The Elegant Out Read online

  “While exploring the need for self-expression and the obstacles to achieving it, The Elegant Out offers a hard look at the choice between a second pregnancy and the writing life. An ode to creativity that combines psychological insight with the passionate pursuit of inspiration. Moving, absorbing, and honestly written.”

  —JESSICA LEVINE, author of Nothing Forgotten

  “I lost myself in this story . . . the plot unravels beautifully.”

  —KRISTEN MOELLER, author of What Are You Waiting For

  “Beautifully told, this story of a woman at her fertility crossroads will resonate with many readers. Choosing between the long-term commitment of having a child and the joyous fulfillment of writing a novel feels like a downside of being a liberated woman, but working out the answer can lead to insights that expand the heart.”

  —JENNI OGDEN, author of A Drop in the Ocean

  “Elizabeth B is on a warpath toward life. The author convincingly weaves the conflict of a thirty-six-year-old caught between the biological imperative and the desire to birth herself as a writer. She paints a heartfelt picture of a woman in the throes of urgency. Bartasius explores the yearnings for forgiveness toward self and others in this portrayal of Elizabeth, who can’t seem to “take those hands off her throat” and emerge from her stranglehold. The Elegant Out offers much wisdom, inspiration, self-reflection, and love.”

  —BARBARA SAPIENZA, author of Anchor Out

  “The eloquence of the writing is palpable. Her words paint pictures. I couldn’t get enough of it, like a good cup of coffee that you want to savor. More than that, The Elegant Out is a reminder we all have our hands around our own throats, choking off our self-expression, and we all have the power to remove them, should we choose to. A beautifully written book by a brilliant writer.”

  —JENNIFER COKEN, author of When I Die,

  Take My Panties and Embrace the Ridiculousness

  “From the first line to the last page, Elizabeth is both audacious and subtle in her story and her writing style.”

  —JOSEPH NUCCI, author of Bubble Dynamics

  “The novel of the year that you WILL NOT be able to put down . . . Elizabeth’s witty, compelling, and fragile voice moved me to the core in a way that left me reading the last words of this novel with regret that they didn’t last longer, and feeling ravenously desirous of more of this talented author’s stories.”

  —ABIGAIL SKEANS, ESQ, cofounder of Pomona Society

  “Elizabeth Bartasius’s wit will have you laughing out loud. Her gritty, steadfast prose offer comfort and understanding. Her heroine’s honest tone assures readers that they too do not have to apologize for unflattering, vulnerable, and painful missteps.”

  —JILL MURPHY LONG, filmmaker and author

  of three books in the Permission To series

  “I love the way Elizabeth Bartasius writes. Abuse is a triggering topic, but she delivers the story with such grace. I felt myself cheering the character on.”

  —SHELLY BELL, Entrepreneur of the Year, Technical.ly DC

  “The Elegant Out made me laugh and shed multiple tears of joy . . . I was reminded of the power of storytelling and stunning prose. I found myself chanting, ‘Never give up and never settle.’ What a rich and beautiful way to spend an afternoon.”

  —SHOSHANNA FRENCH, founder of Simple Spirit

  “Deep insights, enjoyable characters, a delightful unfolding of an intimate conversation.”

  —ANNIE ROSE STATHES, social justice performance artist at Be Authentic

  “The Elegant Out is a true treasure—a story you will turn to time and again for inspiration, heart, and a good chuckle when you need it.”

  —MONICA MEHTA, author of The Entrepreneurial Instinct

  THE

  Elegant

  Out

  Copyright © 2019, Elizabeth Bartasius

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, digital scanning, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please address She Writes Press.

  Published 2019

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN: 978-1-63152-563-6

  ISBN: 978-1-63152-564-3

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018956763

  For information, address:

  She Writes Press

  1569 Solano Ave #546

  Berkeley, CA 94707

  She Writes Press is a division of SparkPoint Studio, LLC.

  All company and/or product names may be trade names, logos, trademarks, and/or registered trademarks and are the property of their respective owners.

