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

by Gurwitch, Annabelle

  On the other hand, I would like to ask him to pay for my son’s college and my face-lift. During our spree, I mentioned I was thinking about getting one, and he said he didn’t think I needed it, which is flattering, but at the same time, I wonder, would he offer if he thought I did?

  Would he let me live in his guesthouse if I got divorced? Why did I ever break up with him? Was our somnambulant sex really that much worse than some of the sex I’ve had when I’ve been very much awake? It was. Still, what if I threw myself at him and got pregnant? I’d probably only have to fuck him once and I’d be set for the next eighteen years. And better the devil you know wants to fuck you from behind while you pretend to be his mute housekeeper than the devil you don’t know. But getting knocked up and entrapping a man is now physically impossible for me. Not that this is something I ever even remotely entertained, but the idea that I can’t do it is upsetting. Of course, I am twenty years older and a different race from the woman he married. On top of that, if he can’t go in my bathroom, how could I think he’d ever enter my vagina? By the time I climb the flight of stairs to my bedroom, I am so exhausted I have to lie down.

  I know in my heart that had we stayed together any longer it would have ended disastrously. I also know he’s never coming to my house. That is how it is with our rich and famous friends; we go to their homes, but they do not visit our humble abodes.

  This is what it means to live “Hollywood adjacent.” Hollywood is a place where nepotism runs rampant and people rise to the top on sheer will, talent or membership in the Church of Scientology. Having any family member in the business can give you a colossal leg up, but there are also success stories of people who were once living in their cars or emerge completely from outside the show-business world. Usually those involve the extremely gorgeous, like Hilary Swank, or the uniquely gifted, like Melissa McCarthy. Most of the rest of us have done one if not a dozen failed pilots or dreadful movies, which is how it is that I’ve acted opposite actors like Anne Hathaway, Shia LaBeouf, Uma Thurman and Patrick Stewart in movies and TV shows no one remembers. You might even have remained friendly with some of the elite. You’ll email each other, but it’s so hard to nail down plans. You will invite them to your parties, but unless you’ve scheduled around their demanding social calendar, it won’t be possible for them to put in an appearance. You’ll see them at a party and you’ll be laughing and talking politics and they’ll say, “I don’t know why we don’t get together.” But you’ll know why. You might live on the same block for seven years, during which time you share major holidays and glasses of wine and swim in their pool. When they tell you they’re frustrated by their square footage or are considering adding a bridge from the master bedroom to the pool, you’ll know as soon as their TV series gets picked up for a fifth season they’ll be moving to a more luxurious abode and that when they do you will not hear from them regularly, if ever again. You will not vacation together. Your kids will go to different schools, and you will find yourself stuck in traffic wondering if you will spend your golden years in a dusty apartment with no air-conditioning and a view of the parking lot in an industrial suburb of Los Angeles known for its preponderance of meth labs. You’ll look up at a billboard looming over the roadside and see a familiar face staring down at you. You will find it hard to believe that you and they ever breathed the same air, shared confidences, laughed so hard at a lunch table together that cola came out of your noses or that you can be found in clips on YouTube in a lip-lock with that very same person.

  Sitting in traffic on my own block a few days later, I receive a text: “Thx, she loved the purse. My mom’s birthday is coming up, what should we get her?”

  A few weeks later, my husband and I have accepted an invitation for cocktails and dessert at the home of someone my husband worked with years ago. So eager was I to sample the hostess’s legendary delectables at this industry soiree that we arrived uncharacteristically half an hour early. Peering into the garden, we can clearly see several well-heeled couples seated at a dinner table finishing a meal. It takes only a few minutes to surmise that we are second-tier guests. We wait in the car until we see other members of our caste arriving. I could have turned around and gone home, but I’d already gotten dressed up, she makes the most amazing trifle and Madonna’s pilates teacher just pulled in behind us. Definitely Hollywood adjacent.

