ONCE by Michael Bogan
Once we dated in high school. I was a sophomore, she had just graduated. Once I walked three miles to that high school, ditching the school bus, so that every morning I could stop midway at her house, wait across the street for her abusive father to leave, then quietly let myself in the back door, tiptoe up the back stairs to her bedroom, wake her softly from her bare mattress set in the middle of the empty room, and guess but never ask about what abuse she suffered the previous night. Once I was grounded and she snuck me McDonald’s, tied the paper bag to a rope I dangled from my second-story bedroom window. That’ll show my parents. Once in the middle of the night she arranged a homemade chocolate cake on my front porch with a card that said I love you Michael, and my mother woke first and found it. Once, swinging on my parents’ front porch swing, she held out her legs as high and as long as she could, and when I asked why she said to see how much pain she could endure. Once, on a windy summer night just before we started dating, we were walking the streets of my neighborhood and she started shivering, so I gave her my Cure shirt and walked back home bare. Once I snuck out and we drove two hours to Dayton to watch a Cure concert. Once when I was a senior in high school she finally ran away from her abusive father and moved in with my family, leaving her younger brothers and sisters behind. Once after I graduated, and she moved into her first apartment, her brother and I stole a newspaper box and smuggled it into her new living room, and she didn’t want us to leave it there but I said Oh come on, so she let us. Until her landlord found the box and threatened to evict her. Once on New Year’s Eve I spent the night on her apartment floor throwing up because I had food poisoning from spoiled Fazoli’s meatballs. Once we drank bottomless cups of coffee in a Steak & Shake booth all night because her apartment didn’t have air conditioning and good god it was sweltering.
Once we lived together, in a studio apartment, then in a two-bedroom apartment, then a rental house, then our own house. Once we spent every day together. Once we had four children together. Once we were married together. Once we were together.
Once we sat together in the McDonald’s break room, before we started dating, and she played a School of Fish cassette tape for me. Once as teenagers we tried to spend the night in a cemetery but the darkness and the gravestones and the cold wet dew spooked us and we barely stayed past midnight. Once when we first lived together we ate grilled cheese and canned tomato soup for most meals, used empty Bulk Frozen French Fry cardboard boxes for our dining table, slept pressed together on a lumpy thrift-store couch as our bed, walked the shoulder of a highway to work because the engine block of our car had cracked. She worked the desk at a tanning salon, I clerked a video store. Once we emptied an entire year of savings and flew last minute to San Juan Capistrano to see Cowboy Junkies play. We couldn’t afford a rental car, so we walked the three miles from the hotel to the concert. Once years later we bought our first house – an 1860s Italianate with original plaster walls and ceilings and walnut floors, and windows that waved with hand-blown glass. We planted alpine strawberries and raspberries and an apple tree and a cherry tree. She planted roses that twined around the picket fence. We walked our children down the wide sidewalks and admired the quiet and dignified houses we now lived among.
Once I couldn’t call her on the phone because her father didn’t allow her to get phone calls. Or go on dates. Or leave the house.
Once she asked me to wait outside her house, under her window and hidden from the streetlights that might expose me, until her bedroom light turned off. Because the light turning off was her signal that her father had finished screaming at her, smacking her, running a razor across her knuckles and arms.
Once I let that happen and never told anyone. Forgive me.
Once we fell in love. I was only 16, she was only 18. And what does love mean at 16, or at 18? I was just a few years from my sister’s suicide and she was just a few years from her mother’s death. We were in love and in need. I needed someone who would not leave me; a woman who depended on me. She needed someone kind; the men in her life had been cruel. This is all conjecture. She was soft. She was wide eyes. She was an innocence to fit my need for a benevolent world. I was a path out. I was stability. I was a better life than she thought she would have.
Once in our late twenties she picked me up from my corporate job and I was so embarrassed by her I wouldn’t take her inside. Maybe I had decided she wasn’t the woman I should be married to. Maybe I wanted to pretend I was a single father. I don’t know. But I unbuckled the kids, led them inside and up the elevator, walked them from cubicle to cubicle, introducing them; I told her to wait in the parking lot.
Once I hacked into her email. At least once. Probably more. I wanted to trust her, but I couldn’t figure how. Still, I tried. I read books and articles and talked to friends and counselors. But I never tried the obvious, which was to sit her down and explain all my worries and ask her questions and get all the mistrust into the open. I never tried that because we had, early in our relationship, formed an encoded, passive-aggressive system of talking. We never acknowledged pain openly or clearly. That was not part of our canon. I didn’t know how to talk to her any other way.
