I See You Made an Effort: Compliments, Indignities, and Survival Stories from the Edge of 50 (16 page)

At ten p.m. we’re told she’ll be going home the next day. That’s when I get the brilliant idea that I might be able to make it back to Los Angeles in time to accompany my son to Fuck Yeah Fest, the indie rock festival he’s been pining to attend. He’s planning on meeting up with several girls who are going to be there. I’ve been read the riot act. I am to accompany him to the festival grounds and disappear from sight, dissolve into the ether, if possible, until he’s ready to go home. “So, is there someone you like?”

“I just want to make out with girls.”

“Anyone in particular?”

“No, Mom, any girls.” I have found a purpose in my son’s life. This will mark my new incarnation as a wingmom. So with the help of more of that local café con leche, I pull another all-nighter. I purchase concert tickets online and begin making lists of after-care procedures for my sister, who is scheduled to fly in and take over after my departure. I’ve collected times and dates of support groups for cancer patients, meditation classes for cancer patients, yoga for cancer patients, bra fittings for cancer patients—there are even makeover days for cancer patients. With one out of eight women in the U.S. being diagnosed with breast cancer, the related industries are so extensive, I almost expected to find a service providing cancer for cancer patients. I record the contact numbers
for mom’s doctors and home health-care provider, plus an admonition to make sure to have extra safety pins on hand as well.
*

By the next afternoon, we’ve gotten my mother home, and by the evening I feel satisfied that she can perform her own milking and has the meds she needs, at least until my sister arrives. I beg my parents to open the curtains once a day, knowing full well that they won’t, and I head to the airport to catch the last flight of the day out of town.

My plane lands at midnight. After stopping for gas, I accidentally drive over a small concrete island and knock off one of my hubcaps, but my mother just had a boob lopped off, so I’m able to shrug that off without too much fuss.

A few hours into the next day, my son and I head to the festival grounds located in an industrial area on the outskirts of Los Angeles. It’s dusty, loud and 102 degrees. It takes us over an hour to snake through the long line of teenagers until we make it to the entrance, only to find out that in my exhaustion I bought tickets for the wrong day.

“Please, please, let us use these tickets today,” I beg the security person but he’s not budging. “Do I look like I’m trying to sneak into this concert?”

“You’ll have to come back tomorrow, ma’am.”

“That’s right, I
am
a ma’am and you couldn’t pay me to come back tomorrow.” My son is mortified and moves several feet away from me. He wants nothing to do with me. I have not only screwed
up with the tickets but also in doing so, totally lost any sliver of credibility I might have had in the ongoing campaign to get us organized at home.

I get the silent treatment until I agree to drop him off alone at the fairgrounds the next day, something I consent to because by this point, I’ve only got the briefest connection left to my sanity. As I speed away from the concert grounds I pass a billboard with the alarming sentiment “Prepare for a Longer Retirement,” writ large. I turn on the radio just in time to hear that suicides, formerly the domain of disaffected teenagers and depressed seniors, are suddenly on the rise for boomers and researchers aren’t sure why. Ask me. I know why! It’s a miracle that billboard alone isn’t sending drivers careening off the roads lemming-style.
*
During what seems to be an interminable drive home, I remember that I’ve left my phone charger and night guard on the plane.

But there’s no time to dwell because I’m going to be needed for the next emergency soon enough. And wouldn’t you know it, this whole episode has left me with a whopping credit card bill; between the last-minute plane tickets, the misplaced dental appliance and the concert debacle, I’ve spent over a thousand dollars in the last two days, and I’ve got a big honking pimple on my chin.

Googling health problems on the Internet is normally a bad idea, but at forty-nine, it’s a disastrous mistake. Any ache or pain can be linked to an impressive number of horrifying age-related conditions. From what I could deduce this time, I appeared to be suffering from a degenerative form of arthritis and Heberden’s nodes, also known in colloquial terms as old-lady hands. Fucking fifty.

