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

by Gurwitch, Annabelle

  I’ve filled, frozen and ultrasounded, all in the name of what is often referred to as “maintenance.” The last time I went to see the wizard, he did an uneven job, and to correct it he added so much Botox over one eyebrow that I could barely open that lid for a month. On one occasion he said, “I have some extra filler. Let me put it in your chin—you need a bigger chin, like mine,” and before I could say, I don’t want more chin. I don’t like your chin! he had done it. I hated that extra chinnage, which did fade with time, but still. I used to wonder who would let someone experiment on their face and now I know—me.

  “Maintenance” is truly a misnomer because what no one tells you is that it’s a zero-sum game. You look the very best immediately after one of these treatments, while your face is slightly swollen. The swelling restores your face’s lost volume in a way that looks more natural than anything you can get on the market today. Once that goes away, the results, if noticeable at all, begin to fade, day by day, until very shortly afterward, sometimes weeks, you look exactly the same as you did the day you forked over an amount that an entire family in Turkmenistan could live on for a year. The similarity of “radio-frequency” nonsurgical face-lifts to electroshock therapy is not something anyone tells you either. Sadly, unlike with ECT, there is no short-term memory loss. I have only myself to blame when recalling the excruciatingly painful jolts of electricity I have paid to have pumped into my face. Studies show that when people believe they are drinking expensive wine, they enjoy it more than when they sample the exact same beverage they’re told sells at a lower price point. Perhaps after shelling out so much money, we have to convince ourselves that we’ve improved our looks. Heroin addicts call it chasing the dragon when you’re trying to recapture that first amazing high, and this is much the same fruitless pursuit.*

  After the big earthquake eventually hits Los Angeles, it’s not hard to imagine desperate women, unrecognizable even to their own personal assistants, roaming the streets of Beverly Hills trying to score black-market Botox. If I were truly enterprising, I would start stockpiling vials of injectables and store them in my AARP refrigerated tote so I could sell them out of the trunk of my car at massively inflated prices. In fact, given the volatility of the stock market, this might be my best hope at funding my retirement.

  My grandmothers never grappled with such nonsense. These matriarchs were peasant stock who survived the Depression and had managed to rise to the middle class by the 1950s, and all that effort showed on their faces. They embraced their roles as grandmothers when not only being a grandma but looking like a grandma was a sign of respect. My grandmother Frances always kept a tub of cool, creamy, cucumbery Pond’s in her bathroom cabinet. That was as much vanity as she had time and money to afford. She really did have the softest, most glowing skin until her death at eighty-nine, so maybe it worked.

  At seventy-five, my mother feels bad about her neck. She’s had the benefit and curse of rising just enough into a social strata in which she has longtime friends who can afford to pony up for procedures, while she cannot. My mother, who had the temerity to turn fifty in 1985, the year the United Nations proclaimed International Youth Year, confided that she felt old next to her friends who’d had work done. At the time, I dismissed this as ridiculous, but now I understand the sentiment. Why wouldn’t my mother want to age as gracefully as her peers, as the saying goes? It’s not a stretch to say that you can get a pretty good idea of someone’s economic status at fifty or older by looking at their skin.

  “Do you think you’ll ever be tempted?” I ask Carla as we finish the very last sweet potato fry.

  “We almost lost my sister-in-law when she went in for a tummy tuck. She had a heart attack on the table. I couldn’t put my family through that. I can’t ever remember to get any products, either, so everyone is just going to have to live with my face.”

  “So what exactly do you do as an FBI forensic profiler?”

  “It’s like putting the pieces of a puzzle together. My specialty is examining audio and visual evidence.”

  “Well, if I do have any more work done, at least I can hope that you will always recognize me.”

  “It all depends on how good it is,” Carla reminds me as we kiss good-bye.

