Todd was the across-the-street neighbor who would take my garbage bin to the street after my husband left. Todd was older than me and had a live-in partner who was older than him. He was the kind of guy who talked with you at the mailbox about boring stuff like the weather and the latest Internet sensation.
Back when things looked hopeful for my marriage, I would deliver baked goods to neighbors over the holidays. When I got to Todd’s house, he would hold it gently, saying, “I don’t know how you do it…you know you’re amazing, right?” The comment made me roll my eyes as I walked back to the house, nothing more.
I preferred keeping to myself after Matt left. I separated myself from friendships and support, feeling afraid good people would disparage my husband for leaving, when really, it was largely my fault, too. I lost weight, wept in public. Underemployed, I applied for food benefits and rented rooms in my basement.
Todd began to pay extra attention to me when his partner stayed at her daughter’s house while recuperating from knee surgery. At first, it was more inane mailbox conversation, only longer and more personal.
“How could a man ever leave you?” he asked, brushing the hair from my face. It was creepy, but I wasn’t scared or annoyed, just tired. “Let me bring you and the girls dinner,” he said. I shook my head no, but he insisted.
The girls he referred to were two international students I was hosting for a semester. A break from the routine sounded nice, so I relented. After we ate, he leaned in to kiss me on the stoop.
He flashed me a grin and nodded with vigor. “Yeah …” he said. “Now you know.”
A week or so later, he knocked on my door to share with me the ‘fictions’ in his journal he had written about a woman he grew to love whose husband had recently left her.
Then he showed up at my barista job crying about his sick father. He lingered at a stool for an hour or so, gazing at me like I was an angel with rescue powers.
When the tires on my Passat were bald, Todd told me he would absolutely not let me drive in that condition for a single day longer. I let him buy the damn tires at Costco.
I was lucky my best friend was paying attention to my situation. She said Todd was grooming me, and I laughed. I told her that it was likely he had a crush, but that he was just trying to be nice. She drove over and gave me the cash to give Todd for the tires. She told me that just because I was a suburban mom didn’t mean I wasn’t in danger.
Surprise! He wouldn’t accept the cash.
I began to worry when he texted, I Love You. Then it was relentless: Are you OK, Bud? How’s my Best Pal? Pretty dress today! I could really use a friend to talk to.
I thought about my daughter and son, who were finally old enough that I could leave them alone at the house. I thought about how Todd knew there was a house key hidden inside one of those fake rocks in a planter by the stupid porch he was always visiting.
This was almost a story about sexual assault, had a friend not made it her mission to interfere.
Instead, it’s a story about not believing your gut, and it’s a story about men who prey on the vulnerable. It’s a story about emotional terrorism. His proximity to my home called for more action.
I went to the cops, who predicted Todd would not stop. Since there had been no crime, they suggested I write a letter outlining boundaries for zero contact. This would serve as an official record. My older brother delivered the letter at Todd’s doorstep. I felt both fortunate and shitty to get the help I needed.
Todd left me alone for a while. I was nervous getting into my car and avoided the mailbox and stopped walking the dog. My exchange student girls moved out, and an older single woman moved in. He left a flower on the new tenant’s windshield with an effusive welcome note. A survivor of assault, this triggered her, and she immediately moved out.
I filed for a restraining order when I came home, and Todd was on my rooftop. I learned he told another neighbor that my Dad had agreed to pay him to remove the moss. My neighbor wanted to know: “Is that true?” It baffled me that an explanation was needed.
I compiled the documents—texts, journal entries, the letter—and showed the judge, who granted me the order on the spot. Something I learned, though: Restraining orders are only good for a year and they cost $80. An officer parked his cop car outside Todd’s house and delivered it to him in broad daylight.
Sometimes I’m shocked at how weakly I acted. Then I remember societal conditioning. When the perpetrator is nice, or when friends and family call your life dramatic, you feel bad. That is the code word for sit down, shut up, and smile, smile, smile.
This summer, Todd and his partner moved. I feel like I can breathe again. I remember how for years I didn’t want to sit on my front porch, not even to read a book in the sun.
