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Oh my God, I realized. I have a superpower! I am invisible.
How do I get up off the floor? What was that popping noise? Should I call my doctor or my life insurance agent first? Do I have to shop at Chico’s now? I stopped smoking thirty years ago. When is it safe to start again?—
There was the year I learned that Death’s calling card makes no sound.
Sales pitches from mortuaries were just the first signs that I was moving into a strange, old land.
Every time that the envelope marked “AARP” squats in my mailbox like a viper, it goes straight into recycling once discovered.
2:15 a.m.: Eyes flew open. Was I awake? Had I been sleeping? My tongue was huge in my mouth and felt like sandpaper. I guzzled water from the bottle on the nightstand. The sheets were stuck to my arms. Holy shit, did I pee myself? Oh my God. I am an animal. I am an old animal. I am going to have to lie in my own pee all night. My hair is even wet! Ohhhhhh, thank God, it’s only night sweats. I can lie in sweat. I can totally lie in that kind
of body fluid. Oh, thank you, God, thank you for not making it pee. I don’t want pee hair. Thank you so much. But F you for messing with my hormones. I wonder how much estrogen I have left. I wonder how much just leaked out of my body and is now soaking my foam mattress topper. I bet my mattress topper is more of a lady now than I am. I am just a sexless log, sweating and counting like I’m learning English. I just want to sleep.
“If Judy Garland had waited until menopause to OD, she’d still be alive,” my friend Erica wrote back. “If anyone has a tranquilizer dart gun for an elephant, I’ll give you a hundred bucks to come and shoot me through my window.” “I haven’t slept since 2018,” Lore posted. “And I just finished the last episode of Homestead Rescue. I have NyQuil decanted on my
Truth be told, I’m not the best baker. My cookies burn, my cakes go lopsided because of my eighty-year-old oven, or my hair ends up in the batter. This happens so often that I used to tell my nephews, “If you find the Lucky Hair in your food, that means you get extra ice cream,” and on more than one occasion, there would be a sad little face accompanied by a whimpering, “I didn’t get the Lucky Hair.”
Before I even registered at Nextdoor.com, I had bad things in mind. I only ventured onto the site because my neighbor Sarah told me that she had been in a fight with a local woman who was stealing other people’s cats and had been caught on video.
Now, I live in Eugene, Oregon, where people are so far to the left that they have almost looped around again to the right, and they have no problem demanding that other people not ruin their nature walks by doing laundry. This attitude is super typical of the neighborhood. We are liberated and free! We delight in passing that liberation on to others by telling everyone else exactly how to live.
The thing is that, mentally, I don’t feel any different than I did when I was twenty-seven and, to be honest, that was basically yesterday. I am still the same person. I still laugh at the same jokes, eat the same food, and like the same kind of movies. I am still Laurie. But now, every morning, I wake up and try not to pop a disk in my back just by getting out of bed. I must be careful not to move my body other than as a unit, because I can now actually break it.
I have had a husband for twenty-five years, which is way longer than most successful dictatorships, and my marriage is more complicated and has more moving parts, as you can probably guess.