It was an early Monday morning in October, one month before my fiftieth birthday, when I awoke with the certainty that a substantial percentage of the twelve million cars that travel the Los Angeles freeway daily had spent the night driving back and forth
over my hands. The little finger on my left hand appeared to be crooked, and a bump on the distal interphalangeal joint (that’s the middle one) of my right forefinger was swollen. Any movement was agonizing. My neck was also slightly compressed. I use the word “slightly” because my skull has never actually been clamped into a vise, and I imagine that a vise might be preferable to the electric pain shooting through my head. It took bed rest and continuous hot packs to get through the day while consulting Dr. Google for what my husband speculated was a case of exacerbated bone spurs and a sore neck.

“It seems like the exertion of putting together your son’s trampoline has activated a genetic predisposition for osteoarthritis in your neck,” pronounced the rheumatologist I begrudgingly went to see.

“What about this?” I asked and held out my hands.

“Oh, we just call that old-lady hands.”

As someone who loves being right, this was one time when it just plain sucked. I had just described how I’d single-handedly assembled a twelve-foot trampoline for my son, jumped on it for a few hours, and now couldn’t button my blouse. The Skywalker 2000 came unassembled with maybe ninety-odd pieces and presented an irresistible challenge because I pride myself on my prowess with a power tool. I have half-painted furniture and bedroom walls scarred by poorly executed attempts to mount pictures, but a self-contained project can be satisfying, even if done poorly. Following a set of rules is relaxing, an antidote to a career as a freelancer in which there is always more to be done. Perhaps women in earlier centuries felt that way about lacing up a corset;
it gave shape to your day in addition to your waistline. It took me only three and a half hours of straining to fasten the springs into the frame, with only two hopefully unimportant screws and one large piece of metal tubing to spare.

That first day, my son invited friends over and jumped for hours. When the boys left, I decided to give it a try. I had been warned that for anyone who has given birth and not done Kegels religiously—and by religiously, I mean continuously from the moment you give birth—leakage is to be expected. I hadn’t been on a trampoline in more than thirty years and in those first jumps, two sensations surged through my body: complete happiness and the jolt of something becoming dislodged internally. Thank goodness I had on dark jeans. I jumped for two exhilarating hours.

Undressing that night, I found an even bigger surprise than I realized. It had taken only one day of trampolining to return my period to me. I’ve still got it, I told myself. I’m not really old yet. I could still have a baby. A baby with a one-in-ten chance of severe birth defects, but I could do it. Not that I wanted a baby, but I could still have one. Still fertile. Fuck you, fifty, I’m still young! The door that slammed shut with menopause had creaked back open.

The sheer joy of jumping made me feel invincible. Having stumbled upon something so unexpected and fantastic, I went to sleep feeling that anything was possible. Our trampoline was, if not a fountain of youth, the closest thing to it you can purchase without a prescription. At least for the sum of three hundred dollars, which is only a hundred and ninety dollars more than an ounce of Hope in a Jar miracle moisturizing cream. Of course, I
hadn’t figured in the cost of a doctor’s visit, and now this doctor was telling me I’d caused irreversible damage, and that could mean only one thing: staggeringly high medical bills.

As Dr. Nudgey droned on, I considered which word was less sexy, “arthritis” or “rheumatology,” and decided it was a draw.

Nudgey, I concluded, had the worst bedside manner in the world, when he added, “You’re my youngest patient.” Why the need to tell me that? At various points in my life I had hoped to be the youngest person to win an Academy Award, a Pulitzer Prize, a MacArthur Genius, but I never, ever wanted to be the youngest patient of a doctor who treats persons afflicted with aging-related diseases.
*
I was dabbing at my eyes as the doctor, who was ancient himself, told me that I should put it in perspective.

“You don’t have pancreatic cancer.”

“Yes, I know that,” I said without mentioning that my old-lady hands had recently helped one of my best friends with that exact disease to exit this world.

“That’s one of the . . .”

“Bad cancers,” I said, thinking how nice it would be to have a numbing dosage of OxyContin right about now.

“I have high blood pressure and a low-functioning thyroid; that’s worse, let me tell you.”

Were we in a disease-off?

