The Splinter

New Year’s Eve found me flat on my belly under a bed, groping. I was trying to reach my book light. As I thrust my hand in the dark, I struck wood and felt a stab to my index finger. I yanked back my hand and cursed, but quietly—my two young daughters slept on the bed above. In the bathroom, I flipped on the light. The splinter was millimeters long, maybe, but it stung. Of course the new year would enter this way, this night of ritual and reflection and sometimes kissing. I was at my mother’s condo with the children, taking the weekend away from my husband, who was drunk, and had been drunk for what felt like centuries. Everyone here was asleep but me. And now, not a kiss, but a splinter.

I had fled to my mother’s many times over the years, on each occasion threatening to leave Will for good. “You’re an addict,” I said. Between us, there has never been any other problem. I said it knowing that nothing is ever that simple.

Under the bathroom light, I could see no clear point of entry. The splinter was fully submerged. I considered leaving it. Would there be any harm in that? What about tetanus? How long would it sting? I couldn’t tolerate obstacles to sleep because recently I’d been having nice dreams from which I awoke with the sense of having been deeply in love or being deeply loved. Was it the same? And by whom? I couldn’t say. When sleep receded, I tried burrowing back into unconsciousness but couldn’t get the dream back. When I say love, what I mean is the feeling of being understood, perfectly.

Above my mother’s bathroom sink hung a broad mirror. A mirrored medicine cabinet hung to the left, one panel at a right angle to the other, so when I looked left, I saw myself in profile as an onlooker. Here was a frowning, tallish, broad-shouldered brunette in loose pajamas. I hoped I was not really this pale, that it was only the bathroom light turning me spectral. I seemed rigid, stoic and bony. Were my cheeks slackening? Did this constitute a jowl? I was 40. Nearly 41. Women on the Internet kept talking about collagen. Was I supposed be eating a supplement? A powder? People said I looked like my mother, who was beautiful, and at 73 not terribly jowly. But I couldn’t see any resemblance, except that we had in common some subtle hardness.

I looked angry, was what it was. Beneath that, disappointed. Could I unknit my brows? When I tried, they darted back together. It was being angry at Will all the time, being angry about the drinking and the lying about drinking. How could one not worry? Was he having beers at lunchtime at the cafeteria at work? The answer was, many days, yes. I knew he stopped at bars on his way home in the evening. Some months were better than others. He hadn’t spent the years in a stupor, exactly, but after all this time I felt I could recognize his drunk from the lurch of the minivan up the driveway, from the way he shut the door (gently, gently, had it even latched?) then certainly from the film over his blue eyes and the way his smile would tick up on one side like he was remembering a joke. I would see the signs and feel myself combust.

*

Several weeks before New Year’s, in a rare deviation, we’d argued about something other than his drinking. Will always drove his grandmother Helen to the Presbyterian church on Sunday mornings. He dropped her there and retrieved her after the sermon. But on a Sunday night, as we sat in front of the TV passing time before bed, Will told me he was thinking of taking the kids to church with Helen the following week.

“No,” I said, without thinking.

Will asked, “Why not?” though we both knew my official position on church. I looked at him with my chin lowered towards my chest, the way a person wearing glasses (which I did not) would look over the rims. I raised my eyebrows. “Because I don’t want to have to undo whatever BS they tell them in Sunday School.”

Will sighed and rubbed at his eyebrow—an anxious tic. “They just do art projects and stuff. They’re not going to shove anything down the kids’ throats. My mom took me to church when I was little, and I turned out great.” The last bit was meant to make me laugh and he smiled as he said it. I didn’t smile.

I was openly distrusting of dogma. My mother was raised Catholic; my father was Jewish. I had been raised by two people with no interest in church, maybe even an aversion, though they mostly didn’t elucidate except for an oblique quip from my mother that she didn’t want us to grow up fearing the devil. I grew up assuming faith was basically irrational, that it reflected gullibility, credulity of monsters and fantasy, certainly more Tolkien than Merton. The older I got, though, beneath the derision was a more complicated, nagging sense that there was something important, something the children ought to know or be taught about a potential God, but I didn’t want it mediated by the Presbyterians or anyone else. Not without my control.

