Woman Last Seen in Her Thirties: A Novel

by Camille Pagán

  “So you’re saying I have to spend money to make money . . . even though I have no money.”

  Linnea nodded her head vigorously. “Exactly.”

  “Terry,” I said to my boss a few days later, “do you think you might give me a raise?”

  “Mmm-hmm,” he said, staring at an X-ray affixed to a light box. Terry, a.k.a. Terrance Krutcher, DDS, had been looking at the image for so long I suspected he was sleeping with his eyes open, so I didn’t feel bad about interrupting him.

  “Really?” I said, rising from my chair. Terry had set me up at a small desk in the back of the office where he reviewed X-rays and stored molding materials for night guards and the like. That I was not given a more sanitary workstation or permission to work at home should have been the first clue I was not going to get more money out of him, but I was trying to utilize the last shred of optimism I had left. After all, since I was the bookkeeper, I knew Terry paid the cleaner the same amount he paid me.

  “Mmm-hmm,” he said again.

  “Thank you so much. Two more dollars an hour would make a big difference. I promise I’ll make it worth your while.”

  Now he spun around to face me. “Oh. Oh my. I’m sorry, Maggie, I thought we were discussing something else,” he said, peering at me over his bifocals. “My budget is set in stone for now. I could give you, say, an extra half an hour of work every week if it might help.”

  An extra six dollars a week would buy me two-thirds of a glass of wine at the Italian place Gita and I liked to go to. “I see. Even though I’m now managing credit card payments and helping Chrissy?” I said, referring to the receptionist, who was the sort of wickless candle that mistook herself for a hundred-watt bulb.

  “I’m sorry, Maggie; it’s not personal. If money’s an issue, you could try Craigslist,” he said, turning back to the light box. He retrieved the X-ray and started for the door. “I’m told there are lots of positions for seasoned bookkeepers,” he called over his shoulder. “Not that I want you to quit, you understand, but I would be happy to serve as a reference for you if you got another part-time position, provided you weren’t going to work at a competitor and it didn’t infringe on your time here.”

  “Thanks,” I mumbled, but Terry was already gone.

  I didn’t have to work there. In addition to my QuickBooks wizardry, I had a master’s degree in social work, a field that paid better and was infinitely more interesting than dental billing. But I had left social work in the early nineties after one of my clients, coming down from a two-day high, held a knife to my neck and demanded I give him everything I had, including the pink plastic bracelet that had been Zoe’s Mother’s Day present to me. I complied, but not before the man left a shallow cut several centimeters from my jugular. I was pregnant with Jack at the time. With Adam’s support, I quit the same day. As much as I loved my job, it wasn’t worth my life.

  Initially I assumed I would find a safer social work position, or perhaps pursue a related career once Jack and Zoe were both in school full-time. But someone needed to be home for sick days and to let the repairmen in; someone had to stock the fridge and shuttle the kids from one activity to the next, and it sure wasn’t going to be Adam. Our family could have made do if I had returned to work, but Adam liked me being home, and I liked being needed by the people who mattered to me most.

  The position at the dental office was mostly a way to bring in some extra money for retirement while occupying my time after Jack went to college. I was well organized and good at math, and compared to helping recovering addicts get their children out of foster care, bookkeeping was a cinch.

  It was also riveting as watching cement set. But as I stared at the 3-D model of a jaw that had been discarded at the end of my desk, I realized I would rather be at the office than at the house. At least I had been able to preserve one small aspect of my preseparation life.

  When I got home that evening, I wandered from one room to the next, admiring what Adam and I had built together. It may have been a little outdated, but every paint color, piece of furniture, and knickknack had been our choice—and I, for one, still loved it. When I was finished with my tour, I poured myself a teeming glass of tempranillo, drank the entire thing while standing at the kitchen counter, and served myself another because no one was there to judge me.

