The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones (7 page)

“Fun,” I wonder aloud. “Yes. Whatever happened to fun?”

“At one time, if I recall, you had yourself a bit too much of it.”

“That is true.”

“But here’s the thing.” Clare leans forward, her voice dropping. “Outside of a rip-roaring affair, which you had, and which was fun for a moment before it became absolutely horrible, have you ever noticed how often the adult things that are supposed to be ‘fun’ really aren’t? Adult ‘mixers,’ for instance. Don’t you dread them? Or the beach. Yikes!”

“Or certain holidays.”

“Or holidays on the beach. Like Fourth of July.”

“The worst.”

“The parking, the shlepping, the Gladware.”

“The fireworks’ too-loud booms and the sand in the undies and the hysterical exhausted children.”

“Farmer’s markets,” she says. “On what planet is that a fun weekend activity? Alan—” her long-suffering husband “—took us to one the other week. First I always think: We’re going to the fair, the fair, the fair! But then I always find, on approach to those tents—those sort of self-satisfied, pointy little blue tents—I actually feel dread. Dread! Why? Because it’s the Lucy-and-the-football thing over and over again. I always look eagerly toward the first line of booths as though I’m going to see something Willy Wonka wonderful, but oh no, it’s just piles of bok choy. Bok choy and turnip greens and broccolini, the very things I try to avoid at restaurants. There is too much organic produce. Why am I pawing through all this produce?”

“Well, it is a farmer’s market,” I say. “It’s what farmers sell.”

“Sure,” she says. “I get that now. But as I’ve found, the high point of farmer’s markets has nothing to do with farmers. The high point is the Julia Child moment—”

“Oh no, not even the Julia Child moment but the Meryl Streep playing Julia Child moment—”

“Oh no—next level,” she says “The Meryl Streep playing Julia Child in a Nora Ephron movie moment, when you select some artisanal vegetable that will be part of some amazing transformative dish you’re actually never planning to cook. Three weeks later, as usual, you’re pitching all those weeping brown legumes into the garbage. Summer squash? Mustard greens? Organic heirloom Japanese tomatillos? Why do I want these? Why would anyone? Who have I become?”

“Exactly,” I say.

“What about Kickstarter?” she adds, shrilling higher. “Pardon me, but I don’t want to hear about anyone else’s Kickstarter. The album, the play, the film—why is funding everyone else’s creative project suddenly up to me?”

“That’s right,” I agree. “There used to be another word for Kickstarter. It was called ‘grandparents.’ ”

We embrace the notion of a happiness-boosting field trip, which will involve shopping but—here’s the key, we decide—not at any depressing stores.

“I can’t face Michael’s,” I say. “I’ve been there too many times on emergency scavenger hunts working off fourteen-item lists for my daughters’ awful school projects. The fiberboard, the dowels, the button eyes, the glue guns.” One of our most notorious escapades was Hannah’s fourth-grade “California mission,” when, while trying to affix the lopsided bell tower, with a scream I accidently jammed a toothpick into my thumb, resulting in the project’s new moniker: “Mission of Blood.”

“No Michael’s,” Clare agrees, shivering. “I friggin’ hate that place. We’ll go to the fancy German-named art store we never allow our children to enter because everything costs three times as much.”

Seizing the moment, we fill up our water bottles, jump into her Prius, and immediately:

Go to Blau’s to buy Clare some clay for sculpting (“I’ve never sculpted!” she declares, “I want to sculpt!”).

Go to the music store to buy sheet music for Clare to learn to sing the entire score of
West Side Story
. Back in the car, she throws her arm up into the air and keens: “One handed catch!”

Go to Crate and Barrel to brainstorm mad new paint colors for my too-ice-blue and hence to-me-depressing bedroom—perhaps a hue called “Burnt Tangiers.” I can actually visualize this color in my brain. It echoes a kind of Moroccan burnt tangerine color I once saw in some throw pillows on some wicker in some other section. We also energetically smell—and savor—and enjoy—and meditate on—about fourteen different “flavors” (Rosemary Mint, Japanese Plum, Ylang-Ylang) of six- and twelve-inch pillar candles.
Ommm
.

Go to Cost Plus World Market to buy severely colorful plates. Severely. To “happy up” the chore-filled eyesore that has become my home, I’ve decided that everything in my household must please the eye. Also a set of four hand-painted coffee mugs. “I need something to get up for in the morning!” I exclaim. “I want a pretty mug! Not just all these dismal chipped unmatched things from all those damn public-radio pledge drives.”

