The Malnutrition of Marriage

Karen stood barefoot in the kitchen at 2 AM, the hum of the refrigerator the only sound in her suffocatingly silent apartment. She dumped a handful of spinach into the blender—organic, expensive, the kind she'd started buying when she turned forty and suddenly feared her own mortality. Her mother had died of a stroke at forty-two. The irony wasn't lost on her: Karen exercised daily, took every vitamin supplement Gwyneth Paltrow ever mentioned, yet somehow she was the one alone in the middle of the night, pulsing greens into something that tasted like lawn clippings and desperation.

She should have been asleep.

Her husband David's iphone sat on the counter, charging, its dark screen like a mirror reflecting her own exhausted face—hair frizzy, eyes puffy, that peculiar middle-age erosion that happened while you were busy living a life you hadn't exactly chosen. Three months ago, she'd found a long blonde hair caught in the passenger seat of his car. David, whose hair had been thinning since graduate school. David, who now worked late so often he'd practically moved into his office at the university, where his students were young, bright, and undamaged by life's slow accumulation of disappointments.

The phone buzzed. A text message lit the screen: "Can't stop thinking about last night. The swimming pool after hours—so dangerous, so perfect. -L"

Karen felt the vitamin supplements she'd swallowed earlier turn to stone in her stomach. L. Lauren. The teaching assistant with the swimsuit-model body who led the university's swimming team. David had mentioned her once, casual, dismissive—"new grad student, very dedicated to her athletes." Dedicated enough to meet him at the pool after midnight.

The blender sat unused on the counter. Karen picked up the phone, her thumb hovering over the screen. She could confront him. She could pack her bags. She could—

No. She set the phone back down precisely where she'd found it.

Instead she turned on the blender. The spinach whirred into oblivion, reduced to something digestible, something manageable. She poured the green sludge into a glass, forced it down, vitamin by vitamin, nutrient by nutrient, while the minutes ticked toward dawn and the slow, certain realization that she could feed her body perfectly, precisely, scientifically—and still, somehow, starve.