by Melanie Figg
In April 2020, with lockdown already drawing its huge cape over our house, I saw an article about a game to make COVID fun, so I made blank Quarantine Bingo cards for my family. My two stepsons could not have cared less; they filled out their sheets with nineteen tasks and never looked at them again. But my husband and I played the game, halfheartedly like we played at being married after ten hard years of growing disconnection and resentments—and now a global lockdown with two teenagers.
In 2027, GRACE & GRAVITY will be edited and published by the Washington Writers’ Publishing House. Submissions for Volume 12: Grace in Justice are open through November 15th.
Don’t all kids live in a kind of lockdown inside their parents’ marriage? I was raised by my father’s silent treatments, conditioned by my mother’s Midwest workhorse habits and her dogged begging for my father’s attention. I’d already survived this version of marriage once; I thought I could do it again—make it to the college years when my husband would go on date nights again, talk to me like he used to. So I eagerly played the game with my husband. One of his bingo squares was “learn a song on the piano.” He’s resourceful with the Internet and soon had an app and tablature, and an easy song to learn and sing along to.
My husband’s singing voice is a kind of falsetto that skims the surface of notes and lets him never reach back into his throat or deeper into his lungs for a fuller tone or deeper meaning.
A few years earlier, he’d begun to sing karaoke during his business travel. He’d even had some signature songs that people had begun to expect from him at bars close to the annual conferences—cultivating an audience for his watery voice. “Born to Run” and then “Easy Like Sunday Morning” became his signature songs for his colleagues. I learned about all of this overhearing him as he Zoomed for work. He had stopped talking to me about work altogether (he told me I hadn’t been supportive of him, but refused to give a specific example that we could talk about and resolve), so there were very few things for us to talk about now except CDC self-quarantine guidelines and the ineffectiveness of cotton masks. Sheltering at home was pretty tough on us.
Our piano was down in the unfinished basement. While practicing, his voice would get louder on the chorus as he became more confident with the keys. Say something, I’m giving up on you, he called out from below. Say something, I’m giving up on you as I worked on the computer, I’m giving up on you as I sanitized surfaces, I’m giving up on you as I sat with the cat on my lap and worried about masks, dying alone in the hospital, saying goodbye to people on an iPad.
Weeks went by until I worked up the nerve to mention it to him. The past few years we’d stopped our predictable fights altogether, opting to go through the motions of a busy family. The arguments were so brutal for me: I’d be flooded in the first round and then too confused and exhausted to follow his twisting logic only to slam into a final wall of a declaration that felt untrue but left no place for purchase. So, I’d rehearsed what I wanted to say in my head over and over, determined to have the conversation go right. I tried to keep my voice casual and playful: “You know, I can’t help but hear a message for me in that song that you’re always singing…” when he returned from the basement. “It’s just a song,” he snapped. He didn’t look at me as he pushed open his laptop. Just a song, out of millions of songs. Since when was he a Christina Aguilera fan?
He didn’t stop.
Was this serenade the only way he could communicate with me, or with himself? Was he waiting for me to do something while he fumbled in the basement, convincing himself to be the desperate suitor, the wounded boy? Was that a generous perspective from me, or a denial? I ricocheted between those two poles, spinning myself tighter into a tangle of self-blame and confusion, digging deep into stuck.
The song had a few introspective lines that he skipped or mumbled, blurring the words into a high-pitched whisper. Were those lines too hard for him to voice or could he simply not play the piano part? Maybe he played the song like how my stepson practiced: replaying the parts he was good at and leaving the harder sections to labor over with his teacher.
Two years later, vaccinated and seemingly safe, we’d had another fight about something. I’d been able to speak up this time, call for a timeout until I felt less vulnerable and could think clearly and reply. But two days after that, he declared the marriage dead. I moved into the guest room and a few weeks later he finally spoke to me about his feelings, offering his insights into his part of the dissolve. “I just wanted to make you happy…” and I looked up expectantly, “…but you don’t want to be happy.”
It’s another year later and I’m ready to reply now: go ahead and pretend I don’t want to be happy—I’m giving up thinking it was all my fault. And I’m sorry that I didn’t know how to push through my fear, it was over my head. I know nothing at all about forgiving myself but I really want to learn and I’ll be the one to sing the tough notes and move on. I’ll be the one to see how hard I tried. I willstumble and fall but anywhere is better than that mean house and anywhere is better than being a ghost of myself. I’m still learning to love myself when I think of how much I let him bully me and I am just starting to crawl toward bright years ahead and say keep going and say be patient and say there’s beauty and say goodbye.
Melanie Figg is the author of the award-winning poetry collection Trace, named one of the seven Best Indie Poetry Books of the year by Kirkus Reviews. She’s won many grants and awards for her writing, including a fellowship with the National Endowment for the Arts. Her poems and essays have appeared in dozens of journals including Hippocampus, The Rumpus, Colorado Review, Nimrod, and others. A certified professional coach with an MFA, Melanie works remotely with writers. www.melaniefigg.net
