The Elegant Out Read online

  I breathed and curved my fingers over the keyboard again.

  “Keep going. You can do it,” the echo encouraged.

  What do you know? I thought, bitter. My fingers hovered over the keyboard for another minute before they dropped.

  “This is important. You can make a difference,” the echo repeated my deepest wish.

  I can’t make a difference when I’m frustrated and tired. I can’t worry about making a difference when Jack is still learning about solar systems and sentence structures. I’m needed elsewhere. Aren’t I?

  “Gabe,” I called to him on the other side of the wall, “we need to talk.”

  I pushed the laptop to the side and left the echo, unheard, picketing, in a drawer, in the coffee table, with the remote control, resting on the Ikea rug in the living room of the blue house.

  Chapter 5

  Mole

  “Let’s have a child,” I tested, as I walked into the kitchen and grabbed a tea mug from the cabinet. “We already have a child,” Gabe said, taking a sip of his freshly brewed coffee, then wiping down the counter with a wet sponge.

  “Well, yes. We do. But biologically, he’s not ours. You and I have never made a baby together.” The obvious statement even sounded dumb to my ears as I spoke the words.

  “Sweetie, I told you when we met I didn’t want to have babies.”

  “That was years ago. You could have changed your mind.”

  “Why do you want to have another baby?” His question challenged me to poke deeper, to come up with a sound, debate-proof argument. I hated his question (and the hundred times he’d asked it) because it felt like an investigation to which I had no plausible leads. I thought for a moment, maybe two, resting my hand on my chest to steady my anxious heart. Forefinger pressed to my skin, I felt the tiny bump of a Cindy Crawford mole above my right breast. The mole comforted me; it was, and still is, a bodily touchstone, prominently displayed above the upward slope of any V-neck.

  I’ve always thought this mole was special. Quite beautiful, really. Yet, the only ones who have ever taken notice of this mole were curious toddlers, the puppy who likely mistook it for a small piece of hotdog, and my grandmother. Each and every time I’ve seen her, before the hello hug, she drops her eyes to my chest, places her right pointy-finger on the mole like she is pushing a button and says, “Have you gotten that checked?”

  For me, this mole has always been a sign of grace and extra-special-ness, like Audrey Hepburn. I wanted to be admired like Audrey. I wanted to be beautiful like my grandmother. I wanted to be worth-full. Growing up on the tennis courts of Delray Beach, Florida, where it seemed everyone was a rich doctor or lawyer (and therefore valued in my father’s eyes) I learned worth-full meant professional success. Dad taught me early on that a B+ was not an A. Mom, the wanna-be actress, only ever pointed out the Oscar winners; she had little tolerance for community theater. On the court, only the Wimbledon winners mattered. I wanted to matter. Happy marriages, best-selling authors, self-made millionaires mattered. High achievement was the game; and like on the tennis court, I knew I had to win the match.

  Perfection, though, is the weave of a Chinese finger puzzle, trapping the digits in bamboo as the victim resists. Perfection, with all its sophistication and admiration, quickly becomes a paralyzing loop of “not good enough” and net shots—the perfect segue for righteous abandonment. No matter how many honor student breakfasts I had attended, no matter how many tennis matches I won, no matter how many bosses praised my work, no matter what valuable lessons I learned from botched start-ups, no matter how many times Gabe worshipped my newly graying twigs of hair, I never felt like I lived up to the mole on my chest.

  I still looked to places outside myself, like the mole, to find validation. Which is exactly why I couldn’t have a doctor check the mole for cancer. Nor could I allow Gabe to see I felt scared I wouldn’t make it as a writer, scientist, entrepreneur, or professional anything. I certainly couldn’t have my own self peering through the microscope to uncover why, behind the rebellious women’s lib façade, I secretly hoped I could simply be a mom driving a Gap-dressed tot to tennis camp.

  Now, at thirty-six going on IUD-less, I felt desperate for the privilege of a fairytale marriage to a man who would take care of me and leave me well-off like my grandfather did for my grandmother. So that I too could have little more on my mind than sneaking potatoes at breakfast and pointing to my granddaughter’s chest, asking her if she’d been to the dermatologist. But I would need a granddaughter first, and my current odds weren’t looking good.

