“Ah yes, the Loh family!” Marilyn exclaims. “It’s a very Asian thing,” she adds, to Barry.
“Right, you’ve told me,” he says. “Where family interest rates are set . . .”
“In the 1990s it was 6 percent. Six percent!” I exclaim. “Now it’s closer to 3. But more deeply than that, I worry that I’m just too irritable to live with a man anymore. At least in the shared space we have. Let me tell you the story of my friend Karen—she’s about my age, fifty-four, divorced, two sons off in college. Karen met Leo in her apartment building on Melrose. Leo is a menschy and wonderful—and gainfully employed—film editor guy. He lives two floors down. It has been ideal. He rises early, she is an insomniac. . . .”
“Like us,” Marilyn adds.
“I mean, sometimes I really want Charlie in bed with me. I need that electrical grounding, that Waiting to Exhale thing, that soft place to fall where you spoon him or he spoons you.”
“But sometimes the angle isn’t quite right, there is snoring, and, man, if you get a good bed pillow!” Marilyn exclaims.
“And she wants the temperature so cold,” Barry adds, “like a tomb.”
“And have you heard of these fabulous new weighted blankets?” Marilyn asks. “They’re good for anxiety.”
“Anyway, for Karen, if she has a spider or something, Leo can come right over. But of course, two apartments are expensive. They could save money by moving in together. To, let’s say, this adorable Spanish-style bungalow Karen and I found online. Three bedrooms, two baths, converted garage. Plenty of room for everyone to have their own space.
“So we’re walking through this bungalow, and it’s cute,” I continue. “I hear myself chiming in with my usual responses: ‘You could have a kitchen herb garden! This fire pit is perfect for entertaining! Here’s the den where you can binge watch your shows together!’ But it was like dealing with an alien. Karen just wasn’t getting excited about, well, moving in, and nesting. She had already done that with a husband and two sons, both in college. She’s looking at this homey kitchen with its cheerful skylights and her only comment is ‘Oh boy, I’d have to share a fridge again.’ It was like walking through a cheerful IKEA display of the bedroom of a college student. Cute, but from a former life.
“And afterward, we go to a coffee bar and she says, ‘Leo is a great, great guy. But his taste in music is awful! It’s this streaming that’s a constant sort of house music jushjushjush, from his tablet, awful fidelity, leaves it on when he’s not even in the room. It’s noise pollution.’
“And I say: ‘Well, that could be solved with headphones! You love each other!’ But even as I’m saying that, I’m thinking, Egad. Charlie’s Hindu trance music drives me nuts and I am growing increasingly allergic to the aroma of his smelly incense! It’s like having soap shoved into your mouth!”
“Really?” Barry exclaims. “I like the smell of incense.”
“I don’t know if it’s because I’m menopausal,” I say, “but so many things irritate me now. Sounds! Smells! His clothing and laundry, piled on our bench in the bedroom!”
“Actually I’m the one who does that,” says Marilyn. “I’m the messy one.”
“But she has her own bedroom!” Barry exclaims.
“And Leo has these two dogs that Karen finds too ‘lungey.’ . . . And suddenly it sounds sensible to not move into the cute Spanish-style house, and Karen and I realize there may be a word for us. Instead of ‘postdivorce,’ maybe we’re both ‘postcohab,’ or ‘postcohabitation’? Maybe we just can’t do it anymore!”
“Are you saying you’re against marriage?” Barry asks.
“Do you regret marrying Ben?” Marilyn asks.
“Well no,” I say. “Looking back, I realize marriage isn’t the culprit, in the same way a fancy school versus a state school isn’t really the culprit—you may well get a decent education from each. I married the right man at the right time, and made the right kids. Ben is the type of man you actually do marry. He saves money and fixes things and is an ocean of sanity. I was filing some papers recently and realized I still have an old Writer’s Guild Death and Dismemberment policy. That’s what I told my daughters, ‘It’s not just death. It has to be dismemberment. So make sure, in the flaming train wreck, you cut off at least part of one of my fingers.’ ”
“Ghoulish!” says Barry.
