Time of My Life_ A Novel - Allison Winn Scotch [24]
“It’s the look that makes the woman,” I’d tell myself each morning after dragging myself from bed, dreading the oncoming day, the tedium and the poop-filled diapers and the plastic smile that would eventually cause my cheeks to cramp if I didn’t let it fall at least three times during one of Katie’s playdates. So I’d reach into the depths of my closet and pull out a splashy pink and green tank top with ironed khaki capris to match, and I’d slide on deep chocolate leather sandals, and pull my highlighted hair into a clean low ponytail, and wash just a touch of cream blush across my cheeks and onto my lips, and then I’d stare into the mirror and convince myself that indeed, “it’s the look that makes the woman,” and now, this woman was me. Then I’d nod at the embodiment of mommyhood perfection and turn to climb the stairs to whisk Katie from her crib.
“Come on,” Megan whines. “I never thought I’d say this, but Jill, I’m sick of shopping. We’ve been at this for nearly two hours, and you haven’t liked anything you’ve seen!”
Is it my fault that designers in 2000 seemed to think it was a brilliant idea to bring back the hideous fashions from the ’80s? Is it my fault that I have good enough taste to just say no to prints that look like they belong on the curtains of my Westchester home and shoulder pads that couldn’t flatter a linebacker?
“Here,” I say, pulling a strapless silver cocktail dress from the back rack. “This might work.”
“Finally,” Megan sighs, and plops down on a beige leather chair that they put out for drained husbands who are forced to trudge after their wives for a rash of weekend shopping. Nearly a month after her miscarriage, Meg’s looking vibrant, healthy even, and I can’t help but stare just before I duck into the dressing room.
Last time around, I hadn’t stopped to notice. Jack and I were starting to wind our way free of each other, like a ball of yarn in which just one thread had come loose, and the Coke project was drowning my free time, and I’d started dreaming about my mother again, so somehow, Meg got lost in the shuffle. Lost in the innocuous way that happens when life simply piles up. You grab a friend on her cell for two minutes, then promise to call each other back later, but later becomes tomorrow, and tomorrow ebbs into a week, and before you’ve even realized it, a month has flown by, and you’ve disengaged yourself from each other’s worlds. Which doesn’t mean that you don’t adore each other, and certainly doesn’t mean that when you do catch up that you don’t pour out all of the missing details. You do. But for that month or those weeks, you’re blind to the nuances that change a person over the course of time, that stack up like dominoes until she’s a different person entirely. This time out, I’d vowed to keep a closer eye on Megan, to perhaps protect her from the spiral that would suck her downward into emotional depths that, at least in my previous life, I’d failed to understand. Or perhaps more honestly, I failed to understand because I didn’t see the spiral in the first place.
“How’s work?” I ask Megan over coffee, after I admired my naked body in the dressing room mirror (No stretch marks from Katie! No stomach that perpetually looks three months pregnant! No shaking jello under the curve of my butt!) and purchased the silver dress (two sizes smaller!).
“Eh,” she says. “I don’t really give a shit.” Meg’s an associate at Bartlett and Jones, one of the top law firms in the city, where they process their lawyers in the way that cuts of beef might be at a slaughterhouse. They string you up, put you through your paces, and just like those poor cows, you rarely get out alive.
“That bad?” I say. She never wanted to be a lawyer in the first place, and just went to law school because she couldn’t think of anything better to do, a holding pattern for those first few postcollege years and her early twenties.
“Just a lot of filing papers and reading over fine print in documents and blah, blah,