Plotless: A Coming-of-Middle-Age Story

By Sarah Lea Glover

Inertia is a property of matter and of marriages. Lori is a nurturing type who avoids conflict, priding herself on her adaptability. Parenting keeps her too busy to face her eroding relationship with independent Ike, who is consumed by his job. Receiving only crumbs of attention and affection has left Lori starved, so she throws herself into hel

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: Jul 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9798889267188

Book preview

Plotless:

A Coming-of-Middle-Age Story

Sarah Lea Glover

new degree press

copyright © 2023 Sarah Lea Glover

All rights reserved.

Plotless: A Coming-of-Middle-Age Story

ISBN

979-8-88926-723-2 Paperback

979-8-88926-724-9 eBook

979-8-88926-725-6 Hardcover

To Daddy, who helped me understand people

Contents

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Author’s Note

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Acknowledgments

Author’s Note

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Do you ever feel like something is missing in your life, and you’re not sure what? You pray you’ll recognize it when it floats across your path. Or maybe you’ll float across its path.

My ex-husband once accused me of being a child of circumstance. Though he probably didn’t mean it as a compliment, I felt grateful to see myself in the mirror he held up. I was never one to set a big goal. I was known more for adaptability than drive. I would follow shiny ideas to have adventures. This tendency led to living most of my life drifting along and adapting to wherever I found myself. When the adventures were clearly over, like that first marriage, I was great at learning from them and moving on.

Being so adaptable meant I ended up with many friends from different times and roles in my life. They didn’t all know each other and may not have liked each other if they did. I’ve actually done pretty well that way—having adventures, being nice and adaptable. So why, in my forties, did I cry with longing at certain songs, including Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here, Bonnie Raitt’s I Can’t Make You Love Me, and U2’s I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For? That yearning feeling of melancholy was where I centered my protagonist, Lori, in this book. It’s a different kind of loneliness when you aren’t alone.

I’ve wanted to be a writer since elementary school. After creative writing opportunities provided by high school and college teachers, I wrote two practice novels. Still, I somehow found myself, decades later, a grown-up do-gooder professional with a great reputation for writing emails and meeting notes. While I satisfied my need to contribute to social justice through day jobs, dozens of fantastic story ideas lay hidden in folders, boxes, and journals, gradually sinking under the accumulating sediment of the quotidian. Thank you for that vocabulary word, Mrs. Lancaster.

I did get married again, to an artist, a private person who I admired for his nonconformity, sharp sense of humor, and ability to speak his mind—a trait I thought I might absorb by osmosis. We had our child when I was forty. Talk about the ultimate creative experience! I kept a blog about her for the first four years or so, sharing cute and funny things she said and did. Around 2013, I started transcribing conversations with her to preserve them, as she was then six and reluctant to appear online. I also found myself capturing and fictionalizing interactions with other people as a way of processing them afterward. It felt like a natural thing to do. I found some joy and a lot of therapy in it.

Eventually, I shared some of these scenes with a writing group I joined. I really got into the process of paring a scene down to its essence, like sculpting. It’s satisfying to reveal what’s pure and clear beneath all the excess. I started thinking about making this collection of vignettes into a book. The writing group liked reading brief pieces and piecing together the through lines for themselves. They thought while it was not for everyone, the structure would be unique and refreshing. An editor told me years later fragmentation is a trend in literature and film right now. I had been calling the collection Plotless as a tongue-in-cheek working title, but as Lori’s character developed, it started to fit.

Fragmentation is also what Lori and I were both suffering from. That yearning was, possibly, for integration. Wholeness. Authenticity. That’s not a new trend, but I had the opportunity to tap into it deeply while writing this book. I suspect this yearning is particularly strong in middle age and particularly now in the 2020s, with all the cultural and political divisions front and center. You might say fragmentation is also a trend in our lives overall. Integrating one’s identity into a cohesive whole is one of the developmental tasks of young adulthood, I understand. Some of us come late to the party, probably because we’ve been living lives that leave no time for processing, like Lori and Ike.

The thought of publishing a novel containing so many personal feelings makes me feel vulnerable. However, the time has come. I’m fifty-seven as I write this, and I have about ten to fifteen years left before retirement. Now, I finally have the courage, sense of self, and self-discipline to follow my dream. When you get to this age, you reflect a lot. Your family and your older friends are getting frail or passing on. You feel your energy level and focus changing, which affects your priorities. Most of all, if your head’s not in the sand about aging, you look back and want your past decisions to make sense and add up to something of value. You need to feel your life has meaning before you let go of it. I am happy to say, despite it being ten years in the making, this novel is not overdue. It was maturing and awaiting its moment.

