SEARCHING FOR JULIA STONE
Deborah Monk
* * * *
SEARCHING FOR JULIA STONE
By
Deborah Monk
Published by Raven’s Wing Books, an Imprint of Briona Glen Publishing LLC at Smashwords.com
© 2012, Deborah Monk. All Rights Reserved.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any re\semblance to actual events, locales, or persons is entirely coincidental. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval systems, without the written permission of the copyright owner or the publisher.
Soft cover: ISBN-13 9781618070104
Hard cover: ISBN-13 9781618070111
Kindle (mobi): ISBN-13 9781618070128
Nook (ePub: Sony Reader and Ipad): ISBN-13 13 9781618070135
Generic (PDF): ISBN-13 9781618070142
LOC Number: 2011943014
Cover and Interior Design: Pamela Marin-Kingsley, Far-Angel Design
Ravens’ Wing Books
an imprint of Briona Glen Publishing LLC
ATTN: Customer Service
PO Box 3285 Peterborough, NH 03458-3285
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Web site: www.brionaglen.com
* * * *
Dedication
To my Mother,
who told me I could be anything I wanted.
And I believed her.
* * * *
Acknowledgements
There are a number of people who have assisted the author along the way in making this book a reality and my thanks go out to all the people who believed in and supported me. I would also like thank the staff and consultants of Briona Glen, for working so hard to bring this book into being: Pam Marin-Kingsley, Dana Blythe, and Jason Reilly, Tammy Andrew, and Wil Birch.
* * * *
Chapter One
This isn’t my life.
That’s the first thought I’ve had every morning for the past I-don’t-know-how-long. I squeeze my eyes shut, hoping I’ll fall asleep and wake up on the right side of my life but my conscious and subconscious do battle and I lay in limbo.
Cue second thought. I have a great life.
Oh goody. Guilt has shown up before breakfast.
There’s nothing wrong with my life. It’s me. There’s something wrong with me.
And that gets me to wondering… can I divorce myself ? I grab the sticky pad I keep on my bedside table and start writing.
I, Julia Stone, being of unsound mind and body, want to divorce abovementioned on the grounds of irreconcilable differences.
I read it again. Simple. To the point.
But maybe a little antiseptic.
I, Julia Stone, being of unsound mind and body, want to divorce the plaintiff, aka me, because I can’t stand her anymore!
Much better.
I put the sticky pad back on the table and pull the blanket over my cold shoulder.
Michael, my boyfriend of four years, wedges his back against mine. It’s cozy and claustrophobic at the same time. He says I’m too dramatic.
I say I’m not dramatic enough.
I stare at the walls, making a mental note, for the umpteenth time, that the hydrangea blue walls are just a shade more purple than I wanted. Instead of making me think of spring with soft blue walls and a buttercup yellow comforter, I wake up with the urge to put Pepto Bismol in my coffee. You’d think there would be a simple light blue paint at the hardware store. There’s Robin’s Egg Blue, and Seafoam Blue and Bali Blue. How about giving a busy woman a break and calling a paint something like, oh-I-don’t-know—Light Blue? I can’t tell you what’s wrong with it, but I know it’s slightly off .
Katie knocks on the door and pushes it open without waiting for an answer. My tween daughter—a term I thought stood for early teenager but now know stands for Sybil-likepersonality-changes-that-are-as-dangerous-as-a-great-whiteshark—crouches at the foot of my bed, waiting for me to sign her note. I look at it, blame the early morning light for the fact that I can’t quite read it, and pretend to look it over. I figure if it’s a note telling me she’s failing out of school, or that she got detention for some hormone-induced crime, Katie’ll fidget. I stare at her over the paper, waiting for a guilty sign, kidding myself that I can still read her. She sighs, the quintessential sound of adolescence, and points to the line I’m supposed to sign.
Katie’s a good kid… so what if I just gave her permission to skip gym? She pulls the paper out of my hand a little too quickly and starts out the door, mumbling about not forgetting to pick her up. I want to ask where and when but can’t bear the thought of one more sigh clouding the room.
I look around the baseboard for the Alice in Wonderland portal that will transport me to the much more exciting and glamorous life I had every intention of growing up and into. But, no. The damn hydrangea blue wall is solid; no magic holes there.
I wiggle around, trying to get comfy. If I could just sleep for five more minutes—
Something scratches my leg. I reach down and find my very official divorce paper stuck to my ass.
I yank the paper from under the covers and throw it on the floor. All my gyrations have woken Michael. He rolls toward me and rubs my neck for two point five seconds, which is supposed to turn me on like a Mercedes, able to go from zero to sixty in under three seconds. “Hon, want a quickie before work?” he asks.
Is he serious?
Wait, maybe I’ve tucked passion somewhere in this coffin of a body.
Nope.
“Sorry, I don’t have time,” I say. Or inclination. Or desire. The only thing I want is to find the damn rabbit hole.
“C’mon. Katie’s left for school. And it’s been a week.”
Jeesh. The electrician is coming later this morning. He could make the same argument for sex. Will I give in to him, too?
The feminist in me knows having sex when you’re not in the mood is wrong, but I give in anyway. Why? Because sex will only take ten minutes and an argument would take much longer. Since I’ve got a civil war going on inside me, I don’t have time to be side-tracked by an argument.
Michael rubs my back. I remember loving that. I remember arching into his touch, so it’s easy to go through the motions, like Harrison Ford doing another Indiana Jones movie. Not an Oscar-winning performance on either of our parts, but good enough returns at the box office to justify the performance.
Michael starts breathing heavier and I match his breath. Maybe if I wiggle around more I’ll still have time to run out and get a cup of cinnamon coffee—who cares if it costs more than my blouse? After all, a woman’s got to prioritize.
