Sunday, September 26, 1999 — Comeback
Flashes today: 0. I keep checking, like a tongue on a missing tooth. Reading: Harry Potter, the second one, because I'm still number forty-two for the new one and a seventh grader told me I "have to" catch up.

The golf is on in the den and Jim is yelling at it. The Ryder Cup is being played in Brookline, an hour down the Pike, and the Americans were way behind going into today, and now they're coming back, and my husband, who has never held a golf club in his life, is on his feet in his socks going "Get in the hole! Get in the hole!" like a man possessed. Every so often he comes into the kitchen to give me a report. I say "Wonderful, hon," and he goes back in. It's a very happy marriage.

I was out on the lake this morning at seven. There's a maple on the Shrewsbury side that's already gone orange at the top, just the top, like a match. I sat out in the middle and let the kayak turn around on its own and watched it go by, all the way around, twice.

Brendan called at noon. He needs money and he got a B-plus on a history paper, in that order. Sean called at one and wanted to know if his father was watching "the golf." Erin came by at four with a casserole dish she'd borrowed, and stayed an hour, and told me something that I'm not allowed to put on here yet, and I'm not going to, so don't even write and ask. I'll just say I may need to learn to knit.

Two years ago when I started this page I thought "the change" meant one thing. The hot flashes, the three a.m., the whisper in my mother's kitchen. And it did mean that. But I'm starting to think it was the whole package. The kids going, one by one, and the body going, and the house getting quiet, and some woman I barely remember, a girl who used to swim across the lake at camp, coming back up to the surface to see what all the fuss is about.

From the den: "NANCY! THEY WON!" Well, all right, then. Somebody came back.

Wednesday, September 22, 1999 — Twelve Weeks
Flashes today: 1, a small one, at the photocopier, where it doesn't count. Reading: Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, Dot's pick for October.

It's been about twelve weeks on the hormones, and a few of you have written to ask, so here's the honest report.

The flashes: back in the spring I was at eight or nine a day. This month, one or two, and some days none. The nights: I sleep. I go to bed at ten-thirty and wake up at six-fifteen and I don't know what happened in between. I'd forgotten that was possible. I feel like somebody handed me back an hour of every day I'd stopped expecting.

The mood: better. Less crying at the telephone company commercials. Still some crying at the telephone company commercials.

And the part nobody writes about in the pamphlets: I feel a little like I cheated on my mother. She did it with an open window and a closed mouth, and here I am with a prescription and a web page. I told Maureen that at lunch and she said, "Nancy, your mother also washed diapers by hand. Are you going to do that too?"

Point taken. I'm keeping the pills. I'm keeping the page, too.

Sunday, September 19, 1999 — Ma Says Something
Flashes today: 0. Reading: nothing. I was too busy listening.

I picked Ma up for the ten o'clock and brought her back here for lunch, and she saw the kayak up on the sawhorses in the side yard, where Jim keeps it for me.

"What on earth is that?"

"It's my kayak, Ma."

She walked all the way around it twice with her pocketbook on her arm. Then she asked if she could sit in it. So Jim lifted it down onto the grass and I held one side and he held the other, and my seventy-nine-year-old mother lowered herself into a red plastic kayak on my lawn in her church coat and sat there holding the paddle across her lap like a scepter.

And sitting there, not looking at me, she said: "When I was going through it I used to go out on the back porch in my slip. In February. And stand there till I could breathe."

I didn't move. I didn't say a word. I was afraid if I did she'd stop.

"Your father thought I was losing my mind. Maybe I was, a little." And then: "My mother told me it was God's will and to offer it up. So I offered it up."

That was all. Then she said, "Help me out of this thing, Nancy, my knees," and we did, and she went inside and had a cup of tea and asked Jim about the Red Sox.

Twenty-seven months I've been writing this page. It took a kayak.

Friday, September 10, 1999 — Waiting List
Flashes today: 1. Reading: the waiting list, which is now longer than some of the books.

The new Harry Potter came out on Wednesday, the third one, and our library got three copies, and as of three o'clock today there are forty-one names on the waiting list. Forty-one! In my whole career I have never had a waiting list over nine, and that was for a book about a dog who dies, which they all want because they want to cry in public and be excused for it.

