“What are you going to do?” Andie asks. “Just stop trying and quit?”
“Why not?” I exclaim. “Can’t I step out of the endless cycle of self-improvement? Which is”—here a new idea strikes me—“itself a form of capitalism, isn’t it? Marilyn! Help me out.”
“What on earth are you talking about?” Julia asks.
“Yes—the capitalization of feminism,” Marilyn says, twirling her baguette in the brie. “To whip women into a bipolar frenzy of dependence on purchasing outside products to ‘fix’ us, the pattern is ‘Chastise! Indulge!’ It’s all ‘Lose ten pounds!’ ”
I riff back to her:
“Here’s a scrumptious fudge brownie recipe your family will love!”
“Walk off the belly fat in thirty days!”
“Oprah says, ‘Love and accept yourself for WHO YOU ARE.’ Buy the book!”
“You may not have noticed, but YOUR HAIRSTYLE IS AGING YOU!!!”
“Indulge in some hazelnut Dove Bars immediately. Order online. Two-hour delivery.”
“Depressed and confused? Try Cymbalta.”
“Are your toes ugly? The twenty-minute pedicure.”
“Practice Kegels—”
“I know,” I say, “even the vagina. It’s not enough that it stretches to give birth. Now it has to stay slim and thoughtful and moisturized. It’s another thing on the to-do list. Jesus! Isn’t fifty-six an age where I don’t have to do this anymore? Can’t my vagina just take a smoke break and do crosswords now? Can’t it just be an obese, retired Nancy Pelosi who goes to Las Vegas and gambles?”
“Honey,” Andie says. “It’s just that for you, ‘goddesshood’ seems to be just about eating cheese and not exercising!”
NO MATTER IF my girlfriends don’t get it. Or if the party ends without anyone even touching my adorable fanned-out “cat” tarot cards.
The next morning is my personal time to shine.
I go into Third Eye, for my magical 11 a.m. “shirodhara” goddess massage. It is a physically and spiritually transformative eighty-minute Ayurvedic massage treatment, whose culmination is warm oil poured soothingly onto your third eye. (“You have to experience it to believe it,” enthuse, on the website, apparently rejuvenated clients.)
I sit in the waiting room in my fluffy spa robe, sipping lemon cucumber water. Therapists come out and greet their clients. At 10:58. 11:00. 11:03. 11:05. While waiting, I can only laugh watching my monkey mind count the minutes. So what if it’s six minutes after 11? Now seven. The door opens—there she is! Vasti!
Vasti gently leads me to our treatment room and sits me on the massage table. Indicating a basket of oils, she asks, gently, “Are you familiar with Ayurveda? With the three doshas? Vata, Pitta, Kapha?”
I tend to not like eighty-minute—and now due to the lateness, seventy-three-minute—massages that begin with an enervating Ayurvedic lecture. Never mind. Deep breathing. Om. I quickly select the oil that smells nicest, like a vanilla lymph node. And she begins.
Although there is much fussy, almost ritual draping and redraping going on, it’s a nice massage and I relax. It’s true that the room has a space heater, the bed warmer is on, we’re in a California winter heat wave, and I am fifty-six. But—
Whoa! What’s this? A drizzle of—ouch—almost scorching oil splattering onto my forehead. Then oozing into my scalp and eyebrows—eww—
I endure this, biting my lip, so transformation can happen, but forty seconds in I am forced to ask, “How long does this go on for?”
“Eight minutes.”
I sit up, pulling my sheet around myself in shame. I’ve failed at Ayurveda—and the bar was low! “Stop it!” I shrill.
“No problem,” she says calmly, rebundling my head in yet another towel, before retreating. “I’ll leave you for your five minutes of personal time.”
Fully refreshed, I arise from shirodhara ready to do what stressed middle-aged ladies do best. I yell at the front desk and demand a discount. They give me 30 percent off—which I guess is for the third eye, so we’ll call it even.
Home Self-Care
THE TIME HAS COME. I can deny it no longer.
My three-story 1906 craftsman house has become a haunted house–like eyesore. Understand that we live in a historic enclave in Pasadena called Greenfield Heights whose local pride—fueled by architectural tours and block parties and wine tastings—only continues to swell. Yesterday, right across the street, on our neighbor’s lawn, a fussy GREEN GARDENING AWARD sign went up. The arrow was conspicuously pointing toward his lawn, away from ours.
Further, our most recent Greenfield Heights e-newsletter said, under a banner titled NEIGHBORHOOD PRIDE: “Please e-mail us if you need references for gardening, painting, or deck refinishing.” Was this for my eyes only? Back in 2009, at the bottom of the market, I bought my home on a short sale. I can’t explain exactly what that means, except to say, as the owners were in trouble, I got the house way below market value. Yay! Unfortunately, it was not enough below market value that I had money left over to properly maintain it. So it’s basically fallen, like Norman Bates’s house, into disrepair.
However, here’s what my Pocket Pema Chödrön says: “You can feel as wretched as you like, and you’re still a good candidate for enlightenment.”
So starting today, I’m going to be newly proactive about my house problems, which are many.
BAD FRONT YARD
When I first bought this house, the grass was green. Our new gardener Vic—who seemed to immediately materialize out of a hedge—was a genius at setting sprinkler timers. The lawns looked great and then we got our first—? Well, it was less a water “bill” than a water citation. Water tirade. Water hazing. Our utility company began mailing us accusing bar graphs showing what hogs we were compared to our (far superior) neighbors.
So, in response to the drought emergency declared by Jerry Brown, we decided to let the lawn turn the color of the governor’s name. It was a badge of honor. A few years went by. I became increasingly short-tempered. First I thought it was menopause. Then one day, I realized it was because our gardener Vic was coming every Saturday morning at 8 a.m. With a high-pitched, shrieking machine, he would blow dead leaves around our brown yard for an hour. The ear-splitting sound was no doubt meant to prove that he was busy “gardening.”
It took another two years for me to let him go. The irony was that I would have kept paying him to simply stop leaf blowing, but having a diligent work ethic (or perhaps a secret love of ear-splitting leaf blowing?), he refused.
That said, I would still like to apologize to our neighbors, block, zip code—really, to everyone, in Los Angeles—less for our front “lawn” than what is now a rectangle of compacted dirt. Our small Okie Dust Bowl is actually dangerous due to the heavy dead palm fronds that intermittently plunge from the sky like Damoclean swords. I want to throw a sheet over our front yard, like a corpse! Or at least put up a sign that says, WE KNOW, WE KNOW. AND WE’RE SORRY!