Woman Last Seen in Her Thirties

by Camille Pagán

  “Tradition’s overrated. Remember Thanksgiving?” she said, raising her perfectly manicured eyebrows. (How my daughter managed to master personal grooming with a seventy-hour workweek was the eighth wonder of the world.)

  “I do, and it was fine,” I lied.

  She wrapped her slender arms around me and hugged me tight. “Oh, Mom. It’s okay to not have things be perfect.”

  I cringed as I recalled my Italian almost affair and my drunken phone call to Adam. “Honey, if you knew how far I was from perfect, I don’t know if you’d let me be your mother anymore.”

  Zoe let me go and poured the rest of the tea she had made into her mug. “Come on. You know that’s not true.” She cupped the mug between her hands and blew on it to cool it. “But humor me: What if your friend’s house is actually a dump, or there’s a serial killer waiting for you when you get there?”

  Naturally, a string of ugly what-ifs had already paraded through my mind. I had decided that if Jean’s place was unsafe or awful (which it very well might be), I would return to Oak Valley and seek temporary shelter in the mother-in-law suite above Gita’s garage—this, provided the serial killer Zoe had alluded to didn’t get to me first. “I don’t know, sweetheart,” I told her. “I guess I’ll try to stab him back? As for what I’ll do, I guess I’ll figure that out as I go.”

  “It’s okay if you change your mind, you know.”

  “Well,” I said, trying to sound chipper, “maybe I will. Life is nothing if not full of twists and turns.”

  Zoe looked at me for what seemed like an eternity.

  “What?” I finally said.

  “Nothing.”

  “No, what is it? You can tell me.”

  She had set down her mug, and now she pulled at a piece of skin on her lip. I resisted the urge to tell her to stop. Finally she said, “I just know Dad’s going to regret this one day. And I was wondering what will happen then.”

  “Nothing,” I said quickly. “Nothing will happen then. Everything will be like it is now, only I’ll be in a better mental place.” I had envisioned so many scenarios by that point that I understood it was not in my best interest to entertain the one Zoe had just posed. I was finally starting to get on board with the idea that Adam would never have a change of heart. I could not go back to treading water in my sea of grief.

  Yet Zoe’s comment stayed with me as I spent a teary Christmas afternoon at Gita’s and made it through the next couple of days with Jack and Zoe before driving them to the airport, kissing them goodbye, and collapsing into a puddle after they disappeared from sight.

  Well, I hope he does regret it, I thought angrily as I sat in a corner, sipping seltzer while dozens of my closest acquaintances rang in the new year. Gita had convinced me to join her at a friend’s party so I wouldn’t spend the night alone, but it turned out that the only thing worse than being by yourself on New Year’s Eve is being surrounded by inebriated couples.

  Two minutes after the ball dropped, I said goodnight to Gita and our host, grabbed my coat, and walked the ten blocks home. I was not one for resolutions, but as I trudged through the snow, I vowed to send Adam away if he actually returned to me (which, given his confession on Thanksgiving and my foolish phone call from Rome, seemed highly unlikely).

  Because even after everything, I wasn’t sure I could summon the strength to tell him no. And that uncertainty made me feel like I had already failed a mission that I had not yet begun.

  Just after the new year, a moving company arrived to deliver my boxes to a storage unit. The house would be rented out from February until the end of July; through our lawyers, Adam had agreed to take care of maintenance during that time and revisit the idea of a sale when I returned from Ann Arbor.

  On the sixth of January—just two days before what was to be Adam’s and my twenty-eighth anniversary—I arrived at the courthouse to finalize what my husband had set in motion almost a year earlier.

  I expected it to hurt. To be honest, I expected to be racked with pain and maybe even weep quietly into my lawyer’s blazer before throwing a shoe at Adam. But when I saw Adam standing beside his lawyer in the courtroom, I felt an almost clinical detachment toward him. Then I turned and stared straight ahead, saying yes to the judge each time I was asked to confirm that I agreed with the terms of our divorce. Adam’s responses were identical to mine, but I refused to look at him again.

