The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones (25 page)

The reception afterward takes place on a manicured rectangle of lawn overlooking an unusually and cruelly sunny Puget Sound. There is a buffet of roast-beef sandwiches and a tray of cookies and coffee, caf and decaf. It is the saddest kind of adult “mixer.” I meet a long-ago woman friend from Ray’s junior-college days thirty-five years ago. She is not technically an ex-girlfriend, but by the carefully preserved photo-booth photos and neat collection of handwritten notes they had exchanged, one sensed maybe she would like to have been. She is a fourth-grade teacher from Tacoma with a gray ponytail and wide hopeful eyes, who I think, thirty-five years later, is still in love with him.

Because it is a church “celebration,” no mention is made of Ray’s depression or of his suicide, only of his love for his (now-devastated, never-mentioned) wife and his dogs and his boat. And the fucking Seattle Mariners. The long-ago woman friend—Darlene—is continuing to follow suit.

“Ray was so funny! He was so literate! And so brilliant, so brilliant. What a wonderful ceremony. It was so fun to hear those old childhood stories about him.” And then Darlene adds a quietly bewildered afterthought: “I—did you?—I had no idea he was in such a bad state.”

I put my paper plate of roast beef down.

“Darlene?” I say candidly, as she is the only person in Seattle I have to talk to. “I think it’s a shame people don’t talk about moods more. I believe that difficulty coping with ordinary life is more common than we think. Maybe it’s because we live in twenty-first-century America as opposed to eighteenth-century Ireland on a thundercloud-darkened heath. We just don’t seem to have any vernacular for addressing some ordinary garden-variety darkness. In the newspaper, there is a crossword puzzle and a jumble and a sudoku and a KenKen but no Little Corner of Darkness with a melting scream face in it (‘Find the Melting Scream Face. Level: Advanced’).”

Encouraged by what I take to be her thoughtful silence, I continue. “I mean, just this last year I’ve been perimenopausal and I’ve had some real attacks of the darkies, some real winged monkeys coming after me. I’ve had days where just seeing the sharp early afternoon shadow a tree made by the side of the road would fill me with horrible despair, worse than an Edward Hopper painting—Edward Hopper, you know, who did
Nighthawks
. I guess it’s like when the whole world becomes an Edward Hopper painting, with slightest greenish tints and too-sharp shadows and it is all corpses and mannequins and wax figures and it’s all about mortality and everything is death. But no longer is it just a lonely city coffee shop at midnight, but this is what everything previously comforting now looks like: spring, Christmas, shortcakes, parks, a hazelnut latte, muffins, children, puppies, bunnies.”

“Nice meeting you,” Darlene says, gathering her mementos, moving away.

Ah well.

KAITLIN AND
I will end up throwing my father a blowout ninetieth at the Malibu Beach Club, where amazingly a big festive crowd turns out, not irritated at their neighborhood eccentric but in fact, more and more as the years have passed, affectionate fans. They’ve taken a certain familial care of my dad (“Oh yeah, I’ve always given him rides to the bus stop”) as you would a wryly beloved tidepool treasure. Surprising guest? I kid you not—Ricky Jones, a skateboard dude whom I distinctly recall being a pal of Sean Penn’s at hideous Malibu Park Junior High, his overhanging cloud of surfer hair now graying. Apparently even he is a longtime fan of my father. “I remember waking up in the sand hungover in the summer and Mr. Loh would say, ‘Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas!’ Your dad! The wacky professor! What an awesome guy!”

My father is a bastard but you only turn ninety once. Thank God. The party and wacky beach people testimonials were completely hilarious and perfect.

I saw how everyone is under orders now to throw everyone else parties for the big ones, because if you don’t, people will gather only at your memorial and that is a waste of life.

A great party, however, everyone can remember.

Your fiftieth birthday party is the one last event in your life, after your wedding, if you’ve had one before then, where friends, family, and acquaintances can be guilted into showing up, and they can be guilted into bringing a gift, even if it’s a joke gift. A fiftieth birthday is the half-century mark. It is imbued with both festivity and gravitas. By this point everyone knows plenty of people who didn’t make it to fifty, and everyone knows plenty of people who are at least twice divorced, so showing up is not just a pledge to the guest of honor but a pledge to all of our mortality. There’s no other event like it in the life cycle. Jewish kids have bar and bat mitzvahs, of course, but these events celebrate kids who have actually lived only thirteen years. No, the only event like a fiftieth birthday–the only event that celebrates and commemorates you as a grown-up, with a full, adult life, will be your funeral. So let this celebration of your fully golden self happen when you are alive. And have some cake, for God’s sake.

