(Re)MAKING LOVE: a sex after sixty story
By Mary L. Tabor
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Copyright © 2011 by Mary L. Tabor
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(Re)MAKING LOVE: a sex after sixty story. Copyright © 2011 by Mary L. Tabor. All rights reserved. Published in the United States of America by Outer Banks Publishing Group – Outer Banks/Raleigh.
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All of the characters and events in this book are real, and any resemblance to actual events or actual persons living or dead, is intentional.
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Second Edition
eISBN-13 978-1-4524-9694-8
ISBN-10 098299317X
ISBN-13 978-0-9829931-7-0
July 2011
(Re)Making Love: a sex after sixty story is luminously insightful page after page. Vivian Gornick says in her slender book, The End of the Novel of Love, that nowadays it’s not possible to write a love story—we’re all too cynical and wised up—but I think Mary Tabor has written one that’s uniquely beautiful and moving in both its form and its content. It’s Eat, Pray, Love for the baby boomers. –Marly Swick
In this extraordinary memoir’s jigsaw pieces—the internet dates, emails, notes, disasters, recipes, poems, philosophies, romantic comedies, dreams, the Obamas, and yes, even the kitchen sink—Mary has found a way to translate the desire to be found (Write it!) into her own modern fairy tale, this book, its slipper, a perfect fit. —Randall Brown
Mary has written a memoir of the highest quality. Her experiences and the way she brings them to us remind us why we bother to read in the first place: empathy is better than callousness, trust more rewarding than cynicism; adventure food for the soul. —Kelly Abbott
Praise for (Re)MAKING LOVE
(Re)Making Love - A love story for any age, August 15, 2010
By K. Mayfield (London, England) *****
Mary Tabor's (Re)Making Love is one of the best memoirs I've read in quite a long while - and I've read more than a few. I found myself fiercely cheerleading her on as she fought her way through an unwanted separation from her husband of 21 years. Her writing is smart, funny, lyrical and at times, heartbreaking.
How many times have you read a blurb that used the words "unflinchingly honest" when describing a memoir? I always say to myself, well of course, shouldn't it be? But often they are not. (Re)Making Love is that - and more. Mary puts beauty into ugly honesty, laughter into sad honesty and hope into painful honesty.
There is even a surprise ending!
I highly recommend this book.
Another Beautiful Book from Mary Tabor, August 10, 2010
By Kyle Minor "reader" (Columbus, Ohio) *****
Here is a book that stretches the promise of the lyric essay to book length, and the result, for the reader, is at least sixty-seven varieties of pleasure. (Re)Making Love is intelligent, occasionally heartbreaking, and ultimately inspiring. And, I almost forgot: Sexy. I want to be like Mary Tabor when I grow up.
Wonderful Story, August 10, 2010
By mdalton322 *****
Mary Tabor, starts her excellent book with a reference to the movie Charade, and ends with an equally effective metaphor from the same movie. There is nothing about Mary's insightful memoir that is a charade, of course, and that is just part of what makes (Re)Making Love a book that is deserving of the reader's attention. Mary Tabor has written a memoir that removes the veil from who we are as people, and who we are as people in relationships. There is no charade in the search for who one truly is, the writer knows this; a remarkable achievement in an age when the existential search for the soul has been mitigated to cliché adventures in a dark and stormy night. There is nothing cliché about what Mary Tabor has written and there is nothing cliché about the desire to understand the connection, the longing of romance and desire, that one person has with another person. Her story is wholly unique beautiful and imaginative. Not only has Mary remade love in her novel, she has remade the medium in which an author can communicate with her audience. (Re)Making Love: started as a blog and has been made, or remade, into a wonderful book that all should read. The work itself is a remaking of how we conceive of the memoir and how we remove the charade from our self.
A Story of True Love, January 16, 2011
By Wart *****
Mary has shared with us in her book, "(Re)Making Love: A Sex After Sixty Story" that with hope love and forgiveness that everything is possible. I found her story uplifting as I go through my personal journey in life. It made me realize that those people who truly love you will forgive you, stand by you and support you always. Most of all there is always hope. Mary shows us that by living life and facing its challenges we grow and become better even from our personal failures. A true love story you must read with a real life happy ever after ending.
The Best Is Yet to Come, August 27,2010
By D. A. Hickman (Indianapolis) *****
Mary L. Tabor is charting new territory with her lovely memoir RL:SASS. Her story proves that beginnings occur in our lives at any age, that change comes when least expected and somehow we must endure and thrive. Her story is our story: indeed, a universal story of transition, finding peace, and discovering life anew. This is a book to read slowly, appreciating the subtle and the not-so-subtle. If you are looking for a kindred spirit, look no further. Women the world over will enjoy this book, regardless of age, location, personal circumstances. I'm hoping to watch her guest appearance on Oprah. Are you listening, Oprah?
From T.S. Eliot to The Wizard of Oz, Mary Tabor’s Great Read, October 24, 2010 *****
By Seymour M. Nemirow
Nietzsche and T.S. Eliot created hope and beauty in the face of modern despair. Mary Tabor has woven their prose and poetry into her own finely textured reflections on the near despair of lost loved ones--one dearly loved human being after another, early in life. Not enough: The fates lash one more stone around her neck; the love of her life loves her but insists they live apart, which they do.