Will said, “You’ve got Davi over at B’nai Israel. That’s a church.” He said it gently, not trying to catch me out. Like he wanted to understand.

And I said, “It’s a temple. And they don’t do anything weird. I’m there all the time.” My younger daughter attended a Jewish preschool. Not for religion, I told people, but because I liked the teaching model, and it was right around the corner. On Fridays, the temple hosted a morning Shabbat service for the children. Parents could attend or not, and when I was not working, I did. I told myself that parent participation was virtuous. The children sat cross-legged on the carpet, solemn before the altar. They were flanked by panels of blue stained glass, which stretched from floor to ceiling on the dais, so that they were bathed in blue light like underwater people. Together, a little girl and a little boy would unveil Challah with a flourish of white cloth. They drank grape juice from tiny gold goblets. One wore a tiara, the other a crown. Candles were lit, Hebrew prayers intoned, even by my child, and everyone shielded their eyes. I did too, which was helpful because I would cry and cry, and I preferred that my daughter and the teachers and other parents didn’t notice. I returned on Fridays, though I knew what would happen, how I would sob and narrowly avoid embarrassment. In the car on the way home, I thought there must be something happening, something or someone important knocking at my door. The force, if that described it, behind the crying, was nondenominational, the yearning inchoate. Week after week, I stifled undignified snuffling. I pocketed my snot-sodden sleeves.

*

I resolved to extract the splinter. It was the only way to stop the sting before bed. I retrieved a set of tweezers from the medicine cabinet and poked at my finger in hopes of creating an opening. It would be so satisfying to draw the thorn out in one piece. Prodding at it, I flayed open a flap of skin but succeeded only in chipping a grain-sized fragment and making the area angry. Blood beaded. I jabbed at the redness for a few moments, becoming nauseated in the poking and re-poking. It wasn’t the blood, but all the little stabs.

*

On a trip to Disneyland with just the four of us, me and Will and our two girls, he wore a Kansas City Chiefs jersey, number 15 embroidered on the sleeve, Mahomes on the back. The team was going to be playing a big game while we were at Disneyland. At some point, one of the girls asked Will where he’d even gotten that nice jersey, and he told her from his friend, Mike, which was a name none of us recognized. We three looked back at him blankly and he said, “He works at The Landings.” The girls’ expressions were still blank, so I said, “That’s the place near Daddy’s work where he goes for lunch.” The airport bar. We turned back toward the carousel and waited to choose our horses.

*

Will was deft with tweezers. He was the parent the children sought when they had splinters. For a drunk, he had very steady hands. If he were here, he could have easily extracted my splinter. But he was an hour away, in our home, likely snoring in a profound, alcohol-induced sleep. He was an extremely steady person in almost all ways, with the kids and the extended family, and had a reputation for evenness, for being unflappable in confrontations. He was a person who interceded on flights when passengers argued over seats or unruly, kicking children. He would take and soothe your crying baby. Indeed, he was the gentlest person I had ever met. Unlike me, he didn’t lose his temper. I was, I knew, extremely flappable.

But I knew him better than anyone, so I knew that there was no true calm for him. His was a steadiness to the point of being over-taut. I thought his private tension was likely what made him drink. He did it to soften up. The booze hadn’t yet interfered with his job, which meant he was “functional,” which is an important word for a drunk. Also, the children might still be too young to recognize the syrup smell when they come to kiss him. But when I recognized it, I was merciless. I hissed about him ruining our lives. I meant my life, the life which had become obsessed by knowledge of him, of trying to predict him or outsmart him. I watched him teeter around the house some late nights, and I’d get so angry that my teeth would start to hurt. We would be so happy, I told him, if he would just get sober. “Imagine our life,” I would say when hissing fizzled to weeping. “Tell me one thing you’ll do to try to stop, and you can keep us.”