* * *
When your son says, Will you give me a dollar for every fish I catch? Say yes. When he asks, In the shallow end, the minnows will nibble on my toes, isn’t that right? The answer is yes. His memories live in pictures; these are stories he has been told. Say yes to minnows. Say of course. It will kill your heart when he tells the truth: It’s been so long since I’ve been anywhere; all I know is this house on our block. Say you’re right.
The blood in your veins will explode when he wants all the vacation lake house details: Whose is it again? What do we call it? Can you show me on the map? How long will it take? Say it’s big, with a separate garage and one of those kitchens that has a counter where you can eat cereal and talk to people in the living room at the same time.
There is a basement with a pool table and an electric keyboard and darts and a sliding glass door to a deck with an outdoor shower you use to rinse off the sand before you come into the house. If we play hide and seek, I’ll probably run into the glass door. Say you think so? Yeah, that’s something I’d do. Say that’s true and ruffle his hair. Are there neighbors? Say the beach is private.
Say how once, you had a water-balloon fight with the neighbors’ grandkids, you don’t remember that at all? I just remember the fish nibbling on my toes. Say oh. I don’t think I’ll get bored there. Say, I don’t think you will either. Can we take pictures, like when above the earth? Say, of course we can; we will. Lie down and inhale his sticky sweet neck and stay there until he falls asleep.
* * *
I am up, so I walk the dogs— our new puppy, Jackie, and a dog I’m watching for money, Babs. Babs is OK, but I’m anxious for her to leave. She’s an eighteen-month-old Goldendoodle, which means she is the size of a golden retriever with fur like a poodle. She’s blond, and she likes to dig.
I am alone listening to chickadee-dee-dees. I let the hounds off leash in the nearby woods so they can be their true dog selves, prancing in the ravine and tugging on each other’s fatty puppy-skin necks.
I return, feed them, and give them a pork rind so I can catch a few more minutes of rest on the couch. I’ve been having a hard time with energy lately. It is summer, so I can leave the back door open for them to chew, eat, drink, and play.
After the catnap, I pop up to make coffee and assess the pups’ damage. Jackie’s paws are damp from the dewy grass, her snout wet from taking a drink from the kiddie pool. Babs, though, she’s a hot mess, with poop smears tangled inside her matted butt fur. I tie her up and hose her off with a blast to the rear: a dog enema.
Isaac is up —in fact, he is pointing at me from the porch, giggling. Cool. Cool, cool, cool, cool. I’m swearing at the pups, and he is watching Family Guy cuddled inside a grey fleece snowman blankie. His laughter has died down, and I note his look. He looks … rattled.
I ask him about his sleep, and he says he had a nightmare, but he doesn’t want to talk about it. I immediately think about the nightmare I didn’t want to talk about from a few months back, and I urge him to tell me his.
“It will make you feel better,” I say. “I promise.”
I believe in leading by example, even if the example is not always great. So, I go first. I tell him about my nightmare where he, Lizzie, and I were trapped in a car submerged in water.
“It’s just a nightmare,” I say.
“Mine would never happen in real life,” he says. “I know,” I say.
He is quiet for a few more seconds.
“Does someone die in the dream?” I ask, and he nods. Then says, assuredly, “But it would never happen.”
“I know,” I say again. More quiet. “Was it me who died?” I ask, and he shakes his head.
“I killed Dad,” he says. “Dad poured concrete all over me and the cousins’ feet so we couldn’t move, and he was laughing super hard, but I escaped from the concrete and lunged at him with a knife and stabbed him a bunch of times. Then I laughed for like twenty minutes.”
Isaac has tears in his eyes. “It didn’t mean anything,” I say. “I bet you were glad when you woke up. I know I was, with the dream about the sinking car and river.”
He nods and looks at the TV. He asks if I will make him some French toast. I want to say I will buy you a small pony if you agree not to feel bad.
I visit my counselor at the community health clinic. We discuss the usual shit: money, my teacher program, summer plans, the kids. I tell her about Isaac’s nightmare. She suggests it may be anger surfacing from his subconscious.
“Think of all the feelings kids have that they can’t articulate,” she says. She poses the question: “Does Isaac have an intuitive distrust for his dad’s failure to manage their basic welfare?”
I haven’t thought of that before. I need time to digest.