On our way to Target (less depressing than CVS) to pick up persimmon-colored (and why not?) nail polish, Clare’s eye lands on a
USA Today
magazine. Its cover is a cheery megablast about the joys of “extreme couponing.” “Look how happy that woman looks!” Clare marvels. “Why have I never couponed? That sounds like fun. I want to start couponing!” This reminds me of how my mother used to collect Blue Chip stamps in the sixties. I share the memory: “I totally remember my mom sitting at the dining room table in the afternoons gluing those Blue Chip stamps into that neat little booklet—it seemed so deeply pleasurable. That, and her cigarette at the end of the day. In fact, I feel like I have some memory of her blissfully doing Blue Chip stamps while smoking cigarettes.” Feeling psyched, we pick up twin green plastic sleevelets that can apparently be used as coupon organizers.

Not to leap ahead here, but before we keep going, pencils up:

MENOPAUSE QUESTION

When it comes to menopause/depression tips, why do typical lists of “solutions” always look like activities one would do at a Finnish Christian work-study camp for moderately slow children? Why is it always:

Sing!

Clean out your closets!

Organize your sock drawer (you’ll be amazed at how satisfying it is)!

Take a daily walk!

Hydrate, hydrate, hydrate!

Cut and arrange some fresh flowers in a pretty vase!

Why don’t those lists ever have items like:

Have a pitcher of margaritas and just get fucking bombed!

YouTube until your eyes bleed to see who’s fat in a bikini!

Eat raw chocolate-chip cookie dough until you puke!

How about a heady bit of Nordstrom’s shoplifting?!

Three words: Bang a sailor!

Just asking. “One handed catch!”

I find that, by hook or by claw, my happiness project is actually working. These manic “project” activities masquerading as incredibly happy busy-ness are doing an okay job of covering up some of the day’s shifting fogs and fens of stealth guerrilla depression. Perhaps it is because my little projects give me something to focus on, like a cat distracted into hypnotically batting a paw against colorful guppies in a fishbowl, while at the same time being free of anxiety-producing deadlines, negative critiques, or yardsticks of dwindling resources. (For example, I’ve long enjoyed the tactile, deft, satisfying keyboard-smacking experience of paying my bills with Quicken, and yet no amount of colorful pie charts can mask the fact that month by month my money is draining away.) As I beaver away at my personal not-connected-to-anything-at-all-crucial to-do lists, it is like the first day of school, red apple in hand, snap of autumn, when I was young and first realized: “Yay! I am good at sitting at a desk and filling pages with neat if perhaps not always terribly meaningful handwriting! And I will get rewarded for it!” I can’t really do much about global warming, world hunger, or the deficit. Today’s problems are too large, overwhelming, and ever present, on that twenty-four-hour news cycle. You can recycle all year long, but get on a plane and in a flash your ecofootprint sprouts giant bunions. So one’s goals begin to shrink. And that passitivity on my part is rather sad. After all, my generation of females came of age in postrevolutionary times: The good fight had been fought, we had coed schools, a pro-choice society, and all avenues of personal freedoms open to us. Our generation of women was going to change the world—to feminize the power structure and workplace while giving up our subjugation at home. So why then, three decades later, are we staring in a glaze into a Starbucks vitrine counting the calories in a raspberry cake pop? It’s all we can do to manage our own moods in a day. It’s all we can do to watch HGTV until noon and not overdose on antidepressants, and that itself is sad. Because are we not still women? Do we not still roar? Do we perhaps need our own female version of a Fight Club? All big questions and a bit too much to take on, but in the meantime, what’s wrong with a little extreme couponing? That’s a win-win. Because now I am no longer passive. And I am no longer focused on my usual also Sisyphean tasks. Mortage, what mortgage? Health-insurance premiums, what health-insurance premiums? So what if my IRA has so declined in value that my children will be able to afford only three hours of community college? That’s not what’s at stake here! My happiness projects have one goal: happiness!

• • •

I AM CONTINUING
to build around myself a protective, ever-growing mandala of crisp new legal pads and folders and binders. Ever more ideas and lists and resolutions are coming to me—Pilot pen out:

I’m going to finally, for once in my life, drink eight glasses of water a day and see what actually happens (I buy a metallic blue water bottle—just admiring its sheen makes me happy)!

I’m going to get a sassy new haircut!

I’m going to get a pair of those new Shape-up-type thingies!

One of these days I’m even going to decide what version of Burnt Tangiers I want to go with, as my bedroom walls are covered with so many slightly different paint colors by now it looks like an insane asylum!

