When I'm Not Myself

by Deborah J. Wolf

Genres: Family Life; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

Once again, with astonishing truth and refreshing humor, Deborah J. Wolf brilliantly depicts a woman's real joys and sorrows during love, loss, and starting anew. . . Sometimes a marriage is over long before it officially ends. When Cara's husband packs a bulging suitcase and leaves her for a younger woman ironically named Barbie, Cara can only say, "That's it?" before the tears begin. Now Cara has lost three dress sizes while picking up the pieces of her life with four kids and no man, and a mother whose idea of support involves detailing how Cara didn't do enough to save the marriage. But she is surviving with the help of her best friends: Melanie, aka Mel-the-fixer-of-everything, who feels that faithless Jack's departure is the best thing that could have happened; Leah, solid as a rock, who is always there to lean on; and Paige, the casserole queen, who shows up with mac-n-cheese and sympathy. Despite frustrations and self-doubts, Cara is learning to hope and heal as she transforms from a long-suffering wife to the vibrant, self-assured woman she was meant to be. But the road to Cara's brighter future is strewn with complications, especially when the "other woman" asks for a favor. . .and Cara's path takes a poignant twist on the road to happiness.

Release date: November 20, 2014

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 302

Sample

Cara’s husband left her six months and twenty-three pounds ago. He turned her in for a new model, an updated Barbie. It wasn’t that she was being cruel; her replacement’s name was Barbie. Barbie was twenty-seven and quite pretty. Cara was in a position to know because she had spent enough time studying her from across the soccer field—the petite frame, narrow hips, pancake-flat stomach, and round, melon-shaped augmented breasts.

Cara turned forty-three this year, and although she was down three dress sizes since Jack had moved out, she’d lost the weight in all the wrong places. She was thinner in the face, but the lines were still there, the round curve of her belly still prominent. Cara had a closetful of clothes that didn’t fit her and very few that did. She didn’t think of the size 14s as her fat clothes; she thought of them as her married clothes, those that she’d peel off when Jack would still watch her undress. For that reason alone, she couldn’t seem to part with them. They hung in her closet and mocked her silently.

They had four children together, Jack and Cara. The kids were the only things they shared anymore. Jack and Cara arranged to split their time with the kids evenly as if they were slicing a piece of pie right down the middle.

Katherine. Katie-girl, Kit-Kat, Kate, Kitten. Seventeen and a beauty, though, thank God Katie hadn’t yet figured that out. She was tough at the surface, but soft and sweet if you scratched just beneath. Katie sided with Cara automatically, defensively; her first go at unconditional love. Jack, on the other hand, got a dose of love with more conditions than he could recognize or find names for. Katie went the first three months without speaking to him; she went longer without speaking to Barbie, regardless of the pile of endless gifts the poor woman futily showered upon her.

William. Willie, Will the Thrill, Baby-Boy-Blue. Second in line, you’d never know it. Because of the distance between him and Katie—seven years—Will was more like a firstborn, and acted sometimes as if he was the eldest of the bunch. Independent and strong-willed, he suddenly needed neither his father nor his mother when Jack left, angry with the both of them for the cards unfairly dealt him. Unable to touch or control his own emotions, Will’s outbursts came in long stretches that lasted days where he’d hurl discontentment like fast pitches on a baseball field.

Luke. Linus, Luke Skywalker, Lucas John Clancy. Two years behind Will, Luke stumbled through the third grade, stunned by what had befallen his family, and crawled so deeply into a shell it took nearly everything Cara had to pull him back out. For weeks, just after Jack left, she would find him each morning curled at the end of his bed and sucking his thumb, his sheets still damp from some middle-of-the-night accident. Luke hated to be left alone now and would do anything to avoid being so.

