Turning Fifty
I ADMIT THAT I’M NOT that thrilled about turning fifty. My instinct is not quite avoidance, but it is to do something very, very low-key. I’m thinking less “celebration” than a kind of subtle holistic offstage underwater birthing . . . ceremony. In Australia.
No. In reality, my idea is to mark this passage with a quiet champagne potluck for perhaps a dozen women friends. I am thinking lots of soft cheeses, and many stunningly expensive little chocolates—of the gourmet kind that invoke sea salt, lavender, rose hips, etc. Our Wiccan circle could dine and share stories and toast the fabulousness of fifty, with many inspiring affirmations (taken from books like Women Who Run with the Wolves or When I Am an Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple). We could then write down things we wanted to get rid of and throw those pieces of paper into the fire (a thing I had never in fact managed to do at Burning Man).
Unfortunately, my fiftieth birthday actually falls on a Saturday, which seems to give the lie to slipping on quietly through the night with cheeses, food that I no longer absolutely deny myself anyway, now that I’ve given up on my Spartan lifestyle. (What happened was that I had a lucky score at Ross Dress for Less, where I got a few pairs of magical “mom” jeans, on sale. They are in regular-sounding sizes but have tons of room and are all made of stretchy fabric. I feel oddly newly comfortable and stylish, at least for me. Ross Dress for Less!)
No, Saturday night is calling for something big . . . Which makes me feel a bit sullen. Because it seems like I am always planning everyone else’s party and no one is ever planning mine.
I have in fact, just pulled my bachelor composer friend Carlos’s fiftieth birthday out of the fire. Literally two weeks before his birthday, he had sent out a plaintive e-mail that said, “I am turning fifty. Is there anyone who wants to offer their house for a party for me?” And of course being gregarious to a point of self-harm, I volunteered our house. But it was so last-minute that by the time Carlos had tweaked the Helvetica font one hundred times on the e-vite (“Carlos turns half of 100!”) it was like five days before a Saturday, it was like in the nog-flooded middle of December, with all its Handel chorales and holiday office parties and daughters’ Nutcrackers, so it looked as if we were only going to have six people out of thirty.
In order to avoid a lonely Stella Dallas bomb of an evening, I thought we should joyously and festively postpone the celebration to the empty weeks of January, but Carlos seemed to take my logistical strategizing the wrong way, and the next thing I saw was a mass e-mail copied to fifty people, titled: “CARLOS’ 50th BIRTHDAY CANCELLED BY SANDRA DUE TO LACK OF SUPPORT.”
But in fact we did move it to January. And thanks to my strategic move, there was an upswell and crowd (more than fifty people!) and the wonderful testimonies that people tend to get together for people’s fiftieth birthdays (in a way they don’t quite deliver at people’s fortieths). So, surprisingly, Carlos had the greatest and most touching fiftieth, and now here was mine, and I wouldn’t even get as good a party as friggin’ Carlos, because I didn’t have myself to shill for me. I could really probably only get the twelve women. But maybe some of them could be drafted into bringing their reluctant husbands. Then I might get up to twenty people. I suppose that’s a quorum.
So I am just typing the kind of pointed-if-vague “Save the Date” e-mail one needs to send out one month in advance when Mr. Y confesses that “something” has been planned that was supposed to be a surprise that he wasn’t supposed to tell me about but perhaps now he should. I tell him very, very carefully and calmly I think that is wise. He confesses that Clare and a group of my girlfriends had already approached him five months ago about throwing a big surprise fiftieth birthday party for me. Clare had actually drafted three different invitation templates. But then Mr. Y had sort of let it drop through the holidays and all. But now that my birthday is four weeks away, maybe he should pick up the thread again and give her a shout-out.
You can imagine my immediate cortisol-flooding response. But given that Dr. Stacey is morbidly expensive and Mr. Y and I are trying to live together again more harmoniously, I do my deep breathing. I repeat “All will be well,” and . . . hit Send on my “Save the Date for MY SURPRISE PARTY I’M NOT SUPPOSED TO KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THAT MR. Y IS SUPPOSEDLY COORDINATING.”
