Thresholds.

Eight months ago, I sat in a perfect little dollhouse of an A-frame in the backyard of a slightly ramshackle Victorian in West Berkeley, typing out an echoey “hello” to the world. I listened to that greeting or plea or whatever it was ping off the walls of the studio, waiting to hear some reply to remind me that I am here in the universe, this is where I am, I exist, as I waited for life to happen to me. Alex and I were most certainly together, apart — Julian’s refusal to increase my spousal support to subsidize a move to San Francisco was certainly one reason, but I’ll be honest. (I’m trying to be honest more frequently, with the world and myself.) As much pain as it was to wave goodbye, goodbye every Sunday night to my boy as he slipped through the garden gate into the bad old world without me, I was terrified. Terrified of loving him too much or in the wrong way, of asking too much of him or indulging his vices and flaws (and I think I know them all). Of watching him descend once more into the blackness which had before nipped at his toes and crawled up his legs and wound and wound its way around him until it wormed into his mind, filling him from there with its poison.

Today, the dollhouse is empty and shut, its contents — which included some of Alex’s for a few months — packed and loaded and rolled down the interstate to another castle in the sunny kingdom by the sea. A new castle for the Princess Melissa to live in, but she’s no captive there. The drawbridge is down and the brave Duke Alexander does not bar the door. And she hopes and hopes and hopes that the little cloud of misery, the Duke’s childhood pet and nemesis, will stay just its same sleek tabby grey as it has been recently and will not darken, will not entice him with its grim familiarity.

“Up in me arms, sweetest,” he ordered as I reached forward to slot the key to the new apartment’s navy blue front door. “What kind of a man would I be if I didn’t carry you over the threshold?”

“A man without a hernia,” my mom quipped as she pulled one of our suitcases behind her from the elevator.

Alex lightly placed his hand on mine to stay me from opening the apartment. “Wait,” he whispered, before stomping down the hallway to engage in a tug of war with my mother over the suitcase.

“I’m perfectly capable of dragging this 20 feet. Let go.” She was going nowhere — I knew that flinty look too well from years of watching her square off against my father over the dinner table. Until recently, my parents’ politics had roughly aligned, so lines were drawn over picayune cultural preferences: Are the Ramones truly punk? Salman Rushdie is overrated — fight! Meryl Streep can do no wrong, even in Ricki and the Flash. There was no animus behind the scraps; they were two sharp wits who indulged in a little banter from time to time to stretch their muscles. The only time I can remember either of them storming out of the room in fury was when my dad insisted that the Aladdin Sane incarnation of Bowie was way cooler than Ziggy Stardust.

“Trish, indulge me,” Alex purred, the slightest sweet wisp of Scots tingeing his voice. (Clever boy, it disarms all of the de Mornay women.) “With all these gorgeous, strong women around, let me feel useful.”

Tilting her head to one side and pursing her lips, my mom gave me what Rachel and I always knew as “The Look” — she raised her eyebrows and opened her already large green eyes even wider, finishing with a curt demi-nod. It had a multiplicity of uses: are you really going to wear that outside, Rachel? Melissa, are you going to let Julian get away with being rude to that waiter? Did you really think I wouldn’t notice that you stole $100 out of my purse? Which one of you decided she could wear my scarab bracelet and then not put it back? If you two can’t behave at your grandmother’s funeral, where can I take you? (Granted, we were 9 and 7, but Rachel definitely started it. Sorry, Maman, I didn’t mean to disrespect you in death.)

I shrugged a shoulder. “Path of least resistance, Mom. Let him have a win.”

Alex was by this point trying to peel each of my mom’s fingers off the handle with one hand while his other kept a grip on the top of the suitcase, but she eventually let go with a little grunt. “It’s a good thing I love you, Alex, because there’s already been enough toxic masculinity imposed upon this family.”

He leaned down to pop a kiss on the crown of my mother’s red hair before lugging the bag down the ash laminate of the hallway, the slight wonkiness of one of the wheels ca-thunking its way as he approached me. “I swear to you, I’ll never let my masculinity become toxic. Smelly, maybe, or at least that’s what Mel says.” He stuck his tongue out at me; I returned the favor.

The brass key was warm in my hand from clutching it tightly. No turning back now, Melissa. This is what you said you wanted — a real home with Alex. A real home with the probably fake Danish Modern sofa and the little blue velvet loveseat. A bathroom for you with a mirror surrounded by globe bulbs and a smaller one for him; a kitchen big enough to fit two bodies amiably chopping vegetables side by side. A human-sized bed for reading the news and drinking coffee and sleeping and making love in. A home for us two, a home for the (someday) Carrs.