And, Claire. Claire-bear. Joy of joy, sweet little princess. The last in a series, only eleven months behind Luke, they might as well have been twins. Angel eyes, sweet and cuddly, Claire would never utter an unforgivable word toward anyone. She was the most moved by her father’s disappearance, and wanted to talk about it every waking hour. Cara cringed and blinked back the tears as Claire’s questions came like topics in a round of Jeopardy! She tried her best to answer her daughter’s inquisitions, washing the venom from her mouth. Claire forgave Jack instantly and without repercussion, and was the only one to warm to Barbie, accepting her readily and crawling into her arms, unaware of what this did to Cara, how it tore her apart to see her daughter loyal to the woman who had stolen her husband.

Even with a full house, Cara never knew the loneliness would be so numbing. Jack left them with everything except his company.

He packed on a stifling Sunday afternoon in August, as if he was going on one of his extended business trips. He took the best suitcase and filled it with two weeks’ worth of the underwear Cara had just folded and stacked neatly in two piles in the top right-hand drawer of his pine armoire. Briefs, for the most part, along with a few pairs of boxers. He took his black socks and two pairs of his good black wingtip shoes. He layered a few golf shirts in with his khakis and stacked a few T-shirts and jeans on top of those. He was a horrible packer; everything would be wrinkled by the time he got across town to Barbie’s condominium. Everything but his suits and dress shirts. Still in the bags from the dry cleaners, he left those on hangers and looped them over the coat hook in the backseat of his 7 Series.

Cara watched him load the car. When he was done, he turned toward her and said, “Well, I guess that’s about it.” His sunglasses were perched on the end of his nose so Cara couldn’t see his eyes, the blue eyes she had fallen in love with so long ago when they’d first met, but she had a feeling he wasn’t looking directly at her, anyway. Coward. It was as if he’d been stripped of the features that had once made him so attractive to her.

“Really? Are you sure you have everything you need?”

Jack dwarfed her. She felt nearly invisible in his presence now.

He stared at her awkwardly with a crooked eyebrow, not sure what to make of her concern.

“I mean, that’s it? This is how it ends? This can’t be the way it ends. This is just pathetic. Me standing here in the driveway in my shorts and sweatshirt and you driving off with a carload full of clothes from the dry cleaners? They’re not even neatly folded, Jack. Everything’s going to be a mess by the time you . . . Well, I mean, wouldn’t you like me to fold them for you?”

He tilted his head and stared straight through her. “Yeah, Cara, I think that’s it,” he said, sensibly. “I’m not really sure what else there’d be.”

He settled himself behind the wheel as if he was driving off to work, then pulled the seatbelt tight over his wide chest and buckled it. The sun stretched in long bands across the sky, bleeding. Cara thought about what a beautiful sunset it would be, about how this would be the last sunset she would remember with Jack.

“Wait! Wait!” Cara screamed after he’d backed out of the driveway and started down the court they had lived on for fourteen years. She tore after the car the way Katie used to when she didn’t want him to go. Halfway down the block he stopped the car. Cara stood on the sidewalk parallel with his car and stared at him, trying to catch her breath. The pavement beneath her bare feet was hot, as if she was stuck walking through a bed of coals. She shifted her weight from foot to foot, bouncing lightly on the balls of her feet.

“You can’t go, Jack,” Cara said. “Please, you can’t leave.”

He took a deep breath, then calmly said to her. “Why not?”

Cara’s hands fell to her sides and she felt naked, as vulnerable as she had the first time she’d given a speech in junior high school. He stared at her, waiting on her answer. Trouble was, she didn’t have one. There was no good answer, no real reason for him to stay. There was so much that had passed between them, so many weeks and months, years even, of distance that had grown like weeds between who they were.

“Why not?” he asked her again, impatiently.

She couldn’t answer him. There was nothing left, really. He was right about that, about this being all that was left, an awkward silence that spanned the distance between them, from the sidewalk to the hot pavement where his car sat idling. She stared at her bare feet, discontented with the way her toes looked, the week-long stubble that angrily stood at attention on her legs. She’d let herself go, there was little attractive about her. She’d become who she thought she would never become, so disinterested in taking care of herself, of putting herself first, that he’d lost interest in her along the way.

