her third filled garbage bag of recycling. And then she wants to take those bags and toss them into the alley behind Pioneer Street, into the hippo-sized trash cans waiting there for the New York City Department of Sanitation to take away.

This is the goal—to have their apartment in something like working order before they leave for Nate’s parents’ place out in Montauk later today, before they leave for his parents’ for a reason she doesn’t even want to think about, one she has been trying to avoid thinking about.

Nate’s parents’ divorce party.

Over the last several weeks—since she found out that they were going home to see Nate’s family, since she found out why they were going—she’s been tripping up, referring to it in her own head as an anniversary party. How could she not? A divorce party? What does this even mean?

Back in North Carolina, the closest she came to a divorce party was Loretta Pitt throwing Henry Pitt’s things out of their third-floor bedroom window. Clothes and hats and dress shoes falling like snowflakes, like bricks. To music. Madonna, if Maggie’s remembering. The Immaculate Collection.

But according to the tasteful green and white invitation her future in-laws sent them—according to the half dozen books that Nate’s mom, Gwyn, sent along with it, named things like A Graceful Divorce—a divorce party is an important and necessary rite of passage, an important and necessary way to celebrate a peaceful end to a valued union. Her future in-laws just happen to be peacefully ending theirs on the very day Maggie is meeting them for the first time.

Fabulous.

The only good news is that knowing this is what she is headed to puts a new fire in her belly to get her own house in order. (Who is she kidding? Not wanting to come back to an apartment that is even messier than it was before she started cleaning it is putting a new fire in her belly.) But just as she is tearing open the first Champ Nathaniel Huntington envelope, she turns to see Nate standing in the living room doorway.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

He is wearing a pair of boxer shorts, no T-shirt. Dark hair standing on top of his head. Green eyes shining at her. Yawning. It is only 8 A.M., and Nate was downstairs breaking apart walls with the contractor—Johnson the Contractor, as they call him, as Johnson calls himself—until well after 5 A.M.

“What am I doing?” she asks. “What are you doing? Why are you up already?”

He shrugs, starting to stretch. “I can’t sleep, I guess,” he says.

Can’t sleep? Nate can never not sleep. But here he is: walking barefoot across the floor, like proof that she is wrong, until he is standing directly above her. She follows his gaze as he checks out her endless piles of papers and newspapers, wrapped glasses and packs of wire hangers. She points to the open Fantastic bottle by her feet. She hadn’t used it yet, but it is there.

“What?” she says. “I’m cleaning.”

“I can tell,” he says. He smiles his smile, the one that goes all the way to each ear, opening up his whole face, making him look younger and older at once. The first time she saw it, he was across the table from her at a farmer’s market in San Francisco. They were both searching through a pile of heirloom tomatoes. Dozens of tomatoes. He picked up a large yellow one with thin black ridges, smiled, and tossed it across the table to her. Somehow, she managed to catch it. That’s the best one there is, he said.

And what were you going to say if I’ d dropped it? she asked.

He looked down at the table, looked at all the tomatoes left. I had about forty-nine more chances, he said, for things to go my way.

“Maggie,” he says, now gingerly pushing her piles out of the way, as if they were truly piles, and sitting down across from her, so that their knees are touching, so that his hands are holding her bare thighs.

“What?”

“Please tell me you haven’t been doing this all night,” he says.

“Why? Someone has to.”