Portion of the Sea (39 page)

I had casually mentioned to Leo weeks later that there had been a childhood sweetheart, but I stopped there, never telling him that my heart still beat off the coast of Sanibel. Then, one summer day, I walked into his office suggesting that the two of us take a mini-trip to Florida where he had never been. He said nothing but flipped open his maroon account book and studied it religiously. He then closed his eyes and muttered calculations under his breath, then opened his eyes, turned the page of his maroon book, looked up at the calendar, and counted days.

I watched him perform his calculated ritual, aware that I had married a devout man, a worshipper of money. It was he who taught me the power of the green gods. “In God we trust,” was his favorite prayer, but occasionally he prayed deeper, and to the same God I prayed to. Leo closed the calendar and looked at me. “A trip to Florida is not going to happen right now,” he said. “Besides, it’s summer. I have no interest in Florida in the summer.”

I stared at him but said nothing.

“What’s with that pout?”

“Sorry.”

“You don’t have to apologize,” he said.

“Why can’t we go to Florida?”

“Florida has too many mosquitoes in the summer. If you want to go somewhere else, we will. How about Paris? San Francisco? How about a place you’ve never been before, one we can discover together and call our own?”

I threw my arms around him and kissed him on the lips. There were no bugles blowing when I kissed him, but this time I heard a peaceful anthem. I’d never been to Paris before. I’d never left this country.

When Leo and I returned from Paris, I put my mind to work overtime, and I was fast becoming known for my articles on fashion, all the while wearing the latest and the greatest, while my husband was working on advertising campaigns that promoted the fads that I was wearing. We were acquiring more wealth for ourselves, while creating a reputation and social existence beyond my wildest dreams, and working morning, noon, and night. Nothing was going to stop us, not even that first speed law passed in New York State, mandating a maximum speed of ten miles per hour in populated districts.

Lydia

I put Ava’s pages away and glanced up at the stone water tower that looked so out of place in the midst of a steel and glass city that was now sparkling in hues of orange and gold from the descending September sun.

I was glad to learn that Ava was surviving. Her spirit was indomitable, and I was glad to hear of her rising forth from a potentially disastrous choice she had made.

A chill in the air sent geese running up and down my arms, leaving behind their bumpy tracks on my skin; so, I got up and walked to the nearest store that sold bicycles. There, a red one caught my eye, and I purchased it on the spot. It was a poorly thought-out purchase and meant I’d be pedaling instead of eating lunch for the next several months. Unless, of course I’d give in one of these days and let Ethan pay for me. But I preferred paying for myself. My old self-perception, of the best-dressed little
girl that got everything handed to her, had long since faded away. I now had to work hard for everything, including the clothes on my back and they were nothing like the fashions Ava was wearing.

“I’d prefer you to take a bus to work,” Ethan said one morning as I put my backpack on and mounted my bicycle. “It’s dangerous for you to be riding in rush-hour traffic. A woman shouldn’t risk her life like that and …”

I whipped my hand through the air and slapped him across the face. I wasn’t just swatting at Ethan, but at all the men throughout history who held women back from biking and voting and working in the careers of their choice and from doing all they wanted to do in life. Still, none of that justified my slapping poor Ethan. He was just one man who didn’t want me getting hurt on my bike.

“I am sorry,” I said, touching the red area of his cheek. “I can’t believe I did that. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“It didn’t hurt,” he claimed. “But don’t ever do it again.”

“Of course not,” I said, ashamed I did it once and disgusted he thought I’d ever do it again.

“Why’d you slap me?”

“You were trying to tell me I shouldn’t ride my bike to work when I think it’s a perfectly fine thing for a woman to do.”

“Your choice,” he said. “I’m sorry I worry about you and care for you and love you like I do.”

“You do?” I gasped. “You love me?”

“Yes. I have from the moment you bumped into me and knocked all my papers to the floor. I never told you this, but I could hardly get you off my mind after the Republican convention, and the worst part was, I had a major deadline to meet, and I’ve never in all my professional years come close to missing a deadline like I did that night.”

“But yours was the next day’s cover story.”

“I know. See what you almost did? Can you imagine the front page of the
Windy City Press
blank?” He smiled. “You turn me reckless, Lydia Isleworth, and I kind of like it.”

His words that day flattered me, but I continued riding to and from work each day, and as I pedaled my way through the city, I appreciated
for the first time the simpler strides that women of history had made, things that in present times are taken for granted. Who would want to live in a world where bicycling was only for men? If I could say a huge “thank you” to Ava for going against the stares and ridicule and for riding that bicycle anyway, I would, for I enjoyed my own riding time immensely.

But my appreciation for Ava didn’t pardon her from being a criminal in my eyes. And as I rode along Lakeshore Boulevard one Sunday afternoon, my stomach growling from not being able to afford any lunch, I resented her. She had married for money. We were nothing alike, I decided. We were both writers now, but I had done it on my own. I didn’t have a wealthy husband to get me what I wanted. And I wasn’t the type to need such a man. Neither was she. She was the girl who once vowed to never marry a man. And when she fell in love with Jaden, I forgave her and fell in love myself, but now, to have married for money, it was an act that defied gravity and all that was natural for a woman like her.