“The benefactor was still my ex-husband Ben, and upon thinking about it I decided to leave it that way. That $20,000 would be safest with him. He’d invest it conservatively for our girls. Charlie would blow half of it on Hindu prosperity candles. That’s really the way I feel! Marriage was just the name of a set of ideas we had, then.”
“I remember your wedding,” Marilyn says. “It was fun!”
“I remember initially feeling that ‘marriage’ sounded so conventional, and I didn’t want to be a ‘wife.’ I told Ben—upon buying our second house together, right?—we should have a ‘commitment ceremony.’ And he said, ‘My mom is not flying in from Minnesota for a commitment ceremony!’
“So we did throw a wedding and I did buy a gown and this fancy stylist did my hair in this awful too-ornate way, making me late to my own wedding. We got married fairly straightforwardly by a Lutheran minister friend, even though it was 104 degrees that day, margaritas were being served, the bartender got drunk, and one of our guests (my boss) was rushed to the emergency room. My husband’s hip musician colleagues refused to play ‘Mustang Sally,’ which was my one request. But then Chick Corea—whom Ben was working with at the time, true story—Chick Corea made a surprise late arrival, he vamped on ‘All Blues,’ everyone joined, and I’m told I led sixteen women in a drunken ballet. My wonderful choreographer friend Raiford was there. I do remember him saying, as we careened all over our cramped Van Nuys deck, fringed with tea lights: ‘Think very Egyptian, ladies. Less is more, less is more.’
“So marriage was something we decided to call it at that time, to rally our friends and families to us. And, in the years to come, when as fate dictates, not everyone stays around, no regrets over the memories. And oh, the platters. There were some really beautiful platters.”
“That is true,” Marilyn says, grasping Barry’s hand. “The kitchenware of weddings is very beautiful!”
The Fantasy of Living Alone
AN EDITOR AT New York magazine calls me up with an essay assignment: Living Alone After Fifty. As he writes: “Statistically, these are boom times for middle-aged people who are living alone. Their numbers have nearly doubled since 1999, rising from 13 percent to 21 percent of the 55- to 64-year-old population. Over 50 percent of people 50 or over are single.”
THE TIMING IS PERFECT. I am intrigued both on behalf of the project and on behalf of myself.
I begin working on my magazine assignment, e-mailing all my middle-aged girlfriends who are living alone. My editor, in his thirties, is interested in the fear and despair of fifty-pluses living alone. But horribly for me, to the last woman, they are all thrilled, thrilled, thrilled! to be single!
Danielle, for instance, is having a housewarming party. Flush with her inheritance from her dad, she has bought herself a Silver Lake duplex.
“Oh my God,” our gaggle of some dozen women exclaim, as we sip chilled basil-cucumber martinis while getting the tour.
Danielle’s freshly redone skylit bachelorette aerie is a calming sea of white warmed with dots of Mediterranean color via fresh flowers, art, and pillows. (Downstairs is a private studio that rents on Airbnb for two thousand dollars a week.) There are cunning natural wood built-ins and frosted glass cabinets that encase any errant clutter in camouflaging ice. None of the herbs in her jewel-box garden window are dead, dying, or brown.
Everything visible is beautiful.
It’s like a boutique hotel I want to check into immediately.
“It took a lot of work to get it here,” Danielle says. “We had to practically gut the place to get the flow.”
“We” includes herself and her dream contr
actor/sometime actor John Kennedy. “Isn’t that funny? My handyman’s name is literally John Kennedy.”
Danielle swings open the red door to her home office.
“Oh my God!” I exclaim. “It is so exactly like how I’d want my home office to be!”
Here is a creative sanctuary of glowing track lighting, a blonde wood desk, custom-fit bookshelves that—I can see, looking closer—have only classics on them. Unlike me, Danielle has culled her books. Just perusing her quality personal library (and it’s alphabetized—Cheever! Didion! Eggers!) feels like coming home to a better self.
My own boxy house is defined by large square public rooms, ideal for Quaker meetings or Lutheran potlucks. For all its square footage, I do not have an office. I type from my unmade bed. Collapsing bookshelves on my right are choked with food magazines, PC computer manuals, ONLINE INVESTING FOR DUMMIES (none of it mine!). Along the opposite wall is a ragged skyline of Charlie’s New York Timeses and half-read New Yorkers.
