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Though her best friend Diedre assured her that there was some turning-forties-magic that she could anticipate when she’d wake up with a new, better world view and life would transform.
Mary grabbed at her aching toe and squeezed it to stop the throb.
A little transformation wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing.
Mary found herself in a predicament that she hadn’t anticipated as she crossed over the demarcation line between decades.
She was a woman who lived in no-man’s land.
Twenty years ago, in the small town where she’d grown up, high school couples married after graduation. It was conventional and expected that she’d marry Dan Williams. They’d had their first date at the end of freshman year. They were two peas in a pod, finishing each other’s sentences, ordering the same thing off the menu, and having the same familial lack of ambition in terms of seeing anything for their future selves beyond the mundane.
It honestly hadn’t occurred to Mary to do anything else; her worldview had been as narrow as the strictly patriarchal edges of the county lines.
She was eighteen, and Dan was nineteen that May as they prepared to graduate from St. Ambrose High.
Married in June.
Dan left for Navy boot in July.
He was gone all of one week when Mary realized she was pregnant.
Surprise!
In their small-town Catholic school, seventy-year-old Sister Inez—who had been sequestered in a Spanish convent from the time she was ten until she was forty and came to America to teach languages—hadn’t really taught much about sex in their state-mandated sex-ed curriculum. To say Mary was unprepared for her wedding night was exceedingly generous.
Mary kept the two-pink-lined pee test a secret until she could tell Dan in person that they were going to be parents when she saw him at his graduation, becoming a U.S. sailor. In turn, Dan didn’t consult Mary in advance of signing on to submarine school, which would mean he’d deploy for six months’ stints.
They both had surprises for that graduation day.
Mary couldn’t imagine life under the sea with the escape hatch sealed tight.
Yet, that’s where she found herself, too. For her, there was no way out; all she could do was power forward.
While Dan was at submarine school, she’d been on her own in their military housing.
Thin walls, her next-door neighbor, Deidre, heard her vomiting at all hours of the day and night and banged on her door with electrolytes and saltines.
For weeks, Mary had been unable to open her eyes without retching up acidic bile. One day, Deidre knocked on her door. “Come on, I have an appointment for you to see my OB. This can’t go on anymore.”
When the ultrasound doctor sang out, “Congratulations! You’re expecting twins!” Mary opened the black plastic yard bag she carried with her everywhere she went and puked.
At nineteen, with a husband sliding along the ocean floor near the Arabian Peninsula, Mary gave birth, squeezing Deidre’s hand, becoming the mother of colicky newborns. And she, in turn, got out of her hospital bed to hold Deidre’s hand when she gave birth to her own son the next day.
Yeah, life comes at you fast.
Twenty-one years on, Mary had fulfilled her adult duties of raising a family. The boys were grown and off learning how to adult. She and her now ex-husband divorced as soon as the kids left for college. She closed the cover on the story of who she had been from high school until the day of the “great good-bye” when the boys loaded their cars and drove in tandem across the United States, as far as they could get from her without diving into the Pacific. (Yeah, Mary knew that was self-pitying garbage, but that didn’t mean she didn’t think it.) All in all, it had been a pretty good book, taken as a whole. But it was finished and now sat on the shelf next to her baby book and school yearbooks, all gathering dust until Mary felt compelled to pull out moments of her past to reminisce.
Starting young meant Mary burst across the finish line just as many families her age were moving toward the starting gate for their own race.
She felt an odd disequilibrium now.
Untethered from a nuclear family sharing the same house, Mary was flailing a bit as she tried to figure out this next chapter.
It would be helpful, she thought, if she could find some other women who were her kind of “Wow, you’re so young to be so old!” as she was. Even Deidre, her best friend since the life-preserving saltine and electrolyte delivery, was twelve years her senior.
The fellow nurses her age working at the hospital all had to juggle daycare pickups and toddler dance tutus.
They came in with scouting peanut sales sign-ups and cookies, so many cookies.
