Bring Your Baggage and Don't Pack Light

by Helen Ellis

  But not in an annoying way. Not like a red-nosed smudge-lipped woman who thinks she’s funny (but most certainly is not funny) who clinks her glass and shouts, “Attention! Attention!” and then once everyone quiets down and looks at her jokes: “Thanks, I just really love attention.”

  A character wants to be the life of the party. Or the life of a seven-hour flight delay. Or the life of a Piggly Wiggly checkout line. She wants to be everyone’s friend.

  So befriend her.

  And maybe you’ll become a character too.

  There are worse things to be than a lady who’s the first to be invited, and is invited everywhere because she makes everyone smile.

  Happy Birthday,

  You’re Still

  Fuckable!

  When my husband and I entertain long-married couples at our apartment, one of the first things I say when they leave is: “There is no way they’re still having sex.”

  “Shh,” my husband says. “They’re still in our hallway.”

  My husband does not want other people to know that we talk about their sex lives. And by “we” I mean me. He listens, while I wonder aloud about who does what to whom and how often. Using what accoutrements. Accoutrements is sexy-time talk for anything you’d hide in your top dresser drawer. Or order with a fake email account. Or ask a friend to come over and get rid of, before your kids or parents find it, if you and your spouse both die in a car crash.

  So for my husband’s sake, I started keeping my mouth shut until I could no longer see our guests through our peephole before saying something like: “They are so weird, they either never have sex, or they do it every night in front of Law & Order.”

  “Shh,” my husband says. “They might hear you on the street.”

  We live on the second floor and overlook a bus stop. Every day, all day, we hear the automated announcer lady say, “Caution, bus is turning. Caution, bus is turning.” Before we moved our bedroom to the back of our apartment, we woke every morning to a homeless man crowing like a rooster: “FUUUUUCK YOU! FUUUUUUCK YOU!” I didn’t need to join the co-op board to get the building gossip, because I get it from eavesdropping on the doormen under our awning. So when couples leave our home and pause to talk about my attempt to please the vegetarians (sourdough cubes and a fondue pot of molten lava hot cheese), we can hear them. Therefore, my husband assumes that when I talk about their sex life, they can hear us.

  Nowadays, the procedure is: you and your spouse leave our apartment, and my husband peels back a window shade to watch you walk or bus or taxi out of earshot. Then, like a producer holding a clipboard on the set of a live TV show, he counts down—five, four, three—holds up two fingers, holds up one finger, then points to cue the talent.

  In our marriage, my talent is talking about you. And your sex life. Which I know nothing about.

  Unless I do.

  If you’ve told me about your sex life, I’ve told my husband.

  I’ve said, “Those two do it every Saturday.”

  I’ve said, “Those two have costumes.”

  I’ve said, “He has a nylon fetish. She has thirty full-body stockings.”

  I’ve said, “She listens to two hundred erotic audiobooks a year by playing them at three times the normal speed so they sound like chipmunk orgies.”

  I’ve said, “He bought her a vibrator at a Vegas trade show. But it’s not really a vibrator. I mean, it vibrates, but it’s for the outside, not the inside. There’s a suction function. You have to use lube or you’ll burn your clit off.”

  My husband does not appreciate such details because he worries that if a friend has shared something this juicy with me, I have reciprocated. You know, tits for tats. Like a pornography potluck. My husband worries that if he engages with me, he’ll encourage me. And he’s right. Because the only reason to go to a potluck is to then come home and talk about how somebody else uses malt vinegar instead of mayonnaise in her potato salad.

  Here are things I’ve told my friends about my sex life: If I want to let my husband know I’m in the mood, I say, “Put the cats away.” If my husband wants to let me know he’s in the mood, I’ve requested that he pull back the comforter, climb into bed, and say: “Give it up for Steeeeeeve Harvey!” If I write something sexual on a to-do list, my husband will do it because to him a ballpoint check mark is better than a post-coitus cigarette.

