I was starting to wonder myself if I was going to return to New York. I was shocked by my own indifference. “Who am I, if I don’t want to be a New Yorker?” I asked Ivy one day as we drove into Sheridan to eat at the town’s only sushi place, which we’d discovered was not terrible.
“Plenty of writers come out here from the east and set up shop,” she said. “Hemingway wrote one of his books not far from here.”
“Yeah. Probably with his wife to make him French toast every day.” I’d told Ivy about Beau and it had become a running joke.
But I was going back, at least in the short term. I had to be in Philly in a week to officiate Jo’s wedding.
I was scheduled to fly home on my birthday. The afternoon before I left I went for my usual hike in the hills. It was amazing to think only one year earlier I’d been on a hot subway car on my way to the beach, feeling as though I’d been handed a death sentence. I thought of my mother, who had spent the year with an actual death sentence. My own fears once again felt like a luxury. I had known a year ago that I could do what I wanted, and had spent the last twelve months figuring out what that meant. What it required and what it afforded me. I had ridden off into my own sunset, and now I was about to turn around and ride straight back into my life. It was all my life.
The horses had been let out into the pasture already, and I wandered through them as I made my way up the slope, stopping here and there to rub their noses before continuing on. I wondered who I’d find when I arrived back in the city. What changes had been wrought in me while I was out here. I’d come here on a whim. Allowed myself to just be happy. This was good. All the terribleness of this year and all the greatness had culminated here, in this vast open space. I’d discovered that left on my own, away from phones and magazine racks, I was quite thrilled with who I’d turned myself into, and quite up for the task of navigating through what came next, whatever it was. Like walking in the dark to the horses or taking off into the hills on my own. Too exhilarating to ever consider turning back.
Behind me I heard a noise. I’d stopped habitually looking over my shoulder when I walked. There was no need. But now I turned around to see what was behind me and was greeted with such an extraordinary sight that I promptly burst into tears. All the horses in the valley had turned and followed me; they were trailed out behind me in a long line, as if I’d been nominated their de facto leader, following as I led them up the rise and through the trees to the other side. An entire herd of mythical creatures, as if out of a storybook. Except they, and I, were real.
EPILOGUE
There Are No Happy Endings, Only Good Editing
My mother died a year and a half after I returned from Wyoming. Six weeks before she passed away, following some vague intuition that I should be there, I moved back to Toronto, renting an apartment downtown for the month of February so I could be closer to her while I finished the first draft of this book.
A few afternoons a week I trudged through the frigid, snowy, Toronto weather, the way I had as a child to catch the school bus, and took a commuter bus up to her nursing home, so I could sit and hold her hand. My sister went more regularly. For months she’d driven over three times a week and stayed for hours. It was Alexis who insisted my mother’s painkillers be upped, arguing that the unrelenting stress on her body from being held rigid for hours at a time by the tremors of Parkinson’s was an unfair exchange for keeping my mother conscious. My mother didn’t recognize any of us anymore. She could no longer talk. She was being fed liquids only.
One afternoon I arrived and found her unexpectedly calm; even when heavily medicated she often thrashed in her sleep. Her eyes were closed and her breathing regular. I pulled my Kindle out of my bag and began reading her The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, taking big, gulping breaths between sentences. I made it to the Mr. Tumnus’s illustration at the end of the first chapter, before the nurse came around and said it was dinnertime. I leaned over her and kissed her forehead.
“I love you, Mom,” I said out loud. “Thank you for being a good mother.” She opened her eyes, looked into mine, and smiled. A real smile. Not the confused smile of politeness she’d greeted me with so many times when she was still able to speak and move, but a smile of unconditional love and recognition. The same one I’d been getting from her my entire life. She knew who I was. Later I would think back on it as my parting gift from her. It was the last time I saw her conscious.
After she died I was stunned by the response. She had been sick for so long, and I had been struggling with her illness for so long, I was taken off guard by the immediate outpouring of sympathy from so many people. This must be what it’s like to be a bride, I thought wildly. To have a baby. To be at the center of a ritual everyone understands, and knows the language for.
A number of my friends offered to come to Toronto for the funeral. I told them not to worry about it. I was so accustomed to doing things on my own, it didn’t occur to me that this would be any different. I thought I was prepared. I thought I’d be fine. No doubt they believed me. I’d always been fine on my own.
I didn’t realize what a terrible error I had made until the morning of the funeral.