  “Why don’t you want a baby?” I deflected Gabe’s question with my own—as I would do over and over again in the months to come—and I walked into his arms for comfort as he again told me “no.”

  “We’ve already got a child to take care of,” he explained, “and I believe there are going to be very limited world resources in our lifetime. I want to make sure we can care for us and Jack. I don’t want more responsibility right now.”

  We both stayed quiet for a few moments, feeling our arms around each other. Eventually, Gabe went back to sipping coffee, and I went about brewing tea, dreading Monday morning and wondering if I too was actually craving less responsibility, not more.

  Chapter 6

  Die

  Mondays were a cliché of back-to-school, staff meetings, and waking up before sunrise to a nasty alarm. Mondays meant forcing Jack to listen to reggae during breakfast in an attempt to prop us—by which I mean me—up with an island fantasy as we headed into another furrow of a week.

  I had yet to discover Mondays as the bold opportunity to begin a new project. I had yet to embrace the notion that my job at the nonprofit had catapulted me into being a better writer. At the nonprofit job, I had learned how to organize and use structures to craft narratives. I had learned how to map projects with sticky notes. I built muscle around meeting deadlines by declaring the work “done, not perfect.” I achieved success winning hundreds of thousands of dollars in grant awards to serve those in need. Grant writing had helped me build muscles I hadn’t yet exercised, or even knew existed. At the time, though, all I felt was stuck in the routine of the horrid J-O-B. Mondays reinforced the rut.

  Rather than a tool to fulfill my dream of being a novelist, grant writing seemed to me the fifty-pound weight pinning me to the ground and sucking my creative juices. Resistance became the enemy I battled each day as the desire to write fiction morphed into a pest, amped up on a romance novel binge, which sat on my shoulder and taunted me with story ideas.

  Midway through reading/writing/researching laborious statistics about the needs of underserved populations, I wanted to invent a crime of passion or watch two people fall in love.

  “Don’t give me numbers and data. Tell me about a man standing before you, not your husband, lips like cotton candy. You’ve tasted them before when you were both young and poor, eating satsumas, hidden in a grove on his family farm. Now he’s back, ten years later, after the drought, after your parents wed you off to a respectable man with a pocket watch and Italian leather shoes that left black and blue heel prints on your face. Cotton Candy wants you back. He’s never stopped loving you, he says under the hundred-year-old oaks with Spanish moss dangling in silence from the branches like the secrets you’ve buried inside. Tell me that story!” demanded the devil of a monkey muse.

  Grant writing is important, of course. I felt proud to spend my days making sure the homeless got funding for homes, veterans got back on their feet, victims of domestic violence and their families had a safe refuge, and those who lost their homes in Hurricane Katrina once again had a place to hang their hearts. It was all very respectable work. When others heard what I did, they approved. On the contrary, when I told people I wanted to write, they’d look at me like I was one of those nutcase, artist types. Doing useful work and being respected was important to me, maybe more important than writing fiction, as my father had groomed me from a young age to study “something practical at
university; not drama, like your mother.”

  As much as my groomed and coiffed practical side talked sense into my silly brain, that delightful bastard of a monkey wouldn’t shut up.

  “What the hell happened to joy? Joy, for joy’s sake!” The monkey muse had a point. Spreading joy is as much a social service as is mental health counseling or rental assistance. Housing is indeed a basic need that many do not have, but for most of the home-ridden, middle-class, first-worlders, if one cannot find pleasure in her own temple, then the roof overhead is but a place to keep dry as one wilts into death. Over the years, I’ve learned to fight for happiness, to hold onto it with all I’ve got, to demand it. Like the protesting echo in the drawer, like the monkey on my shoulder, I glitter up the signs and stand in the picket lines. I flail my arms and shout at the top of my lungs no matter how many times society-mediocrity-naysayers-judgments-perfection-my-own-insecurity insults me, tear gasses me, arrests me, batters me with its police sticks. Again and again, I get out of jail, into the open, where I can breathe and laugh again, create. Because, sometimes, that’s just what it takes to keep living in joy.

