Hot Flashes

by Raskin, Barbara;

  I became so crazy—or maybe it was because of all the drugs I was taking—I lost the curl in my hair. I had never had to worry about straight hair before. I said to myself, other women have had trouble with their hair all their lives; my problem was so new I had no right to complain about it. But suddenly having straight hair confused me. It made me feel like I was someone else.

  Afterwards I came to believe that he had left me in the springtime. Actually it was nearly winter. Sometimes I remember the coat I’d worn during those days and nights, mildly surprised that I’d needed a wrap since I believed it was happening in the spring.

  Once that winter, I roused myself enough to take David and one of his friends skiing. Approaching a chalet attendant, I asked, “Where do you buy tickets for the scare lift? I mean the chair lift? Oh well, never mind.” I went back to the hotel and stayed inside the entire weekend, watching the skiers through the large picture window in the cocktail lounge.

  Often on Sunday afternoons I would lie on the sofa and watch pro football games. I would watch and wait to see a single strand of long curly hair peek out from beneath the helmet of some heavy lineman huddling before a play. The boyish lock of hair always seemed totally incongruous on such a large athlete and invariably it twisted my heart. Sometimes I felt that the dark shadows beneath my eyes were as visible as the black grease worn by players to deflect the sunlight. Many of my perceptions were abnormally exaggerated.

  On Sunday nights I would watch the football roundups at the tail end of the eleven o’clock news to see replays in which a shapely receiver caught a pass, scored a touchdown, and then got down and boogied—all slim hips and rounded rump—before spiking the ball into the ground with sexual exhilaration. When the Commissioner banned spiking, I was sure it was out of spite toward women.

  By late Sunday night I would be aching to feel the weight of a man descending upon me once again. I yearned to feel my own immediate, melting response to the authority of a male body. I have never sought out slim men because they seemed to lack magnitude. I always wanted more, rather than less, in everything. Especially in men. I loved large men, even if their shirts took much longer to iron.

  I am an alcoholic who hates sobriety, an addict who abhors restraint, a hysteric who looks up that word in the indexes of psychology textbooks at other people’s houses.

  I view the next generation with skepticism. Max felt compelled to teach the new generation what he knew so as to tutor their better instincts. I liked to see how the generations differed. He savored the similarities, finding faith and hope in continuity. Max liked sleeping with me every night just as he liked finding a parking space on our own street, discovering the newspaper on the front stairs every morning, and having the kitchen chairs stay where they belonged next to the table. I liked things to change.

  As soon as I wake each morning, my mind begins to leap about seeking a specific source for my pain. If I drank the night before, I try to remember what drunken phone calls I made, what fights I started with my son, what trouble I created. I cast about for the quickest route to remorse and find it. I think about what relationships I might have spoiled, which of my few remaining friends I might have insulted, what further damage I did to make any marital reconciliation impossible.

  I am without steady work, without resources, without a support system to help me survive. I no longer have a lover or even an admirer. My children are bitter and angry; my father is suffering from my visible deterioration. He is glad my mother is dead so she doesn’t have to see all this.

  A few months after Max moved out, a woman was shot through the head on our front steps. The bullet ripped through her brain and smashed through my second-story bedroom window. Happy’s barking woke me up. When I looked outside and saw the crowd starting to gather, I thought it was me I saw sprawled out front, I was that drunk. The next day there was a story in the newspaper about the shooting, but Max never called to see if we were all right.

  What is weird to me is that someone who for years could be anguished by a splinter in my finger or a cooking burn on my wrist didn’t mind a few months later if bullets shattered my bedroom window.

  One day he cares about every cut or bruise, the next day he doesn’t care if I die.

  I just can’t adjust to that.

  “That was too fucking-A-much,” Joanne says tersely.

  We have turned off Sukie’s computer and retreated back to the kitchen table.

  “How could it be that none of us knew Sukie was having a breakdown?” she asks incredulously. “This is exactly like The Big Chill.”

