Bridge of Sighs

told you where you were and what you were meant to be doing: ten o’clock, chem lab; eleven, study hall; noon, lunch. At home, they alternated cooking duties, though following the same dozen or so recipes, and they ate at six sharp. Fridays they went out for pizza. Saturday mornings they went to the supermarket.
    At her mother’s you could search in vain for any structural principle. They shopped when they ran out, her mother purchasing whatever struck her fancy. If the produce looked good, she’d fill the cart with fruits and vegetables, most of which would be thrown out later in the week once they’d spoiled. She shopped until she grew bored, whereupon she’d proclaim, “That’s enough for today,” and promptly join the checkout line, which was why they were forever running out of necessities, like milk or toilet paper, and having to improvise. Her mother’s tiny kitchen was full of cookbooks that she’d read around in, as if they contained poems, for an hour or so before deciding to order Chinese takeout. “What?” she said when Sarah hinted that a little organization in their lives might not be amiss. “You want me to be all buttoned up, like your father?” A
little
buttoning up, Sarah thought, might not have hurt. On hot sunny days, her mother often came home early from her studio and took a sweating shaker of martinis up onto the roof of the apartment house to sunbathe in the nude, a habit that altered the flight path of many a small aircraft. Entering her mother’s world each summer, after the inflexible routine of her father’s, gave Sarah vertigo, and swapping again in September was no easier. She tried not to think about the genetic implication that one day she would have to confront and resolve their contradictions or else lose her mind.
    The apartment house was called the Sundry Arms, and it catered, by design or serendipity, to recently divorced men. “All and Sundry. That’s who lives here,” her mother joked, because the landlord’s name was Harold Sundry. Though not much below medium height, Harold, thanks to a very large head, seemed dwarflike. His legs were of unequal length, which gave him a strange, rolling gait, and by watching him you couldn’t quite tell where he was heading until he arrived there, though it was probably someplace in the Sundry Arms. Sarah never once saw him outside the complex, and he appeared to spend his every waking moment getting a recently vacated apartment ready for a new tenant. He himself lived in the outsize front unit that doubled as the complex’s office. Every June Sarah was amazed that no one, except for her mother, remained from the previous summer. Where did they all go? Anywhere and everywhere, apparently. A few, those willing to grovel, returned to their permanently aggrieved wives and distrustful children. Others found apartments in the city. The luckiest moved in with new women. Still others moved to the Sundry Gardens, which was owned and operated by Harold’s ex-wife Elaine, who’d gotten it in the divorce and now lived in the large front unit directly across the street from her ex-husband’s. “Kiss my ass, Elaine,” he often could be heard calling on warm evenings when the traffic had died down and he imagined his ex-wife’s window might be open.
    According to Sarah’s mother, both complexes owed their existence to the fool’s errand institution of marriage, which since she left hers had become her favorite subject, one she could riff on for hours. One of the stranger things about her parents’ separation was how it had loosed her mother’s tongue. Back when they were still together, she had mostly just stared at her husband in disbelief. Sometimes she’d open her mouth as if to say something, or a big bunch of somethings, but then she’d glance at her daughter and close it again. Now she just talked and talked. It was as if she’d committed to memory every single thing she’d meant to say for all those years and was letting it all loose in a flood. Away from her husband, she just hemorrhaged words and ideas, and whole philosophies on pretty much any topic, though marriage remained her favorite.
    Matrimony, she explained, was based on two fallacies, both real doozies. The first was the ridiculous notion that people knew what they wanted. There was no evidence in support of this contention and never had been, but they seemed to enjoy believing it anyway, blinded as they were by love and lust and hope, only the last of