Prologue
I look around the room, hugging my arms to my chest. It’s cold in this vast warehouse but I feel a burning inside me. I look down at my naked breasts. Will everyone see the toll that nursing took on them? I squeeze and lift them together gently, creating a deep cleavage. They aren’t so bad for a 38-year-old mother of two. Not so bad at all.
Lights flash, the bass vibrates through me. Joe Cocker’s voice resounding in my ears: You can leave your hat on. Above me, the cheesy disco ball spins sending the light spattering across me, across the stage, in a whirl of patterns. I move toward one of the poles and reach an arm out to grasp it. Walking around slowly, deliberately, I feel the floor beneath my bare feet. Over the music that rings in my ears, I can hear people clapping their hands and chanting my name.
Maa-cy! Maa-cy! Maa-cy!
The anxious, nervous churning inside gives way to a thrill I haven’t felt in a long time. Maybe ever. I am all powerful, I am in control of my destiny, I am free, if only for the duration of this song. You give me reason to live, Joe sings. I spin around the pole and dance across the floor, leaning over to pick up my bra, tossing it above my head. I bask in the glory of the chants. This is what I’ve been missing. To feel this alive again. It’s beyond crazy that I could find it in this venue, with these people.
I look into the audience and see faces smiling, laughing, cheering. All for me. Something inside tries to pull me away, hold me back. This doesn’t fix anything, it tells me. Tomorrow will be the same as the day before, and the day before that, and all the days before those.
But right now? Right now, I’m intoxicated, as if I’d taken some new and strange drug. Right now, I’m free from expectation and routine. Right now, I’m not Macy Reardon from the suburbs, devoted wife and mother, the good girl who does what they all expect.
Right now, I’m Macy from Santa Fucking Barbara.
Chapter One
I pour myself another cup of coffee—Starbucks French Roast—and watch the steam evaporate into the air above my shiny new granite countertops. At a PTA meeting last month, Juliette pressed a bright yellow Post-it into the palm of my hand and whispered, “Call Hilario. He’s a master at kitchens and bathrooms.”
I run my hand along the edge of the granite, admiring the sheen, the smoothness. She was right. My countertops are now a work of art. I should feel accomplished. After all, I talked Hilario down 10% from his original price.
Yesterday’s mail sits on the counter, unopened, and I sift quickly through the pile, tossing the bills and catalogs aside. There’s a letter addressed to my maiden name, Macy Wagner, and I tear it open. It’s an invitation to attend a business networking party for USC alumni. It’s almost humorous, considering the primary business I conduct now is purchasing bulk paper goods at Costco and housewares at Pottery Barn. I imagine attending the event, dressed in a smart suit, a shiny briefcase in my hand, mingling with the crowd, shaking hands, and telling everyone how I’m “between jobs” and “just waiting for the right thing”. Would anyone buy it? Could I successfully mimic a woman with a purpose? I drop the invitation into the trash and watch it sink to the bottom next to the coffee grinds and empty yogurt cups.
I turn up the volume on the kitchen radio and flip through the channels until I hear familiar chords, the end of a Nirvana tune from the early nineties. Memories of college parties, drives down PCH in Rick’s convertible, flood over me, my almost-career in music, almost within reach. For a second, I let myself imagine how it might have been if I hadn’t found myself pregnant just six months after Rick and I married, if I hadn’t decided that staying home with my newborn was the right thing to do. What if I’d accepted that position with Sony? Their alternative music group was just taking off and the possibility that my fresh-out-of-college entry-level job could turn into a bonafide career in artist development had me giddy. I even let myself imagine how life might have been if Rick and I hadn’t married. If I hadn’t found myself now, all these years later, increasingly consumed with wondering “what if”, and entertaining doubts about our marriage and a growing suspicion that Rick might be having an affair.
My cell rings. It’s Juliette again. She’s already called twice this morning. Once to see if she left her house keys in my car. Once to let me know, she realized she left them at the gym. I turn off the radio and pick up.
“Hey. You know there’s this thing called texting now, right?”
“Are you sitting down?” she asks in her unmistakable valley girl meets Georgia native twang.
“Do I need to?”
“Dana Marbach is pregnant!” she practically screams into the phone.
“Really?”
“Yeah, and there’s a little problem.”
“Such as?”
“Such as, she hasn’t slept with her husband for at least a year.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, oh!” Juliette hates Dana Marbach. First, Dana has breast implants. Second, they’re perkier than Juliette’s.
“So, who’s the lucky guy?” I ask, sipping my coffee.
“Lily thinks it’s her pool man.”
“That’s awful.”
“Hah! I’ve seen him and he’s definitely not awful.”
“What is she going to do?”
“I don’t know, but our Bunco game should be interesting this week. And I have a proposition for you.”
Juliette is full of propositions.
She lowers her voice a notch. “I met this really interesting gal at the gym. She has a group. A club, really.”
“What kind of club?” My mind races back to my college sorority sisters at Delta Gamma. I’ve completely lost touch with most of them, despite our pledge to always be as close as actual sisters.
“I don’t know exactly how to explain it, but it’s a group of gals who get together and go out, have some fun, experiment a little.”
“Experiment?”
“Oh, honey, I don’t know all the details yet, but I really like this woman. She’s so different from all our friends.”
I can’t imagine what that means, but different could be good. Our usual group of country club friends – mothers and wives like us – are forever lunching and shopping and hitting the gym and talking about the next surgical procedure they’re going to have as if they were picking out a new shade of lipstick. Last week, I’d found myself in the gym locker room, surrounded by a group of acquaintances who talked incessantly about our local club soccer teams, and which one had the best coaching, the least politics, the right number of tournaments to give their kids the visibility they needed for college recruiters. I’d nodded and tried my best to add to the conversation, to pretend that, like them, the discussion fascinated me. In the background, The Counting Crows’ Mr. Jones played over the gym’s speaker system and my mind wandered back to my first days as a young intern at Sony, the same song playing on the radio in my boss’s office, how she’d talked about Geffen signing them before she could, how she’d known from the first note that they had a hit.
Juliette’s voice is impatient. “You’re coming to Bunco on Friday, right? I’ll tell you more then. Gotta run. I’ve got a nail appointment in ten.”
“Sure. See you Friday.”
I put the phone down and wander around my kitchen, straightening the copper pots that hang over the stove, reorganizing them for the third time this week. I think about bringing in Rick’s dry cleaning. Or taking the dog to get washed. Damn thing is shedding all over again.
I look out the picture window in the breakfast nook and notice for the first time that the daffodils I have planted religiously each year have decided not to make a reappearance this spring.
“Shit.” I look at the patch of brown dirt that should sprout yellow. How could that have happened? What did I do wrong? I run through the explanations in my head, then think about what to do next. Something has to go there.
I sink into the couch and stare at the dog, happily curled into a ball on the floor, his back rising up and down with each breath. He looks so peaceful, and momentarily I consider crawling right next to him. Maybe I could push away all the thoughts I’ve had lately about Rick, about our life together, and why it is I suddenly long for something more than what I have here.
Instead, I resolve to take in the dry cleaning and drop by the local nursery to look at replacements for my daffodils. If I hurry, I can get all of this done before noon and I’ll still have time to swing by the gym before I pick up the kids.
I take a deep breath. I have a sense of purpose again. Stop worrying, I tell myself. Life is good.
