Read Online You Lost Me There by Rosecrans Baldwin - Free Book Online
Authors: Rosecrans Baldwin
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token artiste in silk floral scarves, a dilettante at ethnic dinners I labored to prepare from magazines for Victor’s esteemed colleagues, where here they’d won national medals—a Nobel winner one time—and I was asking who wanted more couscous.
Then I turned forty. I expected to hate turning forty, but it turned out much worse. Life was all tragedy, no comedy for a year. I thought my existence was finished, and then it wasn’t; there was still room to turn forty-one, and the humiliation became a fever collar around my neck. I couldn’t hide beneath enough black sweaters. I struggled to write anything meaningful, anything reasonably authentic to my life. All the clichés became personal. Did I lose interest in exercise? In sex? I couldn’t see why I’d ever want to use my body again. At one point I was in a salon ordering the stylist to shave off all my precious hair (she wouldn’t do it), and I started crying so intensely I had to be moved to the manager’s office. Eating and napping, however, or staying in the apartment, watching period dramas in the afternoon with a goblet of white wine, programs I’d previously recorded and already seen five times, there I excelled. Hell, I improved by the week.
And where was Victor? Where was my devoted husband? Still in the lab chipping away at his life’s work, working nine to eight, six days a week, the self-appointed superhero of public health. And when he wasn’t working, he was swimming or reading or insisting we see some chamber music quartet on tour from Budapest.
Of course there were good days, days we spent motoring up through the Hudson Valley, nights out at the movies, nights in bed with the lights off, just talking. But the bigger picture? How I saw the pattern at that point? Our marriage was a book written by authors in separate houses.
Then one weekend, six months after my birthday, Victor was away for a conference, and Saturday morning I woke up typing. I’d had an idea in a dream and I wrote a marathon through Sunday night. Like it was a question of stamina: Did I have it in me to go one more page? I kept quiet when Victor returned, I didn’t show him a thing. It felt very naughty and secret, like I was seventeen again, shielding what I’d written from Mother. For a month I got up at three in the morning, wearing my tattered bathrobe at the dining table, writing longhand. Soon, semiconscious, I had a monologue in two acts, Woman Hits Forty.
And it was good. It was the best thing I’d ever written.
I showed it to a director friend and she loved it. Her lead actress loved it, she said I’d “stumbled into this big untouched heart” (how I loved the little note card she sent me; I still have it above my desk), the question of when women bloom and toward whose light. Maybe it was the era, but it resounded. Those first two weeks, seventy-five people down on Franklin Street were standing every night. Women were crying on the sidewalk: women my age and their teenage daughters. Then came Cheryl Cheney from The New York Times, stopping by unannounced one Thursday. After Friday morning’s review, investors seemed to materialize from the air itself.
“A feminist triumph written by Sara Gardner for women who didn’t know they were feminists.”
But look at Victor. Roll up the headaches and the excitement involved in trooping up Broadway, and see Victor instead, Victor who hadn’t noticed a thing those weeks in production until the review was in the newspaper, beside his cereal. Why? Because I’d left him out, and because he’d been too busy with a grant to attend the first performances. Because I didn’t want his help, I didn’t need his support. Probably because I was still furious over how easily he’d turned forty the year before, when it didn’t mean anything to him. When, worse, he hadn’t seen why it should be a big deal to me. “It’s a number, not a milestone,” he said at some dinner a few weeks after my birthday; we were out with
Then I turned forty. I expected to hate turning forty, but it turned out much worse. Life was all tragedy, no comedy for a year. I thought my existence was finished, and then it wasn’t; there was still room to turn forty-one, and the humiliation became a fever collar around my neck. I couldn’t hide beneath enough black sweaters. I struggled to write anything meaningful, anything reasonably authentic to my life. All the clichés became personal. Did I lose interest in exercise? In sex? I couldn’t see why I’d ever want to use my body again. At one point I was in a salon ordering the stylist to shave off all my precious hair (she wouldn’t do it), and I started crying so intensely I had to be moved to the manager’s office. Eating and napping, however, or staying in the apartment, watching period dramas in the afternoon with a goblet of white wine, programs I’d previously recorded and already seen five times, there I excelled. Hell, I improved by the week.
And where was Victor? Where was my devoted husband? Still in the lab chipping away at his life’s work, working nine to eight, six days a week, the self-appointed superhero of public health. And when he wasn’t working, he was swimming or reading or insisting we see some chamber music quartet on tour from Budapest.
Of course there were good days, days we spent motoring up through the Hudson Valley, nights out at the movies, nights in bed with the lights off, just talking. But the bigger picture? How I saw the pattern at that point? Our marriage was a book written by authors in separate houses.
Then one weekend, six months after my birthday, Victor was away for a conference, and Saturday morning I woke up typing. I’d had an idea in a dream and I wrote a marathon through Sunday night. Like it was a question of stamina: Did I have it in me to go one more page? I kept quiet when Victor returned, I didn’t show him a thing. It felt very naughty and secret, like I was seventeen again, shielding what I’d written from Mother. For a month I got up at three in the morning, wearing my tattered bathrobe at the dining table, writing longhand. Soon, semiconscious, I had a monologue in two acts, Woman Hits Forty.
And it was good. It was the best thing I’d ever written.
I showed it to a director friend and she loved it. Her lead actress loved it, she said I’d “stumbled into this big untouched heart” (how I loved the little note card she sent me; I still have it above my desk), the question of when women bloom and toward whose light. Maybe it was the era, but it resounded. Those first two weeks, seventy-five people down on Franklin Street were standing every night. Women were crying on the sidewalk: women my age and their teenage daughters. Then came Cheryl Cheney from The New York Times, stopping by unannounced one Thursday. After Friday morning’s review, investors seemed to materialize from the air itself.
“A feminist triumph written by Sara Gardner for women who didn’t know they were feminists.”
But look at Victor. Roll up the headaches and the excitement involved in trooping up Broadway, and see Victor instead, Victor who hadn’t noticed a thing those weeks in production until the review was in the newspaper, beside his cereal. Why? Because I’d left him out, and because he’d been too busy with a grant to attend the first performances. Because I didn’t want his help, I didn’t need his support. Probably because I was still furious over how easily he’d turned forty the year before, when it didn’t mean anything to him. When, worse, he hadn’t seen why it should be a big deal to me. “It’s a number, not a milestone,” he said at some dinner a few weeks after my birthday; we were out with
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