Derek winked conspiratorially and stood to get another round. He came back with three pitchers and a tray filled with golden amber shots.
“Oh no.” I waved it away. “I don’t do tequila.”
“Spoken like a real grandma,” Noah said as he tipped the liquid into his mouth and shook out his scruffy curls. He looked pained, like his mother had just crashed his favorite indie film festival.
I quietly passed my shot over to Derek, who took it down in a single gulp.
“They don’t have ‘Kokomo.’ ” Mia thumbed through the laminated song catalog for the obligatory karaoke machine. “But they do have ‘Dancing Queen’ and ‘Mamma Mia’ and well, the entire ABBA repertoire. Who wants to be the Christine Baranski to my Meryl Streep?”
I raised my hand, finished my Sticky Sex, and sashayed Beyoncé-style to the stage with Mia.
The place was packed with a crowd of unwashed backpackers half our age. We had them on their feet and cheering by the time we got to “Fernando.”
Derek handed me the pitcher and I drank from it without bothering with a glass.
When we went back to the table he nudged his sister. “Should we do it?”
She shook her head. Mia’s eyes were glassy and her speech was getting a little slurred.
“Come on, Mee. We can do it. This crowd would love it.”
“Nope. Out of practice. Can’t do it.”
“Can’t do what?” I leaned over to them and pushed Noah’s hand away as he tried to hand me another shot.
“Mia and I can do the lift from Dirty Dancing,” Derek stated with confidence, in a voice that told me he knew I would find this impressive.
“Mia brought me out to med school for a weekend when I was a teenager and we did it for the entire med school class. It’s like our thing.”
I shook my head. “No one can really do the lift from Dirty Dancing. It’s physically impossible for anyone except for Swayze.”
“I’m better than Swayze,” Derek insisted.
Noah was listening in. “I’ll bet you twenty bucks you can’t do it, mate.”
“Come on, Mia,” Derek pleaded. “Now we have to.”
She placed her head on the table and murmured into her hands. “I’ll puke if we do the lift.”
“You can’t do it,” Noah said.
“I’ll do it with Kate then,” Derek said. “Right?”
“No, no, no.”
“Oh, it’s easy. Let’s go.”
Before I knew it the dulcet strains of “I’ve Had the Time of My Life” began playing. Noah and an equally pale, nearly albino girl sang along loudly. News of our grand attempt rippled through the room and someone had pushed the tables and chairs out of the way, clearing a path toward the stage. The bartender did away with the pretense of a kamikaze shot and handed me a tumbler of vodka. I took a swig and began to sway.
You’re the one thing, I can’t get enough of . . .
All eyes were on me. Cell phones were raised in the air.
I wasn’t old. I just climbed down a waterfall. I was getting drunk in a hostel with a bunch of twenty-year-olds.
Derek nodded. I took off slow, running toward him. The crowd began to chant my name.
KATE, KATE, KATE, KATE!
He caught me perfectly on my pubic bones. I spread my arms wide as I balanced in the air. We did it. We did the goddamn lift from Dirty Dancing. Derek began to twirl. The crowd screamed. I was having the time of my fucking life.
• • •
We didn’t get back to the retreat center until noon the next day. I put my bag in my room. I was in pretty rough shape from the night before, with hand-size bruises on my hips and a lingering desire to vomit. I went upstairs to check my e-mail on the center’s computer before planning to sleep it off for the rest of the day.
Then I saw it. An e-mail from Ben Hirsch. The subject was simple: “Your Submission.”
I clicked on the e-mail and began to read.
Dear Ms. McKenzie:
Thank you for submitting your four stories to Zoetrope. Your pieces show promise. I regret to say that three of the four that you sent are simply not ready for publication. The fourth however was a gripping story and incredibly well crafted. You have all the elements of a memorable piece here, though they may not be in the right order just yet. I am attaching a PDF of a marked-up copy of your story and several suggestions for revisions. If you are interested in reworking this piece, I think it could be ready for publication in our summer issue. Please let me know how you wish to proceed.