He drove away then, slowly at first as if he was afraid she might come after him again, before accelerating sharply and taking the corner with an embarrassing screech from his tires. She stood watching the back bumper of his car, the turn signal blinking urgently, until it disappeared from sight.

After Jack left, Cara sat as still as she could in the bedroom that had been theirs together and listened for the first sounds of the house to come back to life, for familiarity to breed itself back into the room. Jack had purposely sent the boys and Claire to Cara’s sister’s house. Katie was out with some of her friends. From the bedroom, Cara could hear the Whitneys’s sprinklers kick on next door, a dull chuck-chuck-chuck followed by a thick spray of water. A block over she could hear a dog barking at kids passing on their bikes. But inside there were no real sounds of life. All that was left was the pierce of silence that screamed in wailing cries from room to room, haunting the halls. Sadness crept into Cara’s house, the house that was now hers alone, easing its way in, seeping into the paint on the wall, into the fabric on every piece of furniture. Like the stench of the poison left behind by a smoker, sadness grew on Cara like a debilitating cancer.

When Katie arrived home Cara was sitting at the kitchen table, a square box of tissues surrounded by nearly two dozen balled up, crumpled, snotty used Kleenex in front of her. Cara’s eyes were bloodshot and swollen; she’d been crying in waves for nearly three hours.

She couldn’t think of an easy explanation for her daughter when Katie said to her, “Mom, what’s wrong? What’s going on? Where’s Daddy?”

“C’mere, sweetie,” Cara said in a slur, drunk on the exhaustion and nausea that had washed over her. She yawned big, her body convulsing involuntarily, and patted the side of the chair, though clearly there wasn’t enough room for the both of them.

Besides, Katie, with her feet planted firmly on the floor in an old pair of grimy tennis shoes, wasn’t willing to budge from the very spot that welded her to the floor. Instinctively she said to Cara again, slightly more in control and with an edge in her voice this time, a thin line of distaste running through her vocals, “Where’s Daddy?” Women’s intuition.

“He left, sweetie. He left this afternoon . . . Um, he moved out. I think he just finally needed some space. All the arguing we’ve been doing, you know. He didn’t see much way around it, I guess. We’ve been disagreeing on things for a long while now.”

The color drained from Katie’s pink cheeks, her eyes changed from their usual lustrous green to a dark, dead brown. “He what?” she asked Cara in a tone that accused no one but the man who was not there to stand in his own defense.

Cara plucked a fresh tissue from the box in front of her and blew her nose with effort. She pulled herself up from the kitchen table and pushed the chair out from behind her, letting the harsh scraping sound fill the room. Her daughter was frozen, rigid with hostility. She meant to take Katie into her arms and hold her, but she didn’t have anywhere near the strength required to do it. Cara took a step toward Katie but her daughter backed away, cold.

“What do you mean, ‘He moved out’? Where the hell did he go?” Katie took the backpack she had slung over her shoulder and heaved it across the room and into the foyer. It slid, then came to a halt near the base of the stairs, taking out a pair of Will’s shoes in its path. Katie’s temper was known to flare; she was easily angered, especially these days when there had been so much anger in the house, so much screaming and yelling and arguing. She was resentful and moody, the anger playing out in small Broadway shows that were most often negatively reviewed.

“Katie,” Cara warned her, though she was hardly in a place to be strict with her. “Can we sit down? I want to talk to you about this. I want to make sure you’re okay. Dad would want to make sure you were okay. You know how much he cares about you, honey. He always has.”

Katie looked at her with disbelief and shook her head, disgusted. How could her mother defend him?

“Okay, okay,” Cara said and moved even closer to her daughter, invading Katie’s personal space, “if he wanted to make sure you were all right, he’d have been here to tell you himself.”

