"Survival Kit" by Christine Seifert

A woman stuck in an unhappy marriage decides to do nothing...

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Survival Kit, by Christine Seifert

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I married Andy Morrison four months after we met. It was a mistake, the marriage, but I didn’t realize it until after the wedding weekend and by then it was done. Andy had gone along with the marriage plan gamely, though I guessed that was because I was only his second real girlfriend, an initially gratifying position that turned sour when, a few months after the wedding, I ran into Girlfriend Number One at the car wash. We recognized each other immediately, and while I would have been content to simply hide behind the spinning rack of air freshener trees, Girlfriend Number One took off her giant sunglasses and said, “I just want you to know, I don’t envy you.”

“Are you cold?” Andy asked as he arranged pieces of newspaper over his legs. He was the only person I knew under the age of fifty who read newspapers on actual paper.

“No,” I said, though I could feel the wind blowing through the cracks of the car window. It was still light out—just barely—but the late-winter weather was bad enough that all I could see was a gray-white wall of snow. The cold was settling under my skin, around my bones, threading through my blood. 

“I’m glad we don’t have the girls,” he said. “Can you imagine?” His newspaper blanket fluttered. He was wearing children’s earmuffs and gloves that couldn’t cover his hands. Andy and the girls loved the desert-dry heat of Arizona. All three wore winter coats if the mercury dropped below sixty.

“What do you think they are doing right now?” I asked. It was a game we played when we were alone, a conversation without stakes, one that never ended, even when it grew old. “I think Natalie has already announced that she wants chicken McNuggets.”

His turn: “Natasha has colored on the walls and eaten glue at least twice.”

I laughed, but only to be polite. Natasha would never do either of those things. It was Natalie who ate anything she could wrap her grubby hands around. It was Natalie who once ate my birth control pills and required a trip to the emergency room.

My parents pretended to love babysitting the girls, but they would all four be watching the driveway, waiting for Andy and me to pull up. I wrapped my arms around myself and tried to imagine a world without the girls, without Andy. It was a picture that came easily and faded slowly; one by one the figures disappeared.

“How long do you think we’ll be here?” Andy asked.

“It’ll be fine.” I said some version of that line to Andy a hundred times a day. Everything will be fine. I’ll take care of it. Don’t you worry. I’ll do the heavy lifting.

A snowstorm this bad wasn’t going to let up any time soon. We were stranded, completely stuck, under a deep underpass in a flimsy rental car—a powder-blue Toyota hatchback—and the snow was endless.

Andy’s parents attended the beachside wedding in Maui, but they had not been invited. Andy’s father—a man the entire family referred to as Blip for reasons that I had never learned because not a single member of the Morrison clan could remember—had sat in bird shit on a bench provided by the photographer. Suzie, Andy’s mother, had insisted that the photographer pay for Blip’s linen suit, a suit he had allegedly worn at his own wedding thirty years prior. (The story had the literal whiff of truth: the suit smelled like mothballs.) Even the wedding planner, a woman with cat’s eye glasses, couldn’t escape blame for the bird shit incident. Because the wedding planner recommended the photographer, Suzie insisted I refuse to pay her sizable fee.

When Suzie threatened to sue the photographer, the wedding planner, and inexplicably, the manufacturer of the bench itself, for damages, Andy stepped in. Andy, who had a twenty-eight inch waist and arms like kebab skewers, threatened to punch the photographer. The photographer laughed. Of course he did. Then Suzie took over and the photographer blanched.

Everyone on the beach witnessed the debacle and there I was, in my size four casual beach wedding dress I’d gotten for thirty dollars at Maurice’s in Desert Sky Mall, watching Suzie punch the man while Blip cheered.

In the end, I wasn’t sure who convinced the photographer to agree to a small refund on the photo package and to apologize to Blip for suggesting he sit on the bench in the first place, but I often suspected the photographer shot the photos in such a way to make me appear ten pounds heavier than I was. The entire stack of discounted photos were now stored in the closet, along with purses I never used and my diaries from middle school. If the twins eventually ask to see them, I might very well tell them the photos were lost. 

After Suzie swung at the photographer, I forged ahead with the ceremony for reasons I couldn’t understand myself. It was a steaming chemical mix of duty, stubbornness, and a splash of something like love. Yes, Suzie’s punch had delayed things long enough for me to seriously consider running away. But I stayed. I stayed when the uniformed police officer arrived. I stayed for the statements that had to be made. I stayed while the wedding planner brought ice for the photographer who ended up with a black eye. And then it was time for the ceremony. Without even realizing it, I’d made a decision. Action, after all, can be just a series of inactions.

To come back from Maui with nothing to show but a sunburn and a pair of souvenir sea lion barrettes was unthinkable. It was bad enough that my parents would be hurt for months after the wedding. Here were Blip and Suzie in every damn picture while my own parents shoveled heavy March snow and ate salmon loaf on TV trays. 

The bird shit story had been retold so often since the wedding that I could almost recite it along with Suzie and Blip. Even years after the wedding, Blip’s misfortune and the scene it caused were a reminder of that wedding weekend, the first of three things that solidified into a hard mass of memory, a tumor that grew and served to remind me, when I was willing to touch that malignant lump, that marrying Andy was a mistake—one that couldn’t be rectified. Not now.