The Small Closings

The thing about a door closing quietly is that you do not hear it.

You hear doors that slam. You hear doors that creak. You hear the ones that announce themselves. The quiet ones the ones that close behind you one by one, in rooms you are still walking forward through, while you are still looking at the man in front of you those, you only hear later. After. When you turn around, finally, and try to go back, and find that the hallway you walked in through has been sealed off, one soft click at a time, while you were not paying attention.

Here is how it closed for me.

The second date was Saturday.

Derek took me to a restaurant in the West Village with a waitlist longer than my job title. He ordered for me. I want to be precise about how he did this because I’ve had a lot of time to think about it and the precision matters. He did not ask me what I wanted and then order it. He did not consult me at all. He looked at the menu, he looked at me, he looked back at the menu, and when the waiter came he said, "She’ll have the sea bass. I’ll have the steak. We’ll start with the octopus."

I had been about to order the pasta.

I did not say that.

I thought, at the time: he is being thoughtful. He is choosing for me. He is the kind of man who knows what to do in restaurants like this, and I am the kind of woman who has never been in a restaurant like this, so this is a kindness.

The sea bass was fine.

I did not like it as much as I would have liked the pasta.

I told him it was delicious.

Click.

Three weeks in, at a party in Cobble Hill, I was talking to a man named Ezra who had been in my art history program at NYU. Nothing was happening. Ezra was married. Ezra was telling me about a show at the Morgan.

Derek came across the room with two glasses of wine and put his hand at the small of my back the same gentle, brief, proprietary gesture he had used at the curb on the first night and he said, "Saoirse, there’s someone I want you to meet."

There was no one he wanted me to meet.

He walked me across the room and into a small alcove by the kitchen and he said, "I didn’t like the way he was looking at you."

I said, "We were talking about a museum show."

He said, "I didn’t like the way he was looking at you."

He said it the exact same way, the second time. The same cadence. The same words. And I understood for the first time, in a way I immediately put away again, because at three weeks you are not yet ready to understand these things that Derek had not heard what I said. He was not going to hear what I said. The sentence he had brought across the room had already been decided, and my job in this conversation was not to answer it but to agree with it.

I said, "Okay."

He smiled at me. Warm. Settled. Like I had done something right.

I did not talk to Ezra for the rest of the night.

Click.

At two months he told me he didn’t like the blue dress.

He didn’t tell me this the way a boyfriend tells you. He told me this while I was putting it on, in the bedroom of my sublet, while he sat on the edge of my bed and watched me in the mirror. "It makes your shoulders look wide."

I said, "Oh."

He said, "I’m just being honest. You’d want me to be honest."

I wore a different dress.

I put the blue one in the back of my closet.

Two weeks later, when I was cleaning the closet, I threw it out.

Click.

Priya the friend who had set us up took me to lunch at four months.

"You’ve gone quiet," she said.

"I’m in love," I said.

"You’ve gone quiet," she said again, because Priya was that kind of friend. Because Priya could hear the difference between love and quiet. Because Priya had known me since we were both eighteen and had watched me be loud in rooms men had told me to be smaller in, and she knew what my voice sounded like when a piece of it was missing.

"I’m just happy," I said.

She looked at me for a long moment.

Then she said, "Okay."

We did not have lunch again for six months.

The next time I saw her, it was at my engagement party, and she stood across the room from me with a glass of champagne she did not drink and she left early.

Click.

Derek proposed at seven months, in a restaurant, with a ring that had been his grandmother’s. He told me this about the grandmother before I had answered yes.

He told me this while the ring was in the box, while the waiters were circling, while the whole restaurant had turned to watch, and I understood, in a small part of myself I did not want to look at directly, that he had made the answer mandatory before he had asked the question.

I said yes.

I said yes because the ring was his grandmother’s, and because the restaurant was watching, and because the version of me who said yes was the version of me he had been building for seven months, and the version of me who might have said something else had gone quiet at four months and had not come back.

Click.

My mother met him at the engagement dinner.

She hugged him. She laughed at his jokes. She said all the things mothers say about finally, and settle down, and I’m so glad she found someone who.

After in the bathroom of the restaurant, alone, fixing my lipstick in a mirror that had seen a hundred women fix their lipstick on nights that mattered she came in, and she stood behind me, and she looked at me in the mirror the way mothers look at their daughters when they have something to say and have already decided not to say it.

She said, "Saoirse."

She said my name the way only she had ever said it.

Correctly. Completely. With the specific weight she had been putting on it since the day she chose it, which had been a day when she had been twenty-five and pregnant and living in a walk-up in Sunnyside with a husband who was already, even then, the kind of man who practiced names before he used them.

She said, "Are you sure."

And I looked at her in the mirror.

And I said the way you say a thing when you have decided, in advance, that saying it will make it true "I’m sure."

She held my eyes for another moment.

Then she squeezed my shoulder. Once. Lightly. The way a woman squeezes the shoulder of another woman who has just told her something they have both agreed to pretend is the truth.

Click.

At the wedding, my mother did not cry.

Every mother cries at her daughter’s wedding. Every mother at every wedding I had ever been to in my life had cried. My mother had cried at my cousin Aoife’s wedding. My mother had cried at my cousin Niamh’s wedding. My mother had cried at a wedding in Galway in 2009 when she did not know either of the people getting married.

At mine, she did not cry.

She smiled the whole day. Warm. Present. Holding my father’s arm. Dancing when it was time to dance. Making small kind comments to the women at her table about how beautiful I looked.

She did not cry.

And I understood later, years later, from a chair in a living room in Brooklyn with a broken wrist in my lap and a man in a silver mask waiting for my answer that the reason my mother had not cried at my wedding was because my mother had already done her crying in a bathroom seven months earlier, and had already understood, seven months earlier, what I was about to spend three years learning.

The door closed.

I did not hear it.

I turned around, three years later, and found the hallway sealed.

And that is when I started counting the distance from my chair to the couch in strides.