No One Tells You This

by Glynnis MacNicol

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  CONTENTS

  Epigraph

  Prologue: Numerology

  1. The Forecast

  2. Husband Material

  3. Messages from Invisible Sources

  4. Woman of a Certain Age

  5. Women Never Really Faint

  6. The Jet Set

  7. Choose Your Own Rom-Com

  8. The Grown-Up

  9. Having It All

  10. The Showdown

  11. On the Road

  12. Be Careful What You Wish For

  13. The Family You Make

  14. The Long Goodbye Begins

  15. Don’t Forsake Those Duties Which Keep You Out of the Nuthouse

  16. Men of a Certain Age

  17. What Remains

  18. The Other Woman

  19. Women Are Well-Acquainted with Thirst

  20. We Are Not on the Run

  21. The Equality State

  22. “Balls,” Said the Queen

  Epilogue: There Are No Happy Endings, Only Good Editing

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For my mother and my sister

  There are years that ask questions and years that answer.

  Zora Neale Hurston

  You’re lonely? Get a cat. They live thirteen years. Then you get another one, and another one after that. Then you’re done.

  Katherine Olson to her daughter Peggy, Mad Men

  PROLOGUE

  Numerology

  For someone who has always been bad at math, I have a weird fixation on numbers.

  Take my mother’s death. Officially my mother died on March 20. A Monday. This is the date on her death certificate, and the date on her gravestone. This is also what the staff at the nursing home north of Toronto, where my mother had lived for the past twenty-six months, told my father when they called him at seven that morning. My mother, they said, had died overnight.

  I wanted more details, though. “Overnight” felt too nebulous. When my sister, Alexis, and I arrived the next day to retrieve the last of my mother’s possessions, it was the first thing I inquired about. Who exactly had found her? I asked the nursing attendant manning the staff desk that oversaw my mother’s wing, hoping this would lead to the specifics I was searching for.

  The nurse was an older blond woman and she seemed puzzled by my question. “When a person is that ill,” she said, “we send someone in to see them every hour.” Behind her on the wall, in the frame reserved for pictures of recently deceased residents, was a picture of my mother. IN LOVING MEMORY read the gold-plated plaque nailed to the bottom of the frame. It was a terrible picture, taken recently. My mother’s face was thin and frail, the confusion that had eaten up her mind apparent in the angry, taut expression. It made her look like a stranger. My mother, always so careful with her appearance, would have been horrified by the photo. She wasn’t even wearing lipstick.

  I turned back to the nurse. I understood her confusion; there was exactly nothing mysterious about my mother’s death. She had been sick for a long time; the previous Wednesday a specialist had told us she probably had six months, “give or take.”

  Still, I tried again. I concentrated on sounding calm—I’d long ago learned this was the best way to deal with medical staff—as if I was just making casual conversation. But the truth was that since the previous morning, when my father and then, minutes later, my sister had called to tell me the news, I’d been preoccupied with this small bit of information: I wanted to know the exact minute my mother had died. And barring that, I wanted a time stamp on the last instance they’d seen her alive. I had obsessively time-stamped my journals as a child, carefully watching the second hand on my Mickey Mouse alarm clock, and then furiously scribbling down the numbers before it ticked on, as if this detail would give more authenticity to my record. I wanted to be able to do the same for my accounting of the end of my mother’s life. It felt like a loose thread in an otherwise perfectly woven tapestry I was trying to reattach correctly.

  I hadn’t yet shed a single tear. I had a vague sense they were on the horizon, but the tsunami of emotions brought on by her loss wouldn’t reach me for a while yet. In the meantime, I set about constructing a narrative around my mother’s death that made sense, a path I could funnel everything down when grief arrived and tried to wreak havoc on me. So many of the decisions I’d made in my life had been the result of stories I’d read, or heard, or was trying to emulate—there was a safety there, I knew. I also knew there was an irrefutability to numbers that I could rely on to nail everything else down.

  The number I was looking for that day was nineteen. The 19th was Maddy’s birthday. Maddy, my oldest friend in New York, the person who had for nearly two decades stood in so many times as my unconditional support system, my emergency contact. That my mother would depart the world on the same date Maddy had entered it seemed to me a perfect conclusion to the story I was creating for myself about her death. It made sense. I deeply wanted proof from the nursing home staff that it was possible “overnight” meant my mother could have died before midnight and simply hadn’t been found until the 20th. This was my first foray into the house of mirrors that I later came to recognize as the early days of grief, and I was confident I was being entirely rational.

  But no one knew. As far as the world was concerned, my mother had died, alone in her room. Peacefully in her sleep, as they say. After a lengthy battle with Parkinson’s and forty-nine years of marriage to my father.

  My sister and I wrote those lines, in fact, composing her obituary in the car on the way to the funeral home the next afternoon. I dictated sentences from the driver’s seat and Alexis typed them into her phone and then read them back to me, making corrections and suggestions as she went. It all sounded so normal. Practically comforting. The sort of benign obituary one passes over and thinks: long life, well-lived, no tragedy here.

