Hot Flashes

by Raskin, Barbara;

  In the future, if we need money, I suppose I can send David to ask Max. That doesn’t mean we’ll get it. How is it that I became dependent upon a man who hates my guts? How is it that he makes me feel old and ugly?

  No matter what happened during our marriage, I was totally predictable and reliable. I always did the same things; I was always home to greet the children after school. Things stayed pretty much the same all the time. Now everything changes and fluctuates. Even my weight. I have to keep buying different pairs of blue jeans. I have Levi’s in sizes twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine and thirty. It drives me crazy guessing which pair I’ll have to wear the next day, depending upon how much I’ve eaten.

  I became a seller in a buyer’s market in 1970.

  Back then I was doing a lot of travel articles and I had to go down to the Bahamas on an assignment. That’s where I tilted at the age of thirty-five. My editor wanted a story about living cheaply in expensive resort areas so I had to stay in a tacky, second-class commercial hotel in downtown Nassau that looked like the stage set from Separate Tables remaindered and exported to the islands. The place was crawling with obviously third-rate British traveling salesmen.

  When I went downstairs the first night for dinner, the maître d’asked me to wait at the bar until my table was ready so I walked through the lobby toward the makeshift counter he indicated. A young man, already seated there, watched me approach and then slid over one stool to sit beside me.

  “Do you have to wait for a table too?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  He was sleazy and unattractive. His teeth were absolutely British and terrible. His skin was murky and he proceeded to ask all the obvious questions—why was I there, was I alone, what did I do with my time?

  I answered lethargically.

  He asked what I drank. I said gin and tonic. He ordered me one and began to act as though he were my escort. I sipped my drink while he studied my backside surreptitiously. He started to ask more intimate questions. Finally the maître d’ walked over to say my table was ready. I stood up and smiled at the young man.

  The bartender slid a single check across the counter and the young man pushed it toward me. He already had two drinks of his own on the tab.

  “I’m yours for the taking,” he said.

  “No, thanks,” I answered casually, although I was stunned by that body blow.

  It was while I was paying for my drink that I realized I had changed from a buyer into a seller—that in bars on islands around the world from this time forward, I would appear ready to pay for companionship. I had unknowingly crossed some invisible frontier between youth and middle age.

  I couldn’t believe it. I also couldn’t eat. I went back to my room instead of into the dining area.

  On Caribbean islands I am always suffused by a sense of adventure. Within days I darken and slim myself so strenuously that I am able to pass for a movie star checking out locations for future film projects.

  I like it down in the islands.

  I can even live with lizards. Although I’m phobic about rodents, and not totally happy when lizards have to travel across the ceiling above my bed, I can handle them when they stay on the walls. Once I heard that if one lizard bites off another lizard’s tail it will grow back. The man who told me this said, “You can always get a piece of tail in the tropics.” Then he winked at me over the top of his brandy snifter in a dark neighborhood bar in Old San Juan next to a small appliance repair shop.

  Iguanas, however, are another story.

  Resort towns always made me feel romantic.

  When I was in my twenties, I knew how to emerge as a standout in East Coast resort towns that were well stocked with super-beautiful women. I mixed what looks I had with a carefully cultivated nonchalance that bordered on affectation. With dazzling instinct, I established an air of indifference—casually matched clothes, designer sunglasses, unbrushed hair and neglected feet—that somehow translated into a kind of careless glamour. It was sort of like going to Saks dressed like a slob and acting too rich to care.

  Summers always licked me like a cat. I would envision hot highways waiting to be devoured, small towns wanting to be tasted, cool nights kissing sunburnt days, shadowy twilights infringing upon sandy afternoons, love scenes longing to be played out on dusky beaches. Once summer summoned me, I, wanted to hold it in my hand like an orange and suck it dry, filling my mouth with its bright yellow color and letting its sticky sweetness drip down my chin.

  But I am not near the sea now and it is not summer.