Once in our thirties I sent her a dozen daisies with a note that read: We’ve been together 10,000,000 minutes. When I got home from work she said I wish you wouldn’t have done that. Those words hurt even now, a decade later. She was a couple weeks from moving out.
Once when my parents kicked her out of our house, she joined the Air Force. She wrote me letters on notebook paper saying how much she missed me, how desperately she wanted to come back to me. And she did come back, just a few months later, with a medical discharge due to nightmares about her father.
Once we were a good match. More than a good match. We were emotionally reliant. We stuck together through the years when many couples walk away: the drama of high school, the reinvention of our late teens, the searching of our early twenties.
Once I told people a story about our four kids: When Frankie was born I cried like a baby, when Scout was born I was teary, when Jack was born I was smiling, when Zoe was born they had to wake me up. It was mostly true.
Once it took me too many years to marry her. We finally married with Frankie and Scout as our young witnesses; she was fat and pregnant with Jack.
Once our first date was playing miniature golf on the east side of Indianapolis. She brought a friend. She made eyes at me and we giggled. I had to ask my dad to drive us because I was only 15. Our last date was at a steak house in downtown Indianapolis. My mother watched the four kids while we stared into the crowd and struggled to find something, anything to talk about.
Once her brother said to me, standing in front of the McDonald’s fry station, Hey someone with a funny laugh likes you, and it took me two guesses to figure out it was her. He worked there, too. And another of her older brothers, and a younger brother, and one of her sisters. Both of my older sisters had worked there. My brother had been the first person in line at the grand opening. He ordered a Big Mac.
Once, after her mother had recently died, her father knocked the kids around, did torturous things. She needed me.
Once we lined up our kids, at first just 2, then 3, then 4, in a row on our couch, youngest to oldest, and took their picture. That same couch where they read Goosebumps and Magic Treehouse, jumped up and down playing Mario Kart on the Wii, laughed at Looney Toons.
Once we moved to Atlanta for my first professional job – a computer programmer at Citibank. My salary multiplied overnight. She never had to work again. No more waitressing at delis, no more clerking at tanning salons, no more greasy nights closing at McDonald’s. I thought I had given her everything she could need or want. I didn’t yet understand the physics of needs and wants, how they are in constant flux, expanding, swallowing, changing.
Once in high school I owned a wicked 1982 Chevy Malibu station wagon, long as a canoe and brown as ‘70s living-room paneling. A friend had cut the bulldog ornament off a Mack truck and welded it to the hood of my Malibu. The wagon and dog charged forth together wherever I drove. When I picked her up after work, she scooted across the bench seat and leaned her head against my shoulder. We drove, skin-to‑skin, to Washington Square mall, to Tech High School basketball games, to Dayton for a Cure concert, to County Line Road where we parked off the gravel shoulder, late on a Friday night.
Once we had a second child, then a third, then a fourth. I worked; she raised kids. Half a decade passed. We were happy. We put the kids to bed at 9 and watched movies together. We bought pots and pans and hung them on a rack. We bought a new minivan. We bought a riding lawn mower. We turned thirty and created a budget with a column for discretionary spending. We opened a 401k and started talking about saving for an early retirement. We taught the kids to read and ride bikes. We held hands when we walked. Our life was rote. It was steady and safe. Routine, snug, prudent. Nourishing and satisfying, our comfort food. I worked; she raised kids.
Once while I was working and she was raising kids she had an affair with our next-door neighbor, and when I found out she stopped. Then I found out again six months later, same guy. Maybe she stopped again. The first time I smashed a laptop to pieces and cried like a kid and seethed with fierce anger and slept on my mom’s couch for a week. The second time I was so worn down from questioning and negotiating and suspecting and wobbling the marriage is over no wait the marriage is not over, that I just submitted without resistance.
Once she cried about her affair. She cried on the tile bathroom floor, praying for her long-dead mother, asking her how did this happen, what should she do now? She said she never slept with the neighbor, that it had never progressed beyond emails and secret meetings in the back yard. I don’t know if I believed her.
Once, a few years after our divorce, she married him.
Once she said you’re lucky to have a wife like me. I let you sit up in your office and write and never ask you to help with dishes, or with dinners, or with baths, or with bedtimes. I take care of the kids, and you just work and write and run and relax and nap. You’re so lucky. Most wives would never let their husbands do that. You should appreciate me more. Maybe do the dishes once and a while. So I started doing the dishes once and a while.
