Is There Still Sex in the City?

She had a drink at the bar before her flight and passed out nearly as soon as they closed the doors.

It was early evening by the time Ess got home. Coming upon her house after a turn in the road, Ess was thrilled to see the familiar driveway and the pink-blooming magnolia tree where her dogs loved to lie on a summer afternoon. And there was the house itself. Somehow she’d forgotten how grand it was. And how when she’d first moved in with her boys, she’d thought she was the luckiest woman in the world.

Back then, when she thought about her future, she vaguely envisioned Eddie dying before her and leaving her everything, including the house, where she would live out her latter days in peace.

She knew now that wouldn’t be true.

It was really all she knew.

Moving on from MAM

Eventually, Ess would figure it out. Most women do. Moving on from MAM means taking a good look at the reality of your life and discovering what you can build from it. A good example of this was Sassy’s friend, Margo.

Like most women who experience MAM, Margo never expected to find herself in the position she was in: nearly sixty, single, and without a permanent place to live, with no income coming in and no job or career. At some point in the hazy future, she would get some money, when her soon-to-be ex-husband in Atlanta sold their house.

Margo hadn’t had a regular job in twenty years, but she did have a talent. She could paint, and people were impressed with her paintings. Sassy and I each bought one and so did a few other friends, and this, we thought, could solve Margo’s money problems. We were sure a local gallery would discover her. They would start selling her paintings for ten, twenty, fifty thousand dollars and Margo would be saved. Surely, there were enough rich people in the vicinity for whom fifty thousand dollars was the equivalent of fifty dollars for everyone else?

Of course, the reality was very different. Margo packed her paintings into the back of her Jeep and drove them around to galleries. She found one that could sell her paintings for twelve hundred dollars. Margo had to pay for the framing, however, which was expensive. After the gallery took their cut, she could expect to clear five hundred dollars. The store guessed that they would sell one or two paintings a month, which would add up to one thousand dollars. Not quite enough to live on in a place where the cheapest rent was at least two thousand a month.

And so, that winter we worried. Not just about Margo but also about Queenie, who had had a couple of fainting spells. And about Marilyn, who was back to hiding in her house.

There were no guarantees. While we’d sit around the fire at night, it didn’t escape us that while Margo had done everything that was once considered “right”—she’d worked, married, had children, and then she’d pulled back and out of the income stream in order to stay home, take care of the kids, and perform all the other endless duties of the reproductive lifestyle—it had left her with nothing. Meanwhile, Sassy and I, who had bucked the family tradition, were okay. We had houses and retirement plans and savings in the bank.

Margo didn’t. She needed a job.

Three months later she found one: measuring blinds for a decorating firm that did houses for the very rich.

It paid fifteen dollars an hour for forty hours a week. That was six hundred a week, twenty-four hundred a month, nearly twenty-nine thousand a year, not including taxes, which was nearly the same salary she’d been making thirty-five years ago back in the early 1980s. Back in a different century.

But it had health insurance. That was the good part.

It was also a job she knew well. It had been her first job back when she was twenty-two and working for a famous decorator on the Upper East Side. It had been exciting back then. She was just starting out, convinced it was all going to work out for her.

Now, nearly forty years later, she’d come full circle.

Or she would have, if MAM hadn’t decided to give her one more chance.

* * *

At 8:00 a.m. on the morning that Margo was supposed to start her first day of work, the phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Margo?” It was her brother. “Aunt Penny died.”

Good old Aunt Penny. Margo’s father’s sister. She’d never married and had no children and had left all her money to Margo and her brother.

And because Aunt Penny had always worked, she had quite a substantial IRA built up.

And so Margo was saved! At least in the sense that she didn’t have to take the job measuring blinds.

“A miracle,” Sassy declared.

We all agreed that this was the result of Margo’s good karma. Of always being nice and being there for other people and look—the universe had finally decided to be there for her.

Sort of. The money was just enough to afford her a small house in a rural area where it’s a twenty-minute drive to the supermarket.

Margo doesn’t mind. She says the solitude is worth it to pursue her dream of painting full time.