And then my lips were done.
I looked in the mirror. Swollen and bloody.
“The appearance will change in the coming weeks,” Lisa emphasized for the twentieth time. “The true color comes only after the skin has shed.”
She gave me an information sheet on what, when, where, including phases where the tattoos appear blue as skin sheds, or colors disappear altogether, or brows appear markedly larger and darker as they cure.
“Don’t worry. It’s going to be beautiful!” she said.
Steph and I got in the car for the drive home. I took a look in the rearview mirror. Groucho Marx stared back at me. My brows were big black slugs stuck on my forehead.
I did not look again, just hoped for the best. What’s done is done, I thought. No sense in worrying.
Over the next few weeks, my face went psychedelic. I held my breath and religiously put on the healing ointment Lisa recommended and waited, checking off phases on my info sheet.
“How’s it look?” I asked John, my husband of twenty years.
Poor guy.
I not only looked like Groucho Marx, I was also a Groucho. What in heaven’s name was my husband of twenty years supposed to say?
“Let me put that ointment on so it heals faster,” he said.
Good answer.
As my body withered and my looks changed, John always had a good answer. He stuck with me without a word, even when my face was blotchy.
And then the makeup cured. It looked good. Far better than no makeup at all.
It was me, the way I had presented myself to the world for twenty years. Thinner in the cheeks. Less muscle control. But me.
Ah, makeup. Still mine to control.
A part of my body that will remain the same, permanently.
Hungary
February
Youth
I met John Wendel at Lake Lytal Pool in suburban West Palm Beach. I was a lifeguard, just graduated from UNC. John was a high school teacher, swim coach, and former collegiate swimmer who practiced there.
I was transfixed watching him swim, his long, fluid strokes torpedoing his gorgeous body—he was a six-foot-one bronze statue—through the water.
John was so handsome that after two years of razzin’ each other, I had a friend call and tell him he’d been selected for the Palm Beach Lifeguard Swimsuit Calendar.
John called me that night, the sap. I was in graduate school by then, and we were dating long-distance. “Hey, Susan, guess what?” he said. “I’m going to be in a swimsuit calendar. They let me pick the month. I asked for December because of your birthday.”
“John . . .”
“Yes?”
“What day is it today?”
“Tuesday.”
“No, what date?”
“April first . . .”
April Fools’ Day. He laughed.
The April Fools’ Day calendar-hunk caper started a tradition that continued all the way through Marina and Aubrey’s chocolate-radish/slippery toilet classic. In twenty-three years, we have pulled some zingers, especially in the early days.
One year, I hid John’s pricey bike, making him think it had been stolen.
“Goddammit!” he hollered as he hurtled his bike helmet across the apartment in frustration.
“April Fools!” I said.
The next year, oh boy, he got me back good. We were fooling around—I mean a moaner of a roll in the darkness—and John called out a name. “Beth! Beth!”
His old girlfriend.
’Twas I who went hurtling across the room that time.
I’ve always enjoyed that about John: he can laugh at himself. And he can laugh at me. Inside that beautiful body, I recognized a soul: a modest (yes, really), smart, steady-yet-fun soul.
When John talks about meeting me, though, he mentions my shorts. “She was wearing a University of North Carolina sweatshirt, and these blue shorts.” He always stops there and shakes his head, thinking about my rear end.
I trust John with my life, and now with the lives of our children. In more than twenty years together, I have never seen him make a rash, senseless decision. (Except once, purchasing a used Ford with 80,000 miles on it.)
Even marriage was a practical decision. John received a Fulbright Commission berth to teach at a high school in Budapest, Hungary, in 1992. I had urged him to apply. Actually, I filled out the Fulbright application for him. He’s an awful procrastinator.
John asked if I would go with him. We had to be married for me to accompany him on Fulbright functions, so one of us said, “Why don’t we get hitched?”
We don’t remember who.
And the other said, “Okay.”