  On that Monday, though, I felt handcuffed. As I listened to reggae, longing for a different life, driving the track to work, and cranking out another grant proposal, writing nothing of my own creation, I felt the secrets that I’d buried inside me settling deeper into an inescapable catacomb.

  “Miss Elizabeth?” the receptionist called over my intercom. “Can you help out with Miss Stacy? She wants an update on her application. Everyone else is at lunch. She’s on line one.”

  Uggg. “Sure.” I picked up the phone and greeted the client.

  “Hi. Can you help me? I hope you can help me because I keep calling but no one can help me. When is my house going to be ready?” the woman on the other line demanded with a voice scratched from years of smoking.

  “Sure, Miss Stacy, let me look up your status.”

  She didn’t wait for the update, instead she rattled on about all those asshole FEMA guys.

  “I understand. That must be frustrating,” I replied, on a replay loop.

  “And I’m sick,” she droned on. “You name it, I’ve got it. Rheumatism and arthritis, asthma. Now the doctor says I have diabetes, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, and I’m getting treatments for breast cancer. I may have lung cancer; I’m seeing another doctor on Thursday. I take twenty-five different pills. Pill bottles everywhere. I can’t even walk without my walker. I need this house now.”

  “Shit, she doesn’t need a house,” said the monkey in my ear. “She needs a coffin.”

  “I understand, ma’am. This must be frustrating for you. I know it’s a long process. I wish it were faster. Your application is in the review stage.” It occurred to me that the gritty woman just wanted company rather than an actual update, so I listened as she munched down on my ear with complaints.

  When I finally escaped Miss Stacy, I picked up my cell to call Maureen, and as I listened to the ringing on the other end, I imagined what it would be like to have dozens of serious health conditions and end up dead.

  I would miss Jack and Gabe. I would miss Maureen.

  For sure, I would miss the long auburn curls that twist and cascade down her head like bunches of Hawaiian leis.

  And teeth as white as Caribbean clouds.

  I would also miss her four-minute phone messages, always from the road, usually including a rant about only getting a couple hours of sleep the night before or the rudeness of customers at checkout lines: “Can’t these people read? When it says ‘twenty items or less,’ it means twenty. Twenty! Not fifty-two. Jeez! What’s wrong with people?”

  I would miss her incredible sense of integrity, knowing from the depths of her soul what is right and what is wrong.

  I would miss calling her back, getting her voice mail, and leaving an even longer ramble. Which is what I did just then.

  “Maur-eeeeeen!” I sang it like a melody, then threw out an exaggerated Southern-slanged “How are ya?” in honor of my then-current Mississippi residential status. “Why is it so hard, Maur-eeeeeen? This life? Why so hard? Come rescue me, pleeeeeease?” I tried sounding like I was making fun of myself, but I probably didn’t pull it off.

  “Work was terrible today. My boss went crazy. This woman called and complained about her twenty illnesses. What am I doing? God, how did I get this way? Auuuugh, I wish we could travel back to those college days when we were full of possibility. I mean, I’m trying. I promise, I am. I’m trying real hard, but some days I just can’t take it anymore. And I’m tired of being nice. Maybe I could become a real bitch. Say nasty things to people. I’ve never done that before.”

  Her machine cut me off, just like that, and I thought back to a time when Maureen lived down the street. We didn’t have to dial a number; we could just pop over for a hot dog at Mustard’s Last Stand. In those days, she ate peanut butter crackers, then maybe some yogurt, maybe some granola; take-out trips were a treat. As an adult, she switched to Whole Foods and joined an organic co-op. She married and moved into a planned community, modeled after the Truman Show, in a house thousands of miles away. She was so far away that the only way to pop in with her was to leave voice messages.

