I was angry. Not for nothing, but at almost forty-six years old, I had managed to earn four degrees and was about to earn a fifth. I had been a teacher for twenty-six of those years, from the time I graduated, a raw girl, from university. I had managed to avoid pregnancy and single motherhood, not through any great goodness of my own, but because God was watching my back, and I didn't sleep around, except for that one year, when I was nineteen, and then only with those two Indian boys from Trinidad, and then only once each time. In fact, I was generally afraid of men, even though I had had deep friendships with three boys-who-wanted-to-be-men before I was twenty years old. I had grown up in a dysfunctional household where, among other things, I was the only legitimate child of my parents. My siblings, one of whom was younger than me, were either related to my mother or my father by blood, but not to both. I bore that special distinction.

Now, at almost forty-six, I was a married mother of two, a boy and a girl, both of whom were off to college in a few weeks. One would be a junior, one a freshman. I was about to have an empty nest, and I was grateful not sad, because I knew I was about to blow a gasket and I didn't want the children there when I did. Maybe this was all about menopause. I certainly had had my fair share of hot flashes, anxiety attacks, weeping fits, mood swings, and weight gain. I was not happy about any of these little joys of middle life, but the weight gain upset me the most, because it only added to an already overburdened body. I was fat, and I hated it.

Damaris, my daughter, had blossomed in her fourteenth year, from a fat girl to a tall, willowy young woman, now about to take the college world by storm. Her older brother, Joshua, the junior in college, had lost all the baby puddles around his middle after his first year in college, and had come home with a six-pack and beautiful biceps and triceps. My husband had taken my word for it and had lost his belly and regained his buff. Yet here I was unable to lose an ounce of flesh, and falling further and further into a funk I didn't seem to be able to get myself out of. And it didn't help that Alex, my husband of twenty two years, had developed the, in my opinion, bad habit of making decisions for us and acting on them without regard to my feelings in the matter. This was why we had ended up in this huge house two years after we bought it, with no children and a ridiculous mortgage. This was why we had a Hummer parked on the driveway, as well as the second-hand Lexus that we had before the house and the Hummer. This was why I had to drive for almost an hour to get to a hair dresser who could do black hair. This was why I was still writing my dissertation instead of job hunting in the local colleges.

I was angry with Alex, as much as I was angry with myself. And it didn't help that, unlike most other menopausal women, my libido had spiked, not dipped, and being at heart a moral human being, I had to seek release in Alex. How can you be angry with someone and want to jump his bones at the same time and almost all the time? The interesting thing is that I could probably just as easily have jumped any man's bones, if I found him beautiful enough, but I knew any man I found up to scratch would find me wanting and not even spare me a second glance. So I was angry.

This is why I ended up in a hotel by myself, supposedly taking some time to myself before it was time to go back to work, and before we had to take the kids up to their colleges. Alex used to suggest that I do this, when the kids were younger and I was feeling hemmed in, but I had never worked up the courage to do it until now. Now, when we could ill afford the cost of a four-day, three-night stay anywhere. But I knew if I didn't get away from him, I'd say the absolutely wrong thing and ruin any chance we might have to keep things stable between us. I looked out of the French windows to the pool beyond the flowering fence, and wished I could join those people splashing about or lounging around. But I knew I wouldn't fit in. My body was too round, and my conversation was too flat. I kept wondering why I hadn't chosen a small country inn or B