The Elegant Out

by Elizabeth Bartasius

  Gabriel placed the eggs in a pot of boiling water and set the timer to five minutes, then walked over to me, wrapped his arms around me tight, forcing me to stop my mindless shuffling about.

  “Good morning, sweetheart.” He kissed me on the forehead, dropped his lips to my neck, then worked his way back up the line of my jaw. He stopped to hover in front of my mouth, teasing me with the air of a kiss. My neck leaned forward, wanting more, wanting to cross the breath between us until I landed safely on his side. God, I loved this man, so doting and sexy.

  Jack came out just then, a long crease in his white shirt and navy slacks that rode too high on his ankles because, like me, they couldn’t keep up with the changes taking place in this once-small boy. He thudded into a chair at the dining table, sitting half on and half off.

  Gabriel rounded the table to kiss Jack on the top of his head. “Good morning, little sweetheart.”

  “It’s not a good morning.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I have to go to school.”

  Like every Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday-Friday, I went about the to-and-fro routine of getting ready for the day, speed-walking from bedroom to kitchen and kitchen to bedroom, picking out which earrings to wear and packing Jack’s lunch bag with applesauce, a turkey sandwich, and a napkin on which I’d scribble a love note or a riddle.

  Gabe went about the routine of serving the eggs.

  Jack went about eating the eggs. He poked a hole in the white shell and yellow yolk gushed out the sides.

  “Gabe, what is your definition of hard-boiled?” he asked, more curious than angry, more inquisitive than irritated.

  “Sorry, baby. I can cook it longer next time.”

  “It’s okay.”

  Gabe delivered my plate and his, and we sat down side by side, a solid team; together we could handle whatever came next.

  “I dreamt last night we went through storage boxes looking for a VHR,” Jack said without looking up from the egg.

  “What’s a VHR?” I asked gobbling my food like if I didn’t get to it first someone else might eat it for me, a throwback to the days when I competed with a little brother for the Oreos.

  “You know, it’s that thing that plays movies that aren’t on DVD.”

  “Oh, you mean a VCR?” I laughed, remembering when I was almost ten and my father brought home that most amazing technology. I’d never heard of a VCR, but I was beyond thrilled that I could do something so unbelievable as capture a movie so I could watch it whenever I wanted. Superman, which aired on HBO after my bedtime, was the first movie I ever recorded on a VHS tape. VHS tapes seemed a distant memory, barely accessible, as eight-track was for my father. Just another measurement of time, like wrinkles, iPhones, and roach clips.

  “Did you brush your teeth?” I asked, trying to remember if we’d forgotten any part of our morning getout-the-door-for-school-work routine.

  “Yes.” Jack rolled his eyes and decided he was done talking. He snagged a scrap piece of paper from his school bag. In English class, he’d been studying poetry, so while he ate, he wrote a Haiku:

  I don’t know, do you?

  What day it is, or the time?

  Lost in confusion.

  No, I didn’t know, then.

  Time was moving. Fast.

  Yes, lost. I felt so lost.

  And I didn’t understand how a mere nine-year-old could possibly translate my internal state of mind in seventeen syllables at the breakfast table. God, I loved that boy, so brilliant and unripe.

  “Mom, what time is it?” He finally looked up.

  “Shit! We gotta go.”

  I rushed him off to school, like every morning, behind schedule.

  Chapter 3

  Thirty-Six

  At a spaghetti party, Maureen and I both wore pigtails. She wasn’t normally the partying type, but years ago, during our first year out in the “real world” after graduating from journalism school at CU-Boulder, Maureen had wanted to throw a red-themed shindig.

  Our early twenties was a glorious age before elders, bosses, and mortgages told us we couldn’t become Hollywood movie directors in five years or less. Or maybe we didn’t listen-care-know-better. Either way, Maureen wanted a night with red food, red streamers, red twinkle lights, and red guests. So that’s what we did.

