Halfway There Read online

  “That you talked to Renée!” I shouted.

  “Not really. The play was great, wasn’t it? I’m glad you got me to come.”

  That was it. She received something I didn’t. To make it even worse, she wasn’t going to gloat about it either. Damn her!

  “Are we going to ask your mother to come along?” I asked, trying not to mope too much as I opened the door to our car.

  Ellen smiled at me as she got behind the wheel. I didn’t care that she wasn’t supposed to be driving. I certainly couldn’t. Perhaps she could follow Renée home? All we needed to do was figure out which car she was in. The parking lot was nearly empty. If we waited long enough we were sure to see her. This seemed like a great idea!

  “I don’t think they can sail either.”

  “Huh? Who? Oh, your mom, right? Is there anything they are actually allowed to do? I mean, seriously—”

  “Yeah, but either way, I don’t want to share this trip with anyone else but you.”

  We spent our last day in L.A. beneath a pure white sail on a gentle blue-green ocean of water. The boat captain left us mostly to ourselves as we drank champagne and nibbled on strawberries. I couldn’t have dreamed up a more idyllic afternoon. We had survived the plane trip, Hollywood, and the mother-in-law. As far as I was concerned, there wasn’t anything in this whole damn world we couldn’t do. I thought of Xena and almost ululated in delight.

  “I love you. Did you know that?” I said as I tapped my glass against hers.

  “Even if I don’t have a war cry?” she teased.

  “We’ll work on it.” I smiled, leaned over, and kissed her soft lips with tender affection.

  “Be careful. You know where that kind of stuff leads to.”

  “I told you we were going to work on your war cry, didn’t I?”

  4

  It’s Just a Job

  It was a long drive home up Highway 55, past the brewery, and onto 44, a highway locals tend to call “foorty-foor.” There wasn’t much traffic because, even though it was rush hour, I was heading north and everyone else was heading south. But I really wasn’t paying much attention. At three o’clock that afternoon, my position as a managing editor had been eliminated. It hadn’t come as a surprise; it had been in the works for months. The venerable establishment at which I was employed had finally stopped vacillating between doing electronic publishing or going back to what they did best which was producing a magazine and publishing various inspirational books. Electronic publishing lost out to the tried and true. I was out of a job.

  As I drove, I thought about my previous fifteen years in the job market. If you measured success by the money you earned, I did pretty well for an English major. By all accounts I should have been flipping burgers somewhere or, more likely, still in school. I smiled when I remembered telling Ellen, back when we were baby lesbians, what I really wanted to do with my life.

  We were both in college when I told her I wanted to be a professor. They seemed to have it all—their own little offices, time off in the summer. They got to study what they wanted, and most importantly, they got to torture students. It was a pretty powerful concoction. Ellen wanted to be a pilot, which is why I couldn’t, for the life of me, understand the reason she was majoring in Communications. She seemed to think all her part-time flying would do the trick. Ellen was going to be a pilot, and I was going to be a professor. It had to work because it sounded so good.

  So eventually, Ellen got to be a pilot. She kept on logging hours with Marvin, her ancient flight instructor. Marvin, by his own boasting, had been teaching women to fly since he got back to the States after World War II. I knew from the way he looked at women that the only reason he taught them how to fly was so he could be locked in a closed space with “the fairer sex” for endless hours at a time with all the power that comes from being the only qualified pilot in the cockpit. I always thought Marvin took the term “cockpit” a bit too seriously. All that being said, Marvin thought the world of Ellen, and Ellen swore he never tried much with her, so she stuck with him. She flew for four years as a private pilot while she worked at United Parcel Service and Home Depot to pay the bills, and then she did two years as a corporate pilot working for the worst kind of “I’ve got more money than you” people I’ve ever met. Finally, she made it to commercial pilot—at first with a small commuter airline out of Saint Louis and, at last, the jackpot: Southwest.

