Insurance. That’s what she hadn’t gotten.
He’d be over-insured and sleeping, snoring a little, with some woman beside him, a woman he hadn’t even given her the courtesy of naming. He’d claimed fidelity, as if men ever left a perfectly fine marriage for anything but a new woman, new as in young, no doubt. Gwen walked to the window and opened the drapes. No one could see into the ninth floor, and she was too old to incur the interest of a peeping tom anyway.
Below, the lights were surprisingly bright for only a mid-sized city. She’d always loved that glow at night, as if a white heat somehow flooded up and helped, helped anything that was cold, dark, or lost. Maybe Steve had always been lost with her and just righted himself with someone else. He’d found another path that changed her course whether she wanted it to or not.
She felt a wave of home sickness, and she wasn’t sure she’d ever had it before. She’d never gone to camp, hadn’t missed her mother the first time she’d gone to college. But the sadness that rose up in her, like a longing for something she couldn’t even name, made her wish for at least the familiar, maybe just her own bed. Even that made her wonder. With Steve not on the other side was it even her bed, or was it still theirs until some legal document divided it?
Everything in her life felt that kind of foreign. Things were new and unfamiliar at Belmar, but to be honest, they would be like that anywhere she could go. She felt foreign to herself. She’d like to step back into her kitchen and make a cocoa from scratch, just the way Missy loved it, but that kitchen was hours away, empty, and she didn’t know if she could be trusted to not just cry in it. She didn’t know anything anymore. She didn’t know the way to go or the way to be. She’d try to get some sleep and wake up to an empty alarm clock.
Gwen's Journal - September 3rd 1989 – Saturday
When I graduate I’m going to teach in California or Alaska. And then when I’ve done that for at least five years, I’m going to get married. Love is like getting a piece of the pie, and since it’s just one piece of the whole thing, you’ve got to focus on the rest of, you know, the pie, to make sure the whole thing, the pie, comes together just like you want it to.
Gwen's Life - the night before…
Molly steadily led the way down the dorm hall, unscathed by the night's outing. At two a.m. with a couple of iced teas, like they make in Long Island, floating in her bloodstream, Gwen felt a bit scathed. She had to concentrate going past the R.A.'s door. The lime green poster tacked to it outlined the twenty-seven rules for Good Neighbor Behavior. The R.A. probably thought the butterfly stickers softened the blow of twenty-seven ways to hear don’t, but it just made the prison policy creepy.
When Gwen made it past the gauntlet and into their room, she sat down on her bed with her back propped up by a Care Bear pillow. Molly sat cross legged on her bed, like she could stay up the rest of the night with no trouble. Gwen felt more tired than that but still buzzed from her first night in a bar, first drinks consumed in public like a real adult, first night on the dance floor, and the first time she'd given her phone number to a guy. She'd dated once or twice in high school, but those were people you knew well. Most of them you'd known since they still ate glue and got the occasional bean stuck up their nose. There was nothing mysterious or exciting about the dating ritual when you held a decade-old memory like that.
"Think he'll call?" Isn't that what women asked each other after a night out?
Molly shrugged. "They do. They don't. Mostly they do."
"Really?"
"Well, they call me."
Gwen wondered if she'd be the girl who would get called. God, she didn't want to be the kind that didn't, the perpetually waiting-for-him kind. She was going to be an elementary school teacher. She'd be too busy to wait for some guy. Maybe she'd teach in the inner city for a year or someplace where teachers were hard to come by, and she could be really useful. Alaska. Or L.A. Someplace