Books |
Disassembly Required: A Memoir of Midlife Resurrection
Beverly Willett
By
Published: Jul 29, 2019
Category:
Memoir
DISCLOSURE: Beverly Willett found me through Facebook or Butler and asked if I’d look at her manuscript, and I had her send two chapters, and they were so compelling I asked for more, and soon I’d read the whole thing and, along the way to becoming her friend, I sent her this blurb: “This is the book Sheryl Sandberg might have written if she hadn’t been rich. Beverly Willett had the dream: husband, children, career, and that most important New York achievement, a house in Brooklyn. And then she just had. . .her kids. She didn’t ‘lean in,’ she sucked it up, moved on, and built a new life. ‘Disassembly Required’ is more energizing and inspiring than a triple espresso.”
That’s the short take. The longer one is considerably more harrowing. One morning Beverly Willett checks her husband’s phone and, on his voicemail, hears an unrecognizable woman say she loved him. After 20 years of marriage? After two children, then 7 and 12? Has Jake lost his mind?
She wanted to save the marriage, but you know this story plays out. Well, you don’t know the details in detail, but there’s a reason — “Disassembly Required” is more about re-assembly than the predictable wallow in despair and recrimination. Yes, there are nights of looking at bottles of tranquilizers and trying to calibrate how many she needs to take to sleep forever. And she loses 23 pounds in a few months, shrinking from size 12 to 2. But her daughters make bubble baths for her, bring her cookies, read “Little House on the Prairie” to her. These are good things. She is loved. She can live on that.
Her business in these pages is to move forward, and to tell us how she did it, and what it involves, on the full range of levels: practical to spiritual. Because she is 50. And because, ten years ago, she gave up a successful career as an entertainment lawyer to be a stay-at-home mom. And now she must find work and keep her kids in their comfy rooms in their Brooklyn home.
The house. A four-story Victorian brownstone in Brooklyn’s Carroll Gardens. It is everything to Beverly Willett. She will crush rocks, pull wagons, kill wild animals with her teeth if necessary — she cannot move her kids from the house. The Flannery O’Connor quote at the front of the book says it all: “It’s just about as poignant to be torn from a house as it is from a person.”
When Jake moved out, he said magic words: “I’ll be fair and generous. I’ll give you and the kids whatever you need.” That included the house: “I realize what moving will do to the children.” And with that, she was relieved: The foundation of the American dream was solid.
Then Jake moved to New Jersey, where he could get divorced without his wife’s consent. Which, seven judges later, he did. “You’ve offended every working parent in the courthouse by becoming a stay-at-home mom,” the judge — a woman — lectured her. Jake immediately remarried.
Four years pass. The girls move into their own lives. It is time to sell the house. [To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
But wait! The house is full of history. And stuff. Most must be sold or given away. Important papers — and they’re all important, aren’t they? — must be sorted. And, of course, some of his things are still there.
A tedious process, and it starts to be tedious to read. Then you get it. This is the heart of the book. Women’s work. The work that men leave to women when they leave women. Described here more thoroughly than I have ever seen before. It’s powerful.
I think because Beverly Willett dedicated the book to her kids and her kids have a relationship with their father, she notes big events almost in passing. Jake files for sole custody. He leaves a message on her answering machine: “No man in your lifetime is ever going to love you.” He ends child support, knowing that will send her back to court and knowing she… just… can’t. More to the point she wants to make here, Willett tells us how she throws herself into spiritual practices that she prays will transform her. And, by God, they do.
The book has a radiant ending: new life, refreshed spirit. A door closes, a window opens — a cliché, but here it’s true. Beverly Willett is the very model of a Good Person. But I think I speak for lesser mortals — decent men and angry, wronged women — when I say I could go for some modern-day Biblical justice here. Karmic punishment, if you prefer. Like: there should be an audiobook. And Jake should have to read his part in it. Just that. His words. His voice. For all the world to hear.
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AN EXCERPT FROM “DISASSEMBLY REQUIRED”
“You should give your house a name,” one of my girlfriends said when I told her about the Victorian brownstone my husband and I had bought. “Call it Les Escaliers,” French for “The Staircases.”
