Gillies - A year and six seconds: a love story

For Peter, and our beloved children

Well turn on your light, you wont regret it,
Youve got to go for the good and get it.

GOOD LOVIN AS SUNG BY THE GRATEFUL DEAD

In the cosmos, there is no refuge from change.

CARL SAGAN

Contents

D id you know that it only takes six seconds to fall in love?

A friend told me theres a new study out that proves it. Thank goodness science has weighed in on love at first sight, because I have always loved that human faculty. I believe in it. Six-second love has happened to me. More than once. Im not talking about a fleeting thought about how someone is hot, and Im not talking about a crush; Im talking about knowing with certainty that you could spend your life with this person. In an instant, not only are you down the aisle, but you have had the babies, you have reached old age, and you are buried side by side under a tree for all eternity. In six seconds, you see it all. And you feel it; you feel the love that will make your whole life shift. Six-second love is real, but it doesnt always get you to happily ever after. With one of my loves, I got to the married part and through the babies part, then we divorced.

And right after you hear the words I dont want to be married to you anymore, there is another kind of time, a transition time. Everyone will handle this period differently, and it will vary in length from one person to the next, but it has a beginning, middle, and end. Im not saying that you will ever be over the breakup of your marriage. Any relationship that started with that six-second love stays with you forever, and that is as it should be. Like everything else in this life, it changes constantlyit subsides, flares, grows distant, comes close, gets smoothbut, make no mistake, it stays. Meanwhile, the reconstruction of your life happens within a distinct time, during which you pick up your chin, dust off your jeans, collect your belongings, look around at where you have landed. If you have children, you hold them close until they get their bearings. It is a natural time to make lists and organize yourself into being okay. It is also a time to look inside and find out if there is the possibility for even more change . This transformation can be painful, as it often begins when you are wrecked and tender, but it can be extraordinary, too. Even by taking the smallest steps forward, you grow and learnand to quote the genius Carl Sagan, Understanding is joyous. This is an important time, and for me, that time was a year.

Somewhere in the middle of that year, I fell in love again, in six seconds. Thats what happened. And a while after that, I found myself on a road to happiness.

Part
I

I thought for sure the boys would make him stay. They are the best things I ever had a hand in creating (if one can even take credit for that kind of thing), and if the two of them plus my most sincere and thought-through arguments for our life together didnt convince him that leaving me was a bad idea, I couldnt think of anything else that would. Truthfully, he probably would have taken the boys, but I couldnt bear that, and we both agreed it didnt make sense for me to stay where we lived, so, stunned and sad, I left behind our long-dreamed-for, recently renovated house, and our beloved, small college town in Oberlin, Ohio, taking our little ones home to the apartment where I grew up, to live with my parents in New York City.

Id never imagined ending up in the nutty situation I found myself in, carting toddlers, Wallace and James, with only one precious book and one lovey apiece, on an airplane, by myself and separated, to New York, in the middle of what should have been the jolly Christmas season, to live with my parents, wedding ringless (and in the place of the ring was an inexplicable, angry rash), exhausted and humiliated from countless conversations about what happened (unclear) and the other woman (also unclear), shaken from banging out custody plans with someone I still loved, and humbled by talking with my poor mother about where the diapers would go in the boys new room in Apartment 7A. The only thing I could think (except for images of Meryl Streep at the end of Heartburn or even Berger marching onto the plane in the final moments of Hair ) while standing in the taxi line at dreary LaGuardia Airport, one arm wrapped around a baby who desperately needed to be changed and the other holding the hand of an almost-four-year-old in an unbearably sweet but ill-fitting (because it was a hand-me-down, from my sister-in-law) loden coat, was: Crikey .

C rikey is my mothers word. I think it was my grandfathers word, too, but my mother always uses it in times of wow-this-is-a-pickle-and-I-dont-know-what-to-do-about-it . Anything from leaving the oven on to something much more serious, like a divorce, gets a crikey.

I was going home to the apartment where I grew up to find out what on earth the rest of our life was going to be besides a wild and deeply sad reality. My marriage, which I had treasured, was gone.

Oh, HELLO!... hello... , my mother called, then she softened as she got closer to me, her arms went up and then fell around my shoulders, kissing me on both sides of my face. She had a kitchen timer in one hand, as if she had just been setting it. Goodness... what a trip... Come in, my darlings.

Hi, guyz-ies! my dad bent down and cheerfully said to his grandsons. How was the plane ? He wrapped one arm around me and squeezed.

The apartment was done up for the holidays, tall boughs of white pine on the piano, the crche set up with kings, lambs, and the Holy Family, but everywhere there was also evidence that my parents had been rearranging their lives to prepare for an unknowable, intimidating chapter. A wrench had been tossed into my life, but I saw right then, across my mothers shoulders as she hugged me and I looked out from the front hall and into the living room, that my parents were getting a wrench as big as a city bus tossed into their lives, too. At the far end of the room, where there had once been a window bench and two French bergre upholstered chairs, with plenty of space for sitting quietly, there now were neatly piled puzzles, a low preschool-like table for Legos and blocksand alongside the table were the Legos and the blocks; also, a bin of 1970s Matchbox cars that had once belonged to my brother Andrew, and an ugly, plastic carpenter tools set in primary colors. The far end of my parents living room looked like the set of Romper Room.

My mother is the kind of person who anticipates the basic needs of travelers, especially of travelers who are in some kind of trauma. The first need very well might be for a hot bath, and not any old bath. In the corner where the rounded, old tub meets the bathroom wall, there will be a little glass bottle of Floris Florissa bath oil, like a potion from the Good Witch. You need only shake the tiniest drop under the tap to fill the room with a heady, woodsy, transforming fragrance. I always used to think queens would use that stuff. Any remnant sense of troubling airport travel or a too-cold day or a bad dream evaporates when that brew mixes in with the hot water around you.

A long soak will usually be followed by a good meal. This kind of thinking is instinctive for my mother. I bet you the moment she knew the date we would be arriving she had self-soothed by planning the menus for a first-night-home dinnerone menu for the grown-ups and one for the small children. In my family, the children, because of bedtimes, almost always eat first and in the kitchen. This might sound rigid and formal, and maybe it did come out of a children-must-be-seen-and-not-heard time in the past, but it is actually cozy. At least one adult is always there to sit and talk with the children, pour more milk, maybe give a gentle reminder of manners, and also stir or chop something the older generation will be having for dinner later. When I was little, suppertime in our small Upper West Side kitchen was warm and smelled of browning onions and Uncle Bens rice.