“I always think you’re not really listening to me, that you’re always doing something else on the phone, distracted, but in fact, that advice is very wise!”
“It’s amazing how wise I am: Conversation number 922.”
A buzzer goes off.
“What was that?”
“I’ve just been defragging my hard drive. But no worries. I was really listening!”
I stand on the curb at the Oakland airport. Southwest. The sky is a gray haze. Traffic brays by. My flight was early.
I stand waiting, all I can do. I’m actually not quite sure what I’m looking for. Celeste said, “I’ll pick you up,” but does that mean town car, limo, Hummer?
I look up one way—Asian family of five, a slim blond college student bent over a tennis racket. I look the other way—a gaggle of mop-haired trustafarians, all typing things into laptops—
I hear a familiar voice from behind me.
“You.”
I whirl. There Celeste is, in T-shirt and khakis, with that big, toothy smile of yore…
“’lest!”
She tackles me into an embrace. She holds me. Hard. Her body is shaking, she is wordlessly crying, now I am, too…
And all at once, the years roll off. The decades melt away. The cage of my heart opens. We are those girls again. We are those girls laughing on the sleeping bag.
We hug. We squeeze. We laugh. We weep.
Now there is more laughing…at the weeping, weeping after laughing…
We stroke each other’s hair, murmuring our apologies. So many years have I been wearing this body armor. To be putting it down at long last. To once again find the place—the comfortable bathrobe—where I fit.
“Okay,” she says, wiping her nose. “This is very Beaches. It’s just a bit too Beaches.”
“Yes, it’s very much like how movies jump-cut from twenty-six, and then suddenly the women are standing in an airport weeping at forty-two.”
“And then you’re sixty doing a solo cabaret act for the armed forces—”
“And you’re walking through a snowstorm with James Brolin—”
“Let’s not do that,” she says. “Let’s just get this messy reunion done. We’re now forty-two, I am divorced, you are still married to—” She gives me a gentle punch in the ribs. “Good old Mike, salt of the earth. The years have spooled by, what in the world happened, we have become like strangers—We don’t know who we are—Regrets, we’ve had a few—Women in transition, blah blah blah—Cue Carly Simon—”
She opens the car doors of a slate-blue convertible Saab thing, its innards a welcoming living room, a step-down Jacuzzi, of cream-colored leather.
“And it’s now the weekend!” She raises her fist in exultation. “We are going to ENJOY our vacation. ‘Women Getting On to the Next Page!’”
Celeste and I are now winging our way, fast, through Napa.
We have been laughing since Oakland.
I have come on this weekend determined to suspend my judgment about all her money…And I must say, I have found it ridiculously easy.
It’s hard to feel sour in this glorious countryside, vineyards falling open all around us, under the most golden, perfect, late-afternoon Northern California sky.
It’s hard to feel sour while cupped in soft leather that, thanks to the seat warmers, is artificially warm beneath my ass. While surrounded by a magical constellation of invisible German micro-speakers.
Celeste has programmed into her iPod an eclectic-mix of all the old music we used to listen to—Joni Mitchell, Prince, Aretha, James Taylor, Sly and the Family Stone…
“Sly and the Family Stone!” I scream.
Our conversation is seamless. We are yelling insights at each other. We are vomiting out all the thoughts that have been collecting in our innards, over ten years.
I have talked, she has talked, I have talked, and now she is talking again.
“Here is the problem with women’s friendships, in the forties. No one has the time. All I find myself doing is ‘bookmarking’ women. I run across an interesting woman at work or somewhere and I ‘bookmark’ her—I say, ‘I like you. I’m bookmarking you. I’m mentally making a note that I’d like to know you better.’ So last year I ‘bookmark’ my music supervisor, we go out for lunch and suddenly we decide to order a glass of wine with lunch, which no one ever does anymore, and then we have more wine, and now all at once we’ve been sitting there three hours and this door to a whole new universe has opened and she is telling me about who she was in her twenties, going to school at Columbia and studying composition, she thought she was going to be a female John Cage, or Yoko Ono—
“And I look at this woman I’ve been working side by side with for five years and I realize…I have no idea who she is! All this stuff she is telling me about herself is fascinating! And we realize we have become just these working automatons, pushing all this work THROUGH, on a constant SCHEDULE, and that in fact we know at least twenty women just like us! Not only should we all go out to lunch together, with mandatory wine, we should throw a midsummer’s night bash for all the other stressed forty-something women we know who never make time for a mental-health day!”
