MY PROFESSIONAL focus was shifting, too. One day when I was forty-two, Mr. X and I attended a crowded open house for a fancy potential private kindergarten for our older daughter. We couldn’t afford the $20K-plus tuition, but neither could we choose public school, as our local public schools were terrible, or so we had been told. But this ambivalence quickly resolved itself. The smug director of admissions answered a parent’s question with: “But no one goes to public school in Los Angeles!” When I realized that by “no one” this man was referring to approximately 750,000 children, I knew that I had found my passion and my cause.
All my life I had worked for myself, alone, on narrow intellectual projects, in what I now understood to be a shallow, self-centered void. But now, on behalf of 750,000 children, I could cut the rope to my past and dedicate myself to something huge!!! I could join the world!!! It turned out that I was but one of many educated, middle-class Los Angeles moms who felt this way. (There had been kind of a baby boom triggered around 9/11, so there were many of us who had toddlers at the same time.) We had all been sleepwalking through our thirties, pursuing less-than-meaningful careers, writing condo association newsletters, and accumulating many sets of wicker furniture, which we had then dutifully painted with sealant. But around forty, awakening to the needs of our and the world’s children, our hormones were sailing as high as in our teens. We, the Burning Moms, were going to save the world by fomenting a public-education revolution.
At the apex of my mania I decided to throw a massive public-school rally in Sacramento. At this point Mr. X was starting to look askance at all of his wife’s frenetic activity as one would look askance at Don Quixote tilting at windmills. A former performance artist himself, however, Mr. Y, unlike Mr. X, found my activities perfectly reasonable. He even agreed to drive a twenty-seven-foot U-Haul housing a gigantic papier-mâché elephant up to Sacramento. It is a measure of how much I took him for granted that I never doubted Mr. Y would do such a thing, if asked.
This political rally was, unfortunately, more a ragtag multifamily outing than a politically effective transformative event. As I’ve learned since, real change involves more than stenciling banners rhapsodically in the sun with one’s children. But still I felt I’d been a part of something magical. The night before the rally, one hundred women and children had camped together in firelight, and I poked my head into row after row of gaily flapping tents to give my soldiers cheery huzzahs. Less Joan of Arc, I was a mother on fire.
OUR NEXT adventure was more in the spirit of fun, not protest. The simple act of RV camping proved so liberating for several Burning Moms, who were starting to sport aviator sunglasses and bandannas, that we decided we were now badass enough to hazard a trip to Burning Man. Which is where the magic flipped upside down.
Burning Man is an annual pagan, clothing-optional, drug-friendly weeklong gathering of some fifty thousand people who build a temporary city in the scorching Nevada desert. It was an unlikely destination for a suburban middle-aged mother such as myself. But the year before, Mr. X, in his constant search for offbeat movies on Netflix, had found a documentary focusing less on the culture of Burning Man than on its spectacular art. Mr. X and I watched in genuine wonder. Wow! Here were giant metal dune buggies and alien-spaceship-inspired flamethrowers and even a fairy-tale-like wooden temple into which people threw whatever they wished to get rid of, from wedding dresses to letters from dead wastrel fathers, which was then burned to the ground. For a moment Mr. X and I had considered going, but given that he was a fifty-something-year-old dad who had long given up all of his youthful bad habits (including not just pot but alcohol)—whereas, of course, somewhat furtively, I myself had not—we mutually and sensibly let the idea fizzle.
However, now that I had formed this tribe of Burning Moms, we could go as a she-wolf pack and take pictures. And for protection we would take not just Clinique moisturizer but our mascot and driver, Mr. Y. Breathed Mr. X, “A male chaperone. Yes. Thank goodness.”
Burning Man turned out to be a lot how you’d expect a desert “city” of half-nude stoners to be, particularly stoners who had built makeshift “camps” with names like Andy’s Wonder Factory, Astral Headwash, Big Puffy Yellow Camp, Barbie Deathcamp and Wine Bistro, A Shack of Sit, and Zombie Unicorn. Ours was called Camp Baggage Check (“Check your emotional baggage at the door”), a relatively normal camp run by a software engineer from the Pacific Northwest. Reassured by such ordinary recreational totems as Doritos, beer, and dominoes, our group of six felt ourselves slow down and relax into the heat. We women gradually stripped down to our shorts and flip-flops and even bikini tops. There was no fear of appearing fat or of even being looked at twice at all by the sixty-something-year-old men rattling past naked on bicycles (ouch!). Feeling as though we were falling into a pleasant, heavy dream, my friend Lily and I set out for an exploratory stroll around the sandy metropolis’ grand central circular boulevard.
