THE NEW YORK TIMES DIVORCE ANNOUNCEMENT
Elisa Albert

“… My New York Times wedding announcement read, as many do, like a smug sigh of relief: Nice privileged over-educated girl marries nice privileged over-educated boy. Accelerated offspring, sound real-estate investment, timely death, and flourishing of Judaica on the planet forthcoming. Continuity of the Jewish people thusly assured and hopes and dreams of respective families fulfilled, all with a lively hora, some lovely orchids, and top-of-the-line kitchenware to seal the deal.

But less than a year after our triumphant announcement (oh, and the getting married itself), my husband and I separated, and all that pride, joy and hope inscribed in the paper of record quickly gave way to a tailspin of failure, reproach, and profound guilt. It wasn’t only my life and heart I’d destroyed: I felt I had dashed the hopes of loved ones, wasted an obscene amount of money, and failed to fulfill the needs of my people by reproducing. I found myself fairly buried under the rubble.

Disaster begets questions. For starters, how do you pick yourself up and dust yourself off when you’ve colossally messed up in front of everyone you know? What the hell happened, for another? Whose “fault” was it? Did I try hard enough? What does true love look like, if not what I thought I had? Who keeps the gifts? How do I go about the rest of my life trying to forget that box of fabulous wedding-photo proofs buried at the back of my closet? How did something that looked so “right” turn out to be so devastatingly wrong? The answers I felt compelled to give – to great-aunts, my mother’s friends, my friends’ mothers, various dissociated yentas, the lucky red-state bride who won my absurdly out-of-character Vera Wang on e-bay – ranged from the practical to the existential. What, in the name of Colin Cowie, had I been thinking?

I wished I could fend off those inevitable, proliferate questions with my imaginary Times divorce announcement. I had fleetingly grasped the supposed brass ring of my adulthood: a perfect Jewish husband. How could it be over? Unfortunately, the Times lacks such a section. And anyway, I have precious few easy answers.”

Elisa Albert received an MFA from Columbia University. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Washington Square, Response, Pindeldyboz, and Body Outlaws: RE-writing the Rules of Body Images and Identity (Seal Press, 2004). She teaches creative writing in New York City, and is at work on a collection of stories and a novel.