  She was a pilot, but I never quite made it to professor. Somewhere along the way, I decided I liked money more than going to school, and I certainly liked money more than spending potentially sixteen years of my life studying. Besides, I consoled myself, somebody had to pay the rent. To be honest, I never really expected Ellen to make it. To be even more honest, she had made a career while I seemed to be floundering around.

  I had lucked into being a Technical Writer as an undergraduate and just stayed with it. Eventually, my job-hopping took Ellen and me out of Baltimore, where we had met, to Saint Louis. In Saint Louis, I took a series of jobs as a consultant for Anheuser-Busch, MasterCard, Monsanto, and various other companies where I fit in for a few months and then proceeded to piss off the boss by playing fast and loose with dress codes and flextime, among other things.

  I was never very good at obeying the rules, let alone established business protocols, but what I did do well was somehow turning this merry-go-round into an ever-increasing salary. It seemed to be working, except that I hated what I was doing. So the obvious conclusion was that I should get into management.

  This bit of inspiration came to me the day my team leader, after a rather confrontational meeting, told me over a cigarette that I wasn’t the “queen of all knowledge” and I needed to remember my place. I was only the writer. As I watched her mouth move, it dawned on me that compared to her I was, in fact, the “queen of all knowledge.” I needed to find a position that recognized my talents. Within a week I quit and started my search. It took about a month before I landed my first managerial job. Now, on this Friday afternoon, it had all come to a screeching halt.

  I parked on the street in front of my house. The windows were dark. For a few seconds I was disappointed, but then it seemed like a really great thing to go into an empty house and sit for a bit. I didn’t have to talk to anyone. I didn’t have to explain. I could sit and have a drink. So I sat in my dark, empty house, not speaking to anyone for a total of ten minutes before I had to find someone with whom to commiserate.

  I got on the phone and started dialing. Fortunately, I caught my neighbor at home.

  “Beth, you want to come over—?” I started when she picked up the phone.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked before I had even finished my question. I must have sounded desperate.

  “Nothing. Can you just come over? I’ve got some wine.” I let my voice linger over the bribe.

  “What kind?”

  “White, of course. You know I always keep a bottle around for you.”

  “All right. Give me a bit to find a babysitter. I think Mom might do it.”

  I hung up the phone and took a long drink. The scotch was smooth and sent a little shiver through me. I looked down at my glass. Time for a refill. As I went into the kitchen, I thought about where I was when a little voice, a hateful little voice that sounded a bit like my mother’s, rang in my head. “What are you doing with your life?”

  I didn’t have an answer. I was over forty. I was out of a job—again—and, no, I didn’t have a fucking clue what I wanted to do with my life. I poured the scotch into my glass and splashed some symbolic water over the top. Beth came through the front door as I was making my way back to the living room.

  “Hey, there! Where’s the wine?”

  “In the fridge. Go ahead and pour yourself some. I’m heading toward the couch.”

  I went in and set my glass down on the coffee table. My cat sniffed at it, then turned up his nose and walked out. I guess he wasn’t in the mood for one himself. I followed him back to the kitchen and thr
ew out some catnip on the floor. Why should I have all the fun? I watched as he started rolling around through the little green flakes. He was easy to please.

  “So are you going to tell me what’s going on?”

  “I got laid off today. Well, actually, I got fired. They gave me a nice severance, though.”

  “Oh, sweetie. But you knew it was coming.”

  “That doesn’t make me feel any better.”

  “When’s Ellen coming home?”

  “I don’t know. Tonight, I think.” Beth followed me back to the living room where I proceeded to tell her the details. When I finished, she looked at me.

  “So, what are you going to do now?”

  “How in the hell do I know? I don’t want to go back. God, I can’t go back. I hate working.”

  “Who doesn’t?”

  “You’ve got it pretty good. You get to stay home.”

  “Yeah, right. Like taking care of a six-month old is a cakewalk.”

  “That’s not what I meant. You wanted to be a mom. You wanted—” She didn’t let me finish.

