Hot Flashes

by Raskin, Barbara;

  “Okay. Sukie said it. You didn’t. But I sure as hell didn’t know what it meant that night and I just lay there trying to decide whether I should get up and make the bed or make some phone calls or make myself a drink. But then I decided that I couldn’t decide, so all I did was lie there and think about Sukie. Because, really, she was basically … a paradox, Diana. She was both the thesis and the antithesis of everything she said or did. I mean, half the time she wanted to be the best woman writer in the country and the other half of the time she just wanted to sit around getting stoned and suntanned at some beach somewhere. She always talked one way and acted another. And there was always this huge discrepancy between her appearance and her reality. I mean, Sukie liked to dress like a whore, but in fact she acted like a nun in bed. I’m not kidding. Nothing about her was in sync. On the outside she liked to look wicked and wanton, but on the inside she was this prim, prissy little pricktease.”

  “Oh Max,” I complain, laughing a little.

  “And after her mother died, she really freaked out. She started collecting all these tiny paper things, these scraps of memorabilia that she made into miniature collages. I swear, Diana, she would sit around for hours gluing these scraps onto onionskin sheets of paper, which she folded twice, first lengthwise and then across the middle. She spent days arranging all these little papers—old ticket stubs and newspaper headlines and lottery tickets and cash-register receipts and pieces of her mother’s birth certificate that she’d ripped up and little torn-off corners of bus transfers or tinsely gift-wrapping or other paper shit that reminded her of something. And then she’d paste all that stuff onto those onionskins. And the whole time she kept sniffing the model airplane glue she was using. She would just snip and glue and sniff, and then snip and glue and sniff some more. I tell you, she was making me crazy. And finally, when she had three full scrapbooks of these finished collages, one day she says she’s going to Georgetown to see if she can find some gallery to give her a show, and off she goes and of course I never see those scrapbooks ever again, and when I ask her about them she doesn’t answer. They’re just gone. Forever.

  “And I’m lying in this mess of a bedroom, in a bed that hasn’t been changed in a month, feeling like a criminal because my wife has left me. Me. I’m feeling responsible and trying to remember if I did anything the past few days that might have ticked her off. I’m like some detective at the scene of a crime, trying to piece together a case against myself. But all I can remember is that she woke up sort of sad that morning, which was unusual because it was a Friday. Friday mornings Sukie was always full of false expectations about the weekend. There she was, in her mid-forties, still believing that every weekend was going to be ‘fabulous.’ Sukie was like some Broadway theater, lit up on weekends but always dark on Mondays. I mean, the end of a weekend had the same effect on her as the end of a love affair has on other women.

  “Maybe I should have known something was wrong since she woke up acting weird on a Friday, but shit, I had to teach a class at nine-forty and I couldn’t get it up to start in with ‘What’s wrong, honey? What’s the matter? Something happen?’ You know, all that shit husbands are supposed to produce at the drop of a tear. Anyway, she just got up and put on my dirty shirt I’d dropped on the floor and walked out of the bedroom without saying a word. Like I wasn’t even there.”

  Sitting beside Max and hearing his deep voice delivering his persuasive perceptions, I realize I am in danger. His arm, resting beside mine on the wedge of the wicker chair, is turned to expose the blue highways of his veins running upriver, thin, sheer azure tributaries that ripple when he moves his fingers. I feel overwhelmed by his nearness.

  “So when I went downstairs for coffee, I thought I’d try to buck her up a little and I asked if she’d like to play tennis that afternoon. But of course she says, ‘No thank you, the water came back. My knee hurts.’ Every time Sukie wanted to avoid any discussion about her emotional condition, she would claim she had water on the knee and that it hurt too much to talk.” Max shakes his head hopelessly. “She was like a kid. I’d say, ‘Sukie? Do you want to go to a movie?’ ‘No,’ she’d answer. ‘My knee hurts.’ It was wild. Just wild. Before we got married I used to think I could handle women. Like I knew how to make salad without a recipe? But, nope. I was wrong. Not with Sukie.

