FICTION

The Sadness of Wicker

By Marilyn Abildskov     VOLUME 57 No. 1

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Caroline was the first to go. I helped her pack up her kitchen when, after her divorce, she moved from her house on Yale Avenue to a condo near the mouth of Emigration Canyon.

I had sprained my ankle cross-training the week before so I wasn’t a lot of help, but I could sit at her kitchen table and wrap glassware in newspaper as others emptied cabinets, lifted boxes, and asked Caroline—who remained as imperious as ever—what was next.

And I was there six months later, too, to help Caroline pack up her condo when she downsized again. That’s what she called it: downsizing. As if financial decline were part of a fashionable minimalist mindset. It made me mad at the time, though it’s also true that one night, after she’d moved into her apartment in the lower Avenues, a neighborhood where many of us had lived as students decades before, she looked around and said, almost sheepishly, “I guess I’ve gone bohemian.” We were both a little drunk. I was sitting on her IKEA couch, thinking it wasn’t as uncomfortable as I’d expected it to be. Caroline was forty-six at the time. She touched a dangling silver earring and laughed, then changed the subject.

In her old house in Yalecrest, a desirable neighborhood in that it made us forget we lived in Salt Lake City, which we knew was second tier, Caroline had had beautiful furniture: a bright blue velvet couch, an armoire from her grandmother, a big farm table in the kitchen that the rest of us, who had children, envied even as we wondered what a childless couple did with a table that size. But in the apartment in the Avenues, Caroline downsized even more: that faux leather IKEA couch, one waist-high bookshelf, a sad narrow bed. I wondered where her old furniture was, if she’d given it all to her ex-husband or put it in storage, hoping for better times.

Within a year, that’s what she got. A better house: a two-story Tudor in the upper Avenues, one remodeled top to bottom, featuring period details plus shiny quartz kitchen countertops. The best of both worlds, old and new. She began hosting parties, inviting the old gang from Yalecrest to mingle with new friends, university professors, refugees, artists, visitors from California and New York. Her parties were important to us, people who’d grown up in Salt Lake and felt embarrassed about that, or who’d moved from Sacramento, Boise, the Twin Cities. People like me. People like Caroline. People who would not admit to it but felt embarrassed to have landed here, rather than where we imagined we’d live by now, a more sophisticated place. Her parties proved, by proximity, we were not as provincial as we feared, that we didn’t need a certain zip code to be interesting.

Those of us who had known Caroline from the Yalecrest neighborhood whispered privately at this turn in her address and fate and wondered why. A gift from her ex-husband? A relative who left her money? She continued working part-time for Utah Tourism as she always had. How had she afforded this house—this house that began, in my mind, to represent a city within the city?

We were the ones in Utah you rarely heard about—the ones who voted Democrat; who supported Planned Parenthood; who took our children to the Unitarian Church on Christmas Eve; who called ourselves agnostic; who spoke with barely disguised disdain of our provincial neighbors, the ones who blindly followed the rules of the dominant religion and believed its absurdist origin story involving golden plates. They were the people who belonged to a church with a history of racism and sexism and homophobia and did not care for the need to keep a separation of church and state. We were better than that. We knew it. We planted KEEP UTAH WILD placards in our front yards and posted during Pride on Instagram. “We don’t want to trans your children. We want to protect trans kids,” we said, borrowing others’ taglines. We were the ones in a few adjacent neighborhoods who made up, in this red state, a strong case for progressive thinking, for voting blue, and if we were smug about that, well, so be it.



Caroline announced her divorce over brioche French toast at Tulie’s, where a group of us met every Thursday morning, a breakfast date among neighbors to reward ourselves for speed walking or running every other day. I kept the news inside my chest all day, savoring it, because her divorce highlighted my own good fortune: a solid marriage, no trouble in sight. I reported the news to my husband later that night as he rinsed dishes and I put them in the dishwasher, the two of us working in sync. Our boys, twelve and fourteen then, must have been off in their bedrooms, doing homework, watching video games, though who knows. Maybe they were, without my knowledge, looking at porn.

When I think back to those years now, I think I needed to get my head out of my ass. Did my husband ask me what I knew of Caroline’s marriage? Did I tell him? I knew very little. Caroline had said the divorce was a good thing. She didn’t sound all that upset. She planned to keep the house. He would find an apartment, probably on Foothill Boulevard, at least for now. I kept nodding and finally thought to say, “You’ll let us know if we can help?”

What help did I mean? There were no kids involved. So however sad, life would go on for both of them, right? Though she would not keep the house, it would turn out.

Still, I remember sitting with my Americano, silently congratulating myself on my own intact and happy union. I made a mental list: how our boys were in honors classes, running cross-country and playing basketball; how my husband and I had nearly paid our house off; how I had, after nine years of staying at home with the kids, finally found my footing again, career-wise, working for the Utah Humanities Council—fundraising, which it turned out, I wasn’t half bad at, having learned early on that the best way to wrest money from people with money was not to mention money at all.

No, we wouldn’t be so stupid as to split up, to squander resources, to break the spell of living in our “desirable neighborhood” as the real estate people always put it, though houses were hard to come by here, a ten-minute drive from downtown but nestled in a quaint set of tree-lined streets. And we were happy. Or believed ourselves to be happy. Now I wonder, are those the same thing?