The ridges and tip of the key’s blade bit into my palm. I knew somewhat to expect inside already. Jenn had taken up one of her favorite tasks — bossing people around — in taking over the move in process for us. As we hurtled down the 101 South the morning before with Alex at the wheel (I kept reminding him we weren’t in the Gumball Rally and to slow down while he cursed the sluggish, mushy gearbox of the rented SUV), Jenn livestreamed the load in.

First the bed — well, part of the bed, frustratingly. The king-sized mattress had arrived, pristine in its plastic wrapper, but only the walnut headboard of the bed frame had come along for the ride. No one seemed to know where the rest of it was, except that it might be on its way to Salinas. Jenn barked her anger down the phone to the poor store clerk at that shop on Melrose where I’d fallen in love with the bed’s clean lines. Though I’d dragged Al along with me for his opinion, his only criteria for selecting the perfect bed had been, “Will it fit me?” and “Is it horizontal?” After that, I left him back at the hotel on subsequent shopping trips.

In came the creamy-beige Arne Vodder dining chairs (all six of them), the (slightly dented) Milo Baughman credenza and rosewood dining room table — pieces I’d spotted online and hunted down in Van Nuys, of all places (yuck). The sofas from our old homes came in next under Jenn’s careful eye and my remote direction from the front seat of the Mazda. Though neither truly suited each other, or really much of anything else I’d purchased for the apartment, sentimentality overcame any insistence on a flawless vision.

The furniture for Alex’s study, the only pieces he had shown any interest in, were carefully carted into his study by the deliverymen. Though I’d planned to showcase a mid-century aesthetic in the rest of the place, Alex had requested free rein in his study. “Let me make it how I need it to be. My own stamp on the place.” He’d dotted a small smack on my cheek as a sweetener before he flung himself into a hideous walnut throne of a chair he’d found in a shop on that Melrose trip, all barley-twisted legs and lion head finials on the arms. “After all, how much will you be in it?” he’d argued. “Except to bring me another sandwich. Maybe a beer.” He leaned out to swat my behind but I grabbed his arm before he could deliver the blow. “Just a beer, then?” (This merited a slap to his own behind when he finally stood up.)

On Alex’s iPad, I watched Jenn’s face drop as the heavy oak Victorian banker’s desk, complete with green leather inlay, was pushed on a dolly into the bright bedroom we’d given over to his workspace. “Mel. Mel. You’re letting him bring this stuff in?” In came the cane-backed swivel chair, the heavily-carved bookcases and a small Aubusson needlepoint rug I’d managed to wheedle out of Cora during our October visit. “It looks like the set of a low-budget Sherlock Holmes movie,” she moaned as I passed on the message to have the green-shaded banker’s lamp set on the upper right hand corner of the desk, and to hang the red damask drapes with gilded ropes for tiebacks. It looked like Trump and Prince Albert had simultaneously and prodigiously barfed in the room. I could only imagine what the planned addition of a chandelier would bring in terms of further questionable charm.

“Low budget?” Alex yelled so Jenn could hear him. “That’s $10,000 of antiques! Fuck!” He swerved to avoid a hubcap in the middle of the 101. “I wanted one corner of the flat that was mine, Jenn, after you and Mel saw fit to furnish the rest of the bloody place without me. One corner!”

“He’s smiling, don’t worry,” I reassured her — I could read a trace of irritation in the set of her mouth. She’d seen enough of Julian berating me over the years for (supposed) transgressions even smaller than this one to be pricklishly protective of me. To prove it, I turned the tablet’s camera towards Alex, who glanced briefly at the camera and favored her with the broad grin of a man who’s gotten his way. “See? Happy.”

“Hmmph,” Jenn snorted as I turned the camera back to face me. “To each his gloomy own, I suppose. We’re just waiting on the the smaller boxes, I think, after the living room bookcases and the dressers for the bedroom. Do you want me to unpack those? I assume they’re clothes and books and blah blah blah.” She pulled the brass chain on the banker’s lamp on and off several times. “Oh, and the lighting guys are coming tomorrow at 4. Sorry, couldn’t do it today after all. Alex, you’ll have to wait on that whorehouse chandelier one more day.”

Alex snaffled a small laugh. “Only one whore in my house, and she’s all mine.” I tried to give him a hard stare, but he refused to look at me, protesting that he had to keep his concentration on the road.

Even though she said she’d be happy to manage take care of the small stuff, and as much as I love Jenn, there was something a little weird about her crisply snapping Alex’s underwear out to fold them into a dresser drawer. It only took a little cajoling to convince her to lay off the knickers and concentrate on getting the large items placed where I wanted them, more or less. “Do yourself a favor, Jenn,” I urged as I watched her wiping down the granite countertops again with a microfiber cloth. “Get them finished up and get out of there. Go grab a glass of Pinot Gris at Ester’s. Eat something.”