  In the four months since the 2016 election, I’d greeted nearly every reported death of a person over seventy with a sort of mental hat doffing, as if to say good for you, this definitely feels like an excellent time to make an exit. But now that the person exiting belonged to me, it didn’t feel that way at all. As it turned out, standing by death’s door, no matter how long you may spend there with a person, no matter how comfortable you think you are with its presence, is a great deal different than having that person walk through it.

  Everything felt like a set of nearly-but-not-quite symmetrical numbers to me that week. At forty-three I was one year younger than my mother had been when her own mother died. I’d done the math as I was driving up to Alexis’s house after landing at the airport in Toronto. Even the roads that morning seemed slightly off, which was especially odd since I’d been born here. I had grown up traveling these highways to swim meets, to visit relatives, to sneak out to downtown dance clubs. In the last few years, as my mother’s health had failed and my visits home increased, I’d done this drive an average of every six weeks, and yet on this trip I dimly stared ahead wondering why it all seemed so strange. It wasn’t until I was halfway home that I realized I was on the wrong highway. I’d taken the wrong exit out of the airport but had no recollection of doing so. This would be the first of many wrong exits I would take off
familiar routes over the next few days.

  More numbers: My mother had been married to my father for eighteen years by the time she’d attended her own mother’s funeral. She’d had two children, Alexis and me, nine and eleven, respectively. She’d blazed through university, the first in her family to do so. It was my father who insisted we include in my mother’s obituary the fact she’d completed two master’s degrees on full academic scholarship and received straight As throughout her education. He’d always been just as enamored with her brain as the rest of us.

  Not long after they’d married, however, she’d opted to become a stay-at-home mother. In pictures snapped on our front lawn from the year my grandmother died, my mother looks forty-three: thoroughly middle-aged, from her overlarge eyeglasses to her taupe wraparound skirt and orthotic shoes. It’s almost as though she’d walked out of a museum exhibit about mid-eighties motherhood in the suburbs. She appeared sensible and respectable, someone you would expect to be carting her children around to various activities (in the hulking brown Oldsmobile, visible behind us in many snapshots), rising early to make our breakfast before swim practice and to carefully pack lunches, complete with sliced carrots wedged into Tupperware containers holding just enough water to keep them fresh. Which is what she did. She never traveled. She never went anywhere on her own. I can’t remember a single day when she wasn’t waiting for us when we arrived home from school. Always modestly dressed, she never left the house without lipstick on.

  I appeared to be none of these things. I lived in New York by myself. I had no children. My main mode of transportation was a bicycle, which I wielded through the streets of the city like a weapon. I traveled as much as I could. I enjoyed being alone. I often walked to the corner store in my pajamas (though rarely without lipstick, it’s true).

  In short, I had not become my mother. Which was not an accident. I loved my mother very much, but the truth—a truth I couldn’t escape even after her death, when the world called on me to create pleasing truths—was that she had never been an example for me. Never been a source of wisdom or guidance. I hadn’t come to her with problems I needed solving. I hadn’t sought her approval. Once, when I was small, four or five at most, a therapist she’d been seeing to deal with her then near-paralyzing agoraphobia—or perhaps it was her claustrophobia; she battled many anxiety-related phobias for most of her life—had told her, “You have a very powerful child there, Mrs. MacNicol.” I’d loved this anecdote growing up. Even at a young age I was already marking the gap between my mother and the heroines I liked to read about in books. I was powerful like them! And now I had proof! Only years later did it occur to me that I had been, in part at least, the subject of that visit. That my relentlessness had always been a challenge for her.

  I had known early on that I did not want my mother’s life. If anything, I actively unwanted it. She must have known this, too, but if it hurt her, she never let on. I was certainly never made to feel bad about it. Instead of filling this gap between us with guilt or anger or fear, she gave me stories. Nearly every night of my childhood we sat in the living room, where the dog was not allowed to enter, on the white couch my parents had purchased as newlyweds, in a room now reserved for holidays and company (even though we rarely had any of the latter), while she read to me. The Chronicles of Narnia, Little House on the Prairie, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Black Stallion, Anne of Green Gables (I was always tasked with reading aloud the chapter where Matthew dies, my mother too choked up to get out the words). Like the blue atlas I continually pulled out of the bookcase to mark Laura Ingalls’s trek across the American Midwest—eventually rubbing off small towns completely with my repeated attention—my mother spent my childhood supplying me with these literary maps of the world. What she had been unable to provide for me as a lived example—fearlessness, adventure, ambition—she made sure I had in abundance in tales. An ever-expanding blueprint for life, doled out to me chapter by chapter, night after night, while she scratched my back with her long, elegant fingers and well-filed nails and read on in her calm, articulate voice.

  As much as anything my mother did, or didn’t do, the lessons learned from those books made me the person I became, often in ways that I’m sure made my mother wish she’d handed me something more practical instead, like a guide to economics, or even a cookbook. These stories directed my entire life. Until they didn’t.