I call Clare and tell her that, given the unfortunate lateness of the project’s launch—particularly given that she started five months ago—trying to throw a big party is probably not a good idea. It’s Saturday, it’s Los Angeles, it’s like setting oneself up to fail. Perhaps something smaller would be better, and throw in some lobster or something so the foodies would have to come (even though of course those tend to be the same people with season tickets to things).
“No, no, no, no!” Clare exclaims. “It’s your fiftieth! You have to have a big party, an epic party! There’s no argument! People will come! I will force them!”
“How?” I wail. “Everyone always has a million excuses—the traffic from the Westside alone! Think of Elise. You know what Elise is like. You’ll invite her to my fiftieth birthday party and just get a monologue back about her allergies.”
“Come on!” she says. “This is huge. If need be with Elise, I will tell her that you are in very, very fragile depressive mode and if she ever wants to see you alive again she needs to come and bring a very large gift. And that’s the beauty of a surprise party, because then people can’t bug you with phone calls begging off. It’ll be much harder for them to diss me. I’m just waiting for Mr. Y to get me a guest list.”
“Oh God, no!” I wail. Of the many things Mr. Y can do, putting together a thorough e-mail list of my friends without my help is a super-Herculean task of which I believe few heterosexual men are capable. They just don’t have that gene. “This means I’m going to have to do it! For my own surprise birthday party!”
“Well, you’ll do a much better job,” Clare assures me. “Just focus. Be shameless. Don’t edit. Put on that list anyone you can think of. Go far and wide. Include everyone—old boyfriends from high school you have dropped entirely, girlfriends who became whiny and whose e-mails you actually stopped responding to, an old work colleague who did you a professional favor you never quite returned. Invite people you friended and then whose ‘feeds’ you immediately unsubscribed to, invite your fat friends, fat-friend new people and invite them, go to town. Invite all your bosses—”
“Oh for Pete’s sake—they’ll never come! It’s the last thing they want—”
“But they may be shamed into sending you a gift! That’s the beauty! Because the next time they get an official announcement about you, you may be dead. Invite your financial adviser, your mortgage broker, or anyone else who sends you a card at Christmas. I must say how delightful it was the day before my own fiftieth to sit on my doorstep and open a giant gift basket—the full Monty, champagne, chocolate, cheese, spa sandals—from Millie Olivas, my realtor from Dickson-Podley. I had put so many fishing lines out there, it was a surprise to pull up such a big fish on just one. But of course a realtor always will send a gift, particularly a female realtor.”
“You invited your realtor to your fiftieth birthday party?”
“Sure I did! Had I known it would work so well I would have also invited my dentist, my gynecologist, and my newspaper carrier. Numbers, people, we want numbers!”
“This sounds awful,” I say. “I just can’t take the stress of this. And I’m going to be driving my dad around a lot this month. I simply cannot do this. No.”
BUT THEN what happens is that I get tragic news about my friend Ray. Ray is one of my oldest friends, literally from college. As twenty-year-olds we used to grill things on a tiny outdoor hibachi in our dorm’s courtyard and listen to music and talk about books. Ray has always had a wonderful optimism and sense of humor, and has gone on to have a successful career as an engineer in a beautiful part of Seattle. Or so I had surmised from his friendly annual Christmas letters, full of cheerful detail about hobbies (his was
boating), his and his wife’s two dogs, and wry commentary on the varying fortunes of his favorite sports team, the Seattle Mariners. You really couldn’t have constructed a more normal, happy-looking life—they were always smiling on a mountain somewhere, or biking, or sailing, shading their eyes from the sun.
But no. Apparently Ray had been struggling with depression for the past ten years, and they couldn’t quite get the mix of chemicals right. So he took himself out, and now after decades of e-mailing back and forth and sharing funny YouTube clips, now I’m finally flying to Seattle to see him, and he is in a coffin.
I admit that I am extremely pissed off at Ray. I am pissed off that he kept this stream of chat going (the Seattle Mariners? who the hell cares?) while he was so sad inside and could not admit it, so he covered it up with all of this trivia. I am pissed off that while women are accused—and perhaps rightfully—of shrei-ing and kvetching and rapid-cycling and parsing, men suffer many of the same depths and unpredictability of moods we do, but they seem to do it alone, for fear of oversharing, and it’s a waste of life, literally.
