I’m in Miami for my daughter’s high school graduation, and I drive my ex-husband’s Ford Fusion around town. He’s been kind enough to let me borrow his car even though his new wife resents the gesture.
The first couple of days, I am elated to be away from the solemnness of New England where I now live. The sun, heat, music are blaring, and I speed down I-75 as if I've been freed from a small cage. I even show cleavage, something I don’t do in Maine because the place and people can’t stomach it. Now my cotton tee-shits are v-neck, low cut, and fluorescent colors. But I don’t care. Being in Miami is like shooting techno music into the veins, and everyone gets a daily shot. Mine includes the Sirirus radio channels programmed into my ex’s car -- Venus, Blend, Hip Hop, Rock, 80’s, NYC Mix, all stations I blast with pleasure.
I know I’ll tire of the glitz and glare way before I leave in seven days. Sixteen years of living in the place gave me a heat/noise/drama/artifice exhaustion so consuming it took three years for me to sleep it off in remote Maine (I divorced, worked three shifts, and raised my children in Miami). Now, the only evidence of Florida’s ravages is reflected in my friend, whose house I'm staying at and who suffers from inertia and a lethargy so overwhelming it makes her sit on the couch every day after work until she falls asleep at 8:00 p.m. “I’m so bored,” she bellows every so often to which I respond, “Maybe you need to start a new life away from all this damn heat.” (Most of the days the temperatures are in the 90s.)
When I go to Delray Beach with my children, their stepmother joins us. In the eight years I’ve known her we’ve never had much of a friendship much less an extended conversation. I know she finds me too unconventional for her taste. My ex-husband once told me that she didn’t understand how I moved to Maine by myself. In the car, she talks the entire hour it takes to drive to the beach. Then she gives us instructions on how to place the beach towels on the sand, open the umbrella, eat the store-bought fruits and vegetables, hand out the water bottles… I regret wasting precious time with her in tow, but when we get into the lukewarm waters of the Atlantic Ocean, where happy beachgoers jump out of waves and the lifeguard talks to young children playing on the shore, she shoos away my kids and starts to cry. “I’ve spent eight years with your ex-husband and now he wants to leave me,” she says.
I don’t want to get involved, and I don’t want to be pulled into their marital woes. Really, I wonder how my ex managed to stay with such a controlling woman for so long. Regardless of their differences, I like and admire her: she did a great job with my daughter who moved in with her father when she was 16, she makes gingerbread houses and Christmas wreaths from scratch during the holidays, she grows her own rose and herb garden, and she makes gourmet dinners every night. Instead, I say, “take your distance, talk to a therapist, get some clarity, do what’s right for you. The woman is the prize, never the man. Anyway, you are like an earth goddess.”
The next day, I take my 19-year-old daughter to Hallandale Beach with the aqua blue lifeguard tower and cute Hispanic lifeguards wearing fiery red swim trunks. We sit on the sands of the beach and look at waves on a late cool afternoon while sipping on a glass of cheap wine we bought from a vendor. Clara tells me how she had to hold her drunk friend Abigail’s head while she vomited into the toilet at the graduation party she attended last night. I give her mini lecture on drinking and drinking and driving. And then she says, “I know mom.” She’s charming and smart and ready to go to college, like her 22-year-old brother who is headed to graduate school on the west coast of Florida later on in the summer. The children my ex-husband and I adopted from orphanages in Russia when we were in our early 20s are grown up, beautiful, charming, and smart. If anything, I've always reminded them they have to live great lives for those orphans who didn't get the same opportunities.
On the day I leave, I pick up my children early in the morning and we buy a roasted rosemary garlic chicken, dill cucumber salad, and French baguette at an organic market. Then we sit at a picnic table at C.B. Smith Park - my favorite park in Broward County - with charming wood bridges, canals, palm and pine trees, tiger butterflies, Asian geese, and large green iguanas, and we have a picnic at 10:00 in the morning. My son shows us pictures of his trip to China where he just spent two weeks on a language exchange program, and my daughter talks about her dreams of studying art and being a teacher. When they drop me off at the airport my heart breaks, but then I notice my tee shirt with the high ballerina collar I unwittingly put on this morning and know it’s time to go back to Maine. Read my exciting memoir, "The Continent of Ruby," available at:https://www.amazon.com/Continent-Ruby-Memoir-Because-sometimes-ebook/dp/B00TT5DDWO?ie=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0
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