5941 steps
“Hey, wait up,” I yelled over my shoulder.
Tess and Rosie kept walking.
I pulled my front door shut, locked it, found the flashlight on my phone.
I imagined the Noreens cheering for me as I race-walked between them. “Thank you, thank you,” I said. “We are all worthy of great things, and today our charmed life begins.”
So, apparently I was affirmation-rhyming at statues now, although I had to admit that it wouldn’t even make the top-ten leaderboard of my problems. Also, did things and begins rhyme, or was it too much of a stretch? Maybe we are all worthy of great spins would work better. Grins?
“She’s still alive,” Tess said when I caught up to them under a streetlight.
“Don’t you dare jinx me,” I said.
“Good point,” Tess said. She reached over and knocked on my head a few times.
“Ouch,” I said.
“Fastest way to undo a jinx,” Tess said, “unless you happen to walk with a saltshaker.”
Rosie still hadn’t said a word.
I flashed her a big smile.
She ignored me.
I shined my light in Rosie’s direction. “Hey, your hair looks great today. Did you do something different?”
Even if I hadn’t seen Rosie roll her eyes, I would have felt it. She yanked the purple bandana she used to cover her hair out of her jacket pocket. So much for throwing out a compliment to diffuse the bad vibes coming my way, a defensive skill I’d been pretty much perfecting my whole life.
I genuinely loved Rosie’s hair, but I probably should have looked at it before I opened my mouth. Crazy tufts of red curls stuck out in every direction exactly like they always did.
“Speaking of hair,” I said, even though I seemed to be the only one doing it, “I lost a significant chunk out of the back of mine. Long story.”
Rosie shook her head and finished tying her bandana at the same time.
I crossed over to Tess’s other side, which seemed like my safest bet, fell into step.
“Where was I,” Tess was saying. “Oh right, so then I said to the hubernator, if we each drag down one box a day, by the time the attic is empty, we’ll know where we want to live next. Or we’ll both be dead, which would simplify the whole moving thing. You know, whichever comes first.”
“So what did he say?” Rosie said. Clearly, she was capable of having a friendly conversation this morning, just not with me. I knew it was an overreaction, but I felt ridiculously stung. It was as if I had an invisible hurt backpack slung over my shoulders at all times, filled with the pain of being ignored and underappreciated and excluded. By this point in my life, my hurtpack was bursting at the seams and heavy enough that it practically counted as weight training. I’d been lugging it around for so long that I could forget I had it for a while, but one little insensitive slight could make me feel its heft all over again. The truth was that right now I felt like taking it off and hurling it at Rosie. And the rest of the stupid world.
Tess zipped her jacket up higher and nudged her hair under her hood while we crossed the street. “He ignored me and went out to give the lawn the last mow of the season. But it was a good thing, because the very first interesting item I unearthed up there was a shoebox filled with love letters from one of my college boyfriends. I’d never really thought of myself as a love-letter hoarder, but there you go.”
“It would make a great HGTV show,” Rosie said. “Love Letters, Buried Alive.”
“What kind of shoes?” I said.
Tess stopped, put her hands on her hips. “What kind of shoes? I tell you about these hot attic letters I found, and you want to know about the shoebox?”
This was so not my morning. My day. My week. My month. My year. My life.
“Sorry,” I said. “Former occupational hazard. When I was in college, I had these gargantuan red and white platform saddle shoes with woven raffia uppers and gum soles that I found at a thrift store. Amazeballs. I have no idea what happened to them. My mother probably threw them away when I wasn’t looking. My old meddling mother, when she was still Lois.”
Rosie let out a puff of air.
“I read them all through twice,” Tess said. “Each and every one of them. They were seriously sizzling. Impressive enough that I actually Facebooked the guy who wrote them. Which completely destroyed the whole fantasy, because after all these years he and my husband are totally twinning. And I’m talking identical twins, not fraternal. I’m just glad I read the letters before I went to Facebook, so at least I got to luxuriate in a quick burst of flashback bliss before reality rained down on me.”
“Your husband’s still pretty hot,” Rosie said. “I mean, for his age and for a husband.”
“Yeah, I could probably see that,” Tess said, “if I wasn’t married to him. But what I can’t stop thinking about is what if it didn’t matter which one I married? Because they’d eventually become the same guy. I mean, holy existential question.”
Tess made that mind-blown gesture, holding her fingertips to her temples and then exploding her fingers outward. I did it, too, not that I had anything to be mind-blown about, but just because I’d never tried making it before.
“I don’t know,” Rosie said. “They might look similar, but that doesn’t mean they’d be the same, or that your life would have turned out the same.”
“This is getting way too heavy,” Tess said. “I try not to think too early on a school day.”
We walked through the break in the seawall, spread out across the wide swath of sand.
In another life I would have been able to casually compare my husband to a former boyfriend. In my current life, I was lucky to have stepped it up from chicken clients. Even though being an adult wasn’t exactly a new experience, I had to admit this grown-up stuff still wasn’t easy for me. But even if I was a bit lost, I wasn’t sure I wanted to be found. I mean, what was next, some other guy who would mass produce me and dump his sculptures on my front yard instead of stepping up to initiate a kiss-and-make-up conversation?