I am very pissed off that by the time one hundred of Ray’s friends and relatives have gathered here in this small white wooden church just outside Seattle to “celebrate” his life, he isn’t here to see it. Because maybe if he saw this church full of people he might have staved off the darkness a bit longer, because in point of fact we would have come flying if we had known remotely how much he was suffering. I am pissed off that I am the only friend from LA who flew in.
My black jacket and pants feel too tight, and my cheap pumps are uncomfortable. The picturesque Norman Rockwell quaintness of this church is suffocating and discordant.
Why is the organist playing “Amazing Grace”? It has nothing to do with Ray. He was into Steely Dan, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Berlioz. I look around around at the rows of wooden pews. Why are so many smiling white-haired elders of the church here, and so few of his same-aged friends?
The reception afterward takes place on a manicured rectangle of lawn overlooking an unusually and cruelly sunny Puget Sound. There is a buffet of roast-beef sandwiches and a tray of cookies and coffee, caf and decaf. It is the saddest kind of adult “mixer.” I meet a long-ago woman friend from Ray’s junior-college days thirty-five years ago. She is not technically an ex-girlfriend, but by the carefully preserved photo-booth photos and neat collection of handwritten notes they had exchanged, one sensed maybe she would like to have been. She is a fourth-grade teacher from Tacoma with a gray ponytail and wide hopeful eyes, who I think, thirty-five years later, is still in love with him.
Because it is a church “celebration,” no mention is made of Ray’s depression or of his suicide, only of his love for his (now-devastated, never-mentioned) wife and his dogs and his boat. And the fucking Seattle Mariners. The long-ago woman friend—Darlene—is continuing to follow suit.
“Ray was so funny! He was so literate! And so brilliant, so brilliant. What a wonderful ceremony. It was so fun to hear those old childhood stories about him.” And then Darlene adds a quietly bewildered afterthought: “I—did you?—I had no idea he was in such a bad state.”
I put my paper plate of roast beef down.
“Darlene?” I say candidly, as she is the only person in Seattle I have to talk to. “I think it’s a shame people don’t talk about moods more. I believe that difficulty coping with ordinary life is more common than we think. Maybe it’s because we live in twenty-first-century America as opposed to eighteenth-century Ireland on a thundercloud-darkened heath. We just don’t seem to have any vernacular for addressing some ordinary garden-variety darkness. In the newspaper, there is a crossword puzzle and a jumble and a sudoku and a KenKen but no Little Corner of Darkness with a melting scream face in it (‘Find the Melting Scream Face. Level: Advanced’).”
Encouraged by what I take to be her thoughtful silence, I continue. “I mean, just this last year I’ve been perimenopausal and I’ve had some real attacks of the darkies, some real winged monkeys coming after me. I’ve had days where just seeing the sharp early afternoon shadow a tree made by the side of the road would fill me with horrible despair, worse than an Edward Hopper painting—Edward Hopper, you know, who did Nighthawks. I guess it’s like when the whole world becomes an Edward Hopper painting, with slightest greenish tints and too-sharp shadows and it is all corpses and mannequins and wax figures and it’s all about mortality and everything is death. But no longer is it just a lonely city coffee shop at midnight, but this is what everything previously comforting now looks like: spring, Christmas, shortcakes, parks, a hazelnut latte, muffins, children, puppies, bunnies.”
“Nice meeting you,” Darlene says, gathering her mementos, moving away.
Ah well.
KAITLIN AND I will end up throwing my father a blowout ninetieth at the Malibu Beach Club, where amazingly a big festive crowd turns out, not irritated at their neighborhood eccentric but in fact, more and more as the years have passed, affectionate fans. They’ve taken a certain familial care of my dad (“Oh yeah, I’ve always given him rides to the bus stop”) as you would a wryly beloved tidepool treasure. Surprising guest? I kid you not—Ricky Jones, a skateboard dude whom I distinctly recall being a pal of Sean Penn’s at hideous Malibu Park Junior High, his overhanging cloud of surfer hair now graying. Apparently even he is a longtime fan of my father. “I remember waking up in the sand hungover in the summer and Mr. Loh would say, ‘Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas!’ Your dad! The wacky professor! What an awesome guy!”
My father is a bastard but you only turn ninety once. Thank God. The party and wacky beach people testimonials were completely hilarious and perfect.
