"Signposts for Nora"

Warning: Depression Ahead

Nora and her first husband Miguel go to Tobago on holiday, right before Miguel gets really sad. Nora doesn’t know what is coming. If Miguel does, he keeps it to himself.

On Valentine’s Day in Tobago, Nora and Miguel walk along a dirt road behind their hotel. They are staying at a decent hotel, but the nice hotel in town is hosting a Valentine’s Day dinner. It is lovely to be wearing a sleeveless dress in February. It’s dark, but the air is thick and hot—cozy. Nora and Miguel hold hands as they walk. 

“Look!” she says, letting go of his hand to point at the sign, shining their flashlight on the yellow diamond so he can see.

Warning: Depression Ahead, says the street sign.

Nora laughs. Miguel doesn’t. She shines the flashlight on his face. He squints against the light.

“Nora! Quit it!” he says, turning away. “I guess we should watch for dips in the road.”

You’re a dip in the road, Nora thinks. Later, she feels bad for thinking this.

Miguel’s big sadness lasts for three years. Nora makes him tea and lets him cry and works extra hours so he can rest. She masturbates quietly in the bathroom so he doesn’t feel pressured to have sex he doesn’t want.  She cries on the phone to her friend Marisol but turns on the fan so Miguel does not overhear and feel worse. The day he finally asks for more dinner instead of just crying into it is a turning point. As he continues to improve over the weeks and months that follow, Nora begins to make plans for another vacation. She buys a new bra and underwear set. She starts researching cruises. But the depression has changed something in Miguel, and he doesn’t want to be married anymore. He stays anyway because Miguel is not a jerk. He is just a sad guy who has lost his gusto for Nora, and after a while, the weight of obligation between them is an anchor, heavy and sinking.

Nora calls Marisol. The fan whirs in the background.

“I’m a terrible person,” she says.

“Unhappy and terrible are not the same thing,” Marisol says. “Do you want me to come to pick you up after you tell him? We can go to the Mexican place and have margaritas?”

Nora’s friendship with Marisol feels like a zip-liner’s helmet. With it, she might manage to survive a fall.

This Space Available

Nora meets her second husband at the mall. She is standing in front of an empty store, trying to remember what it was before.

“I think this used to be a Things Remembered,” says a man’s voice nearby.

Nora turns. The man’s body is tall, his smile huge.

“That’s it!” Nora says. “I couldn’t remember.” 

Nora and the man laugh together. 

“Come here often?” the man says.

“Oh Jesus,” Nora says, but she is laughing.

“Can I buy you a cup of coffee from the food court?” 

Lou is the opposite of Miguel: cheerful, fun-loving, and disloyal. Unfortunately, Nora doesn’t learn about the disloyal part until after they are married, when she goes to check the weather on his laptop and gets more than she bargained for. Maybe it’s just pictures, Marisol says. But there is correspondence, too. So much correspondence, about what Lou is going to do to the woman in the picture when he sees her. Nora keeps reading and discovers that he is going to do a lot of things. To more than one woman.

“How can you be bored already?” Nora screams at him.

“I don’t see what the big deal is. I’m not meeting any of these women in real life. I’m not touching anyone except you.”

Nora tries to be cool with it. Lots of people look at porn, she tells herself. This isn’t much different. Except it is because Lou is so available to these women. Going through the emails and later the texts, Nora notices that he always writes back immediately. It seems like he has nothing else going on: no job, no wife. Lou writes the women back right away, but when Nora texts him to pick up more milk, he doesn’t respond until he is already home, without milk.

Marisol, who always writes Nora back, opens the door and wraps Nora in her arms. 

“It wasn’t just pictures,” Nora sobs into Marisol’s neck. Marisol’s husband Gordon quietly takes his beer into another room, and this small, kind gesture makes Nora cry harder.

MAXIMUM 40

The speed limit sign—MAXIMUM 40—is lodged in a patch of grass in front of Nora’s building. At 48, Nora takes the sign personally. She would like to discover a MINIMUM 40 sign, but of course there are none of those on her street or anywhere. Nora wants to rip the sign out of the ground and beat someone with it. A millennial. Even better: a teenager. A generation zed. Maybe the one who lives in the next building over, blond hair flicked over a shoulder as she runs out of the house and down the street, always late for something.

