Story: A flight (Part 1 of 3)

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In their marriage the role of Soul was played by the wife, the role of Body by the husband. It’s like an experiment, we are going to be so free, the wife said. But had circumstances changed? Was this something new? Was it like when producers took some tired all-white musical and recast it with black actors, something different that was in fact the same?

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You got different answers depending on who you asked.

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Body had lots of different jobs, but mostly he taught ESL in the barrio, backbreaking work really, no health benefits, etc. Well the students didn’t have them either. In any case, Soul was the real breadwinner of the 2 what with her terrific management jobs and the constant travelling. She was proud of what she’d accomplished in that arena but only in that arena, otherwise a certain feeling of emptiness that one shared whenever one was with her. There had been a child, there had been cancer and a death that neither of the parents had really gotten over. They hadn’t gotten over each other either, how different they really were.

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This difference, this constant nagging difference. Well, it might be a healing sort of thing, a sort of symbiosis but it also might be an unbridgeable rift. Or it might seem to be, at most hours of the day, simultaneously both at once.

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In his sorrow, Emil drew even closer to his church. Alas Sarah had lost patience with its very demand for patience. I am absolutely through with trusting God, she said. The husband’s heart turned over when she said that. Of course he said nothing but merely let his grief double. And conversely his own patience with his own grief, his acceptance of sorrow, made the wife’s own heart twist with non-acceptance. So that their relationship was like a mirror that reversed the meanings as well as the images. No loving God takes a child away, Sarah insisted but Emil would then answer: He just has, and just did so.

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Do not deny your own eyes, your own heart.

Serious problems. She grew thin as a rail. She wouldn’t touch the food he cooked. She drank her meals out of little cans, secretly poured half the contents out.

The missing child was making her work twice as hard. She became a Republican, he became a Democrat. They no longer even argued about why.

Part 2 of the story will talk about Emil.

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