From the Publisher: “In this warm, deeply-personal, and often humorous book, Nancy McCabe re-examines and gains new understanding of her early life and her ill-advised marriage. Borrowing from Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights and Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” how-to essays and before-and-after weight loss ads, a curriculum guide, Bible study notes, an obsession with Tom Swiftie jokes, and women’s magazine columns and quizzes that oversimplified women’s lives and choices, McCabe examines the many influences that led to her youthful marriage—and out of it, into finally taking control of her life…”
About the Author: Nancy McCabe directs the writing program at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford and teaches in the low residency MFA program at the Spalding University School of Creative and Professional Writing. She is the author of four previous books of nonfiction and a novel. She lives in Bradford, Pennsylvania.
McCabe and Lori Jakiela will be celebrating the launch of Can This Marriage Be Saved? with a virtual event hosted by White Whale Books on October 15th. To order copies with a signed book plate, visit White Whale’s online store!
Our first date is on Halloween, though at first I don’t think of it as a date, just two friends going to a party together. He dresses like a nun. I go as a devil. I can’t help but think that we’re both playing against type, him a lapsed Catholic, me a girl with a strict religious upbringing.
Couples in garish makeup and rubber masks come and go from a disintegrating Victorian house with loose porch railings and cracked siding. The house reeks of pot and cigarette smoke. It hangs fog-like over big empty rooms containing crumbling yellow carpet pads, a rickety kitchen chair here, a dingy mattress there. It’s warm for late October and the windows are all shut tight, turning the air to a cloudy fishbowl. Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin tremble the walls, and people yell over the music, mouths moving as soundlessly as goldfish trolling a bowl for flakes of food. Music pulses through me like a headache.
“You’re so sexy in that costume,” Marc says. I look at him skeptically. I’m wearing a hideous double-knit red polyester jumpsuit, a last-minute purchase from the Goodwill store.
I try to smile as a guy in a Groucho Marx nose sizes me up, his gaze traveling from my knees up to my breasts and then flicking away, seeking out more impressive cleavage.
The music dies down.
“Hot,” says Luke Skywalker, voice loaded with irony as his eyes rake me.
Marc beams proudly. “Bless you, my child,” he tells Luke Skywalker in falsetto. “Hail Mary full of grace.”
I stab him with my pitchfork. I mean to be playful. My attempt feels strained.
A woman in a playboy bunny outfit and fishnet stockings twitches her little round tail as she prances by, casting me a scornful look.
The music blasts again. This whole party feels like a rude awakening, my transition from a sheltered childhood, my initiation into a real world underpinned with a vague chaos and brutality.
I wonder when Halloween stopped being about pretend as I thread my way past a cat, a streetwalker, and Audrey Hepburn. When did it become an excuse for girls to wear clingy black things?
When someone passes Marc a joint, he pinches it between two fingers and sucks at it, then tries to relay it to me. I shake my head. On the second round, he passes. And then mutters, “Let’s get out of here.”
I appreciate Marc’s sensitivity to my discomfort, until, in the car, he pitches his veil and my horns into the back seat and comes after me with his hands and tongue, and I realize that he’s taken our departure from the party as tacit agreement to a makeout session. That’s the moment I fully realize that he thinks we’re on a date. I shrink away from him, pressing myself against the window.
Falling leaves surf the breeze and rustle against each other as they land, a constant shivering bustle that makes it sound like it’s always raining.
Marc tugs at the zipper down my front, and I turn away. “Don’t,” I say.
“Don’t you like me?” Marc asks.
“Yes.” I hold his hands so he can’t unzip me. He looks cheerful, as if he’s interpreting this restraining gesture as a sign of affection.
“Just relax,” he says.
“Let’s just talk.” I pull away again, and his habit tangles as he falls with exasperated exaggeration against the back of his seat. “Okay,” he says. “Talk.”
“No, you.”
“Talk about what?” He stares at my breasts. “I think I love you,” he adds hopefully.
“I’m not having sex till I’m married,” I reply.
My words have the desired effect. His hand, inching toward my zipper, stills in midair, then drops. But then he says in a joking tone, “I think I want to marry you.”
I laugh uneasily and slip back in my seat, putting distance between us again. Out the window, leaves tap-dance, shuffling on the asphalt, then hop-step and kick up in the wind. This street, where just a few hours ago children trick or treated, now is desolate.
This is the kind of night, I will think many years later, that should have been relegated to a vague memory, its only significance my new flicker of interest in the idea of marriage. Not to Marc, but marriage in the abstract, marriage as something that might provide refuge from the scary and unpredictable and unfathomable world. A kind of disguise, an insulation from smoky rooms and throbbing music and people in masks whose identities I can’t determine, whose expressions I can’t read.
“I’m never getting married,” I say less than two years before I do, in fact, marry him and don a new disguise: Marc’s wife. Happily married woman.
So what happened between then and the Halloween seven years later when I dress as Miss MFA, Pageant Queen, once again playing against type? I married against my better judgment, I lost my way, and maybe I’m starting to find it again. Marc and I have recently separated. We were kind and sad.
Now I glue sequins to a tight black dress from Goodwill, make a sparkly sash, lather on makeup, tease my hair up high, and stuff my bra. I look in the mirror, finding myself unrecognizable, but what’s new?
A guy I have a crush on and his officemate will arrive, dressed like each other. One of our classmates wears a sandwich board bearing an Atlantic Monthly letterhead; he’s a rejection slip. Another classmate dresses as a male chauvinist pig, complete with pig snout and muddy streaks across his face. Some of the guys get drunk and try to place long distance calls to Walker Percy and Anne Tyler.
I advocate for world peace. When guys stare at my boobs, I say, “They’re not real.” When a couple of women tell me I should wear makeup like this all the time, I laugh.
I can’t wait to wash my face and peel off my clingy dress, as terrifying as it is to imagine finally facing the world undisguised. All I know is that I’m anything but a devil, a pageant queen, the insulated girl I used to be, Marc’s wife. The dance floor is so crowded that people keep bumping into me and accidentally stepping on my shoelaces, untying them. The laces flop around, threatening to trip me up. Finally I kick up one foot, then another.
My shoes loosen from my feet and soar through the air. I go on dancing in my socks.
This excerpt from Can This Marriage Be Saved? A Memoir by Nancy McCabe (University of Missouri Press, September 2020) is published here courtesy of the author and should not be reproduced without permission.
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