2 People, 25 Years of Marriage, and the DNA That Could Tear Us Apart


By: Lauren Slater

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Photo Courtesy of Katie Gustafsson/Trunk Archive

This article appears in the March 2015 issue of ELLE magazine.

We have been married for 22 years, and everything was fine until, 12 years into it, we had kids. Our children changed us. They brought out in Benjamin a love so fierce, so focused, that I fell off the edge of his world, plunging straight past him and into some sea where, no matter how much I flounder and flail, he fails to toss me a line. As for me, in the sea, my children often appear to me as apparitions, floating forms, people of poured plaster or glass, ghostly and beautiful but beyond my reach.

I recently told my husband that if we want to save our marriage, we need to find time to spend together without the children. “It works like this,” I tell him. “The husband and wife are a team. That team has to be the prime priority, or the family collapses.”

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“It works like this,” my husband tells me. “We need to pay attention to the family. We need to do more things together. If we were a more coherent group, if you would join us when we play Scrabble or Clue, then our marriage would improve.”

I don’t know who’s right. I suspect I am. I suspect that the dyad needs to be diamond-hard to survive the assaults life throws its way, the challenge of children, the bland familiarity that rides on the tail of time. I can’t see how Scrabble could possibly restore the romantic bond that drew my husband and me together way back when: he with his strawberry-blond hair and pale-sky eyes, me with my mahogany hair and hands the size of starfish. We made our wedding invitations ourselves, taking pictures of our faces and cutting them in half and then pasting them together. I found a copy of the invitation the other day, and I can see now that the joined faces do not present a whole but rather look like some kind of crash—and if you peer closely, you can see the ragged rift between the half husband and the half wife, a subtle seam of white between us.

My husband and I have always been radically different people, so I suppose it should come as no surprise that our differences have deepened. He is an engineer and a committed rationalist, evaluating every problem, no matter how slight, by breaking it into its component pieces and searching for a solution. Feelings, Benjamin says, only obscure the necessary steps. Over the years, we have become clichés. I, of course, approach problems by listening for their emotional undertones to discern the hidden issue: life as layers, me peeling back, lifting lids, while my husband draws graphs and composes computer code.

Not long ago, he brought home two boxes and lay them side by side on the counter. The labels read “23andMe,” and the picture showed a pop-art X chromosome. “We spit into the test tubes,” my husband said, tapping the top of one box, “and then send it off, and in a few weeks we’ll get back our genomes, all analyzed.”

“I don’t need to have my genome analyzed,” I said. “I already know I’m Jewish and come from Eastern Europe, and I know that breast cancer runs in my family, as does diabetes, so…I don’t want to.”

“You might find out that you are not as Jewish as you think,” my husband said. “You might find out you are at high risk for a disease you could do something about.” (23andMe no longer provides information about disease risk; the FDA ordered the company to stop until it completed the agency’s regulatory review process.)

“Yeah,” I said. “And I also might find out I’m at high risk for a disease I can’t do anything about, like Alzheimer’s.”

“I’m going to do it,” my husband said. “For the kids. They deserve to know what they inherited from us.” And right then and there he tore open the package, read the instructions, and began to spit into a little tube. It had a line about one third of the way up, indicating the stop point. “My God,” my husband said after several minutes; his spit, which had a strange pinkish tinge, barely filled the bottom well of the tube. “My God, I never knew how hard it is to salivate.” The instructions said to rub your cheeks to stimulate your salivary glands, so he did that.

And then I said, “Let me,” and I massaged his cheeks—the first time we’d touched in who knows how long, his cheeks covered with stubble, the barely there beard the color of sunset, russet orange, wiry but also soft. It took about 20 minutes to reach the red line, his spit still pink, glowing, and frothy, like magic fluid—and indeed it was, was it not? From this quotidian stuff, the scientists at 23andMe would uncoil a portion of my husband’s DNA.

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Later that night, alone, I massaged my own cheeks and then spit into the cup of my hand. My spit did not have a pinkish glow and did not look luminous. The wetness seeped into my life line, darkening it, almost as if it had been inked. What, really, did I know? I knew that my great-grandmother’s name was Mindel and that she was a seamstress in Minsk. But my whole long line, plush with possibilities, certainly with swerves—no, I did not know that. Did I want to know? The 23andMe pamphlet said that the genetic testing would reveal your past going back hundreds of thousands of years, back to a time when two species of humans roamed the earth: the Cro-Magnons—who survived and thrived and, at some point about 10,000 years ago, discovered the power packed inside seeds and started the agricultural revolution—and the Neanderthals, who lived in Europe and elsewhere during the long Ice Age, eventually dying out, pushed out by the Cro-Magnons or simply dwindling in numbers from hunger and fear and who knows what else.