  It had been six months since Adam left, and his absence still felt like one of the legs of the chair I was sitting on had broken off. I was just barely managing to balance, but selling the house or giving Terry the heave-ho would be like yanking out another leg, at which point I was sure to find myself on the floor.

  Yes, I thought as I drained my second glass of wine, I would find a way to hold on to the house, at least for the time being. I would keep going to work and calling Rose and, when need be, crying over drinks with Gita.

  Adam may have wanted something different. But the last thing I needed was another change.

  FOUR

  I have always loved Thanksgiving, the way it involves neither religion nor wrapping paper, and for nearly two decades Adam and I had hosted dinner for our extended family and anyone else who wanted to swing by with a side dish. Adam was a lousy cook but a good companion, and he would stand beside me all day long, slicing and dicing like a sous-chef with two left hands and slipping me an occasional glass of wine if I started to stress.

  Gita told me I should come to her house this year. “You can bring the kids, and even Rose if you want,” she said. I laughed and said I was too much of a creature of habit to give up my beloved holiday ritual, but in fact I was dead serious. I had no intention of breaking our family tradition.

  “I’m calling about Thanksgiving,” I told Zoe one evening at the beginning of November. I had waited until nine to phone her, and this had resulted in her actually answering for a change.

  “Yeah, about that,” she said. “Jack and I talked, and we thought maybe you could come to New York, just this one time. The three of us could do something at my apartment, or we could even go out. There’s a French place around the corner from my apartment that does a nice prix fixe dinner.”

  Bad enough that I would have to plaster on a smile while Adam was eating another woman’s pumpkin pie. But trade my turkey for a stranger’s coq au vin? I would rather starve. “That’s very sweet, love, but I was still planning on you and Jack coming home.”

  “We haven’t bought tickets, though . . .”

  “Well, you better hop on that tonight, because they’ll be more expensive every hour that you wait. I can’t promise it won’t be strange here without your father, but it’ll be a chance for us to spend time together and for you to sort through some of your things in case I do have to sell the house.” I sniffed; my lawyer told me there was a distinct possibility that the court would compel me to sell the home where my children had thrown epic fits and attempted to murder each other.

  “Mom, have you been drinking?” asked Zoe.

  “Why on God’s green earth would you ask such a ridiculous question?” I closed one eye to assess the volume of the bottle of pinot noir before me on the kitchen counter. It was practically half-full; could I not call my own daughter without being harassed?

  “I wouldn’t blame you if you were. I just—”

  “Want to chastise me? Yes, Zoe. I am aware.”

  “No, Mom,” she said, using the exact tone Adam used when he made Maggie sound like a curse word. “I’m just worried about you. You don’t have to act like this isn’t hurting you.”

  “I think you’d be better off worrying about the white collar criminals you’re wasting your energy representing.”

  “That’s not very nice.”

  It wasn’t, and that’s because it was true. When Zoe was little she preferred doing whatever I was doing to playdates with her friends. But by high school she had become prickly, as though I, Mom-God, had personally devised each of her problems. She no longer erupted in hormone-fueled rages, but her laser focus on her career made it difficult for us to see ey
e to eye; I simply could not understand how my brilliant daughter could funnel her intelligence into the dark art of corporate law. Even Adam, who ended up as a tort lawyer like his father before him, felt there was something ethically sticky about Zoe defending pharmaceutical companies’ price-gouging practices.

  I sighed. “I’m sorry.”

  “Just because I don’t make the choices you made doesn’t mean mine are bad. You don’t hear me criticizing you for giving up your career for Dad.”

  “Zoe Halfmoon Harris, that is both unkind and untrue. I did it for all of us—and I for one don’t regret it.”

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean anything,” she said, and although she sounded apologetic, we both knew she did indeed mean every word. In third grade, Zoe announced that she thought it was “weird” that I didn’t have a job like some of her friends’ mothers. Little had changed over the years; she seemed unable to comprehend that willfully derailing oneself from a career-oriented track was not synonymous with being incompetent, unconfident, and unfulfilled. It was true that I found bookkeeping largely thankless, but until Adam left, I had loved my day-to-day life—not just the domestic minutiae, but the flexibility to drop everything and have lunch with Adam, or fly out to see the kids in New York, or run Rose to the doctor. Most of my hours were my family’s, which was how I liked it.