  “I started to think maybe she’d been doing some amphetamines again, because the last time we were in Mexico she’d scored like crazy. But when I asked her if she was, she swore she’d flushed all of them down the toilet. Uh-huh. Yyyyah. The way she was acting made me pretty sure she’d just crashed. But then all of a sudden she jumps up, goes out on the porch, and starts repotting some plants that didn’t need repotting and making a big mess of dirt out there that I knew she’d never clean up. I guess maybe I said something before I left about her sweeping the porch after she was finished because that’s the only thing I can figure that might have pissed her off. Anyway, she was gone when I got back.”

  “Where’d she go?” I ask casually, lighting a fresh cigarette and sipping some support from my wine.

  “Who the hell knows? Four days later she comes back, but she isn’t talking. Ten times I ask her where she’s been, but she won’t answer. Then all of a sudden she starts telling me that the Abramsons are getting divorced and when I ask her why, she says—and this is God’s truth, Diana—she says they’re getting divorced because John couldn’t learn how to read faster. Apparently he took a speed-reading course that didn’t help him much and Ceilly just couldn’t stand how slow he read—how long it took him to finish a book—so she was divorcing him. Diana, I swear to you, Sukie believed every word she ever said at the moment she was saying it.”

  “She was burned out, Max,” I say apologetically. “She tried to do too many things. She tried to be everything to everybody and ended up not being true to herself. They’re … we’re … writing lots of books about burnout nowadays.”

  He doesn’t respond.

  “The next morning she says she knows we shouldn’t have gotten married because I cut my breakfast toast diagonally. She says people who cut their toast diagonally are traditionalists or something. Then she says she’s never going to see her friend Myra ever again. Really. Myra was one of her best friends here in Washington and when I ask her why, she says Myra is too destructive, and when I ask her how she’s destructive, she says Myra told her that people can still see the wrinkles underneath your eyes even when you’re wearing sun glasses and that also it’s wrong to believe you’ve only got one mouse in the house because how did you know you were seeing the same mouse twice rather than two different ones? And all this presumably proved that Myra was a destructive friend because she tried to de stabilize Sukie’s defenses. Or illusions. Or whatever the hell they were.

  “Then, later on that day, we’re in the kitchen and she tells me she wants to move to Chile because she thinks she might be of some use to the resistance down there. She says that there’s this silent underground campaign being run in Santiago and she thinks she might be able to help them think up some new ideas. Apparently people have been writing Libre on the margins of their pesos—or whatever the money’s called down there—and on the walls of buildings and on the backs of bus seats. Finally Pinochet had all the seats removed from the public transportation and all the defaced pesos recalled and the government announced that any factory women caught weaving resistance symbols into the fabrics they were making would be imprisoned on the spot.

  “But when I didn’t say anything, because I didn’t know what to say, Sukie starts in yelling that I don’t think she can do anything, that I don’t even think she can learn Spanish or come up with any good new ideas about other kinds of silent protests for the people in Santiago. And then she starts crying and says that if she has any talent at all, it’s exactly for thinking up new ideas for political dissenters to use against homicidal tyrants.

  “And then, right while she’s talking and crying about things like that, she starts mak
ing herself a three-layer club sandwich stuffed with lettuce and peanut butter and mayonnaise and jelly and some cold hamburger she found in the fridge. Listen, Diana. I know you all have hangups about your weight and your bodies and I even have some serious theories about the etiology of that whole syndrome, but I swear, Sukie’s eating was crazy. Crazy. I’ve seen her fast for two solid weeks and then just sip watered-down orange juice from a wine goblet like she was Mahatma Gandhi or somebody for the next few days. But I’ve also seen her devour an entire sirloin steak, smeared with catsup on both sides, while holding it in her hands like a corn on the cob. And I’ve seen her eat four two-dollar boxes of popcorn during one movie and then nothing but cottage cheese for the next ten days. I mean, we’re not talking neurotic here; we’re looking at some major psychological problems.”

