My ex-husband’s new wife is taller than me, which doesn’t sound particularly newsworthy, I know, but he once informed me he wouldn’t want anyone taller than me because I was “big enough.” In the beginning, he told me I was the perfect height for him, but that was long before every word carried so much weight and long before Genevieve.
Even before I met her, she struck me as the kind of woman who was comfortable taking up space. My name is Jen and when I heard about her existence for the first time (when we were still married) I asked if her nickname was Gen, too. “She doesn’t shorten her name,” he said. Of course she doesn’t, I thought.
When she and my ex pulled up to the graveside service today, all I could see was her giant white hat in the passenger seat, like she might be heading off to a Kentucky Derby party after the funeral. When I whispered this to Liz later during the service, she peered at me over her glasses and said earnestly, “Come on, Jen, that hat is much too chic for a Derby party.”
She was right, of course, but I just wanted a laugh. Admittedly, maybe I should be more serious at my ex-mother-in-law’s funeral. “You don’t have to play everything for a laugh,” my ex told me more than once, near the end. “Not everything is funny.” Which was true, then.
Like the day he came home to pick up some of his clothes and I clutched his arm and pulled him toward the bed, practically begging him to stay. I felt like I was too light, vanishing like a balloon accidentally released and floating silently out of reach. I needed his heaviness to hold me in place. “Give me all your weight,” I used to request, back when we would stay in bed all morning, pretending our bedroom was the entire universe, our bodies the planets circling each other, magnetic forces we couldn’t explain. “Are you sure? Can you breathe?” he would ask, his body on top of me like a blanket.
“Yes.” I would always say yes, barely breathing.
He jerked his arm away this time, telling me Genevieve was waiting in the car. When he left, I looked out the window and there she was, like a giraffe in a convertible, staring down at her phone.
At the cemetery, the priest was chanting and swinging incense over the casket. Suddenly I was floating again, but this time I let the wind take me — let it lift me out of my seat and pull me past the priest, past a solemn sea of bowed heads. No, not everything is funny, I thought as I landed beside the casket, directly in front of Genevieve and her enormous hat.
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