Orchid     It was six months after sherry's divorce, and she hadn't gone out on a date yet. Everyone she knew was worried about her.     "Oh, Sherry, you have to go out sometime. You can't spend your whole life alone." These were the same people who had encouraged her to divorce her husband. 'Better to be alone than miserable,' they had told her.     Not that they were totally unjustified in encouraging her to get a divorce. Her husband, Matt had been a real jerk, especially towards the end when his gambling started putting them in debt. But Sherry tolerated it without saying much, always being the forgiving wife. The breaking point in the marriage occurred when she caught Matt lying in bed with their cleaning lady, both of them naked. she lost it then, screaming five years of resentment at the top of her lungs and threatened murder. The cleaning lady jumped out of the window to escape Sherry's rage and ran like a scared plucked chicken the hell away from there (And this little piggy cried, wee, wee, wee, wee all the way home). Sherry didn't see her again until a custody trial for Matt's children, where she testified that Sherry was unstable and given to hysterical emotional attacks.     Matt had denied that anything went on between him and the cleaning lady. They were having an "existential" conversation, and freeing themselves of clothing helping them to free themselves of the mental barriers that came between them. Then Matt could be freer with Sherry in their marriage. Yeah, right. Matt had never been philosophical a day in his life. Sherry had never heard such bullshit before, but after five years of marriage she should know to expect that type of crap from her husband. All of his crazy behavior was justified in this marriage because of her- he drank because of marital fights, he gambled because their salaries couldn't afford the mortgage on a house she never wanted anyway as well as child support for three kids to his ex-wife. Once the wedding vows had been uttered, nothing he did was wrong; everything he did he did as proof of his undying love and sacrifice. And now this "existential" crap to justify an affair.     Well, Sherry couldn't say she was completely surprised. She wasn't even that angry, once she got past the initial confrontation of her husband's adultery. It was almost a relief, like her ticket out of hell. She still loved Matt, but the affair gave her the ammunition she needed to get out of the marriage.     Divorce sounded so ugly, which was precisely the reason why she had waited so long to file for divorce. She had known that the divorce rate was high when she got married, but she wanted her marriage to be different. The idea of being a man-hating divorcee like many of the divorced women she knew made her sick.     So when she filed, she was without a doubt in her mind ready to terminate the marriage. She figured she would get her divorce and get on with the rest of her life. I actually look forward to being alone, she considered as she discussed proceedings with her attorney. She'd gotten married very young-nineteen- and wanted some tine to herself to discover what the world was about, and, more importantly, what she was about.     But that dream wasn’t as easy to attain as she had hoped for. She had not counted on Matt contesting the divorce as vehemently as he did, delaying the action for almost three full years. He had refused to sign any papers or go to any hearings whatsoever if it had to do with letting her go permanently. And he harassed her, making it all that much harder to let go of him emotionally. Sherry was through with the marriage, but she still had had heartstrings attached to him. It killed her to go with the divorce. And in the inner recesses of her mind, she hoped he would get some kind of help and become the man she met and fell in love with at eighteen. She wanted to go home again.     So every night for three years she'd return to her apartment to either find him sitting on her doorstep holding wilted violets (they grew wild by their house) or thirty messages from him on her answering machine begging her to come home, sometimes both of the above. There were times when she listened to her husband's voice on the answering machine she could hear other women's voices in the background with her husband. It made her sick.     Sherry never knew what happened to Matt that made him comply with the divorce after he'd fought it so hard for three years. She never spoke with him directly, their attorneys spoke for them. The only proof that he was in volved with the process at all