Marilyn had decided that she and her MNB were going to get married. He hadn’t asked her yet, but she knew he was going to, very soon. They were going on vacation in Italy and he had a jeweler friend there and said he wanted to buy her a ring.
And in the time-honored way in the world of women, Marilyn already had the wedding planned out.
They’d get married on the beach where they loved to walk. Then they’d go to the nearby miniature golf course for the wedding meal. The clubhouse had a small, old-timey
restaurant that served breakfast all day, so the wedding guests could have a feast of pancakes and bacon, waffles, sausages, real maple syrup, French toast, and several types of eggs benedict served with a thick hollandaise sauce.
We would all be bridesmaids I was sure. Me, Sassy, Kitty, and probably half a dozen other women—Marilyn had a large network of girlfriends—all of whom adored her and would do anything for her. I suggested that we walk from the beach to the miniature golf course. It was only about a mile and a half, and that way we’d get in twenty minutes of exercise to mediate the thousands of calories we would consume at the wedding breakfast.
Sassy wondered if we should all wear hats. She was going to wear a hat and she wasn’t going to walk.
Kitty didn’t want to walk either and had already decided she wasn’t going to eat any of the breakfast and would only have coffee. We wondered if the whole bridesmaids thing was silly. Then we decided we should do what we wanted. Why should we care what other people thought?
Marilyn said she wanted someone to scatter rose petals on the beach.
The very idea of Marilyn’s wedding felt like a triumph. Of the possible over the impossible. Of the moving forward against decline. Of personality and passion and belief over age and MAM and whatever else life throws at you.
Marilyn’s getting married felt like proof that every once in a while, just like in a movie, a person can get their happy ending. And of all the women we knew, it felt like Marilyn deserved hers the most.
But life just doesn’t work that way.
chapter ten
Middle-Aged Sadness: Marilyn’s Story
The year before, at the end of that MAM winter when we’d all been scared about our futures, Marilyn took these fears one step further and slit her wrists. Although she slit them vertically and not horizontally—a difference she’d looked up on the internet she would explain later—Marilyn did not die. Instead she bled for two hours and then got in her car and drove herself the half mile to the walk-in clinic. She was swiftly transported to Southampton Hospital, from which she was able to make a few quick phone calls before being transferred to the state clinic mid-island.
Every couple of days I’d get a phone call from her and she’d tell me about it. It was grim. No matter what happened she said, she was never, ever going back there again.
They finally let her out ten days later. Marilyn’s brother flew in from Australia to take Marilyn back to Sydney. And it was there that Marilyn finally got the right diagnosis: she was bipolar.
It made sense. Her father was bipolar as well. Even so, Marilyn resisted the diagnosis at first. She told me she cried when the doctor told her. She couldn’t accept it. She didn’t want to be a bipolar person. She was ashamed.
But the doctor explained it was really just a disease, like diabetes. Lots of people had diabetes and they managed it by taking medication.
Marilyn vowed to change her life. She stopped drinking, and she exercised every day. She saw her shrink regularly and looked better than she had in years.
And she fixed up her house. It was now pristine, a pretty white house that sat straight up on top of a small hill, with a violet-colored front door. Violets being her favorite flowers, and “Violet” being the name of both her grandmother and her former dog.
Her gardens were in bloom. Marilyn had been working on them for three years, including a year of mulching. At the beginning, I’d gone with her to the gardening classes she attended every Sunday morning at ten like a regular churchgoer. I abandoned them after fidgeting through a sixty-minute lecture about the right way to water plants. But Marilyn kept at it, and now her hard work was paying off. She and her house had come a long way.
And once again, we could talk. Especially about that MAM summer when we’d had the terrible altercation. She hadn’t realized it, but she was manic at the time.
Was she sure about getting married? I asked. Why, when she didn’t have to?
“Because I’ve finally found him,” she said. “My man.”
* * *
Marilyn and her MNB went to Italy and Marilyn came back with a gold ring with two diamonds, although she insisted that technically they weren’t officially engaged. And then three months passed. Three months in which Marilyn seemed more than happy. Indeed, everyone said she was better than ever. She was working and she was very, very fit. She would stare adoringly at her MNB at the parties and dinners we sometimes attended now as a foursome with my MNB.
And then, as usually happens with the addition of a relationship, Marilyn and I didn’t see each other as much as we used to. None of us did. Marilyn was busy. She was planning to airbnb her house during summer weekends and spent all her spare time organizing her belongings to get it ready.
It wasn’t until two weeks after Memorial Day that Kitty, Sassy, and I compared notes and realized that none of us had actually talked to Marilyn for a few days. I thought I had the answer: Marilyn was sick. The day before, she had canceled on a girls’ lunch at the last minute, claiming she wasn’t feeling well.
Now we tried calling her to no avail. A couple of minutes later, we got a text. Her health insurance was canceled and did we know of a good insurance company?
Insurance issues weren’t unusual for Marilyn. Over the years, as a single woman with her own business, with financial ups and downs, and with a variety of small medical issues, Marilyn occasionally had these battles. Sassy texted her a few recommendations.