  “So about Thanksgiving—”

  “What about Dad?” Zoe interjected.

  The wine I had just sipped made a wrong turn in my throat, and I sputtered. When I could speak again I said, “What about him?”

  “Well, is Grandma Rose going to come over?”

  “Yes,” I said. While Adam’s brother, Rick, and his wife, Heather, had declined my invitation, Rose said she would be there, with or without Adam. “What does that have to do with your father?”

  “It’s just—well, it’s going to be weird without him. I talked to him about it, and he sounded pretty blue about being alone.”

  Was he? Good. I wasn’t sure why Adam wouldn’t be with Jillian—she was probably celebrating with her family, who didn’t know about her home-wrecking ways—but I was glad his lousy decisions were not leaving him unscathed. “I hope you’re not suggesting that you’re going to have dinner with him instead of me,” I said, more sharply than I had intended.

  “Hey,” said Zoe. “I’m not the enemy here.”

  I refilled my glass. “No, you’re not.” Then I took a drink of wine, even though the room was starting to tilt ever so slightly.

  That was when it came to me. On the advice of Gita and my lawyer, I was trying not to reach out to Adam. I had largely succeeded. But once in a while I gave in to my impulse to try to convince him to come back and called him. He mostly ignored me. One time, though, he picked up. “Our lawyers told us not to talk,” he said before I could even say hello. “You’re not going to convince me to change my mind, so please stop calling.”

  I remember thinking that he sounded like someone I barely knew. A stranger, even. It was too easy to be cold and callous over the phone; Adam had told me this very thing when explaining why lawyers screamed at each other during conference calls only to laugh together later over drinks. Face-to-face, it’s hard to pretend the other person isn’t a human being.

  And face-to-face, Adam couldn’t possibly pretend I wasn’t still his wife and the mother of his children. After all, that was the whole reason he was steering clear of me—wasn’t it? To fool himself into thinking he hadn’t wreaked catastrophic damage on our family? To ignore the truth lurking in his heart, which was that he had left behind the best thing he had ever had?

  “Do you know if your father is planning to have dinner with his girlfriend?” I asked Zoe.

  “Of course not, Mom,” she said, more gently this time. “You know he never even mentions her.”

  “I’m very glad to hear that.” I dabbed my eyes. “As it happens, I just had a fantastic idea. Please ask your father to join us for Thanksgiving, even if it’s just for dessert. I’ll ask Jack to ask him, too. We can celebrate as a family, just one last time.”

  “I really don’t think that’s a good plan, Mom.”

  “It’s not like your father and I are on bad terms.” We were on no terms at all, really, but that was beside the point.

  “That’s not—”

  “Please, Zoe. I need normal this year. I know it won’t be completely normal, but it’s almost as good. If you and Jack tell your father this is what you want, he’ll agree.”

  She sighed. “Fine. But I’m on record as thinking this is a bad idea.”

  “Oh, Zo-bear, you’re the best. Thank you. This really means a lot to me.”

  “It’s okay.” She paused. “Mom?”

  “Yes?”

  “Take care of yourself, okay?”

  I promised her I would. Then I kept my promise by pouring myself a tall glass of water to try to minimize the hangover I would inevitably suffer the following day and offset at least a bit of liver damage. As I sipped it, I thought about how Adam could barely look at me when he told me he wasn’t in love with me anymore. He probably couldn’t stand to see the way he was hurting me—or admit that he might be wrong. Oh, Adam. As much as I didn’t envy myself, my heart ached for him. What was he going through, to have dug his heels in after making such a shortsighted decision?

