Divorce stands out among other things I don't like about marriage. After three failed marriages, I still can't accept that a man I taught to shower, brush teeth, wear clean clothes, and eat healthy would start hunting on different hunting grounds and abandon me. I married my first husband by mistake. I married my second husband for romance; and I married my third husband for money.
My dad, a military officer, and mom, a nurse, thought I could do so much better with my looks and brains. They gave me a great education; I graduated from the University of Pennsylvania at 4th and Walnut Street in Philadelphia, which was an Ivy League college. I majored in Business Administration. Years ago, my parents had dreamed of me working for Bear Stearns or Lehman Brothers, running some important department, getting my career together, and marrying some executive, with a couple million dollars yearly benefits package, and having a couple of beautiful kids in a mansion.
Instead, I married a guy I had met at the Mystery Book Club in the local Ink & Blood book store. Steve was short, with a triangular `chicken' chest and a round head. Add short-cropped hair, round glasses and a barn sweatshirt year-round, and you get the picture. He swept me off my feet, being an endless source of crime stories, real and fictional. He also educated me about gender relationships with my pregnancy as an unexpected complication. We got married a month before Iris invaded our lives and spent the following year arguing about which one of us should enter the Greater Philadelphia area workforce and start winning bread for the family. It was Steve who gave up and filed for divorce. Being single, he could stay in his parents' basement, have meals every day, and still keep up with reading every mystery novel ever published.
After Steve took off, and as a result of equitable distribution of marital property, I was left with our daughter Iris, and my first husband made away with the furniture and a 61-inch flat screen Scenium TV.
The local police department kicked my second husband out of our rental property after some amazing facts about his sex life surfaced.
I wasn't terribly surprised when my third husband walked out on me on a bright Monday morning. The night before we spent kissing in the dark; next morning, after a substantial breakfast, my husband finished his coffee, belched and said casually that he was leaving.
"Bye, sweetie," I said and rushed toward the door to see our daughter, Iris, on the bus.
"I mean, I'm leaving you."
I tripped over the carpet. The following day we spent arguing over divorce. It turned out that after four years of marriage; he went out to explore other options. He used the word `options' like it wasn't our marriage and our child we were talking about, but some alternative routes to get to his relatives in New Jersey.
Our divorce was completed with a settlement based on an equitable distribution relief principle. My husband evicted his stepdaughter and me from his house in the presence of two cops, and let us take only our personal belongings, like a pile of mystery novels and computer games. My husband's lawyer argued in court that the defendant, a.k.a. me, contributed little to the family budget because I did not hold any job other than being a housewife. I couldn't afford a lawyer, so I argued on my own behalf that it was our mutual decision for me to become a stay-at-home mom. Still, I had produced no income for the past four years, they argued, and was entitled only to child support. I lost my house, because it was my husband's; I lost my car, because it was my husband's as well. I kept some pieces of furniture, though. All antiques with mismatched drawers.
Struggling to survive in a sluggish economy, I took the first job available. I drove a cab, because I could keep my cab after hours. Besides, driving was one of my two favorite things to do. (The other was reading mystery novels.) I could drive anywhere, anytime, regardless of weather. When I wasn't behind the wheel, I would most likely be lying in bed with a new whodunit and a nice calorie-packed snack.
Six months later, I knew the streets of Philadelphia like my parents' backyard. We rented a place on 4th and Arch street, a quiet, sleepy neighborhood, where shootouts and police raids were usually over before three, and burglaries wouldn't start until nine in the morning. After moving here from a Huntingdon Valley mansion in the Philadelphia suburbs, we got burglarized twice. The first time, thieves took our TV, which I didn't miss; the second time, they took my quilt, which I did miss. In this neighborhood, a single white mother living without a boyfriend had `troubles' written all over her; that's why I carried a compact pink, rubber-coated, ten-pound gym weight in my purse.
This particular glorious October morning, I kicked my Ford to life and cruised slowly towards Market Street Station, looking for a client. A man in a business suit flagged me down, and soon I had several dollars stuck in the pocket of my purse. Two hours later, rush hour turned the city streets into something remarkably similar to an elementary school's hallways: the same chaotic traffic, the same noise, and the same intense knowledge of the priority of one's needs. It was time to get off the road and have the second daily cup of coffee. I pulled into a secret parking space between two rundown buildings off Spruce and 13th Street and went into a tiny Uncle Tad's coffee shop. They brewed very strong coffee and carried good ole American Tastykakes at a thousand calories apiece, but that was all I needed to wake up and start a bright new day.