How can the reader, not to mention the author, go on with her life or this book? I put the book down. Can I handle such tragedy, sadness? Yet there was something quite engaging between the lines, pulling me in. As the days and weeks passed, I found her story increasingly engaging, eloquent, witty. Written with high intellect. And using, film buff that she is, a kind of indirect lighting illuminating her life--romcom films, fairly tales, dreams, N.Y. Times headlines.
Tabor began a blog interacting with readers a few years ago. She highly respects her readers. It showed in her blog and now in the book, enhanced by lovely graphics, photos, tighter continuity and clearer context. Her emotional journey made me root for her one day, mock her the next, finally suspend judgment as she wove a tale postmodern yet romantic, Four Quartets and Hollywood, existential angst and quantum mechanics, why lovers cheat and why Christmas in Paris is a magic show. Above all we are detectives, partners with this Sam Spade (I'm showing my age) investigating who if anyone is guilty, and will be the next sentence, so to speak. The passion for her and us is in the search. Read it.
Martin Nemirow
Former book reviewer, Hartford Courant, Los Angeles Times
Memoir as poetry, January 18, 2011
By DCer (Washington, DC USA) *****
When I bought Mary Tabor's, (Re)Making Love: A Sex After Sixty Story, I had certain expectations about the book, and I was not disappointed. But I got more -- much more -- than I expected. I discovered that this memoir had a punch to it and transcended its own subject. It has subtle levels of complexity that I'm still discovering as I reread it.
There's no doubt that this is indeed the story of a woman in her sixties suddenly cut loose from her moorings, and her sometimes tragic, sometimes funny, road to finding love and herself again. The book is interspersed with literary references and some unlikely things (hint: has to do with cooking). It's also richly entertaining. Mary tells her story courageously and with breathtaking candor, and a surface reading of the book will be very enjoyable and rewarding.
But a deeper reading of the book -- beyond the plot -- will yield more, where you will discover themes and insights that Mary did not always consciously intend to reveal. This, though, is the stuff of great literature and writing, where the greatest insights are often gleaned and discerned by the reader who dares to plumb the psyche of the writer. It is through this that we internalize her experiences, recognizing and discovering ourselves, not just for how we have responded to life's crises, but how we might. There are cautionary tales here (e.g., Internet dating) that may just influence some readers on how not to react in a crisis.
Daisy Hickman, of the SunnyRoomStudio blog, interviewed Mary last October and characterized (Re)Making Love as a "living memoir." This is not as obvious as it seems. Mary began her book as a blog, writing about events as they unfurled and whirled. In the epilogue in her book, she writes that her daughter and son-in-law suggested that ". . . I write about my journey while I lived it. They said 'Blog,' while I wept, and I did." Thus, it is indeed a living memoir, full of uncensored, raw emotions and the stumbles and falls during her journey.
Yet, it's still more than that. Mary's exquisite writing skill infuses her memoir with poetic qualities. If you approach it this way, it will enhance your reading experience.
The book begins at the end-- the end of her marriage. In Chapter One, "I Need to Live Alone," -- the roundelay of her memoir -- Mary lays it out in stark simplicity: "I had been married twenty-one years when D. [her husband] announced, 'I need to live alone.' Oh so Greta Garbo. There was absolutely no noise." Announced; just like that.
From there Mary takes us on her journey, reaching back to her childhood, her losses of family, her gaining of family, her courtship with D. and the aftermath of the Announcement.
Thus, this is a book that I took in portions so that I could absorb more. In one particularly intimate and poignant chapter, "Deceptive Cadence," Mary skillfully weaves in Shubert's Opus 90, No. 3, in G Flat, which has much to do with "D." The three short pages of the chapter stopped me flat in my tracks. I had to read it again, but first downloaded the piece, and then played it while I read it. I was deeply moved-- more than I expected. I suggest the same for other readers; the results are palpable. I learned later that Mary wrote the chapter in cadence to the piece.
While Mary became unmoored, she did not become unhinged. She made mistakes and sometimes reckless decisions with the best of intentions: (Re)making love and getting off that awful island of Lost. She attributes her not completely losing it not to herself, but to her metaphoric passport. In the chapter, "The Last Place You Look," she writes:
"Here's how I think of my passport: On the front is a picture of my father. My picture lies under his and under my mother's. Remembering from where I've come has helped. My father's love, my childhood with them lay inside that passport to my destination."
And her children and their families helped too by keeping her under close watch, oftentimes helplessly as they learned of some of her missteps (essentially always with men), but their entreaties sometimes fell on deaf ears. Mary channeled the teenager within.
But while Mary is taken advantage of and sometimes mistreated in this book, she's no victim, nor ever invokes that role. She knows what she's doing and the risks she's taking. And she takes action when it's necessary. One particularly delicious instance is when a suitor, m.r.s., a widower "still married" as Mary soon learns, dumps her (in an email, of course) after a briefly promising start. He writes that he feels "badly" about doing this. A badly chosen word, "badly," to use with a professional writer. Her parting shot is searing. No spoilers here. Read it in the chapter, "I'm Cooked."
The book transcends itself because a deep reading of it reveals lessons and insights that affects all of us, regardless of age or gender. I bought copies for my two adult sons, as I wanted them to get their own unique experiences out of it.
As one of Mary's readers wrote of (Re)Making Love, "(Mary's) experiences and the way she brings them to us remind us why we bother to read in the first place . . ." At the end of a video interview posted on her website, Mary says so modestly of (Re)Making Love, "I hope it's worth your time." It is; it is. Her courageous -- and funny, insightful, thought-provoking, shocking and soothing --memoir is so well worth our time.
