“There is a tipping point in midlife, a midpoint in your journey, a day when you feel that middleness of having equal parts past and future, of the life that you’ve lived and the life that you will live, of what is done and what is still possible.”
— Michael Lipsey
“The only time you really live fully is from thirty to sixty. The young are slaves to dreams; the old servants of regrets. Only the middle-aged have all their five senses in the keeping of their wits.”
— Theodore Roosevelt
Chapter 50: Home is where the heart is.
One week later
I have my first full day back at work on a Tuesday, which means that, right on time, Jodie and Ben show up at noon for their weekly game of Scrabble and dal bhat tarkari. I fill their water glasses when they sit down, ask if they need a menu.
“No,” Ben says. “Just the usual today, thanks.”
“How was Switzerland?” Jodie asks, studying my face like it might reveal some mysterious new secret she can share with her salon clients.
I smile, but it’s wan. “It was fine.”
And truthfully, it was fine — more than fine. It was nearly a full week of Amy, nearly a full week of lovemaking, interrupted only by the pesky tasks of daily life like “work” and “moving.” But since I arrived home two days ago, I haven’t heard from her at all. I’ve texted. I’ve emailed. I tried Skyping once or twice.
Nada. Amy’s gone dark. Again. And I alternate between worried as hell that Swiss cat burglars broke into her home and raped and murdered her, and angry as hell that, after everything we’ve been through, she’s decided I’m not worth the trouble.
Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am.
“Only fine?” Jodie probes, picking up immediately on my sullen mood like the seasoned gossip she is.
“Yeah, you know,” I say with a shrug. “Moving isn’t ever fun. It was a lot of packing, a lot of shipping stuff to Ohio, a lot of closing accounts and ending basketball contracts and breaking my apartment lease.”
“Mmm,” Jodie says. Then her face brightens. “Oh — did you hear about Dillan McElroy? You know, of Dillan’s Bar & Grill?”
“No,” I say. “What about him?”
“Had a heart-attack last week,” she says. She adds sagely, “It’s not surprising, really. He eats his own food too much. And you know they’re practically a greasy spoon…”
I let her go on for a while, glad she’s stopped probing me, even if I’m not that interested in Dillan McElroy’s heart attack. I nod at the appropriate moments, raise my eyebrows and say, “Oh really?” at other appropriate moments, just as I watched my mother do with Jodie for years upon years.
The bell above the door rattles with a customer coming in, so I tell Jodie and Ben, “Excuse me for a minute,” and turn to wait on my new patron, my welcoming restaurant owner’s smile already plastered on my face.
My smile falters when I see who it is.
“Amy?”
She lifts a hand in greeting, gives me one of her trademark smirks.
“What are you doing here?”
“Is that how you greet all your customers — ‘what are you doing here’?” She raises an eyebrow. “No wonder the restaurant’s been struggling.”
I glance over my shoulder, and of course Jodie has already turned her attention from Scrabble to Amy and me. I’m sure we’re looking way more interesting to her than a TRIPLE LETTER SCORE square. I cross the distance between Jodie’s table and Amy in a few long-legged strides. When I reach her, I take her shoulders and turn her physically towards the door.
“Outside,” I say. “We’re not talking in here.”
“Okay, okay, I’m going,” Amy says, still light as a feather, as if she hasn’t completely fucking ignored me for the past two days.
I grab Amy’s arm, half-guiding, half-pulling her to the alleyway on the far end of Soul Mountain. Becker’s back there, dropping trash in the dumpster.
“I’m going to be out here for a second,” I tell him. “Keep an eye on the front of the house?”
He smiles, nods, and wisely slips back inside the kitchen door.
“What are you doing here?” I ask Amy. “And why have you completely ignored me for the past two days? I’ve been worried.”
“I’m sorry,” Amy says, and it sounds like it’s a genuine apology. “For most of the past forty-eight hours, I’ve been traveling. And I didn’t tell you because, well, I thought it would be fun to surprise you.”
I throw my hands in the air. “Consider me fucking surprised.”
She grimaces. “I’m sorry. Seriously. I didn’t mean to worry you or upset you.” She takes a step closer, reaches up and tucks a wily strand of hair behind my ear. “Can you forgive me?”
“Depends. On whether or not you’re going to answer my question. You still haven’t told me why you’re in Ohio. And please don’t tell me it was just because you missed the cornbread.”
Amy laughs, lets go of my face. “You do have the best cornbread I’ve ever tasted. But no, that’s not why I’m here.” She chews on her bottom lip for a moment, pensive. “I’m here because… I took the job at Ohio State. I just moved to Columbus yesterday.”
“You — what?!” This new news is almost as shocking as seeing her walk through the front door.
“I did another phone interview with them when I was in Florida visiting my parents,” she explains. “And a couple days after that, right before I left for Basel, they offered me the position. I was trying to decide whether or not I should take it when you just… showed up on the plane. And then told me you were moving to Ohio to put down roots. It seemed like… does it sound ridiculous to say it seemed like a sign?”