All the best,
Ben Hirsch
Senior Editor
Zoetrope
I sat stiffly on one of the meditation cushions. For a brief moment I forgot that Ms. McKenzie was me, it had been so many years since I’d been Kate McKenzie. I read and reread the e-mail five more times, and the words still didn’t feel real. When I mailed that package I never expected an actual response.
I pinched myself hard on the thigh. I was awake. I was a little hungover, a little nauseated, but I was awake. It was true. Someone wanted to publish me. Not just someone, but Zoetrope.
I hit reply to respond. Then I closed the browser. I didn’t know what to say.
I felt elated and petrified at the same time.
That one story, the one that showed promise, was the story of the couple whose marriage was crumbling, the ones who attended strangers’ weddings.
Was I really comfortable putting something like that out into the world? It wasn’t Karl and me. It was fiction.
Instead of writing to Ben Hirsch I began an e-mail to Karl. It was brief and filled with exhilaration. I gushed. I told him I loved him and missed him and wanted him to read what I had written.
I needed him to be proud of me. I craved his approval. When we got married, I knew he’d chosen me over all those girls he’d dated in his twenties and thirties because I challenged him, pushed him outside his comfort zone. I had lived a life before I met him. He once told me I was the smartest woman he’d been with, and to me, that was far greater praise than telling me I was beautiful. I was never going to be boring. But then things changed. I changed. Being published would make me interesting again, would show Karl that I still had my own life. But, most important, it would show him that I’d actually accomplished something while I was away.
Still, I regretted the e-mail the second I hit send. It was all wrong, tone-deaf and juvenile. Unfortunately, there was no getting it back.
I returned to Ben Hirsch’s e-mail and opened the PDF. The page was filled with notes and scratch marks. Entire paragraphs were covered over with an X. Every word of praise from his e-mail disappeared from my mind. All I could see was my ravaged manuscript.
It was impossible. I couldn’t do this. I was fucking stupid to think that I could.
Submitting anything to be edited is like removing your clothes in front of a stranger you desperately want to like you. I felt raw and exposed and completely out of my league.
I read the document over and over until the red of the changes became a murderous blur. I had to walk away from it.
By morning my trepidation at having to make so many edits had faded to slight unease and was even ready to give way to excitement. This was the kind of challenge I had wanted.
I bounded up the stairs filled with excitement and anticipation for the day. Sticky dew clung to the railings. I liked the way it felt on my fingers as I ran them along the smooth wood.
I didn’t even bother with coffee before I opened my computer to see if Karl or Hirsch had responded.
I should have had the coffee.
The first e-mail in my in-box came from the law firm of Goldberg, Lynch, Aster. Instantly I knew. I couldn’t bear to read it word for word; instead I let words and phrases come at me from the screen like I was being punched: “divorce” “custody” “deserted her children.”
I pictured Karl sitting in a glass-walled law office overlooking downtown Manhattan on one side and the Empire State Building on the other. His
mother may have been sitting next to him, her spine straight as a flagpole, her smile perfunctory and cold as she detailed how her son’s wife had abandoned him and their children. I thought of how Karl must have felt when I didn’t come home from California, and then when I didn’t come home from Thailand. I thought of Karl begging me to come home the last time we spoke. I heard myself tell him no.
The facts would make me seem like a flake, a madwoman, an idiot, a middle-aged fool who’d gone on a walkabout, someone unfit to raise children.
I could hear Alyse say in her tight efficient voice: “She was always a little off. Different, you know. She’s from Idaho.”
Wisconsin, you bitch.
I stared at the screen, my mouth slack, my eyes dull. I heard blood pulsing at my temples. I reminded myself to breathe so that I didn’t pass out.
I had deluded myself into thinking he’d never do it. But who was I kidding? I had been gone for almost six months.
Love can last indefinitely through space and time and a long separation. A marriage needed more. It required work, effort, and sacrifice from both parties to keep it alive. I thought about that Gabriel García Márquez quote about marriage: “The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast.”