As lulling as the drone of midafternoon bees, our conversation began with chitchat about our families. Lily was married to Brian, and they were the parents of Nick. Together they were the quintessential comfortable alterna-family—they barbecued, brewed their own beer, and hosted a funny Christmas-caroling party that always featured antlers on pets and kazoos. They had a bungalow in Silver Lake. Their son was in a wonderful new homegrown charter school, and they had a wonderful dog. Lily and I were making plans for our fall “Martinis and Magnets” (where we would ply anxious parents with martinis as we explained LA’s frighteningly complex magnet-school system). It was in the middle of this conversation that Lily turned to me and asked: “You know what I’m going to get myself for my forty-fifth birthday?”
“What?” I said.
She leaned back, opened her chest to the heavens, and said: “An affair.”
“What?”
It was like that moment in Jaws when Roy Scheider hears his first “shark” scream and the background wipes into ribbons. It was the moment you so wish you hadn’t heard what you heard. You would give everything to throw that ugly horned toadfish back into the pond, never to be seen again.
Lily began to tell me about a traveling LAUSD (Los Angeles Unified School District) theater instructor at her kid’s school—oh the cliché, and oh the irony, given that her husband was also a theater instructor. She was clearly merely bored with the good things she already had, and wanted to start over with something similar. “The thing is that Simon and I realize we both have this background in world theater,” Lily was chattering on, “so we’ve started having coffee, to strategize how to bring the work of Augusto Boal to school. But then Simon sends me this e-mail with this Pablo Neruda poem! And I’m thinking, oh my God, he really likes me, and now we have this dinner date next week for Indian food. . . .”
No, no, no. I wanted Lily to be my funny sensible-mom girlfriend who enjoyed wine and gossip. I did not want her to reject her wonderful family life—and, by extension, mine—for a secretive sex life with a traveling LAUSD theater teacher.
Against my will Lily continued. “And I realized how you can know someone for years and then all of a sudden something causes you to see them in this totally different way. It hadn’t occurred to me to have an affair—I’d just resigned myself to the fact that I’d never have sex again because Brian is now interested only in his online historical baseball league, you know—. And of course I’ve had this yeast infection. But now that we’re here at Burning Man and people are so free, I just want to go back home and grab my life!” And with that she removed her top and tied it around her neck like a scarf! Oh Jesus! And in that vast hallucinogenic trailer park, even this awkward moment passed unnoticed.
And yet all at once I found myself thinking about Mr. Y. I’d always considered him conventionally attractive, surely, if I even thought about it, which I never did. He was my buddy—in truth, we were really more like girlfriends. But now I suddenly felt—and this is how addled your mind gets in the desert, which is why you really need to keep hydrating—that, g
iven our ten-year-long platonic friendship, it might be nice to grab a quick camp snuggle with my good friend Mr. Y. It would be akin to affectionately rubbing the ears of a favorite golden retriever. With his irreverent Scotch-Irish sense of humor and WASP discretion, Mr. Y could be depended on to take a snuggle in the proper safe and convivial spirit. And we did in fact have a business relationship. Which surely boded well for this little idea of mine. Didn’t it?
My fists flew to the sides of my face in hot confusion as Lily kept going on. No, no, no! What was I thinking? Both Mr. Y and I were happily married with children—so happily married that both of our extremely tolerant spouses had encouraged us to go to Burning Man and to have fun! And it wasn’t as if I had to satisfy the ragings of my libido, which I hadn’t noticed in years.
A couple of hours later I found myself nudging Mr. Y in the elbow in a collegial way and saying, “Can you believe it? Lily has gone mad in the desert heat. She’s thinking of having an affair back in LA with her son’s traveling LAUSD theater teacher.” I decided that, to sublimate the confused state Lily’s confession had left me in, I would not commit an actual adulterous deed but the next best thing: I would gossip about one. It would have a frisson of danger, but it would be entirely contextualized and safe.