  * * *

  ————

  I judge a friend by how much she tells me about her sex life. The more I know, the better friends we are. And the sooner she tells me, the closer we become.

  Twenty-something years ago, my best friend Patti called me the morning after her first date with the man she would eventually marry. She said (and I may be paraphrasing here) that his penis took up half her twin mattress.

  I asked, “Why are you whispering?”

  Patti said, “He’s sleeping right beside me.”

  My husband claims that he and his friends do not talk about sex. When he comes home from a night out with the boys, and by “boys” I mean middle-aged married men, I ask, “What did y’all talk about?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing. Work.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “Nothing. We don’t want to talk about what you think we want to talk about.”

  Case in point: our friend Gordon was in town from San Francisco and reported to my husband and me that he was plagued by sex talk from the Forty-Year-Old Divorcées.

  Gordon said, “The Forty-Year-Old Divorcées are moms where my kids go to school. Everybody’s divorced but me. My daughter asks, ‘Daddy, when are you and mommy getting a divorce?’ And I say, ‘Never, sweetheart, Daddy’s too lazy.’ Anyway, all the Forty-Year-Old Divorcées want to do is have sex with new men—and there are a lot of new men—and then tell me and my wife about it.”

  I asked, “What do they tell you?”

  Gordon said, “Nothing too-too specific, but there’s a lot of innuendo and high-fiving, and it makes me very uncomfortable.”

  My husband said, “I can imagine.”

  I said, “Telling you must be part of the thrill. You know, titillating.”

  My husband shook his head. He hates it when I’m crass.

  Gordon said, “Once when my wife was out of town, one of the Forty-Year-Old Divorcées invited me down.”

  “Down where?” I said. Nudge, nudge.

  My husband shook his head.

  Gordon said, “Down to her house. She was having a party. So I show up anxious enough already about being alone and surrounded by her and her friends, you know, the Forty-Year-Old Divorcées, and then she introduces me to this German guy, who I’ll call Klaus. And Klaus shakes my hand and says, ‘Nice to meet you, do you believe in God?’ ”

  My husband said, “Oh no.”

  I asked, “You said yes, right?”

  “Oh yes, I said yes,” said Gordon. “But then Klaus reaches into his wallet and pulls out a card that says he’s an atheist. He’s an actual card-carrying atheist. And it’s at that moment I realize that I’m going to spend the next three hours at this party debating the existence of God.”

  My husband said, “That sounds horrible.”

  “Oh no,” said Gordon, “I was happy to do it. I was so relieved not to have to spend the night hearing about the sex lives of the Forty-Year-Old Divorcées.”

  For me, the sex lives of the Forty-Year-Old Divorcées is all I want to hear about. If they’re jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge wearing some sort of sex harness, I want to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge wearing some sort of sex harness. There’s no such thing as middle-age peer pressure. Or anti-anything campaigns. Complaining about how you’re too sluggish to have sex after a meal is a public service announcement, the likes of which used to be on TV accompan
ied by a rainbow. You know: “The More You Know!” As in: “Don’t swim until an hour after you eat.” A fifty-year-old friend of mine has a cross-stitched PSA on a pillow that reads fuck first.

  My friends and I talk about our sex lives like some people talk about fantasy football because we’re afraid that one day we’ll be too old for the game. My recurring nightmare: I’m naked at a pep rally and nobody notices.

  In college I worried I’d never have sex. After college I worried I’d never get married. Married, I worry that one day, perhaps overnight, I’ll wake up and—poof!—be as sexually undesirable as I don’t know what. And really, I don’t know what. Every undesirable thing I can come up with, I can imagine some man climbing on top of. Scarecrow, street sofa, a model of the Titanic made out of Legos.

  Now all I want once a year for the rest of my life are sheet cakes that read: happy birthday, you’re still fuckable!

