by Jessi Klein
When it was over, I walked back to my adobe cottage, jelly-legged, and I was struck by two things. First, the temperature of the air. It felt like the exact temperature of my own body, so it was difficult to tell where my skin ended and the outside world began. The second thing was the stars. I looked up to see, for the first time in my life, the ghost-chalk whiteness between all the stars, the milk in the Milky Way. I was so happy I felt like crying. Not to worry—when I got back to my room, I found three strategically placed tissue boxes perched at different points around the bed, bathroom, and sitting area, waiting for me.
Day Two
The next morning, my schedule was packed. I had another massage (I know), a class called “Athletology,” and a private session wherein I would learn how to “Ride the Wave.”
I walked to the spa, slipped into a robe, and went to the “quiet room” to wait. In the quiet room sat a copy of Condé Nast Traveler with a big article about Miraval, so you could read about Miraval while being at Miraval. But the article could not compete with the scenery. The room had a giant floor-to-ceiling window so you could look out at the mountains. The morning sun moved across them dramatically, painting one peak dark purple and then brilliant yellow. I stared at them, thinking about how breathtaking mountains are and how crazy it was that I, as a New York City kid, had never really seen them until now. Suddenly I heard a tapping sound and turned to see the woman in the chaise lounge next to me ignoring the mountains in favor of playing Candy Crush on her iPad, tapping away with a perfectly manicured nail.
I had my second stupidly wonderful massage and then rushed to Athletology, another class in another corporate-looking conference room. About twenty women piled in, once again tanned and Lululemoned, and once again the exception was sad Dracula, who had changed into somewhat bedazzled gold-accented loungewear. Our leader this time was a woman going by the handle “Coach Leigh,” and the minute she entered the room, I felt a strong urge to be her. She was about six feet tall and broad-shouldered, with long swinging brown hair and more than a passing resemblance to supermodel volleyball player Gabrielle Reece. Everything about her radiated confidence and optimism. She began by explaining that she’d been a tennis junior pro, and pointed out that all athletes listen to music to get psyched for the task at hand. “I don’t want you to be any different,” she said, and told us that she was going to play us a song in its entirety, during which we were to write the answer to the question “Who am I?” and I was open to this idea until she started to play “Man in the Mirror” by Michael Jackson, at which point I just started writing “what the fuck am I doing here” over and over again for three minutes.
But post-song, things improved as she explained that everything she ever learned during her life in sports felt 100 percent applicable to everyday life. The notion of optimism less as a choice but simply as a necessary part of winning, the idea of changing your life just 5 percent every day to get huge changes in what you can achieve, and more than anything, the idea that in order to play your best game you must let go of caring about the outcome of the game, and that herein was the secret to happiness. And about twelve minutes into her talk, as her good vibes shimmered across the room, I felt something I had never felt before: namely, how embarrassing it feels to be genuinely inspired by an inspirational speaker. Because in that moment, at the same time you’re getting excited for the clarity with which you can suddenly see your life, creeping up right behind it is a rain cloud of shame that it’s come to this.
After Athletology, feeling like a real Orange Diamond, I zipped over to the main lobby where I would meet Dr. Smith, the man who was going to teach me about “Riding the Wave.” It would be a one-on-one session, meaning that I had paid over $200 for this conversation to be just between us. The saddest thing was that between signing up for this class and now getting ready to attend it I had lost all memory of what it was about or what had motivated me to choose it in the first place. This feeling only got worse when Dr. Smith emerged and called out my name, and I looked up to see a man dressed in billowy pin-striped pants, a short-sleeved collared shirt, and a vinyl visor, all of this centered on a face that looked exactly, and I mean exactly, like that of Jim Carrey in Dumb and Dumber.
If you’re waiting for me to tell you how to “Ride the Wave,” or even what that means, you’re in for a world of disappointment, because all I could think about while he was talking, in addition to the Jim Carrey thing, was the fact that he kept sniffling and wiping his nose with his thumb, possible indicators that Dr. Smith’s trick for Riding the Wave might simply be to do coke.
