Free To My Ex-Husband by Susan Dundon Page A

confidence, her sexual juiciness, and leave her dry, parched, and utterly repellent. I want her all scratchy and prickly inside, like a stinging nettle.
    But then Esther was never exactly cozy. Besides which, as June said when I showed her Esther’s picture, “She’s no beauty.” But beauty was never the point, was it? You once told me that passion breeds passion. And Esther wanted you.
    I need to know: Was Esther earthy? Was she raw with desire, in a way that I have never been? Was she the kind of woman, for instance, who never worried about whether she was going to leak little glutinous pools of sperm onto the bedspread, or, if you were being particularly intimate, thought back to how many hours it had been since she’d had a shower? I could never be jealous of who Esther is, but I could be jealous of her abandon. That letting go, literally giving yourself over, is the secret to so many things that seem just beyond my grasp.

JUNE 3
    It’s wonderful living in the dark. You should try it. Sometime, somewhere, when you least expect it, a light goes on, and you’re pulled out of the tunnel. Let me tell you about my latest “light.”
    I am not by nature a suspicious person—as has already been established. But when Annie starts making a habit of cutting her telephone conversations short as I enter the room, starts humming, or launches into what I know instinctively is a change of subject, I take it that there is something that I am not supposed to know. Okay. Parents are not supposed to know. They may have what the military calls the Need to Know, but when it comes to their children, need doesn’t enter into it. Now if she’s talking about sex, or boyfriends, or about what a flake her mother is, that’s not my business. But when I combine this with Annie’s moods lately (part-CIA agent, part-ocelot), I have to think that this is not your typical adolescent frame of mind, at least not Annie’s frame of mind.
    So I began pressing. And pressing. And what do you know? The monosyllabic wall of stony impenetrability came tumbling down.
    At that moment, she happened to be eating an after-school snack of peanut butter and Carr’s crackers. Her face got all red, her mouth opened and, almost noiselessly, she started to cry. Peanut-buttery strings of saliva stretched between her lips as I pulled her close to me and buried my face in her hair.
    â€œIt’s all over school,” she sobbed, “about Daddy and Isabel.”
    Isabel? And here I was, still preoccupied with Esther. Not that there’s anything wrong with Isabel; I like Isabel. She has a quiet dignity that has served her extremely well in these circumstances. But, for Annie’s sake, couldn’t you have chosen somebody she doesn’t see every day, somebody all of her friends don’t see every day, somebody other than the school librarian?
    At first, I thought Annie had to be wrong. You and Isabel were just friends, I said. But as the words were leaving my mouth, I heard the doubt in my voice; I was the one who was wrong. And, of course, there was no doubt at all in Annie’s mind.
    She came out with an Oh, Mom I hadn’t heard before. It wasn’t that whiny, teenagey, “Oh, Mo-om, you-can’t-be-serious, a cur-few ?!” we’ve been hearing. It was grown-up and sympathetic—and yet impatient. It was “Poor Mom, you just don’t want to see it, do you?” Anyway, it had the ring of truth. I couldn’t have convinced her otherwise, so I didn’t try.
    Obviously, you can do as you like. We’re separated. But I wish you’d at least have had the decency to wait until school was out. What a way for Annie to finish her senior year. It just isn’t fair, when I think of what she’s had to contend with already. She’s done well, and should feel good about herself. Instead, she’s crying and eating peanut butter and crackers and is too