Hot Flashes

by Raskin, Barbara;

  And if, sometimes, a Sunday morning seems too unnaturally silent, I can always go out to meet any number of wonderful friends for coffee and compassion before returning home again. And if sometimes I awaken alone during the night, I can always listen to music, watch late movies on television or write in my Hot Flashes notebook where I am planting images and pruning ideas about my generation. Or if, in the most uncomfortable of all situations, I need the comfort of a man, I can always call my not-so-significant-other—knowing he tends his aloneness less well than I—and that he will appear promptly at my door. The rest of my life is in good order.

  My friends and I don’t travel much anymore but when we do we stay in first-class hotels with our second husbands or much-younger lovers and leave most of our lingerie behind for the maid when we check out. Actually, we are most comfortable now in the assorted beach houses some of us acquired during the past decade of divorce settlements. We view these summer properties as communal resources where, in case of emergency, we can always send one of our teenagers to recover from some severe complication occasioned by growing up. We can also use these mountain or beach houses when we need solitude more than sisterly sympathy or when, on those choice occasions when inspiration strikes, we want to write something of value. Of course we are discreet about not intruding when these recreational retreats are being used by their owners for family reunions, rendezvous or reconciliations.

  Our beautiful friend Liz, who ran for Congress in Wisconsin, sent her two boys off to summer camp and then went up to the Vineyard to stay with Ellie. One morning they went to the beach and were sitting back away from the water when Liz saw her biological husband sweep out of the parking lot and sprawl, with his new wife and her three small children, across the sand down to the shore. Since Steve didn’t have his glasses on, Liz knew he couldn’t see her so she was able to observe everything in a relaxed, leisurely way.

  Late in the afternoon, Steve had his new wife and new family pose for some snapshots. As he began taking the pictures, Liz said, “Do you know that we’re going to be in the background of all his shots? His eyes are too bad to see us, but I know the range of that camera. You and I are going to be in every one of those pictures. He’s going to freak out when he opens them up in the drugstore. I wish I could be there. He won’t believe it. He’ll think it’s just my vindictive spirit.”

  Whenever possible, we still try to coordinate some summer weekends so our children can be together for a few lazy, happy days. “Come to me,” says Anne, who summers up north in Maine where she owns a home and can find neighboring ones for overflow friends to rent or sublet. “Come to me,” says Ellie who has a pondside cottage up in the Vineyard; “Come to me,” says Janet, who has a farm in Vermont; “Come to me,” says Mary from her condo down in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. “Come be with some black folks,” cries Eleanor, who inherited her parents’ cottage in one of the first and only all-black resort towns on the Chesapeake Bay; “I swear there’s no jellyfish until August.” And when we do go there, it is like no other place in America.

  But no longer will we have to travel to a patch of peninsula called Delmarva which Sukie, for some mysterious reason beyond geographic convenience, loved but which none of the rest of us could endure. Next to Ocean City, Maryland, Rehoboth, Delaware, is the tackiest town on the Atlantic seaboard. On that Boardwalk there are more underdeveloped, weird, out-of-it misfits than in any other resort town in the country. They come here because the place doesn’t make them feel odd or out-of-it. Here, freaks prevail—genuine sideshow freaks plus circus families, adolescent girls with deformed feet, identical twins dressed exactly alike in homemade clothing, palsied old derelicts talking to themselves, bag ladies in their summer costumes, Baptist ministers singing and preaching aloud as they walk the streets, motorcycle freaks, ugly young lovers who kiss and pet in public, people propelling themselves in automated wheelchairs from which they play endless carnie games, and blondes wearing terrycloth shorts without any underpants.

  Now there is no Sukie to nag us into trying Delmarva just one more time.

  Now there is no Sukie.

  When the chill of a shadow falls upon me, I open my eyes.

  Joanne has interposed her body between me and the sun. She is glistening with water and looks svelte and taut bending over me, although from this angle I can see that her waist has begun to soften slightly. She has removed the rubber band from her hair so it will dry, and the long tangled strands fall forward over her shoulders like a careless scarf. I look away. I love Joanne’s beauty and I don’t want her body to melt as mine has begun to do.