Once she asked me to come to her sister’s funeral. We were mid-divorce, not talking other than arguing. She rose at the service to speak and motioned for me to stand with her, which I couldn’t believe. But she motioned again, so I walked up and she held my hand while she tried to memorialize but mostly cried. Afterward I drove to Bob Evans and awkwardly ate lunch next to her, surrounded by her brothers and sisters. I left as soon as I finished eating. I was already living through the pain of our collapse, I couldn’t pretend we were a couple again.
Once I was best friends with two of her brothers. I hung out with them in their bedrooms and listened to Metallica and Primus. I ran cross-country with them. Once her oldest brother drove over an IED in Iraq and lost his right hand and right testicle. After that he called himself Uncle Lefty.
Once we decayed under the routine, the rote, the prudent. I went to work; she stayed home. I spent my day trapped in a cube; she spent her day trapped in our house. I drove home then we ate dinner, we played outside with the kids then we watched TV. We crawled into bed.
Once, about six months before she moved out, I used the credit card to buy her the most expensive violin in the violin shop because she wanted to learn and how else could I prove my love?
Once we bought our first ever set of new furniture, a La-Z- Boy recliner, a love seat, a matching living room couch. We squeezed onto that couch with our four kids, snuggled tight, watching Disney movies on Friday nights.
Once we stood in the living room in the early morning, our kids still asleep, and watched concrete corners of the Twin Towers melt like butter.
Once her young divorced mother had a stroke, and with eight kids and no options left, moved them all back in with her abusive ex‑husband. A couple months later, immobile in bed, her mother caught pneumonia. The abusive ex‑husband, when the kids told him they were worried because their mother was coughing and pale, said don’t worry and don’t call anyone. A few days later her mother died.
Once as an adult I spent hours researching on the Internet and holy shit found her long-lost grandmother and uncle on her mother’s side. Three months later we flew to England to meet them. Her grandmother, in her late eighties, rocked infant Scout in her arms, and sang him Irish lullabies. Her uncle talked fast, drove fast, and apologized over and over for losing touch after her mother’s funeral. Her cousins drank breakfast tea with us and told us about their horses stabled nearby. From Leicestershire we rode a train, then a boat, then a car, to Wicklow, Ireland, where we found the pub her grandfather had owned, and a man who in heavy Irish brogue still remembered her grandparents, and the Catholic primary school her mother attended, and the church registrar that in a tall blue script recorded her mother’s birth. I would have sworn to you then that I had given her everything she ever wanted.
Once we went to my high school prom together, and she wore my recently deceased sister’s prom dress. My mother refitted it for her. She danced with me, arms lost in frilled sleeves, dress sweeping the floor.
Once she took too many walks on those wide sidewalks of our Italianate neighborhood. She walked too far, stayed away too long. And I obsessed. Who did she see on those walks? Why did she turn left instead of right? Why did she chew a piece of mint gum before she left? And when she checked her email five times in ten minutes after her walk, what message was she hoping for? Who did she imagine, later that night, when I wrapped my arms around her waist, when I slipped my hands inside her pockets, when we quietly watched movies on opposite sides of the couch in the dark? And after she’d fallen asleep, and I lay next to her in bed, slowly and cautiously inching my hand to hers, then finally holding her hand, secretly, who did she run to in her dreams?
Once my parents found a disc of birth control pills in her purse, and kicked her out of our house.
Once with our four young kids we tried to drive the entire Oregon Trail. We started at the Arch in St. Louis, drove a series of lonely side roads through Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota. We brought along a small plastic toilet for Zoe to use in the van so we wouldn’t have to stop every hour for bathroom breaks. Three hot weeks and a thousand miles of boredom later, I gave up at the Wyoming border. Too many historical marker signs as destinations, too many dirt roads, too many wagon wheel ruts about half a mile back in that field but don’t worry there’s a gate and the farmer doesn’t mind if people walk back to see. We turned the van around and we camped in the Black Hills for a week, visiting Mount Rushmore in the fog. We drove back home, bought a dog, and named him Rushmore.
Once we pushed our lives forward until we checked off the entire middle-class- American checklist: marriage, kids, mortgage, professional job, two-week vacations, health insurance, new minivan. And now . . . what?
Once there was nightly counseling homework: talk, but use only emotions, no explanations, no blame. Listen, don’t argue. Create a safety zone. We talked, on our living room couch, with our feet curled under ourselves but not each other, at first pressed against each other but then with each passing week more cushions appearing between us. At first pausing for a stroke of arm hair, for a neck kiss, for a cheek wipe or sigh, but then eventually just marching through a dutiful list of that day’s emotions: I felt this, then I felt this, then I felt this. Even then, despite all the nights talking, despite all the guidance and goals, despite all the revelations of heartbreak and pain and jealousy, we still never talked about why our marriage was failing. Maybe we didn’t know how, or didn’t know why, or maybe we just didn’t want to.
