Hot Flashes

by Raskin, Barbara;

  Dusk has begun draining the light from the kitchen. Suddenly, sitting together like this around Sukie’s table feels preordained. It is almost as if Sukie herself scripted this last scene, gathering an all-star cast of her oldest friends on this familiar stage to confront the young woman who first befriended and then—perhaps—betrayed her. The dramatic conflict seems to be whether or not our generation is still viable in the 1980s. The question seems to be whether or not we are outdated, outdistanced and outdone in this the new era of yuppies.

  Hot flash …

  Few of us have changed all that much with the passage of time. We’re still rather old-fashioned and quite fifties-ish. We still follow certain trials, such as the Jean Harris, De Lorean and prize Pulitzer one, with great ardor. We are still enormously proud of Betty for kicking her habits, Joan her alcoholism, Jane her bulimia, and Liz for going on the wagon and losing all that weight. We are still mad at Mia for acing out her best friend, Dory, with André, at Joan Canwetalk for performing at the Republican Convention, at Shirley for becoming a space cadet, and at Natalie for drowning.

  We still hate Scrabble, charades, crossword puzzles and prefer dogs to cats. At the piano we can play only chopsticks and remain frightfully insecure about classical music. Inevitably, we return rental cars ten minutes after the end of any bargain weekend, use our fingers to count the hours we’ve slept, and find it hard to resist American men who display foreign drugstore sundries on their bathroom shelves. Although we now wear glasses to read, cook, or make phone calls, and rely heavily on flannel nightgowns to stay warm—regardless of who’s in our beds—we are still suckers for the varoom of a fast sports car, the grunt of a lover trying to hold back, and high-grade sinsemilla from Humboldt County.

  Unlike our daughters, we do not consider Madonna a tramp. We love Anouk, Claire, Tuesday, Gena, Jill, Candice, Catherine, Diane, Lee, Sissy, Jane, Sophia, Carrie, Goldie; Mary and Elizabeth. We prefer Lily to Joan, silver to gold, bars to tables, Spanish to French, and south to north. We are still lazy about conjugating irregular verbs in foreign languages, figuring out the actual time when it’s 17:30, trying to remember “spring forward and fall back,” or determining the real cost of souvenirs when there are 1.7 escudos to the dollar. Even though we don’t drink anywhere as much as we used to, because both Sheila and Jill met their current husbands at AA meetings, a number of us have joined Alcoholics Anonymous—not to go on the wagon but, hopefully, to meet some nice guy who has.

  Technologically, we are agnostics living in a computer age. We do not actually believe our tape recorders are working even if their red light is on. We cannot remember the kind of car we drove prior to our present one and we still frequently use contact paper for re-covering various containers—or for other spruce-up jobs around the house. Unfortunately, we believe that if we win the lottery, one of our children will get run over by a Greyhound bus, and that when we die—we will still have to change planes in Atlanta.

  Although we have gradually become more interested in real-estate tax exemptions, aerobics, Keogh plans and adult extension courses, we remain vigilant against liver spots. While we may modify our traditional summer tans and forget to take our emotional blood pressure every morning, we have absolutely no interest in acquiring senior citizen discount passes. Although we do peer into the faces of bag ladies and bums to see if we went to high school with them, and read, rather than skip, newspaper articles about osteoporosis, we snobbishly feel that if we can’t afford to see a flick without a discount, forget it. We still think of ourselves as sort of … fortyish, certainly not middle-aged.

  While some of our youngest cohorts have suddenly begun delivering their first babies, most of us discuss root canals more often than birth ones. Although we probably have more biopsies than manicures nowadays, we still consider Tina Turner our main role model. When Gwensandra, one of the sexiest women we ever knew, was heard to say she wasn’t “thrilled” with her new laxative, Sharon told her to knock it off—loud and clear. While using Turns, not for our tummies but as the cheapest source of supplemental calcium, and continuing our efforts to wear out the Star Wars sheets that our sons refused to take to college with them, we also persist in doing research on collagen treatments that fill out wrinkles and laugh lines, thereby postponing facelifts which we fear almost as much as old age.