If I spit into that tube, I might get back a report that says part of me comes from a land of snow, or the opposite, that I have a Sephardic strain, that my lineage winds through red deserts and up over crumbling cliffs. I might find out I am related to Wagner, Marie Curie, or Catherine the Great. And there was a staid side to this too. Ten years earlier, I’d had a bilateral mastectomy for breast cancer, and I could find out whether my disease was related to a mutation that might have been passed on to my children. The second kit still sat on the kitchen counter. I broke the band around the box, removed the test tube, and felt my mouth begin to water.

My husband now massaged my cheeks. He kneaded the sides of my jaw, which was continually clenched, even in sleep; I was often awoken by the sound of my own teeth grinding. It was late, that night. The moon was flat but also bright in the sky, a perfect disk, a decal it seemed you could peel right off the skin of the sky and stick to your window. Within minutes I hit the fill line, and my husband gently took the tube from me, carefully, cautiously, treating it with a reverence that made my heart ache from memory and want. My flanks burned. I could still feel his fingers on my face. His eyes looked sunken—sleepiness. He usually crashed on the couch while I slept alone in what our children called “the big bed.”

“Come upstairs with me,” I said, extending a hand, the one with the life line. He shook his head no. “You’re going to read before bed, and I need to get up early.”

“Okay,” I said. Why didn’t I tell him that I wouldn’t read, that as soon as he slipped between the sheets, our sheets, I’d snap off the light? Why didn’t I insist, persist? Habit, I suppose, and also the terrible fact that I prefer to sleep alone, prefer to be draped with darkness when no one else is around. The darkness does not conceal you; it reveals you. In the dark, I utter my dreams, waking myself midsentence as I talk urgently to clowns and snowmen, to birches and bones. In the dark I grind away, mashing my mouth over and over again.

Benjamin got his test results before I did. The envelope was addressed by hand—which, coming from a big company, seemed significant, as though the findings required some softness, a personal touch, which could be very good or very bad. Perhaps the company was writing to tell him he came from British royalty, that he carried a king’s blood; or perhaps he harbored some dreadful disease, and the company personalized the response to ease the pain.

I wanted to tear open the envelope and read his results, so I could know him before he knew himself. But I knew better; Benjamin is a deeply private person. I picked up the phone and called him at work.

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“Hi,” I said, “your test results have come in. Want me to open the envelope and read to you what it says?”

“No!” he said, without a moment’s hesitation. “No. Don’t touch the envelope. I’ll read my results when I get home.”

“I’m curious,” I said.

“Don’t,” he said, and then paused. “Lauren, don’t touch my mail.”

We hung up, and I thought of how my husband had offered up his body to the scientists in a way he never had to me. Our sex, before it stopped, was always with the lights out, always with his eyes clamped closed, the kind of sex that leads to loneliness, if this is possible, for sex is the joining of two bodies and the mingling of your germ cells, an act so intimate and primal, and yet it can be lonely, if you open or are opened and find no one sitting on your stoop. Sometimes during sex with Benjamin I thought of doorways in children’s books, doorways in forests, three planks of wood in the middle of a grove of evergreen trees, the children tentatively approaching, and then finally, in a big gust of courage, walking through, into a whole other world of blue pools and fruit trees, of big birds with crimson beaks and eggs that gushed gold when you broke them.

When Benjamin got home, he immediately picked up the letter, kissing the children on the crowns of their heads, and disappeared into his study. I expected he’d be in there for some time, but only minutes had gone by when he marched back out into the kitchen. “The downside,” he said, “is that I have a 15 percent chance of developing Alzheimer’s before I’m 79, but I share that risk with over 80 percent of the population, so that’s pretty standard. As for the rest”—he paused and straightened his spine, thrust out his chest, and, with a fist, pounded it three times—”I’m pretty much pure Viking.”

“Pure Viking,” I repeated, not knowing what, precisely, that meant.

