I See You Made an Effort: Compliments, Indignities, and Survival Stories from the Edge of 50

by Gurwitch, Annabelle

  He maintains his first memory is of me accidentally closing his finger in his bedroom window, followed by my leaving his beloved blanky at an airport, but he really has no clue as to the scope of my missteps. For his thirteenth birthday, I surprised him by updating his bedroom. I purchased a sleek steel and wood storage cabinet and desk at a local vintage shop even though the dealer insisted on a hefty price, claiming these were “one-of-a-kind pieces.” They were an instant hit. A few weeks later, I was checking out an office collective I’d been invited to join, and what did I see upon entering the large shared space? Two small end tables that were an exact match to my son’s furniture. I tracked down the owner, Vanessa, who told me it was simply impossible that I had matching pieces because they were one-of-a-kind. It wasn’t until I produced photographs of my son’s room that she agreed to give me an explanation. It turns out that both she and the dealer acquired the furniture at a fire sale on the grounds of a mental institution in upstate New York. It was too much of a coincidence not to offer her cash on the spot. Carrying them upstairs to his room, I notice the word “optimism” etched into the side of one of the tables. I have not yet nor do I ever intend to ascertain whether this sentiment was engraved by my office mate or by an inmate at the sanitarium, and I hope it wasn’t carved using teeth or a toenail, but I’d rather not know. Furthermore, though I am well aware that inanimate objects cannot exercise willpower, it’s tempting to consider that his bedroom furniture is deliberately conspiring to reassemble, at which point a malevolent chain of events will be set into motion. I must never reveal the unusual provenance or any of this speculation, as decorating his room is one of the few things he concedes I’ve done well.

  I open my computer and find a song by the band. Their sound is addictive. I learn that Titus Andronicus the band has a higher listing on a Google search than Titus Andronicus the play, which is good news for me, because unless my son attends acting school, he will probably never know the irony of tonight’s endeavor. I hear the same tune playing in my son’s bedroom. I knock on his door.

  “Hey, I just wanted to let you know that Amy went to Harvard.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I found a YouTube of Patrick singing Lana Del Rey’s ‘Video Games’ at his parents’ house.”

  “I can’t hear you, Mom, I’m busy.”

  He’s listening to the band, texting friends and posting the pictures he took of Cheer Host’s cleavage on Instagram.

  In one last desperate move, I throw open the door to his room and do my best “Walk Like an Egyptian” dance move. There is something irresistibly pleasurable about embarrassing myself in front of him. “Mom, no!” he shrieks and puts his head down on his loony-bin desk to shield his eyes. At least I can still get a rise out of him.

  I turn around, head back into my bedroom. As I pass through the hallway connecting our rooms, I catch a glimpse of nonagenarian Rachel gazing out of the picture window in the living room of her home just across the street. When she goes, there’s only Mrs. Ho three doors down who’s got a few years on me, then I’ll be the Rachel. We moved onto this block when I was pregnant, and in a short amount of time I’ll be the oldest person on our street. I’d better ask Rachel the secret to her longevity, because I am going to have to live to at least a hundred if I want to make regular eye contact with my son again.

  THE SCENT OF PETTY THEFT

  Dear God,

  If there really is an afterlife, can I spend mine in a plush bathrobe?

  The rich are different from you and me. Fitzgerald’s line repeats in my head as I pull my dusty Prius into the driveway at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. It has been years since I have been a guest in such an opulent setting, but I am neither intimidated nor overly impressed, because I am as comfortable at my corner burrito stand as I am in a five-star hotel. I have transcended class. I am an artist.

  This is the narrative I have crafted for myself since I was nineteen and flat broke in New York City. I didn’t see it then, but it was my youth, a certain amount of beauty—style, really—and the promise of a big career that allowed me to travel between classes. This combination can give you an all-access pass to the enclaves of the wealthy, but there is a time limit. There’s a grace period you’re allotted when the future is ahead of you, before people in your industry start saying things like What happened to you? I thought you were going to have a big career, or I’m so impressed with all the ways you stay creative, which translates to It’s astounding that your body hasn’t been found decomposing in a fleabag motel in the high desert. I am not becoming anything anymore. That’s the kind of thudding honesty that occurs at fifty, and it’s that kind of thing that can lead to petty theft.

