Have a Nice Guilt Trip

by Lisa Scottoline

  We begin when summer started, in earnest. The heat wave rolled in with temperatures of ninety degrees, but for some reason, I don’t turn on the air-conditioning. One part of my house has central air, and it happens to be where the family room and my office are, but still I can’t bring myself to turn it on. By habit, I try not to turn on the air-conditioning unless I absolutely have to.

  Dumb.

  I tough it out. It’s warm but not unbearable. I drink lots of iced drinks and wear tank tops and shorts. I tell myself I feel cool, even though the dogs pant and flop listlessly on the floor, flat as area rugs.

  The cats don’t mince words. They walk around with signs that read: TURN ON THE AC, DUMMY.

  I know if I had a window air conditioner, I’d feel differently. Then I would turn it on and it would cool down the one room I was in and nothing else. But central air has to cool the family room, kitchen, and office—all for one person.

  Me.

  When Daughter Francesca lived at home, I would turn it on all the time. It makes sense, for two people.

  But for one?

  Me?

  I sweat as I type away, and I’m on deadline, running out of steam. Still I think if I could just hang in a little longer, I could get through another day. Partly it’s the money, because the bill is so high, but it was high for two people, too, so that can’t be the real reason. It’s not the money, but it seems wasteful.

  For me alone.

  Do you remember the commercial for L’Oreal hair color, where the tagline said, Because you’re worth it?

  I’ll explain, for those under seventy years old.

  The idea was that L’Oreal was the most expensive of the at-home hair-color kits, costing, if I remember correctly, twelve bucks a box.

  Yes, there was a time when things cost twelve dollars.

  And yes, there was a time when I did my own hair color, and it looked it. I was a Nice ’N Easy fan, which went for six bucks and was neither nice nor easy.

  They also called it hair painting, and we all know what a lousy painter I am. I’m the girl who paints around the pictures on the wall, so you can imagine what my roots looked like.

  Boone bows to the fan in the absence of air-conditioning.

  Picasso.

  By the way, L’Oreal doesn’t use that tagline anymore, though its website asks, What Does Your Hair Color Say About You?

  Which, I realized, is a more tactful way of saying, WHY DON’T YOU TURN ON THE AC, DUMMY?

  I didn’t spring for the L’Oreal, and frankly, I don’t turn on the air-conditioning because, at some, level, I don’t feel worth it.

  Really?

  Me?

  Advocate of strong, independent women everywhere? Writer of books featuring same? Could I really have self-esteem that low?

  Ouch.

  I don’t know the answer, and I don’t want to know, but I turned on the air-conditioning immediately, just to prove it to myself that I wasn’t a loser.

  The dogs thanked me.

  The cats didn’t.

  They knew they were worth it, all along.

  Bon Voyage?

  By Francesca

  Tomorrow I leave for vacation with my boyfriend. I was crazy excited about it, until I started packing.

  Then I just went crazy.

  My suitcase turned into a Pandora’s box of worries, stress, and expectations.

  We’ve never been on a trip together. Actually, I’ve never been on a trip with any boyfriend ever. But thanks to women’s magazines, seventeen seasons of The Bachelor, and other people’s Facebook feeds, I’m an expert on how to do it right. Every girl is. We are acutely aware of how we should look, act, and feel in almost every situation.

  And if we know how we should be, then anything else is just lazy.

  So even though this is my first trip with a boyfriend, I became determined to be awesome at it.

  I want to be the Dolce Vita version of myself. I should be the type of woman who wears a dress and espadrilles to go biking, who sports a silk head scarf and earrings on the beach.

  This was my Great Romantic Getaway, and I should look the part.

  My boyfriend certainly didn’t put this pressure on me; he doesn’t sweat this stuff. He will be traveling in Europe for work for over a month and he’s only bringing a carry-on. I am joining him for two weeks, and I might need a carry-on for my shoes.

