Still, what I wouldn’t have given for a little romance myself in those times.
If there’s any wisdom I’ve gained from reaching seventy-five, sadly, that’s it.
Sex with Howard was fine. At least I think it was fine; I never knew it with anyone else. Howard was the only man I ever had sex with in my entire life. We never had crazy sex—just plain old Howard-on-top or me-on-top sex, three times a week, sometimes four if Howard felt like it, never me. I was never much for sex. I wonder, if I had ever been with anyone else would I have liked it more? Believe me, I was a pretty woman back then, with a cute figure. I could have gotten a lot of men in my time if that was my thing. How wonderful it would have been to have someone in my life who wrote me love letters. Howard never wrote anything. His secretary even signed his name on my birthday cards. How marvelous it would have been to just have that thrill of someone else finding me attractive.
You know, it did almost happen once. I’m not saying I would have actually gone and had the affair, but once at a benefit for the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Russell Minden took me aside and told me he thought I was one of the most beautiful women he’d ever seen. He asked to take me to lunch. This was 1962, and I got scared out of my mind. I was sure that everyone at the benefit could hear my conversation with Russell. So I just laughed demurely, and then regretted not doing anything about it for the rest of my life. Russell died a few years back (the C-word, pancreas). I saw the obit in the Philadelphia Inquirer. I sent a donation to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in his memory, to thank him in my own way. I hadn’t seen him for about twenty years, but I never forgot how beautiful he made me feel that night.
That’s another thing I’m angry about. I never knew how attractive I was. When I look at pictures of myself back then, God I was beautiful. Everyone always said so, but I never believed it myself. I wish I had taken more advantage of my looks. In those days I looked good for Howard. I did my hair and ate right for fat-bald-run-around-with-other-women-behind-my-back Howard. If I bought a new dress or a new perfume, it was for Howard to compliment. I should have been doing it for me. I only wish I had taken the time to feel good about myself.
So in a nutshell, take all that—no education, sex with one man, not knowing that the sun was bad for me, and not realizing how gorgeous I was—and that’s why I’m jealous of my granddaughter, Lucy. She’s got her whole life ahead of her, and she lives in the perfect time in history. That’s what I was thinking through my whole seventy-fifth birthday party: I was born at the wrong time. I wish I was Lucy.
You should have seen my Lucy sitting there at the party. She’s got this mini e-mail contraption that she was using to talk to her friends the whole night about where they were going to go after she left my birthday celebration. “Texting,” was what Barbara kept saying, as in, “Lucy, it’s Gram’s birthday. Can you stop texting for two seconds to toast your grandmother?” I winked at Lucy. It was okay with me.
All I wanted to know was who she was talking to and where she was going.
And the way she was dressed! Barbara kept saying all night, “She looks like a streetwalker.” She had on a tiny minidress with platform heels and a jean jacket over it. I thought she looked like a movie star, and I wished I could wear something like that. Lucy has such a figure! She is so trim, not like her mother. Barbara takes after Howard’s side of the family, with their big hips and ample bosoms. Barbara is constantly on a diet. (Ha! I think she cheats more than she diets.) Lucy and I don’t diet. Sure, I watch my figure, but because of my metabolism I can afford to cheat, and so can Lucy. Sometimes Lucy and I have ice cream for dinner. Just last week we got a big tub of Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough and went hog wild. Lucy looks like I did when I was her age. I always had great legs, and a great tush like Lucy’s. Everyone said so. I don’t know what happened—my body just . . . sagged. It looks like . . . oh, you know when you put too much paint on a wall and it starts to drip down? That’s what my body looks like. I’m thin, but saggy. But, oh, did I have a great behind! God I miss my cute rear end. I lost my tush somewhere between my forties and my sixties and I’m still looking for it. (And by the way, if you’re reading this and you’re much younger than I am, I have one word for you: moisturize. You’ll still sag like a wet washcloth at seventy-five, but at least you’ll look better than your girlfriends at the same age. At least I do. Oy, if you could only see Frida.)