“A mental-health day! I love the idea!” I cry out.
“This would be a fabulous evening where everyone would wear—”
“Sarongs!”
“Exactly!” Celeste lifts a hand from the wheel to snap her fingers. “Just like in 28 Beads—”
“Although that Paolo, I must admit he seems—”
“Gay!” Celeste snaps her fingers again. “I believe those are toreador pants he’s wearing on the cover.”
I feel like saying, “Conversation #207: Paolo is gay,” but for once it’s fun to actually HAVE the conversation.
“So,” Celeste continues, “at the dinner, our idea is all the women would wear sarongs and no one would talk about their jobs or their children or their allergies or any other enervating topics! We would call it ‘Women Getting On to the Next Page.’”
“I love it,” I say, taking another swig of…the flask. That’s right. Celeste has handed me a flask of chilled Stoli and tonic, from our youth, our signature beverage.
“Unfortunately,” Celeste continues, “when the week in question rolls around, neither Lynn nor I can stand anyone we are currently working with, let alone each other. There are scheduling issues, there are cat issues, our executive producer has that thing—” Celeste makes a vague gesture down her back.
“Chronic fatigue syndrome?”
“Close.”
“Epstein-Barr?”
“Closer.”
“Fibermyalgia?”
“Fibermylagia, YES!” Celeste snaps her fingers. “So I tell her just take a Vicodin and a bath, and she says, weepily, ‘Then I have to wash my tub. And baths—they’re so complicated these days. I don’t even know what to put INTO the bath anymore.’ WOMEN! I want to say.” Celeste pounds the steering wheel. “WE’RE TRYING TO GET ON TO THE NEXT PAGE!”
“Then again,” I say, “bath crap is complicated.”
“TELL me about it!” Celeste erupts. “Just last month I was going through the things in the house—”
“The one in Santa Barbara?”
“Yes—the nightmare house.”
“I thought it was fabulous,” I said, putting in a college try of loyalty.
“You liked it? That stone-and-glass monstrosity? I hated it. It was Bran’s project. And all the people who live in Santa Barbara? I thought I would go insane.”
“I’ve missed you,” I say.
She puts her hand on my arm, squeezes it, continues.
“So I’m going through the things in the house, and just the tonnage of bath products…! Lavender bath bombs, driftwood-shaped loofah sponges, eucalyptus-scented candles, clay jars of Dead Sea mud, aloe vera lotions, masks, exfoliants, a complete unto-itself oatmeal scrub unit, one crusty bat of—I think—New Mexican sage, a small glycerin nest of seashell-shaped soaplets…”
“Yes!” I say. “I have that kind of stuff, too, under my bathroom sink. I don’t even know where it came from. I think it’s the accumulation of years of bath gifts—graduation, marriage, baby showers, birthdays—it seems there’s no rite of female passage that can’t be marked, in some vague way, by a little hay-strewn basket of bath items. As if to say ‘Happy Graduation! Have a bath.’ ‘So you’re thirty-seven! Have a bath.’”
“Yes!” Celeste lifts a hand off the steering wheel again, to gesture. “I even got a DIVORCE bath basket! It’s like ‘Wishing you a fabulous divorce, and menopause! Rock on, sister, and what, I guess? Try a bath.’ And I look at this giant pile of unopened bath crap, and I mean to re-sort it, or re-gift it. But the sheer hugeness of the task daunts me—the sheer amount of relaxation woman-hours it represents. A hundred females soaking in a hundred tubs for a hundred days could not soak up these oils.”
“Maybe we’ve reached a point where we simply have more aromatherapy than the nation can use…”
“And you know what’s funny? We do a lot of cross-advertising through New York, and you know who the most stressed magazine editors in the world are? The ones who work at Real Simple. Apparently it’s a real sweat factory. A eucalyptus-scented sweat factory.”
