The condo was sold in April, and as soon as I received my aunt’s legacy, I made a radical choice: I decided to take a year’s leave from Appleton. Money in the bank, middle age on the way—I’d turned forty-two already by then, and was looking at forty-three. I was getting arthritis in my left knee, which made running harder, and I’d started to dye my hair just to look normal. I needed glasses for the print on the aspirin bottle. All in the space of a couple of years. Death knocking. The sniper on the roof. I’d almost renounced bearing a child of my own, but this didn’t mean I didn’t want children. I’d renounced, I thought, once and for all, the fantasy of being an artist of any renown, but I would still have said I hoped to make art; and I suppose I thought that time, or rather a lack of it, was my impediment.
I’d also been teaching at Appleton for ten years, an entire decade, and even Shauna McPhee was moving on (although not, in her case, willingly: the parental revolution against her, which had never subsided, had finally moved the functionaries at City Hall, who had, in turn, moved her). So my official reason was that after long service, I needed a short break, to recharge the batteries, rediscover the world; and the perceived reason was surely that I needed to weather some small midlife crisis—oh, Nora, she’s worked hard, sweet woman, so patient with the kids, and she’s had to contend with a lot, you know? And the official real reason was that I needed time and space properly to give my art a try, because I hadn’t been able to manage it, these past few years, on top of the demands of school and my aging father; and the secret real reason was that I was miserable, because even all these years later, every night when I lay down to bed, I still clung to the shreds of my Shahids—so little to keep me going, a few perfunctory e-mails and that one sighting, each memory worn threadbare from overuse—and in clinging, I still hoped for the richer and more fulfilling and more wondrously open and aware existence that so briefly had seemed possible. Well beyond forty now, I wanted genuinely to give myself the chance at that life, although I didn’t know, really, what it might entail.
I signed up for a sculpture class at Mass Art, starting in September, and for a pottery class in a studio off Monsignor O’Brien Highway, because I thought perhaps I needed to explore new media. I ordered an expensive digital camera off the Internet, so I could explore photography on my own. I was the teacher planning a curriculum for a single pupil: myself. I ordered books from the library—Emmet Gowin, Sally Mann, shocking, wonderful, intimate photographs—aware as I did so that I had no family to photograph, aside from my father, or Matthew and Tweety and the kid, who didn’t count.
The most dramatic thing I did was to book a summer trip to Europe. Why not? I didn’t ask my dad if he’d like to go with me. I jokingly suggested to Didi that she might come along—without Esther and Lili, it went without saying—and she laughed. “How’re you going to meet any guys if you’ve got me in tow? I’m like the opposite of a beard: fake lesbian lover as potential mate deterrent!”
“It’s not about meeting anybody. What a ridiculous idea.”
“Well, it ought to be,” she said. “It’s about time.”
“About time for what?”
“You’re in your prime! Like Miss Jean Brodie. Remember her? It doesn’t last forever, so don’t waste it.”
“Waste it?”
“Nora Adora, do I have to get blunt with you? When was the last time you even had a fling?”
I shrugged.
“I’m not trying to push domesticity down your throat. I’m not saying what I’ve got is for everyone. Not what you want—totally cool. But you’ve got to want something.”
“What if I don’t?”
“If you say you don’t, then you’re either lying to yourself or you’re lying to me. Because I know you for a wanting sort of person.”
“How about a Buddhist conversion? Like you’ve wished upon me all these years?”
“Buddhist bullshit. A Labrador puppy is more of a Buddhist … Nora, promise me it’s not still the same old?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Buddhist, no, obsessive, yes. I know you too well, and I know you hoard things under your rock to nibble away at when