Liza Porter

BRACELET The silver and turquoise bracelet Bobby bought me at the mall broke in half on the exact day our divorce was final. I’d found a pair of women in downtown Eugene, one was a lawyer, one a social worker, who’d gone in together to help women get divorced for cheap. I remember really liking them both, but wishing the social worker would quit asking so many questions. I don’t remember how much they charged me, it’s been so long. Almost exactly 40 years ago, next month, actually. March 1978. Whoa. Maybe that’s why I’m even thinking of this at all. Or it could be that at my new job, the art and antiques store, there are a couple of bracelets that look very much like it. Who knows why things come up in a person’s mind. Or body. This feels like a body thing, for some reason. I can still feel that breaking of the bracelet—my God!—I was not even 22 years old yet and already getting divorced for the first time. Why I was still wearing the silver and turquoise bracelet when I hadn’t lived with Bobby since the previous November, I have no idea about, either. But there it was, the day of the divorce, I must’ve caught it on something at work and it split. Maybe the silver was weak because every time I put it on, I had to bend it a bit in the center to slide it on my wrist. It broke and I wish I could say I burst into tears. That would have been a healthy thing, a good thing. But I just shrugged, I think, and said to myself: Well, there it goes. I still have that broken bracelet in my jewelry box.