He said something about how counting to four on your inhale and exhale is a good way to calm yourself. As he began to explain this, and didn’t stop explaining it for over forty minutes, I suddenly realized that this was the entire substance of his teaching, just this breathing and counting to four. He said you should start to think of your breath like a wave, and I tried, but instead I felt wave after wave of shock that this is where I was, in this small room in Arizona with this potentially coked-out man.
At the exact same time that I was sitting with Dr. Smith, Becky was having a private session with Tejpal, who was telling her that in a past life she had been an Irish boy.
Day Three
The final morning of the trip, I left my room just before six to watch Becky do the Leap of Faith. Sadly, the other development since we’d watched the Oprah episode those many years ago was a labral tear in my hip, making Leap of Faithing impossible (although now that it was in front of me, I was stoked to have an excuse to opt out). The name had been changed, for no reason we could discern, to the Quantum Leap. We met up with six other women in the lobby, who, in combination with Becky and me, were a perfect Breakfast Club of diversity. Among them: the fun Southern gal from Little Rock; a type A lesbian; and a kooky former surgeon with a limp, along with a few others. The guide/facilitator, Matt, was the type of guy that in New York City would be considered a unicorn: comfortable, open, nurturing, and happy to be in cargo shorts and a loose T-shirt with a name tag pinned to it.
We embarked on the five-minute walk to the obstacle area. Once again, the weather was perfect: a cloudless desert blue sky, the early-morning sun lighting all the nature around us with an electrically bright outline. Upon arriving in the shadow of the pole, we sat in a circle of white plastic chairs under a little tent and Matt asked each leaper what her intention was in doing this exercise. All of the women talked about wanting to face a fear or to leave behind an anxiety. Many mentioned wanting to be comfortable with not being in control. Susan, the one with the limp, talked about struggling with the physical challenges of her body and wanting to find peace. Another talked about going through a divorce.
As each one spoke, I felt myself, for the first time, wholeheartedly believing in this. I’d spent most of my adult life getting paid to be funny, which had often translated to looking for holes in other people’s beliefs. And since I’d arrived in Tucson, I’d been reluctant to simply give in to this level of sincerity. I was haunted by the notion that, after all, wasn’t this place just oozing with the worst kind of New Age bullshit? Weren’t we all indulging in the most excessive kind of privilege, paying through the nose to travel here so we could talk about our itsy-bitsy feelings in our premium spandex?
But in this moment, I let go. It felt clear that everyone was both struggling and trying, stuck in the mud and also wanting out. Yes, this ritual felt silly, but it wasn’t really any different from all the other ancient rituals in the world that have been created to make people feel less afraid. And so I found myself feeling compassion for the story of each of these strangers, feeling my heart pound for them as they climbed the pole as much as it pounded for Becky, who went first. When she made her way to the top, she discovered that the disk at the pole’s peak both wobbled and spun. Everyone gasped as she put down one knee on the disk, and then a foot, and then found her way to standing. “How do you feel?” Matt yelled up at her. “I feel good,” she shouted back.
“Whenever you’re ready,” Matt said. Becky held on to her rope and took the leap of faith into the desert air. At the peak of her arc her rope tightened, as her peers belayed her gently down. When Becky returned to earth, everyone hugged. I took photos of each woman’s turn and whooped for each. The hugging continued. I felt alive. I felt the possibility of going forward and facing life’s unexpected obstacles with courage. Essentially, I felt like Oprah.
This feeling continued through dinner and afterward, when Becky, her mother, and I went to sit around the spa’s fire pit. Becky was planning, per Tejpal’s instructions, to write down all her life’s disappointments on a piece of paper and then burn it, never mentioning them again. A few other women holding spa tea and dressed in robes were enjoying the stars. It was a scene of perfect peace, a beautifully calm night, until I heard Becky’s mother say, “Oh, okay, just watch out.” “What?” I said. “It’s a tarantula,” she said.