I’ve rediscovered the joy of writing and found my voice, and my life no longer feels plotless.

2012

Chapter 1

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Prologue

Lori Vance lay on her back in the dark: wavy, gray-brownish hair flowing out from her pale, squarish face onto the worn and dingy, vaguely beige vinyl kitchen floor. Her eyes were closed, not seeing the cobwebs on the ceiling, dead bugs in the light fixture, and crumbs under the edges of the cabinets. From the floor, she could also have seen the flower vases on top of the upper cabinets, undisturbed for so long that they were sticky with greasy dust.

It was 6:23 a.m. on a Thursday in the medium-sized, Southern city of Trendlerville. It was her time.

She used to resent the fact that the kitchen was the only clear space available for her to do yoga, but she never had any time to do yoga, anyway, and she couldn’t find her mat. I’m not a hoarder, she always reminded herself. She just had no time or energy to deal with it all since having had a baby at forty.

In the open-plan living room, there was only enough space for Lori and her daughter Claire to sit on the floor and play Chinese checkers or Monopoly Jr.—surrounded by extraneous inherited furniture, boxes of potential memorabilia, and other unmade decisions. The giant cat tower loomed, humbled to have become a home for things like old mail and orphan computer cables.

In this two-bedroom starter home Lori’s husband Ike had purchased in his bachelor days, he had sacrificed his office-slash-music room for Claire when she came along. He’d sold the drum kit, saving only his djembe—currently in Claire’s room serving as a stage for My Little Ponies—and moved his drafting table into the living room. It was the only furniture in there with a clear surface.

A blanket and pillow were on the couch with dirty socks underneath. Between the blanket and the pillow was Ike himself, his middle-aged belly gently rising and falling with his snores. He had taken to sleeping on the couch when Claire was a nursing newborn and Lori was sleep-deprived. That was two-thirds of their marriage ago. She appreciated his kindness then, and now it was a habit that neither of them felt urgent to change.

Twenty minutes is how long it takes for the cushions between the vertebrae to plump back up with fluid after you’ve been upright for a long time. Upright is a stretch. She had been slumped at her computer, editing an outcomes report due at her 10:00 a.m. meeting. At 6:10 a.m., she clicked save and lay down on the floor to recover.

Once again, she had sacrificed her time—the early mornings—to fulfill obligations for someone else. When Claire’s alarm rang down the hall, Lori sighed one last time and eased herself up, putting on her mommy hat. The first shift, the unpaid one, began at 6:30 a.m. Every. Damn. Day. At least her back got its twenty minutes.

Expelled

When Lori put her key in the door on Friday afternoon, the arguing inside stopped. She paused, wondering what she might be stepping into.

Everyone in the office had been released early that day because of a big, all-hands-on-deck donor appreciation event that night. She had stopped at home an hour ago to collect the chicken-broccoli casserole she’d made the night before for her coworker with cancer. Now, she was back—in between good deed and obligation—hoping to relax for a couple of hours before she had to be on again.

Claire, age six, wore only her crocheted purple blankie over orange underpants, her straight, dark brown, shoulder-length hair wet from a shower. She threw her arms wide and wrapped Purple Blankie around Lori’s hips in a hug, exclaiming, "Mommeeeee! Daddy locked me out!"

I thought Claire was with you, Ike explained as he finished frying pork chops, his back to Lori. His hair was just like Claire’s but dry and tied back for cooking. It wasn’t fair he had no gray yet.

What? Lori asked, not quite processing. She caressed Claire’s head with one hand and set down her work bag with the other. Her stomach tightened, and she began gently extricating herself from Claire’s fierce grasp.

Ike glanced over his shoulder. I thought you took her with you, so I locked the door. His tone was flat.

Lori said, Sorry, without knowing what she had done wrong. It was a bad habit. She kicked off her work shoes. What she didn’t say was, I told you my plans. Why would you think I changed them without telling you?

Claire skipped to the table and back to Lori. I had to ring the doorbell! Then she held out a scrap of something green on her fingertip. Her blanket muumuu fell down. Do I have to eat this?

Automatically, Lori accepted the mysterious item onto her own finger. Claire picked up Purple Blankie and draped it over her shoulders.

Don’t renegotiate with Mommy, Ike warned.

Never undermine the other parent’s authority in front of the child. Daddy’s in charge tonight, Lori reminded everyone, including herself.

That’s not fair! Claire whined. Lori looked down at her finger and saw that the green scrap was the empty hull of a garden pea. Claire artfully dodged her attempt to give it back and stomped off down the hall in a huff of orange and purple.