“My ancestors,” he said, “are all from northern Europe—Greenland, Iceland, those regions. I descend from the far north.”

He turned to leave the kitchen, calling as he went, “Come on, kids, come downstairs.” Then I could hear his voice from the living room. “You descend from people who conquered the cold,” he told the children, “who came to Iceland in boats they made by hand, strong people, fierce people who built an empire out of ice and sweat.” Benjamin told them about the old Norse gods, about Odin, master of ecstasy, a war god, and a poetry god, about Thor and his huge magic hammer you knew he was using whenever lightning struck. But this was hardly the whole story. After all, I was Jewish, and according to Jewish law, children take the religion of the mother, so my children were at best one hundred percent Jewish and at worst, or at least, 50 percent Jewish, and thus were inheritors of a whole other set of Old Testament tales.

One night at dinner a few weeks later, I announced that this year we were going to have a seder to celebrate Passover.

“Cool,” said Benjamin, chewing thoughtfully. Then he put down his fork. “What exactly does Passover celebrate?”

“The Jews,” I said, and I looked at my two kids across the table. “The Jews, which both of you are, were once slaves in Egypt, and Passover celebrates their escape from that slavery.

"You are,” I continued, my voice rising in a way I did not like, rising with a whine in it, “part of a tiny, tiny tribe of people, a people so persecuted that it’s a miracle Judaism even still exists.”

“So tell us more about Passover,” Benjamin said.

Moses. The burning bush. The parting of the Red Sea. The pieces of the Passover story swirled around in my mind, but it had been so many years since I’d practiced Judaism that the shards couldn’t cohere and so my story fell flat. “What matters,” I finally said to the kids, “is that you understand you come from this tiny tribe of people who survived against all odds. You have Jewish blood in you.”

“There’s no such thing as Jewish blood,” Benjamin said. “Judaism is a religion, not a bloodline.”

“It’s both,” I said, the kids drifting away as we faced each other in the kitchen.

“That’s what the Nazis thought,” Benjamin said, “that Judaism was a bloodline, when in reality it’s a set of beliefs and practices that have nothing to do with the way we, in this house, live our lives.”

“Judaism is something you are, not something you do.”

“I disagree with you,” Benjamin said, “but I’m happy to have a seder.”

Benjamin had gotten his 23andMe results early and had responded to the science of his self with a set of stories. I would have thought he’d meet science with science, not myth, and the fact that he didn’t reminded me that Benjamin could still surprise me, and a little flame flickered somewhere in my middle, in the hollow that once was not. The hollow hurt, a burl of grief for which I could not find any tears, even though I longed for them, water snaking down my face and making moisture in my arid enclosure. I wanted to cry in front of Benjamin, to cry with Benjamin, joined to him in mourning for what we both had lost, how he used to call me “pie,” for “sweetie pie,” how we used to go see movies, how we’d eat Thai food straight from the cardboard boxes. I missed these things and badly wanted them back. Benjamin said they’d return once the kids grew up and we were alone again, a dyad once more, but in these child-rearing years there was no room for what I wanted.

In early spring, I received my genetic-test results, via email, the only way that 23andMe now makes the data available. After staring at the screen for some time, I came to understand that, like most people, three percent of my genes come from the Neanderthals, meaning that during the time when two distinct species of humans roamed the earth, there was crossbreeding—a fact that made me feel oddly happy and full of possibility.
If the Neanderthals and the Cro-Magnons could find enough common ground to mate, than surely Benjamin and I could too.

On the second page of my report, I learned that I came from Eastern Europe and was 100 percent Ashkenazi Jewish. I did not carry the gene for Alzheimer’s or for Parkinson’s, nor for breast cancer, thankfully enough. My report told me that I was at risk for deep vein thrombosis and high cholesterol, that I have wet earwax and am genetically prone to like sweet and salty things. More significantly, my report confirmed what I had secretly feared: that my husband and I had absolutely no point of crossover in our bloodlines. We were two people whose differences extended past the simple surface of things and went straight through the skin and down to the cellular level, and that chilled me.

That night Benjamin and I had a huge fight, about money. “The horses,” he said to me. “Those horses are making us go broke.”

“The whole purpose of buying this property,” I said, “was so that I could have horses.”

“They are a purely discretionary expense. And it appears you care more for them than you do about our kids’ college educations.”