And sure enough, along the base of the wall not seven feet from us, I saw it, crawling in ghastly slow motion like a disembodied hand from a B-movie. I had never seen a tarantula in person before, my experience being limited to that episode of The Brady Bunch where the Bradys are cursed in Hawaii and Peter wakes up to find a hairy spider crawling on his chest. I remembered watching it as a kid and wondering how the actor playing Peter could have possibly dealt with something so unbearable. And I thought of how stupid I’d been to think that a few days of scribbling down aphorisms would exorcise the presence of fear from my life. The fear that my marriage would end the way my first real relationship had, with me screaming like a tortured harpy on the street. The fear that my hip injury was the beginning of a physical decline that was inevitable anyway, with my fortieth birthday looming. The fear of losing my desirability. The fear of having children, the fear of not having children. The fear of the end of the world. But mainly I thought, as I screamed and jumped onto my chair, of how insane it was that I could have ever forgotten that Arizona is filled with tarantulas, and that they’d been around me the entire time.
1 I hadn’t.
2 Actually 10 mg.
Ma’am
Like all women, I started out life as a miss.
When I was a little girl, people would sometimes call me miss, but in a way that was kind of playful and silly because I was just a child.
Then in my early tweens, I moved into a category at department stores called “Junior Miss,” which is basically for girls who don’t have breasts yet.
And then once I was a full-on teenager, I was to the world at large just miss.
“How can I help you, miss?”
“Miss, you dropped a dollar.”
“Miss, can I buy you a drink?”
“Excuse me, miss, I’m interested in having sex with you.”
The last one is the most important thing about being a miss. Being a miss means you are just a slip of a thing, a nymph, slim-hipped and flat-stomached and sexually alluring. Even if you’re obese, if you’re still a miss, you’re golden.
Everyone wants a piece of a miss. Miss sounds like you’re mostly air, like your body has the magic and delicacy of a wind chime and when you walk down the street everyone around you hears little bells.
Then one day everything changes.
I don’t remember the exact place or time I was first called ma’am. That’s abnormal for me because I tend to remember the details of traumatic things (where I was when I was first stung by a bee, the friend’s house I was at when I watched the disappointing finale of Seinfeld). Which means on some level, I must have blocked it out.
I know I was around thirty. In my mind, I was still wind-chiming around town as a miss. And then some waiter, or maybe it was a teller at a bank, looked me up and down and decided I was a ma’am. I didn’t expect to be called ma’am any more than I expected Clive Owen to walk in and demand we have sex (although in my head there might still have been a chance because again, I thought I was a miss and when you’re a miss there’s a very real possibility anyone at any given moment wants to fuck you, including celebrities).
In that moment I felt very viscerally the beginning of something slipping away: not just the possibility of fucking Clive Owen, but something bigger—my image of myself. How was I being perceived as a ma’am? And by how, I mean why? And just what is a ma’am anyway? And why was I so upset?
Ma’am makes us crazy for a bunch of reasons:
1. Ma’am is yet another horrible-sounding word in the lexicon of words that women are stuck with to describe various aspects of their body/life/mental state/hair. Vagina. Moist. Fallopian tubes. Yeast infection. Clitoris. Frizz. These are all terrible words, and yet they are our assigned descriptors. Who made up these words? Women certainly didn’t. If, at the beginning of time, right after making vaginas, God had asked me, “What would you like your most intimate and enjoyable part of yourself to be called?,” I most certainly wouldn’t have said, “Vagina.” No woman would, because vagina sounds like a First World War term that was invented to describe a trench that has been mostly blown apart but is still in use. Even off the very top of my head I feel like I could have come up with something better, like for instance the word papoose, which actually as I’m typing it feels like an incredibly brilliant word for a vagina.
