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FRAGILITY
Mom Hammered Dad’s Wedding Ring into Smithereens
What Secondhand Catastrophe Sounds Like
It was the kind of thing you stowed in your mind’s basement.
Mom and Dad were separating. They knew it; I feared it; my nine-year-old brother, Mack, did not seem to register it. But a rude awakening was coming.
It came in the middle of the night, in fact.
I was 12 when we moved to Michigan to outrun my mother’s affair. A suave, male voice had called our house too many times in Virginia. I’d burst my dad’s bubble of denial by accident, asking about that strange man’s “no message” phone calls one night at the dinner table.
It was silent for the rest of that evening.
After the move, my parents slept in separate beds for awhile — Dad, on a futon in their bedroom; Mom, in their queen-sized bed with the Wamsutta Dumask comforter she’d fallen in love with so long before at the outlet store. Their bouts of yelling in that Michigan bedroom got louder. Mom’s voice became demanding and Dad’s was all but gone.
On and on it went, until their marriage imploded in sounds. One December night, I woke up from a dead sleep to a deafening slam. In my dream, a brass doorknob had been hitting the paved ground repeatedly — from a fall of 10 meters high. But now, as I rubbed my eyes and followed the mysterious noise downstairs to the basement, no doorknobs were out of place.
There, at the workbench beneath the floor of my bedroom, was a hammer and anvil. And in the center of it all lay a sad pile of gold, a coin with a hole in its center.
For years, my parents’ divorce smashed my whole heart. Mom admitted to taking and destroying Dad’s wedding band after he’d refused to come back to their bed. Anger was easier than sadness — a hard fact we all tend to prefer to vulnerability.
But, by that stage, it was late. Her transparency only made my rage more malleable. I yelled at them that they both were assholes! for hurting each other. I said it at any and every teenaged chance and any time I was so much as mildly disappointed. In the loss of both parents to this drama, I was crushed — and it was only fair that they be crushed, too.