  Cover design by Mimi Bark

  Interior design and typeset by Katherine Lloyd, The DESK

  THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION. NAMES, CHARACTERS, PLACES, AND INCIDENTS EITHER ARE THE PRODUCT OF THE AUTHOR’S IMAGINATION OR ARE USED FICTITIOUSLY. ANY RESEMBLANCE TO ACTUAL PERSONS, LIVING OR DEAD, IS ENTIRELY COINCIDENTAL.

  For Corinne, who has never left

  “Resistance’s goal is not to wound or disable. Resistance aims to kill. Its target is the epicenter of our being; our genius, our soul, the unique and priceless gift we were put on earth to give and that no one else has but us. Resistance means business. When we fight it, we are in the war to the death.”

  —Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

  Prologue

  Hands

  Iremember the night my son’s father put his hands around my neck, choking me, my body pinned to the ground. I hated him in that moment. I thought he would really kill me, twenty feet from our two-year-old son playing in his crib.

  I kicked, cried out, and kicked again. It had all happened so fast: his temper, my anger, the hole in the wall, me on the ground, and his knee in my ribs.

  Little Jack bobbed up and down in his crib while his parents struggled on the floor, maybe for the last time. Maybe the daddy wouldn’t stop squeezing. Maybe he would drain it all out of me. Maybe I wanted him to; I’d lived too long in the little house, in the little town, without my voice, as the man-child I’d married whispered over and over again the only mantra he knew: “Take some Prozac.”

  Yet, something in me knew he couldn’t kill, he wouldn’t. The summer evening was too perfectly warm, and our son too perfectly delightful, happy with slobber dribbling from the corners of his mouth. Like every other project left undone, Tom didn’t have the stamina or the courage to follow through.

  Tom was only thirty-two. I was twenty-eight. We had our whole lives ahead of us. But neither of us knew at that moment how the hell to deal with the lives we had behind us. I was married and miserable. And he was married and happy, if only I would take that damned Prozac.

  I’m sure I called him stupid or insensitive. Maybe I even told him I hated him. I don’t remember what I said exactly, only how I felt.

  Lost.

  Full of rage.

  Like at any moment my body would all at once turn leathery and wrinkled, and fill itself with tumors from toes to lips, all from the massive channel of negative energy that I just couldn’t seem to purge, no matter how many pages I wrote in my journal.

  My neighbor at the time, a therapist living slightly above the poverty line, had asked me if I was sure I wanted a divorce. “You make beautiful babies,” she said. “Besides, most women who get divorced struggle financially.” She’s the only therapist I’d known up to that point, and I didn’t have health insurance, so I didn’t know “Go to Hell” was the proper response to her loony advice.

/>   Then, of course, there were the wedding photos. Tom and I had the most beautiful album. It was quite something out of a fairy tale. I loved my wedding dress. I loved the dude ranch with the long, lazy front porch looking over Steamboat Lake. I loved the field of yellow wildflowers that had bloomed exactly on that weekend, I’m sure just for my wedding day.

  I was afraid to leave; maybe divorce wasn’t such a good idea.

  Tom never asked what was wrong or how he could evolve. He just punched a hole in the wall, yelled at me, threatened to take my son away from me, and called my parents to see if they could do anything to set me straight. Occasionally he’d remind me how good I had it; after all, some people have husbands who beat them regularly, he’d say. The bar was set lower, and then lower once again when he put his hands on my neck.

  So many days during that four-year marriage, I hoped I would come home and find him tangled up in some woman so I’d have a good excuse to throw a wild fit and call my lawyer. When that didn’t happen, I did everything I could imagine to get him to hate me so he would please just leave me alone. After one fight, he mock ran out on us. He kissed Jack goodbye, got in his old beat-up truck named Rusty, and drove away. I felt so relieved, so thankful. Thirty minutes later he returned home.

  So I had a weekend affair with a man who immediately ordered a cheeseburger afterwards. When room service showed up, I lay shaking, praying that this misadventure would somehow set me free.

