Marriage: A Grammar Exercise by Melissa Grunow

I wanted to bolt on my wedding day. “Bolt” as in to run, not “bolt” as in to secure two objects together to make something strong, sturdy, new. We got married in our backyard, well my backyard, as I had owned the home for years before I met him. Our guests were seated in rented folding chairs, while I stood with my dad in the driveway on the side of the house. The hired violinist began to play, and I glanced back toward the street instead of ahead toward my future husband. The limo bus that had driven us around town to take pictures was still parked in the street, and I felt a tug in my gut to run toward it, leap into the back, and tell the driver to go, just go. The ceremony was already starting late because we were late returning to the house. I had planned everything, but Chris was supposed to keep track of time that slipped away from us as we traveled from the Heidelberg Project to Riverwalk to Belle Isle, posing on bridges, under trees, in front of monuments and fountains. By the time we finally returned, most of the wedding party was drunk, and my home was overrun with expectant family and friends.

I didnt run. Instead, I took my dads arm and proceeded down the aisle because I was committed. “Committed” as in bound, obligated, pledged to devotion. Inwardly, the commitment felt affixed to me, that I was “committed to” an institution by lawful authority.

Chris and I stopped getting along the day after we were married. Or maybe we had stopped getting along before that. Or maybe we had never gotten along. Maybe we had never really known each other.1 We both clung to the memory of Petoskey, a trip to northern Michigan we took just three weeks after our first date. We spent five days in the lakeshore town on the cusp of autumn, where we wore hoodies and walked along the beach, dangled our bare feet off the pier at the base of a lighthouse, sipped fruit wine in a tasting room an hour after they closed because the sommelier said we gave her hope that true love was real. She stayed open just for us, turning away other customers and bolting2 the door behind them.

Yet at the end of the trip, I felt empty and uncertain. I hoped to leave with a commitment from him, while he was preoccupied with getting back in time to watch the Breaking Bad finale. I arrived home with a trunk of lazy luggage to unpack and a case of wine to unload.

That was the beginning of my erasure.3 To seek something from someone who cannot give it is to delete words from the story.

Our romance began with our words, lengthy conversations that took place over a dating app for more than a week before we finally met. Those words were sacred, special, intimate, private. That is until after our marriage he printed them out and shared them with a female friend of his for a reason he could not explain. When our relationship evolved from written to spoken language, he recorded our conversations without me knowing, justifying later that its legal to do so in the state of Michigan as long as at least one person knows they are being recorded. He never saw it as an invasion of my privacy and, therefore, refused to apologize.

Before long, we didnt communicate at all.

Even when we moved our mouths and words came out. Even when our voices took turns filling the air between us, we weren’t really speaking. Not to each other. The exchange of words was hardly a catalyst to our success.

When he talked, I heard the television.

When I talked, he heard the ding of a new message that illuminated the lower right corner of his computer screen.

Any vocalization was no more than attempts at sentences without a recipient. Our marriage unraveled within ten months.

Definition: A sentence is a subject plus complete verb plus details.

A sentence without a subject is a fragment. “Who is doing the thing?” A sentence without a complete verb is a fragment. “What is the who doing?”

A marriage without a couple is a relationship fragment. How do we correct it to make it complete?

Rule: The subject and verb of a sentence must agree, whether they are singular or plural. If the subject is singular, the verb is singular. If the subject is plural, the verb must be plural. The rules of grammar are straightforward and finite, but they do not address the complications of lost identities, of prioritization of the self over another.

Who were the subjects of those sentences between us? At home where language is lost in the rubble, there were no answers. The rhythm of the voice had dissipated.

“More than” is quantifiable, while “over” is less so. For example, “There are more than 700 CDs in those boxes, and you never listen to any of them. Can we at least try to sell some in the yard sale?” In contrast, “over” expresses an excess of amount: water in a glass, shame in my eyes, pain in the bruises that collect on my arms and stomach, the silence created by closing the windows during our fights so the neighbors wouldnt hear us yelling. For someone who had no qualms about going out in public with messy hair, stains on his wrinkled shirt, or unbrushed teeth, he was awfully particular about appearances. He feared more than anything that others wouldnt see him as a nice guy.4

Between the two of us, I was the pedantry: bills must be paid on time, no trespassing onto Detroit blight and abandoned buildings. I found it unconscionable that he charged a photo storage membership fee on my credit card after we separated, deplorable that he tried to hack into the tax preparation website when he couldnt find the paperwork I left him. When confronted, he told me I lacked empathy. For at least six months after our divorce, he would call or text and ask me for help: locating his passport, cleaning his house before an inspection, borrowing tools or lawn equipment and returning them dirty or broken. He would show up and invite himself in then move swiftly throughout the house, opening closed doors, venturing upstairs, taking inventory of anything I had changed in his absence. His usual monotonous voice5 would rise to a shrill in protest as though I was trying to erase him from that house.

We knew there would be challenges; at least, I knew. I recognized them early on when he broke his arm weeks after we started dating and feigned helplessness. If he needed to go somewhere, I drove him. If he needed to shower, I helped him. If he needed to eat, I cooked for him. They were problems of inconvenience but not impossibility. I knew how to break down the complex into the simple and rebuild it into something with recognizable and functioning parts: parts of speech, parts of phrases, appropriate clauses to form complete sentences. If I could repair broken sentences, I could wait for his broken arm to repair itself. If I had patience to edit, I could have the patience for him to notice when I needed help making the bed, shoveling snow, mowing the lawn, taking out the trash without having to ask or nag. If I could let old writing sit before slicing through it with fresh eyes on revision, I could coddle him when he melted down just before first meeting my parents and forgive the Xanax he stole from me to endure the weekend with them. I didnt know how to revise the already-done, to amend the standing verb to make it an acting verb.

