The Hot Flash Club (22 page)

35

The good news was that Alan wasn’t lying around the condo like a basset hound on Valium anymore.

The bad news was that Alice was lying around the condo like a basset hound on Valium.

Friday morning, she didn’t even wake up until after nine o’clock. Groaning, she wrapped her robe around her and walked into the kitchen to find that her son had already gotten up and quietly slipped out, leaving her a note saying he’d be back that night, and, thoughtfully, a freshly brewed pot of coffee.

She poured herself a cup and carried it into the living room. That in itself was a change. Usually she slurped her morning coffee from a thick, rubbery mug with a plastic lid that prevented any liquid from spilling as she rushed around dressing for the day.

Today, she didn’t have anything to dress for.

It felt really odd.

Alice had
always
worked. At fourteen, back in Kansas, she’d held her first job as a waitress in Archer’s Café; since then, she’d never been without a job. Of course she’d had vacations, and good ones, when she reached the executive level at TransContinent, but the truth was, she’d never really enjoyed them unless she had some work to take along to build her day around. Alice Murray was all about accomplishment, and she had no idea what to do with herself without work.

She was giving another party for Golden Moments a week from Monday, so she wasn’t totally useless yet. But that was a long time away. She couldn’t get together for a brainstorming session with Shirley that day, because Shirley was doing the rounds of her masseuse jobs. Faye was out at the Eastbrooks. Marilyn was at MIT.

Alice was in her living room.

In her robe.

Well, hell. She might as well eat a pint of ice cream every night and fry bacon and eggs every morning for breakfast and sit around all day watching the hair grow on her legs.

Then she remembered that Esmerelda, the cleaning woman, was due at one. No way Alice could sit in her robe, watching TV, while another woman scrubbed her bathroom floor. No, Alice had to get out and do something.

At the HFC meeting the other night, they’d compiled a list of rules to live by, axioms that they knew from their struggles in the past would help them through the future, things they
knew
, even if they hated knowing them, like eating broccoli is good for the body. These were nutritional hints for the soul, like a kind of spiritual muesli. Near the top of the list was:
If you’re depressed, get up, get dressed, and get out of the house.

So Alice picked up the
Boston Globe
entertainment section and snapped it open, recalling how the three other women had reprimanded her for having lived so long in Boston without ever having taken advantage of its attractions. Dutifully, Alice grabbed a pen and pad and scribbled a list—the physical act immediately cheered her. She loved seeing the words marching in file down the paper, black on white. A kind of exterior order seemed to be lying latent in her interior disarray, and that gave her hope.

Boston Aquarium.

An International Festival of Women’s Cinema.

Museum of Fine Arts.

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

Museum of Science.

The Alvin Ailey Dance Theater—that would be interesting. Except it would be at night, and she wasn’t sure how she felt about attending theater alone. Might be something she’d have to work up to.

The Boston Philharmonic had matinees on Friday—
well
.

Alice looked at the clock. It was just after nine-thirty. She looked out the window. Sunny day.

The program was Stravinsky and Prokofiev, composers about whom she knew very little. She’d always preferred jazz to classical. But it wouldn’t kill her to try something new, and how would she know whether or not she liked the music until she heard it?

She phoned and reserved a ticket at the symphony, but as she showered, her spirits lagged until it was as if she were dragging her own body like a nanny with a recalcitrant child.

“Buck up!” she commanded herself as she opened the doors to her walk-in closet. All her work suits hung there in a gloomy ensemble of black, gray, brown, like shapeless habits for an order of nuns. Just looking at them made her stomach constrict and her breath go shallow.

Well, they no longer fit her body or her life!

She jerked a charcoal crepe suit with its death-grip waistband off the hanger and cast it on the floor. She yanked out a drab olive suit with a skirt that squeezed her stomach like a vise, and tossed it on top of the charcoal. As she added the mouse gray and the dog-shit brown, she sensed a new energy flowing through her. Anything the color of ashes, dusk, dust, clouds, feces, or mud was ripped from its hanger and flung out of her life. Her lungs swelled with power as she tugged and tossed, her chest expanded, and she felt like wings were growing from her back, lifting her into the air. She was becoming weightless!

