Lucky for me, my friend worked in the local bookstore. “Come with me to work,” she said. “You can find something new.”
I knew about Parnassus Books already, of course. It was owned by the writer Ann Patchett and her business partner, Karen Hayes. I’d read about it on the front page of the New York Times after it opened: “Novelist Fights the Tide by Opening a Bookstore.” The store had a certain kind of fame among book lovers. I was excited to visit.
What a jewel of a place. Store feels like too commercial and impersonal a word. This was not a store like Target or Kroger or the place where you get car batteries. This was a home. Books nestled together in tidy lines along every wall, bunked up on wooden shelves under warm yellow lights. Booksellers milled about, each busily tending to some task or another: climbing a ladder to pull down a memoir, shelving a stack of paperbacks, tying ribbons around gift-wrapped bundles at the register. Customers—but again, the word feels too impersonal; they seemed like they must all be neighbors or cousins—treated each other like friends, or at least acquaintances, passing books back and forth over the New Fiction table. I stayed for about an hour, imagining I shopped there all the time, too; then I bought a few novels and took them back to the house.
I went back a couple of days later. And again a couple of days after that.
One afternoon, I wandered back to the office at the far end of the store and said hello to the three women seated there, each of them barely visible behind stacks of paperbacks heaped on their desks, a busy, joyful mess. They waved cheerfully and asked what I was reading. I wanted to stretch my arms against the store’s wall and hug it.
DAY 15: Figured out how to stream TV on the laptop. Watched six episodes of The Good Wife, season one. When the show comes on and the house fills with strangers’ voices, Winston goes back under the bed.
One afternoon my friend came over and asked for my help writing an email. She wanted to ask her boss at the bookstore for a raise and a promotion. “I’ve been subbing for someone on the late shift and I like it,” she said. “I think I should be the assistant manager and always work evenings.”
“But what about when school starts back up?” I asked. Her son was the same age as mine and in middle school, which meant lots of homework. I hated homework more than anything. It made my already exhausted children desperately frustrated and turned what could have been relaxing family time at the end of the day into teeth-gnashing, paper-crumpling torture sessions. When John was home, it was bad enough; but if he was working late or traveling, the lack of his patient presence made everything worse. I tried to give pep talks—“Check your work! Write neatly! Stop fiddling with your eraser!”—but my attempts to help only stressed the kids out more. We were often war-torn and raw by the time bedtime rolled around. I figured it was like this for everyone.
“Oh, I’m terrible at homework time,” my friend said. “I’m better at handling the mornings, so my husband and I split it up. He leaves for work early and I stay at work late. He handles dinnertime and I do breakfast.”
It may seem crazy, but that conversation was a revelation for me.
My friend explained it all so calmly: She hated homework, so she got a job at homework time and handed homework over to her husband. She and her family had all made an adjustment in their lives in order for things to be better for everyone. She didn’t look at her new routine like a failure to make her old routine work; she looked at it like a sensible solution. No big deal.
You can just change things, I thought. What a concept.
DAY 18: Watched six more episodes of The Good Wife. If I had a cat, I would name it Alicia Florrick.
DAY 19: Made it to season three of The Good Wife. Donuts for dinner for me. A can of Poultry-Lovers Dinner for Winston. He’s a poultry lover.
I fed the cat. I watered the plants. I watched my show about a woman taking control of her life. I walked. I read. I slept. I sat. I felt like a fist unclenching. I could remember, with greater clarity than I had in years, the person I was before I was a speck on a highway clogged with other specks.
Sensory memories came dislodged and bubbled up to my mind’s surface: A shadow fell over the chair where I sat staring out the window at a spider, and I remembered the fuzzy webs among the old shoes at the back of my childhood closet, where I sat sometimes to read. I tied my sneakers to go for a walk, and I could smell the asphalt track where I walked with my friends at lunchtime in middle school. I bent to pick a fallen twig out of the monkey grass along the back deck, and suddenly I was running my fingertip along the notched edge of a leaf on my mother’s rosebushes. It was as if, given the quiet and permission to come out, past iterations of myself were emerging from their places in my memory and tumbling one over another, allowing me to sort through them and remember who I’d been. Who I still was.
We coexisted in that house for those weeks, all the me’s.
I had phone calls with my therapist once a week.
“Sometimes I drive around Nashville and don’t even go anywhere,” I told her once.
“What goes through your mind as you drive?” she asked.
“It’s so green,” I said. “They say the traffic’s bad here, but it’s nothing like Atlanta. It doesn’t feel like the city is screaming all the time.”
“What do you think about when you think of going home?”
“I think, ‘Maybe I can try to feel like this there.’ ”
“Do you think you can?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
DAY 20: I am too smart to go back to being miserable.
Ungrateful Bitch
I know how fortunate I am to have my health and my family and my jobs and my roof and my car and my democracy. I do know. I promise. And I know that saying out loud, “I think I might want a different life,” when you already have a perfectly good life is sort of like holding a half-eaten chocolate chip cookie in your hand while saying, “I don’t want a chocolate chip cookie. I think I want some other kind of cookie.” I know some people have no cookies.