  But everywhere I went, there I was. I couldn’t escape me. And none of my antics worked. He wanted to keep going, fighting all the time, whether I cheated or not. My father, who only saw the goofy front that Tom wanted him to see, told me I ought to be “thankful for being so loved.” Only I didn’t feel love present. Not from him, not from me.

  On that night, when I finally kicked free of Tom’s hands, I ran to Jack’s crib side and laughed. The kind of laugh you give when you’ve used up all the other forms of expression. The kind of laugh you give when you’re tired and worn and ripped to shreds like a hash-browned potato. The kind of laugh that comes from somewhere deep inside and makes a sound so guttural, so haunting, that even you don’t recognize it as your own laugh.

  I relished this foreign, maniacal noise that etched its way up my sore throat and made my eyes burn as it forced its way out of me and onto Tom. That laugh was freedom. For he had shown his true colors; I no longer had anything to lose.

  He’d never laid his hands on me before that night, but once was all it took. His hands lingered like ghosts around my neck through the divorce, through a custody battle, through the reconstruction of our separate lives. As the years went by, I fell in love with another and the handprints faded; I then realized I had everything to lose.

  Chapter 1

  IUD

  Iawaited the tenth birthday of my IUD with only one word on my mind: expired. Past its ten-year useful life. Copper shine dulled by a decade of dark and damp vaginal fluid. No longer a protector against unplanned fertility, unwanted surprise.

  When the IUD went in, my lower half was numb from an epidural and the shock that I was now a mother. Jack, the bright sundial I gave birth to, seemed like an obvious eternal attachment, a little rascal by my side. He would never leave; he would always need me. Unlike the intrauterine device, he would never expire.

  Then, even ten years seemed like forever, an always one-day-some-day event, nothing to worry about. Ten years was way more time than I thought I would need to conceive a second child. But during a divorce that took four years, a Hurricane Katrina recovery that took five, and the ongoing potting, planting, fertilizing, debugging, and growing of new love, that IUD hung, nestled inside, growing in age with its twin, my son.

  When the deadline drew near, I often wondered if the IUD would go bad gradually or suddenly from one day to the next. If on some Friday night, after a dinner out, my life journey mate, Gabriel, and I would arrive at the nine-year-three-hundred-sixty-forth-day mark, celebrating our last birth control Mardi Gras. What a night! We’d order the 1990 Gaja Barolo Sperss, savor the duck pâté, and gorge on the chocolate pot de crème. Then we’d head home to lit candles, curtains blowing, and sex, unsheathed, as much as we wanted, with no regard for fertility.

  I imagined on the following Saturday morning, when the clock struck twelve, if that IUD wasn’t upgraded immediately with the new, more modern version, all bets were off. Floodgates open. Eggs vulnerable.

  As Jack grew taller and Gabe’s roots entangled in mine, I began to think vulnerable eggs weren’t half bad. Maybe I wouldn’t mind so much. Having another baby. I wondered what it might be like to raise a human wonder with a true partner, a man I want to share bath towels with ’til death do us part. A man who doesn’t roll over and say, “You’re the one with the breasts, you feed him,” but instead, naturally and with initiative, cradles the crying wee babe and grabs a bottle of mother’s pumped milk from the fridge, so she can catch up on much-needed sleep. This is what Gabriel would do with a tart newborn blueberry, just as he took Jack, another man’s son, under his soft wing. Gabriel took the role of caregiver seriously, treating Jack as his own, taking the squirt on train rides because trains were so cool, waiting in the car pool with all the other Southern mammas day after day, interrupting the bachelor’s life of extreme skiing and adventure trips to help pay for clothes-school-supplies-whims-food-travel-medical expenses when Dad wouldn’t/couldn’t.

  Gabriel would make a great father, I knew. He’d proven himself. However, three years before we sealed the deal to spend our lives together through talk of family cell plans and where to store the toothpaste, my love disclosed he wasn’t looking to sign a marriage certificate or have babies. At the time, I wasn’t either.

