No One Tells You This

by Glynnis MacNicol

  Someone called to Mauri from across the dance floor, and she moved away from our table to continue her wedding rounds. Ally called her back. “Wait, we need a picture of all of us!” She handed her phone to one of Ben’s wine bar employees who was at the table next to us, and we leaned in together.

  “Do you think any of the regulars would have believed we’d come out so good?” Maddy asked as we marveled at the photo on the phone he handed back. We looked like a postcard for life: five smiling, well-dressed women secure in their lives. We exuded vitality and confidence. There was scant evidence of the chaos from which we’d all emerged. Certainly, very few people would have looked at a similar shot of us taken fifteen years earlier and leapt to the conclusion that any of those women, raging around New York, hanging on to one another tenuously, could possibly be headed for productive, stable lives. And yet here we all were.

  Later that night, Ally and I found a diner that was still serving milk shakes. The party hadn’t stopped for wedding toasts until long after the sun had set. By the time I got up to speak, we’d made our way through an entire bucket of champagne, and the dance floor turned into a sea of gin and rosé—then it started to rain. When we arrived at the diner, sometime after midnight, I’d already forgotten what I’d said during my wedding toast; I just had a blurry recollection of smiles and tears.

  “I wish I’d recorded it,” Ally said, as our plates of fries and mozzarella sticks arrived. “You said something about how we were the ones giving Mauri away, and that it was painful only because we loved her so much. But better than that. Not like a greeting card.

  “I’m sorry about 646,” she went on. “I don’t think you’re stupid, by the way. You’d have to be really fucked up yourself to realize what he was doing. I do think the question is, what do you want?”

  A panicked look must have crossed my face because she quickly followed up.

  “Look, I’m married and I don’t know what I want. Do I want a baby, do I not want a baby? Do I want to go back to acting? I don’t know!” She threw up her hands.

  “Do you want a baby?” I asked. For as long as I’d known her, Ally had said she didn’t want kids. Period. It was a running joke that whenever she got commercial acting jobs, it was always playing the suburban mother. But even after her marriage a few years ago: no kids. She was thirty-nine now.

  “I don’t know! Matt would be such a great dad. He’s always said he’s okay if we don’t. But I don’t know. And I have to make up my mind soon. But it’s hard, I love our lives.”

  “This is why people have babies,” I said, “because it’s exhausting not to know what you’re supposed to do next. A baby is basically a nonnegotiable map for the next two decades.”

  She laughed. “But, Jesus, a baby. It’s so scary. What about you?”

  I leaned my head back into the seat.

  I didn’t know. I had scrambled through the last few years, making the best of what I had, and then making sure other people got what they needed. I couldn’t envision who the person might be that I did want. Did I want anyone? Had I just assumed the children would show up on their own, even as I watched so many friends battle to get and remain pregnant?

  “Maybe I just like being alone,” I said.

  “Well, you’re certainly really good at it,” said Ally. Few people could have made that sound like a compliment, but she did. And something clicked.

  For the first time it crossed my mind that being alone could be a good thing, and not evidence that I was defective. I had been beating myself up for so long about allowing myself to get involved with a married man, and I had been overcome with shame over keeping 646 in my life. Had I always actually just preferred to be on my own and not known that was something I could be without it being something I should feel ashamed about? Had I instead found men I could slip in without actually having to give up what I so cherished about my life? They were there, but not there at the same time.

  “No more married men. No more fake text message relationships,” I said.

  “That seems like a good start,” Ally said drily.

  Goodbye to all that. I knew I could be alone, but what if I gave myself permission to prefer it? What would that be like?

  “I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night. Let me think. Was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I’m not the same, the next question is ‘Who in the world am I?’ Ah, that’s the great puzzle!”

  Alice in Wonderland

  6. The Jet Set

  The first time I got on a plane I was nineteen years old and alone. It was Halloween, and I was flying to London on a ticket I’d bought for myself using the money I’d earned working as a hot walker at Woodbine racetrack in Toronto (the job was far less salacious than it sounded: I walked hot racehorses in circles around a barn until they cooled down enough to return to their stalls). Over the summer, eager to put off university for a year, I’d signed up for a six-month work program in England. At the time six months sounded like a decade. My plan was to stay on after my job ended and backpack around Europe. Even though I’d been living on my own for almost a year at that point, I’d never been outside of Canada. When I complained about this growing up in our suburban house outside of Toronto, my father would helpfully point out that he’d once driven us across the border at Niagara Falls and then done a U-turn and driven us right back, so technically speaking I had, in fact, left the country. I was unmoved. Literally as well as figuratively. Unlike every other person I knew in Ontario, my family had not gone to Florida for winter vacation. We had not done the drive down I-95 to visit grandparents or go to Disney World. We didn’t even make the trip to Buffalo to take advantage of the cheaper American prices at the mall outlets. The MacNicols stayed put. Travel was for other people.