Unfortunately, having a fine life doesn’t exempt anyone from existential angst. Maybe it should. Maybe if we were all perfect people, we’d wake up in our nice warm beds, appreciate that we’re not waking up on concrete under an overpass, and cease fretting about our hopes and dreams, because if our basic biological needs are covered—food, shelter, water—what else could be so bad? Perhaps if I were homeless, I wouldn’t give a damn about things like professional satisfaction or personal fulfillment, because my greater concern would be not freezing to death. But I know damn well that once I had food in my belly and a roof over my head, I’d start thinking about those things again. The horizon of needs and wants never actually gets closer; it’s an illusion, a trick. We can always want more. We can always perceive some need.
Robert Browning wrote, “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, / Or what’s a heaven for?” and I feel him on that. But I also say, Okay Bob, what about a woman’s reach? You could fill a canyon with all that’s been written about women wanting “it all” and whether “it all” is fair to want and what the hell even is “it all” and how tired we all are of the backlash against backlash against backlash against that whole overplayed conversation. But I think the question people are arguing about when they fight about it isn’t What should women want? but Should women want? I mean, hey, America gave us the right to vote. We’ve got some high-powered lady-CEO role models now. There are breastfeeding lounges in airports. We have so much! Shouldn’t we stop all this unseemly wanting? Of course not. I know that’s bullshit, even as I know I still feel a little guilty whenever I want more or different than I have.
Knowing all this doesn’t change anything.
Remember that little mermaid? You might say she got what was coming to her for reaching too far, but I understand how she felt. She had a good life underwater, but she wanted a different one on land. Is that so terrible?
* * *
I get the guilt thing. I imagine, sometimes
, that when I stick up for what I need or insist on what I want, people are whispering behind my back, calling me an ungrateful bitch. They’re not. (At least I don’t think so.) That voice is coming from inside me. I have to talk myself out of it. I have to remind myself that wanting doesn’t make anyone an ungrateful bitch.
Or maybe it does.
Does it matter?
I mean, think about it—if you are an ungrateful bitch, then you’re an ungrateful bitch whether somebody else thinks you are or not. The ship of bitchy ingratitude has sailed, so why not climb on board and sail it somewhere interesting? Either I’m an ungrateful bitch or I’m not, but I’ve decided I don’t care which.
I made up a helpful exercise for whenever I’m worried about doing something that I believe, deep down, is important and necessary because I’m afraid someone might call me an ungrateful bitch. I’ll share it here in case anyone else needs to try it. It goes like this:
* * *
March over to the nearest mirror. Put your hands on your hips, look yourself right in the eye and say, “You ungrateful bitch.”
Walk outside to get the mail. When a car drives by, mouth the words UN-GRATE-FUL BIIIITCH at the driver while hooking both thumbs at yourself, so they know.
Stop to look at an earthworm. Crouch low and look the little guy in the face—or the ass, it’s hard to tell on a worm—and say, “You know what I am, little fella? I’m an ungrateful bitch.”
Now, go to a coffee shop. When they ask what name to put on your cup, spell it out: U-N-G-R-A-T-E-F-U-L B-I-T-C-H.
Change your phone greeting to, “You have reached an ungrateful bitch, leave a message.”
Write the words down—ungrateful bitch—and stare at them until they’re just squiggles and shapes.
Say it out loud until the syllables are no more than the clatter of forks and knives in a drawer, the whir of an engine, the shushing slide of pages as you thumb a stack of blank paper. White noise.
Ungrateful bitch.
Ungrateful bitch?
Ungrateful bitch!
Sloths on a Waterbed
My friend Corrine couldn’t wait to move into her new condo. The trouble was what to do with the spare room.
We were in our early thirties. Corrine was newly single, and she’d already set up the master bedroom as hers. She could do anything she wanted with the second bedroom, but she was hung up on the idea that she was supposed to have a guest room.
“I want to put a desk in there and build some shelves,” she said. She wanted to be able to leave work earlier on weeknights and stop going to her office on weekends. Plus she’d been bookmarking chic home-office designs for years.
“Do it,” I said. “Build your room.”
“But then where would I put a guest bed?”
I asked if she anticipated having a lot of guests. She said no, out-of-towners almost never came to visit. But doesn’t everyone have a guest room? Isn’t that what homeowners do? And what if she did have guests one day?
“Look at it like this,” I said. “Are you willing to live without your dream office—which you know you’d use every day—just so you can have a guest room sitting there unused most of the time?”
She built the office. If a guest decided to come through town, she could blow up a mattress or get them a hotel room. Arrangements could always be made.
* * *
I’ve come back to that conversation again and again.
I thought about it when John and I started playing with the idea of moving to Tennessee.
Nashville hadn’t cured me. It didn’t change me into someone else. But it did help me see myself and my life in a new way. It helped me remember what it felt like to be me, just me, not lonely-and-traffic-crazed-me. It reminded me that I could change things about my daily existence to make it fit me better, which made me ponder whether there might be a daily existence that fit our whole family better.
