Last August I got a job at an interior design firm. I had known and worked near this business many years ago and nobody was more stunned than me when at the end of the second interview, they offered me the job. I felt like I’d hit the work jackpot. It has lived up to its expectations, and when the day is rocky and I feel like I’m in over my head, there is a massive collection of fabric in the basement for me to run my creative hands over and reset my tired brain.
The job is mostly accounting, and at the start of every month creating client invoices of billable design hours from an Excel spreadsheet. In the interview they asked me if I could write and I confidently said I could, but I was unprepared for this kind of writing. My first month of flying solo in invoicing, I proudly turned over my work and it came back with so many redlines I felt like I was back in my 4th grade math class with Sister Morrison. This writing is laborious with an “L”, as a front entry isn’t a front entry but a Front Entry, and you’d be surprised at the amount of time and lines required for a Front Entry. But I have learned and slowly gotten better, and last week because of a new hire not starting yet, I was asked to help out in creating cost estimates.
Cost estimates take invoicing, sprinkle it with steroids, hand it back, and say, “Take every tedious detail you can find in a description of a light fixture, read the fine print until your eyes go bonkers, and include all of that but not too much”. When my first batch was redlined because among other things, antique bronze is Antique Bronze, I looked at that stack of sheets and shakily said, “You are not the boss of me.” It took four tries to get it right, and that part of writing I am familiar with because it’s always about trying to get it as close to perfect as possible.
The day prior to learning this new skill set, I had made some changes to my phone plan and decided to cancel my landline. I never used it and rarely answered it because nearly all of the calls were trying to sell me something. Last week my cell phone had a whisper of battery left and my youngest daughter and I had planned on talking. I picked up the landline and no matter how many times I tried the call it wouldn’t go through. I texted Mal to call me and when that didn’t come through either I admitted defeat. I have always hesitated on canceling the line because it’s the only number my mom ever used to call me, and it seemed like the final admission that her dementia had won and calling me was never going to happen again. Oh, to pick up the phone and hear her say in her ever cheerful voice, “What are you up to today” or “How are Mark and the kids?” It would be such a gift but she has been unable to do that for several years, and every week when my sisters Facetime me with her I wonder if she knows who I am or that I’m the one with the dead husband.
I texted the kids to let them know our landline had gone the way of the dinosaurs, and while I was working on these cost estimates they were texting me back to say that POOF there went a part of their childhood. I smiled at the memories of all those calls coming through the phone that hung on the wall in the kitchen, the one with the cord that was long enough to answer the front door, and then from out of nowhere was gut punched by the thought that if Mark wanted to reach me he’d never call my cell phone. Without his cell phone he wouldn’t know my number. Of course he’d call the landline and I had just canceled service on it, and how is my mom supposed to remember my husband is gone when even I can’t? And how is Mark supposed to let me know this whole being dead thing wasn’t working out like he thought and he needed me to pick him up?
Before I could comprehend any of it, a new round of redlines were handed to me for corrections because I forgot that a slim cone shade is a Slim Cone Shade and I looked down at them like they were the dumbest things I’d ever seen. Then I looked around my work space for some kind of answer to what had just happened and it was as blank as Mark’s side of the bed.
Landline. Landslide. Mirror in the sky what is love when I’ve built my life around you?
Early in Mark’s career, when he was an assistant professor with three small kids at home, he went to a conference and met a group of British scientists that he fell for big time. They were bawdy and outrageous, minced no words when calling out colleagues over crap science, and I think Mark felt that in an occupation filled with inflated egos he’d found his people.
He could not stop talking about a guy named, Tony, and somehow convinced me that he needed to go to England for three weeks to work with him to learn some cutting edge techniques. I don’t know how Mark always managed to get me on board with his ideas. I think he was good at presentation and excellent at enthusiasm, and by the end of his spiel could convince me that I was helping the cause and would be the lucky recipient of a Junior Ranger Science Badge, which was only steps below a Nobel Prize. But we were barely getting by on his salary, I would be left on my own with the kids and no family around to help me, and nobody was bankrolling this endeavor. But I bought into the plan and off he went to stay with Tony, his wife and, Binks, his young daughter. He’d call me every few days to tell me about the science and the delightful Brits he was staying with, and I’d roll my eyes on the other end, because unlike him I was not being stimulated and/or having fun.
When he got home he had all kinds of stories to tell of his adventures. Mark was a fantastic traveler. He embraced the culture of every place he went, didn’t complain, and could regroup on a dime when things went south. He incorporated his travel into our lives, and for months after that trip, would go around the house and say, “Mind the gap,” in a very British accent to the kids who had no idea what he was talking about. “The gap,” he’d explain like they were supposed to know. “When you go on the Tube you have to mind the gap between the platform and the train. That gap,” and they’d nod and go off into their world which was the backyard and halfway up the block and no further.
This holiday season wasn’t the worst I’ve had which is the barometer I use now. I have been working two jobs since August, and by December was hitting the wall and counting the days until the office was closed for a bit and I could get some time off. I spent Christmas Eve finishing things up and searching frantically for two misplaced gift cards until I decided to quit looking and sat down with my phone. Up popped a photo of Mark with our youngest daughter in California.