  To be clear, if I had discovered he had cheated on me and concealed it in order to preserve our marriage, it would have destroyed me. I would have tried to forgive him, though it probably would have taken us years to repair our bond. But for him to leave me for someone else—well, that meant that he was in so much pain that he was willing to go to the most drastic extreme to feel better. Surely hitting fifty had taken a toll on his ego, but maybe he, like I, was bereft over our children leaving home. Or perhaps decades of a financially rewarding but psychologically unfulfilling job had finally gotten to him. He himself had claimed he wanted a new life.

  I couldn’t remember if it was the Dalai Lama or Oprah who had said it, but the first step to healing was radical honesty. Yes, yes, it was. I drank some more water, even though I could hear all that liquid sloshing around in my stomach, feeling more hopeful than I had in months.

  Maybe if I could help Adam face the facts—and by the facts, I meant me—he would finally see that an old wife and a new life were not mutually exclusive.

  FIVE

  After graduation, Adam went to Notre Dame for law school. I headed to Chicago, where Adam had grown up and where we intended to settle down, to get my master’s in social work. We managed to spend most weekends together and generally regarded the difficulty of being apart as a requirement for the future we were building. My graduate program was a year shorter than Adam’s, but rather than joining him in Indiana, I decorated our apartment, took a position as a caseworker for the state of Illinois, and continued to visit Adam when I was able. Two weeks after he received his law degree, we were married.

  As much as I relished being Adam’s girlfriend, being his wife was worlds better. He worked long hours and I usually did, too, and in retrospect I wonder if that didn’t make the time we had together that much more charged; those early years, we made love whenever we had an opportunity or could create one. We traveled—to California and Spain and small towns up and down Michigan’s west coast—and went to parties and friends’ weddings, spent time with our families, and talked and talked and talked. I had never thought of myself as much of a conversationalist; more often than not, when I opened my mouth a random worry would pop out, branding me as a pessimist (which I was, but I didn’t want others to know that).

  It was different with Adam. Politics, pop culture, our families, the many wonderful and unpredictable facets of life—we discussed it all at length. Adam saw my cynicism and anxiety as signs of an intelligent mind. Maybe because of that, I soon stopped worrying about how I was coming off and got used to the idea that some people simply weren’t for me.

  Just when I thought things were as good as they ever would be for
us, Adam said, “Maggie, I want to start a family the second you’re ready”—and so we did. I had Zoe when I was twenty-six, and Jack just before I turned twenty-nine. I was under no illusion motherhood would be easy, even though I wasn’t a single parent like my own mother. And indeed there is a several-year period that is mostly a blur in my mind, punctuated by the occasional memory of a first word or trip to the emergency room.

  Oh, but my thirties were glorious. I emerged from days of dirty diapers and sleepless nights a competent, fulfilled caregiver to two smart little humans who loved and needed me more than anyone in the world. I don’t have many photographs of myself from those years; mostly I was the one on the other end of the camera, documenting soccer games and holiday parties and vacations at the lake house we rented for a week each summer. In the few pictures I’m in, though, I’m not being vain when I say I looked as good as I ever had or would again. Beyond the fact that I was slender and in my sexual prime, there is simply a glow you take on when you’re happy about where you’re at in life.

  Sadly, there was no serum or surgery that would transport me back to that time. But I could take a cue from whichever Jillian Smith was sleeping with my husband (I was certain it was the public policy advocate, but was attempting to keep an open mind) and begin taking better care of myself. As long as Adam and I were still married, there was a chance for us to stay that way. And if I was going to make a go at salvaging our relationship, I would have to give it my all.

  “I can’t see Adam looking like this,” I told Gita. We had just returned from a brisk evening walk around our neighborhood. I wasn’t a fan of vigorous exercise, but Gita swore sweating had kept her from falling through depression’s trapdoor during a terrible breakup she went through before meeting Reddy. I was fairly certain I had already survived the worst of my separation, what with the doughnut aversion and spontaneous sobbing, and that my return to crullers and cabernet was proof I was on the other side. Gita remained unconvinced.