"Getting Out"
... spouse will miss her when she leaves and regret the way he treated her. The husband probably also feels the same way, so, in a way, they end up worsening the situation. The decision for the husband to leave was difficult, “Think how you tried to pack up and go, for weeks stumbling over piles of clothes”[9]. If the husband really wanted to leave that badly, he would have been packed and ready to go in no time flat. He was not ready to leave “for weeks” though. I believe that he just liked the thought of getting the last word in. He feels that he has won the constantly persisting argument since he is leaving her first. He does not leave right away though, and that’s because he does not really want to leave but enjoy the satisfaction of letting his wife know that he is leaving her. When he figures out that she is not going to beg him to come back, he has no other choice but to actually leave. The condition of the apartment is a metaphor for the uselessness of their life together, like the “unstrung tennis rackets”[12] that are completely useless to them. The tennis rackets are just lying around the house, with no one making any attempt to repair them. This is much like the relationship between the husband and wife; their relationship can be repaired but neither of them are making any attempt to fix things. Finally they reached a point of no return, “we paced that short hall heaving words like furniture”[14]. This was an emotional and angry scene, nothing was held back from the argument. They let all the anger cooped up inside of them out since they knew that the marriage was already a failure. This is one of the main reasons that the broken couple finally decided to get a divorce. The memory of their time spent together is bittersweet. The persona keeps the “last [of the] unshredded pictures”[15] of her and her former husband. She was so angry with her husband that she started ripping up every picture of him that she could find. You have got to ask yourself why she saved some of the pictures of her husband. The reason is that she did stay angry at him because she knew the divorce was necessar...