  MONSTER BALL

  Dear God,

  Please let me remain recognizable to my friends.

  “Ladies, may I show you to a table?” the maître d’ asks us.

  “‘Ladies,’” I whisper to my friend Carla. “Well, at least he didn’t ‘ma’am’ us.”

  We settle into the seating area of an outdoor restaurant, hold our menus at arm’s length and simultaneously reach for our reading glasses.

  “Should we order fries?” I ask.

  “For old times’ sake, we have to, don’t you think?”

  “They only have sweet potato. Let’s put a ton of salt on them.”

  “And a dipping sauce!” Carla giggles with that same piercing high-pitched laugh that first assaulted my ears in Mrs. Kramer’s fifth-grade math class.

  “Definitely.” If I’m going to eat something stupid, I don’t like it to be even remotely healthy. Carla looks remarkably the same as when we saw each other last, but times have changed in Miami Beach. This bistro occupies the space that used to be our favorite greasy spoon. She and I haven’t seen each other in thirty years, but we’re able to pick up right where we left off. It can be like that with girlfriends, especially if you both always felt like oddballs. It’s only fitting that we have this reunion over fried food because we grew up sharing plates of deep-fried clams at our local Howard Johnson before cosmopolitan hotels crowded the coastlines of South Florida.

  Every trace of your great-aunt Sylvia’s Miami Beach is long gone, but through the miracle of the Internet, even the few friends I’ve lost track of have been found, and that’s how Carla and I have been able to rekindle our friendship.

  I treasure my old friends. Or, as one of them recently corrected me, “longtime” friends. Don’t say “old,” say “longtime friends.”

  You need your sisters. Even though your male friends adore you, they evaporate into thin air at the first mention of a hot flash.

  Only a few days earlier, I was heading to a job in New Jersey when Michelle, another longtime friend, was on her way to Long Island to visit her father-in-law, who’d had triple bypass surgery, and she needed to talk. The best we could arrange was a meet-up in the cell phone waiting lot at New York’s LaGuardia Airport. Amid a sea of limo drivers and what appeared to be mobile escort services, I jumped out of my rental car and into her minivan. Our sons are the same age. She had big news.

  “Pubes.”

  “No!” I screamed. “Did you see them yourself?”

  “No, I heard about it from my husband.”

  “Oh my God! That’s not happening yet at my house.”

  “Well, Miles has started shaving.”

  “Just think, we’ve known each other since before we started shaving our legs, and we will probably start shaving our faces at the same time. So much to look forward to!” But wait, there’s more. She’d taken my advice to stock tampons at her house, and one of her son’s friends had gotten her period during his birthday pool party.

  “What did you do?” Between us we have only boys, so neither of us has prepared for The Talk. “She’d locked herself in the bathroom and didn’t want me to call her mother, so I planted myself outside the door and I just kept repeating, ‘So you probably know the way things work down there,’ like I was talking about NAFTA. It got very quiet. It only took about twenty minutes, but I was so exhausted afterward I slept for sixteen hours.”

  “I am not ready for that. You know, it would just be so much easier if we lived together.” When my son was a toddler, the idea of built-in babysitters made that FLDS sister-
wife concept seem almost palatable. At this age, if it weren’t for those starched rayon-blend prairie dresses and the nauseating prospect of having sex with a relative of Warren Jeffs, living in the company of women would once again hold appeal for me.

  “Sonya stays with us a lot, doesn’t she, Mom?” It’s true. She’s one of several friends who’re time-sharing the divorce couch in our guest bedroom. She’s going through a messy separation and stays with us when she’s in town for court appearances. The situation could be reversed in the future.

  If I have achieved nothing else, I feel a sense of accomplishment that I’ve got a (tiny) guest room with a sleeper sofa always available for my girlfriends to visit. I put out fresh towels, roses from the garden and at least one good pillow.*

  Many of my friends are turning fifty within months of each other, but we appear to be aging at such variable rates it’s almost enough to convince you that the gravitational pull affects people differently. Some of it is genetics at work, and some of it is work at work.

