“What? My mom’s had one.”
Thelma would probably miss the blood from her face, but right now, she didn’t need it. She was too shocked by what her granddaughter so glibly said.
“Uh-oh, you broke her…” Emma whispered over the table.
“I’ll have you know that abortions existed in the ‘50s,” Thelma softly informed them as she plucked her wineglass off the tableand helped herself. “Every woman knew where to go if she needed one. Now, if she had the money, on the other hand…”
Something about that had made the birthday girl uncomfortable.And rightly so!After one more second of disquiet, Thelma would let it go. She already knew that topics like abortion were more common in the modern age, but that didn’t make it any less shocking to her when someone just brought it up like that.
And, goodness, how easily those two girls jumped back into other topics as if nothing had happened. Yet Thelma couldn’t shake how their reactions to her “quick” marriage to Bill and her forsaking women affected her.
In this era…In this era, Thelma could have been someone else. She could have at least taken her time deciding what was best for her. She could have had birth control. She could have had a career before becoming a mother if she had wanted to try it.
Except she didn’t know what she might have wanted. Her whole life, she “knew” she would get married and probably have children. It was a foregone conclusion, like getting old, going to church, and watching fireworks on the Fourth of July. She never dreamed about being a schoolteacher, a nurse, or a secretary, the first three “careers” she thought of that wouldn’t have been too hard to get into with her looks and skills. As for being someone like Sandy, who was fiercely independent and forged her own career in writing and journalism?No. I didn’t have the stomach for that.That Thelma of back then wanted her creature comforts and to claim her preordained place in society—a middle-class housewife in the Los Angeles suburbs.
But what about the Thelma of today?
Emma and Megan told jokes to one another and lightly flirted with some of the young men sitting at one table over who had noticed Megan’s birthday tiara. Thelma didn’t hear a thing theysaid. She was too lost in the eggplant lasagna that arrived and matched well with the red wine they shared.
The Thelma of today…
When she looked at women like Pauline and Jo, two time travelers from times long before her—especially in Jo’s case—she saw those same fiercely independent women who had carved their own destinies while dealing with the pain and trauma that came from accidentally ending up in the future. Pauline never got to see most of her family again; Jo had entered a brand-new country and learned a new language. Both were, more or less, thriving in the modern America they found themselves in.They both found love. They both got married and are doing their own things outside of therapy.Pauline worked part-time at a home goods store for extra cash, and Jo was a pre-war historian who had spent the past twenty years learning English so she could not only understand modern America, but relate it to the Spanish pueblo she had left behind in the 1700s.
What could Thelma do? Besides take this all one day at a time?
One year ago, I was a housewife with two kids.Now, she was an aimless woman with one grown son and one daughter with dementia. She had a granddaughter who was about to embark on her own life.
Thelma was still in the crossroads. There may be checkered tablecloths and candles before her and Dean Martin’s “Mambo Italiano”playing on the speakers, but this wasn’t Las Vegas, 1954. This wasn’t her on baby break with her husband, who would inevitably stop at the poker table to smoke cigars and gamble a little after escorting Thelma back up to their room, where she would stare at the lights outside the window and wonder about the possibilities.
Perhaps that quiet part of her had always been there. The one whisperingbut what if?
She was louder now. Even in a busy restaurant one block off the Strip, Thelma heard that voice inside of her that had begged to be heard since she was a teenager, establishing her own identity.The good Christian girl who wanted to be in love.
She pulled her phone out of her purse due to some crazed instinct that told her to see if Gretchen had finally texted her back. Indeed, she had.“Wait, you’re in Vegas?”
There was that voice. Still screaming in the back of her mind, telling her to wake up.
But.
What.
If?
She felt the need for more sunscreen out in the Nevada desert than she did in Los Angeles, but the girls were happy to trot ahead in nothing but T-shirts and baseball caps to keep their youthful skin protected. Even Megan laughed Thelma off for handing over some sunscreen before they left the hotel to go touristing early the next day.
They stayed together, although Thelma felt more like the third wheel as they toured through museums, shopped in a local mall, and had lunch at a diner that pretended to look like a soda shop from Thelma’s childhood. Yet the jerk behind the fountain didn’t have the same customer service skills, and the milkshakes were runny. Still, Megan was delighted to get one to share three ways.
They took so many pictures, and Thelma couldn’t avoid them all. She was still getting used to the concept of “selfies” and posting pictures to public social media platforms.No, thank you.She didn’t think anything of Megan posting their pictures to Instagram. If anything, she was grateful she took extra timethat morning doing her makeup and hair while the girls lazed about in bed and eventually dragged themselves to the shower together.
While they sat in the soda shop, surrounded by international tourists speaking languages Thelma had never heard of before, she received a text from Gretchen. A concept that still left her feeling somewhat tingly—and confused, because handling written communication of gadgets was still very new to Thelma, who always had to mentally walk her way through opening her notifications and hitting “Reply.”Never mind how long it takes me to write one of these things out with my stupid thumbs…
“Sorry I didn’t get back to you last night,”Gretchen wrote on one message—then, another came in while Thelma was reading.“I was beat from the conference. Anyway, I am also in Vegas. Staying in the Paris. I think we’re right across the street from each other. What are the odds? Like, Vegas levels.”
None of that made any sense to Thelma. Nothing besides the fact that they were in Vegas on the same weekend!
“If you have some time tonight, we can get dinner. I’m done with conference stuff at 3 and have the rest of the day off. Get me away from these sweaty construction bros.”
Thelma glanced at the girls, who huddled together on the other side of the table while staring at something on Megan’s phone. “Believe it or not,” she said, catching their attention, “one of my friends from LA happens to also be in Vegas this weekend. Why don’t I go see them for a few hours so you two can be alone this evening?”