  It seems just yesterday I showed up to her house, a fresh Go Buffs! alumna in a tank top patterned after a Howdy Doody costume, plaid and the color of a barn. In a picture I saw after the party, I could see that my skinny biceps bulged and were bigger than they’d ever been before. Which was still not very big; not quite the size of a vine-ripe Roma tomato, yet defined and ready for a ketchup fight or a night of salsa.

  Maureen wore a shirt in a cranberry shade, I think. There were others there too, other college friends whom I don’t remember now, her brother, his friends, her mom, her dad, all in varying hues of brick.

  Tom was there too. Those were the early days, before we were married, before Jack took root in my uterus, before a long-winded divorce, when I wanted Tom to be harmless, nice enough, a good choice. Simple-minded and in his mid-twenties, Tom showed up by my side in his usual uniform: stone-washed jeans, a crimson polo shirt, and a goofy grin. He carried a Coors in one hand and a cherry liquor in the other. We liked each other then. And he liked the party, a stage on which to perform, as he ate pasta and wove tales of childhood pranks about swinging a bat over his pleading little brother’s body.

  “My mom always told me to watch out ’cause one day my brother would be bigger than me. He is now!” Tom said, like he said most things, louder than necessary and laughing like a hyena.

  Everyone cracked up; I did too, sipping a screw-top cabernet, relishing the day I’d met Maureen in our broadcast TV class sophomore year. Her hair curled like crazy down below her shoulders, and she had invited me to work on an assignment with her. I had immediately liked her porcelain skin and the fact that she had sought shy-me out; she had wanted me to be her friend.

  Two decades ago at Maureen’s spaghetti party, dressed in rojo, surrounded by radishes and raspberries, Coca-cola cans and baked ziti, charmed by Tom’s bad jokes, I had felt giddy, a sprouting human being. Because of Maureen. I sensed she wasn’t just a good choice, but a lifelong choice. We were on a journey together, to make our dreams come true, to write books and screenplays, to have our work read and seen, to beat the odds of mediocrity and sustain ourselves on our creativity. Our friendship had cemented, and together, we two would face whatever came our way.

  I couldn’t have predicted that I would land in my mid-thirties, unsprouted still, missions of notoriety unaccomplished, dreams of publishing on the back burner.

  Four days before my thirty-sixth birthday, months away from a rotten IUD, the duct tape no longer held together the wounds of failure. Thirty-six felt like a new level of failure reached. Thirty-six felt on the verge of being mature, as though I should look like money, act like Grace Kelly, and feel a certain satisfaction in ways that I didn’t feel because I still saw myself as the newbie to adulthood who stayed up all night with Maureen in the editing booth procrastinating on our final TV News project.

  Sure, my nine-year-old child walked into the kitchen with morning breath every day reminding me that I, indeed, was a mother, a tricenarian, a bona fide big girl, and not a college grad. But when I looked at him, I felt (beside the required parental gush of unconditional love) an overwhelming, “Whose child is this? ’Cause I’m too young to have babies.”

  At nine, though, he wasn’t a baby. Neither was I. Yet I still possessed the same distracting habits I’d developed during my youth: switching projects midstream, binging on Lay’s potato chips, sleeping until the last possible moment, rushing out the door, avoiding writing, leaving novels incomplete, wishing-hoping-praying, and engaging in magical thinking without the sit-down-and-get-’er-done to back it up.

  I thought I would have published novels by now, like I dreamed when I was sixteen in the back of the Subur
ban on our family road trips. But novels aren’t published on their own, it turns out. My last attempt at writing a novel was a beach read I wrote during snowstorms in Steamboat Springs shortly after I’d divorced Tom. I was such a good girl, disciplined and diligent about waking up at six, heading to the coffee shop, and telling the story of how the Bible Belt unbuckles when Gracie, a stuck-in-a-rut accountant, steps out of her goodie-two-shoes and has the affair of a lifetime. I would type away, getting goose bumps of inspiration as I wrote about how Gracie, her vibrator, and her Southern-style band of Charlie’s Angels went whole hog to find that the greatest pleasure is the pleasure you give yourself.