We casually mentioned it to my mother at Thanksgiving. Within days, she had the church, the pastor, the music, the organist. It was so swift, people musta wondered if I was pregnant. Let ’em wonder! I thought.
All I had to do was buy a wedding dress and show up. Which I did. Smiling the whole time. It was a small wedding, just family and our closest friends, at a nondenominational church.
Nancy, of course, was there.
We spent our wedding night at the local Hilton. Sat back in bed, looked at each other, and said, “What the hell did we just do?”
Five months later, we were living in Budapest.
People who know me a little think that doesn’t sound like me at all. I’m a very together person. I don’t make rash decisions.
When they know me better, they say, “That’s so Susan.” When I know what I want, I grab it. No waiting. No what-ifs. Just stop talking and do it already.
I wanted John, and I wanted Budapest. I was twenty-five. I was an international studies major with a master’s degree in my cherry-picked portable profession, journalism.
It was time for travel and adventure.
Budapest turned out to be one of the best decisions of our lives.
It was 1992, so the Berlin Wall had just come down. The city was rejoicing. Businesses going up. Statues coming down. It was the Wild West. Anything possible. A magnet for hucksters, youngsters, dead-enders, dreamers, anyone who wanted a chance.
And writers. I must have met a hundred. I met a recent Princeton graduate who was starting an English-language newspaper, the Budapest Post. Within a week, I was writing articles. Within two months, I was a senior editor, mentoring recent college journalism grads out to see the world.
At a news conference, I asked a question of Queen Elizabeth. At another, Boris Yeltsin. I flew on a relief mission over Bosnia and covered the Bulgarian rose harvest.
When I sat in the Hungarian Parliament, I’d see legislators with our paper, reading my articles. I was a twenty-five-year-old who didn’t speak Hungarian, who had a translator for most of her interviews, and I was helping shape the opinions of legislators!
Then the kid ran out of money. The paper went belly-up. But someone knew someone at Forbes, the magazine of the ultra-wealthy. The paper was reborn as the Budapest Sun. My salary was now a pile of Hungarian cash. No checks or bank accounts. John and I hid the wad in a book in our apartment.
When we had money, we scoured the city, toured the nation and neighboring ones (we were almost killed in traffic in Turkey!), attended operas and concerts. We drank homemade wine in the midafternoon Budapest winter gloom.
When our cash ran out, we sat tight until the next payday. Laughing, talking, exploring each other. Surviving, like the newspaper, hand-to-mouth and day-to-day.
Those days, those adventures together, bonded us. Like glue on a piece of furniture, they were the invisible underpinning that held us together for a lifetime, strained or unstrained.
The Fulbright ended. We came home, after two years abroad, to boring jobs and American excess. John didn’t like his teaching position. I didn’t like being a grunt at the Palm Beach Post
after two years as a managing editor in Budapest. Even our small apartment with the air conditioner unit stuck in the dining-room window felt hollow.
And quick as a Florida thunderstorm, depression was upon me. Thwack! Boom!
I did not realize I was mentally ill until I’d lost fifteen pounds. Until my mind was so frazzled by lack of sleep, I’d have a panic attack when I lay down to try again.
In Hungary, every sense had been massaged with new sights, sounds, tastes, smells. Even the ordinary journalism assignments were fascinating.
Like when I was dispatched to cover the Eastern European debut of the Chippendales, an America-based franchise of muscular men who stripped down to thong undies and thrusted for the hundreds of young women assembled.
“DO YA WANNA GET NASTY?” the buff boys hollered to the audience.
Which responded with absolute silence.
Delight.
Now I felt lousy, and everything seemed blah. John, increasingly depressed himself, felt powerless. We argued. I stayed with my sister for a brief spell. Stephanie drove me straight to the psychiatrist.
“Is the television talking to you?” the psychiatrist asked.
“I’m depressed, not psychotic!” I replied. The doc put me on an antidepressant. I felt much, much better.