  I felt this keenly. Even as a very small child I liked to be on the move. I once sent my mother into a panic when, at age six, I decided to walk the mile home from school alone instead of waiting for the bus. One of my favorite childhood songs was “Carey” by Joni Mitchell (growing up in Canada meant that Joni Mitchell was not a late-teen discovery made during someone’s dingy basement high school party, but an ever-present voice on the radio along with Neil Young, Anne Murray, and Gordon Lightfoot). It was the line The wind is in from Africa that reached out and held me with its promise: until I could go somewhere myself, somewhere would find its way to me. Even something as intangible as the wind could connect me in real life to a place that otherwise existed for me only in books.

  Growing up, nearly everything existed for me only in books, which had the effect of making all travel seem automatically rife with adventure and exoticism, no matter the reality. When friends complained about the terrible monotony of being trapped during spring break in the back of their parents’ car en route to Myrtle Beach, it fell on uncomprehending ears. To me, the concrete American Interstate held the same unknowable mystique as Paris. Perhaps it was less than surprising then that I cleaved on to the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder the way I did: not only was she also an adventurous young girl, she was a real person; I could find the places she’d gone to on a map and know she’d actually been there, and that because she’d done it, perhaps I could do it, too.

  Eventually I found my way to those dots in real life along with many others, always slightly astounded that I had managed to manifest my own childhood imagination. After that first six-month stint in England when I was nineteen, where I learned to drive stick shift on the wrong side of the car on the wrong side of the road, I backpacked through Europe for three months with a girl named Ang, whom I’d met on the plane. It was during our time on the road that I picked up my habit of never arriving anywhere after dark—before the internet this self-imposed rule seemed less a practicality than a survival tactic for two teenage girls on their own in strange countries. I also learned never to hitchhike after a botched attempt to thumb a ride from Bari to Naples left us scurrying away from an aggressive truck
driver who’d picked us up at a gas station and unceremoniously dropped us off hours later onto the shoulder of a Naples freeway at four o’clock on a Sunday morning, where we walked for hours till eventually we found our hostel. On this trip, I mastered the art of walking as if I knew exactly where I was going, quickly and decisively: a wrong turn was never a wrong turn, it was simply a different route I had chosen. This quickly resulted in Ang and me frequently being asked for directions, often by cute boys whom we’d allow to tag along until they got tiresome.

  But my main takeaway on that first trip abroad was a lesson that would sustain me for the rest of my life: travel meant reinvention. On the road, time was measured by experience, not the hands of a clock. Motion could equal redemption.

  During the years after I quit waiting tables, when I was trying to launch a writing career, I made too little money to even consider traveling. Being a freelancer meant that when I wanted to cover a story outside of New York, like the 2008 New Hampshire primaries, or even Barack Obama’s inauguration, I had to pay for it out of my own pocket. Or now, out of Rachel and my joint pockets. We were both writers on the internet—Rachel had given me my first writing job, opening the door to a world I hungered after but had no access to—and we became well-practiced at pooling our money and resources and hacking our way to events we wanted to attend. Otherwise we stayed put.

  My clearest memory of the months I’d spent burned out and unemployed were not the hours I sat on my apartment floor watching The Golden Girls, but of the mornings after my cable had been shut off, when I’d slink downstairs with an open laptop and pace the sidewalks under the stately trees of Brooklyn Heights searching for a free Wi-Fi signal. When I found one, I’d locate an empty stoop and take a seat as if I lived there and were just enjoying the sun. I always had my response ready in case I was spotted by acquaintances on their hurried, determined way to work: Like my new office? My stupid Wi-Fi is down AGAIN. Before returning to my internet-free apartment (my wish to be off the internet having been fulfilled with an ironic vengeance) I’d download a clip of Audrey Hepburn on her moped in Roman Holiday, or Grace Kelly in the convertible in To Catch a Thief, or even Keira Knightley languishing in that green dress in the humid English countryside in Atonement, to take back with me. Little crumbs of an adventurous life I desperately hoped one day to return to, even if at that point I had no idea how it might be accomplished.

  Had I been able, on any one of those days, to gaze into a crystal ball and see myself two and a half years later, six weeks after my fortieth birthday, exiting a cab at JFK airport on a Friday night, dressed in a vintage fur chubby and asking for directions to the VIP check-in line, I would have ditched all those clips and simply watched my future self.

  Four days earlier my friend Jo had emailed and asked me if I wanted to take a weekend trip to Iceland. She’d recently been hired as the deputy editor of a large travel website and was assigning stories; this was one of them. It was the sort of writing assignment you saw in the movies but never actually encountered in real life. (And it was almost definitely temporary: soon enough—two years or less was my bet—the company funding all this glitzy “content” would figure out there was no money in it and pull the plug.) Could I manage it on such short notice? Jo wanted to know. I nearly said no out of habit, before I realized I could! I could just leave. I thought of that bubble that had hovered over my head back when I was tied to my BlackBerry and Gchat windows; how badly I’d wanted just to get away. As I pulled my luggage toward the terminal door at JFK, I was dazzled by the sensation that I was occupying the life I’d yearned for for so long. And now I was doing just that. Calmly and chicly. I strode through the premium security line feeling that I was exactly where I wanted to be and who I wanted to be. And then.

  SMACK.