It isn’t that the sex is bad. Or good. Or anything. It’s like the screaming in my head has made me numb to everything else. Find your real life, I hear echoing in my head, like the eternal last sock lost in the dryer, going round and round with every other load of laundry, constantly looking for its lost mate. It’s like who I am is tumbling around in the dryer of life… searching for me.
I moan, which Michael takes as encouragement to continue doing what he’s doing. Although I appreciate the effort, it will take more than a little tongue action to get me going this morning.
Thirty-eight isn’t old, I tell myself—a mantra that has lost its shine.
It isn’t young either, a sardonic whisper caresses my skin, kissing me with its foul breath.
Shoving the insidious thoughts aside, I take a long, slow breath, yoga’s promise for finding your way into the moment. Long breath in through the nose…Michael’s head fits into my neck like our very own nook and cranny and I smile. My grandmother had loved the “nooks and crannies” in her English muffins and I never knew what they were. Long breath out through the mouth… Maybe I should write a sex manual. Instead of the Joy of Sex, it could be the Nooks and Crannies of Sex. Forget multiple orgasms; Chapter One would suggest bringing butter and grape jelly to bed, multi-tasking for today’s busy woman.
He kisses my neck for a while, almost as though he knows that might be the only part of me that is paying attention to him. My libido tingles like a long forgotten limb that has fallen asleep, but I gladly squash those feelings. I have more important things to contemplate than my misplaced sex drive… like how the hell did I get here? Bored out of my cotton-picking, who-the-hell-am-I-but-please-let-me-be-anybody-but-me, mind.
Michael moves on top of me and I make the necessary adjustments, a leg here, an arm there. Holding him close, I am grateful that my body is following his lead while my mind races.
I don’t like boredom. I don’t like middle of the road. Growing up with an alcoholic father set me on the road to chaos. I grew up with the idea of escaping, like a puppy straining on a leash. I didn’t know exactly what I was going to do with my life; I just knew it was going to be fabulous.
At eighteen, I moved to New York. Dance requires certain things that I knew a lot about…. addiction, which I got from my father; an unbelievable work ethic, which I got from my mother; and a talent that was all my own. With those three things and my trusty old tap shoes, I spent the next decade completely and passionately devoted to my craft, my own birth into who I was meant to be. I fell in love with Richard, the only straight guy in our company (contrary to Mom’s opinion, which didn’t change even when we got married and had Katie). Our romance had all the elements of Cinderella that eroded into a Greek tragedy.
Incredible ups, and equally amazing downs. But I wasn’t bored.
At the ripe old age of thirty, I knew it was time to retire from show dancing, divorce Richard, and put my life together. Recognizing I had a daughter and not enough money to support us, I moved home to Boston, opened a studio and worked my butt off teaching young girls to tap dance.
At thirty-five years old, I sensed a mid-life storm on the horizon, so I did what any reasonable woman would do. I moved in with my boy-toy and tried to have a baby.
Bored, I was not. Miserable, moody and hormonal as hell. But not bored.
Apparently, my mid-life crisis, although patient, has decided her time has come. She wants my attention and she wants it now. And I’m too tired to run anymore.
Michael is finished and I paste a smile on my face. So what if I missed foreplay and the main event? If I don’t start paying attention, I’ll miss the roughly three minutes of obligatory cuddling. I roll over and he puts his arm around me. I synchronize our breaths, my yogic contribution to our mating.
I have to admit, though, that if it had ever occurred to me that I was going to have a mid-life crisis, I assumed that I would do that with as much gusto as I had done most things. I would quit my job, go off on a world-wide soulful journey and write a book about it, with Julia Roberts playing me in the movie.
But no. I am condemned to a mid-life crisis of boredom. How mundane. How mediocre. How insulting.
Even my mid-life crisis is anti-climactic.
I follow Gabriel the chiropractor into exam room three. He’s the only Gabriel I’ve ever known. Michael and I had agreed if we had a boy, we would name him Gabriel. It’s the kind of name that could be anything. Gabriel the Astronaut, Gabe the Football Player, Gabriel the Macho Pianist.
“So, you think I should take a month off ?” I ask as I lie on the exam table.
“You ask me that every time you come here,” he says, putting the electrodes on my shoulder that are supposed to relax the muscles. The involuntary little spasms feel like mechanical bugs are crawling under my skin. Oddly enough, I find it comforting to give up that tiny bit of control.
“I know,” I murmur, resigned. Just like I asked the acupuncturist I saw, and the herbalist, and the psychic before that. None of them answered yes. Obviously, I was most disappointed in the psychic. Talk about a leading question. The others all promised their particular specialty was all that I needed to feel like myself again.
So far, no one had poked, prodded, or supplemented me back to who I wanted to be.
“Have you been doing the stretches I showed you?”
I nod enthusiastically. Of course I am… not. “I think I have CFS,” I say, my voice muffled in the tissue covered pillow.
“Chronic Fatigue Syndrome?”
I sit up, sending my muscle stimulators flying. “You agree?”
“I’m just confirming that’s what you meant,” he says, replacing the little buggers that fell off .
He flips through my chart. “When you went for your physical, it says here they checked your thyroid.”
“Thyroid-schmyroid. In the book I just read, it said a normal thyroid test doesn’t mean everything is fine.”
“You probably need a rest. A vacation. Don’t you close the studio over school break?”
I sigh. “Yeah.”
“A week off will be good for your shoulder.”
My phone vibrates, tickling my chest. I swore I would never be one of those people who have their phone attached to their belt like a cyber umbilical cord. Instead, I tuck it in my bra. According to Oprah a few weeks ago, the fact that I can fit a gadget in my bra is a sure sign that I am wearing the wrong size. Go to a store and have a real bra fitting is on my list of things—I’ll-never-get-to.