  Here’s what I know. I liked my face best in my forties, but I’d like it to stop aging now. My face has progressed past the point where I recognize it as “me.” Age can stamp a certain sameness on the face just like plastic surgery. I can’t yet wrap my brain around or afford a face-lift, and that’s where humility and a sense of humor come in. “Hello, new old face,” I say to myself while I brush my teeth in the morning. “Soon you will be gone and I will get to say hello to my next, newer, older face, if I’m lucky.”

  I love my pals who are going face commando. I respect my friends who are content with their newly renovated faces and I empathize with my peers who want to look, if not younger, then like the best versions of themselves, whatever that may be. I’d just rather not be photographed next to Rhonda, Jannelle, Maureen, Paula or Cynthia. And definitely not Jeanette.

  AREA FIFTY-ONE

  Dear God,

  If reincarnation really exists I’d like to be a few inches taller in my next life. And I don’t mean hair height.

  “Golden hour,” that’s what it’s called in the film business. The perfect time to shoot a scene outdoors in Los Angeles. The light is soft and flattering, even for women who are certain of their age, and the scorching desert sun doesn’t beat down like a police interrogation lamp. It’s also an ideal hour to play tennis in the stagnant, heavy heat of late August. That’s what my husband, son and I were doing one Sunday night: squeezing in those last minutes of daylight on the Vermont Canyon free tennis courts a few blocks from our home. We’d just about exhausted ourselves when my son looked up in the sky and noticed a V-shaped pattern of lights. Even I had to admit that it looked like a formation, and it did seem to be moving. Fast. Really fast.

  “Mom, it’s alien spacecrafts.”

  “No, honey, it’s weather balloons or satellites. You know, there are so many military installations here in California, we have no idea what they’re doing.”

  “No, Mom, the lights are so far away, past the stratosphere. It’s got to be UFOs. Are you denying that the government has documented real sightings?”

  “Sweetheart, that’s not true.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because no one in our government can keep a secret,” I said, referring not only to Watergate and Troopergate, but how everyone knows that Eliot Spitzer keeps his socks on during sex.

  “What about that secret military base, Area 51?”

  “Area 51,” I said, “is not that mysterious. It has never been shown to be anything other than an ordinary Air Force base.” But I can feel my pulse racing as I peer into the heavens. The tennis courts do kind of look like a landing strip. Are we about to experience a close encounter of the third kind?*

  “Would you want to go, Ezra?” I asked. “If aliens landed and invited you onto their ship, would you go with them?”

  “Of course, Mom!”

  Of course he would. What thirteen-year-old wouldn’t want to hitch a ride to the stars?

  “Brush your teeth, try to get at least eight hours of sleep a night, and text us pictures—we’ll keep you on our phone plan.”

  The three of us stood there. We peered into the sky. We were the only ones left in the canyon. It was so quiet.

  That’s when reality set in. There’s no chance that I’m going anywhere. I’m too old to be a candidate for interplanetary travel. What would extraterrestrials want with me? To see the effect of the speed of light on the aging body? I’d never make it out of our solar system much less the Milky Way. Besides, if you’d traveled across the universe, wouldn’t your first stop on our little blue marble be the White House, The Hague or the Kremlin? How about the South of France for a restorative infu
sion of Chateauneuf-du-Pape? But there was a time in my life when I was sure they were coming for me.

  I’ve wanted many things in my life, including balancing my checkbook to within even one hundred dollars and summoning the resolve to resist movie theater popcorn, but more than anything I wanted to leave the planet, and I was confident I would get that opportunity. That’s what we all believed in the cult I belonged to in the eighties in New York.

