was extraordinary how many people offered to set her up on blind dates, within what felt like minutes of her separation), so she went to bed.
Days would pass when she barely emerged from the comfort of her cocoon in the grand master suite on the second floor, aided by Ambien at night and pointless reality shows on the television during the day. She once watched almost eight hours straight of Project Runway, even though she wasn’t the least bit interested to begin with—but by hour three she was desperate to know who was next going to be auf wiedersehened off the show by the glamazonian Heidi Klum.
And then, when they finally agreed a custody arrangement, she had the kids every other weekend, but by that time Adam had agreed to sell the house and split the proceeds, and the resulting house hunt was like a well-needed injection of energy.
They were lucky. Their house sold quickly, and Kit found a small cape on a pretty street behind Main Street, that was easily big enough for her and the children, and Adam rented a small farmhouse on the other side of town.
It took the best part of a year for Kit to start feeling like herself again after the divorce. And at the end of that time she was not the self she was during her marriage—the wife she had tried so hard to be—but the self she was before her marriage: her true self, the identity she lost in her quest to be the perfect wife.
It is extraordinary, she thinks, picking up the phone and scrolling back through the numbers to see who has called, how much her life has changed. She was a wealthy Wall Street widow in a large house, with immaculate children dressed in French designer kiddie wear, complete with Land Rover, a wardrobe stuffed with Tory Burch and a social life that involved going to the gym with the other Wall Street widows, then coming home to shower and change before attending a trunk show in someone’s home.
The trunk shows varied. Designer stationery featuring cute colorful cartoons of women who were supposed to look like Kit and her friends, or jewelry made by a local once-high-powered-but-now-looking-to-find-her-creativity mother, charging exorbitant prices for semiprecious gemstones strung together with pretty clasps. Some held children’s wear sales and displayed tie-dyed funky yoga pants for three-year-olds, sparkly navel-baring tops for toddlers. Others filled their homes with children’s clothes from the catalogues, trying to induce mothers to order copious amounts of clothes. Whatever the trunk show, what they all had in common was the aim to satisfy the instant gratification gene that all Wall Street widows seemed to have.
As soon as she and Adam separated, Kit knew she needed to work, but she didn’t want to go back into teaching. She had loved it while she did it—teaching at a Montessori school until she became pregnant with Tory—but she didn’t want to be an employee, as such, of anyone. She wanted to make some money, and retain her freedom. Adam paid child support, and the alimony was just about enough to live, but not enough to live the life she had grown used to in Highfield, heart of Connecticut’s Gold Coast.
It wasn’t even as if it was a big life, not compared to some of her friends. Certainly, her life was bigger when she was married, but one of the lovelier changes that occurred post-divorce was that she suddenly saw no reason to feel insecure around the women who used to cause her nervous breakdowns while waiting in the corridors outside the classrooms in preschool.
She doesn’t see the need to dress to impress these women anymore, because who else had she been carefully applying makeup for, popping diamond studs in her ears, carefully coordinating her ballet pumps with her bag?
She had felt those women looking her up and down, judging her, deciding whether or not she was good enough based on the cost of her handbag or the number of carats in her ears, and she had shrunk with inadequacy every time she walked in.
Since the divorce, she has found she doesn’t want to wear makeup anymore. Her daily uniform has become jeans and boots in winter, and shorts and flip-flops in summer. Sure, she still dresses up on the rare occasions she has to, but now if she bumps into one of the scary gala-obsessed women in Stop & Shop and she is in shorts with her hair shoved back in a