You had to be there if you wanted to rebuild it. I wasn’t there.
I closed my e-mail as if I could make it go away. Floating geometric shapes from the screen saver danced from side to side, taunting me. I held my hand up away from me, staring at my ring, as I used to do a thousand times a day when Karl first proposed. And then my wedding band, which I hadn’t taken off since the day we got married and I became Karl’s wife. I was Karl’s wife until just fifteen minutes ago, now I was something else. I was in limbo between two different lives. I felt paralyzed. I didn’t know how to go back, and I was terrified of moving forward.
Go home. I said it again for the hundredth time. It’s time to go home.
But now there was a new voice. Do you have a home to go back to?
Chapter Nine
* * *
I went straight back to bed and didn’t get out for two days. I didn’t need food, in fact the thought of it sickened me. Nausea kneaded my stomach into a hard knot. I stared at the ceiling while hot tears rolled down my cheeks. My body created a permanent imprint in the cheap foam mattress. I pushed the tattered quilt off my legs. Sweat dripped all over my body. For a brief moment I wondered if I’d come down with a fever, but I knew that wasn’t the case. My body was simply reacting to the complete and utter destruction of my life. For the first time since I arrived I longed for the old comforts of home, my linen sheets and down pillows. My heart was heavy with shame. I clenched my fists and dug my nails into my palms hard enough to draw blood. I fought sleep as long as possible. It was a peace I didn’t deserve.
Buppha knocked on my door the first night. I knew it was her because Buppha always clicked her tongue and shuffled her feet when she came to my door. There was no lock. She could have just walked in, but she must have heard the despair in my voice when I called out to her, “I’m sick. I need to be by myself, please,” because she left without another word, though I knew she’d be back.
The next afternoon, Mia came, but she didn’t leave when I yelled to go away. She walked right in and sidestepped around the piles of books I’d been using as furniture. Guests always came to the retreat center with leisurely reading material—historical novels, weighty biographies, lots of Pema Chödrön. They inevitably left the books behind to make room in their suitcases for teak elephants and silk pajamas. I especially enjoyed coming across a book published by Paradigm. I’d flip to the acknowledgments and beam with pride when I saw another author praise Karl for making their dreams come true.
I’d used one pile of books as a nightstand and another to hold coffee and a pitcher of water. A third held photographs of the girls I’d printed off my phone and framed in cheap plastic frames from the Chiang Mai market.
“Do you want to talk?” Mia sat on the bed and pushed my damp hair from my face. She didn’t flinch at my puffy eyes or the tears coating my cheeks.
I didn’t want to talk, but I didn’t have much of a choice. I had to get the words out of me. Keeping them inside allowed them to fester. I spoke quietly, letting the tears come again. I had a hard time saying the word divorce out loud. No matter what had happened in my marriage, no matter how little Karl and I spoke or how tense things had grown between us, divorce was never the way I saw this ending.
I was so stupid. How could I have been so fucking stupid?
Mia scooched down onto the mattress, pulled my legs over her lap, and leaned her back against the wall like we were teenagers listening to CDs in my bedroom.
“I never told you about my divorce.” Mia sighed when I was finished and closed her eyes. She gently massaged my ankle with her thumb and index finger. I was grateful for her kind touch.
I wanted to hear her story. It’s one of the more true clichés that misery loves company. “You never told me. Derek mentioned it once.”
She gave a low snort. “Derek has his own narrative about the end of my marriage. Men in Aussie are still so masculine. Even the good ones. My little brother can’t wrap his head around the idea that maybe what happened wasn’t so cut-and-dry. Maybe I wasn’t the victim.”
“What happened?” I asked quietly, my throat raw from the sobs.