*

We had married quickly, in a courthouse, in a closed side chamber with a judge and a witness. I was pregnant and skeptical of the institution, deriding it the way I derided most solemnity. I didn’t understand marriage, though it seemed like I ought to if I was going to go through with one. But we were pressed for time. I’d agreed to marry so I could be added to Will’s health insurance. We’d been together five years, and now we were going to have this child that I knew I wanted. I assumed we would both reform from the drunkenness that had brought us together and that had carried us forth, like a strong, boozy current. We would have to. It was the responsible thing to do.

I hardly remember the ceremony, if it can be called that, except that it was, incidentally, Valentine’s Day, and the court had been decorated with paper hearts, and there was a theme park-esque line of people trying to get married. It was overcast. But Will paid twenty extra dollars to have a clerk videotape our vows, which we read from a three-ring binder. So I found out, on video review, how adoringly he looked at me, how he kept trying to meet my eyes. I saw myself, my head cast down or glancing around the room. Not admitting any feelings, trying to wriggle my hands out of his and wriggle out of a moment that exacted faith, which I did not have, in us or in anything.

*

At my mom’s, I turned off the bathroom light and went to the living room, to the big sliding glass door. When I pulled it open, midnight entered. The mist was perforated by the pops and sizzles of fireworks. Some of it might have been gunshots. Will had an ear for the noise. He’d grown up near Wyandotte, Kansas where, he said, a gun was generally closer to hand than a firecracker, though both were probably close, and people shot rounds into the sky after football wins, on the Fourth of July, at New Years, or on Fridays. I thought I couldn’t relate because I was from a beach town. People here collected surfboards, not firearms. These kinds of cultural differences would make a marriage hard, too. They represented a pain point that I sometimes pressed into, the way you press a sore tooth. We were foreigners, he and I, and that could foment war. Maybe we were doomed because we were culturally estranged, and the drinking just made everything worse. Of course, it turns out the guns were always everywhere.

*

He had said, “Please, just let me take them to church.” He wasn’t smiling then. There was longing in his voice, though tempered. He was asking a favor, deferring to me. I rubbed my eyes. I considered trying, right then, to untangle the God-knot I’d formed. I even opened my mouth to explain. Will sat with arms folded, his body nestled deep in an easy chair, long legs extended before him, ankles crossed. He had a shaved head and wore rimless glasses on a prominent nose. He had a powerful jaw and thick, pinkish lips. His was a beautiful, un-aging face—a Michelangelo face. Why didn’t I want to kiss it? Then, before I could explain myself, a fantasy arrived: He would meet a woman at his grandmother’s Presbyterian church and have an affair. Would any of the prim women at church be open to adultery? Members of Helen’s congregation seemed uptight and old-fashioned, evidenced particularly by the fact that some of the couples attended in matching sweaters. Still, what if Will met and romanced some other woman? I wished this not because I would be off the hook for sex, but because it would inject desire into the relationship. Someone desiring my husband made him more desirable to me, by shifting a perspective, the same way two right-angled mirrors create an omniscient view. If someone saw him as new, free of all these sad years, I could want him too. Or at least see him differently. Plus, it would ease the guilt I felt about my dreams, the ones in which I was held and known by someone unnamable, though distinctly not my husband. Also, a still dark, un-shot root in me acknowledged that Will ought to be held. Go to church, I thought. Yes, maybe you should go to church. There might be something for you there. A woman or something even better than that. I closed my mouth and did not explain my questions to Will. I also didn’t offer the idea of an affair.