  “Carla, have you done something? Because you look better now than you did in high school.”

  “Here’s the thing, I always looked thirty years older than I was. My age is just catching up to my face.”

  “Well, it’s not fair,” I say between bites. “Jeanette is so stunning now. I think she’s had a face-lift and maybe her brow lifted? I’m not really sure what she did. Our friendship was always based on my thinking I was better looking than her, not that she knew that, of course, but now she looks younger than me.”

  “But does she look younger, or does she just look different from how she used to?” Carla says.

  She poses a good question. Cosmetic surgery doesn’t really make you look younger, particularly next to someone who is genuinely younger than you. You just look like someone who has had something done. There’s also good and bad work, and like porn, you know it when you see it.

  “Well, she doesn’t have ‘monster face,’” I say. That’s a term I use for crossing that line where you no longer resemble your fellow humans. It’s a slippery slope. Are nose jobs okay, but a face-lift unacceptable? Lasers good, knives bad? Too much Botox and your face becomes a shiny monolith. Too much filler and you’ve got Pillow Face. Too much plastic surgery and you look like a Picasso.

  I think what I want is to age gracefully, to be the best version of myself. But when did I look most like “me”? Was it the “me” I was at forty, or the “me” at twenty?

  I felt disappointed and then strangely liberated when in 2011 Gloria Steinem owned up to having had cosmetic procedures done. Steinem said she regretted it, although women having work done and later claiming to regret it seems part of the ritual of getting it done. One might even argue that the quest to look younger is the modern expression of the search for the fountain of youth, which first appears in written records somewhere around 425 BC. Being young and looking youthful are two different things but to appear young is the next best thing, and there are a myriad of choices available for first-worlders.*

  None of this pursuit holds any appeal for Carla, having aged into her face. She’s had a long and successful career as an FBI profiler and she believes her face gives her added authority in the courtroom.

  “Are you in touch with Allison?” I ask.

  “No, would I still recognize her?”

  “Maybe not. She wears less makeup now than she did in high school. For the last eighteen years she’s worked at an animal sanctuary caring for rescued baboons. A few months ago I asked her how she felt about aging and she told me, ‘I don’t look in the mirror very often. I see myself reflected in the eyes of the primates I’m helping to end their lives with dignity.’”

  “I respect that.” Carla nods.

  “Me too. It’s very Jane Goodall—she’s one of my heroes. I’ve always wondered what kind of sunscreen she uses because her skin looks great.* Anyway, Allison is also a regional distributor of Nu Skin antiaging products and offered to sell me a galvanic microdermabrasion facial wand for three hundred and fifty dollars last year.”

  Nothing makes any sense. In fact, the majority of people who have cosmetic procedures are middle-income earners.* The “soccer-momization” of cosmetic procedures might be the most telling sign that we’re in the grip of a collective facial dysmorphic disorder.

  When I’m sure that no one in my family is awake, I can be found intently studying websites devoted to disparaging the disastrous things celebrities are doing to their faces, but these are only rivaled by the number of sites decrying the haggard appearance of those who resist going under the knife. Oh, if only these famous women had had the good sense to take Deborah Harry’s words to heart, to die young and stay pretty! Debbie Harry, it’s worth noting, finding herself still very much alive and kicking, has been extremely forthcoming about having had a cornucopia of improvements. In yet another frightening sign of aging, I don’t actually know who most of the Kristens, Kendras and Kates (not the Middleton Kate) are, but sadly I could give a general accounting of their current weight and marital status. Meanwhile, it is doubtful we will see the visages of genuinely fascinating public figures like Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir, former prime minister of Iceland and the first openly gay head of state, Margaret Atwood, Aung San Suu Kyi, and Sonia Sotomayor splashed across tabloid covers—tabloids that I would never, ever consider purchasing but am forced to peruse when I’ve accidentally on purpose found myself in the longest line at the supermarket.

