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

by Gurwitch, Annabelle

  I started hormone replacement therapy after noticing changes in my physiology. Over a six-month period, not once but twice a month, I couldn’t leave my house. It was like my vagina had slaughtered something.

  Then there were the hot flashes. Nothing can really prepare you for the suddenness and completeness of the blood-boiling sensation except maybe a bout of dengue fever or listening to hour one of Rush Limbaugh’s daily radio show.

  But neither of those things was the worst symptom of perimenopause. I was regularly morphing from my usual bitchiness into a raving bitch. I wanted to kill everyone in my house, the people who live next door, in neighboring counties, and in countries whose names I can’t pronounce. As I recall, the exact words that sent me to a pricey Beverly Hills doctor were spoken in response to my son when he mentioned he hadn’t begun his homework yet: “Fine, don’t do your homework, if you don’t mind being a MORON.”

  It also felt like the inside of my vagina was being sandblasted during any form of sexual activity. “Dry vagina.” Two words that should never be in the same sentence.

  On my initial visit to a Beverly Hills hormone specialist, the doctor handed me a compendium of supplements she deemed essential for menopausal wellness.* Complete with diagrams, maps, and intersecting circles, it was so complicated, I thought it was a schematic drawing of the Large Hadron Collider. She also suggested a regimen of lasers, lightening and tightening, injectables and fillers. It was so overwhelming, I went home and curled into the fetal position on the chance that the effects of gravity on the aging process might be retarded if I ceased all movement.

  When inertia was no longer possible (it was time for the afternoon carpool), I slathered on my bioidentical hormone creams and started downing supplements by the fistful.* After a few days, I did feel less homicidal and suicidal. However, this new routine dovetailed with yet another perimenopausal symptom, brain fog, to create a perfect storm. I couldn’t always remember to follow the regimen, and once you start outsourcing your endocrine system, you’ve got a hormonal monkey on your back.

  A month into the protocol, I set off on a book tour. I arrived in New York but my hormones stayed in California on my bathroom counter, where I’d left them. I sobbed for two days straight while staying in a hotel room other people were paying for. Months later, just as I was starting to feel good about mastering my routine, the Wall Street Journal and New York Times published front-page articles on the very same day about the relationship between cancer risks and hormone therapy but came to diametrically opposing conclusions.

  But standing at the department store counter, I feel compelled to pass along my limited and flawed understanding of the subject to Marte because my do-gooder humanitarian streak, coupled with what might be considered an elitist condescension, assumes that she might not have access to the caliber of doctors I go to—or have gone to, as I’ve right-sized my budget and now score synthetic hormones at a health clinic located under a freeway overpass in the dusty San Fernando Valley. Marte, maybe, dutifully nods as I fill her in.

  I pull out my list and read off the product number I’ve come to replace. The liquid concealer I’ve come for is so expensive it costs the exact same amount per ounce as beluga caviar. Clé de Peau’s silky cream foundation, B20 “GLO,” runs $120 an ounce. Clé de Peau roughly translates to mean “key to skin,” but it might be more accurately labeled “key to your wallet.” For that price, you’d think they could afford the “W.” While she reaches to retrieve it, I notice a second number on the label—“3500.” Could that be the dollar amount they predict users will spend over a lifetime? Probably. But there’s no time to do the math because Bobbi Brown’s Sunburst lip gloss really does have a warm glow. Her Tropic of Nectar blush is so peachy, and its name might even be a nod to Henry Miller, and Laura Mercier’s Terra Cotta lip pencil perfectly complements my fading lip line and it might be the key to my looking, if not younger, then just the best version of myself.

  And 6,906 miles away, the Greek economy is collapsing; and 5,457 miles away, 20,000 public sector workers are protesting for a living wage in London; and 16.3 miles across town, my son is ordering a three-dollar public school lunch whose ingredients most of the mothers in my zip code would never allow inside the bodies of their precious offspring but that my child will eat because I cannot afford a private middle school where sushi is being served in individual bento boxes.