  But that’s to be expected. My boyfriend’s wardrobe could be described as spartan chic—not that it is filled with leather and loincloths (I wish), but that it contains a sensible option for most occasions and not a thing more. The five dress shirts hung up in his closet have so much room to breathe—they look like they’re for sale.

  Meanwhile, my closet is vomiting hangers. My excuse is that my apartment closet is tiny, but it might also be because I throw nothing away.

  Who knows? Someday I may want that pink dress I wore to the eighth-grade dinner dance.

  When I can’t find space on the rack to hang something, I wedge the new hanger in between the others and it stays in place.

  Joan Crawford’s head would explode.

  Finding things, much less paring it down for a suitcase, was no easy task.

  First, I auditioned each of my bathing suits to see which I felt the most confident in and I didn’t feel confident in any.

  So I packed them all.

  I can diet on the plane.

  Then I started trying on jeans to find the pair that were washed recently enough to be cute, but not so recently as to be sausage casing.

  I set to work hand-washing the good bras while trying in vain to hunt down the long lost matching bottoms.

  Oh right, I remembered. I’m too cheap to buy matching bottoms in the first place.

  I wondered how late Victoria’s Secret was open.

  In my Boy-Scout frenzy of preparedness, I envisioned every possible occasion short of a red carpet and packed accordingly. Before I knew it, my closet was clean.

  The Leaning Tower of Pisa erupting from my suitcase was another story.

  This was so unlike me. I’m usually low-maintenance. My bathroom mirror is the only one in my entire apartment, and I only use the blow dryer on the dog after his bath.

  But I had lost all sense of perspective; everything had to be perfect—I had to be perfect. On my new mental checklist of insecurity, it seemed of critical importance that I find a sunscreen that won’t make my face look like an oil slick.

  I rushed to the mall for emergency cosmetics. The saleswoman showed me a foundation with sunscreen that called itself “Camera Ready.”

  Something about the name gave me pause.

  Is that what I really want to be?

  Camera ready?

  “It will hold up all day,” the saleswoman said. “It was developed by makeup artists for models.”

  When models go somewhere exotic, it isn’t vacation. It’s work.

  This trip is supposed to be my reward from working, but I had turned it into a job.

  Sure, I want to look good, but mostly I want to explore and taste and see and do.

  I want verbs, not adjectives.

  I’d like to create great memories, not perfect pictures.

  This trip isn’t an audition, or a job, or a test.

  It’s a treat.

  It should be fun.

  Now that’s a “should” I can get behind.

  In Which I Officially Hit the Wall!

  By Lisa

  I used to have a good attitude about getting older. I felt smarter and better than ever before, and I believed that my rich and varied life experience offset whatever age and gravity have done to my looks.

  Well, forget it.

  Because that was when I was fifty-six.

  I’m about to turn fifty-seven.

  And you know what’s happening?

  I’m hitting the wall.

  I didn’t even see it coming. I drove right into it, even though I was paying attention. I wasn’t drunk or texting, and I ev
en had my high beams on.

  Though my high beams are lower than they used to be.

  I’m thinking that this is how it must happen. Aging hits you like a head-on collision. Because all of a sudden, there it was, smack in my face.

  There was no air bag, only an old bag.

  Me.

  Let’s be real.

  We use the term “hitting the wall” in this context, but it’s not easy to find out exactly what it means. I looked through the conventional dictionaries for a definition of “hitting the wall,” and they defined it as an idiom for “exercising to the point of exhaustion” or “running out of glycogen.”

  You have to be an idiot to believe that idiom.

  And neither applies to me.

  I’m at the point of exhaustion before I even start exercising, and I never have any glycogen, unless it comes in gummi.

  Then I found another dictionary that defined “hitting the wall” as the point at which “one cannot make any further progress,” which is close but no cigars.

  I’m making enough progress.

  But I’m looking like Methuselah.

