The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones

by Sandra Tsing Loh

  This will of course require bookshelves. Mr. X used to take care of things like bookshelves, but I doubt he will do that for me any longer. If I ask Mr. Y to procure shelves, they will be—I don’t know—like “stage shelves” (being that Mr. Y is not the handiest person). No matter: I dog-ear pages of the IKEA catalog for bookshelves that the new claw-free me will assemble myself!

  I find I am thinking with unusual swiftness and clarity and penetration. My thoughts flow quickly and easily.

  I have come up with ideas for three books, four one-woman shows, and a community-based (think Zip Car) Costco purchase-share plan!

  I’m going to write a blog about my happiness project, a happiness blog!

  I’m going to create a happiness app, a depression app, and a “what the hell is an app” app!

  I am labeling all my ideas on color-coded charts in color-coded folders in color-coded files in my brand-new file cabinet. It is one from Staples with 237 individual screws and twenty-seven steps that it took me seven hours to hand-assemble. I am not kidding.

  In moving several boxes of books to make way for the cabinet, with the Herculean energy of a crazed lumberjack, I see an old paperback on Southern recipes and hostessing. It is a book outlining what to serve at funerals called Just Because You’re Dead Is No Excuse. How very true! I laugh. In the mail, intrepid menopause specialist Ann has sent me some catalogs especially targeted for middle-aged women. What fun! With enigmatic names like As We Change and Solutions, they contain fascinating items like bathing suits with skirts and bathtub reading racks with a wineglass holder and special toe-bunion spreaders. Excitedly I mark my catalog and order up a storm! Sure! As We Change . . . Solutions!

  CLARE HAS crashed.

  She is still in her bathrobe at 11:00 A.M. Her two kids are home with the flu. They are parked on the living room couch, watching Nick 2. The TV wails and wails and wails. Clare’s ankle is swollen and wrapped in ice in an Ace bandage. She looks terrible.

  “What happened to your foot?” I ask.

  She puts her hand up. Her voice is toneless.

  “Remember how excited I was about the couponing?”

  I nod. It was the one activity I hadn’t gotten to.

  “So I read the USA Today article about it, and it turns out what really gets these couponers going is double couponing, triple couponing, and extreme couponing. It’s surprisingly technical. You can’t go on impulse. To rack up those savings, you have to be really disciplined.

  “So I open up my Sunday paper,” she says, “I pull out all those glossy coupon sheets I typically ignore, and I begin cutting them out. I see a coupon for Air Wick, regularly a dollar twenty-nine, today a dollar nineteen. There’s a five-cents-off coupon for a two-pack of rubber bands. Next up, six Irish Spring deodorants for five dollars. And instead of feeling excited, I’m starting to feel sort of sick. Rubber bands? Air Wick? I don’t even want this stuff. It’s depressing!

  “And look at this,” she says. “I clicked on some wrong savings link, and now I’m starting to get all these strange e-mails. Here’s an ad that was sent to me just this morning. It shows—look!—this silver-haired woman who is really really excited about . . . catheter delivery. Who are all these crazy beeyotches? And, oh my God, is this, in just a few short years, going to become me? The thing is that I do adore home delivery, and I can almost, almost imagine how delivery of a personal medical device like a catheter could really provoke some excitement! But maybe I’m just lashing out desperately and losing my mind! Maybe instead of really happy, all of America’s women including me are just really, really insane!

  “So I’m now looking around the house,” she continues, “and instead of happy I’m feeling kind of pathetic. My kids think my singing is terrible. My sculptures look like frozen poo. I can’t even cut coupons without a meltdown—I don’t have one-tenth of the coping power of one of those . . . those cat ladies who collect Hummel figurines. I used to mock my mother for doing that, and now instead of mocking her I am amazed by her because she led such a more limited life but seemed much more happy. What I would give to be made happy by a cat and some Hummel figurines—think of all the money I would save! Who wouldn’t prefer a cat and Hummel figurines over antidepressants? So yesterday when the kids were at school, I’m sitting in my bathrobe playing Solitaire like some addicted lab rat. Jesus the gardener appears suddenly, like this apparition, just outside my home-office window, with his panama hat, leaf-blowing. I am suddenly frightened that Jesus will look up and see his middle-aged First World lady ‘boss’ playing Solitaire while Jesus is actually working for a living.”

