by Helen Ellis
But just like JoBeth, I’m not so sure.
When a friend had a preventative hysterectomy to avoid a high genetic chance of uterine and ovarian cancer, she went into menopause overnight. But this woman is a problem solver. When she got her first hot flash, she took all her shirts and dresses to a tailor to have the sleeves cut off.
Another friend layers. In the dead of winter, when we’re out to eat, she does the dance of the seven veils, but instead of stripping veils, it’s a scarf, then a cardigan, then a blouse, until she’s down to a cleavage-drenched camisole fanning herself with a laminated menu.
My friend Hannah was born in Salem, Massachusetts, so she is 93 percent Catholic and 7 percent witch. Here are things I’ve seen her pull out of her purse: burnt sage, tarot cards, a book of spells, and a bag of wishing stones. When she pulled out an antique crepe fan, I snatched it because I’ll turn a game of Show and Tell into one of those prize booths with a cyclone of dollar bills up for grabs. Hannah’s fan is now my fan and now lives in my purse.
I’ve been sleeping with a burlap sack packed with lavender that I got on my grown-ass ladies’ trip to a spa in the Great Smoky Mountains. The lavender sack is the size and weight of Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, but saggy like a sandbag, and chills in my freezer until it’s time for me to go to sleep.
After my husband shuts our cats out of the bedroom because they would otherwise sleep on me (and I run hot enough already without a fur stole and merkin), I ask him, “Will you please bring me my chillow?”
He says, “You were just in the kitchen.”
“I know. Will you please bring me my chillow?”
What can I say? Everything is better when it is brought to you. Besides, I want my husband to know what I’m going through. Ours is a gold-star marriage, graded on participation.
My husband goes to the freezer and removes my cold, saggy lavender sack from between the ice trays and bags of frozen fruit left over from my smoothie phase and presents it to me. I kiss him good night and lay the sack over the top half of my face or under my neck, or lay it lengthwise in the hollow of my throat and cleavage because that’s where the sweat pools and wakes me up from bad dreams.
But, the thing is: I’ve had bad dreams all of my life without side effects. I don’t think it’s nightmares that are making me sweat.
Are you there, Menopause? It’s me, Helen. I’m putting on weight. Ten pounds in two years. The fat coats me like layers of a caramel cake. But I don’t want to stop eating caramel cake!
I’ve been cruising the Vermont Country Store catalog with the red-hot desire to buy a velour housecoat. A velour housecoat covers you from your neck to knockers to well past your knees. It zips up the front, is plusher than a Beanie Baby, and it drapes you beautifully, like a circus tent, hiding your lion and tiger and bears. There are side pockets that the catalog copy describes as “perfect for your keys, glasses, tissues and more.”
I showed a catalog picture to my husband, and I swear I heard his penis shrink.
Even if the “and more” is a can of Reddi-wip and a French tickler, my husband would rather come home and catch me in a pyramid scheme.
At lunch with the Bridge Ladies, I tell my four friends about my weight gain. I met the Bridge Ladies—Terri, Erica, Val, and Jean (the lady with the Poltergeist air conditioner)—five years ago when I started taking bridge lessons because I wanted a card game that would cost less than poker.
The Bridge Ladies are five to eight years older than me. They are smart and stylish and funny and fresh. They go to the theater and to concerts and travel and are always out and about. They are all empty nesters, and let me tell you: empty nesters are the new gay men of New York.
Jean said to me, “Just wait until you get to your Fuck-You Fifties.”
I asked, “What does that mean?”
“It means that you love women friends more than you ever did before. And when you meet new women, you ask them: ‘Are you fun? Nice? Do you have a personality? Are you available?’ If yes, then swipe right, baby! If not, then fuck you!”
Case in point: when I met the Bridge Ladies, it was friendship at first sight.
Bonus points: menopause has happened to most of them, and I look to them like Sherpas to validate my symptoms and guide me through.
Val said, “I never got hot flashes, I just broke all the bones in my body.” She explains: “Premenopausal osteoporosis.” And then: “How’s your cholesterol? Chuck and I are completely off cheese.”