  I shouldn’t be shopping like this because I’m on the declining side of my earning capacity. It’s possible that in the remaining part of my life, I will earn less money than I have made up until this point altogether. I am earning less, I have less time in which to spend it and yet I need more money. Much more money.* Besides the kid expenses, not to mention the essentials, like shoes and shampoo, after a lifetime of perfect vision, I need glasses. Root canals, colonoscopies, and regular osteoporosis screenings are required as well. There’s also the money I have spent on age-related sports injuries incurred while trying to get the amount of exercise recommended for a woman of fifty. And although I am an atheist, the only way I can afford the longer life span that the supplements I can’t afford are supposed to afford me will be to find gainful employment in the afterlife.

  And sure, given all of that, I should not be handing over my credit card, but I am not alone. No, I’m just further statistical confirmation of “The Lipstick Effect.” The worse economic times get, the more women splurge on small luxury items. Which is why, as I reach for the card, I review the list of things I do not and will never have the money for, now that I am a slave to my face.

  I have never owned a second home; I don’t really own my first home, mortgaged as it is. Never flown in a private plane, never holidayed in Turks and Caicos (had to look up the spelling of Turks and Caicos), and the likelihood that I will travel there is so remote that I’m not even sure where they’re located, though I am aware that they’re a spectacularly tony destination where vacationers’ effluence gets whisked swiftly away but flows untreated into the surrounding waters, causing degradation to endangered coral reefs.

  I’ve never purchased a designer handbag, never hired an interior designer or eaten at a Wolfgang Puck restaurant when I was paying. I also have never lived through a genocide, walked across Africa, or licked newspapers for nutritional value like Frank McCourt, although I was once tempted to lick a positive review in the New York Times. I have first-world problems, I know this, but they are still my first-world problems. It’s not that I want any one of these extravagances or that I think these things will make me happy, but there’s something about knowing I will probably never have them that’s not unlike how devastatingly sad I felt when I realized the window for having children had closed forever.

  I also kept buying tampons long after the periods ended, eyeing them wistfully in the bathrooms of younger women, until I contrived an actual justification to purchase. I reasoned that I should stock our bathrooms with tampons in case one of my son’s friends needs one. I’m sure I appeared deranged, strolling down the aisle, gleefully plucking the package off the shelf, triumphantly plunking it down at the checkout counter. “No, thanks, I don’t need a bag,” I chirped and sashayed out of the store clutching my totem of membership in the lady community. At home, I carefully opened the package, removing a few so the girls wouldn’t feel self-conscious about taking one. If I spend any more money today, it will threaten my Tampax budget.*

  So as I hand over my credit card and Marte repeats that she really wants to show me that scrub, I am holding the line at the outermost layer of my epidermis. It’s like Vietnam. Must not cross the seventeenth parallel. “No, I’m fine, but do you have any samples of moisturizers?” I say, as the realization sinks in that I have spent over two hundred dollars in less than five minutes. I must not leave without receiving something free, and moisturizers are the Holy Grail of all facial products. The sheer quantity of them on the market is astounding. Promising everything from age-defying renewal to
tightening, toning, repairing, rejuvenating and stimulating, the descriptions alone can restore your faith in the value of a liberal arts degree. The dramatically depicted ingredients range from the oceanic (seaweed, algae and fish oil) to the botanical (lavender, jojoba and maracuja).

  Many of the products on the market advertise under the moniker “cosmeceuticals,”* a term that conflates cosmetics with pharmaceuticals. Often this refers to “biologically active ingredients,” and despite the fact that the FDA does not recognize any such category, it has a ring of authority, but means nothing in this context. A frog contains biologically active ingredients; so do lima beans. So go figure.

