Marriage - Jackie Davis-Martin

Adam and Eve: once out of the garden, did they quibble over who’d pulled the weeds last or trekked to the stream to lug water in gourds or disagree on when it’d be fitting to insist Cain and Abel wear fig leaves too? Or did they just lapse into a silence, a faultfinding punishing day-to-day thing like a cloud, If it weren’t for you, we’d be far better off; it was your fault too.

Jo and Eddie: did they have nicknames, a playful life where they’d sit on stone benches outside the large castle watching the children making smaller ones in sand, their children, the little girls, the boys who must have laughed and run around and chased each other. Did he, Oedipus, think for a moment, she’s lovely even with the laugh wrinkles around her eyes? Did she, Jocasta, doubt his fidelity with the servant girls his age tempting him? Or was the union one that startled their neighbors to say it won’t last, how could it? until rumors were silenced with the absoluteness of the truth.

And before the King came to town, before he honored the Macbeths with his presence, all those years before—or maybe not that many, maybe they were really a young couple named Ethan and Emily—they must have shared secrets (she knew his) whispering in a bed hung with tapestries; he must have consoled her, the hint of lost children, they wanted so desperately to make each other happy in some way, to stave up what couldn’t be, unless it could. Murder must have seemed easy—a gradual accustoming oneself from one pain to another, numbed with it, loving in spite of it, until there they were, both of them trying, incapable, murdering anyway, murdering what they’d had left.

And Percy and Mary flitting about Italy with toddlers in tow: did she wake next to him, his fine features, his fantastic mind, and smooth his fine hair, his thin limbs, thinking how lucky she was? Or was she nagged by a guilt: what of her, what of Harriet, your other kids, do you think of them? Is poetry worth it? They all hate us. And he later, shuffling through papers, slumped over a desk, said yes, yes, pick up Dad’s money, pay the rent, take the kids out of here, until she, in love with his beautiful genius, heard of Harriet’s suicide and, aware of the intimacy and insanity of their lives, created her own monster. Maybe Frankenstein was a metaphor for the marriage they had wrought?

No one knows, really, what goes on in a marriage. The beautiful young woman, so faultless in her complexion, her tumbling hair, her sweetness that it comes as a shock when she laments to you after a Meeting, Why can’t I live like my friends, in peace, planning babies? Why do I have to be here, dealing with his addiction? And tears fill in her blue eyes, vibrant without makeup, nothing to detect from the outside. Or the old friends—they’re all old now—the couple who always hold hands when they’re sitting next to each other—an affectation? or a genuine reassurance, one to the other, we’ve made it to this point?

Because after the silences induced by arguments over who wrote the directions or made the arrangements and what went wrong or who heard what or didn’t hear what was certainly essential, there are the other times, the public times of dressing up and presenting oneself, or both selves to the world, a marriage: this is ours, right now.