I deeply believe we are the masters of our minds. That healthy, we can choose how we feel. But we are also our minds’ lone caretakers, and we must keep them healthy. Now I practice my slow breathing, getting my Zen on. Living with joy.
Back then, John and I sought another post abroad, trying to recapture the wonder.
About a year later, we went to an international job fair for teachers. “There’s a teaching position at a high school in Colombia,” John pointed out. “They don’t have spouse benefits . . . but they do have a job running the school yearbook.”
My heart skipped. It was 1995, and Colombia was in the middle of a drug war. The year before, a soccer player on the national team had accidentally kicked the ball into his own goal during the World Cup. When he returned home, he was murdered. At that time, Colombia was widely considered the kidnapping capital of the world.
I agreed anyway. Life’s an adventure, right? We signed a two-year contract.
This adventure wasn’t so carefree. The cocaine wars were in their dying stages, but violence was rampant. Every corner shop had an armed guard. I’m talking ice cream shops, not banks. The school where John and I taught had a metal gate and armed guard turrets. There were men milling outside the gates with Italian suits, bad dental work, and machine guns. They were the students’ bodyguards.
Kidnapping had devolved to a street-level crime: people were getting snatched on their way to the grocery store.
“I want to go home,” I told John after seven months.
Honorable John didn’t want to break our two-year contract. But I finally convinced him. We would leave at the end of the school year.
A month later, we hiked into the mountains during spring break. We were headed to La Ciudad Perdida (the Lost City), site of an ancient civilization hidden in the jungle for hundreds of years. It had only been rediscovered in the 1970s.
The hike was majestic. Mountains. Canopied forest. Streams. Toucans flying across terraced landings.
It was also long days of walking uphill. With a guide and armed bodyguards, because this was guerrilla country. No showers. No toilets. Our group slept in hammocks on the second story of open-sided huts. On the first story, a fire was kept lit to ward off the bugs. The smoke kept me awake.
By the sixth day, I couldn’t take it anymore. It was raining. I was sick. I snapped. “That’s it,” I said, on the verge of tears. “I’m tired. I’m hungry. I’m filthy and nauseous and sore. And I think I’m pregnant!”
I turned to stomp off into the jungle and slammed right into a support post for the hut. I fell flat on my back in the mud. Splat.
And that’s how John found out about our first child. Then did the math—back to our celebration on the night we’d decided to go home.
Life is perfect like that. Otherwise I would have delayed and delayed having children, wanting to travel more. I was thirty years old.
The pregnancy began as twins and was high-risk. We couldn’t afford health insurance without our jobs, so we had to stay in Colombia for another year. Talk about nerve-racking—try being pregnant at an altitude of 9,000 feet in the kidnapping capital of the world.
I miscarried one twin.
Then, a week short of due, the remaining baby stopped moving. I was at school, working, so I talked to the nurse.
“Eat sugar,” she said.
It didn’t work. The baby didn’t start moving again. By the afternoon, we were in panic mode. John ran out into the rain to hail a cab to the hospital, couldn’t find one, and stopped the next best thing.
“Come on,” he said, dripping wet. “I got us a ride.”
It was the kindergarten school bus. Full of children. Sure enough, it went right past the hospital, opened its hydraulic doors with a sigh, and dropped us off.
“What have you had to eat in the last six hours?” the anesthesiologist asked.
I had taken the nurse’s sugar advice. “Two Cokes and three brownies,” I replied.
The doc gave me that look. You know the one. Pathetic.
An hour later, I was in the operating room. The baby was breech, and the cord was wrapped around its neck. It would have to be a C-section. John watched them make the incision. Then his face turned gray and he started to sway.
“Unlock your knees!” I yelled. “Don’t pass out!”
He did and stayed upright. I heard a cry and asked him the baby’s sex.
“I think it’s a girl.”
