Woman Last Seen in Her Thirties: A Novel

by Camille Pagán

  She regarded me from across her kitchen island. “You do need your roots touched up, but give me an hour and I’ll give you a full month of good hair.” (In addition to being my closest friend, Gita owned a salon and was my colorist.)

  “Har har.”

  “If we’re being serious,” she said, pushing the glass of wine she had just poured for me across the granite counter, “I would argue that you shouldn’t see Adam—period.”

  The wine was crisp and dry, and made me feel slightly less bitter about exercise. “Well, I am, so I think you should be a little more supportive.”

  Gita walked around the island, took the glass from my hands, and set it on the counter. Then she hugged me. “Oh, Maggie, don’t be such a toad,” she said, and I let out a reluctant croak. “I’m so supportive it’s ridiculous. I just wonder, what are you trying to accomplish, being in the same small space with the man you’re trying to get over?”

  I wasn’t trying to get over anything; I was trying to get my life back. But this was my secret to carry. Even my closest friend in the world could not understand that the void within me was one only Adam could fill.

  When I didn’t answer, Gita added, “You don’t even know if he’ll come, do you?”

  I shrugged. “Jack said he said he would consider it.” When my son told me this, I hopped around the kitchen triumphantly, more buoyant than I had been since before Adam had left. He would not have considered coming to dinner if there weren’t still a chance our relationship could reverse course. “So I’d like to look at least semidecent. I’m not expecting miracles, but this,” I said, motioning to my lint-covered t-shirt, “won’t do.”

  Her face lit up. “Nothing a trip to Nordstrom can’t fix.”

  “You know how I feel about shopping.”

  “I do, but a department store is preferable to dragging yourself from store to store in the mall. And Nordstrom carries sizes for real women.”

  “As opposed to the fake kind who fit into clothing between the sizes of subzero and twelve.”

  “They have a plus-size department and a great petites section,” said Gita in a voice that told me I was not to insult her favorite pastime.

  “So helpful of them to categorize women by body type.”

  “Toady, stop being so cynical and trust me. You could use a pick-me-up, and you probably need to go down a size, too.”

  I glanced at my waist. It was true; for the first time since perimenopause, my clothes were loose. “Go buy some outfits that make you feel good about yourself,” insisted Gita.

  But my goal wasn’t to feel good about myself; it was to make Adam feel good about me. He had the body fat of a professional athlete and a full head of hair. He was well groomed, wore nice clothing, and saw the dentist every six months. I, too, had good teeth and was not balding—but that’s roughly where the commonalities ended. I had not taken particularly good care of myself over the years, and it wasn’t like I could get a free pass by wearing a pin that said, I look like this because I have been caring for everyone else.

  I understood that tearing off my apron to reveal a slinky black dress would not be enough to make my husband fall in love with me again. But as his affair with one Jillian Smith had demonstrated, he preferred the company of a woman who tended to herself. On that front, I had my work cut out for me.

  Gita offered to help me shop, but her work schedule didn’t sync with mine until after Thanksgiving—which was how I found myself standing in the center of a sea of garments alone. I felt dizzy: So many colors! So many styles! So much mental energy required to choose items that were flattering, fashionable, and age appropriate!

  I fingered a crisp white blouse. It was a welcome contrast to the black shirts overpopulating my closet. But I could locate every size but my own, which would prove to be the case with the next half-dozen shirts I selected.

  At last I spotted a billowing purple blouse with a small flower pattern. It had a bohemian garden-party vibe, though I’m not sure the manufacturer would have described it that way, and it came in my size. I eyed the tag sewn in the back of the shirt. Viscose? Wasn’t that a fancy name for thread spun from petroleum by-products? Whatever it was, I could not justify spending a full week’s wages on fabric of an indeterminate origin.

  I looked around, frustrated and frazzled; I could feel my blood sugar starting to dip to a level that would send me straight into the arms of the devil (that is, Cinnabon). With relief, I located a protein bar in my purse and broke off a large piece, which I popped in my mouth.