I saw how everyone is under orders now to throw everyone else parties for the big ones, because if you don’t, people will gather only at your memorial and that is a waste of life.
A great party, however, everyone can remember.
Your fiftieth birthday party is the one last event in your life, after your wedding, if you’ve had one before then, where friends, family, and acquaintances can be guilted into showing up, and they can be guilted into bringing a gift, even if it’s a joke gift. A fiftieth birthday is the half-century mark. It is imbued with both festivity and gravitas. By this point everyone knows plenty of people who didn’t make it to fifty, and everyone knows plenty of people who are at least twice divorced, so showing up is not just a pledge to the guest of honor but a pledge to all of our mortality. There’s no other event like it in the life cycle. Jewish kids have bar and bat mitzvahs, of course, but these events celebrate kids who have actually lived only thirteen years. No, the only event like a fiftieth birthday–the only event that celebrates and commemorates you as a grown-up, with a full, adult life, will be your funeral. So let this celebration of your fully golden self happen when you are alive. And have some cake, for God’s sake.
• • •
SO I compose the opus of my e-mail list, Clare sends it out, and within days Mr. Y tells me, unbelievably, that we are expecting 150 people. I won’t lie—it makes me feel fantastic. I love a big party. I can’t wait.
So the day of my fiftieth opens with the kids and Mr. Y bringing me breakfast in bed—applesauce with Cajun seasoning on an egg. Oh well, regardless of the strangeness of my breakfast, it was made with love, and today is going to be a wonderful day because all I am doing is working on my killer fiftieth-birthday-party dance mix. I’ve bought a brand-new iPod touch and have just learned how to download music and make playlists, and I am completely engrossed in this project. I finally have a hobby! I am one of those magical people who can happily while away a day without drawing hash marks on a page and penciling them in (Shades of Grey)! Yayyy!
But it’s even bigger than that. The fact is, I have lived half a century to create the amazing legacy of this historically unprecedented dance mix. I will make it into an app. I will be famous among my grandchildren! I will be elected Time’s Person of the Year!
“And what is your dance mix?”
Mr. Y asks indulgently, from behind his New York Times.
“All right,” I say. “Thank you for asking. You can ignore me completely as I speak, as you usually do while reading. I believe all of dance begins and ends quite simply with the Commodores’ ‘Brick House.’ It’s all about ‘Brick House.’ It’s basically a five-hour plan for easing not ‘Down the Road’ but into, and out of, the Commodores’ ‘Brick House.’ ”
“Aha,” he says.
“I realize I may seem a bit manic here, but I am excited. Let me tell you how it goes. We begin with the Motown/oh-hello-old-friend-sitting-at-the-bar-and-finishing-your-drink section, prompting the gentle swaying in the chair, the refreshing of the beer, the final trip to the bathroom to fix the lipstick. Then it’s Wilson Pickett, Aretha Franklin, early James Brown, Marvin Gaye’s ‘Grapevine,’ Stevie Wonder’s ‘I Wish.’ It’s the sound track to the Big Chill section, perhaps somewhat cliché, but comforting and familiar. People need to have had at least two beers, perhaps three, before loosening up. It is at this exact moment now that the party gauntlet is thrown down, hard, with the Jackson Five’s ‘ABC’ and then—yes, people—even some disco. We are talking ‘Funkytown,’ ‘Freak Out!’ and even ‘Boogie Shoes,’ just for laughs. And now—doot! doot!—the Michael Jackson train pulls into the station, starting with ‘Gonna Get it Started,’ ‘Thriller,’ and—well, you see how many you can do before a panting Lily puts hands on hips and wails: ‘Excuse me? Am I in some 1980s step class or what?’ ”
“Oof,” he says. “Lily. Burning Man. Did she ever end up having that affair with the traveling LAUSD theater teacher?”
“No!” I exclaim. “He canceled the Indian dinner and did the big fade. The erotic e-mail was as far as it ever got.”
“Well, that’s kind of sad, but it’s good too because I like Brian.”
“We all do. Anyway,” I continue, “it is at this point—end of hour two—where we throw in the towel and open the throttle wide with ‘Brick House’ and then ‘Play That Funky Music White Boy’! Wow!
The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones Page 19