We had gone out to visit her, and after Mark took care of some business at UCLA, we asked Mal what she wanted to do. “It’s all on you, you decide and we’ll make it happen,” we told her like we were the Griswolds going to Wallyworld, and Mal said she wanted to go to the Channel Islands. The Channel Islands? Why that sounded charming and off we went, and as those things tend to go for us it was an epic shit show. We stood outside the closed, small building where one can buy a ticket for a boat ride to these channels that had left hours earlier, because we presumed these things were hourly. Half-ass planning was how we rolled. Mark paced a bit, looked around like there was supposed to be a dock manager to make this right, then waved his hand and said, “Back in the car,” which is how we ended up in Santa Barbara, and it was perfect and beautiful and one of the best days ever.
So on Christmas Eve that picture popped up on my phone and I started to cry and could not stop because WHERE IS HE? WHY ISN’T HE HERE? WHY ARE WE CELEBRATING ANOTHER CHRISTMAS WITHOUT HIM? I was never a crier but now I am, and there are things I’ve learned along the way, that sometimes fighting it is useless, that without being aware things are building up that need a release, that you just have to lean into it. Sometimes it’s like a brief afternoon shower when the sun quickly reappears and the skies are blue again, but not so on Christmas Eve. I leaned hard into that one until I fell asleep and later showered and dressed and went to a friend’s house like we had been doing for years. The next day the kids came over and we Zoomed with our California girl and her boyfriend and it was so good and so generous in love and spirit. Mark would have loved it and nothing about the day made me sad which was a gift in itself.
People always say, “may their memory be a blessing,” when someone dies, and after Mark died I had the hardest time figuring out what that even meant. Memories are a very mixed bag for me – they are beautiful, funny, sweet, painful, and traumatic. They have their own operating system and can pop up out of nowhere, catching me off guard, and making me lose my balance. When that happens I swear I can hear Mark in his Brit accent pleading with me to “Mind the gap,” lest I slide down into that narrow space between here and there, light and dark, where he tripped one day and landed.
I always loved listening to you and Mark tell a story. It was like an episode of I love Lucy. – Ann (my younger sister)
I have no idea what you’re talking about. – me
When I was in my early forties, I went to my oby/gyn’s office for an annual routine appointment. During my exam, he kept asking me if I was feeling okay, if anything felt off, was I having any discomfort? I kept thinking, “Sheesh, dude, I’m fine. Let’s just get this over with,” only to be told that he was certain I had a cyst on my ovary, that he couldn’t believe I wasn’t in pain, and that I needed an ultrasound scheduled ASAP to confirm. It all sounded very urgent so I got the ultrasound and it was confirmed that I had a cyst the size of a lime and the Pain Train suddenly yelled, “Everybody onboard,” and I went from being just fine to not.
I had a simple, outpatient laproscopic surgery to remove the cyst and all should have been well. It wasn’t and the next few months were feeling like something was very wrong and return trips to the doctor. During that time, Mark decided we should get a tv in our room for me to watch when I wasn’t feeling great. This was some not-so-veiled bullshit because he’d been nagging me for years about putting a tv in the bedroom and finally broke me. He went out and bought one, set it up, and during the weekend when he was home to take care of things around the house, I’d go upstairs, lay down, and flip on the remote. There was no better station for me to watch during my Ovarian Rehabilitation than The Lifetime Channel, a cable channel devoted to movies of women being mistreated, abused, lied to, cheated on, and generally done wrong by men.
I’d immediately get engrossed in a movie, and when Mark would come upstairs to check on me, I’d say, “They were in love, but you could see the red flags right away. Get this. One night they have friends over, and she’s dressed up and wearing makeup and LOOKING ALL FINE FOR HIM BECAUSE SHE LOVES HIM SO MUCH, but when the friends leave, he goes crazy, tells her she looks like a whore with all that makeup on and he doesn’t need a whore in his life. And she’s like, ‘Honey, can’t you see I love you. I did this for you,’ and he’s not having it because he’s an abusive jerk just like his father which we know because of the flashbacks.” Mark would shake his head and say, “I don’t know how you can watch this shit every weekend.” I would counter that it was ABOUT LIFE, hence the name Lifetime Channel, and he said it should be called The Man Haters Channel, and from that day forward that’s the only thing he ever called it.
By the end of that summer when I couldn’t eat anything and had lost a bunch of weight, my doctor decided that he was going to go in and see what was going on. I was full of old blood because I’d been making and breaking cysts all summer and woke up to the news from Mark that because of that and other issues I had a hysterectomy. I blamed Mark for allowing that to happen even though he was merely the bearer of bad news, and suddenly I legit had a man to hate.