  Three hundred twenty-five double-spaced pages and 78,074 words later, with carpal tunnel and hundreds of dollars invested in green tea and blueberry muffins, I finished the sassy, sexy novel, Conversations with Roberto. It wasn’t long after the word count that I ran out of money and needed to cover the house payment and grocery bill. Like any single, reasonable mom, I got a job writing grants at a nonprofit and stopped storytelling.

  Now, with an eye toward the next, non-childbearing decade of IUD, I was suddenly aware that I did not have forever ahead of me. Time wasn’t unending like it seemed when Maureen and I met at the park at twenty-two years old to write the next scene of a homegrown short film (which only ever debuted to those two family members who promised not to laugh before it was tucked in a case, forever hidden from the light of day).

  “Forever” ceased to exist, just as my mother had warned me it would: “The window of life opens for but a small hour.” Four more years of the same old, same old, and I would be blowing out forty candles and singing the same hymns: “I want to be a novelist! I want to have a baby!”

  I couldn’t bear to hear the scratching of another broken record.

  Something, I knew, must change.

  I’d better hurry up.

  Chapter 4

  Echo

  The remote control rested on a redwood coffee table, which rested on an Ikea rug with washed-out colors of mustard, sky, tree stump, and bougainvillea. Underneath, a sophisticated hardwood floor propped up a “dorm room” aesthetic, making a $300 Scandinavian sofa appear edgy and cool. Ten-foot ceilings and periwinkle wood siding wrapped the historic Acadian into a pretty bow of a house. Interior designers might have called our décor thrifty and creative. I called it hiding.

  Not long ago, before we moved the furniture into our new house, I could stand in the center of the living room and hear my echo bounce off the walls and flow through the dining room into the kitchen. Once we’d lugged all our belongings inside—a floor lamp, the cheapo couch with a matching cheapo love seat and armchair, a gold-framed, thrift-store mirror meant for gowned women in bridal shops, and two red pillows imprinted with tropical leaves, reminding me that I someday want to live on an island—the echo disappeared.

  Sometimes, though, I heard another kind of echo, one that didn’t come from the canyon of house walls; I heard it like a conscience, guiding me, or sometimes, telling me to get off my high horse. This wise echo was faint, practically inaudible. At first, I couldn’t hear it over Gabe’s talking, the voices of internet marketing gurus on get-published-quick workshops I ordered online, or the collective chatter of our small Southern town. In our time at the blue house, the internal voice was a faceless, and likely frustrated, muse desperately trying to reach my deaf ears. But one morning, I heard the voice whisper loud and clear, and it echoed through the canyons of my head.

  “Get a mentor,” it said.

  Without thinking, I picked up the phone and dialed an old friend—a writing coach.

  “Hey there,” she answered. “Have you been writing?” I could always count on Robin to start a conversation in the middle.

  “No. Help!” I whined, and then forced a laugh to diffuse the whine, as if that would make me sound less whiney.

  “What do you need, girl?”

  “I want to be writing again. I’m lost when I’m not writing. It’s been too long. I want to be a best-selling author.”

  “Ha! Who doesn’t? Have you ever considered if you are actually willing to do what it takes to be a J.K. Rowling? To write seven-hundred-page novels? Spend decades of your life writing and writing? Digging deeper into the craft? Are you willing to make it a priority? Are you willing to actually write?”

  I didn’t answer her. I wasn’t sure. Her questions rammed into the gaping insecurity, of “could I?” Was I good enough? Smart enough? Writing a book seemed easy, but writing many, over and over again, sounded hard, not doable, and taking too much time, energy, and resources. I really, really liked sleeping in on Saturdays, for God’s sake. And ordering pepperoni pizza while kicking back for family movie nights.

  “Look,” Robin said, her voice as charged as ever, “you were born to write. Or else you wouldn’t be so good at it. You have a passion. But, you don’t have to be on the New York Times list to be a published author. You do, however, have to be willing to develop your craft.”

  “So what do I do? I’ve started and stopped so many book projects. How do I begin again?”

  “Start a blog,” she said.