Apparently, Gabriel can feel it through my back. “You’re supposed to shut that off when you come in here,” he says.
“What if the President needs to reach me?”
“Answer it,” he says with a sigh. “You won’t relax enough for me to adjust you anyway until you check it.”
I pull the phone out of my bra and read the text. “Shit! I forgot!”
“What?”
The electrodes scatter around me as I jump up. “I’ve got to go. My lifelong dream is being delivered in half an hour!”
It is eleven o’clock, Tuesday morning, and I have officially made it. I hand the carpenter his check and I am grateful when he leaves me alone, promising to be back first thing in the morning to begin installing the wood floor. He’s already hung the spotless mirrors on the south wall. A Bose sound system, complete with four small speakers, hangs discreetly in each corner of the room. The smell of the stacks of red oak permeates the room.
A practice room.
All my life I have wanted a practice room. A place I could go first thing in the morning, still half asleep when choreography ideas spring from my sleep but never last quite long enough to get to the studio. Or at night, one last dance to put myself to sleep.
I’m not sure what to do first. Put the music on. Put my tap shoes on. Dance without either.
I have wanted this all my life.
And now I have it.
I think I’m afraid to believe it’s true. I move around like a stranger in my own house. In my own studio. It’s like I’ve never danced before. Like I haven’t spent a good portion of my waking hours since I was five years old in a studio just like this.
Having imagined this moment so many times, I walk in a daze to the brand new stereo. I put in my favorite John Mayor CD—none of that typical piano tap music in my personal studio. This is my space, just for me.
I stand in the center of the room. A primal scream rises up from my un-tapping toes, spirals its way up my un-stretched body, and bounces off the walls like a ballerina on speed.
I am crying.
And I can’t stop.
* * * *
Chapter Two
My therapist, Nancy, moved to Hawaii last year. When she left, she gave me her associate’s business card. I was sure I wouldn’t need it.
Lucky for me, my subconscious thought different and kept the card. And this morning when I couldn’t stop crying, my subconscious remembered where I put it. Apparently, my subconscious could also call, book an appointment, and drive me to the medical building because now I’m sitting in her waiting room. The secretary offered me my own box of Kleenex when I checked in, but she keeps glancing at me as if she’s never seen a grown woman cry. You’d think she’d be used to it.
I want to tell her the only reason I’m here—well, besides the obvious that I can’t stop crying—is that my best friend Charlotte is away on vacation. I encouraged her to go to help her get over the married bum she had been seeing. Good timing for her to go away. Bad timing for me. Because without my best friend, I’m back to needing a therapist.
Nancy was a godsend. I often thought of her as my emotional mother. The time I saw her after I miscarried, she actually had me sit on her lap. Even though I weighed twenty pounds more than she did and was six inches taller, I curled up on her lap and cried like a baby.
I’m hoping Nancy’s twin is on the other side of the door, her arms open, her lap waiting, and her schedule clear for the next three years.
Instead, Tinkerbell opens the door and gestures for me to come in.
I am so shocked, my tears stop for a moment.
How the hell is this tiny woman, who couldn’t ride the big roller coaster on a good day, going to save me? Does my insurance know they’re paying one hundred and fifty dollars to a Disney character?
“Julia?” She shook my hand. “I’m Madelyn LaPointe. Would you like to come into my office?”
Unless you’ve got a magic wand that I can use to cut off everyone’s head, my own in particular, not on your pixie little life.
But my tears have stopped. It seems anger, the injustice of it all, is enough to piss me off just enough to make me stop crying. Her blue dress swirls around her legs, polka dots floating across the soft material like happy little bubbles. What professional woman wears polka dots? Clearly, only a therapist who hasn’t had life kick the shit out of her. Well, maybe I’ll just teach Little Miss Perky a thing or two. “Oh, yes. I’ll come in,” I say, thinking life should have forewarned her. If she wasn’t going to comfort me, then I was going to find comfort in popping her proverbial bubbles.
“I’d like to take a look at your old files,” she says, handing me a clipboard, “but I need you to sign this release form.”
I take the form and sign it, figuring it is just a formality anyway. All the therapists in the office probably read each other’s files after work, trying to find the craziest patients, the funniest, or the ones they could write papers on. That’s what I’d do if I had to listen to people whine all day.
We sit in matching purple velour chairs. “May I ask you a question, Ms. LaPointe?”
“Certainly. And you can call me Madelyn.”
“Okay, Madelyn. How old are you?
“Thirty-three,” she answers.
“You’re thirty-three?” That took some of the wind out of my sails. She wasn’t that young at all… thirty-three…only five years younger than me. Tears claw at the back of my throat.
“So you want to tell me what happened this morning?”
I sit there, not knowing where to start.
“You told my secretary that a contractor was at your house and that when he left you couldn’t stop crying.”
I shrug. “Well, yeah, that happened.”
“Everyone knows home construction can be very frustrating.”
“It wasn’t home construction, really. He was dropping off the supplies to build me a dance floor. My aunt gave me an early inheritance, ten thousand dollars, and the only caveat was that I had to spend it on myself.”
“Do you cry every morning?”
“Do I call you every morning?” Okay, maybe sarcasm wasn’t the best path toward mental health, but really…
Madelyn sat there, apparently waiting for me to answer her question.
“No, I don’t cry every morning.”
“So what made you cry today?” she asks softly. “And why are you still crying?”
How can I still be crying? Shouldn’t I have run out of tears sometime in the last two hours? “I don’t know why I started crying. I don’t know why I can’t stop.”
“First things first,” she said. “It’s okay if you cry all day. You can cry here, you can keep crying, and you can go home and still cry.”
“That’s your professional advice? That I just walk through my life crying?”
“I’m not advising it. I’m letting you know it’s okay.”