  Eleven minutes later, we were legally unwed.

  Therein lay the trickery of it all. Divorce was a legal guarantee that you were a free agent—but where were the guarantees for marriage? One day your husband would claim you were the love of his life; the next, he could decide he was done with said life, and you as his wife.

  My lawyer led me out of the hall ahead of Adam and his lawyer—apparently there was some sort of etiquette to these things. I thanked her for her time and effort, which had cost a tenth of our savings. Then I fled to the bathroom, where I sat in a stall, trying to stanch the thoughts rushing through my mind.

  Nine months had passed since Adam had left me. That was longer than I had gestated Zoe, who was born two weeks early; it was time enough for three seasons to pass, and roughly three hundred days in which to wrap my mind around life sans spouse. But now I had the paperwork to officially declare me the very thing I had spent my whole life trying not to be: alone.

  I don’t know how long I sat there; it must have been a while before I decided to find somewhere other than a courthouse lavatory to ruminate. I had almost reached the front of the building when Adam called my name. I spun around and saw that he and his lawyer were standing against a marble-paneled wall.

  I shook my head vigorously, but Adam began walking over anyway. “Maggie,” he said again.

  I gave him a chilly stare.

  “Hi,” he said, slipping his hands into his pockets. When he first left me, he looked younger than he had in years. But beneath the unforgiving fluorescent lights, the years were etched on his face, and he looked exhausted.

  Not your circus, not your clown, I reminded myself. Just because your instinct is to care doesn’t mean you have to.

  “Did you mean what you said?” he asked quietly.

  My face grew warm.

  “When you called from Italy,” he added, like my flaming cheeks weren’t indication that I knew exactly what he was talking about.

  I could neither confirm nor deny that I had meant what I had said, as I had no memory of our conversation. But I was not about to further humiliate myself by telling him this. I tilted my chin up. “Of course I did.”

  “I see,” he said. He rubbed his forehead for a minute. Then he looked back up at me. “Maggie? I’m sorry.”

  Yeah, well, that made two of us. But I could not—would not—slip back into the role of someone who grasped for what was long gone. “Save it for someone who cares,” I said, sounding more tired than unkind.

  His eyes searched my face. “What are you going to do in Ann Arbor?”

  Learn how to go through life without you, I thought. But I owed him nothing—not my plans, not my motivation, not a single thought in my head. So I turned and walked away.

  “I wasn’t expecting you!” said Rose when she opened the door to her apartment the next day.

  Her skin was like rice paper as I kissed her cheek. “I’m sorry, Rose,” I said, trying not to let my spirits sink. I had called again that morning to remind her I would be stopping by on my way to Ann Arbor. “If it’s a bad time—”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “It’s always a good time for you. I was wondering if you’d visit sometime this century.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said again, even though I had been to see her just before leaving for Rome. “Things have been . . . hectic.”

  “You don’t say.” She motioned for me to follow her to the living room and then sat across from me on one of the identical velvet sofas.

  “Did Adam tell you our divorce was finalized?” I asked her, staring at the bowl of white Jordan al
monds on the coffee table between us.

  “Goodness, no!” she said.

  “Yes, yesterday. I figured he would have told you . . .”

  “Well, he didn’t.” Her hands looked like tiny bird claws as she wrung them in her lap, and I wondered if mentioning the divorce had been a mistake. “I begged him not to do this to our family. Where are you going?” she said woefully.

  I had already told her about going to Ann Arbor, but I told her again. “I’m really sorry to be leaving. You’ll still have Adam and Rick, of course, and we’ll talk on the phone like we always do. Six months will pass before you know it.” I wanted to promise I would return to Chicago or at least visit, but I wasn’t sure if either was true. Adam had said he was done planning—but for the first time since perhaps high school, I also had no plans and had seemingly lost the ability to make them.

  I asked Rose if she would be okay.

