Frozen Assets

by Lee Schultz

  In other words, do your thing, Mom, just don’t make us look foolish. Can’t say I blame them. I see plenty of middle- and late-middle-aged men and women who make complete asses of themselves, whether it’s trying to take thirty years’ wear and tear off by having multiple surgeries, or taking up with a Bimbo or Toy Boy. I would hope I wouldn’t try the same sort of thing.

  Then the Committee started digging up all my old doubts about myself. Especially the fat part. My doctor says I’m healthy in every way but one - my weight. My blood pressure’s good, my cholesterol is enviable, my cardiovascular system is exceptional. But he wants me to lose fifty pounds. Somehow, I’ve never got around to it.

  I was a chubby kid, and Mom, bless her, tried her best to regulate my eating and exercise and used every weapon at her disposal including ridicule, pleading, threats, and "boys don’t like fat girls." One of the results was that after my children were born I became obsessive about my figure, strictly regulating my diet and becoming an exercise freak. I stopped short of anorexia and bulemia, but five days a week you’d find me at the gym at five a.m., working up a sweat and burning calories. Not being blessed with long bones and a revved-up metabolism, I had to work constantly to avoid putting on weight. I was almost, but not quite "fashionably thin."

  When Mom and Dad had both gone and my siblings and I were going through boxes of old photos, we pulled out several of me at various ages. We looked at each other and I said "I was NOT fat! Why did she tell me I was fat all those years!" It wasn’t until I left lawyering that I decided to hell with it. I "let myself go" as thin people are fond of saying. When I walked away from my law practice, I walked away from those constraints, too. I had spent too many years encased in pantyhose, designer suits and killer stilettos. I quit worrying about what I weighed, and as my clothes grew smaller, I simply bought new ones. With elastic waistbands for comfort. And trainers instead of heels.

  No longer did I feel the need to impress anyone and gradually the Bitch Lawyer faded away to a tiny bit I stashed away I my psyche in case I needed her again. I ate what gave me pleasure, and that’s a pretty wide selection. I gained fifty pounds and grew a respectable spare tire. I substituted yoga and meditation for exercise, and managed to strip away almost all the layers of stress I had accumulated over the years.

  I got to where I was so laid back I almost fell over. No more road rage, no more fuming at the person ahead of me in the checkout line who paid for his purchases in nickels and dimes, holding me up from going somewhere important. If a driver behind me wanted to go faster than I was, I moved over and let him by. If someone behind me in the checkout line only had a few items, I stepped aside and let them go before me. Life was good.

  People still tell me I’m pretty, and because of my genetic inheritance my face is still smooth and firm and my hair is still in the salt-and-pepper stage, but I’ve never felt comfortable contemplating exposing my definitely-less-than-perfect body to anyone, much less a lover. From time to time I would meet an interesting man, and some of them even showed a little interest in me. But I used my weight as a protective barrier, and they eventually gave up and went away. Was I getting lazy? I had no desire whatsoever to get involved in something as labor-intensive as a relationship. I had come to savor having no obligations to anyone, never having to explain myself, being able to do what I wanted, when I wanted, where I wanted, without worrying about impinging on someone else’s plans.

  So why was I having trouble getting Nate Walters out of my head?I finally managed to distance myself from those thoughts and drop off to sleep well after midnight. I had some very nice dreams about getting naked with Agent Walters. Except that in my dream I had my thirty-year-old figure again.

  38

  You might be a Yooper if you know the four seasons: Winter, Still Winter, Almost Winter, and Construction.

  I didn’t see Agent Walters for the rest of my week in Marquette. He had been called away on a case and had left a message on the cell phone I had forgotten to turn on. I was a bit disappointed that I’d missed his call. On the other hand, it bought me some time to dither my way through the situation and decide what, if anything, I wanted to do. I could opt to do nothing, to just go with the flow, but I knew that with his strong personality, not to mention the pheromone and Irish Spring thing, I’d be putty in his hands.

  When I was a legal Beagle, I took no crap from anybody, and could give as good as I got. Nobody, but nobody, could make me do something I didn’t want to. Except for the occasional client, but that’s neither here nor there. My intimate relationships were another story.

  When I was a kid, I was brought up to respect authority, which meant if Daddy said jump, I asked how high or I suffered the consequences. I watched my mother slowly quench her own personality to become an extension of my father. If he said something, she echoed it. I don’t remember him ever being violent, just firm and unyielding. It was his way or the highway.

  I took the highway when I was nineteen by getting pregnant and married, in that order. Talk about jumping from the frying pan into the fire! When George started getting overbearing to the point of violence, I had no tools to protect myself. I was relieved when he decided he didn’t like family responsibilities and disappeared from our lives. My two children didn’t even miss him. The only thing I missed was child support. And because it was the early seventies, I hadn’t changed my name, so I was spared the bureaucratic nightmare of changing it back.

  The next three years were, to put it mildly, tough. I had plenty of friends who had chosen the same road as I did, and they were either staying in miserable marriages, or on welfare. Determined not to let myself fall into that particular rut, I worked two jobs and went to night school. I aced the secretarial course. Remember, these were the days when women had limited options - I couldn’t get into the auto mechanic’s program, or the construction program - so I chose what I thought at the time was the least objectionable program.