  Which returns us again to the question of numbers. Or one number. Forty.

  Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?

  Virginia Woolf

  1. The Forecast

  Eight hours before my fortieth birthday, I sat alone at my desk on the seventeenth floor of an office building in downtown Manhattan, unable to shake the conviction that midnight was hanging over me like a guillotine. I was certain that come the stroke of twelve my life would be cleaved in two, a before and an after: all that was good and interesting about me, that made me a person worthy of attention, considered by the world to be full of potential, would be stripped away, and whatever remained would be thrust, unrecognizable, into the void that awaited.

  It was ridiculous. Deep down, I knew it was ridiculous. However, knowing this did not keep me from anxiously glancing at the clock out in the hallway as if the hands on it were actual blades.

  I thought of my mother, of course. Whether or not we actually resemble the image we see, our mothers are our first, and most lasting, reflection of ourselves: a mirror we gaze into from birth until death.

  I was eight when my mother turned forty, and while I could no longer recall the exact details of that day, I did have a vague memory of it being surrounded by the sort of manic hysteria I associated with the Cathy cartoons that were sometimes clipped and taped to our fridge. My mother loved the comics; she found joy in their simple, two-dimensional humor. For most of her life she would try to hand the comic strip section of the newspaper to me over the breakfast table or read them aloud, so I could enjoy them too. I never did. I was baffled that anyone found them interesting; they were so bloodless. At age eight, the appeal of the Cathy cartoon, about a single woman with heavy thighs, who dimly battled with her weight, her dating life, and her job, all with pathetic aplomb, was especially confusing. My interest in those days was almost exclusively directed at Princess Leia and Laura Ingalls. This sad Cathy creature, so often pictured feverishly trying to shove herself into bathing suits in department store changing rooms, struck me as the exact version of life I would happily expend all my future energy avoiding. Which is largely what I did.

  My strongest impression of my mother’s birthday, however, was that it was an ending. I sensed an abandon all hope, ye who enter here message woven into the colorful birthday cards that arrived in the mail for her. As if simply by turning forty, my mother had somehow failed at something. And now here I was so many years later, about to turn forty myself, gripped by those identical fears despite all my determination to be otherwise. Eight-year-old me would have been revolted.

  My desk faced north. Through the wall of windows that made up half of the corner office I was in, I had a panoramic view of the island. Below me Manhattan stretched out like a toy city, all sharp angles, silver rectangles, and the unbroken lines of the avenues running north. Even from this height the city exuded purpose, like an engine exhaust. Right then it was shimmering in the late afternoon, early September sun. The light cast a golden hue on everything. It was the sort of light that caused even the most hell-bent New Yorker to look up with renewed awe. I pulled out my phone, automatically angled my head in a well-practiced tilt, and took a selfie. I contemplated the result with some satisfaction, but I didn’t need the picture evidence. I was aware that to the outside world I could not have appeared less like a woman who should be worried about her age, less like someone who was now spending the last hours before her birthday seized by the belief she was being marched to her demise. In all likelihood, even my friends would have been surprised to hear it. I was not known
as a person who tended to cower; I was a person who kept going, who took care of things, who always had the answer, who rarely asked for help. I had been on my own since I was eighteen years old. I had taken myself from waitress to well-paid writer to business owner and now back to writer without stopping to consider whether any of these things were plausible to anyone but me. I knew what I wanted, and what I liked, which was probably why most of my friends had taken me at my word when I said I didn’t want a birthday party; they were accustomed to me knowing my own mind. I wasn’t so sure anymore, however.

  Currently my mind felt split, as though there were two voices in my head debating the importance of my birthday, and like the pendulum on a grandfather clock I was swinging from one to the other. The rational voice kept pointing out that it was not only shameful, but also a waste of time, to cower before age. Wouldn’t my energies be better spent contemplating how lucky I was? Lucky was too weak a word. Did I really need reminding that by nearly every metric available, there had never been a better time in history to be a woman? (Sometimes this voice merely noted how universally horrific it had been to be a woman up until very recently.) After all, I hadn’t been raised by a mother who responded to fifth grade homework questions, like “How many wives did Henry VIII have?” with a detailed explanation of the War of the Roses, only to arrive at this point in my life without a deeply ingrained sense of the larger picture.

  Who cares, said the other voice. Sure, fine, technically it might be true I was lucky. But this so-called luck was no more interesting to me than the meals I’d been commanded to finish as a child because “there are starving children in the world”: knowing I was fortunate did not make the plate before me any more palatable. The only truth this increasingly feverish voice recognized was the sort that had been gleaned from stacks of literature, countless movies, and decades of magazine purchases I’d made: it was a truth universally acknowledged that by age forty I was supposed to have a certain kind of life, one that, whatever else it might involve, included a partner and babies. Having acquired neither of these, it was nearly impossible, no matter how smart, educated, or lucky I was, not to conclude that I had officially become the wrong answer to the question of what made a woman’s life worth living. If this story wasn’t going to end with a marriage or a child, what then? Could it even be called a story?