Racing into the kitchen, she grabbed a box of clear plastic bags, took them to her closet, and stuffed them with her clothing. Her business shoes, tight and high and pinching, went into the bags with the clothes. She saved one black suit and a pair of black heels, for funerals.

That finished, she rose and surveyed her closet. She didn’t have a whole lot left.

Well, she’d just have to go shopping!

Maybe she’d invite Shirley to come with her.

Until then, she’d wear her loose batik trousers, a long white shirt, and all her turquoise jewelry. And the bright plastic bracelets.

The day was cool, but bright with sun. She set out in her low-heeled cork-soled shoes, striding briskly along the pavement, cutting this way and that through the busy streets, until suddenly she realized there was no need to hurry. The thought was so stunning, she stumbled and almost fell down.

Slowing her pace, she took time to gaze into the windows. She stopped at a bookstore to purchase a paperback novel with a candy box cover, something she’d never permitted herself before in her life, something she’d never before wanted. Before, she’d always read newspapers and
Forbes
and
Money
and other journals, to keep up with the business news. Occasionally, on cross-country flights, she’d skimmed the latest paperback thriller, as long as the plot was so fast she was assured she could finish the book in a minimum amount of time. She’d developed a scheme for judging an airplane book before buying it: the amount of white space on the pages. The more white space, the shorter the paragraphs and sentences, the less the book demanded of her. She could whiz through it without a thought.

What would it be like to read a book she didn’t want to
get through
, Alice wondered. Perhaps she’d find out with this little pink bit of froth. Certainly she’d give it a try. She settled in at a sidewalk café for lunch, intending to read. But the food—a chicken salad with Asian spices and a glass of cool Chardonnay—was so delicious, and the opportunity to eat at her leisure such a novelty, that she put the book back in her purse and concentrated on taste and smell. It was a pleasure, too, overhearing the conversations going on at the tables near hers. People were discussing clothes, movies, music, parties, vacations, and the occasional love complication, but no one was talking about work, and they were of all different ages, in fact, most of them were under sixty. It brightened her day immensely to know that people could build lives around something other than achievement and the battle for success.

Still, she was rather dreading the concert, she decided, as she paid her bill and strolled down Huntington Avenue to the brick concert hall. Because she’d never been to a matinee of anything since local productions of
The
Nutcracker
when her boys were young, Alice assumed she would be the youngest person there, surrounded by hordes of doddering little old ladies who would, with much crackling of foil, sneak mints into their mouths throughout the concert.

She was right. When she picked up her ticket at the window and handed it to the usher, the crowd around her was mostly female, and over fifty, and to make matters worse, their hair was coiffed as stiffly as Nancy Reagan’s, and they wore expensive, plain wool dresses with a modest diamond pin or gold necklaces. They looked as if they’d all just come from having tea with Barbara Bush. In her flowing batik pants, loose white shirt, and plastic bracelets, Alice was like a parrot among pigeons.

Her seat was in the gallery, toward the side and about halfway back. She slid down the row, found her place, and settled in, pleased by the width of the seat, not so thrilled with the hard wooden bottom.

A skinny young woman with magenta spiked hair, a tattooed necklace, and shitkicker boots slunk down the row and landed next to Alice. I see, Alice thought, they put all the weirdos in the same place.

As she bent her head to study her program, she saw, from the corner of her eye, an African-American man in a silk shirt in stained-glass colors coming down the row. He settled next to her, nodded at Alice, then pulled glasses from his pocket, fitted them over his nose, and turned his attention to the program.

She nodded at him and did the same, but she couldn’t concentrate. It wasn’t every day an attractive African-American man her age just happened along. She glanced sideways, to see whether or not someone—a wife, a girlfriend—was coming to join him. But the woman who came down the aisle and sat next to him was chattering to her teenage daughter and didn’t notice him. Well, then. And he wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. My, my.

