Single File
My divorce has just come through. I’ve anticipated it for some time, I’ve even been looking forward to it, in a peculiar way, as the closing stage to unfinished business. Yet when the day dawned I tasted the bile of anti-climax.
So I tugged on my coat and went out to splurge on a dress – a green velvet one with peacocks on it. I hardly bothered checking the price tag, for it simply seemed crucial that I hand over whatever sum was required to take home the gown.
I don’t know when I’ll have an opportunity to wear this exotic affair but it’s hanging in my wardrobe, ready for the occasion. I’ll recognise it when it arrives.
Later I cracked open a bottle of champagne. It struck me as appropriate, since we drank bubbly at the wedding to toast the launch of a new way of life, to equally mark its demise. Not in a festive way, just in a fitting manner to commemorate the event’s solemnity.
Friends urged me to throw a divorce party but I decided against it. I understand why some people do, but in my case it struck a triumphalist and therefore jarring note. A divorce is sad as well as liberating. It occupies an uneasy position at the interface between life as a couple and life as a divorcée.
Even when you want to be divorced, you are obliged to acknowledge a sense of failure. A recognition of romance’s high hopes subverted by reality’s grim grind. And your own contribution to that collapse.
The marriage was a fleeting one, we had spent longer separated than together as man and wife by the time he petitioned for this divorce. Its brevity continues to shock me to the core.
All the same, I much prefer being a divorcée to being part of a married couple, for it was not a state that suited me particularly well. The trouble is, you can’t know that until vows are exchanged and the deed is done. I always felt a spark of recognition at feminist Gloria Steinem’s description of marriage as mating in captivity.
I’d prefer to be a spinster of this parish than a divorcée , but you can’t turn back the clock, and it strikes me there’s something rather thrillingly decadent about being a divorcée.
She’s definitely the calibre of creature to wear a peacock dress with glittering sequins for eyes. Some wives are too, of course, but I didn’t belong to that breed.
Maybe I’ll never step into that peacock frock, it may gather dust as a symbol of something I’d prefer not to be reminded of: the day my divorce was granted.
Then again, perhaps I’ll wake up next week and think ‘today’s the day’. Peacocks preen, don’t they? They swagger and flaunt themselves to catch the eye.
I think every man and woman needs one chance to strut in the wake of a divorce. To celebrate their survival and to signal their readiness to embrace the foreign territory that lies ahead.
When I’m ready for it, I know my peacock dress is ready for me. It’s my insurance policy.
