The Balloon

I felt detached. I felt like a balloon cut from the string holding it down, the balloon floating aimlessly, until it pops. What you don’t feel is embedded in pain. The only way to face pain is to take a journey deep into your subconscious. I need to finally face you, the father of my daughters. The person who let go of the balloon.

It was 1960. A few months before we met, I had married the dream of my life. A ‘’catch,” Mother had said. I was nineteen, and a virgin. Only on my wedding night, my husband wouldn’t touch me. He said he didn’t love me, made a mistake, and took me home early the next morning. Then to get out of paying alimony , he sued me for fraud, claiming that I was frigid, and he won an annulment. My mother blamed me. He spread rumors that I was “mentally unstable.” My friends and family stopped talking to me. No one mentioned the lavish wedding that had been in all the papers.

In my Jewish princess world, these things only happened to Jean Harlow or to those in the movies or books. I went back to work at Saks, selling bridal gowns, dreaming of leaving my parent’s house where anger floated in the air, like smoke.

Fate is odd. It plays havoc with your life. Strangers become each other’s life, lovers get lost and sudden paths set you in the wrong direction. Our story starts here.

Two months after the annulment, my parents and I were invited to a big fancy wedding reception at the same hotel I had just married in. “Pull yourself together. Meet someone else before it’s too late,” my mother had lectured. I dressed in my sexiest black low cut dress, high heels, my long dark brown hair set into a pageboy. I didn’t want to go. I never wanted to go out again. Consistent migraines plagued me, and I wanted to hide forever. I had to face the world. I had to save myself from complete detachment. If I didn’t, I was afraid that my body would float away and I’d never return. I had to find a way to get out of the house. The only vocation I knew was to find a husband.

At the Gold Room, where my first wedding had been, a twelve-piece orchestra is playing It’s Just One Of Those Things. The newly married couple stands in a receiving line. With my parents, just as I approach the happy couple, I burst into tears. Aware that friends who had just been at my wedding, are staring, tears streaking my mascara, I rush into the powder room. I soak my face with cold water, take an aspirin, apply fresh white lipstick, and after I stop shaking, I go back to the reception. To stop my hands from shaking, I clutch my beaded purse shaped like a fan, a fixed smile on my face, I hurry to the bar. I can’t feel my feet and I know I’m smiling, know because I was taught to smile. “To please.”

I order a cherry coke with vodka, and lots of ice. Girls who had been at my lavish wedding, pretending they don’t see me, are dancing with their fiancées, or new husbands. The orchestra plays “It Had To Be You, and the couples slide into a slow fox trot. I finish the drink and get another, feeling lightheaded now. Fat Susan, a cousin who always hated me, gushes that she had heard I was “not well,” and is surprised to see me. Gulping the drink, I see you. I hadn’t seen you since we were sixteen, when you were the most popular boy in our Sunday school class. You’re very tall, with jet black wavy hair. Very handsome. I heard that you became rich buying real estate and live in the country, raising Arabian horses. As I watch you laughing, gesturing with a group of girls , I remember one summer at Lake Tahoe with my parents. You and your parents were at the same hotel. Self conscious about being so tall, with large thighs and breasts, I had gone water skiing behind your fancy speed boat and when I fell into the water, my top fell off and the girls on the boat screamed with laughter.

As if fate intervenes, as if aware I’m watching you, you look up. You smile. As you hurriedly approach me, push through the crowd, I pretend I’m looking for something in my purse. The orchestra plays, “I’ll Be Seeing You.”

“Well, hello there,” you say, boisterously. You are very tanned, and a gleam shines in your dark blue eyes. It’s been forever, you say. You are glad to see me. “Dance?”

I drop my purse on top of the bar, aware that my mother is holding up two fingers for the victory sign, that Fat Susan and the couples she’s sitting with a are watching. Easily, you take me into your arms and lead me gracefully onto the crowded circular dance floor. You hold me close, and you smell like grass. My arms are around your neck and you guide me into a smooth slow dance. A wonderful dancer, you twirl, dip me way back so my hair swings back, and people are clapping. We dance to another song, and another, and another. When I close my eyes, the room spins. “You’re beautiful. I noticed you from across the room,” you whisper into my ear, dipping me again. Sometimes fate is cruel. At that moment, we’re each other’s victims.

Eight weeks later we marry at my parent’s house. Mission accomplished. Not once did you ask about the first wedding, and you ignored the warnings I’m sure your parents and friends gave you about me. For that I shall always love you. “I’m still a virgin,” I had assured you. “Okay princess,” you had said. So under a Chuppa of white roses, we repeat, till death do us part. I wear a short blush pink taffeta appliqued dress, a band of pink roses in my hair combed into a wide bouffant. Does anyone notice my dead eyes? Know that I don’t love you? Or what love feels like?

When you don’ t have yourself, know yourself, live in unreality, there can be only tragedy ahead. I tried to hide my headache. Or that I didn’t want to g be with you, I only wanted to go in my special place in my closet where I hide and sit with my knees to my chin. Where I feel safe.

On our Carmel honeymoon, I don’t feel sex. I don’t feel anything. I’m that balloon you’re holding by the string. You confide that you don’t want children and I promise to use my diaphragm.

Six weeks after our wedding, I’m pregnant. I won. Now everyone will know the annulment wasn’t my fault, know that I’m not frigid or mentally ill. When I tell you that I’m pregnant, you slap me, slap me hard, shout that I “tricked” you. I lie and say that the diaphragm had a hole in it. The tragedy is set. Quickly, we begin our victimization.