And, of course, in every corner, there are collapsing piles of Writer’s Guild Award screeners. I haven’t had a Writer’s Guild contract in years, but I can vote on Writer’s Guild Awards. Actual working screenwriters are always desperate for my approbation!
All the women moan at Danielle’s spa-like master bathroom (fluffy white towels, eucalyptus soaps, flickering aromatherapy candles).
“My house could never be like this,” exclaims Irene, a nonprofit administrator, with surprising vehemence, “because if you open any closet in my house, an avalanche of crap will spill out!”
Julia agrees. “My husband Bill? He must have twenty-five, thirty guitars. And amps. And old Guitar Player magazines. And these Rubbermaid bins full of power cords. We haven’t been able to open the basement door in years.”
“You’re married to a musician?” Irene asks.
Eyebrows raise, for a horrified beat, to utter the obvious: “No!”
“My forty-seven-year-old husband collects baseball cards,” Irene says. “He has 150 boxes of them in the garage. Quasi-hoarding—it’s a real issue at our age.”
“Right,” says Julia. “In our twenties, we had one swing-arm lamp and two milk crates. By now, we’ve accumulated so much of what George Carlin used to call my ‘stuff’ and his ‘shit’—it’s like maintaining an extra ghost person.”
Out on Danielle’s immaculate teak back deck, I hold up my phone: “Okay, ladies. Here’s a HuffPo article called ‘The Lifestyle More Older Women Are Starting to Embrace.’ It says: ‘Midlife women are doing it again. As we did in our 20s, we are questioning fundamentals, challenging the status quo, being stubbornly bohemian and embracing the unconventional.’ Living alone, for or against?”
“For!” says a lawyer named Serena. “I’ve lived alone my whole life, in four different countries. What’s the big deal? I have my own business, fly a plane, and am so used to managing on my own I’m unworried about the future. Often couples enable each other to become weaker. Instead of two people, you have one and a half people. They just enable each other’s bad habits.”
“That’s true,” I say. “When my girls are away, many nights Charlie and I drink red wine, smoke pot, and fall asleep in front of the TV. I’ll wake up in the morning in a sea of Kettle Chip crumbs—‘Oh honey, no, did we eat that whole bag?’ Opening my e-mail, I see iTunes is claiming someone named ‘Sandra Loh’ bought the Lord of the Rings trilogy at midnight for $19.95, a trilogy I already own. Sure, it was fun at the time, but I am a loser. Shit!”
“Oh, since divorcing?” says Andie. “One of the best things? Traveling alone.”
“Yes!” says Irene. “The older I get, the more I adore traveling alone, wandering, sketching, eating all the baked goods I want. My husband Luke had a medical conference in Germany, so I flew with him there, then went on to Paris. He calls me and says, ‘Good news! We finished early! I can join you!’ And the sentence that immediately comes to my mind is ‘There is no “U” in Paris.’ ”
We all laugh and clink our martinis.
“Charlie and I were actually able to get to Paris in connection with a travel magazine piece I got assigned,” I now remember. “It seemed it would be so, so romantic. I got a guidebook and lovingly circled the Louvre, Arc de Triomphe, Versailles. . . . Upon arrival, I learned that Charlie had no intention of going to any of these places because they were, quote unquote, ‘touristy.’ ”
“Oh no!” comes the chorus. “So what did you do?”
“Once there, I realized what Charlie liked to do was to sit in cafés in Le Marais reading the New York Times and smoking cigarette after cigarette. Why? ‘Because everyone smokes in Paris,’ he said. He smoked at the window of our hotel room. He smoked during meals, literally at the table, blowing smoke across my steak frites. He smoked in cabs so much at one point our—mind you, French—cab driver turned around in indignation and . . . guess what? Irately ordered him—in English—to stop smoking.”
As we begin to eat our tasty Thai food (seamlessly delivered), Danielle describes this guy she met a few months earlier on Match.com. “He spent a weekend here, then never left. He was nice enough—funny, cute, smart. . . . He initially said he was a ‘producer,’ but as I’ve learned, over the age of forty in Los Angeles, ‘producer’ is a synonym for ‘homeless.’
