"If this is my life, I want a refund." โ 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 โ 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 โ 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 โ 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 โ 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 โ too many three-way mirrors โ 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 โ that
skinny, unconventional woman with the big dreams โ
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."
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