geraniums, were painted the same blue as the front door. I loved the place now as much as I had when we moved in, but I was in no hurry to go inside now that Gordy wouldn’t be there. When I cut the engine, the last of my energy seemed to go with it. I just sat there, arms clinging to the steering wheel.
“You’re going to have to get out and go inside sometime, honey,” Moira said. “Look at it this way, you’ll never have to wait for the bathroom again.”
Not very comforting, but true. My house was probably the only one left in the Cove with only one bathroom. It was one of the reasons Roger had wanted to dump it. Right around the same time he’d decided to dump me. In the years we’d lived there, I had bonded with the house like it was an old friend. I knew every creak. Every draft. But to Roger, the house had been nothing but an investment and, as with me, the time eventually came to trade it in on something that had a higher market value. He’d traded the house for a high-rise condo overlooking Lake Michigan. He’d traded me for a twenty-one-year old flight attendant named Suzie with a z.
Finally, Moira got out of the car and came around to the driver’s side and opened my door. To save her the trouble, I dragged myself out.
“Geeze, girlfriend, you really are in bad shape.” She put her arm around my shoulders. “Come on over and I’ll scramble us some eggs and shake us up some martinis. A couple of those and you’ll forget you have a kid.”
“Tempting, but I think I’ll just go inside and wallow a little.” I didn’t want to forget. At that moment, with the summer coming to an end and my nest newly empty, everything just seemed too precious. What I really wanted to do was put on my oldest, softest pair of cotton pajamas and climb into bed with a couple of photo albums. I truly did intend to wallow.
By late September, with the leaves starting to turn on the maple tree outside my living room window, I began to think there had to be a limit to how much a woman should be allowed to wallow. Not that I hadn’t been out of the house since Gordy had deserted it. And I’m not just talking about the twice-weekly trips to the post office to send fresh baked cookies and care packages to Bloomington.
Whitefish Cove wasn’t exactly a bedroom community, miles from real civilization where the cul-de-sac ruled and there wasn’t a decent restaurant you didn’t have to wrestle traffic on the freeway to get to. We were really a village that was only fifteen miles from the trendy east side of Milwaukee and just a few miles more to downtown. But I’d done the “meeting old girlfriends for lunch” thing to death. Moira, who’d recently started to collect art, had dragged me to every new gallery show in town. I’d gone to enough regional theater performances to fill the bottom of my purse with programs and parking stubs. I hadn’t turned down one single invitation since I’d left Gordy in Bloomington. I’d even issued a few, determined not to become a forty-one year old recluse. But I was quickly becoming sick of hearing about how lucky I was to be divorced with my only child two states away.
“Why, you can do just about anything you want to do,” a friend from my college days exclaimed over her basil, tomato and fresh mozzarella salad. I’d taken the initiative of inviting her and a former roommate to lunch at the latest trendy sensation—an overpriced café in a building that had once been a garage for city buses. The huge door at the front was left open at the owner’s discretion, which was one of the big draws. The excitement! The suspense! It was rumored that he’d opened it during a March snowstorm last year and there was a big buzz going on about whether he’d leave it open for the first snowstorm this year. Personally, I couldn’t get past the fact that I was eating a fourteen-dollar sandwich in a place where someone once drained motor oil from a city bus.
“Like what?” I asked after I’d swallowed a bite of my baby spinach and radish sprouts on asiago foccacia.
“Well—anything. You’re footloose and fancy free,” pointed out the former roommate who was trying to overcome bulimia, so she was eating nothing at all.
“Well, I have been considering finding a new kind of volunteer work—”
My former roommate laughed. “That’s Lauren. Always the good girl.”
These kinds of conversations did not make me feel better about my situation. Neither did spending the money on overpriced sandwiches since Gordy’s support had started going into a trust on the day he started college and the maintenance Roger had to pay me was in nineteen-ninety-six dollars. So I went back to wallowing and baking until Gordy called one afternoon. I was absurdly pleased to hear his voice when I picked up the phone.
“Ma,” he said before I could tell him how happy I was that he called, “you gotta stop sending all the cookies. One of my roommates saw a roach last night.”
“You’re not eating my cookies?” I asked with a modicum of mommy devastation.
“Ma—come on. Who could keep up? We get a package like every three days.”
Perhaps I’d gone a little overboard, I thought as I eyed the two batches of oatmeal cookies cooling on the kitchen counter. “Okay,” I vowed, “no more cookies. So, how are things going?”
“Things are cool, Ma. Gotta go, though. Class. See ya.”
“But—”
But he was gone.
I packed the cookies up and took them next door to Moira’s.
“Listen, hon, I know you’ve got time on your hands,” she said as she chewed on her fifth cookie, “but you can’t bring stuff like this over here. I have to be able to get into my new red dress for that cocktail party next month. CPAs and their wives. Big Yawn. I plan on being the most exciting aspect of the event and these cookies aren’t helping.”
That was the night I started watching the shopping channels on TV. Looking forward to finding out what the deal of the day was at midnight was about all the excitement I was getting. One night I found myself reaching for the phone while the on-air personality rhapsodized about a kitchen tool that would replace just about every other implement in the house—and all for $19.95. I snatched my hand back and vowed right then and there that there were going to be some changes made.
With butterflies in my stomach, the next day I called the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee campus, ordered a catalogue of courses, and made an appointment to speak with a counselor in the department of continuing education.
Two days later, my heart did one of those funny little stalls when I opened the mailbox to find the catalogue had arrived. Oddly, I was not comforted that the postal rules hadn’t changed since I was a twelve. Good things, like free makeup samples, took forever to arrive. Things that you’d just as soon not see, like report cards—and catalogues that were going to force you to start thinking about where your life was going—showed up in no time at all.
I took the catalogue to the breakfast nook, poured myself a cup of coffee, and started to page through it. After a half-hour I was wishing I’d made decaf. I felt lost and nervous as a high school freshman trying to find her locker.
I’d always intended to finish college someday. I’d even taken a college course here and there over the years. I’d sit in lectures thinking about the Halloween costume I could be sewing or the party I could be planning or the soccer game I was missing or the committee I could be chairing. Pretty soon I’d drop out, vowing to go back again when Gordy got older. Well, now Gordy was older and it was going to be different. It had to be. When Gordy graduated from college, maintenance from Roger would stop and I’d have to buy him out of the house if I wanted to stay on Seagull Lane. Which I did. I intended for
