My Favorite Midlife Crisis (19 page)

“I don’t need a vibrator.”

“Yeah, you do. And I bet you don’t even have one.”

“I do. Somewhere.”

I’d bought my first vibrator back in college. Before Stan. It was the size, shape, and approximate heft of a rutabaga, and it had the bad habit of faltering at the most inopportune moments. When sex with Stan petered out in the last few years of my marriage, I dug it out of a back closet. It gave up the ghost finally a few months after he left me. I was too depressed to replace it.

“Well, you might think do-it-yourself action is beneath you,” she persisted, “but a good vibrator is better than nothing at all which, since you’re tossing out Harry, is what you’ve got.”

I was mildly insulted. “Maybe, but I prefer something a little less mechanical.”

She eyed me sadly. “Sweetheart, at the rate you’re going, all work and no play, no man and no prospects, you’re not only going to use it for sex, you’re going to dress it up and take it to dinner.”

Wrong.

***

The following morning, at six, my phone rang.

“Gwyneth Berke?”

“Uh-huh.” My father had roused me ten minutes before from an exhausted, dreamless sleep. I was still groggy.

“I’ve wakened you, haven’t I? Not a good start. This is Simon York calling.” Pause. “Of Kerns-Brubaker. We met at the IAGSO meeting.” Long pause. “You there?”

“Sorry. It’s just that you caught me getting out of the shower.” Lie. He’d caught me sitting on my bed, legs swung over the side.

“It’s rather presumptuous of me to call. You do remember me?”

“Yes, of course, Simon.”

Long pause. Throat cleared. “Ah, good.” A breath that sounded like relief. “The truth is, Gwyneth, I’ve been wanting to get in touch with you since London. We kept missing each other at the meeting. And you had a question I never got to answer. Which I’d like to do. So I thought, well, I’d give you a call and see if we might…uhm…get together.”

“I see,” I said, as I bolted to my feet where I was hoping my brain might kick into gear.

“But I’ve been out of town. Saudi Arabia, actually. So this is the first chance I’ve had to call. And then I’m a bit awkward when it’s not…ah...entirely professional.” Deep breath on both our parts while that last bit hung in the air. “Anyway, I screwed up my courage and here I am.”

“Very brave of you,” I countered, which wasn’t half bad for early morning repartee.

“Don’t you think?” he said with a laugh. “Look, I know this is terribly gauche to say, but I just touched down and I haven’t been in my office for more than two weeks so I’m in something of rush. What I called about is to find a time when we can get together. I’d like that to be soon, and then we’ll talk about that question you had for me, and anything else your heart desires.”

For a research scientist—a notoriously slow, methodical, and cautious species—he was galloping along at breakneck speed.

“Are you free this Sunday by any outlandish chance?” he asked.

Shit and double shit.

“Actually, I’m in Philadelphia this weekend. Speaking to five hundred women on Saturday about the risks of HRT.” I credentialed here.

Credentials ignored. “Ah, Philadelphia. I’ve consulted at the Abramson Center there. The city is quite nice. How about I train in?”

“Into Philly? Just for the day?”

“New York is hardly more than an hour by rail. Why not?” I heard clicking in the background. He was typing into his computer.

“Well, Sunday afternoon, I promised to do breakout sessions with some of the women from the day before...”

“Breakfast, then? Right, here we go. I could be in by nine thirty, at your hotel by ten, and on my way back by noon. Just enough time to see what we shall see.”

“Well, sure,” I said. Brilliant.

“And the name of the hotel is?”

“The Marriott. Downtown.”

“McMarriott. Remind me to tell you of a much nicer alternative for next time. Gwyneth?”

“Yes?” I just wanted to get off the phone.

“I’m glad I called.”

“Yes, well I guess I am too.”

That sent him into peals of laughter.

When he clicked off, I stabbed #6 on my speed dial. “Fleur,” I said. “Simon York just phoned.”

“The English thunderbolt?”