  “I’m always okay. You and I are alike that way, Maggie.” She sighed and looked out the window. “I do miss Richard, though,” she said. “It’s very hard to be alone sometimes.”

  “Yes, it is,” I agreed.

  “We fought like cats and dogs, you know.”

  I nodded; Adam had told me as much, and I had witnessed it on several occasions before Richard’s death.

  “Yet he and I stayed together,” she continued, “and in the last ten to fifteen years, we were very happy, your father and I.” She had begun speaking to me as though I were one of her sons, and I couldn’t bring myself to correct her.

  Nor was I about to point out that as long as I had known them, Rose had regarded Richard like a bothersome man-child, and he had treated her as someone who was constantly in need of correction. This dynamic had not changed during the last years of their marriage. But the only people who can truly understand a marriage are the ones in it, and perhaps this had fit Rose’s definition of happy.

  “Sometimes it’s easier to be alone, not having to explain yourself to another person,” she added. “Most of the time the pain is worth it if you love each other. You and Adam could still work things out.”

  I had a divorce decree and a broken heart that said otherwise, but at least she was no longer addressing me as though I were Adam or Rick. “I think it’s a little late for that,” I said quietly.

  She gave me an incredulous look. “Oh, dear, that’s not true at all. It’s only too late if one of you is dead.”

  I had no response to her remark, so I gave her a sanitized recollection of my trip to Rome. This triggered Rose’s memory, and she told me about her parents, Polish immigrants who had met after settling in Chicago and had found success in a series of small businesses. They were loyal to their roots, attending the Polish service at their Catholic church, making sausage, sauerkraut, and pierogies for meals, and dutifully sending money back to the old country every month. But they never returned to Poland, even for a visit. “I always meant to go there myself, but it was such a long trip and it simply never happened,” Rose said, staring at her hands. “I wish I would have.”

  Her resignation seemed like proof that sometimes it really was too late, even if you were still alive. But when we said goodbye, Rose clutched my arms so hard I wasn’t sure she would let me go. “I’ll miss you, dear girl,” she said. Then she whispered, “Remember—there’s still time.”

  FOURTEEN

  After having so many decisions foisted upon me, I was finally taking my destiny into my own hands—or so I told myself as I drove past the gray, half-frozen expanse of Lake Michigan, toward the industrial graveyards of Indiana, and through the snow-covered fields of southwest Michigan. No matter how ill-advised my previous decisions may have been, moving was something I could be proud of.

  By the time I reached Ann Arbor, my optimism had been out too long and had begun to curdle. What had I been thinking? I didn’t want to find new friends and new places to shop and eat. I didn’t want to have to adjust to a whole new life—again.

  The city was more charming than I remembered, but surely its allure owed much to the fresh layer of snow that had fallen, I decided as I drove through downtown. Even if its charm was authentic, I was obviously in the wrong age bracket to enjoy it, because everyone was young. Twentysomethings beeped their horns at me for driving too slowly on the icy roads. Trendy young professionals rushed into restaurants and coffee shops to escape the cold. A coed was throwing up into a snowy bush after what must have been a night of one too many cocktails. It didn’t matter if Jean was a full fifteen years older than me, because she was young at heart. I was a crotchety old woman who belonged in a retirement community in Florida. This midwestern college town was the wrong place for me.

  Jean lived in an eclectic, vaguely bohemian neighborhood on the city’s west side; her house was on the last lot on a quiet street a few blocks from a river. After I pulled into the driveway, I called the number of the woman who had been tending Jean’s home while she was away. A minute later she met me at the front door. I was expecting someone more artistic, à la Jean, but the neighbor’s hair was clipped in a sharp bob, and she wore a long camel overcoat. She appeared to be roughly my age and introduced herself as Cathy.

  “Well, here it is,” she said, unlocking the front door for me. “What brings you to this neck of the woods? Are you going to be working at the university?”

  “No. I just got divorced,” I said, following her inside.

  She frowned. “Oh.”

