Planting Dandelions

by Kyran Pittman

  “What’s she like?” I asked, open to learning where we needed to shore things up.

  “Blond,” he said, without hesitating. “Dumb as a post.”

  At the time, I was heavily immersed in Jungian studies. Every aspect of our lives, waking and dreaming, was wrung out for hidden meaning. Obviously, I needed to lighten up.

  In recent years, I’ve watched married friends of mine ride out their own crushes, from mild to severe. It must be our age. It’s like the dance of the mayflies, with everybody’s libido at two minutes to midnight. Most of these are passing fancies, the kind that afflict almost everybody at some point over the course of a long-term relationship, me included. “Just put your head between your knees and breathe deeply a few times,” I told one friend. “You’ll be all right.” She was all right. But she never looked more beautiful than she did those few weeks. I could almost smell the electrical charge in the air around her. Something in her was wide awake, and I was the last person to tell her to hit the snooze button. Every married person has to grapple with temptation in their own way, run their own cost-benefit analysis to come up with the reasons why or why not. Me, I’ve done the affair. I pulled the chute cord. I know where it lands you.

  It lands you back in a relationship, is where. A relationship strewn with the inevitable tedium, crankiness, and wanderlust that accompany two people living together, no matter how much they love each other. You don’t need to have fundamental compatibility issues; those weeds can sprout from trivial ones. Like the time we went to the new pizza place in town. Within moments of arriving, it was clear that Patrick was less than thrilled about the place. It was crowded and busy when we got there, the service was rushed, the food was expensive, and customers were swarming for tables. It was a kind of hive atmosphere, because this is a small town, and the place was getting lots of buzz. My husband is particularly resistant to social buzz. I could tell it was grating on him like the noise of fluorescent lights.

  Me, I was excitedly flitting around. I love buzz. I thought it felt festive. The restaurant’s specialty was wood-fired pizza, served up in a style I would call “rustic,” and my husband called “sloppy.” We ordered, and when our pies arrived, with their toppings in a more or less virgin state (slices of cheese instead of shredded, fresh baby spinach instead of cooked), I was the only one smiling.

  We argued about it all the way home, and well into the next week.

  “That place was awful,” said Patrick, “sloppily prepared food and no service masquerading as philosophy.”

  “It’s trying to do something different and creative,” I said.

  “Pretentious,” he declared. “Inflated.”

  “Small-minded,” I charged. “Judgmental.”

  We were moving beyond critiquing the food, and into one of our dirtier forms of fighting, spinning a disagreement into evidence of each other’s “issues.” The negative side of being even a little bit hip to psychology, which we are, is that you can use it as a handy weapon in a pinch.

  Clearly, I told Patrick, he was threatened by the pizza’s success.

  Our hot air was a bellows to the embers of another disagreement we’d had a few weeks before, when Patrick decided he needed to shade all the windows in his beautiful sunlit office in order to see his work on his computer screen. Sunlight to me is like oxygen. The idea that the windows in that room, in the center of the house, would be permanently shaded, made me crazy. Worse, I knew I didn’t have a leg to stand on: He’s the one who has to work there, and he let me have my way in virtually every other aspect of interior decoration. All I could do was sulk. And glower. Which is what I did every time I passed through his office for the next two days, thinking, go ahead, take a happy, bright space and make it a sad and dark space. Like your soul.

  Because natural light is important to me, and if it’s not as important to him, then he must be wrong. And bad. And most likely a fascist. And if he doesn’t like his very expensive pizza flung down in front of him with all the toppings scattered unevenly and the edges a little charred from the wood fire, if he didn’t find that charming, if he didn’t get that, he must not get me.

  I know better than to nurse that line of thinking at my bosom for very long. It’s temptation, waiting to strike, with the lie that I would be infinitely happier with someone different. Something new. It promises that somewhere out there is a man who loves full-spectrum light and artisanal cuisine as much as I do, and I owe it to myself to find him, and spend the rest of my life with him under the Tuscan sun, eating wood-fired pizza alfresco, in the nude. But different and new is just the same old if you keep doing it over and over. The real novelty for me lies in seeing what the next decade of marriage brings.

  What I’ve taken from the first is this: If you can hang in there through minor and major differences of opinion, through each other’s big and little fuck-ups, year after year, you come to understand that the person you married is really, terribly flawed. There isn’t a human being you can hang out with, day in and day out, for over a decade, and not come to the same inescapable realization. You can find a new lover who gets you and completes you, and you can run off together and never look back. One day, I promise, you will find yourself leaving a restaurant with that very person, wondering what in the world you are doing with someone so obviously wrong for you in every way. But in that same instant, in a one-two punch to your consciousness, you’ll realize he has wondered the very same thing about you; that the real wonder is that any two people stay together, as impossible to live with and as broken as we all are.

  18.

  Good-bye, Girl

  The dress is one hundred percent pure vintage polyester. The fabric is flimsy and printed with a psychedelic shooting star motif, in faded rainbow colors. It has long flared sleeves and a halter-style top with a keyhole opening at the bosom. The hemline barely skirts public decency. I always wore it with five-inch stiletto heels. Patrick audibly panted whenever I put it on. He said it was a dress a Marvel comic book artist would draw on a girl, a fantasy straight out of his seventies boyhood. He called it the Super Heroine Dress. I’d sling my fringed leather jacket over it and go out to make the scene.