  But when she finally settles down on her chaise, I hear her breathing rapidly, and when I look at her face I see that she is crying.

  “Hey,” I say softly.

  “It hurts so much,” she sobs inconsolably. “And there were things I’d been saving to tell her.”

  I wait while Joanne wipes her eyes with the corner of the hotel towel.

  “I feel so shitty that I didn’t know what she was going through.”

  Now Sukie’s anguish has become her deathbed where we must keep our vigil. Because her death preceded our discovery of the illness that probably killed her, we feel compelled to grieve for Sukie’s pain as well as for our loss of her. It’s like back in the sixties when hippies used their women’s afterbirths as the base for a celebratory stew that they ate at postpartum parties.

  “I suppose everyone knows by now,” Joanne says softly, “but I think we should call someone from her old CR group. At least to say we’re here and staying at the house. Or something.” Soberly she observes the heavy sky. “And I suppose we should try to call Lindy. She’ll want to come down for the funeral. She loved Sukie.”

  “Did you know Lindy had a bad breakdown?”

  “Yah. Sukie told me. Have you seen her?”

  “No. She wasn’t allowed to have any visitors at first and then I went out to Long Island. But last week I saw Bob out there and we had a cup of coffee together. He feels real bad about Lindy’s being in the hospital, but he’s got no intention of going back to her. Did Sukie tell you the reason he left?”

  “No, what?” Joanne asks.

  “He was doing his yoga when Lindy walked into the living room and said he should lift his legs up higher for the lotus position. And that was it. He just stood up, went into the bedroom, packed his clothes and moved out.”

  “After five years?”

  “Yup. And when Lindy asked him if he didn’t think he was overreacting, he told her she couldn’t even fucking do the lotus position, so where the hell did she get off telling him his legs weren’t high enough?”

  Joanne flashes her awesome smile, but after a few seconds it flickers like a fluorescent light fading out. Then she shakes her head and sits up to light a cigarette, priming herself to speak.

  “You know, I missed the mating season,” she says mournfully. “That’s all. It’s simple. I just missed the mating season. But not having a man is not my number-one problem right now. What I can’t accept is that I don’t have any children. I can’t accept that. I’m absolutely bloated with undelivered love. That’s what I wanted to tell Sukie. I wanted to say that to her. I’ve had it with men, Diana. And I’ve had it with est and all the personal-growth encounter jazz and all the feminist c-r stuff and all the exercise classes and all the group sex. I’ve done it all. I’m just not a groupie anymore. I lived through the whole sexual revolution and the women’s movement and now I’m stuck in the postfeminist famine. I’ve run plenty of personals and I don’t ever want to do that again. I don’t ever want to try explaining myself to some asshole who can’t understand anyway. I’ve had it, Diana. I’m just burned out. Jesus …

  “When I think of all the men I slept with—it freaks me out. I mean, I’ve been with so many men. I’ve gone with a guy who kept a separate Rolodex for women from Dallas and one who kept a spritzer under his bed in case some woman he picked up had her period and smeared his fancy Porthault sheets. And for
one entire year I went with a guy who used to say, ‘I’ve got to be alone right now. Right this minute. It’s not personal. Please just leave.’ I have screwed standing up in the bathroom of a 747. I’ve screwed standing up in the stationery closet of a senator’s office.”

  “Who was that?” I’m compelled to ask.

  But she doesn’t answer. We are known for protecting married men with legitimate excuses for adultery and elected officials with good ADA voting records.

  “I think I’ve done more one-night stands than any big-name group in the country. And now I’m done.”

  She has finished toweling her hair and lies back to look directly up at the sky. After a few moments she closes her eyes.

  We didn’t start sleeping around until after our hideous high school years had ended and we finally escaped to college. Although we had been discusing free love since ninth grade, we had been unable to give ours away because there were neither takers nor opportunities. But as soon as we got to our respective colleges, we threw away our rubberized Playtex girdles-with-garters and became moody existentialists who wore no underwear at all. Then we took down the chintz curtains we had brought from home and began to use our dormitory windows as late-night rendevouz routes.