“What do you mean, ‘you think?’ ”
“Well, everything’s kinda swollen.”
We could not name our child without meeting her. So a few hours later, in a hospital bed, I asked John what name popped into his head when he saw our little girl.
“Brie,” he said.
Like all babies, she had been covered with white goo.
I rolled my eyes and decided on Ella.
The notary said the name would not be approved. In Spanish, ella means “she.” Nope, it wouldn’t do. The woman didn’t care if it was common in English.
So we gazed at our baby for days. At the wonder of her. Finally, we named her Marina.
Partly because it sounded Spanish. Partly because it was Greek, like my mother. Mostly because she had blue eyes. A calm, gentle blue that reminded me of the ocean on a sunny day, a place I always felt safe and warm.
Oh, Marina. Beautiful girl. I remember holding you. And learning to nurse you.
My milk came in full force the night we arrived home from the hospital. “You look like an exotic dancer,” John said of my supersized self. This was the same man who had brought my thong underwear and skinny jeans to the hospital, as if I was going to immediately spring back into my old shape.
“Please find me a breast pump!” I begged. “And not a cheap one. The Cadillac of breast pumps.” It felt like my breasts were going to explode.
But oh, the amusement of thinking of all that now. I’ve relived with joy those nights of pain, when my tiny child bit me like a demon. That sweet life in my arms. That milky breath. My husband at my side, bringing her to me to nurse in the moonlight. Then laying our baby back so gently in her bassinet.
Marina, you put an end to our traveling days.
Marina, you catapulted us into the parent years. That phase of life where days are interminable and years are over in an instant.
A time I wish was longer. A time I would not trade for anything.
A Couple
We tried for another child awhile before he came—a son, Aubrey, in 2001. Such a content, adorable baby—he was as chubby and content as a B
uddha—that we mulled over another, and shazam! there he came, Wesley, in 2003.
Suddenly, I had three children under the age of six, while working full-time. Naturally, our marriage suffered. John and I became like furniture to one another.
We were so strained, we considered separation.
But as with an old comfy chair, we were reluctant to let it go.
Both sets of our parents have been married fifty years. We thought of their example. We stuck it out, moment by moment.
We rarely did anything alone, just the two of us. John had quit teaching. Why? Try forty students, twenty-five desks, and twenty books. He became a pharmaceutical sales rep for GlaxoSmithKline. Occasionally, he would win a Glaxo trip. We went to Vancouver in 2006. For a decade, that was our one big couple trip.
Then, in the summer of 2009, John won a trip to Hawaii. It was during the packing and planning that I noticed my withered hand. I delayed a follow-up neurologist visit till after the trip because, let me tell you, when you’re looking at an all-expenses-paid vacation to Hawaii, there is not a whit wrong in the world.
Forget temporary health setbacks. That summer, my chief concern was finding (tasteful) silver heels to match my (tasteful) silver bangles to match my favorite blue tube dress for the luau.
And did my turquoise batik sarong truly match my swimsuit? Oh my! Now that’s a reason to worry.
In August, John and I left the kids with Nancy and Stephanie and flew to a Technicolor dream. The Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu was resplendent with antiques and painted an elegant pink, unlike the cotton-candy schmaltz of south Florida. The Pacific Ocean was violet offshore, aqua inland. The leis glowed magenta, and the evening sky orange.
Glaxo had the whole trip planned, an activity for every minute. A pig roast luau. A dance. John and I took a surfing lesson and rode horses at a ranch overlooking the ocean. We stood on a cliff, side by side, and watched a huge mango sun sink into the sea.
A moment to remember, like John as he glided through the swimming pool in 1991. Or ice in the Danube during our first year in Budapest.
Near the end, we kayaked with a guide to Lanikai Beach, oft-voted one of the most beautiful beaches in the world. The sand was white with the texture of flour, but no powdery residue. I called it “magic sand.”
Until I Say Good-Bye Page 10