  To make a scene, more accurately. Musicians onstage missed notes when I walked into a club wearing that outfit. Conversations stopped. Women whispered and men stared. I saved it for special occasions, as if wearing it was a kind of gift I brought. I wore it to birthday celebrations. To gigs and concerts. To the funeral of an old hippie friend, accessorized with a matching rainbow bouquet of helium balloons, which I released to the blue sky when his ashes were scattered.

  It was outrageous. I was outrageous.

  Then I became a mom. As my body and my lifestyle changed, an identity crisis came to lurk in my closet.

  “I don’t know who this girl is,” I lamented from deep inside it one day, clutching the phone in one hand, a silver lamé halter in the other. I’d called a friend in a panic attack brought on by an attempted wardrobe purge. “I don’t know where she fits anymore.”

  It made sense to let go of the shiny cropped tops and the low-slung pants, the crazy shoes and the short-shorts. When I got pregnant, I took my belly button ring out and let the piercing grow over. Those were all appropriate edits. I couldn’t chase toddlers around the playground in Lucite stripper shoes. It wasn’t as if I was expunging sexiness from my life, succumbing to the mom haircut and mom jeans. But the excisions weren’t painless either. Whenever I came to the Super Heroine Dress, the purge was over. I could never part with it, but neither could I imagine wearing it. I would close the closet door, unable to reconcile that wild child with motherhood and maturity.

  I tried. On a whim, I put a customized license plate on my minivan that was imprinted with the words HIPMAMA. It was meant as a personal affirmation, but it soon felt like false advertising. There was no way I could consistently deliver on it, unless you interpreted the term to mean a woman whose offspring are attached to her hip, or a reference to anatomical changes wro
ught by childbirth. After we downsized to one vehicle, Patrick found the license plate equally hard to live up to, and I was just as glad to remove it. I thought I’d get a tattoo instead, something artful and discreet—a more private reminder that, beneath the capri pants and nursing tops, I still rocked it. I had my design picked out and was ready to go when I discovered I was pregnant again.

  “I guess you got tattooed all right,” a friend smirked.

  Surrender, the universe seemed to be saying. You’re not That Girl anymore.

  Oh, but I loved being That Girl. I knew exactly how to be her. I understudied for years as a kid, playing with Barbie dolls and reading fashion and beauty magazines. I practiced dress-up more than I ever rehearsed being a mommy. As an awkward-looking preteen, I despaired of ever getting to be her. As an insecure teenager, I faked that I was her. As a young newlywed playing house with my first husband, I buried her. And then I came to America, anonymous and free, and I became her.

  “Like a movie stah,” one of our neighbors used to say, every time he saw me in one of my getups. “Like a seventies homecoming queen,” said Danny, the cook at the bar one day, looking me up and down, as I sauntered past in my standard waitressing uniform, bell-bottom jeans, towering heels, and a bared midriff. “Where did you come from?”

  I laughed with the sheer pleasure of having created something that someone else appreciated. From nowhere, I told him. I made myself up.

  Of course, I couldn’t really pass for a movie star or homecoming queen, or even the prettiest girl in that barroom or most others. It was always a game of dress-up, closer to drag than fashion. But when I wore those clothes, I felt like a beautiful girl, enough to convince others that I was, or at least convince them to play along with me. It was a wonderful time, and there was a part of me that was sad to leave the ball when the clock struck midnight and turned my belly into a pumpkin. Any illusions I might have had about staying sexy through pregnancy, like real movie stars and prom queens do, were banished the first time I looked down and saw that there was a coffee ring on my maternity shirt, a few inches above the spot where I once sported a belly button ring. My girth was enormous enough for me to have rested my mug on it, level, while sitting up. I think of it as The Day Sexy Died.

  It was later revived, but it’s never been the same. Fortunately, becoming a mother puts sexiness in perspective. As does turning forty. It’s not that it doesn’t matter, it’s that a lot of other things matter more. I wouldn’t trade who I am now to be able to wear hot pants and thigh-high boots again. But it would be a lie to say I have been cheerfully letting go. As evolved as it would sound to claim that I embrace the first wiry gray hairs, the crow’s-feet, and stretch marks as badges of experience, the truth is less pure. I mourn a little inside when I see a photograph of me with long glossy tresses and taut belly.

  I’ve heard older women say that sometimes when they look in the mirror, they don’t feel like themselves anymore. The image no longer reflects how they feel inside. A friend of mine in her sixties recently had a face-lift. Although we are close, there was a note of hesitation when she told me her plans. I think she was afraid I would judge.

  When I was younger, I would have. There are all kinds of objections to be made to excising age this way, as if it were malignant. I always feel a little betrayed when I discover that someone who is older and beautiful has had “work” done. Because until I’ve learned the truth, I think perhaps it’s possible for me to age as beautifully. Look at her, I think. Fifty, and still so sexy. Well, why not? Maybe I could be, too. Who’s afraid of fifty? Not me. And then I find out they’ve “cheated,” and I despair a little.