“How much more blood can you get from a loofah sponge? Oh! And then the herbal teas!” I exclaim.
“The herbal teas!” she shrieks. “How many types of noncaffeinated green tea can you have?”
“And the gourmet hot sauces. Which I think our nation also has enough of. Particularly those with cartoon labels featuring devils or gleefully self-designated insane guys named Dave! The demand peaked about 1994, to judge by the untouched bottles in our pantry, slumped together like once-irrepressible frat boys now permanently hung over.”
“YES!” Celeste says. “Dave! Who WAS Dave?”
“I, too, have given up on women friends,” I declare. “Since entering my forties, I’ve sort of gone into hiding. I feel like maybe my twenties and thirties were my social time, but now I’ve retreated into my shell.” I don’t know why I’ve suddenly plunged into such candid territory, but the vodka has enlivened me, the sun is shining, and Celeste is playing me, drawing me out like a brilliant conductor, a Toscanini.
“I know what you mean!” she says. “The shell. In a way, it’s just easier.”
“I guess I feel like I’m at the point of my life where I’ve met most of the people I’m going to meet, and there are no more new people or ideas under the sun.” I think of people like Joan, and her sweaty, fluorescent-lit Lord of the Rings flailings, and I amend it to say, “Well, I mean no ideas that are really workable. Like saving the whales? I’m not going to save the whales. I know my limits.”
Celeste leans in: “Can I admit something?”
“Please.”
“I have not seen An Inconvenient Truth. I mean to, and I’m for it, but admit to anyone you just haven’t gotten around to it and it’s like you’re burning coal.”
“Exactly. I’m in sensory overload. Too much information!”
“Exactly! That’s the problem now! There’s too much information! Did you know that an average weekday edition of the New York Times contains more information than a typical seventeenth-century villager would come across in his or her entire life!”
“Where did you hear that?”
“On NPR!
“Forget the bath. My own favorite evening—my own favorite form of ‘me’ time—is sitting glamorously alone at the computer and playing Solitaire. My laptop nub is worn from all the satisfying squeezing and snapping of cards. It’s my version of worry beads. I’ve always got a secret game going—while on hold with Blue Cross, in between reading irritating e-mails that flock to my in-box like crows, for that last delicious two minutes in the day before returning to husband and children. Those last two minutes of the day being penultimate time when my otherwise ever-cheerful sixties mom used to retire to the back porch, alone, Greta Garbo–like, for her one grim cigarette.”
“Supposedly, Hillary Clinton’s preferred mode of ‘relaxation’ is playing Tetris on a Game Boy.
“You know HILLARY has a pile of unused bath products!”
“You don’t still stay up all night in a ratty leotard anymore, eating popcorn, playing games on the computer, do you?”
“Noooo,” I say, alarmed that she remembers that about me. “Of course not!”
Auberge du Fenouil—which, loosely translated, means “hotel of the fennel”—is so exquisite, you can’t see it. Which is to say, the buildings are actually built into the hillside, and covered with wildflowers, sage, moss. The only sound is the occasional distant squawk of a jay, and the discreet whine of a golf cart.
We pad our way across what appears to be ancient rock and salvaged farmhouse wood into less a lobby than a gently glowing orange orb.
From within her cartouche of maple, a young supermodel tilts her chin up to us. One glimpse of us and, I kid you not, her face has lit up. The plucked eyebrows have spontaneously risen. In honeyed tones of perfect German-accented English, she says, “Welcome!
That is, she would be a supermodel—glowing skin, cheekbones slanting outward under clear blue eyes, white-blond chignon—except for the fact that she is totally devoid of hauteur. Brita—that is her name—appears to have been placed on the planet for the sole purpose of serving us.
“I parked in the—?” Celeste waves an arm.
“Of course,” Brita says. She rings a bell.
“Ms. Walden,” she says automatically, placing a cream-colored envelope on the counter. Clearly no formal introductions are needed—there’s no nasty-ass check-in. At Auberge, apparently guests are tracked in by GPS. She slides a second cream-colored envelope forward. “Your key, your map, your schedule, spa pass…? Ms. Tsing Loh.”
