Divorce Rat

When my husband and I thought we would stay together,
we decided to landscape the front, tear out the weeds,
pull out a row of shrubs and one big tree.
The shrubs had been planted back in the 80s when the house was built.
Upon quick glance, you might think they were fine—the tops green,
like a toupee. But all of them were half or three-quarters dead.
Brittle by their pudgy middles, desiccated and brown from their waists
down into the ground. We chain-sawed each one at the base,
not realizing the sweaty months, the hatchet hacking,
what sweat and pleading and burns on the palms
to pull out the roots. Into drilled holes, we poured soap
and salt, soaking the roots. Then burning, hand-sawing off
some of the larger roots like taking off an octopus’s legs
one by one, until my husband could use a large pole as a lever,
and you heard the tear. To tear a tree from the Earth
sounds like you’re ripping God’s thick fabric.
When we pulled out the last one, the biggest,
not a shrub but an actual pine tree, taller than either of us
and dead to the height of our heads. Amid its dead roots,
we saw a tunnel in the soil, and a big fat rat body
rolled out and lay on its back on the gravel driveway in the sun.
Once during a fight, I told my husband my affair was his fault.
Not in those words exactly, but it’s true, I blamed him.
I realize now how much this was like the times he had told me
his being suicidal was all my fault. Excuses, how much
I loved the baby compared to him. Once the weeds and tree
were gone, we could see the dry dirt, full of the kind of grubs
that indicate the soil is gone, containing little to no nutrients.
My husband later claimed my affair was to punish him.
I can see the way in which I was, indeed, indecent, an eye for an eye—
not with the affair exactly, because I thought I loved that other man—
but with the blame. The rat lay there. Then, amazingly, sprung up.
Ran into the woods. Terrifying to see a country rat, larger than
a chihuahua, spring into action. Terrifying and thrilling.
A rat is a creature that can survive a dry, dead burrow
filled with chemicals and illness. To think, its belly warmed
from the sun. To pretend to vanquish your foes: a shovel, a chainsaw.
To pretend to reanimate, your own Firebird
from the ash, your own springtime, to begin again.
I am a rat, I might tell my next lover. A rat is a creature
that can play dead for eons until it nearly forgets it is alive.
A rat is a creature who knows how to get by.

*

“All is fair in love and war,” the saying goes. WIFE X disagrees. Pat Benatar sang, “Love is a battlefield.” And with the statistics about intimate partner violence, household labor, and more–WIFE X agrees with Benatar, which is why she is using this nom de guerre as she writes from her home somewhere on the East Coast.