  We agreed to take it slow and to explore the potential of, as Gabe called it in German, Lebensgefaehrte, which he translates to life journeyman. A powerful, committed partnership (a tall order by any standards) would do us just fine, and the existing toddler from my expired first marriage was the only child we wanted to smother with our love and attention. Children take a lot of selfless care, after all, and while we would happily give Jack everything, we also had desires of our own. We wanted to live in different countries, walk the Great Wall of China, learn to scuba dive, run an organic farm, or simply have space and time to read a good book in the middle of the afternoon.

  What started as a month-to-month relationship turned into a refurbished home in Old Town with cabinets full of knickknacks picked up during Sunday afternoon strolls through antique shops. When I tallied years of arguments resolved, differences navigated, and hurdles leapt, I garnered faith that Gabe and I might actually stick it out. I didn’t know for sure if it was the metaphorical bookshelf of “I did that” trophies, or just the biology of woman, but the horizon of tenth birthdays had me thinking of babies. Maybe Gabe and I didn’t have to choose between Thailand and a room with a rocking chair. Maybe, somehow, I could still muster the energy to become the writer I so desperately wanted to be, while putting my time in at the office and nutrients into my son’s every minute of breath. Maybe even Jack wasn’t best served by being our sole focus; maybe he didn’t require every ounce of attention, latest-Webkinz, food-made-his-way. Maybe a farting-crying-cooing darling was just the gift we needed on Carroll Avenue.

  If it were up to me, I would have haphazardly gotten pregnant and figured out what to do next, but Gabe liked to thoroughly think things through when making decisions. Sometimes, though, he’d shove the thinking aside. Like the philodendron we bought at Home Depot one Saturday afternoon that became root-bound for a year until we finally called a gardener to just plant the damn thing, I knew if I put in a shiny new IUD, the likelihood of taking it out sometime in the next ten years to have another child was probably zero. There are so many other things to tend to when the biological clock is ticking: the garden needs watering, the PTA won’t run itself, the homeless need written grant applications to help them get back on their feet, and my grandmother awaits my calls. Another ten years
could pass and a third IUD could be required. Or menopause could take over. Or I could take to smoking cigars and trading options, losing my appetite for diapers.

  Besides, the thought of being an older mom didn’t necessarily spark my beating heart. Who wants to go through sleep deprivation at forty-six, toddlers at fifty, teenagers at sixty, and eventually grandkids in the seventies and eighties? If my grandmother was anything to go by, that’s when I’d want the earned quiet to kick back with a book, plan lunch while I’m eating breakfast, visit the hairdresser every two weeks, and live in a house on a hill where I can say, “I like to look down on people.”

  Perfectly healthy at thirty-six, I was in love this time—in an authentic adult relationship—and had the benefit of motherly wisdom. My parenting résumé glowed with accolades and hard-knocks experience; I had, after all, been raising a child for the last ten years. I was good to go. If ever there were a time to have babies, it was when the IUD expired and I was thirty-something still.

  Before biology said no. Before Jack turned rogue teenager. Before the mood passed.

  Maybe Gabe would change his mind.

  Maybe I could help him change his mind.

  Chapter 2

  Haiku

  “Hard boiled, scrambled, or fried?” Gabe asked, raised volume, with the skillet in his hand and a kitchen towel draped over his left shoulder.

  “Hard!” Jack shouted from the bathroom where he’d supposedly gone to brush his teeth.

  I stepped into the kitchen, dressed for work, and stuffed a laptop into my shoulder bag. A sunbeam inched across the brick floor as if ready to pounce on my feet like a cat on scrambling lizards.

  “Did you make tea?”

  “Over there.” Gabe pointed to the single cup with the tea bag string flopping over the side.

  “Thanks.” I picked up the mug, thinking of outcome measurements. It wasn’t even seven thirty in the morning; my stomach swirled with the anxiety of grant deadlines. Dear God, please let the boss be in a good mood today. Sometimes walking into the office felt like walking into my high school history class; I so badly wanted Mr. Peacia to know I was smart and upgrade my B+. I needed to get all A’s so I could attend the honors brunch and Mom and Dad would be proud. I wanted my boss to be proud. I wanted to a do a good job. I wanted a goddamn skyscraping thank you of approval.