“Where’d he go, Mom? Tell me where he is.” Her thick dark eyebrows narrowed, a wrinkle forming above the bridge of her nose.

Cara stumbled. DAMN, Jack. Damn, damn, damn. He’d left this for her to clean up, for her to make right.

“He’s staying with a friend, honey.” Cara picked at a button on her shorts, avoiding Katie’s eyes. She didn’t feel like she owed Jack anything, certainly not the least bit of dignity, but she did want to spare her daughter the ugly truth, the lies that would come crashing down on her soon enough. Besides, she wasn’t sure Katie was altogether strong enough to tolerate the truth, not the enormity of it in its entirety.

“Where?”

“Um, I, well . . .”

“He’s with someone else, isn’t he?” Katie asked, and then when Cara didn’t answer her right off, barked at her, “Isn’t he? Tell me, Mom. He went to stay with that woman, didn’t he?”

At seventeen, Katie was keen to pick up on the scent of another woman. She’d been through her first heartbreak, the first boy who had disappointed her, and so the feeling now was not unfamiliar, though far more grave coming from her father. She shuffled across the kitchen floor until she reached the bakers rack in the corner. One-handed she picked up a small, framed photo of her father and her at a dance taken years earlier. In it Katie was twelve; her leg was in a cast and she was on crutches. It was the year she had fractured her ankle skiing but insisted on going to the father-daughter dance anyway. Jack was holding her as if she was his bride and he was crossing the threshold, her white-cast leg swinging wildly in the air.

Katie was ages different now, harder and unforgiving. She had lived through the unraveling of her parents’ marriage, the broken promises, the ugly disagreements followed by stretches of silence and discontentment. She had learned from both of them that life didn’t work out the way it was supposed to, that commitments weren’t always kept.

“DIDN’T HE?” she screamed, not at Cara, but at the silent room, before she hurled the photo against the far wall, glass shattering in shards across the floor.

The sound caused Cara to jump, startled, and made her feel sick, her stomach churning in giant waves. Cara shivered even as the breeze blew warm air through the room, stirred the used Kleenex on the table.

Cara took a long, deep breath and tried to steady her voice. “Yes. He is. There is someone else he wants to be with, someone besides all of us. He’s staying with her for now. I can’t answer for him, sweetheart, I can’t tell you what he’s thinking; he’s going to have to do that. And I’m sure he will, in his own time.” She said this to Katie in a whisper. Never had she sounded, never had she felt, quite so dead.

Katie crossed the kitchen floor with determination and picked up the cordless phone that hung in its nest on the wall. She punched in the numbers and waited, her eyes focusing on nothing in particular. Subconsciously she gnawed on her fingernails, the black nail polish chipping off with each bite. Muffled, the outgoing voice mail greeting on Jack’s cell phone clipped out of the receiver. The beep tone pierced through the still air in the room before Katie began hurling obscenities and left her father the last words he would hear from her until nearly Thanksgiving:


Jack would be furious with Katie’s disrespect. Cara silently wondered if such a rage existed somewhere within herself, some untouchable place she hadn’t yet found. Somewhere that she’d eventually be able to find and use. She was never more proud of Katie, never more in awe of her than while watching her berate her father on his voice mail. Cara hoped he’d play Katie’s message on his speakerphone, Barbie poised in the front seat of his car with her lips pursed as if she’d bitten into a lemon.

Cara sat at the table, and tucked her legs up under her behind. She knew she had a role to play—the parent—but she was so tired, so done with life, that she couldn’t find the strength to take Katie aside to talk with her, reason with her, even punish her for the outburst she’d just had. Katie slammed the phone back in its cradle before she made her way back to Cara’s side. She stopped to run her hand down her mother’s spine, kissing her on the top of her head lovingly before she stomped down the hall and out of sight to the back of the house, her bedroom, her refuge.

