A Kick-Ass Fairy: A Memoir (8 page)

After spending the weekend together living in the same house, at work Doug would question me in front of others. “How are you doing?” “How is your daughter?” “How’s the work on the house coming along?”

I didn’t think it was funny. It made me anxious.

“You are no fun!” he said.

We planned the wedding. I didn’t want a big affair, since I’d been there, done that, but Doug did. We were to be the hosts and would foot the bill. Together we compromised on a guest list of about eighty-five people. One weekend we went to Massachusetts for Kim and me to meet Doug’s family. I didn’t understand why they didn’t seem very welcoming. In the weeks that followed, Nancy and my sisters planned a wedding shower—a small lingerie party at a Japanese steakhouse, since this was my second time around. Not one member of his family came. Just like a Romeo, he wrote his family a scathing letter in defense of me. I told him I didn’t think he should send it, so out of deference to me, he didn’t. The apparent lack of closeness in his family was strange to me. I was glad they lived far away.

After planning our wedding with the priest, who questioned why we were still keeping our impending marriage a secret, we met with the human resources partner at work to tell him our upcoming plans. Doug volunteered to leave the firm since he was a manager now and the company had an antinepotism policy. The partner laughed with delight at the news and insisted that neither of us would be leaving.

As the news of our engagement spread through the office, we heard the usual jokes about supply closets and conference room tables. When we told Janet we were engaged at the “end of busy season” party at the Copacabana, she practically fainted.

“I thought you two hated each other.”

On the day of the wedding, a peak weekend for fall colors, the storm clouds rolled in. My parents came to my house. Nancy helped me dress in my blush pink ball-gown. Kim, our designated flower girl, was dressed as a pink princess and missing her two front teeth. The limousine pulled up to the house. The photographer finished and left for the church. We got into the limo but, to my horror, it wouldn’t start. My father ran to the neighbor’s house in his tuxedo to try to get the limo jump-started. I began perspiring. Doug had been threatening to abandon me at the altar if I didn’t turn up on time. But it was Doug who’d booked the limousine at the lowest possible cost.

We made it to the church thirty minutes late. Doug was still there, and the ceremony was very nice. It was magical for Kim. We were too cheap to hire someone to videotape it, but Doug’s father had just bought a new video camera, and our copy of his tape includes snippets of the ceremony between his test shots playing with the zoom feature and panning head to ankles while we took our vows.

The reception was at an elegant night club, The Black Orchid, in a hotel in Morristown. Everything was beautiful. Doug’s brother toasted Doug and forgot about the wife. Doug’s mother drank too much, and there was an incident with a couple of my aunts in the ladies’ room. An eyewitness said Doug’s mother was complaining to her oldest daughter that I wasn’t good enough for her son when one of my aunts flew out of the bathroom stall pointing a finger in her face and saying that she and her family weren’t “fit to shine her niece’s shoes.” My sister ran out of the bathroom and grabbed my Aunt Marion, fearing that the fight would become physical, and dragged both her and my other aunt away.

I did get general wind of the scuffle but was quickly distracted by the many other guests and general merrymaking. Doug had warned me that his mother drank too much. Then I noticed out of the corner of my eye Doug’s father physically removing her after she stumbled repeatedly into my father on the dance floor. Before the main course had even been served, she had been removed to her room for the rest of the night.

At the end of the evening Doug and I went to his parents’ hotel room to say goodnight and good-bye. Their door was open, but when his mother saw us coming down the hall she slammed it in our faces. I thought she was mourning the loss of her son. I didn’t know at the time that, since I had been married before, even though I was widowed, I was tainted for her—dressed not in blush pink but in scarlet red.

For our honeymoon, we went to Acapulco. It was wonderful even though I cried the whole time. I was a mess of emotions, sad because I thought my wedding was ruined by Doug’s family, depressed from quitting smoking, overjoyed and hysterical. I had not had a single break in five solid years. I felt relief, love, and then guilt. I had for all intents and purposes closed the chapter on Dave and started a new chapter with Doug, five years and two months later.