  I’ve arrived to discuss my duties at a charity event being held at the hotel that evening. I head into the bar to meet the producer of the event and it’s easy to be friendly and breezy, primarily because I’m donating my services, so I can’t be fired. There is a certain irony that I have been asked to forgo my standard fee at a black-tie event where most of the women will be wearing gowns that cost more than I typically earn in a month or maybe six. But it’s a worthy cause, and I readily signed on.

  We sit down in a cozy alcove on a silk damask settee and I sip what is probably the most expensive latte I have ever ordered. How do I know that? The price is written in Arabic. We’re discussing the event but I’m distracted. Maybe it’s because I’m shivering. It’s as cold as a meat locker. Glancing around, I see that I am surrounded by expensively maintained skin, capped teeth and two sure signs of wealth: women with hair so blond and so immovable it can only be described as starched, and though we are nowhere near a body of water, 75 percent of the gentlemen present wear nautically themed jackets, brass buttons polished to perfection.

  Monica, the catering manager, whom I’m introduced to, is professionally beautiful in the way that every woman working here today is. Tall, in good shape, but not so beautiful that she takes up space in your head. She doesn’t even blink an eye when I blurt out, “Isn’t this bar supposed to be a good place to meet high-end hookers? Which of those women are prostitutes, do you think?”*

  “What? I’ve never heard that,” she says.

  It’s an overshare, but I can’t take it back, so I add, “Can I have your card? It’s so nice to meet you.” She hands me her card, and notes that if I need anything, to please let her know. “Oh, I will,” I say, dropping her card into my bag, where it will join the bottom-of-purse lint—cookie crumbs, crushed vitamins, a crumpled notice from my son’s PTA—until the day I change purses, maybe two years from now. I can’t imagine why I’d ever need to call her except to ask for a job application.

  I want this lunch to last forever. Bouquets of flowers are exploding from vases on both sides of our table. I am gripped by a sense of dread that this might be the last time I will be invited into a place where even the air smells expensive.

  It turns out that it’s not the flowers that are perfuming the air. Hotels have started pumping fragrances through their air vents to aromatically enforce their brand.* The Beverly Wilshire’s aroma, Purple Water, has been designed by Asprey (the British line specializing in both jewelry and polo equipment) to reach into your reptilian brain and mimic the smell of old money. It has notes of leather, cigars and cooked peas. If an odor had corporeal form, Purple Water would be wearing an ascot. It taps a memory deeply buried in my subconscious.

  Before my family moved to Florida, where I grew up, we lived in a series of small apartments in Wilmington, Delaware. The units had 1970s avocado-colored plasticky kitchens, and wall-to-wall carpeting, even in the bathrooms. That was an improvement from camping out at my aunt Gloria’s house, where we landed after losing our home in Alabama. The Florida move marked a major step up for us. Our new residence was located on one of the exclusive man-made islands in Biscayne Bay, right off Miami Beach. A uniformed guard was stationed 24/7 at the gated entrance of the bridge leading to the islands.


  I gleefully bounded into the house and lay down, pressing my face into the cool, polished hardness of the white tiles in the eight-hundred-square-foot living room. “We’re rich,” I reveled, though our cottage-style home was modest compared to the surrounding estates. Everything looked brighter here, from the tropical fruit growing in the yard to our future. It was like we’d been living in black-and-white and had woken up in Technicolor. I couldn’t know it at age ten, but it was to a large extent an illusion. We were floating on a sea of debt. Our wealth was as artificial as the island we resided on.