  The saddest unguent on the counter has to be the tub of goop whose label is simple and to the point: Hope in a Jar. I have never purchased that one. It seems like the last stop on the line before I start making animal sacrifices and sleeping in a hyperbaric chamber. But I am not immune to the seductive powers of the adjectives and adverbs that promise miracles, and I have spent so much money, I deserve samples, damn it.

  But she doesn’t want to just give me a sample. No, Marte is personally going to make a sample for me. As she scoops a minuscule amount of a vanilla pudding–like substance into the smallest plastic container in the known world, I shudder picturing the factory that produces these miniature pods. I say a silent prayer that they’re not sorted by the tiny hands of child workers, and I promise myself I will reuse them when traveling. I try to make my features appear interested when she recites the antiaging qualities of this particular elixir, though I know perfectly well I have no intention of ever purchasing it. Depositing the teeny treasure into my purse, I move toward the door, but she is following me and subtly blocks my exit, positioning herself by another counter, manned by a slightly more mature version of herself. Marte tells me that her colleague Older Marte will show me that fruit exfoliant. Cornered. Matronly Marte takes my right hand and begins rubbing a fruit exfoliant on my skin. It’s mango, or pomegranate, or watermelon, and she’s massaging and massaging this cucumber, or papaya, or was it sweet potato? I have no idea, because the circular motion is starting to make me feel nauseous. She stops scrubbing and for some reason the skin on my hand looks brighter, shinier, whiter—how did she do that? “It’s only fifty dollars,” she tells me with an inflection that suggests that she is handing me fifty dollars.

  “Oh, that’s a bargain,” I hear myself say in agreement. “Only fifty dollars.”

  It’s made by a doctor, a doctor from New York, she tells me in the same voice my grandmother used to describe men who were good marriage material—a doctor! Marte says to Older Marte, “Tell her about the deal she can get.” They’re double-teaming me now.

  “If you spend two hundred dollars, you get this bottle of oxygenated, harmonized water for free.”

  My grandmother Rebecca, from Minsk, would have liked the sound of that water. In the summers during the 1940s, our entire clan traveled by Greyhound bus from where they had settled in Mobile, Alabama, a few hours to the north, to take the waters at Healing Springs. For centuries, the Muscogee people visited this site, where the mineral water was said to cure everything from dyspepsia to eczema. You would not only bathe in the springs, you’d drink its curative properties as well. My grandmother had lived through pogroms and the Depression, so she expected a lot of value from everything she purchased.

  “But will it keep my vagina from being so dry?” I blurt out. The Martes look at me blankly. “I was joking,” I say. “JK, as the kids say—just kidding.” But they just stare at me and I know I’ll be going home with Dr. Colbert’s Intensify Facial Discs, because they don’t know me or my sense of humor, because I said “dry vagina” and because she spent so much time on my hand.

  This time the financial exchange is rapid. Surgical, really. In that moment, I recall shopping when I was a kid, my mother holding her breath as each credit card she’d hand over would have to be tried before a sale could be completed. I would look around, hoping no friends from school were there to witness this ritual. At forty-nine, I have discovered that age gifts you with invisibility in all but monetary transactions. It’s also given me compassion for my mother. I have it covered, barely. Cash extracted, I leave.

  Arriving at home, I rush upstairs past my teenage son. “I’m working on a deadline,” I yell down to him, which is sort of true when you think about it. I immediately strip off my clothing and step into the shower, pushing aside the upside-down bottles of shampoo and body wash. I carefully place this jar, labeled “daily nutrition for skin,” next to the one marked “transdermal, bioenergized resurfacing solution,” which I purchased only a few weeks earlier. I take out a facial disc and begin scrubbing my left hand, wondering how many of the millions of American women born the same year as me are doing something similar at that very moment.

  After only a few circular motions, it’s clear that I simply have dirty hands. I am an idiot. Brown was never ever going to be the new black. I scrub my face hard. Remove another disc. It’s more scouring than scrubbing at this point, applying so much force that terra-cotta-colored capillaries bloom on the thinning skin around my nostrils. Thank God I bought that concealer, I think as I head down to heat up a frozen pizza for dinner.