  “Can I help you?” asked a saleswoman, approaching from behind. She was several decades younger than I was and wore a thin smile that said her mind was somewhere else entirely.

  “Ywesth,” I said through a mouthful of chocolate-flavored cardboard.

  “Great! Well, let me know if you need anything,” she said, and disappeared as quickly as she had surfaced.

  I said yes! I glanced around with the wild eyes of a child whose mother has just gone missing. What now? I was about to go into full-on meltdown mode when I spotted another salesperson, this one also young but male. “Yoo-hoo!” I called, and then cringed because Zoe said I sounded so old when I said that. “Excuse me!”

  I swear the salesman’s head twitched in my direction. But rather than turning around, he glanced down at something—probably his phone—and started striding toward the other side of the store.

  Big mistake: I was not going to waste my time or money in a place where I had been deemed nonexistent. There must be one or two semi-nice items hanging in my closet that I could wear to Thanksgiving dinner.

  The nearest exit was just past the makeup counters, which I usually sprinted past in order to avoid aggressive perfume spritzing. I was gearing up to do my best Jackie Joyner-Kersee when a woman wearing a pink smock smiled at me. Maybe because she wasn’t armed with a malodorous bottle, I found myself smiling back.

  “You have fantastic eyes,” she said. “Any interest in trying our new Bare Naked Bombshell mascara? It would make them pop even more.” My skepticism must have been obvious because she added, “The name is silly, I know, but the product itself works wonders. Look,” she said, motioning to her own eyes. “Normally my lashes are so short and pale you can’t tell they’re there.”

  I wasn’t into makeup, but Gita, who knew about these things, said it was a shortcut to confidence. Prior to my separation I wasn’t necessarily lacking in confidence. True, I didn’t like the way the skin above my eyes had begun to sag, nor the ever-deepening fault line in my forehead—but when I caught myself being self-critical, I redirected my thoughts to more pressing matters, like my mother-in-law’s failing health. Now I felt less certain about my priorities. Even if Adam had mostly been motivated by his own internal struggles, I couldn’t help but wonder about the role my appearance had played in his deciding to pack that last suitcase and go.

  “Okay,” I said, regarding the woman’s eyelashes, which had to be falsies. “I’ll try it.”

  She clapped her hands together. “Fantastic! Let me take you to my station.”

  I followed behind her and sat on a high stool as she pulled various pots and palettes from a set of drawers beneath a makeup display.

  “Just mascara, right?” I said, looking at the array of makeup she had retrieved.

  “Well . . . I would love to try our Breakaway concealer and foundation on you, and maybe a sweep of First Crush Baby blush and a tiny bit of the Barely Believable eye shadow trio. And just a hint of Come Hither gloss. I think you’ll really love how natural it all looks. But it’s completely up to you.” She stared at me with big, hopeful eyes.

  I sighed. It was a shame that putting on a bold face meant covering it with chemicals. “Let’s have it.”

  She worked remarkably fast; it could not have been more than seven minutes later when she held a mirror in front of my face. “Well? What do you think?”

  What I thought was that my wrinkles were no longer the first thing I noticed. The brown sunsp
ots Adam used to call freckles were hidden beneath a layer of Spackle that was the exact color of my skin. My cheeks were flushed like I had just emerged from a windstorm or a roll in the hay. And my eyes? They were enormous.

  Best of all, I still looked like myself—only better.

  “I’m impressed,” I said slowly.

  “But?”

  “But it seems like an awful lot of makeup. I don’t know if I’m the kind of woman who uses a dozen different products just to face the world.”

  “I only used six, but even if it were triple that, is that really so bad? It’s no one’s business how much makeup a woman wears. The point is to make you feel good about yourself, not make other people feel good about how you look. Though you know, you don’t really need makeup—you’re gorgeous.” She smiled at me. “From the look you’re giving me, I’m guessing it may have been a while since someone told you that.”

  When was the last time Adam had paid me a true compliment? I couldn’t remember. My throat tightened, making it impossible to speak.