  Not that it seems any less implausible or makes sense in any way, but many, many people in the eighties belonged to some kind of self-help—or self-hurt—group. Downtown New York was bursting with drugs, transvestites and cheap places for artists to squat or rent. Add to the mix new-age mystics, Buddhist-inspired sects and self-realization fellowships that denied bathroom privileges, and half of the population of lower Manhattan fit into one or more of these categories. The group I was a part of existed because of the abundance of all of those elements, but unlike Werner Erhard’s EST seminars, there was no fee, no recruitment, no Scientology secrecy, and you could go to the bathroom anytime you wanted. There was also no unflattering dress code. I was horrified to read in 1997 about the mass suicide of thirty-nine members of the Hale-Bopp UFO sect, who favored boxy jumpsuits and adopted boring monosyllabic unisex monikers. It was also unfathomable to me that anyone would have been content to live with sect leaders “Do” and “Ti” on a 3.4-acre property with a pool and tennis courts but be housed in dormitory-style rooms with bunk beds. Ridiculous! But snagging a seat on a spaceship? I was on board with that idea.

  How I ended up in a UFO cult is directly related to my moving to New York in the fall of 1980. I had fair to middling SAT scores and a grade point average good enough to make me a decent candidate for NYU acceptance, but I had other advantages working in my favor: desperation and good timing. I remain convinced I was accepted because I cried and begged to be admitted during my interview. I hear this doesn’t work anymore in the college application process, but as luck would have it, I had specifically requested placement in their Experimental Theatre Wing, a fledgling program that was actively soliciting students for enrollment.* The night before my audition I had attended a student production. There was no set, no lighting to speak of, no costumes and no script. The cast members, a man and a woman, both of them androgynous-looking, were attired solely in black, as was everyone in attendance. Halfway through the performance, the woman mounted the piano, sang a self-composed song of disaffection and began screeching, “I’m fucking a piano,” at which point a real pizza delivery guy distributed pies to both the cast and the audience. I had no idea what it meant, but I knew that the performers wanted to change the perception of language, pizza and maybe the world. I had to become a part of this eccentric and iconoclastic community.*

  I wasn’t merely heading off to college; I was hoping to find a new family. Such is the promise that the theatrical community holds. Whenever a friend lets me know that their kid has been bitten by the drama bug, my reaction is always the same: “Call me immediately! What is going wrong over at your house? We’ve got to nip this in the bud!”

  It’s possible I was just hardwired to be the kind of person who looks at other families and longs to be part of them, who thinks that everyone else’s life looks better than my own, but it’s also possible that childhood experiences carved deep grooves in my brain, making a certain path irresistible for me.

  Growing up, my family weathered numerous dramatic reversals of fortune that to a child seemed to happen overnight, like magic.

  Sometimes we’d be eating fried chicken off the mahogany pull-down trays in the back of my father’s Rolls-Royce, and sometimes it was Kentucky Fried right out of the bucket. Dad’s love of cars proved a reliable barometer for our bank account. Good times meant matching Mercedeses for my folks, but I might come home and see a Chevrolet in the driveway where a Jaguar had been parked a few weeks prior. I still dream of that Jaguar. The compact XJ6 in the 1970s was the Petit Trianon of luxury cars, with its leather interior, polished wood and chrome fixtures. It also never worked. We took turns sitting in it, basking in its elegance, as it sat in our driveway, the salty Floridian air eating away at its undercarriage.

  This lifestyle had its advantages. There were vacations in the Bahamas and Cozumel, regular exposure to classical music, art, and plays by Noel Coward. There were also unique educational opportunities. I was the only student at my school who could spot an FBI plainclothes agent. In 1978, my parents were invited to a party on the yacht of an Arab sheikh who claimed to be looking to invest in American business ventures. What they didn’t know was that they, along with other business types who worked at the margins, were being used as shills in an FBI investigation that became known as Abscam, intended to ferret out dirty poli-ticians. My mother maintains that she knew something was wrong because the appetizers served included Ritz crackers topped with Cheez Whiz. Later, the Justice Department would accuse the FBI of entrapment, and months of investigations of all the parties involved ensued. I learned to spot the flat paint on their bland American sedans before answering the door to poker-faced agents wearing ill-fitting polyester suits and reflective sunglasses. I was instructed to tell anyone that came to our door that my folks weren’t at home. Ever. They were never at home. I also became well versed in avoiding creditors’ phone calls. One night as my father and I were watching Star Trek reruns, I said, “Who on earth would have their house mortgaged to Phil Rizzuto and The Money Store?!” We did. That’s who. My family was way ahead of the curve: we were carrying two or three mortgages long before everyone in the country was underwater. It was both exciting and terrible, the perfect combination that leads one to pursue a life in show business or to fall under the spell of a guru. Or both.