“My cholesterol’s fine.”
Jean said, “You have to make a change in your diet and start exercising now, otherwise it’s nearly impossible to lose weight after your period stops.”
I said, “I do Pilates twice a week.”
Val said, “Do you break a sweat?”
“I do five sit-ups, and then a gorgeous young woman stretches me for an hour.”
Jean said, “You have to break a sweat. My trainer takes me to a six-level athletic complex where the New York Giants train. I asked him, ‘Are you kidding me?’ He said, ‘No, ma’am.’ And now, after three years, all the football players are like, ‘Lookin’ good, Miss Jean!’ ”
Terri said, “Erica walks Helen once a week.”
Erica said, “I pick her up like a dog walker.”
It’s true. Erica walks me every Sunday around the Central Park reservoir. I wait for her at my window. Sometimes she wears clogs and sips a latte, or brings her standard poodle Stella and walks us as a team, but I wear exercise clothes and I sweat, so it’s exercise for me. On the way home, she buys me a cookie.
Are you there, Menopause? It’s me, Helen. All of a sudden I’m not so nice anymore. Once a month, I’m downright mean.
Three years ago, I told my friend Ann that my PMS had gone crazy.
Ann has the temperament of an overstuffed chintz chair. She sits and fits beautifully in any corner of any room. Her presence is welcoming. In twenty-five years, I’ve never heard her raise her voice or seen her cry, the woman is serene, and the nicest thing she’s ever said to me is: “Sometimes my PMS is so bad, I want to murder my husband. But don’t worry, there’s an app for that.”
It’s called Clue.
“Like: get a clue,” said Ann.
I downloaded the app faster than Mrs. Peacock bludgeons someone in a billiard room.
Clue tracks your menstrual cycle and predicts your PMS based on your history. My PMS used to come two days before my period, and make me sad for two days. Now PMS sneaks up on me whenever it damn well pleases and makes me sad and maniacal for two to five days. But then I check my app, and Clue shows me that I have PMS by putting storm clouds around the calendar dates.
To cope, Ann runs. Another friend puts CBD vaginal suppositories up her cooch. There’s a writer out there who kept a crying journal. She cried every day. For ten years! Me, I harass unsolicited callers.
I pick up my home rotary phone on the first ring, and when I am told there is something wrong with my computer, or that my husband owes back taxes to the IRS, or that there is a warrant out for my arrest, I shout: “Are you kidding me? Young lady, if you call my house again, I will murder you!”
Yes, I threaten a stranger, even if the stranger is most definitely a man.
Or I say, “What?! Should I wire you money right this minute? Should I give you my credit card number too? How about a retina scan of my eyeball? Or maybe I should fill my tub with ice cubes, YouTube do-it-yourself surgery, and Uber you a kidney!”
And then I laugh and laugh until they hang up.
Jean said, “I had to go on hormones because I wanted to kill everybody. I remember very clearly being at a four-way stop in Vermont and thinking, If I hit the gas, I could bump the car in front of me into traffic.”
I asked, “Are hormones a pill?”
Val said, “Mine is a tiny pill
named Angeliq. I take one every night.”
“Like a birth-control pill?”
Erica said, “It’s basically the same thing.”
Val said, “Insurance won’t pay for it, so my doctor tells them it’s birth control. Like I’m fifty-seven and on birth control!”
* * *
————
I got my first period on Christmas Day in 1982. I showed my panties to Mama, and when she smiled, I was so mortified I threw those panties against a wall. Mama took them to the laundry room and came back with her big box of Kotex that had sanitary napkins so thick I thought I was straddling a picnic bench. I used to hide my used maxi pads in a cabinet under my Atari because if I left them in the trash, our dog Frisky (aka: a wheelbarrow with legs) would pull them out and shred them—in my bedroom, down the stairs, out the front door, and into the yard—like he was mutilating Cabbage Patch dolls.
I can still hear Mama shouting, “No, Frisky! Bad dog! Not your toy! Drop it!”
