by Amy Sohn
“What gets my goat,” my mom went on, “is how little research there is about it. The medical world has done so little to look into what it means and ways to treat it and as a result women are left completely at bay.” I’d never heard her speak so strongly about anything. When she presented me with a tallis made by blind Israelis at my bat mitzvah she was so nervous I could hear the spit crackling in her mouth. “We need to feel free to talk to our ob-gyns, and not be ashamed, because menopause is a normal part of life.”
“If it’s normal then why is it so harrowing?” Nina said. “Gail Sheehy says women report the best sex of their lives between forty-five and fifty-five! Where on God’s green earth did she get that from? If I can stop barking at Larry long enough for us to try, then I’m too hot to be in the mood, and other times it’s so painful I have to make him stop.”
“Maybe I should go,” I said.
“This is important,” my mom said. “You should listen.”
“It’s like my body won’t pay attention to my brain,” Nina said.
“You’re like a man!” Joan shouted, and they all broke up in laughter.
“You see, this is why I’m glad to be divorced,” Shelly said. “I don’t have to worry about any of that.”
“Nina,” Carol jumped in. “Didn’t your doctor tell you about the Estring?”
“I’ve never even heard of that.”
“It’s an estrogen ring that sits inside the vagina right below the cervix. You put it in for three months and it very slowly releases a small amount of estrogen directly into the canal…” I tuned them out. My deafness was instinctive and adaptive. The thought of Carol Landsman with a little cock ring inside her made my stomach weak. I didn’t have any need to know; I just had a fear of knowing.
Suddenly I felt a spoonful of discharge slide out. My twentysomething vagina must have felt the need to make itself heard. I jumped a little and inched forward. If I wasn’t careful I’d stain the couch.
“Are you all right?” Carol asked, slipping an arm around my shoulder. Another blob came out.
I leapt to my feet. “Can you excuse me?”
“Where you going?” my mom called after me.
“To the bathroom.”
“Wait till you get older!” Nina called. “You’ll have to go every ten minutes!”
AS soon as I got down to my bedroom I beelined for the dresser. All my teenage posters were still on the walls—Johnny Depp from 21 Jump Street, Sean Penn in Fast Times. My old particleboard Work-bench desk was in the corner and the Kelly green wall-to-wall carpeting still had the huge bleach stain I’d made when I tipped over a tray of Jolen I mixed for my mustache in ninth grade.
I opened the top drawer of the dresser and after rummaging through about a dozen stretched and malformed nightshirts that said things like “Jenny Stein’s Bat Mitzvah—10/20/87,” I came to the unsettling conclusion that there were no spare pairs of undies. I couldn’t go back upstairs pantiless when I might leak all over again and if I left the meeting my mother would think I wasn’t being supportive. There was only one recourse.
My parents’ bedroom was adjacent to mine, and my dad’s office was next to their bedroom. A thin stream of light was coming out of his office door. If he was working on his computer I didn’t have to worry about him coming out; even a nuclear war couldn’t pull my dad from the screen of a PC.
I pushed open the bedroom door. Their room had a dark homey feel and always smelled the same. My dad’s mystery books and computer stuff were strewn all over the place and his dresser was littered with nails, bolts, and eyeglasses with lenses missing. My mom’s dresser was opposite the bed and her underwear drawer was the top one, to the right. There was a divider in the middle and her bras were stacked on one side and the panties folded on the other. She’d worn the same kind since I was a kid—white satin three-panel control-top with total coverage in the ass—Full Dorsal Fashion. I lifted the top pair out and inspected the cotton patch to see if they were clean.
The patch was dingy but unstained. Trying very hard not to breathe through my nose, I stepped in and hiked them up. They were baggy and slipped down to my hips but the leg holes were tight, which was kind of a downer: it meant my thighs were as wide as hers.