In closing, it's notable that Mary quotes Nietzsche often, and in Chapter 10, "Bliss," she informs us that Nietzsche uses the term "bliss" 26 times in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. (No, she had not found it then.) Nietzsche also used the term "joy" many times (from the German "lust," not in the common English usage, but rather as an active, participative joy). In Nietzsche's book is the famous poem "Zarathustra's Roundelay," where joy is used very hopefully:
O man, take care!
What does the deep midnight declare?
"I was asleep--
From a deep dream I woke and swear:
The world is deep,
Deeper than day had been aware.
Deep is its woe;
Joy--deeper yet than agony:
Woe implores: Go!
But all joy wants eternity--
Wants deep, wants deep eternity."
This joy Mary does find and continues to experience. You can experience it with her by not just reading, but absorbing this transformational book.
Oh, the paradox . . . January 27, 2011
By R. Pluta *****
Mary's well-written emotional story is a must-read for people who appreciate intelligence and all the good things in life.
The author takes us on a curve-filled tale accompanied with poetry, movies, art, music, food (with recipes), nostalgia and reminiscences both sweet and sour.
As with all masterful compositions, this one holds treasure greater than what the title alone suggests. Some people report reading the book at one sitting. However, this book is meant to be savored over time with the knowledge that all journeys have a beginning and an ending. When it's over, you'll want more.
Refreshingly Romantic, February 1, 2011
By annaliz *****
Heartache and the brothers Grimm, loss and John Donne, the salving grace of the romantic comedy - Mary Tabor intelligently interweaves the fragments of a broken heart in her memoir, "(Re)Making Love." The effect is a distinctly affecting love story, where to read Mary is to wish your best friend had the author's wealth of allusions always at her disposal, or Mary's elegance with a phrase. Although her story of love lost and found has a well-tread tradition behind it, like a good romantic comedy, it's the experience of indulging in "Love" that proves an unparalleled joy for the reader looking to lose her (or him)self in one romantic's unapologetic search for the fulfillment that yes, you'll come to declare, she deserves. References to online dating and modern films may place the tale firmly in the 21st-century, but one of the work's more endearing qualities is its equally firm rejection of 21st-century irony (no Mary, don't ever become more `ironized'). Hipsters may moan over our inability to connect in a world where the threat of a disconnected laptop, BlackBerry or Smartphone spells disaster - Mary, no less "modern," is able to indulge without the whine, touching on clichés without ever becoming one herself. LOVE is one of the most difficult concepts, sentiments, burdens a writer can choose to tackle so directly, and consequently, the most unfailingly popular. Mary, in her fearlessness, has advanced the challenge to expert level - not only does she dare write about LOVE, but does so earnestly. Before or after 60, the earnest reader will respond to this recognition of kind, finding his or her own satisfaction, alongside the author, in "Love." I HIGHLY recommend it!
A Feast of a Book, May 11, 2011
By KatyO “books books books” (Galway, Eire) *****
My review does not have the greatest title, but here's what I mean - Mary L. Tabor's '(Re)Making Love: A Sex After Sixty Story' is one of those books that you just have to read twice.
The first to be gobbled in one sitting, quickly, eagerly, willing the outcome to be a good one (and it is).
The second, to take time over, slowly and softly reveling in her marvelous writing. What a writer!
People often say that truth is stranger than fiction, and so it is in the case of this memoir.
The author's self shines through as she tells her tale without the slightest hint of self-pity, admirable indeed under such a set of circumstances.
What's more, she mixes and spices and weaves a story interlaced with fairy tales, movies, recipes and dreams. And the result is a truly inspirational book - moving, intimate, philosophical, elegant and honest.
I really loved reading this, and you will too.
For my mother, my father and my sister, who would have helped if they’d known.
Prologue
For this second edition that comes now one year after its first publication, I would like to share with you as you embark on the journey of (Re)Making Love what I have learned about living within time’s limits from writing this book and from living beyond its first publication. Rabbi Hillel, who spoke these words 2,000 years ago, has been widely quoted ever since, perhaps most notably in my lifetime by the ilk of Primo Levi and Robert F. Kennedy.
If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, then what am I? And if not now, when?
Truly knowing what these words mean has come from the place of not knowing. And by this I mean that I have had to live this journey without the full understanding of their plain spoken sense. I have had to learn the hard way: through the good, the bad and the foolish that this memoir recounts.
Mary L. Tabor
July 2011
Table of Contents
Something Old for Something New
You Cannot Get Out of the Game
Chapter
1
I Need to Live Alone
I love romantic comedies: weep over them, quote their dialogue without attribution in conversation as when I am with a man who says he wants to be friends with me, “You actually believe that men and women can be friends?”
When Harry Met Sally: Harry: “What I’m saying is—and this is not a come-on in any way, shape, or form—is that men and women can’t be friends, because the sex part always gets in the way.”
I collect music scores of Rom-Coms, buy the DVDs and watch them over and over again. Now sure, the appeal to me and others is this: girl meets boy and LOVE results, inexorable, indomitable, irrefutable, life-changing LOVE.
I was sixty years old when my husband—let’s refer to him as D.—dumped me—old story, I know. But wait, as the commercials for fancy French Fry cutters say.