*

Last fall, we went to a wedding. I didn’t know the bride and groom. They were colleagues of Will’s from work. The couple had met on the job, and many of the wedding guests were also employees of the biotech startup. At dinner, Will and I were seated with other people I didn’t know, all from the company. They had a lively conversation about people, places, and events unknown to me. They talked about the old crew from The Stag and Lion, the bar they all went to after work and maybe also on lunch from work. Was so-and-so okay? Someone named Brian had earned his fifth DUI. Had people heard from him? The man seated next to Will reminisced about another wedding they had all attended, where Will had become so drunk he passed out against the door outside the wedding suite upstairs. The groom had emerged in the middle of the night to find him there, curled in a tidy ball. I sat and listened to these strangers tell me about my husband. I saw Will turn pink around the neck like the stories chafed. He got after his eyebrow, rubbing it, brushing the little hairs back and forth. He shot me little glances, to see how I reacted to it all, to learning about his other life with these strangers, these people from work and the bar and their hundreds of afternoons, accreted in dimness together, enough afternoons maybe to stretch into a second life. They spoke to each other with unexpected tenderness, I thought, for drinking pals.

*

I took the tweezers to my mother’s couch, where I sat under a lamp, trying to get a clear look at my little wound. It didn’t really hurt now, but its presence nagged. It looked like it had always been under my skin, a blurred object, out of reach, not bleeding, just there. You’re a dumb metaphor, I thought. Very on-the-nose. I laid my head back against the couch and thought how it was next year already, but nothing felt new or fresh. I’d left the sliding door cracked, and mist drifted in carrying more fireworks and maybe gunshots. I was so tired. I shut my eyes and thought I smelled brine, though the sea was miles off. I thought I could hear it pitch and roll, the growl of water curling and crashing. Lulled by this, I imagined a swim. I saw my own skin slipping off, the wrinkles and splinters and scars, sliding maybe like a selkie’s, revealing a body of bright, new sensitive flesh.

*

As infants, the girls slept between Will and me in the bed. One night after my first daughter was born, I awoke and saw a spider traversing the comforter toward us. I brought my fist down like a hammer and flattened it into a brown paste, but the spider confirmed what I suspected: I could not afford to sleep. So I didn’t, really, for several years. Motherhood brought with it an astonishing array of fears for the safety of the small, smooth babies. No one told me that it took more than a year after birth for their skulls to fully fuse and how I might watch, in the triangular fontanelle atop their heads, their quick pulse, the very beat of their hearts. I watched the babies tick tick tick away while I breastfed. In this way, the most obviously holy thing that had ever happened to me was subverted by terror.

Devotion to the babies occupied me completely until it didn’t. Eventually, they did not look or act fragile. Their bones got long, and they ran and jumped and played and generally did not stop to address little wounds, and this was an amazement, too. What I began to fear then was my own death and abandoning them with their father who sometimes did not come home for a couple days in a row. On those occasions, I would put both girls in the car and drive around to the houses of his drinking buddies to find where he’d crashed. I would rap on the doors of these houses, and some half-drunk man would stumble up and say whether Will was there or not. The point—I think the point—was to embarrass my husband into sobriety so that in case I died early, the children would be safe.

*

I returned often to the question of which came first: the marriage or my sadness. I thought of the wild person I had been before, how dumb I was to mortality (had it been better?). I had done a lot of drinking myself, for years, stumbling from bar to bar on Highway 101, finding after-parties and the parties after that, ostensibly looking for sex or at least proximity. Sometimes, my friends and I would wind up at the dark beach where we’d get naked and run into the breakers, our bodies flimsy, tempting the undertow and that deafening black maw. I had the sense, growing up by the ocean, that if you can see the sea, you can see everything. Getting in the water meant approaching the sublime. But on those tipsy nights, what actually happened was that I emerged salty, rattling with cold. We drunks never had any towels. In the mornings after, I woke disoriented, dry and hollow as a sand dollar and sick enough to want to die. But by evening, I’d re-muster energy to make myself game and pretty. I’d find my friends and go again to the bars. Booze was a wave I rode giddy and hopeful. The thing was, those nights after the hundreds (thousands?) of drinks—Cape Codders and Screwdrivers, tequilas and Bourbons and Jägermeister shots nasty as cod liver oil—I slept with hardly anyone. I made myself sick, continuously, for years, trying to make contact. With what? And then there was Will, and there was still booze, but I stopped looking for other men. I thought I had applied drinking to its essential end, in successfully finding a mate—and a kind one. To gain proximity.

