Excerpt of Flying Lessons by Peggy Webb

"If this is my life, I want a refund." — Beth

I don't look like the kind of woman you'd think would run away from home. But here I am in Huntsville, Alabama, wishing I could stamp Cancelled on my marriage license and go off somewhere and become somebody else — anybody except Elizabeth Holt Martin, boring, dowdy wife of Dr. Howard Martin.

This strange restlessness is partially why I drove one hundred and fifty miles and paid five hundred dollars to listen to a woman with three degrees and an overbite tell me how to cope with my life. Glenda Wiggs is her name, B.S., M.S., Ph.D., heavy on the B.S.

"Or-gan-ize." She stretches her words, either to lend weight and credibility or to work up a sweat so she won't freeze in this room where the air conditioner is turned up cold enough to kill hogs. "You must keep lists."

She sounds just like my husband. I could have stayed home and saved my money.

"Pri-ori-tize!" Wiggs shouts.

I wonder where she would put, Resist the urge to stand in the aisle at Wal-Mart in front of the Tampax display, cursing your dried-up eggs? I did that last Tuesday, and Howard asked if I wanted him to write a prescription for Prozac. He's a psychiatrist, which says it all. He can spot a patient having an anxiety attack in a packed mall, but he can't recognize a wife in midlife crisis at Wal- Mart — let alone a wife having an attack of lust in his own bedroom.

Last weekend, in a last-ditch effort to get Howard to notice me, I tossed my panties on the bedpost.

"Elizabeth," he said, "there's a hole in your underwear."

"That's not a hole, Howard. They're crotchless."

I didn't even get an acknowledgment from him, much less a rise. The salesgirl at Naughty but Nice had said they were guaranteed to work. Obviously, the panties were flawed.

Of course, you have to consider Howard. He wears two-piece pajamas to bed and then folds them into thirds every morning, even when they're dirty and he's going to put them in the laundry hamper. I used to love Howard's sense of order and neatness, but lately I've wanted to take his precisely folded, accusatory pajamas and stomp them. Instead, I refold them into sloppy halves, toss them back under the pillow and say, There, take that.

I don't know what's wrong with me. My Lord, I'm fifty- three and my older daughter, Kate, left the nest ten years ago. Of course, my late-in-life child, Jenny, will be leaving for college this fall, so technically I could be suffering delayed empty-nest syndrome. But it's more than that, I think. I feel like somebody who got all dressed up for the parade and by time I got there, it had already passed by.

Sitting here, on a hard chair in the Imperial Room at the Marriott on Tranquility Base, I forget about folded pajamas and failed panties. Instead, I look out the window at the Saturn Five rocket dominating the Space Center, thrusting toward the wide open spaces, grand and glorious and phallic.

Wouldn't I love to get on that and ride? I'd go straight to the moon — both ways. I'd forget that my nest is empty, my eggs are dried up and my husband can't find the henhouse.

We don't even have conversations anymore. He hasn't started one with me in three years that doesn't begin with, "Elizabeth, where are my...?" Fill in the blank. "Where are my gray socks, my car keys, my reading glasses, my hemorrhoid suppositories?"

Who am I trying to kid? It's not Jenny's exodus to college I mind. It's not even creeping age, missing car keys and socks. It's sex. I can't remember the last time Howard and I had sex.

"Beth..." My friend Jane startles me out of my reverie. She's the only person who calls me by my childhood nickname. I'd love her for that alone, but she's also full of every good thing I can imagine — kindness, truth, laughter, loyalty and love. She's like a Mars bar brimming with nuts and marshmallows and caramel and chocolate. Once you get a taste of Jane Meaders, you don't let her go.

I glance around the cold room where women are milling about talking in that too-sweet drawl Southern women use when they're telling lies under the guise of being polite. Jane has turned sideways in her chair and is giving me a funny look. "Are you having another hot flash?"

"No. I don't have hot flashes. I just sweat a little at night, is all."