  “Sure,” I say. Inwardly I coin a phrase: “Soliterror”—the terror that another person is going to come up behind you and see those white cards floating on that telltale green background. Mr. X used to catch me playing Solitaire when he would water plants just outside my office, and he was as outraged as if I were streaming porn. (“You told me and the kids to leave you alone to write, and you’re sitting at your desk playing Solitaire!” “I’m just warming up to write!” I’d protest.)

  “So before Jesus’s hat can tilt up and he sees me,” Clare continues, “I try frantically to click over to another screen, away from the cards—but I click and click and click and it isn’t switching. Starting to panic, I try to reach behind the computer to actually yank out the power cord. Never mind saving the game, I think . . . it’s all lost! It’s all lost! Do you see? I actually find myself thinking the words: ‘It’s all lost.’ But alas, as I lunge forward I actually fall off my chair, right onto a now-broken plate—that had also flown off my desk—of a Starbucks cream-cheese-and-apple muffin. I am the first person in history ever to have sprained her ankle playing Solitaire.”

  “Oh, I’m sure many others have done that,” I say unconvincingly.

  “I’ve got to give it up cold turkey. Kyle! Kyle! No!”

  “Oh no,” I say. “Don’t go crazy.” I’m afraid that if she gives it up I too will have to commit to giving it up, and I am not ready to do that. “What, Clare? We’re already depressed, and now what? We’re going to take away the one thing that dependably gives us pleasure? Remember Jonathan Franzen. Don’t blame the cards, Clare—use the cards. I myself have a Solitaire practice that is very, very sophisticated. My technique has taken decades to perfect. Only the masters can do it—I call it ‘Chasing the Cat.’ Simply put, I openly and without shame set up my computer to ping back and forth between my exciting Solitaire game and my boring article. Over the next four hours, it more and more dawns on me that I’m making no work progress, my Solitaire game is getting more frustrating, I now have just forty minutes until my deadline, I’m really screwing up this time. Now comes the strangely pleasurable adrenaline-fueled panic of having procrastinated for too long. . . . And now my day is exciting. And in panic I finish just under the wire. Whee! It’s like giving yourself permission to smoke just a little bit of crack!”

  “Wow,” she says flatly. “Now that’s pathetic.”

  And with the utterance of that telling phrase—“that’s pathetic”—oh no, the rosy-hued magic spell of our happiness projects is broken. Because in point of fact, we are rather pathetic!

  Gym Dandy

  CLARE AND I DECIDE to give our happiness projects—and each other—a break. In the meantime, my menopause expert, Ann, has informed her friend Isabel of my change-of-life situation. Isabel says that to fend off her own menopausal blues, she had tried therapy (expensive), hormones (the bloat), and even a bevy of natural aids like soy and black cohosh tea and Saint-John’s-wort (ran out of cabinet space in kitchen, had to expand Whole Foods “library” onto back porch, raccoons—eventually very mellow raccoons).

  “The only thing that worked?” Isabel insists. “Regular exercise.”

  I’m not typically a fan of exercise, as I have yet to experience its reportedly magical endorphin-rushing effects. Then again, possibly the reason it hasn’t worked for me is that my own form of exercise is doing sudokus—carefully propped
up on the “dashboard,” with a mechanical pencil—while walking on a treadmill so slowly I might as well be sitting.

  That said, neither do I feel ready to join Isabel in her clearly mad Groupon offer for “bikini boot camp” that meets in the park every morning at 6:15 A.M.

  It’s at this point, though, that I am sent on a travel-magazine assignment to visit an eco-spa in Arizona for a weekend “yoga retreat for foodies.” It’s, at the very least, a tribute to how creative spa marketing directors become in the off-season: The filled-to-capacity workshop is 90 percent women, of whom almost half seem to be celebrating their fiftieth birthdays. It turns out to be light on the yoga and heavy on the small tasting plates. By the third day, indeed, there have been so many witty amuse-bouches, edgy dark-chocolate creations, and locally sourced gourmet cocktails like prickly pear margaritas that, what with the Arizona desert water retention, I am finding myself feeling just a bit bloated.

