A Dangerous Age Read Free Page A

the job? Can you get me one?”
    “There aren’t any jobs for someone like you, Winifred. You’re overqualified for anything I can think up for you to do. You’d be in a perfect place in Washington to study for the MCAT. It’s nuts to give up on your dreams.”
    “I might do it,” she said. “I might just do that. I could take the Kaplan and pick up a refresher course in organic chemistry at any of the schools near there. I’m going to stay in Washington and help with Brian as long as they need me. It’s my memorial to Charles. Their family isn’t very large. They don’t have a lot of people like we do.”
    “Get a big apartment and I might come live with you, if you get a comfortable place without any cats and dogs. I’m sick of every childless woman I know having a house full of rotten spoiled pets.”
    “Will you try to find a place for me? I need you to help me find somewhere to live.”
    “I live in Baltimore, Winnie. I don’t know anything about D.C. except that everything is done by pull. You need to getyour daddy to call some senators or representatives or lobbyists. I heard that’s how it gets done around there.”
    “Well, look anyway. I mean, see what you can do.”
    “I’ll try. When will you get here?”
    “In a few days. I’ll call as soon as I get an airline ticket.”
    S O OF COURSE I got no sleep that night for worrying about where Winifred would live and where she should apply to schools and how she could find a part-time job. Finally, about three in the morning, I got out of bed and made a list of contacts; then I found the Sunday papers and put them in a pile to look for apartments. I wanted to move into D.C. myself but I’d been too busy to look for anything. I’d been living for three years in a garage apartment behind the home of the style section editor of the
Washington Post
. It’s comfortable but far away from any work I do. When I can find work, it’s in D.C., or I have to talk to people there: small pieces for magazines or papers, or pickup jobs at television stations. Anyway, I wasn’t looking forward to spending the rest of the winter driving into D.C. in bad weather and awful traffic.
    “Epiphany,” I told Cousin Olivia when I got her on the phone the next morning. I always call her first thing in the morning because she goes to the newspaper at dawn, so she’s available. Plus, she’s maybe the smartest person in the family now that Aunt Anna’s dead.
    “I’m going to find a place where both of us can live,” Iwent on. “If Winifred needs to be in D.C. while she heals her wounds, I might as well help her. What else do I have to do with my empty heart and empty womb?”
    “You don’t have an empty womb. You have a busy life. If you want a child, go find some sperm and get to work. A baby is going to slow you down, but who knows, it might spur you on instead.”
    “I have to get a script ready for Allison Cardy by the tenth of February.”
    “Then get it done. You procrastinate, Louise. It’s your Achilles’ heel.”
    “Not always. I can stop it if I like.”
    “Then do it. Look, I have to go. Call me tonight, okay?” She hung up and I made a pot of coffee and went into my workroom and finished the script. By two in the afternoon I had it in the FedEx box and was on my way to D.C. to look for an apartment near Walter Reed. It was time for a change. I called Winifred and told her what I was doing and she said go ahead and don’t worry about what it cost and just find something and rent it, she’d be there by the end of the week.
    That was Wednesday.
    “Without change, something sleeps inside us and seldom awakens.” That’s my mantra, when I remember to use it. I learned it from
Dune
, a book I will never stop loving. A great newspaperman wrote the
Dune
books after a lifetime of watching the world and its madness. It’s the best metaphor for modernlife ever written. It’s our
Don Quixote
although no one ever admits it in literary circles.
    I