Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give by Ada Calhoun

Author:Ada Calhoun
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

“My food!” a friend’s toddler said the other day, pointing to my nine-year-old son’s plate. My son was horrified. “Uh, no, that’s my food,” he said, appalled that this kid couldn’t understand something so basic as what belongs to whom. “That,” he said, pointing to the baby’s plate, “is your food.”

So simple, right? I don’t belong to this man in this other town. My husband is my husband, and other men are not. Monogamy: it’s what we promise in pretty much every religious or secular marriage: “I bind you to me and loose you from all others.” But like Damayanti, sometimes I look at other men and I get a little muddled. Lust creates meaning where there isn’t any, builds mountains of slesha, turns us into children who can’t tell mine and not-mine apart.

When I was a teenage babysitter, one of my charges called all women not his mother “Ada.” I was flattered, though I think having an easy-to-pronounce name was a lot of it, and also it was baby-brain logic: I was called Ada, and I was a woman, and not his mother; therefore, all women not his mother were Adas. It was a category error. And now here I was making such a basic mistake when it came to the strictly limited category of men it’s okay for me to kiss.

I think of all the men I’ve liked over the years, a new crush pretty much every month when I was single, and now every few years I’ve been married, and how each time I’ve thought, How novel! This is delightful and new!

When really it’s the same, over and over again. I look at old diaries and I see a pattern going back to sixth grade: attraction comes on like a flu. Then, eventually, the fever breaks. I try to remember that inevitable dissolution when in the thrall of desire, but it’s difficult—like, when you are sick, believing you will be well again, or trying, in the depths of slushy February, to remember the blazing sun of August. On second thought, rather than illness or the weather, maybe lust is more like hunger: even if you eat the best meal you’ve ever had, a few hours later you’re hungry again.

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