Then he told me how his own mother tried to warn him of the horrors of aging, telling him, “You’ll see,” every time he
questioned her lifestyle: “Mom, why don’t you get out of your bathrobe during the day?” “You’ll see.” “Mom, why don’t you take an exercise class?” “You’ll see.” He tells me there is really nothing I can do.

“I’ve read about glucosamine and chondroitin. What about taking those?”

“They don’t really work.”

“Exercise?”

“Doesn’t work.”

“Changing my diet?”

“Nope.”

“Acupuncture?”

“You can go ahead and spend money on that if you want to, but it doesn’t do any good.”

I wanted to take my old-lady hands, put them around his neck and strangle him.

Dr. Nudgey did suggest one course of action. “You can down fistfuls of aspirin, but that’s about it. There’s no cure, and it only gets worse.”

That’s when the weeping began.

He asked me if my mother had disfigured hands. “No,” I replied, but then I thought about my grandmother Frances. She’d had knobby fingers for as long as I could remember. I assumed this was the result of her meticulous cleaning. She washed the wallpaper in her dining room so often that the glue seeped through. When my cousins and I would slap our artwork and spelling tests against the wall, they stuck. She even had wheels
put on her larger pieces of furniture to make polishing the floor easier.

Just when I’d gotten used to the idea that my once smooth hands were becoming as veiny as my mother’s, I was going straight for gnarly grandma hands. Frances, whose character had been shaped by the Depression, never complained about pain in her hands, thus leaving me totally unprepared. I’d also used Frances’s hands as an excuse for my poor housekeeping skills, and now I’d have no excuse.
*

Maybe the weeping got to Dr. Nudgey, because he thrust some informational pamphlets at me, said he was going to write up his notes and hurriedly exited the examination room.

The pamphlets highlighting gadgets specifically designed for osteoarthritis sufferers were even more depressing than Nudgey’s bedside manner. Jar openers, button and zipper pulls, playing-card holders and, yes, even walkers. Each item was offered in a variety of rainbow hues.

I mark this day as my first experience with how the elderly are infantilized. The faces of the people in the pamphlets appeared vaguely distorted, their bodies rounded like Botero sculptures. Has this condition rendered them incapable of exercise, transforming them into sexless, shapeless blobs? These rotund couples were dressed in those same insipid pastel-colored sweaters as the AARP elders. The dreaded, neutering pleated khakis were boxy
to boot. My son was right: khaki hadn’t murdered anyone, but it was almost as bad, and the pants were so high-waisted they looked like geriatric rompers. Each couple was depicted at home. Was it by accident or by design that their homes were isolated structures? Shunned by society, had they been cast out to dwell on the fringes of civilization? In one drawing, a woman is tossing a salad with gigantic pink tongs under a man’s watchful eye. Which one has the osteoarthritis? Is it the woman wielding the circus-clown utensils, or the man, so handicapped he’s unable to lift the massive tongs? It’s probably both of them. The disease has turned him into a mercurial taskmaster, and he’s overseeing the preparations, making sure she tosses the salad with flavored water to keep their weight down.

I gazed expectantly toward the bank of windows located just above my head. They don’t open. Given Dr. Nudgey’s winning personality, it’s possible that the building’s management has sealed them as a precautionary measure.

I’d worked myself into a total panic by the time Dr. Nudgey came back. He took in the sight of me still weeping, and said to make an appointment to see him again in six months. Why on earth would I do that? So I could come back and he could make me feel worse?

“No, thank you, that won’t be necessary,” I said as I squeezed the door handle with my better hand, exited and didn’t look back.

When I arrived home, my son was jumping on the tramp. The 2000 doesn’t much resemble the trampolines I grew up with. Those had menacingly large, exposed industrial-sized metal springs. The springs looked like sharks’ teeth to me. You could
land on them and chip a tooth or fall through the gaping spaces between each one. At the summer camps I attended, we were made to stand shoulder to shoulder as safety watch whenever another kid was jumping. We were ordered to be vigilant. The extent of this danger was constantly drilled into our heads. “Don’t turn away for a second, not a second! Donna Rosenstock broke her collarbone last June! She’s still in a neck brace!”