But ma’am fits right into this pattern. Ma’am is the onomatopoeia of drowning in a lake-size bowl of borscht. Ma’am sounds like a species of frog that just watches reality television all day. Ma’am sounds like a woman whose body is mostly cheese whiz.
2. Ma’am isn’t just a form of address. It’s a way for a perfect stranger to let us know how old he thinks we are. What is the purpose of this? Why does a clerk at West Elm have to let me know he thinks he knows how old I am? And for the record: I am not someone who cares about hiding my age. As I’m typing this I’m thirty-nine and by the time this book is in anyone’s hands I will be at the very least forty and maybe even forty-one and if you wait just a few more years to read it I will probably be mainlining Boniva. The issue isn’t my comfort with my age so much as it’s the why why why the fuck why does this need to be a factor in every interaction I have? Why do we have to be a nation divided between misses and ma’ams? Why do I have to be trained to respond to a different name once the world at large has decided I am no longer a fawn? I guess fawns deal with the same thing. A fawn is a fawn until one day she’s checking in for a flight to Burbank at JetBlue and the TSA agent calls her doe. But I would rather be a doe than a ma’am.
3. Ma’am is doubly insulting because we hear men being called sir all day. And sir is awesome. We long for sir. Sir is what knights are and what Paul McCartney is. Sir sounds like you are sitting at a castle round table eating a rack of lamb. Sir means you are respected and maybe a little bit feared. No one fears ma’am, except in the sense that they may be worried oh no what if this ma’am starts hitting on me, then what will I do?
Sir, your private plane is ready for boarding.”
Congratulations on becoming president of the United States, sir.”
What can I do to make sir happy today?”
Men are called sir starting from when they’re old enough to be called anything, and they stay sir through old age (at which point chances are they’re still fucking a miss). Men don’t have to deal with the fact that at some point in their early midlife, they will find themselves tossed into a linguistic system that will let them know, in no uncertain terms, that in the eyes of the world, essentially, they’ve begun to die. When you’re called sir, you’re being called the same thing that James Bond is called.
For a lot of guys, being called sir is the closest they’ll ever get to being an actual man.
When I’m called ma’am, I’m being called the same thing that Senator Barbara Boxer is being called, and she’s seventy-five. Except scratch that. Even she famously got bent out of shape when she was addressed on the Senate floor as ma’am. She corrected the person, firmly asking to be called Senator instead of ma’am.
But if you’re not
a senator, and have no plans to be one, and probably couldn’t be even if you wanted to because of some unfortunate YouTube videos where you do stand-up about your sex life, what do you ask to be called? We’ve never come up with a good alternative. But I know you can’t complain if you’re not trying to solve the problem yourself. So, may I offer:
Your Highness
Meryl
Khaleesi
Queen
Miss Jackson (if you’re nasty)1
Since that first ma’am, I have now been called ma’am more times than I care to count. Once in a blue moon, I am still called miss. It’s like being carded, except way better, because in the instance when someone cards me it’s either because even though they know I’m of age they have to do it by law, or they’re just being terribly condescending. In either case, we do the little song and dance where they ask to see ID, even though it’s clear that I have no first rodeos left. Then they wait for me to say, “Ohmigod, really? Wow I haven’t been carded in forever, THANK YOU.” I hate saying it but it’s inevitable I will say it. I don’t know how to stop saying it. The farce of being asked to prove I’m not eighteen is so ridiculous that it feels like someone needs to acknowledge the ocean of bullshit we are suddenly standing in.
But someone calling me miss means maybe they still see a little of my former missy self underneath my non-skinny jeans and my glasses and the wiry white hairs sprouting from around my forehead. I do still have decent boobs and thin arms and I’ve never smoked. And when I’m called miss, I feel an uncomfortable little thrill. Because as much as I hate to admit it, I miss the sound of that light wind-chimey word. It’s embarrassing to care what someone calls me, because the number one symptom of being old is caring whether someone thinks you’re old.