F*ck Marriage Read online

  Copyright © 2019 by tarryn fisher

  All rights reserved.

  Visit my website at www.tarrynfisher.com

  Cover Designer: Maripili Menchaca

  Editor: Lori Sabin

  Proofread by Erica Russikoff

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN-13: 978-1097105397

  For Sarah Hoffman

  Contents

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Part II

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Part III

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Acknowledgments

  Tarryn Fisher

  Part I

  Chapter One

  Billie

  The salon is warm, all west-facing windows. I stare out at the parking lot wishing for a fan, a breeze—anything to cool the heat on my skin. I watch as a mother chases her toddler across the cracked asphalt; he falls. Rolling onto his back, he screams, arms and legs flailing like a turned over beetle. When she picks him up, I see that her hair is stuck to her face in wet clumps. She’s at her wits’ end, either from the heat or the boy. I feel her. The entire state of Washington is an oven, and we are her bread.

  With mother and boy tucked safely in their car and on the way, there is nothing to distract me from my current discomfort. My mind drifts to nicotine, my tongue curling around the imaginary flavor. I want a cigarette so badly I’m jittery. The bell to the door jingles, and one of the stylists walks in carrying two tabletop fans under her arms. She purses her lips to blow her bangs off her forehead, but they stay put.

  “It’s all they had left,” she says to a different stylist.

  They confer about where to put the fans, and in the end, they drag a table to the center of the room and make a fuss of arranging them. If I lean to the left, I can catch some of the breeze they’re creating.

  “Can you sit up straight?” my stylist asks, tapping me on the shoulder. “I thought you wanted to cut it.” She stands over me, hands suspended, mid-action. They always seem so disappointed when you tell them you don’t want to hack your hair off.

  I can see the damp on her blouse just under her arms. She opens and closes her scissors for emphasis, drawing my eyes back to her face. I think of comparing her to Edward Scissorhands, but she’s freshly twenty-five and I doubt she’d know who he is.

  “Change of plans,” I say. “I’m going home next week.”

  The word home is a sour word in my mouth. Even as I say it, my tongue curls back in protest. Home to me is a city, not a house, or a husband, or a family. Maybe because I don’t really have those things anymore, or maybe because I’m not cut out to have those things.

  “No one there has ever seen me with long hair,” I explain, as if that’s a good enough reason.

  It’s not entirely the truth. There’s no one left to see me. My friends are gone. In my exodus from the city two years ago, I made the decision for them. For a while, they tried to stay in touch, but in my grief, I sent their efforts to voicemail. And just like that, they stopped trying. My ex was the one who stayed, so he inherited custody of our friends. It sounds silly to think that, but it’s true. When there’s a divorce, lines are drawn, sides taken.

  I reach up, running my fingers through the length of it. It’s past the middle of my back, hanging in sleek mermaid waves, thanks to Tina’s grooming. I like the idea of them seeing me in my new body, with my new hair: I am thinner, longer, wiser…more jaded. I tell myself that being jaded gives me an edge. If Woods met me now, there’d be no way he’d call me trusting like he did all those years ago.

  “Home, huh? I thought you grew up here in Port Townsend,” Tina says.

  She likes to make fun of my divided loyalty; though, if you put a gun to my head, I’d choose New York every time.

  “Do you have a cigarette?” I ask.

  “Nice try. You told me not to give you one no matter how much you beg.”

  “I just want to put it in my mouth.”

  “That’s what she said,” Tina jokes.

  She rummages around in her bag and pulls one out: Marlboro. Ew. I stick it between my lips and close my eyes in pleasure.

  “You’re pathetic,” she says when I hand it back to her.

  “I know.”

  “—but beautiful.”

  “In New York I’m Billie, and here I’m plain ol’ Wendy.”

  “Oh my dear,” she says, spinning my seat around to face the mirror. “You’re anything but plain.”

  I smile at my reflection. A lot has changed since I arrived home two years ago, my tail tucked between my legs. And Tina is right, partially right: I am no longer the plain girl I once was. Rejection is a fine motivator.

  “When do you leave?” She unclips the robe from my neck, and I unfold myself from her chair. The breeze from the fan finds me and I close my eyes in pleasure.

  “Tomorrow.” I turn to face her.

  “Will you see Woods?”

  Tina’s stylist chair doubled as a therapy chair my first year home. She probably knows more about my failed marriage than my own family.

  “That’s the plan,” I say.

  She frowns. “I hope you know what you’re doing, Wendy. Be careful, okay?”

  Careful? That’s what I will not be this time. Careful is what got me into this mess in the first place.

  “Sure,” I say, and Tina frowns. “Wish me luck?”

