A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me

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On the morning I was to be married for the second time, I found myself going to my knees in the shower and praying: that my ex-husband would find love again, that I would always love my new husband and that whatever pain I had caused in my life would be forgiven. Just one of those maudlin premenstrual moments; I suppose the wedding could have been better timed.

I washed and conditioned my hair, toweled off, blow-dried the fog from the mirror and laid out makeup on the ridge of the sink. The pictures from that afternoon show a bride who might still have passed for thirty.

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In fact, I was thirty when I’d married my first husband, whom I’d met when we were both working for a Gannett paper in the Hudson Valley—not much of a job for a gal with a degree from Yale, but we can’t all be Naomi Wolf. (She was in my year, and I suppose I have to admit to some envy.) He was twenty-seven and looked younger; they’d hired him mostly because he could speak Spanish, having spent two years with the Peace Corps in Peru. This was back in 1990, when somebody had finally noticed that Hispanics had come to Peekskill, Beacon and Poughkeepsie. I’d been at the paper for three years. When the editor brought him by my cubicle, with his flat stomach and male-model stubble, I thought: Maybe one time with him just because I can, if I can.

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