  Now officially recognized refugees from conformity, obsessed with the absurdities of modern life, we unloaded our virginities on the first available organ recipient we could find and began “sleeping around” as if it was going out of style instead of just coming in. We rationalized our outrageous promiscuity in Marxist terms, viewing it as a means of redistributing the wealth. The works of Sigmund Freud became our sexual manuals. Having grown up during the Cold War, we were well schooled in maintaining long-term hostilities so our sexual liaisons were as urgent and neurotic as Russian/American relations. Each of our affairs was epic. We spent our nights going out, making out, breaking up and making up.

  Nowadays I hear Loren and Lisa talk about “fooling around,” by which I think they mean screwing. We never “fooled around.” We were deadly serious about sex. We geared up for it. We dressed for it. Screwing for us was a fashion statement as well as a political posture and for a while we used up more Tampax absorbing morning-after sperm drainage than our own menstrual blood. We loved our love-hate relationships and discussed them in dreary detail. We came to love the color purple. We loved purple prose, purple lipstick and purple nights.

  At Radcliffe I roomed with Doris from Dayton, who carried The Stranger around with her and hummed songs from The Threepenny Opera to show she was an intellectual. Our dorm was a time bomb loaded with books, bennies and boys. Every day, as soon as we woke up, we began yearning for the unavailable and craving the unattainable. We condemned Korea, criticized conformity, cursed McCarthy, got diaphragms from the Student Health Service and spent a lot of time trying to identify the tip of a cervix which the doctor had said felt like the cartilage at the tip of a nose. We dated, dieted and discussed Sartre endlessly.

  Those were the days when we refused to declare a major until the very last minute and read everything on the recommended—as well as the required—reading lists. We read relentlessly, argued passionately and screwed incessantly. After making up all the Incompletes we’d collected, we graduated from college and went to New York where we collected unemployment comp while trying to test our talents. Since we’d never learned the numbers at the top of our typewriters—blissfully believing the letters were enough for writing poetry—we were unsuccessful as stenographers or typists. What we were good at was suffering-with-style and doing-without.

  We wore turtleneck sweaters with no makeup and no bras. We picked up men on trains and in coffee houses, airports and depots, in the streets and on the sidewalks of New York City. We hung out in the Village and made the art scene at Max’s Kansas City. By the time we finished college we had learned how to drink bourbon, rye, wine, Scotch, beer, vodka and even cappuccino when stuck in coffee houses during long poetry readings. We drank to excess in bars, bathrooms, boats and bedrooms. We were intensely intense about everything. We went to plays and museums and old movies, and if a date paid for a meal, we paid him for paying. We played and prayed we wouldn’t get knocked up. We loved being bohemians and we couldn’t get enough of anything—especially sin.

  Sin still existed back then.

  During that bridge of time between the mid-fifties and mid-sixties, college bohemians became on-the-road beatniks and the Beatles exploded, smashing middleclass hypocrisies. We immediately bought navy-surplus pullover sweaters and walked along Macdougal Street in our new custom-made leather sandles eating Italian sausage sandwiches and Italian ices on our way to see some arty Italian movie full of malaise.

  It wasn’t until the disorienting discovery of truly casual—rather than intensely casual—sex in the 1960s that we really got into some serious trouble. It was Hippie-style free-love that eventually turned out to be the most costly of all. It was sixties free-for-all-love that left us with so many outstanding debts.

  “And when I think of the abortions I had …” Joanne’s chin beings to quiver. “For all I know, I probably can’t even get pregnant anymore.”

  Tears well up in her eyes. I can see her swallow forcibly in an effort to gain control over her voice.

  “Jesus. The way Elaine snapped my head off for mentioning The Big Chill almost makes me afraid to say this, Diana. But really, I’ve been thinking about getting knocked up by somebody and just not telling him. Some stranger who seems like a decent human being. I mean pretty soon, with this AIDS thing going around.… I mean, I’m almost forty-four and if I don’t try soon, and I mean really soon, it will just be too late for me.”

  “Oh, Joanne.” I laugh gently and cautiously, knowing she experiences all her enthusiasms as authentic and serious.