  “Why is it that anytime anything real actually happens to us, somebody always has to say it’s exactly like some movie?” Elaine hisses. Her blue eyes sweep across the table to challenge Joanne. “Sukie dies and someone’s got to say, ‘God, it’s just like The Big Chill.’ This is not like The Big Chill. That guy committed suicide. Sukie just … Sukie just died. And also, we are not like those … survivors,” Elaine concludes definitively. “We’re very different.”

  Chastened, Joanne looks off into space.

  And then, suddenly, Elaine screams.

  “Aaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.”

  It seems as if she had waited her entire life to scream like that. She begins to stand up, but only succeeds in knocking over her chair.

  Joanne, staring toward the door, turns her mouth into a perfect circle, but issues no sound.

  Finally I turn around.

  A tall young man, wearing a black T-shirt and long, lean jeans over heavy cowboy boots, is standing in the kitchen doorway.

  “Je-sus,” he groans. “What the hell’s the matter? Whadaya screaming like that for? Didn’t Sukie tell you I was coming over?”

  “Who are you?” Joanne demands.

  “I’m a friend of hers. Where is she?”

  He moves into the center of the kitchen. He is perhaps thirty-five, but he has the ageless eyes of American men who have trouble coming to terms with themselves.

  “How did you get in here?”

  “I happen to have a key, that’s how,” he answers. “And Sukie knows damn well I come over every Saturday around noon. Maybe even earlier; it depends on if I work Friday night. What’d she do, go away for the weekend? I wasn’t home if she tried to reach me.”

  This young man is clearly one of Sukie’s types. She always had an enormous weakness for studs and jocks, allowing them to get away with things she wouldn’t tolerate from self-proclaimed liberated men.

  “What’s your name?” I ask the young man.

  “Jeff.”

  “Jeff?”

  “That’s it. Jeff. What is this? A press conference or something?”

  Joanne stands up and walks toward Jeff until she is only a few feet away from him.

  “Something’s happened to Sukie,” she says quietly.

  I can hear him inhale extra air as if to cushion the news he’s about to receive. He has blue-gray, almost childishly bright, eyes and straight blond hair that rides across his forehead. He reminds me a little of William Hurt, whom I like a lot.

  “What’d she do?” he manages to ask.

  “She had a cerebral hemorrhage yesterday; she died right away,” Joanne answers gently.

  Immediately he whirls around so that his back is toward us. Then he stands alone and silent for a few minutes. Joanne moves forward as if to touch him, but slowly retreats after a second. When he finally turns around, it is evident he is in extreme pain.

  “Where’s David? Didn’t he go to Europe with his father?”

  Joanne nods. “They were in Portugal, but they’re on their way home now.”

  “Shit.” Then he walks deliberately toward the refrigerator. “Where’s Sukie?”

  The three of us look at each other in even greater dismay.

  “At a church? A funeral home? Where?” he demands.

  “She’s at Brownell’s.”

  “Brownell’s? Oh, shit. What a boojie place.” He opens the Frigidaire. “No beer?”

/>   “There’s a couple cans behind that jug of wine,” Joanne answers.

  “Well, I loved her,” he states matter-of-factly as he reemerges from the refrigerator. “I loved her and … she let me love her. She was the biggest thing that ever happened to me in my life. After Vietnam.”

  With that he anchors Sukie’s sliding stool against the wall, mounts it, and wheels across the floor to park at the table between Joanne and me. Then he opens the beer can and begins to suck it.

  “But that wasn’t all we had going for us,” he says. “I was also helping her with her new book.”

  “What book?”

  “Sukie was writing a book?”

  “Was it done?” I ask, hurt that she had never told me.

  “Not done enough,” he whispers hoarsely. “Not done enough. And God knows, there’s no one else but Sukie who could finish it.”

  “Well, don’t forget, friends and editors completed works by Fitzgerald and Hemingway.”

  “No way,” Jeff says, shaking his head. “No way.”

  “Maybe we can take a look at it. I’ve published quite a bit, and Joanne is a writer,” I insist.

  “Are you kidding?” Jeff asks me in a voice that is both insulted and insulting. “Sukie’s book is a genuine comic novel. Didn’t she even tell you about it?”

