Forty-Two

Abstract

Forty-Two Lisa Taddeo (bio) Joan had to look beautiful. Tonight there was a wedding in goddamned Brooklyn, farm-to-table animals talking about steel cut oatmeal as though they invented the steel that cut it. In New York the things you hate are the things you do. She worked out at least two hours a day. On Mondays and Tuesdays, which are the kindest days for older single women, she worked out as many as four. At six in the morning she ran to her barre class in leg warmers and black Lululemons size four. The class was a bunch of women squatting on a powder blue rug. You know the type, until you become one. forty-two. Somehow it was better than forty-one, because forty-one felt eggless. She had sex one time the forty-first year, and it lopped the steamer tail off her heart. After undressing her, the guy, a hairless NYU professor, looked at her in a way that she knew meant he had recently fucked a student, someone breathy and Macintosh-assed, full of Virginia Woolf and hope, and he was upset now at this reedy downgrade. Courageously he regrouped, bent her over, and fucked her anyhow. He tweaked her bony nipples and the most she felt of it was his eyes on the wall in front of her. The reason the first part of the week is better for older single women is that the latter part is about anticipating Rolling Rocks in loud rooms. Anticipation, Joan knew, was for younger people. And on the weekends starting on Thursday young girls are out in floral Topshop shirts swinging small handbags. They wear cheap riding boots because it doesn’t matter. They’ll be wanted anyway, they’ll be drunkenly nuzzled while Joan tries ordering a gin & tonic from a female bartender who ignores her or a male bartender who looks at her like she’s a ten-dollar bill. But on Mondays and Tuesdays older women rule the city. They drizzle orange wine down their hoarse throats at Barbuto, the dressed-down autumn light coming through the garage windows illuminating their eggplant highlights. They eat charred octopus with new potatoes in lemon and olive oil. They have consistent bounties of seedless grapes in their low-humming fridges. Up close the skin on Joan’s shoulders and cleavage was freckled and a little coarse. For lotion she used Santa Maria Novella, and her subway-tiled bathroom looked like an advertisement for someone who flew to Europe a lot. When her pedicure was older than a week in the winter and five days in the summer, she actually hated herself. The good thing about Joan was, she wasn’t in denial. She didn’t want to [End Page 55] love charred octopus or be able to afford it. But she did and she could. The only occasional problem was that Joan liked younger guys. Not animalistically young like twenty-two. More like twenty-seven to thirty-four. The word cougar is for idiots but it was nonetheless branded into the flank steak of her triceps. Now Joan knew the score. For example, she was never one of those older women who is the last female standing at a young person’s bar. She didn’t eat at places she didn’t have a reservation or know the manager. For the last decade she’d been polishing her pride like a gun collection. She no longer winked. In the evenings she would attend a TRX class or a power yoga class or she would kickbox. Back at home before bed she free-styled a hundred walking lunges around her apartment with a seven-pound weight in each hand. She performed tricep dips off the quiet coast of her teak bed. She wore short black exercise shorts. She looked good in them, especially from far away. Her knees were wrinkled but her thighs were taut. Or, her thighs were taut but her knees were wrinkled. Daily happiness depended on how that sentence was ordered in her brain. In a small wooden box at her nightstand she kept a special reserve of six joints meticulously rolled...