Sinking.
No.
Swim.
Swim.
I find the tasting booth in the back of the store. I slug a mini-cup of Trader Joe’s coffee, swallow a one-inch square of warm, buttered cinnamon toast. Next, the wine aisle: two bottles of Vinho Verde. Better make it three.
The mini-jolts of caffeine and sugar do their job. Grateful for the lift, I surf the wave. I’ll get the damn kitty litter later, Angeleno style, in my car. Look how cute the checkout stands are, each one named for a different old-school movie star. I choose Susan Hayward. My cashier is so dreadlocky friendly, he actually cheers me up.
My phone rings as I’m exiting the chilled air. Celia, I think. Thank God. But it’s Larissa, another San Francisco friend I’ve known for twenty years. “Just checking in with you,” she says. “I know the holidays are hard.”
Larissa’s voice is as familiar to me as my face. It’s weird to hear it here, in a place she’s never seen, a place we’ve never been together. Does she still know me if she doesn’t know this parking lot, the bearing-down intensity of this heat, this light?
I sink onto a low cement wall and burst into tears. My grief is a living thing, a beast thrashing inside me. In my best moments, I can contain it, deny it, console it, cajole it. But it’s roaring now.
“Mer?” Larissa is saying. I can’t answer. I’m crying too hard.
A young guy in a tropical Trader Joe’s shirt kneels in front of me. “Are you all right, ma’am? Did you fall? Are you hurt?”
Oh, great. Now I look like an old lady who’s taken a fall in a store. I shake my head and push myself upright. “Meredith!” Larissa is saying in my ear.
Larissa and I have walked each other through two decades of best and worst and all the minutiae in between: abortion, marriage, cancer scares, infertility, new love, miscarriage, divorce. I handed Larissa her squalling newborn baby daughter. We danced at each other’s weddings. We toasted her parents’ fiftieth anniversary, my first book deal, her last premarital romance. Larissa loved my wife. She loved us as a couple. Watching our marriage fall apart, she told me once, was like watching someone set the Mona Lisa on fire, with no way to put it out.
I hang up the phone. I can’t handle any of it. Larissa, four hundred miles away. The fight with Celia, unresolved. The weight of the bottles in my backpack. The weightlessness of me, drifting through this day, this week, this life.
“Ma’am? Do you want to come inside and cool off?” The Trader Joe’s kid puts a gentle hand on my elbow.
“No, thanks.” Someone has to help me, but not this guy. Where’s my wife? Somewhere being glad I’m not with her, not taking my calls.
I want her anyway. I want Patricia. I want my dad to tell me who I am, who I’ve always been. I want Celia to call and make up with me.
I gaze at the Pinkberry across the parking lot. I imagine the smooth cold sweet sliding down my throat. When I was four and I had my tonsils taken out, my dad brought me my mother’s nightly treat: hand-packed pints of Breyers ice cream. He put me in his bed and fed it to me, spoonful after soothing spoonful.
Maybe the sound of my father’s voice will calm me. “He’s sleeping, Mer,” my stepmother tells me from the other end of the line. Her tone is distracted, upset.
“Is he okay?” I ask.
After a long silence, she answers. “He felt better yesterday. Maybe he’ll feel better tomorrow.”
“Anything I can do?”
“I’ll tell him you called. That will cheer him up.”
Usually breathing helps when I get like this. Right now breathing makes it worse. The wine bottles clink against one another in my backpack. Maybe they’ll break while I’m walking. I can’t breathe. I slump onto a bus-stop bench, forcing air into my lungs. My chest hurts. I didn’t get the kitty litter. Did I close the kitchen window? When I get back, will the cats have run away?
My phone rings. “I’m sorry, honey,” Celia says.
I take a deep, hot breath. “I’m sorry, too. You were right. I acted like a big baby.”
“You’re grieving. I know it’s hard.”
“My chest hurts. And it’s so fucking hot.”
“Your chest is hot? Or it’s hot outside?”
“Both.”
