What surname will be on my headstone?
I bore my maiden name when I was no longer a maiden.
When I married the first time, I kept my maiden name and attached
my husband's name with a hyphen, like a rope attached to a secret; a line
tied to a tree as I tread into the dark and narrow cave of matrimony.
When we divorced, I kept the last name, hyphenated, so I would not be mistaken
for an unwed mother. These little roped names were often doubted because
of my youth. My children bear my first husand's dark blonde hair,
crooked teeth, and last name.
The twins came: a surprise. A pregnancy surprise; a two-for-one deal. My
boyfriend and I, from a great distance, casually bantered about the idea of marriage.
I went to confession. I wallowed with child. With children. Kneeling
was difficult. The confession was difficult, hurried, and furtive, choked in remorse and
incense. My penance: to marry the father of the twins. I laughed into tears at this
cosmic joke, and understood, as I stood outside Our Lady of Perpetual Help in the ticking snow, that a marriage between us would be a gulf too great to cross, even if I invoked
the safety of the hyphen-rope. When the twins were born, their father came to claim
them with a grunt. That was the last I saw of him, except in the knowing grin of our daughter and the bullet-proof stance of our son. I gave these children my maiden name.
I married my second husband in a flurry of hope and promise. I took his name. I grabbed
it with both hands, flourishing it as a mantle of love and legitimacy. This was it for me,
no more new names. I would grow into this person as "wife". I didn't use any rope. I was free
falling without a flashlight. In his dark and narrow hours he cast me out.
He raised the bottom of the valley up to meet me. I am stunned and
wide-eyed at the end of this journey. I gave myself no rope.
I carry his last name like a blank tattered Bible. My four children bear two different last
names, neither of which is the one I have now engraved on all of my affairs.
All these names, shuffled like playing cards, a deck stacked for tricks with the
Queen of Hearts and a Suicidal King. What name will my great-grandchildren read
on my gravestone? What ropes and hyphens will they climb to find me?
Perhaps I will invent a new name. One that does not blur the limits of me with
legalized love, authorized sex. Something moving and ridiculous: loud, and hard to spell. Something people have to trip over twice in order to pronounce. A new password, the key writ thick upon my headstone.