I shake my head and take her hands in mine. And don’t make fun of me — I’m an emotional fucking person, okay? — but my eyes start to mist over with tears.
“No,” I say. “It’s not ridiculous. It sounds like as clear a sign as the universe ever bothers to offer.”
She gets teary, too. “That’s what I thought. And then you got down on your knees in the middle of Heathrow to beg my forgiveness…” She gives a wet chuckle. “No one’s ever made an apology like that to me before. No one’s ever bothered to try. And then the botanical gardens… and the dinner at my place… and everything else…” She looks up at me, totally crying at this point. “I had to say yes,” she whispers. “To Ohio State, I mean. I had to see if you and I could…”
I’m crying, too, and my voice cracks when I say, “You said yes… for me? You moved to motherfucking Ohio for me?”
She shrugs. “Home is where the heart is, right?”
I nod, and just like that, I feel something click into place. It’s like putting in the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle and going, “Yesssss!” because now you’re finally done with that fucking puzzle. No — it’s better than that; it’s more like the fist-pumping feeling you get when you sink a clutch shot in a tournament game with the clock running down its final few seconds. Or like the janitor in your brain unlocking all the doors that have been sealed shut for way, way too long.
I gather up my Tinkerbell-sized Jane Lane in my arms and kiss her.
Amy’s here, and I’m here, and I’m home at last.
* * *
#
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Would you like a free short story?
Guess what: A friend of mine unearthed something I thought I’d lost a long time ago — a semi-autobiographical short story that got published in an anthology of lesbian erotica that has long since gone out of print.
I wrote it when I was twenty-three, almost twenty-four, and when my friend took photos of the pages (the anthology doesn’t exist as an ebook — it’s that old!) and texted them to me, I laughed and laughed and laughed. I honestly hadn’t even remembered I’d written it, but thinking back, I realize it was the first time I’d ever gotten paid for something I’d written. It made me feel like a “real” writer.
Anyway, would you like it for free? If so, sign up for my Reader’s Club here:
Also, getting older’s a bitch.
(My customary rant at the end of my novels.)
In my last book, I wrote a bit of a longish “About the Author” that morphed into a rant about lesbian representation in mainstream media. I felt a little embarrassed that I wrote it at the time, but in the reviews for my book, a lot of people mentioned that they appreciated it, so I figured, hey, why not. There’s a fantasy writer who used to include what was basically a personal essay at the end of each of his novels. I thought, “Maybe I could be like that. Share a little something personal with my readers when they reach the end of each book.”
So, at the risk of boring you, annoying you, and possibly coming across as self-absorbed (if you already think it’s any of the three, then I would suggest you stop reading now), I thought I’d tell you a bit about how this book came about.
A lot of you probably already know the basic story of where this book came from. It’s a sequel / spin-off of my other lesfic novel, To Have Loved & Lost (), in which Anika was a side character. I liked Anika so much that I wanted to give her a novel of her own.
But also, in case you didn’t notice, this book you just read is less about Anika and more about going through a mid-life crisis.
When I started writing this book, I was not having a mid-life crisis. I had just published To Have Loved & Lost, life was good except for the 2016 presidential election, and I was pleasantly surprised to watch my latest book climb the charts on Amazon into the number one spot. But somewhere about halfway through writing the first draft of this novel, my mid-life crisis hit, BAM, full force.
Look, I’ll spare you the gory details. They are personal and dramatic at a “truth is stranger than fiction” sort of level. You can use your imagination to guess my situation, but I promise you that you won’t guess right. I doubt you’ll even come close. Let me put it this way: If I fictionalized my mid-life crisis into a novel, people would complain that it “just wasn’t realistic.”
Ha! It’s not realistic… until it’s your life.
But what I do want to share with you is what I’ve learned from my experience. With any luck, it will help you in some way, provide you with some comfort. So here it goes, broken into six stages:
(1)
When we are in our twenties, and to a large extent our thirties, I think we have a tendency to do whatever the “next thing” is that appears before us. We might choose a college major based upon what our parents think is good for us, for example, or we might move in with the person we’re dating because it seems simpler at the time than supporting two households. We end up “going with the flow” without even realizing there’s a flow or that we’re going. Weighty decisions don’t seem weighty at the time; they don’t seem like they steer our lives into the paths of invisible tractor beams (sorry, that’s a nerdy Star Trek reference), but they are and they do. Unfortunately, these early big decisions don’t always correspond with who we are at our core, but we don’t realize that yet because we’re still young and living with a black-and-white idealism that we’ll never replicate again in our lives.