  Tucking into yet another arresting appetizer featuring sharp-angled prawns that appear to be on a steeplechase across a field of crostini spattered with goat cheese, I observe humorously to Mr. Y, who has accompanied me, that I am soon going to have to escape the health spa and go home just to be able to fit into my pants.

  Mr. Y jovially agrees, drains his glass of wine, goes to the bathroom in the nearby men’s lounge, and—apparently just because I have raised the issue—cheerfully leaps onto a scale. To his horrified (and yet still-not-uncheerful WASP) amazement, the number he sees is 195. “I’m stunned,” he reports upon returning to the table. He refills his wineglass to calm himself.

  “Is 195 a lot?” I ask. I have no idea what Mr. Y should weigh. He looks fine to me, for a man whose idea of exercise is stooping down over his welcome mat to pick up the Wednesday New York Times (the one that contains the Dining section). I’m at the stage of life where I’m not going to hold anyone—including myself—to any sort of punishing bar.

  “I feel technically that I should weigh 175,” he muses. “I mean in theory, I like to. Back in the day. For me 165 is probably almost too skinny—”

  “When were you 165?” I ask, truly surprised.

  “Oh, college,” he says vaguely. “On the other end of the dial, 185 feels chubby, definitely chubby. That always feels like a lot. But 195! Nelly! Whoa!”

  “Then again,” I say, “maybe you dodged a bullet by not seeing the dreaded two hundred.”

  “Perhaps so,” he agrees as we clink glasses.

  Upon thinking it over, I found this whole conversation extraordinary for two reasons. One was how, as opposed to women, a man might jump on a scale in the middle of dinner with no preparation at all (dieting, voiding, or making out a will in case of seeing a truly frightening number). Second was how, also as opposed to women, men measure their weight in ten-pound increments. Mr. Y’s assessment of his weight was similar to that performed by most of the men I know: While they consider a weight of 165 skinny (even for middle-aged men, the reference point always seems to be college), they don’t generally care either (too much) to bounce around in the low two hundreds. By my estimation, for a normal-size man, that is almost a fifty-pound “normal weight” range, and that’s without giving birth to a baby or small heifer in the middle.

  The take-home was that Mr. Y was concerned enough to think that he himself might like to begin exercising, and so, based on another more humane Groupon forwarded by Isabel, we decide to check out Equinox. If you don’t know Equinox, let me tell you that these glittering, slightly overpriced, urban yuppie gyms are marvelous. It’s a brand that just works. Our local Equinox was located in a luxury condominium complex that also included a microbrewery, a J. Crew, and a Gelson’s gourmet supermarket, all one needed for life in one fell swoop, provided you were a microbrew/J. Crew/Gelson’s person, which I could well see myself becoming. (Persimmon nail polish—and why not?)

  More than a health club, Equinox is a sparkling ship of fun, a kind of Holland America Line cruise ship designed for anxious middle-aged professionals (like moi!) with zero attention span. Upon entry into its eucalyptus-scented interior, we immediately saw a gleaming hive of incredibly fit fifty-something people humming, humming, humming on their tendon machines, as though in some sort of fitness military academy. Almost all looked keenly Lance Armstrong–like (too bad about the steroids) with incredibly lean thighs and papery skin and feathered three-hundred-dollar haircuts. They were in better shape than most twenty-year-olds. Have you seen Kelly Ripa? In contrast to how perfectly petite and sculpted she looks today, twenty years ago she looked like a large blobby muffin.

  I have become an expert on Kelly Ripa because of all the midday television playing at Equinox on twenty, thirty monitors at a time, hanging in banks above all the treadmills and the cycles. These flickering eyes into midday America show a nation in a frenzy of activity. Amid the usual windows into the exploding Middle East or the plunging Dow or gaggles of football players mauling one another, you can see ordinary people remodeling homes, hand-making pasta, and competing against one another as they frantically bake cupcakes before a giant red digital timer. One memorable commercial showed a man carrying a flask of his own uric acid in a satchel. I can’t tell you why, but he seemed pleased about it. Americans are surfing at fifty, dating at sixty-five, playing rock guitar at eighty. How terrifying! Game on!