  We were also only the second Jewish family to move onto Sunset Islands. The first, a prominent local Jewish family, had to sue the Island Association to gain permission to live there. Upon our arrival, I made fast friends with Shelby, a longtime island resident my age. She and her mother, Gigi, were long, lanky blondes with sharp, birdlike patrician features who wore faded fruit-and-flower-printed A-line shifts. The whereabouts of Shelby’s dad were never spoken of. Thirty-foot Doric columns framed their colonial-style mansion. There was little furniture, but even I could tell that it was “important.” High-backed winged armchairs, heavy crystal chandeliers and leather-bound books. I thought it was fun that the only food in the pantry was crackers and hard cheese. That first summer, I enjoyed long sweaty days at Shelby’s—they didn’t “believe” in air-conditioning—polishing her mother’s silver and skimming the leaves from their kidney-shaped backyard pool.

  After my mother learned I was essentially working as a maid, the home was off-limits to me. I rarely saw Shelby again during the remainder of the eight years in which I lived there. They would drive by in their ancient wood-paneled station wagon, and I’d wave to them as they headed off to the Surf Club, a club whose membership excluded Jews, while I played touch football in the island park with the kids from the island’s other Jewish family. Years later I recognized Shelby’s colorful smocks as Lilly Pulitzers. Too bad I hadn’t stuffed one of those dresses into my pocket while cleaning their silver. It might be worth something today. The smell of their home stuck with me, though. I couldn’t put my finger on it then, but it turns out to have been cooked peas, cigars and leather—old money, in this case, really old money, so old it was barely there.

  The hotel’s Purple Water works its magic on me and I hear myself announcing that I’m going to be so tired after the event, I will need to stay overnight. Remarkably, the event planner agrees to this and after lunch I head up to my suite.

  My hotel room is well appointed and maintained in a way that my home, built in 1932, will never be, with its corners that don’t meet exactly.* Settling in the foundation leaves cracks in the ceiling paint and uneven gaps between the floor moldings and the hardwood floors.

  There are no water marks on the suite’s tables, no cats have sharpened their claws on the upholstery, and the walls bear no children’s handprints or bicycle skid marks. In fact, the paint looks so fresh I have to touch it to determine it’s not still damp.

  A fruit plate has been placed next to my bed for my enjoyment. It’s more like an ode to fruit. A perfectly shaped pear, two figs, and a grape rest on a single mint leaf inside a shallow Chinese porcelain tureen. It’s so exquisite it seems wrong to eat such an elegent construction, but consuming it will be the only way to possess it, so I scarf the whole thing down quickly.

  The room has not one but two balconies, and the bathroom is so sparkling clean I might be the first person to ever use it. It also has a feature I always think of as the true sign of luxury: a heavy door separating the toilet from the rest of the facilities. It’s like Vegas: what happens there stays in there. In my own bathroom, mistakes were made. It was a full five years after I sprung for copper piping that water began leaking into the sink cabinetry. But why wouldn’t it? Our contractor had apparently decided that replacing the old pipes would involve too much actual contracting, so he had wrapped the rusting aluminum in electrical tape. That was ten years ago. Correcting this remains on my to-do list. We simply have them rewrapped every year.

  I open a bottle of Asprey hair conditioner in the bathroom and inhale deeply. I’ve got Fitzgerald’s line stuck in my head: the rich are different from you and me and we will know them by their scent? I know that can’t be it, but it also seems true. I proceed to stuff every single bath product into my purse and call down for more. It’s a pattern for sure. I took home rolls of toilet paper from the nightclubs where I worked in the eighties, yellow legal pads from the offices of each TV series that employed me in the nineties, and there was that time I was sent to audition for the director John Hughes at a hotel in New York. I recall waiting in the foyer with an actress, whom I assessed as so plain, though I greatly admired her stage work, I was genuinely saddened that she’d never work in film or television. That actress was Cynthia Nixon. After John candidly admitted to not seeing me in the role, I thanked him and on my way out stopped to use his bathroom. I stole every amenity in plain sight and a few more from the housekeeper’s cart in the hallway. I couldn’t stop myself then and I can’t stop myself now.

  A card on the marble bathroom vanity reminds me that guests are invited to go to the spa, so I have to take them up on that as well. Who am I to turn down the invitation?

