Theo Pauline Nestor - How to Sleep Alone in a King-Size Bed: A Memoir

Contents

Part Three

Acceptance

Go to the edge of the cliff and jump off. Build your wings on the way down.

RAY BRADBURY

Part Two

Adjustment

Faith is the bird that sings when the dawn is still dark.

RABINDRANATH TAGORE

Part One

Shock and Denial

How did you go bankrupt? Bill asked. Two ways, Mike said. Gradually and then suddenly.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY, The Sun Also Rises

How to
Sleep Alone
in a
King-Size Bed

For my mother

Copyright 2008 by Theo Pauline Nestor

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers,
an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com

Crown is a trademark and the Crown colophon is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nestor, Theo Pauline.
How to sleep alone in a king-size bed : a memoir /
Theo Pauline Nestor.1st ed.
1. Nestor, Theo Pauline. 2. Divorced women
Biography. I. Title.
HQ814.N45 2007
306.89'3092dc22
[B] 2007041074

eISBN: 978-0-307-40972-0

v3.0

The Year of the Rat

I could see that I was moving through the stages of the divorce recovery process I'd read about. I was long past Shock and Denial with its hibernation and raw pain. Adjustment with its attendant ambivalence and coming to terms with the new reality of divorce was behind me as well. In many ways I was in that period referred to as Acceptance. I was feeling a sense of belonging and comfort in my new life just as the book had predicted. But had I skipped the phoenix experience? What happened to the moment of magical redemption that supposedly capped off Adjustment and ushered in this new king, Acceptance?

There had been no shaking of sooty ash from golden wings, no soaring triumphantly from the ruins of my life into something undeniably new and profoundly better. Part-time work had evolved, piecemeal, into something more. I was teaching writing groups several times a week as well as a class for the university extension program. I was on a budget and still paying for my own health insurance, but at last self-sufficient.

I had a boyfriend who shared a few wonderful nights and days with me each month, but mostly he was in Canada living the life he'd begun years before we reunited, and I was in Seattle giving all I had to a family I'd started more than a decade earlier with someone else. He made me happy, but he wasn't the answer to all my problems.

I'd made a few new friends who were around my age and single through widowhood, divorce, or defaultcreative, talented women who were living amazing lives on their own. Long coffees and walks around the lake with these women became the backbone of my week, feeding my resolve to make a life that made sense all by myself.

I started going to yoga a few times a week and witnessed all those beautiful left handssome brown, some white, some ringed, some bare like mineshooting up like arrows toward the ceiling as each of us breathed into triangle pose, into the moment, into our lives, whether they be solitary or coupled.

I began to write again and to dig up weeds and plant dahlias, lilies, sweet peas, and roses, and I began to see my family not as broken but as altered.

All this happened as slowly as learning a new language. It was all gained piece by piece, word by word, punctuated by moments of anger and despair and big clumps of loneliness. There was no day like the one I'd hoped for, the day when I'd think, Wow! See how everything has worked out for the best! In short, there was no phoenix.

But there was a rat, and I now think that this scrappy bottom-dweller was an envoy from the animal kingdom who'd come to shepherd me into my new good life. In Chinese astrology, the rat is considered a sign of good luck, and although I didn't see it that way at the time, I think in my case it might be true.

Like my other troubles, my rat ones began with a protracted period of denial. I had made so many excuses for the problems in my marriage and kept them so well hidden from myself that I hadn't seen the truth even when it was right in front of me. This new relationship was no different. The bottom corner of the cereal box stored by the basement door had been torn off somehow. Damaged in the store, perhaps? Yes, that's it, and that's why Raisin Bran had fallen onto the white carpet. There were flecks of black dirt that looked like wild rice on the basement stairs. I told myself it was just something the kids had tracked in. When at last I was ready to admit that maybe, just maybe, it wasn't dirt, I was only able to commit to calling it mouse poop. Like a nice family in a cartoon, we hadoh dear!a mouse. Eek! One. Small. Mouse.

I tossed mousetraps for my little friend into my cart at the grocery store and nudged them down between a box of cookies and a box of laundry soap. I plotted how these plastic, enclosed traps would lure my opponent through a teeny, tiny little mouse hole to a yummy hunk of poison bait. With the dead mouse neatly entombed, I would then collect the trap, deposit it swiftly in the garbage can, and slam down the lid. Problem over.

The only flaw in my plan was that no little mouse ever made it as far as the bait. And I didn't dare think it was because the boy was too hefty to squeeze himself through the designated hole.

One day I chaperoned Jessie's Brownie troop on a field trip to a pet store. As brown-vested girls streamed around me, darting from fish tanks to hamster cages, I nonchalantly plucked a booklet from the rack, Caring for Your Rat. I looked at the cover photothe flat, soulless eyes, the glistening fur, the teeth like sewing needlesand shuddered in horror, repulsed down to my toes by its essential ratness. Breathing in the stench of urine-soaked wood shavings and dried kibbles of food, I leafed past Feeding Your Rat, Playing with Your Rat, and Cleaning your Rat to Types of Rats.

There he was, my nemesis, black and disgusting: the Norwegian Rat. I skimmed past the sordid details of his lineage and zoomed down to the line, This rat loves basements. Yes, that's him, I thought.

I entered the next phase of our dysfunctional relationship: the shame and the cover-up, interrupted by occasional backsliding into denial. Could it be that coming out about rats was harder than coming out about divorce? I didn't even think I could tell Trish. Surely she'd never want her daughters to play at our house again. I wasn't ready to admit to the outside world that I was a single mom with a rat (rats? no!) in her basement. What if we became known as the rat house? I wasn't willing to fall that far from middle-class grace. I'd deal with this problem quickly and quietly, and no one would be the wiser.

At my neighborhood hardware store, I threw a few sundries in my basketmasking tape, screwsand scanned the rows for rat poison. I felt criminal and creepy, like Joan Crawford in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? I skulked around the aisles, but the stuff was nowhere to be seen. Maybe you have to ask for it, I thought. Like the girly magazines, maybe it was kept behind the counter.

Excuse me, I whispered to the clerk at the register, I'm looking for rat poison?

We had some, but we're all sold out, he said in a booming voice.

Sold out? I said, in a low voice.

What you whispering for? You don't think your neighbors have rats? All these houses around herehe waved his hand in every direction like a compassI don't care how fancy, they have rats.