In fact, next level, I’m going to actually finally open all those old Pirate’s Cove cardboard boxes and rebuild my small personal library. I will perhaps even—oh hey,
ding, ding, ding!
—rebuy
One Hundred Years of Solitude
. I will commit to correcting my youthful past by even reading a South American magical-realist novel all the way through, and maybe at least one Henry James!

This will of course require bookshelves. Mr. X used to take care of things like bookshelves, but I doubt he will do that for me any longer. If I ask Mr. Y to procure shelves, they will be—I don’t know—like “stage shelves” (being that Mr. Y is not the handiest person). No matter: I dog-ear pages of the IKEA catalog for bookshelves that the new claw-free me will assemble myself!

I find I am thinking with unusual swiftness and clarity and penetration. My thoughts flow quickly and easily.

I have come up with ideas for three books, four one-woman shows, and a community-based (think Zip Car) Costco purchase-share plan!

I’m going to write a blog about my happiness project, a happiness blog!

I’m going to create a happiness app, a depression app, and a “what the hell is an app” app!

I am labeling all my ideas on color-coded charts in color-coded folders in color-coded files in my brand-new file cabinet. It is one from Staples with 237 individual screws and twenty-seven steps that it took me seven hours to hand-assemble. I am not kidding.

In moving several boxes of books to make way for the cabinet, with the Herculean energy of a crazed lumberjack, I see an old paperback on Southern recipes and hostessing. It is a book outlining what to serve at funerals called
Just Because You’re Dead I
s No Excuse.
How very true! I laugh. In the mail, intrepid menopause specialist Ann has sent me some catalogs especially targeted for middle-aged women. What fun! With enigmatic names like
As We Change
and
Solutions
, they contain fascinating items like bathing suits with skirts and bathtub reading racks with a wineglass holder and special toe-bunion spreaders. Excitedly I mark my catalog and order up a storm! Sure!
As We Change
. . .
Solutions
!

CLARE HAS
crashed.

She is still in her bathrobe at 11:00
A.M.
Her two kids are home with the flu. They are parked on the living room couch, watching Nick 2. The TV wails and wails and wails. Clare’s ankle is swollen and wrapped in ice in an Ace bandage. She looks terrible.

“What happened to your foot?” I ask.

She puts her hand up. Her voice is toneless.

“Remember how excited I was about the couponing?”

I nod. It was the one activity I hadn’t gotten to.

“So I read the
USA Today
article about it, and it turns out what really gets these couponers going is double couponing, triple couponing, and extreme couponing. It’s surprisingly technical. You can’t go on impulse. To rack up those savings, you have to be really disciplined.

“So I open up my Sunday paper,” she says, “I pull out all those glossy coupon sheets I typically ignore, and I begin cutting them out. I see a coupon for Air Wick, regularly a dollar twenty-nine, today a dollar nineteen. There’s a five-cents-off coupon for a two-pack of rubber bands. Next up, six Irish Spring deodorants for five dollars. And instead of feeling excited, I’m starting to feel sort of sick. Rubber bands? Air Wick? I don’t even want this stuff. It’s depressing!

“And look at this,” she says. “I clicked on some wrong savings link, and now I’m starting to get all these strange e-mails. Here’s an ad that was sent to me just this morning. It shows—look!—this silver-haired woman who is really really excited about . . . catheter delivery. Who are all these crazy beeyotches? And, oh my God, is this, in just a few short years, going to become me? The thing is that I do adore home delivery, and I can almost, almost imagine how delivery of a personal medical device like a catheter could really provoke some excitement! But maybe I’m just lashing out desperately and losing my mind! Maybe instead of really happy, all of America’s women including me are just really, really insane!

“So I’m now looking around the house,” she continues, “and instead of happy I’m feeling kind of pathetic. My kids think my singing is terrible. My sculptures look like frozen poo. I can’t even cut coupons without a meltdown—I don’t have one-tenth of the coping power of one of those . . . those cat ladies who collect Hummel figurines. I used to mock my mother for doing that, and now instead of mocking her I am amazed by her because she led such a more limited life but seemed much more happy. What I would give to be made happy by a cat and some Hummel figurines—think of all the money I would save! Who wouldn’t prefer a cat and Hummel figurines over antidepressants? So yesterday when the kids were at school, I’m sitting in my bathrobe playing Solitaire like some addicted lab rat. Jesus the gardener appears suddenly, like this apparition, just outside my home-office window, with his panama hat, leaf-blowing. I am suddenly frightened that Jesus will look up and see his middle-aged First World lady ‘boss’ playing Solitaire while Jesus is actually working for a living.”