  I frowned back. I had already learned the hard way that many married people viewed divorce as a communicable disease. But why? pushed one woman at the New Year’s party I had attended with Gita. Like I could offer an antidote made of one part less nagging and two parts not neglecting to wax my bikini line ever since the elder Bush was president.

  I was ready to yell Thanks! at Cathy as the door hit her backside when she said, “I’m sorry. I got divorced two years ago.”

  “Really,” I said, eyeing the diamond-encrusted band circling her ring finger as she handed me the keys she was holding.

  Cathy nodded, wearing a new expression that was impossible to read. “It was awful. Let me know if you ever want to grab a drink.”

  I wanted to grab a drink. Three, in fact. Why did eighty-five percent of all social invitations involve alcohol?

  “I’m not sure I would have made it through that first year without talking to people who had been there,” said Cathy. “It’s true what they say, you know.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “Divorce is worse than death,” she said grimly.

  “Hmm,” I said, because I wasn’t so sure I bought that. Losing Adam had made me feel like I had been broken in two. Yet even this was not the same as the empty, irreplaceable loss I had experienced after my mother passed.

  “Don’t go it alone,” added Cathy.

  This was lousy advice for someone who had just moved to a new town by herself. But I was pretty sure Cathy meant well, so I thanked her and promised I would keep her offer in mind. Then I closed the door behind her and went to explore the place that would be my home for the next six months.

  While small, the house was bright and airy, and smelled of a surprisingly pleasant mix of paint and cinnamon. The ceiling above the living room was vaulted and had a large skylight on the southern side. Fractured rays of sun were streaming onto one of Jean’s paintings, and as I took a step forward, what seemed to be an abstract riverfront from afar revealed a stunning level of detail up close.

  Jean had hung paintings like this in most rooms. As I examined them, I found myself wondering why I had not checked county records to make sure this home was really hers to rent out, nor combed through various Internet databases to confirm that my friend and her neighbors were not murderers or sex offenders.

  But these worries were dwarfed by a larger, more looming thought.

  And that was that I didn’t belong there.

  This house was suited for someone with a sense of adventure who was content enjoying all that tranquil beauty b
y herself. But save a few moments of joy in Rome, I no longer seemed to be able to enjoy myself.

  No, I thought suddenly as I looked at a small painting of a dark forest with a glowing red light coming from deep within the trees. The problem was not that I had lost the ability to enjoy things.

  It was that I had lost myself.

  My first few days in Ann Arbor were busy enough to seem pleasant, and I tried to view this as evidence that my initial despair had been nothing but a spike in anxiety. I unpacked. I walked around the neighborhood and got reacquainted with the city. I found a grocery store and a café, and when the coffee at that café turned out to be brown water, I found another, Maizie’s, where the cappuccinos were nearly on par with the ones I’d had in Italy. I called Rose, Jack, and Zoe, and assured them all that I was fine.

  Then I hung up and cried.

  In Oak Valley, I could hear cars zip past on the nearby highway, and the wail of sirens in the distance; even though my kids had left home, someone else’s were usually hollering down the street. But at Jean’s, deer bounded inaudibly through the yard into the woods. The air above seemed impervious to the roar of planes. The neighbors existed—I had seen them dashing in and out—but the houses were far apart, and I couldn’t hear anyone in the distance.

  The quiet was a constant reminder that I was completely alone. I could clearly remember my children screaming as they ran through the house, attempting to tear limb from torso, and Adam turning up the television so he could hear the Cubs’ score over their clamoring. I would kill for a day of silence, I used to think to myself, even though I knew every word to “Big Yellow Taxi” and was presumably intelligent enough to understand that the paved paradise Joni Mitchell sang of could very well be a metaphor for an empty nest. Now I had all the silence I ever could have wanted—and far more. As I stood at the sink one day, my lips pressed together as my shoulders shook because I didn’t want to fill the house with the sound of my crying, I was forced to admit that perhaps Cathy had a point.