I Lost Everything in the Post-Natal Depression (12 page)

“Better traumatic than enriched.”

This country is extremely age-conscious. That is why a new group has been formed called “40 Anonymous” to help people overcome the problem. Here’s how it works. Several months before reaching age forty, birthdayees are invited to a group-therapy program.

There is a ten-minute film where Doris Day wrinkles her nose, moistens her lips, and smiles, “I’m over forty and I still have all my own freckles,” just to get the audience in a receptive mood. Then a testimonial is given. The one I heard was from Sylvia X.

“I’m over forty,” she said in a faltering voice. (Applause) “A few months ago I was depressed and morose and thought life was not worth living. I got a chill when the furnace blower went on. I refused to eat apples even though I had my own teeth. I nipped at Geritol in the mornings after the kids went to school. I sent sympathy cards to myself and refused to start any long novels. A friend suggested I come to a 40 Anonymous meeting. That
night I heard Senator Thurmond speak. He was wonderful.

“I went home and practiced saying ‘forty’ in front of the mirror. I thought I was cured. Then one night I went to a party. Everyone there was under thirty. It was terrible. No one knew the verse to ‘Shine on Harvest Moon.’ They had never heard of Lyle Talbot or Maria Montez. When I said Okey Dokey, they laughed.

“I went berserk that night and drew a mustache on an advertisement for ‘Mod Squad.’ A member of 40 Anonymous found me throwing rocks at a rock festival. ‘Get hold of yourself,’ he said. ‘Just say out loud, “I am forty.” ’

“ ‘I am fooooofffffffoooorrrr … I can’t do it,’ I cried.

“ ‘You can!’
he challenged.

“ ‘It’s no use,’ I said, ‘this world is for the youth. Everyone around me is younger than I am. My doctor carries his stethoscope in a gym bag. My attorney has to shave only once a week. My son’s math teacher is still wearing braces. I rode a plane the other day with training wheels on it. Good Lord, man, don’t you understand, I am older than Mickey Mouse!’ ”

Sylvia’s voice broke. “Today I am proud to say I have learned to live with my problem one day at a time.” (Applause)

That night I stood in front of my mirror and said, “My name is Erma X and I’m fffff.… I don’t look it, but I’m ffff … some days I look … fffffoooo … last year I was.…” It was no use. I called 40 Anonymous. Sylvia came over and had a drink with me.

Actually, forty or any other age wouldn’t be so hard to face were it not for the current trend of restaurants making a fuss over birthdays. This ranges anywhere from a drum roll and house lights to a group of waitresses in headbands and adenoids charging at you with a cupcake and a sparkler on top.

I have warned my family if they ever inflict a public birthday on me, I will impale myself on a flaming skewer. After age twelve, birthdays should be as private as hernia surgery. After all, they’re as personal.

Philosophers and poets may be as cute as they like about middle age but the question remains, “
What
begins at forty?”

Your laugh lines turn to wrinkles, the dimples in your knees and elbows fill in, you need glasses to read billboards, you find yourself listening to every word of the commercials on motel management and when you at last figure your teen-agers are old enough to be told about sex, you’ve forgotten what it is you weren’t supposed to tell them until they were old enough to be told.

There is little comfort in people like Elizabeth Taylor chirping, “I am not going to fight middle age or wrinkles or fat.” (If I had Richard Burton sewed up in my hip pocket, I wouldn’t fight anything.)

If I sound bitter, it is because I am going through a phase of middle age known as the “Didn’t we go to school together syndrome?” (DWGTSTS)

The DWGTSTS begins on the eve of your fortieth birthday and continues until no one wants to claim you as a contemporary. I have never had so many bald, paunchy individuals accost me and invite me to remember the good old days. (And those are the women.)

The other night at a restaurant a Sun City Freshman stopped by our table and said, “Remember me? We were in cooking class together.”

I looked up, shocked. When this woman was in cooking class, fire hadn’t been invented yet. “It’s Edna something or other, isn’t it?” she persisted. “And you used to write for the school paper.”

