My Red Car

Marcy Dermansky worried she couldn’t survive her therapist’s maternity leave…and what happened instead.

Red Car Watercolor by Marcy Dermansky

My therapist was pregnant.

“What?” I said.

She was seven months pregnant and in a month she was going to take maternity leave. After giving birth, she was going to spend three months at home with the baby.

“You can’t do that,” I said.

Somehow, until her announcement, I hadn’t noticed that she was pregnant. Suddenly, looking at her, it was ridiculously obvious. It seemed impossible I hadn’t noticed. I was embarrassed. I also wasn’t happy for her.

“I need you,” I told her. “I can’t get divorced without you.”

I don’t remember how she responded. Her words came out as wah wah wah, something about how hard we had worked, and how she believed in me.

Talya, of course, left to have her baby. Selfish.

I had been abandoned.

Here is some background. I was 43 years old, back in my parents’ house, back in my childhood bedroom for the first time since graduating from college. My three year old daughter slept across the hall, in my brother’s room. I had recently gotten on a plane, leaving my German husband in what felt to me a lot like an old Sally Field movie, “Not Without My Daughter.” He had not wanted me to go. He had felt, let’s say, very strongly about it.

I didn’t have a job or money. I had published two novels before my daughter was born, but the last thing I had written, a short novel about a sad girl taken hostage on a spaceship, had just been rejected. Somehow I didn’t even see it at the time: the sad girl held captive by alien creatures on a spaceship was me.

I was 43 years old, back in my parents’ house, back in my childhood bedroom for the first time since graduating from college. My three year old daughter slept across the hall, in my brother’s room. I had recently gotten on a plane, leaving my German husband in what felt to me a lot like an old Sally Field movie, “Not Without My Daughter.”

In my mind, I was lower than low.

And my therapist had told me I was wrong.

We’d had one of those break through moments like on TV, when she asked me why I was so scared to do what I wanted. And somehow, I was able to tell her that there was a real reason I was scared, a valid one, something that had happened years ago, and then she explained to me why it very much made sense for me to feel the way I felt still, but that I did not have to always be scared. And then I cried and cried and cried and she told me that was good.

Good, Marcy.

And then, she ditched me.

Insert curse word.

My then husband was still calling me, writing me, every day, sometimes several times a day, alternating between telling me that I was the love of his life and sending threats, demanding I return his daughter.

I no longer had a therapist to tell me to be strong.

And so, I started writing again.

Because that’s how low I felt. Bad enough to start writing again.

Order the book…

I couldn’t write in my parents’ house, but my daughter had started pre-school, so I actually had time to write, and I went to a Starbucks three towns away, because the one nearby was off limits. I knew the both the local schizophrenic and the homeless artist guy from when I had worked in the library during high school. They seemed to spend their days in the Starbucks.

“Hi, Marcy,” they said, remembering me, and I worried that I was one of them.

So, I went to another Starbucks.

And I wrote and wrote. I decided I was going to write a Haruki Murakami novel. He always wrote about men who were not extraordinary who were actually extraordinary, and crazy things happened to them while they also did ordinary things, like swim laps and cook spaghetti.

More Red Car Watercolors by Marcy Dermansky

I made my novel about a woman. I called her Leah. She was ordinary, but also extraordinary. Like me, I guess. She gets to go back to San Francisco, a city that I had loved and left, after her former boss dies in a car accident and leaves Leah her most prized possession—the flashy red sports car she died in. The shock of it forces Leah to reevaluate her whole life.

Leah gets to do things I never did, like have sex with the beautiful man who used to work in her office and then with a beautiful woman with short hair who lived in Leah’s old apartment on Castro Street.

I couldn’t write in my parents’ house, but my daughter had started pre-school, so I actually had time to write, and I went to a Starbucks three towns away, because the one nearby was off limits…I wrote and wrote.

When it is time to keep moving, Leah drives her boss’s red car, which has somehow— to the disbelief of a mechanic — miraculously fixed itself. Leah drives down to Big Sur. She puts her feet in a river. It sounds so corny. She heals.

Oh, did I mention that at the beginning of the book, she leaves her husband, who didn’t want her to take this trip?

Because if I didn’t have a therapist, cheering me on, I was going to write the book that I needed.

Order the paperback edition of Marcy Dermansky’s latest novel, out last week…

As if it was an instruction manual.

And then, I sold the book. The Red Car even went to auction— a small auction, sure, but two editors wanted it. A veritable bidding war. Sometimes, now, I pick up the novel and reread parts of it and I think, Wow, this author really gets me, and then I laugh, because I realize the author is me.

I had money again.

If I didn’t have a therapist, cheering me on, I was going to write the book that I needed. As if it was an instruction manual. And then, I sold the book.

I was able to move my daughter and me out of my parents’ house and into our own apartment. And yes, I went back to therapy. I even forgave my therapist, back from maternity leave, though I am pretty sure I never told her how mad I had been.

Now Talya is no longer my therapist, but she is on my mailing list. When I announced the publication day of Hot Air, my sixth novel, she was the first to respond, to congratulate me. Sometimes, I think I have a mailing list just so that I have a reason to write to her.

Thank you, Talya, for having a baby.

I could have fallen apart when she went away.

Instead, I saved my own life.

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