I Can Barely Take Care of Myself (28 page)

After convincing my mom that it wasn’t anything she did that made me no longer want to be married, she finally concluded, “Well, Jen, this is very Hollywood. It’s very hard to stay together in show business. Look at Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. They married, divorced, and then remarried! Their relationship
couldn’t take the scrutiny of the public eye.”

“Mom,” I told her, “Matt and I weren’t in the public eye. I’ve never been chased by a paparazzo.” She then consoled me, not about the divorce but about my celebrity standing. “Oh, Jen, you will be there shortly. I always run into people who say that they love watching you on
Chelsea Lately.
”

I was sitting in my divorce lawyer’s office, thinking,
I have a divorce lawyer. This is something that grown-ups have. Well, not every grown-up, but still. I feel like a war veteran. I have been through some shit that not everyone is strong enough to go through. Some people stay married when they’re not in love. Some people don’t even demand that lots of love exist in their marriage—it’s a partnership, a way to raise kids and join incomes. But hey, I’m not a victim. I’m not a hero. I’m just a grizzled old vet who fought for his country/woman getting a divorce.

Then I caught my grandiose train of thought and abruptly changed gears.
Jen, what are you, five years old, thinking that putting a divorce lawyer on a five-thousand-dollar retainer makes you a grown-up? And speaking of retainers, you wear one at age thirty-seven. Where is it? Your orthodontist told you that you have to wear the Invisalign twenty-two hours a day for one year if you ever want to see that incisor on your top row of teeth move or else it will stick straight out just like your grandmother’s. A crooked tooth is fine for her—she lives alone in a nursing home—but you’re about to get out there and have meaningless postmarriage sex with young musicians.

My lawyer took me through
the basic questions as he filled out the
paperwork for me. Homeowners? No. Age? Thirty-seven. His Age? Thirty-three. Kids? No. Mr. Legal Marriage Ender dropped his pen and looked me in the eye. “No kids?” No. “Did you want kids?” No. “Did he want kids?” No. “Well, if he changes his mind, at least he’s young, right?”

I always wondered whether Matt would change his mind about kids if he weren’t
married to me. I know he said he didn’t want kids, and he never had a visible paternal instinct. He cringed even more around babies than he did around cats—and he’s allergic to cats. I always predicted that if I died before Matt, in some kind of tragic stand-up comedy accident on the road—like if too much in-flight Klonopin caused me to trip over my carry-on bag as I shimmied out of my seat toward
the bathroom and I used the emergency exit door handle to break my fall, causing me to get sucked out of the plane, where I’d free-fall for a bit and have a heart attack in midair, and my lifeless body would flop to its final resting place in someone’s backyard in Oklahoma—he would remarry a much younger woman who really wanted a baby. She would have family money and neither she nor Matt would ever
have to work again, nor would they have to take care of their own child. Matt agreed with my assessment. The only way he could see himself becoming a father would be after my untimely death and his union with a hot twentysomething and her trust fund.

Mr. Legal Marriage Ender said, “Okay. Off the clock.” This was his way of showing me that he was keeping it honest. We were about to talk but it
wouldn’t be deducted from my retainer (the money one—not the one on my teeth).

“You really don’t want kids? Are you sure it wasn’t just because you were with the wrong guy?”

“You know,” I told him, “I’m actually writing a book about how I never just get to say, ‘I don’t want kids,’ without a million follow-up questions and now this conversation is going in the book.”

“What if you get pregnant
before the book comes out?”

“Then I hope you’ll represent me in the first-ever divorce from a baby.”

NATURALLY, MY FRIENDS were concerned about me after the divorce—not because of the fact that I live in a first-floor apartment in a complex with no doorman and a very chintzy home alarm system, making me the perfect victim of a home invasion by either a roving gang of up-to-no-gooders or an army
of superfit, tan L.A. zombies, but because I was now thirty-seven and childfree, even though I’d spent all thirty-seven of those years telling them I didn’t want children.

