Bring Your Baggage and Don't Pack Light Read online

  also by helen ellis

  Southern Lady Code

  American Housewife

  Eating the Cheshire Cat

  Copyright © 2021 by Helen Ellis

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.doubleday.com

  doubleday and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Cover photograph © Levi Brown/Trunk Archive

  Cover design by John Fontana

  library of congress cataloging-in-publication data

  Names: Ellis, Helen, author.

  Title: Bring your baggage and don’t pack light : essays / Helen Ellis.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Doubleday, [2021]

  Identifiers: lccn 2020029356 (print) | lccn 2020029357 (ebook) | isbn 9780385546157 (hardcover) | isbn 9780385546164 (ebook)

  Subjects: lcsh: Ellis, Helen—Family. | Ellis, Helen—Friends and associates. | Female friendship. | Authors, American—20th century—Biography. | Authors, American—21st

  century—Biography. | lcgft: Essays.

  Classification: lcc ps3555.l5965 z46 2021 (print) | lcc ps3555.l5965 (ebook) | ddc 814/.54 [b]—dc23

  lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020029356

  lc ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020029357

  Ebook ISBN 9780385546164

  ep_prh_5.7.0_c0_r1

  For Poochie!

  · CONTENTS ·

  Grown-Ass Ladies Gone Mild

  She’s a Character

  Happy Birthday, You’re Still Fuckable!

  She’s Young

  Are You There, Menopause? It’s Me, Helen

  Call Me

  The Backup Plan

  The Last Garage Sale

  My Kind of People

  I’m a Believer!

  I Go Greyhound!

  There’s a Lady at the Poker Table

  I Feel Better About My Neck

  Acknowledgments

  Grown-Ass

  Ladies

  Gone Mild

  From the start of our grown-ass ladies’ trip to Panama City Beach, aka “The Redneck Riviera,” Paige and I could see that Vicki was having a hard time. Days before, she’d dropped her eldest off at college and gotten a bad mammogram. Her follow-up biopsy was scheduled for the week after our reunion with two other childhood friends, and until then, all Vicki wanted to do was stay in her room, sleep late, sit on the condo balcony, sit on the beach, drink white wine out of a Chardonnay glass or drink white wine out of a one-liter sippy-lid souvenir cup, and catch up.

  The last time we’d gotten together as a group was ten years ago—my four childhood friends carpooling over from Atlanta and Athens, and me flying down from New York City—so we respected Vicki’s wishes.

  As we respected Ellen’s wish to run on the beach at dawn like she was reenacting Chariots of Fire (which nobody else did). And Heather’s wish to play Cards Against Humanity (which four out of five of us did). And Paige’s wish to wear matching woven friendship bracelets (which we all did). And my wish to go to a water park (which two of us did).

  When Paige and I arrived at Shipwreck Island, we were self-conscious about barefooting around in our one-pieces in the broadest of daylight, but then we saw a nine-months-pregnant woman in a bikini, and her meemaw in a thong. Awash in a sea of botched tattoos and bullet wounds, third-degree sunburns and cellulite that made our cellulite feel good about itself, we stood up a little straighter and wore our particular brand of sunscreened and soft-cupped middle age like Bob Mackie gowns.

  Braving the Raging Rapids ride, we sat ass backwards in inner tubes held by beautiful bronzed teenagers.

  I said to one good-ole-boy Adonis: “You’re gonna have to push me.”

  He said, “Yes, ma’am,” and shoved me over a waterfall like a sack of dirty sheets down a hotel laundry chute.

  I screamed.

  And Paige screamed. Because she too is a screamer. And Paige’s screams have always enabled my screams. Ever since elementary school.

  Paige and I met in the 1970s Alabama gifted program. I don’t know why we were pegged as gifted, but I’m pretty sure I scored high on the IQ test because when I was asked to name all the words I could think of in sixty seconds, I read every word I could see on book spines behind the test giver’s back.