Once we could only afford one car and I had to drive it every day to my new computer programming job, so the only escape she had from the apartment was to take walks with our infant son Frankie around the apartment parking lot. In the center of the parking lot was a small playground, and she carried him there, wedged him in the swing with a throw pillow, swung him. I worked harder so we could afford a second car. I thought I was giving her everything she wanted. Can we ever give someone everything they want?
Once our infant son Frankie ate a dime that had fallen out of the pocket of my new work khakis. I saw him choking from across the room and I lunged and pounded his back and he threw up the dime on the carpet.
Once late in our marriage I returned from a week in Carolina and said, Did you miss me? Do you love me?
You’re their father, she said. I love you because they love you. I missed you because they missed you. But that’s all.
Once her pelvis drew me in like never before, pulled me. Her torso writhing, her arms and legs wrapping, her fingers seedy and exploring. Her body speaking new verbs. After 18 years I’d memorized every movement she made, every movement she had ever made, and now suddenly she made love in an all-new way? Who the hell had she been fucking? Who the hell had been thrusting his body inside my wife, who had caused such an awakening in her spirit that even when I was the one on top, her muscles remembered him not me?
Once she told me we’d lost our emotional connection. She had nothing left for me. I was allowed small touches to her shoulders, which she shuddered against, but had to allow; she was still my wife, still their mother, still married to me, still doing her job no matter how much she didn’t want to. And I asked What have I done, what have I failed to do? What more can I do? And she said, Nothing, you’ve done all you can, all you could be expected to do. You’ve been perfect, even, she said. You just can’t help who you are.
Once we made love in the kitchen of our new two-bedroom apartment in Atlanta, my new job, my new salary. But we didn’t have a condom. So once we had a baby when I was 24. We called him Frankie-bear. The doctor pulled him out with suction cups and forceps.
Once I begged her to go to counseling. I demanded she go to counseling. Talk to someone, please. Tell them about our marriage. Tell them about your past. It will help. She came home from her first and last counseling appointment and said the therapist said we should just take our time and that I’m doing everything right.
Once she listed her main complaints: I left her in the parking lot when I took the kids up to see my office; I hacked her email; I never helped around the house; that time when Rushmore ate my seedlings, the ones I had planted in the little Styrofoam cups that I had been growing in the sun room for a month, that were just about ready to plant in the garden, and I had worked so hard to find time between naps and diapers and cleaning to take care of them, and when I told you what happened you just blew it off saying oh well, no big deal.
Once she had an affair and said well maybe if you’d stop checking up on me, reading my emails, demanding to know who I’m talking to, smothering me, I wouldn’t have looked elsewhere. Maybe, it was said, if I was a better person, she wouldn’t have needed to look elsewhere.
Once, still, we tried. Because I don’t give up on people. She wanted children running and shouting and filling the house – I gave her children running and shouting and filling the house. She wanted to stay home and raise kids and not worry about bills – I gave her staying home and raising kids and not worrying about bills. She wanted a rose garden and a sunroom and a TV to watch movies at night – I gave her a rose garden and a sunroom and a TV to watch movies at night. What else could she want? What had she asked for that I had not given? I still hadn’t realized that marriage needs more than situational comfort. Marriage needs sparks and love and openness and more. And most of all marriage needs both people wanting to be married.
Once, just after our last child was born, I cashed out my entire 401k and took a year off to write. We didn’t know where the year would lead, but I needed a chance to write with all my effort. I threw myself a retirement party and bought myself a frosted cake. I cleared out the upstairs storage room and bought a writing desk from a garage sale. I read three dozen classic novels and wrote chapters of my own book and trained for a half-marathon and started playing the piano again. She sat downstairs and raised the kids. In the summer we tried to drive the entire Oregon Trail.
Once she loved me openly and unabashedly. She clung to my arm as we walked. She snuggled up to me always, on movie dates and dinner dates, or just watching TV or sitting on a porch. She announced to everyone she knew how devotedly she loved me. Her love was encompassing and I thrilled in it.
