Say Never

PRAISE FOR SAY NEVER

“With her trademark humor, Janis Thomas gives a refreshing, heartfelt look at parenting, family, and letting go of the past.”

—
S
UZANNE
R
EDFEARN, AUTHOR OF
H
USH
L
ITTLE
B
ABY

SWEET NOTHINGS

“One of July’s Hottest Beach Reads…”

—
P
OP
S
UGAR

“Editor’s Pick”

—
FIRST
FOR
W
OMEN
M
AGAZINE

“Sparkling, witty and poignant, Sweet Nothings is absolutely delicious!”

—
J
ANE
P
ORTER, AUTHOR OF
T
HE
G
OOD
D
AUGHTER

SOMETHING NEW

“Chick Lit has a new heroine.”

—
M
OLLY
F
ISHER,
T
HE
N
EW
R
EPUBLIC

“A breezy read.”

—
P
UBLISHERS
W
EEKLY

“Janis Thomas is spot-on in capturing how it feels to be an upper-middle class suburban mom who longs for…something more. She writes with sparkle and humor.”

—
S
ALLY
K
OSLOW, AUTHOR OF
T
HE
L
ATE
L
AMENTED
M
OLLY
M
ARX

Say Never

a novel

Janis Thomas

Published by Wedlock Publishing
9121 Atlanta Avenue Suite 803
Huntington Beach, CA 92646

For more information about Wedlock Publishing, visit:
WedlockPublishing.com

This book is an original publication of Wedlock Publishing

Copyright © 2014 by Janis Thomas
“Readers Guide” copyright © 2014 by Wedlock Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

ISBN 978-0-9906919-1-4

PUBLISHING HISTORY
Wedlock Publishing trade paperback edition: October 2014

Cover design by Lan Gao
eBook Design by Michael Campbell

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

For Shoney:
sister, confidante, partner in song,
and New Yorker at heart.
I’m glad you’re here, sis.

Prologue

“Good morning New York, this is Barry Humphries…”

“And this is Meg Monroe…”

“You’re listening to the Barry and Meg Show.”

“That’s right, coming to you from WTLC, the station that LOVES its listeners.”

“Barry, do you have to say that every morning?”

“Why, yes, Meg, I do. You know why? Because I LOVE our listeners. Don’t you?”

“They’re okay as long as they don’t call in and say stupid things.”

“Meg, our callers never say stupid things.”

“You’re right, it’s mostly our guests who say stupid things.”

“And we sure have a great guest this morning, Ramjun Imfar, who’s taken to picketing every 7-Eleven in Manhattan to get them to sell bigger sodas.”

“It seems to me that’s a mayoral issue, don’t you agree Barry?”

“You know me, politics isn’t really my thing. So, Meg, I know you wanted to share a story with all of us this morning.”

“Yes, Barry, I do. I was at my gynecologist last week…”

“Oh, dear, we’re not going to talk about your, uh, feminine area again, are we?”

“It’s called a vagina, Barry, and before you go all apoplectic, I checked with the FCC and vagina is perfectly okay to say on air.”

“Not this again…”

“Actually, I was going to talk about being in the waiting room of my gyno’s office. And all these woman are in there with their huge bellies and their screaming children and their husbands who look as though they’d rather be cleaning toilets with their tongues than sitting in that room.”

“That’s quite an image, Meg.”

“Thanks, Bar. So, anyway, I was thinking that procreation is sort of a ridiculous notion. I mean, the only reason we have kids is to A) keep the species going and B) to prove to ourselves that we mean something in the Universe. You ask any middle-ager about themselves, and what do they say first? ‘I have three kids, one just graduated from MIT, the other is doing stem cell research, and the third just got out of rehab.’ Yes, they’re even proud of
bad
offspring, because, it’s one more sperm that knocked through an egg and multiplied into a sort of quasi-person that had to eventually squeeze out of a VA-GI-NA. Ta-dah! ‘Yes, he’s a serial killer, but I grew him in my loins! I really did something! Oh, uh, sorry about your daughters…’

“And people like to see themselves in their kids, it makes them feel young, immortal. It makes them feel validated for being stupid. ‘Here’s little Kayla who looks exactly like me and has my eyes and my figure and will probably have my penchant for OxyContin. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Tee hee hee.’ We use our kids to excuse our own selfish, ridiculous behavior.”