I begin writing about my separation from D. on August 25, my parents’ anniversary. They were married fifty-four years. Can you believe it? I am alone and reading The New York Times in my condo where I live now. I find this: AP report, dateline: Chamonix, France (Isn’t that where Cary meets Audrey in Charade’s first scene? “Can’t he do something constructive like start an avalanche or something?” Reggie, played by Audrey Hepburn asks Silvie after young Jean Louis shoots her in the face with his water gun. Jean Louis shoots Peter, played by Cary Grant, as well.) The AP reports on an avalanche that “swept down a major summit in the French Alps before dawn on Sunday, leaving eight climbers missing and presumed dead along a trail often used to reach Mont Blanc . . . One survivor, Marco Delfini, an Italian guide, said he saw ‘a wall of ice coming towards us, and then we were carried 200 meters.’ An injured survivor Nicholas Duquesnes, told Agence France-Presse, ‘There was absolutely no noise; it was very disturbing. We only had time to swerve to the right before being mowed down.’ ”
I had been married twenty-one years when D. announced, “I need to live alone.” Oh so Greta Garbo. There was absolutely no noise. I was sixty years old and had been chasing him around the bedroom—to no avail—for ten years. Bill Maher in a comedy routine on HBO not so long after he had been dumped by ABC only to arise again with Politically Incorrect, said in a joke about older women, “menopause.” Get it? Men A Pause. Yeah, I got it.
The French Fry Cutter salesman raises his voice on the commercial in my head: “But wait, there’s more”: I decide to date. I want a man who believes that men and women in love must be friends. But Harry is right that the sex part matters.
The hell with Bill Maher.
Chapter
2
The Princess and Her House
But first, we sell our house—against my wishes—and I buy a condo in the Penn Quarter of DC.
I live a short walk from the White House. It’s on my route to my teaching job at George Washington University. As I write this and look back to 2006 when my life fell apart, Michelle and Barack Obama live in the House. Go to The Daily Green (thedailygreen.com) to see a picture of the beautiful princess Michelle in her garden on the south lawn of the White House. A princess should live in a white house. She says, “Every single person from Prince Charles on down was excited we are planting a garden.”
I live in the condo I bought when D. and I sold the old lady of a house in Adams Morgan. But I was not there for the leaving of the house. I took a cab to the airport and flew to Columbia, Missouri, for a visiting writers job. On the curb stood my daughter Sarah and her husband Ryan and my husband D. In the trunk was the big suitcase with as many clothes and books I could fit. In another truck owned by Town and Country Movers—the moving company that moved us into the house and would move us apart—were all my files, my computer, the chair I sit in now to write at the computer and one stuffed chair from my attic study. I was moving to what I thought was a furnished house.
D. would move the furniture and dishes and paintings and photos we had into our two separate condos two and a half blocks apart. But I would not live in mine for one academic year.
And what an education that year was.
In olden times, when wishing still did some good, there lived a king whose daughters were all beautiful, but the youngest was so beautiful that the sun itself, who, indeed, has seen so much, marveled every time it shone upon her face. In the vicinity of the king’s castle there was a large, dark forest, and in this forest, beneath an old linden tree, there was a well. In the heat of the day the princess would go out into the forest and sit on the edge of the cool well.
And so “The Frog-King” begins, and, yes, this is the same story as “The Frog-Prince.”
We are in the game of Charades. Two different versions of the same tale: when wishing still did some good . . .
In June 2006, two months before I moved to Missouri to teach, two months before the actual physical separation, when our house in Adams Morgan was sold and I moved out of town, I made up a vignette:
Dreamlike.
In this less-than-perfect perfect town where the husbands take their bikes to the train or their wives pick them up in cars, where the storefronts have signs that say things like Simply Good or Hats Galore or Pink and Blue, the dream of adultery understood unfolds: Lily is having an affair with Gordon, her best friend’s husband. During a party that this friend, Skilly, is having, Lilly sits on Gordon’s lap. The adulterous pair Gordon and Lilly become entwined rapidly whenever they are together. They hide, skulk—a word Lilly heard in a British romantic comedy that describes what they must do to be together. But at the party Skilly can be seen more often than usual with Fergus who is married to Lilly. When Lily leaves the bathroom, she sees Fergus with Skilly, his hand in hers.
Suddenly Lilly knows they are all free.
She tells Gordon, “Skilly and Fergus. Yes, I know you don’t believe it, but yes, Skilly and Fergus.”
Gordon will ride his bike to the train in the morning but what will he do about Skilly when it is Lilly’s vulva that he craves?
Nietzsche says, But thought is one thing, the deed is another, and the image of the deed still another: the wheel of causality does not roll between them.
I knew when I made up the vignette that my husband did not want me—or so I thought. I created a fantasy that we would each find other partners and simply exchange.
Do Sa Do. Change partners.
Here is what Dorothy Parker had to say:
General Review of the Sex Situation
Woman wants monogamy;
Man delights in novelty.
Love is woman’s moon and sun;
Man has other forms of fun.
Woman lives but in her lord;
Count to ten, and man is bored.
With this the gist and sum of it.
What earthly good can come of it?
I prefer D. H. Lawrence:
But firm at the centre
My heart was found;
My own to her perfect
Heartbeat bound,
Like a magnet’s keeper
Closing the round.
Do Sa Do. Change houses.