I eventually got comfortable with pads and panty liners, wings and things; I advanced to tampons, then tampons without applicators; I even flirted with a DivaCup. I still get my period once a month, or as I’ve said since I was twelve, my Aunt Flo comes to visit. But she hasn’t been herself for years.
Every month, Aunt Flo is like: “Surprise, doll! I’m four days early. Now I’m three days late. Doll, you need all the tampon sizes: mini golf pencil, dill pickle spear, rolled-up newspaper, Nerf baseball bat. But you forgive your Aunt Flo because as long as I keep showing up, you feel like a teenager. A teenager who dyes her gray roots and says ‘Oof!’ every time she slings her purse over her shoulder, but what-EVAH!”
My gynecologist said, “Lemme guess: you spot for two days, and then your toilet looks like a crime scene.”
“Yes!”
“Totally normal.”
“So I’m not in menopause?”
“No, because your period is still on average every twenty-eight days. But if it’s bothering you, I can put you on the pill.”
My friend in Florida got an IUD because she told her gynecologist, “Doctor, my childbearing years are over, if you don’t give me something to lighten the bleeding, I’m gonna sell my uterus on eBay.”
I am not going on birth control at forty-nine years old. My age is my birth control. My reproductive system looks like an hourglass with six grains of sand left.
So many of my friends are waiting for that last grain of sand to drop. And that waiting, that unknowing, that complete lack of control reminds us of when we were waiting for our periods to start.
Back then we had Judy Blume’s Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, which was banned in my school and the rest of Tuscaloosa, but Mama drove to Birmingham and bought me a copy and gave it to me in a brown paper bag. I must have read it about a million times. It’s part coming-of-age novel, part user’s manual.
Margaret and her friends get Gro-Bras and their first periods, and learn how to tape Teenage Softies to their underpants. They practice kissing and play Two Minutes in the Closet. They are sixth-grade girls, as my friends and I once were, eager to learn about becoming young women. And they have lots of resources to help them do that, including a special day in gym class where they are taught “certain private subjects for girls.”
Now my friends and I don’t know what to expect while we’re expecting menopause. Our bodies are not ourselves. It’s puberty all over again, but instead of the boys, we’re the ones who get a mustache. And then what? It used to be we stopped menstruating, we died. But now we’re supposed to live on and on.
Are you there, Menopause? It’s me, Helen. I’m waiting for you.
Call Me
I’m an eighties girl living in a Generation Z world. Hardly anybody calls me anymore. Everybody texts. And I hate texting because I read all texts as antagonizing.
For example, a good friend texts: “Happy birthday!” followed by a GIF of a girl picking up a punchbowl and slamming it into the ground. Translation: You’re old.
So I text: “Thank you!” Translation: Are we not good enough friends for you to mail me a card?
I also don’t trust that what I text is private. Because it ain’t. Texting is like putting yourself in the funny pages. It’s permanent. Anyone in the future can pick up what you wrote with a wad of Silly Putty or roll it out on microfiche and cite it in a term paper.
Every text is evidence.
Don’t believe me? Go to a murder trial and witness what a DA has salvaged from a victim’s mutilated phone. Or the killer’s. When I served grand jury duty for a month for the Southern District of New York, I learned three things: heroin is cheap, stuff goes down at a certain five-star midtown hotel, and there’s no such thing as encryption. Anything you type on a phone can be screen-grabbed. So unless you can personally chew it up, poop it out, and flush it, nothing you send up into the cloud disappears.
The cloud is tech talk for something Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg invented to store your political preferences, porn searches, and high school reunion pictures. As in: Tag! That ruffle-neck collar makes you look like Stephen King’s It!
In my phone, nobody I text is identified by their real names. So my contacts read like an “Also written by” list at the front of a John le Carré novel: The Expat, The Grifter, The Puzzler, The Saint, The Zookeeper. You get the idea.
Sometimes, one of my friends will text me something ever so critical about another and I will text: “Call me.” Translation: You’re not bringing me down when you get caught.