  Also, one sports dictionary said that a synonym for “hitting the wall,” in bicycling, is “bonking.”

  But that’s not what I’m talking about.

  Though I’m betting that if you’ve hit the wall, you’re not getting bonked.

  Uh, bingo.

  Then I dug a little deeper and found a website called urbandictionary.com, which bills itself as “the dictionary that YOU wrote!”

  Yay!

  We’ve officially reached an all-time low in our culture, if a word’s definition can be whatever any anonymous person says it is. This would be like having your facts checked by Family Feud.

  Because, to give credit where it’s due, the urban dictionary defined “hitting the wall,” thusly:

  “The point at which a girl that used to be hot is no longer hot. This is typically due to advancing age.”

  BAM!

  Feel that?

  It was the wall.

  Not politically correct, but true.

  And here is the example they gave, verbatim: “Heather Locklear has finally hit the wall. She must be over 40 now.”

  I’m not making this up.

  Don’t tell Heather Locklear.

  She won’t be able to hear you anyway, as she is over forty and will have to turn up her hearing aid.

  By the way, please note that, according to urbandictionary.com, men don’t hit the wall.

  Women, start posting now.

  Other terms we use to talk about aging are equally ouchy. For example, we say that we “look good for our age.”

  Okay, that might not be the best turn of phrase. It implies that if we looked our age, we would look bad. Like our age is a big secret, which it isn’t, at least not for me. I’m pretty sure that my wrinkles spell fifty-seven.

  And it ain’t pretty.

  Plus it’s a losing battle. Gloria Steinem famously said, this is what fifty looks like, but she looked good for her age.

  And she hadn’t hit the wall.

  The urban dictionary gives helpful synonyms for “hit the wall,” which include “busted,” “tore up,” “haggard,” “lost it,” and “used up.”

  Yikes.

  Still, you know the ones that are missing?

  Alive!

  Happy!

  Healthy!

  Lucky!

  I may have hit the wall, but it didn’t stop me. Which defies the definitions of the urban dictionary as well as the laws of physics.

  Happy Birthday, to all of us who are alive, happy, and healthy.

  We’re lucky.

  Whether we’re hot or not.

  William Wordsworth Needs a New Password

  By Lisa

  I pay my bills the old-fashioned way, which is to say I put a check in an envelope, use a stamp, and stick it in a mailbox, to be lost by the postal service.

  All my adult life, my habit has been to sit down once a month, during the last week of the month, and pay my bills. I’m lucky enough these days to be able to pay them all, which was not always the case, when mortgage and utilities got first dibs. I used the Monopoly System of Home Finance, which was that only monopolies got paid.

  I even pay down my credit cards completely, to avoid interest charges. You may recall that I charge everything possible, so I can collect reward points with which I can buy vacuum cleaners I won’t use and spices I don’t like.

  But they’re free, so you can’t beat the price.

  Still, even though I have the money, I hate the day I pay my bills. It’s like tax day, every month. Who likes to pay the piper? Nobody, and he charges too much.

  Until recently, my bill-paying system was working fine, but lately my VISA card has been getting declined left and right, which is always a nice moment, especially in a crowded grocery store. You really don’t want to be the person saying, “I’m sure I paid that.”

  Nobody believes you.

  They’re all thinking, “No way she paid that.”

  And then you get to say, “I have another card.”

  But everyone is thinking, “That one won’t work either. She might be a crack addict. Look at her hair. Also I think she slept in those sweatpants.”

  So this happens enough times that I have a few cranky calls with my VISA card company, which seems not to have made my acquaintance, though I’ve sent them a small fortune each month for the last fifteen years. They say they keep declining the card because my payments were respectively one, one, and two days late for the past three months. The fact that we’ve been together forever doesn’t matter.

  I’ve divorced men for less.

  And the VISA card company isn’t the only bad husband.