“Untrue!” I shouted. “Of course I care about our kids’ college educations. But the horses are not making us go broke. What’s making us go broke are all the computers you buy.”

“I’m tired,” Benjamin said. “I didn’t get any sleep last night.”

I felt slapped. Last night I’d awoken from a nightmare and gone downstairs to Benjamin on the couch. “Can you sleep with me for the rest of the night?” I’d asked. “I had a terrible dream.”

And, without answering, he had risen from the couch and followed me upstairs and climbed into bed beside me but then, once there, had turned his back to me and pulled a pillow over his head. Still, I thought it was a start. And now here he was, telling me he could not sleep in our marital bed.

“Why didn’t you get any sleep?” I asked. “I was completely quiet.”

“Just couldn’t,” he said. “You thrash around.”

I had an image then of myself thrashing around in a giant ocean, the horizon gray, drizzle darting from the sky, figures on a distant beach tiny and unreal. I could not tell whether it was a memory or simply something I was seeing in response to my husband’s words. I was swimming and swimming and could not get closer to the shore.

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And as I stood there, seeing myself wrestle with an ocean, my husband walked out of the room. I sat down in a chair. I felt as if I could not get enough air. I sucked in huge draughts, but my lungs were stuffed with wadding. The house was very quiet. Darkness fell. Lights from passing cars swept over the walls and the woodwork and my bare feet, illuminating them briefly, two feet on which I could rise and walk out of here, forever, if I wanted. From the barn I heard the horses whinny and pace, whinny and pace, hugely sensitive animals that knew when storms were approaching, scenting it on the breezes blowing past. I could hear my husband shuffling in his office. I wanted to burst through his closed door and say something, anything, to break the cold caul our marriage was in, but what words would do that? “Please,” I wanted to say, and nothing more. I could not go to him and kiss him because too great a gulf was between us, and it would be as inappropriate as kissing some stranger on the street. “Please,” I would say, and that’s all.

I stood up and began to walk down the long hall to his office. But the closer I got, the stronger a familiar and pungent scent I could not place became. I swear, my nostrils flared and quivered like those of my horses when they were scenting the wind and the weather. The smell had body to it; it felt physical, palpable, not a bad smell but a ripe smell, as if someone had left out a plate of fruit for a few days too many, the browning bananas and apples with their black bruises. I found the origins of this strange but strangely comforting scent right outside my husband’s closed door: a wicker basket piled high with his laundry, which he’d no doubt been saving for months. I put my hand on the mound of sweaty softness and then lifted my palm to my nose and took in the direct scent of him, feeling defeated and demeaned, like a dog with his nose in a crotch, but at the same time almost buoyant, because, well, here he was: the man I married, his scent the same now as it had been two decades ago when, after the ceremony, we had headed to our hotel room, laden with wedding cake half gone and roasted root vegetables on which we feasted before making love, and smelling him then like I always did whenever he came so close, the smell of a garden slightly past its prime, the smell of musty and dusty mathematical equations in a dank but beautiful book. Right there, with my hand on his mound of laundry, I recalled an experiment I’d once read about. Called the “Sweaty T-Shirt Experiment,” 20 men had slept in cotton T-shirts for several nights, and then 20 women rated which shirts smelled best to them. The researchers found that women consistently preferred the shirts of men whose immune systems contained important components that theirs lacked. The theory behind it was that nature, or Evolution with a capital E, does not want us to pick mates with immune systems that are the same as ours, so that our children will end up with more robust defense systems. A similar evolutionary imperative is the incest taboo, guarding our species from picking partners with genomes that are too similar. Thus we are caught in a complex bind, unconsciously drawn toward people who deeply differ from us to create healthy offspring, and then, once the offspring have sprung, so to speak, we’re left with someone who may be more foreign than friend. What is one to do in such a situation? Say, simply, “Please,” and hope that single simple word ferries you and your partner to some single, simple place where you can stitch your strings together? Obviously that won’t work. So, really, what is one to do?