  “Dictionary, encyclopedia, parachute, penguin.”

  From then on, one day a week, me (and another kid from Alberta Elementary School) and Paige (and another kid from Arcadia Elementary School) went to gifted school at Northington Elementary with twenty other kids from around Tuscaloosa.

  Here’s what I remember about being gifted: logic puzzles (whodunit spreadsheets), Chisanbop (finger math), and our teacher’s belief that we, a bunch of fifth graders, could put on a show (three acts from, you guessed it, Evita, A Chorus Line, and The Crucible).

  Paige remembers: “I was one of the extras, and I think my one line was ‘It’s up there, behind the rafters,’ pointing at a witch or a bat.”

  It was my line too.

  For Arthur Miller’s big courtroom scene, Paige and I played Puritan schoolgirls. But we didn’t point at a bat. Costumed in black dresses with white collars and bonnets, we cowered on a cafeteria stage screaming and crying and accusing another girl of turning into a yellow devil bird that wanted to tear our faces off.

  Vicki, who’s known Paige since kindergarten, attended that show with her mother. She remembers thinking, “Whaaaaat?”

  Paige and I still don’t know what. All we remember is that we got those parts because we were the best screamers. Looking back, “the best screamers” might have been our teacher’s southern lady way of saying that we were the worst actresses. Regardless, one good screamer holds tight to another for life.

  At the water park, Paige and I screamed flying down the rapids, we screamed bumping into each other, we screamed seeing each other scream, and we screamed getting stuck and spiraling in whirlpools.

  Every fifteen feet, another good-ole-boy Adonis unstuck us and slung us along.

  We screamed, “Thank you!”

  They said, “Yes, ma’am.” And shook their heads in what I am sure was marvel over never having seen grown-ass ladies such as ourselves having more fun than little girls pumped up on 16 Handles fro-yo chasing Taylor Swift through a shopping mall.

  Paige and I drifted along the Lazy River, congealed with season ticket holders. We got in the Wave Pool and gripped the sides like castaways. We climbed what I believe was in fact a rickety wooden stairway to heaven to ride White Knuckle River, which is four people in a big inner tube going down a 660-foot twisting snake of drainpipe. And we debated the Tree Top Drop, which is a seventy-foot slide down an XXXL human–size straw.

  I asked a woman who’d just finished it, “Should we ride the Tree Top Drop?”

  She said, “If you wanna taste the crotch of your own bathing suit.”

  We did not.

  So instead, we went back to the Raging Rapids and rode it twenty-eight times in a row.

  At some point, I asked Paige about the tattoo on her shoulder.

  Paige’s tattoo is of what I would call three “M” birds. Three birds that look like the letter M. Inked in black without features, as if seen from a distance, flying high, maybe over an ocean. One
is the width of a nickel; the other two, the widths of dimes. Mama bird and her babies. Soaring to safety.

  Paige said, “I just came to the point where I felt really free. I felt free and thankful that me and the kids were in such a better place. I’d never even thought about wanting a tattoo before.”

  Paige got that tattoo after she left her first husband, who we’d all known was a problem since high school.

  Paige never spoke of what went on in her house when she was married to him, but she speaks to me of it now. And there are two things I am certain of: I will never forgive that man for what he did to my friend; and if Paige’s father hadn’t stepped in and saved her, my friend would not be here.

  When Paige’s children were six and nineteen months old, her father, who was perfectly healthy, sat her down in a restaurant and said, “I will give you your inheritance of thirty thousand dollars now, if you leave him.”

  Within a month, Paige hired a moving company and got out while her husband was at work. The divorce was finalized a year later.

  “Best decision ever,” she says.

  Paige never looked back. And neither do we.

  * * *

  ————

  Let me give you a little rundown of who we are now.

