Why I Wanted to Keep My Marriage a Secret, by David Sedaris

All these years later, I could still see their room so clearly: its dark, almost black wood panelling, their checkerboard-tiled floor. It was three times the size of mine and a lot quieter. I’d just bullied their mattresses into the hall when my mother showed up and put an end to it. “But I have a contract!” I told her. “They signed it. The matter has been legally settled.”

The bedroom exchange never went through, but both Amy and Gretchen have honored our 1970 agreement. Gretchen has a long-term boyfriend who lives in another town, but Amy hasn’t even dated since the early two-thousands. I used to refer to them as spinsters. Then I learned that, historically, the word applies only to unmarried women up to the age of twenty-five or so. After that, they’re called thornbacks, a thornback being a bottom-feeding skatelike fish with sharp spikes running along its spine.

Meanwhile, an unmarried man of the same age is simply called a bachelor, or, in gaming circles, a wizard.

Often I think that I did my sisters, particularly Amy, a favor. Oh, to be single and accountable to no one. Then Hugh will do something sweet and I’ll remember that it can actually be nice to have someone around. Recently, for example, he trimmed my toenails. I used to do it myself, but now I have arthritis in my back and can only reach my feet in Arizona.

I didn’t ask Hugh to clip my nails. He just saw two of my toes poking out from the holes they’d stabbed in my socks and offered. Watching him tackle the worst of it with a pipe cutter, I thought of a poorly drawn syndicated comic strip that used to run in the Raleigh newspaper. Each pictured a boy and girl who were naked but had no genitalia. “Love is” was written near the top of the frame, then every day, beneath it, there would be an example: “love is . . . laughing at the same old joke,” “ . . . wearing ‘his’ and ‘hers’ T-shirts,” “ . . . quietly watching a hummingbird having lunch.”

I don’t recall “love is . . . clipping his amber, daggerlike toenails,” but then, I didn’t read it every day.

Of course, love is different from marriage. It can exist within a marriage, flickering like a tea-light candle at the bottom of a hurricane glass, but it’s hardly guaranteed to endure. That’s why one doesn’t want to draw too much attention to it. Having a wedding or an engagement party, running off to couples therapy, renewing your vows: isn’t that all just courting disaster?

How hypocritical that of me, Amy, and Gretchen, the only one married is me. It happened in 2016 and was done secretly—it was essentially a shotgun wedding, completely the idea of my banker, Cindy, and undertaken solely for financial reasons. We did it at the county courthouse in the small town of Beaufort, North Carolina. Entering the building late that spring morning meant passing through a metal detector. This is the last time I’ll empty my pockets as a single person, I thought, surrendering my wallet and the old man’s leather coin purse I’ve carried since 1992.

Neither Hugh nor I was particularly dressed up, though we weren’t slobs, either. We probably looked as if we were being audited: slacks, freshly ironed button-down shirts, and the facial expressions you assume after learning that the doctor who’ll be checking your prostate decided to grow his nails out. At least that was my expression. Just close your eyes and think of the money you’ll be saving, I told myself.