I was on a flight after a gig once with my comedian friend Ray, who couldn’t wait for the plane to land so that he could get home and give his wife and kids a hug. He said to me, “Jen, you were so sure that Matt was the One—so
how can you be sure that you don’t want kids?”

“I wasn’t a hundred percent sure Matt was the One,” I replied. “But I took a leap of faith. Romantic love is not parental, instinctual, unconditional love—it’s complex. And what if I change my mind about having kids and I decide to have one and then I change my mind
again
? As gut-wrenching (and expensive) as it is to change your mind about who you
love, it’s a hell of a lot easier to get divorced than it is to toss a kid back into the sea and tell them that they’ll meet someone else someday who will really love them.”

Then Ray added the kicker, the go-to asinine comment from parents everywhere who want to induct you into their club of 3:00 a.m. feedings, applying to private pre-preschools, playground concussions, teenage daughter pregnancy
scares, and teenage sons who realize one day that they always wanted to be daughters and hit you up for money for their transition surgeries: “I’ll just feel so sad for you if you never know the love of a child.”

To which I said, “Well, I feel sad for you too. You’ll never know what it’s like to fuck a twenty-three-year-old drummer.”

THE FIRST MORNING that I lay in bed without Matt beside me,
I decided to go to Starbucks and get a coffee and the
New York Times
Sunday Styles section, and then get back into bed in my clothes and stay there all morning. And yes! I get up at seven on weekends because I love my free time. Not every childfree person sleeps late and parties all the time. I am still a
grown-up.
I was happy. It felt right to be in a big bed by myself. I was relieved that I
was on my way to no longer being married. I thought of my old coworker Miriam, who used to read the
Times
every morning in our shared workspace in the basement of the Charles Playhouse in Boston as she balanced a lit Pall Mall cigarette in her mouth.

I revered the way Miriam ashed her cigarette while she counted the one-dollar bills in the cash box. We were box office cashiers, selling tickets
to Boston’s original long-running dinner theater show
Sheer Madness.
I was twenty-two years old, broke, single, and miserable. Miriam was sixty-two years old, broke, single, and fabulous. Not only did I want to be her when I grew up—I wanted to be her at that moment.

Miriam wore a brooch that on any other woman who doesn’t get her period anymore would look musty. She looked fashion-forward. Her
nails were painted such a specific shade of retro-red that I’m sure it came from a thirty-year-old bottle of nail polish. She wore a different black dress every day—always a fine wool-cashmere combination, always perfectly tailored. Miriam went to New York City two weekends every month to have dinner with friends and see a Broadway show. She told me that it was easy—just a forty-dollar round-trip
bus ride on Greyhound and a very inexpensive stay in a youth hostel. It sounded so glamorous and free-spirited. Years later when I realized you have to share rooms in youth hostels and there are no private bathrooms, I wondered how she possibly could have lived that way. Miriam was the type of woman who, if not obligated by a job sitting behind a card table in a Boston basement every day to make
a living wage, would be in a café somewhere just drinking endless cups of black coffee and reading the paper. She had a
European sophistication about her, where she could linger leisurely doing one thing at a time, smoking unfiltered cigarettes and apparently not getting cancer.

I was struck by Miriam’s independence. She was divorced and happily never married again. She had no kids. She seemed
just as content and natural as other women her age who were grandmothers. I couldn’t picture Miriam ever having ugly stained potholder mitts on her red-lacquered hands. Money was saved not for a rainy day but for a few days later at the TKTS booth in Times Square. She was exactly the kind of person a teenager/young adult looks up to. She seemed to be doing all of the things that reminded me of what
James Dean did during his years in New York City—taking dance classes, being creative, hanging out with interesting people who knew they were interesting, kissing men.

I smiled in bed as I read Bill Cunningham’s column and wondered whether Miriam was still alive. I hadn’t thought of her in fifteen years but that day, because of her, I wasn’t sad to be alone in bed, reading the
New York Times.
I’d never read the paper with my husband, or any man, as a couple. I cringe at those TV commercials that show couples doing the crossword puzzle together in the morning. I start to get claustrophobic just watching. Can’t couples do anything apart? Can’t one of them run an errand while the other one chain-smokes at an outdoor café? How do they have all of this free time to waste together? And more
important, who has one pencil in their home—
let alone
two?