I was doing everything myself. I didn’t want any man paying or paving my way, and I forgave my father for leaving me nothing. I was stronger for doing it all on my own. Ethan and I were dating, but I never asked him for any help in advancing me at the paper and he never offered. And suddenly, as I was pedaling down Delaware, the revelation that Ethan never offered me any help turned me suspicious. Maybe he was one of them—one of those men who didn’t want his woman rising in her career. Maybe he wanted me staying put where I was in the obituaries. And come to think of it, even marriage would be better. He did say he loved me, and when a man says those three words, it usually means he wants to marry a woman, and typically that means she must quit work and stay home. I had questions for Ethan. I had to figure out what he was thinking.

Then, again, I didn’t want him knowing what I was thinking, which was nothing close to marriage. Marrying him when my heart was still dancing with someone else would be a crime, and that would put me in prison with Ava.

I knew it was illogical, sad, crazy maybe, to be harboring desires for someone I hadn’t seen in so long, but I couldn’t help it. As I pedaled alongside Lake Michigan, I tried figuring how I might slowly end things
with Ethan. I did care for him. But I loved someone else. I can’t help that, can I? Besides, it was getting dangerous for me to view marriage as a place I prefer over the obituary department. And then I knew what I had to do so I reached deep down into my jar of wisdom and pulled out some words my father once spoke.

“It is time to accelerate my career,” I said. “Yes, that’s what I need to focus on right now—my career!”

XXXIV

CHICAGO

1963
THREE YEARS LATER

Lydia

SOUTHWEST FLORIDA RECOVERED AFTER
Hurricane Donna, winds averaging nearly one hundred and thirty-five miles per hour, passed directly over Fort Myers Beach and Fort Myers, and life went on.

The next three years were fascinating ones for me, a female journalist writing her way out of obituaries and into the land of the living. When I accepted the position covering womens’ issues, I feared I’d become meshed in recipes or rounded shoes versus pointed shoes, like Ava, but that was not the case.

My first assignment was covering a controversial historical milestone for women taking control of their own fertility. It came in 1960, and the headline for my story was as follows:

U.S. FOOD AND DRUG ADMINISTRATION APPROVES FIRST ORAL CONTRACEPTIVES FOR MARKETING IN THE UNITED STATES

My story, which ran on the front page, described how women had been taking substances by mouth to prevent pregnancy as far back as four thousand years!

And three years later, in 1963, I was still the journalist following the topic when another monumental moment arrived. The headline for that story read:

MAJOR PHARMACEUTICAL COMPANY INTRODUCES ITS FIRST BIRTH CONTROL PILL

   I liked writing about the smaller issues, but kept getting assigned to larger ones.

EQUAL PAY ACT MAKES IT ILLEGAL FOR COMPAINES TO PAY DIFFERENT RATES TO WOMEN AND MEN WHO DO THE SAME WORK

   That story got me a pay raise and motivated me to work longer and harder than I ever had before. I was driven, and each story I was assigned to cover made me feel like I was pedaling my way over mountains, sweating profusely as I went but getting stronger and more informed and better at mastering my craft. My mind had never trained so hard for anything before.

And when the government took its first steps toward addressing the issue of inequality of the sexes, I was the one to cover it. When President Kennedy formed a Commission on the Status of Women chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, who was in her seventies, I was the one to interview her.

And when Kennedy issued a presidential order demanding that the civil service make hiring decisions “solely on the basis of ability” and “without regard to sex,” I threw my arms up and shouted a personal “hooray” for everyone in the office to hear, and then I wrote and submitted my story.

Maybe it was the jumping jacks I did and the cheering, or not having used a single vacation day in three years, but after turning it in, I felt exhausted and weak, as if I had just tumbled down the side of a mountain
and was dying from having overexerted myself on the way up.

I sat crouched over my desk one August morning, hardly able to lift the coffee mug to my mouth. I now drank five strong cups a day, and anything less gave me a pounding headache. Today was the day I upped my dose to six cups, and as the mug touched my lips, I felt my heart double step within me. My heart was something I hadn’t felt in a long time.

I laid my head down on my desk and tried to rest a minute, but from that angle I spotted the seashell I had brought to work back on my first day in obits. It was lying buried under a year’s worth of papers, with only its tip sticking out. I reached for it and pulled out the rolled-up obituary I had written for Abigail and stuffed inside. Then I put the shell to my ear.

There were all sorts of noises in the office, phones ringing and meetings going on, but I listened deeply as if trying to hear my own soul, and then I heard the sea and in it the words of Abigail, tidbits of wisdom bobbing up and down in the water like buoys for me to grab onto. I remembered her saying a woman is made up of a heart, soul, and mind. I no longer felt my heart, and I was trying to get in tune with my soul. It was my mind working overtime that was drowning out the other elements, but I didn’t know what to do about it. And now, due to overexertion, I feared my mind might be shutting down.

“Lydia,” said my friend Jane. She covers women and politics. “Hearing anything good in there?”

I jumped in my seat, dropping the shell onto the floor. “I need to get away, Jane. I desperately need a vacation.”

“Maybe if you hadn’t given all your vacation days away as holiday presents last year, you could take one for yourself.”