Lizzie sulks in her room. I ask her what’s wrong: Girlfriend drama? She asks if she can get acrylic nails, and I say heck no. She hates her yellow nails and dirty nail beds. She hates the large blemish behind her left ear. I ask her if she’d like to get pedicures and she cries. I take her phone, a currency for access to her private life. She protests, but not that hard.
I take it to the couch and scroll messages. The way I see things, it’s my phone. Here it is, a screenshot of the inside of her scratched, bloodied arm. She’s been cutting again. My stomach consumes my heart in one pump. I throw open her door and point to the screen.
“What is this?” I cry.
“What do you think it is?” she says.
I cry. She cries. I say, “But why … WHY?” and she shakes her head; she doesn’t know. There is talk about how no one likes her, that I don’t like her.
“How can that be?” I ask. I think about her all day, every day. All the bullshit work as a lunch lady, dog sitter, latte maker- it’s all for them. I think about her little body and big heart, about what she needs and how to get it.
I ask about her trip to see her Dad. “I love it when I’m there,” she says, sobbing.
The mascara she painstakingly applies is streaming down her face in black, goopy blobs. I love looking into her round hazel eyes. I feel terrible for all the minutes I have spent with my new love interest instead of her, sleeping with him in my bed, not her. But I know it’s useless to tear myself up—she is simply sad, and that is that. Still, it is eye-opening; it is get-your-ass-in-gear serious.
She is old enough now to understand that brain injury is forever, that divorce is forever. Maybe she is also old enough to understand that one day she will take care of her Dad, forever.
She calms when I lock eyes with her and say as plainly as I can: “We are all hurting because he is far away. I love you more than anything and so does he. We must accept it for what it is or at least try. Tell yourself you love yourself every night before bed.”
Say it, I tell her. She repeats: “I love me, I love me, I love me.”
Later, she texts me as I walk the aisles hunting for dinner. The kids, especially Isaac, like to accuse me of being gone all the time when really, I am food shopping. The grocery store is one glamorous place!
Lizzie’s message: “Can we get manicures? I’ll pay. Regular ones are fine,” she says. “I don’t even need a color.” (My fourteen-year-old wants to pay.)
I stop the cart mid-roll to put my hands over my heart. I let out a small sound, a gasp. My knees are shaky, and I want to kneel and bow my head, but I have tasks ahead. It’s time to lock in. I text her back: “Yes, of course. That sounds fun.”
* * *
On my way home from work on the bus, I write in my diary. I take a picture of my writings, and text it to my friend. She says, “Are you okay?” We make a plan for coffee and hugs.
Con: Your daughter uses Instagram like a dating app and blocks you.
Con: Your daughter uses Snapchat like a dating app and blocks you.
Con: Your daughter’s birthday wish list is a spreadsheet of celebrity-endorsed makeup.
Con: You get emails from neighbors about boys entering your basement and exiting with bongs.
Con: Your daughter carries mace.
Con: Your daughter’s friends are mean.
Con: Your daughter thinks love means obsession.
Con: Your daughter has friends with no parents.
Con: Your daughter knows a boy who murdered a girl.
Con: Your daughter pretends the vape you find in her closet isn’t hers.
Con: Your daughter pretends the bag of weed you find in her closet isn’t hers.
Con: Your daughter pretends the pink flask with the words Vodka you find in her closet isn’t hers.
Con: The police know where you live.
Con: Grown men watch your daughter.
Con: Grown men request to friend your daughter.
Pro:
I tell my friend I am ready to fill the Pro’s category, any day now, please. I am ready for an all-around win.
* * *
Nicole, mother to Benni, texts asking if Lizzie can babysit. Nicole is an old roommate, and we often ask favors. Say yes with no lip, I think to myself as I call my Lizzie. She says yes, and I breathe better. It’s my job to coordinate rides and chances to say yes like this, so I cancel my plans with a friend. My friend appreciates that I am a busy mom. I appreciate that she has a good head on her shoulders and is reasonable about finding time when we’re both able to connect.
I pick Lizzie up and hand her the keys. It is a Monday on a warm Seattle summer night, and she recently passed driver’s ed. She is in a good mood, maybe because she gets to make some dough, maybe because she gets to practice driving—it’s hard to say with teens why they are the way they are. We pull into the apartment complex and look for unit F and make our way to Nicole’s door.