  I groaned. “Me and internet technology? Isn’t there another way?”

  “It’s easy. Any idiot can do it. Just write one post a week. You’ll find your voice. In a year you’ll have a book.”

  “Okay.” I wasn’t convinced, but I was desperate for something to stick, so I vowed to follow her advice, hoping this time she would be my savior. We spent another half hour trading stories about Jack and Gabe, her kids, the two pugs, and three men she had dated in one day.

  “No keepers, but it was fun,” she said. A Northeastern girl at heart, Robin had a Brillo pad laugh that always rubbed me the right way. I felt good in her care, better than I had in a long time. For over a year, I’d been fading into and out of a sadness I couldn’t quite tackle. I’d come up for air often, but I’d always dive back down. I’d hoped the renewed feelings of hope and possibility for being published that Robin inspired would hang around.

  “Now, go start that blog. Wordpress dot com. It’s the weekend, take an hour right now,” she demanded. “Send me the link to your post when you’re done.”

  We hung up and I pulled the MacBook onto my lap, reluctant to learn how to set up a blog, but hopeful. I thought of the success of Julie, Julia. Certainly, my blog could, would, go that big. Yes, indeed, the magical thinking turned on full throttle, and I felt blinded by the sudden need to validate my writing. Money, readership, bestselling status seemed like the easiest venues to get potential naysayers off my back so I could do and live the way I wanted. I still wasn’t able to tap into writing for writing’s sake, for the joy of wordsmithery, and the adventure of plot weaving. The act of writing seemed impure then, mixed with agendas, expectations, and shoulds about how much I could write, how often I should write, and what I ought to write. At the time, I thought those restrictions came from the outside. At the time, those pressures slaughtered my joy and left me crippled.

  Five minutes into the blog setup, I was bored. I didn’t know what to call the blog. I didn’t know what to say on the blog. Who would care anyway? And what the hell should I write for an “about author?” I felt the lie in calling myself a writer when I didn’t write. The lie added bruises to the collection I already carried on the inside.

  Before it could no longer be heard, the echo chimed in once more, “Just start writing. No need for perfection. Just get present to the moment. Write whatever comes to mind in this moment. No one will read it.”

  “Fine.” I gave in, aware of the tightness in my chest. I opened a Word document as I heard Gabriel fill his coffee cup in the kitchen. He moved forward with everyday life, as did the world, while I sputtered, typing any and everything to see if sparks flew.

  What is the meaning of life?

  What is my purpose here on earth?

  Should I simplify life and move to a remote beach in Costa Rica, or should I dive into the rat race and
build a Fortune 500 company?

  Should I take cooking lessons? Or a nap?

  What should I write?

  What should I do?

  What should I write?

  What should I write?

  What should I do?

  What I do seems never enough.

  Should I burn my to-do list or reorganize it?

  Should I go to yoga or clean out the fridge? How long do I have to sit at the computer before I can get up and have a snack?

  Staying present in the moment is fucking hard.

  My mind drifted into hodgepodges of memory: Jack breaching the birth canal, Tom passed out on the floor until two in the afternoon, Tom’s fist punching a hole in the wall, and then his hands on my neck. One night after a fight, Tom had called my parents to tell them of my affair. They rushed over—to my rescue, they said— shouting in the middle of the night alongside Tom. All three of them, a brigade of masters, closed in on me, determining my right and wrongs. They were a frenzy of sharks ready to eat me in the name of love. My parents didn’t know they were protecting me from the wrong one. I hadn’t had the strength to tell them, or even to see the truth for myself. I’d sunk in a corner, my body convulsing, a cat throwing up a fur ball.

  I woke from my memory to hear Gabe unloading the dishwasher. Every clink of a plate agitated me, obstructing inspiration like a metronome of self-doubt. Are you sure you want to do this? Tink. Are you sure? Tink. Are you sure? Tink. Are you sure? Tink.

  Computer in lap, I dialed Maureen on the cell phone to see what she was up to, to see if she could save me, assure me, help me regroup, distract me, anything—but she didn’t answer.