  * * *

  ————

  When a pipe burst in our bathroom, a plumber broke through the wall to fix it. The tiles had to be replaced, the walls re-wallpapered, and the shower glass reinstalled. At one point there were rub-a-dub-dub three men in my tub trying to convince me to install a safety bar.

  “A what?” I asked. “Why?”

  “In case you slip and fall,” said the glass guy.

  “I’m forty-nine, not eighty.”

  Outside of nursing homes, a safety bar may also be called a “decorative grab bar.” It’s four feet long and runs diagonally down your shower wall. If you find yourself naked and afraid, your body collapsing in on itself faster than one of those nature videos of a fox decomposing, a safety bar is for you to grab on to and hang off of like a wet pair of nylons.

  You want professionals to drill it into the tile to keep the tile nice.

  The tile guy said, “Are you planning to move? I don’t think you’re planning to move because I don’t think you’d upgrade from ceramic to marble tiles if you were planning to move. You’re gonna get old here. You’ll have an accident.”

  The contractor said, “Let him put in a safety bar, level with your hand. Come on, step into the tub with us and show him where your hand hits. The bar will be beautiful, a nice metal. You’ll barely notice it. You’ll be happy to have it.”

  “Yes,” said the glass guy, “soon you’ll fall in the tub. You should put in a bar.”

  The contractor said, “We can add a matching bar by the toilet.”

  “No thanks,” I said, “I’d rather slip and break my neck.”

  Because honestly, if my friends saw a safety bar in my bathroom, what would they say?

  I’ll tell you what they’d say, they’d say that a safety bar is the sexual equivalent of wearing nothing but a smile and one of those medical alert necklaces. Push the button dangling between your dingle-dangle breasts and shrill to some stranger in a call center: “Help! I’ve fallen! And my husband can’t get it up!”

  When my seventy-something-year-old mama tripped and got a concussion walking her dog at four in the morning, she refused to use a walker during her recovery because she said it would make her look like an old lady. Instead, she opted to butt-bump her way up and down the driveway and cling to the walls of her home as if any minute she might climb them.

  Our friend Danny says, “For our parents, the F word is falling.”

  When his mother refused to use a cane, he bought her trekking poles. “She loves them!” he wrote in an email to which he attached a twenty-second video of her suited up in an overcoat and sensible flats, cruising a sidewalk with the confidence of a millennial on an elliptical machine.

  My husband started snoring this year, and I refused to buy him a wedge pillow because it is a triangular piece of foam that props you up like you’re in a coffin. I would rather wake up panicked from a dream that warthogs are burrowing under my bed than wake up and slide my iPhone under my husband’s nose to check for fog to make sure he’s breathing.

  Taking vitals ain’t sexy!

  FYI: if you want to make millions, open an Etsy store and sell handmade pillowcases for wedge pillows. Wedge pillows don’t come with pillowcases. Wedge pillows are sold as bare as the day they roll off an assembly line that also makes adult diapers. Yes, I know these products are helpful, but so are convertible beds that raise and lower either side so that while one of you peddles his legs from night terrors, the other can read or watch her stories on the flat screen, but I don’t want my friends to see those buzzkills in my boudoir either.

  It’s the same reason I won’t install a stripper pole: people will talk.

  A stripper pole says anus electrolysis, while a safety bar says salt ’n’ pepper pussy.

  One extreme or another, my sex life is mine to tell you about. Or you can let your imagination do the talking when you leave our apartment after one of our dinner parties. Trust me, I’ll be eavesdropping. But I’m not giving you any hints.

  She’s Young

  I was laid out on my back in my exercise class. My instructor hovered above me in a Cirque-du-Soleil-acrobat kind of way with her hands on the soles of my feet, pushing my knees toward my earlobes. In yoga, they call this pose the happy baby. In my exercise class, I call it the happy lady.

