Prologue


Save yourself, the plotlines and narratives and trajectories of the bestsellers crowding my night table earnestly urge in sweet, seductive whispers from their pastel-colored covers. And now, I am a typical reader: a casualty of intention and expectation, a woman shaking off a bad fall. Maybe I’m like someone you know: someone who believed she held all the answers until the day a bouquet of questions was delivered to her hospital room. And now I’m guilty of reading every one of these damn memoirs of reclaimed self-esteem, trying to figure out what just happened and what I'm supposed to do next. I’ve become a sucker for self-improvement, a postulant of positive messaging.

For someone living out her own cautionary tale, someone who started out on a pedestal of righteous good intentions and wound up crying herself sick and half-dead in a restroom off the New Jersey Turnpike, these books more than fit the bill, with their messages of salvation through cookbooks and ashrams and poems composed in serene Italian gardens. And like most parables, all of these stories come with a similar, simplistic message. Save yourself. Find yourself. Reclaim your soul from darkness and despair. Shine your light and proclaim your Truth from the hilltops, from the mountaintops, from your desktops and your laptops.

With time now to catch up on my reading, friends bring books by on a regular basis. I can’t help but notice that the covers of these stories I’ve been reading lately resemble nothing so much as board books– those chunky volumes meant to capture the attention of pre-verbal infants. By contrast, the young adult books lent to me by my young cousins and nieces are a coven of black covers adorned with gothic typefaces and distorted images of blossoms and flames and waterfalls in intense shades of orange and vermillion and ocean blue. The message of this phenomenon is that the next generation is valiantly protecting the world from supernatural forces. Women like me are merely trying to appease the demons they have created for themselves.

Like me, my favorite heroines start out in early pages weeping in places just as undignified as the Grover Cleveland Service Area – in a subway car, on the bathroom floor, just prior to the second act of Tosca, during the dessert course of an elaborate dinner party complete with wine pairings. A picaresque journey ensues, and by the time one reaches the acknowledgements and the book group guide at the end, my vicarious self has shed her dead-end job / fears about marriage / fears about motherhood / fears about Life Itself. Invariably, she has either jetted off to Asia to procure ancient wisdom, courageously cooked her own weight in artisanal butter, or bravely sets and raises her chin as she accepts the weight of a newborn or two nestled into her blessed, benevolent arms.

I, like so many other women my age, reach for one dog-eared volume or an interchangeable other in that final quiet hour of the day before sleep. We read along and imagine ourselves returning our table trays to the upright position, anticipating the descent into the foreign city that will lead us to our true selves. We picture ourselves at the stove, the wooden spoon at ease in our fingertips and the nutty aroma of browned butter and sautéed leeks filling the air as we embrace our destinies of home and hearth.

In the hour that transitions us from doing to dreaming, we try to reconcile our true potential with our deep fatigue; the equations of work and love and memory and independence relentlessly resolving and unresolving themselves with imperfect symmetry. We attune our ears to that distant melody, the song of self-salvation.

But until now, I have never been particularly interested in saving myself. I wanted to save the world.

Ever since I was a little girl, I was taught that it was my responsibility to leave the world a better place than I had found it. My mother was a schoolteacher, my father a detective. In our house, fighting injustices – of crime, of poverty, of ignorance – was as normal as pouring the first cup of coffee in the morning. It was all I ever knew. I never for even one moment imagined that going out into the world, armed only with a talent for words and intentions of doing good, would do me no good whatsoever.

Now I know differently. Like my sisters in literature, I, too, have done my time on the bathroom floor; I know the feel of white tiles cold against my cheeks. Like them, I believed the old biblical saw: those who sow in tears shall reap in joy. Something in me could never believe in a world so unjust, or a God so cruel, that those who sow in tears could actually reap a harvest that only brings forth more tears.

But I am not one of those heroines. And this is not one of those stories.

Dispatches from the Permanent Vacation

This whole being unemployed thing is just plain weird. I realize that I'm only one of millions of people who are out of work right now, as I can see for myself judging from the volume of people taking up tables at Borders right now, at 3:00 in the afternoon on a Tuesday. When I wrote my book here, back in the spring of 2005, I could show up at 9 in the morning and be the only person here. Now it's downright crowded. Sometimes I can't even get a table with an outlet. But I did today, which is a good thing, because even though I am not making any real second-novel progress since Sunday, I can at least waste time on Facebook and AOL and the NYS Department of Labor website.

So, hineni: here I am. Jittery, uninspired, anxious, under-exercised, pretty much broke, full of dread, and just as busy as I was when I had a job. I'm always at temple on Monday nights for meetings, on Friday nights for Shabbat services, on Saturday mornings for Torah study. On Wednesday nights, I'm in my Year 2 class for the Melton adult Jewish learning program, which, thank G-d, gave me a scholarship to continue my studies. I'm more grateful than anyone can ever know, because seriously, this is the highlight of my week at the moment. I'm trying to stay busy, call on friends, make plans. But what I'm most aware of is how quiet my life has become. Most days I go hours without talking to anyone. It's not like I have no one to talk to, but most of my communication is by email these days. When the phone rings (with apologies to anyone who has called me recently) I can't bear to pick it up. Lately I just don't have the energy to tell people the lie that I'm doing fine. I'm scared and I'm worried from the second I wake up in the morning until the sleeping pill kicks in.

(There happens to be a really cute guy one table over at Borders, which is not a bad thing. But talk to him? Yeah right. Hi, I'm a garden-variety 39 year old writer wannabe with no job. And he's probably unemployed too. Fabulous. Oh, and he just left. Probably because I exude unhappiness and stress like a subway car at rush hour.)

Most of my friends, rightfully, tell me over and over again that my last job, nice as it was, wasn't really what I need to be doing with my life. That it was just a nice little marketing job with no real potential and lots of annoyances. And they are right: it certainly did not feed my soul or fulfill my ambitions in any way. But it was a safe haven, somewhere to go, where I had a routine. Where I knew what the day would generally bring, where I could predict what a client would or wouldn't like, where I knew the guy in the deli and he knew how I took my coffee, and where I had a method to getting through the day. And sure, some days were a lot worse than others, but that's with any job. It wasn't a bad job. I've had bad jobs. I know the difference.

And now that Im trying to write about what it was like to have a bad job, I find myself lost for words, unable to get anything down on paper except a whole lot of throat clearing and basically meaningless delays. I don't seem to be able to access the emotional heart or language of the story. And I don't know why. It's not like I don't have time. It's not like I don't have access to good, cheap hazelnut latte every day between 3 and 5 (Borders coffee happy hour! Maybe that's why it's so damn crowded?) I sit down to write and, well, nothing happens.

Last time this happened to me, where I suddenly found myself without a job, I was able to both complete a book and find a new job within ten weeks. It doesn't look like that's going to happen this time. There are just so many good people out of work. And very, very little to apply for.

And of course this is complicated by the fact that I'm not sure if I really want to go back to work as a marketing director. If only there were some way to translate this writing thing into, well, writing for a living. I'm not without total hope. I mean, I do have a book coming out next summer.

But calling myself a writer, right now, feels more like a fancy way of saying that I'm a 39 year old jobless person who has had to move back home because it's just not possible to get by on $405 a week in Larchmont, NY. And without the ability to focus on a new book, I can't really call myself a writer anyway. After the past few days of nothing but beating myself up about the poor quality of the six pages I've managed to accomplish, I can totally understand why Fitzgerald and Hemingway drank. Maybe I should start.