I was thrown into immediate menopause at the age of 44, and it was a full year before things got better. It was day after day of hot flashes, insomnia, and forgetting everything. It came to a head when I told Mark he had to go into work later one morning because we had a parent-teacher conference, he rearranged his schedule, and when we showed up the teacher looked at both of us and said, “Umm, that was yesterday.” Because the low fuel on Mark’s tank of empathy had been flashing for months he said, “Look, you’re the one that keeps the kids, me, and this house running. You need to get your shit together.” I responded by saying, “What a great idea except I haven’t slept in a year.”
That’s when I went back to the doctor with my raggedy self and said, “I cannot do this anymore. I never sleep and I DO MEAN NEVER,” and he prescribed Ambien and I started singing zippity do dah every morning because I finally was sleeping all night. Except for the wee, little problem that Ambien is meant to be a short-term solution and not something you took forever. He gave me a few refills and if I went to my regular doctor for any reason, I’d ask for a script there, too, because I could not sleep without it. I finally figured out that I could take half a one and it would work, and so I’d split my stash of pills and go off into LaLaLand every night.
It was during this time that my friend called me very last minute to say that she had gotten four free tickets to see the Backstreet Boys and did we want to take our girls to go see them. I said, “Of course,” and an hour later she and her daughter picked up me and my daughter and we went to a concert full of middle-aged moms with screaming girls. We chatted above the noise the whole time until the Backstreet Boys came out and the screaming ratcheted up a few decibels. Turns out those Backstreet Boys were very easy on the eyes and Gayla leaned over to me and said, “Which one would you do?” She told me her pick and I said, “The drummer, I’d definitely do the drummer,” and she said I could have him all to myself, and like two high school girls we swooned over our picks from up in the rafters. We got home close to midnight and Maggie went right to sleep. I was too wound up and so I had a beer with a full Ambien chaser and went to bed.
The next morning, I took the kids to school, came home and was drinking my 3rd cup of coffee to wake up and Mark came downstairs dressed for work. As I stood at the counter pouring cream into my cup, he came behind me and was kissing my neck and asking me if I was tired after LAST NIGHT. “Yeah, kind of,” I said. “It was pretty late before I got to bed,” and he kept kissing my neck and then said, “I thought so with the concert and you getting home late and then us doing it you must be worn out this morning.” “Doing what?” I asked and he said, “It.” I was so confused and turned around and said, “I have no idea what the it is that you’re talking about?” He looked surprised and said, “The sex it.”
“The sex it??? I went upstairs and went to bed,” I said, and Mark said, “No you didn’t,” and it went back and forth like that for a long time until we both realized I had no recollection of something he had total recall of. We were both shocked, and after letting this information settle for a few minutes, I said on the down down down down low even though we were the only ones in the house, “Wow, I don’t know what happened last night but it’s going to be okay, Mark. I’ve seen this before in a Lifetime movie. I’m not accusing you of anything but there is a thing called marital rape which isn’t cool but I since I don’t remember any of it it’s no harm no foul, amiright?” He looked at me like I was batshit crazy and said, “Marital rape??!!! Oh no. Oh no you don’t. You’re not pulling that Man Haters Channel shit on me. Nope. Not having it. I would never do that to you and, guess what, Virgin Mary, I was sound asleep and next thing I know you’re naked on top of me,” and all that lovey-dovey morning stuff that had been going on just a few minutes before took a hard left. He was out the door and I was left alone with my thoughts which were blankety blank blank.
For the next few days, we gave each other a very wide berth like we were two drunks that met in a bar and had a quickie in the bathroom and then found ourselves seated next to each other at a wedding reception. Lots of side-eyes and, huh, this person looks familiar but I can figure out why. It was all I could think about and I’d look at Mark and start to say, “Did I….was there……do you think….” and there was no second part of the question because it was all a big nothing. From there I convinced myself that this was the unraveling of my brain and before long I would end up, as Mark would frequently say, “Sitting in the corner looking at the wall and humming one note over and over.”
Finally Mark asked me about the details of the night, and I gave him the Cliff Notes version of the concert and how I couldn’t wind down when I got home. When I got to the beer and Ambien part, he said, “Jesus Christ, Kath, you can’t be mixing that shit. That’s why you don’t remember anything,” and he kept shaking his head and looking at me like I was an absolute moron. “Oh, I said, “I knew about operating heavy equipment, but c’mon, a beer bottle isn’t heavy.” And then I laughed, hahahahahaha ha ha, which he who was accused of marital rape did not find funny. Eventually we went back to regularly scheduled programming until one day I brought up that night again. “Was I talking at all when this was going on?” I asked Mark. “Yeah,” he said, “I didn’t know what you were saying at first but you kept repeating the same thing over and over. You asked me if I was in the band.” “Oh my god,” I said, “what did you say?”
“I looked at you and said I am tonight, baby.”
It was many years later before I told Gayla what happened the night of the concert. She listened, nodding every so often, and then said, “If I’m understanding this correctly, what you did was roofie yourself so you could bang Mark and pretend he was the drummer for the Backstreet Boys. Is that right?” I took a sip of my wine and said, “Sheesh, Gayla, when you put it like that it sounds kinda bad,” and then she took a sip of her wine, looked straight at me and said, “God, you’re such a whore,” and we laughed until we cried.