  My hard-core aerobic years are over, so I am embracing my restorative years. Restorative means, at some point, someone holds her eucalyptus-oiled palms over your face and tells you to inhale. Nowadays, my idea of exercise is five sit-ups and fifty minutes of my instructor stretching me.

  Anyhoo, there I was folded in on myself like a lawn chair, and my eighty-something-year-old friend and classmate who was lying next to me said, “Helen, you must see the new off-Broadway play about Gloria Steinem.”

  A twenty-something-year-old receptionist within earshot piped up: “Who’s Gloria Steinem?”

  And I, a forty-something-year-old now not-so-happy lady, screamed through the void between my thighs: “ARE YOU KIDDING ME? How do you not know who Gloria Steinem is?”

  My eighty-something-year-old friend said, “Oh, Helen, she’s young.”

  To the twenty-something-year-old, she said, “Google her.”

  It took me a while to stop fuming as I heard the twenty-something-year-old reach for her phone and begin typing Gloria Steinem’s name into her device. But when I did, I took a deep breath and thought, “Oh, Helen, she’s young.”

  I myself was once young and working as a secretary in the chairman’s office of Chanel, and on my first day spelled Coco’s name like that of the sign-language-speaking gorilla: K-O-K-O. And I remember how embarrassed I felt when a judgmental woman screamed at me, “Are you kidding me? How do you not know how to correctly spell Coco Chanel?”

  And so, I apologized to the twenty-something-year-old. On my way out the door, I said, “I’m sorry I snapped at you.”

  And she said, “That was snapping?”

  “Are you kidding me?” I wanted to scream, but what I said was: “Just say thank you. It’s an apology, not a colonoscopy.”

  Look, I don’t want to be judgmental. It’s exhausting. It makes me go through my days huffing and puffing and rolling my eyes like a cat clock. But I’m a forty-something-year-old woman, and I can’t help it. I want younger women to know what I now know so they don’t make the same mistakes. Such as: step aerobics will give you shin splints, high heels give you bunions, feminists like Gloria Steinem give you power, and apologies don’t come often, so accept them whether you think they’re owed to you or not.

  When I tell my eighty-something-year-old friend how frustrated I am, she says, “Oh, Helen, you’re still young. Be thankful that you’re at an age when you can still change.”

  And I am old enough to trust that this older woman is right.

  Are You There,

  Menopause?

  It’s Me, Helen

  Are you there, Menopause?
It’s me, Helen. I just finished my 453rd period. Every month, I worry it will be my last. Wait, was that a hot flash? Is it me or my hot rollers?

  * * *

  ————

  Today, at a deli, I fanned myself with a quarter pound of sliced honey-glazed ham. Yes, it was wrapped. It was the shape and weight of a nonsurgical neck-lift pamphlet, which I fan myself with when I go to my dermatologist; or a laminated menu, which I fan myself with and refuse to give back to waiters after they take my orders in restaurants.

  The deli worker said, “I’m always freezing in here, how are you hot?”

  I gave her a look.

  She said, “Oh, I got you. You’re going through what all women go through.”

  “Yep,” I said. “That’s me, rising like a phoenix in front of the potato salad.”

  I gave her a little wink, and she laughed.

  I give a lot of little winks these days, to let people know it’s okay to laugh when they catch me muddling through what I think is menopause like it’s a rubber ball pit. I know I look awkward, but—wink—I’ll get through this.

  My friend Jean says that I’m not in menopause yet, she says I’m “running hot.”

  She says a real hot flash feels like her bones are on fire. Every night she wakes up, leaves her husband in bed, and stands in front of a window air-conditioner unit—her blond hair and nightgown blown back like she’s JoBeth Williams in front of her kid’s blue spectral closet porthole in Poltergeist.

  Sometimes, I think of menopause as that Poltergeist psychic lady with the lilac dress and carpool sunglasses hollering at me and my middle-aged friends, “Cross over, children! All are welcome! All welcome! Go into the light. There is peace and serenity in the light.”