  Although we still need to take off for an occasional “mental health day,” we are physically in good condition and are still mad at Marilyn, Natalie, Janis, Sue, Grace, Sylvia, Edie, Jayne, Sharon and Jean—as well as Sukie—for leaving us too soon. We wanted all the Dionne quintuplets to survive and grow old along with us.

  Crazily enough, in a sexual sense the Change has been a change for the better for many of us. It actually catapulted a number of our slow starters into sexual athletes. Some of our newly aroused members, who actually still use the words hot and dirty as sexual adjectives, believe that multiple orgasms several times a week provide sufficient exercise if they also watch their diets. We still cannot swallow aspirin or cum. Although the majority of us do not frequent singles bars—since there is no way for an extra to star in a crowd scene—we will, upon occasion, place a well-written, elegantly edited personal in some presentable and plausible publication such as The New York Review of Books.

  It remains clear that if some future right-wing government required us to sign notarized statements restricting our right to sleep with strangers in order to qualify for Social Security, we would never collect any of our allotments. Anyway, few of us believe that the Social Security Administration will still exist in the year 2000, when most of us turn sixty-five, so why would we give up a sure thing for a chancy one? After all, we weren’t born yesterday.

  Luckily, there are some advantages to getting old. Audrey, who has always suffered some chin whiskers, says she doesn’t have to be quite as militant as before since they’re coming in white now and don’t show as much. Customs inspectors seldom even ask any of us to open our luggage anymore and though we move fewer drugs than we used to, we do, at every opportunity, smuggle black tulip bulbs out of Holland. Also, happily enough, we no longer feel compelled to finish every book we start, accept every social invitation we receive, or vote for the least bad candidate in either local or national elections.

  Over the years we have belonged to local chapters of the National Society of the Survivors of Suicides, the Sierra Club, Amnesty, AA, AAA, ABA, ADA, ACLU, AMA, AAUP, NAACP, SDS, WIW, L.A.D.I.E.S. (Life After Divorce Is Eventually Sane), Snick, Weight Watchers, Displaced Homemakers, the National Writers Union, the Lawyers Guild, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Smokenders and NOW. Those of us who were eligible to do so dropped our memberships in the DAR or B’nai B’rith, and when we attend international conferences it’s always as NGOs. Eventually we’ll join OWL—the Older Women’s League—as well as the Gray Panthers.

  We are definitely going to have to brainwash ourselves into believing we qualify as senior citizens.

  We are now, as the French say, women of a certain age. Although we can still flash gorgeous smiles, a lot of our teeth are loose because we have been grinding them and/or clenching our jaws, while presumably asleep, for almost half a century. Because top and bottom jaws clenched together exert two thousand pounds of pressure, nowadays our gums bleed more often than our hearts do. Those of us who suffer from temporomandibular joint syndrome know that ice packs in the morning help relieve sore cheeks as well as decrease unnecessary swelling around the eyes.

  We have had a number of wonderful lovers. Although we were never the type to run out of a shower naked, we have flexed our love muscles so often that we could probably lift heavy weights vaginally. We always preferred isometrics to aerobics and have learned to live with what Charlotte calls our Jewish thighs. We are relieved to have stopped sending innocent rabbits to their early graves with our sunny urine, but we will never forget favorite lovers and the cosmic shudders they suffered in our arms. Currently our favorite anecdote is about the young girl who asked her
eighty-year-old grandmother at what point sexual desire died and was told, “You’ll have to ask someone older than me.”

  “I kept thinking that such a silly little affair would just blow over,” Miranda offers in a dreamy voice. “I mean, I couldn’t even think of Elizabeth and Sukie at the same time. Sukie was so superior. And I thought, why hurt Sukie by telling her about their tacky little affair when I was sure it was going to end soon.”