  One thing my father taught me was the English language - spelling, definitions, pronunciations, grammar - and I excelled from the time I was in grade school. This served me well, because half the people I worked for couldn’t spell their way out of a paper bag. I got a job as secretary to the head of the community college where I got my certificate, and within a year was making enough money that after paying rent and daycare, I still had money for groceries and the occasional treat for the kids. A couple of years later I became his executive assistant, which was a fancy title for the person who did most of his work for him.

  When he moved over to the four-year college, he took me with him. I got a substantial raise and an office of my own.

  Then I met Brad Metcalfe. He was reasonably good looking, kind, had a wry sense of humor, and we hit it off immediately. I liked that he was a little unconventional. Not the 70's post-hippie unconventional, but he was a fervent environmentalist, an organic gardener who grew most of his food, and he wore Birkenstocks. He was as different from my dad – and George - as night and day. He questioned authority, which I found exciting, after a childhood where following the rules and obeying those in power were more important than original thought and individuality.

  Brad flirted openly with me and made me feel attractive. In retrospect, I was fairly pretty, with waist-length auburn hair that glowed like burnished copper in the sunlight. I had a zaftig figure which men seemed to find attractive. This was before ten-year-olds started sprouting C-cup breasts and becoming obese at sixteen. In fact, when I was twelve, there were only three of us in the whole sixth grade who wore bras, and the other two were already experimenting with things sexual.

  Not me. I was a reluctant virgin until I was nineteen. Contraceptives other than condoms were still illegal in many states, and in states where they were legal, doctors would not prescribe them for unmarried women. I feared the wrath of my father if he found out I was "doing it" - so I didn’t. It had taken George Wyman six months of heavy petting to talk me out of my panties, and thirty seconds
to make me pregnant.

  So when Professor Brad, as his students called him, began paying attention to me, I felt wonderful. By now I had access to contraceptives so the fear of pregnancy receded into the distant past. This was the era of free love and love-ins, but I still felt extremely naughty actually having sex with someone I wasn’t married to. Not that sex with George had been all that great. He was definitely the sort of man who thought he was blessing me every time he wanted sex - which was every day - because he was, in his words, "hung like a horse." A horse might have been more fun, because George was definitely a Minuteman. I guess I was supposed to swoon with passion at the mere sight of what he called "Big Man." A couple of times he brought home pornographic pictures, of the variety where the participants’ eyes are covered with a black rectangle, and when I didn’t react the way he thought I should - panting after him like a bitch in heat, I guess - he decided I was "frigid."

  See what I mean about having absolutely no taste in men?

  The experimentation with Brad showed me that sex could actually be satisfying for me as well as him. He showed me how to do some of those things with the strange Latin names, and even at the end, he never, ever tried to make me feel sexually inadequate. He just decided he wanted to be with one of his students instead of me.

  Initially, he took to my two children right off. They loved him, too. He seemed to delight in taking them to places like the zoo, or to the park where he would push them as long as they wanted to swing. He taught Fiona as well as Kieran to play softball and took the time to show them how to stand, how to swing the bat, and how to pitch. He had infinitely more patience with them than I did. He took them out to the large vegetable garden and taught them everything there is to know about organic gardening. Together we built a small chicken coop with a fenced in run, and we raised our own chickens, until Brad decided he didn’t like killing them anymore. The remaining few chickens died of old age.

  Brad loved to cook, and the kids loved helping him. They learned how to peel and chop vegetables without lopping off the tips of their fingers, and they learned how to make gravy without lumps, something I never mastered. In the second year of our marriage, he adopted Fiona and Kieran as his own.

  I had everything I thought I wanted, and we were all ecstatic when, on purpose, I became pregnant with Olivia. We did the Lamaze birthing thing, and when the tiny, red-faced, squalling infant was wrapped in a blanket and handed to Brad with instructions to carry her down to the nursery, I thought he was going to pass out from the sheer joy of it.

  The idyll lasted another five years. Brad became increasingly distant from me, and gradually began spending less time with the children. When Olivia was ten, he announced that he was in love with a twenty-year-old blonde bimbette who was a student in one of his classes. Within the week he had moved out, resigned his professorship, and he and the bimbette moved to Taos, New Mexico, where they intended to "pursue the artistic side of our natures." Translated: we’re gonna live in tents, never bathe, and weave baskets and make beaded jewelry.

  Once again, I was single, only this time I had three children to finish raising. There were some tense, unhappy moments when one or the other of the children would blame me for their father’s departure, and I confess I blamed myself a lot. If I had been thinner, sexier, hadn’t worked outside the home, yada yada yada. I thought maybe if I hadn’t developed such a strong personality myself, he wouldn’t have felt threatened or whatever.

  It was all bullshit.

  But having grown up in an era where women were taught to defer to their men, where overbearing mothers were thought to "create" homosexual sons, and where women who wanted to be more than "just a housewife" were thought to be "castrating bitches," it was tough for me to simply realize that no matter what I did or didn’t do, Brad would have left.