  In 1965, Diana and Leonard, Elaine and Nat, Joanne and Karl, and Max and I took an oath to spend one month together every summer—to rent some huge beach house in a different place along the Eastern Seaboard each year. And we did it. We kept that promise. Now those holidays are like bright patches of light for me in the dark quilt of my past.

  By 1980 I realized that I had not taken enough photographs. Of anyone. Now it is too late. A group of middle-aged strangers has replaced my beautiful young friends.

  Still, there are snapshots other people took of us during our summer holidays.

  In the sixties, when Max and Leonard and Nathaniel and Karl (Joanne’s live-in lover for most of that decade) were with us—everything was different. Along with the smells of the sea and shellfish and sand and mildewed towels and dirty diapers and sweaty sneakers, there was always a sweet scent of sex in the air. On mornings when we only threw on cotton robes so we could hurry into the kitchen to feed our morning-hungry babies before we even showered, I was always aware of that odor. It was part of our then-sweet marriages and our summers at the shore.

  Once when Leonard arrived a few days later than the rest of us, he slammed into the big wraparound porch, overlooking the sea, where we were all sitting in semi-darkness and said, “I swear I can smell sperm.” And we had all laughed because we agreed and knew everyone made more love near the ocean than any other place in the world.

  Back then, there was a male presence to draw a hard-edged frame around us.

  Mikey and Allen, Elaine’s sons, were six and seven when we first initiated our summer holidays together, so they were old enough to supervise our toddlers down near the water, and we could actually have tiny patches of time in which to talk. Also, at the beach, the men participated in surveillance since they were just sitting around talking anyway and could see the children without any extra effort. The only troublesome question was if they didn’t see the children, would they realize they’d disappeared? Actually, the men were great about arranging amusements when the kids got older—fishing expeditions or bike rides or shopping excursions or trips to the boardwalk.

  We spent the days in our bathing suits, slim again even if ghostly white stretch marks laced our tans and mysterious brown lines traveled down our midriffs, pointing like arrows toward our birthing areas. Those lines arrived with each new baby—just like our mothers—and then faded away after a year or two.

  Now that there are only us women and our grownup children—who drift in and out for weekends with their friends and lovers—it’s not all that much fun anymore. Now there are no excuses for laughing excursions to fast-food restaurants or late-night cruises along sloppy boardwalks that slosh with excitement, spilt soda, fallen popcorn and easy fixes.

  My friends and I always sit in each other’s kitchens when we visit so we’ll be near the coffeepot, the liquor bottles, the food and the telephone. When we really settle down to talk we always go into the kitchen. It’s in there that we excavate our old memories and explicate their meanings. It’s there that we examine ancient confidences, as if they were poems, and reassemble memorable incidents from our pasts. Sometimes we talk substantively about our work, but most often we play with gentle visions of ourselves, testing different images just as we do when we try on each others’ new clothes. More and more often now we can anticipate each other’s conclusions about most subjects. That’s nice.

  My friends and I understand each other. Sadly, my d
earest friends live in New York so that I feel distant from them and when I most want to inhale their beings, I can only hear their voices through a telephone. Perhaps I should move to New York to be nearer them when David goes to college, but then I would only discover that they have their own busy lives and I would feel hurt because they didn’t have more time for me.

  It would be especially that way with Diana. Diana has really gotten herself together. Although I don’t know precisely in what ways she and I are different, it is that difference which keeps me searching and her settled. It is that difference which allows her to control her environment while mine buffets me around. Whatever it is—I want some of what she’s got. I don’t expect life to be easy; I only want a touch of ease before I die.

  Would I have felt worse if Max had run off with Diana?

  Both Loren and Lisa were very angry when Diana divorced Leonard. They refused to understand her rationale. She said there wasn’t much she could do about that. She couldn’t make them understand. She says it simply boils down to the fact that daughters and divorce don’t mix. Her daughters blame her for their father’s absence—for his no longer being home and always available to them.