Anyway, Lucy and I are very close. She only lives about four blocks from me in the city. I’m so happy we live close to each other. After Howard passed on, I had no desire to stay in that big house in the suburbs anymore. A few months after he died, I noticed that the water heater was leaking—just a little puddle, nothing dramatic. The water heater was located in the basement, just a few feet away from the washing machine. I only noticed the leak when I went to grab a new box of detergent. I always bought extra boxes of detergent and kept them right beside the heater. That’s when I noticed the leak. I remember thinking to myself how funny it was that I never noticed that water leaked from the heater. I didn’t know it wasn’t supposed to leak. (Gladys, our dear housekeeper who died last year, was the one who always did the laundry.)
So when I went to take a bath a week later, there was no hot water. They had been doing some construction on Mrs. Lewis’s house next door and I figured that had something to do with it. What can I say? It all seemed logical at the time. Later that day I went downstairs to throw some towels in the washing machine and the whole basement was flooded. Because I had those extra boxes of detergent by the water heater, there were soapsuds everywhere. Everywhere! It looked like a Turkish bath!
I was in such panic that I called Barbara, who came right over. When she saw the mess, she berated me for not having the sense to call a plumber. (Okay, berated is a harsh word, but she treated me like a child. So shoot me. I didn’t know it wasn’t supposed to leak.)
Anyway, that was it for me. I got a new hot water heater and put the house on the market the same day. I moved into a lovely apartment on Rittenhouse Square and I sold my car (word to the wise: when that “service” light that comes up on your dashboard, it is not there for decoration); and I’m so much happier as a result. My days are spent playing bridge or going to concerts at the Kimmel Center. At night I go out to restaurants with my friend Frida or other girlfriends who’ve lost their husbands. I bought in the same building where Frida lives and so we’re always in each other’s apartments. It’s fun actually, and it’s good that we can check on each other. My apartment faces Rittenhouse Square Park and nothing makes me happier than to go down there on a nice day and sit on a bench under a tree and read the newspaper.
Barbara didn’t want me to move into the city. “It’s too far from me,” she said at the time. “Why don’t you get something in the suburbs?” I’ll tell you, I’m even happier that Barbara still lives in the suburbs. Barbara and I are close, too, but not in the way that Lucy and I are close. Lucy and I understand each other better. Barbara and I could never have that kind of closeness. Honestly, I don’t think that’s entirely my fault.
When Barbara and I talk, it sounds like an argument, but it’s really a conversation. With Lucy, it’s a plain old conversation. My daughter keeps tabs on me like I used to keep tabs on her when she was a teenager. I tell her, “For Christ’s sake, Barbara, I’m a grown woman, and I can take care of myself!” She doesn’t listen, though.
“Who is going to look after you if I don’t?” she asks me.
“I can take care of myself,” I tell her, even though I’m not quite sure that’s true.
Lucy comes over about twice a week, sometimes more. She doesn’t have laundry facilities in her apartment so she does it here. Those nights I’ll make us a brisket and we’ll eat and watch her reality shows while she does her laundry. Sometimes we’ll leave the laundry and go to one of the quaint BYOs in the neighborhood. Lucy tells me all about her love life and her job designing clothing, and I listen. I listen to all her gripes about the boy of
the week she thinks she’s in love with. At twenty-five, Lucy has yet to have a serious boyfriend, and I’m so happy she hasn’t. She has mentioned this boy Johnny lately, but I don’t think there’s anything serious to that. Who could take a person seriously when his name is Johnny, and not John or Jonathan? Barbara begs her to meet someone and settle down already, but I always pipe up and tell her she’s got a lot of years ahead of her for that. I listen to her stories about work and who she’s met and who she sold her clothing to and how much they bought. I love every minute of it. I always wanted to work with clothes like Lucy does. I used to know the inventory of Saks Fifth Avenue better than some of the women who worked there. My mother’s best friend, Hester Abromowitz, worked there until she died. Hester outlived my mother and her friends by twenty-five years, and she always said it was because she worked. I loved Hester very much and think of her often. Before Hester’s funeral, her daughter Diane, who was much younger than me, asked if I would say a few words about Hester, so I spoke about her time at Saks, since that was where I saw her most. I talked about how she took such great care of her clients, most of whom were at the funeral, and about her great style. People always said I had great style, and I thought so, too, and always attributed it to Hester. Over the years I thought about taking a job sometimes, but I had Howard and Barbara to look after, and even though we had full-time help—Gladys—I still had my role. Also, in my time, you were looked down on if you had a job. I brought it up to Howard a few times over the years, and he laughed.