  “No.”

  “Well, it’s about one of your basic JAPs who decides to murder her husband after he walks out on her and it’s the final word on Jewish royalty. Even the title was great: Death Sentences. See, the female narrator fucks up the murder attempt, gets charged with attempted homicide, and then handles her own legal defense in court. It’s sort of a takeoff on the Jean Harris case; it’s really a brilliant tour de force.”

  “I can’t believe she was working on a book called Death Sentences,” Elaine whispers, shaking her head superstitiously.

  “I was helping her edit it,” Jeff says, studying the Amstel Light script on his beer can. “See, Sukie needed someone to take her seriously as a writer. And I do. I mean, I did.” He tosses his head so that another layer of slick blond hair slides across his forehead. “I still do. My BA was in Lit.” He mashes his now-empty beer can in one of his suggestively large hands, kneading it with thick strong fingers. “Sukie was a talented writer, but a genius of a woman.”

  Despite the fact that we are all in mourning, each of us is now looking approvingly at Sukie’s young man. He is clearly a hunk with a heart.

  Jeff gets up and returns to the refrigerator. “This is the last can of beer,” he announces, surveying all the shelves before kicking shut the door. “Anyway, I’ve got a complete copy of her manuscript over at my place.” He shrugs helplessly. “What a fucking loss.”

  We all nod.

  It is clear Jeff wants to make Sukie’s death a literary loss as well as a personal one. And we want that too. From his description, Death Sentences sounds like Sukie’s other novels, all of which explored the domestic distress of American women. Despite the dark humor that characterized her work, pain peeked out from behind her hectic prose, and her stories cringed beneath the heavy cargo of despair they carried.

  “But when did she start to write it?” I ask, still aching because I hadn’t known.

  “Right about the time we met, I think. I never figured out if she started writing because she was feeling better or if she started writing and then got her shit together. Anyway, by the time I met her, she was doing okay. I wish I could take some credit for it, but I think it was her shrink who got her wrapped up tight again. The doc put her back together with baling wire.”

  Jeff’s voice has begun to fade. His face is beginning to crumble.

  “All I taught Sukie was that it’s nice to live in a place with no telephone. Hey. Look, I’m going to go out and buy us a case of beer,” Jeff says. “We’re really gonna need it. But I’ll come right back, okay?”

  “Sure.”

  So he hurries off and we sit listening to his heavy boots clomping down the hallway, the clatter as he opens the door and then the rush as he slams it shut behind him.

  “Did you know Sukie was seeing someone special?” Joanne asks in a conspiratorial whisper.

  Elaine grimaces. “You think he’s special?”

  “I didn’t mean that way,” Joanne responds defensively. “It’s been a long time since any of us met any guy who’s really special. I just meant did you know she was seeing someone on a steady basis? You know, once a week like he said.”

  “No,” Elaine answers firmly. “In fact, Sukie always said she didn’t know from once a week when it came to men. Once a week was for getting your kid’s braces tightened or ballet lessons.”

  “Well, he did have a key.…” Joanne pauses definitively and then gets up to pour herself a glass of white wine. Without asking, she fills a second goblet and hands it to me.

  “Isn’t it a little early to begin drinking wine?” Elaine asks irritably.

  “You know there isn’t any more beer,” Joanne shrugs.

  Her shrug loosens the flap of her wrapper again.

  I smile as I take a sip of the cool white wine.

  Half an hour later, when Jeff returns with a case of cold beer, he also produces two fat, squat joints, which he lights in rapid succession and passes over to us.

  “Go on,” he says. “It’ll help. No reason you should feel this fucking bad.”

  By one o’clock we are all stoned out of our minds.

  “She used to come like an angel,” Jeff says, breaking a lengthy silence.

  Although we have integrated Sukie’s young lover into our circle, and find it gratifying to hear how sexually happy our dear friend had been right before her death, none of us knows how to respond to Jeff’s comment.

  “I’ll never be with anyone who can come like that ever again,” he continues mournfully, hunched over in an attitude of deep despair.

