The Hot Flash Club (24 page)

37

Who was it who said, “Beware of all ventures that require new clothes?” Shirley wondered, as she dressed for her Saturday seminar in a six-week cram course on business management.

Whoever said it was dead wrong, because Marilyn had bought new clothes to play her part as Alice’s secretary, and look at her now, she was a babe.

Today was Shirley’s moment of transformation. Her goal was to appear professional, managerial, capable of efficient thought, and Alice and the other HFC’ers—but especially Alice—assured her that her usual wardrobe didn’t come within a mile of that image. Marilyn had given some of her suits and dresses to Shirley—they were about the same size—and dutifully, Shirley tried them on in front of a mirror, grimacing at the reflection. In these drab garments, Marilyn might look like a scientist; Shirley looked like a scientific
experiment
.

But that didn’t leave much else. She wished she could afford to do what Marilyn did, skip off to the mall on a shopping spree. But she didn’t have the money to buy a new shirt. Actually, she did, but she needed to save every penny toward Golden Moments, or Alice would skin her hide.

Finally, she settled on a pair of jeans, her own plain black T-shirt, and a muted heathery tweed jacket of Marilyn’s. She still didn’t look like herself—the jacket was so rigid, it didn’t
flow
. She focused on her face, putting on a minimum of makeup, leaving off the violet eye shadow and toning down her blusher and lipstick. When she was finished, her face had about as much allure as her elbow.

Still, she persisted. She stuck simple silver studs in her ears instead of any of her fabulous earrings. She skinned her hair back from her head into a long fall held by a scrunchie—and nearly gagged at the result. Without the flamboyant cascade of red, every line and wrinkle and sag was visible. How could she walk into a room full of energetic, tech-smart, cell-phone-sporting, Palm Pilot– punching young people, looking like this—
old
?

What had she advised Julie?
Don’t let fear rule your
life?
Great advice, but sometimes difficult to follow. Even harder to do it alone. She needed a friendly voice to buck her up and blow away the clouds of self-doubt.

She grabbed up her phone and called Alice. “Alice! I can’t go to this seminar! I look old and dried-up!”

“Nonsense,” Alice assured her. “You look like Bonnie Raitt.”

“More like Willie Nelson.”

Alice laughed. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. And remember, you’re not entering a beauty contest. Neither are the other people at the seminar. They’ll be as nervous as you, afraid they won’t understand everything, trying to take it all in—they won’t even
see
you.”

“I suppose you’re right. Oh, but Alice, I didn’t even go to college!”

“Neither did I, until late in my twenties, and then I put myself through night school.”

“Yes, but you’re
smart
!”

“So are you.”

“No, I’m not! When I read the seminar options, I couldn’t understand half of them or pronounce the other half!”

“You’re exaggerating.”

“I’m not! Listen—what the hell is
macroeconomics
?”

“Well, if micro means small, and macro means big, what do you think?”

Shirley chewed her lip. “The economics of big corporations?”

“Sure. Or even bigger, of nations, of international trade, of the world.”

“Oh, jeez,” Shirley moaned.

Alice became serious. “Shirley, you don’t have to worry about macroeconomics. No one’s going to force you to. You need to look at this seminar as a
tool
. Like your massage table’s a tool, or your aromatherapy candles. If you want to be the head of your own business, if you want to run Golden Moments properly, so you make a profit, you’ve just got to get a grasp on certain concepts. And you can do it. I know you can.”

“I know I can, too. I just needed to hear someone else say it.”

“Well, look,” Alice continued. “I’ll be glad to help you with the start-up, if you’d like, and I’ll get your office in shape for you.”

“Oh, Alice, that’s so good of you!”

“I’ll enjoy doing it. But I wouldn’t do anything if I didn’t think you were going to make a success of it.”

“Thanks, Alice. You’re exactly what I needed!”

Buoyed like a kite on a fresh spring breeze, Shirley grabbed up her notebook and pens, raced to her car, and sped to the Natick Marriott. Borderline late because of her mini nervous breakdown, she ran across the enormous parking lot, checked the room event schedule in the hotel lobby, and, rather than wait for the elevator, took the stairs to the third floor, two at a time.

