The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones (20 page)

Really? I mean,
really
?

Gail Sheehy and
Passages
—what a laugh! She will live to rewrite
Passages
for another fifty years. To humor the occasion, I open the book at random and read this:

In my books and speeches since 1995, when I published
New Passages
, I keep predicting liberation ahead—the advent of a Second Adulthood, starting in one’s midforties and fifties. At that proud age, having checked off most ‘shoulds,’ people generally feel a new sense of mastery. Haven’t you done your best to please your parents, your mentor, your boss, and your mate, and now it’s time for you? The children are making test flights on their way to piloting solo. Your parents have become giddy globe-trotters, piling up frequent-flier miles and e-mailing playful photos of themselves riding camels. . . . Now you can finally earn that degree, start your own business, run for office, master another language, invent something, or write that book you keep mulling.

I have an urge to find Patty and throw the book in her face.

But I don’t.

I carefully place the Caregiver’s Journey calendar in the recycling bin, and immediately wolf all the chocolates.

Ladies of the Lake

M
R. Y HAS LEFT
a cryptic message. Still living at Wilson’s sprawling bachelor pad, presumably, he and I have not seen each other in four weeks, and have only exchanged a few texts. His first-ever phone message is friendly and guarded and wry, in that sort of punch-one-in-the-arm-type way, inviting me to be his date to the closing-night party of
Jam City
. It sounds awful. I am telling Kaitlin about this as we round Balboa Lake (yes, we do have the occasional lake in Los Angeles) on one of those healthful walks she enjoys. It’s so windy we are less walking than beavering our way, heads down with determination, around the lake. All around us other ladies in Asics and visors are also beavering around the lake. It’s almost as though we women power the lake, as though we’re its worried turbine engine.

“How is it going otherwise?” she asks me.

“Oh, it’s tough,” I say. “Grimly I clock forward. Everything is emotionally flat. There’s nothing in life to look forward to. Every day I Scotch-tape myself together, I staple myself together, I glue myself together, and get up to forge forward into, well, this wind. I do it for the girls. I stay in there. I sledgehammer into the ice, put my ice pick in, grimly hang on to the side of the mountain.

“I found myself thinking, you know, of Mrs. Sedaris as she appeared in David Sedaris’s story ‘Let It Snow.’ I taught that in my writing class last year. There were too many snow days in a row so, going crazy from their constant company, Mrs. Sedaris locked the children out of the house, and sat at the kitchen table quietly smoking and drinking. Then she fell down in the snow and lost her shoe. The children collected her.”

“And?”

“And I realize I am at the point in my life where, instead of thinking of myself as one of the bright semi-young lights of
This American Life
as at one distant time I used to be, I actually think a lot about Mrs. Sedaris. I am not David or Amy Sedaris, I am really much closer to their mother, who sits at the kitchen table during the day haplessly smoking and drinking and who loses her shoe in the snow. Oh God.”

“Hmm,” she says. “What else are you reading?”

“Good question. It’s hard to find a book to get into these days. Since Mr. Y’s been gone, I just want something comforting at night, like a cozy English country cottage of a book. In the middle of a sunny meadow where the bees
bzz-bzz-bzz
and the dragonflies go
zzp-zzp-zzp
. I want a book to gently entertain and lift and then tranquilize me. I want kind of a Zoloft of a book.”

“I never travel without a P. G. Wodehouse or a David Lodge. I just adore those books. I bring my foldable night-light along, and everything’s perfect.”

“Well, I always think that sort of comforting midafternoon voice is going to come from Anna Quindlen, your funny, smart, sensible friend who sort of always has your back. So when I was staying at Judith’s, I took to my temple-like guest bath Anna Quindlen’s
Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake
, a book I thought should be its own cozy warm bath.

“But while reading it I soon began to freak out and feel like a failure. I realized that Anna Quindlen is a warm, sensible, self-deprecating essayist who also happens to still be happily married (no blow ups, no affairs) to her high-school sweetheart after decades and decades and who very sensibly gave up drinking, flat, in her twenties because she thought it wasn’t a terribly wise idea. Her worry is that she has collected a few too many plush throw pillows in her beautiful home with her husband whom she loves.