I feel the need for light. I flick the switches as I descend the stairs with my husband’s laundry basket. Where, I wonder, are the children? Should I worry? It is nearing 6 P.M., and only my husband and I are home. Friday night—they must have made plans; I remember that, yes, they’re not expected home until later. Light. I continue making my way through the house, illuminating every corridor, every corner, going up into the kids’ rooms now, into the master, and then into the bathroom where, when the light pings on, I see the gleaming bathtub, deep and white, the huge head of the shower through which water pours when I turn the faucet, a roaring steam rising from the heavy hot water. I peel off my clothes and step under the jet of spray, enveloped by the soft steam that rises up my legs and winds around my torso, soap bubbles slick on my skin—my skin, the biggest organ in the human body, how long can it go without touch? I touch myself: my navel, my shoulders, my armpits, my neck, feeling the taut tendons in it, reaching back behind myself to touch the upper vertebrae; I dig in. I take the cake of soap between my palms and, rubbing, create an extravagant, sweet-smelling froth that I use to wash my chest, my hand running between the two saline implants that are my breasts and then lifting each implant, each saline sac, and washing beneath, and that is how I find it. Suddenly I come across a nub of hardness, a little knot right by a big bone, a rib. I’d had my breasts removed 10 years prior, after being diagnosed with ductal carcinoma in situ. I remember waking up from my mastectomy in a dim recovery room in which there were many beds, the room filled with stirrings and groans, a machine beeping, and then a nurse standing above me saying, “Breathe, breathe,” which scared me because maybe I wasn’t breathing correctly. And then Benjamin was there, flowers blazing in his fist, and the wheels of my bed were unlocked and we went whisking through the labyrinthine hospital to my room, which overlooked the Charles River.

It took me many, many weeks to heal from my mastectomy, but not once did I regret it, even when it became obvious that the plastic surgeon had botched the job, giving me two asymmetrical saline-filled sacs with no nipples on their mute mounds. “If you want nipples,” the plastic surgeon had said to me in a postoperative visit, “we can take some tissue from your tongue and create them.” Enough was enough. I’d go without. And so I have been free from mammograms and breast exams and MRIs and worry until now, this knot, this bur beneath my skin.

I step out of the shower, glistening. My heart is paddling fast, and I look down to see if it is visible, because it feels visible. “Benjamin,” I say. “Benjamin,” I call. I don’t bother wrapping myself in a towel, and that is different, because in our estrangement we have become shy and no longer show each other our naked bodies. But the knot changed that; in a single second, it changed it. Shyness suddenly seems entirely beside the point and, beyond that, I feel so stripped, so scared. I feel as if I’m standing without clothes in a blizzard where the snow is as fine as flour, but freezing, and I shiver. Benjamin comes to the doorway of the bathroom, his eyes widening as he sees me standing there stark naked. “I have a lump,” I say. We both know that a recurrence post-mastectomy would be a very bad thing; the oncologist had told us that a decade ago. I feel like I’m wavering. “What’s wrong?” Benjamin asks from another world, on the other side of the threshold. “Come here, please, I need you,” I whisper, and I say it again because I don’t think he heard me the first time. “I found a lump,” and then the tears I’ve claimed I’ve wanted for so long burble up inside me, and I wonder whether you can analyze a genome using tears instead of spit. “A lump,” Benjamin says, still standing on the other side of the threshold, and I say, “Yes,” and then I sail on that little raft of a word across the tiled bathroom and almost—but not quite—into his arms. “Feel this?” I ask, and lift up the pathetic little saline sac, and he kneads the flesh around my ribs, his eyes half closed, his fingers touching the crest of my clavicle, the hollow where my heart beats. “Over to the left,” I say, his fingers moving and then landing on the spot, massaging, measuring, contemplating, as if trying to assess what he could not assess—the danger. I feel in danger, endangered, about to be extinct but also, as Benjamin touches my knot, I feel something unwind like a bolt of cloth or a piece of twine, unwinding between us, undoing, at least for some seconds, years of rigid posturing, my knot giving way to an opening, and we go through it. With his free hand, Benjamin reaches behind me and wraps me in a towel; I am shivering. And together we go back to a time that seems like thousands of years ago, like another eon, a door appearing in our own personal forest that we both step through, stepping back into a time when I was first diagnosed and Benjamin had cupped my breasts the night before the surgeon removed them, and later, when he saw the botched reconstruction job, had the heart to say, “It’s not that bad.” And when I asked him if he could touch them, he said, “Of course I can.” He touched my prosthetic, no-nipples breasts, tenderly cupping first one and then the other, with his thumb circling the spot where the nipple should have been, and even though I know it was not possible to have felt this touch in these breasts made of saline sacs with no nerves in them, I nevertheless felt a sizzle when he circled what would have been the areola. And then he had kissed them and said, “Welcome.” And even though you can’t go back in time, even though time is not a knot that can unwind, standing there in this towel, I swear I hear his voice say, “Welcome,” and it steadies the little reeds that are my legs. “You welcomed me,” I say, and he nods, still feeling, still probing.

