by Cathy Alter
30s: The butt. It’s sexy at any age, but women in their thirties are old enough to love and flaunt what they’ve got.
40s: The calves. Or any other part that shows strength. Sarah [Jake’s “Sarandon”] has such beautiful, defined calves, I used to beg her to wear skirts.
to…
WHAT’LL IMPRESS HER
20s: I gave Stephanie [his Sienna] a favorite book of mine, one that came out maybe 10 years ago. She was thrilled to be introduced to Martin Amis. In 1995, after all, she was busy reading the Torah at her bat mitzvah.
30s: Unlike Nora’s [or Marisa’s] previous boyfriend, who was 27, I knew enough to pick a vacation spot that hadn’t been featured on a Girls Gone Wild video.
40s: Sarah appreciated my ability to begin foreplay without the aid of a little blue pill and dismount without having chest pains. Note: She’d just divorced a 53-year-old.
I reread the article, substituting my ribbon legs for Susan Sarandon’s sexy calves, and wondered if Karl would have been so faux-charitable in his own categorizations. Did he find his ex–bikini model’s “night out” ensemble of “stilettos and sparkly dress” sexier than my “designer suit,” which, according to Jake, is the fuck-me outfit for women in their forties? (I had already put myself in the forties slot, since I would be, in four short months.) What if Karl preferred the kind of conversations he could have with Jackie, who “hadn’t gotten to the point where arguing about Led Zeppelin versus The Rolling Stones, God versus Nietzsche, and Snickers versus Milky Way seemed cliché” to the special kind of chitchat he could have with me—where, like Jake’s older woman, I’d use my seasoned perspective to assure him that his “big life quandaries,” from his beliefs about marriage to his questionable career choices, “would work themselves out just fine.” (“Sometimes,” revealed Jake, “just feeling understood is the best aphrodisiac.”)
I looked at the photo of Sienna Miller with her head thrown back in open-mouthed laughter, a flute of champagne in her hand and compared it to the one of Susan Sarandon, who was eye-locked with Jude Law. He was leaning forward conspiratorially and painting her fingernails a Russian red. I didn’t know whom Jude wound up with in the movie version, but postproduction, he had continued to romance Sienna, who didn’t look like the kind of girl who would squander precious party time waiting for her polish to dry.
I flipped back to Self and had another look at Diane Lane, who made a much better mirror for me. She was too good for the likes of Jake/Jude. Sure, she was beautiful in an unfussy, unmadeup way that probably took three hours and four stylists to stage, but there was still something about Lane that was entirely transcendent. To paraphrase the famed line from When Harry Met Sally, how could I have what she was having?
I found the answer in Real Simple, where three female writers, all confounded by traditional standards of beauty, discovered that “true or real beauty can best be found by creating standards of one’s own.” In her essay, Lily Tuck examined how she was shaped by her mother, to whom appearance, and its meticulous upkeep, was everything. Lisa Teasley’s definition of beauty was informed by black men, who rejected her for darker skin and “regular black girl” features. And in the final essay, Ann Patchett discovered that her attractiveness was influenced by her geography. Because she didn’t have big hair or blue eye shadow, she was dowdy in Kentucky; because she wasn’t a gay man, she was invisible in Provincetown. She finally felt at home in Montana, where her freshly scrubbed face and lip-balmed lifestyle fit in with the rest of the residents, male and female.
Of the three women, I identified most with Lily Tuck, who wrote about her changing attitude toward going gray, which she had recently embraced, but had combated for fifteen years with hair dye. She contrasted her un-dye-ing, quite literally, with her mother’s dying: “My mother, until the day she died in her eighties, was blond.” The desire to preserve her youth, her gilded artifice, ranked higher than anything else—even her health. Tuck’s mother, we learned midway through the story, refused chemotherapy to treat her cancer. “She claimed that if she were to go bald she would no longer be able to look at herself in the mirror,” wrote Tuck.
