“I can’t believe they can do that,” I said.
“It’s incredible what they can do these days,” Tilda Tia said. “And thank god. Now at least maybe she can find another man. Because let’s face it. She doesn’t have a lot of options. It’s not like she can get a job.”
I blanched.
“It’s a reality,” Tilda Tia said scoldingly. “Not every woman has a big career. Look at Jerry Hall. She married an eighty-seven-year-old man. That’s what’s out there if you’re a woman like Ess.”
“Except it’s a much lesser version,” Kitty pointed out. “Which is even more depressing.”
Nevertheless, we all agreed the surgery was a triumph. Every friend’s triumph, no matter how they get there, is a triumph for all. It shows that maybe we can do what we’re all afraid we can’t: beat the odds.
But MAM doesn’t work that way.
MAM is like Medusa—cut off one head and two grow back.
Two weeks later, while Ess was still at home recuperating, she got a call from her old friend Jennifer. She and Jennifer hadn’t seen each other for years, but Jen had heard about Ess’s situation and wanted to see how she was. Ess was grateful. She filled Jennifer in on her latest batch of troubles. She’d had to put the house on the market and Eddie had told the real estate agent she was an alcoholic. She missed her father terribly and her mother was still not speaking to her and wouldn’t let her have any of her father’s things. And her boys were away at camp and she was all alone.
Jennifer suggested if not actually a solution, at least a break from her problems—a trip to a spa in Arizona. Jennifer had won the trip for two in a raffle. All Ess would need to pay for was her flight.
Ess said yes. And it might have been just what she needed if MAM wasn’t about to light up the sky with stink bombs.
Because in MAM, two women who once thought they had everything in common can suddenly discover their lives couldn’t be more different.
Like Ess, Jennifer also had two children and had been married twice. At the beginning of her career as a real estate agent, Jen had met a perfectly fine man. They’d married and had two daughters, while Jennifer continued to work.
By the time they were in their early thirties, they both cheated and the marriage fell apart. But unlike Ess’s situation, when her first husband left, Jennifer didn’t have to sell the house. In fact, she didn’t have to move or change her life at all. In a sense, she had it easy. Her life went on pretty much the same as before, with her working and taking care of her girls and the house, except that her husband was no longer in the picture.
Eventually Jennifer met a wonderful man who was her age and also a real estate agent and they married and started their own firm together.
Now, fifteen years later, they’re still together. They live in a very nice house and they have savings and lots of friends. Jen is close to her daughters, who live nearby. And soon, Jen knows, like her, her daughters will meet someone nice in their circle. They’ll marry, have children, and also work. Jennifer is her daughters’ role model.
At one time, Ess thought her life—although perhaps not quite as happy—would end up resembling Jennifer’s.
Now it wouldn’t. A fact neither one would realize until they clashed in Arizona.
Jennifer, who was traveling from a different airport, got up early to do a yoga class before her flight. Ess, meanwhile, woke up late and flustered. She’d been drinking too much and doing some of it alone. In the past, drinking would have eased the pain, and usually when she woke up, everything was generally okay. Now that was no longer true. She drank, she woke up, and something else was wrong again. Like her passport was about to expire.
But she noticed something different as she walked through the airport. People weren’t casting their eyes away at the sight of her the way they had before the surgery. It had to be her new body. She smiled at one or two, and when they smiled back, she began to think that this trip was going to be the perfect tonic for the lousy last few months.
Ess made her way to the bar. She and the bartender immediately got into a conversation and she found out everything about his life and how he lived an hour from the airport and had to get up every morning at 5:00 a.m. He ended up giving her two free drinks and she gave him a forty-dollar tip she couldn’t afford.
On the plane, Ess made more new friends. A woman and three men. They had a jolly time and the people around them didn’t mind when they got a bit too loud. The p
assengers were either going on vacation or going home, heading to people and places they looked forward to seeing.
Ess landed in Arizona with the sickening thud that happens when all the alcohol you’ve consumed on the flight coagulates into a roaring hangover in regular atmosphere. There was only one way to combat it: with a small sip of something.
She went to a bar, ordered a glass of red wine, and picked up her phone. She had four texts from Jennifer.
Where are you? Are you okay?
The texts annoyed her. She wanted to write back: What are you, my mother?
Just landed, she wrote. She chugged down the glass of wine, partly in defiance.
* * *
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