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  THE LAST TIME I WAS ME

  Books by Cathy Lamb

  JULIA’S CHOCOLATES

  THE LAST TIME I WAS ME

  And in the Anthology

  COMFORT AND JOY

  “Suzanna’s Stockings”

  Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation

  THE LAST TIME I WAS ME

  CATHY LAMB

  KENSINGTON BOOKS

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  For my mother-in-law, Doris Mae (Lindsay) Lamb

  1925-2002

  and to her son, Bradford Howard Lamb,

  with love and laughter

  Contents

  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

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  EPILOGUE

  A READING GROUP GUIDE

  DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

  CHAPTER 1

  Women can look so innocent.

  And a few of them might be. Innocent, I mean.

  Most aren’t.

  Most have secrets. Pretty big ones, if I do say so myself.

  They silently nurture raging passions they’ve smothered for years because life has insisted they do so. They hide who they truly are because they’re in a box and no one in their families would feel comfortable if they broke out of that box like a rose on speed. They think non-innocent thoughts like: Should I castrate my husband? Should I leave my family and pesky in-laws, head for Tahiti, and have a fling with a lifeguard while downing daiquiris?

  Women can smile and be gracious and kind. And most women usually are. Gracious and kind, I mean.

  But to assume that a woman, any woman, is completely innocent is to be completely naïve.

  For example, take my recent not-so-innocent nervous breakdown.

  The breakdown happened to occur in front of eight-hundred-thirty-four advertising execs and their minions. All of whom think they are imminently cool and vitally necessary to the earth’s continual spinning around the sun.

  As the creative director for a stratospherically successful advertising firm in Chicago I suppose you could say I went out in a big way.

  My mother had died two months before.

  I had also found out that my longtime live-in boyfriend had not one current girlfriend on the side, but a small harem. This had prompted me to retaliate against him in a colorful and creative manner using, among other things, a hot-glue gun. The police were called, handcuffs were snapped, charges were filed, and now I had to be in court in a few months to fight assault charges.

  Plus, Jared Nunley, the boyfriend, who will heretofore be known as Slick Dick, was suing me for every nickel I had.

  Me, an ex-soloist in my church choir, who sold the most cookies three years in a row in Girl Scouts, had charges filed against her for assault.

  The truly bad thing about it was that my ex had no lasting damage done to his body.

  I had worked days and nights for a week for this particular presentation and Jessica, my insanely competitive twenty-three-year-old intern, kept implying that I was creaky-old and out of touch, with one of those saccharine sweet smiles you want to rip off people’s faces. I suddenly felt this insidious crack in my body breaking me open right up at the podium.

  It was a small crack starting in my small toe on my left foot. The crack raced by my ankle like a miniature rocket. The crack said, “Cancer has killed your mother. You are alone.” The crack wound up my thigh. “You have nothing,” the crack mocked me. “Your fun little town house doesn’t count. Neither does your sports car. Neither do all your little trips. To say nothing of that silly shoe collection of yours.” The crack zipped up between my legs and another crack joined it right in the heart of my femaleness.

  “You have worked incessantly for almost twelve years, with hardly a break. You have traveled to keep persnickety, picky clients happy all over the world who would only be satisfied if you brought them Pluto. You have handled other creative people, most in their twenties, who are crazed and edgy and who insist on riding their motorcycles through the building for inspiration, wear no shoes, drink beer for breakfast, and don’t wash.

  “Jared cheated on you,” the crack whispered. “You slept with him, and only him, for two years. God knows how many women he slept with during that time. You paid for all the groceries, including that vile sushi he loved, cat food for his mangy overgrown rat, his various electronic toys, and his nose-hair razor. He took off with the stereo equipment, your mountain bike, and nineteen-hundred dollars in cash. You had to fake every single orgasm with Jared. You miss that mountain bike.”

  The crack arrowed straight for my heart. “And you still miss Johnny and Ally.” The crack splintered into a million pieces and each crack burned its way across every pulsing artery and spindly vein in my body until I was one throbbing mass of aching pain.

  The crack wound its slippery way up to my mouth. “That drinking problem of yours that started two weeks after that night has got to go. It’s out of control. You’re out of control. It is going to kill you.”

  So the tears started. Right up at the podium with eight-hundred-thirty-four shallow schmucks looking on. I felt a surge of laughter bubbling and it rolled right out of my mouth-loud, rollicking laughter, who knows why.

  Now, anyone who is relatively smart like me-not that I have always been smart in my life but I do know I’m relatively smart-would have hightailed it off that stage. But I didn’t.

  I stood there and laughed and cried, my body quaking with pain.

  The schmucks’ mouths were hanging open in shock. Slack and loose.

  I decided to make a speech.

  An odd speech, a little speech, definitely a speech.

