After we hang up, I text him, “Come home to me. I’m not sure why, but my breasts are big and beautiful right now. We should enjoy them while we can.”
I don’t tell him that I know exactly why I’ve recently gained more than a cup size. I’d lost my ample breasts after nursing two kids, but now, in perimenopause, they are larger and firmer. Once again they are the breasts I hid from the boys in school forty years ago.
Brad and I wait for our son to head out to a friend’s soccer game. As soon as he leaves, Brad comes to me, kisses my neck as he lifts my shirt.
“I wonder if kids know their parents are waiting for them to leave the house so they can have sex,” he says as we lie in bed afterwards.
“No, they’re just thinking about their own escape and the sex they want to have,” I say, laughing.
But even as I say this, the knowledge that next year will be different hangs over us. There will be no son down the hall, no children at home, and my full, ripe breasts may wane again for good. Gazing into my husband’s eyes, I push such worries from my mind. Determined to seize this season and savor it, I run my hand along his thigh.
Glory, Glory
FOR OVER A DECADE NOW, MY MOTHER HAS LIVED IN New York City, on the ground floor of a brownstone between Riverside Drive and West End Avenue. About twice a month, I take the train from D.C.’s Union Station to see her. I navigate the bowels of Penn Station with precision born of practice, my pace calibrated with the rolling crowd as we maneuver the main fairway with its newsstands and grab-n-go lattes, salads, pizza, and gyros. Rounding one corner and then the next, I climb a short flight of stairs holding my breath against the urine-soaked landing. At last, I arrive on the subway platform, where the Uptown 1 Express will whisk me to 96th Street.
Emerging on the Upper West Side, I stop at Barzini’s market for flowers—in springtime, I always hope for lilacs or peonies, my mother’s favorites. The store clerk wraps them for me in a cone of thick white paper. Bouquet under my arm, I cut over from Broadway to West End. At my mother’s door, digging in my bag, I fish out my set of jangling keys. Four keys to be exact: two for the outer street door, one for the vestibule door, and one that unlocks the deadbolt to my mother’s apartment.
I often get there before she does. Yet my visits give her an excuse to leave earlier than usual from her windowed office high above Times Square, where she manages five floors of lawyers. Not long after I arrive, I will hear the heavy outer door pushing open, the click of her heels and the rat-a-tat-tat as she knocks, knowing I am waiting for her.
Alone in the cool of her darkened, hushed apartment, I am at home in my mother’s scent—a mix of Chanel No. 5 and books. The apartment has one of those long, narrow layouts, nearly windowless except for the large sliding glass door to the garden at the back. Floor-to-ceiling, built-in mahogany shelves are overstuffed with mostly art, travel, and history titles. Treasures from her trips—jade miniatures from China; a hand-carved gazelle, lion, and zebra from Kenya; even signed and numbered Picasso and Rembrandt lithographs—perch there, mingling with the books.
The shelves line the length of the apartment’s main room, which my mother has cleverly divided via furniture to signal “study,” “dining room,” “formal living room,” and what she calls “the garden room.” In winter, we spend most of our time sitting on opposite ends of the garden room’s lush velvet sofa, a deep purple. But in the warmer months, we lounge in the garden or eat there—as we will tonight. Through the window, I can see the thick-trunked flowering magnolia at the center of the garden, and the red and yellow tulips my mother has planted around the edges. She doesn’t really need my flower offering. Yet, it would feel graceless to come empty-handed. Once I finally became whole enough to think of her and not always of myself, giving them became a habit.
Searching the cherry wood breakfront, I find the tall crystal vase she likes. As I arrange the lilac blooms, a silent question leaves me breathless, as if a heavy boot stood on my chest: When she’s gone, what will I do with all her treasures? Who will remember what she went through to get here? Who will remember her triumph?
Tonight, by the time I hear my mother’s footfalls, I’ve got dinner almost ready. She hugs me, then can’t resist turning to breathe in her lilacs, closing her eyes as she does. We carry our plates from the narrow galley kitchen into the garden to a wrought iron and glass table circled by cushioned chairs. As we continue talking, long after the sun goes down, the leavings of our dinner—steak au poivre, asparagus drizzled with Dijon mustard sauce, buttered baguette, and a slice of chocolate ganache cake to share—fade into the darkness. Fireflies begin to blink around us. We can hear neighbors on either side, but they remain unseen behind a high fence.
No doubt people up above in the neighboring buildings can look down into her garden, like something out of Rear Window, but the magnolia boughs shield us from view. A block away, the choir at the Greek Orthodox church on the corner is practicing. Hallelujah! Glory, Glory, they sing. We pause to listen. In the navy suede of the night, sitting beneath pink-bloomed branches, fallen petals all around us, no one would know we were here.
Lately, my mother has been puzzling over what she will do when she retires. Having been employed steadily since she was fourteen, she’s nervous about not working. But she recently sent me an e-mail outlining the plan she will start implementing in two years: Learn Italian and take senior ballet classes now that she’s quit smoking. Live in France again and in Italy for a few months. She’s planning trips to India, Vietnam, Australia, and Scandinavia. But first Kenya, where we will go together this coming fall—the first trip we’ve taken, just the two of us, in many years. My mother is giddy at the prospect. It will be her fourth safari and my first.