• • •

SO I
compose the opus of my e-mail list, Clare sends it out, and within days Mr. Y tells me, unbelievably, that we are expecting 150 people. I won’t lie—it makes me feel fantastic. I love a big party. I can’t wait.

So the day of my fiftieth opens with the kids and Mr. Y bringing me breakfast in bed—applesauce with Cajun seasoning on an egg. Oh well, regardless of the strangeness of my breakfast, it was made with love, and today is going to be a wonderful day because all I am doing is working on my killer fiftieth-birthday-party dance mix. I’ve bought a brand-new iPod touch and have just learned how to download music and make playlists, and I am completely engrossed in this project. I finally have a hobby! I am one of those magical people who can happily while away a day without drawing hash marks on a page and penciling them in (Shades of Grey)! Yayyy!

But it’s even bigger than that. The fact is, I have lived half a century to create the amazing legacy of this historically unprecedented dance mix. I will make it into an app. I will be famous among my grandchildren! I will be elected
T
ime
’s Person of the Year!

“And what is your dance mix?” Mr. Y asks indulgently, from behind his
New York Times
.

“All right,” I say. “Thank you for asking. You can ignore me completely as I speak, as you usually do while reading. I believe all of dance begins and ends quite simply with the Commodores’ ‘Brick House.’ It’s all about ‘Brick House.’ It’s basically a five-hour plan for easing not ‘Down the Road’ but into, and out of, the Commodores’ ‘Brick House.’ ”

“Aha,” he says.

“I realize I may seem a bit manic here, but I am excited. Let me tell you how it goes. We begin with the Motown/oh-hello-old-friend-sitting-at-the-bar-and-finishing-your-drink section, prompting the gentle swaying in the chair, the refreshing of the beer, the final trip to the bathroom to fix the lipstick. Then it’s Wilson Pickett, Aretha Franklin, early James Brown, Marvin Gaye’s ‘Grapevine,’ Stevie Wonder’s ‘I Wish.’ It’s the sound track to the Big Chill section, perhaps somewhat cliché, but comforting and familiar. People need to have had at least two beers, perhaps three, before loosening up. It is at this exact moment now that the party gauntlet is thrown down, hard, with the Jackson Five’s ‘ABC’ and then—yes, people—even some disco. We are talking ‘Funkytown,’ ‘Freak Out!’ and even ‘Boogie Shoes,’ just for laughs. And now—
doot! doot!
—the Michael Jackson train pulls into the station, starting with ‘Gonna Get it Started,’ ‘Thriller,’ and—well, you see how many you can do before a panting Lily puts hands on hips and wails: ‘Excuse me? Am I in some 1980s step class or what?’ ”

“
Oof
,” he says. “Lily. Burning Man. Did she ever end up having that affair with the traveling LAUSD theater teacher?”

“No!” I exclaim. “He canceled the Indian dinner and did the big fade. The erotic e-mail was as far as it ever got.”

“Well, that’s kind of sad, but it’s good too because I like Brian.”

“We all do. Anyway,” I continue, “it is at this point—end of hour two—where we throw in the towel and open the throttle wide with ‘Brick House’ and then ‘Play That Funky Music White Boy’! Wow!

“Where can you go from there? Only one place—and here’s the turn! You have to change the palette entirely at this point, and the way you do that is with Latin! ‘Oye Como Va’ by Tito Puente. Now change of scene, shift of scene, it’s a conga line through the house. Brazil and tequila will segue into another sweet sweet”—I do a Napoleon Dynamite hip flair—“dance hammock, ‘Low Rider.’ From there I may either go Stones and David Bowie or directly, depending on how gay the crowd, into
West Side Story
original Broadway cast version, ‘One handed catch’!”

“Great!” he says, picking up the business section.

But in point of fact, for my girls this morning I have created a special tween dance mix (“Time Warp,” “Jailhouse Rock,” and even—well, you pretty much have to do it whether you want to or not—“Footloose”). Because it’s my birthday and I can, I force my kids to audition my tween dance mix in my bedroom, and I realize that nine-year-old Sally does not try to conserve energy at all: She dances by jumping joyously into the air on every beat. Kids have not learned yet to contain their joy. They still have an endless supply.