There were eight, a total of 120 steps. I finished tallying them sixteen years after we moved in, the day I moved out.
One by one, everyone in my family but me had already left. My daughter Ella had started college in the fall. Nicki, my eldest, had graduated the previous spring, then moved in with her boyfriend. That same summer our beloved family cat Thunder died. It was Jake, my ex-husband, who’d begun the exodus over a decade earlier, after meeting another woman and suing me for divorce.
That left me, alone in our four-story dream house in Brooklyn.
A few months before I left, my aunt and her six-year-old granddaughter came for a visit. That’s when I first began counting the stairs. But we had somewhere to go that day so we never finished our counting. I came across her notes the morning I left home for good and decided to finish.
I left the wooden spiral staircase descending from Ella’s room on the second floor straight down to the kitchen for last. I hadn’t meant to; it simply worked out that way.
As I descended it my final morning, I suddenly saw what Ella must have seen nearly eleven years to the day earlier, when she’d been only seven. Her mother, me, sitting at the kitchen table below, crying, broken. No wonder she’d been frightened. Hers was a picture of Mom she’d never witnessed before.
“Mommy, what are you doing up already?” Ella had asked, barefoot, standing at the top of the spiral staircase wearing her pink silky nightgown.
“I couldn’t sleep, honey,” I said.
“Is everything alright?” she asked, rubbing her eyes.
Someone once told me they could stare straight through Ella’s big brown eyes and see her soul. That day I felt she was looking directly through to mine.
By the time I moved out, I’d downsized three-quarters of our possessions, giving away expensive antiques and artwork. By then, despite the losses I’d endured, I understood what was important.
And so I kept every single one of the love notes and pictures Ella and Nicki made for me. Many had been taped to the wall above my desk for years, right up until the time I had to box them up to move. “The Wall of Mom,” Ella called it.
“I’m fine, honey,” I lied to my daughter that long-ago day at the kitchen table. “Get dressed and come down for breakfast.”
Everyone but me had moved on and started a new life. Now it was time for me to leave home too. To exit Brooklyn, pick up where I’d left off over thirty years before, and begin again.
First, though, I had to sell my house.
The night before I’d worried when Jake hadn’t come home until after midnight. I’d phoned the salon where he told me he was going for a massage after work, but they said he’d never shown up. When he got home, he refused to tell me where he’d been. Restless, I awoke early, the house quiet, my husband and children still slumbering. As I walked downstairs, my eyes were drawn to his brown suede jacket in the vestibule. Feeling like a thief, I reached inside the pockets, drew out Jake’s cell phone, and carried it into the kitchen, shaking.
I brewed a pot of coffee, conscious to place a moment between what I feared might be on that phone and whatever came next. And then I sat down at the kitchen table, picked up Jake’s cell phone, and perked up my ears to hear if my powering it on had woken anybody up.
My husband and I had had problems in our marriage from the start. But we’d worked through so many of them, or so I believed. I hadn’t dreamed he was having an affair.
He hadn’t created password protection so I scrolled to voicemail on my husband’s cell phone. Instantly I heard a woman’s voice I’d never heard before.
“I love you. Call me at home,” the voice said.
My hand trembled. I inhaled my tears and stuffed my wails inside so the children, one floor above, wouldn’t hear.
“Want to come over here tomorrow and have a little time to be private instead of meeting at the office?” the voice continued.
Fear exploded in my chest. I couldn’t swallow. I wanted to bolt the doors and keep my family in suspended animation, safe and rolled up in their covers until I could figure out what to do next.
But I pressed the send button to hear more, unable to stop inflicting my own pain.
That’s the moment Ella called to me from the top of her stairs, standing where I stood eleven years later, minutes before I left my house forever.
Twice before I’d left home, once for college and then again after law school when I moved to New York City. But this time was different. This time I would be leaving the nest I’d built—the nest that had become the symbol of the most important thing I had ever done and the people I loved more than anyone else and the place where it finally and officially crumbled. Everyone but me had moved on and started a new life. Now it was time for me to leave home too. To exit Brooklyn, pick up where I’d left off over thirty years before, and begin again.
First, though, I had to sell my house.