  “I just want to pick out a man and forget to put my diaphragm—do you say in or on?”

  “I don’t say either anymore.”

  “Actually, three women I know pretty well in New York did it. They picked out some guy—some friend—to knock them up and now they have babies. Real, live, darling little babies. And the men don’t know shit. They probably couldn’t care less anyway. Look, the seventies sucked. There wasn’t a chance in the world to meet a man back then and make things work out. Everything was too tense. The war between the sexes really got out of control there for a while. We were facing some major disorders back then.

  “But now I’m down to the wire, Diana. Really. And I feel frantic. I want a baby. I want to raise a child. And if I’m going to do it, I have to do it now. I mean, I did think it was a little weird when Glenn Close provided her own husband for her girlfriend. That did seem like a little bit much. But with a stranger or with someone like Jeff, who Sukie cared about and who loved her … Anyone who loved Sukie that much couldn’t be a bad human being, could he? And he’d never know. He wouldn’t even bump into us at the Children’s Zoo in Central Park, since he lives here in Washington. I really would never see him again.

  “And I don’t want to get shot up with a turkey baster full of sperm from some pricey sperm bank. Every time I’d look at the kid, I’d think of a turkey. And I don’t want a baby from Bolivia. I can’t even remember my Spanish. I want my own baby. Now. Before it’s too late forever. Because I’ve got an apartment and enough money and all this love to give. What am I supposed to do with all my love? Eat it?

  “I tell you, I’m scared to death I’m going to go into menopause any minute now. I go crazy waiting for my period every month. I wait for it like back in college when I was scared I’d get knocked up. So twenty years later I’m still running into the bathroom every ten minutes to do the old toilet-paper oil-dip routine, you know. Remember? Swiping the sides to see if anything’s happening? Looking for some show-and-tell.”

  She begins to cry. Hard. Very hard for a very long time. She’s off on a jag. She’s crying for herself and for a baby and for the past and for Sukie. She doesn’t even try to stem the tears or the harsh noises she’s making.
/>   I wait.

  “What did I do wrong, Diana?”

  “You didn’t do anything wrong, Joanne,” I say gently. “Your life just got out of sync. Go ahead and get pregnant if you want to. There’s nothing wrong with it. Let Phil Donahue worry. So he’ll have a show called ‘What About the Biological Father?’ So what? Nobody worried about the ‘biological father’ back when unwed mothers existed. Then it was always her fault and her problem and her baby. So if you want to do it, just go do it. Do some dope and do Jeff. What the hell?”

  Although decades have passed, essentially, we have not changed very much over the years.

  Except for Sandy and Nadia (both brilliant but unrecognized research scientists who helped Sandy’s husband win a Nobel Prize and who aren’t afraid of dropping a vital syllable when they use the word organism in polite society), most of us remain science-and-technology virgins. Although we have learned how to operate PCs, like our mothers we still cannot load a camera, remember the number of cups in a quart, use the metric system, open someone else’s car trunk or reverse angles in order to get a table back through a doorway after getting it through frontwards.

  We still do not wash our lettuce unless someone is watching, bake anything from scratch (although we say we do), or stick our heads inside the toilet to scrub away the high-water marks. Occasionally, we have been known to emerge from a restaurant rest room with a piece of toilet paper stuck to the heel of one shoe and, on a bad day, to abandon a stuffed shopping cart at the checkout counter of a crowded supermarket for no apparent reason to the total bafflement of the management. Many of us persist in cutting our own hair with manicure scissors, burying our feet in the sand so as to hide crooked toes, kissing with our lips closed to cloister bad breath and thinking—whenever we are drunk—that we are about to be able to speak, or at least understand, Spanish.

  We still order magazine subscriptions under false names, listen to odd radio stations in hopes of catching interviews with old friends, and join the BOMC every few years to receive cheap introductory books before canceling our memberships. We continue to carry breath fresheners in our purses in case we bump into an old lover, and will never stop curling and/or straightening our hair, waxing our legs and bikini areas, or maneuvering the bathroom scale around to find an advantageous floor slope that will produce a tilt that allows us to detect a weight loss.