“The Garage Room” by Sara Winslow

2023

I wake to a text from my ex-boyfriend, asking if he can rent the room in my garage. I answer with a garble of words that sound like a bad greeting card: “I’m so sorry to hear about your divorce. I know how rough it must be. Unfortunately, the room isn’t available. I hope you find a place soon. Please take good care of yourself during this difficult time.”

These words answer his question. And they fail to encompass my empathy, my memories, my pain.

2001 

My husband and I move to San Francisco and buy a house. We live on the second floor. The first floor has a garage with a bedroom and bathroom. We use the garage room for guests and for TV watching. Flat screens aren’t common yet; our bulky TV doesn’t fit in the tiny living room upstairs.

2006 

My husband moves into the garage room. I rent an apartment, fleeing a marriage that’s become stifling in its monotony. He doesn’t want to stay upstairs, in the bedroom we used to share. 

I meet a saxophone player who is daring where my husband was cautious. Free-spirited where my husband was strait-laced. I fall for him, not realizing (or not caring) that my new boyfriend is unreliable where my husband was steady, noncommittal where my husband was dedicated. 

2007

My ex-husband moves back east. I remortgage the house to buy him out. Although we’re still new, my boyfriend moves into the house with me. We say it’s for economic reasons. For him, it mostly is. For me, it’s mostly about going to sleep with him every night and waking up with him every morning. 

The garage room still holds the TV, though technology has advanced and we mostly watch things upstairs, on his laptop. When we don’t have anyone staying in the garage room, he goes down there to practice his saxophone. 

2008 

My boyfriend’s nine-year-old daughter is coming to visit. It will be our first meeting and I’m giddy with anticipation. I paint the garage room purple to welcome her.

2010

His daughter is staying in the garage room on her annual visit. The three of us go to a jazz jam at the neighborhood pub. A stranger comes by and says, “You have such a nice family.” I want to cry from pride and from yearning. We resemble a family – all of us tall, slender, long-limbed. He’s black, I’m white, she looks like she might have a parent from each of those races. Which she does, but I’m not one of them. 

I will us to be a family, yet I can’t make her into my daughter, or even my stepdaughter. He has made clear that he’s done with marriage. She’ll never be more than my boyfriend’s daughter who stays in the garage room each summer. And he’ll never be more than my boyfriend. Still I cling to as much of them as I can have.

2012

My boyfriend moves into the garage room. Not for the first time. We argue a lot, we often break up temporarily. The previous times, he would move downstairs for a day or two, then our paths would cross in the house, we would have makeup sex, get back together. This time, I want to disrupt the pattern.

I tell him he can stay in the garage room until he finds his own place. But he can’t come upstairs. I still love him, but I know this break has to be the final one. I long for someone who will stay with me forever, and that isn’t his plan. When we first met, his free spirit helped me recover from the monotony of my marriage. Years later, my need for stability has imposed that same monotony on him. While he looks for somewhere else to live, he comes and goes through the garage, staying out of my living space. 

After he moves out, I turn the garage room back into a guest room. I consider restoring the walls to a neutral color, but decide to keep the purple, to preserve something of the girl who once spent her summers there.

2020

My ex-boyfriend’s daughter is in town, visiting him and his current girlfriend. In the intervening years, his daughter has become an adult, nearly finished with college. When she was a child, I dreamt of her moving to California for college and taking up residence in the garage room. During one of our breakups, I confessed this to him. “That was never going to happen,” he informed me.

The three of us have lunch. I feel empty, sharing an awkward meal with these two people I once loved intensely, people I now barely know. He mentions that his mother recently visited him and his girlfriend at their home. “Your mom stayed with you?” I ask. “Even though you’re not married?” He nods. His mom, who lives a few hundred miles away, never visited us during the five years we lived together because we were “living in sin.” 

Later, one of his social media posts reveals that his current girlfriend isn’t his girlfriend, she’s his wife. He’s not actually done with marriage. He just didn’t want to marry me.

2023  

Then comes the day that I wake to a text from him, asking if he can rent the room in my garage. He’s getting divorced. His wife wants a kid and he doesn’t want another. He was adamant about that when he and I were together. Apparently, he loved her enough to waive his no-more-marriage rule, but not enough to waive his no-more-children rule. 

When we were together, part of me wanted a child, one like his daughter. Part of me hoped I would accidentally get pregnant. I didn’t, and when we split, I was 47 and too old to keep thinking about it. Reading his text now, I wonder how young his wife is that she can still think about it. I calculate his age as 55.

I empathize with him, needing to find a home at 55, being humbled enough to ask if he can stay in my garage. Then I remember how much I once wanted a different future for us, not as landlord and tenant. I remember how we so often broke up and fell back together. I remember how it devastated me when our relationship finally ended. I remember how empty our lunch seemed a few years ago. And I remember how inadequate I felt when I learned he had married someone else. I decide he can’t have the garage room back. I tell him so in a text that sounds like a bad greeting card.

Postscript

All of this is true, but it’s not the whole truth. If I wrote an entire book, included every nuance, our time together surely would come across as more mutual, more meaningful. But this is an essay, not a book. This is what I hold in my head. And this is what keeps him out of my garage room.

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