“Tim and I met in college. We dated forever, all through med school, and then we got married the day after we graduated. It felt like the next step. I’d never been with anyone but him. He was the first guy I slept with. Hell, his was the only penis I’d ever seen. Everyone loved Tim. I told myself I’d be insane if I didn’t love Tim too. He studied so long to be a pediatric surgeon, he was eager for our lives to finally settle down. He knew he could get a position in Sydney or Melbourne, or Adelaide. We both grew up on farms out in the bush and he wanted all of the nice trappings of a good life in the city, a fancy house with a garage and two cars. Maybe we’d join the country club. I wasn’t ready. Maybe I’d never be ready for that kind of life. At that point we’d been together so long it seemed absurd that we hadn’t already discussed these fundamental differences. We both assumed we wanted the same things without ever discussing it.”
Her story reminded me that Karl and I had discussed the kind of life we wanted to lead after marriage and children. Looking back, I thought I had been honest. In hindsight, he was the one who had wanted something completely different.
Mia continued. “I wanted it to work. I agreed to start looking for jobs in Melbourne. It seemed a little more bohemian than stodgy Sydney. My condition was that we join Doctors Without Borders for a year first. ‘When else in our lives will we be able to travel and do good in the world?’ I said to Tim over and over again. ‘Soon we’ll have two kids and a tennis club membership and the best thing in our lives will be the Melbourne Cup.’ He agreed, even though it frustrated him to have to put his life on hold. I even suggested we ask for different locations, thinking it could be exciting to have two separate adventures before we came back together and started the ‘forever’ part of our lives. The truth was, I just wasn’t ready for that life . . . or to let him go. I felt like I was buying time. He went along with it. Tim was a marathon runner. He always trained for the long game.
“I went to Laos and he went to Somalia. I’d never left Australia at that point. I went straight from the farm to college to medical school. The things I saw in Laos, working with the poorest of the poor, terrified and shattered me, but making a difference in their lives, giving women birth control so they didn’t have to be slaves to pregnancy, dressing the burns of a baby who had leaned too close to the fire, exhilarated me. I knew very quickly that I couldn’t go live in a three-bedroom split-level and drive my Subaru and host a fish fry on Sunday nights for the ladies in my book club when I could be saving lives. I also learned during that year that I didn’t need to be with Tim. H
e’d been a part of me since I was a child and I didn’t know I could ever live without him. I was still too chickenshit to call things off. Thankfully he did it for me. When I told him I planned to re-up with DWB for another year he told me he needed to start his real life. During the last few months of his contract he had met another woman, an American ophthalmologist who wanted all those things he wanted. They were engaged within two months and married in six and now they have three little boys and a dog and a cat and a three-story Victorian in Coogee.”
My body trembled as I saw the similarities to my own marriage. Mia’s thirst for adventure was the end of her marriage. But there was more than that. There was the gap in expectations. There were the missing bits of information that we withheld in order to fall in love. I’d never lied to Karl. I’d lied to myself.
Until I met Karl, I never thought I would get married. I didn’t think I wanted kids. But Karl changed everything I thought I’d wanted. I was so in love I was ready to toss out my old romantic notions of a nomadic solo existence. I allowed myself to be swept off my feet and domesticated like a wild mustang who walks right into a rancher’s pen and asks for a saddle and harness. For more than ten years I allowed Karl to call the shots, to determine where we lived and how we lived. I became a person I hardly recognized. And where had it gotten me? I’d short-circuited. I’d run away and blown the entire thing up.
“Do you regret it?” I finally asked.
“Sometimes,” she said honestly. “I traveled all over Asia, and for a while I held on to this fantasy that maybe I would meet another doctor too and maybe we would get married and have kids of our own. I thought I would have kids someday . . . and then I just didn’t. I married the guy at the right time, but he wasn’t the right guy. Then there are days I’m happy I don’t have to go through so much of the pain mothers go through. I was selfish with my marriage. I don’t know how selfless I could be as a mother. It’s confusing.”
“Are you happy?”
She drew in a breath. “I’m fulfilled. I’m content. Sometimes I’m happy. I know it’s hard for most people to imagine, though. Even Derek, who loves me more than anyone on the planet. A lot of people look at me and see a woman in her late thirties without a husband or children and they think that I missed out on something. They think I must be a tragedy. They can’t understand how I could possibly be happy.”
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