  One of the unexpected consequences of the rise of social media sites is that everyone feels to a certain extent like they are in the public eye, or at least in contact with people they went to high school with and, of course, their exes. If that’s not compelling enough, boomers are trying to maintain a youthful appearance in a job market that favors younger employees.

  In About Face, an HBO documentary with supermodels discussing the loss of beauty, former model Paulina Porizkova claims it is worse for a great beauty to suffer the loss of her youth to the aging process than for us mere mortals. I would like to state for the record that I think that’s a load of crap. It’s just as big a deal for the rest of us who were never paid $10K to get out of bed. Maybe bigger. Just because you’re short doesn’t make falling and breaking your hip hurt any less.*

  Growing up, I never liked my face. I was born in the 1960s, but I had a face that suggested I was about to be marched across Russian potato fields on a pogrom in the 1890s. I came by this naturally, as a second-generation American with Russian Ashkenazi Jewish roots on both sides of my family.

  My face took a ribbing in Miami Beach, where I grew up surrounded by girls with tan, heart-shaped faces, while I was pale, with a long, sad face, and oversized features. Kids called me “nigger lips,” which was the worst thing they could think of to call a white girl in the seventies. During a consultation about removing my wisdom teeth, our local oral surgeon took it upon himself to measure my bottom lip and informed my parents it was several centimeters larger than the average Caucasian-American lip. He offered to “normalize” my lips for no extra charge. I might have even been in favor of this idea, but luckily my folks had the sense to dismiss it offhand. At forty-nine my lips have shrunk to an average size, and if I’d had that reduction I would be completely lipless today.

  I tried to make my face fit in. I would lie in the sun, slathered in baby oil, cradling a reflecting foil made just for that purpose. When the infamous Farrah Fawcett swimsuit poster came along, I got her hairstyle and I could just about manage to make it work, though in pictures, I can see that the Florida humidity prevented my hair from really feathering properly; it just winged. Those frizzy wings, coupled with ten extra high school pounds and the deep tan, made me look like a chipmunk. Luckily, soon after that the Ramones played at a small venue in Fort Lauderdale. It was life-changing. I immediately stopped going out in the sun, adopted thrift shop clothing, dyed my hair a series of artificial colors and never tried to
fit in again.

  It wasn’t until I hit forty that I started to look at my face critically. I became obsessed with the bags under my eyes. They were all I could see when I looked in the mirror. I began to see the bags as something separate from my face, something that needed to be removed. I convinced myself it was a genetic problem. And it is. I am genetically predisposed to look as tired as I actually am.

  It took only forty minutes to take out the bags I had spent forty years accumulating. While I was recovering and feeling like a character in Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls, I wrestled with a case of buyer’s remorse. Had I tampered with an essential part of myself? I reasoned that we carry eggs from other women, take antidepressants and adopt radical dietary regimens, therapies and lifestyles, so was this luggage under my eyes really indispensable to a definition of myself? What about a mole that became cancerous? Wouldn’t I immediately have that removed and never think twice about it? Once my eyes healed I didn’t have to worry anymore because it turned out that I had fixed one problem but created another. Now I have too much hollow space under my eyes.

  Even so, I am not immune to the siren song of the latest innovations to hit the market. I’ve had things injected in my face that I wouldn’t clean my house with. Once or twice a year, I raid my savings to get my fix from a doctor in Beverly Hills who has clearly sized me up as the sucker that I am. I’m not actually sure what he charges, as it seems to vary widely from visit to visit and I suspect his fees have something to do with his mood and his current credit card balance.* I prefer going to someone I don’t like. Having been a client of several practitioners of these dark arts, I have learned that none of them are immune to making mistakes and it’s just less disappointing if I don’t like them in the first place.