The Affair

Her name is Isabel. I’ve known about her my entire life; she is the neighbor who slept with my father when I was a baby. Isabel was also married, they were good friends of my parents. There still are so many photos of the whole crowd, at picnics by the river, at cocktail parties, neighborhood gatherings.

I felt responsible for this affair my entire childhood. I must have cried a lot. I was in the way. I made my mother unappealing….

I am 55 now. I know I am not responsible for my father’s affair with the neighbor, carried out… 55 years ago, now. But still. I know her name, I think of her, I wonder about her.

The mark she and my father left on our family has been indelible.

I’ve always known the story:

Mom finds out Dad is sleeping with the neighbor (Who told? How did Mom find out?), confronts my father, tells him to stop it now or she is “outta’ here.” Mom then marches over to Isabel’s house, confronts her — and her husband, I guess — tells her to leave our family alone.

My siblings, then ages 7, 10, 15, and me, the 6 month-old, are all sat down and told the whole story (this part I heard from my aunt — she knew — I’ve never quite understood this aspect of my parents’ openness towards the children, but….it’s just part of our history, now).

The specter of Isabel has followed me ever since, it seems, although Isabel is still alive, in her 90s now, living in another state than the one we lived in during their affair.

Isabel. What can happen to a marriage when you’re not looking, when you’re busy, when someone else wants to feel safe, or alive with excitement, or just doesn’t care your family exists. Isabel. When someone decides to cross the boundary of marriage for their own interest.

Isabel.

I know she was pretty. There are still photos around. I know nothing else about her. What she was like, what made her laugh, what intrigued her…. other than my father. That’s the legacy she left in our family, that’s all that has lasted of her in our story: she’s the woman who took Dad’s attention while I, in my infancy, was taking my mother’s time.

In our family, Isabel has been reduced all the way down to this: she is The Affair.

Some vestigial child’s part of my mind still thinks I must have been part of the problem, even though I really do know better than to blame myself, by now. The useless thoughts still arrive, albeit rarely at this point. Only when reading assertions that someone else’s affairs are ‘okay’ (and I’ve had my own moments as an adult, I get it), or, when hearing that someone finds benefit in crossing another marriage’s line: reassuring themselves, justifying to themselves, it’s not their problem, the marriage, The Other One. What they don’t know can’t hurt, right?

So many do know, though. They find out. The kids learn. Respect disappears. Was self-respect ever there?

I still sometimes wonder if Isabel is the reason my first memory is of crying endlessly in my crib and no one ever comes (Was Mom crying, too? Was I just a mistake? One big mistake?), so I give up crying and watch the sunlight play across the wall. The shadow of the window frame moves from one corner of the wall to the next before someone comes in to take me out of my crib.

These memories have lingered, have been shoved away, yet they wander back.

When Mom was in hospice dying, forty-plus years after the affair between Isabel and my father ended, I joked with my aunt, the irreverent one, that Mom would die in ten days, on Isabel’s birthday, and finally get her revenge. That Isabel took up space in any of my thoughts while my mother was dying I still find rather sad.

It became my one prophetic moment: ten days later, on Isabel’s birthday, my mother died.

Today when I went to look (why?), to see if Isabel was still alive (her husband died a couple years ago, I see), I noticed for the first time a listing for her relative, must be her daughter, a woman two years older than I. Isabel’s daughter. She would have been two, then, during the affair. A toddler.

Does she know?

Was she another troublesome child who just got in the way?

Has my father’s existence followed her around, like a ghost that won’t leave, all of her life? Does she have a full and complicated pile of baggage dragging along behind her that is encapsulated in just one name, too?

For some reason that creates a tiny smile on my face, I feel less alone — less ashamed — knowing about Isabel’s daughter, only a couple years older than me.

I begin imagining one day I might find an article written with just one name as title, an article about a long ago affair that must have been rather thoughtless, had to have been rather selfish, one that left its mark for a lifetime on another little girl. A story titled: Woody.

This piece also published at OurSalon, where an interesting comment thread developed. I think when a comment thread works, it draws out different and varying aspects to a story, giving depth, nuance, camaraderie, even, for people who stay on a site over time, who keep reading and writing.

~ Cheers! to anyone reading, here, there, anywhere ~