Miss Me When I'm Gone (2 page)

Chapter 4

Gretchen and I met when we were freshmen at Forrester. Forrester is a small liberal-arts college in western Massachusetts, once a women’s college, now coed with about a 35 percent male population. Gretchen lived down the dormitory hall from me. I can’t remember exactly what attracted us to each other at first. She seemed a bit spacey and pretty shy, but at the first floor party, she was hilarious when she was drunk. We’d sat together on someone’s couch confessing to each other what dorks we’d been in high school and our ambitious plans to be much cooler at Forrester. There was something mutually sarcastic about the exchange that no one else in the room seemed to grasp, and we ended up falling over each other with laughter, toasting each other’s likely collegiate domination with swigs of Goldschläger. The evening ended with me puking my guts out in the corner bathroom, with her checking on me periodically even though she couldn’t remember my name. The next morning we officially introduced ourselves over breakfast, and we were fast friends. I made friends with Jeremy while working in dining services and introduced him to Gretchen. They started dating the next year, and were an on-again, off-again couple for several years before they got really serious after college.

The three of us were pretty tight all four years. The friendship worked well because we all studied such different things. Jeremy was an economics major, Gretchen was American studies, and I was journalism. It was easier to be friends with Gretchen if you didn’t have classes with her. Her classroom demeanor sometimes creeped out fellow students. She rarely spoke in class—often made a show of looking bored by doodling, yawning, stretching. And when she did speak—and this would be only once or twice during a given semester—she’d raise her twiggy arm very meekly, weak at the elbow, and say something so goddamned clever that you just knew she’d been planning it all semester and waiting for the right second to say it.

And professors loved her—probably more for her essays than for these bizarre classroom performances, but it was hard to say.

Gretchen showed off her tall, frailish figure by wearing demure dresses a size or two too small—often covered up by oversize, pilly old-man cardigan sweaters that she picked up at the Salvation Army. Her favorite was a cable-knit cream one with dirty little cuffs and a shoulder hole awkwardly repaired with pink thread.

That was in the late nineties. We graduated together in 2000, and were close friends for many of the years after college. Gretchen’s and my lives followed similar trajectories for a while. We both got jobs right after college—me at a western Massachusetts newspaper, Gretchen writing for a Boston marketing company that produced viewbooks for colleges and ritzy private high schools. We both got married about five years out of college—Gretchen to Jeremy, me to Sam, whom I’d met at a party of a mutual friend. Even after that, we visited each other frequently—sometimes with husbands in tow, sometimes not. It was only in the last few years that our contact had become more infrequent.

Gretchen’s life had taken an unusual turn. She got a divorce, somewhat abruptly. I never got a clear read on why—Gretchen just insisted that it wasn’t working between her and Jeremy anymore, and hadn’t been for a long time. The week the divorce was finalized she took a solo road trip down south, going to Nashville, Dollywood, and various other landmarks related to the legendary ladies of country music. She wrote about the trip, and those writings eventually turned into a quirky memoir about the aftermath of her divorce, reflecting on her own experiences and American womanhood generally as she traveled and contemplated the lives and lyrics of Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, and Dolly Parton (and, to a lesser extent, Patsy Cline, Emmylou Harris, Dottie West, and a few others).

I had not realized up till then that Gretchen had ever listened to country music. She managed to get pieces of the manuscript published on a couple of popular blogs, then sold the whole thing to a publisher.
Tammyland
was an odd little book, but it did surprisingly well. One reviewer called it “a sort of honky-tonk
Eat, Pray, Love
on a shoestring
.
” Book clubs liked it. A prominent reviewer complimented her wit and her appreciation for Americana. It received a considerable bump because of a popular country music biopic that came out around the same time, and then a national discount chain started advertising it as their “Book Club Pick.” It sold thousands of copies after that. Gretchen quit her day job and started a second book.

Meanwhile, there were budget cuts at my newspaper and I got demoted from health reporter to part-time night copy editor. I was lucky to have any job at all at the end of it—lots of my friends didn’t. It was a blow but I kept the job while I “looked for something else”—a perpetual state of affairs that lasted two years and was still going strong when Gretchen died. At that point I was six and half months pregnant and not likely to get anything soon. My husband’s job with a boring but generously paying area insurance company limited our movement somewhat.