“Oh God, that’s never a good idea,” he said, adjusting his improvised-for-the-desert sarong. “Why?”
“Well,” I replied, “she says sometimes you can know someone for a long time and one day see him a totally different way.” And then I heard myself saying something like: “And I now do similarly realize, Mr. Y, that I think you’re hot, I guess I’m sort of madly in love with you, have been ever since I first laid eyes on you ten years ago, but you were so married and unavailable with your flat affect, and so was I, which is why we’ve been best friends for a decade and each other’s constant companions, but as in a tragic Merchant-Ivory movie nothing will ever happen because we are married to others, and suddenly in midlife I see all I have lost and now excuse me while I go hurl my youth into the fire!”
Mr. Y and I had known each other so long I wasn’t even particularly embarrassed to have said this. I had spontaneously blurted out this spate of truth, and there was nothing more to do but gaze at this thought balloon and watch it blow away into the cloudless desert sky. There it went, like a dandelion, disappearing over the low brown hills. So I loved him—how interesting that it had turned out that at forty-six I wasn’t entirely done. There was one last man on earth I truly wanted to sleep with. In a moment, perhaps, this desire would be gone, forgotten, and on Sunday the temple, with its dead letters and wedding dresses, would be burned. Then Monday would be Monday. Tuesday would be Tuesday. Life would continue as usual because my youth was over. The cat would poop in her litter box, the cars would need servicing, there would be—always—something very good on HBO.
Oh my God, I thought. I finally understand that Prufrock poem: “I grow old . . . I grow old . . . / I shall wear the bottom of my trousers rolled.”
But in the inky blackness just a few hours later, the towering Burning Man fell in flames to the desert floor. And now Mr. Y had had time to think it over. If I loved him, it turned out my feelings weren’t entirely unrequited. If I wanted out of my marriage, so did he. It was part of a vague grand plan. “I always figured we’d end up together eventually, like in our sixties or seventies,” Mr. Y said.
And so we made a prison break for it.
We dug ourselves out of our cells with spoons, and we ran for it.
Which is to say that Mr. Y and I exploded into a second adolescence. We were like pirates. We smoked, drank, cursed, and met in hotel rooms. It was a fast adrenaline rush all the time—with your best friend whom you totally trust. For God’s sake, what had I been doing with all that mad public-school organizing and Winnebagos when I could have found all the adventure I was seeking in a single person? Because as I now saw, Mr. Y was love, Mr. Y was life, Mr. Y was magic. He was the elephant in the U-Haul.
• • •
WE FORMED a plan. Although Mr. Y’s son was extremely close to both his parents, he was in his last year of art school in the Bay Area, so we told ourselves he was old enough, and he would be fine. My girls, Hannah and Sally, were only six and eight. But they were accustomed to their parents living on separate tracks, often in entirely different cities, so we figured that they, too, would be fine.
All that was left was telling our spouses. Which would be okay because they didn’t even like us anymore, we told ourselves. When you looked a bit more carefully, you could see evidence of our spouses’ disinterest littered everywhere. Our spouses seemed to prefer traveling without us, when they were out of town they wouldn’t call, once home they preferred the eerie glow of their favorite cable programs to the apparently tedious drone of our conversation. It would be a mitzvah. No more bottles of our lotions cluttering the bathroom, tons of closet space would open up, they’d have all that room in the bed to flop around in, better for your back—.
But, of course, humans are humans. What were we thinking?
Kicked out of our homes in scenes alternately gothic and grim, we fled to a cramped 750-square-foot rental unit that, due to a hidden back driveway, with gallows humor Mr. Y dubbed “Pirate’s Cove.” Our married friends watched in fascination and horror as Mr. Y and I cobbled together a makeshift home, with rust-spotted beach towels and a claw-foot tub piled with 1980s suit jackets and a constantly deflating AeroBed and lone spatulas bought at Target (“And a step stool—to change the lightbulb I think we need a step stool. Also a lightbulb.”).
