Divorce, Diamonds and J.D. Vance
Fern: I read J.D. Vance’s memoir when it first came out, before he became a vice presidential pick and a partner to a man he once demonized. Vance is an opportunist. The best thing about Hillbilly Elegy is the title. I thought that the book, described as “broadly true,” was broadly phony-baloney.
But wow! He sure pissed off an entire population of women. Miserable Childless Cat women?
Joe: Vance said he was just joking. And you don’t even like cats.
Fern: True. Cats give me the creeps. They’re sneaky. And always jumping up on the kitchen counter, sitting with their bare asses next to the hor d’oeuvres tray.
Joe: I like cats. Though I’m highly allergic.
Fern: That’s why we’re a good match. You cook and I like to eat. I’m neat and happy to clean up. I’m bossy; you’re easy-going and agreeable.
Joe: I wouldn’t say bossy. You have good ideas. Besides, I’m happy to take direction.
Fern: So would you mind if I take over the rest of this column? I have something that I want to share on my own.
Joe: Are you going off on one of your political rants?
Fern: Well, I’ll get back to J.D. but first I want to talk about divorce. Actually my divorce, which occurred thirty-six years ago.
Joe: Not that you carry a grudge. Ok. I’ll proof-read when you’re done and give suggestions. I have a poker game to go to.
*****
Fern: In both of our first marriages, Joe Geha and I were the ones who were left. I believe that neither of us wouldn’t have chosen to get divorced on our own. I kept my ex-husband’s last name because I had developed a substantial writing career with it.
Background for readers: My ex was a college professor. The woman who became his second wife (before his third) was his student, and there were others. Today he would have been Me-too’d. But this was in the before times, when professors sleeping with their students was not as fraught.
Well, writers are dangerous people to betray and at the time I was crazed. So I did what writers do. I wrote about what happened when my marriage of twenty years exploded. I wrote my version. And it was my story to tell.
Actually, I couldn’t stop writing about it: articles in women’s magazines and newspaper columns. Across the country, women I didn’t know whose husbands had cheated wrote me supportive letters and told me that I would survive. And maybe be better off. But at the time, I was both devastated and furious.
My first husband and I went for counseling. Then he told me that he wanted to continue to see his girlfriend. “Because if our marriage doesn’t work out, then I would have no one.”
And so we began divorce proceedings.
I couldn’t sleep. I had divorce motor-mouth. Do you know what he did to me I repeated to anyone within listening range. Once a bank clerk kindly put her hand on my arm. “I know, dear. I was divorced myself.”
I went to a therapist on my own. She prodded: Did I ever think of doing something to myself?
“Like what?” I asked. Then I realized she was asking about me taking my own life. No, I honestly had never thought of that. I did, however, think of killing him.
Then I wrote a book, a memoir telling the story of my marriage’s end.
My agent couldn’t sell it. She said: “Fern, no one wants to read a book by a woman who’s so angry and strident.”
So I trashed that book and wrote another, a comedic novel. By that time I was married to Joe Geha and a new step-mom to his daughters. I was also happy. The novel, Love Lies is a mystery about a philandering husband, a university professor. He is dead in the very first chapter.
The novel had a modest advance and less-than-modest sales -- probably minimum wage if I counted up the hours it took me to write. There was some interest by a famous actress – I think it was Sally Field – for film rights. Then nothing. And that was that!
But there was something else. Something that I think of as The Diamond Story. It goes like this:
Iowa is a no-fault state, which means everything in a divorce is divided without fault or blame, no matter what the cause of the dissolution. Our “everything” wasn’t much. Part of our everything were some diamonds that had belonged to my ex’s mother: a bracelet, a ring, a necklace.
I’m not a diamonds sort of girl, so when my mother-in-law died – way too young at fifty-six of stomach cancer – I put the diamonds in a bank vault and basically forgot about them. My soon-to-be ex did not.
“Those are my mother’s diamonds,” he told me, and by some interpreted legal right they were an inheritance that were his alone. “My mother’s diamonds,” he said. Like jewels that had been in the family for generations. Precious heirlooms, rather than gifts she received from a rich second husband.
“Ok,” I said. It seemed fair that perhaps he should have them.
But when I went to get the jewels out of the vault I saw they were in an envelope with a note in my mother-in-law’s loopy scrawl: These are for Fern.
Suddenly the sacred family jewels became joint property.
I was going to New York the following month, so I suggested that I go to the diamond district and sell them. My soon-to-be-ex agreed.
A friend had a friend who had a father who bought wholesale.
So there I was, walking around 47th street in Manhattan with a couple of thousand dollars of diamonds in my purse. I found the address and I went up to a window – as I recall it had bars -- inside a vestibule and was buzzed into another room with a barred window facing the street. There I met an elderly man who got down to business spreading out the jewelry on a table, the thing-a-ma-jig in his eye, a calculator at his fingertips.
When he got to the ring with the largest stone, he stopped. “This looks like a beautiful ring,” he said. “But the stone is flawed.”
I nodded, expecting his verdict that this – the biggest diamond – would bring in the least amount of money.
Instead, he smiled and said: “So I suggest you just keep it.”
Which I did.
I wore this diamond ring on my finger for a picture which appeared on the book jacket of Love Lies.
“How to you want to look in this photo?” the photographer asked.
“Happy,” I said. “Really, really happy.”
Eventually, the flawed diamond went to one of my step-daughters on her engagement to someone who couldn’t afford a ring, whom she eventually married and divorced and then she sold the flawed diamond in a redesign for a different ring.
So who ever said that diamonds are forever?
Kamala Harris may have never had a baby, but her husband’s adult kids call her “momela.” Her step-daughter, took umbrage with Vance’s mean quote about “childless” women. “I love my three parents,” she said.
I have a biological daughter who is now over fifty! She and my two step-daughters end every phone call telling me that they love me.
Those who read Hillbilly Elegy today should know that memoir is a tricky genre. It’s your story to tell. I actually agree with J.D. Vance on his view that the best place for children is growing up in a loving home with their two parents.
Only real life doesn’t always work out that way.
Thank you for sharing your story! I understand anger after a divorce. I was a minister's wife--later, I joked about having 'divorce insurance,' because who expects a minister's wife to get divorced? We went to counseling and he asked them to check to see how much welfare I could get if he left. However, I was in denial he would actually do it. After all, we had two small children--4 and 2. The counselors told me to go back to college, where I prepared to be a high school teacher. My husband confessed doing some truly awful things. He cried a lot and became suicidal. I couldn't imagine life without him and tried to get pregnant. Then I miscarried and grieved. He moved out when I went to a wonderful weekend conference with several women from church, leaving our children with my mother and sister. I survived but anger fueled me as a single mom on welfare. I got a master's degree from Iowa State and worked as a substitute teacher and adjunct at several colleges before getting hired full time at Hawkeye Community College. Almost 40 years later, I can look back and remember that anger--at a teacher telling me my daughter should be in gifted and talented, but coming from a broken home, she wasn't sure. I'm angry just remembering! But I, too, survived, as did my children. I was single for 15 years, and finally married in 2000. My second husband, Mike, was a farmer/bachelor turned librarian/IT guy. We've had almost 24 years of marriage and he's become a wonderful step dad to our children and grandpa to our grandchildren. My 28 year old self could not have imagined my life today, including becoming a novelist at age 68. We're more resilient than we think, and maybe that anger fueled that determination to survive!
I love this Fern. Thanks so much!!!