We hung out at the pools by day, reading and playing spades, and ate ourselves into a food coma every night. We flew home at Halloween to be with Kim for trick-or-treating and then left for Kennebunk, Maine, where we stayed at a bed-and-breakfast for another week. The place was so simple, so quaint, I wanted to move there. I think Doug would have too. Even though I loved my job, my life, I was feeling the effects of the rat race and all the stress from all the life changes—college graduation, career change, new job, buying a house, taking and passing the CPA exam, getting married, all in eighteen months.

I came home, still depressed. Kim and I had become three—Doug, Kim, and me. I remember thinking, Oh my God, what did I do? Great, now I have another person to take care of, with all the associated expectations and disappointments. At that time, I really focused on the negatives, but in the years that followed we became a family—for better or for worse. We remodeled the little Cape Cod, went to Kim’s softball games and dance recitals.

I also gained ten pounds. I decided my depression must have been nicotine withdrawal. During the busy season at work, while spending three months of my life in a conference room auditing a precious metals dealer in the company of two chain smokers, I started clipping their cigarettes and smoking them in the ladies room. Within a week I was buying again. Doug and Kim were very disappointed. I’d failed.

Doug and I weren’t getting any younger, so before our second anniversary the three of us became four. Blue was the color of my newborn son at his one-minute Apgar score in August of 1990. What the doctors didn’t tell us—between delivering the head and then the shoulder and saying, “This kid is a football player”—was that the cord was wrapped around his neck. I heard “It’s a boy,” saw the blue, didn’t hear the cry, inhaled and exhaled the relief that comes with the delivery, and then held my breath, waiting for him to breathe. Hearing my own heartbeat in my ears, I watched the neonatologist suction my baby boy, wiping meconium stool from his face under the neon light of the hood of the open-air incubator.

And then I heard it, the cry, the repeated air-gasping cry that announced, Mommy, I’m here! Daddy, I’m not going anywhere! I cried with relief, tears rolling down my cheeks as the placenta slid out. Then Bradford, our baby, was brought over to Doug and me, wrapped up snuggly, red from all the crying. We cried tears of joy, tears of relief, awestruck by the act of witnessing a miracle, assisted by the obstetrician and the neonatologist. I was worshipped like the Madonna by my husband for two weeks and one day. Then, I was just me.

It was quite a change from just having a 9-year-old daughter in the house. We were showered with blue—baby blue onesies, blue sweater sets, mini blue jeans with snaps, blue rattles, blue cards, and blue baby wrappings infiltrated our home like the cloudless blue sky on those hot August days. I loved every minute of it. I knew he was to be my last child so I savored every second of his tiny new life. Many a day I would just sit and hold him on my chest while he slept between feedings.

Shortly after Brad was born, my Aunt Marion was diagnosed with metastasized bladder cancer and given less than six months to live. I was beside myself. I decided to stop smoking (again), giving up each cigarette as a prayer offering for her healing. I stopped smoking for good. Besides, since I spent most of my time in the house, I didn’t want Brad to breathe in secondhand smoke. It didn’t occur to me that I could have smoked outside, nor had it occurred to me to stop smoking when I was pregnant, even though people smarter than me freely commented that smoking wasn’t good for my baby. It took my aunt’s illness to motivate me to stop.

Miraculously, I later learned that the scans were erroneous, and chemotherapy flushes of her bladder healed her completely. I was so happy.

But after a few weeks, I started crying. I couldn’t understand why I felt so blue. Was it hormonal, or nicotine withdrawal, or was it that I knew that I had only four months of maternity leave and then would need to hire a nanny to take care of the children? The idea of leaving my new baby with a stranger made me sad. I wondered why I didn’t feel bad about working or school when I didn’t think I had a choice, but now felt bad because I thought I did have a choice. Guilt, depression, confusion, hormonal upheaval, lack of nicotine, and dilemmas of career versus baby track and dependency versus independence were the ingredients in the soup of my emotional turbulence.