  I spoke my little mind. All that I had been thinking about during my years in advertising came right out of my perfectly lipsticked lips as I stood in my perfectly fashionable blue suit and blue high heels with the tiny gold chains in my perfectly way-too-thin body, and my perfectly sparkling jewelry that Jared supposedly “gave” me, but I ended up paying his credit cards off even though he had a trust fund from his daddy.

  I talked about what a shallow profession we were all in, announcing, “Our profession is utterly ridiculous! Our days and lives are dedicated to packaging and selling products to the American public who really, truly don’t need or want what we’re selling. Every minute of our existence is wrapped up in lies and deceit! Wrapped up in crap! We could all die tomorrow and we’d have to face God and tell him we wrapped our lives up in crap. How’s that going to go over?”

  I talked about a recent potato chip campaign that took eight people working almost round the clock for months to complete. “Potato chips! And Americans are already way too fat!” I boomed. “Way toooooo fat!”

  I talked about the endless discussions that occur in the halls of advertising about how to market a new car that, if bought, would slap the average person into deep debt for years on end. “And what about the panty and bra ads where overgrown women with impossibly large bowling ball breasts strut around on high heels? Do we think that most women can wear any of that lingerie without looking utterly ridiculous? Who
thinks cottage cheese thighs are sexy? Who thinks saggy boobs can be made to look better with red satin?

  “And frankly,” I bellowed, “who even cares about having a perfect body except the shallow schmucks sitting right here? Yes, you people! You shallow schmucks!”

  I decided to yell that part at them. “Don’t we have better things to do with our time on this planet than to worry about how we look? No wonder we’re all so miserable.”

  I talked about the complete self-absorption I had seen in people in advertising. “All we do is think about ourselves, our next ad, our next success, our next promotion. We are the most boring people on the planet!” I decided to pound the podium while I cackled like an overgrown witch. “That’s not the worst of it! We’re not good people. We’re not! Our profession means nothing to anyone. We make people’s lives worse, not better. We tell them in print and on TV that if they don’t have these products, they are useless people, that they’re not keeping up, they’re not cool, they’re ugly and poor and bottom-dwelling failures. And folks, guess what? It’s all a bunch of shit!”

  I suppose hysteria makes one acutely aware of life. As does death. Death is a great equalizer. It brings your own life into pinpoint focus. I decided to speak of that pinpoint focus. “When I die, what do I have to be proud of? That I designed a campaign that sent Tender Tampons skyrocketing? That Baucom’s vaginal cream is now used by more women than ever before for irritation? That overly sugared cereals for children that surely rot their teeth are being sold at a record pace? All that so a few thick-headed asshole white men with limp dicks at the top can become even richer? It’s pointless.”

  I looked around the room. I dare say everyone looked mighty stunned. Schmucks look even uglier when they’re stunned.

  “We’re pointless,” I said, taking a deep breath. “We’re pointless. There is more to life than this.” I cried a bit. For my mother, for my useless self, for those pesky assault charges, and for the blazing realization that I had done nothing worthwhile in my entire life. Almost forty I am, and I had done nothing. Nothing.

  Well, I had assaulted and humiliated my ex, but I didn’t think that counted. That made me laugh and snicker again. I sobered up quick. “There is more to life than figuring out how to persuade women to buy a certain brand of yeast infection medicine that resembles small white bullets. There has to be more.”

  I thought of my mother, with that doctor straddling her as he forced a tube down her throat so that she could die more peacefully, of all the other doctors and nurses who had tried so desperately hard to help. I wanted to bang my head against the podium. Hard.

  Now they had become Someone Useful. They had tried to save my mother’s life. I had only tried to convince some exhausted mommy in suburbia to buy some unhealthy cavity-causing crud for her child’s breakfast.

  “There has to be more to life than Tender Tampons.” I said this so quietly I could barely hear it myself, yet at the same time the words seemed to echo right off the walls of that room like thunder.

  And then I left. I walked off that stage in my blue heels with the tiny gold chains, right out the door to my car, a low, red, expensive, humming machine.

  I sold it on the way home without a second glance back, bought a big hulkin’ Bronco and a storage trailer to haul behind it and pocketed the cash. On my cell I called my friend, Joyce Her-ber, a real estate agent, and told her to sell my town house. I called a man named Isaac Porter who owned an estate business and told him to sell my stuff. It was modern and sleek and I hated it. I called my lawyer and my mother’s special friend, Roy Sass, and he told me to stay in touch because of my little problem with the police. He also reminded me I needed to enroll in a court-ordered anger management course to show that I was getting help for my poor behavior.

  When I got home, I piled everything I wanted into the back of the Bronco and the trailer in boxes, including my silly shoe collection and my photograph books filled with pictures of my mom and Roy and my brother Charlie and his family that I had spent hours putting together.