That morning I lay in bed absentmindedly scrolling through Twitter on my phone. I’d already discovered real reading was impossible, utterly beyond me. I couldn’t make my brain follow the words. I’d picked up my phone hoping for messages from friends. Hoping, I realized, to find that someone had neglected my assurances and bought a plane ticket anyway, that someone was on their way. My oldest friend from high school, who’d lived next door to us, whom I still saw every holiday, and who knew my mother, was in Switzerland that weekend with her new boyfriend. She would cancel if I wanted her to, she’d said earlier that week. But those are not requests one can make of friends. Just of family members, spouses. The obligations of friendship are unwritten.
There were no messages. People think that death is something to be avoided out of respect. No doubt I’d been guilty of it. But the truth was, all I wanted was to hear from everyone constantly, something to fill the void that had been left by my mother’s body. Instead I scrolled through Twitter, spotting an interview with a New Yorker writer who’d just released a memoir about losing her son shortly after his premature birth. My eyes glanced over the words, but I couldn’t make any of it stick, until I came across a line that detached itself from the context of the interview and jumped out and grabbed me by the throat. “I was childless and alone at thirty-eight,” she told the interviewer, “I felt like a complete failure.”
At the funeral home, I had no one to stand between me and all the people who wanted to extend their condolences. I’d never been more aware of the empty space people sometimes saw beside me; I felt like a ship being violently tossed on the ocean with no anchor, no port, exposed.
I gave the eulogy. I have no idea what I said, only that I didn’t cry. After the service, the mother of an old friend stopped me and asked if she could put in a request to have me give the eulogy at her funeral. “You were so eloquent!”
When I sat down after the eulogy, my brother-in-law put his arm around my sister, and my uncle put his arm around my father. I was the solitary figure in the front row. The absolute loneliness of it was so intense it was painless—I felt like the blue center of a flame. This is why people get married, I thought once again, so they can have an arm around their shoulder; no matter how mediocre or disappointing the arm might turn out to be, it was still obligated to be there. I could feel the pitying eyes on my back and without warning the line from the interview I’d read that morning rose up and grabbed me again—but even now, facing this worst moment alone, I didn’t feel like a failure. I felt like a warrior.
A strange thing had happened in the days after my mother had died. For so long her presence had been limited to a physical one. Her body, writhing and confused, was at least a real thing we could see. Her person, as it was leached away, was replaced by this body, until her physical presence was the only
reality we knew, and the person, the woman whom I’d been raised and loved by and read to so carefully, was a distant memory that rarely entered into my mind.
Two days after her death I stopped at the bookstore on the way back to my sister’s from the funeral home, largely for a distraction. It was a chain store, a favorite destination of my mother’s and mine; we’d often come here together and spend an hour browsing. As I was walking aimlessly through the aisles, she was suddenly there beside me. Not in the I’m thinking about my mother and how she would like this sense, but literally. I could see her. I could see the outfit she was wearing. I could watch her as she walked away toward another aisle in that good-natured way she had of strolling absentmindedly with a half-smile on her face, holding a stack of books she’d picked up. I could hear her voice, “Oh, sweetie, look what I found,” as she proffered a new Georgette Heyer edition or Ellis Peters mystery my way. I’d been here a hundred times on my own after she’d gone into the nursing home, but this was the first time I’d remembered us here together. It took my breath away. I stood gaping as I watched her walking around the store, tears streaming down my face.
After that I saw her everywhere. Heard her voice. Felt her nails on my back. Turned to see her coming up the stairs. It was as though the death of her body had finally released her person back to me. It was strange and wild—stranger and wilder than anything I had experienced—and so unexpected. This must be what people mean when they say they are haunted, I thought, except it wasn’t bad or frightening. I didn’t want it to stop. I was terrified of it stopping. I wanted to be haunted forever. Have her walk alongside me and never leave.
She was buried in the graveyard behind the house we’d lived in when I was younger and still dreamt about. In the same town where she’d attended high school. The plot had been bought by her parents. A space for each of them, and one for my mother. She’d been a teenager at the time, the middle child and only girl, beautiful even then, though apparently to her parents, for reasons I can now only guess at, an old maid in the making. I had played in this graveyard growing up, built Star Wars forts under trees that still stood. Raced around in my Princess Leia costume with the neighborhood boys. Gone on long bike rides through it with my mother and my sister. It was the scene of some of my happiest childhood memories, when the world felt very safe and filled with the same potential I found in the stories my mother read me.