“One and the same. We have a date for breakfast on Sunday.”

“Fast worker. Ah well, I suppose this means I’ll have to return the vibrator I picked up for you last night. He’d better be good, your Brit. The Magic Bullet has five speeds.”

Chapter 20

At thirteen, I won the public speaking contest at Ferdinand C. Latrobe Junior High School reciting from memory “Renaissance” by Edna St. Vincent Millay, all one hundred and fourteen lines of it. The phrase “How can I bear it, buried here” invariably made me cry. I tried not to, but I wept saying it on stage. And who knows what the judges saw? They hung a medal around my neck.

My parents and brother waited for me at the back of the auditorium looking like no other family in the room, the school, the universe. Standing with them was the principal, Mr. Cohen, who said as I approached, “Here she comes, our champion orator. We’re very proud of Gwyneth. A straight-A student, and I don’t have to tell you she’s quite talented as a public speaker.”

My mother, her eyes hot coals, nodded. My father said thank you. And Rolfe leaned behind the both of them to whisper at me, “You’re going to get it.”

That night I padded down to the basement, inched out the loose brick ten bricks in from the side of the furnace, a hiding place I’d fashioned when I was ten.

“Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you.” I said the phrase out loud for the first time in my life, although I’d thought it for a couple of years. I shoved the medal to the back of the hollow among other treasures that would have been confiscated had my mother known about them.

The next morning after my father left for work, she asked me to show her my medal. I told her I left it at school.

“Well, I want it,” she said. “You only won it because all the other kids were shit. Don’t let what that old kike Cohen said go to your head, Miss Too-Big-for-Her-Britches, Miss Quite Talented. Miss Poetry. Don’t think you’re better than everyone else, because you’re not.”

“I don’t,” I said.

“Yeah, you do, you just say you don’t because you know I won’t put up with that fancy-pants attitude. I know what you’re thinking. But it ain’t going to work. I’m too smart for you. I’m going to wallop that show-off out of you.”

Which she proceeded to do, with a vengeance.

Years later, when she was shrinking and I was growing and she didn’t dare touch me, I dug out all the stuff I’d hidden in that hole. The medal, the silver cross my Aunt Margie gave me for my sweet sixteen, some coins from baby-sitting money my mother hadn’t got her hands on, a photograph of my father’s mother I’d rescued from the trash. On our second wedding anniversary, Stan spirited the medal from my jewelry box and hung it on a gold necklace, which I wear every time I face an audience.

You would think after my mother tried to beat it out of me I would have lost my taste for poetry but I never did, and I’m still good speaking in public, in love with the sound of my own voice magnified and the way the audience gives back to you when you hit the mark.

Onstage in Philadelphia, I filled the next to the last seat on a panel of five. At one end, Peggy McGrory, PhD, anthropologist and author of
Hot Flashes and Hottentots: A Survey of Menopause Among the Girquas of South Africa
,
read through her notes
.
Next to her sat Charlotte Springer, a proponent of menopause done naturally with herbs and acupuncture. Then Sidney Luskin, a cardiologist from the Penn’s Women’s Health Program, then me. The chair on my other side remained empty, its absent occupant’s nameplate flipped facedown.

“Before we turn the afternoon over to our distinguished panel, we have a surprise for you.” Andrea Chung-Parker, MD, the Forum’s president, leaned over the podium.

A surprise indeed. I hadn’t been informed and from the scowl on Sid Luskin’s face, I wagered he was in the dark, too.

“Last night, I was at a dinner party given by the governor of Pennsylvania, and one of the other guests was a woman who has just about single-handedly turned menopause from almost shameful to almost fashionable. When I told her what we were up to today, she asked if she could be on our panel.”

A rustle of speculative whispers rushed through the crowd.

