The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones

by Sandra Tsing Loh

  “It’s his kitchen,” she says wryly. “He designed it. As you can see, it’s a very manly kitchen. It’s where he plays. They say the kitchen is the new garage.” It is indeed a very masculine kitchen, all dark cabinets and stone counters and ordered rows of gleaming restaurant-quality appliances and stainless-steel kitchen tools, as clean a space as one would imagine one might need to perform surgery.

  “He’s the performance cook,” she laughs. “You should see what he’s making tonight. Oh!” She turns to me eagerly. “Oh! Are you around? Maybe you should come for dinner!”

  My evil plan is working. I haven’t been planning on ever leaving. It is all I can do not to handcuff myself to a whisper-shut drawer.

  I am now staring at a brand-new retaining wall they have built, to create a multidecked Zen front garden. It is the sort of project I would never be able to figure out spatially or pull the trigger on. Mr. X was always the one getting quotes and getting things fixed and cursing because all-new copper piping would cost four thousand dollars, but he would always go ahead anyway, and as a result his homes (two bungalows next door to each other) all look very well maintained. In his absence, I now see the huge gaping life hole that he has left.

  Mr. X kept me together. Now I am in collapse. Because I thought what I needed in a man was to stand and gossip in my kitchen.

  I think back to that ur-anecdote I tell myself about Mr. X setting down his suitcases and saying, “The roof needs fixing.” Now, without him, I realize . . . the fact of the matter is that my roof is still unfixed.

  It was Mr. X who took care of all of these matters, invisibly, like an angel Gabriel in the house. I miss him deeply like a phantom limb. He had roots in the earth, and his steady internal clock brought a calm and security that I never even noticed.

  Oh God.

  I miss Mr. X.

  Never mind all the loneliness and separate TV shows we liked and the kids and twenty years of life rolling by.

  He was my rock. And actually still is. Father of my children. Salt of the earth.

  I ask how Judith has managed to figure out all the projects she is showing me—the retaining wall and the foundation and the fencing and the refurbished pool deck.

  Hand on her chest, she leans forward and says, as lovingly as Tony says “Maria” in West Side Story: “Luis.”

  There is a knock at the door.

  “Oh, there he is!” she exclaims, almost too trillingly.

  Luis is a perhaps-forty-five-year-old Guatemalan handyman clutching several bags from Home Depot. “Hello, Mrs. Judith! You want I put motion detectors in today?”

  “Yes! And would you like some coffee?”

  “Yes I would!”

  “I always make him coffee,” Judith purrs to me.

  Luis, apparently, is the secret ingredient that makes their domestic life hum. Sure! I think. Who couldn’t make that work? Lovely home, big pot of Swiss family money, and staff! But Judith is also a very calm domestic organizer. Judith gives Luis a constant running list of repairs, and he is there every day. This particular thing she does is a very Old World skill.

  Judith invites me to hang out in what they call the library, a perfect little tree house hovering above the foliage. I congratulate myself on the perfect casting of my perfect friend and her perfect house. There is actually a pristine guest bathroom attached—it has lavender-slate-colored tile, a bathtub under a glass-cubed window, and I see that extra touch: She has even lit an aromatherapy candle for me. And in the windowsill in an alcove beyond? A perfect blue bowl of fruit. Meyer lemons. I have found it—the meme of the perfect bowl of fruit.

  I open my laptop and words pour forth. All around is the distant hum of a home and puttering and distant conversation and also, always, the sound of Luis’s distant hammering. It is soothing, and one feels not cramped but gently enveloped as though with a soft pashmina shawl. The AC breathes steadily, like a spray, and outside is a tinkling fountain.

  And now here is this marvelous thing that happens at a quarter to twelve. Judith slides open the doors, sticks her cropped blond head in, and says, “Lunch is tuna salad on English muffin. Okay? It’s what I tend to have. Don’t worry—it’s small.”

  And a moment later Jude slides open the doors, glides down the stairs in her ballet slippers, and slips a plate next to me with a cloth napkin. It is an English muffin with tuna salad and scallions and dill and, “Oh my God—is this ginger?” I ask. “It’s delicious!”