Here is what I found in August 2006 in Missouri. Consider this a letter I wrote you after I’d arrived:
The furnished house I rented sight unseen turns out to be a pit owned by a tenured English professor and her poet husband—both writers. The first thing I had to do was buy a bed as they were sleeping on a 20-year-old futon and I woke the first night thinking I must be the princess and the pea as a stone is clearly sticking into my hip bone. But it was the futon that has hardened over the years into a substance not unlike cement.
Did you know that when you are desperate and have no car—am getting to that—you can order a bed over the phone? The kitchen did not have a working oven for three weeks: The owners didn’t want to fix it—but eventually came around. So as of today I do have an oven, but only three of the four burners on the stove work. The cabinets have virtually no glassware or dishes and every spoon is bent. They didn’t even leave me a can opener that works. But they did leave me the trash can in the kitchen—a metal outdoor can that is some twenty years old and filthy. The house is basically unfurnished and I brought with me only my books, my computer, an old stuffed chair and a small table that I was grateful for: I had a table for the lamp I brought. In this house: no side tables, no nothing.
They also left me their car as a gift: It had a flat tire when I arrived and did not have a rearview mirror on the driver’s side. It was filthy dirty, with no gas in the tank and a non-working muffler. I couldn’t hear if someone beeped; the radio was on but I couldn’t hear it except as some sort of odd additional noise and it wouldn’t turn off; only the window on the driver’s side operated. It cost me 125 bucks to get it in some sort of order so that I could buy a few groceries. I then bought a used car by having the salesman drive to my house with whatever he had—desperate woman gives salesman the 5,000 dollars she’s saved in an envelope over eleven years of teaching and hoarding bits of cash (couple hundred bucks for my daughter, slipped in her palm, when she needed it, that sort of money)—and I gave him the car. The second day I drove the car, the air-conditioning died, but the salesman who actually stopped and bought me milk and orange juice when I asked came back and had it fixed (I hoped—it turns out that the air-conditioner had a leak he did not fix.) after I had signed the paper releasing him of all warranty and declaring the car I had just bought was a junker—a Missouri law. I am not making this up.
Then I drove to school: The university would not declare me as present and working without showing the strange fiscal officer for the English Department (everyone tells me she is OCD) my actual Social Security card. It did not matter to her that I know my number. She wouldn’t accept my passport or driver’s license. I had to come back to DC for settlement on the house in Adams Morgan and was able to locate my card, which I obtained when I began working at age 16—you do the math—and no one has ever asked me for. As a result, I will now be paid eventually but I do not have the all-essential employee I.D. number which would allow me to get paid and get an I.D. card and use the library. Perhaps in a few weeks, I will have that number.
And god knows when I will get paid because I appear not to exist.
That is, I fear, a partial story, but here is the good news: I have held up, have only “hit the wall” so to speak once (cried all day the day I had no food, no car, and no way to get food—and that was one week after the initial move). But I love to teach and taught my first class this past Monday, and, as I said, I have a condo in the Penn Quarter (so does D.; it is all very weird, I know) to which I will return as often as I can and permanently in mid-May.
I am writing this on Saturday morning as I wait for the cable guy for whom I waited last week from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. and who did not show up-no TV reception without cable where I live.
And the professor/writer Marly Swick has befriended me, read my collection and loves it, especially the story “Sine Die,” which everyone hates and I think is the best in the series of stories about one woman one day who could no longer cook. Marly has asked me to come speak to both her undergrad and grad writing students the first or second week of classes about that story and my book. I think I’ve made a true friend. (I did.)
And Missouri is unusually gentle: Yesterday, my mail lady rang my bell—She said, “I have been worried about you—the car was here but the mail was piling up. Are you okay?” I told her I had been briefly away, that I had been having a bit of a hard time here, but that she reassures me about the goodness in the world.
Nietzsche and the Brothers Grimm are not so different. This I am learning. I do wonder if Nietzsche is the reality check on wishes and dreams. I refuse to believe this while I consider the possibility.
Chapter
3
She Should Have Known Better
I went to Missouri with a long mane of white hair. Hair and its length in women indicate sexual availability. Think about all the women you’ve known who cut their hair after they have a child. Oh sure, they say they cut it because they don’t have time anymore and there is truth to that assertion: They don’t! Or think about religious traditions including mine that require hair to be cut off or covered once a woman has married.
I now see that I knew long before D. left that something in the marriage was amiss because on November 15, 2002, I decided to let my hair grow. I’d worn a buzz cut, a short spiky 'do since I married D. It was wash-and-go, tamed my curly hair and gave me the freedom I thought I needed.
I quit my job where I met D. and married him—see the photo, me pencil in hand—and went back to graduate school in 1996.
I never would have quit that job—or now I realize—cut my hair if I’d thought for a minute that he would leave me. He and I made equal salaries, his a bit more than mine even though I was perhaps more successful at my job than he at his. I know what you are thinking: Female emasculates male. She should have known better.
When I let my hair grow, it became wild, frizzy, untamed. D. one morning in the fourth month of this “trial of the hair” took my picture with my hands over my face. I look in that photo like Einstein. I tolerated this untamed hair for what I hoped would come. I despaired but still I hoped. I tried gels and conditioners but nothing worked. I looked like the wild woman of Borneo. I grew up during the age of big rollers and carry-on hood hair driers. What did I know about this hair? What did I know of the meaning of this hair rebellion?
I got off a plane to visit my daughter and her boyfriend, students in graduate school at the University of Chicago, and met my daughter’s alarm and unflinching honesty. She pulls no punches: “Your hair looks awful! What are you doing?” And then, her solution in the form of a rhetorical question: “Haven’t you ever heard of a curling iron?”