“As always, she’s coming through for women’s issues. For twenty years, this extraordinary human being has shaped the minds and opened the hearts of America. Though she lives in New York City now, she is truly Philadelphia’s own...” which gave it away and a collective “Ohhh” swelled from the seats to the stage. They knew. Even I—who watched television only for the news and Brit wit—now knew the identity of our mystery panelist whose loyalty to her hometown was legend. The women rose to their feet before Andrea could announce her name, and then it got lost in an outburst of applause and cheers so you could barely hear her shout, “Fortune Simms!”

Iconic to half the planet, in life looking like a Masai warrior at six feet four inches, wrapped in a garment of purple and yellow tribal print, Fortune Simms strode on her endless legs to center stage, lifted her arms into a grand V, and shouted her signature question, “Who’s In Charge of Your Life?”

The audience, comprised of five hundred MDs, PhDs, MSWs and MBAs, sent back the response in one voice, “No One But Me.”

I heard Sidney Luskin mutter, “Shit, this will be a circus.”

But it wasn’t. We presented our ten-minute talks to a rapt audience. The energy generated by Fortune’s appearance swept up everything in its path. She really was a multimedia phenomenon, galvanizing her public to whatever was her current pet project. And since Fortune was about to hit her fiftieth birthday, her daily talk show had been obsessively concerned with osteoporosis, arthritis, and, ta-da! Menopause.

I popped out my standard speech, warning about mistaking cancer symptoms for the normal signs of menopause. But I felt supercharged and the familiar phrases snapped as if they were fresh. Afterwards, I called for questions from the floor. One had to do with vaginal dryness and there was a general swish as half the audience took a swig of water. “Change of life should change the sexual part of your life only for the better. Let’s put the men back in menopause,” I said, which elicited a mix of laughter and applause and a whoop from Fortune.

From a center table, a woman shot up, hand waving. “Arletta Washington, Black Women’s Support Alliance. My question has to do with racial differences in the menopause experience. Specifically, do black women undergo a different kind of menopause than Caucasians? Because from what I hear when we all get together, it sure doesn’t sound the same to me.”

“In what way?” I prodded.

“For one, we seem to suffer more and whine less.”

When the laughter died down, I said, “What you’re observing has also been noted in some studies. Whereas Caucasian women may see menopause as a signal of aging and slowing down, African American women tend to view it as a liberation from the responsibilities of childbearing and even welcome it as a time to pursue their own interests.”

“Amen,” Fortune stage-whispered.

“I saw this firsthand when I ran a free clinic in downtown Baltimore with a mostly African American patient population.” In the margin of my vision I registered Fortune’s gaze sharpening, and after I took a few more questions she lead a generous outburst of applause.

At the cocktail reception following, she made her way to my side. A large man wearing a headset and a blazer with an FS emblem on its pocket stationed himself a few steps away, his eyes always on her.

“So, Doctor Gwyn,” she’d nicknamed me already. “Looks like you knocked them dead out there.”

“Not exactly a sterling recommendation for a doctor,” I said with a laugh.

“Now that’s what I mean. That’s exactly what I’m looking for.”

“I’m sorry?”

“The quick wit. The sassy mouth. You relate as a human being, not only as a doctor. I watched how you connected with those women when you took their questions. You didn’t pull any of that high-and-mighty doctor crap—you know, the scientific jargon, the superior attitude. You respected them. You
honored
them.”

This was Fortunespeak. Not my style, but, God knows, it worked for her.

“You’re a natural for television and you’ll be great on my show. No, wait, let me finish.” She cut off any possible protest. “Around the holiday season, we’re planning a series on making and keeping life-changing resolutions. And of course, at the top of the list is health. You’d cover the gynecological angle. I’m not sure of the format yet. My producers can work it out with you. You’ll be doing the women of America a great service.”

I envisioned Bethany McGowan wracked with envy, Seymour Bernstein incredulous and awed in that order.

I said, “Since you put it that way, how can I decline?”

“Wonderful.” She laid on the glorious Fortune smile. “We pay scale. But I’ll personally make a donation to that Baltimore clinic you manage.”