He cleared his throat. Alice crossed her legs so that her toe pointed at Spike Hair sitting on her left. Spike Hair took a box of mints from her purse and slipped one into her mouth. The scent drifted tantalizingly into the air, making Alice crave a mint. She forced herself to concentrate on her program until the conductor, a Russian with an unpronounceable name, came onstage and the concert began.

It was Stravinsky’s
Persephone
, something Alice had never heard before, and something she decided, as the program continued, she didn’t need to hear ever again. A swarthy tenor and a pale narrator intoned gloomily in French, as did a despondent chorus, about the underworld and spring. As a violin chord pierced the air, a resounding note pinged in Alice’s body.

Uh-oh. She needed to pee,
now.
She shouldn’t have had that cup of coffee with lunch, she knew coffee was a diuretic, but it had been such a
small
cup. She recrossed her legs, hoping the change in position would relieve the pressure.

The “Melodrama in Three Tableaux” was long. Persephone was abducted. She was sorry The Shades were so sad. Finally, she was reborn, while flutes and harps plucked strings that resonated up and down Alice’s urinary tract.

At last it ended, and after the applause died down, most of the audience rose to stretch during intermission. Some headed out to the rest rooms, which was exactly where Alice was longing to go. She looked to her left. Spike Hair had fallen into a kind of trance, slumped down, head resting on the seat back, eyes closed, legs in their black jeans intersecting in a kind of cat’s cradle Alice couldn’t possibly step over. To her right, the man was reading his program again.

He noticed Alice looking at him, and lifted his head, giving her a wonderful smile. “That was pretty amazing, wasn’t it?”

“I suppose amazing’s the right word.” Alice paused, wondering whether or not to be honest. She knew she came off pretty strong. But she admitted, “I found it a bit overwhelming.”

“Like a disturbed hornets’ nest.”

She laughed. “Like that.” The slight movement of her torso as she shifted in her seat made a heavy weight press on her bladder.

“My son gave me season tickets,” the man confided. He turned toward her. His face was wide, his hair thick, peppery gray, his eyes dark and large. She wouldn’t call him fat, but
portly
might work; he clearly enjoyed his food. “I’ve come regularly the past few months, and I’ve enjoyed most of the concerts, plus there’s something about attending a concert of classical music that makes me feel, well,
virtuous
.”

Alice smiled. The man was charming, but he was probably also gay, or a serial killer. If there was one thing she knew for sure in this world, it was that Fate didn’t drop an attractive, unattached man almost in your lap every day, or any day. “I know what you mean,” she replied, because she couldn’t just sit there gawking at him. Her bladder tugged on her attention like a spoiled child.

“I don’t believe I’ve seen you here before,” the man volunteered.

She was flattered by the implication that he found her remarkable enough to remember. “You’re right. This is the first time I’ve been to a concert in years. I am, um, actually, I’ve recently retired.”

“Well, congratulations!” He smiled, showing gorgeous white teeth. “You’re about to begin the best period of your life!”

She squinted at him. “Do you really think so?”

He leaned toward her, talking eagerly. “Oh, yes, absolutely. Listen, I was a high school teacher all my life, and I loved my work. Then, five years ago, my wife died, and a few months later, I retired. I thought I’d go nuts. I was afraid I’d end up glued to the sofa, watching old movies and eating too much cold pizza.”

Alice smiled. “I’ve got my own version of that vision.”

“Well, I confess I did live that way for a few months. It does take you a while, sometimes, to get back on your feet. But I did. I found—”

“Ssssh!” The woman behind him leaned forward, rapping his shoulder with her program. Only then did Alice realize the conductor had returned to the podium. She exchanged guilty smiles with the man and faced forward, composing herself to listen.

The Prokofiev ballet music was also turbulent and strenuous, but compelling, with occasional comic moments. For minutes at a time, Alice almost forgot how desperately she needed to pee. She turned, crossed and recrossed her legs, trying to find a position that put the least pressure on her bladder. She didn’t succeed. She clenched her toes and bit her lip. The urgency increased. She felt like she was sitting on a burning blade.