Instead of walking around it, I jumped on a hunk of driftwood with both feet. It shot up in the air and twirled right at me. Too late, I raised my hands to protect myself.
“Ouch,” I said.
“Whoa,” Tess said. “Did that hit you in the face?”
“That’s okay, she has two of them,” Rosie said.
There was a beat of silence.
I let it go. “I’m fine,” I said. I mean, how many times in my life had I tried to make a stupid joke, only to have it fall flat?
It was colder today than yesterday, and a winter breeze was lurking just a few degrees away. Something worse was always lurking just a few degrees away.
I jogged around in a little circle to snap myself out of my fast-descending funk, fell into step again. “Hey, do I remind you of a specific animal?”
Rosie let out that same aggravating puff of air.
“What?” I said.
“Nothing,” Rosie muttered.
“What?” I said again.
“Never mind,” Rosie said.
“Say it,” I said.
Rosie stepped around Tess so she could see me. “I’ll tell you what animal you remind me of: a fox. Cunning and deceptive and a master of wiggling around obstacles instead of facing them head on.”
“Excuse me?” I said.
“You heard me,” Rosie said.
“It’s way too early for this shit, too,” Tess said. “How about we just sing a few rounds of ‘Alison?’ Or we could try a different song. Bette Midler’s ‘Friends’?”
“Oh, you’ve got to have—” Tess sang.
Rosie turned and race-walked away from us.
I jogged a few steps in Rosie’s direction, turned back, caught up to Tess. She was belting out the part about standing at the end of the world and waiting for new friends to come.
Was that where I was? Had my whole world flattened like a Frisbee, and now I was teetering at the edge?
I looked over my shoulder to see if Rosie had changed her mind and was heading back, maybe even to apologize. But she was still race-walking, getting farther away by the second.
Tess finally stopped singing.
“Thoughts?” I said. It was the best I could do, because I was trying not to completely lose it.
“I’m about to go to work,” Tess said, “where I will spend another entire school day telling third graders to figure it out for themselves. If they can handle it, you might want to give it a try.”
My grandmother used to say that the world needed more cockeyed optimists like her, because whatever problems come their way, they approach them with an upbeat attitude. Then she’d sing my brothers and sisters and me a song about how people say the human race is falling on its face and that it just ain’t so. I thought she’d made up the song herself, and I had to admit it lost a little bit of magic when I found out years later that Rogers and Hammerstein had written it for South Pacific.
I knew the cockeyed optimist gene had pretty much passed me by, but I’d still imagined that Tess and Rosie and I would keep walking together forever. We’d be like that unofficial letter carrier motto cliché. Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of early mornings would keep us from the swift completion of our appointed walks. Sure, one day we’d get old, or older, but we’d keep on keepin’ on, still fit and feisty after all these years. We’d go through some tough stuff along the way because everybody did. But whatever was or wasn’t happening in our lives, as long as The Wildwater Walking Club took it step by step, we’d hang together and eventually we’d be fine.
Now I wasn’t so sure. Maybe I’d been hoping to be saved after all. Not by a guy but by my walking friends.
Tess usually blurted out whatever was on her mind. While there were pros and cons to that, at least you knew where you stood with her. But Rosie held things in. There should be a rule that if you yell at someone, you have to tell them why. Instead of making said someone feel like crap by trying to figure it out like a third grader.
As soon as I got home, I peeled off my workout clothes and put on the T-shirt I’d slept in last night. I climbed into bed and pulled the sheets up to my chin.
I stared up at the cracked white movie screen of my ceiling and alternated between feeling sorry for myself and watching a montage play out. Tess installing a clothesline for me. Rosie planting my first lavender plants. The three of us lifting weights and stretching in my garage. Our trip to Sequim. Our trip to Provence. What if we never went anywhere together again? What if we all stopped walking? Or worse, what if the two of them started walking without me?
Maybe I needed a guy to save me after all. Preferably one who liked to walk.
Either that or maybe I’d have to take Tess’s advice and start figuring things out for myself. I hated that. I supposed I could actually call Rosie and ask her what I’d done to make her so mad, even if I wasn’t sure I necessarily wanted to hear it. Maybe I’d get on a roll and call Rick, too, and together we could calmly and companionably figure out what to do with the Noreens, as if we had joint custody and wanted to work together to put the statues’ needs first.
Instead I took a nap.
I woke up about half an hour later. “It was only a power nap,” I said to the crack in my ceiling. “Exactly what I needed to get myself heading in the right direction again.”
I jogged down the hallway and jumped in the shower. As the hot water rained down on me, a long stretch of ragged crying took me by surprise. I tried to look at it as an extra cleansing. Then I banged my head against the shower tiles a few times, since I didn’t happen to have a brick wall around. I washed my hair, conditioned it, washed it again, conditioned it again. Maybe I’d stay here for the rest of the day, just washing and conditioning, until I ran out of hot water or my hair fell out, whichever came first.