  Her statement, delivered with a toss of the head: “I was single for a long time, I never had children, I’ve never had to be reasonable.”

  WHAT HAVE I been searching for? What have I been yearning for? In the serenity of Sunswept Drive, I suddenly know, my mind calmed and soothed by the quiet, sure ticking of a well-run house. Day by day in my frenetic, chaotic home, why am I so unglued by the leaking Ziploc bag or the microwave-deformed Gladware that now doesn’t quite close? I realize now that what I am seeing in all these small secret totems is evidence that no one is taking care of me! No one! No one! And that is no small thing.

  Instead of a man, perhaps what I need at this point is a spa, or staff, or a hotel. Even though I’m not doing a show right now, I wish I were still being treated like a diva. That is not a terribly attractive thought but in the moment it feels true.

  The sun sets over the Valley; six women, friends and dinner guests of Judith’s, sit on the terrace; just beyond, Roland, in his scraggly, scraped-back white ponytail and coveralls, is busy grilling at some giant metal contraption that looks like a small wind tunnel; he is flanked by two equally boyish, middle-aged guy friends who, like him, look a little high and a little surprised about being high, and who are holding beers. Brazilian Suba music is playing; wineglasses clink; there’s muted laughter. The oversize wooden smorgas-table to our right groans with good wine and European waters and exotic aperitifs and minibouquets of artisanal olives and a rustic cheese board flanked by a rustic pâté board. And of course one must have fresh-baked bread, sourdough baguettes and herb-seeded boules and whole-grain filones.

  What with the tiki lamps descending like modern dancers in a snakelike line down the hill, these are sights, sounds, and cadences that remind me a bit of my twenty-something years in Los Angeles. The difference, of course, is that we creative-class folk are now all forty-something and fifty-something and sixty-something and the air is refreshingly free of sexual tension. No one gives a fuck about the big proscenium drama of heterosexuality anymore, no one believes that escape from life’s basic tedium will come in the corpus of another person. Staring unapologetically into the grill are the men of manopause, and clinking pinot grigio in a circle are the women of menopause: the undatables.

  There is Wendy, a radio-producer friend of mine who was tormented, through most of her forties, by a passionate yet thoroughly miserable affair she was having with a married colleague who, in the end, never mind all his protestations to the contrary, never did leave his family. Rounding the horn of fifty, though, in the next turn, her life canoe suddenly shot forward into the calm happy waters of home. This came via a depressed real estate market, with unheard-of bargains everywhere.

  “After all those years with Jonathan,” she says, “I could finally dream in a new way. You know that house hunting has its own kind of romance. The stately Victorian, the charming Craftsman, or even the ‘rambling midcentury stunner with great bones.’ ” Of course her budget could only sustain an eight-hundred-square-foot cottage in Highland Park, but . . . “Unlike Jonathan,” she continues, “my little house is fixable. It’s something I can work on. It can be constantly improved. I can put effort in and get results out. If I’d just been able to buy a house before I met Jonathan, I would have saved myself a lot of trauma.”

  Petra, a marketing executive, has been trying to date again now that her divorce is eight years old and her kids are long up and gone. But she’s losing the strength for it. A toothsomely attractive blonde (she is fifty-five but looks thirty-five, with Kelly Ripa sin
ews), she keeps getting set up with eligible men on the Westside, but due to her workout regime and desire to stay slim, Petra finds she cannot really “look forward to” dinner at 7:00 P.M.

  “I guess we should go hiking instead or something, but that’s not really a date.”

  She had a recent taxing outing with a Cedars-Sinai anesthesiologist. They could barely stretch the date to two hours. He was, quite frankly, “a little stiff.”

  “Of course he’s a little stiff!” We all laugh, easing into the growing comfortable darkness. “He’s an anesthesiologist!”

  As we undatable women natter away, though, with our garden-variety shots about men, I realize the balance of this particular festive hill is dependent on the three men down below, wordlessly grilling. It is as though the men are deep in the earth, in some sort of Lord of the Rings–type way, shoveling coals. In so doing, in holding down that ballast, they are keeping some part of this mysterious clockwork going. They blessedly do not react to our critiques or parse our language; they sip beers, they turn coals, they keep going.