  “Luck? You don’t need luck for revenge. You just need balls.”

  Chapter Two

  The guest house. It’s seven hundred square feet with a wall of windows and an attic bedroom that faces a nature belt. Not a bad place to hide out when you’re shamefaced with a broken heart. Other than a bed and a cracked leather sofa, I don’t have a lot of furniture. The lack of space in New York taught me to be a minimalist. What I do have is exercise equipment. A treadmill, a rowing machine, weights, and a Pilates machine. It started with the treadmill a few months after I got back. I was in the middle of the second and third stages of grief: anger and bargaining. I looked at myself long and hard in the mirror (naked) and decided that my husband left me because I was fat. If I were thinner, fitter, more toned—I could surely lure him back. Prove my worth. I wasn’t fat. But you can’t deal with your big issues first, you ha
ve to gradually work your way up. If anything, I was curvy. Okay, maybe a little chubby. So, I bought a treadmill and a pair of running shoes and took out my anger on that human conveyor belt. As soon as I was sober enough to notice the results, I got addicted to exercising. Now, where there used to be layers of fat, there are layers of muscle. I’m not even sure I like being this ropey and hard, but when you lose control of your life, you seek to regain control in some other area, and so here I am. Oh hey! You left me, but I can probably beat you up now. Oh sure, you have a younger woman, but can you bounce a quarter off her ass?

  I sell my equipment on Craigslist, and by the time I’ve packed up everything I’ve accumulated in Washington over the last two years, it fills one measly suitcase. I stand over the zipped and ready-to-go luggage feeling largely pathetic. My father finds me there, hands on my hips.

  “This is it,” I say. “I’m thirty years old and this is the sum of my life.” I kick the side of it disparagingly.

  I say it more to myself than to my father. Any type of emotional proclamations make my parents uncomfortable. As a result, I was a largely silent kid. My father chuckles like I’ve just delivered the punchline of a joke and then hauls my suitcase to the car without a word. Once he’s gone, I give the place a final look over. I don’t know that I’ll miss it. It was a good place to rest…I enjoyed being naked without worrying someone could see me. I sigh deeply and head for the door.

  “Bye, little house. See you.”

  I lost my virginity to Carter Benini when I was sixteen years old. This was after he handed me a melted Snickers bar and told me in that too-cool-for-school voice of his that he loved me. The truth is Carter and I had only been dating for a month, but he was captain of the football team and the type of guy who said, “Hey girl, you so fine,” while biting his bottom lip. The biting of the lip thing had done me in; slimy attention was my favorite aphrodisiac. I was living in the moment, or at least I believed I was. Carter, unfortunately, had only lasted a moment before collapsing on top of me, and after we did the deed he pulled off the condom and proclaimed he was hungry, asking if he could have my Snickers. He took my virginity and he took my Snickers, and a week later he broke up with me. So cold. I found out I was part of a year-long commitment he had to de-virginize as many sophomore girls as he could. Talk about trust issues; I’ve always had them. I was devastated, of course. Teenagers can deliver lies but seldom have the stomach to take them. I took a whole year off from dating, dyed my hair black, and listened to my homegirls—Fiona, Meredith, Stevie, and Alanis—on repeat. I finally caved when Philip Von asked me to be his girlfriend my junior year. I told Philip that under no circumstances would I sleep with him before we’d been dating six months (the agreed amount of time my friends and I decided was appropriate to judge if a guy was a douche).

  “It’s cool,” he’d said. I was worth the wait.

  And he had me believing it until my best friend caught him at a Halloween party with a girl dressed as Vivian from Pretty Woman. It was a week shy of our six-month anniversary. Saved by the ho. It still hurt and I cried for two weeks. There was a string of relationships after that. I went through a brief slutty period in college when I slept with frat boys with R-letter names: Ryan, Ross, Rick, and Reid. And then during my senior year of college came Woods: sexy, unassuming, self-deprecating Woods. He always smelled like Juicy Fruit and he had a big head. It was impossible to find a hat to fit him. I loved holding his head between my hands, running my fingers through the thick brown curls. It was a solid head, you couldn’t miss it in a crowd, and it was mine. Real talk: I’m the girl who always believes the newest set of words. Brandon’s ... Philip’s ... Woods’…

  No matter how flimsy they are, if you dip them in some delicious lie, I’ll gobble them up.

  On my first date with Woods he told me that I was too trusting.

  “What makes you say that?” I’d had a visceral reaction, jerking my head back before sluggishly feeling the weight of insecurity.