Benni wears Minion’s pajamas. We take turns hugging because we know each other pretty well. Nicole looks great—her makeup is elegant, and her outfit is cute. We visit while she waits for her Uber. She gives me a tour of the apartment and tells me how she finally got her tax refund and is using it to take a trip to Cuba, her great-grandmother’s country. She will not support the regime. She will stay at hostels and buy art from locals.
I leave for my car and see a jeep creeping along with a driver staring at me. I know the driver! It is Angela, the other single mom who rented the downstairs for a year. Angela and Nicole have never met. But what they have in common stretches farther than the dollars they gave me. Shoot, I needed them as much as they needed a room.
Angela’s jaw is slack with surprise. I make googly eyes at her new baby while we make sense of the situation. I learn her bestie, another single mom named Jessica, lives above Nicole. Her son plays with Benni, and Angela visits the apartment nearly every day. We both shake our heads in wonder. What are the chances …? How random is that …? Nicole’s Uber is late, so I introduce the women, and they emote positivity about kids, the apartment, me. I feel warm inside. Lizzie pops her head out with Benni and glows at her aunties.
It wasn’t always like this. I was married for thirteen years, so having roommates while parenting wasn’t something I imagined. But when he had to go, I rented out rooms. First, it was international students, but I was gone too much to fulfill the requirements of making them dinner. Then I advertised word-of-mouth, which worked out fine. Having single mothers and their children downstairs might have been lots of things, but it was never scary.
Women have been depending on each other for housing and childcare for a long time. Something happened in the States where single-family hetero households reigned supreme. What happened? The advent of the car? The non-farming, 9-5 schedule? A sociologist would know. All I know is that the single women with children I know are trustworthy and supportive. I also know that in the suburbs, you feel like a bit of a target for judgement when your lifestyle is “alternative.”
Lizzie is babysitting and driving. Isaac loves baseball. Benni will be great because his mom is Nicole, who is brave and smart. Angela’s oldest is proof in the pudding—an athletic scholarship to the University of Washington. And yet, praise for being a superwoman is not praise at all. A community without masculine energy is not an ideal. But what can we do when the ones we know are often negligent, ill, or abusive?
Angela and Nicole are family. We aren’t trying to set each other up with a blind date. That cycle of expectation and disappointment I felt being married with children isn’t there with other single women. Maybe that is the benefit I have been waiting for. If I can’t have financial support, well, at least I don’t have the burden of resentment.
* * *
A faculty member asked me to order special tent cards and create name tags for his class. I suppose this is a normal task for an administrative assistant, and I say, yes, because it’s the job I accepted. I spend my lunch crunching personal numbers: driving, gas, clothes that make me feel professional. I also do this in the shower. What can I squeeze from where?
I join happy hour and drink beer flights among younger gals who get paid more to do the same job. The servers here make more than me. “Please, no tips,” a sign displays. “We pay our staff a fair wage.”
My freelance business is not great, and here, at this college, they will pay for my kids’ future college. Sure, my youngest is only eleven, but I hold on to hope one of my B-average children will seek higher education. Is this a good plan, or is it career suicide? Either way it’s an eight-year sentence.
I used to write books. I used to dance. I used to be married with two incomes. I used to have an imagination. Now I write in a diary while riding the bus.
An assistant is everyone’s underling, and pretending you care about their agenda is part of the deal. For those of you reading this who have an assistant, please go into work today knowing that the hardest part of your assistant’s job is pretending they care.
I am an artist trapped in a secretary’s body. Or am I a secretary trapped in an artist’s body? I don’t know what I am. I know getting anywhere by 8 am feels impossible during November in Seattle, and certainly getting anywhere by 8 am looking presentable feels close to impossible.
I feel like Lily Tomlin in 9-5 when she trains Jane Fonda at the paper copier, except I am also Jane Fonda messing up the copies. I hope I’m inside one of those switcheroo movies where the rich and famous person wakes up in the body of the poor person they’ve scorned in the past. What lesson am I learning here, and how can I get back to my rich and famous self?