I write “Call me” in response to emails, too. It is amazing to me when friends bad-mouth their bosses using their work URLs. Don’t they know that work email is monitored? Well, maybe they do and maybe they don’t. The same way I ignore the fact that my phone somehow knows to put ads for caftans and cat beds in my Instagram feed. The truth is: we’re surrounded by spies.
No, I don’t know exactly who is spying on my friends’ corporate emails, but I picture a woman like myself, working from home in footie pajamas and drinking a double-pod Nespresso latte from a mug that reads my other coffee mug is a crockpot. Every time she reports an employee who calls his boss an ass-clown or embezzles, she gets a five-dollar bonus. This woman makes $685,000 a year.
My Classic Trashy Book Club joined WhatsApp because some of our emails are in reference to the books we select, so there is a lot of back-and-forth about animal cruelty (sex with a goldfish in Shirley Conran’s Lace); drugs (amphetamines and barbiturates in Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls); a botched Tijuana abortion (in Jackie Collins’s Hollywood Wives); and glory holes (in Judith Krantz’s Scruples). You can imagine how, taken out of context, those emails could ruin some careers.
So when I text or email “Call me,” it translates to: I plan to tell you the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. If I write “Call me” to you, we are real friends, and you should run to a pay phone and ring my rotary because I am going to give you the lowdown on what’s going on down below whatever tip of the iceberg wedge you just mentioned. If I write “Call me,” it means I want you to hear my tone and my timber. As in: TIMBER! Redwood-size secrets are about to fall out of my mouth.
The
Backup
Plan
I’m an alpha’s alpha. A second-best friend. Always a bridesmaid, never the maid of honor. I’m content to sit on the sidelines and be on a B team. As in: Put me in, coach! Nope? Okay, cool. I’m not your in-case-of-emergency contact, but if yours doesn’t answer, and you call me, I will show up and give you my all.
I’m number two, I’m number two!
The person I went to help on a drizzly February night in Manhattan was my friend Michelle, who was on her way to Mt. Sinai Hospital because her doctor had told her that due to her headache, high blood pressure, and vertigo she might give birth to her baby two weeks earl
y. Michelle’s best friend, Tal, was supposed to be her birth partner, but Tal was visiting her sister on a long-planned trip to Florida. Michelle had asked me to be her backup plan, and I, of course, had said yes despite that fact that I am notoriously averse to childbirth.
I don’t want to watch it in movies or on TV. I don’t want to look at iPhone video footage or photos. But, oddly enough, I do like to hear about it because I’ve never given birth, and to me listening to you relay all of your gory details is like cozying up to an old radio show like The Horror! or Suspense! I like to imagine how a surgeon pulled your uterus out of your torso like I wrestle a suitcase out of the back of a closet, but I don’t want to experience it live and in person. I would rather spend the night in an abandoned lunatic asylum.
The first day Tal was gone, I went to sleep with my cell and home phones by my pillow. On the second day, at 4:30 in the afternoon, I saw Michelle’s name on my caller ID and answered, “Are we having a baby?”
Michelle said, “Maybe so.”
Michelle is fifty and sunny. She has blond curly hair and a bright smile, made brighter when she wears her favorite color, hot pink. She’s a licensed clinical social worker working for the New York City Department of Education, and has been an auntie to Tal’s two sons since the day they were born, the eldest twenty years ago. Tal, too, is sunny. She’s got that Eagles’ peaceful, easy feeling and wears prairie dresses so that she looks like she’s drifted out of a 1970s “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing” Coca-Cola commercial. When Tal and Michelle are together, their bond is so electric they glow in the dark.
Michelle has always wanted to be a mother, but never met the right man. So, at forty-eight, she took unconventional steps to start a family. At forty-nine she was pregnant and had herself a very merry pregnancy; no morning sickness, no problems of any kind. Tal was by her side every step of the way and pooled funds from our group of friends to buy her a top-of-the-line stroller, which was delivered to Michelle’s apartment building an hour before I walked through the front doors.