A boy who has checked out exactly one book in two years, on fishing knots, came in before the doors were even open to put his name down. Number twenty-six. He looked at me like I'd told him he had a week to live. I'm going to see what's in the budget.

Librarian's confession: I have not yet read it myself. I'm number forty-two. It's only fair.

Tuesday, September 7, 1999 — First Day
Flashes today: 2. Reading: the new schedule, which has me doing lunch duty. Lord.

The kids' first day. New sneakers squeaking all over my floor and the same old questions: do you have anything scary, anything with horses, can I use the Internet. (Yes, yes, and only with a pass.)

And then I came home at three-fifteen to a house with nobody in it. No size-twelve sneakers kicked off in the front hall. No backpack on the kitchen table. The milk in the refrigerator was exactly where I'd left it this morning, the same amount. I stood there holding the refrigerator door open, which I used to yell at the kids for doing, and I let it stay open as long as I wanted. That's all I did. I didn't cry. I just let the cold air out.

Monday, August 30, 1999 — Table for Two
Flashes today: 1. Reading: nothing, I was out on the lake.

First weekend just the two of us since 1972. I didn't know what we'd do. I'd been dreading it a little, to tell you the truth. You spend twenty-seven years talking about the kids, and then you look up and it's just a man in a recliner.

But Saturday night Jim came in from the garage at five and said, "Don't cook." And he made supper. Spaghetti, with sauce from a jar and meatballs from the freezer, and a candle stuck in an old wine bottle that he'd found in the cellar from God knows what year, and the good napkins. My husband has made me supper maybe eleven times in twenty-eight years and nine of those were grilled cheese.

We sat at the kitchen table until after eleven. We talked about our first apartment, over the bakery, that was always ninety degrees because of the ovens. ("You'd have loved it now," he said.) About his father. About whether we'd ever go to Ireland. About me. He asked me what I wanted to do now, and I didn't have an answer ready, and he waited, and that was the nicest part. He waited.

At the end he said, "So. It's you and me, kid."

I said, "Don't call me kid."

He said, "It's you and me, Nancy Anne." And did the dishes.

Saturday, August 28, 1999 — Drop-Off
Flashes yesterday: 1, in the dorm elevator, between the second and third floors, with a mini-fridge. Reading: the dorm rules, taped to the door.

We took Brendan up to Vermont yesterday, the car packed to the ceiling: a comforter, a lamp, a fan (from me, naturally), a milk crate of CDs, and a box of cereal so big Jim said it would outlast the Clinton administration.

His roommate is from New Jersey and very proud of his goatee. Brendan was so busy being cool that he forgot to be nervous, which was a relief to watch.

At the car, at the end, Jim held out his hand to shake, the way men do, and Brendan looked at the hand for a second and then just walked into his father and hugged him. Both arms. In front of the whole parking lot and the kid from New Jersey. Jim patted him on the back three times, very hard, like he was burping a baby.

Then me. He's so tall now I get his collarbone. He said, "Bye, Ma. Don't go crazy." I said, "Too late, honey."

I didn't cry until we crossed back into Massachusetts. Then I cried from the state line to Fitchburg, and Jim drove and kept one hand on my knee and didn't turn the radio on the whole way, which for Jim is practically a sonnet.

Saturday, August 14, 1999 — Maiden Voyage
Flashes today: 2, one of them on the water, which is the best place I've ever had one. Reading: the tag on my life jacket.

I launched this morning at quarter past six from the little public ramp on Lake Quinsigamond. Nobody there but a man with a fishing pole and a thermos who watched me get in the kayak with an expression of great interest and not one word of advice.

I did not tip over. I want that written down somewhere permanent, and this is as permanent as I get.

There was mist on the water, and it was so quiet I could hear the drips off the paddle. I paddled up past the boathouses where the college crews keep their shells, and a great blue heron stood in the shallows by the reeds and looked at me like I was trespassing, which I suppose I was. And out in the middle a flash came on, the old familiar oven door, and for the first time in two years I didn't care one bit. I put the paddle across my lap and leaned over and trailed both hands in the lake up to the wrists, and sat there cooling off like a pie on a windowsill.