“Well, I don’t think anyone else will believe it’s okay. I think my boyfriend will be upset if I add tears to the lasagna. And when my daughter tries using the old excuse ‘my mother cried all over my homework’—”
“Maybe worrying about everyone else is part of what got you here today. There’s obviously a part of you that needs to cry
right now. And you can shut it off —”
This is what I came for. The magical elixir to regaining control. “How?”
“You can try to stuff it back inside, but I’d say your tears have been stuffed inside for a long time. That’s why there are so many of them.”
No magic. I fall back into my chair.
She looks at the personal forms I had filled out. “So, you live with your daughter, Katie, and your boyfriend—”
“Michael. He’s much younger than I am.”
“Do you think I need to know that?”
“I don’t know. You wanted to know his name.”
“Okay, so his name is Michael and he’s … how much younger than you?”
“Nine years.”
“And how old is your daughter?”
“She’s fourteen.”
“A teenager. That’s certainly tough.”
Madelyn probably thinks I’m an unfit mother for living in sin when I have a child. “We moved into Michael’s house three years ago when Katie was starting middle school. The school system is much better than the town where we lived before. So there were a lot of good reasons to move in together.”
“Julia, I’m not judging you.”
Yeah, right. “We were going to get married last year when I was pregnant but then I miscarried and it kinda ruined the mood.”
“I’m sorry,” she says.
I reach for a tissue, stalked by tears. “It happens. I already dealt with this with Nancy last year.”
She studies me for a minute, then looks back down at the form I filled out. “I see here you’re a tap dancer.”
“Yes, I teach. I have my own studio.”
“So overall, Julia, how would you say your life is?”
Suddenly, I can’t speak. The floodgates have opened again.
My nose is running and there aren’t enough tissues in the world.
“Okay, Julia. Do you realize that while you were talking about your family, your tears were just a trickle. But when I ask you about your job, it became more like a river. And when I asked you how your life was, it was like a tidal wave of grief came into the room.”
I start crying harder. “I have nothing to grieve. I have a great”—hiccup—“life.”
“You agree a wave of emotion came over you, right?”
I nod.
“Grief? Anger? What would you call it?”
“Insanity. Mental breakdown. Something in me is broken, and nobody believes me.”
She leans forward, not touching me, but moving a bit closer. “I believe you.”
That makes me cry harder. She gives me a pillow and I clutch it to my chest. The last shred of dignity holding me together breaks and I cry for real this time, the sobbing, can’t-breathe-my-heart-is-breaking crying. All the safety pins and the glue and the masking tape that I had used throughout my life to patch myself together came undone and I cried, somewhere between a minute and eternity.
When there’s nothing left but some ragged, worn out breaths, Madelyn asks gently, “Julia, when was the last time you knew what you wanted?”
“I’ve wanted the floor forever.”
“When was the last time you really wanted the floor? Not just remembered wanting it, but really wanted it?”
“I don’t know. I just always thought, that’s how I’ll know when I’ve made it. Not by being in big plays, and not by having my own studio. But having my own floor, dancing just for myself; that was when I was going to know I’d made it.”
“There’s nothing more terrifying than ‘making it.’”
“Why? I should be so happy.”
“First, there’s the disappointment. Usually, “making it”
doesn’t quite match what we expected.” She smiles gently. “And then there’s the dreaded question that comes with making it... now what?”
“No one warned me there was a sequel to making it,” I say.
“Okay… so last time you wanted the floor?”
“I just told you it’s been a dream all my life.”
“Then you must remember the last time you wanted it.”
“You’re not listening –”
“Was it when you booked the contractor who built the floor?”
I looked at her helplessly, honestly not knowing the answer. I miss Charlotte. She would get me a warm cup of coffee instead of barraging me with all these questions I don’t want to answer.
“Okay, new question. What do you want now?”
“What do I want now?” I ask, repeating those five words like they are heresy. “I don’t have time to want anything now.”
“That’s right. Because you are too busy doing what you think you should do.”
“What’s wrong with that? I love Katie. And I love Michael.”
“I’m not saying you don’t.”
“It sure sounds like it.”
“What I’m saying is that you can’t really love them, you can’t really know them, when you don’t know, and love, yourself.”
“That’s the best you’ve got—I need to love myself more?”
“To say more would imply that you love yourself some now.”
Ouch… Tinkerbell has a sting. “My self-esteem is just fine.”
“I’m not talking about self-esteem. Or confidence. You obviously are quite capable, and you know it.”
“I’ve had a great life. You know the old saying about going to the grave having used every drop of life God gave you? Well, I’ve done that. My eulogy is complete. If I was seventy and closer to check-out time, I’d be fine with it. I’d sit back in my rocking chair with my photo albums on the table and chocolate on my lap. But I’m side-stepping into my forties and I swear, if I have to be this frustrated for the next forty years, I’m going to kill myself.”
“Have another incredible life then.”
I droop further into the chair. “I’m too tired to do it again.”
“Then don’t think about a new life. Think of just one thing you want now.”
“I don’t have time to want anything now. Wanting something will be just one more thing I have to do.”
“Because you’re doing what you thought would make you happy,” she said again.
“Exactly. What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing,” she says softly. “If it’s working.”
“But that’s what we’re supposed to do,” I cried. “Figure out what we want and then go after it.”
“Yeah, but no one told you what it was going to be like when you got there. All that planning and working, where did you think it was going to get you? I’m guessing being here in my office wasn’t part of your plan.”
“I thought I was on the fast track to my own personal happily-ever-after, dance floor and all.”
“Yes, you were. We used to teach our girls that getting married and having kids was going to make each and every woman happy. Then we smartened up and added careers, and unbelievable amounts of stress, and we now teach our girls you can have anything you want, be anything you want, it’s all up to you. With that amount of choice and so little real advice or training, I think every little girl is bound to get lost.”