As the choir continues, I sing along with the refrain: Since I laid my burden down. Even though I can’t see my mother’s face, I sense her smiling in the dark. I know I’m right when she hums glory, glory and I hear her soft laughter rising up into the night.
A Different Kind of Birth
I ALWAYS KNEW I WAS MY MOTHER’S MIRACLE. THE BABY that emboldened her to leave my father, to set off on a new life and reroute her future. But it wasn’t until I was about eleven or twelve—old enough to have my period but still my mother’s girl—that I discovered she had been a miracle baby too. We were folding laundry. As we separated my mother’s lacy bras and panties from my days-of-the-week cotton bikinis, some newly stained at the crotch, we talked.
“I used to envy Grandmommy her pristine underwear,” my mother said, speaking of her mother. Pristine because my grandmother had had a hysterectomy a few years after my mother was born. From twenty-eight on, she’d never had to worry about period stains.
According to her doctor, it was a miracle my grandmother had borne any children at all. He said this before surgically removing any chance of her having more. But after the operation, she became sick. So sick that the hospital broke its own rule by letting my mother—a child, and so not allowed into such solemn places—visit her dying mother.
My grandmother, the daughter of missionaries, later said that Jesus appeared to her when she was in the hospital. She saw him standing across a green riverbank in his long white robe, extending his hand. But she denied him. Refusing to leave her miracle baby behind, she experienced a second miracle and lived.
The births of my own children were personal marvels but, in the grand scheme, nothing extraordinary. Both were easy conceptions and healthy pregnancies. Still, birthing my son was physically the hardest thing I’ve ever done. He came fast, too fast for my midwife to get to the hospital. Too fast to consider an epidural, like I’d had with my daughter. Numbed that first time, I was unprepared for the heaviness between my legs, like a two-ton speculum dragging me down to some murky ocean depth as my son’s head pushed its way into the world. “Open your eyes, Andrea,” the doctor said, calling me back to the ocean’s surface, back to that bright room and the present moment.
Like a version of the children’s song
“We’re Going on a Bear Hunt,” I knew then that I could not shut my eyes against that ocean of sensation threatening to drown me. I could not go over it. I could not go under it. I was going to have to swim through it. I’ve understood that ever since.
I understood it when my two-year-old daughter was attacked by our dog. Brad carried her in his arms to the ER. So much blood; a half an inch closer and her eye would have been lost.
I understood it when my son clung to my leg on the first day of kindergarten, until I pulled his little hands away and waved good-bye to him.
I understood it when my daughter was in high school and I glimpsed the hickey at the top of her breast. She turned to me and said, “Don’t tell Daddy.”
I understood it when the police called in the middle of the night because my son had been caught sneaking out with friends.
And I understood it when, after moving our daughter into her college dorm room, it was time to go. I’d kept it together for three days—during the cross-country flight, the trips to Target for supplies, the making of her bed, and stowing of duffle bags she’d use to come home at Christmas. Not wanting her to see me cry—oh, how I’d resented my mother’s tears at my own drop-off—I turned from her after a final hug and didn’t look back.
Driving to the airport, a sinkhole of grief opened within me—great, keening sobs, oddly familiar. I’d cried like this once before. When my grandmother—only fifty-nine—at last crossed over, leaving my mother and me behind. Missing her would be forever, and we would have to live through it.
No! I told myself. How could I equate my child leaving home with death? It’s just the opposite: the life force driving on, leaving behind our time together.
And what of my life force?
On the other side of fifty, every month I wonder if this will be my last period, and I’m secretly relieved when it arrives again like clockwork, keeping me tethered to the self I’ve known so long. After I heard the news that singer Sophie Hawkins gave birth at fifty, I spent the next several days fantasizing about starting all over again.
With my history, I’m prone to believe in miracles.
Would having another baby salve my grief over my children leaving home? Or are such impulses simply vanity, wanting the world to think I’m still young enough to be making babies? Wanting to believe it myself. Forty years of period stains passed, the children of that laundry-folding girl grown and nearly gone, who am I becoming? Part of me wants to hold that woman at bay.
Yet I’ve learned again and again that I can’t go over, under, or around, and I can’t turn back. No matter how high or rough the surf, going through every stage is where the living is.
Each month when my period comes, I tread water in that vast ocean a little while longer, waiting for a different kind of birth.
Open your eyes, Andrea. Open your eyes.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am thankful to my many teachers, especially my Bennington MFA mentors Elizabeth Cox, Jill McCorkle, Alice Mattison, and Douglas Bauer. I am also forever grateful to Debra Spark, who encouraged me when I first returned to writing after a long hiatus, and to Bill O’Sullivan, who helped me discover creative nonfiction as my writerly home. “Thank you” does not begin to express my gratitude to my friend, guide, and first reader, Elizabeth Mosier, who helped me again and again to bring to the page the story I wanted to tell.
