Miss Me When I'm Gone

chapter 4



Gretchen and I met when we were freshmen at Forrester. Forrester is a small liberal-arts college in western Massachusetts, once a women’s college, now coed with about a 35 percent male population. Gretchen lived down the dormitory hall from me. I can’t remember exactly what attracted us to each other at first. She seemed a bit spacey and pretty shy, but at the first floor party, she was hilarious when she was drunk. We’d sat together on someone’s couch confessing to each other what dorks we’d been in high school and our ambitious plans to be much cooler at Forrester. There was something mutually sarcastic about the exchange that no one else in the room seemed to grasp, and we ended up falling over each other with laughter, toasting each other’s likely collegiate domination with swigs of Goldschläger. The evening ended with me puking my guts out in the corner bathroom, with her checking on me periodically even though she couldn’t remember my name. The next morning we officially introduced ourselves over breakfast, and we were fast friends. I made friends with Jeremy while working in dining services and introduced him to Gretchen. They started dating the next year, and were an on-again, off-again couple for several years before they got really serious after college.

The three of us were pretty tight all four years. The friendship worked well because we all studied such different things. Jeremy was an economics major, Gretchen was American studies, and I was journalism. It was easier to be friends with Gretchen if you didn’t have classes with her. Her classroom demeanor sometimes creeped out fellow students. She rarely spoke in class—often made a show of looking bored by doodling, yawning, stretching. And when she did speak—and this would be only once or twice during a given semester—she’d raise her twiggy arm very meekly, weak at the elbow, and say something so goddamned clever that you just knew she’d been planning it all semester and waiting for the right second to say it.

And professors loved her—probably more for her essays than for these bizarre classroom performances, but it was hard to say.

Gretchen showed off her tall, frailish figure by wearing demure dresses a size or two too small—often covered up by oversize, pilly old-man cardigan sweaters that she picked up at the Salvation Army. Her favorite was a cable-knit cream one with dirty little cuffs and a shoulder hole awkwardly repaired with pink thread.

That was in the late nineties. We graduated together in 2000, and were close friends for many of the years after college. Gretchen’s and my lives followed similar trajectories for a while. We both got jobs right after college—me at a western Massachusetts newspaper, Gretchen writing for a Boston marketing company that produced viewbooks for colleges and ritzy private high schools. We both got married about five years out of college—Gretchen to Jeremy, me to Sam, whom I’d met at a party of a mutual friend. Even after that, we visited each other frequently—sometimes with husbands in tow, sometimes not. It was only in the last few years that our contact had become more infrequent.

Gretchen’s life had taken an unusual turn. She got a divorce, somewhat abruptly. I never got a clear read on why—Gretchen just insisted that it wasn’t working between her and Jeremy anymore, and hadn’t been for a long time. The week the divorce was finalized she took a solo road trip down south, going to Nashville, Dollywood, and various other landmarks related to the legendary ladies of country music. She wrote about the trip, and those writings eventually turned into a quirky memoir about the aftermath of her divorce, reflecting on her own experiences and American womanhood generally as she traveled and contemplated the lives and lyrics of Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, and Dolly Parton (and, to a lesser extent, Patsy Cline, Emmylou Harris, Dottie West, and a few others).

I had not realized up till then that Gretchen had ever listened to country music. She managed to get pieces of the manuscript published on a couple of popular blogs, then sold the whole thing to a publisher. Tammyland was an odd little book, but it did surprisingly well. One reviewer called it “a sort of honky-tonk Eat, Pray, Love on a shoestring.” Book clubs liked it. A prominent reviewer complimented her wit and her appreciation for Americana. It received a considerable bump because of a popular country music biopic that came out around the same time, and then a national discount chain started advertising it as their “Book Club Pick.” It sold thousands of copies after that. Gretchen quit her day job and started a second book.

Meanwhile, there were budget cuts at my newspaper and I got demoted from health reporter to part-time night copy editor. I was lucky to have any job at all at the end of it—lots of my friends didn’t. It was a blow but I kept the job while I “looked for something else”—a perpetual state of affairs that lasted two years and was still going strong when Gretchen died. At that point I was six and half months pregnant and not likely to get anything soon. My husband’s job with a boring but generously paying area insurance company limited our movement somewhat.

But it wasn’t the job situation that kept me from Gretchen. It was mostly the pregnancy. For one thing, I had an especially miserable first twenty weeks. I had something called hyperemesis, which basically means severe morning sickness. You turn into a horrifying puke machine and you lose unhealthy amounts of weight. I had to be hospitalized for dehydration a couple of times. Even when the drama of that was over, I never felt quite well. So, while I’d always pictured myself being one of those happy, glowing little pregnant ladies, I was quite the opposite—just a miserable old crab who happened to have a distended stomach.

The really big elephant in the room in all of this, however, was not Gretchen’s success or my lack thereof, or even my miserable pregnancy specifically, but the fact that Sam and I had gone ahead and chosen to have children.

Gretchen had been very congratulatory, but I knew how she felt about the matter. She found the prospect of having children terrifying. I’d always known she’d been ambivalent on the subject, but parts of Tammyland made me realize how strongly she felt. I understood where she was coming from. There was a time when I might’ve articulated very similar feelings. I simply wasn’t allowed to feel the way she did anymore.