“So now what?”
“First we have to pull you out of the game.”
“What if I don’t want to get out of the game?”
“Then I’ll be happy to teach you.”
“Teach me what?”
Madelyn has a devilish gleam in her eye. “How to become a quitter.”
“You’re just full of fun and games, aren’t you, Tinkerbell?” I say, not meaning to say my nickname for her out loud. Or maybe I do.
“You tried the fun and games. You just spent ten thousand dollars on a dream you haven’t had since you were a kid. My advice?”
“Besides quitting?”
“Get your money back and figure out today’s dream.”
* * * *
Chapter Three
I walk through my practice room, ignoring the bundles of wood leaning up against the wall like matchstick soldiers, all standing at attention. Are they defensive or offensive soldiers? Only one thing is certain—they aren’t getting laid anytime soon.
I glance in the hall mirror, glad to see that my face had lost the look of a bruised tomato. I had driven around for an hour after my appointment with Madelyn so no one would know I had been crying. During the drive her question had whispered through the car like stale cigarette smoke—what do I want now? It seemed like a simple question, but I’ll admit, I was glad when I pulled into the driveway and could distract myself from the empty silence in my head.
Michael has Neil Diamond blaring on the stereo as he moves around the kitchen. He reminds me of Tom Cruise from that movie Risky Business, except that he has all his clothes on, which is good since Katie is upstairs, her music competing with his.
Today they seemed almost in harmony, the bass of her music shaking the walls on their very foundation and his music providing a softer melody. More often, though, they feel like two bulls inside my head trampling through the corridors of my mind like the bulls in Spain, a congested panic with nowhere to go.
Feeling like a voyeur in my own house, I watch him move around the kitchen. I love the way he moves—quick, concise, efficient. I had met him when one of the ballet teachers at my studio got married. She had brought her wedding party in to teach them all the basic Foxtrot. Her brother, Michael, was the only one without a partner and she asked me to fill in. Dancing in a man’s arms was so different than tap dancing alone. Of course, I picked up the steps quicker than he did, but it was such a relief to let go, to not be responsible. I often say I fell in love with him that first night. On good days, it sounds romantic. On bad days, it sounds desperate.
“Hey, Hon,” Michael says, seeing me when he turned around.
I smile. At least I try to.
He gives me a quick kiss. “I’m making your favorite.”
How come he knows what my favorite is when I can’t think of a single thing I want to eat? I lean over the pot. Stew. We had bought a cook book on one of our first dates and made this stew together. Hadn’t I picked a new favorite in four years?
“Do we still have the book?” I ask, nonchalantly leaning against the counter. “Maybe we should pick something different.”
He looks hurt. “When you called and said you were going to be late, I stopped and got the ingredients we need for stew,” he says. “If we pick something new, we won’t have everything we need.”
Of course not. Silly me. What was I thinking? You can’t just open a cook book and cook something—if I hadn’t already decided I was crazy for spending half the day crying, clearly I’d be found off-my-rocker for suggesting such mutiny in the kitchen.
“We could try something new tomorrow,” he adds.
“No, it’s fine,” I say, knowing tomorrow we’ll have left -over stew.
“I’ll stop and get those biscuits from the bakery that you like. They were already closed when I went by today.”
Here I am complaining and he was going to drive five miles just to get the biscuits I like. Clearly I need to add ungrateful to my list of crimes.
I sit at the breakfast bar and pick up a knife and continue cutting up the tomatoes for the salad that had been started in the glass bowl.
“Katie’s supposed to make the salad,” he says, his tone obviously trying to tell me something, “but then the phone rang.”
When I didn’t pick up his hint, he couldn’t help himself. “One of her friends called, she screamed something like, ‘Oh My God,’” his best imitation of a California valley girl even though we live in New England, “and ran up to her room.”
I take a slow breath, hoping he’d drop it.
“You really shouldn’t finish it for her.”
Yeah, right. Because I’d rather have Katie come downstairs either all excited, or in tears, about the latest drama in middle school. And one reminder from Michael that she left a chore undone is going to convince her that we are only here to make her miserable. Never mind we are cooking a healthy meal because we love her. No. Asking her to finish the salad is tantamount to ruining her life. Why can’t Michael understand that?
“I like it when we cook together,” I say, using my words to kill two birds with one stone… avoid confrontation with Katie and appease Michael all at the same time. When did I stop using my words to communicate my thoughts, my feelings, my needs? Now I seem to measure my words effectively. Effective for everyone else, that is.
“You letting her off the hook isn’t right, you know,” he says as he has said a million times. As an eighth grade math teacher, he thinks he has insight into kids. Half the time he’s right. Probably more than half. Most times I don’t care. Most times I think until you’ve been in the trenches with a child of your own, you don’t know squat.
“I know,” I say, my familiar line in the script. The words feel like rotten meat in my throat. When had I become an actor in my own life—a second rate, B-list actor, with a lousy script? Who the hell is my writer? And why can’t I fire him?
I had thought that if we had a child, then he would understand that love doesn’t make sense once you become a parent. That your heart and your mind will be torn apart trying to figure out the right way to parent, and they will most oft en disagree. Lately, I’ve been thinking that he wouldn’t have been any different with his own child. To him, love does make sense. His heart and mind would only be more convinced that he was right.
I sigh, feeling the tears worm their way up my throat, trying to decide who I want to take on more, the self-righteous father figure or the belligerent teen.
Maybe I’ll just take a shower. There’s the old question: if a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound? That’s how I feel about crying in the shower. If no one sees you cry, it doesn’t count.
I put the knife down. “I’ll go see what she’s doing.”
As if he’s recognized that by winning, he’s ruined the mood, he grabs me as I walk by. “She’ll be down sooner or later. How about a little dance?”