  The spa changing area is paneled in dark mahogany, the lighting is indirect and muted and there are no windows. It’s like a tomb, a bomb shelter or the inside of a bank vault.

  There are cut orchids everywhere. There’s even one in the pocket of the spa robe.

  I enter the steam sauna, but it feels less like entering a room and more like I’m being drawn into it, like a black hole in space. I am the only person in the cave-like, serpent-shaped enclave. Tiny iridescent azure tiles cover the floor, walls and ceiling, the only light coming from pinpoint LED spots on the low ceiling that flicker from yellow to green and vary like the night sky. I’ve been transported to the Australian outback and am peering up at the stars. After a sweaty interval, I exit past a tiled wall where crushed ice is flowing into a polished chrome pocket on the wall. An attendant appears and inquires whether I am experienced. Is she making a Jimi Hendrix reference? No, she means have I tried the Experience Shower. It would just be impolite to refuse. My entire kitchen could fit inside this shower. I push the first of three buttons in front of me. This one is labeled Atlantic Squall. Streams of water lash my back; the pressure varies and moves from side to side like I’m being tossed in the middle of the ocean. I startle and turn when I feel someone’s hand tapping me hard on the shoulder, but no one is there. It’s the Experience Shower’s many nozzles ratcheting up the pressure. I must be farther offshore now, as I’m drenched by torrents of hard rain. I begin to feel seasick. I saw The Perfect Storm. This might not end well! The lights in the shower area move from yellow to green to purple. Was the person who designed this on acid or in the employ of the CIA? It’s like the Experience Shower is trying to get information from me. I switch to Caribbean Rain. It’s a gentle sprinkle, falling softly, but it soon becomes chilly, so I select again and a slow swirl of warm Maui Mist envelopes me.

  When I emerge fully Experienced, I check the full-length mirror to see if I’ve sustained any bruising, but I am intact. Pulling on my robe, I again think of that line—The rich are different from you and me—and then I remember the rest of the sentence— and we will know them by their showers. No, that can’t be right. I know that, but my brain got jangled during the monsoon and it seems true. In less than five minutes, I’ve been drenched with enough water for several large families to cook and bathe for a week. How, I wonder, will I ever go back to my state-mandated low-flow showerhead with its 2.5-gallon-per-minute limit? But I can’t stop to consider this now because there’s a path of fresh flowers and candles leading to the Tranquility Lounge and I need to recover after my time at sea.

  The lounge has chaises with fake-fur throws and dim lighting and new-age music that makes you feel something is happening, something essential, imp
ortant, and you’re not sure what, but it’s a journey and you’re on it. You’re setting off on the Silk Road. The music is stirring and I feel charged with purpose, but there’s nothing to accomplish except more pampering and there is a bountiful array of nourishing snacks, so I have to eat a strawberry or two, or seven. I sip water infused with cucumber, also so soft. Soft, inside and out. Tomorrow, I will learn that at that very moment, in the harsh light of day, in a room buzzing with fluorescent lights, someone was yelling out questions and there was no guided meditation music, just charges of sexual misconduct being leveled against the serial sexting politician Anthony Weiner. But I am in a cocoon, and they just might have to arrest me to get me to leave. I close my eyes.

  I know I can’t stay in the spa all evening. I do have a job to do, after all, so I head to the locker room to dress, but somehow I take a wrong turn and head deeper in the spa. An attendant greets me, hands me another orchid and asks if I’ve made an appointment yet for a treatment. No, I haven’t.

  “Would you like an explanation of all the services we offer?”

  I am curious, but always feel guilty in situations like this.* I don’t want him to waste his time and attention on someone who can’t afford to leave a gigantic tip or become a regular customer.

  “You don’t have to do that,” I assure him. I want to whisper, “I’m one of you. I’m just working here tonight.”

  But instead of refusing, I let him walk me to view the five-foot purple amethyst crystal positioned in front of a purple glass wall that has purple water gently cascading into a small pond.