  The next layer of Equinox fascination was a copy of the weekly exercise-class schedule—a document I started taking to my As We Change evening-bath rack to peruse like an intriguing novella. My goodness! Just the language brought to mind a hyperfantastical version of Logan’s Run, with the difference being that rather than getting killed for the sin of turning thirty, we were all going to get crunched or burned or punked or something. All the instructors had names like Skip and Moon and Keli. The exercise-program names were reminiscent of the CIA or Navy SEALs. I ask you: What is METCON3? TARKL? VIPR?

  I think these frightening activities have something to do with intervals, weights, Dynabelts, and the Israeli military, if possibly not in that order. And who were the people, I wondered, who would regularly (ever?) turn up for all these outlandish classes? I mean, sixty minutes of spinning, every weekday morning, at 5:45 A.M.? Good God! I could cycle for an hour, check my stocks, take my cholesterol meds, tweeze my nose hair, and it would still not even be 7:00. My days are already interminably long. To get up before dawn to do something miserable like spinning and then to have even more day left over afterward? Which they wanted to fill with—something? One could only marvel at these people.

  More immediately, though, due to confusion about our Equinox “package,” Mr. Y and I have somehow ended up buying twelve weeks’ worth of individual personal training. (Was it twelve weeks apiece or twelve weeks for two people for a total of six each? I found it difficult to grasp our Equinox finances, as if it was all in a foreign currency.) In any case we decided to embrace the experience, and dutifully appeared on a Wednesday around lunchtime for our first training.

  Mr. Y’s trainer was an affable Venezuelan named Fabrizio. Mine was a steel-cut Scandinavian named Stef, a twenty-three-year-old with a tiny nose.

  The first thing I learned is that today’s personal trainers are all into “the core,” working “the core.” There is also quite a bit of this disturbing thing called “planking.” Overall, I have to say that buying personal training seemed a bit like buying an Adelphia cable bundle. You just wanted HBO but it turns out you also have to take Cinemax and Starz. I’d like smaller thighs, but equally urgent to Stef was that we strengthen my woefully weak lats, a part of my body I couldn’t even see. So there you go. After twelve weeks of body sculpting I might still have a big if more muscular rear end, but I would also have these amazingly strong invisible underparts of my shoulder blades.

  On the upside, instead of sort of vaguely Black Swanning it all day so one can heap all of one’s measly fifteen hundred calories into a reasonable dinner, I would now be obliged to eat not just breakfast and lunch every day but carbs. Stef was firm ab
out that. In order to get enough fuel to power through my rigorous new weight-training regimen, I would have to eat carbs. Carbs were back in!

  I in fact start needing those carbs because Stef is pushing me so hard—with giddy “games” and “relays” of her own invention, all of which (like so many adult activities) fall just short of “fun”—that I actually start to dread our training sessions. But because of the tireless endurance Equinox trainers have, Stef is merciless about texting constant reminders about our weekly schedule so I can never quite “forget.”

  Indeed, at one point I actually started thinking, Oh great. To cope with midlife depression, I’ve signed myself up for a weekly exercise program so demanding that the very idea of it makes me even more depressed. It seemed unfair. I had courageously made the financial commitment (which, when I looked at my Visa bill, gave new meaning to the phrase, “feel the burn”). Now I wanted Stef to go away. Could I gift my twelve training sessions to someone? Sell them on Craigslist? Maybe I could pay Equinox a second fee to get this overeager trainer to now leave me alone.

  Then again, thanks to Stef, I was no longer depressed. I was simply scared of my personal trainer, and instead of mortality what I most dreaded in life was our sessions.

  I also noticed that while I was grunting with Stef, almost wanting to vomit, just beyond, Mr. Y and Fabrizio could be seen leaning against the pec equipment and discussing local haircutters. Poor Mr. Y. In six weeks (or twelve?) he was still going to have a fluffy soufflé top while I was going to have—as Stef put it—a “rock-star body.” (“Rock-star body!” she’d scream, as I hopped through an endless row of tires in a fit of panic.)