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  Praise for the Writing of Barbara Raskin

  Hot Flashes

  “As important as The Group and The Women’s Room … A female Big Chill.” —Cosmopolitan

  “A landmark woman’s novel … Raskin has captured the feelings of a generation.” —People

  “Funny, perceptive, outrageous, and sad.” —The Washington Post

  “[Hot Flashes] will assuredly and deservedly take its place with such other contemporary classics as The Group, Class Reunion, The Women’s Room and Superior Women. In many respects, it is far more universal and therefore, more enduring.” —The Asbury Park Press

  Current Affairs

  “Just as she did in Hot Flashes and Loose Ends, Barbara Raskin provides fresh insights about fortysomething women in Current Affairs.” —Atlanta Journal & Constitution

  “Delicious, wicked.” —The San Diego Union

  “Fantastic … There is adventure, abandonment and adultery.… Stylish and slangy, written in a wild and wordy prose that is engaging and catchy.” —The New York Times Book Review

  Hot Flashes

  Barbara Raskin

  for the men in my life: noah, jamie, keith, zachary,

  sam, dick, and jedd

  and for the women: andrea, aviva, barbara, bethany,

  bobbie, charlotte, dorothy, emily, erika, glenda,

  helen, isabel, jackie, jane, janet, jean, maggie,

  monique, myrna, pat, perdita, phyllis, rebecca,

  ronni, rosalie, sally, sharon, svala and zina

  CHAPTER 1

  Hot flashes in midair:

  We always looked good at airports.

  We liked to visit hot countries.

  We slept with strangers whenever we felt like it.

  We learned a lot from our lovers.

  Some of us learned that the fastest way to get ahead was to give some.

  Eventually most of our husbands were listed in Who’s Who.

  We wanted everything, got it all, and then discovered it wasn’t enough.

  We have read and written many of the books about women like us and the way we live now.

  Politically alienated, we squandered much of our energy.

  We are a generation of Type-A, A-List, Number 10–type women.

  We were such good friends. Really. We still are.

  I am Diana Sargeant. I am forty-eight, a tenured professor of anthropology at Columbia University, and an internationally respected authority on female rites of passage. Because I believe that people invent their own memories and that the past has an unruly life of its own, I am frequently called upon to act as the official historian for my group of friends.

  A generation must tacitly agree to remember certain things in certain ways and refuse to be dissuaded from its chosen version of the past. Otherwise the past won’t stay put. If we’re not vigilant about preserving our own history, someone will always come along and try to correct our memories. And then how will we know who we were or who we are now?

  Some of my closest friends complain that I am addicted to generalizations, that I am too bold in extrapolating from my own experiences. I understand their discomfort, but I discount their criticism. I know most people like to believe they are unique and different from their cohorts. But because of my anthropological training, I see the group in the individual, the common experiences of a generation in the idiosyncrasies of a particular person. The part embodies the whole.

  On the Friday evening of Labor Day weekend, 1985, while aboard the seven o’clock shuttle circling Washington National Airport, I experience a number of hot flashes. Hot flashes are rolls of unreasonable, unseasonable heat that create a rush—a flush that floods the face from neck to hairline. A hot flash is itchy, prickly and provocative—like a sudden spike of fever that produces a mean and cranky irritability. Sometimes I have as many as fifty hot flashes a day.

  Totally absorbed in some intellectual problem, I will suddenly feel like I’ve just opened an oven door to lift the lid off a turkey roaster, allowing a stream of steam to escape and slap my face. Although a hot flash only lasts a few seconds, it reminds me of how I feel when I have to retrieve a lost ball in some itchy, knee-high weeds after finishing two sets of tennis on a hot July day or when I first enter a chalet following a ski run and stand by a blazing fireplace before removing my parka. A hot flash causes my face to sizzle like the backs of my knees when I’ve lain too long on my stomach at the beach or like the crown of my scalp when I’m forced to fish in a flat-bottom rowboat on an inland lake at high noon in August.

