The Art of Isolation—I--Plants
The day I leave my husband, it’s a Wednesday morning and I’m late for the dentist. My alarm goes off and I roll out of bed. “Let me hold you one last time,” my husband says and pulls me back to him. He’s either psychic--or more likely, he’s secretly been reading my journal (one of the many reasons I’m leaving).
At the dentist, the hygienist scrapes at my teeth and digs into my gums, bloodying my thin paper bib. Afterward, I step into the bright, sun-shiny day with clean new teeth and decide never to go home again. I call my husband and say, “I can’t do this anymore. I’m not coming home again.”
“What???” he says, in total shock. For the past 7.5 years, I have been wildly, passionately, crazily in love with him, with crazy being the operative word.
“What are you talking about?” he asks, panicked.
“You’ve been lying to me,” I say.
“About what?” he asks.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I just know you’ve been lying.”
He doesn’t deny this, but he begs me to come home.
“No,” I say, “but can you do me a favor? Can you just please water the plants?” I ask, and then hang up.
I spend the night at a friend’s house and the next morning go to the best divorce lawyer I can find. I walk into the lawyer’s office and say, “I know you’re not a therapist, but I need to do this.”
I cry for two hours straight and pay her $295 an hour to listen to me sob. Then we strategize together about what to do next.
My husband calls me repeatedly. When I finally pick up, he says, “I can’t believe you’re doing this to me.”
“I can’t believe I’m doing this either,” I say.
My husband thinks I’ve gone crazy, but just like a flock of birds that knows when it’s time to fly south, or a soldier who mysteriously gets up and moves 10 feet from where he’s been sitting seconds before a bomb explodes, my body is moving me out of harm’s way.
A year from now, I’ll get a letter in the mail from the FBI subpoenaing my husband’s bank and phone records because he’s been accused of white-collar fraud. I’ll breathe a sigh of relief and think thank God I left.
But for right now all I can think of is rescuing my plants. My dog can fend for himself. He’ll let my husband know when he needs to eat or pee. But my plants can’t speak. My husband will not water them. He will let them wither and die. I just know it.
I arrange for a police escort to accompany me to my house to collect my plants. I’m not afraid my husband will harm me physically if I go alone, just that he’ll talk me into staying. And I can’t risk that.
The police escort—most likely a family man who disapproves of wives leaving their husbands for no apparent reason—stares at me with arms folded as I lug 50 potted plants out the door. No one offers to help.
I irritate the officer further by making him stand by for another 10 minutes as I transplant a fruit tree into the backyard. I dig into the soil and turn to my husband. “Please, please, water the trees,” I say.
My friend and I go to a fancy restaurant to celebrate. But my plants are not happy. I’ve moved them from a massive sun-filled house to a small, dark room in my friend’s house whereshe is graciously allowing me to stay. My plants curl up their leaves in protest. I put a few of them outside in the bright light, but it’s too hot for them. They wither in despair.
I wither in despair, too. What was the point of the marriage? What was the point of “rescuing” these plants? What’s the point of anything?
A year-and-a-half later, my husband long gone, I come back to my house with one surviving plant. I stick it haphazardly in a corner of the house and water it occasionally. After a while, I notice something strange. The plant is literally stretching itself—stretching its entire body from one room down my stairwell closer to the light. My husband and I have failed each other miserably. We have failed the plants, which have mostly withered and died. But somehow this one plant, all on its own, in its own weird twisted way has stretched itself into the light-- as far as it can go possibly go.