  All of these experiences left me longing for what appeared to be a stable home. I’d attach myself to friends whose parents had jobs I could understand, like architect, dentist or accountant. I pined to be adopted by them or by any of my teachers who showed an interest in me, and during that thirty-minute performance and a three-day stay in the city, I fell into a love affair with New York that I’ve never gotten over. New Yorkers seemed like one big extended family to me.*

  But I found something even better than the theatrical community. A family who professed love for me not only in this life but in past lives as well. This was a bond way stronger than plain old Jewish guilt. It was destiny.

  How do you meet someone who claims to channel disembodied spirits? It happened the way so many things do, especially when you’re young: through someone you’re sleeping with. That my college curriculum included learning to whirl like a dervish made the idea of someone entering transcendental states seem perfectly reasonable. It was sometime in that first year in New York when my boyfriend became acquainted with new-age seekers and he introduced me to this group.

  Van Zandt hailed from Texas and had a bigger-than-life personality. He was only thirty-five when we met, but as I was nineteen and in college, he seemed decades older. He was an accomplished classical pianist who preferred idiosyncratic composers like Scriabin but supported himself as a church organist in the outer boroughs of New York City. I rather doubt he ever mentioned his paranormal activities at his church gigs. A gay man who established himself in the post–Stonewall liberation West Village of Manhattan, he made annual treks to China, Tibet and other parts east to add to his collection of antique textiles, and frequented the club scenes. He didn’t wear a turban on his head or tell fortunes by staring into a crystal ball, though he did have both, but he did, every Friday night for the better part of seven years, give psychic readings and channel spirits in his incense-filled living room.

  Van Zandt charged no money, nor profited in any way other than being a much-sought-after dinner guest. There were always hangers-on requesting psychic predictions, but he was such a handsome, charismatic and warm person, he probably would have been just as popular without the readings.

  I was instantly absorbe
d into the fold. We were told by the entity he channeled that we had all been part of a family in ancient Egypt. And not just any family but a rather prominent one. The personage, David, whom Van Zandt channeled, informed us that he was the reincarnation of the pharaoh Akhenaten, often credited as the father of monotheism. The others in our group were sisters, aunts, uncles and priests of the high court. I was one of his cherished daughters, Meritaten. Akhenaten was a much more interesting pharaoh, much cooler than the better known Tut, the boy king. Akhe was an avatar that advanced the culture in many ways, including being the first pharaoh to allow depictions of himself in activities of his everyday life, a move toward populism that was so radical for a monarch during this period that historians suspect he was killed for such a heretical action. This was a far more exalted heritage than being the great-granddaughter of a junk dealer who traveled from shtetl to shtetl on a swayback mule. Because of this connection, we threw ourselves into study of this ancient time period. You want to know anything about the eighteenth dynasty, just ask me, I know almost as much as if I had lived then myself. I would often go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to visit their collection of artifacts, items I believed I had called my own only three thousand years earlier.

  Ours was a loose affiliation of artist types. We began to refer to ourselves as Members of the Council. These were self-appointed positions; even though we had lived as nobility in a previous life, we were a very egalitarian body. There was a debonair gentleman who worked as a very successful nose in the perfume industry, a busboy, a buyer for a prestigious fashion house, the girlfriend of a bona fide rock star and there were always colorful gay men, lovers of Van Zandt. They were the exact opposite of the members in the last organization I had belonged to, the Temple Beth Shalom Youth Group.