I don’t have gray hair, and my mother does not have cancer, but still, when I read that line, I instantly wormholed back to a conversation I had with her years ago. I was spending the weekend with my parents in Connecticut, on hiatus from my totally chic life as an executive trainee at Bloomingdale’s, and as I usually did when I was home with nothing much to do, I came down to breakfast unshowered and with very little intention of even putting on a bra until suppertime.
“How can you stand to look at yourself in the mirror like that?” complained my mother.
Like Tuck’s mother, mine also derived her sense of self through what she reflected back to the world, her adoring audience. Like Tuck’s mother, mine also felt duty-bound to maintain her good looks. If you were born pretty, as my mother was, you stayed pretty, no matter what.
Back then, when I was doing my own Goldilocks search for style (These stirrup pants are just right! ), my mother was always regarding me, cataloging what I had on my feet (“I knew a girl who used to wear shoes like that,” she’d comment, “until she fixed her club foot”) or appraising the efficacy of my hairdo (“When you don’t fluff the back,” she’d note, “you look like you have cradle cap”). Whenever I did assent to wear makeup, she’d stand at the bathroom door and watch me like a cat. “You look pretty,” she’d allow, after I had put on my face.
And so I spent a great deal of the vulnerable years between girlhood and womanhood (and beyond, quite honestly) thinking my mother’s interest in me was purely cosmetic. When she sat me down and announced that I was no Christie Brinkley, she was telling me that I was not a natural beauty and I should get used to having a makeup bag as a constant companion. Not surprisingly, my mother’s standards of beauty (which included a slavish devotion to Revlon’s Love That Red lipstick and her treasured black Armani pantsuit) developed out of her own painful past. She often referred to her preteen years as her “chubby baby” phase and admitted to still seeing a fat face every time she looked in the mirror.
I knew then, as I know now, that my mother only wanted for me what she had wanted for herself—to be accepted, to be popular, and to have a happy life. But back then, her way of expressing this ambitious wish for me really did a number on my self-confidence. Instead of landing in that soft spot of unconditional love, I often felt that the only way to win her acceptance was to model myself after her. Whenever I was home for a visit, I’d walk around my house in a What-Would-Mommy-Do haze, wondering if I’d ever find the perfect shade of me. But the barefaced truth was (and still is) I looked horrible in red lipstick.
Struggling against my mother’s beauty paradigm had the unintentional benefit of generating my own standards. I may have turned my back on her red army, but I was in no way retreating. No. I was still fighting for something; I just was using a more gently hued arsenal.
As if reflecting on my mother and her makeup bag wasn’t enough, Karl invited me to meet his mother, Joy, for dim sum. This presented a few problems, least of which was the actual meeting of his mother. For instance, dim sum contained unidentifiable food that could kill me—like kung pao shrimp dressed in moo-shu-chicken clothing. Worse, we were going to a traditional Chinese restaurant out in the suburbs, and that could only mean one thing: our table would be set with those paper placemats depicting the Chinese zodiac. I was 100 percent sure that at some point during lunch Joy was going to look down at her placemat and innocently ask me when I was born.
“Why don’t you find out what animal will make you thirty-two?” schemed my mother.
“Because I don’t want to lie,” I said.
“I would.”
But as far as I was concerned, I had already cracked open my fortune cookie and learned my fate. There was no escaping it. So when we got to the restaurant and I saw those placemats, the same placemats of my imagination, with the twelve zodiac animals positioned
around a Wheel of Fortune–like circle and the words “What’s Your Sign?” done up in fancy calligraphy across the top, I felt psychically vindicated. The only thing I couldn’t have predicted was how long I could dodge the bullet. I sat down next to Karl, and immediately reached up my skirt and began to dig my fingernails into my thighs.
Joy knew half the staff, whom she brightly greeted in Cantonese. An ancient woman in a shiny red cheongsam immediately swooped down on us and set heavily chipped dinner chargers directly over our placemat’s zodiac wheels. As long as we continued to eat, I figured, the stimulus for my undoing would remain hidden under plates of greasy dumplings. Karl told me that dim sum typically lasted for three hours. I wondered if I’d have any flesh on my thighs by the end of the day.