  Clinically speaking, hot flashes are symptoms of menopause. But menopause is the cessation of a process, which means hot flashes are a manifestation of nothing. I don’t understand why nothing should have symptoms. Unlike menstrual periods, hot flashes serve no purpose such as the sloughing off of old tissue or new issue. Their heat cannot be harnessed as energy for other purposes; like life, they are unpredictable, uncontrollable, uncomfortable and unfair.

  More and more frequently nowadays, my hot flashes have begun to feel like urgent communiqués from the interior of a vast, dark continent—fast-breaking news items from my heart of darkness. Sometimes hot flashes trigger sudden insights into previously obscure experiences. Other times, in reverse fashion, a rush of revelations will release the heat like thunder after a flash of lightning. Either way, I have come to trust the wired insights that hot flashes produce.

  Because I believe in epiphanies, I record most of these illuminations in a notebook that I carry in my purse. Since hot flashes are often cryptic, I try to decipher them as soon as possible, but often while I’m trying to do so, I get another hot flash that steams up my reading glasses so I can’t even see what I’m writing. Anyway, while the Eastern shuttle dawdles Over Washington in its usual holding pattern, I flesh out some of my airborne hot flashes for possible inclusion in my continuing study of Female Adult Depression Babies.

  We always looked good at airports. We had style and our luggage was suitably battered. Even after air travel became more economical—democratizing the class of passengers—we still wore killer heels, dangling earrings, tight jeans and silk shirts whenever we flew anywhere, even on long night flights or short commuter hops. For us, airports—like cafés, chalets and cabarets—were stages on which we felt required to perform. We used such places as launch pads to expand our career opportunities, improve our social situations, or initiate romantic adventures.

  We used to have a fear of flying, but that passed. Relaxed, we trotted through airline terminals, transmitting our messages via the coded clicking of our high heels on resonant marble floors. The sophisticated signals we dispatched could only be decoded by “special agents”—men with sufficient imagination to tune in to the suggestive dramas we felt compelled to stage. Deciphering our code required a certain affluence and a familiarity with most of America’s serious films and novels. (This is not to say wimps and nerds did not attach themselves to us. They did. We were usually gracious in our dismissal of them, unless, of course, we had time to kill over a couple of drinks and saw no special agents around.)

  The tic-tac-tac of our heels signaled that we were in imminent danger of missing an urgent flight. Wearing Hollywood-referential expressions that suggested both dramatic destinations and mysterious pasts, we walked in a way that whipped our hair away from our faces and puckered our clothing in strategic places. We always carried large shoulder-bag purses that held every legal, medical, financial, hygienic and cosmetic necessity a forced landing on some Caribbean island might require. However, we traveled with only a single piece of beat-up designer luggage so we could mak
e our moves quickly when we changed our minds.

  Since we had a habit of using travel as an escape from boredom or disaster, we logged a lot of air miles during the late fifties and early sixties. Lots of us kept a suitcase partially packed and a complete cosmetic kit ready to go at all times. A few of us routinely stuffed tissue paper in the shoulders of our blouses so they wouldn’t get crushed when we folded them for packing.

  We picked our destinations on the basis of our politics, money, movies we’d seen, assignments, assignations, or the whereabouts of parents, friends, former lovers or fast-breaking news. Often we arrived at ticket counters without any idea of an itinerary and when we ran away no one knew where to start looking for us. Indeed, if our ships ever came in, we probably missed them because we were out at the airport trying to get a tetanus shot.

  As a group, we became proficient at making scenes in terminal cocktail lounges and actually developed a highly sophisticated repertoire. Sukie, who wrote several modestly successful novels during the seventies, kept wonderful files of such scenes. She alphabetized them in manila folders marked “Breaking Up” or “Wild Parties” or “Fabulous Fights in Public Places.” Over the years, we channeled her a lot of material.

