My mother is ten years younger than Erica Jong. She might seem older than her by now, though. Age is so relative, and to my mother it has not been kind. Her bloated, waxy body lurks like a termite queen in swathes of fabric as she trudges through her cluttered house in upper California, cropped hair dyed a puce reserved in the salons, it seems, for sixty-five-year-old women with a great quantity of turquoise budding on their fingers and sweaty strings of it snaked around their necks, as if to say, “Still we rebel, still we are slovenly, still we do not keep our receipts.”

I personally do keep my receipts. I like to know what I have paid and why. On the day I’m remembering, about fifteen years ago, I was in fact on a bumpy flight, the kind of bucking and lurching that makes you feel incredulous that you allowed yourself to get locked into a metal tube connected to absolutely nothing and get hurled through space. The laws of physics are nothing to your basic human need to have earth under your feet at moments like this, and I can see why people start praying. But not me. I hold on to my atheism and wait. That day, it was a quick flight to Fort Lauderdale from Cincinnati, for a medical device conference. I was working for Avista, promoting a new range of asthma inhalers. I had packed in a distracted state. Chad and I had an argument as I did so. I was going to be missing our second anniversary by going to the conference. I could have sent someone junior to me, but frankly I was looking over my shoulder at the time, worried I’d be laid off. The company was downsizing. I wanted to weather the shedding of employees, to seem essential. If I could secure purchases of a significant amount of product at this conference, I was looking at a promotion, and Chad and I were hoping to get married. We didn’t want children. I had never wanted children. Children led to everything I disliked: anxiety about money, depletion of free time, inability to enjoy your life. Chad was the youngest of a fecund six, so there was no pressure on him. My stepsister Gaby (my mother remarried a couple times after my dad) had three kids, so Suzanne had checked the grandma box. I was thirty and excited for all this time I had to become a big success and not have kids.