“The last straw was the hardwood floors. When I told Sean the refinishers were coming, he complained that now he has to get his magazines off the floor and he didn’t feel like doing that this weekend. To which I said: ‘Either this stuff goes or you do. They’re coming Monday, move your shit.’
“So now I’m doing the math. I’m calculating the price, literal and metaphorical, of a man.”
Danielle ticks it off on her fingers. “His income? I don’t need. The sex? It was okay, but you can date and get that—I’ve been seeing this guy recently I met on OkCupid and arguably it’s better. The ability to fix things is a plus, but Sean was completely inept and I have John Kennedy. I do like to watch TV at night, but Sean would talk all through Downton Abbey.”
“Did you tell me he used to cook a lot?” asks Julia.
“Yes! But for Sean, it was such a project! It took the whole day! Who needs that when you can Yelp anything you want, no dishes?”
“That’s just like Charlie!” I say. “The cooking projects! First comes an hour of Talmudic study of the New York Times food section. Next is a trip to the farmer’s market to buy exotic vegetables, some of which he may cook for dinner, possibly grilling them, in some fussy experimental manner. In the process, the kitchen sink fills with pots, pans, a colander, a mandoline, both a large and a small food processor, dinosaur-sized tongs.”
“Oh, the important kitchen gadgets!” Danielle exclaims. “It’s such a male thing! The maestro is in! Hopefully a housecleaning crew will follow!”
“Right!” cries out Julia. “What’s with that ‘food scientist’ guy Alton Brown? He’s always cooking, alone, in his kitchen, sterile as the inside of a Patek Philippe watch. The phone doesn’t ring, dogs don’t run through, children don’t howl. He never has to run back to Ralphs for that one thing. He never washes a dish. Whose life is like that? I humbly ask: Aren’t there patches of time, while waiting for pasta to boil, when Mr. Brown could rinse off some pots? Transfer a load of socks to the dryer?”
“Exactly,” I say. “Men have taken one aspect of housework—cooking—and lifted it to an arcane, time-consuming sport like fly fishing. James Beard has a recipe to make ‘perfect scrambled eggs’ that requires stirring them for thirty minutes. Meanwhile, for centuries women have been doing all the cooking, and also most of the grocery shopping, housecleaning, laundry, child care, and, oh yeah, the dishes! Forget the Food Channel. When will we get a glamorous Housecleaning Channel, or Laundry Channel? Think of it: a channel of just men in stylish Warby Parker rims artisanally doing laundry!”
“My Midwestern mother-in-law has a cookbook called The Lutheran Mother’s Cookbook,” says Irene. “There are recipes with names like ‘Lazy Woman
’s Pickles’ and ‘Washday Soup.’ This is essentially boiling water that you throw ground beef into, because, you know what? It’s wash day.”
“And all those f-ing male food writers,” Julia says. “Sam Sifton, Michael Pollan. ‘Slow Food.’ Fuck you. How dare you lecture me about spending more time cooking?”
“You know what we should write?” I say, getting a brainstorm. “ ‘The Angry Divorced Working Mother’s Cookbook.’ Between the girls’ schedules and mine, I’m in the car twenty hours a week.”
“So until car dashboards come with stoves, or trunks with crockpots,” says Julia, “no Slow Food movement for us.”
I say, “My ‘broken family’ recipes include Festival of Toast. The Loaded Biscuit. Quesadilla Surprise. Broccoli from Hell—”
“What’s that?” everyone wants to know.
“Throw broccoli on a baking sheet, shake on olive oil and salt, and shove it into the oven at 475 for twenty minutes until it’s blackened. I discovered it by accident—”
“Here’s another recipe,” Irene says. “ ‘How to Roast a Chicken.’ Begin by taking the plastic off. Preferably. You should probably take the giblet things out, too, although, to be honest I can’t swear I’ve done that every single time and my family is still alive. Then put it into the oven at 350 for two hours.”
“Better yet,” Serena says, “just pick a roasted chicken up at the store. Sometimes your best cooking utensils are your car keys.”
“We just know more who we are now,” says Danielle. “In our twenties, we were still forming, as young women. We didn’t really know what we wanted. Now we do—”
The Madwoman and the Roomba Page 17