In my beautiful suburban Happy Valley home, I pretend that I’m a happy new wife. Pool parties, barbecues, carpet samples., Dr. Spock. But emotional betrayal destroys you. Hidden rage destroys you. “If you cry one more time when I fuck you I’m going to divorce you!” you shout. It is dark in the room. A moon drops light across our naked bodies. I listen to the wind blowing the trees, to your horses cantering along the hills. I remember my first wedding night, naked, on fire, begging my husband to “do what he wants with me, to his sighs as he explains that he made a mistake and just didn’t love me.

Only a shell now, I go through the days like a sunbeam, moving from routine to routine, wanting the day to end, wanting not to wake up. I don’t feel the sun. Smell the vines of roses growing along the trellis, or taste the food you make.

You did not know that if you stuck a pin in me I wouldn’t feel it.

That I trapped you.

Trapped myself.

I apologize.

Even when I give birth to a lovely little girl, the experience feels like a dream. I can’t relate to her. Sometimes I smell her baby skin, hold her, but then let her go. How can I relate to her. How can I? When I’m so empty? When I don’t know what love or loving feels like? Afraid that she’ll breathe in my numbness, inherit my grief, that I’ll do harm to her, I give her to your mother for days, and then weeks. But I’m not through. I trick you again. I’m pregnant. You get drunk, threaten to divorce me. You get a vasectomy. You drink every night now. My beloved father drops dead at sixty.

I have a second little girl. I hold her tight. Sing to her, swaddle her with kisses. But I can’t sustain. I disassociate. Like the balloon, I drift into my numb world and give her to your Mother full time. So I can enroll in art college. Then my world changes. When I’m painting, or look at the trees, or at the museum, or reading art history books, I feel exhilarated. I feel alive. I fantasize about becoming a famous artist.

Nightly, you get drunk, roar that I used you. For hours into the night, you play your horn, your anger reverberating through the air. The sound of your beloved horses cantering along the hills. The moon low. While I hide from you. Lock doors. But I take no accountability. I’m too far away from myself. I begin writing a novel and like a private investigator, I begin researching my first husband, trying to figure out why he married me only to abandon me, to ruin my life. Or had I already ruined it? Was I born without a soul?

Amazing. You and I exist a decade. We watch a man land on the moon. We cry when President Kennedy is shot. Bobby Kennedy shot. We give lavish expensive pool parties. You make more fortunes. We are strangers trapped inside an existence we don’t know. Until one hot summer day, my girls at your parents, I arrive home from art college. As I drive up our private road, past your white Arabian horses, I know fate is about to change. Something I feel. Pasted on the refrigerator door is a note from you. “Get a lawyer. I’m divorcing you. Don’t call me again.”

The rest of the story is hard. Sordid . It’s my fault. For your sake, for our daughters, I could have made a life for you, for them. Made good memories. Given them stability, financial security, all the things children should experience. I didn’t prepare them for the world. Let alone prepare myself. You let go of the string and I was fully detached. In the divorce settlement you gave me the house, and why did I sell it only to squander the money on stupid things and expose the girls to small places, hardships, hand-me-down clothes and no father? Why did I not reach out to you as a friend, as the Mother of our children? Why did I not apologize? Apologize for allowing our victimization?

We were caught in our fantasy.

Instead, I went from one man to another, until I began therapy, hard therapy, the long journey of diving into my subconscious.

I’m dangerous.

I apologize.

Apologize to my daughters.

Apologize to my daughters.

Apologize to my in-laws.

Apologize to my self.

Submersion into the subconscious brings you every lost word, emotion, regret, scene, relationship, acknowledgement, and accountability.

Forty-five years have passed. Our daughters are beautiful inside and out, and so accomplished. Beyond anything we ever knew ourselves. But yes, when the self has been damaged, they have illnesses, eating disorders, sadness pervasive in their journeys. Have always wanted you.

You never contacted them. Ignored their dead daddy letters.

Missed their college graduations.

Didn’t pay to help them. They worked since they were ten. Experienced many hardships.

Daughters without a father seek love with odd men. Sometimes men who have also been wounded. Men who have love issues. Our daughters stay in their marriages. Your second daughter contacted you decades ago. Finally, you meet once a month . You call her cruel names. You drink still. You never meet her without your wife who doesn’t want her your daughters to have a penny of your massive wealth. Her children and Grandchildren call you “Papa.” You bestow gifts to them, buy them cars, homes, and ignore your daughters. When your oldest daughter almost died from anorexia, and I wrote you, you never answered.

Still I blame myself. I should have called you. Driven to your house in Happy Valley. Called your wife. Begged a union for the girls.

You got a terminal painful illness. Had to stop drinking. My daughter was at your bedside. Your oldest daughter face timed you and said she hoped to meet you in heaven someday. She thanked you for giving her life. She thought she saw tears from your closed eyes.

You died.

You left your vast fortune to your wife. Not a penny to your daughters. Not a note. Not anything. It would have been nice.

If I hadn’t victimized you, used you to save face, had apologized , who knows? We might have been friends.

“Rest well.”

I just wanted to tell you about us.

Barbara Rose Brooker is the author of many novels. Her latest novel Love, Sometimes was published in 2020 by Post Hill Press/ Simon Schuster, and the audible was released November 2020. She is at work on a new book. Her podcasts and TV appearances are on www.barbararosebrooker.com