But it wasn’t the job situation that kept me from Gretchen. It was mostly the pregnancy. For one thing, I had an especially miserable first twenty weeks. I had something called hyperemesis, which basically means severe morning sickness. You turn into a horrifying puke machine and you lose unhealthy amounts of weight. I had to be hospitalized for dehydration a couple of times. Even when the drama of that was over, I never felt quite well. So, while I’d always pictured myself being one of those happy, glowing little pregnant ladies, I was quite the opposite—just a miserable old crab who happened to have a distended stomach.

The really big elephant in the room in all of this, however, was not Gretchen’s success or my lack thereof, or even my miserable pregnancy specifically, but the fact that Sam and I had gone ahead and chosen to have children.

Gretchen had been very congratulatory, but I knew how she felt about the matter. She found the prospect of having children terrifying. I’d always known she’d been ambivalent on the subject, but parts of
Tammyland
made me realize how strongly she felt. I understood where she was coming from. There was a time when I might’ve articulated very similar feelings. I simply wasn’t allowed to feel the way she did anymore.

“The Pill”

Southern Virginia

Rest stop somewhere off Interstate 81

I’ve stopped at this rest area because it has a Dairy Queen. I go all out and order a Peanut Buster Parfait. As I dig into it, a family is finishing up their ice cream at the picnic table next to mine. The skinny mom’s ice cream is dripping all over her elegant hands because she can’t keep up with it, as she’s spending all of her time trying to help her towheaded toddler eat his soft serve with a plastic spoon. The slightly older, equally towheaded son is standing on the bench but holding his own with his cone, although his chin is smeared with chocolate ice cream and rainbow sprinkles. “Superrrrr . . . HERO!” he keeps saying between licks of ice cream, then making exploding noises with his lips. Everyone ignores him. Nobody else says much. The dad is young and muscular with a receding hairline. He’s isn’t eating any ice cream. He’s checking something on his iPhone.

Back when I was married, I used to witness scenes like this and try to imagine myself as the mother. Would I leave the younger one to his own devices and enjoy my own ice cream? Would I demand my husband help? Would I think those exploding mouth noises were cute?

The fact that I could never figure out the answers is a big part of why I’m sitting alone here now. Children confound me. The reasons why people choose to have them elude me. Jeremy did not feel the same way. Not at all.

Mine is one of the first few generations to grow up thinking of kids as a choice. We, of course, have not only the choice of when but if.

Which brings me to Loretta Lynn’s famous song “The Pill.” Truthfully, it’s not among my favorite Loretta songs. I love it more as a piece of history than as a piece of music. Loretta was smack-dab in the generation of women who were of child-bearing age before the Pill was available and after.

The song is written from the perspective of a wife who’s had a few kids already and declares she’s not having any more—she’s gonna start having a little fun because now she has the Pill. Loretta recorded it in 1972, but her record company wouldn’t release it till 1975 because they were nervous about how it would be received. And indeed, there are a few racy lines in it:

This incubator is overused because you’ve kept it filled

The feeling good comes easy now since I’ve got the pill

It’s getting dark it’s roosting time tonight’s too good to be real

Aw but Daddy don’t you worry none ’cause Mama’s got the pill.

If anyone was ever in a position to sing a paean to the Pill, it was Loretta. She was married at thirteen and had four kids (and two miscarriages) by the time she was eighteen. “They didn’t have none of them pills when I was younger, or I’d have been swallowing ’em like popcorn,” she says in her autobiography. And after the birth of her twins—number five and number six—her husband “got himself clipped,” as she puts it. So she never actually took the Pill herself. But she knew well the burdens of too many pregnancies, especially when combined with poverty. And she was proud that the song educated rural women about their options. She mentioned once in an interview that doctors often told her that her song reached their young rural patients better than their pamphlets ever did.

Of course, my generation takes the Pill as a given. If I were to pen a song about it, I’m not sure how it would go. As a married woman, I found the enormity of the decision mind-boggling. And at times I even wished it wasn’t my decision to make. Because if kids just happened to Jeremy and me as a matter of course, I imagine we’d have gotten through it, we’d have made it okay, we’d have learned to enjoy the ups and downs of family life together. But deciding to have them was not a step I was ever willing to take.