Doug would come home every day from work, shut down and exhausted. He didn’t want to talk about anything. I was left to figure this out on my own. He wouldn’t weigh in one way or the other. So then I added anger, bitterness, and disappointment to the mix. Tapes of my mother’s voice ran through my head. Snap out of it! and What do you have to complain about?

When the four months were up, a nanny was hired, and back to work I went, complete with the commute and the long hours, smack in the middle of busy season. I started smoking again. But now I had it all, the marriage, the children, the career, the house, working in New York. I was living the dream. Wasn’t I?

Chapter 8

April–December 1993

B
y 1993, Nancy and I had been best friends for more than twenty years. It was only natural to consult with her regarding the dilemma I was facing. Should I move to California?

As we sat over lunch, I reiterated the main reasons why I was reluctant. She knew one of my aspirations since Dave’s death was to be financially independent, have a successful career, and to work in Manhattan. During the past year Doug had been commuting from the firm’s New York office to its San Francisco office to assist the team out there in winning a new client. In the proposal, the client had been promised that Doug would be part of the ongoing audit team. We knew that if he agreed to move, it would demonstrate his commitment to the firm and be positive for his career. I didn’t really plan on the firm’s winning the engagement, but Doug did. The firm won and asked Doug to move.

Second, I was disillusioned about our marriage. I hadn’t felt supported when I took some time to stay at home after Brad was born, first during maternity leave but then for a full two years. We started fighting all the time, probably for sport, but also I think because we were both by nature professionally competitive and probably envious of what we perceived as each other’s greener grass. I suppose on some level I envied his opportunity to advance, to receive recognition, and to be paid for his efforts even though I wanted to stay home with the children. I believe he envied my freedom.

He would comment, “What do you have to complain about when you have the whole day ‘free’?”

He further suggested, “You should go back to work, then I can take the baby golfing all day. What’s the big deal?”

These types of comments basically summed up the extent of validation and support I received for staying at home. Therefore, I returned to work. I was back to commuting to my fifty- to an occasional eighty-hour-per-week, stressful but rewarding job—while also caring for our two children, managing the nanny, homework, the house, the bills, shopping, and the rest. By this time, my daughter Kim was 12, a sixth grader, and Brad was 3. It was clear to me that Doug and I weren’t connecting at a satisfying level quite a bit of the time.

The other reason I was hesitant about committing to the move was a concern about uprooting Kim. We had always lived on the East Coast. All of our family and friends were there. Two thousand, six hundred plus air miles was logistically too far away to attend a family picnic. Besides that, the three-hour time difference was a big deal in the days before cell phones. And when Doug was home, his fatigue and disengagement were irritating. Because of all of these circumstances, I thought that perhaps now would be a good time to call it quits and go our separate ways. I had to wonder, did I want to give up all my dreams for him?

Nancy and I weighed all the pros and cons, and as would be expected of any great friend, she couldn’t and wouldn’t tell me what to do. Talking all of this over with her helped, though.

I decided we should all go. I thought of it as a chance to start anew. I also believed in the personal values around family, commitment, and perseverance, and I was always hopeful. I got on board with the plan, even if I did have reservations—which of course I kept to myself. I did love Doug enough that I wanted him to be happy. I wanted us to be happy.

Instead of looking for the gold of the forty-niners, I was hoping to find love, peace, and contentment. I thought, What better place than the Golden State? So, we were going to California, and by golly, we were going to make the best of it! I did strike a deal with Doug, asking him to take some areas of responsibility off my plate once we arrived. He agreed to pay the bills and do complete kitchen management, which included shopping, meal planning, cooking, and cleaning up. Maybe now I would have some time to relax, to take care of myself.

The next few months were a flurry of activity in preparation for our move. For the sale of our house, the relocation company required that we have all sorts of inspections, one of which was a test for radon. Radon, a radioactive gas, was detected in the basement of the house. This problem had to be remedied before we could put the house on the market and before the relocation company would sign the papers agreeing to buy it if it didn’t sell. At the cost of several thousand dollars, a large contraption was erected in the corner of the basement that looked like the robotic invader from a war with another world, complete with its large radioactivity sticker placed like a medal in the center of its chest. The radon was vented to the outside of the house, invisible, odorless, and undetectable by us either before or after the remediation.