“Where are you?” Celia asks.
“In a bus stop. I’m not sure how to get back to where I’m staying.”
“Sweetie, the address is in your phone, isn’t it? I’ll hold on while you get the directions.”
Of course. There’s an app for that.
“I’ll stay on with you till you get home,” Celia says.
The thought of that much conversation exhausts me. So does saying no. “Thanks,” I say. I squint at the map on my phone, start back up the hill.
“Did something bad happen today?” Celia asks. “Besides our spat, I mean? I’ve never heard you sound so low.”
“Everything bad happens every day,” I say. “It hurts to breathe.”
“What about . . . you know . . . praying?” Celia asks in the awkward way that my atheist friends, which is to say most of my friends, refer to my renewed relationship with God.
“I don’t have it in me to pray.” I inhale a ragged breath. “I don’t have it in me to keep living like this.”
“What does that mean, Meredith?” Celia asks.
“I’m not going to kill myself,” I say. “But I have nothing to look forward to except bad things. I don’t want to be here anymore.”
I wonder if I’m being manipulative, because it helps the tiniest bit to hear Celia say, “Meredith. We love you. We need you here.”
“I love you, too. I won’t . . . do anything stupid.”
“Good,” Celia says, and we hang up.
I make my way back to Karen’s house, climb the ladder, rummage through the bathroom cabinets for a thermometer. I discover that I have a fever of 102. I climb back down the ladder and drive myself to the ER—my second trip there in the past month. A different doctor tells me I have bronchitis and prescribes a course of antibiotics. Swaying on my feet, weepy with fever and self-pity, I push a cart through a grocery store, buy a chicken and some onions and garlic. Go back to Karen’s. Climb the ladder. Make myself a pot of chicken soup.
Is this what the rest of my life will be like? Being so sad that I keep ending up in the ER? Being so alone that I’m making chicken soup for myself?
I thought I had old age nailed. What better quality-of-life insurance could there be than being in love with a woman who’s in love with me? I wasn’t going to be one of those small-minded, no-life old ladies, driven batty by solitary confinement. So much for insurance. Now I’m even living with cats.
If I’m going to live, I cannot be this alone.
Although I haven’t quite given up trying to traverse it, the road to reconciliation with my wife is looking more impassable every day. But friends. Friends, I can make. My Bay Area friends are lifesavers, but I need new friends. Local friends. Because a body in need of solace needs bodies, not just voices crackling through a hard, flat phone pressed against my burning ear.
SIX
The antibiotics kick in. My fever breaks. My chest lightens. So does my heart, knowing that some of my pain, at least, was physical. Determination replaces despair. I need to get myself into therapy. And I need to make some friends in L.A.
The therapy is the easy part. My new health insurance covers twenty-six sessions per year. With fifty-five years of therapy behind me, I’m normally a meticulously selective consumer, but my PPO assigns me a staff therapist, which is fine, since all I need is someone to make sympathetic faces while I cry. Olivia does that for me, and more. She rebuts my self-loathing. (“I don’t know why you’re blaming yourself for the end of your marriage. It takes two to save a relationship, and it sounds like you did everything you could.”) My appointments with Olivia lea
ve me feeling cared about and comforted and known.
Making friends is a tougher job, but it needs doing. In the words of my childhood heroine, Helen Keller, “Walking with a friend in the dark is better than walking alone in the light.”
I discovered the joys of bestieness in first grade, sitting next to Gail Lieberman in the PS 187 auditorium, which doubled as our lunchroom, trading my Velveeta with Gulden’s mustard on Pepperidge Farm for her squishable purple-stained Philadelphia cream cheese and Welch’s grape jelly sandwiches on Wonder Bread, whispering secrets about the mean girls. Since then, friendships have been my best source of fun, camaraderie, adventure, solace, and self-awareness, and my best source of advice about every big and little thing.