  “No, what I wanted was to teach philosophy. What I got was a husband, a child, and a part-time job at a community college. How’s that for working your ass off getting a Ph.D.?”

  About that time, my stoned cat came racing across the floor, jumped into Beth’s lap, and flung her drink all over her and the couch. It took a few minutes to clean up and collect the cat. When I found him, I threw him outside to terrorize the dog. We settled back in our places and picked up where we left off. We didn’t bother to complain about the cat. It’s probably because we had both known him to do worse.

  “Did you think you’d be here at forty?”

  “I didn’t know where I’d be,” Beth answered. “I didn’t think about it much. I just figured if I finished school everything would work out the way it was supposed to.”

  “I want a damned job where I make a difference. I’m tired of working to line somebody else’s pocket.”

  “You’ve done pretty well for yourself. You and Ellen have a nice house, cars, and each other. Don’t make it sound as if you’ve hit rock bottom.”

  “That’s all fine.” I couldn’t keep the sarcasm from my voice. “But it’s not like anybody really cares. What have I contributed?”

  “That’s a hard one. I think most of us just try to get through each day doing the things everybody else does.”

  “You know what my parents once told me?” I said. Beth shook her head. “They once said they could see me as a professor, an absent-minded professor walking around in blue jeans and Birkenstocks.”

  “So why didn’t you take their advice?”

  “Who the hell listens to their parents? Besides, they made it sound as if I couldn’t do anything else. You know the old adage, ‘Those who can’t do, teach’.”

  “Thanks for the continued slamming.”

  “Give me a break. This is my pity party.”

  “Okay, so what are you going to do?”

  “I think, dear Beth, I’m going to have another drink. How are you doing over there?”

  “I’m fine.”

  A quick pour, no water this time.

  “You know, I can’t imagine going back to idiot bosses, snide co-workers, and inane projects.” The scotch was going down nice and easy. Too easily.

  “As far as I can tell, you’ve about eliminated every job that’s out there.”

  “Exactly. That’s why I’m whining about it.”

  “You could always go back to school.”

  “Yeah, and study what exactly? No, wait; don’t answer that. I know exactly what I should do.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I think I’m going to sit back and spend Ellen’s money for a change.”

  “Can you two afford that?”

  “We could just stop eating. I could stand to lose a few pounds anyway.”

  We talked for hours going around and around. It kept coming back to the fact that I didn’t want to go back to work. I’d had enough. After we accepted that, the possibilities were endless. Reality blew, so fantasy ruled, at least until the phone rang. It was Ellen.

  “Hello, honey. What’s up?” I slurred into the phone. In the distance I heard a dog yelping. “I think your cat just beat the shit out of my dog.”

  “That’s nice. I need a ride back from the airport.”

  I put my hand over the receiver. “Beth, Ellen needs a ride,” I giggled.

  “I don’t think you’re up to it. I know I’m not.” For emphasis, Beth poured the last of the wine into her glass.

  “I think you’re on your own,” I said into the phone.

  “Great. Fine. Whatever.” Ellen hung up.

  I looked over at Beth. “I think she’s pissed.”

  “She’ll get over it, but it looks like I’ll need another bottle.”

  We kept talking for another hour. I had pretty much forgotten Ellen was even coming home until I heard her stomp into the living room. She looked us over for a minute. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking.

  “Hiya, honey,” I slurred.

  “I need fifty dollars for the cab I had to take from the airport.”

  “What?” I couldn’t quite grasp what she was saying. “Why do you need fifty dollars?”

  “Because you were too drunk to come get me, honey. What do you think, I just flew home?”

  “That would be cool—”

  “Ellen, I’ve got about thirty here. Aubrie, Aubrie!” Beth got my attention. “Where’s your purse?”

  “Uh, it’s on the radiator by the door. Why do you need it?”

  “I’ve got it,” Ellen said.