Katie was fragile, just barely on the mend. Surely Cara could find the courage to remind her that they could all deal with this, that a drink wasn’t the solution. Katie had lost herself so many times in the bottom of a bottle; Cara couldn’t bear to think of what this might do to her.

Cara put her head down on the long kitchen hardwood table and dozed off.

What seemed like forever later, she heard the front door swing open and close firmly and listened for the footsteps that would follow. She made her way out of the chair she’d been molded into and toward the entrance hall, convinced it must be Jack who had realized his stupidity. She prayed that he’d come to his senses. Either that or he’d gotten Katie’s message and was ready to stand battle.

She cut the corner at the dining room, and came face-to-face with Melanie. Their eyes met just as Mel began calling Cara’s name. Melanie’s hair was swept up in a long but simple heavy black braid; she’d been at the gym. Dressed in her workout clothes and her cross trainers, she seemed longer, more graceful than she already was at six feet. Her legs went on forever. She was without makeup, but sheer beauty, confident and calculated, and she took Cara in with her exquisite, piercing eyes.

They slumped on the polished marble floor together; Cara’s cleaning lady had just mopped and high-gloss waxed it the day before. The tiles were cool and they dissolved against them in a heap. Heaving, heavy sobs racked Cara’s body until there was nothing left. Mel held her, wordless and comforting. Then she asked Cara if she was done, if she’d had enough. Melanie said it just like that, too.

“Cara, for God’s sake, are you done now? Have we had enough of this already?”

“How did you know?” Cara asked, confused. Mel lived in San Francisco, nearly an hour away, and she rarely ventured south of Market Street unless she absolutely had to. It had to practically be a life-or-death emergency for her to follow the freeway south of where the bay cut inland, separating the Peninsula from Oakland and the East Bay hills.

Melanie cleared her throat purposefully. “Kate called me.”

Across the foyer, Katie made her way down the hall toward her room, convinced she’d done the right thing. She’d changed her clothes and brushed out her hair and, in a pair of holey jeans and a tank top, her hair loose and cascading around her shoulders, she looked much younger than she had only an hour ago when she had been screaming obscenities into the phone at her father. Her eyes were dark, circled in eyeliner and heavy with mascara. She jammed her hands into the back pockets of her jeans and waited, watching them.

Melanie’s tone was reassuring but short and clipped. Cara knew Mel would have no sympathy for Jack; there would be no mourning period. Never friends to begin with, Mel and Jack had tolerated each other for Cara’s sake. Jack had moved in on Melanie’s territory, stole her time and diverted Cara’s attention. Mel was here to stake claim on what she thought had been unjustly taken from her.

Melanie lifted Cara to her feet, steadying her and, allowing her to rest her head under the arm she cradled around her as she led Cara back to the kitchen table. Immediately, Cara felt cared for, protected, the way she had always felt when Mel was around. Melanie then went to the bar, reached for two scotch glasses and filled them generously with tequila before she returned to the table and sat opposite Cara’s chair, the half-full bottle between them. She set the glasses on the table and sighed, waiting for Cara to say something.

“I don’t think I can drink that,” Cara said to her, because the same nausea that had been with her all afternoon had washed over her again. The smell of the tequila rose up to burn Cara’s nostrils even before she reached for the glass. From the back of her throat Cara tasted bile.

“Suit yourself,” Mel said and reached for her glass, “but it would do you some good, it would help.”

Cara stared at the shot, the honey-colored liquor that filled the bottom one-third of the glass. The smell was pungent, strong.

“He’s gone, Mel. Walked out.”

“Yep, sure is.”

Melanie tipped back the glass and took the booze into her mouth in a single swig as if she was taking a long drink from her water bottle. She placed the glass back down on the table and wrapped her hands over Cara’s, encapsulating them in her own. Mel’s hands were warm, and she laced her long fingers within Cara’s.