As I walked out I noticed something on my mom’s nightstand. It was something completely incongruous, more frightening than a glow-in-the-dark dildo or transsexual porn. Wedged between her glasses case and tub of Clinique anti-aging cream, sitting there as nonchalantly as if it had been there forever, was Mars and Venus in the Bedroom by John Gray, PhD. I opened it up and read the first line: “He wants sex. She wants romance. Sometimes it seems as if our partners are from different planets…” I dropped it to the floor with a horrified gasp.
Menopause brought on slight insanity, I knew, but this meant my mom was truly far gone. She was doing the middle-aged equivalent of The Rules, taking love advice from a sexist idiot. It was so unlike her. The only other book she owned that was even slightly self-help was Fat Is a Feminist Issue and she’d had it thirty years.
Why was she reading John Gray in plain sight of her husband? Was it a signal to my dad to lay off, and stop hitting on her? Maybe he was the one having sexual problems. Was he too depressed about his unemployment to get it up? I shuddered, unsettled by every possible visual.
As I replaced the book on her nightstand I heard a noise coming from his bedroom. It sounded like panting and it was rhythmic and determined. I walked out and stood outside his office. Beneath the panting was the faint sound of Terri Gross, interviewing Paul Auster about his newest book. I turned the knob and pushed the door open. He was on his back on the floor, his feet wedged under the couch. My fat father was doing sit-ups.
He was in a white V-neck undershirt and snot-green sweats, and he was counting, “Thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-eight…,” loudly, over the interview. When he saw me he jumped for a second in surprise but instead of stopping he held up a finger and made me wait till he got to fifty.
“Arrghhh!” he said, collapsing back onto the floor.
“What’s going on?” I shouted.
“What do you mean what’s going on?” he said, panting. “I’m getting in shape.”
“Since when have you cared about exercise?”
“I figure it could help with my search. Didn’t you see the article in the Job Market section about how men are taking personal grooming more seriously now that so many of us are unemployed?”
“I don’t read that section. I’m not looking for a job.”
“I’ve got to do everything I can to tip the scales in my favor!”
The plot thickened. Maybe my mom was reading Mars and Venus because she was the Mars in the relationship. Maybe he was the one trying to woo her back, by getting in shape. She was the one who was more masculine on the surface—she never cried like he did at movies, and she was totally unsentimental. Maybe he was afraid she’d leave him unless he cleaned up his act.
“This is so unlike you,” I said. “You’ve never cared about looking good before.”
“You see?” he said. “This is why I need to do it! Because people like you say things like that.”
“That’s not what I—”
“It’s all right, Rach! I’ve let myself go and I don’t have much time to make up for it!” There was a loud laugh from upstairs and he pointed to the ceiling. “How’s the hen party?”
“They’re talking about estrogen rings,” I said.
“Ugh,” he said. “I don’t even want to know.”
“You should take an interest,” I said. “Gail Sheehy says that after menopause there’s this thing called postmenopausal zest. It was named by Margaret Mead. Postmenopausal women have a love of life and a vim and vigor stronger than any they’ve felt before.”
“She’s right! The vim is killing me!”
“Why are you so insensitive? Maybe you should go upstairs and eavesdrop. You might learn something.”
“You know what, Rach? I think I h
ave enough on my plate right now.” There was something new in his face: contempt. I’d only seen flashes of it before when I was young and they fought over stupid things like my mom throwing things away. He’d say, “Why would you throw out something labeled taxes? Are you retarded? Are you a six-year-old?” and she’d yell back, “You shouldn’t be such a slob!” and then he’d yell some more and eventually she’d run into the bathroom and close the door.
But since then it had seemed like things had leveled out. He’d been placid, kind, even, and it frightened me to see the coldness in his eyes.
“I just don’t see why your abs are so important,” I said.
“I’ve told you before,” he said. “It’s a horrible market. I’m twice the age of my competition and I have to do something that gives me an edge. You should be happy for me. Feel how much harder my gut has gotten.” He took my wrist in his hand and lowered it to his belly.
“I don’t want to feel your gut,” I said, jerking it away.