Eventually, I just got bored. I wrapped a towel around my head, another one around the rest of me.
I dripped my way into my bedroom. I flashed back to right after I took my buyout, which felt like a bazillion years ago. At the time, I didn’t think I could sink any lower into the depths of despair. I’d stood naked in front of the full-length mirror on the inside of my closet door and taken a good look. And then I’d slammed the door shut. But not before I realized that I’d lost myself to a downward spiral of sixty-hour work weeks, slovenly behavior, and really crappy taste in men.
In some ways, so much had changed. I opened my closet door, dropped both towels to the floor and checked myself out in the mirror. I looked pretty damn good, if I did say so myself. Leaner and lighter and fitter. I yanked my scale out from under a pile of sneakers. I stepped right up on it and stood tall, instead of leaning back a little to try to lose a few pounds. Not bad at all. I mean, not awesome, but not self-esteem-crushingly awful either.
Physically, I seemed to be moving in the right direction. If only the parts I couldn’t see would catch up. For that, I knew I had miles to go.
“The woods are lovely, dark and deep,” I whispered as the tears came back. “But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep.” So spare, so beautiful, so heartbreakingly true.
I’d memorized Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” back in fifth grade. At least I thought it was fifth. I didn’t think I’d really understood the poem way back then. To be completely honest, the part about giving the harness bells a shake always made me think of Santa Claus.
But I got it now. My journey wasn’t over. I’d been sleepwalking through most of my life, and it was way past time to knock it off. I had work to do. A rhythm to find. A life to cobble together.
I picked up my towel, wrapped it around me like a cocoon, and got ready to start emerging like a freakin’ butterfly.
A note was perched on my kitchen island:
N‑
Kent and I stopped by with the intention of joining you for breakfast. Alas, we’ve moved on to greener pastures. Once you’ve visited the grocery store, do let us know and we’ll try again.
Hope you’ve finished pouting and you’re back to your semi-sunny self again. Tell Rick his pickle ball lesson awaits!
Finally, lovely as those statues are, less is more when it comes to yard art. As in there goes the neighborhood. Kent and I agree that they would, however, do quite well at the lavender farm store.
Love,
Mom
“Do let us know and we’ll try again,” I said in my best imitation of my mother’s voice. No wonder I couldn’t find a rhythm to my life. It didn’t matter whether she was whiny Lois or luscious Lo—nobody could piss me off like my mother. Hopefully she and Kent had stopped by while I was out walking, which was invasive enough, as opposed to peeking in while I was power napping or crying in the shower or weighing myself.
I filled a glass with filtered water from the front of my fridge, chugged it down while I stared at my blurry reflection in the refrigerator door. I had to admit that wrapped in a towel I looked more like an emerging burrito than a butterfly.
From a health and fitness point of view, the contents of your refrigerator say a lot about your priorities. If your fridge is stocked with a rainbow of fruits and vegetables, you’re probably bursting with health, both physical and mental. If you have a freezer full of homemade healthy dinners, in glass or silicone containers that are labeled and dated, you’re not only forward-thinking and organized, but you’re frontloading your chances for success. If your contents consist of wilted lettuce and three rotting apples, you might have good intentions, but your follow-through needs some work. If your refrigerator is overflowing with processed food with long lists of unpronounceable ingredients in tiny fonts you can’t read even with your cheaters, you’ve got some serious changes in front of you.
I took a deep breath and opened my freezer drawer. A huge bag of frozen mixed berries smiled up at me. It was a good start. Some studies showed that frozen berries are even healthier than fresh, because freezing them makes their antioxidants more available.
Odds and ends of frozen vegetables circled around the berries. An ancient box of baking soda had dumped most of its contents. I found a forgotten pint of non-dairy ice cream called Half-Baked, which I tried not to think of as an apt description of my life. I popped off the round cardboard top, thinking a snack might be in order, only to find that Half-Baked had been hanging around long enough to have full-on freezer burn. I considered this, decided I did have standards after all. I lobbed it into the sink and turned the hot water on. I waited until I was sure every non-dairy bit had washed away, so I couldn’t change my mind later.
Back at the freezer, an army of chopped spinach blocks crowded together in one corner. Their life-enhancing nutrients were locked and loaded and waiting to be released, but they were frozen solid and inaccessible in their present condition. I could totally, totally relate. I seemed to be feeling an awful lot of camaraderie with frozen food lately. I wondered if I should take it as a sign that I should pitch my double-wide tent in Antarctica.
I pushed the freezer closed and opened the refrigerator door. I’d finished the last of my almond milk last night, so a short roundish jar of Dijon mustard and a taller jar of peanut butter were the only contents. To my sad and twisted mind, they looked like a couple.
“I hope you’re not doing anything in there that I wouldn’t do,” I said.
And then I laughed like a chucklehead so I wouldn’t start to cry again.