  Paige is a survivor. Vicki is a caregiver. Heather is religious. Ellen is such a feminist that when she married a man with her exact same last name, she insisted they hyphenate. At least, that’s what I told my husband, who having met Ellen, believed me and still calls them (and here, I will substitute a generic last name for the sake of their anonymity) the Doe-Does.

  Me, I’m the funny one. My friends say that I have a special way of saying things, which means that when we’re together I revert to my adolescent ways of Shock and Aw-no-you-didn’t!

  No matter how old we get, we see each other like we first saw each other: young. We forgive each other like we did when we were young: easily. We lean into every story because no story is too long, or too much, because we come together so rarely to share. We don’t judge each other’s baggage, and we don’t pack light.

  Here’s what we brought on our PCB trip: tales of four husbands and a second husband; tales of seven kids; tales of aging parents and dead parents; tales of jobs lost and husbands’ jobs lost; tales of injuries and surgeries and menopause and perimenopause; tales of dreams shattered and second chances and second chapters; antianxiety medications; red wine and white wine and vodka and gin; drink mixers and powdered onion-dip mix; low-calorie TV dinners; serving-platter-sized sunhats; long-sleeved swim shirts; cover-ups that quilted together could shade a Jungle Cruise boat at Walt Disney World; foul language and flip-flops; board games and yearbooks; photographs that you have to hold by the edges; a delicious lasagna that Heather fixed, froze, and drove over; and a final draft of a book that I’d written in which there was a story about us.

  Everything I’ve ever written I’ve read out loud to Vicki. When we were teenagers, I read her my diary over the phone. Vicki is what you call a good listener. Every time I look up from a page, the woman is rapt.

  When we see each other, she asks, “Do you have something to read to me?”

  If I do, she settles into a comfortable chair. If we’re spending weekends at each other’s homes, we leave our husbands in our marital beds and sleep together. And I read her to sleep.

  We met because I played Little League baseball with Vicki’s brother. In 1980 I was the only girl on any team because I had seen Tatum O’Neal do it in The Bad News Bears. To get a team to take me, Papa had agreed to coach. At the end of the season, there was a family picnic.

  Papa said, “Look, Helen Michelle, there’s another girl here. Go introduce yourself and take a walk.”

  I think Vicki’s parents must have told her the same thing because I remember us being pushed toward each other, and then pushed into the woods like sacrificial virgins.

  We hit it off because I made her laugh.

  And Vicki’s laughter remains one of my favorite sounds. She is a quiet person, happiest when reading a cozy mystery, listening to a ghost podcast, or watching Masterpiece Theatre on PBS; but when I make her laugh, her body stiffens and she bounces like a jackhammer on a couch, and when I really get her going—and she’s red-faced and can barely breathe—instead of saying “Stop,” she gasps, “OH, HELEN!”

  In my book Southern Lady Code, Vicki appears for the first time in one of my stories. And so, for the first time, she’d be hearing me read to her about her.

  “Party Foul” is the story of how my father faked his own death for my thirteenth birthday. Paige and Ellen were at that party. But Heather didn’t go to school with us then, and she’d somehow never heard tell about what had emotionally scarred so many of my classmates for life.

  So when I read about an isolated, poorly supervised party hut, an accusation of adultery, a stranger with a gun, that gun waved in my friends’ faces, and then blanks fired into my father’s chest, Heather curled her feet up under her and yelled, “NO! NO! NO!”

  “Yes! Yes! Yes!” Paige and Ellen yelled.

  “OH, HELEN!”

  For a moment Vicki was as scared as she had been then, but able to laugh because she was on the other side of that fear. She could enjoy it because she knew that she would make it out alive and be safe. For a moment she forgot about the scary story that had begun the week before in an Atlanta radiology center. You know, the least popular fairy tale: “The Princess and the Pea in Her Mammogram.”

  Nobody wants to hear that one.

  Because a happy ending ain’t guaranteed.

  * * *

  ————

  When we returned to our families, Vicki group-texted that her biopsy showed breast cancer. She went straight into chemotherapy: eight treatments, every two weeks.