  Not only did I feel far away from her, I felt far away from myself. On my way home from work that Monday evening, I tried to dig up some memory of who I was at my core. I thought back to middle school, before bills arrived in my name, before any living creature counted on me for food and watering, and before my creativity butted heads with Tom’s chokehold and Dad’s mantra to be practical. When I was young, I’d head to the backyard after school and play soap opera, inventing all sorts of plot lines with J.R. & Bobby Ewing. In true Dallas style, I imagined myself in ball gowns and Western hats. I declared myself the trusted twin sister to Pam Ewing (because she was my favorite character), instrumental in a plot to bring her and Bobby back together. Yes, even then, as a twelve-year-old with friendship pins clipped to my shoelaces and three Swatch watches wrapped around my wrist, I had stories in my head.

  As a middle schooler, I got the stories out through playacting. As an adult, I got them out through writing. Only I wasn’t writing and hadn’t been for years. With each day, another blank page left behind, Robin’s question— “Are you willing to do what it takes?” —closed another padlock.

  When I got home, I dropped my bag to the ground as I entered the front door and walked to Gabriel, who sat on the couch in the living room of the blue house reading a copy of Die Zeit his mother had sent him.

  “Hi, love,” he said as he lowered the right corner of his foreign newspaper and poked his cheek out for me to kiss. “How was your day?”

  “Groovy,” I said, sarcastic and kissing him ten times on each cherub before I landed on his lips. They tasted of coffee and sunscreen.

  “No wait. Keep kissing me.” He make-believe pouted.

  I laughed. “You are pathetic.” Then, I kissed him some more. Happy to do it. Thankful he was there to kiss.

  “What was your day like?” I plopped back against the couch, taking in a long slow inhale, surprised at how good it felt as air filled my belly and moved up through my lungs.

  “I got a call from Albert today.”

  “Nice. How is he? And what’s-her-name?” Gabe’s cousin and fiancée lived in Berlin, in an apartment with a sunny balcony, far from our everyday lives.

  “Anka.”

  “Yes, Aaaaannnnkaaaa.” I said it again real slow, as if that would burn her name in my memory. But, I knew it wouldn’t. Next time Albert called I’d ask for her name again. “So how are Albert and Anka? They pregnant yet?” I’m not really sure why I asked the p-question. Maybe it was because Albert told us a while back they were “trying” for a child. More likely, I wanted to plant another subtle seed for Gabriel to reconsider having a baby with me. The question backfired.

  “Yep, they just found out. How did you know?”

  “Really?” I went quiet for a moment. Then,
for the second time that day, I went on autopilot, “That’s great.” Because what else do you say when someone calls to celebrate their good news?

  Chapter 7

  Headache

  Iremember the night I called the emergency room, fumbling in the dark hotel room, after midnight, for a phone number. Not wanting to wake baby Jack. Not wanting to wake Tom.

  “Have you had a migraine before?” the nurse asked when I told her what was happening.

  “No, no, never,” I told her. I didn’t know what to do. I could barely open my eyes. The pain had engulfed me all day at Barnard Square and Forsyth Park and followed me into the Colonial Park Cemetery as I searched for an ancestor’s headstone. I didn’t want to tell Tom how bad I felt. I didn’t want to ruin my one weekend trip to Savannah. I didn’t want to appear weak.

  The nurse gave me directions to the emergency room. There was nowhere else to go in the middle of the night, and there was no way I could operate a motor vehicle.

  I put my hand on Tom’s sleeping body. “Please, I’m sorry to wake you,” I said. “I can’t drive. Please take me to the hospital. I don’t know what’s wrong, but it hurts so bad. Please.”

  He mumbled, his breath gross and stinking already. I could smell tequila sweating from his pores. He’d gone to the bar earlier, because he wanted to, and because I wasn’t much fun with a headache. Since I had stayed in bed, Tom had decided the baby could stay with me while he went out. I hadn’t any will or strength to argue. He’d left Jack, ten months old, in the portable crib next to my incapacitated body.

  “Please, please wake up.” I shook him a little, afraid. I knew he’d be angry. But I couldn’t drive. I couldn’t think. God, my head hurt so badly. Was I going to die?

  “I have a headache, it hurts. You have to take me to the hospital.”