  “Hey, don’t take everything,” I yelled.

  “Don’t you worry about how much I’m taking. If it hadn’t been for—”

  I couldn’t hear the rest of what she said. She went out to pay the driver. Beth and I sat quietly dreading Ellen’s return. It didn’t take long.

  “Now that that’s taken care of, what in the hell is going on around here?”

  “Was there any change?” I asked.

  “No, Aubrie, there wasn’t any change, and if there was change, I wouldn’t give it to you.”

  “You’re pretty selfish, you know that?”

  “Then why don’t you explain what was so god-damned important that you had to strand me at the airport?”

  It would have been easy to get a really good fight going. I snickered a bit at the idea, but I merely said, “It’s a long story.”

  “Aubrie’s having a mid-life crisis.” Beth held out her glass in a toast.

  “Again?”

  “That’s fine. Make fun of me. I don’t care. By the way, you’re the sole breadwinner now.”

  “They finally did it, huh? I suppose there aren’t too many better reasons to get drunk. I’m going to go change. Are one of you sober enough to get me a Captain Morgan and Coke?”

  I attempted the task, but after the Coke bottle dropped on the kitchen floor Beth came in to finish the job. She tried to convince me I should go up to bed.

  “But, I wanna stay up and talk to you, Beth. You know I love you, don’t you?”

  “I know, sweetie, but you need to—”

  “Is it time to put her to bed?” my beloved Ellen, my little sweetie, asked.

  “Give me a hand,” Beth answered.

  “Wait. I’m not ready to go. Pookie, tell Beth I’m not ready to go to sleep yet.”

  “Pookie, huh? You’re definitely ready. Beth, take her arm. I’ll get the other side.”

  All I recall after that are weird foggy images of faces peering over me. Something about towels and trash cans. I do clearly remember Ellen pulling down my pants while Beth pulled my tee shirt up and over my head. The next thing I knew, my cat was on my chest, licking my face.

  “Mikey, Mikey, Mikey. You’re the only one who loves me, you know that?” A little tear dribbled down my cheek.

  “I can hear you,” Ellen said. I turned toward her voi
ce. She was in bed beside me.

  “When did you get here?”

  “About an hour or so ago. Take this. You’re going to need it.”

  Obediently, I swallowed three ibuprofens, a few crackers, and a big glass of water.

  “Now, would Mikey have done that for you?”

  “No. Is the dog okay?”

  “I haven’t seen him since I’ve been home. I’m sure he’s fine.”

  “What am I going to do, Ellen? I can’t keep going on like this.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you.”

  “How did you know you wanted to be a pilot?”

  “You told me I was going to be a pilot, remember? You said something like, ‘Stop wasting your life at Home Depot’ and the ever popular, ‘I’m not living with a blue-collar worker.’ Should I go on?”

  “No. I think that pretty well covers what a shit I am.”

  “It’s easier fixing someone else’s life.”

  “Am I broken?”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “What did you mean?”

  “All I can tell you is what my father told me.”

  “I want to hear from a man who was crazy enough to marry your mother?”

  “Fine. I won’t tell you then.”

  “No, come on. What did he say?”

  “He said the only real thing, the only real purpose in life, the one thing you must do, is find your passion and follow it.”

  “How in the hell do you find out what that is?”

  “He didn’t tell me.”

  “Damn him.”

  “I can’t do everything for you.”

  I rolled over onto my side and pulled Ellen’s arm across my waist.

  “I guess we’ll have to see what comes next. After all, I’ve got another forty years or so to figure it out.”

  “That long?”

  “It would be nice to get the second half of my life right.”

  “The first half was right. Now, you have a chance to do something different. It’s like being twenty all over again, except this time you know more about what you’re doing.”

  “You mean you know how easy it is to fuck things up.”

  “Or get things right.”

  I yawned and closed my eyes. How hard could it be to find what I was passionate about, I wondered. Ellen started to snore, and I drifted.