Nadine At 35 Synopsis

Nadine at 35: A Synopsis

Jo Sapp The brain cells slip away, one by one. One hundred thousand of them a day, departing. If she is very still and concentrates very hard she can feel it happen. One by one by one, the cells descending to her rump. It is an exodus, a relocation. A mass conservation. Her brain is escaping. And so, she discovers, is her husband. “All I need is a little time,” he says, his brown eyes wet and earnest as a cocker spaniel’s. “Kind of a vacation from marriage. A year or two to find myself.” And she didn’t even know he was lost. She bounces back quickly. “So go,” she says. “what the hell,” her vocabulary impoverished already by virtue of the missing cells. She figures she has lost over twelve billion to

When she has the time. She cannot search for herself because, unlike her husband, she has yet to fully realize that she is lost. She would like to return to school, to become a nuclear engineer, or perhaps a dietitian. There is, however, a problem. Only two worn suits, a set of golf clubs, three monogrammed neckties, and a few billion brain cells were left behind by the vacating husband. The money he

Hungry mouths. She does what any other right-thinking, thirty-five-year-old American girl would do. She gets a job, subscribes to Ms., deletes the word girl, along with housewife and mankind, from her vocabulary, further limiting it, and decides to take a lover. As for the children, she has an extra key to the apartment made for each of them and tells them to fend for themselves. That is the American way. Finding a lover is difficult. Lovers for thirty-five-year-old-brain-diminished vocabulary-impoverished women are in short supply. Particularly for those with three children and miscellaneous pets, even if they do all fend for themselves. So she resigns herself to celibacy, broken by occasional chance encounters and bouts of masturbation. It is not a altogether satisfactory life, but it has its rewards. She finds, to her surprise, that she enjoys working, and is good at her job. She is a teller at a savings and loan. So friendly is she, so helpful, and so accurate in tabulating the amount of money in her drawer at day’s end—never having to add a penny secretly or take away two—that in time she is promoted to New Accounts. She will go far, they tell her, and she knows they are right. She makes more money now, and hires a housekeeper. The children and pets are fended