A pretty young woman at the reception table flashed a smile. “You must be Shirley Gold,” she called out. “Here’s your name tag and packet. Go right in. They’re just about to begin.”

“Thanks.” Shirley slapped the name tag above her left breast and slipped through the doors into the function room.

Long tables filled the room, facing the front where a white board and a video screen were set up. Every table seated four, and every table was filled to the max.

“Over here,” a woman called, gesturing to a place at a table in the corner.

“Thanks,” Shirley said to the woman as she took her place.

Maybe fifty people were there, she figured, scanning the room. She saw the backs of everyone’s head. White hair, black hair, gray hair, no hair. All ages. All ethnicities—jeez, she never thought of that, of trying to set up a business when English wasn’t your first language. At least she knew English. Many of the other students wore jeans and T-shirts, and quite a few of them were overweight and out of shape and, Shirley could tell by their posture, riddled with stress. Yet there they were. She could feel the optimism in the room. If a hope and determination meter existed, this group would send it over the top.

The instructor, Dr. Newcott—but call him “Bob”— was talking, pacing back and forth across the front of the room, slapping his hands together, making jokes, like a coach before a game. He softened them up, whetted their appetites, then hit them with a list of the hard stuff they were going to cover during the day.

Tax laws. Pension and health benefits. Social security taxes. ERA. Job discrimination, federal leave, salaries and promotion, organizational charts, job descriptions, and annual job performance evaluations.

Could it be more boring? To become a certified masseuse, she’d had to learn the names of the skeletal and muscular system in the human body, and at first she hadn’t thought she could do it. The words had sounded so silly, and her mind had bubbled with questions like, if fingers were called
phal
anges and the penis a
phal
lus, did that mean the penis was a kind of finger, or fingers a kind of penis? Her teacher had stopped calling on her when she raised her hand.

But she’d persevered, and if she could learn all that, she could learn this stuff. Shirley picked up her pen and pressed the point to the first page of her new lavender notebook.

A year. Twelve months. That was how much time Theodore’s lawyer told Marilyn she could have to move out of the old Victorian where she’d lived with her husband and son for the past twenty years.

In the grand scheme of things, a year was nothing. If all time were the size of the planet Earth, a year would be a paper clip, an eyelash, a staple. In her own scheme of things, a year was larger, but not quite large enough, Marilyn thought, for the job she had to do.

She wandered through her house like a tourist in a museum gift shop, observing with a ruthless eye what, of all the possessions crowding the rooms, she would like to take with her to her new life.

It was difficult to see the furniture. Most of it was piled with books, and most of the books were Theodore’s. Well, then, he could deal with them, he could pack them, or arrange to have them packed. The furniture was a strange mix of dark, heavy oak from his parents’ home and sleek teak and chrome they’d bought in their later years when they desperately needed a new chair or bookshelf. She had no use for any of it, he could have it all.

She climbed the stairs to the second floor along a narrow path between more books, journals, and lopsided stacks of clippings from newspapers Theodore had dropped on the stairs, intending to take up later, or, rather, intending for Marilyn to carry up. The hall was lined with bookshelves stuffed to overflowing, as were the two bathrooms and the four bedrooms.

Teddy’s room hadn’t been changed since he moved into his own apartment. She leaned in the doorway, a slight smile on her face as she remembered how life had once been. You could read the passions of Teddy’s life on the walls. Over the childhood dinosaur wallpaper were plastered posters, not of rock stars and blond babes, but charts of the planets, the anatomical structure of the human body, chemical elements, water fleas, flatworms, and gastropods.

Teddy and Lila were in the process of buying a house with rooms for lots of children. Teddy might want these posters, and all the books piled on his desk, bed, chairs, and floor. Well, he could take what he wanted from this room and toss what he didn’t. She closed the door and went down the hall.