I melt into his arms. He did the foxtrot to whatever song was on and I am not going to tell him the band is clearly playing a swing beat. It feels wonderful to be moving together and quiet.
Madelyn’s question weaves its way into the lyrics of the song. What do I want now? Swaying to the gentle rhythm, the question seems less threatening encased in the music.
Somewhere, echoing up from my well of tears, I hear a whisper.
Rest. I want to rest.
The song ends suddenly and he lets me go. I stand there, lost in the middle of my own kitchen. A song shouldn’t end that fast. One beat and it was over. Where was the wind-down? The after-play? The warning? Abandoned by the music, the question and answer still taunt me.
Suddenly, I am jealous of Sleeping Beauty. I can see her lying in her glass bed, sleeping for days and months, and I want to crawl in beside her. No alarm clock, no list of things to do. Just sleep for a long, long time.
I climb the stairs and walk toward Katie’s room. Who was Sleeping Beauty before she went to sleep? Was she a princess in her own right? A cobbler’s daughter? An orphan? No, wait, that’s Cinderella. Forget that. I already tried Cinderella on for size in my twenties. Married my Prince Charming. Somehow, we took a detour on our way to Happily Ever After and ended up in divorce court.
It seems sad the fairy tale I now most want to emulate is Sleeping Beauty. That the one thing I want more than anything in the whole world is a nap. And keep that damn Prince away from me because, I swear, I will kill anyone who tries to wake me up!
I stand outside Katie’s closed door. I hear her laughing on the phone. She might as well have been on the other side of the world.
I go back downstairs and sit at the bar again, picking up the knife. “She said she’d be right down,” I say. We both know I’m lying.
Michael hums as he chops the meat on the other side of the kitchen. He looks so happy. He loves living together. He’s told me so. And sometimes when he talks to his friends, I hear him call me “his wife” and I can tell he is test driving the words and finding them to his liking. Sure, I can understand him wanting to get married—but to me? How is it possible that he is happy as a clam and I feel like I’m being tossed about in a tiny rowboat lost in a hurricane? With a hole in the bottom of the boat? And gray fins circling?
“I see the room’s started…” Michael said.
“Yep. Bob got another project, though, so it might take a little longer.” I had called the contractor after my appointment with Madelyn and asked him to postpone the floor.
Indefinitely.
Great. I’m a crazy, ungrateful liar.
Now is the time to come clean. Tell Michael that I am losing it. Tell him that although I’m sure I love him, that I remember loving him… that sometimes I don’t.
That sometimes, too often lately, all I can think about is running away.
“You okay with that?” he asks, ready to jump into rescue mode. “I could call him back…”
“I’m fine,” I say, cutting the carrots into tinier pieces. I scrape them off the cutting board into the pot of boiling water and watch them disappear.
* * * *
Chapter Four
I walk into Madelyn’s office the next day and plop down in the dark purple velvet chair. I am glad to see she is dressed more appropriately in a black turtleneck, black pencil skirt… and knee-high patent leather boots that obviously came from Street Walkers-R-Us. I decide to ignore the fact that Tinkerbell is obviously a dominatrix. “I think your idea to spend the money my aunt gave me on today’s dream is dumb.”
“I thought you said she wants you to spend the money on yourself ?”
Why does she have to act like I am kicking the gift horse in the mouth? I am not trying to abuse it, just find a loop-hole. “But putting it in Katie’s college fund isn’t spending it. It’s saving it,” I explain.
“You’re saving it for Katie. Isn’t that just a technicality?”
I shrug. Madelyn doesn’t know my aunt is like a bloodhound and I’ll never get away with it.
“You know what I think?”
Here we go. Tinkerbell is sharpening her rapier wisdom.
“I think you don’t have an answer. That you don’t know what you want.”
Should I tell her that she’s made me start thinking in fairy tales and I want to be Sleeping Beauty? How can I tell her that my bones, my skin, and my blood are weary? That I want to rest more than I want to breathe?
“It’s not an easy question,” she says. “Next time you come—”
The look on my face stops her. “I wasn’t really planning on making this a regular thing,” I say.
She smiles. “That’s fine. I’m here when you need me. Well, except for the end of next month. I’m going to Hawaii for a yoga retreat.”
Charlotte will be home long before then.
“Anyway,” she continues. “I was going to ask you to bring me a picture of yourself, of you when you remember being happy. When you remember knowing what you wanted.”
“A picture of me? I’m the Mom, otherwise known as the photographer. We take pictures, we aren’t in the pictures.”
“It doesn’t have to be a recent picture. It can be from anytime, when you were a kid on a swing set, when you remember being happy.”
“Actually, I think I have one.” I pull out my wallet and rifle through receipts for God-knows-what. “When Katie was going into first grade, she wanted to take a picture of me with her. In those days, the idea of spending a whole morning without me was tantamount to nap-time without her teddy-bear,” I explain, finding it behind a coupon for maxi-pads that expired two years ago. “I had this picture of me laminated so she could take it in her lunch box. I found it hibernating under her bed with the dust bunnies.” I don’t tell her I kept it, hoping Katie will want it back when she goes off to college. I try to recognize the woman sitting on the white baby grand piano. I am wearing long flowy pants, a creamy white lace vest, and a smile the size of Texas.
Madelyn studies the picture. “You do look happy.” She hands the picture back to me.
This person, who is me and isn’t me, is grinning like she is Ariel the Little Mermaid and life is an oyster buffet. “It certainly wasn’t like me to climb on furniture,” I say. “I must
have asked, but I don’t remember asking. I don’t even remember who took the picture.”
“If she could talk, what would she tell you right now?”
“We don’t run in the same circles,” I try to joke.
“Julia…”
“I don’t think she would talk to me.”