“Come on,” he said. “Hit me.”
“I don’t want to touch your stomach!”
“Suit yourself,” he said. “But don’t come begging to touch it three months from now, when I can bounce a dime off my six-pack.”
He grimaced and started his next set. I stepped over him like he was a dead body with chalk around it.
WHEN I got home from the meeting the phone was ringing. “So how was the passage?” Powell murmured.
“Dark and depressing,” I said, slithering out of my mother’s panties. I tried to chuck the underwear into the wastebasket by my desk but they missed. “How are you?”
“Exhausted,” he said. “I just put Nora down. She was wired. Her class went on a field trip to the Tenement Museum. Since when did poverty become educational?”
“Where does she go to school?”
“Montessori.”
“Am I going to meet her someday?”
“I dunno. I prefer to keep my private life separate. I’m very protective over what she sees.”
“What’s so scary about me? I’m good with kids. I used to babysit a lot.”
“Exactly. You were the naughty babysitter. I don’t need her under your influence.”
“Do you like me?” I asked suddenly.
“Jesus,” he said. “Now why would you go and ask a question like that?”
“I just meant, the way you insult me. I said I wanted to meet your daughter. I’m aware that day might not come. But why wouldn’t you just say yes? Don’t you have any social graces?”
“I want you to listen to me, Rachel,” he said softly, “and I want you to listen very carefully. I understand you, maybe better than you understand yasself. I understand that instinct to ask these questions, these ugly and predictable questions—‘Do you like me?’ ‘Can I meet the child?’ ” He put on a whiny high-pitched voice, the kind women cringe at when they learn that’s how a man thinks they sound. “I am deeply aware of your animus problem so I know how hard it must be for you to wait to see me. I know how instinctive it is for you to keep saying and doing the wrong thing. But if you keep down this road, and I say this not as a threat but as a neutral statement of fact, we will have no further interaction.”
I saw the whole thrilling future of Powell and me burning to my oak floor. There was an ugly intruder into whatever was beginning between us and I didn’t know if it was my anxiety or his callousness. Whatever it was I wanted it out and so I did something I had never done before: I kowtowed.
“I understand,” I said. I hated how high my voice sounded in my throat.
“Good,” he said. “Can you come over Tuesday at four?”
“Yes.”
“I’d like you to wear your hair up off ya neck.”
“Why?”
“So I can see the veins.” I was dating Dracula. At least he liked my veins, though. Most guys got weirded out when they saw them. I have a perfect W across my chest that stretches from my left shoulder all the way to my right. “I’d also like you to wear shoes with a little more heel than the last time. Shoes that raise the back of your foot and reveal the shape of your calf.”
“Those boots were my highest pair!”
“So ya cancelling?”
“I’ll see what I can do,” I said, and hung up.
WHEN I got in bed I put the covers up to my chin but couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about my first date with David. He had taken me to an expensive Asian fusion restaurant on Mott Street but the service was really slow and the waitress was incredibly tall and hot, with this weird hard-to-place accent, and we joked about the inverse relationship between server attractiveness and quality of service. We called it the hot ratio and said Zagat should include it as its own category, and even though the whole thing was stupid, at the time I thought it was really funny. In the middle of dinner he put his hand under the table and held mine and I spent the rest of the meal struggling with my chopsticks because I didn’t want to let his hand go.
I wasn’t sure why I’d given up on him so fast. He was a good person and he was funny and he cared about me. If David had been a dad when we met he would have introduced me to his kid right away.
Maybe I should have given him a chance, and gotten married to him so we could have worked at the same congregation, him as a cantor and me as a rabbi. We had fantasized about that a little when we lay awake at night after sex, the way some people fantasize about building a home or moving to Paris. We both wanted to live some-place rural and liberal, so we always imagined Burlington or Montpelier, both of which had big Jewish populations. We’d live in a farmhouse with a cast-iron stove, drive pickup trucks to the synagogue, and raise kids that could chant Torah and milk cows.