I hustle. I grind, as the kids say. Friends say I’m strong, I’m badass, but I say pfffftt to that. Today’s gig work is for a tech behemoth. I must sanitize a document and scrub a file. I’m not kidding—that’s how they talk. I pretend to know what they are talking about, then Google it. Why they can’t just say clean up the files, I don’t know. I think they wish they were doctors.
I used to be cute when I woke up, and now I’m forty-five. Now I’m cute after I’ve slept eight hours, lubricated my eyeballs, drank two cups of coffee, blown out my hair, applied face primer, tinted face lotion, anti-puff cream, and of course, concealer. Even then I’m pretty sure “cute” is a stretch. Approachable? Professional? Maybe. The hours to get from waking to working are getting farther and farther apart.
Sometimes at night I search real estate in Spokane. I warm a little milk and have Ritz crackers and search for houses downtown. Older homes with unfinished basements and creaky stairs and banisters and original moldings. The affordability of older homes east of the Cascades gives me a peaceful feeling, like I could start over somewhere, like I could pay my way and save. Meet a handy, childless man. I do this imagining until I become drowsy. I put away the pocket computer until next time. If the Spokane idea doesn’t pan out, I will buy a condo next door to a weed shop. I will become best friends with all the young people working there, and they will make sure I get deals and discounts, since I’m their neighbor and tip well.
I’m on the train when I get a text from my nosy neighbor. “Did you and Carl break up?”
I used to spill the tea because I used to be a pleaser. I always know what people want; a real gift, ha ha. I’m stronger now. I take half the day to respond. “Why do you ask?” I write. My therapist told me that trick. It really stops people in their tracks. You can practically count the seconds until they snivel in their own nosy shame.
* * *
My sister Debbie knows David, who is sharing custody of two small children. He makes loads of money leading a marketing division for a tech start-up. Debbie knows my skill set and thinks he might have some work for me. Yay money!
I bring my laptop and my portfolio to lunch, ready for a conversation about how to pivot from Administrative Work to copywriting. We order tacos and beer—he pays. Minutes into the food, he asks me, “So what did you get in the divorce?” I chew slowly, noting the mist coming down from a darkening sky.
I feel my pants squeezing my thighs; I want to unbutton something. Christmas is coming; there will be presents to buy. The restaurant is festively green and red, and I wish I could magically transport my family to a beach somewhere warm. Instead, here I am, trapped inside a snow globe with this educated city man.
I know what he means and ask, “What do you mean?”
I want to hear him before it is my turn. He complains about losing his 401K and the house to his wife, who doesn’t really want to work.
“She took a job for minimum wage at a daycare,” he says, “But I still need to pay her four grand in spousal support a month.”
He is glad he gets the kids equally. He is not glad that she is drinking and dating too much. He quiets down, and I clear my throat.
“You and I have had different experiences,” I say. He raises his eyebrows. Was this camaraderie or competition? I put my laptop away, seeing as it’s not really a business meeting.
I share my ex’s terrible accident and how he can’t work or love the same. There is no financial support for the kids, because he has no income. I have become good at delivering this news softly yet matter-of-factly, without tears or sentiment.
I am surprised when he nods kindly and says, “I’m really sorry to hear that.”
We spend the rest of the time together talking about dating apps. He thinks my story about the polyamorous engineer is a knee-slapper. He is likewise shocked to hear about the homeless man I met who arrived in Teva’s and a straw hat with toothpaste crust smeared on his cheek.
“What about you?” I ask.
He gives a mischievous grin. “I’m just having fun,” he says.
He tells me how a surefire way to get a “hot chick’s” number is tell her you’re a mess and warn her you’re trouble.
“Ah,” I tell him. “Taking advantage of a woman’s empathetic nature. Noted.”
I can’t help it: I tell him how freshly divorced dads like himself are unattractive; at least to me, someone who knows better.
David doesn’t need to know I like sex a lot and miss the regularity I enjoyed in my marriage. He doesn’t need to know that last weekend I banged a silver fox who drives racecars. I have a feeling he’ll be mad if I tell him how easy it is for me to get attention.
“Be careful out there, my dear,” he says.
He asks if I’ve heard about the lady who went missing after a date to a Mariners game. They found her dismembered body in a dumpster near the stadium. She had three kids.
At home, I alter my online profile to rule out men with young children. Then I go back later and delete it all.