“Why not?”
“Well, if I were her, and someone like me came up and said, “Hi, I’m your future,” she’d just have to kill herself right then and there. And I don’t think she looks suicidal, do you?”
“What would you say to her then?”
“In my ugly Mom-jeans, with my heavy face, I would hide if I saw her. I’d be too embarrassed to talk to her.” I take a deep breath and glance at my watch. Plenty of time left . “You know what’s depressing? Living with a happy man. And I don’t just mean happy, I mean annoyingly happy. Michael walks around like everything is fine,” I say, wondering if it would be inappropriate to offer to buy her new chairs for her office, more comfy chairs, since I’m thinking I’ll spend my aunt’s gift on therapy.
“Maybe everything is fine for him,” she says, her notebook in her lap.
“And he has fun,” I say, like having fun is a crime.
Madelyn pretends to look shocked.
“He works as much as I do, but he still makes time to work out. He loves it. And he loves his music. He’s a DJ part-time,” I explain.
“I imagine as a dancer you love music, too.”
“I did. I do. I remember buying a tape or a CD and listening to it over and over again. I could listen to my favorite song in the car for an hour, the same song over and over again, and I heard something new every time.”
“And now?”
“Now it seems like it’s all the same stuff. I find a good CD and I listen to it once, maybe twice, and then I put it somewhere and I can’t find it. And then I even forget I have it. So seeing him excited about music just irritates the hell out of me.”
“I’m sure it’s not easy for someone who is depressed.”
I wiggle around in my chair. “I’m not depressed.”
“You came to see me yesterday,” she says, “because you were crying and you couldn’t stop. You told me you’ve been searching for a diagnosis for the past two years, with naturopaths, and chiropractors, etc. I give you a diagnosis and you don’t like it.”
“I don’t want to be depressed.”
“I know you don’t want to be depressed. You don’t want to cry. You don’t want a dance floor at your house. Seems there’s a lot you don’t want.”
“Exactly.”
“I imagine it’s not the first time you have cried.”
“Yes, it is.” Remember, crying in the shower doesn’t count.
“Well then, maybe repressed is a better word for you.”
I toss the word around. Repressed. I try it on for size. “Repressed?” I say out loud like a question.
“Restrained,” Madelyn explains. “Held down, kept in check.”
I nod. “Repressed, like the slaves.” I can live with that.
“You know who is repressing you, right?”
I can tell she’s going to ruin this for me.
“You. You’re the only one holding you down.”
“So I’m strangling me? Got myself locked in a choke-hold?”
She doesn’t say anything.
“Sometimes I think I’ll never find my new happiness with his old happiness around me,” I say softly.
“You talk about how young he is, so how come his happiness is old?”
“Because it’s my old happiness. How can I ever find my new happiness with him walking around with my old happiness
stalking me, reminding me, of what I had… what I was?” I drop my head, ashamed to sound so pathetic.
Madelyn smiles. “I guess that could be annoying. But you’ve got to realize that he’s not here just to torment you.”
“Easy for you to say. I’m guessing you’re not married.”
She doesn’t answer, but I can tell. She’s not married. “I sometimes say to him that living with him is going to force me to marry an old codger just to compensate for his immaturity.”
“You know that’s cruel,” she says.
“Tell me about it. The old goat was never my type.”
“I’m talking about you. What you said to him is cruel.”
“He knows I’m joking.”
She looks at me for a moment. “How can he? When you’re not sure.”
I lean forward. “This is what you’ve got to help me with. This hate. This anger. I think part of me literally hates the people I love. I know I love them. I believe I love them. I mean, I still want to love them. All I know is I don’t feel like I love them,” I confess.
“And from the sounds of it, you’ve having trouble faking it.”
“Exactly! I don’t want to be faking my life.”
“How long have you been faking it?”
“I don’t know. That’s not the important part. Fixing it, getting me back to loving them is the important part.”
“Even if I could wave a magic wand and time travel you back, you’d still end up here in a few years.”
“I don’t want to end up back here.”
She took a slow breath. “Are you trying to make Michael leave?”
“Why would I do that?”
“Do you love him?”
I start crying. “Of course I love him.”
“Think this through. If he came home today, said he met someone…”
“He wouldn’t.”
“Okay. He is just tired of everything and he’s leaving.”
“I would be really surprised….”
She takes a deep breath. “Julia, just go with me. Close your eyes. He’s gone. You don’t even have to think about why, he’s just gone.”
“He died?”
“No. Because then it’s not his choice and you would take on the role of poor girlfriend.”
I open my eyes. “I wouldn’t be the poor girlfriend. I’d be the look-how-strong-she-is-how-well-she’s-handling-it girlfriend.”
“Okay. What would you do? What would your life be like?”
“I’d buy a townhouse in the Newell Meadows complex. They have garages and fireplaces. And it’s in the same school district for Katie.”
“You know the complex?” she asks, obviously surprised.
“I’ve thought about it.”
“You’ve got an escape route to your own life already planned.”
“Is that bad?” I ask, leaning forward. “Or are you telling me to take it?”
“Do you want to?”
“Stop answering a question with a question.”
It’s her turn to lean forward. “I can promise you one thing. Your relationship isn’t your biggest problem.”
“It’s not?”
“I’m not saying your relationship isn’t in trouble. It probably is. But before we worry about that, you’re in trouble.”
“I am?”
“C’mon, Julia. You know you are.”
“If we had had a baby, Michael would be the perfect dad. And then I could be the fun, crazy parent. I always said I was going to take my kid out one summer morning and teach her to eat cereal without a spoon. That’s the kind of parent I planned to be. Then when Katie came along and Richard spiraled into depression, I was the only adult left and I never got the chance.”
“Who says you can’t be that parent now?”
