My Nest Isn't Empty, It Just Has More Closet Space: The Amazing Adventures of an Ordinary Woman (22 page)

It’s no secret that women compare themselves to each other. The woman running on the treadmill next to me, or sitting across from me in the subway car, or untangling her dog’s leash from mine—I can size each one up in a glance—her clothes, her weight, her hair, her makeup. But it’s okay, she’s doing it to me, too. It’s how we get a sense for norms, trends, and where we fit in.

Since I moved to the city, I’ve observed that women wear sky-high heels and blow-dry their hair straight. I go with the heels thing—it’s not so bad, I’ve developed a minor addiction to Advil and cracking my toes—but I actually like my naturally curly hair, so I let it exist in all its springy, poufy glory. Standing out is okay with me. My hair is my thing.

On my head.

Down south is a different story. I’m a nice girl, a fun girl, a regular girl. Down in nether nether land, I don’t want to make a statement. I just want to be normal.

But what is normal? It’s the one thing we can’t compare with other women by looking at them. Some of my friends spill every dirty detail about their boyfriends’ particulars, but we’re all too squeamish to discuss our own.

How do you keep up with the Joneses when you have no idea what the Joneses are doing?

Part of the problem is that we can’t talk about it. Not that we don’t talk about it, but that we can’t bring ourselves to say the words. We speak in euphemism: “down there,” “bikini area,” “hoo-hah.”

You know it’s bad when Oprah, the richest, most powerful woman in the world, is too embarrassed to call it anything but “va-jay-jay.”

Recently, I was talking to two of my closest girlfriends, and the subject of intimate grooming came up. The language barrier was clearly an issue:

“I’m pretty neat, I mean, I take care of myself,” my friend said.

“Take care of…everything?” I asked.

“Well, almost. I mean, not
everything
everything, but kinda.”

My third friend joined in, tentatively. “Really? I just do sort of what matters.”

“Matters for what?”

“Oh, you know.”

But I didn’t know. At that point, I had no idea what we were talking about. And I’m not sure they did either. But we were all too giggly and red-faced to say anything further.

Even the salons are too shy for specifics. The last time I made an appointment, I had three choices: bikini wax, French bikini wax, or a Brazilian. What is a French wax? I thought French women were notorious for not shaving their armpits, now we’re putting them in charge of the lady business?

I’ve heard that the label “Brazilian” is a fiction of marketing; the style did not originate in Brazil at all. How did a perfectly innocent country get such a bad reputation? Did it sleep around with Peru and Colombia?

My mom’s favorite joke is, “When did a ‘Brazilian’ stop being someone from Brazil?”

Actually, my mom thinks the whole thing is pretty funny. Women her age have a different perspective on the issue. She grew up during the sixties, the sexual liberation, and the rise of feminism.

My generation’s unifying movement, if we have one at all, is overexposure. Reality TV, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube. The upside is that self-expression can be empowering. But I think the downside is harder on women than men.

Paparazzi rush female stars as they get out of their cars, hoping for a careless exit. Ashton Kutcher tweets a photo of his wife, Demi Moore, in her underwear. Even the squeakiest of clean starlets get tangled in sex-tape scandals, since it takes two seconds for an ex-boyfriend to make the private public.

I can’t help feeling like there’s a spotlight where the sun-don’t-shine. But I guarantee that whatever I do down there…

I’m not telling anyone.

We adults don’t have enough fun. We go to work and the dry cleaner’s. We shop for produce and pet food. We attend the weddings of our cousins and make conversation with people we don’t know. We have so many errands and obligations that when we’ve finally performed them all, we sit around and do nothing, delighted that no one is torturing us anymore.

I know it’s easier to do nothing than to do something.

But I suspect it’s a big mistake, which could lead to depression and maybe even cellulite.

I drag myself out of my house when I get a Bright Idea to do something fun, just for me. Many of my Bright Ideas suck. Once I bought a bat house that you had to build yourself and paint, which is embarrassing to admit in print. It was an arts-and-crafts project for the menopausal.

I never built it, and my bats remain homeless.

Women of a certain age have no business with glue guns.

One of my more successful Bright Ideas was to go to the Metropolitan Opera—at the mall. You may have read about the Met’s program, which telecasts live opera performances to movie theaters. It was way more fun than a bat house. Go. Order tickets online. And don’t worry, there are subtitles. Fun subtitles.

It’s not like going to a normal movie—it’s better. The crowd dresses nicer, as if we were all at the real opera house and not just the multiplex. I share this delusion and wear my contacts for maximum hotness.

Wow!

Before the opera starts, the camera pans the gilded Met balconies, and the real-life orchestra tunes up, a high-rent cacophony. The camera takes you into the orchestra pit, close enough to read the score. The musicians look excited, and the female violinist smiles shyly. I like her instantly. The enormous screen spans the actual stage, so you feel like you-are-there, though you didn’t spend-the-money.