We jump together to the young Michael Jackson, still so sweet and birdlike, still so classic, still so pure, it is like trampolining, and I realize that—fuck the gym and the machines and the grim torture of training and all those steel water bottles and all those rubber straps and CNN televisions. If I just dance every day with my girls the way they like to dance, no holds barred, I will get into the greatest shape of my life.

The whole day we clean up the house and cook food and I keep re-tweaking dance mixes, in my wonderful sunny home when the nests are (fairly) contained, armed with a core of people I dearly love. We move the furniture aside and these big wooden dance floors open and Hannah spontaneously breaks out into mad spinning and kicking and dancing. I do so love throwing a party. I am the sort of hostess who maniacally checks the RSVP list and tries to introduce compatible people to one another and to have snacks—not brilliant snacks, but enough snacks—and make sure there are plenty of festive beverages. Mr. Y grumbles that the guest list has become too large and he will have to move the cars and helm other burdensome logistics, but I know he is just being gruff for show because, like me, Mr. Y dearly loves a party, any party.

Mr. Y takes us out to dinner at an old-fashioned chophouse. Wonderfully, with that light buoying cloud lining of estrogen (coupled with a late afternoon snack of turkey and avocado, I’m not going to lie), I now have the capacity to sit with these three people over dinner and to actually converse with them. In fact, I feel so effortlessly bubbly and euphoric, I lead the group in a joke-telling session, which is quite unheard of. I turn it on and I have the girls in stitches, knowing them as well as I do. We don’t just trade a blizzard of Tom Swifties like “The Yellow River, by I. P. Freely,” “Spots on a Wall, by Who Flung Poo,” and one I had never heard before, “African Lion Taming by Claude Mbuti,” I even mention something funny about Burning Man, carefully framed, “Once we visited a camp in the desert that featured just a bunch of comfy chairs to rest in. It was called—and you have to say this very carefully, ‘A Shack of Sit.’ ” The girls literally howl with laughter and declare that I am fun. I declare that they are fun.

And then Mr. Y begins to get anxious texts from Clare (who is at our house setting up).

He goes oddly silent.

It’s then that I notice that the patter of rain on the roof has begun.

And oh no! Suddenly I know what is happening. It is Los Angeles, after all. Due to the drizzle we are going to get attrition, and instead of 150 people there will be 8 and I will be sorely disappointed and will spend the entire evening outside of myself, as I am so easily disappointed by everything in life. Oh God. Why am I like this? I wonder. I love fun so much that even sometimes in the middle of having fun, I get sad calculating at what point the fun will end.

Which is a long way of saying I am suddenly overwhelmed with sadness and horror and terror that I am walking into a birthday party
trap
where but a few hapless awkward souls will be and my children will see their mother destroyed. This was my very fear.

I feel that, as usual, too-optimistic-WASP Mr. Y probably wildly overestimated the numbers, particularly given the lateness of the invitation.

I feel like I’m going to an execution where once and for all it will be proved that
life is never enough
for me.

The cortisol starts firing. My throat starts closing. I am having a panic attack.

I have to excuse myself alone to get air in the parking lot, I am hyperventilating.

Mr. Y, tie askew, finds me in the parking lot. Amazed, “Get yourself together,” he orders me gruffly, pulling me toward the car, where the girls are already waiting.

In the confusion of Saturday-night traffic, we actually get home a tad late. It is quiet. There are very few cars out front. I start to whimper quietly and hate myself for doing so in front of my children in their fluffy party dresses.

But as we pull in, yes! There are strings of colorful party lights and a huge crowd spilling out everywhere. People have hats and bottles of beer and tacos, and as if in a dream or in a movie, in slow motion they are coming up and hugging me and laughing and spilling beer on me.

It is all these wonderful familiar faces—my sister, Kaitlin, my dad and his nurse, for God’s sake, Clare, Ann, Isabel, Elise, Carlos and Judith and Roland. There are Burning Mom friends and their spouses and their children, as hale and tanned as if we were all camping in front of the capitol yesterday, although (can it be?) all the children seem several feet taller, and—oh God—there is Lily and her entire family, including their wonderful dog in a desert pirate bandanna, there are friends from grad school and college and even, oh my God, junior high. These are all the wonderful, wacky, crazy friends who have helped me through this year as I have helped or will help them. It’s sort of like a This Is Your Life reunion.