I always knew that I was a Miriam, but as each year of my life went by I talked myself out of it, thinking that since being a Miriam wasn’t what most women did, my reasons for wanting to be like her were probably just immature fantasies or excuses to myself about why I couldn’t have a “real” job and a “normal” marriage and family. Parents
talk a lot about how much strength and dedication it takes to raise a child. It does. It also takes a lot of strength and dedication to carve out a life that doesn’t seem normal to anyone else.

After my marriage ended I found out that I have something in
common with moms and dads. Divorcées count time in months just like new parents who say, “Little Jillian is only sixteen months old but she’s
already reading!” I find myself saying, “It’s been nine months since my twenty-month marriage ended and I’m not waking up in the middle of the night with nervous explosive diarrhea anymore!”

People used to ask me whether Matt would regret marrying a woman who didn’t want children. I don’t know whether my ex-husband has any regrets. I do know that he has to write a letter to Brookstone and tell
them to stop sending catalogs addressed to him at what is now just
my
apartment. I also know that, like not wanting to have kids, one of the only other instincts I ever had as a young adult turned out to be correct and it’s that I am a Miriam. Miriam is like the silent, fifth character from
The Golden Girls.
She’s the spontaneous and unafraid-to-be-alone woman who lives inside all of us. Just
like the spirit of God exists even in the most lapsed Catholics—we can access our inner Miriam as much or as little as we want at any given moment in our lives.

I do have one regret, though. I never asked Miriam how she managed not to get yellow, nicotine-stained fingers after smoking her three morning unfiltered Pall Malls.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’m sure plenty of people will be mad at me for writing about them in a book—even with a fake name. And now everyone else can be mad at me for either forgetting or omitting them from the acknowledgments. I will try to keep this list of people I’m thanking to those who have something directly to do with the book—or else the list is going to go on and on and I’ll end up thanking
Morrissey or just listing private jokes I have with my friends as if this were a middle school yearbook.

Thank you to Sarah Knight at Simon & Schuster. Because of your lack of maternal instinct, you made me a paid author. Thank you for your smart notes and encouragement to keep this book on target and funny and to take chances. Thank you to my manager, Kara Baker, for encouraging me to write
a book about my experience as a childfree chick. Thank you to my agent Simon Green at CAA for your support and for selling this. Thanks to everyone at Avalon and CAA.

Thank you to Chelsea Handler. Let’s be honest. Nobody was buying my book ideas before I became part of your show(s). Thanks for everything you’ve done for me—and for hiring me twice. Before you hired me the first time I was temping
in a windowless room. I love you.

Thanks to everyone at
Chelsea Lately
—especially the printer by my desk for printing out the first completed manuscript. Everyone else—thanks for reading things in advance and telling me this isn’t a piece of shit that should be thrown away: Chris Franjola, Brad Wollack, Heather McDonald, Fortune Feimster, Sarah Colonna, Jeff Wild, Sue Murphy, Tom Brunelle, April
Richardson, Josh Wolf, Dan Maurio, Steve and Andrea Marmalstein.

Thanks to my immediate family for just being you: Ron, Joan, Linda, and Gail; and my nieces and nephews, Buffalo, Ali, and Zac. Thanks to my extended family for just being you. If I list you all by name, this will turn into an encyclopedia. I love you all.

Thanks to my friends who were part of this book, from the child-having to
the child-free. I appreciate your reading early drafts and sharing your stories. Margaret Morse, Andrew Donnelly, Sharon Houston, Morgan Murphy, Tami and Tara Fitzkoff, Shauna Beland, Teri McDonald, Paul F. Tompkins, and Janie Haddad-Tompkins. Thank you to everyone who has ever had me on their podcast.

Thanks to “Mr. Bergen.” I still have the card.