  “You mustn’t let yourself get too depressed,” Joanne comforts him. “Sukie wouldn’t want you to feel that way.”

  Elaine raises her eyebrows.

  I am vaguely aware of wolfing down some honey-roasted cashews from a can I found in one of Sukie’s cupboards, pausing only occasionally to lick the sweet salt off my fingers.

  Joanne, whose silk wrapper is verging on disintegration, reaches across the table to take some cashews and flashes the deep smile of her cleavage at Jeff, somehow suggesting her own outstanding orgasmic capabilities.

  “No one else can understand how much she loved it,” Jeff moans inconsolably. “She loved it. I mean, she really loved it. She could come eight, ten times a night. I think she got that way after she went through her change. I told her that. I really wanted her to believe fifty was nifty, that it wasn’t just because of anything I did or the way I was … built or anything like that.”

  “I’m not sure you should be telling us all of this,” Elaine says dubiously. “I’m not sure we want to know all the details. Why don’t you … tell us how you met Sukie instead?”

  She speaks in her best substitute-teacher voice and effectively castles Jeff off centerstage into a more sequestered environment.

  Although he is clearly both stoned and drunk, Jeff rubs his stockinged feet (having long ago asked permission to remove his “shitkickers”) and sweetly acquiesces to Elaine’s suggestion.

  “Well,” he drawls, “I was driving my cab last summer and I picked Sukie up on Wisconsin and M Street. That’s sort of my home base. In Georgetown. So as soon as she got in, I could smell this wonderful smell on her. It reminded me of something, but I couldn’t figure out what. So finally I just asked her and she said, ‘Vanilla.’ She said that she rubbed vanilla all over her body because she was taking Antabuse to quit drinking and someone in AA had told her that perfume has too high an alcohol content to use when you’re on Antabuse. You know, Antabuse makes you vomit if you get too much alcohol in your system—you can even die from it. So, hey, that was real interesting and I said you can always learn something new hacking, and that she smelled lik
e some cookies my mom used to bake. I told her she smelled good enough to eat and that made her sort of … laugh and well, I don’t know, we didn’t go straight to her house. I mean, instead we went out for lunch first.”

  Silence.

  Eventually Elaine smiles rather tentatively.

  Then Joanne smiles rather ruefully.

  I burst into laughter.

  Yup. That was Sukie. Our gal Sukie.

  I laughed and laughed.

  Good old Sukie. Never one to miss an opportunity.

  Hot flash …

  A guy comes on to us, we’ve got to respond.

  That’s who we are.

  We were always that way and we’re not about to change, even now—in the 1980s—when a lot of the fun has gone out of sex. Previously, although sex was often dangerous, it wasn’t necessarily unhealthy. But now that AIDS makes people weigh love and/or lust against sickness and/or death, we have become Reformed Romantics and are beginning to edit our sexual resumés, which are a bit too long for this new AIDS era into which we’ve entered.

  Having already made the leap from Hot Pants to Hot Tubs to Hot Flashes, we are not sorry that casual sex has gone out of style about the same time we have. Since childhood, we always hated missing out on anything. In the sixties, we not only wore hot pants, we internalized them and by acting them out, turned hot pants into a lifestyle as well as a fashion. Because of this, however, by the end of the decade, sex started to feel like a hot ticket on a cheap charter flight to Europe—overcrowded, overheated and inevitably overwrought.

  By the mid-seventies, sleeping with strangers had begun to metastasize our anxiety rather than relieve it. Awakening too early on a dim morning atop a messy bed in an unfamiliar room of a large hotel overlooking some foreign city alongside a married man with no last name felt upsetting rather than exciting. By the end of that decade, making love with a stranger was like watching our own takeoff over a closed-circuit TV in a wide-hipped 747 that blew a tire on the runway so the entire flight was spent worrying about our chances for a safe—or at least a soft—landing. By the time we finally began our descent, we felt dizzy and our ears rang from the shocking loss of altitude, echoing the infernal, internal drop of our hearts into the lobby of our souls.