  We liked to visit hot countries and consort with men who wore white suits designed for the tropics. Although terrified of customs officers, no matter where we went we always acted like travelers, never tourists. We liked to believe that once we arrived somewhere, we were “just there.” We loved photogenic islands replete with reptiles and exotic flowers. Despite rumors of dangers, we tanned as much of ourselves as feasible for as long a time as possible. We liked our lovers to work on his-and-her matching tans. We enjoyed doing those sexual acts best done in the tropics on location. We were always keen to discuss Eurodollars, Vietnam, the Beatles and revolutions in Central America.

  Often we slept with strangers. Or, rather, we slept with strangers whenever we felt like it—or when we deemed it necessary because of insomnia, intoxication, an old grudge or an inability to say no. Highly prone to panic attacks—an ethnic disorder common to Type A’s such as ourselves—we used sleeping with strangers as a quick homeopathic cure for our unfocused, floating anxieties. Strange hotel rooms offered us instant opportunities to anchor our incipient hysteria. Like California, we fought our high-intensity brush fires with larger countervailing flames.

  Back in the fifties, because we couldn’t think of anything else to do, we carefully selected our china, glassware and silver patterns, registered at the nearest department stores, and got married so that we could proceed with our lives. Enthusiastically we embraced that institution which allowed us to abuse ourselves, antagonize our husbands, indulge our lovers, ruin our careers and spoil our children.

  While many of our husbands became famous, most of us didn’t. Regardless of their professions, our husbands became men-of-a-million-letterheads who eventually turned up in Who’s Who. We were unlisted, since there’s no section for Muses; we were only mentioned as in: “He is married to the former blah-blah and has three children.” Few of us accomplished half of what we were capable of doing. We squandered our expensive educations, mishandled our careers, and toyed recklessly with our talents. We took our husbands’ work seriously and our own lightly. This resulted in long-term resentments, since we never found it particularly interesting sleeping with someone just because he was in Who’s Who.

  We have had numerous abortions: Back in the 1950s, those of us who lived in the East went to Dr. Freddy in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. Judith holds our record for abortions with eight; she had one in Cuba before the Revolution and one after. Karen paid $2,500 for an abortion, received a general anesthesia, but later discovered she had not been aborted after all. She named her baby after herself and then gave her away for adoption. Some of us died from sloppy procedures. Nowadays we take our daughters downtown to some “pre-term” clinic and then out for an expensive lunch afterwards.

  (“Aren’t you even going to kiss me first?” Glenda asked the gynecologist as he started doing a pelvic on her. A humorless man, he immediately buzzed for his nurse to join them in the examination room.) We took the births of our children quite casually. We had our babies before natural childbirth classes requiring husband participation became popular. For us, there were no trendy home deliveries with some twenty-year-old midwife playing folk songs on a homestrung guitar while we counted contractions amid colorful pillows on our conjugal bed. Unlike Roberta, we did not sit on our own toilet during the last stage of labor.

  Instead we were wheeled into a labor room, shaved, given an enema, and allowed to expel our babies amid a mess of excretions. (“Take a tuck for the old man,” Patsy said to her obstetrician when he began sewing up her episiotomy after a twenty-three-hour labor and the birth of a nine-pound son. The doctor smiled but probably didn’t do it, because Neal left Patsy when Jonathan was only four months old.) Although Mandy elected to have both her children by cesarean section so the chairman of her poli-sci department would feel secure about her returning for fall semester, most of us delivered our babies in the old-fashioned, nonscheduled way requiring long hours, traditional labor pains and the selection of two names—one for a boy and one for a girl—since we had no advance warning system.

  Few of us had many children. Three were usually plenty. When there were more than three, they were likely to be by different daddies. Shamefully, in the fifties, we prayed for sons rather than daughters. Carola wanted a boy so badly after two girls that when she looked up into the ceiling mirror following her third delivery and saw the long umbilical cord still attached to the baby, she thought it was a terrific penis. Wrong. Carola named the little girl Heidi—after Castro’s compañera—and decided not to try again even though she’d always imagined herself the mother of six strapping sons.