Lori began tidying Claire’s school things, directing her words but not her eyes to Ike. I really thought you knew she was outside when I left. She was making such a big production about the water balloons.

Ike set a small glass of plain milk by Claire’s plate. Lori got out the bottle of strawberry syrup to flavor it the way Claire liked. I knew she was outside, he said, but I went out and looked, and I didn’t see her. I tried to call you to ask . . . He paused as if to let that sink in.

Oh, I forgot to take my phone off silent. Are you implying this is my fault?

So I just assumed you took her with you.

Lori stared at Ike, her jaw not quite dropping. Did you even call for her?

Claire called out from her room, Mommy! Come see what I can do!

Ike asked, Aren’t you going back out tonight? If so, you should go on and go, or you’ll mess her up.

Lori sighed and nodded. I know the drill. Might as well try to relax somewhere else.

Claire marched into the kitchen as Lori put her shoes back on. Claire, I have to go back out for my special work thing I told you about. She muttered, An hour and a half early.

No one heard her under the sound of Claire’s dramatic wail. Noooooo!

I’ll be back after you’re asleep, so good night. Lori fought for balance under Claire’s forceful hug. Come on, now, don’t knock me over.

Claire froze in place, squeezing tightly and looking up at her mom with a glint in her eye, clearly weighing the idea. Lori gave her the look—raised eyebrows, eye contact, sideways tilt of the head. Claire slowly relaxed her grip. Daddy’s making me eat too many peas.

You can handle it. You do every time.

He gave me thirty-two!

Lori stroked Claire’s cheek. Wow. You said you swallowed twenty-eight in two minutes one time.

Claire grabbed hold of her mother again and pressed the top of her head into Lori’s stomach, burrowing it from side to side, almost as if she was trying to get back into the womb.

Lori sighed deeply, and her eyes stung a little. It would have been so nice to abandon her duty and indulge the child, indulge herself. Stop, Claire, she said, exhausted. You’ll have me tomorrow. All day long. Tomorrow’s Saturday. She tried to pry the bony arms from her waist again. Let me go, sweetie.

Ike placed a pork chop on Claire’s plate next to the thirty-two peas and said, I’m setting the timer, Claire. When it rings, dinner will be over.

Once loose, Lori left the house as if propelled. Expelled.

No New Messages

Lori’s car, a ten-year-old Honda Accord, decided she deserved to go to Roberta DeVaney’s, a nice restaurant. She ordered a glass of house white and the Parmesan-crusted trout, along with a glass of water so the wine wouldn’t give her a headache. She unlocked her phone and dialed her voicemail. Checking frequently for communications from Ike or the school was a habit, but it had been a very busy day. Maybe she missed a notification.

Nope. No new messages. Only the one missed call. He can’t find our daughter. Why does he not leave a message?

Lori made sure the volume was up and put the phone face down. She couldn’t just sit there, so she got out her billfold and started entering receipts in her checkbook. Her waitress—server, she reminded herself—brought the wine and water.

This wine is so good. God help me. Trying not to guzzle the wine all at once, she studied the elegant travel posters on the wall, her eyes resting on the one for Ireland. Her ex, Tony, was half-Irish. He had said he would take her there one day. Twenty years ago. Am I even the same person?

Her thoughts popped instantly back to today. Aside from the fear of what could have happened to Claire, Lori realized she also felt offended. Tony always assumed the worst about me, too. Never believed anything was a misunderstanding. Always had to be some agenda on my part. Are all men like that, or just the ones I pick?

An older couple nearby asked their server lots of friendly questions about himself and his life. Lori couldn’t help eavesdropping. He was very polite and oh so young. Sometimes she felt like crying when she saw young adults in their physical prime. The fast-food receipt in front of her blurred. When the server left their table to do his job, the older couple fell silent.

Twirling the wine glass slowly by its stem, she imagined the scene if she had come home and Ike hadn’t realized yet that she didn’t have Claire. Too self-conscious to call out for her outside. Maybe it was beneath his dignity. Embarrassing to let the neighbors know he had lost a kid. God forbid they might come over and offer to help!

Her empty stomach churned. Tums don’t pair well with chardonnay, but Lori found one in her purse and chewed it thoroughly anyway. She pictured Claire, her shirt wet from the water balloons, barefooted, wandering to the park. Somebody offering her candy, making her laugh.

Ike was always cautious about Claire’s safety, so Lori was truly confused. Of course, he’d rather die than admit he was scared or felt guilty. She sighed. Still. My other child.

Lori’s meal arrived. She put away her receipts and thoroughly savored it. The cost of this meal could have covered dinner for the whole family at Pizza Hut, complete with sodas and breadsticks, and even Krispy Kreme afterward. She tucked the after-dinner mint into her purse for Claire.