I’ve been asked since Jeremy and I separated, “Didn’t you two talk about it before you got married?”

Why, yes. Of course we did. We were a modern pair, and we weren’t dumb. At the time, though, we both thought the answer was “probably.”

He was confident of his answer. I grew less confident of it as the years went by. Because, you see, it’s easy to say the answer is “probably” when you’re twenty-three. When you are twenty-three, you want to believe you are the optimistic, life-embracing sort who wants to have kids. And it’s okay to think that you do, because you have years to get around to it. And by the time the proper time rolls around, you’ll surely have done everything else you’ve wanted, you’ll be so much more mature and settled and eager to make your ultrasound your screen saver and sign up for Mommy & Me classes. But then you find yourself twenty-seven and feeling no closer to that. Then twenty-eight. And you realize your “probably” meant maybe and your husband’s “probably” meant absolutely. Then you’re twenty-nine, and he wants to start trying. And your “maybe” has now faded into a “probably not.”

Babies don’t make you weep, you begin to realize. They don’t necessarily even make you smile. You find yourself muttering to yourself, “Someone shut that kid up!” whenever you hear a child whining or a baby screaming in the grocery store, and you’re alarmed by the nastiness of your inward tone. You notice tired, vaguely angry parents at the airport. It seems to you you’ve never seen happy parents at the airport. You wonder if having a child means never being able to enjoy a trip again. Commercials for diapers or baby powder annoy you, with those sensual voice-over ladies talking about babies’ butts like they’re as delicious as a chocolate cheesecake. You start to wonder what’s wrong with you, that you just can’t bring yourself to think of a baby’s butt that way.

You would like to stay married. But how? Only if someone changes his or her mind.

This is what the Pill has come to mean to me.

So the song I’d sing about it would be quite different from Loretta’s. It would probably have some melancholy notes, even some confused and cacophonous bits as well.

But I’d still sing it.

—Tammyland

Chapter 5

Gretchen grew up in Connecticut, and her parents still lived there. On my way down 91 for the memorial service, I bought a new copy of
Tammyland
at the mall. The one Gretchen had signed for me now seemed too precious to take out of the house, but I knew I might want to read it at the hotel. I probably could have made it back home that night, but Gretchen’s mother had asked me if I could come for breakfast the morning after the service. She had something she wanted to discuss with me, she said—something about reading Gretchen’s new manuscript, possibly editing it.

When I checked out with
Tammyland,
the shaggy-haired cashier said, “Didn’t this lady die recently? Isn’t this the one who fell on some library steps, or something?”

This lady.
It had been ten days since Gretchen died, and I certainly wasn’t ready for small talk about it.

“I think so,” I murmured as I handed him my credit card.

“Kind of ironic,” the young man continued with a grim scoff. “Author dying in front of a library.”

I shrugged and signed the receipt, then tore out of the store. I hadn’t expected this—although Gretchen’s death had made some New England papers and was picked up by the AP as a minor story. Gretchen was by no means a famous author, but the combination of the popularity of
Tammyland
and the unusual nature of her death somehow translated into media kindling.

I checked into the Best Western outside of Gretchen’s hometown with a couple of hours to spare before the service. Sitting cross-legged on the bed, I took the book out of its plastic bag and examined the glossy cover. It pictured the back of a young woman—smartly dressed in a khaki miniskirt, knee-high boots with thick heels, a snug black sweater, and an olive-green messenger bag slung over her shoulder. She is on tippy toes, with her hands cupped as she peers into the window of what looks like a run-down nightclub. Against the black of the window is a pink neon sign that reads
TAMMYLAND
.
Skillful Photoshopping, but they’d gone a bit overboard in making the girl look tweedy, I’d always thought—but I guess that was the point: Northeast intellectual type finds herself in old-time country music. Still, it had always been odd for me to see Gretchen’s words packaged this way. And she’d never dressed anything like that.

I looked around the hotel room. The heavy maroon curtain over the window kept all of the daylight out, the lighting was low and yellow, and the room was chilly. I went to the wall unit and turned up the heat, then switched on CNN. I usually love hotels, but I’d never had occasion to stay in one alone, or for such a tragic reason as a friend’s funeral. I wondered if this would be the last time I’d be in a hotel for a very long time. Once the little guy arrived, I wouldn’t be going anywhere by myself.