“God, I felt like a hideous monster failure with a crippled fucking claw. Anna Quindlen was a judgmental beeyotch masquerading as a nice person, and I hate her. I realize this puts me in the can’t-win position of attacking a clearly very nice and successful person, with my crippled fucking metaphorical claw. But if only we could see women crash around a bit more, particularly in middle age. If only our cropped Katie Couric hair could be let messily down.

“I mean,” I press on, “I think of a famous poet I know whom we’ll just called Devorah. Devorah was interviewing for a good university job teaching poetry. She is both celebrated and a bit scary—with a dessicated overthin look that would look amazing on any of the Rolling Stones but that people might perhaps find off-putting on a fifty-six-year-old woman. Even though she is incredibly thin and wears cool rock-and-roll belts.

“Anyhoo, when she was invited to sit down for the interview she declined, saying, ‘It’s just that last night I had so much sex my pussy is sore!’ It so very much cheers me when a sister lowers the bar. Thank you, Devorah. Okay, K. Your turn. What have you been reading?”

“Oh my gosh, in my book group we’ve been reading the best book—
Oops, I Married My Mother
!”

“Oh boy!”

“Sure! Well, it’s not really the best book, it’s a little on the nose, and she seems to have borrowed all her concepts from other writers. But it was handy to have all these ideas in one slim manual. Okay, so she posits this not-terribly-new theory that whatever wounds we suffered in childhood, via the dynamics of our parents, we carry forward into our adult relationships. Sometimes what we do in fact is marry our mothers, as I did with my ex-husband, Gerald.”

“Sure,” I say glumly. “That’s nothing new.”

“With Gerald, I was always patrolling the perimeter, trying to make sure everything was okay in just the same way I used to hover nervously over Mama. Then he got depressed and let everything go to seed, and I probably enabled him as I just kept caretaking him and caretaking him until I realized I no longer wanted to be married to a depressed, fat, unemployed alcoholic. But now of course with my second husband, Steven, I have a totally different relationship. If anything, he’s sometimes a bit too independent. So now I get to be the whiny one.

“But you know what, Mouseling,” she says turning to me and calling me by my childhood name. “You talk a lot about being lonely when Mr. Y is gone. Lonely. This is even though you guys generally spend more time together than humanly possible—you used to go together to the gym, for crying out loud! And you were never ‘lonely’ with Mr. X. Aside from that one time early on with Mr. X, when he was in Spain for two weeks and you couldn’t take it and were crying on the phone and then he sent you that plane ticket—”

“He did?” What’s curious is I don’t even remember the incident. It’s hard to remember crying on the phone with Mr. X, but now I vaguely recall that that must have been true.

“Uh-huh. Oh yeah. And when you were a little girl and we had twin beds, you used to flop out your leg to cross the bridge so your leg would actually be in my bed. Also at night we used to sometimes pile into Mama’s bed, and she would get so crowded and fed up she’d go back into one of our empty beds.”

“Well, that part I remember,” I say.

“The thing is, I know you. And you are not by nature a lonely person. You are by nature interested and focused and busy doing ten things at a time that you enjoy.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Mr. Y has put up with a ton from you, for so many years you don’t even see it. The man loves you so much—he destroyed his life for you. But just like I’m always patrolling the perimeter to make sure everyone around me is happy, which is my pathology, it’s like you’re also patrolling the perimeter, always alert, on watch, to make sure that love is not going away. It’s like you’re asking him to prove it over and over again: Don’t take that job. Come home on time. Don’t be late. Call me back quickly. And he always does, pretty much, but it’s never enough.”

“It does feel like that,” I admit.

“But maybe you’re going to have to let that go. Look. You lost your mother quite young to Alzheimer’s disease, and that’s sad. That’s really sad. Starting from nineteen you didn’t really have a mother, and she had been everything to you. But you can sit with those feelings and let them move through you. It’s okay. You don’t have a mother and that is sad. The author of
Oops
says we don’t sit enough with our grief and let our bodies process it. It’s grief we’ve sometimes been holding on to for decades. And that’s okay until the age of fifty. After fifty our bodies can’t hold it anymore without inflicting self-damage. So our health will begin to suffer with the burden of carrying all this stuff around.

“Apparently when you actually let yourself feel an emotion—rather than pushing it off because you think it will swallow you—well—when you actually let yourself feel it, and sit with it, it goes away. Maybe it’s okay to want to be loved, and just the fact that your mom died does not make you unlovable. Maybe it will all end up okay. Maybe you can have a joyful life. Maybe you can become the man you always wanted to marry.”