Caroline’s divorce and subsequent moves—her financial fall, then inexplicable rise—ushered in a new phase. The Parkers split up next, Alley announcing her impending divorce over breakfast at Tulie’s just as Caroline had done, though Alley shed many tears while Caroline had tossed out her announcement casually. Plus, we all knew Alley’s husband, Sam, had had multiple affairs. Alley was just the last to know. So Alley’s divorce wasn’t a surprise, but Trish’s was. Trish Williams. She told me first over the phone while we were trying to sort out who would do what on Jenny Hatfield’s city council reelection campaign. She asked me not to tell anyone yet, but apparently she changed her mind because by the end of that week she’d called a dozen of us, saying the same thing. I learned as much a few weeks later. Lori Davis was next. I heard about Lori’s divorce through my oldest son, who was good friends with Lori’s youngest. Lori and Pete would get back together a few years later for reasons the cynic in me would say were primarily financial but who knows.

“Is there something in the water?” I asked my husband. A fifth couple, Diedre and Allen, had just announced their split. He laughed and said, “Then let’s quit drinking the water and open the wine.”

But I wasn’t joking.



Meanwhile, Caroline threw lavish parties in her new/old house in the upper Aves, a neighborhood that rivaled Yalecrest in its desirability, though it was, perhaps, in some of our eyes, slightly soiled, its proximity to the lower Aves sometimes evident. These were parties where she served fresh oysters in December, grilled lobster in July, tiramisu in the springtime that tasted, no lie, like something I’d had once in my youth in an unforgettable cafe on the outskirts of Rome.

Guests proved interesting. Always interesting. There was nothing worse to any of us in those days than failing to be interesting. I met a man in his thirties at Caroline’s one night who said he was working on a collection of short stories that each took place in what he called the anteroom of American life: the driveway. I met a woman in her twenties whose dissertation pertained to the history of treatments for syphilis. I met a couple so committed to animal rights that both men had chained themselves to one of the university’s research labs to save rats.

Once, one of Caroline’s neighbors, an older Russian woman who wore bright red lipstick and pashminas that smelled of Chanel, leaned in while we waited for the bathroom and said to me, “Never marry the Russian.”

“She would know,” Caroline told me later. “She’s married four.”

Caroline had three velvet sofas in her new house, each the color of a jewel: red, eggplant, and cerulean. That’s what she called the blue one. Cerulean. Her Russian friend perched herself on the red couch one January night and drunkenly said over and over again, “Here is my throne, my throne upon the ocean.”

What I remember now are the pillows. So many pillows! Caroline’s couches were filled with striking and abundant pillows. Had she had all those pillows in her house on Yale Avenue? Now she had pillows in bright lemon, lime-green, and mandarin. One night, I sat on her blue couch, drinking wine as my husband flirted with one of the interesting women in a nearby room, and I relished the interesting textures of all of Caroline’s pillows: the shag, the linen, the velvet, the basketweave, the silk. That’s when I was married.

Later, when I was divorced, I did the same, stroking one of those brilliant pillows as my ex-husband sat close, flirting in a companionable way with me.

Caroline invited everyone to her house—all of her old friends, all of our husbands, all of our ex-husbands, all of our current boyfriends and our boyfriends’ ex-partners, and all of her exes and prospects and everyone in between.

In the five years I went to parties at her house regularly, she accumulated two ex-husbands, a dozen boyfriends, and one ex-girlfriend, the result of a brief relationship with a violinist named Sophia. When Sophia left Salt Lake for Cincinnati, we figured Sophia wanted to become a famous violinist more than she’d wanted Caroline.

Caroline didn’t seem hurt.

Perhaps more surprising than her varied and interesting relationships were the tattoos. Caroline accumulated many tattoos in those years, the first a series of small black letters at the top of her tailbone, right above the panty line: believe.

She showed us one night when we were all a little tired or drunk or both.

“I want to remind myself every day,” she said, pulling her pants up after we’d all lightly touched her still-red skin.

Later, I heard she got a heart on her right upper arm, then the word deserve etched onto her left thigh.

Soon she began hosting international students, always young men, each more beautiful than the last, young men who arrived to study at the university from China, Indonesia, Guatemala, and Brazil.

When my ex-husband came to Caroline’s parties, I pretended to barely notice him until late in the evening, and then we’d curl up on the couch. Just as I had when we were married, I’d pretend to listen as he complained about his new partner at Quarles & Spencer, who—he was sure—had a sleeping pill addiction. Basically, we all marveled at how everyone got along because we were, or believed ourselves to be, bigger than that, not like the unsophisticated people we lived among, those who believed in God and temples and oaths of secrecy. We were more open-minded, more intelligent, and more understanding. We knew that things, well—things happen. When a marriage falls apart, you don’t have to split your insides open for God to punish you. You could go to a party in the Avenues and feel the brush of your ex-husband’s hand against your thigh and other than the fact that you’d make a mental note that your ex-husband looked like he’d gained a little weight in the midsection, that would be that. You could keep the civility intact. Remain amicable. We were an intelligent and amicable bunch. I’m surprised we did not choke on our amicability.

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MARILYN ABILDSKOV is the author of The Men in My Country. The recipient of a 2024 creative writing fellowship in fiction from the National Endowment for the Arts, she has also received honors and residencies from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, Yaddo, Djerassi, and the Utah Arts Council. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, Mississippi Review, Story, The Southern Review, The Best American Essays, and elsewhere. She lives in the Bay Area and teaches in the MFA program at Saint Mary’s College of California.


VOLUME 57 No. 1