  I wrapped up my grandmother’s teacup collection, my mother’s china, and a set of tiles with a fruit bowl painted on them. I grabbed a violin I’d hidden way back in my closet that made tears burn down my cheeks like a mini-fountain, a gold necklace with a dolphin that my father gave me two weeks before he died of a heart attack when I was twelve and, at midnight, with that moon as bright as the blazes, I left Chicago.

  I stopped by my mother’s grave and dropped tears all over her gravestone, the night dark and silky but not creepy there in the cemetery, then drove from Chicago, Illinois, toward Oregon wearing my dolphin necklace. Charlie lives in Portland, Oregon.

  Me and my insanity drove off. Together. As one. I shook my brain, my nervous breakdown making me nervous.

  I wondered if there were anger management classes in Portland?

  But who cares, I yelled out loud. “Who cares?” Life was currently quite sucky so I yelled, “Sucky! Sucky!” In fact, I might give up on it altogether and drive my ole engine-grinding, muffler-roaring, growling Bronco straight to the west coast and make a permanent dive right into the ocean. Headfirst.

  CHAPTER 2

  Although my grief for my mother covered me like the wings of a thousand black crows for the initial six days of my journey, by the seventh day I felt those wings lifting me up for the first time since her death. I talked to her in the car, pretending she was sitting right by me. We had stimulating conversations and we laughed a lot. She had cheered my speech to the advertising schmucks and revealed that she thought my retaliation against Slick Dick was justified.

  I stopped in the small town of Weltana because I liked the trees and it was raining when I arrived.

  I love rain.

  I rolled my growling Bronco to a stop off the side of the highway in front of a little yellow building with green trim. It was called The Opera Man’s Café. The walls inside were made of logs. A fire burned in the brick fireplace and a chef with a white braid flipped pancakes two feet up into the air and sung along at full throttle with Bocelli on CD. Little white lights twinkled from the open rafters over long wood tables.

  When my pancakes arrived I smothered them in maple syrup and butter, the way I liked them; the way I have not eaten them in twelve years because that would have driven me into a downward emotional spiral into hell.

  During those years I craved pancakes so much I would sometimes dream of them in the approximately four hours of sleep I snatched each night when my caffeine fix and whacked-out stress level would soften to a dull roar in my head or when I passed out from one too many drinks.

  I dreamed about those pancakes and hot syrup far more than I dreamed of sex.

  Come to think of it, I rarely dreamed about sex.

  Which tells you something about me.

  So I poured the syrup on until it formed little lakes and started in on my pancakes in that cozy café under the fir trees in the foothills of Mount Hood made by a cozy chef with a white braid.

  But if I had been able to see the future, I would have trembled in my knee-high black boots that day and headed for Kosovo or Mongolia.

  But how was I to know that a naked run along a river, a raucous bar fight, a self-painting ritual to decrease my self-anger, and a court trial that exploded into a media circus, would follow?

  How was I to know that I would finally be forced to do battle with my deep and abiding obsession with liquor?

  Oh, and one more wee little tidbit: How was I to know that the woman in the café who looked like she’d stepped off an Italian Renaissance painting, who spoke at great length with the cook about germs and germ-killing, would decide that a certain man had polluted our earth long enough and would execute the Elimination Plan, and that the other woman in there would help hide his body?

  That “other” woman?

  That would be me.

  How was I to know that?

  Had I known, I would have choked on my pancakes.

  And that woul
d have been a shame because I love pancakes.

  “Welcome to Weltana, young lady,” the chef said to me as he rang up my bill, his braid over his right shoulder. “Are you staying around town or passing through?”

  I’d put him at about seventy. He reminded me of a white crane-but he was the most attractive white crane I’d ever seen. His name was Donovan and I later found out he used to be an opera singer in New York.

  “I’m not sure,” I told him. “I’m not too far from the ocean, am I?”

  He shook his head, handed me my change. “No, ma’am. You’re about three hours from it. Did you want to see the ocean?”

  Did I want to see the ocean? I sure did. Up close. Intimately knowing my own grave site would be helpful. “Yes.”

  “Well, by gum, if you take the highway outside of town toward the city you can bypass Portland and head straight on out by driving west. The sunsets are spectacular.”

  I could use a spectacular sunset. I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d seen one. I had been too busy working my way into burnout and convincing myself that my faster-than-lightning life was dandy. That takes a lot of time, you know. Lying to yourself.

  “’Course we have spectacular sunsets here, too. Take a drive straight up the mountain. You know, a sunset is God’s last painting of the day. It’s his last gift to all of us before he gives us the gift of a sunrise.”

  I nodded. A last gift. I had given my ex a last gift and Slick Dick had called the police. It had been a particularly prodigious, poignant, and profound present to the prick that his psyche would probably be hard-pressed to forget. (I have always liked alliteration. Goes back to a favorite English teacher in eighth grade named Mrs. Gaddinni. In times of stress it comes in handy.)