Sitting on the bed again, I remembered that Gretchen had written a scene or two about staying in motels by herself. I picked up the book, found the first one, and muted the TV.

The passage was about Tammy Wynette. Of all the women Gretchen wrote about, she seemed most enamored of Tammy. Even after reading the book, I hadn’t quite understood the attraction. But I was still willing to try.

“Crying Steel Guitar”

Motel 6

Crossville, Tennessee

I’d hoped to get to Nashville by dark, but I’m too tired to drive the last couple of hours. One forgets, being married, what long road trips are like without someone along to share the driving. There was a construction project near Knoxville that tied me up for longer than I expected. I’m too exhausted to plow through the last hundred miles.

I’ve checked into a Motel 6 in a town called Crossville. The room doesn’t have any obvious flaws—mouse poop or sour smell or a frayed noose hanging from the shower-curtain rod—so I toss my bags inside and drive a couple of blocks back toward the highway, where I’d seen a Popeye’s on the way in. I’m too tired to eat a salad or something healthy. Too cold, too much crunching of lettuce, too much self-respect, which takes energy. Fried chicken is one of my many food vices. It was one of Jeremy’s very few. So we used to eat it together, trading white pieces for dark, fingers slippery, groaning with a mutually grossed-out pleasure at the end. And when we’d share a meal, he’d always let me have the buttery biscuit.

I sit cross-legged on the bed’s brown quilt and polish off a breast, a thigh, a wing, a biscuit, a tub of coleslaw, and mashed potatoes. It’s more than I’ve ever eaten with Jeremy. I think of Tammy as I gnaw the last bits of breaded goodness off the poor chicken’s ribs. Contrary to her fancy diva style and her ladylike public persona, her favorite food was anything deep-fried county-fair style. She supposedly would order her tour bus miles out of the way to get to a Cracker Barrel. “If there was a corn dog within fifty miles,” one of her backup singers said of her, “the woman had to have it.”

The chicken fat comforts me, and the pile of bones left in the greasy Popeye’s box by my side makes me feel raw and rank, like a cave woman. I drink the last of my Coke and belch so loudly I’m certain the guy next door can hear it over the endless baseball game droning out of his TV.

I reach for my iPod and play one Tammy tune after another, repeating my favorites as the night rolls on and the television next door falls silent. “Crying Steel Guitar” and “Apartment #9” are perfect for this evening. “Apartment #9,” in particular, is exactly what a newly divorced woman should listen to on a Tennessee highway, in a seedy hotel room. Tammy sings of a lonely room, a dark apartment, of the raw pain of being left, and of allowing yourself to hope that he’ll come back. Loved-and-left songs are a dime a dozen in any genre, but no one embodies them better than Tammy Wynette.

Tammy was a woman who knew the dim light of a room like this. By the time she recorded “Apartment #9,” she already knew it well. She was twenty-three, but she had been married and divorced by then, had three kids in a run-down shack in Alabama, had been to beauty school, and had suffered serious health problems as well as depression and electroshock treatments. She was living intermittently in a cheap motel in Nashville (with the man who would be her next husband), trying to get someone to give her a recording contract. This was the first song she ever recorded, and it was her big break after being turned down by just about every other producer in Nashville. So part of the experience of this song for me is not just the sadness in her voice, but the promise of her career. With each sob in her delivery, part of me cheers through the pathos, “Go, Wynette, go!” Because I know that when she was finished, the producer was blown away. After that song was recorded, she had a career.

So I’m torn between the sadness the song wants me to feel and the thrill of knowing what that song did for her. I know this isn’t how I’m supposed to feel listening to Tammy Wynette. I know I’m generally supposed to weep and feel pathetic. Many of her later songs do that to me. But this one makes this room seem more cheerful than this icky orange light, this worn carpet, and this crusty brown quilt.

This song is an anthem of someone who felt as desperate and lonely as I’ve felt in recent weeks, and turned it into something she’d always wanted. There was certainly pain before and even more after it, but here is the beginning of what she was meant to do—to sing for the brokenhearted, to put a little humanity and sympathy into thousands of lonely rooms, a little bit of comfort into thousands of dim-lit worlds.

I turn out the light. I get into bed. I press repeat.