“What are we, poor?” he’d say and smirk.
A lot of times, Lucy will go out after she visits me. She’ll go to meet her friends in a bar in the neighborhood, and I can hardly keep myself from telling her I want to go with her. Sometimes I joke to her that I’m coming along, and she eggs me on, saying, “You’d be the coolest woman there! Let’s get you dressed!” Once, just once, I’d love to go with her and see what her nights are all about.
Lucy is also much smarter than Barbara gives her credit for. Barbara wanted Lucy to go to law school, like Howard, but I know that’s not my Lucy. Lucy went to the Parsons School of Design in New York City to learn how to design clothes. She worked for Donna Karan herself for two years as her personal assistant, and then she moved back to Philadelphia last year to pursue designing clothing on her own. Oh, and you want to know what else she did? She took my last name! Okay, Lucy Jerome looks a lot better on a design label than Lucy Sustamorn. How horrible is the last name Sustamorn? When Barbara first brought Lucy’s father home and he said his name was Larry Sustamorn, I thought, Oh, that’s just pathetic. It sounds like “such a moron” if you say it quickly. Try it—say the word Sustamorn ten times fast and see what you get. Anyway, Lucy Sustamorn became Lucy Jerome, and although her mother was a little hurt by it, she came around. After all, my Lucy has her dresses in some of the best shops in Philadelphia—Plage Tahiti and Knit Wit and Joan Shepp—and the new Barneys CO-OP on Rittenhouse Square is interested in her dresses. Barneys!
I know. I’m such a proud grandmother.
One of Lucy’s favorite things to do is go through my closet and pick out styles she can copy. I’ve saved everything through the years, and boy do I have a closet to show for it. By the time I moved from the house in the suburbs, I had filled every closet in the house. Barbara’s childhood closet held my Chanel and Halston suits from the sixties and seventies. The guest room closet held all of my beautiful gowns. My furs (when fur was acceptable to wear, and you weren’t in danger of having those people throw paint on you) and other winter coats were downstairs. I had my own closet for all my shoes and the clothes I wear now.
“You could put this stuff up for auction!” Barbara told me when I started to pack up the house.
There was no way I would do that, though. My clothes contain my memories of all the good times. I don’t have scrapbooks full of pictures of old memories; instead, I’ve got the closet of a lifetime. My Oscar de la Renta pale blue taffeta suit from Barbara’s wedding; my gorgeous James Galanos white sequined one-shoulder gown that I bought for a black-tie affair Howard and I went to in New York once in the 1980s—Howard said he’d never seen me look more beautiful. I would never give up any of it. No siree, bob.
So I bought a three-bedroom apartment and turned one room into a closet. It took more than three months for the contractors to get it right, but when they did it became my favorite room in the world. Barbara doesn’t understand it. Lucy does.
Lucy and I could spend hours in there together. She makes sketches of some of my dresses. She even copied a bright pink Lilly Pulitzer shift I bought on a trip to Palm Beach, Florida, in the 1960s, before Lilly Pulitzer was anyone in the fashion world.
Lucy calls it “the Ellie Jerome dress.”
She named it for her grandmother.
When I think of my granddaughter, I glow.
And that’s exactly why I’m jealous of her.