I quit drinking when the kids were toddlers. It had never been the booze I loved, just the hope. But in some ways, as my babies became kids, I tried on old concerns. I exercised a lot. I bought tight pants. I traveled without my family. On a trip to New York to see my sister, I bought a purple eyeliner. The makeup was bright, metallic violet. I privately acknowledged a desire to make myself a beacon. For a new man, maybe. I could be worthy of a fresh life. But on the plane home from New York, my eyes limned, exotic, I thought only of crashing and burning to anonymous ashes. I left my seat to cry in the tiny metal bathroom. When we landed, I staggered up the jet bridge, exhausted, purple eyes so smudged I looked like I’d been brawling.

*

New Year’s Eve. Now New Year’s Day. Will lay alone in our home, deep in slumber. In my mind, I saw him there. He would be on the couch, where he slept most nights. The TV would be bright but muted, the reflection playing in his glasses. It was a short couch, a love seat, and he’d be curled on his side, hands folded prayer-wise under his head, his mouth parted. His feet would be like two white fish, stacked. I imagined him snoring faintly, and I was, for the first time in a long time, overcome by tenderness. For his body unprotected, for how he suffered and drank to be soothed. I imagined him outside the context of our life, outside of my exhaustion and worry, and I loved him. I loved him sorely.

Why had he wanted to take the kids to church, I wondered then. When we’d had the argument, I assumed it was to make his Grandma happy. But now I reconsidered. Maybe he needed something there, for himself, something that he didn’t know how to say. Maybe it was to be known, perfectly, as one might be known by God. Once, when I asked him whether he remembered his dreams, Will reported that he did not dream at all. “Everyone dreams,” I said. “Yeah,” he said, “well, I don’t remember any of it.” I thought, but did not say, that I knew he did dream, because we all do. We can’t stop.

*

I knew enough about myself to know that tomorrow I would go home with the kids. For days, I would avoid eye contact with Will. I would not mention the New Year or the fight. On Monday, I would go to work, and he would go to work, and the children would go to school. Intermittently, I would think about God and about how time was tick-tick-ticking, and maybe I would never know what to do about Him. As the end of the day approached, my body would become taut, waiting for the sound of Will’s car, waiting to know whether he had stopped after work and for how long.

*

I closed my mother’s sliding door, and when it sealed, it muted the sound of those whistling, unexploded bombs. Under the lamp again, I examined my fingertip. The cut no longer bled. I went back to the dark room, now filled with the sweet sleeping smell of my daughters. I inserted my body between the two of them and lay straight on my back, arms tight by my sides like we were all slats in the bottom of a boat. I listened to their breath like uneven, gushing waves. I breathed together with them and heard a whole ocean. At intervals, with my thumb, I pressed the splinter in my finger, feeling the fading pain again and again until I could get to sleep.

*

I often said to Will that I feared the phone call where someone told me they’d found my husband, Dead in a Ditch. Why did I say Dead in a Ditch? I don’t know. Likely for the allusion; I resort often to literary stunts to address real problems. Will would shake his head and smirk at my concern. But there was that one time I did get a midnight call, and feeling a kind of cold permeate the house, knew something was bad before I answered. When I said hello, a man’s voice said he’d found someone wandering by the road, that the lost man still had his wallet and phone and mine was the last number dialed. I said I was the lost man’s wife. The man told me where to find him. When I pulled up, I found Will, disoriented but affable. Shirtless. Glasses awry. Not remotely dead, but rosy-cheeked, warm and vital. He wasn’t in a ditch, but more of a gutter, the place where the sidewalk opens to send runoff into the sea. Anyway, I had coaxed his loose body into the car. I had taken him home.