The French Fry Cutter salesman raises his voice on the commercial in my head: “But wait, there’s more.”
She sat me down on the toilet seat in her tiny bathroom in her miniscule Hyde Park apartment and strand by strand straightened my hair, tamed the hair follicle, lightened its touch to glimmer and shine.
I am too old to look like the goddess that Michelle Obama is, but my hair moved the way hers did that night the prince and princess won the throne: it shone, it “swang” the way Michelle “swings.” We all know that she is not tamed. We know that the night Obama won the election men sat in front of their televisions mesmerized by her narrow dress, her delicate hands, her flat stomach and the curve of her hips and all of that started at the top of her head with that 'do.
She “swang” and so did I that night in Chicago. I tossed my hair that, once it had met the curling iron, now lay down in a silver sheen, curled under at the edge of my chin.
I was reborn.
In 1931, the year my mother was nineteen years old, a documentary entitled The Wild Women of Borneo hit the screen. It was black and white, made in the UK. At phrases.org, I find this attempt at definition of the source of the phrase, “[T]his comes from the Victorian circus habit of calling their black show people ‘wild’ and often attributing their origin to ‘Borneo.’ They were often displayed wearing only a loin cloth, or similar tropical coverings, wielding a spear, or similar. The crowds were attracted with the call: ‘Roll up, roll up, see the wild man of Borneo.’ The ‘wild man of Borneo’ was well established as a concept in the UK before WW2, and possibly earlier. The ‘woman’ version is merely an extension.”
The New York Times tells me this about the film, comment attributed to Hal Erickson:
To say the least, the title of this 68-minute documentary is misleading. For one thing, we don’t see any women until the last few minutes. For another, most of the film was shot in Mexico, which was not then nor is not now anywhere near Borneo. Only after the narrator comments on the natural beauties of the Island of Guadeloupe does the action shift to Borneo, and even then precious few human beings are seen. By the time the ‘wild women’ show up, they are so obscured by trees and shrubbery that no one can get a decent look.
When my mother was seventy years old, shortly before her stroke, I was applying her make-up for her birthday. She and I were looking in the mirror at her aged face. She said, “I still see the nineteen-year-old girl.”
She was a natural beauty: long dark thick hair, fair skin, hazel eyes, delicate hands. She was obscured by the shrubbery of age. We could both see her through the trees of time. There was no noise while the nineteen year-old girl slid behind the trees.
There was no noise while my hair grew. There was no noise while my daughter tamed the hair follicle with a curling iron.
There was no noise when the avalanche hit in Chamonix, France.
Chapter
4
Oz
In Missouri, I fantasize: I am free. I can date. I join JDate, but keep my address as D.C. I can “date” safely? at a distance. I believe in fairy tales.
The prince and princess in the white house have a Portuguese Water dog. The dog’s name is Bo because Sasha and Malia’s cousins have a cat named Bo and because Mrs. Obama’s father was nicknamed Diddley, as in Bo Diddley, who died June 2, 2008. My sister died on that date in 1993, three years after our mother. I wish for them both.
My family has been broken.
The Obama’s children are beautiful, perfect and happy. They are the dream. But are they real? Or better: Is what we see real? There is a scrim across their lives. There is a scrim across our view of them.
The Grimm brothers told many stories, some of them barely known. “The Frog-Prince” we all know. And don’t we all wish for a time when wishes did some good. Here is the beginning of “Brother and Sister”:
Little brother took his little sister by the hand and said, “Since our mother died we have had no happiness. Our stepmother beats us every day, and if we come near her she kicks us away with her foot. Our meals are hard bread crusts that are leftover and the little dog under the table is better off, for she often throws it a choice morsel. God pity us. If our mother only knew! Come, we will go forth together into the wide world.”
They walked the whole day over meadows, fields, and stony places. And when it rained the little sister said, “Heaven and our hearts are crying together.”. . . Then the brother said, “Sister, I am thirsty. If I knew of a little brook I would go and get a drink. I think I hear one running.” The brother got up and took the little sister by the hand and they set off to try to find the brook.
My son Ben gave me my wish in December 2006 as I was going on semester break from my visiting writers job at the University of Missouri-Columbia. “Would you like to come to Oz?” he asked.
“Some day, sure,” I answer. I don’t have a signed separation agreement yet. I am worried about alimony and health care. A vacation? Not possible. I have borrowed money from him to pay my attorney.
D. when he learned this paid Ben back. But the fear revealed by the loan was real even if the fear of D.’s reprisals was not.
Ben bought me a round-trip, business-class ticket to Oz. My son imports and produces serious, ambitious wines from Australia. Before I opened the ticket, he told me not to look at the price. “You are my mother,” he said. I did look: 10,000 bucks. I did not have the funds to fly to Australia coach, let alone, the funds to fly in comfort.
I met on this trip almost all the winemakers he imports. I lived for two weeks on his vineyard: wild and craggy, rough-hewn beauty with a view of the sea.
Here’s what he said to me when I wasn’t on my computer looking for dates with men in D.C.: “You are strong. Don’t disappoint me. Move on. It’s time. It’s way overtime.”
I am making dinner at the vineyard one evening and open the refrigerator that is full of wines I cannot afford. I go outside: It is summer in Australia in December when I am there. I ask which white wine I may choose. “Any that suits you,” he answers.