So tonight at my seventy-fifth birthday party at The Prime Rib, all I could think of was how much I wished I could go back in time and do it all over again in this day and age. Even for just one day. I wished that for one day I had my firm tush again, and my smooth, tanned skin. I wished that I could make mad passionate love to someone who only wanted to pleasure me. I wasn’t asking for a lifetime; I didn’t want to be piggish about it. I just wanted to have one day out of my miserable old-fogey life to experience the things that I missed out on and gain some appreciation for the things I took for granted. Do you know that I’ve lived for exactly 27,394 days? I figured that out on my calculator this morning. Out of all those days, would it really be a big deal to take one day off and really go crazy? What a wonderful wish! I thought it was highly creative. I would have shared the idea with someone, but of course you’re never supposed to tell your wish or it won’t come true. Ha!
So that’s what I wished for when Barbara and Lucy came walking in with that big birthday cake.
“I could only fit twenty-nine candles on it,” Barbara told everyone and laughed. Barbara can get on my last nerve sometimes.
So I wished on my twenty-nine birthday candles.
I wished to be twenty-nine again for one day.
If I had that one day, I would change everything.
This time, I would do it the right way.
And I would never regret again.
my word! i’m gorgeous!
The first thing I noticed when Barbara called and woke me up this morning was my boobs.
I always sleep on my stomach, so I have become used to waking up with my boobs hanging around my underarms. The first thing I do every morning is pull those mounds of flesh into a more comfortable position.
The phone was ringing when I came to, so I instinctively reached out to comfortably situate the first boob and noticed it was not in its usual spot. The boob was where a boob should be.
I didn’t think much of it. It wasn’t a big deal, and didn’t jolt me into recognizing the changes that had occurred during the night. I only realized later that this should have been the tip-off.
As I opened my eyes for the first time to grab the boob (and the phone, of course), I looked at the digital clock beside my bed and saw that it was eight-thirty. I’ve been blind as a bat since I was fifty, yet I could read the clock. I thought that I’d fallen asleep with my glasses on. I’ve done that many, many times before, only the glasses never stayed perfectly on my face, especially since I sleep on my stomach. I looked at the clock again and then felt my face. No glasses. So I grabbed my glasses. Maybe I just thought I could see the clock. Obviously, I wasn’t thinking with a clear head.
As the phone kept ringing, I sat up in bed and put my glasses on. The world around me suddenly became blurry.
So I took them off again.
The world was in focus.
So I put them back on.
Blurry.
Bernice Zankhower, a friend of my friend Lois Gordon, woke up one morning and found that her feet were a half a size smaller. I thought that
maybe this was something along the same lines. What did I know?
Finally I picked up the phone, and of course it was Barbara.
“Did you have a nice time last night?” she asked.
“I had a lovely time, dear,” I said, speaking my first words of the day. My voice sounded smoother, younger. Even Barbara noticed it.
“Well, if anything, you sound more relaxed today,” she said.
“I feel more relaxed,” I said.
I put on my slippers as Barbara babbled on, never noticing that my feet had no bunions from years of high heels, that my legs lacked the varicose veins I got when I was pregnant with Barbara. I did remark to myself that my pedicure still looked good after a week—a record for me. But the thought was fleeting.
“Didn’t Lucy look awful last night?” Barbara droned. “What she puts on sometimes. I know you like some of the things that she wears, but honestly, Mother. And my steak was just a little too rare,” Barbara went on complaining as I walked to the bathroom.
“Oh, for Christ’s sakes, Barbara, everything was beautiful.”
“Still, I thought that we waited a little longer for our food than we should have. Your friends seemed like they were ready to faint from hunger.”
Truthfully, I had noticed Frida looking a little peaked from hunger, but Frida could stand to lose a few. She was a solid size eight before menopause, and then, poof! She was as big as a house, and she stayed that way for the next twenty-five years.
“Anyway, the reason that I’m calling,” Barbara griped on, “is that I think I left my sunglasses in your handbag. Remember how they wouldn’t fit in mine so I stowed them in yours? Are they still there?”
“Let me check,” I muttered without glancing in the bathroom mirror.
I knew that I had left my bag on the table in the foyer, in front of the mirror Howard and I bought in a Paris flea market years ago. That mirror has always been one of my favorite items. I used to have it in the entryway in the old house, and now I have it in my foyer here.
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