There is some writing that cannot be fixed. What is to become of those deleted  sentences  that  don’t  survive  the  drafting  process?  Those  are  the casualties of erasure. We call it “killing our darlings.”

Rule: People are “who” and things are “that.” In our home, though, the rules were never followed. The things6—stuffed into boxes, piled into empty rooms, filling every space, teetering under the weight of more—those things became the “who.” I became the “that.” The things, the need for more, the comfort of dust and clutter and collections without value, grew a mountain between us. There can be no open field on which to stand, no grass to sprint across toward each other barefoot as the sun beats down and the cicadas click their mating chirp call in the surrounding woods. There is depletion in the dehumanization of a “who” to personify a “that.” I was never given a right to my own chaos. I was a fixed part of speech; he was an anthimeria.

When his family automatically assigned his last name to me, I cringed and he didnt correct them. When we struggled to deposit checks addressed to Mr. and Mrs. because there was no merging of identities, his suggested resolution was for me to change my name after all. The word, his name, didnt fit right in my mouth. It was as abhorrent to me as is mispronunciation of “espresso” as “expresso,” but there was nothing I could do to change the way others saw me. To them, to him, my surname no longer existed. It was a revision that, to me, lacked parallel structure.

There was the slow extinguishing of the relationship like a campfire that reignites when the ash is poked. And then it was over. I was the one who dumped the bucket of water onto our marriage to put the fire out for good. And I did it with a text message. I was expecting a fight, and texting was our favorite way to fight.

“I’m coming home,” he responded. That night we had the fairest, most adult conversation we’d had since the early months of our dating relationship.7 He was supposed to move out Labor Day Weekend, so I took my dog and  went camping alone. When I came back on Monday—my birthday—I expected to have my house to myself again, his key on the counter the only sign he had been there.

Instead, I found a frazzled and distressed Chris who started yelling at me as soon as I arrived.

Rule: There should always be a comma after an introductory element. Where does the comma go when there is no introduction? No greeting?

The reason: I had locked the door to my home office, so what was he supposed to do with some receipt he found that needed to be added to the taxes file? That one found receipt and realization of forbidden space sent him spiraling out of control. Instead of packing and moving, he spent three days alternating between watching internet porn and devising ways to break into my office.

“You could have just left it on the counter,” I said, my voice flat and distant as I stood with my arms crossed.

“But why did you lock the door?” His anger had devolved into frustrated whining. The door was the actual problem. The paperwork was a ruse. The detail, a misplaced modifier, dangled between us.

Rule: To avoid run-ons, we place commas before coordinating conjunctions that join two independent clauses, not the subordinating conjunctions because their interjection in the sentence makes the second independent clause dependent. (Notice there is no comma before “because” in the previous sentence.)

Example: “But no, I dont recall, nothing in that second paragraph feels true, I know you randomly messaged my family to tell them I was suicidal even though you werent talking to me, but I dont know where you ever thought I was threatening suicide.”8

Our languages9 clashed because I wanted to remain an independent clause; he shoved commas into complex sentences. The aftermath was where truth and recollection began to deviate. Maybe that was our downfall.

Two years later when I’m emptying my closet of clothes to be donated, I notice a red wine stain on the front of my wedding dress burrowed beneath the lace and seeped into the satin underlay. I dont drink red wine, but it had spilled on me in the limo and no one told me. I didnt notice it all that day. I didnt notice it when I took off my dress that evening and kicked it into a corner, exhausted. I didnt see a stain in the pictures when we received them six weeks later.

I got married outside. Had my hem dragged on the grass as I walked toward a man who looked like standing under a garden arch was the last place he wanted to be, the stains would be on the bottom. Even if I had run away that day, bolted like I felt compelled to do, the dress was already stained. It didnt matter how or where the dress became soiled; its ruin became its calling.

1 The definition of certainty is not helpful in this context.

2 Definition: To lock for the purpose of preventing entry.

3 Synonym: Obliteration.

4 There is irony in perception.

5 Antonym: vocal fry.

6 See previous mention of CDs for an example

7 Another example of irony. There are so many of them.

8 Reference: Email

9 Reference: The 5 Love Languages by Dr. Gary Chapman


Melissa Grunow is the author of I Don’t Belong Here: Essays (New Meridian Arts Press, 2018), finalist in the 2019 Independent Author Network Book of the Year Award and 2019 Best Indie Book from Shelf Unbound, and Realizing River City: A Memoir (Tumbleweed Books, 2016), which won the 2018 Book Excellence Award in Memoir, the 2017 Silver Medal in Nonfiction-Memoir from Readers’ Favorite International Book Contest, and Second Place-Nonfiction in the 2016 Independent Author Network Book of the Year Awards. Her work has appeared in Brevity, River Teeth, The Nervous Breakdown, Two Hawks Quarterly, New Plains Review, and Blue Lyra Review, among many others. Her essays have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, as well as listed in the Best American Essays notables 2016, 2018, and 2019. She is an assistant professor of English at Illinois Central College. Visit her website at www.melissagrunow.com for more information.

Illustration by Sarah Salcedo


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