  We’d closed down the restaurant where we had dinner. After mutually deciding we didn’t want the date to end, we walked twelve blocks searching for a place still open to get another drink. We found a dive on First called American Trash, and I took off my shoes as soon as we sat down at the bar. My hair at the time was blonde, short and shaggy, and he’d reached up to tug on a piece near my cheek while the sleepy-eyed bartender mixed our drinks.

  “Let me see your feet,” he’d said.

  Without question, I’d put my feet in his lap and he’d started rubbing them.

  “See. You barely know me.”

  “They’re just feet,” I’d pointed out.

  “If I’d asked for your wallet you would have handed me that too.”

  He was probably right. He talked about it like it was a novelty to find someone who wasn’t jaded and so I believed myself special. At least to him. To the guy with the soft chocolate curls and the easy smile. That should have set off alarm bells in my head—a guy who was looking for a girl to trust him probably wasn’t getting an A+ in the honesty department.

  Turns out Woods got a big, fat F. When he said he was going to the gym, he was really having dinner with the lifestyle editor of our blog, a girl I’d hired myself. The perfume on his shirt that smelled like candy: hers, even though he claimed it belonged to our sixty-year-old client. He came home one evening just a month after we celebrated our third wedding anniversary and told me he wasn’t happy and wanted a divorce. I laughed. Laughed, like he was pranking me. Life was pranking me, love was pranking me; Woods, he was completely fucking serious.

  Anyway, we’re divorced now. But for eight years, that man massaged my feet any time we were in a bar together. As it turns out, the most painful experience of my life was laying those eight years of a relationship into a grave I was forced to dig myself. The person doing the leaving hands you a shovel and you bury something you once lived to nurture.

  That’s the way it goes during the death of a marriage: the denial, the anger, the grieving, and then the inevitable purging of soul.

  Chapter Three

  New York bulges in front of me, splitting her city seams across the horizon. Excitement crackles in my belly as I watch her come into view. I’ve been ridiculed for my love of this city back home, but I don’t care. She’s testy, ambitious; everything about her pulses lightning fast. She’s easy on the eyes and hard on the nose. Warm wind blows through the open window and I crinkle my nose at the smell of exhaust fumes and piss. Weak, Billie. You leave for two years and now you’re wrinkling your nose like a tourist. I smile, leaning my head against the back of the seat. It feels so good to be back.

  I always feel most at home here because New York is me: my soul city. Neither of us knows how to sleep, for instance. And there is the fact that we make people from small towns feel uncomfortable.

  I peer out the window as the cab veers left then right, swerving at the last minute to take the exit. It’s the type of erratic cab driving that tourists bemoan for years after visiting. Oh my God, you wouldn’t believe how they drive in the city…

  In my expert opinion, you haven’t truly experienced New York until you’ve thought you were going to die during a cab ride. My hair, a tangled mess after the red-eye I took, hits me in the face as the wind from the open window zigzags through the car. My cabbie is a nice man named Frank who has three snake tattoos. He stops in front of a building on Fifth Avenue and hooks his arm across the back of the seat to look at me.

  “You gonna be okay? You’re the color of my Aunt Bee’s pea soup.”

  “Word,” I say. “You should see what my insides look like.”

  “That bad, huh?”

  I eye the cigarette propped behind his ear.

  “Can I smell your cigarette?”

  He plucks it from its resting spot and hands it to me without comment. Lifting it to my nose, I sniff.

  “Okay,” I say, handing it back. “Better.”

  When I step out, my entire body is tingling i
n anticipation. I flex my fingers and stare up at the building, while Frank retrieves my bag from the trunk. All of a sudden, I feel foolish for ever leaving New York. This is the place I love. Jules, my friend since college, has taken a job in Brazil for a year. She’s letting me stay in her apartment until I get back on my feet. That means I have exactly a year to figure things out; if I can’t reverse what I’ve done in a year, I’ll gladly skulk back to Washington. The apartment is on the third floor, and after I pay my fare, I haul my meager suitcase up the stairs. The keyring Jules mailed me bites into my sweating palm. I know this city, I love this city, and yet my hands are trembling as I turn the key and push open the door. Relief kicks in as soon as I step inside. It’s not the spacious one and a half bedrooms, or the hardwood floors, or even the impressive collection of thrifted furniture that I’m happy to see. It’s the fact that I made it back, that I came back after what happened. I didn’t let the hurt swallow me whole. Just thinking about the hurt makes me hurt, so I busy myself with looking around.

  Jules had a cleaning company come in; I smell wood polish and bleach. I walk around the apartment touching the spines of her books, the carved wooden wings that sit on the coffee table, like an invisible angel ready to take off. I can’t believe I’m here.