  “Don’t worry, the Bombshell mascara is waterproof,” the woman said kindly, and handed me a tissue.

  “Thank you,” I said, dabbing at the corners of my eyes. “That’s very nice of you. Though doesn’t you saying nice things about my makeup-free face hurt your sales quota?”

  She laughed. “Yeah, it occasionally takes a toll. By the way, I’m Dionne.”

  “Maggie,” I told her. “Dionne, do you think you could help me pick out only the most important items? I’m on a bit of a budget.”

  Before leaving the department store, I told Dionne about my miserable shopping experience. She confessed that she did the majority of her shopping online. “Your bedroom is the only dressing room you should ever use,” she whispered. “I read reviews to see how things fit, stick to styles that look good on me, even when they’re not on-trend, and return everything that doesn’t work. Make sure you go through your wardrobe first so you don’t end up with fourteen pairs of identical pants.”

  When I got home, I rifled through my clothes. I had never been interested in fashion, but I used to put more of an effort into looking put together. I wasn’t sure when that had stopped being true, but judging from the contents of my closet, which I had mostly accumulated during the past ten years, I had approached my children leaving for college like a Victorian-era widow in mourning. Here was a black sweater that made me look like a charred sausage; there was a black cardigan that pilled the minute I put it on. Both of my go-to black t-shirts were worn out, and the yoga pants I wore most days sagged in the rear and had faded to a dingy gray. Almost everything was dark and joyless, and not a single piece of it played up my backside or long legs, which were the two parts of my body I truly took pride in.

  At the end of the funeral procession that was my closet, I spotted a soft pink button-down I had bought around the dawn of the new millennium. I had worn that shirt to dinner with Adam, to PTO meetings, and any other time I wanted to feel good about myself. That was, until Adam told me offhandedly he didn’t really like pink. Green, yes, blue, definitely, and black and white, he said when I pressed, were always a safe bet. He wasn’t trying to be unkind. But I had already been wearing that shirt for several years when he admitted he didn’t care for pink, and I was crushed, because I didn’t want to wear something my husband disliked.

  Well, the pink shirt still fit, and while it was well worn, I happened to like it. I left it and my least offensive garments on their hangers and threw everything else in a pile to be donated. Then I went online to look for new clothes.

  Our savings account was off-limits until Adam and I finalized our financial agreement, and my checking account had just been depleted by my trip to the makeup counter. I hated to use a credit card—my mother always told me not to spend money I didn’t have, and this advice had served me well. But these were drastic times, so I reluctantly pulled out my plastic to buy a couple of blouses, a pair of slacks, a blue dress in a forgiving jersey knit, and two pairs of jeans. None of these items screamed, “Look at me!” But even if Adam were wild about leopard print and plunging necklines—and I could no longer say for sure that he wasn’t—my goal was not to be screamingly visible.

  No, if all went as planned, these tasteful separates would call to mind my wardrobe from decades past, which would in turn remind Adam of the woman he had fallen in love with.

  Except . . . what if it didn’t work? What if Adam really had found the fountain of youth in the arms of a younger woman? No dress or tube of lip gloss would help me compete with that.

  My mother had told me I’d be a fool to let Adam go. But as I closed my computer, I found myself considering the distinct and all-too-real possibility that I would not be making a winning touchdown in what very well may be the last seven seconds of my marriage.

  And then what? What if I really did have to sell the house, start my life over as a divorcée, and subject myself to the horrors of dating, knowing that even the Adams of the world were not immune to the siren song of fresh tail?

  I left my computer on the bed and walked to the kitchen to retrieve a bottle of pinot grigio from the fridge. After uncorking the bottle, I served myself a generous pour. But as I began lifting the glass to my lips, one word rang through me:

  No.

  As I stared into the straw-colored pool of delight mere inches from my mouth, there it was again: No.