It was raining as my father lowered my mother’s urn into the ground. A dismal March rain, a funeral scene from a movie. But I didn’t look down. Instead I looked around at the winding lanes and saw my eight-year-old self, dancing around the figure of my mother that had not yet left me, bursting with promise, thrilled with the possibilities of life and where it might take her.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book was made possible by the unwavering encouragement and support of a team of women. My brilliant editor Christine Pride, who saw the potential for this story immediately, and who believed in it even when my own resolve flagged. And my incredible agents: Lucy Carson (who once gave me a much-needed pep talk in the form of a seven-page letter with all her favorite lines), and Molly Friedrich, who has been giving me much-needed everything since I wandered into her kitchen fourteen years ago. It was an extraordinary experience to have beside me people in whose guidance I was able to trust unconditionally, and I’m forever grateful.
There are two people whose presence in my life is not properly reflected in this story:
My friend and business partner Rachel Sklar, who has her own story to tell about this year, and whose support as a friend and a colleague throughout my career has been unmatched.
The exceptional Kimberly Burns, who has been my cheerleader and confidante since we spotted each other across the room in 2007 and just knew.
Thank you to Mel Hamilton and Crispin Russell who, having not laid eyes on me in twenty years, offered up their home, sight unseen, so that I could have a place to write. It’s wonderful when the instincts of your twenty-year-old self prove out two decades later.
Thank you to my early readers, Allyson Rapisarda, Lindsay Robertson, and Ivy Givens, for all their good reading and kind feedback. And my blood sister, Naama Bloom, who not only read many early versions of this but asked me to write a book with her.
Thank you to Clay and Leah Miller for their breathtaking generosity. And Laura-Ellen Brewer for hers.
I’m very lucky to have the friends that I do. Thanks to Lesley, Maddy, Mauri, Margeaux, Allyson, Kara, and Rachel, who all appear in these pages. No one should come to New York to live unless she is willing to be lucky. Thanks to Meghan Nameth, Greg Macek and Yaya, Amy Lemen, Jen Doll for her iMessage therapy, Carolyn Murnick, Rebecca Soffer, Aminatou Sow, Alison Gelles, Whitney Joiner, Jane Barratt, Elizabeth Plank, Jenn Romolini, Jess Bennett, Alyssa Mastromonaco, Anna Holmes, Julia Cheiffetz, Stacy London, Lori Leibovich, Chaédria LaBouvier, Melissa Lafsky, Kate McKean, Mary Traina, Mary Kate Flannery, Ashley Ford, Erin Edmison, Julia Carson, Vass Bednar, Carita Rizzo, Heidi Moore, Eve Panning, Cathrin Wirtz, Kathleen Fox, Bernie Shanahan, Benjamin Peikes, Benjamin Heemskerk, Nick Aster, Matt Lambert, the Perekoppis, and TheLi.st. Thanks also to the amazing Sarah Reidy and Elizabeth Breeden at S&S.
Special shout-out to my manly reading club: David Bloom, David Gelles, and Justin Soffer.
Thanks to the kids: Quinn, Hannah, Oona, Connor, Scarlett, Ruby, Desi, and my niece Zoe, who felt strongly this book should be called About an Aunt.
Thanks to Jo Piazza for her constant advice and counsel and for making it possible for me to leave when I needed. And thanks to Maddy for feeding me, and always, always making sure I have a place to come home to.
And finally, thanks to my family for their love and support. Also, Carrie Fisher and Laura Ingalls Wilder for existing, and then telling us about it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
© NAIMA GREEN
Glynnis MacNicol is a writer and co-founder of TheLi.st. Her work has appeared in print and online for publications including ELLE.com, where she was a contributing writer, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Cut, New York Daily News, W, Town & Country, The Daily Beast, and Shondaland. She lives in New York City.
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Copyright © 2018 by Glynnis MacNicol
Some names and characteristics have been changed. The Tinder dates described are composites.
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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition July 2018
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Interior design by Carly Loman
JACKET DESIGN BY ALISON FORNER
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: MacNicol, Glynnis, 1974– author.
Title: No one tells you this : a memoir / Glynnis MacNicol.
Description: New York : Simon & Schuster [2018]
Identifiers: LCCN 2018000331| ISBN 9781501163135 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781501163142 (trade paper : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781501163159 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: MacNicol, Glynnis, 1974– | Single women—New York (State)—New York—Biography. | Canadian Americans—New York (State)—New York—Biography. | Man-woman relationships—New York (State)—New York. | Caregivers—Family relationships—Canada— Toronto. | Middle-aged women—Family relationships. | Mother and child. | Self-realization in women. | Women authors, American—21st century— Biography. | Women authors, American—21st century—Family relationships.
Classification: LCC HQ800.4.U6 M33 2018 | DDC 306.7—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018000331
ISBN 978-1-5011-6313-5
ISBN 978-1-5011-6315-9 (ebook)
No One Tells You This Page 26