“Ooh!” I say.
A brunette appears at Brita’s side. She is just as long and lovely, also with a chignon, but…brunette. Indeed, it’s hard to know…who is lovelier! They look like impossibly leggy Euro air hostesses from some zeppelin in a James Bond movie.
The brunette’s name is Gisele and she is also “aus Dusseldorf.” Brita and Gisele met in “international hotelier school,” whatever the hell that is.
“Mein mutter war Deutsche!” I say ham-handedly, with my extremely bad German.
Brita and Gisele cry out in delight, fluttering around me like birds. I feel like some kind of linguistic genius. They love me! In this room, I am actually killing.
“I just want to make a note of where we are on the Auberge map…” I say.
“Natürlich—” says Brita, who is tearing something off a printer.
Celeste leans into me and whispers, “Brita and Gisele remind me of the prettiest girl in high school who you desperately want to like you and then you finally meet her and, unbelievably enough, she actually IS…really, really nice.”
“Because secretly she’s Christian,” I whisper.
“I have placed the cheeses in your suite,” Gisele murmurs. She leans her chignon into the radio, nods, informs us, tersely: “Warm fresh bread is on its way.”
I don’t know that I’ve ever been happier than in the perfectly warmed infinity pool at Auberge du Fenouil.
We have been discreetly attended to by chiseled young men in white—not in white suits, you know, or in white gloves, or in outfits so stuffy and formal you feel bad for them…No, these young men, with brown eyes you could melt in and clearly the souls of poets? While they have apparently also been placed on this whirling blue marble to serve us, they’re clad in the relaxed natural fibers they themselves might choose to wear, while relaxing at the Auberge. Fueled less by duty than by breathless inspiration, they keep bringing us little tiny plates of things—a kiwi tart, a raspberry sorbet, adorable chilled glasslets of things…
And I realize I may have to handcuff myself to the Auberge’s infinity pool, in case the authorities ever try to make me leave Napa.
Celeste and I are joined by h
er friend Lynn, same age as us, but with wild dark curly hair, big hoop earrings, a sparkly Stockard Channing, very attractive.
“Are you also from the Women’s Divorce group?” Lynn asks as she doffs her terry-cloth robe.
“Oh no!” Celeste cries out. “Sandra is married! Been living with her husband for eighteen years! Great guy! Mike, salt of the earth.”
“No!” Lynn says in amazement, settling herself into the pool. “Oh my GOD, this feels good.” She raises a glass to clink with mine. “Eighteen years! How do you do it?”
My marriage feels so remote right now. I almost forgot I had a husband, and children. I’m not so sure I’m eager to fly back to them, to, in particular, my daughters’ many tiny socks. All those tiny, tiny little socks.
I look down over the gentle rolling hills of Napa Valley. Slowly, a hot-air balloon wafts by. Down the hill before us, two bicycles zing. An extremely lean man, and an extremely lean woman. In matching green jerseys, and helmets.
“You know couples like that who do everything together?” I say. “Bike together, hike together, kayak together? You know? They literally KAYAK together in matching visors, their paddles dipping neatly up and down like synchronized swimmers…”
“Yes?” Celeste and Lynn say.
“Mike and I,” I say. “We do NOTHING together. We can’t even bear to GROCERY SHOP together! That’s the secret to our longevity. I have this writer friend Joe. He WAS dating Liz, the most fabulous woman in the world…with the exception of this thing she calls the ‘stay ’n’ dart.’ Shopping together, at Costco—”
“Which could be the problem right there,” Lynn points out.
“Well, Liz will ask Joe to STAY with the cart in one aisle while she DARTS one, two, maybe even three aisles over to fetch a forgotten item—that’s what she calls it, as though that term solves the whole thing, the ‘stay ’n’ dart’—and they broke up over it!”
“No kidding!” Celeste and Lynn exclaim.
“More advice,” I say. “Beyond the Sisyphean futility of trying to load the dishwasher together, in light of the perennial gender-incompatible question of knives up or knives down—”
Mother on Fire: A True Motherf%#$@ Story About Parenting! Page 9