  Wine would relax me, but for once I didn’t want to relax. What if my anxiety was trying to tell me something? (Wasn’t that what I had always argued when Adam told me I worried too much—that worry was an evolution-honed defense mechanism that kept our entire family alive and well?) What if my pain actually served a purpose, and soaking it in thirteen percent ethyl alcohol would keep me from ever finding out what that purpose was? How many cocktails and glasses of cabernet sauvignon had washed down disappointment before I had a chance to taste it? And anger and sadness and shame—and at what cost? After seven months of numbing my worst feelings, I was ready to feel them, even the ones that made it seem like life was nothing but a big fat cosmic joke.

  And the thing was, I knew better. I did. Unlike Adam’s father’s funeral, which was recent enough to still be archived as a short film in my mind, I barely remembered my mother’s memorial service. I was just thirty-four then, but it wasn’t time that faded the details. It was that my head was somewhere else entirely (and not because I was drinking).

  I simply pretended what was happening wasn’t, really. I must have secretly believed that denial would allow me to slip from one reality—in which my mother was gone, in the most permanent sense of the word—into a more tolerable world.

  Of that day, I did remember the newly budding trees through the window of a church I had never been in before. I remembered the tiny pink flowers on Zoe’s spring dress and being irrationally upset when she smeared chocolate on its smock during the luncheon following the service. I remembered staring at Adam’s fingers woven through mine, and his gold wedding band, which I had chosen for him. Notice I do not mention the sorrow. Because though it was there, lurking beneath the surface, I was determined to power through it. After all, I had small children to care for; I had a husband whose employer demanded sixty hours of his time each week. I could not afford to luxuriate in my sadness, or so it seemed.

  Grief came back for me, as it will. Six months after my mother died, woe rose from the ground on what would have been her fifty-fifth birthday. A year later it twisted my stomach when I reached for the phone to call her, only to remember she was no longer among the living. Even years after her passing, grief stabbed me while I was in the midst of mundane acts, like tucking Jack in at night or trimming Zoe’s hair, as my mother had done for me. My mother’s death taught me that when you think you are bypassing heartache, all you’re really doing is borrowing happiness from another day.

  Yet there I was, trying to drown my separation in wine. I regarded my glass one more time and emptied it into the kitchen sink. As the pino
t grigio disappeared down the drain, leaving only the sharp fragrance of Italian grapes in its wake, I found myself thinking that in spite of my makeup and new clothes, this may have been the first sign that a newly improved Maggie was beginning to rise from the ashes.

  SIX

  “Mom, you okay?” Zoe asked. It was the evening before Thanksgiving, and she had arrived home a few hours earlier. Now she was at the dining room table, sorting through a box of her old photographs and yearbooks that I had retrieved from the basement. Jack had flown in with her but opted to spend the night at Adam’s apartment so Adam wouldn’t feel too alone. I was not thrilled about this—if anyone was too alone, it was moi—but I bit my tongue; the last thing I wanted was for the kids to join me in counting tallies on my separation scorecard. Anyway, maybe Jack would be able to help ensure Adam showed up for dinner.

  “I’m fine,” I told Zoe, pushing my lips into a smile as an invisible vise threatened to crush my temples. Normally I would have marinated my worries with wine, but I hadn’t had a drink in two weeks. It was hard—harder than I had thought it would be, even though I was more alert when I was awake and better able to sleep through the night. But it took a long time to actually fall asleep with so many sober, anxious thoughts floating through my mind, and a mug of tea just didn’t symbolize that I had made it through another day the way a glass of wine did. Yet I stuck with it, because with every day that I allowed myself to wade in the flood of emotions that seemed to come from not drinking, I grew a little stronger and surer.

  “You look a little nervous,” said Zoe, looking up from the photo she was holding.

  “Well, I’m not!”

  “Okay, Mom,” she said, as if I were the child. “But it’s not too late to change plans. We could have dinner with just us, and then Jack and I could see Dad the next day.”

  “Grandma Rose is coming here, though,” I said.

  “And she still can. That doesn’t mean Dad has to be here.” With her brown hair in a knot on top of her head and her long legs folded like a pretzel, Zoe looked more like a dancer than a lawyer. She narrowed her eyes. “Please tell me this isn’t about you getting back together with Dad.”