  Marte must be at home by now as well. Marte, whose real name I may never know, because I too have worked service jobs under a “slave name,” is heating up the casserole she made yesterday from scratch. She’s boiling corn and steaming greens for her kids. Marte, who is actually twenty-nine, in all probability, didn’t need my lecture on hormones and vitamin D. She’s probably read the latest research and smartly decided to skip them all, and I hope she’s working on commission, because she deserves it.

  “KA-CHING” OR “CHA-CHING”?

  Dear God,

  Is it “ka-ching” or “cha-ching”? You’re so omniscient, you decide.

  I am no longer allowed to sing in front of my son. I can’t ask questions about school, no queries about girls, can’t look too proud or enthusiastic at ball games, and all public displays of affection are, of course, verboten. Must sit separately when taking him to the movies with his friends, must never be nude within a hundred feet of him, even if doors are closed, can’t allow a sigh to pass my lips (too old), an “oy” is forbidden (too Jewish), can’t make a loud sound in an enclosed space even if a shelf falls on my head.

  It’s all come down to starchy foods. I’ve been dragging myself out of bed every morning to get breakfast ready just so I can watch him eat the Aunt Jemima–brand pancakes I’ve mixed from scratch. But now he hates my pancakes, I chew too loudly, the timbre of my voice is grating and he’d prefer to eat alone.

  Our sole discussion of any length in the last few months took place over the course of an eight-hour car ride down the California coast, during which time we debated whether the proper pronunciation was “ka-ching” or “cha-ching” when mimicking a cash register sound. This went on for six and one-half hours. The remaining hour and a half he was sleeping, and although unconscious, he still managed to communicate his disdain through hostile body language.*

  The downhill slide began last year. I was instructed not to make eye contact with him on his middle school campus. Doing my best to walk while staring at my feet was difficult enough, but I once made the unforgivable mistake of waving hello, a gesture that was deemed way too enthusiastic. It caused so much distress I could only surmise it was the teenage equivalent of waterboarding. After that, I was instructed not to leave my car; instead, I was to text him when I was in his immediate vicinity. There was an occasion, however, when I was forced to address him in front of a girl who may or may not have been his girlfriend, and I cavalierly mentioned his (adorable) freckles. A teenage boy’s appearance is a very, very bad and inappropriate topic for his mother. There is zero tolerance in this arena for teenagers. You might inadvertently use the adjective “cute” when “handsome” is the desired effect, or vice versa. I suggest treading carefu
lly.

  On top of that, entering the immediate space of a teenager subjects your own appearance to a scrutiny I doubt Anna Wintour could withstand. It’s hard enough to please myself, but a teenager’s prohibitions include: do not wear any outfit that could be construed as either trying too hard, not trying hard enough, or classified simply as “trying.” I found out just how discerning the teenage eye can be when I enlisted my son in a project rebuilding elderly veterans’ homes that had been destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. I was going to introduce him to social activism and impress him with my knowledge of local fare while connecting him to the part of the country where I spent my early years. We’d work alongside volunteers from across the country, share beignets and étouffée, and contemplate the mysteries of NOLA, including the gender of the attractive, scantily clad women who walk the streets of the French Quarter from midnight to dawn. My teenager refused to eat meals at my table or work on my crew and declined to be photographed with me, all because I had the temerity to be wearing khaki work pants. What horrible crime did khaki commit? Was khaki responsible for the collapse of the euro, the decline of science education in America, or Hot Pockets? Later, when I asked what the most memorable part of the trip had been, he replied it was befriending Skunk and Sam, the resident cats at Café Du Monde.

  Tonight, however, my stock will go up, I am sure of it.

  I’ve scored something that no teenager who plays the electric bass can resist, an invitation to a private concert of a well-known indie band. But we’re late-as-usual-Mom-why-can’t-you-remember-where-your-keys-are, and we’re rushing to get out of the house.