Written by Sue Ann Gleason
The Goddess | Photograph by Adam Jon Miller
Buffalo, New York. 1979. The dining room table is covered in a blizzard of food and drink: pizza, chicken wings, bottles of Molson’s Stock Ale from our trek across the Peace Bridge. My fiancé, Norman, who is miles away in Virginia where he works while I finish my last year at university, sends me a flannel-lined sleeping bag as a graduation present. I tuck it away beside the blender he used in his proposal. “I think we need a blender,” he said. Code for: Will you marry me?
The phone rings. I take the call upstairs, away from the hustle and bustle: friends laughing, drinks flowing. Norm’s voice, distant.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
“I met someone,” he says.
I don’t remember the rest of our conversation. The room spins above the clatter of plates and voices below—aunts and uncles and cousins buzzing through the rooms of this house like bees spinning honey.
Our wedding is one week away.
I return to the party, searching my brain for what I’d missed or, maybe, ignored. The day I found a photograph of another woman in his glove compartment. The hot summer night I called to tell him Caroline was dead, phone ringing long past the break of dawn. The words of my friend’s mother, “He has roving eyes.”
I break the news to my parents.
“Do you have any idea how much we’ve invested in this wedding?” Mom asks, lips as tight as her posture. Dad? No words, just an arm around my shoulder, a gentle squeeze.
I fly to Virginia the next morning with an empty suitcase, still feeling the glare of my mother’s stare. But when I arrive, my soon-to-be husband is in tears. “I was lonely,” he says. Desperate to believe him, I carry on with the wedding plans.
The ceremony takes place on Memorial Day. On Labor Day, I find myself pregnant. My husband? Once again, seeing the other woman.
We schedule the abortion.
Years later in my sixties, I feel a mantle of unresolved grief. When I ponder the geology of relationship, I see a young woman who, even at twenty-one, was afraid to cross her mother. I see a young woman who desperately wanted to believe the words of her beloved. That loneliness is a plausible excuse for duplicity. For years, I thought I needed to forgive my mother, make peace with the ex. But now I see that the hot molten layer in my belly was asking me to forgive myself.
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Sue Ann Gleason is a poet, writer, and educator. Author of “in the glint of broken glass” and “Pencil Man,” her work has appeared in a variety of literary magazines and several anthologies, including Kerning, A Space for Words, and The Wonder of Small Things, Poems of Peace & Renewal, winner of the New England Book Award for Poetry. Sue Ann holds soul-inspired writing circles and organizes grassroots efforts, nurturing individuals and agents for change in an increasingly complex world. When she’s not worrying over words, you’ll find her cooking up mouth-watering meals or conjuring craft cocktails. Like her father, she loves a good party. You can find more of Sue Ann’s writing at https://sueanngleason.substack.com/