  My friend is as smart, as strong, and as deep as anyone I know. I couldn’t judge her decision. If ridding myself of ten pounds or neck wrinkles were as easy as plucking gray hairs, what would the difference be? If I can have my hair cut or colored so that I feel my best, why not alter my face or my breasts? I use a face cream that removes old skin cells. Could I use a laser to remove more? A scalpel? Where is the line? I thought I knew it when I was thirty. Now I’m less sure.

  I miss making heads turn. I am trying to accept that I will never weigh less than 120 pounds again without acute deprivation. It irritates me that the makeup and hair styling I used to do for fun now feels as necessary a prerequisite to leaving the house as brushing my teeth. It takes work just to look okay to myself. The big guns, like self-tanner and Lycra, are no longer just for special occasions. So much that was once optional and playful has become a maintenance chore. There’s a striving to it that feels familiar, like those insecure teenage years, when I was trying so hard to act my way into someone I didn’t know how to be yet.

  I flicked on my straightening iron the other morning, and realized that the daily use of hair appliances is something I haven’t done since I was a teenager, when I would set my radio alarm clock for five in the morning so I could scorch and lacquer my layered hair into sausage curls before school. In those years I wore a mask—literally—made with thick coats of cheap makeup. I used to wince to see old photos in which my face would be an entirely different flesh tone than my neck, but I came to look more lovingly upon them later. In some ways, the mask protected me while I was in that tender, larval state. It came off when I was ready to take it off and become my shiny new self.

  I looked around my bathroom, noticing that every shelf and drawer was filled with the latest potions and powders, and realized I am back in metamorphosis again, straining toward what I don’t yet know how to be. I understudy older women as carefully as I once pored over those beauty magazines, taking note of what works and doesn’t work; dress, hair, makeup, comportment. Taking note of who has aged gracefully, who has hung on to her younger persona well past time, or who seems to have abandoned any interest in her own appearance. I especially note who can command respect and attention when she speaks, because so many older women often seem invisible and powerless in the company of men.

  I’m embarrassed to admit that part has worried me. It seems ridiculously regressive that twenty years after adolescence, I am back to wondering how to get the boys to take notice, but the easy, obvious answer is getting less easy and obvious. Youthful sex appeal is a hefty talking stick in our culture. When it passes from me, will my voice still be heard? Maybe in ten or twenty years, I’ll laugh at that question, and look back with fond bemusement at photos of my bottle-tanned, Lycra-bound forties. Maybe I won’t miss being That Girl, because by then, I’ll have become That Woman.

  I actively scan the horizon for women who personify her with their vitality. I have one arm stretched out to them, and I am trying to summon the courage to let go with the other, make the leap, and grab hold of my future with energy and determination rather than just passively losing my grasp on the old power base. I swing back and forth on this trapeze, working my way up to flying across the gap, into the unknown.

  I decided I would give myself a push by retiring the Super Heroine Dress in style. I wore it out dancing with friends one night, made the scene with it one more time. The polyester-draped figure I cut was that of a middle-aged mother of three, not a twenty-five-year-old party girl. Definitely not from the panel of a Marvel comic book. Definitely not the fantasy of any teenage boy.

  I think it’s okay. I have given birth to three children. I am a good mother. I’ve made it to the second decade of a marriage. I have many friends, a career that I love. I have different strengths now. I tell myself it is going to be okay. Better than okay.

  As a friend in her fifties assures me, there are some pretty great compensations for not being the center of attention with the guys anymore. One of those, I’m discovering, is finally finding my place among women. I have somehow always had great girlfriends, but for years, I had no clue how to be one. My closest female friendships always came behind even the most casual relationship with a man. Women were Plan B. I could never have imagined, when I was twenty-five, being so content to spend an entire evening with only them, let alone looking fo
rward to it all week.

  My innermost circle of girlfriends widens, contracts, and rotates, with axis coordinates that change with the seasons. But for a few weeks in the spring they are fixed: five o’clock sharp, my front porch, kids welcome, no husbands, no regrets. The drinks are fancy, the snack is simple. The children are encouraged to play video games and forage from the pantry. It’s our time. The Ladies have convened.

  We talk about hair and makeup, sex, clothes, religion, music, food, and the riddle of being wives and mothers, and still ourselves. The laughter becomes deep and earthy. The second round is shaken and poured. Someone puts chicken nuggets in the microwave for the children. The husbands are called, soothed, cajoled, notified. A little while longer.

  Patrick stays discreetly in the background, steering our boys toward baths and homework. On a trip inside to refill the ice bucket, I tease him, “We are talking about our vaginas. You don’t want to go out there!” He raises his eyebrows in mock horror, smiles.

  When the kids slip outside, hovering near the porch like moths around lamplight, I wonder if I should shoo them back inside, if our conversation is too strong for them. Patrick herds them into the house, again and again, but they keep escaping, dancing on the lawn in the twilight, pagans around a mighty bonfire.