Bridget Asher - The Pretend Wife

T HAT SUMMER WHEN I first became Elliot Hulls pretend wife, I understood only vaguely that complicated things often prefer to masquerade as simple things at first. This is why theyre so hard to avoid, or at least brace for. I should have known thisit was built into my childhood. But I didnt see the complications of Elliot Hull coming, perhaps because I didnt want to. So I didnt avoid them or even brace for them, and as a result, I eventually found myself in winter watching two grown menmy pretend husband and my real husbandwrestle on a front lawn amid a spray of golf clubs in the snowsuch a blur of motion in the dim porch light that I couldnt distinguish one man from the other. This would become one of the most vaudevillian and poignant moments of my life, when things took the sharpest turn in a long and twisted line of smaller, seemingly simple turns.

Here is the simple beginning: I was standing in line in a crowded ice-cream shopthe whir of a blender, the fogged glass counter, the humidity pouring in from the door with its jangling bell. It was late summer, one of the last hot days of the season. The air-conditioning was rolling down from overhead and Id paused under one of the cool currents, causing a small hiccup in the line. Peter was off talking to someone from work: Gary, a fellow anesthesiologista man in a pink-striped polo shirt, surrounded by his squat children holding ice-cream cones melting into softened napkins. The kids were small enough not to care that they were eating bits of their napkins along with the ice cream. And Gary was too distracted to notice. He was clapping Peter on the back and laughing loudly, which is what people do to Peter. Ive never understood why, exactly, except that people genuinely like him. Hes disarming, affable. Theres something about him, the air of someone whos in the clubwhat club, I dont know, but he seemed to be the laid-back president of this club, and when you were talking with him, you were in the club too. But my mind was on the kids in that moment I felt sorry for them, and I decided that one day Id be the kind of mother not to let her children eat bits of soggy napkin. I dont remember what kind of mother mine wasdistracted or hovering or, most likely, both? She died when I was five years old. In some pictures, shes doting on mecutting a birthday cake outside, her hair flipping up in the breeze. But in group photos, shes always the one looking off to the side, down in her own lap, or to some distant point beyond the photographerlike an avid bird-watcher. And my father was not a reliable source of information. It pained him, so he rarely talked about her.

I was watching the scene intentlyPeter specifically now, because instead of becoming more comfortable with having a husband, after three years I was becoming more surprised by it. Or maybe I was more surprised not that I was his wife but that I was anybodys wife, really. The word wife was so wifey that it made me squeamishit made me think of aprons and meat loaf and household cleansers. Youd think the word would have evolved for me by that pointor perhaps it had evolved for most people into cell phones and aftercare and therapy, but I was the one who was stucklike some gilled species unable to breathe up on the mudflats.

Although Peter and I had been together for a total of five years, I felt like I didnt know him at all sometimes. Like at that very moment, as he was being back-clapped and jostled by the guy in the pink-striped polo shirt, I felt as if Id spotted some rare species called husband in its natural habitat. I was wondering what its habits wereeating, chirping, wingspan, mating, life expectancy. Its difficult to explain, but more and more often Id begun to rear back like this, to witness my life as a National Geographic reporter, someone with a British accent who found my life not so much exciting as curious.

The ice-cream shop was packed, and the two high school girls on staff were stressed, their faces damp and pinched, bangs sticking to their foreheads, their matching eyeliner gone smeary. Id finally made my way to the curved counter and placed my order. Soon enough I was holding a cone of pistachio for Peter and waiting for a cup of vanilla frozen yogurt for myself.