We Are Just Six Ordinary Women
Gayle’s husband went blind. Mine got cancer and is okay, and then we got divorced. Marie’s got cancer and is probably not okay. Or probably not going to be okay fairly soon; it’s a tenuous situation. Dory’s husband is fine, but her brothers keep dying. Micky’s husband is fine. Ann’s is dead.
We are 47, which seems impossible, because we are really — we will really always be — 17. And it’s such a cliche, I know: Where did the time go? But seriously: Are we actually (ugh) middle-aged?
We are. We are literally in the middle. We have both dependent children and aging parents. We have both acne and wrinkles. We have more money than we did when we were young, but not enough money to support us when we’re old.
Ann was in the middle of a divorce when her husband dropped dead — literally dropped dead — on the front porch. He’d quietly drunk himself to death, without anyone even noticing. At his funeral, we joked that now she can check off every box in the “status” section of forms. She can be “married,” “separated,” “widowed,” and “single.” She was always an overachiever.
We’re kind of tired of everything, except each other. This is the real secret of women’s long-term-friendship circles: we prefer each others’ specific company over almost anything else.
We already have this plan to all co-locate when we’re old (I mean older. Really old for real). We will live in granny pods, but I mean super nice granny pods, and we will sit in our rocking chairs in the evening and just crack each other up.
We consider our collective sense of humor to be our strongest collective asset. Two years ago, when we turned 45, the other five of us went on a road trip to visit Gayle, who lives the farthest away. For our grand arrival at her house, we wore matching bedazzled jogging suits. We thought this was absolutely hilarious, and we assumed everyone else would too. What we didn’t account for is that we’re actually close enough to the age…