  “Oh, Max …” I protest, beginning to laugh.

  But he continues.

  “Of course she always felt ugly unless some guy was letching after her, putting the make on her in a big public way. Then she would feel better about herself. Then she’d feel good. And goddamm it, every time I got back from a trip I knew she’d been with some other man. I could feel it. Once she brought home this Arab she’d met on the shuttle coming back down from New York, this real chichi guy who clearly had the hots for her, and she says she’s invited him for dinner because she wants the kids to know some real Arabs. But it wasn’t jealousy that got to me, it was her damn self-destructiveness.”

  “You should have taken more vacations alone together,” I say weakly.

  “God, we did. A lot of times. I grabbed every opportunity to go to international meetings. And we always went to Mexico because she loved it there so much. But do you know why she loved Mexico? Because it has lots of drugs and lots of dysentery that she thought helped her lose weight. When we were in Mexico, Sukie would go around trying to catch dysentery. And if she wasn’t trying to catch the runs, she was trying to catch the rays because she thought deep tans camouflaged her laugh lines. She was always chasing something. And when I said that the sun was like a drawstring that pulled all her wrinkles tighter, she said I was just as destructive as Myra and that with friends like us she didn’t need any enemies.

  “But listen to this, Diana. This you won’t believe. In Cuernavaca, she bought a baby. I swear to you, that’s the goddamn truth. Some old, beggar woman offered her a baby on the street and she fucking went and bought it and brought it back to our hotel. And then she starts running around sending bellboys out to look for baby bottles and American formula and talking about finding a Spanish-sounding Anglo name. She kept repeating that—that she wanted a Spanish-sounding Anglo name—a hundred times while I tried to talk some sense into her. And I want to tell you, I went through hell trying to give that baby back to the authorities. First they claimed she’d kidnapped it and then finally the American Embassy had to step in and handle the whole thing. But those were the things she never talked about to anyone else. I mean, I bet she never told you about that baby, did she?”

  I shake my head.

  “See? She saved all her craziness for me.”

  “She sounds like she was … unhappy,” I say. “Didn’t you try to get her to see a shrink?”

  “A shrink? Are you kidding? Every time she saw a shrink they’d give her tranquilizers and she’d bop them down with a can of beer first thing in the morning and then drink or do coke during the day so finally I had to blow the whistle on that shit because I thought she’d OD.”

  “Look, there are all kinds of different shrinks,” I say. “You know that.”

  But Max isn’t listening.

  “I never knew what she was going to do or say next. Like whenever the subject of the Middle East came up, she’d say the only really good thing about Israel was that their coins were engraved in Hebrew, Arabic and Braille. Diana, she’d say that in front of Israelis or my parents, who are Orthodox, or in front of her own father who would fucking freak out of his head. She was always coming up with crazy political ideas that drove people up the wall. I never knew what she was going to say next.”

  I stand up and move closer to the windows. Across the street there are neon lights spelling out ZACK’S BAR AND GRILL. I watch the hot flashes of the bulbs slice the darkness as I wait for him to continue.

  “Then, of course, she could never sleep at night. She’d do anything to keep me awake with her on a bad night. Except fuck, of course. Anything short of fucking. And she’d bite her fingernails down so low that half the time there was coagulated blood in the culverts of her cuticles. And she’d only stay in hotel rooms below the third floor because she once dreamed she died in a hotel fire. And after her mother died, she was unable—I mean physiologically unable—to finish anything. Anything at all. If she finally cleaned the kitchen, she’d leave at least one big pan soaking in the sink and it would stay there for days until it filled up with so many dirty dishes you couldn’t fit a glass under the faucet to get a damn drink of water. And then, finally, she’d clean up again but leave another pan soaking.