Once, a few months before her affair, I returned from a retreat in Carolina and told her I had fallen for someone else. I said I don’t want to lose this family, I don’t want to leave. I just needed to tell you. She cried. Make me a list, she said, of everything she has that I don’t. I didn’t. This was not a good time for our marriage, though it could have been had we talked about why. But we didn’t. She asked me to never talk to the other woman again; I said no, I can’t do that. That was a sin I committed against my marriage. But to agree would have been a sin against myself. Because I had glimpsed a truth and not yet fully understood it, and I needed to catch it, turn it in my hands. I was unwilling to stop until I figured it out.
Once she drank too much vodka and threw up on the living room carpet.
Once, near the end of our marriage, we sat outside on the porch together.
What about another baby, I asked, grasping.
I don’t think that’s a good idea, she said. But I’ll think about it.
Once we took vacations together. To England and Ireland and France. In Normandy a woman said thank you for liberating us in the war. In Austria an old shopkeeper yelled at Scout for breaking a magnet in his souvenir shop. In Ireland she cried while her grandmother sang Irish lullabies to Scout. Once we took vacations to Milwaukee and Nashville and Charleston and Chicago. Once we took a vacation to the shores of Lake Michigan.
Once, after she moved out, we met for Thanksgiving dinner at my mother’s house. We pretended we were still a family, I brought pies and she brought mashed potatoes. After dinner I overheard her telling my mom how excited she was to live in her new apartment, the new bunk beds she bought for the kids, the joy at finally being alone, the quietness of the evenings. I pulled her into the kitchen and hissed at her to get out. She left. Later that week we made out like teenagers on the steps of her new apartment. She told me she loved me still, that maybe this marriage could still work. A month later she said maybe ten years from now, after we both remarry and divorce again, maybe we’ll get back together then. I told her I wasn’t worried, we were meant to be together. Eventually we stopped all that silliness, had a final blow-out fight over the phone, and she said just get it over with, file the divorce papers. We agreed to only talk about the kids, never to talk about us again, what we are or what we were. And we held to that agreement, still hold to that agreement, as if nothing else before that moment ever happened.
Once she pulled me aside into the kitchen while the kids were building train tracks in the living room and said I might as well move out now. Nothing is getting better, so why wait? I’ll move out and see if anything changes, see how it feels and if I want to come back.
Once there were movie nights, s’mores nights, drive‑in nights, camping in the rain nights, backyard jumping over sprinklers and running through strawberry gardens nights. Once there were family bike rides in the evening, walks at dusk where we held hands, locked arms, swayed. Once we watched our kids play freeze tag in the dusk, and Ghost in the Graveyard, and fight over soccer balls, and fight over cicada skins.
Once I threw away her too-short skirts, asked too many invasive questions, pouted if she stayed out past midnight.
Once I tried to argue, and my argument (which I’d repeated time and time again for the past year) was this: So what. So what if you’re miserable. What does that have to do with anything? I’ve been miserable, too. I didn’t even want to get married. But I did. Just deal with it. I go to work every day, I hate my job, and we don’t have a great marriage. So what. Every day I do my job as father; I support and keep this family together. Every marriage has ups and downs – years-long ups and downs. You have to be patient, you have to wait it out, things will get better. I’ve waded through for this long, now it’s your turn. So just do it.
Once we did finally give up. And to try to list all the reasons is to fail already, though I’ve tried. Eventually the pain grew so dark that we forced our way out of the marriage. We tore down each other until we had no other option.
Once my father drove us to our first date where we played miniature golf. Once when I was just 16 she held my hand as if afraid she would lose me, wrote me folded notes saying she wanted to marry me, have kids with me, be with me forever. Once she took a deep breath and walked away from her abusive father, moved in with my family, slept on our living room floor. Once we had four children and a picket fence twined with roses and a poodle named Rushmore.
Once she said I just want to be alone, to be me. I don’t want anyone reading my emails, watching me, telling me what to do.
Once she rented an apartment, across the street from Target. I asked, what about the kids? She said they’ll be okay. I cashed out our savings and she bought new bunk beds for the kids, a new bed and a new couch, other things she needed, forks and spoons and a coffee maker, as if she was moving to her first apartment in college. The night before she moved out, we sat the kids together on the couch in the living room, four of them in a row, and she told them, smiling the entire time, that she was moving out. She told me they’d be OK – but one of the kids cried. I don’t remember which one. I was silent, didn’t say anything. She told me they’d be OK – but still, one of the kids cried. She sat them on the couch, four in a row, and told them she was moving out. And the whole time, while she told them, she smiled.
Michael Bogan’s work has appeared in River Teeth, New England Review, Indiana Review, and Southwest Review.