Surprisingly, the house sold quickly. In fact we had two buyers. I came home from work early to find the first buyer at the house with the realtor and a home inspector, and was there when they received the call that we had rescinded the contract and sold to a higher bidder. Of course Doug had not informed me of this development. I was blindsided and had to endure the wrath, tears, and name calling by the people in my house until they stormed out, slamming the door.

Doug’s response was the usual, “What’s the big deal. It’s over. We made more money.” What, as usual, was I complaining about?

It was a time of high stress to say the least, the highlight of which was dealing with the horrifying real estate costs in the San Francisco Bay Area. It would be essential for me to return to work immediately so we could buy a house that we felt we could live in without going backwards in our accommodations and lifestyle. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a job since my company had no positions to offer me in California. Fortunately, however, Doug’s relocation package guaranteed mortgage financing, factoring in 100 percent of the trailing spouse’s income. After four or five discouraging trips back and forth across the country, we finally bought a cosmetically challenged typical California ranch house in a great neighborhood in Danville. For me, this move was incredibly scary and a huge commitment financially, emotionally, and most important, for our relationship. Now, I was not only reluctantly committed and perpetually depressed, but also a trailing spouse. This in and of itself was problematic for me, since I was used to having my own identity. I despised the idea of being someone’s luggage.

Then, just before leaving my job in New York, a recruiter in Chicago contacted me about a job in San Francisco. Bank of America headquarters was very interested in my credentials and I would have an interview once we arrived. So we hugged and kissed our family and friends, and temporarily said good-bye to our household belongings. On the way to Newark Airport, we made a detour into Manhattan, where we picked up a beautiful, luminous, eighteen-inch cultured pearl necklace Doug had had made for me. Then we all boarded the westbound one-way flight to San Francisco on July 13, the day before my thirty-sixth birthday.

We were homeless for about a week, roughing it in a posh suite of rooms on Nob Hill in the city by the bay, all on Doug’s company’s dime while we awaited close of escrow on our new house and the subsequent arrival of our belongings. The day of my birthday was spent interviewing at what was to be my next job, at BofA. After returning to the hotel and trying to change my clothes while Kim and Brad waited impatiently to go for ice cream, Doug informed me that we were not getting our mortgage since I didn’t have a job. So much for guarantees, I thought. I told Doug I expected him to handle this latest problem and left the room with the kids, exhausted, thinking, What the hell am I doing? After some phone calls and his company’s involvement, it did all work out. We got financing, moved in, I had second and third interviews, and got the job offer. Things so far were working out in the Golden State.

It was summertime in Northern California. In Danville, nestled in the San Ramon Valley, the nights were cool and clear, without humidity, completely star-filled. There were no mosquitoes. The days were always sunny, so bright and clear. Every day while driving the kids around, doing our errands, setting up house, going to swim lessons, I would say, “Hey, kids, it’s another beautiful day in California!”

Kim was miserable. She asked, “How could you have done this to me? Because of you, now I have no friends!” It quickly got to the point that she would tell me “Shut up!” as soon as I said, “Hey, kids, it’s ….” I enjoyed the weather anyway and tried to stay positive.

While Doug hit the ground running, totally consumed in his new office and job responsibilities, I had a few weeks to hire a live-in nanny, set up nursery school arrangements, and finalize everything before I started my job. I knew that Kim would make new friends as soon as school started, and I understood her anger. I had to believe that things would be all right. Meanwhile, Brad was happy riding his tricycle all over the house, helping deliver unpacked items using the attached wagon, when he wasn’t heading out the back door to try to drown in the pool if I didn’t watch him like a hawk.

I started working again, which I enjoyed, even if it was mostly a way to escape everything else. At home, I met and really liked my new neighbor Lyn, who invited me to join the neighborhood book group. She and her husband hosted a get-to-know-you barbeque and invited some other couples from the neighborhood. I became a little concerned when the barbeque was served with complete china and silver service in the dining room. Our entertaining was done more spontaneously on a wing and a prayer and paper plates.