  I suddenly wonder, thinking back to my own domestic situation, if my trivial yet painful domestic conflicts with Mr. Y have something to do with how my generation of women first encountered men. Our first experience living with them was not as blushing newlyweds but rather in street-battling our sweatpants-wearing, Tron-watching brethren in co-ed dorms in college (the spattering lentil soup, dish-filled sinks, baskets of moldy laundry). Perhaps it is because of that that it sometimes it feels as if we are having the same peevish brother-sister fight over and over again, even though it’s thirty years later, everyone’s fifty, and the dorm is our house. Even today it seems in some ways I still haven’t mentally graduated from college. If I have twenty boxes of books to move from the basement, in a reflex, I immediately think, What guy friends should I call to help me? I think this even though half my fifty-something guy friends have a torn rotator cuff and would not even help me if they could, nor am I a cute college girl whom they have boffed or might like to boff or whom anyone will ever boff or who would even look good on Saturday-moving day in Daisy Mae shorts. I am a haggard, ill-tempered almost-fifty-year-old woman with her own money who needs to drive her ass down to U-Haul, pick up two Mexicans, pay them twenty bucks each, and be done in an hour.

  I think, too, as I look toward the trio of men around the flame, about the husbands, boyfriends, and friends whose company I have so deeply enjoyed over the years. Necking, dancing, sitting on a stoop with a beer, playing pool . . . Men can be such pleasurable companions. Instead of shrei-ing at them for chore work or fixing faucets or paying the property tax, perhaps they are more like these exotic artisanal beings we need to place carefully in tissue paper to preserve their wonderful tobacco and cardamom flavor notes. As far as a warm body in bed, men are nicer to talk to than dogs, and if their domestic skills stink, ours are worse.

  As Roland grills and bastes and sautés, and as he continues to put out headily aromatic platters of meat for the group (lamb, sausage, pork, beef tenderloin), with aioli and chimichurri sauce, our female conversation, like bubbling prosecco, spills forward.

  “Well,” I say, “here’s what I think. I think part of the problem with modern heterosexual relationships is that all women secretly yearn for in the world is not one husband, but four. What do you think?”

  Everyone agrees and jumps into the game. We tease it out and come up with, essentially: “The Four Husbands of the Apocalypse.”

  I lay the initial groundwork by suggesting that the first two husbands are, as I’ve lived it myself, Mr. X and Mr. Y.

  “Which is to say your first husband—Mr. X—is your financial partner. He’s not necessarily the financial provider, because so many of us women make money. But I think of the first husband as that calm, intelligent partner with whom to negotiate the tedious financial technicalities of life—the 401Ks, college funds, Metropolitan Life health-insurance plans. The second husband—Mr. Y—is the feelings guy who actually talks to you.”

  “Oh God,” Wendy says. “The feelings guy. Mr. Y. That was totally Jonathan.” Her married man. “He was all about the glass of chardonnay proffered with soulful active listening at the end of the day before the roaring fire. Before going home late to his wife.”

  “I think the second husband provides pampering—” Petra adds.

  “What sort of pampering?” I want to know. “Do you mean like massage?”

  “Oh no!” she says. “No massage. Which some ‘date nights’ are supposed to feature. Yuck.”

  Everyone immediately agrees that no sensible human wouldn’t prefer a massage from a professional, because when your “mate” rubs your back, instead of relaxation there is the tension of anticipating what reciprocation will be required—five minutes of sex, or worse, a twenty-minute massage back.

  “I feel that second husband is a complex role. While it falls to the second husband to provide amorous relations if needed, for some women it would be enough or even preferred for Mr. Y to function as the gentlemanly squire. That’s what I thought it was, anyway. Maurice Tempelsman holding the umbrella in the rain. Or I suppose he could even be gay—David Gest to Liza Minnelli—‘Madame will be home at seven, ready the Vosges chocolates, draw her a bath!’—although, of course, that ended after sixteen months in lawsuits, beatings, herpes, etc.”

