The banquet hall at the Akron Lodge held sixty people at round tables with white cloths, and every one of them was looking at me. Howard, at the head table with a plastic retirement plaque in his lap, smiled the way he smiled at the gas station when someone held a door. I tapped the microphone, and it squealed, and people laughed. “Thirty eight years,” I said. “That is a long time to keep the paperwork of a man.” I let the laughter fade. Then I unfolded a sheet of paper and held it up so that the lights caught it.
“Howard, you changed your pension election last month. Single life, no survivor benefit. Six hundred dollars more for you every month, and nothing for me when you are gone. Am I correct?” The room fell silent. Howard laughed, too loudly. “Honey, we can talk about this at home.” I said, “I would prefer to talk about it here, because I have the form. Federal law requires my signature on that form, notarized. I never gave it.”
Mr. Peterson, the plant manager, a heavy man with kind eyes, leaned forward. “Mrs. Bowman, are you saying the election is invalid?” “I am saying, Mr. Peterson, that the retirement plan of this company is governed by federal law. A married participant cannot waive the survivor benefit without the written consent of the spouse, witnessed by a notary or a plan representative.” I looked at my husband. “Howard, whose signature is on the line marked Spouse?” He did not answer. So I told them. “It is mine. Except that I did not sign it.”
The woman who has filed every form in a marriage is the one who knows which signature is missing.
The forgery was not good. Howard had practiced my name on the back of an electric bill, and the practice sheet had been in the pocket of his gray jacket for a month, which I discovered when I took it to the cleaners. The notary stamp belonged to a friend in his bowling league, who had stamped the page without asking a single question. “Four lines,” I said to the room. “Four lines of ink, and a man would take away the roof from over my head. I call that a poor return on thirty eight years.”
Nobody laughed this time. The boss of Howard, Mr. Peterson, rose to his full height and said in a quiet, steady voice, “Howard, I will need to see you in my office on Monday. With your attorney.” The woman from human resources, at the next table, was already writing on a napkin. Howard sat as though he had been nailed to the chair. For the first time in thirty eight years I saw him look at me not as a wife but as an opponent. It was a very small satisfaction, and I decided to enjoy every second of it.
Carol did not come. I learned later that she had been sitting in her car in the parking lot, in a blue coat, with a suitcase in the back seat for the flight to Myrtle Beach. She watched the guests leave the building, one by one, and saw that Howard did not come out. She drove away without waiting. By midnight she had blocked his number. By the end of the week she had told her own sister that she had been taken in by a man who was already taken.
The pension office in Cleveland reviewed the form and issued a letter in nineteen days. The election was void. The survivor benefit stood, in full, as it had since 1987. Howard was referred to the plan administrator and to the county prosecutor for forgery, and the notary who had stamped the form lost his commission. Howard hired a lawyer, an expensive one, who looked over the practice sheet, the stamp, and my sworn statement, and advised him in a single word: “Plead.”
The divorce was not a battle. It was an accounting. I had kept the books for his side business for thirty eight years, and I knew where every dollar had gone and where every dollar was hidden. The judge in Summit County gave me the house, half of the pension in a division order, and half of the business accounts, including the ones Howard had forgotten to mention. When he stood to leave the courtroom he turned and said, “I never thought you would do this.” I said, “That was the whole problem, Howard.”
I did not sell the house. I replaced the roof in June, with the help of my son, who drove down from Cleveland with two friends and a trailer of shingles. We worked three days, and I held the ladder and made sandwiches. On the last evening we sat on the porch with cold lemonade. My daughter, who had flown in from Phoenix, took my hand and said, “Mom, I did not know you were this brave.” I said, “Neither did I. But I knew the forms.”
These days I volunteer at a legal clinic on Saturday mornings for women who have never been taught to read the papers in their own marriages. We have a stack of forms, a pot of coffee, and a poster that I made myself. It says: BEFORE YOU SIGN, READ. BEFORE HE SIGNS, READ HIS. Forty seven women have come in. Not all of them leave their husbands. But every one of them leaves knowing exactly what is on the table, and that, I have learned, is the only kind of freedom worth having.