Joy continued to hold court with the waitresses, each of whom she held by both wrists while trilling like an exotic bird. I was so thankful for the whole flock, since they also served to distract her from the placemats. After the last one flitted off, she shifted back around in her seat and looked terribly amused.
“Do you want to know what they were asking me?” she giggled. “They all wanted to know if you are my daughter-in-law.”
I found a nice meaty piece of flesh and dug in deep.
“In Cantonese, there is no word for girlfriend,” she explained before continuing on her delightful roll. “So I guess Karl is just going to have to marry you.”
I couldn’t tell if she was fucking with me, fucking with her son, or just fucking around in general. So I decided to play along.
“Well, I guess I’ll soon find out if you really like me or not,” I teased.
“How?” asked Joy, suddenly intrigued.
“If I suddenly start puking,” I cautioned, “I’ll know you secretly told the waitresses to give me shrimp balls.”
Since Joy had done all our ordering in Cantonese, it was a real—albeit absurd—possibility. I think Joy fully appreciated the comedy I was suggesting for her. “Don’t worry.” She laughed. “You’ll live.”
I spent the rest of the meal feeling half like the life of the party and half like dead man walking. When the busboys finally cleared our table, I was desperately praying the placemats would go, too. But there they sat, stained with duck sauce and spilled tea.
I became more and more frantic, filling up every inch of dead air with increasingly ridiculous questions. “Where did you grow up in China? How long have you been a nurse? Have you ever seen a dead body? Do you like cats?” I knew it was coming, and finally, it did.
“Cathy,” Joy began excitedly. “I’m year of the monkey. What animal year are you?”
I flashed back to an article in Real Simple about how to handle nosy questions. “How old are you?” got five noses out of ten on their nosiness rating scale. But none of the suggested responses (“I’m aging rapidly just thinking about it” or “Age means nothing to me—I’m a character actress”) worked when animals were thrown into the mix. Unless I tried answering in dog years.
I quickly scanned for my animal. The snake. There I was, 1965, carousing among those born in 1905, 1929, 1941, and 1989.
“I think I’m the year of the snake.”
There was a moment of silence as Joy consulted her placemat.
“No, you can’t be.” She clucked. “Look again.”
I continued staring at my placemat. I had yet to look over to Karl.
“Yes, that’s right,” I said with more confidence. “I’m year of the snake.”
“You can’t be,” Joy insisted.
“I can.”
This went on, seriously, for a few more rounds. Finally, Joy pounded her small fist on the table and said, “But that means you would have been born in 1965.”
“I was born in 1965.”
Things could have gone a few different ways at this point. Joy might have responded with something flattering like, “Wow. You look so much younger.” Or with a neutral, “How nice for you.” I even would have accepted, “Oh, Karl and his Mrs. Robinson fantasies.”
The reaction I wasn’t expecting was a fifteen-second: “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”
As Joy continued to cry out like she was falling off a cliff, waitresses came out of the woodwork to offer their help. As they formed a shield around Joy, I turned to Karl, who was staring at his knees, and said, “Did you know how old I was?”
Without taking the focus off his lap, Karl began to slowly shake his head back and forth in small, silent no, no, no’s. Cosmo had an article this month called “6 Signals His Face Is Sending You.” With his lips pressed into a thin line and his face remaining in profile, Karl was giving me the dreaded combo of “He’s having doubts” and “He needs some space.”
The back of my neck felt wet, and my hands were buzzing. I couldn’t imagine what was going to come out of Joy’s mouth next. When she finally stopped shrieking to the heavens, she said matter-of-factly, “In 1965, I was in my second year of nursing school.”
We spent a few more agonizing moments waiting for the check, which Joy paid as foot-in-mouth penance. Getting up from the table, I played a horrible game of “If he doesn’t hold my hand/put his arm around me/come within two feet of me, he’s going to dump me.” And when Karl didn’t reach for my hand as we walked from the restaurant to the car, I was certain he was disgusted with the idea of touching my rotting flesh. I imagined he was replaying all the times we’d been naked together and how he couldn’t wait to take a shower and wash off my decrepit germs.
