Dandelion Birthday

Dandelion Birthday

On my fortieth birthday I wrote a poem. A lousy poem, naturally. What other kind could anyone write on a “hump” birthday when she’s either happily settled into marriage or happily settled out?

I was neither. Close to high noon.

I sunned lizard-lie in the lounge chair, aware of the plastic cutting into my near-flabby thighs. Another few months of indecisiveness and chocolates for lunch, indecisiveness and chips for dinner, and wine and cheese for a mid-evening snack and I would dissolve into a puddle of cellulite and plain-out flab. Each day I started my Maltese BowTie and me with a healthy meal and determined to go on in the same way; by noon, occasionally by 10:30, ignoring BowTie’s soulful begs, I had headed in the other direction: carbs, sugars, everything bad. All of which I told myself I deserved. A husband implying: behave; calling: asking will you, why won’t you, call me back, come home, return to our marriage? My behavior might be okay or at least explainable if I were spending my twentieth or even thirtieth birthday at the beach, sprawled out on the Grand Strand with a husband waiting in the room or a lover a few miles down Ocean Boulevard. Or both.

Instead, here I lay, growing pink by the minute, the hour, with my mother periodically checking, “Are you okay, Gina? Can I bring you anything?” A tuna sandwich? A glass of unsweetened tea? A trim fifty-nine-year-old, she played tennis three times a week and volunteered twice a week at the local hospital. She managed her life the way she thought any sensible woman should be able to manage: take a course in time management, dear; take a course in grief management, divorce management, life management. Surely the Center for Perfecting Retirement offered a course for whatever ails you. She served on its board and wrote course descriptions for its monstrous 97-page catalog.

“Gina,” she now called, “I’m going to the college track to interview an instructor who tells women how to manage loss of love through tatting–or is it lace making? Something like that.” I pretended sleep. “Want to come along? You could do a few laps. She’s training for a marathon but we’ll just stroll while we talk. Do you good.” Though my eyes were shut against the glare of the June sun and her frown of disapproval at my inertness, her gaze turned me pinker.

I rather admired my mother’s constant optimism, her linear manner of dealing with life: dad died; she got a job; bored and not needing the minimum wage, she quit and joined a health club; fit after a few months and determined to stay that way, she joined a tennis club and took lessons; finding a unfilled hours in her week she comforted others as needed at Hospice.

When I came home at thirty-nine and 338 days, she didn’t have much time or sympathy for my whining, wondering instead what I would do. Saying, without meaning it, “Fine. You don’t have to tell me what went wrong, Gina. I like Alfred. If you sulk and eat yourself into oblivion, what can I do?” A week later, she had said, “Still not talking? Not going home?”

“Home is here,” I said. “This is home.”

She’d rolled her eyes as every mother can do. To tell her she should find more original body language took energy, so I kept quiet. She left a bun-less veggie burger on the counter. She’d be back after her hours at Hospice where, she reminded me, “people are really hurting.” As far as she could see, I wasn’t hurting because I was lounging, eating, not crying, and not caring.

Alfred called, in the first week, every night; in the second he called three times and each time my mother lied, as I instructed: “She’s out.” The next week he called twice, once slurring his words (she said) and once definitely from a bar or a club with heavy rock music in the background (she said) and someone giggling in the foreground.

“He probably wants you to know he’s not sitting around waiting for you to forgive him,” she’d said. “He’s moving on with his life.” Unsaid was: why aren’t you? Unsaid: how long can you lie on the side lawn and watch the Bedfords wander around Oak Street? She’d pointed to them. “He’s lost it and Lucille ought to put him in a home, but no, she walks him around the block three or four times a day, says it helps his bowels move, makes him sleep better at night.”

I had sighed and she sighed and cast her eyes on my prone state. “Better than putting him in a home, I guess. I’m glad your father didn’t have to go downhill like that.”

Today, hearing her car door slam, I laid the poem aside and was, naturally, inert. “What the hell are you doing, Gina?” she asked. “Are you going to lie there until the leaves turn, ’til the snows come, ’til icicles form on your eyelids?”

“I’m writing a poem,” I said. “Maybe a book.” Tucking the index card and ballpoint pen under my thigh, I sat up, knocking the bag of organic potato chips to the ground. She looked at my empty lap, my empty hands, no laptop, no pencil or pen in sight.

Three hours later and closer to forty, I’d finished the lousy poem, shredded it and gone back to thinking. By my calculating (knowing I’d been born at 4:41 a.m.), I had a few more hours to decide what to do with my next decade. In college my roommate and I had thought of our future in decades. By thirty we’d be married; if not, by forty . . . we listed two options: serene moderate success as teacher and counselor or a flitting, gypsy life abroad. Fifty we could not even imagine.

I became the counselor: listening to the problems of others, qualified sufficiently to advise if not to fix permanently any personal crises that brought (mostly) women to my office. Drugs? Listen and recommend more specialized offices and therapists. Marital? Listen and console, cajole, recommend other therapists. And so it went. I was quite good behind my desk. Mine was a detached, calm, restful approach. I counseled women to leave, to stay, to reconsider and, of course, with time, most found themselves in at least a different set of problems. Most thanked me; most recommended me to their friends. Amazing how little I had to do besides glue an openness to my expression and let them lead themselves in a direction that pleased them. The downside was my thickening thighs and my lethargic thoughts. At some point I began counseling myself right out of a marriage. I reviewed, I analyzed, I considered, I reconsidered and then I said: “Alfred, it’s over. I’m gone.”

