She had not noticed this until right now, sitting on this bench 4 years later.
When did I stop reading in the evenings?
The green chair had gone into storage in the spring of 2020. She had not replaced it with anything. She had been reading in bed, which was fine, which was perfectly fine, but the evenings had a different quality now. She fell asleep earlier, reading less, the books taking longer to finish, the small stack on the nightstand shifting slowly rather than turning over the way it used to.
She had thought this was age. She was realizing now that it might have been something else.
When did I start asking Daniel’s permission for things?
Not explicitly. Never explicitly. She would have caught that, would have refused it. It had happened in a more subtle way. She had started framing her own plans around their schedule, checking before she made commitments that had nothing to do with them, mentioning her plans to Daniel with an upward inflection. I was thinking of visiting Elaine this Thursday, as though it required his approval, as though her own time had become communal property without any formal agreement that this was so.
She thought about the Thursday she had cut her coffee with Elaine short because Vivien had a call in the afternoon and liked the house quiet. She thought about Elaine’s voice. Since when?
When did I stop cooking what I wanted to cook?
She thought about the recipe tin, her grandmother’s index cards, the handwriting she had known since childhood, the apple pie she had not made for 3 years until Christmas. And at Christmas she had made it, and no one had eaten it. And she had wrapped the leftovers in foil and eaten a slice alone at the kitchen table the next morning and told herself she had made it for herself and almost believed it.
When did I stop having opinions?
This one stopped her.
She sat with it on the bench by the river and felt it fully because it was the truest and most damaging of all of them.
She had opinions. She had always had opinions about books and politics and how to grow tomatoes and what constituted a good life and what love actually required of a person and a hundred other things. Robert had loved her opinions. He had married her, he used to say, partly because she always had a clear view on things and was not afraid to say so.
At some point in the last seven years, she had stopped saying so, not because anyone had told her to stop, not because she had been silenced in any way she could point to, but because she had learned through accumulation, through the slow education of a hundred small moments, that her opinions were not particularly welcome at the table. That the conversations she was invited into had predetermined shapes, and her role in them was primarily to agree or to listen, and that when she had occasionally deviated from this, when she had said carefully, that she wasn’t sure about something, that she saw it differently, the temperature in the room had changed in ways that were never acknowledged, but always felt.
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