  Diana finished her doctorate, got tenure at Columbia, and now publishes all the time. She seems to take her success almost for granted. But, of course, Diana doesn’t realize how intoxicating she is. She has no idea how handsome she looks—lean and loose and liquid, with her long hair turning beige instead of gray. She’s not the one men go for first. Rather they watch her for a while because Diana is a knight who moves indirectly but with challenging results. When a serious, intelligent man becomes aware of her powers, he gets a contact high off Diana. Of course men love that—a free buzz is the best hook of all.

  Max was always fascinated by Diana, even somewhat in awe of her. She is awesome. She’s terribly smart, even if a bit erratic, and Max always respected her for that. I often thought Max might make a move on Diana sometime, but he didn’t. At least I don’t think he did. Diana would have jumped off a bridge rather than take up with Max—even though she had some feelings for him too.

  That probably has to happen over years of closeness. We hung together because we mattered to each other. There aren’t that many people in the world who really interest us, so there has to be a little covert lust. Who cares? Diana was like a little dinghy tied to the boat of our marriage. She bobbed along behind us in case of emergency.

  I set the manuscript down on the bed.

  So Sukie had wondered about me and Max; what’s nice is that she didn’t worry about us.

  That sweetest of all triangles—two female friends and one’s husband—is also the most dangerous. It is not like a boat and its dinghy. A married couple and a friend is more like a fast ten-speed bike encumbered by a set of training wheels that affords balance but slows it down. Actually our experience was what it was—three friends splashing around in a summer together, unself-conscious friendship lulling everyone into a false security. Ultimately, upset by so much excited and exciting closeness, someone makes a move—usually the husband who feels closed out or threatened by female friendships. Few women will break the taboo that disallows so expensive an indulgence.

  Anyway, I always felt that the mild threat of my presence made Sukie a bit more demonstrative toward Max—a bit more affectionate than she usually was. I knew he missed that and somehow she couldn’t or wouldn’t provide it. When we were all together, she was more forthcoming and that made Max happier.

  I Remember Mama.

  Mama took me to see that play when it came to Chicago. I was ten and I felt something terribly important was happening to me as I sat beside her in that gentle Saturday afternoon darkness. I think I felt something important was happening because Mama had gone out on her very own, without even telling Daddy, to buy us two tickets to a play. But why had she chosen I Remember Mama? Was it so I could enter that title in my journal now as I remember her?

  When I was eleven I broke my leg sledding on a big hill near our flat. After some time in a hospital I was brought home to continue my recuperation. Although I read and played with my dolls while listening to the soaps over my little radio, I became more and more demanding of my mother’s time and attention. I needed to feel her nearness. One morning I begged and nagged her to sew my favorite doll—Patchie—a new dress. She told me she had some cooking and laundry to do, but if I played by myself all morning, by afternoon she would have finished a new doll dress and would surprise me with it. I agreed.

  Over the next few hours I heard her working around the apartment. But when she brought in my lunch tray, there was a perfectly hand-stitched dress for Patchie. The only problem was that I hated the fabric. It was a garish red cotton with white polka dots.

  “Ugly,” I cried. “That’s the ugliest material I ever saw. I hate it.” And picking up the dress, I flung it across the room.

  Never before had Mama ever become so angry at me. Now she stood beside my bed, her arms akimbo, her face white with rage.

  “You spoiled little snot,” she said. “When you were one year old I had only one dollar to spend for your birthday, but I walked downtown to buy you a sunsuit at Kresge’s. And even though Papa started to make lots of money, I always saved that little sunsuit to remember how poor we were. And now you’re so spoiled that you don’t even think it’s good enough for a doll dress. You’re spoiled rotten, Sukie. Your daddy’s spoiled you rotten. What am I going to do?”

  Oh, Mama. I’m so sorry I did that. Maybe I was spoiled then, but I stopped being that way. I know how much you wanted for me, Mama, I know that you wanted the best for me. I know that you wanted me to be happy. But somehow I lost my way, Mama. Or maybe I never deserved to be as happy as you wanted me to be. Maybe I didn’t deserve all the things you dreamed I’d be and do and have. Maybe I was spoiled and that’s why I didn’t get them. Oh, Mama. Why did you make me think I should have the best of everything and that I would be happy all the time?