In those moments, lying on my bed with David, cuddled up under the comforter, I never felt aimless or confused about anything. I didn’t mind the fact that I spent half my day learning modern Hebrew because the program was so pro-Israel. I didn’t care that I hated most of my classmates, or that sometimes I got really bored during services, or that some of the professors were drones. I felt like I was on my way to doing what I wanted and spending my life with someone I loved.
Now I was a professional Rheingold girl and Stu Zaritsky was right at this very moment probably gabbing to all my former classmates that he’d run into me in a drugstore buying condoms. I wanted to feel like I’d done the right thing by telling him I had fucking to do but instead I just felt ashamed.
Deep down despite what I said to my parents, to my customers, to Powell, I felt pathetic. Maybe my dad was right and I really was losing all common sense. I was something I had never imagined I’d become in a million years: a screwup. Screwups were children of my parents’ friends, the ones who were spoken about in hushed tones. They were the ones who got into drugs and tattoos, smoked cigarettes, the ones who had learning disabilities and trouble with authority. They weren’t smart Jewish girls from Cobble Hill.
I felt stranded, and stagnant. It wasn’t the lack of direction I minded so much as how hard it was for me to romanticize it. That was something that was very hard to learn. I’d been bad at being good but so far I wasn’t very good at being bad. Maybe I just needed a little more time.
THE best—and worst—thing about working in a bar is that you are constantly reminded you’re not the only one in the world who is lonely. Around eight o’clock on my next shift a regular named Matt came in, went right to the jukebox, typed in some numbers listlessly, and came back. “What’d you put on?” I asked cheerily, hoping his dismay might make him drink more.
“Badly Drawn Boy,” he said. “Can I get a Corona?”
We’d chatted a little before. He played in a band called The Changing Subject and usually came in with his girlfriend Sidecar, who worked as a waitress at Patois. This was the first time he’d come in alone.
As soon as I put his drink in front of him his song came on and he let out a long, laborious sigh. I looked straight ahead. The potentially dangerous consequence of striking up conversations with c
ustomers is that if you’re not careful you inadvertently wind up stroking them the rest of the night.
“A few days ago I was shopping at the ABC Carpet in DUMBO with Jenny,” he said.
“Uh-huh,” I said, standing up straight so he wouldn’t think I was too comfortable.
“And I saw her see someone across the store. It was this good-looking guy—built, tall, whatever. Jenny looks like she’s seen a ghost and right away she’s like, ‘Let’s get out of here.’ I’m like, ‘Why?’ and she’s like, ‘I don’t want to go into it. It’s just some guy I went to high school with and I don’t want to see him so let’s go.’ ”
I washed a glass unnecessarily so I wouldn’t seem too engaged. “So as we left,” he said, “I was trying to get a good look at the dude from across the store and I could see he had this shaggy brown hair. The next day I’m at yoga and this shaggy-haired guy takes the spot next to me and I realize it’s the same guy. I wasn’t sure at first but he kept staring at me the whole class, and at the end as I’m on my way out he comes up to me and says, ‘You look really familiar.’ I said, ‘Sorry. I don’t think I know you.’ He says, ‘Wait a second, you know Jenny Ross, right?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I do. I’m going out with her. How do you know her?’ He says, ‘I used to date her. We broke up about six months ago.’ ”
“So? She probably didn’t want you to know this guy was in her life.”
“You don’t understand,” he said. “Jenny and I have been going out for two years!”
“Oh my God,” I said.
“Yeah,” he sighed. “So I started asking him all these questions and it turned out she started sleeping with him like a year into our relationship. She had both of us thinking we were the only one.” It was beginning to seem like if I wanted to maintain even a smidgen of romantic idealism, I was in the wrong profession. “You know what the worst part is?” he said, pulling at his beer. “After I told her the whole story and had totally given it to her for lying to me, she said, ‘It looks like you need space. Maybe we should take some time apart.’ She cheated on me and then she dumped me!”