Shortly after my summer in Nashville, I got a call from the bookstore. They were looking to do some marketing projects, maybe start an online magazine. They offered me a job, the deal being that I’d do the bulk of the work from afar, commuting up to Tennessee a couple of times a month for meetings or events.
Being in Nashville again on a semi-regular basis improved my mental state considerably. I loved the way I spent my days there. I’d go into the store for a few hours, then have lunch or dinner with a friend or colleague, maybe go hear some music, and do some quiet reading and writing. The city was full of literary and creative types, culturally curious people who shared my passions. The parents of kids my kids’ ages were as likely to be novelists, actors, or drummers as doctors, lawyers, or accountants.
The Jason Isbell song “Alabama Pines” was playing on the radio a lot then, and I always teared up at the line “No one gives a damn about the things I give a damn about.” In Atlanta, I once scored a last-minute pair of tickets to a midnight Brandi Carlile concert at a bar, lucking into a truly rare opportunity to see my musical hero in a small venue. John was out of town, and I called at least ten friends, but no one wanted to go. I ended up going by myself and sitting among strangers. In Nashville, people gave a damn about the things I gave a damn about.
Of course, in Nashville I was free of most of the pressures and hassles of everyday life I had back in Atlanta. I didn’t have a house to take care of because I was always staying at a friend’s place (some people do need guest rooms!). I didn’t have to make dinner for anyone but myself; I wasn’t needed at any school events; the mundanities of active parenthood were not part of my life there. I missed my family when I was in Nashville, though. I wanted to sit down with John at the end of the day and talk. I wanted to take the kids with me to see and do all the city had to offer. Nashville’s biggest downside was that my three best people weren’t there. But instead of thinking, I should go home to them, I thought, I should bring them here.
Part of me felt like I couldn’t leave Atlanta because we were rooted there. That’s where so many of our friends lived, and I loved my friends. But the truth was that I hardly saw them. Atlanta was like Corinne’s guest room—a space I was holding on to just in case it might get used for a certain purpose that, in fact, it was almost never used for. Corinne didn’t have guests 99 percent of the time, and 99 percent of the time my Atlanta friends were too busy with their own growing families and commitments to hang out.
Then there were the practical considerations: The traffic in Nashville was nothing compared to Atlanta. You could zip from one place to another in fifteen minutes. The houses cost less. The schools were just as good as the ones in Atlanta.
We decided to go. John started looking for a job, and I started looking for a place for us to live. I swore to all my friends that the minute they wanted to do something fun—go on a trip, throw a birthday party, see a show—I’d hop in the car and be there in less than four hours. But spending day after day sitting in Atlanta waiting for that life to turn into something it wasn’t didn’t make sense anymore. There was no alternate life taking place in another universe. There was no time machine. We had just this one timeline, and it was ticking forward.
I guess it’s crazy that I thought people would embrace our choice, but it had been such a hard decision, and I was proud of it. It had taken so long for me to accept that two things I believed—“I love my friends here so much” and “I don’t want to live here anymore”—could coexist. To reconcile two contradictory ideas, you have to find a way for one of them to win out, to subjugate one to the other. It drove me nuts that I couldn’t do that with this decision. I loved my Atlanta people and I wanted to leave Atlanta. Both. To make a decision, I had to acknowledge that neither was more true than the other and that my way forward wouldn’t negate either truth. I could love my friends even as I made my decision to go.
After wrestling through this dilemma, I wanted everyone to share my pride in it. Talk about naive . . . Telling people we were leaving was one of the hardest things about moving. I wanted to say, “I’m
doing something you’re not going to like, but I love you, and it’s important to me that you cheer me on as I do it, if you possibly can.” I never verbalized that, though. Instead, I blurted it out.
“So, we’re going to do it. We’re going to take a trip up there and look for a house,” I told a dear friend.
“Couldn’t you just join a tennis team?” she asked, half joking.
My friend knew I needed a fresh start; she just wished it could be of a different kind. She knew I’d found something in Nashville life that I didn’t have in Atlanta. “I’m going away” is difficult for people to hear, because it sounds like “I’m going away from you.” It’s hard to sound happy for someone who is leaving you. When a beloved bookseller quit working at the store recently to go to grad school, we presented her with a cake that read FUCK YOU, LINDSAY in icing. Back when I worked in consulting, I once said “No!” to a coworker when she told me she was having a baby. I didn’t mean, “Oh no, your baby is terrible.” I meant, “Oh no, we won’t get to go to happy hour after work anymore.”
* * *
People said other things, too.
“How could you do this to your kids?”
I got that one a couple of times, and it hit me in the gut. Of course I worried about how the move would affect our children. If all those moves during my own childhood had turned me into someone who needed a fresh start every few years, would moving my children now do the same thing to them? Would they ever forgive us for taking them away from their childhood home and friends?
Then again, I reminded myself, all we were doing was moving. It’s not that big a deal. We weren’t sending our kids to go live on the moon. We were going, all together, three and a half hours up the road to a perfectly civilized place—a wonderful place, really—where the children would be fed and clothed and educated, just as they always had been. They’d have to adjust to some change, yes. But they might even like Nashville better.
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