And later that night when he is a bit drunk, he howls at me over the fire he has built in the pit on his veranda. The evenings are crisp and cool unlike the heat of the summer day. “I have seen you ask D. for permission too many times. You are free of him. You are free. Don’t fucking ever ask again for permission to drink a wine in my house. Do you understand me? You are free now. Be strong. Choose, woman!”
In the morning, he asks if he has been cruel. I reassure that he has not. “Good advice,” I say and we move on—though my heart still breaks for D.
Ben and I part at the airport in Adelaide with tears withheld but visible inside his eyes. I think of the way a lake holds back the sea’s surge as a storm pushes its force from afar. He puts on his shades. I get on the plane.
Ben is not speaking to D. (a great difficulty for me who has two children. I talked to both of them too much and inappropriately when D. left me. They are not in full agreement on this point. I suspect my daughter has worked out this trouble with me to some extent but not fully. They both feel “jerked around,” as Ben has put it. And rightly so. Who was I, their mother, to turn to them like the weepy school girl?)
This difficulty, somewhat shared by the two, should not be placed in a parentheses but there I place it with this from E. E. Cummings’ poem that begins,
since feeling is first . . .
and that ends:
we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis
What my son does not know is that the return flight was the beginning of my virtual dating and my fantasies about sex after sixty. What he does not know is that what happened on the flight from San Francisco to D.C. could never have happened if I had flown in coach.
My flight was delayed five hours in San Francisco, so long that the crew changed while most of us stayed on the plane, thinking it would take off soon. It did not. I had already been traveling some twenty or more hours to get from Adelaide to Sidney and Sidney to San Francisco and to the plane that would take me home. I was jet-lagged and I slept through the five-hour delay. Before I fell asleep, I saw a tall, slim elegant older man, a young seventy was my guess, wearing a blue suede sport jacket—strikingly beautiful and an unusual choice for what looked to me like a forceful man. He walked the aisles and flipped open his cell phone with purpose—determined I suspected to get another flight.
The CEO.
I sleep and write down this dream when I wake:
I have been watching a college baseball game. Men are playing. Ryan, my son-in-law, is hitting and fielding and I am wondering why he would choose this school when he could have gone somewhere so much better (of course I wake to remember that he played baseball at Dartmouth) but in the dream he attends a no-name school I also attend. There is a point in the game where I can see the ball coming, know just where it should be struck and have the desire to enter the field, to pick up the bat, to hit it so that the wood cracks with the precision of a well-hit ball, with the sound of wood against leather that is the right-spot sound. The bat does not break.
Then I am crossing the street, leaving the field and the wind is blowing so hard against me that I can see myself as the arc of the letter C trying to cross the street. Someone says, “She may be blown away, she’s light, a feather against it,” but I hold true. I am wearing a pale taupe coat like the coats Audrey Hepburn wore in Charade. I am wearing low heels, pumps like hers. I make it across the street. I make it through the wind. I make it.
How absurd: old woman dreams herself young, like her beautiful daughter who is married to Ryan: my daughter Sarah, the knock-out with brains.
When I woke, I took my quart bag (post 9-11: all liquids must fit in such a bag) and walked toward the restroom to try to repair my face and the CEO met me in the space between the door and the flight attendant station: the galley. I went into the restroom, rattled by the fact that he had made eye-contact with me. He was standing there when I came out, by the way without my quart bag and it was never to be found. He handed me a slip of paper with his e-mail address on it and these words, “Looking is an over-rated feminine attribute.” But I had misread the note. I later learned that he had written “Cooking” instead of “Looking.” He talked to me briefly; I had been chatting with the woman and her husband behind me; she had been out in the airport and bought some wine she’d shared with him. I had told her something about my book. He and she had talked.
I was too rattled to recall what he said to me in the galley or on the Dulles transport that took us to baggage claim.
When home and after a good long sleep, I wrote him a note with my e-mail address and quoted his line about “looking.”
He replied:
Dear Mary,
Just back a few hours ago from D.C. and still a bit punchy from the flight, accumulated mail, etc.
The napkin your “fellow traveler” gave me had your name and as I recall, a line about your book. My scrawled note was intended to say “Cooking is an over-rated feminine attribute,” meant in jest of course in reaction to The Woman Who Never Cooked. Your themes struck me as a fascinating combination that I’d not ordinarily (perhaps never) associate. Fascinating, to the extent I’d like to know how you connected them. I’ll order a copy tomorrow.
I enjoyed our ultra-brief intersection.
From the opposite coast (Saratoga CA).
And signed with his full name (he is highly googleable). Here he shall be lower-case d.
And I replied with this babble:
Dear d.,
And, me, after actually some thirty-four hours traveling from Australia, at that point wearing no make-up and carrying around that mass of curly hair that I usually wear more elegantly. Well, here’s what happened to me after you actually spoke to me: I lost my quart bag (that security requirement for lipstick, etc.), because I became flustered—more below on this state of mind. The quart bag had in it my perfume (Opium, by the way) and other quite expensive little bits of female trivia, considered essential by this female to cover the flaws. No steward could then find the little bag. The super pretty one who looked like Nicole Kidman and was quite aware of our bit of intrigue—had an observant eye, apparently—tried her best to help me find it but failed. I was thus unable to do any repair work—so you have seen the bare truth of the matter.
