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

by Gurwitch, Annabelle

  “Can Christopher Hitchens be my magical creature?” I say.

  “No, it should be iconic.”

  “He was pretty iconic.”

  “A Greek god, a phoenix, a mythical being, you know, the subject of your fantasies.”

  At this point in my life, I find stainless steel kitchen appliances a turn-on and daydream of being able to afford long-term-care insurance. The best I can come up with is Sun Shower Unicorn. I sound like a Renaissance Pleasure Faire reenactor on acid. Every other combination I can think of makes me sound like a wrestler with a weak bladder. “Platinum Fog.” “Steel Rain.” “Titanium Thunder.”

  I want to be useful to the group, so I suggest that the leggy real estate magnate from Morocco should be “Successful and Statuesque.” “It needs to be intriguing,” corrects LC, who proceeds to brainstorm something so perfect and captivating that I am stopped in my tracks: “Golden Lotus.” It really fits her. Impressive. Drawing a blank, I toss out the worst moniker I can dream up, “Green Boots,” and all the ladies agree that I radiate “Green Boots.” I have no idea if this is a good thing, I suspect it’s not, but for the rest of the night, I answer to “Green Boots.”

  Next, she wants us to pen our most passionate fantasy. “We’re taking a stand for love in an age that’s increasingly cynical. We’re casting our ‘love spells.’ You can’t manifest something unless you declare what you want.” I’m manifesting a lot of eye-rolling.

  “Do it, Green Boots,” Coach orders me.

  I feel like a low-rent romance novelist, but I compose a scenario that involves Umberto Eco, Paris and Pinot Noir. I call my composition “Semiotic and Erotic.”

  After I read it aloud, I announce, “I’ve stopped devoting energy to my marriage.” I’m first in the group to cry. I am, it turns out, the exact woman the Love Coach described to me on the phone.

  Each woman reads what she’s written and aside from the fact that the majority of the scenes take place in Paris or on a beach and involve consuming wine or brunch or both, they are all sincerely heartfelt. Texas describes sharing a particularly flavorful egg dish and chokes up. “It’s just been so long since I’ve been intimate with anyone.” She says between sobs, “I don’t know if I’ll ever meet anyone.” Love Coach consoles her by allowing that she’s really doing this exercise to get to know herself better and that’s what matters most.

  As I drive home, bottle of Vulvacious in tow, I’m forced to rethink my initial judgment. Has this whole Magical Mani-festing Makeover been one big bait and switch? I am tempted to label it “lip gloss feminism.” I am awed by the courage it took for her clients to display so much vulnerability and terrified that I will soon be in their stilettos, conjuring my “love spell” and composing my JDate profile under LC’s tutelage if I don’t step it up in my marriage.

  I decide to skip the second day of the workshop. I’ve got enough material for my story. Instead, I stop in at a local lingerie outlet near my home. I purchase lacy boy shorts, and bras that have ornate straps and little bows. I gamely try them on for my husband in the afternoon and before I can even douse myself with my new perfume, he tells me he doesn’t consider them lingerie. If it’s not a garter belt, it doesn’t count in his book.

  I resent the garter belt. It acts like a framing device for the exact area of my body that I now dislike. Having always been one good poop away from a flat stomach, I’d taken for granted the easy gait of the very slim. I’ve heard middle-aged thickness described as a swim floatie, but that sounds too buoyant to me. I liken it to always having a sweater wrapped around my waist. Ironically, the last time I regularly draped something over my hips was when I first got my period. I spent the entire eighth grade saddled with sweaters because I couldn’t remember to bring tampons to school.* I would find it preferable to have the area formerly known as my waist tattooed an attractive and slimming shade, maybe even pink.

  At least I made an effort, I repeat to myself, as I catalogue my marriage pros and cons and change back into my Spanx. It should really be called a cons and pros list because when you reach the point of needing a list, the cons come so easily to mind.