For the past ten years or so, since Teddy left home, she and Theodore had slept in separate rooms. Though they’d agreed it allowed them to read late into the night without keeping the other awake, Marilyn knew it signaled a turning point in their marriage. Theodore’s interest in sex had always been, basically, an urge for something quick, oral, and just for him. Even ten years ago, he hadn’t been interested in touching her or looking at her. She’d been only forty-two, but she’d felt much older, her own body as stiff and dusty as a piece of shale, holding only the impression of what once had been a juicy, warm, living woman.

So many wasted years.

Well. She couldn’t bear to look at her bedroom, and she wouldn’t look at Theodore’s. Let him deal with that.

From somewhere in the house, a kind of music floated. After a few moments, Marilyn realized it was the phone ringing. Whisked back to the present, she zipped down the hall to grab the phone in her bedroom.

“Marilyn!” Alice boomed out, nearly breaking her ear-drum. “Do you have a moment?”

“Of course.” Marilyn sank onto her bed, leaning against the headboard.

“I thought you might be able to help me.”

“Well, I’ll try.” She rearranged the pillows more comfortably. “What’s up?”

“It’s um, this, um,” Alice mumbled.

Mumbling!
How out of character for strong, take-charge Alice.
Nothing
intimidated her. Except—“Oh, Alice! Are you worried about tonight? Your date with Gideon?”

“Not
worried
,” Alice snapped defensively, then admitted, “More like terrified out of my skin.”

Marilyn laughed. “Why? You think he’s going to try to get you into bed?”

“Well, maybe.”

“Is Alan still living with you?”

“No. He found an apartment in Cambridge.”

“So the coast is clear
chez vous
,” Marilyn lowered her voice suggestively.

“Clear? For what?”

“What do you think?”

“Oh, Lord. I don’t know! This will be our third date, after all, because he took me to the jazz club the other night, and if I count the coffee after the symphony as a date, which probably I shouldn’t, but on the other hand, my thinking’s old-fashioned, I know young women
do it
on the first date, but what are the
rules
?”

Now
Alice was
babbling
. Marilyn laughed indulgently. Their conversation stripped years off her life. She threw herself backward on her bed, sinking into the pillows. “Alice, I don’t think there are rules anymore.”

“But there
are
. I think someone wrote them down in a book.”

“Oh, yes, now I remember. But that’s for young women who want to get married. You don’t want to get married, do you?”

“I don’t know!” Alice wailed. “How can I possibly know what I want? This wasn’t in my game plan! It’s all happening too fast. I planned to crawl right down into a pit of depression and wallow there for a few months. And look what happened! I never should have left the apartment!”

“Come on, Alice, you’ve got too much energy to stay depressed. And you like Gideon, right?”

“He’s an intelligent, pleasant, attractive man. But—”

Marilyn smiled, twirling the long curly phone cord while she talked.
“But?”

“But does that mean I want to go to bed with him?”

“You’re the only one who knows the answer to that,” Marilyn told her.

Alice sighed. “I wish it were that simple.”

“It
is
that simple!” Kicking off her moccasins, Marilyn brought her knees to her chest to get a better look at her toenails, which she’d painted a cheerful pink.

“Wait a minute, not so long ago, you said you’d forgotten how to feel sexual desire. Your exact words, if I recall, were that you felt like a purse that was all zipped up.”

“That’s true. But that was before—” Marilyn choked on her words.

Alice sighed gustily. “Go on. You can say his name. I won’t get mad.”

“I am so sorry about your job, Alice.”

“I know you are. Now forget it. Move on. Was Barton a good lover?”

Marilyn closed her eyes and made a funny noise.

“Marilyn?”

“Sex with Barton was wonderful. Of course it helped that he’s so handsome, and he has an amazing body—”

“—and now we know why.”

“Well, let me tell you, there was no silicone implant in his penis! It was all real!”

“So how was he on the foreplay?”

“Foreplay?” Marilyn concentrated, mentally beaming herself back to that night. “As I recall, there wasn’t anything you could
technically
call
foreplay
. We just kissed, and then we took our clothes off, in the bedroom, of course, and—”

“Wait. Did you leave the lights on?”

“No, but some light came in from the living room. I remember I’d pulled out all my white pubic hairs that morning, but I don’t think he even had time to look down there, everything went so fast.”