Thank you to the creative communities that have nurtured me along the way: Bennington MFA, The Writer’s Center (Bethesda, MD), The Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance, The Martin Dibner Fellowships, Hedgebrook, and The HerStories Project. Thank you to my first editor, Bethany Root, and special thanks to Brooke Warner of She Writes Press and Crystal Patriarche of BookSparks for their inspiring vision and leadership.
Constant love and encouragement from family is a rare gift for the memoirist. I am profoundly grateful to my family for their support. Thank you to the love of my life, Brad; to my children who are a daily inspiration to be my best; to my brothers Ryan and Doug; and to the given and chosen parents I am lucky to have including Andy, Dutch, and Ruth. And thank you to my incomparable mother who has supported me in all I do always. I know reliving the events in this book is something she never wanted to do. I didn’t think I could love and admire her more, but through the writing of this story I do. I also hope my readers understand that in real life, people are more complex and multifaceted than a single story will ever reveal.
The names of all those featured in this book have been changed except my husband’s and mine.
Versions of some chapters found previous homes in the following publications. I am so grateful to those editors who believed in my work.
“Just We Two” as “The Getaway,” Full Grown People
“Miracle Mile,” Cleaver Magazine
“Saviors,” Memoir Journal
“Makeshift Twins” as “What We Don’t Say,” My Other Ex: Women’s Real Stories of Leaving and Losing Friendships
“The Proposal” and “Ripe,” The Manifest-Station
“A Measure of Desire,” The New York Times “Modern Love” Column
“A Different Kind of Birth,” Motherwell Magazine
1. Escape is a theme in this novel. What, specifically, does the author get away from?
2. Discuss the author’s relationship with her mother and the role they play in each other’s lives. What is the author most grateful for about how her mother raised her? Explain the pluses and minuses of being “just we two.”
3. How does the author’s childhood shape her views as an adult, girlfriend, wife, and mother?
4. We see the world through the eyes of the author at different ages (child, teen, young adult, full adult looking ahead). Which events in the book resonated with you most directly and why?
5. How does the author feel meeting her father, who has become an almost mythical person to her? As she spends time with him, does she struggle with divided loyalties after a lifetime of “two-ness” with her mother?
6. What kind of man is Nick? What are his strengths and weaknesses, his flaws and contradictions?
7. What character traits does the author inherit from her parents? And how do those traits shape the author’s life?
8. Discuss the theme of the denial of desires in this narrative. How do characters in this book deny their desires and what happens when they do? When should one give in to one’s desires?
9. What is the most important lesson the author learns?
10. Why does the author choose to start the book with the murder of a young woman in her town?
11. How do the various locations mentioned in the book shape the author’s personal journey?
12. What does the author learn about friendship and herself through her relationship with Liz?
13. What does the author learn from her relationship with Wes?
14. The author counterbalances the need to escape and the fear of being unable to get away. Have you felt that before? Or felt a similar kind of struggle between two opposites?
15. What patterns do you see in the lives of the people in this memoir? How do they compare to the patterns in your own life?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
photo credit: Eric Jensen
Andrea Jarrell’s work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and many other popular and literary publications. She earned her BA in literature at Scripps College and her MFA in creative writing and literature at Bennington College. A Los Angeles native, she currently lives in suburban Washington, D.C.
SELECTED TITLES FROM SHE WRITES PRESS
She Writes Press is an independent publishing company founded to serve women writers everywhere. Visit us at www.shewritespress.com.
Fourteen: A Daughter’s Memoir of Adventure, Sailing, and Survival by Leslie Johansen Nack. $16.95, 978-1-63152-941-2. A coming-of-age adventure story about a young girl who comes into her own power, fights back against abuse, becomes an accomplished sailor, and falls in love with the ocean and the natural world.
/>
Secrets in Big Sky Country: A Memoir by Mandy Smith. $16.95, 978-1-63152-814-9. A bold and unvarnished memoir about the shattering consequences of familial sexual abuse—and the strength it takes to overcome them.
The Coconut Latitudes: Secrets, Storms, and Survival in the Caribbean by Rita Gardner. $16.95, 978-1-63152-901-6. A haunting, lyrical memoir about a dysfunctional family’s experiences in a reality far from the envisioned Eden—and the terrible cost of keeping secrets.
Veronica’s Grave: A Daughter’s Memoir by Barbara Bracht Donsky. $16.95, 978-1-63152-074-7. A loss and coming-of-age story that follows young Barbara Bracht as she struggles to comprehend the sudden disappearance and death of her mother and cope with a blue-collar father intent upon erasing her mother’s memory.
Letting Go into Perfect Love: Discovering the Extraordinary After Abuse by Gwendolyn M. Plano. $16.95, 978-1-938314-74-2. After staying in an abusive marriage for twenty-five years, Gwen Plano finally broke free—and started down the long road toward healing.
The Full Catastrophe: A Memoir by Karen Elizabeth Lee. $16.95, 978-1-63152-024-2. The story of a well educated, professional woman who, after marrying the wrong kind of man—twice—finally resurrects her life.
I'm the One Who Got Away Page 12
