My husband is quiet, steady — and boring

I should have known this could happen at the bungalow colony.

The bungalow had been a gift. A one-month vacation, at an aunt’s bungalow she wouldn’t be using that summer. I'd prepared myself — for people with a lot more disposable income than us, for the envy that might bubble up when surrounded by people who owned a house and a bungalow when we were a decade in and still renting.

I'd steeled myself to not get too used to it, to remember that it was a one-time treat and hardly a lifestyle. I knew all the warnings that come with bungalow colonies, where there is little privacy and so much freedom.

But the thing that had stayed with me hadn’t been any of the gossip or the materialism or even the calm afternoons spent doing payroll at a laptop on the porch. It had been Shabbos, when all the families had emerged from their bungalows. I’d seen them then — the fathers and sons rolling in the grass in Shabbos shirts (the grass stains, I’d mourned, but their wives had only laughed), the enthusiasm with which the men had learned and squabbled b’chavrusa, the men who’d sloped off together in search of still-warm cholent.

And the nagging doubts had begun, bit by bit.

Avi is… staid. Methodical. The kind of husband who says little and is always reserved, as though he’s deep in his own mind. He’s a good father and husband who does everything exactly how he’s supposed to do it. He works as a rebbi at a high school during the day, learns a seder at night, sings zemiros at the Shabbos table, and takes out the garbage. He remembers birthdays and anniversaries and rarely gets upset. Avi is reliable. He’s dutiful.

He’s… boring. Empty, as though there’s no life to him. The other men are like children out here, loud and entertaining and boisterous, while Avi sits quietly at a table with his Gemara, head bowed and the world shut out. Menachem stands beside him for a while, big-eyed as he prods the page with a chubby little finger, but he loses interest, wandering off to ride on the shoulders of a friend’s father.

And once I’ve made that realization, it’s everywhere. We drive down from the bungalow at the end of July, the girls sunburned and heartbroken to leave behind new friends and Menachem sulky at the sight of familiar concrete and asphalt, and Avi asks, “Are you glad we went?”

“I don’t know,” I say, and I wait — for him to question me, to push a little bit, to wonder how it is that I can find our month away anything but a dream — but Avi never pushes. He only smiles and picks up the first suitcase, carries it up the long staircase into our apartment.

I think nothing, nothing, nothing, and I have to swallow it back before tears spring to my eyes.