No October Flash for me today. I paraphrase; Truth is more horrifying than fiction. No, no dead bodies, no small murders, no square block apocalypse. Just a divorce, the long last leg of a sprint that became a marathon.
There was a pulp novelist in the fifties, James Cain, who usually started his novels off with the crime and worked backwards or worked forwards to the point of apprehension. His most famous book, I think, was The Postman Always Rings Twice. That’s what a Divorce is like Horror-wise. It’s just the legal wrap up, the apprehension of the criminals after the blood has gone cold and the body’s set to ground or fire or whatever element was the family’s choice.
Several cases were scheduled at the same time; that’s how circuit court often works, things like traffic tickets. The judge or the clerk arranges the Docket in whatever order suits their fancy. I’m sure if I were to get divorced weekly I’d find the pattern here. In Oregon I knew most of the judges at least the ones appropriate to my cases and had a fair idea how they ordered their dockets.
Seems dissolution of marriage can be the sort of sensitive thing where a compassionate system would bring folks in one at a time. Not so much mine which was more like Scrooges funeral, a quiet affair with only the corpse in attendance and poor whatshisface, tiny tims useless dad (I never felt sympathetic to him, the dad, he was not assertive, not pro-active, did not stand up for himself, his wages, his family. I forgave him though, the way I forgive all Dickens Characters; they are not real. They don’t pretend to be real. They are object lessons for people that Dickens believed needed an object lesson to be a mallet for killing cattle swung liberally and often).
Some of the cases involved children, property, short, ugly, brutal marriages with complicated finances. Not all were heard. I sat for a half an hour listening to the clerk go over cases with the – combatants? --- surprised at how many didn’t have the right paperwork. If I knew I could have fucked up I could have fucked up on my own sans attorney. The poor clerk, a nice enough round young gal with boundless energy, almost had my intervention. She was trying to explain to an angry woman how she couldn’t claim the husband (whom she was to divorce on today’s docket) was not the father of the children without informing him or the alleged biological father and, in an effort to make it seem more simple to the angry woman she stretched the truth a bit “If you get divorced today your husband will be the father for all time”.
I knew how to explain it to the lady without her getting angry and was about to intervene, especially when the clerks next words were “I’m not allowed to give legal advice” but one of the kids started crying and she just stormed off. I didn’t want to get mixed up in her affairs but I really didn’t want the clerk to get hurt. It worked out. I would have advised her to go ahead and get divorced and when the legal dad was slapped with child support let him contest the kid’s paternity. Or, if the real dad was the one bent out of shape let him contest the paternity. Neither man nor her attorney was there (mine either, some attorneys were, some not, the cases I saw went the same either way). In my mind The lady who comes to court alone with two infants gets to do what she needs done, the fuck up of the dads is their problem, the fuck up of the attorney his.
So I got called up, read my little piece, was granted a divorce and sent to the clerk for filing. This the part of the horror story where the perp or the vic considers remorse or regret. I am hardwired for nostalgia. I am way past regret or remorse and have no investment in whether sunny has any. I mailed a copy of the decree. She’ll get it or she won’t. Don’t care. The part I care about I have no control over; that she doesn’t lead with her chin, that when the bus comes she doesn’t look for anyone to throw under it, that she try being nice to her family before she alienates the rest of them. That she should either learn how not to be ashamed or quit do things that she’s ashamed of. I didn’t say any of that. I read from a script that met minimum qualifications for a divorce in the State of Michigan.
I gave the lady on the bench next to me a mint. She thanked me. Out in the hallway after we were both done she whispered, like a library whisper, “Some relief, no?” I agreed and told her to have a nice day. She smiled wanly. Yeah, I thought, me too.
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