“He ain’t coming back, Cara. You know that, don’t you? You’ve known that for a long time; that once he left, he wouldn’t be back,” Melanie said matter-of-factly and without fear of repercussion. She wasn’t particularly concerned with hurting Cara’s feelings any more than they’d already been damaged; she simply wanted Cara to recognize what she knew would come to unravel over the next few days and months.

Cara nodded her head slowly, her eyes glazed and very far away. She felt like she should cry again, like there would never be enough tears to be done with it all, but nothing came this time; no loud sobs, no whimpering sighs.

“Cara? I mean it. Look at me.” Mel’s eyes darted across her face. “He ain’t coming back,” Mel said again, sounding out each of the syllables in the words. “You know this because you knew he was leaving. You’ve known all along that he was going to go.” She spoke slowly and clearly, allowing Cara to absorb the words. She wasn’t vindictive or vengeful, just factual.

Cara was used to Mel’s approach. It might have seemed cold, heartless, but it wasn’t meant to be. It was just Mel’s way.

A buzz collected in Cara’s brain like a swarm of bees round a hive.

“What do I do, Mel? Where do I even begin?”

“At the beginning, the new beginning. Oh, baby, you start from this place—this one right here—and move forward,” she sighed. “Sometimes it’s going to feel like you are moving backwards. Sometimes it’ll feel like you’re being sucked backwards and you can’t go on another step, but you will. You’ll see. You start at the beginning, Cara. You can do this; you’re going to be fine. Without that bastard, you’re going to be better than fine.”

Cara knew Mel thought she should have left Jack long ago; Mel had been reminding her about it for years. But then again, Melanie would have never allowed herself to be in a relationship like Jack and Cara’s, married for so many years, dedicated and loving and nurturing in the beginning, truly partners. Cara’s mind flashed to the good times that dotted the canvas of her married life like fireflies in the night. You never knew quite when they were going to appear, but they were like a special treasure when one of them went off, something to be captured and held on to in a jar as if they might live on forever. In the past few years they’d become more rare, leaning toward extinction.

Melanie dropped her friend’s hands and poured herself another shot. Cara said to her, “Really, Mel, you can drink mine, if you’d like. I can’t stomach it right now.” She stared at the glass, and nudged it toward Melanie. “I just never thought he’d go. Really, in the end, I just didn’t think he would actually go.”

“He left a long time ago, Cara. He just packed today.”

Cara sat with those words for a minute, turning them over in her mind, shuffling them like a deck of cards. Mel was right. Jack had been unfaithful the bulk of their marriage, bouncing from one relationship to another, timing them at the most inopportune moments—just after Katie was born, then later when Cara was pregnant with Will. They’d nearly separated then, but Cara had clung to the notion that things would improve, that the kids would bring them closer together, that Jack’s new job would satisfy the craving within him that Cara couldn’t seem to fulfill. Then Luke and Claire nearly back to back, which had sent Cara spiraling and drove Jack further away, rather than closer, from all of them. Jack succeeded in the firm, made partner, spent less time at home, until finally his indiscretions were so obvious, he didn’t seem to mind the number of times he was caught. Still, Cara had never stopped loving him, never stopped believing she could bring him back, to all of them.

“Fool,” Cara whispered, barely audible, shaking her head at the memories of all the times she had known, all the things she’d disregarded.

“Uh-uh. No way, Cara, I won’t let you do that to yourself. This was not your fault. This was not something you caused or did or had any control over. This was Jack, this was all his deal.”

“Such a long life to be looking the other way.”

“You always knew where you stood on this, Cara. You knew what Jack was doing. You never once looked the other way; you were always honest about his infidelities. You do not deserve to be punished for trying to keep your family together, for trying to keep your marriage together. It was an admirable effort, even if I thought you should have given up on it a long fucking time ago.”

“At what cost, Mel? Look at me. I’m forty-three and I’ve got four kids, who I’m assuming will all stay right here with me, right here in this house, where every memory of my husband exists. This is the consolation prize? This is what I get?” Cara spread her arms wide and looked around the kitchen at t. . .