  Much of our communication in the last few years is down to texts regarding “scheduling,” which might be the most unappealing word in the dictionary, next to the phrase “Can we talk?” Can we talk about scheduling? A double bummer. My husband has asked me to stop using that phrase, but it’s hard to avoid. We’ve got our own version of Words with Friends. I call it Words with Spouses. I’ve asked him to stop using “micromanaging” and “agitating.” My husband has banned my use of the adjective “delish” and the phrase “I’m sorry you feel that way.” Much of the time we text “whr r u?” “hm” or “wrkng” to each other. Extraneous vowels have disappeared. When we lose consonants, what will be left for us?

  Mail-ordered shoes arrive at our doorstep every week. They are inevitably blue oxfords. Sometimes the stitching is visible, sometimes the bottoms are leather, sometimes it’s whatever a sole is when it’s not leather. They all look the same to me. However, if I speak this sentiment out loud it is very upsetting to him, so I must moderate and add variety to any opinions.

  “Those? Too . . . preppy. These? Too . . . sartorial.”

  “Those are exactly the same pair, just in different sizes.”

  “Of course, silly! I knew that, I was just testing to see if you were listening to me.” When I close my eyes at night, I see a long chain of blue oxfords speeding toward our home.

  Books on World War II have also begun showing up at our house at an alarming rate. Since we began dating, he’s joked about his father’s fascination with Nazi Germany and marveled at the number of books his dad accumulated on the subject. As my husband inches toward fifty himself, I catch him devouring one tome after another late into each night. We always wondered how it started with his dad. Now I know. Where will it end? We all know the answer: a DVR overloaded with History Channel documentaries.

  Socks lie abandoned next to the bed. Also next to the bathtub, under the couch and next to our front door. Men slough off socks like snakes shed their skin. There was a period of three months when I took Polaroids of sock clusters wherever I saw them and left the pictures as reminders on the pillow on his side of the bed. The worst part of this was realizing I had become the kind of person who takes pictures of socks, and my husband had witnessed that.

  These are small, petty, first-world problems, but such is the stuff of daily life. A few years back, my mother-in-law sent me a copy of Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff. I’ve never picked it up except to propel it past my husband’s head, but the subtitle really says it all—And It’s All Small Stuff. It’s just that you end up with so much stuff. Our stuff has its own stuff.

  So many friends our age are in marriages that are failing.

  “Are we the last ones standing?” I ask my husband.

  “Or running.”

  We might be.

  “Did you hear about David and Michelle splitting up?” he asks me.

  “No, really?” I say. “Do you remember the speech he gave at her birthday party? The way he beamed at her, calling her the love of his life?” I was so envious of them that day. “She keeps their linens in a long glass cabinet in the upstairs hallway. I can’t even imagine how labor-intensive it is to keep them folded so neatly that you can keep them on display like that. She must have a team of people running that household. Between the linens, her three gorgeous kids and her six-figure salary? It’s intimidating.”

  “She’s already got a boyfriend.”

  “Wow, another reason to envy her. Did you hear about Lucinda and Mark?”

  “I saw that one coming.”

  “I didn’t. Don’t say anything, they haven’t told their kids yet.”

  Then there’s Gary and Suzanne, and Valentina and Francesca. Both couples are examples of what’s been recently termed by economists as “sleep
ing with the enemy.” They’re stuck in underwater mortgages and can’t afford to separate. It’s not a stretch to say that every time we hear about another marriage biting the dust we experience it as both a loss and a wish fulfillment.

  My husband and I might be approaching a big window of opportunity. Our empty nest would seem to be within sight. The classic scenario for so many of my generation was for parents to split when the kids left home. My husband’s parents separated when he was in college.

  “Next year we’ll have been married one year longer than my parents,” my husband announces as we cross paths before we head our separate ways, he to yet more ESPN and me to bed.

  “Well, that still gives us time to divorce,” I call after him.