“Katie’s fourteen. She doesn’t like anything I do. Except drive. And buy. We have a simple relationship now.”
“Sounds like you picked Michael, thinking he could pick up your dropped threads. Help you put some pieces back together.”
“Exactly.” Maybe she does get me. “He’s my second chance. I should be so grateful…” I swallow. “I mean I am so grateful…”
“It’s like buying a black dress for a cocktail party, one that’s more expensive than you can really afford, but you buy it for this once-in-a-lifetime party. Well, then the party gets cancelled. Do you keep the dress?”
“You want me to return my boyfriend? I know he’s not very exciting…”
“You didn’t get involved with Michael for excitement. You’re living with him for a second chance.”
Shit! When she says it, it sounds bad. I fidget in my seat.
“And worse,” she says.
“There’s worse?” I am horrified. There is worse than using someone you love for your own second chance?
“You think he’s robbed you.”
I refuse to agree with her out loud, but I don’t deny it either. I do feel robbed. “It’s like Michael is who I should have been with all along. Like my life got side-tracked for a decade or so, and it’s finally picked up where it should be. The problem is, I kept aging during that detour and I’m not who I was. Or who I’m supposed to be.”
Madelyn leans forward. “Maybe you are exactly who you are meant to be today.”
I sigh and pick at the skin on my thumb. “I got my period yesterday.”
“How do you feel?”
“Like I’m broken on the inside.” I don’t tell her that as I sat on the toilet tears joined the blood on my panties.
She is quiet, like she knows there is more.
I add in a whisper, “I also felt an undercurrent of relief.”
“You mentioned that you had a miscarriage not that long ago. Maybe you’re not ready to try again yet.”
“I’m thirty-eight. If I don’t give Michael a baby now, I’ll never be able to.”
“A baby isn’t something you owe him.”
There’s no way in hell I’m going to tell her about the uglier undertow of guilt that I’m feeling. The voice in my head whispers, Yes, you do. You do owe him. “If that pregnancy had just been normal, I really think I could have lived my second HEA.”
“HEA?” she asks.
I smile a little. “My own vernacular for Happily Ever After.” My smile slips. “When you’re pregnant and they tell you your hormones are off and you have to stick vaginal progesterone suppositories up there, fear invades your body. And then it’s just… over.”
“Maybe it won’t be that way next time.”
I wrap my arms tight around my body, embracing my cramps in a tight hold. “I feel loss tugging at my body, and no matter how hard I try to hold on, I’m afraid I’m losing my grip.” I swallow around the lump in my throat. “It feels like the sands of time are pulling everything away from me. Like I’m being pulled out to sea and I’ll be lost forever. One wrong turn and suddenly I’m rowing against the natural current of my life.”
“Julia, do you want a baby? Or is it the idea of a baby that you want?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know. We were using condoms, but when we moved in he just kinda stopped. And I didn’t stop him. I was an only child and I never wanted that for Katie.”
“This dream of another baby might be like the floor. Something you used to want. Maybe you even wanted it a lot. But I think before you do anything, you should really stop and figure out if it’s what you want now.”
I squeeze myself tighter, spreading cramps through my whole body. “I think it’s too late.” “Too late?” “Too late to fix everything.”
* * * *
Chapter Five
Therapy is for crazy people, I repeat over and over to myself as I race through the aisles of the supermarket like a squirrel in Alaska gathering nuts for an eternal winter. After therapy, otherwise known as self-inflicted torture, I cancel my evening tap classes and drive to the bookstore, buying the most exotic cookbook on the shelf. I don’t need therapy. I just need to get back to the business of living. My daughter is perfectly fine, Michael makes me laugh. I have my own business. I have everything I need.
And nothing I want.
I spin around. No one is behind me in the grocery store aisle, but I swear I heard someone say, “Nothing I want” in a melodic voice. I turn back, squeezing the handle of my carriage. My purse sits in the front seat of the carriage with my laminated picture—Flat Julia—peeking out of the side pocket where I had stuff ed her.
I pull her picture out—my picture, I correct myself. That is me, but a me from so long ago it seems a woman on the wagon trail in the eighteen hundreds would bear more resemblance to me than this smiling woman.
If you look at it from a certain angle, I decide, a somewhat annoying smile.
She certainly wasn’t saying anything, this Flat Julia.
I push the picture deeper in my purse.
And I am certainly not listening.
I grab two cans of beans and go to the register, anxious to get home and make dinner for the two people I love most in the whole world.
The woman in line ahead of me has her items clearly separated on the belt… her ice-cream and frozen waffles stacked neatly, then her canned goods, and last but not least, her carton of Marlboro cigarettes.
The young cashier is talking to her friend who is bagging the groceries. “My Mom’s got to work on Saturday, which means I can borrow the car. Want to go to the beach?”
“I would love to have a tan for the party Saturday night,” the blonde girl with the very light skin says. “You are going to Brian’s, right?”
“I’ll go anywhere Brian is going,” the cashier says, all googley-eyed.
The girls are talking about the weekend as if it were the holy grail of possibilities…the beach, the party, the romance. Yeah, yeah. How about raking, laundry, and scrubbing toilets?
I reach for the candy rack and without looking, I grab a bag of M & M’s. Not the peanut kind, the plain M & M’s. The dark brown bag of candy is suddenly in front of my face, like I am a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat. Thirty-eight and my best magic trick in life is pulling chocolate out of thin air.
Seems pathetic, and somehow necessary, all at the same time.
The girls keep talking about how much fun they are going to have. Yadda, yadda, yadda. At sixteen, these girls don’t even have the slightest suspicion of what life has in store for them. It never occurs to them that they’d better expect some sour apples in the recipes of their life. They think it’s going to be all peaches and cream.
Tell them the truth.
That voice again.