As we drove back to D.C., I planned out the rest of my afternoon. When Karl dropped me off at my apartment, I would walk to the 7-Eleven and buy a bag of Doritos and a few giant Snickers bars. Back home, I’d fling myself on the bed, cry my eyes out for a few hours, and then call my mother and tell her she was right.
I imagined my good-byes to Karl. It’s been a nice time, I would tell him. I liked you very much. I’m sorry I’m old.
From the backseat, Joy said, “So, Cathy, what brought you to Washington?”
Great. Now she’s going to find out about my divorce. Is this what they mean by Chinese torture?
“I moved here to be with my boyfriend at the time,” I told her. “But we broke up.” Which was mostly true.
I caught Karl’s eye, finally, and whispered, “Should I tell her about my prison record?”
He took his right hand and placed it on top of my left and patted a few times. Then, he slid his hand next to mine and let our pinkies touch. When we drove right past my apartment building, I felt the bottomless relief of waking up from a bad dream.
We all arrived at Karl’s apartment and before Joy continued home to Virginia, she hugged me around the waist and said, “Next time, you pick the restaurant.”
After Karl and I had sucked the life out of a few cigarettes, we lay down on his futon with our noses touching.
“How do you feel about what my mom said at lunch?” he asked bashfully.
“I feel like throwing up,” I answered, closing my eyes.
“What?” Karl sat up on one elbow and laughed. “Why?”
“Because all this time I’ve been afraid that you’d think I was too old for you.”
“That’s funny,” he said. “Because all this time I was worried you’d think I was too young for you.”
It was like we were in some perverse “Gift of the Magi” story. “But I sold my Game Boy to buy you a gold-plated walker!”
“You mean you knew?!” This was stunning news to me.
“Yeah,” he replied casually. “But not exactly how much older. I figured you might be a Rabbit…maybe an Ox.”
“And you don’t care?”
Then, just as I had seen his mother do with the Cantonese waitresses, Karl took both of my hands in his and said, “I love everything about you.”
And I realized that I had been reading these magazines hoping for the same kind of tender care. But instead of helping me feel good about myself, the sisterhood had merely provided the nod for what was already in my h
ead, tickling my neuroses by manufacturing problems that weren’t even part of my world—but would be, if I continued to read the magazines as parables for my own journey.
In what should have been the biggest no-shit moment of all time, I was only now just recognizing that just because I read an article about men trading up or making “I need space” faces, that didn’t mean that Karl was going to, for lack of a better phrase, “pull a Jake” on me. At that moment, I realized the very real possibility that instead of helping me get a better life, these magazines might just bring about my downfall. All heroes have a tragic flaw—what if believing in Cosmo was mine?
I seriously thought about canceling all my subscriptions.
SEPTEMBER
Bust a Move
for the past week, Karl had been dropping hints about moving in together, commenting, for example, on how well our belongings would merge and how compatible our decorating tastes seemed. Now, considering that Karl’s aesthetics ran toward the postapocalyptic—a collection of inside-out socks strewn over all available surfaces; a trail of dirty dishes leading straight to the bedroom (and ending with a plate of half-eaten scrambled eggs under the duvet); and a twisted motorcycle carcass hanging on a bathroom wall—I wasn’t really sure if he saw his approach to design truly blending with my more Aunt-Fanny-Drops-Acid-at-a-Fleamarket whimsy.
Then, on the phone, each of us in our separate beds, Karl had said, “You’d be easy to live with.”
This comment was like 2 in the 3-2-1 countdown to cohabitation. Overanalyzing as usual, I heard Karl’s roundabouts as a preamble to a much more official conversation.
And I was ready. After nearly four months of dating, we were practically living together anyway. If Karl wasn’t sleeping in my bed, I was clearing the dishes off of his. We had already survived some rough patches (for me, at least)—the camping trip, his mother-traumas, the aching details of my divorce—that had added metaphoric years to our nascent relationship. It was like that scene in The Jerk, when Steve Martin documents the rapid course of his relationship with Bernadette Peters. “I know we’ve only known each other for four weeks and three days,” he whispers to her as she sleeps next to him, “but to me, it seems like nine weeks and five days.”