  Like I said, I’ve spent a lot of money on counseling. I’ve finally got my head on straight about most things, but somehow managed to neglect reassuring myself that I was still attractive and sexy. Maybe that was the beginning of my career as a sexual eremite. That’s a crossword puzzle word which sounds so much better than "hermit." And no, it’s not a nasty word.

  Once again, I got no child support. Today each state has an agency which does nothing but ensure that child support is collected and paid to the custodial parent, even when the parents live in different states. Back then, the only way I could have got any help in getting support from Brad was if I had gone on welfare, and I absolutely refused to do that unless I had nothing else. I couldn’t afford to hire a lawyer, and Legal Services hadn’t been invented, so I never got a dime from Brad.

  When Olivia was eight, I returned to college and in a year and a half I completed a degree in psychology with a minor in criminology. I didn’t have much student loan debt, because at that time there was a lot of money for "nontraditional" students, in other words women trying to get educated so they could support themselves and their children.

  One evening about a month before graduation, I was sitting in a local pub drinking beer with Ramona, a friend from one of my classes. We were discussing where our lives were heading, now that we had degrees. I was sort of moaning about not being able to find anything which would pay me enough to support my family. Ramona, who had broken the male-erected barriers and worked as a heavy equipment operator while she studied for a nursing degree, sat back in her chair, looked at me and said "Why don’t you just go to law school? You know you’d be good at it, you’re a great writer and certainly have the smarts for it."

  I shook my head. "I can’t afford it - law school costs way too much money,"

  She shook her head vigorously. "There’s lots of scholarship and grant money out there, and student loans at low interest rates." She put up a hand to stop me from interrupting her. "At least check it out. Doesn’t cost anything to make a few phone calls."

  Years later, when people asked me what made me decide on law school at the age of 37, I always said "My friend and I were well into our second pitcher of beer, and when she suggested law school, I couldn’t think of a reason why not. So I said to the Universe, Universe, I said, it’s up to you. If I do well on the Law School Admissions Test I guess it means I’m supposed to do it. So I did. Then I said Universe, if I’m supposed to go to law school, I guess I’ll get accepted. So I sent out applications, and lo and behold, I was accepted at three schools. So by this time, I was committed. Or should have been committed. Or something."

  I chose Thomas Cooley Law School in Lansing, Michigan, for several reasons. One, they gave me a huge scholarship based on my GPA and LSAT score. Two, they started a new class every quarter, which meant I wouldn’t have to mark time for a year until the next class began, like at traditional law schools. And three, the average student age was closer to thirty than to twenty, and I figured I’d be more comfortable with people a little closer to my own age.

  And the rest, as they say, is history.

  I managed to find a tiny apartment where the four of us could just barely fit. The apartment complex had several acres of lawn and woods surrounding it, and was back far enough from the main roads that the kids could play outside and I could study without worrying about them. They settled quickly into their new schools, and I breezed blithely into my first day of classes thinking I could handle anything the world threw at me.

  Ah, hubris.

  The next three years were grueling. I found a job as a legal assistant which would allow me to take the bulk of my classes in the evenings. I turned into a classic grind. Up at the crack of dawn to get some studying in before I left for work. Get the kids off to school. Catch the bus downtown to my job, reading cases during the ride. Work five hours, go to the law library to study for two hours, catch the bus home just in time to greet the kids as they got off the school bus. Dinner with the kids, play catch up with everything that happened at school. Everybody take a different spot for mass study efforts. Drive back downtown to four hours of class. Drag my tired butt home and
fall into bed. Repeat the next day. And the next.

  I had a hard and fast rule. Half of either Saturday or Sunday was family time. No friends, no outside influences, no TV - it was just us. Sometimes we went to the arboretum for a nature walk, with the kids vying to see who could accurately name the most plants and mushrooms. We always stopped at the eagle’s cage to say hello to the elderly raptor with one wing. He didn’t say hello back, but sat on his perch and eyed us as if sizing us up for dinner.

  Or we would amble the lovely Riverwalk alongside the gently flowing Grand River. Sometimes we walked all the way to the zoo, sometimes we carried a picnic in our backpacks and stopped along the way for lunch. Those times figure largely in our conversations when we are together as a family. The kids love to play "remember when." I’m just glad I had the good sense to carve out that time for them instead of devoting all my time to studying. Those times nearly erased and healed the wounds left by their abandonment by both their fathers.

  I had a few dates with classmates, but nothing clicked. I became fast friends and beer buddies with several of them. It just reinforced what I had felt in high school - everybody wants me for a friend, but when it comes to romance, they turn elsewhere. Oh well. I convinced myself that friends are more valuable than lovers who, in my experience, tended to eventually wander off. Some of my classmate friends, both male and female, had children, and by my second year in law school, we had formed an informal club which met, children and all, every Saturday morning for breakfast at a local café. Afterwards we would do something fun. The zoo was always popular, especially with the smaller children. One autumn Saturday we drove out to St. Johns and went to the cider mill, where the kids got to ride on a horse-drawn wagon, watch apples being crushed to release the sweet, tangy juice for cidering, and each got to choose a pumpkin to take home for a Halloween jack-o-lantern.