Kaitlin makes me write a letter, and here it is:

Dear Mr. Y,

Here is my letter of apology. You have been a good and loyal person who has gone beyond the call of duty for too many years. I never realized how much you generously gave, I took it for granted, and I humbly thank you for all the help you have contributed that has helped me prosper, both creatively and financially and as a person.

I am sorry in the course of our relationship I have behaved so monstrously, which has helped to destroy this magical feeling we once had. At its best, my time with you was truly the most fun I’ve ever had.

I think I have some unresolved issues that have to do with missing my mom and feeling untethered with my dad and honestly really wanting be taken care of, occasionally, by someone.

Perhaps that’s the wrong role to try to plug a man into at this point in my life. Our relationship began with you in a kind of caretaker role, and I naively misread everything. Nobody’s fault but mine.

I wish you well in all your future endeavors and sincerely hope you find happiness.

The greatest thing I can hope to achieve is, if in five years’ time, I can say truthfully that I am your friend. If not your huckleberry friend, then just a good friend.

Love,

Me

The Great Retreat

R
EGRETTABLY, MY SOJOURN
AT
Sunswept is over.

I am back in my house. I am back with my girls. I brought them home last night, fed them dinner, put them to bed, and now it is morning. Sunday morning. I am back among the clutter and the wreckage. Oh God.

And here it is.

After walking and drinking and Zumba-ing and hydrating and getting together with girlfriends and shopping and fighting and divorcing and kissing and going to therapy and praying and playing Solitaire and sometimes allowing it to overflow but most of the time staving it off by running out ahead of it, driving out ahead of it if necessary, in the freeway’s diamond lane, and then getting a new water bottle and buying new running shoes to dance as fast as one can to keep it from coming down . . .

It comes down.

This is no longer a mere purse of anxiety that sits on the chest, it’s like my open coffin already ten feet down, as the dirt slowly, like sand in an hourglass, begins to pile in on me. The sunlight hurts. My body hurts. The visuals of the bedroom hurt, the burnt-tangerine walls, the piles of clothing, the dusty books. Just blinking my eyes hurts.

It’s 8:17 on a Sunday morning, the day is already too long, and tomorrow will be another day, and another, and another. All upcoming projects represent huge downward-plunging daggers of anxiety; every household task undone (ants, dishes, recycling) is an accusation; the upswell of the heart of love is gone, love has washed out, love is never to return, what is left are chores.

My heart hurts. I am hyperventilating. The four corners of the bed are tipping. There is more and more noise pounding in my ears. I can’t outrun it. It is overtaking me. I have blown up my life.

All I can do is lie still.

I can hear the children puttering in their bedrooms. It’s Sunday. Sunday morning. I should make breakfast for them and inquire after them, how they slept, and send them down to the piano and make sure they are doing their homework, so they don’t just languish in their jumbled rooms all day. There is also laundry to be done and sorted, either by me or I need to reconceive it into some elaborate game. Should I take them to the Huntington, to the Huntington Gardens, to walk and talk and look at plants? The sun hurts. The sun hurts my eyes. I can’t move. When I move, the room appears to tip.

The more I listen to Hannah and Sally putter—the toilet flushes, one calls out to the other, the TV switches on—the more deathly afraid I become. I am afraid to be alone with Hannah and Sally because I fear they will immediately read from my dull eyes what I can no longer hide—that I don’t love them, never will again. That’s the horrible secret at the core of this, the devil’s sibilant whisper. At one time the sweet smell of baby Hannah’s head was my whole world; now I have lost that dreamlike forty-ish haze I was in during nursing and babyhood and toddlerhood, when the peach fuzz of my daughters’ cheeks made for a heady narcotic, when my heart thrilled at all their colorful pieces of
kinder
art, when I honestly enjoyed—oh, the novelty, for someone who had pursued abstract subjects in college and graduate school for ten years!—baking birthday cakes. Almost fifty now, when I squat over to pick up their little socks and snip quesadillas into little bowls and yank fine hair out of their brushes, as I have now for the thousandth time, I feel as if I’m in a dream, but a very bad, very sour-scented dream. I have totally, finally, lost the will to continue this day job of motherhood.