***

Since she felt uncomfortable with wealthy people, which probably had to do with her rural upbringing, the donor appreciation event was not Lori’s favorite part of her job as a program officer at a charitable foundation. She stifled yawns throughout and kept thinking about what to say to Ike. When she finally got home, she told him, I thought you must have left me a message when you called, but there wasn’t one.

Ike, staring at his computer, said, I thought you would answer the phone.

Lori’s whole body tensed. Says he who never answers his phone. She took a breath. I had silenced it earlier and I left it in the car when I took the meal in to Vivian.

I didn’t know where you were. It wasn’t on the calendar.

Lori looked. She had only written the words meal and work thing. She said, matching his tone, Well, you never ask where I’m going, only what time I’ll get back. See? There’s a reason you should be more interested in my life.

When Ike gave his impatient, stop-talking-to-me shrug, she stopped herself from slapping the back of his balding head.

Turning to go, then turning back, she added, trying to keep the shrill out of her voice, Why didn’t you call again? If you don’t leave a message, then I assume it’s not important. She bit her tongue before adding, Which is the exact same thing you say when people call you.

Ike shrugged again.

Did you yell for her outside?

No!

Why not?

Ike’s voice rose ever so slightly. I thought I would see her. I looked up and down the street, across the street, and behind the cars. I didn’t see her anywhere.

Oh, so you did think about the street. Drop it, Lori. He knows his mistake. She couldn’t resist adding, Lucky she rang the doorbell.

Yeah. Ike started typing.

Next time, if you can’t find her, leave a message! Or just keep calling over and over, so I’ll know it’s important. I would never change my mind and take her without telling you. It insults me that you think I would.

It only occurred to her days later, in the shower, that maybe Ike had doubted himself rather than her. Maybe he assumed he hadn’t remembered her plans properly and was embarrassed to admit that. He was always prone to getting deeply absorbed in whatever he was doing. Lori kept learning through trial and error that, at certain times, her words simply could not penetrate his concentration. No matter how often he nodded and verbally agreed to whatever she was saying, she would make a mental note to follow up later. Guess I should have done that this time, she thought. Yet another thing for me to manage, she said out loud, bitterly, to the running water.

Stop Breathing

Before locking her car, Lori placed her sunglasses on the passenger seat. She pictured herself coming back in an hour and noticing the glasses with new eyes after getting bad news. She held her head up, walking from the parking deck into the medical office building. If it’s all fine, I will choose to believe it and try to stop worrying. If it’s bad news again, I’ll wait to tell Ike and my parents in person. I’ll take some time off work today or tomorrow to process. Figure out the next step after that.

In the waiting room, she made a mental list:

•Take inspiration from that mommy blogger with cancer who was an astrophysicist. Share everything, so it can help someone else.

•Keep working but try to go part-time.

•Beg and borrow to take Claire and Ike to London to see where I lived.

•Spend all my free time with Claire.

•Write an instruction manual for how I want Ike to raise her.

•Ask for help dealing with our awful dirty, cluttered house. I don’t want to die in that dump, nor leave it behind for Claire.

White noise piped softly into the dressing closet as Lori took off her top and bra. Her natural breast drooped, while the foob (what those in the know called a fake boob) didn’t move. She stared loosely at the portrait of a mother and daughter in a rose garden as she tied the short pink hospital gown at the neck. What if this stupid constipation is metastasized cancer? She caught her breath. No, don’t be silly.

Lori massaged her jaw muscles. The good thing about having cancer, she remembered from last time, is that it sorts out your priorities, and you can get out of a lot of commitments. She hunched her shoulders up to her ears, inhaled deeply, and then dropped them as she exhaled through her mouth.

The mammographer in the room next door said loudly to someone else, Stop breathing . . . .

Impact

It was 5:30 p.m. Time to change hats again.

On the lookout for Lori from the other end of the school cafeteria, Claire dropped her backpack and lunch box, held up her hand to signal stop, and took a runner’s stance.

Lori checked for any people nearby, set down her car keys, spread her feet for balance, bent her knees, and crouched, holding her arms wide open. A motherly sumo wrestler in business casual, bracing for impact.

Grinning, Claire ran as hard as she could and slammed into her mother’s arms. Lori turned in a smooth, practiced way, transferring the child’s momentum into a big, wide, buoyant spin. Claire’s legs swung out as other kids in the after-school program looked on in envy.

When Lori set Claire down, she held on to her briefly to hide her dizziness and also just because it felt good. This was their ritual for however long it would last.

Hide-and-Seek Rules

Lori watched a thin tuft of