“Eat something” had been Jenn’s constant refrain in the months following Julian’s decision to end our marriage. I’d lost weight precipitously after he told me he knew what had happened in Suffolk, and wouldn’t be cuckolded, particularly by his best friend. (How ridiculous. Nothing happened between Alex and me in Theberton besides the briefest kiss behind the garden shed. Just a brushing of his lips across mine, my tongue barely entering his mouth, his arms tugging and pressing me close for hardly a minute. We were quite restrained, given the circumstances.)

Jenn had tried forcing bites of cheesecake in my mouth, but I’d clamp my lips shut. I let myself be dragged along to Home for a big breakfast with Mack and Jen (already about to hit the skids themselves), but could only drink mimosas and swirl my spoon in the bowl of oatmeal I’d ordered. Mush, I remember thinking. I eat mush because my brain is mush. I worked out three hours a day, when I wasn’t ugly-crying in Julian’s study or hiding in the wardrobe amongst the clothes of his he hadn’t yet removed, just trying to evoke through the lingering scent of him there his image in the house with me once more. Sometimes I sobbed white I was working out, too — there was something deeply pleasing about screaming out my pain and feeling rivulets course from my swollen eyes as I ran on the treadmill, faster, faster.

“Eat something,” Jenn begged as my weight dropped down again, again, my hipbones sharp in my bikini bottoms when she and Jen dragged me to a spa day at Burke Williams. The number on the scale went down, smaller and smaller and so small that I changed the settings on the bathroom scales to measure me in kilos so I wouldn’t know quite how tiny I was. I ate one meal a day — three ounces of salmon and half a Braeburn — only because I wanted to give Rianne something to do, now that Julian wasn’t hosting multi-course dinners for visiting Chinese business partners in the dining room anymore. Julian let her go in March — he was always happy to trim unneeded costs, and why would I need another woman to take care of just me? “You’re happy to be a woman independent of me, darling,” he’d cynically cooed at me during a brief visit to hand Rianne her severance. “So take care of yourself. You always wanted to.”

I weighed 41 kilos that day. 90 pounds, more or less. And I believed myself to be less.

Julian cut off my access to his credit cards — I never was anything more than a signatory — and withdrew nearly everything from the only joint checking account we had. When the balance dwindled to under $100, Jenn’s refrain to “eat something” became more difficult than I’d thought, even when my appetite began to return. Those offers from Mom to come home and “eat something” became more attractive than ever; I even saved on gas by asking Dad to come pick me up so we could spend time together in the car.

Though I was painfully thin, I still looked like the housewife I’d been for years — hair washed (though I tended to keep it in a bun, as I couldn’t afford twice-weekly blowouts), makeup understated (and carefully rationed — if I didn’t need to leave the house, I didn’t need to waste it on the four walls), clothes clean and pressed, though I had to learn how to use my own washer and dryer, and my detergent and softener came from the 99 cent store.

Coincidentally, that store was where I learned to shop more frugally than I’d ever had to before, even during my college days. A packet of pasta for 29 cents? Fantastic. I still had a liter of California olive oil in the larder, and plenty of dried herbs. Ugly produce? Feeling pretty ugly myself, eggplant, into the basket you get. Yeast packets to make bread — Rianne had kept the cupboards stocked with flour, good, good, and there I also found sugar and baking powder. Tins of tomatoes, five for just under a dollar. Make do, make do. In the deep freeze I found butter and frozen peas, chicken and beef, and when Alex came to visit at last at the beginning of April, I knew I could put together meals for a couple of days that didn’t give much away, about how tight finances had gotten.

Although I’d put on a few pounds by the time he saw me — a pasta-heavy diet and drinking my way through the bottles Julian left in the wine cellar will do that — Alex was shocked to see my shrunken body. “No, no good, lass, no good,” he’d sighed as he massaged my bony shoulders that first afternoon, his long fingers firmly kneading the knots that until recently I’d paid a masseuse to work out. “I remember how thin my mum got when my dad died. All she did was drink gin and sit on the banks of the stream or stay in her room. This must be like Julian dying, which neither of us ever wanted.” His hands kept working, up and down my arms. It had been two months since anyone had touched me in more than a platonic, “there, there” way, and I was hungry for the connection.

“Sometimes I feel like it’s worse than having him dead, because he comes here to collect his things and I have to see his body, very much alive. It’s like he’s dead but his ghoul is stalking through my house.” An angry, vicious ghoul. Julian would stalk from room to room, cursing me for stealing his life and his money and his youth as he gathered clothes and papers and the detritus of two lives knit together for years.

Later that evening, the first we’d spend together as (perhaps, finally) a couple, I’d put together for Alex a passable eggplant parmigiana — the only real dent in my budget had been the cheeses, as there was only faux-Kraft parmesan in a green shaker at the bargain store. Al would proclaim it sublime, though that may have been because he was hurrying to get us from the dining table to the bedroom.