Now trampoline springs are covered by protective plastic sheeting, and ours even came with netting that encloses the tarp so the whole thing resembles a giant playpen. Should a bounce threaten to send you sailing over the edge, the net catches you and gently rights you. It’s not unlike the evolution of childhood itself. We keep our children corralled in our homes or backyards, and when we do let them venture out, we arm them with cell phones, yet another layer of netting.
*

“Come on with me, Mom.”

“No, my hands hurt, I can’t,” I said as I watched him jump into the evening hours from the kitchen breakfast-nook window. My son was actually asking me to do something with him, but I was too defeated to join him.

“Are your bones brittle because you’re soooooo old?”

Art Linkletter was right. Kids do say the darnedest things. I headed straight to my closet and put on my darkest pair of jeans.

We’re on the trampoline. We’ve brought a small beach ball
inside the netting and we’re passing it back and forth while we’re jumping. It’s hard to time it right between bounces, so there’s a lot of careening around. Every few bounces, Ezra deliberately propels himself through the air into the net, which ricochets his slender frame back onto the tarp. He rubs his bony legs and then springs back up as if nothing has happened. I marvel at his flexibility. You’d never know that he was born with a tethered spinal cord. The memory of his reconstructive surgery, at age four, is inaccessible to him but in yet one more reminder of the effect of aging on the brain, that incident remains as vivid for me as if it had taken place yesterday, while I have no recollection of whether it was ibuprofen or acetaminophen that Nudgey advised me to take an hour earlier.

He tells me he’s got a game he devised with his friends; he’s named it “Saves.”

“So you have to keep the ball in the air,” he explains, “and to score a point you have to save it from falling by catching it,” but for some reason I can’t understand what he’s saying.
What’s the point of the game?
I’m wondering.
Are we trying to keep a volley going, or prevent the other person from hitting it back by catching the ball?
I suspect that somehow the rules conflict, but I know if I bring this up I’ll be accused of correcting him. So I just nod and try to make contact with the ball while he castigates me.

“Why did you hit it like that?

“Why don’t you catch it like this?

“Why aren’t you trying, Mom? You’re not even trying, why aren’t you saving it, Mom?”

He reiterates the rules and my brain fogs over as I try to
comprehend, but there are new wrinkles. “If the ball bounces once, it’s a save, or if you hit it twice in the air and it touches the net, it’s a save, but if it’s too close to you and you catch it, it doesn’t count.” I’m alternating between hitting the ball and catching the ball and we’re bouncing in circles around and around and maybe the bouncing has loosened something in my brain, because that’s when I start to laugh.

I start to giggle and I then can’t stop. I’m laughing so hard tears are streaming down my face. “Mom, stop it, stop it, Mom.” But I can’t. “Why are you laughing?” he demands. I can’t tell him that I know I’ll never ever win this game, that I can’t follow the rules he’s made up, that I will definitely need a massage, if not a Xanax, to correct the damage being caused right now, and that with every jump I am moving one step closer to those cartoon-sized kitchen utensils.

I can’t tell him that I am trying and that sucking is the best I can do and that my inability to “save” is because I’m forty-nine years old and I’m on my way out of this life and he’s on his way in. You can’t tell children this. Children don’t want to know this, and even if you said it, they’d never believe it and they probably couldn’t hear it because it’s like a high-pitched dog whistle that only people over forty can hear. I’d be his Dr. Nudgey. I don’t want to be another person saying that youth is wasted on the young and that in its absence you will long for it, like someone you had great sex with but couldn’t wait to leave because you had nothing to talk about. Or that you knew you were on borrowed time and it was wrong to be using someone like that, but that thing he did when you rode him backward and he’d slide his thumb inside
you was truly inspired. That you had to break it off, even if there were a few slips where you showed up in the middle of the night begging him to do that thing just one more time, because it was going nowhere and you felt guilty when you were with him, but even that didn’t stop you from missing him. No. I most definitely can’t put it like that. I’m laughing instead.