  “Well, if you really felt that way, why did you keep pushing Sukie to use your beach house?” Joanne asks. “That just gave Max and Elizabeth all the time in the world to get really involved.”

  “But that wasn’t the way it was,” Miranda protests weakly. “See, they were screwing their heads off in my apartment, and I kept thinking that one day, sure as hell, Sukie was going to drop by to have a beer or something and they’d be sitting around the living room half-naked. I wasn’t their beard; I was trying to protect Sukie. Maybe you’re the kind of friends who would have told her, but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.”

  I watch fresh tears well up in Miranda’s eyes.

  Oh, how many times have we discussed whether or not to tell a friend about her husband’s philandering? How often did a friend look shocked beyond words when she realized we’d known and never told her, never saved her from the humiliation that intensified her pain? Our discussions about infidelity always ended like our menstrual blood-spot debates. Should we tell a woman we see at a museum or department store that she has spotted the back of her skirt? Would she rather know the painful truth, and go home to change, or not know and simply deceive herself into believing it happened just as she was unlocking the front door, brainwashing herself into thinking no one else saw that scarlet letter of vulnerability, that discouraging red badge of helplessness, which—like the blood on Lady Macbeth’s hands—appears despite all precautions.

  “You were sort of playing God there for a little while, weren’t you?” Elaine asks in a voice more inquisitive than accusative.

  Miranda shrugs helplessly, and her large breasts twitch in sync with her shoulders. “Look. Sukie could have weathered the whole thing even after she found out about it. The problem was she just couldn’t stop herself from tearing everything apart. Really. I heard about it from Elizabeth who got it straight from Max. So I knew right along about all the self-destructive things Sukie was doing.”

  “And what would you have done?” Elaine asks her.

  “Well …” Miranda looks thoughtful. Her smooth face, shiny hair, and innocently flushed cheeks make her seem incapable of any artifice. “I guess I would’ve pretended I hadn’t found out about it at all … that I didn’t know anything was going on.”

  We all look at her with astonishment.

  “From such restraint we don’t know,” Elaine says with a strong ethnic intonation. “And I for one could never learn it.”

  Regret appears briefly on the screen of her eyes but is then quickly deleted.

  Now we begin to study Miranda in depth. It isn’t just that we are old and she is young, it’s that we are old and she is new. New women are much more premeditative than we are and can weigh the advantages or disadvantages of various alternative actions. Because they analyze all their options, they are more likely to be the conscious authors of their actions rather than the spellbound spectators we historically feel ourselves to be.

  Although Elaine is racked with jealousy over Nathaniel’s new baby, she is hardly the only one of our generation to complain about the inequities of contemporary marriage and divorce. Too many of us remain gray divorcées while our biological husbands marry younger women and father new babies. Although not new men, many of our former husbands are now new fathers, apparently having learned how to breathe through their mouths while bending over to change a dirty diaper—one of the many physical feats they were previously unable to master.

  Nowadays our first husbands can occasionally be sighted walking the streets with their bad backs and new babies (who look vaguely familiar peering out of their Snuglis), apparently sharing child-care responsibilities with an enthusiasm that threatens to unhinge us. Having experienced little distress or drudgery during the raising of their first families, our biological husbands still have sufficient energy to start a new life and a new family, raising babies who are often younger than their own nieces and nephews, whose worn-out, yellow-stained hand-me-downs they must wear because many of their half-brothers and sisters are still in expensive graduate schools around the country. The new women, who married our old husbands, are apparently teaching them new tricks about co-parenting while we, who thought it was all over, continue coping with our erstwhile adult children who have come home to roost once again.

  Of course some of these new women, who are now the new wives of our old husbands, do not necessarily understand everything our men expect or want from them. Everyone knows that George called up Colleen to request that she give his new wife acting lessons so she’d perform better in the films in which he wanted to direct and star her. And lots of people heard that Valerie had to rush over to help her old husband and his new wife when they brought home their new twins from the hospital. Fortunately, so far, none of us has either volunteered or consented to babysit with these infant half-siblings of our grown-up children so that the new parents can get away alone for a weekend. But that, too, may come to pass.