I am now about to sound like a character out of a Victorian novel here—but what happened is that I “swooned” when you came over to me in the galley—or in today’s vernacular, lost my cool, assuming I ever had any of that.
Mary
His next subject line is: Can this be???
Dear Mary,
I’ve ordered The Woman Who Never Cooked and look forward to it, wondering the extent to which it was shaped by personal experience, the experiences of others you knew and/or a vivid imagination. All three? I paint watercolors to exercise the right brain, but I've long felt that “writing” (especially fiction) ranks at the top of creative endeavors.
I confess to no little amazement about our “instant connection” since objectively we’ve interacted in person for exactly 47 seconds. Even with our e-mails it has been ultra-brief. (With glances, etc., it becomes more reasonable wouldn’t you say?) As a writer you must have something to say about the chemistry of spontaneous mutual personal attraction, no?
Your description of your bag of feminine accoutrements provoked smiles and may I remind you that my remark when you said something about not being at your best was along the lines of: “You cannot hide good looks,” something I believe. Naturally it was also intended to put you at ease. Good looks and intellect are a marvelous combination!
In the spirit of full disclosure, I was on my way to spend New Year’s eve with a woman I met on a cruise last year. After what seems like endless months of dealing with loss, I impulsively signed onto a cruise aboard a small ship and made a new friend. I seem to be on an uncertain path, ping-ponging between monasticism and tentative engagement. Best I stop here, lest I tell you more than you’d like.
When I’ve read your book, I’d like to confer, knowing in advance that it will be stimulating, thought-provoking and perhaps a glimpse of MLT beyond that on UAL 782.
d.
And he does read my book, and he does write again. And once again I swoon:
Dear Sleeping Beauty,
“Sleeping Beauty” is as I first remember you in Seat 7C across two aisles, supine and lovely. The last indelible image is of you turning away with your luggage in tow at Dulles to connect with your driver to take you home in Washington. Your departure seemed abrupt and yet I didn’t know how it could have been otherwise at that stage.
I refuse to say how many times I looked across the aisle, somewhat amazed that you were engaged in animated conversation with the young woman sitting next. (You must have been running on pure adrenalin.). Had you two been in opposite seats you’d have been aware of my glances, so perhaps just as well.
Funny thought as I hiked local hills this afternoon: What do you suppose might have transpired had we been in adjacent seats on 782? My guess is that at some point a cabin attendant might have suggested “more decorum” to put it politely.
d.
It is three years later and I have not met him. We corresponded via e-mail for two of those years and he called me two or three times this past year—the last time, I did not answer and he did not leave a message. At one point, the woman in Washington fell quite ill, a brain tumor and lung cancer. He told me about her trials. I hoped she’d recover. I viewed him loyal and true to her.
I value loyalty as does my son. But unlike my son, I value imperfection.
Virtual dating had begun. My son had made it possible. Wishing had begun.
I dreamed of a large wave that rises in the sea. I see it coming, don’t know what to do but hold an inside rail along the wall of the boat. The wave rides large and full and I float with it, my head barely above it, still holding on. And it does not break. It rides over the entire boat and, in the dream, out to sea, though this is not possible as we are at harbor. If this were not a dream, the wave would have hit the shore, but it did not. The sea was before and behind us. Behind me.
That was the wish.
Here are the worries: I worry about what I did to my children. I have two children who went through a hard time with me after D. “needed to be alone” and all the wreckage that came with that decision. They both heard things from a mother that even grown children, both over thirty, should not have heard: I spoke hard and sad about D. I did not know what I was doing. I worried them. I was weak and broken. I was romantic, silly, and searching.
I worry about two strikes—Yes, this is my second marriage that has broken.
I am learning about repair.
But I also know what wishing can do. In the grim Grimm story, the sister knows that if her brother drinks from the spring, he will become bewitched. She saves him from the fate of becoming a tiger who would tear her to pieces and of becoming a wolf who would eat her. She cannot save him from the fate of drinking finally from the brook that will turn him into a young roebuck.
Instead, here is what she does:
Now the sister cried over her poor bewitched brother, and the little roe wept also, sitting sorrowfully near to her.
But at last the girl said, “Be quiet, dear little roe. I will never, never leave you.”
Then she untied her golden garter and put it around the roebuck’s neck, and she plucked rushes and wove them into a soft cord. This she tied to the little animal and led it on, walking deeper and deeper into the forest.
And when they had gone a very long way they came at last to a little house, and the girl looked in, and as it was empty, she thought, “We can stay here and live.” Then she sought for leaves and moss to make a soft bed for the roe, and every morning she went out and gathered roots and berries, and nuts for herself, and brought tender grass for the roe, who ate out of her hand, and was content and played round her. In the evening, when the sister was tired and had said her prayer, she laid her head on the roe’s back: that was her pillow, and she slept softly on it. And if only the brother had had his human form, it would have been a delightful life.
Or, I ask, would it? For do we really know what wish has been fulfilled?
Chapter
5
Let the Rom-Coms Roll
I turn to the Rom-Com for answers. Don’t be quick to discount: Wisdom comes where you look.
I have watched Hitch more times than I can count. I’m obsessed with this movie and many others—Four Weddings and a Funeral, for another (You don’t want to know how many times I have watched and wept over that one.)
Here’s how the best ones work: Hitch, the first example: Two cynics meet, neither believes love works, one or both have been hurt or screwed by believing that the open heart is a good thing. So one, or in this case both, have closed off that option: closed heart, closed heart.