  “Doesn’t Sir Elton John have a Mr. Y?” Judith asks.

  “Probably.”

  We decide that third husband—Mr. Z—is Mr. Fixit. “The burly stevedore, cowboy, Brawny Paper Towel man,” says Judith.

  Wendy agrees: “Mr. Fixit wheels out the garbage cans, repairs the electronic garage door opener, and resets the computerized tankless water heater.” She sighs. “When smoke alarms suddenly scream off at 3:00 A.M. due to low batteries—which it seems is all they do—it is Mr. Z who leaps out of bed with hernia-threatening vigor to still them, with the giant thick baseball bat he of course keeps at the side of the bed.”

  “Luis can do that,” Judith points out. “Maybe you just need a really good handyman. I’ll give you his number.”

  “Fourth husband—Mr. Q—is, I think, the cheerful intern,” I conclude. “Mr. Q executes whatever tiny necessary tasks you request without argument. He accepts a stack of envelopes and addresses them, picks up the dry cleaning before noon if needed, is on call for 24/7 emergency kid transport, and, best of all, when handed a grocery list he will return with—get this—that grocery list’s exact items.”

  “But the problem is, no one man can possibly be all these four people!” Judith exclaims. “Mr. Xs are notoriously bad at processing feelings, Mr. Ys are notoriously bad at fixing things, macho Mr. Zs hate to be micromanaged, and Mr. Qs do not actually exist in real life, although in modern marriages husbands and wives often do treat each other as interns: ‘You pick up the dry cleaning!’ ‘No you should, by five! And put it on the United Miles card, not Bank of America!’ ”

  “Well, like I said, I guess I’m grateful to have had Mr. X and Mr. Y in sequence,” I say. “The way I think of it: Mr. X did my twenty-something unemployment, thirty-something career angst, the death of my mother, two pregnancies, and also that whole forty-something mess of breast-feeding, insomnia, and public-school panic . . . followed by the traumatic affair and a swift divorce. Mr. Y was going to be handling menopause . . . or, as I’ve figured it out so far, in the twenty-first century, your first husband is the provider; your second husband is the one who talks to you; my third husband will be a cat. If I am lucky.”

  “But see how you’re thinking of the men as servicing you,” Roland says, as he lays down another large platter, which looks like a choucroute. “You’re not thinking of men as individual people. And for their part, I think many men would also like not one wife but four.”

  “Oh sure,” says Petra. “Wife number one—Rebecca, the endlessly hectoring if laudably responsible mother of their children. It is she who drives the school admissions applications, doctors’ appointments, allergy
lists.”

  “Wife number two,” Wendy pipes up. “Doubles tennis partner Cheryl, the smart sassy business wife who trills: ‘Last-minute dinner with your Intel colleagues at seven? What fortuitous timing, when the NASDAQ is at 4650! What fun—I’ll show up in either the black cocktail dress or the red—I’ll surprise you!’ ”

  “Yes, just like that tennis-playing gal in Carnal Knowledge,” says Petra.

  “I love that movie!” says Judith.

  “You guys are nuts,” says Roland’s friend Tom. “It shows how little you know about men. Wife number two is only about one thing: She loves and follows your favorite sports team.”

  “Well, I bet I can guess wife number three,” Wendy presses on. “Wife number three—the sex-obsessed nympho who herself has seven roles: St. Pauli girl, French maid, Catholic schoolgirl . . .”

  “Dallas Cowboys cheerleader,” Petra adds.

  “Well, I’ll give you that one,” Tom says. The men murmur their assent.

  “And for wife number four,” I say, “Giordana, the curvaceous Italian earth-mother pasta-at-midnight wife who is always saying: ‘Come on over, late, anytime! I’ve made all this pasta!’ Right?”

  Everyone stares at me in nonrecognition.

  “I think that’s your own fantasy,” Judith says. “Men eat pasta all the time. They don’t care.”

  “I guess I’m just oddly jonesing for that Giada gal on the Food Network,” I say.

  It is now that Roland’s friend Craig, a journalist, who has until now been but orange ash glowing in a gray cloud of smoke in the darkness, gives his two cents’ worth.