The coming attractions roll, for Rossini’s
The Barber of Seville
and Puccini’s
Il Trittico.
Not your typical Hollywood trailer—nothing explodes, and there are no special effects. At the intermissions, everybody in the audience talks to each other, chattering away in a surprising array of languages. The opera I saw, Tchaikovsky’s
Eugene Onegin,
attracted a Russian-speaking crowd. They cried like babies at the end of the show, proving that you don’t have to be Italian to lack emotional control.

And they were extraordinarily polite, unlike the couple to my left, who shook their Milk Duds throughout the entire first act, so I had to get all Ricardo Muti on their heinies.
Eugene Onegin
is about unrequited love. The heroine is named Tatiana, sung by Renée Fleming, and she falls for the hunky Onegin, sung by studly Dmitri Hvorostovsky. Tatiana writes Onegin a letter professing her love, sealing wax and all. Onegin spurns her initially, only to come around after she’s married.

How do you say “intimacy issues” in Russian?

Onegin borrows also from Tchaikovsky’s own life, in which he received passionate letters from a woman who fell in love with him. But Tchaikovsky was gay.

D’oh!

No matter, he married her anyway and later died an unfortunate death. So neither Onegin nor Tchaikovsky end happily.

But the three-hour production took all of us out of our stupid Saturday errands. We burst into spontaneous applause after the arias, even though Renée Fleming couldn’t hear us. We didn’t care. We felt like clapping, and we did. I suspect that those endorphins added a year to our collective life span.

And while we watched the opera with the real audience at the Met, something magical happened. A crowd gathered, nationwide, and we all began to feel a part of something larger. Or at least I felt that way and projected it wildly onto everyone else. Like all great art, opera has the power to transport the imagination and to move heart and soul.

So go.

Have fun.

Even next to the Best Buy.

Daughter Francesca says I’m an amoeba.

“A what?” I ask. I remember vaguely what an amoeba is, but biology was a long time ago. “Remind me.”

“A single-celled organism, immediately affected by a stimulus.”

She actually said that sentence.

I don’t know exactly what she’s talking about, as she went to Harvard, though I get the drift. I’m a happy drunk, and it doesn’t take much to get me happy. A half glass of wine, and I’m off and running. A margarita, and I might remarry.

Or get another dog.

I learned this about myself at an early age, when The Flying Scottolines went out to a restaurant, to celebrate something. I forget the occasion but I remember the place, The Frog in Philadelphia, because it was on the classy side for us. Mother Mary wanted everyone on their best behavior and stopped just short of insisting that I wear white gloves.

She actually believed that if you went “in town,” you had to wear white gloves.

This was in 1970.

I know.

Anyway, I remember that I was fifteen and I had a sip of my father’s martini.

And then I tried to kiss the waiter.

The poor guy couldn’t lean over the table without me chasing him with my lips. My father smiled, Mother Mary yelled, and years later, Brother Frank told me that he thought the waiter was cute, too.

So I know that alcohol affects me instantly, even in small amounts. You may think it’s my imagination, but I swear it isn’t. I’m not the kind of girl who needs liquor to kiss waiters.

Wait. That came out wrong.

So I know not to drink too much wine, but what I didn’t realize is that I’m affected by coffee, too. I knew it kept me awake at night, but I’ve been on deadline for a new book lately, and by coincidence, Francesca’s been home visiting. She’s the one who pointed it out, one morning after I’d had two cups of coffee and snapped at Ruby The Crazy Corgi.

“She’s just barking,” Francesca said gently, but I frowned.

“I know but I’m trying to work.”

“She doesn’t know that.”

“Well, she should!” I shot back, and we both looked at each other.

Then it hit me.

I’m a happy drunk, but I’m mean on caffeine.

It’s true.

I experimented on myself the next few days, drinking coffee as I worked, and I’m not just more alert on coffee, I’m downright nasty. Cranky. Dare I say it?

Bitchy.

Everything frustrated me. The dogs took too long to go to the bathroom. The microwave took too long to cook a Boca Burger. The computer took too long to wake up. It needed coffee. They all did.

I was the one who should have gone without.

You may be thinking that it isn’t news that caffeine can turn you into a witch, but it was to me, and anyway, that’s not the point. Because what bothers me is, what does that say about me, if I’m mean on caffeine?

I always enjoyed knowing that I’m a happy drunk, because I believed that it said something about me, inside. The theory is that liquor lets down your inhibitions, showing the real you, and if that was so, it was proof positive that I was a nice person inside.

Generous, sweet, and kind, if lecherous to men in aprons.

But is that still true if I’m mean on caffeine?

Does this new fact show that I’m really evil inside, or at best, have a high-octane dark side?

I don’t know.

I’m afraid to ask me.

I might bite.