Michigan

She had been with her husband for almost 15 years, since they were sophomores in high school. They had a nine-year-old son and had almost stopped trying for a second baby when, during the pandemic, she found herself pregnant with a girl, the best kind of surprise in the middle of an otherwise strange year. But her water broke early and the delivery went poorly—it was, actually, a traumatic nightmare; an unplanned C-section during which the surgeon’s scalpel nicked her colon, leaving her in the hospital for a month until she was stable enough for a repair surgery that went poorly and still hasn’t been fixed properly. (She’d wanted to sue and thought it would be an easy case, but four different lawyers said that the consent paperwork she signed before being wheeled to the operating room cleared the hospital of any wrongdoing.) While she struggled to get better her husband began an affair with a young woman he met at work, a relationship she discovered only after noting the new distance in their marriage and searching his phone for answers. The days after were a whirlwind of pleading and arguing and separating his things from hers. After he left she looked at her engagement ring. It had belonged to her grandmother and was soldered to her wedding band and she cried when she realized she would have to stop wearing them both. She thought of her grandparents and their long marriage, and how she had thought she would have that same type of love, and realized, suddenly, all that he had taken from her. More than once since that day her husband had begged her to take him back. An impossibility, she scoffed. He had become, somehow, a different person, one she didn’t like or trust or want to see. She had no regrets—her daughter was a blessing—but it was time to let go of all of the rest of it. When I met her she had just filed for divorce and she spoke of everything matter-of-factly, with a sense of calm. I told her she seemed very at peace and she just nodded. It turns out, she said, that it’s possible to be unhappy and not realize it until, suddenly, you have no choice but to realize it. The next night was her birthday party and she had invited a guy she might be interested in, though the thought of dating was sort of unfathomable after spending her entire adult life with the person she’d loved since homeroom and cafeteria lunches and Friday night football games. Still, though. Maybe she could. Maybe, they might.

New Jersey

After bidding on 17 houses, they’d finally gotten one, a cape near the beach with hardwood floors, nooks and crannies and shelves in unexpected places, a small yard for gardening, and a master bedroom with an arched ceiling and, delightfully, a tiny refrigerator. They had lived in their current apartment for seven years, and she had had what felt like fourteen lives before that, so the business of sorting and packing was daunting and littered with emotional minefields. At first she wasn’t sure what to get rid of. A sweater that her mother had knitted that she’d never worn seemed hard to toss (their relationship was difficult and so choosing to either keep or donate the sweater became, suddenly, imbued with meaning). The photo album from her first wedding, full of beautiful photos of a terrible relationship that had ended shortly after she wore the dress (she’d keep the proofs and some negatives and convert the rest to digital, she decided). An old chair, clawed to death by their cats (she left it on the curb and watched from the window as the city hauled it away). But some decisions came easier. The canvas prints from her second wedding, beautiful photos but shabby printing, would go, to be replaced later with framed photos. She’d keep a few settings of fine china and jettison the rest; she’d give wine glasses, long neglected in her sobriety, to friends. Days went by and boxes were sealed and the load, slowly, began to lighten. In the end there was, maybe, something to be said for the process of picking through your past to decide what to keep and what to leave behind.

Oregon

She had long been a champion of local government and so this year she decided to run for the school board, not so much because she desperately wanted to be a member but because there had been discussions of excluding LGBTQ topics from sex education and she felt, strongly, about equity and representation and making sure that every single kid could see themselves in their own curriculum. (To be honest she had mostly hoped that someone else would run and take this on, but no one did, and so she felt it was up to her.) It instantly became awful—the comments on Facebook and in dark corners of the internet from people she’d never met, calling her names and accusing her of things. (She had, for example, spent a lot of time explaining to people that remote learning wasn’t some kind of vacation for teachers, and had in return received a lot of vitriolic comments about how teachers’ unions were making kids suffer and that she must be in favor of that sort of misery.) She wasn’t naive—how could any of us be naive now, after the year we have all weathered—and she maybe should have known it would be like this, and she could have simply stopped reading, but once you shine a light onto a train wreck it’s hard to look away from the carnage. She knew that the loudest voices don’t always belong to the largest groups, but still, there seemed to be a lot of people who didn’t agree with her, and so the race would probably be close, and she might lose, and maybe that would be fine, though she hated the thought of failing and of letting down the people who had supported her. Most of all she hated the idea that she and her family might be part of a system that so fundamentally disagreed with the things she believed in. On election night, she held a virtual happy hour with her supporters. She made tacos and her parents came over and everyone sat and waited for the polls to close. By morning, she was projected to win her race—not by a slim margin, as she had anticipated, but by what could conceivably be considered a landslide. Two months later she took the oath of office and accepted a plant from the superintendent, who told her jokingly that the goal was to keep it alive for her entire four-year term. At the school board meeting that night protesters swarmed the room, standing one by one to object to the idea that the school district might teach its students a clear-eyed view of history that laid bare the systemic racism baked into each layer of the country. One woman read from the Constitution; others talked about how God sees everyone as equal, leaving no reason to dissect the framework that might explain why so many other people see things differently. From the dais she watched her children tightly grip her husband’s hands. This was it, then. She was here now. She was in the fight.

other people's stories, chapter one