I once read that the human heart is built to beat two billion times in a lifetime and no more. To me this means that we all share a huge personal pain, common across cultures and continents, that provides for every human a bridge to any other human, each one of us knowing the other’s darkest heart, the loneliness in the limbs. Some of us deal with the fact of death by having children or writing books, something to preserve our genomic signature into the centuries beyond. Others do things that to me seem strange, like cryopreserve their bodies in the hope that someday scientists will figure out a way to reanimate the dead. What death knowledge does for me, this time around anyway, is to get me into my oncologist’s office, where she puts me in a CAT scanner that clicks and whirs and then finally stops, silent. “Well?” I say, sitting up, clutching the pathetic paper robe around my very vulnerable body. “A bone spur,” she says, smiling. “It’s just a bone spur.”

I am beyond relieved that my latest brush with death turned out to be just that, a brush, a drive-by. Still, the effects of seeing my horizon line and knowing that sooner rather than later I will shoot past it alters my psychology, though it will be only for a brief blip, I know. In these moments of reprieve, I feel like even pancakes are sacred, like a veggie burger grilled on a hot bun is a gift from some god, Thor or Yahweh, no matter. I go out into my garden; it is late summer now, harvest time, and I’m on a quest to preserve. I pick the ribbed squash, the plump tomatoes, and a few pumpkins. I pick the early apples and the apricots from our fertile fruit trees. Back in the kitchen, I get out my canning gear, the glass jars, the sterile tongs, the big white pot in which to boil water. “I’m fine,” I say to Benjamin when he comes home. “It was just a bone spur.”

“Bone spur,” he says, more to himself than to me, and I see a look of genuine relief wash across my husband’s face. It occurs to me that he might not want to lose me, that he might miss me, although I’m not sure why. What we learned from 23andMe is that we have deeply divergent bloodlines, but what we forgot is that those differences are actually quite small when compared with the commonalities the whole human species shares. We all have neurons that recognize the softness of a smile; we all possess laughter, terror, love; we all have a sensory apparatus that works pretty much the same way from person to person, which means we share blue and red and hot and cold and tender touch and the severity of a slap and the yowl of grief; touch. Every one of us dreams. We all know death.

I have no advice. I have only this: a hunch. I believe that Benjamin and I will find a way to stay together. I think that something will pull us through, which may not be the best for either of us at all. God knows, there are good enough reasons to separate, especially once the kids fly the coop. In the end, however, we can call on the thousands of similarities of our species to forge a path wide enough for both of us to walk on. We can call also on the hugeness of the history that we’ve created together—a history that has within it a wedding, a wedding night, pregnancies, two babies carved out of my belly; affections and nicknames and sex that meant something, once upon a time.

What I want to do now, however, is can. I want to preserve the tomatoes and the apricots in sterile jars, in airless enclosures where time seems to stop and rot dramatically slows. After all the canning jars and caps are sterilized by boiling, I drop the ripe fruit into them, seal the tin lids, and settle these timeless capsules in the dank basement where the gooey juice of the apricot will serve as the fruit’s own marinade, the fruit itself softening and softening until it turns into a dark, delicious syrup, a nectar with the faint taste of alcohol, a liquor my mate and I can share one winter night, when the snow falls thickly, when all the world is silenced, when the children are asleep and the windows frosted white, when you look out onto a white world and see just a lone figure in a beacon-red jacket snowshoeing down the closed roads, the church tower gonging out the hour, the two shot glasses side by side on the table, some for him and some for me, this nectar of August in the middle of a snowstorm. We will raise our glasses and touch them together and then sip on summer, we two deeply different, extremely similar, and terribly intertwined man and woman. What we’ll toast to, I don’t know—a bone spur, our 25 years, our two robust progeny, good health, and long lives. It almost doesn’t matter what we toast to, only that we do it, that we raise our glasses and make them kiss and then sip on summer while snow falls over the whole wide world.


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