“Each friend represents a world in us,” Anaïs Nin wrote, “a world not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.” I live for those new worlds. I’m a huge fan of falling in love, and falling in friendship love is a kissing cousin of the consuming-lust stage of early romance. A new friendship brings confidences and cocktails and couch-cuddling, and shopping expeditions, and travel. In good times, a hike or a dinner or a movie with a friend is a glowing nugget on my calendar. In bad times, like the last years of my marriage, Patricia’s and Celia’s house keys on my ring were promised solace, a ready escape from the sadness and the anger in my own home.
I still have Celia’s key, but the door it opens is four hundred miles away. I need a more proximate haven. My thoughts turn to the low-slung über-modern house next door, occupied, according to my surreptitious surveillance, by a lesbian couple around my age. The women seem to have a vibrant social life—people always coming and going, laughter ringing through their walls.
Befitting our demographic, I handwrite them an actual note on actual paper and drop it into their actual mailbox.
Dear Ladies,
This is your lonely lesbian neighbor. If you have any mercy in your souls, please accept my invitation to brunch, drinks, dinner, a hike, or all of the above, preferably at your earliest convenience.
A few hours later, my phone rings, a rare sound. “This is Donna. From next door.” She laughs. “You’ve got our attention. Want to come over and have a drink with Nichole and me?”
“I thought you’d never ask,” I say. “When’s good?”
“You don’t strike me as the patient type,” Donna says. “How about now?”
When I get to the bottom of the quaking metal ladder, I find Donna and Nichole waiting for me there. One of them extends her hand. “I’m Nichole,” she says. Her hair is black and curly, with white sprinkles. Her face is smooth and pretty and kind.
Donna is taller, also beautiful, with straight blond shoulder-length hair. “Help us out, Meredith,” she says, grinning. “Nic and I have a bet going. She says there’s no way you can actually be living at Karen’s with that construction going on. But I’ve seen you in your dresses and heels in the morning, coming down that ladder like Tarzan. Who’s right?”
“Me Tarzan,” I say. “I’m cat-sitting for Karen for the next few weeks.”
“Unbelievable,” Nic says. They usher me through their front door and into their robin’s-egg-blue, art-filled, light-filled living room. Two hours later I’m curled up on their pale yellow couch, shoes off, ginger margarita in hand. On the glass coffee table between us is a near-empty bowl of homemade guacamole, a crumple of cocktail napkins, a cheese board dotted with crumbles of Gouda and blue. Outside the room’s floor-to-ceiling windows, the San Fernando Valley is a smoggy purple carpet unrolled to the Santa Monica Mountains.
And right next to me are two women I didn’t know this morning, asking exactly the right questions with exactly the right looks on their faces, nodding at exactly the right times. Against all odds, we’re laughing. And I’m feeling incredibly at home.
Nichole excuses herself to whip up a fresh pitcher of margaritas, pour another bag of chips. “It’s horribly short notice,” Donna says. “But we have a little shindig every year on the Fourth. Any chance you could join us?”
—
DESPITE, OR MAYBE BECAUSE OF, my attachment to my friendships, I’ve always done a crap job of diversifying them. Most women I know are pretty attached to monogamy with their sexual partners and pretty relaxed about sharing their friends. Having received my free-love diploma in the freewheeling 1960s, I’ve always been the opposite. My wife wasn’t sold on lifelong monogamy, either; it made us both feel better to leave that door open, whether we chose to walk through it or not. (Not.)
Monogamous friendship has been a trickier balancing act, requiring me to convince my friends to obey my neediness-based rules and regs: a set schedule of frequent dates, the cohosting of extravagant birthday celebrations (hers, mine), shared vacations, round-the-clock availability, and full disclosure. By which I mean Full. Disclosure.
On both of our parts.
Of everything.
All the time.
Obviously, my approach to friendship has got to go. I have exactly three friends in Los Angeles, and I suspect that despite my arrival, Charlotte, Donna, and Nichole might want to keep the friends they already have.
A friend a day will keep the ER away. I need to increase my pool of friends; divide my needs by the largest possible number—in other words, change my definition of friendship from “You be everything I need you to be” to “I love you and you and you for who you are.”