I mean, shouldn’t I have known—a guy named Alfred who had never become Al or Fred. Alfred was himself an analyst—a financial one, more than moderately successful, but then he’d had nine more years to work on it than I had. He also had child support for three or five more years, depending on his kids’ educational goals, and I couldn’t see them settling for local community colleges. Jerais, at fourteen, lived in cyberspace while teaching his two pet parrots to speak. And Lissy was set on out-of-state anywhere college, anywhere Daddy had to pay more was my take on it. When introducing Maria Theresa Elizabeth, Alfred had said, “When Lissy was three, she announced ‘I am Lissy’ and she has been ever since.” I admit to a silly admiration for the kid. She had birth control pills when she was fourteen. Granted her best friend had a baby at that age and another friend had suffered psychological trauma after her parents insisted she have an abortion.

Watching Lissy and Jerais turn into teenagers taught me one thing about myself and marriage: no kids for me. I could take only so much secondhand affliction—my patients and their children, my husband and his. I settled for a lovable Maltese, acquired in the third of seven years of marriage. I sometimes quoted to her: “Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be—” the Robert Browning words remembered not from a lit class but from the sun dial at the college quad. Well, BowTie and I were getting on—the next step was up to me. Forty would not be delayed or denied.

“Gina, are you still in that lounge chair? Come on in the house. I’ve made mac and triple cheese—your birthday treat.” (I’d refused going out to dinner to celebrate.) But my mother was no fool. Macaroni would always get me on my feet and to the table. Her recipe called for three different cheeses and heavy cream, a definite upgrade from the box with powdered cheese included. She didn’t stint on making it, nor I at eating it. My pantry included half a dozen boxes with powder packets. When Alfred went to his Kiwanis Club dinners I sometimes whipped up a box and ate the whole thing, with some help from BowTie. A more perceptive husband might have caught on, but Alfred didn’t notice that the day after his meetings I stayed an hour longer at the fitness club and served him salad with lemon juice, no oil. He smiled approvingly, not being particularly fond of heavy-thighed women, or so I assumed since he was quick to point them out at the mall or on the street.

My mother didn’t have to call twice. I groaned and hoisted myself to my feet. BowTie and I went in to eat.

My book was birthed with the death of the poem and the feast of macaroni and cheese.

I’d call my book She Herself and I and dedicate it to all the heavy-thighed women in the country. So what if the grammar was atrocious? Readers loved mistakes, clever ones. Instantly I knew it would sell—when I finished it. She the young, competent, and assured flirt; Herself the mid-life questioner; and I both the counseling self and the “becoming” self: the I bursting the cellulite bubble, joining a nudist colony, paragliding, all activities She engaged in and Herself (and the reader) would never have thought I dared to do.

Replete, I returned to my lounge (“Your new office?” was Mother’s comment) to create some chapter titles, some one-liners, some catchy phrases, to think branding. After all, marketing is the main purpose of writing. With some brilliant word plays on the outside cover, who cared about the inside content? Let the reader discard—once the reader has bought. This was fun. I would give up counseling and become a consultant, a personal trainer, a life coach. With the I inside the She Herself conducting the readers’ life changes, anything was possible.

Into the humid dusk, as the white moon rose, I lounged, my body motionless, my head whirling, looking, in my mother’s words, “bone idle.”

“Aren’t you going to do anything this, uh, special evening?”

“I am doing something, Mother. I’m working my head off.” I smiled at her shrug when she left with a basket of fresh bread for an ailing friend across town. She Herself and I. The She—the outside skin, the giver, the worker; that cloak was easy–the woman people saw every day, heading into the elevator, getting a cappuccino one day a latte the next at 10:45. The Herself—who was she? The dissatisfied, mournful, the questing deep-delver without answers? And the I? Every woman’s very core, the innermost, the hidden, the secretive self, the buried self.

Without a word on paper, tape, or disk, I worked out the scheme for the book: the proposal and the market: all those women who didn’t know who they were or how to perceive themselves, or how to present the way they did perceive themselves. I picked up the cell phone from the grass. It had been turned off all day. Waiting for its ping, I started the introduction: When she walks out the door, she seldom sees herself as I do. No mirror reflects the three aspects of the modern woman…strike modern, be specific: the post modernist? 21st century woman? Too prosaic. I needed a label that proclaimed my generation and had already been claimed. It would come to me.

In one motion I punched in Alfred’s number and swung my legs to the ground. “Alfred, please bring my laptop to Mother’s. No, I am not ready to talk about us. And she’s not either…. Herself, that’s who.”

“After a few seconds, I said, “Okay, don’t do it. I’ll pick it up in an hour—along with all my clothes.” I snapped the phone off. She, herself and I spotted a moonlit dandelion. Picked it and strode toward the forty-first.