  I keep getting notices that threaten to turn off my electricity, and I don’t understand that either, because I paid that bill, too. So I looked again at the last bill and realized that I got it about thirty seconds before it was due. I was late to pay it before I even received it, which might be a land-speed record for financial shenanigans.

  Finally, when I was about to get my bunion surgery a few months ago, I actually learned that my health insurance was in default because it hadn’t been paid in two months. But I knew I paid that. And it turned out that for a reason the insurance company can’t explain, my bills get sent to me every two months, not every month, and if I happen to miss paying a bill, which does happen from time to time, I am already two months behind. Don’t ask me why they don’t send it monthly, but it’s one of the reasons I hate my health-insurance company.

  And so does everybody else.

  I tell my friends these troubles, and they say I have to pay my bills more often, as soon as they come in, and that online bill pay will make this easier. So I go to my bank’s site, and it tells me it needs my social security number, my account number, and my VISA Check Card Number. But I don’t have a VISA Check Card, and the fine print says if you didn’t have such a card, to call a certain phone number, which I did. Then the mechanical operator asked me for my user name, which I didn’t know, and my telephone bill-paying PIN, which I didn’t have.

  So I hung up.

  I’m going to print out a bunch of checks right now, so they’ll be ready when the bills get here. I will stand at the mailbox like a dog and pay each bill the moment it arrives. I will pay for lights I haven’t turned on yet and shoes I haven’t even seen in stores.

  I will turn every day of my life into tax day.

  William Wordsworth said the world is too much with us, and he was right.

  He didn’t have online bill pay, either.

  Love and Marriage, Then Divorce

  By Lisa

  It should be clear by now that I know nothing about love or marriage.

  But about divorce, I’m an expert.

  Or so I thought.

  Ask me anything, I used to think. I could’ve written a book. In fact, I always thought I would or I had, like twenty, but never m
ind, I’ve come to understand I don’t know anything about love, marriage, or even divorce.

  The reasons?

  Tom and Katie.

  I’m a Tom Cruise fan, and so is Daughter Francesca. As you may remember from our previous book, we have Tom Cruise Appreciation Week, especially during power outages, when we watch his movies on laptops. And I remember very well when Tom fell in love with Katie Holmes and jumped on Oprah’s couch.

  You know what I thought?

  Yay!

  Good for him!

  He’s happy and in love!

  Yes, I am the only person in America who did NOT think it was weird that he got so excited he jumped on the couch. Number one, I’m Italian, and we get excited easily. If somebody brings us a plate of spaghetti, it’s all we can do not to jump on the couch.

  We like it. Couches, spaghetti, everything. We’re excitable.

  But even so, I still don’t think it’s crazy he jumped on the couch for love. I myself, your favorite celibate, have felt like jumping on couches for love.

  Why not?

  Couches have cushions for a reason.

  And the guy was happy.

  An entire nation called him weird, but secretly, I was jealous. I hoped that someday, somebody would jump on a couch for me and be called weird by an entire nation.

  So I admit, I was out of the mainstream on that one, which happens sometimes, and we all live. But the very next time I was completely out of the mainstream was when Tom and Katie announced they were separating, and nobody was surprised.

  Except me.

  I was astounded.

  I heard it on TV and I thought something was wrong with the set. I couldn’t believe it. They were so cute together and the kid is adorable, and so are the other kids, and they seemed like such a happy family.

  Suffice it to say, I didn’t see it coming. I don’t know why they got divorced, and that isn’t my point herein. Rumor has it the reason is Scientology, but I don’t know anything about Scientology except that it’s kind of a dumb word. I have no view of Scientology and I don’t poke fun at other people’s religions, because believers will kill me in its name.

  I was still working through the fact of Tom and Katie’s separation when they announced they were divorced.

  WHAT?

  Now I’m really confused.

  Because I grant that I know nothing about love or marriage, but about divorce I know everything, especially that it takes FOREVER and costs A BILLION DOLLARS.