  I hit the floor so hard, and so loudly, that even in my dazed state I could make out passengers running toward me from fifty feet away. A sharply dressed man leapt to my aid and held my right elbow, helping me up. “Good thing you had the fur on to break your fall,” he said, cautioning me to move slowly. I could see his polished shoes and was aware of his cashmere coat, but was too mortified to take a proper look at his face. “Thank you,” I said, my head down. “I’m fine, I’m fine,” I assured him, desperate to blend into the crowds and away from the smack that was still echoing in my ears.

  What had I tripped over? I peered down to find the culprit and quickly realized I’d tangled my bootstraps together when I’d put them back on, probably because I’d been staring at the escalator the entire time, trying to make out where the business class lounge was. “Nothing broken?” asked the security guard, obviously concerned. I shook my head, hobbled over to a bench to remove my boots, and put them back on correctly. And then, as quickly as I could I limped away and up the escalator to the private lounge, eager to escape the scene. So much for my fantasy of being a glamorous international traveler.

  This was my first trip alone, since getting on that plane to London all those years ago. Since then I’d always been one half of a pair: Rachel or Mauri; my university roommate Laura with whom I’d spent two weeks driving around France shortly after I turned thirty; Ang, my backpacking partner; my friend Lesley, a writer whom I’d accompanied to the far reaches of Kansas once for a story.

  I reveled in the fact that I was being jetted away on someone else’s dime and that I’d finally reached the point in my life where my career and, to some degree, finances had aligned to produce the life I’d fantasized about, though I couldn’t help but lament the fact that I was likely going to be doing it alone. All my other halves now had their own other halves to travel with or young kids who made travel difficult. Just as my life was catapulting me into some great beyond, theirs were tying them down to routines and caregiving—decades of both. I would have to get used to the idea that if I wanted to travel, I had to be prepared to have adventures alone. Either that or I was going to be sitting at home hemmed in, not by my finances, but by my inability to see myself as a solo woman traveler.

  This trip would be a good test. For the next few days, at least, my other half was my writing assignment. Being on the road with a purpose tended to cancel out all the questions the world liked to attach to women on their own. Certainly, no woman had ever been told it was a good idea to leave home alone for no reason.

  I collapsed into my extra wide business class seat and pulled from my bag Beryl Markham’s West With the Night, her memoir of life as an aviatrix in Africa in the 1930s and famed solo flight over the Atlantic. When I was flying I liked to reread the chapter of her precarious, middle-of-the-night transatlantic flight to calm myself down. The other reason travel was so otherworldly to me was that somewhere in my mid-twenties, I’d been gripped by a paralyzing fear of flying I couldn’t shake. Every trip felt like an exercise in extended terror, during which I would cycle through all the scenarios that would result in our imminent death. Had all the screws in the plane been drilled in properly? Had any of the maintenance people had a bad day? Were they angry at their low paychecks? Untrained? Distracted? Had the pilot been fighting with his wife? (It never occurred to me the pilot might be a woman . . . they were never in plane crash stories.) Would something essential come untethered shortly after takeoff and send us nose-diving into the sea? Was it possible to water land in the ocean Sully-like? Remember that plane that exploded over the Rockaways and crushed those houses? Remember the TSA flight? Remember Air France? Did the pilots know to aim the plane down if the engine stalled, and not up as instinct would suggest?

  I desperately wanted to be a person who enjoyed flying. Rachel was so blissfully oblivious to being on a plane she once slept through a series of alarming announcements warning us to buckle up because we were about to land on the edge of a tornado. Mauri fell asleep on takeoff. So far, however, I had failed. I never took medication on a plane; most of my flights were to Toronto and too short to knock myself out for (though they seemed endless in my head). Instead I relied on mind games. My friend Margea
ux, whom I’d met two days after first arriving in New York and who’d been my last roommate before she too had left to get married, had the unlikely ability to make new agey adages and ideas that I would normally scoff at sound convincing. Among these was an unshakable, inexplicable (or if it was, I’d forgotten the explanation) faith in the number twenty-one. In moments of pure terror, which is what I experienced the second I stepped on a plane, I leaned on her faith in twenty-one as though it were a divine protectant. It was ridiculous (though perhaps no more so than any other acts of faith), but it kept me in my seat. And so the second I sat down I set about trying to make the seat number and the flight number and the date all add up into something approximating twenty-one.

  The captain came on to let us know we were seventeenth in line for takeoff. I pulled out my phone. I hadn’t yet kicked the habit of approaching it as if it held the possibility of dessert. But no texts. There was an email from my sister, Alexis, subject line: baby logistics. Her C-section had been scheduled for the last Tuesday in October, three and a half weeks from now. We’d agreed that I’d come home when the baby arrived to help with my five-year-old nephew and three-year-old niece. She was still going back and forth about whether she wanted me there for the delivery, or whether it was better for me to arrive home when she arrived home. I’d already booked a ticket that would get me there the day before the delivery, but I wanted to give her peace of mind. I’ll just book two tickets, I wrote, and cancel whatever I don’t use. I have to be at the airport 90 minutes before the flight and can be at the hospital two hours after takeoff. You don’t have to make up your mind until 5am that morning.