  Marilyn did have the supreme pleasure of hearing, via the grapevine, that when her biological husband and his third wife, Sherri, moved to Chicago, the young bride began looking for an editorial job. Many of the editors she approached had known Marilyn professionally for many years and, noticing the young woman’s unusual last name, asked if she was related to Marilyn. Desperate for work, Sherri finally said she was Marilyn’s first cousin and, on the basis of that, eventually landed a job at the Encyclopaedia Britannica where Marilyn had started her career thirty years earlier.

  So it is not as if our generation were either ignorant or naïve about younger women.

  “You mean it wouldn’t bother you if your husband of twenty years fell in love with a young student?” I ask, genuinely interested in Miranda’s point of view.

  “Yes, I’d care. But not enough to break up my marriage over it.”

  We all hear the reasonableness in her voice, but we are not privy to such self-control or in possession of the kind of self-determination that would permit such an enlightened reaction. To be perfectly honest, we have a real thing about original wives being replaced by younger new ones. We have heard far too many horror stories about longtime husbands running off with outrageously younger women.

  When our friend Maxine’s husband, a Miami rabbi, ran off with the young woman who was president of Hadassah at his synagogue and Maxine called Fritzie to tell her what had happened, she referred to her husband’s paramour as “the shiksa.” We all understood this was a generic rather than a genetic description, and we now use the term “young shiksa” indiscriminately when referring to any. Other Woman—even if she happens to be older than the original wife and an Orthodox Jew to boot.

  Judy (who didn’t marry until she was thirty-seven when she fell head over heels in love with Michael O’Leary, the writer-in-residence at BU where she taught) had been married only two years when Mike ran off with his previous wife’s youngest daughter—a girl named Ginger—who came to stay with Judy and Mike while visiting colleges in the Boston area. Since Mike had only done the right “extended formerly-blended family” thing by accommodating his previous wife and allowing Ginger—who had been his stepdaughter for three years, five years earlier—to stay in his new home with his new wife, no one knew whom to blame. At least Ginger’s mother had the decency to call Judy to apologize profusely and even suggested that if they worked together, they might successfully uncouple that unnatural couple—a suggestion that Judy politely declined despite the distraught mother’s hysteria about her daughter not going to college.

  “See, I saw Sukie differently than she saw herself,” Miranda continues.
“And I think that’s what caused some of our problems.” Her eyes are becoming a bit frantic now, darting from one to the other of us. “I guess I saw her as some kind of wonder woman who could do anything and handle everything. But instead, when she found out Max was screwing around, she freaked out. I’ve thought about it a lot since then. It was awful to watch a real nice family like that break up. But it didn’t have to end that way. I mean, Sukie really went off the deep end with all her drinking and pills. She blew it.

  “See, I’ve known Elizabeth Morley for years, so I knew how she operated. Her ambition was awesome and she wanted to get her doctorate more than anything else in the world. Oh, she really liked Max. In the beginning she was crazy for him and she knew he could help her a lot. But, when she finally got her degree this June and didn’t need him anymore, she accepted a teaching job out at Berkeley. Max thought she took the job because it was so prestigious. But I know Elizabeth prefers operating alone in the academic world because there she gets a lot of mileage from being both good-looking and single. So when she didn’t need Max anymore, she just split.”

  I am stunned.

  Max is no longer with Elizabeth. The lovers are no longer together. I am still enough of a romantic to feel a slight twinge of disappointment. I suppose I want—at least—to believe in the permanence of those outrageously illicit liaisons that cause such catastrophic consequences. I suppose I want—at least—to believe in the authenticity and immutability of those perversely powerful passions that destabilize so many lives. If those don’t last, what can or will?

  Elaine and Joanne are also distressed by the news, although in different ways.

  “Well, why couldn’t Max see through Elizabeth?” Elaine asks.

  Miranda looks at her with poorly concealed impatience. “Because he didn’t want to, obviously.”