“You’re thinking of Edna St. Vincent Millay,” I said stiffly.

“No,” she said, “your hair is a little different color, your teeth look different, you’re wearing glasses and carry a little more weight, but I’d know you anywhere.”

“What gave me away?” I asked my husband.

“The way your eyes lit up when the orchestra played ‘Beer Barrel Polka.’ ”

It’s occasions like that that make you swear off high school reunions. If you’re keeping track I have just gone to my last one.

It’s not fair to all those balding, aging, dissipated, frumpy, flabby, graying people wandering around trying to be cheerful, when I look so great.

I found myself walking up to classmates, saying, “What happened?”

Take poor Clara what’s-her-name. Her memory is shot. She went around all night calling me Ernie. Serves her right for marrying old Charley … or was it Harley what’s-his-face.

As for poor Iris Pick, I could have wept for her. Had three children, bang, bang, bang. They drive her out of her tree. Lucky my three are spaced better.

The real shocker was our valedictorian, Enis Ertle. She’s absolutely out of it. If the President had been there she’d have gone up and asked, “What are you doing these days?” I told her I’d give her my copy of
Peyton Place
when I finished reading it.

And if anyone had told me my best girl friend, Wanda Weight, would be nearly white-haired, I wouldn’t have believed it. My wig nearly fell off when I saw her. Everyone was saying my old boy friend, Leroy Katch, looked positively prehistoric. I couldn’t find my glasses in the bottom of my handbag to see for myself, but I can’t imagine they would lie.

As I told my husband on the way home, “It’s incredible to imagine some of our classmates are grandparents.”

“I know,” he said quietly.

“Do you know what that means?” I asked. “It means some of them had to have their children when they were mere babies of.…”

“Twenty-five,” he said.

“It’s funny about the teachers though,” I commented. “Miss Kravitz looked seventy years old when I had her for Social Problems. Tonight she looked only about fifty. You’re quiet. Anything wrong?”

“Nevin Noose came up with a mouthful of false teeth. I nearly dropped my partial.”

“Couldn’t you cry for them?” I said sadly. “Poor devils fighting middle age. We shouldn’t have gone, but I wanted to see them all again before they got too old to appreciate me.”

People do approach milestones in their own particular way.

On my husband’s fortieth birthday, he locked himself in his bedroom with a copy of
Playboy
magazine and made an obscene phone call to Ted Mack.

That’s the way fortieth birthdays are.

I knocked on the door and pleaded, “Why don’t you come out and show us your presents? I want to see what the kids got you?”

The door opened a crack and he said, “Come in.”

“I know they got you a bottle of hair creme,” I said, “but what kind? Torrid Torment? Show No Mercy? Shameless Interlude?”

“No,” he said, shaking his head vigorously.

“What then? Frankly Intimate? Sextop for Pop?”

“Let me say it is something I can handle,” he said, clearing his throat nervously.

“It’s not one of those things you’re going to have to fight your way on and off buses with, is it? Or karate chop your own mother?”

“I know what I’m doing,” he said. As he scooped his boxes, tissue and ribbon up in his arms, the box of hair
creme fell to the floor. I picked it up and read the name “Resignation Hair Creme,” and in small letters below it claimed, “For the man who has everything but hair. No sexy aroma. No tantalizing softness to run your hands through. No double takes from girls on the beach. Resignation Hair Creme just keeps your head from getting chapped.”

“I guess that’s all the kids could buy without a prescription,” I alibied.

“I guess so,” he replied softly.

He moped around for several months after that. Then, along came the football season and George Blanda. For
all of you who think football is a winter replacement for the summer reruns, George Blanda is the world’s oldest quarterback. He is forty-four years old. At a time of his life when he should be sitting in the stands with a thermos of hot chicken soup, he is sparking the Oakland Raiders to some unbelievable victories.

Well, I can’t begin to tell you what George Blanda did for my husband.