  Of course, my mother-in-law was in her thirties, with an entire youthful life ahead of her, and I’ll be fifty-four when our son graduates high school. Just as daunting an idea as “until death do us part” is what’s being called the boomerang effect. Unemployed or underemployed adult children are moving back home after college, so if we’re waiting until our kid leaves home to sell our house and call it quits, we might be looking at an additional five years—if we’re lucky!

  In my own family, an old-world tradition of prolonging misery has been maintained and few have divorced. Thankfully, many have been rescued from long-term suffering by early mortality. Previous generations with their shorter life spans never anticipated marriages would last this long. I lie awake wondering what new revelations will occur with our longer life spans, making age—not love, not space—the final frontier.

  At the wedding of the first of my classmates’ children to get married, I inadvertently share a bit of hard-won wisdom. During the celebratory luncheon, the twenty-three-year-old groom, whose diapers I have changed, was speaking of how wonderful it is that he can fully reveal himself to his bride when “Oh my God, that’s a terrible idea—don’t do that, Zachary!” slips right out of my mouth before I can stop it with a swig of wine.*

  There are things in life that are really best experienced alone. Using a toothpick, sex, and longtime marriage are often most satisfying when you are separated from others by many miles. I had that experience on the night I ran away from home. I can’t remember what it was that sent me packing. It probably involved the word “scheduling.” But on this night, I had the Love Coach’s number in my back pocket; I spritzed myself with Vulvacious for good measure and headed to my friend Marin’s place.

  Marin left her husband after he had one too many indiscretions with women from their church marital counseling group, although she acknowledges her marriage had been over for years. She says it was like she finally lost that last 235 pounds she was lugging around. Since then, she’s remade her life: she’s never looked better, has established a new career after years of being out of the job force in one of history’s worst economies and has even joined a new church. Marin has two kids, one an athletic boy and the other a girl the same age as my son. In fact, they were playmates as toddlers. This beautiful girl scores high on the autism spectrum. Lovely to look at, she has few social graces and attends a specialized education program. It’s doubtful she will ever live on her own or hold any form of employment. She stalks the house like a cheetah.

  My friend is indefatigable. How much caffeine and Klonopin would it take for me to be as relentlessly upbeat and resourceful if I divorced at this point in my life?

  I arrive at her home at around seven p.m. A huge Rottweiler greets me at the door. His name is Buster or Bruiser or Butch, he weighs more than my kid, has a bandanna around his neck and it turns out I will be sharing a room with him. He belongs to a twenty-five-year-old student with whom Marin trades housing for babysitting duties. The student is spending the night at a boyfriend’s house. The dog immediately begins licking my face and neck. “He must really like you,” Marin says. Wow, that Love Coach is good; even male dogs respond to Vulvacious.

  After the kids are ensconced in their bedrooms for the night, the doorbell rings and it’s one of Marin’s ex’s exes, who has become a close friend. They have a standing date once a week to review men who’ve responded to their ads on an over-forty dating site. I have to get a look, as this could soon be my life. Marin pours from her selection of airplane wines.

  The men who have responded to Marin’s ad would appear to be in the same general range of men the Love Coach’s clients, the ex, and I might be interested in.

  All the candidates appear to be professionals of some sort and claim to be between the ages of forty-five and fifty-five, so they’re probably fifty to sixty at the very least. Two-thirds of them are posed next to fireplaces with glasses of wine in their hands. That seems to be a good thing, an image that communicates I am a real person, a stable man with a home that has a hearth, or at least I have access to a hearth. I know how to relax and have a glass of wine. The other third have taken some creative license with their profiles. One sunburned gentleman is pictured on a boat with a beer in his hand and the rest of a six-pack within arm’s reach. I studied just enough semiotics in college to know that if I analyzed this photo long enough, I might come to the conclusion that this man was a loner, a drinker prone to disappearing on lost weekends. Too Hemingway. I wouldn’t date him. Another is at the beach. He is wearing leather sandals. “Too much man foot!” Marin’s friend announces, and we nod our heads in unison. No one wants to see man foot in a picture. He’s also wearing shorts and a fanny pack. How often is this guy in shorts? Might he show up for a date in shorts? Photos of men that have long hair scream romance novel, Def Leppard tribute band member, or might have a long pinky fingernail. What if some of these candidates are clients of a male love coach and these photos are professionally staged? This thought is frankly bewildering.