Nora has just gotten divorced for the second time and, like the first time, it feels completely awful. This time, it also feels familiar, which is the last thing getting divorced should feel like. It’s supposed to feel terrifying and alien, like that time she and Marisol did drugs at the Parliament-Funkadelic concert and Nora spent the whole concert on the toilet, hands clamped over her face, waiting for it to be over. Divorce is supposed to feel like that. It’s not supposed to be a dark, musty basement that brings you back to the worst parts of your childhood, the stink of it instantly familiar and suffocating.

Nora stands in front of the sign and tries to yank it out, but it doesn’t even loosen. This is not surprising, since Nora’s arms are as floppy and weak as dead eels. Nora wishes her arms were strong and ropy and lean like Marisol’s. Marisol could rip that sign out of the ground. Now Nora kind of wants to beat Marisol with the sign.

“You should get back out there,” Marisol says in Nora’s new living room.

“I’m not getting back out anywhere, ever again,” says Nora. “I’m in now.”

Marisol laughs.

“You know how some people can’t get enough of cilantro and to other people it tastes awful?” For dramatic effect, Nora takes another sip of her wine before saying: “That’s me.”

Marisol laughs again. “You’re cilantro?”

“No, I’m other people, in this scenario. Cilantro is marriage.”

Marisol pinches her lips together like she does when she disagrees. Nora is a little drunk, but she still notices how wrinkle-free her friend’s lips are.

Marisol’s husband Gordon is warm and steady and a little boring, and very, very good. Nora’s husbands both thought Gordon was dull, but Nora loves him and so, importantly, does Marisol. 

“Now I want Mexican food. Should we order some? Extra cilantro,” Marisol says, reaching a brown branch of an arm across the table to her phone, her wedding ring catching the light.

Wrong Way

Nora is late to the courthouse because all the streets downtown are frustratingly one-way.  She turns onto a street, and a man on the corner waves at her and shouts, “Wrong way! WRONG WAY!” Rude, Nora thinks as she backs up. 

Inside, Marisol is waiting on a bench for her, pale and shaky. 

“I’m sorry I’m late—did they already arraign him?”

“No, not yet, not yet. They’re behind.”

Marisol’s son, Theo, has been arrested again for possession. He is a sweet kid—a man now, Nora reminds herself—but he has stumbled a lot. Marisol has not told Gordon about this most recent arrest. 

“It’s hard on Gordon,” Marisol explains to Nora.

“And it’s not hard on you?”

Marisol doesn’t respond. There are some things Nora cannot understand because she is not a mother. Marisol has never said this, but Nora knows it is true. She heard something once about how a mother is only ever as happy as her unhappiest child. Theo is Marisol’s only child, and Nora cannot remember the last time he was happy. Her heart aches for Marisol. She sits down beside her to wait, leaning her head against Marisol’s slumped shoulder.

Exit

Despite her convictions to the contrary, Nora does marry again, and this last man is the loveliest one. David is calm and gentle and theirs is an everyday love. When Marisol gets sick, David reads paperbacks in the hospital hallway under the red exit sign. Nora sits with her friend and makes her laugh until she falls asleep again, and then Nora goes out into the hall and cries in David’s arms.

Marisol’s arms are birch twigs against the green blanket, white and stripped down. Nora can’t look at them for long, focuses instead on Marisol’s face, which is sunken and sallow but is still Marisol, especially when she smiles.

Nora brings a fan to Marisol’s hospital room so they can have some privacy, but Marisol doesn’t say much anymore. Nora reads to her from celebrity magazines as Marisol fades in and out of sleep. Marisol’s wedding ring is too loose on her finger now, so she wears it on a chain around her neck. The ring slides into the hollow of her throat when she sleeps.

After Marisol dies, David holds Nora’s hand at the funeral, his palm sweaty and firm. David is the only one of Nora’s husbands to understand what Marisol meant to her, that their lifetime of companionship was the underpinning of both their lives. That they were each other’s soul mates.

Nora waits until almost everyone has left the graveside. David goes over to stand beside Gordon, puts his hand on his arm while Nora walks up to the coffin. From her bag, she pulls a bouquet of cilantro, sheathed in plastic. When Nora takes the plastic off, the fresh smell fills her nose, almost drowning out the heavy, aggressive scent of the funeral flowers. Nora places the cilantro bouquet on her friend’s coffin and already hates how her life is without her.