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       Diamonds and Pearls

      We made it to pearl. As I packed my half of the kitchen, I just kept thinking, we made it to pearl.

      I was keeping the china and the punch bowl, not because I was fond of gold leaf or crystal, but because they had been wedding gifts from my mother. My mother made it to gold. No – I shook my head at the chip in the plate I held, the gold leaf damaged – she made it to until death us do part.

      People will tell you that it’s smooth sailing if you make it past the seven-year itch. Those are the people who didn’t make it past the three-year breaking-in period. Other people will tell you that twenty is the tough year – when you’ve spent two decades with the same person and realise your best years are behind you. Those are the people who crapped out around ten years, only to get remarried and go another ten with someone else. As if a decade per spouse is somehow better than two decades with the same person bitching about your inability to remember to pay the electric bill or put your dirty clothes in the hamper.

      Our silver anniversary had come and gone and my co-worker Janine said, ‘Twenty-five years! Holy shit! You’ve been married for ever!’

      At the time, I’d laughed and agreed with her, but in the back of my mind I remember thinking, it doesn’t feel like for ever. It feels like we just started and then got tired before we reached for ever.

      Everyone knows twenty-five years is the silver anniversary, but no one knows what represents thirty years together. Traditionally, it’s pearl. The modern is diamond. I like diamonds better, but I have a jewellery box full of both from birthdays, Valentine’s Days. Anniversaries, too. He’d given me diamonds or pearls for many anniversaries. A strand of pearls for our eighth anniversary (traditional: bronze; modern: linen) and a gold watch inlaid with diamond for our fifteenth (traditional: crystal; modern: watches – so I guess he was paying attention). Other gifts in-between and after, gifts I admired and enjoyed and put away for some future special occasion.

      There were diamond earrings and pearl hair clasps and diamond-and-pearl baubles for the twenty-sixth through twenty-ninth anniversaries, the ones no one has bothered to put on the anniversary gift lists, as if those years between twenty-five and thirty don’t matter at all. As if what Janine said was true: being married twenty-five years was for ever and there was no need to acknowledge another anniversary for at least five more years, and every five years after. I guess we took that to heart. Those years between the twenty-fifth anniversary trip to the Greek Isles and the thirtieth anniversary trip to divorce court were a blur of pot roast dinners, political talk over waffles at our favourite brunch joint and mediocre sex a couple times a week or whenever we were both in the mood and awake at the same time.

      The traditional gift for every anniversary should be sex. It’s hard to complain about his snoring when he’s fucking you. Suddenly every noise he’s making is a turn-on. It’s impossible to complain about her lousy cooking when you’re going down on her and your mouth is full of the sweetest juice you’ve ever tasted. Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe two people can fuck every day for thirty years and still end up where I was, packing away ugly thirty-year-old plates and a dusty punchbowl.

      ‘What are you smiling about?’

      Nathan and I were civilised people. We didn’t fight and scream, we didn’t throw things, we didn’t pull childish immature acts on each other. No, we were a couple who had been married for thirty years, raised three children and had mutually decided a divorce was in both our best interests. And now the years were gone, the kids were grown and had their own lives and we were a divorced couple packing up our mutual belongings at the same time in the same house we’d shared for over two decades.

      I shook my head as I used several sheets of newspaper to wrap a gravy boat I couldn’t remember using in a decade. ‘Just thinking that if people fucked every day of their marriage, maybe there wouldn’t be any need to get divorced.’

      Nathan had his hands full of some bubble-wrapped thingy from our shared home office. Probably that ugly snow globe I’d gotten him as a last-minute anniversary gift last year. I’d seen it in one of those mall stores you see everywhere and been stricken with a bout of bad taste, buying this hideous glass and wood creation depicting Chicago in winter. I’d even gotten the damned thing engraved with our names and wedding date.

      ‘So, if we’d had sex every day, we’d still be together?’ he asked slowly, the consummate professor repeating the information he’s been given, looking for a different interpretation.

      I shook my head. ‘Who knows? Maybe we’d be fucking right now instead of packing up all this – fucking stuff – and going our separate ways.’

      I don’t know why I said that. Hell, outside of when we were actually fucking, I never even used that word. OK, not even when we were fucking, unless I’d had

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