  There is one party from the sixties that I can remember with total recall. It happened during the October 1967 weekend Norman Mailer described in his Armies of the Night. An old friend of mine gave the dinner party with which Mailer opens his book. I made the apple cobbler that Linda served as dessert to her sixty guests.

  In 1967, I was thirty-two. I know that as a fact, but I can’t remember myself in my thirties. Those years blur, probably because I had no true consciousness back then.

  I remember the photograph on the book jacket of Armies of the Night. Thousands of people are forging across Memorial Bridge on their March to the Pentagon. Their faces are resolute and defiant. They are committed to stopping the war in Vietnam and challenging Lyndon Johnson for control of the country. They are determined.

  That Friday afternoon I had returned home—after conducting three insipid interviews with three celebrated nonentities—to clean the house because two distinguished writers were to be our houseguests. After years of changing sheets for anonymous beatniks, hippies, civil rights workers and antiwar dissenters, I had finally been rewarded with two real celebrities—a Famous American Poet and a Great Literary Critic. Indeed, I made a special attempt at hospitality by replacing burned-out light bulbs in the guest room and setting out an assortment of matching towels, washcloths, and fresh bars of hotel-sample soaps before they arrived.

  But even better—Diana and Leonard and the kids were there when I got home, and Diana, of course, helped me get things ready. We finally got the kids fed and bedded and then we giggled and acted silly while putting on makeup for the dinner party at Linda’s. (I had already dropped off the Brown Betty.) After the dinner, we went to a political rally at the old Ambassador Theatre where Mailer lumbered drunkenly around the stage, rambling through an incoherent speech that concluded with his inviting everyone to a party at a familiar-sounding address that turned out to be our house.

  Somewhere between four hundred and five hundred people trooped through our front door that Friday night. Whatever bee
r and liquor we had in the house was consumed. Cigarettes were ground into rugs, and people smoking grass burned holes in chairs, sofas and tabletops. Everything in the kitchen was devoured, and empty bedrooms were used for quick sexual encounters. Debris and empty beer cans were scattered everywhere.

  At about 3:00 A.M. I approached the Famous Poet, who had a beautiful long-haired T-shirted girl draped around him, and explained the location of the guest room. Then I went upstairs to my own room and fell into an exhausted sleep.

  At six the next morning, David, who was four months old, awoke. Although I still nursed him at that hour, I also fed him cereal afterwards in hopes that he’d be full enough to go back to sleep. Max was rolled up in an unconscious lump on the bed, so I carried the baby down to the kitchen to nurse him. Diana was already there with Loren. To see her in my kitchen gave me faith that somehow my house would get cleaned and restored.

  At seven o’clock the telephone rang.

  “Hello.” A crisp cultivated woman’s voice lilted through the receiver. “Is [the Famous Poet] there?”

  “Oh sure,” I said. “Wait a minute and I’ll run up to get him.”

  But he wasn’t there.

  Slowly, I returned to the kitchen.

  “I’m afraid they’ve left for the plenary session already,” I said breathlessly into the telephone.

  “So early?”

  “Well, it is a plenary session,” I repeated.

  “Well, please ask him to telephone his wife when he gets back.”

  “Oh yes,” I said politely. “I will.”

  Years later, I am still fascinated by my natural impulse to protect the Famous Poet—to safeguard the male prerogative of “having fun” while in another city. I lied—not to protect his wife’s feelings, but to hide her husband’s infidelity for his sake—which, I now see, was the right thing to do for absolutely the wrong reasons.

  As always happened on large demonstration days, people from New York who traveled to Washington with infants or small children telephoned upon their arrival to ask if they could leave some offspring at my house. Usually I got stuck babysitting, but today, since I was determined not to miss another march, I had engaged Mrs. Parrot.