Fifty-one years old. Out on the water by myself. I don't think I've been anywhere by myself, just for me, since 1971.

Thursday, August 5, 1999 — In the Tent
Flashes tonight: 1. Reading: The Red Tent, again, the parts I dog-eared.

Book group tonight, on The Red Tent, at Pat's, on her screened porch, with a pitcher of iced tea and every one of us in sleeveless tops. Heather had her baby in May, a little girl, and she brought her, asleep in a car seat, and we passed her around like the Olympic torch.

We were supposed to discuss the book. What we did instead was go around the circle and each tell how we found out about becoming women, back when we were girls. Who told us, and who didn't. Dot's mother told her nothing at all, and she thought she was dying. Maureen's older sister told her everything, wrong. Pat learned from a filmstrip at school. I learned from a pamphlet with a drawing of a daisy on the front that my mother left on my bed and never once mentioned again. Heather's mother took her out to lunch and gave her a book, and we all looked at Heather like she was from another planet, which in a way she is.

And then, because it was dark and the tea was going around, I told them I'd started the hormones. And it turned out Maureen had been on them a year and Dot for nine, and Joanne was thinking about it, and none of us had ever said so to each other. Six women who talk about everything, and we'd never said.

Dot said, "Well, girls, this is our red tent, then." Nobody laughed. We just sat there a minute with the crickets going and the baby asleep. Then we laughed.

Wednesday, July 21, 1999 — The Kayak
Flashes today: 4. Reading: a canoe and kayak catalog, in bed, with a flashlight, like I was twelve.

I bought a kayak.

For twenty years I've driven past Lake Quinsigamond on the way to the Stop & Shop and watched people out there on the water in those little boats, sitting low, going wherever they wanted, and every single time I've thought: that looks nice. And then I've gone and bought the groceries.

Today I went to the outdoor store instead, and a nice young woman with a braid showed me the one I'm meant to have. Twelve feet long, red, a big open cockpit so I don't feel trapped, stable enough, she said, "that you could eat a sandwich in it." I bought the paddle and the life jacket and the foam blocks for the car roof, too. It's the most I have ever spent on a thing that was only for me, and I wrote the check without asking anybody.

Jim came home and saw it in the driveway on top of the Buick and said, "You?" And then, after a minute, "Where are we going to keep it?" And then he went into the garage and built two sawhorses for it, and that's Jim, all three sentences of him. Brendan said, "Ma, that's actually cool," and I'll be dining out on that one for a year.

Saturday, July 10, 1999 — Penalty Kicks
Flashes today: 6, it's July. Reading: the TV listings.

The women's World Cup final this afternoon, in the den with the shades down and every fan in the house pointed at me. Brendan had three big boys over, eating chips and yelling for girls, which I'd have given a lot to see at their age. A hundred degrees out in Pasadena, the announcers said. Two hours and nobody scored, and when the last penalty kick went in the boys jumped so hard the lamp fell over.

Those women ran for two hours in that heat. I can stand up in front of the seventh grade in September with a flash coming on. It's just nice to have a team.

Friday, July 2, 1999 — The Prescription
Flashes today: 8. Reading: the leaflet that comes folded up in the box, all nine thousand words of it.

I went back to Dr. Amaral this morning and said the words: "I'd like to try them."

She didn't make a fuss. She went over it all with me again, what it's for and what to watch for, and wrote the prescription, and said to come back in three months and tell her how I'm sleeping. On my way out she put her hand on my arm and said, "Nancy, you've been very brave. You're allowed to stop being brave now."

I got as far as the drugstore. The pharmacist was a young man about Sean's age, and he said, "Is this your first time on this one?" very kindly, and I said yes, and then I had to go stand in the greeting card aisle for a minute.

Here's what I was thinking in front of the sympathy cards. My mother, and her mother, and hers, all the way back. Every one of them went through this, and not one of them asked anybody for anything. I'm the first woman in my family who ever asked.

I'll let you know how it goes. You know I will.