  She took it like a champ, with her diligent husband of twenty-five years keeping our group well informed when Vicki wasn’t up to documenting her progress.

  “Texting and phone calls stress me out,” Vicki said, “but I’m a great patient.”

  All Vicki had to do was show up at her appointments, sit under a blanket, and absorb the poison. And somehow, this was a relief to her. After decades of taking care of her family, putting everyone’s needs before her own, making endless decisions and endlessly advocating, working at home and in an office and volunteering at school, cooking and cleaning, and worrying—oh, the worrying—over everyone and everything and what could happen and what would surely happen (What if her kids got hurt? What if her kids got sick? What if her husband got hurt or sick? What if she got cancer?), she could quit. Or, at least, set it all aside until she was healed.

  Vicki said, “The cancer finally gives me justification to put myself first.”

  Vicki said, “I don’t have to do anything! All I have to do is relax.”

  Church ladies brought casseroles. An acquaintance offered medical marijuana. Ellen and Heather paid visits. I gave her my Audible password. Paige bought us more matching bracelets.

  This time, delicate pink strings with silver ribbons for breast cancer awareness. And the five of us wore them, because we do what we can. And sometimes, all we can do is show our solidarity with accessories.

  As if to say: Hey friend, we got you.

  As if to say: Look out, rough stuff, we are a grown-ass lady gang.

  My New York City grown-ass lady gang is a tad more in-your-face. When a member of our book club had brain surgery, we wore matching brass bracelets on which was etched in all caps: fuck cancer.

  * * *

  ————

  The week before Vicki’s double mastectomy, Paige and I met her at a Georgia Spa and Winery for what I was calling her “Farewell Nipple Trip.”

  Not-so-fun fact: when they cut off your breasts, you don’t get to keep your nipples. If you choose reconstruct
ion, you may pay a tattoo artist to tattoo you some nipples. Otherwise, your breasts look like Barbie’s.

  I told Vicki: “Maybe you should get two yellow smiley faces. Or scratch-n-sniff stickers in grape jelly and root beer.”

  “OH, HELEN!”

  Yes, Vicki laughed at that. Because what else could she do? Or maybe everything was funny because she was tippled on Georgia wine.

  And yes, they make wine in Georgia, and it tastes exactly like you’d think it would taste: overly sweet and shallow. But aren’t those the qualities of the very best hostess?

  Heather and Ellen met us for supper one night, and we raised our glasses in support of our friend who glimmered in candlelight. Her hair lost to chemo, Vicki’s scalp was dusted with a translucent fuzz. She looked like a dandelion-turned-puffball: blown, and a wish made upon.

  Vicki said, “Because of the Christmas bald eagle, I have a peace that I haven’t felt since I was a child.”

  Now it was my turn to ask, “Whaaaaat?”

  Two months earlier, Vicki was halfway through her chemo treatments. She, her mother, her husband, and her two teenage children had left her house to go to supper, and as they were getting into their car, they noticed their neighbors standing in their yards and pointing at their house. Vicki looked up to where they were pointing, and on a tree limb outside her bedroom window was a bald eagle.

  A bald eagle. In Georgia. Not a hawk. A bald eagle.

  Vicki’s mother yelled, “It’s a sign! It’s a sign! You’re going to be okay!”

  The big bird flew off.

  Vicki was wowed by the sight of it (because really, who among us has laid eyes on a bald eagle?), but she wasn’t convinced it was a good omen until her family returned from supper and she took her dog, Tucker, for a walk.

  Tucker is a rust-colored creature who looks like he’s supernaturally come to life after spending an eternity oil-painted on the lap of Queen Victoria. Tucker tugged and tugged on his leash, and dragged Vicki to the side of her house where she never walks him after dark because it’s too dark. Beneath the dim light of her bedroom window, she could see something glistening on the ground, under the tree where the bald eagle had landed.