When George kicked a forty-eight-yard field goal against Kansas City for a tie, my husband kicked off his lap robe (he was sitting in the living room by the fire) and said, “I think tomorrow I’ll jog to the garbage can and back.”

When George kicked a fifty-two-yard field goal to win the game with Cleveland 23-20, my husband kicked his Geritol bottle thirty-two feet into the air. When Blanda whipped out a twenty-yard touchdown pass with only seconds to go to beat Denver 24–19, my husband ambled through the living room and announced loudly, “I am donating my Supp-hose to Goodwill.”

George Blanda was Lydia Pinkham to my husband. Then the new neighbors moved in next door and we were back to where we started.

“What are they like?” I asked as he came back across the lawn.

“Young,” he snarled.

“How young?”

“He can still get his car in the garage.”

“What about his wife?”

“She was waxing the garden hose.”

“What did you talk about?”

“Don’t ask. I made the mistake of telling him I was in the Army. He said his grandfather was in World War II and they studied it a lot in college. I tell you, it was incredible. He had never heard of victory gardens, Senator
Joe McCarthy, Glenn Miller, Snooky Lansen, the twist, Ozzie and Harriet, Packards, the Brooklyn Dodgers, or Fred Allen.”

“It won’t be easy. Do they have any children?”

“No. He said he and his wife decided not to have any in view of the fact they were concerned with overpopulation and what do you call it?”

“Copping out?”

“No … ecology.”

“Do they play bridge?”

“No. He said it was frivolous in this time of involvement, when everything else needed his attention. I don’t want to frighten you, but I think he’s going to take sex education out of the home and put it on the ballot where it belongs. And she’s a feminist who is going to picket the Avon lady.”

“What do they do for kicks?”

“I think they sit around and watch each other’s hair grow.”

“You’re being unkind. We were that young once.”

“I was born older than they are,” he sulked.

“Why, I remember the first time my grandmother met you,” I said. “When you turned your back she said to me, ‘He’s a funny-looking thing, but when he grows hair, he might look all right.’ ”

“I had a burr haircut. It was the style,” he shouted.

“I know. And we didn’t know anything about Tom Mix, Will Rogers, the League of Nations, the Cakewalk, Gene Fowler, and the Reo Runabout.”

“I suppose you’re right,” he sighed, “but when people start moving next door to you who have never heard of Fred Allen.…”

“There goes the neighborhood,” I said sadly.

On my fortieth birthday, my family chipped in and bought me a tennis racket. I don’t wish to sound ungrateful,
but this is like buying the Pope a Mouseketeer beanie.

“When are you going to use it?” the kids kept clamoring.

“When it snows and I get another racket to put on the other foot,” I said.

The truth is, I have never cared for sports that take me away from the table. (Besides, I tire easily and tend to black out when I spend an evening licking Green Stamps.)

But these obstacles were small compared to the prejudice I encountered when I ventured to the tennis courts with my brand-new racket and my old body.

There is no evidence to sustain this, but I have a feeling new tennis rackets secrete an odor that is detected within a fifty-mile radius by experienced tennis players. The moment you appear, men in white shorts hurry toward their cars, women in white tennis dresses sniff the air and mumble something about burning dinner, and even small children playing in their bare feet back off and say, “I think I hear my mother calling.”

I found one young man trying to scale the fence and said, “Would you like to play a game?”

“Have you ever played tennis before?” he asked.

“No,” I giggled, “What gave me away?”

“Your sweat band. You don’t wear it to the armpits.”

“But that is where.…”

“You wear it around the wrist. Listen, I gotta cut out. Some other time.…”

The next night I went down again and this time collared a twelve-year-old girl who tripped and fell as the rest of the players ran from the courts to their cars.

“What am I doing wrong?” I asked.

“First, you don’t get a new suit if you hit the ball over the big fence. That’s baseball. Next, you don’t get an
extra point if you hit the drinking fountain. And take the press off your racket when you play.”