The Riddle of Us

You know what's funny about marriage? It's not the grand betrayals. It's the way someone becomes a stranger in inches.

I watched Arthur across the dinner table, pushing his spinach around with a fork. He'd taken to shopping at that fancy organic market now—said he needed more vitamin D in his diet, though the only thing he seemed deficient in was conversation.

"How was your day?" I asked, for the thousandth time this year.

"Fine. Got that report done." He chewed slowly, deliberately, as if buying time before he'd need to ask about mine.

I thought about his sister's goldfish pond, where we'd gone last Sunday. She'd named every single one, thirty fish swimming in endless circles, and Arthur had commented on how peaceful it seemed. I'd wanted to scream. That's not peace, I'd thought. That's forgetting where you've been every three seconds.

Lately, Arthur looked at me like I was a sphinx—some ancient, inscrutable thing he once worshipped but now just found mildly irritating. The riddle wasn't what had changed between us. The riddle was when I'd stopped caring enough to solve it.

"I'm thinking about leaving," I said.

The fork paused halfway to his mouth. A leaf of spinach fell back onto his plate.

"What?"

"Us. I'm thinking maybe we're done."

He looked at me then, really looked at me, for the first time in months. And the terrifying thing was that I saw panic in his eyes—but not because he loved me. Because I was disrupting the pattern. Because I was the one fish who'd suddenly learned to climb out of the bowl.

"Don't be dramatic," he said, and went back to eating.

The spinach was cold by then. So was everything else.