“Let’s go out to eat tomorrow night, somewhere a bit flash, really do some damage to Julian’s credit card. I’ll fill your sweet mouth up with some chocolate cake and a bottle of champagne. And then — ” a lingering kiss on the nape of my neck, bared as he raised high the lank strands of my thinning hair ” — I’ll fill you up some more.” He chuckled, a low rumble, like he thought this not-even-an-innuendo was very clever. I wasn’t certain if I was irritated by it or just tired.

I couldn’t bring myself to tell him the truth yet, of quite how parlous things were financially. That I had begged Julian just that morning for a thousand dollars, which he refused. “I pay the mortgage and the bills on that house. I even pay for your health insurance and your fucking co-pays for your utterly useless therapy. How much do you really need to feed yourself, Mel? It’s just you there now, isn’t it? You can have $300 for the rest of the month. I don’t know why you can’t manage on that. God knows I spoiled you with your hair appointments and your ridiculous vegan manicurist in Echo Park. Do what you did before you met me. Live within your means.”

Just let me have this first night, just one night.

Instead, I fobbed Al off with some mostly-true line about how I didn’t want to leave the bed once he and I finally got in there. “Let’s play house, Al. Let’s pretend this is all ours, and we never-ever have to leave it.”

Of course, we had to leave it. Only six months later, I shut up all the doors and closed every window and pushed the key through the brass letter slot, as instructed by Julian. A new family would move in the following week, a young couple about my age with a sunny little boy who wanted to know all about the vegetable garden when they’d come to view the house. I showed him where in early summer the scarlet runner beans would slowly wind their way up the trellis, where I’d tended my tomatoes and where I’d just sowed the turnips the week before. I watched his golden head glint in the September sun as he ran forward and back from the shed to the slate and brick patio that ran up to the French doors of the dining room. I glanced through the doors at his mom and dad chatting with the realtor — earlier they’d asked me about local schools, pegging me incorrectly as a fellow parent. I wallowed briefly in a fantasy that the boy might have been Julian and mine, a savior child zooming about the yard as this boy was. A savior child who might have stopped up the cracks between his parents well before I threw my lot in with another man.

But now I’m here, ready to play house again with Al. No pretend this time — it really is all ours. In the small Italian restaurant on the building’s ground floor, we’d signed the lease together the month before over red beet ravioli and casarece pasta. Alexander S.C. Carr in a spidery scrawl that tumbled backwards towards the left margin; Melissa D.M. Cranford in loops and swirls cascading down and outside of the box that had been provided for my mark. Alex’s thumbprint was memorialized in ragu on page three, near the paragraph about storage.

Al’s hand is on my back as I slowly push the blade of the key in the lock, click-click-click as the grooves slot in. “Let’s do it together on three,” he whispers behind my right ear, and the electric hum of his nearness slithers through me, deep down through my neck to my core. He covers my hand with his own, not in possession, but in his need to live this moment with me — “yoked together” is the phrase he’s used before. Side by side, pushing through the world.

I count down softly, three two one, and as one we shift the key to the right and push through the door, to the new world. It is 4 o’clock and the sun is low in the sky, but high enough still for two golden shafts to filter through the trees across the street and onto the little blue loveseat, where once Alex had told me he wanted to live with me, and one day marry me, too. Where I’d comforted Rachel, where I’d re-read Bourdieu and consumed terrible Regency romances on my Kindle like miniature Snickers bars. Where Alex had stormed at Fenn over the phone again and again over the past two months, ordering and begging her in turn to make Julian stop loving her, as if she could control another’s affection. (I know well this is an impossible task. Julian had told me several times in the limbo between separation and divorce that all I had to do was stop loving Alex, and I might have my old life back. But love is a current that has no dependable kill switch — it pulses and sputters and surges at its own oscillation.)

“Up in me arms, sweetness,” Alex repeats, and before I can angle my body he’s swept me up high in his arms, cradling me tight to his chest. I am looking in those brown eyes, the ones I thought of when I shut my own while Julian cajoled me into babymaking, the ones that stared up at me from behind the sofa that night at Charlie and Will’s over fourteen years before, the ones that dismissed me as a slut he’d messed with only out of curiosity, the ones that hectically sought me out whenever we were in the same room in the years that followed. “I never stopped looking for you,” he’d once told me. “I will never stop looking for you.”

“Look, Mel,” he says. He holds me like he holds Lucy, like I am strong and able and his holding me is only to afford me a better view from his height. “Home.”

And I nuzzle his stubbled jaw with my head and I know yes, this big blank place is ours to stamp whatever sign we wish upon it. A tabula rasa, no palimpsest. Write upon it grand and sound and firm. Write your names as bold as you wish, as one, or not, in turn, together. Write what you will. Write from your past and write it for your days to come.

The threshold is the only bar and as he takes that one step from the past — together, apart — we cross that strip to the future.

Together.

Together.