  “And for some reason she insisted on removing the straighteners from my shirts when they came back from the laundry before putting them in my drawer. I mean, I must have asked her a million times not to do that because that made them wrinkle, but I couldn’t get her to stop. I mean, she was really getting eccentric. She would call information in Chicago because she thought all the operators there sounded like her cousin Phyllis whom she used to like a lot when she was little but couldn’t locate anymore. Or she’d call the weather number in Ohio to see what kind of day it would be there for Carol. I swear Sukie knew maybe a hundred 800 numbers to call about things.”

  I return to my chair.

  “Sometimes for weeks on end she’d go off on some tangent, you know? Right before she ran away, Vogue magazine came out with a big fashion spread showing Nancy Kissinger modeling fall suits and coats on top of the Great Wall of China and that really freaked Sukie out of her mind. She started carrying that damn magazine around with her every place we went, saying it symbolized America’s insanity, and showing it to everyone at a dinner party we went to where there were a lot of State Department people. And then, after the dinner, she started in on all her theories about why certain women read Vogue from back to front—like a Hebrew book—instead of front to back.

  “Or like when she lost her MasterCard. She refused to report it missing because she said no one else could actually use it since she’d exceeded her credit limit. Then, of course, when thousands of dollars worth of charges started coming in from Maryland and northern Virginia, all she could talk about was how surprised she was that someone was able to charge a new set of car tires at a gasoline station. ‘I didn’t know you could charge something like that,’ she kept saying. She was much more impressed by the feat than by the fraud. But she was like that about a lot of things. Like she went crazy with excitement when she found out that the post office would accept personal checks for postage stamps. Jesus.”

  Max shakes his head again.

  “She just wore me out, Diana. And her cooking? That was as crazy as everything else. Sometimes there wouldn’t be any food in the house for weeks on end and the kids would have to eat at McDonald’s. But other times she’d cook up a storm, make five or six meals at the same time. I remember once she started making a moussaka while we were watching the eleven o’clock news. By midnight she’d done the whole eggplant bit and made a big mess and then she did the white sauce and then she got grease all over the walls while she was browning the meat and there were tons of frying pans and pots all over the kitchen. Pretty soon I could see she was getting more and more confused and finally she yelled at me to go to bed. But the next night when I got home, even though there was this huge moussaka sitting out in the kitchen, she was just lying on the sofa in the living room ignoring dinnertime and watching the news and acting the same as when she hadn’t made anything at all to eat and was feeling defensive. I mean, I just could never figure her out.”

&nbs
p; “You lost sight of the Forest for the trees, Max.”

  “But the worst thing of all was her writing. That was so painful, I still can’t talk about it. She’d work on a short story for six, eight weeks and then tear it up. Or she’d work on some article for months and then decide that the research was leading her to a conclusion she didn’t like, so she’d just dump the whole project. Or she’d start a new novel and work on it for eight, nine months and then just stick it in a drawer somewhere and never look at it again. It was crazy.”

  His words are only stirring up my love for Sukie.

  “It was like … every time Sukie grilled a steak for dinner she’d invariably stick her arm too close to the broiler and get a horrendous burn. But see, all her injuries were self-inflicted punishments for what she considered her nonproductivity. And it wasn’t like she didn’t work hard. She did. She just never thought anything she wrote was good enough to publish. Like her second book. I just sent it off to her agent when Sukie was in Chicago and the damn thing got printed without any revisions. I tell you one thing, Diana, Sukie suffered over her writing as much as any genius ever did. I’m not saying she was a genius, but she suffered like one.”

  My grief for Sukie’s pain is like a pillow pressed over my face, stifling my breathing and muffling any sound I might make.

  “But what was really so weird about that summer was that I spent so much time with her. When the second session was over, we went all over town together, shopping in Georgetown and stuff like that. One afternoon I bought us matching shirts from some hippie vendor on Wisconsin Avenue and we hid in an alley behind the Riggs bank to put them on. And a couple of times we just sat around and got drunk at Clyde’s in the afternoon and went out to a lot of good restaurants and saw a bunch of good movies and went to a concert at Wolf Trap, which we’d never done before, and did some fancy fucking in the afternoons because the kids were still at camp.”