With or without my ridiculous rulebook, I find it daunting to reach out to strangers. Being happily married, being the primary source of my wife’s happiness made me feel successful, confident, grounded. Having then become the source of her misery and my own, without understanding how that happened or why, makes me doubt that I’ll ever feel that good about myself or anyone else or life again.
“The ultimate touchstone of friendship is . . . witness,” I read in David Whyte’s 2015 Consolations, “the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another.”
I know what I need to do if I’m going to see and be seen by new friends, and I don’t want to do it. I need to learn to love and soothe myself, blah blah blah, instead of counting on others to do that for me. I need to seek less relief from others, blah blah, and learn to resolve my own anxieties by myself.
Until now I’ve managed to avoid being responsible for my own happiness, primarily by being coupled. At sixteen, I ran away from home to live with David. At twenty, I ran away from David to live with John. I was married to the father of my sons for twelve years, followed by twelve years of wimmyn-loving with my first girlfriend, Jane. I thought I’d kicked the marriage habit when Jane and I ended. But then a friend introduced me to my wife.
Since age fifteen I’ve been burying my emptiness under the rock of marriage. That rock has rolled. There’s no one left to fill that space. My own efforts will have to do.
As depicted on social media, I’ve made a carefree career move to an exciting new city where I’m seeing new sights, taking sun-saturated pix, and having a swell time. The pretty illusion offers a vision of my future happiness, but I’d rather have a real life. So I swallow my pride and send a mass e-mail to my bicoastal writer friends who bounce between New York, where they write their novels and screenplays, and Hollywood, where they go to try to sell them.
“Dear people,” I write. “I’m in desperate need of friends—IRL, not virtual—who live in L.A. I’m writing to ask you to introduce me to anyone you think I might like.”
In for a dime, in for a dollar. I post a version of this message on Facebook and Twitter. Within hours, names start rolling in. And so my life as a friendship speed dater begins.
Michelle, an L.A. novelist friend of a New York novelist friend, asks me to meet her at a happy hour spot near UCLA at six-thirty on Tuesday night. I get out of work in Hollywood at five-thirty and start driving the eighteen miles. It takes two ho
urs.
Still, I arrive before Michelle does. And then she’s striding toward me, red hair flying, blue eyes flashing, wide mouth curved into a welcoming smile. By the time we’ve emptied our first pitcher of jalapeño margaritas, we’ve poured our hearts out to each other.
“Shit! It’s ten o’clock.” Michelle signals the waiter for our check. “This has been great, dollface, but I gotta go.”
“Same time next week?” my inner needy child blurts.
“Love to,” Michelle says, sounding like she means it. “But it ain’t gonna happen. I live in the O.C.”
She catches my blank gaze. “Orange County. It’s an hour away”—she curves her fingers into air quotes—“without traffic. But we’ll e-mail and text. And I come to L.A. a lot for book stuff. We’ll see each other then.”
Michelle grabs her purse and jumps to her feet.
“Or you can come down any weekend,” she adds. “Unless you have something better to do than watch me yell at my husband and my kid and muck out my horse’s stall.”
“You have a horse? I love to ride! I had a horse when I was a hippie in Taos.” I regret my blathering instantly. Michelle is in her mid-forties. Her parents were probably hippies.
“All my L.A. friends say they’ll come see me. They never do,” Michelle says matter-of-factly. I follow her flying mane through the restaurant doors. “Sincere promises, no follow-through. It’s an L.A. thing.”
She turns to hug me. “Let’s talk soon.” She laughs. “Saying ‘Let’s talk soon’ instead of making a plan? That’s an L.A. thing, too.” And she’s off.
It’s not Michelle’s job to fill your empty calendar, I tell myself, slogging east on Santa Monica Boulevard, only slightly less congested at ten p.m. than it was when I was slogging west at six. Even without a plan to see Michelle again—hello, demon disappointment—our encounter leaves me feeling less alone.
The New Old Me Page 6
