Danny and Betsy have settled on “nesting,” a system of divorce espoused by certain how-to books in which the children stay in the family home and the parents take turns vacating it. Betsy and Danny agree on practically nothing, yet have managed to come together on the subject of minimizing the kids’ suffering.
Normally, nesting requires three domiciles: the home currently occupied by the kids and their Parent of the Week, one for the husband and one for the wife. Betsy and Danny can’t afford a mortgage plus two rents, so they’ve leased a single studio apartment only large enough for one person. The parent who isn’t at home with Jason and Meghan, who isn’t carrying on as if everything is normal and fine, finds him- or herself holed up in the room with the brown carpet and the brown cabinets and the brown interior doors.
They’ve become roommates; the kind that never see one another. When Danny isn’t being a father he’s slouched on the rented sleeper sofa in this stucco dungeon, wearing down the buttons on the remote. When Betsy isn’t being a mother she’s curled on the sofa bed’s thin mattress, sleeping, eating or crying.
When Betsy comes into the apartment after her week with the kids, she feels the residue of Danny’s grief, rising up from the stale carpet. By choosing a place with the décor of depression and an absence of natural light, they’ve managed simultaneously to punish both themselves and each other.
Betsy and Danny are tidy people. Except for their toiletries, which they each have purchased in duplicate, they leave nothing in the apartment. It is as impersonal as a hotel room. In unspoken agreement they both erase any trace of themselves before they leave. They wash their dishes and dry them and put them away in the cupboards. When Danny moved into the studio, he brought the dishes they’d packed away and put in the shed four years ago. These are the same dishes they ate from when they first moved in together, when they were young.
Over the years Danny and Betsy have developed identical domestic habits. When Danny comes back from the kids’ house, the kitchen in the studio apartment is so clean that he cannot tell whether Betsy has cooked anything at all in the past week. Technically, it was he who left the marriage. Thanks to his lawyer, he has come to learn about the legal difference between being the one left in a house versus being the one who puts some stuff in a bag and goes away.