The suffering of our families was far beyond what we’d imagined. We had not anticipated the stunned bewilderment of our parents and parents-in-law, the tearing up of old photos, the racked crying at the kitchen table at midnight. After expressing his shock and pain, Mr. X communicated only through his lawyer, on order to divide our assets and get the divorce done. A shock-black-haired rock-and-roller not known for his shyness, Mr. Y’s son swore he would never speak to Mr. Y again. Mr. Y’s wife threatened to burn all his clothes and destroy all his things and was having a breakdown. Mr. Y got a call from his mother-in-law, who had rushed to town to be there for her daughter.
Mr. Y finally cracks. I saw it coming because he’d begun spending a lot of time on the darkened porch, pacing and smoking and furtively texting. He looks out of his mind and exhausted—in the last eight months we’d each aged ten years. Sitting at our wobbly two-person dining table, Mr. Y informs me, like a wax figure of his former self, that the madness must stop. If he breaks off all contact and acknowledges his mistake, his wife will allow him to move back home, where his family will close ranks. There he can fulfill his heart’s dream—no longer to wander the earth as one of the damned, to be a good father and husband, again to sleep in peace.
Which brings me to why I’m hoisting things into a U-Haul. Mr. Y is moving back home, which is why he’s not here to help me with my truck and boxes. By nightfall my beloved will have disappeared back into the bosom of his family, and I’ll be thoroughly alone in the mess that I’ve made of my life. I will be alone in a silent dark rental unit (we have no TV, even) with a teakettle, microwave, and smoking meteorite crater where he and his coats and ties and boots used to be.
Here I stand on a cannonball-torn pirate ship for one, with a destroyed family, a storm fleet of alienated family friends, professional colleagues who are aghast and embarrassed for me, a bunch of pinwheel-eyed public-school-mom friends who are now all themselves scattered in chaos, their gunboats shattered, as I stagger, fatally wounded, toward fifty. I have children, little girls, who were my heart and soul and earth’s delight before all this madness. What of my babies? What have I done? Oh God, I say to myself, as I weep at U-Haul, flinging the Iliad, the Odyssey, and then the Aeneid into the Dumpster—clang, clang, clang.
I feel in my bones not just the senseless waste of my life, all the good things taken for granted that I have squandered, but the exact measure and weight of my sorrow—
and the sorrow of everyone else—as I hurl. Book after book pounds into the Dumpster, bringing perpetual motion but no relief. My heart is broken, my world is dead, my home destroyed. I’m staring into the void. It’s the pointless void I have carved out myself, maiming all my loved ones in the process.
It’s like waking up the star of one of those Hangover movies. Except that you are not a guy, you are not in your twenties, you have no madcap party buddies, and this is not hilarious.
Bridges
IN THE MONTHS AFTER Mr. Y moved back home to his family, I trudged on with the horrific business of being a deeply compromised mother to my wary children and faxing divorce papers back and forth with Mr. X.
I was having a hellacious time. My life was all upside-down Tarot cards of jagged weeping during the day and duct-taping my cell phone shut at night. I attended weird divorced-people pool parties where at first all these other divorced forty-somethings seemed amazingly attractive, together and datable (where have we all been?) and then, as though on Pinocchio’s Pleasure Island, as night fell everyone sprouted donkey ears and began braying horrible things about being lonely and angry and desperate (and also fat, we “singles” were all forty-something and fat now). To combat the chronic sleeplessness which descended within my four suffocating walls every night I’d gotten a prescription for Ambien, which due to sleeping wrong resulted in a temporary paralysis of my right side, making my right arm a limp useless claw. I had tried to fill out a form for my new very own (I had always depended on my husband’s) Ralph’s grocery store card with this claw, I had tried to write checks for my daughters’ pediatrician with this claw, I had even put in an offer on the perfect Craftsman bungalow that I knew would solve my life with this claw, and had attempted to write the notoriously finicky shy seller a note: “I am a writer and I will take good care of your beautiful home!” But the note ended up looking like something written by a serial killer—it literally read: “I a*& a WME@#$ and I @#! Bdeathmurder home YOU!” I didn’t get the house.
The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones Page 2