Essays

Like most married couples, my husband Jonathan and I have many pacts—no cheating, no bad-mouthing each others’ parents, no going to bed mad. Our agreements are the glue that holds us together.

One of our pacts is to never take up bird-watching. Jonathan and I spent way too much time as kids trapped in some swamp while our parents cooed over coots.

We once took a hike with our friend, Peter, an avid birder. Eyes downcast, my husband and I listened politely as he droned on about plumage and wing span.

A friend of mine introduced us. Well, that’s not entirely true, Sherry only mentioned him in an email and left it up to me. He was a good guy, she said, and why didn’t I give him a call?

So I wrote down his contact info on a yellow Post-it note, filing it away for sometime, someday, perhaps. At this moment, I was too gun-shy to initiate anything with anyone. In fact, the last time I’d tried to connect via a friend’s referral, it turned out horribly; I ended up wishing I hadn’t.

Wednesday Night Dart Night. Single and in my early thirties, a friend who had experienced my competitive nature and lived to tell the tale suggested dart league at the local Irish pub could be a fun place to meet men. While I did love the idea of throwing sharp pointy things, I remained dubious. Meeting men in a bar sounded so...meeting men in a bar. But I was tired of drinking café lattes at Starbucks alone with a good book while not-so-secretly trolling for sensitive types. (Sorry, “girl alone with book at Starbucks,” we all know what you’re doing).

He’s no romantic, my husband. We had only been an item for a couple months when that insight hit me over the head.

Picture a candlelight dinner in my tiny apartment, the two of us seated on the floor at the coffee table, across from each other. Dinner is a smorgasbord of snacks—lovers’ treats: olives, smoked oysters, gourmet crackers, special cheese, and wine. The music of a favorite Canadian singer spills into the room. Hey, I didn’t say I wasn’t a romantic.

I look at the woman sitting in my aisle of the plane. She is young. She is familiar. My god, she’s ravishing.

“Wait, are you...?

She nods. “Yep. I’m you, 20 years younger. Surprise!”

I gasp and flop down in the seat beside her. Okay, maybe she isn’t ravishing, but she’s 20 years younger than me, and that is about as ravishing as I ever was.

We gather one evening near Christmas, as we have for some years now, and as we will for many more, come snow, sleet, hail, or 21st century worse. Postal workers have got nothing on us. We are seven ordinary women (extraordinary, by some measures), brought together by one truly uncommon one. The bright and beautiful Marianne is the reason why our lives have intersected at all—six degrees of connectedness.

This is supposed to be relaxing. I’m allowing this woman to press her fingers into my face. She’s criticizing the parts of it I already overanalyzed in the bathroom mirror this morning before plastering my features with foundation and spackle and hoping for the best. “Your skin is dry,” she tells me. “You need to take care of yourself.” I squirm under her touch. Funny, I thought I was taking care of myself. Nevertheless, my facade seems to be cracking.

My parents had dragged me to a Bar Mitzvah in San Francisco—the kid was the son of a family friend and I was not given a choice about attending. As a sophisticate of 17, I had no interest whatsoever in being there. When the ceremony ended, I separated myself from my parents as soon as I could, dodging past the bejeweled and well-coiffed women, the balding middle-aged men, and the packs of 13-year-olds who jockeyed for position in front of the mounds of chopped liver and towering platters of cookies.

Legend has it that kings in ancient Thailand would deviously bestow the “gift” of a rare and sacred albino elephant on certain unfavored people. Because the white elephant was so costly to maintain and not permitted to work (being sacred and all), the sorry recipient would eventually end up in financial ruin.

Our family’s summer home on the coast of Maine was often referred to as a white elephant by my grandfather. As a child I didn’t understand the expression, but the house was big and white, so the imagery made sense to me.

This room is temporary. Every part of it. The single window that opens to the slant of the roof. The bed beneath, clouded with pillows. The sealed brick fireplace, hearth strewn with fabric flower petals. The mirror I’m looking into while not-so-artfully applying eye shadow. And every part is mine for the summer.

But nothing worth remembering has happened here. Outside of this space, I’ve had months of new people, live music, walking bridges, writing in coffee shops, and relaxing on rooftops along the South Carolina coast.

In mid-summer’s boiling stupor, I anchor here, along a bend on South Carolina’s Cooper River, beneath moody oaks and droopy moss, in the company of hushed monks and whirling dragonflies. I wake at 5:15 to make it to 5:30 prayer, or “Lauds,” telling myself that if I can get up at that ungodly hour to swim during the week, I should be able to do it for the Lord. But it’s not for the Lord that I am here.

Have you ever wanted something you can’t possess? Of course you have. Silly question. Owen’s dump truck in the sandbox, Fiona’s Girbaud jeans in middle school, Kyle’s test scores, Carrie’s VW, a sky-high piece of carrot cake, a perfect body, a way with words, someone else’s wife, husband, house, life.

My close friend Amy, whom I’ve known for almost 30 years, sent an apologetic letter last week explaining why she hasn’t written. She reports that she is drowning in minutiae. Three pages describe a maelstrom of dusting, weeding, pruning, exhuming kitty litter, changing beds, ferrying junk from the girls’ rooms to the basement, an endless litany of tasks. She’s also had to collect water samples from phantom pools which have mysteriously appeared at the perimeter of her yard.

My widowed friend Olivia often talked about her son, a talented Portland musician ten years older than me. He made the trip back to see his mother more frequently than most married sons, with his flutes, violin, and sax stowed in the trunk of his red Prelude. Over the course of a week or so back home in Oakland he’d play Bach duets with her, fix the basement plumbing, help her lug potting soil or fruit trees home from the nearby nursery to add to what was already a lush backyard garden.