Today Will Be Different(25)

Joe: So you just turned atheist? Wasn’t it a struggle?

Me: “Let’s not and say we did” is my attitude.

Joe: I love you.

Me [I knew it was a blurt that didn’t count. But still, you gotta jump on these things.]: I love you too, Joe.

I’d officially fallen in love the week before, in the Adirondacks, and was just waiting for him to say it first. Violet Parry, the creator of Looper Wash, had rented a lake house and invited the animators and their significant others for a bonding weekend. (I’d only just met Joe, so new work friends + new guy = doubly scary.) It was July 4th. Rumor had it if we hiked to the ridge we could watch the fireworks from the town on the other side. Only after evening fell and we were getting ready to go did we discover that none of the cabin’s dozen flashlights worked. We groused and resigned ourselves to a boozy night on the porch. Joe didn’t come outside. I found him alone at the kitchen counter. He’d disassembled the flashlights and laid them out like surgical instruments. He’d swapped bulbs, scrubbed off crusted battery ooze, and was folding tinfoil into small squares. So peacefully absorbed, so competent, so dear. (That was the moment.) I’m not kidding, within thirty minutes Joe had ten of those flashlights working. As we headed up the forest path, Violet pointed to Joe and mouthed, Keep him.


Had I lost him? Might there be someone else?


Yo-Yo’s eyes were closed and his face was raised to the sun. Come to think of it, he was pretty useless. Thanks a lot, Joe. You left me for another woman and turned me against my dog. If Jerry Garcia were alive, he could sing a song about it.

The fisherman helped the tattooed chef load the squid into an ice chest. I caught them looking at me. Had they been talking about me? I gave them a nod. They carried on with their business.

I revisited my Gratitude List. Oh, another one! Joe reads in bed long after I go to sleep. No amount of passive-aggressive tossing and turning on my part, nor looking at the clock, nor dramatically putting a pillow over my head will make him turn off the light. When he finally does, he’ll sometimes rest his book on me. And these aren’t slim volumes of poetry. They’re Winston Churchill biographies, and Winston Churchill lived a very full life.

The van door slammed shut. The fisherman was gone. The chef came around the side. Our eyes caught. I held his gaze. He held mine. It’s not that I wanted to get anything going with this guy, but it was too weird…

And then he was walking toward me with an intrigued half smile.

I don’t put my hair in a clip for one day and this happens? A hot chef, knowing he’s got a squid in the back of his van, boldly crosses a parking lot to start up a conversation with a middle-aged woman?

This brave new world could not have come at a better time.

“I have to ask,” he said.

“I have to answer.”

“What kind of dog is this?”

I was as desirable as a hedge. That’s what happens when you lose your sex drive. I can put on Belgian dresses, wear my hair down, and flirt garishly, but when it came to real currency, sexual currency, I had none.

This morning when Joe said of Yo-Yo, “I know what he’s getting out of us, I just don’t know what we’re getting out of him,” he wasn’t only talking about the dog.

I offered the chef the leash.

“He’s a mutt,” I said. “Want him?”

“Wow,” he said. “No, but thanks. He sure is cute!”

With that, my Gentleman Caller disappeared into the ether.


It’s not like I don’t come with my own grab bag of flaws. Although Joe is far too superior to catalog his grievances toward me, they might include:

1. Once I ate a bagel on the toilet.

2. I use too much floss.

3. I floss in bed.

4. I take the dog into the shower with me to wash him.

5. I take my first bite of popcorn at the movies by touching my tongue to the top of the popcorn and eating what sticks. But Joe always says he doesn’t want popcorn because it’s too salty, so it’s mine and can’t I eat it the way I want?

6. I toss Milk Duds into the popcorn.

7. Actually, I bite the Milk Duds into four pieces and spit them back into the popcorn so they’re smaller, giving me a better popcorn-to-Milk-Dud ratio. Yes, they’re covered in saliva, but it’s my saliva. Though I can see how, to someone reaching into the popcorn he said he wasn’t going to eat, it could be an issue.

Joe wouldn’t say this because he’s a gentleman, but I will: I’m looking worse by the day. I’m all jowly. My back is dry. I have a bush the size of a dinner plate. My core strength is nonexistent. Menopause means your metabolism skids to a stop and you lose 30 percent of your muscle mass. In other words, the self-discipline to watch my weight, which I never had to begin with, I now need more of. Really, I’m hanging by a thread. Sure, Joe had spent breakfast with his face down on the table but at least he was still in the same room with me.


Yo-Yo, bored with the hot sun, let out a snorty yawn.

Come on, Gratitude List, work your magic! I haven’t nursed you all these years for nothing! The whole idea was when Joe finally hit the eject button, I’d feel free too. Kind of like that first shower after getting my hair chopped off, or those first steps in a new pair of cushiony running shoes, or seeing the world through new, stronger prescription lenses…