  As we page through the profiles, the most unsatisfying part of evaluating potential companions is that each person is pictured solo. It makes sense that your friends and family might not want their photos included on a dating site, but this makes for thousands of single people presented out of context. “You are the company you keep” is an adage that seems particularly true when you’re nearing fifty. Each headshot announces, I AM ALONE. It takes only a short leap of the imagination to picture any of these men conversing with a volleyball that has a face painted on it, which they’ve named Wilson.*

  The whole online dating world appears to be a reductive way of learning about people, yet there might be some advantages. I didn’t know until long after I married my husband that he had lived under the illusion that he might have had a career in major-league baseball if only his mother hadn’t discouraged him. It just never came up. Perhaps if I had met him online, I might have spotted his large collection of baseball caps in the background of a picture of him in front of a fireplace. That actually would have been helpful; at least I wouldn’t have been surprised by the long hours of ESPN viewing he’s racked up. And yet, among the three of us, we know at least a dozen friends who’ve found rewarding relationships online, so we flag three or four guys who are wearing long pants and have open smiles for follow-up. (Marin instituted this criteria after a particularly harrowing experience; when you can’t see the teeth, it might be because there are none.) Six months from now, one of us could be sharing a glass of wine in front of one of those hearths.

  Marin shows me to the babysitter’s room and Barker or Boomer or whatever the gigantic canine’s name is rouses himself long enough to jump on the bed. He buries his nose in my neck and pants loudly while I try to fall asleep. At least he’s not snoring, I tell myself.

  I lie awake most of the night wondering how Green Boots would fare on FarmersOnly.com. I never asked how much the Love Coach charges for her services, and I definitely haven’t allowed for romance consultation in any what-if-we-get-divorced budgets. I bet she’s pricey; she’s got that little teacup breed—they can be high-strung and sometimes need therapy. I wake up early in the morning in a sweat remembering how one erstwhile dater, touting
his sense of humor, had included a joke on his profile page. Why did the squirrel swim across the river on his back? To keep his little nuts dry! I quickly and quietly pack my overnight bag and head home.

  I hear my husband in the kitchen making breakfast for our son as I walk through the front door. “Just went for an early run,” I fib to our kid. I offer to take over, but Jeff says he’s got it covered and he’ll drive the carpool.

  “Mom, you smell good,” my son calls out to me. “You smell like . . .”

  “Bubble gum. I know. Thanks!” I say as I head upstairs to our bedroom. I’m exhausted from my sleepless night.

  As I undress, I notice there’s a computer on my husband’s side of the bed. I glance at the screen and see a story he’s writing. It’s about how he chooses not to see the effects aging is having on my lower torso by pixelating his vision when he looks at my posterior. It never occurred to me that when he tells me how great I still look, he might also be “making an effort.” This is quite simply one of the kindest gestures I’ve been treated to in my life.

  My husband comes in the bedroom and whispers he’s sorry. I lie down and he places a throw around my body and I marvel at his ability to tuck the covers around my backside while simultaneously blurring his vision.

  “Did you think marriage would be like this?” I ask.

  “I thought there’d be more fucking,” he replies.

  “I thought there’d be more money,” I say, and I realize my gynecologist was right in advising me to stay funny. Maintaining a sense of humor is the final frontier or at least our saving grace as we age.

  “What’s that great scent?” he asks. “It’s like . . .”

  “Vagina?”

  “Yes. Mmm . . .” He inhales deeply and nuzzles my neck. I decide he really doesn’t need to know that the very same spot was occupied until thirty minutes ago by an amorous Rottweiler.