“Gee, Meg, that’s a little cynical. I think there are far loftier reasons for having kids. I think people have kids to, you know, spread their love, start a family.”

“Family, shmamily.”

“I take it you’re not close with yours, Meg.”

“That’s another subject entirely, Barry. But now that you mention it, do you know anyone who gets along with their family?”

Pause. Longer pause.

“Exactly my point.”

One

I don’t want children. I never have. I’m not the type to have pangs at the sight of pregnant women, not even when they surround me in my OB/GYN’s waiting room, stroking their bellies and smiling contentedly as though they’ve unlocked the secret of life. That whole baby-business is not my bag.

But now, as I listen to Dr. Kim drop the A-bomb on me, my stomach spasms violently.

“Your hormone levels indicate that you are entering into menopause,” she says, reading through the test results in my chart.

“You mean I’ll never have kids?”

“That particular door is closing rapidly,” she replies. “Your periods will eventually stop and you will no longer be able to conceive.”

Her diagnosis should make me elated. I should be doing cartwheels around the examination room. Domestic life was never in the cards for me. Marriage wasn’t something I longed for or dreamed about,
ever
. In my opinion, ‘
As long as we both shall live’
sounds more like a motive than a promise. I gave it a shot—although I can’t remember exactly why—but after one failed attempt at matrimony, the idea of being a
wifey
and a
mommy
and living in the suburbs in a house with a white picket fence makes me shudder.

Menopause is a good thing,
I tell myself.
No more periods, Meg. No more bloating and cramping and birth control pills that mess with your hormones
.
This is cause for celebration
.

But I don’t feel like celebrating. I feel conflicted.
I’ll
never
have kids.

I guess it’s sort of like chocolate. You might be ambivalent about chocolate, you might not even like chocolate, but the minute someone tells you you can
never
eat chocolate again, all you want to do is gnaw on a cocoa bean until you bleed Hershey’s. Except we’re talking about
children
, so it feels slightly more significant.

I shift on the cold metal table, causing the sterile wax paper to bunch up under my butt. I open my mouth to speak, but no words come out, which is unusual since I talk for a living. Dr. Kim glances at me over my chart, then reaches out and lays a cool hand on my forearm.

“Meg, you’ve always said you don’t want kids.” Her tone is gentle, soothing. “I assumed this news wouldn’t upset you too much.”

“I’m not upset,” I say too quickly. “Just surprised. I mean, I’m only thirty-nine.”

Dr. Kim narrows her eyes at me then scans my chart. “Didn’t you have a birthday last month?”

I don’t answer. I haven’t been able to acknowledge the fact that I’m officially in my forties. The only people who know my true age are Dr. Kim, my shrink, my brother Danny, and a bartender at some dive in the East Village. I thought I could enter middle age gracefully. I was wrong. On the eve of my fortieth, I had a full blown mental breakdown that lasted exactly seventy-two hours—ironically, the same block of time one has to spend on psychiatric hold at Bellevue.

Luckily, my birthday landed on the Friday of a long weekend, and by Tuesday I was back to my normal, albeit snarky, jaded and cynical self, so no one I work with was the wiser. But between Friday and Tuesday I managed to drink myself into a stupor, sleep with two different men, not including my regular squeeze Adam, streak through Central Park wearing only my Spanx and my Jimmy Choo pumps, lose eighteen hundred dollars at the OTB on Fourteenth Street, and, disguised as a drag queen, ride a float in the Gay Pride Parade.

By the time I woke up on Monday night, my head full of cotton and my underwear conspicuously absent, I realized that I was having an itsy-bitsy problem with the idea of growing old.

The funny thing is—and by funny, I don’t mean
haha
, I mean,
oh shit
—I have everything I always wanted. I have a moderately successful radio show, a great apartment that I own outright on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a handsome gentleman friend who does NOT want to get married but loves to make me scream with pleasure three nights a week, a great toned body that has never had to endure pregnancy or—
help!
—a nursing baby, a classically good-looking face that benefits from bi-annual cosmetic enhancements (read: Botox and Restylane) and weekly facials, and best of all, I live far away from my past, my ex-husband, my family, and the childhood memories that often plague me in my REM sleep.