The Husband's Secret

Falling in love was easy.anyone could fall. It was holding on that was tricky

None of us ever know all the possible courses our lives could have and maybe should have taken. It's probably just as well. Some secrets are meant to stay secret forever. Just ask Pandora.

You’ve been here before. It won’t kill you. It feels like you can’t breathe, but you actually are breathing. It feels like you’ll never stop crying, but you actually will.

Marriage was a form of insanity; love hovering permanently on the edge of aggravation.

Perhaps nothing was ever “meant to be.” There was just life, and right now, and doing your best. Being a bit “bendy.

It’s all about our egos. She felt she was on the edge of understanding something important. They could fall in love with fresh, new people, or they could have the courage and humility to tear off some essential layer of themselves and reveal to each other a whole new level of otherness, a level far beyond what sort of music they liked. It seemed to her everyone had too much self-protective pride to truly strip down to their souls in front of their long-term partners. It was easier to pretend there was nothing more to know, to fall into an easygoing companionship. It was almost embarrassing to be truly intimate with your spouse; how could you watch someone floss one minute, and the next minute share your deepest passion or most ridiculous, trite little fears? It was almost easier to talk about that sort of thing before you’d shared a bathroom and a bank account and argued over the packing of the dishwasher.

You could try as hard as you could to imagine someone else’s tragedy—drowning in icy waters, living in a city split by a wall—but nothing truly hurts until it happens to you. Most of all, to your child.

Happy endings always made her cry. It was the relief.

All these years there had been a Tupperware container of bad language in her head, and now she opened it and all those crisp, crunchy words were fresh and lovely, ready to be used.

She longed to feel something momentous. Sometimes her life seemed so little.

It wasn’t logical, but the better you knew someone, the more blurry they became. The accumulation of facts made them disappear. It was more interesting wondering if someone did or didn’t like country music than knowing one way or the other.

None of us ever know all the possible courses our lives could have, and maybe should have taken.

Then he kissed her so deeply and so completely that she felt like she was falling, floating, spiraling down, down, down, like Alice in Wonderland.

There were worse things to be than sexist. For example, you could be the sort of person who pinched your fingers together while using the words “teeny weeny.

A son is a son until he takes him a wife; a daughter is a daughter for all of her life.

It was like she was thinking, How far can I go with this? How much more can I fit in my life without losing control?

Some secrets are meant to stay secret forever.

She didn’t understand a damned thing about life except that it was arbitrary and cruel, and some people got away with murder while others made one tiny, careless mistake and paid a terrible price.

This was how it could be done. This was how you lived with a terrible secret. You just did it. You pretended everything was fine. You ignored the deep, cramplike pain in your stomach. You somehow anesthetized yourself so that nothing felt that bad, but nothing felt that good either.

Her goodness had limits. She could have easily gone her whole life without knowing those limits, but now she knew exactly where they lay.

Why did she give up wine for Lent? Polly was more sensible. She had given up strawberry jam. Cecilia had never seen Polly show more than a passing interest in strawberry jam, although now, of course, she was always catching her standing at the open fridge, staring at it longingly. The power of denial.

They could fall in love with fresh, new people, or they could have the courage and humility to tear off some essential layer of themselves and reveal to each other a whole new level of otherness, a level far beyond what sort of music they liked. It seemed to her everyone had too much self-protective pride to truly strip down to their souls in front of their long-term partners. It was easier to pretend there was nothing more to know, to fall into an easygoing companionship.

Was there anything better than to be wanted? Was that all anyone really needed?

Polly had arrived in the world outraged to discover that her sisters had gotten there before her.

Nobody ever told you that being a mother is all about making what seemed like thousands of tiny decisions.

When you were young you talked about ‘falling in love’ with such amusing gravity, as if it were an actual recordable event, when what was it really? Chemicals. Hormones. A trick of the mind.

The words "I´m sorry" felt like an insult. You said "I´m sorry" when you bumped against someone´s supermarket trolley. There need to be bigger words.

Perhaps there were no answers to questions like that. Perhaps nothing was ever “meant to be.” There was just life, and right now, and doing your best. Being a bit “bendy.

A red traffic light loomed, and Cecilia slammed her foot on the brake. The fact that Polly no longer wanted a pirate party was breathtakingly insignificant in comparison to that poor man (thirty!) crashing to the ground for the freedom that Cecilia took for granted, but right now, she couldn’t pause to honor his memory, because a last-minute change of party theme was unacceptable. That’s what happened when you had freedom. You lost your mind over a pirate party.

Poor, poor Pandora. Zeus sends her off to marry Epimetheus, a not especially bright man she’s never even met, along with a mysterious covered jar. Nobody tells Pandora a word about the jar. Nobody tells her not to open the jar. Naturally, she opens the jar. What else has she got to do? How was she to know that all those dreadful ills would go whooshing out to plague mankind forevermore, and that the only thing left in the jar would be hope?