"Same thing." Jane's nine years older than I am, and thinks of herself as my mentor in all things female, which covers everything from menopause to self-exams for breast cancer to how to remove rust rings from the bathtub. Which is fine by me. When you don't know where you're going, it's good to have a best friend who has already traveled the road.

"Let's get out of here," she says. We hurry toward the parking lot without looking back and without one iota of guilt. If there's one good thing about being over fifty, it's the ability to leave in the middle of a boring lecture without being labeled bad-mannered. What people think is weak bladder.

We toss our purses into the backseat of Jane's new silver Sequoia, and she says, "Whose idea was this anyway, yours or mine?"

"Howard's."

"Well, that explains it. Which way's the mall?"

I hate malls — too many three-way mirrors — but I check the map, anyhow, because Jane loves to shop. As we head toward University Drive, I forget about having an itch Howard won't scratch. Spring takes my breath away. I've always said, "May in Mississippi can make you weep." The same is true of Alabama or Georgia or any other state in the Deep South. Mother Nature puts on such a show of greenery and blossom, it looks as if she's trying to compensate for all the tornadoes she sends our way. Creeping purple phlox hides the raw red-clay hills, wisteria cascades from magnolia trees in sweetly scented curtains, and the fragrance of wild honeysuckle spilling over fences makes you drunk on happiness for no reason at all. Gardens riot with explosions of golden forsythia, parades of iris in white and yellow and blue, and arbors bending under the weight of climbing pink roses.

I almost say, "Jane, it's too pretty to be indoors. Let's head straight to the botanical gardens." I don't though. Somewhere between the ages of twenty and fifty I turned into my timid aunt Bonnie Kathleen.

In college I was going to be Edna St. Vincent Millay, compose great symphonies instead of poetry and live a wild, rich bohemian life that would be as far removed from Aunt Bonnie Kathleen's vision for me as possible. She's the maiden aunt who raised me. My mother died in childbirth, and Daddy, unable to cope with the loss and a baby girl at the same time, left me in the care of his only sister. Aunt Bonnie Kathleen dished out love and discipline in equal but cautious doses. Her idea of keeping me in line was the dire warning, "I swear, Elizabeth, if you wear that red dress (or cut your hair, or drive that car or do whatever else she didn't want me to do), I'm going to have a prostration attack." It worked, not because I feared that bogus malady but because I couldn't bear to hurt her feelings.

Eighteen and newly freed from the strict eye of Aunt Bonnie Kathleen, I wore gypsy skirts and purple lipstick, wrote a song called "Love is a Bus" and spouted radical opinions. Once, I danced naked on the balcony of the Tri Delta house while I ate cherries from a jar. Now I wear Martha Stewart-like clothes, copy recipes from Good Housekeeping and worry that I've lost the real Beth — that skinny, unconventional woman with the big dreams — somewhere along the way.

Well, certainly I've lost skinny. Last week while Howard was snoring on his side of the bed and I was tossing and burning on the other, I sneaked into the kitchen and ate peanut butter from the jar. All of it.

That's why I hate stores with three-way mirrors. Even Ann Taylor, Jane's favorite.

"One of the compensations of growing old," she says as we bypass the bargain rack and select from the new arrivals without even checking the price tags.

"Fat pocketbooks."

"Fat behinds."

"Beth, you're not fat. Trust me. At a certain age, the weight shifts."

"How come it didn't shift to my breasts where I needed it?"

"Gravity." She should talk. Jane's tall and elegant, a perfect size eight. She grabs a blue dress off the rack and thrusts it toward me. "Here, try this one on. It looks like you."

I squeeze into the dress, which matches my eyes. "Buy it. The blue makes the gray streaks in your hair look like blond highlights," Jane says. The trick to being a good friend is knowing when to make you feel better with a lie and when to shake some sense into you with the truth. This is a feel-good lie.

"It's too small. Since when did they start making size twelves this small?" I complain.

"They're skimping on material. Let's get an ice-cream sundae, then head out to the botanical gardens before they close."