  When our kids were little, we went to beaches a lot and taught them how to sound out T-shirts. Later, we taught them how to read from bumper stickers on cars stalled ahead of us in traffic jams and utilized the same slogans to explain the class struggle. When it wasn’t summer, we overused inadequate day-care centers, took random jobs, worked for unsuccessful political candidates, wrote sporadically, read prodigiously, smoked, drank and did drugs.

  Although most of our children turned out amazingly well, our first marriages usually failed. For decades we struggled with our first husbands, to whom we remain biologically related by blood through our children. Never very clear about the subject of our quarrels, we nevertheless kept fighting. Compulsive grievance collectors, we marred our marriages with melodrama. While some of us became battered wives, the majority of us suffered only internal injuries. Our husbands usually decided that our trial separations had worked out just fine.

  We had sex frequently because we liked to get intimate fast and sex offered us the quickest possible connection. We liked to watch X-rated movies and get drunk or stoned before going to bed with someone new so we’d have an excuse for any excessive passion or genuine tenderness we displayed. Sometimes, because of the incestuous circle in which we orbited, we would ask men we slept with about the sexual performances of our female friends. We also exchanged notes among ourselves about our lovers. Once, X turned on to Y simply because Z swore Y had been her peak sexual experience. Unlike the next generation, we had few lesbian encounters. As Marilyn explained in Esquire, when we hugged our girlfriends, all we could think about was that they had such thin shoulders.

  We learned a great deal from our lovers. As Sukie once observed, lots of us learned that we had to put out to get ahead and that the best way to get ahead was to give some. We also acquired a great deal of information about politics, business, the arts and spectator sports. We could speak authoritatively about the NFL, the NBA, the NHL, the PGA, the USLTA, and even the WBA and WBC. We also learned how to handicap horses. You name it; we could fake it.

  We played a lot of tennis in a variety of hot countries that were often not much larger than some Class A golf courses where we drove carts for
aging or lazy lovers. We have gone waterskiing, mountain climbing, trekking in the Himalayas, jogging, body surfing, deep-sea fishing and hang gliding. We have crossed mountain ranges in single-engine planes as well as jumbo jets. We have burned our eyelids at the world’s most beautiful beaches and driven along dangerous roads in strange countries with drunken drivers during stormy weather to isolated places for obscure or obscene reasons. We have attended bullfights in Mexico and come home through customs carrying bloodstained banderillas for souvenirs and amphetamines in the hollowed-out heels of our summer sandals.

  We have tried all sorts of exotic foods and erotic games. We have allowed an unreasonable number of obscene things to be done to us and enjoyed most of them. We have picked up tabs for fancy young men and allowed older ones to buy us extravagant gifts in exchange for various flavors of favors. Although fervent feminists, we loved men in the same way we loved movies. Men and movies added drama and texture to our lives; dating was the only distraction that interrupted our dazzling self-absorption. We liked men for the same reasons we liked fall fashions late in August, cold beer after a set of tennis, and buttered popcorn at a double feature. Like Happy Hours, men meant More, which for us meant Better. We have, however, finally learned that passion is not an end, only a means.

  We weren’t a clique or a crowd. We were a generation—although we didn’t think that way. We believed ourselves to be the best and the brightest women of our time. Regardless of where we were born, we left home and moved to New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco or Washington, D.C. We thought there were only five Zip—and maybe seven area—codes worth memorizing in the entire country.

  Born during the Great Depression and named Judith, Sharon, Arleen or Beverly by our bankrupt fathers and frightened mothers, we always suffered from (a) psychological moodiness and (b) financial insecurity. DEBs (Depression Era Babies) customarily feel deprived, regardless of what we achieve or acquire. Although tutored to expect entitlements, we are never quite certain what is rightfully ours. An obsolete but indelible memory of the Depression dollar is eternally engraved in our minds, so that $10,000 always sounds like lire to us. Since many of us survive on credit cards nowadays, our cash flow remains a sitcom. We can still discuss oral sex more easily than our annual incomes.