So we take jobs that we’re going to eventually grow bored with, we fall in love with people who aren’t right for us, and we move to places we don’t necessarily want to live because it all seems magical and wonderful and obvious at the time. But we haven’t acquired any long-term vision yet. We don’t realize that these decisions are dominoes that are going to continue to knock things over when we are well into our thirties, forties, fifties, sixties… And we don’t realize how hard dominos are to stop once they start falling.
(2)
Then there comes this moment, as Michael Lipsey mentions in the quote I used in the final chapter, where we feel the “middleness” of our lives, when we recognize that somehow, our lives are already halfway over, and — here’s the big, scary question — are we actually living the life that we want to be living? Or have we been dragged along by a tractor beam all this time, and now we realize we don’t want to be there anymore?
But now it might be too late.
(3)
This is the moment when the mid-life crisis actually begins to hit us full-force.
It’s like being in the middle of a thunderstorm.
For an hour or two before the storm, you watch the sky slowly darken, the air becomes still, the clouds grow in size. Then the air takes on that electric smell, the sky changes into a deep blue-grey, and then — the first raindrops. In life, this is the phase where we look around and go, “Wait a second. Is this who I actually am? Is this what I actually want to be doing for the rest of my life? Where am I? Why am I doing this?”
(4)
To carry on with the thunderstorm analogy:
It’s like a storm that starts to rage outside, and you’re just coming out of the grocery store, your reusable, environmentally friendly bags in hand. You watch the rain pelt the parking lot, and in the distance, you see your car, alone and soaked and hoping you will come rescue it.
But what do you do? Do you brave the storm? Do you step out into the rain and embrace the thorough drenching? Or do you simply wait, and hope it will pass?
That’s what a mid-life crisis is like. You stand on the brink, you see your options laid out in front of you. You know what your choices are:
A) You can change. You can be bold, and take the risk, and upend your life. You brace yourself and step into the rain with your grocery bags, hoping that the rain won’t ruin what’s inside by the time you get to your car.
B) Or you can wait. You say to yourself, “This, too, shall pass,” and you really, really hope that it does. You put down your grocery bags and you just stand there, watching it rain, hoping you won’t feel this trapped by your circumstances for the rest of your life.
(5)
Here’s the thing. I’m a run into the rain kind of girl. In the end, I figure, it’s only water. You might argue, “But that’s where your analogy breaks down, Eliza. Because when it comes to your life, it’s not just water. There are consequences. The storms of career change and divorce, sickness and loss — these things don’t just dry out. They’re real and they suck and they’re serious business. You can’t just step out into the rain with groceries. You’re not a teenager anymore.”
But consider this, my friend. You are a speck of dust on a speck of dust on a speck of dust. You are this tiny, self-aware bit of biology held by the magical, invisible force of gravity to a water-logged rock hurtling through space at speeds that boggle the mind. And the rock we lovingly call Earth is just one rock among gazillions of other rocks, all of which are hurtling through space in anonymous galaxies populated by anonymous stars, anonymous rocks, and, who knows, maybe other anonymous little bits of biology.
Another way to think of it:
Go to a beach. Pick up a single grain of sand. Hold it on the tip of your finger. Look at it. Say to yourself, “This is me.”
Then look up the beach, towards the pier. Look down the beach, towards the line of hotels and kites and scampering children. Look at all the other grains of sand. And think, “These grains of sand are all the other living beings in this world. All the jet-setting billionaires; all the hipsters; all the poor kids in Sub-Saharan Africa my mother always told me would be grateful to have my vegetables; all the shelter dogs; all the shelter cats; all the frogs and toads and salamanders and crickets; all the sea cucumbers and jellyfish and whale sharks and dolphins and Finding Nemo clown fish.”
Maybe it feels nihilistic to think of yourself as so small. But you know what thinking in this way can do for you?
It can liberate you. Absolutely, enormously liberate you. It teaches you that you’re just not that important. Your problems aren’t that important. They never have been. Hell, even your mid-life crisis isn’t really all that important.
And by thinking this way, you can let go.
You can let go of thinking you have to hold onto the dysfunctional constellation your life has become, and you can reorganize everything, even the parts of your life you thought could never be questioned. You can step into the rain. You can be daring enough to let your grocery bags get wet, and give the world your best Barbaric Yawp. Then you laugh like a madman and enjoy getting soaked.
(6)
Or… you can live the rest of your life standing at the edge of those automatically opening grocery store doors, the cold breeze of air-conditioning at your back, the soothing music of Elton John wafting out towards you.
“It’s not the life I wanted,” you’ll say to yourself. “It’s not the life I’d planned for, but here I am. It’s familiar. It’s safe. It’s dry. I know my place in it, and I have people who love me, so…”
And you will waste away there, staring at your own version of the Mirror of Erised for the rest of your life. Just because you’re afraid of a little water. Just because you’ve imbued far more import to your problems than they’ve really earned.
That’s not for me, friend. I’m stepping into the rain. Join me and let’s Yawp together.