“The Pill”

Southern Virginia

Rest stop somewhere off Interstate 81

I’ve stopped at this rest area because it has a Dairy Queen. I go all out and order a Peanut Buster Parfait. As I dig into it, a family is finishing up their ice cream at the picnic table next to mine. The skinny mom’s ice cream is dripping all over her elegant hands because she can’t keep up with it, as she’s spending all of her time trying to help her towheaded toddler eat his soft serve with a plastic spoon. The slightly older, equally towheaded son is standing on the bench but holding his own with his cone, although his chin is smeared with chocolate ice cream and rainbow sprinkles. “Superrrrr . . . HERO!” he keeps saying between licks of ice cream, then making exploding noises with his lips. Everyone ignores him. Nobody else says much. The dad is young and muscular with a receding hairline. He’s isn’t eating any ice cream. He’s checking something on his iPhone.

Back when I was married, I used to witness scenes like this and try to imagine myself as the mother. Would I leave the younger one to his own devices and enjoy my own ice cream? Would I demand my husband help? Would I think those exploding mouth noises were cute?

The fact that I could never figure out the answers is a big part of why I’m sitting alone here now. Children confound me. The reasons why people choose to have them elude me. Jeremy did not feel the same way. Not at all.

Mine is one of the first few generations to grow up thinking of kids as a choice. We, of course, have not only the choice of when but if.

Which brings me to Loretta Lynn’s famous song “The Pill.” Truthfully, it’s not among my favorite Loretta songs. I love it more as a piece of history than as a piece of music. Loretta was smack-dab in the generation of women who were of child-bearing age before the Pill was available and after.

The song is written from the perspective of a wife who’s had a few kids already and declares she’s not having any more—she’s gonna start having a little fun because now she has the Pill. Loretta recorded it in 1972, but her record company wouldn’t release it till 1975 because they were nervous about how it would be received. And indeed, there are a few racy lines in it:



This incubator is overused because you’ve kept it filled

The feeling good comes easy now since I’ve got the pill

It’s getting dark it’s roosting time tonight’s too good to be real

Aw but Daddy don’t you worry none ’cause Mama’s got the pill.

If anyone was ever in a position to sing a paean to the Pill, it was Loretta. She was married at thirteen and had four kids (and two miscarriages) by the time she was eighteen. “They didn’t have none of them pills when I was younger, or I’d have been swallowing ’em like popcorn,” she says in her autobiography. And after the birth of her twins—number five and number six—her husband “got himself clipped,” as she puts it. So she never actually took the Pill herself. But she knew well the burdens of too many pregnancies, especially when combined with poverty. And she was proud that the song educated rural women about their options. She mentioned once in an interview that doctors often told her that her song reached their young rural patients better than their pamphlets ever did.

Of course, my generation takes the Pill as a given. If I were to pen a song about it, I’m not sure how it would go. As a married woman, I found the enormity of the decision mind-boggling. And at times I even wished it wasn’t my decision to make. Because if kids just happened to Jeremy and me as a matter of course, I imagine we’d have gotten through it, we’d have made it okay, we’d have learned to enjoy the ups and downs of family life together. But deciding to have them was not a step I was ever willing to take.

I’ve been asked since Jeremy and I separated, “Didn’t you two talk about it before you got married?”

Why, yes. Of course we did. We were a modern pair, and we weren’t dumb. At the time, though, we both thought the answer was “probably.”

He was confident of his answer. I grew less confident of it as the years went by. Because, you see, it’s easy to say the answer is “probably” when you’re twenty-three. When you are twenty-three, you want to believe you are the optimistic, life-embracing sort who wants to have kids. And it’s okay to think that you do, because you have years to get around to it. And by the time the proper time rolls around, you’ll surely have done everything else you’ve wanted, you’ll be so much more mature and settled and eager to make your ultrasound your screen saver and sign up for Mommy & Me classes. But then you find yourself twenty-seven and feeling no closer to that. Then twenty-eight. And you realize your “probably” meant maybe and your husband’s “probably” meant absolutely. Then you’re twenty-nine, and he wants to start trying. And your “maybe” has now faded into a “probably not.”

Babies don’t make you weep, you begin to realize. They don’t necessarily even make you smile. You find yourself muttering to yourself, “Someone shut that kid up!” whenever you hear a child whining or a baby screaming in the grocery store, and you’re alarmed by the nastiness of your inward tone. You notice tired, vaguely angry parents at the airport. It seems to you you’ve never seen happy parents at the airport. You wonder if having a child means never being able to enjoy a trip again. Commercials for diapers or baby powder annoy you, with those sensual voice-over ladies talking about babies’ butts like they’re as delicious as a chocolate cheesecake. You start to wonder what’s wrong with you, that you just can’t bring yourself to think of a baby’s butt that way.

You would like to stay married. But how? Only if someone changes his or her mind.

This is what the Pill has come to mean to me.

So the song I’d sing about it would be quite different from Loretta’s. It would probably have some melancholy notes, even some confused and cacophonous bits as well.

But I’d still sing it.



—Tammyland