One unusually warm summer evening Lyn and I were sitting in my yard talking and we heard an owl hooting. I wasn’t used to owls hooting in New Jersey. “When you hear an owl hooting, it means someone is going to die,” Lyn said.

Interesting, I thought. Her comment reminded me of Girl Scout campfire stories.

Unfortunately, Kim’s misery escalated after school started, and she thought everyone was stupid. I came home after twelve hours out of the house commuting and working in a state of physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion. But at home, my refuge, I had to face an angry, hormonal preteen, a middle-aged Swedish nanny making eyes at my husband while glaring at me judgmentally, and a husband who complained about everything. The complaining was the worst. No topic was safe—the abysmal commute, the cost of everything, how long it took to get to a grocery store, the traffic lights, the illogical planning of one-way traffic. It never ended. By this time, I had to respond with the question, again, “Why did we move here?”

Thank God, being with Brad gave me such joy. He was the sunshine of my life. In the evenings, I couldn’t call and talk to anyone on the East Coast for support, comfort, or just plain commiseration, because they were all already in bed. So I escaped into the world of children’s fantasy, dinosaurs, and Dr. Seuss, reading Brad bedtime stories until I nodded off and he had to wake me to finish. Of necessity, he also learned to read to himself at a very young age.

By the end of September, during the best of the Northern California weather, clouds were appearing over just our house. I was worried that Brad hadn’t warmed up to the nanny. I didn’t know if he was just missing me or the old house or if there was something weird about the nanny. Kim was having problems in her new school, and I was meeting regularly with the principal to get her schedule changed to ensure that she was in the proper classes for her abilities. She had been a straight A student in New Jersey, but within one month in California she needed a tutor. She went from a class size of nineteen in New Jersey to thirty-five plus at her new school. All the classes were lecture-based, and questions were discouraged. The school culture seemed militaristic. All these things contributed to a huge adjustment for her.

In October, not knowing what else to do, I started looking into private schools. It did not help that she hated us, hated school, and hated her classmates. I thought, oh my God, we have ruined her life. By then I began to realize that maybe the name Golden State had nothing to do with the gold that was discovered in the foothills—maybe it was named for all the grass that turns a golden color and then dies completely from the lack of rain.

When the going got tough, the tough headed for Yosemite. In October, Nancy came out for a visit and joined us for the trip. Some highlights of the trip, which was supposed to allow us to relax and connect with nature, included making a clothing rope to rescue Kim from sliding off a cliff after she ventured out onto mossy slime from a waterfall’s overspray, to watching Doug hiking up the steep rail-less stone stairs to Vernal Falls carrying Brad on his shoulders while he slipped repeatedly and laughed at me for screaming in desperate anxiety. Still, despite the near-fatal mishaps, I did enjoy the beauty of it all.

Doug began making legal arrangements to adopt Kim. I thought this showed a real commitment to us as a family and hoped it would be good for Kim. She was now 12, with long brown hair, and was slightly taller than I, tipping into full-blown adolescence and the illusion of independence faster than a high-category typhoon.

When I wasn’t working at my job, there were Kim’s orthodontist appointments, dermatology appointments, tutors, religion classes, school activities, and private school open houses to attend. Brad was still young enough not to be overscheduled; he was going to nursery school only three times a week. Doug spent a lot of his free time with him. I spent what spare time I had painting walls, unpacking and decorating. I was always totally exhausted and got two speeding tickets in one week. The message I took away from this was slow down.

By November it had been three months since I joined the bank. A position called Technical Accounting Manager had been created for me. I interpreted accounting pronouncements and wrote about how they would impact the capital markets area of the bank. Most of my time was spent on special projects and getting to know my boss, Jacqui. Jacqui was a self-made woman almost a decade my senior, originally French Canadian, but she had spent most of her time in California. She had one son and was in the process of getting a divorce. She and I seemed to get along well from the beginning. She seemed to take me under her wing from day one, which helped me to transition from the fast and furious energy of working in New York.