The Hot Flash Club - Couverture rigide

1
FAYE

It was while Faye was gathering donations for the community tag sale that she realized, with a shock, that any stranger going through her house would think she was obsessive, anal-retentive, or, at the very least, eccentric.

Although, if the stranger were a female around Faye’s age—fifty-five—she would probably understand what could appear to others as an unhealthy mania for clothes.

Naturally, Faye’s clothing hung in the large walk-in closet of her bedroom.

Also, in the guest bedroom closet.

And in the closet of her daughter’s bedroom, for Laura was twenty-eight, married, and had left only a few of her favorite childhood things at home.

Faye’s clothes did not hang in the attic, because when she and Jack bought the house thirty years ago, they converted the attic into a studio where Faye painted. But more of Faye’s clothes were hung, folded, or bundled in plastic wardrobes in the spacious linen closet at the end of the hall.

So much clothing!

She felt appalled, and slightly guilty.

It wasn’t just that Faye, like most women, changed her wardrobe for summer and winter and fall, or that, like many other women, she had casual clothes for daily life and some elegant suits for the various committees she sat on, and a few gorgeous dresses for the events she had attended with Jack, a corporate lawyer and head of his own prestigious Boston firm. It wasn’t only that she had Christmas sweaters and tennis skirts and the black velvet evening cloak that had been her mother’s, so how could she possibly part with it? Or that she’d kept the expensive, elegant raincoat she’d bought on a trip to London with Jack, where she’d torn the hem, stepping out of a black cab on the way home from the theater. She intended to mend it, but she hadn’t yet found time to do so. In the meantime, she’d bought another raincoat or two, to serve until she mended the London one. It wasn’t that during this long, gloomy spring, she’d bought, on an impulse, another raincoat, a rain slicker of cheery, cherry red.

It was that she had so many clothes for so many seasons and reasons in so many different sizes.

The size 12s were in Laura’s bedroom.

The size 14s were in the guest bedroom.

The size 16s were in the linen closet.

The size 18s were in her own closet, right next to her husband’s clothing. It was his clothing that had gotten her started on this spree in the first place.

One long year ago, Jack, her darling Jack, had died of a sudden heart attack, at the age of sixty-four.

In the middle of the night, Jack had sat up in bed, turned on the light, and said to Faye, “Don’t forget—” then clutched his chest and fell on the floor.

Don’t forget what? Faye wondered. It kept her awake at night, it made her walk right past her townhouse, it bit at her thoughts like a tack in her shoe. Don’t forget I love you? Don’t forget to tell Laura I love her? Don’t forget to look in the secret door in the Chippendale cabinet? (She’d looked there and found nothing.)

“He was sleeping,” her son-in-law Lars assured her. “He might have been dreaming. He might have been thinking something nonsensical, the ways dreams can be, like don’t forget to feed the giraffe.”

Now, a year after his death, her friends, and Laura, too, insisted that it really was time to part with his things. Laura and Lars had taken what they wanted. The rest, they reminded her, should not languish in her house when they could be useful to so many others. So Faye was diligently preparing to donate his clothes to the community fair. Most of them, anyway. She would keep a few items: his old robe, worn at the elbows, no good to anyone else, and so comforting to her, and the blue Brooks Brothers shirt he looked so handsome in. The rest she really would give away.

And she absolutely would give away some of her own clothing, too. At least the size 10s.

Although, Faye wondered, collapsing on the carpet and leaning against the bedpost—because her bedroom chairs and the bed were covered with clothing she’d sorted through—would giving away the size 10s be admitting she’d never be that size again? Would it be like giving up?

All her life, her weight had gone up and down more than the scales of a Tchaikovsky concerto.

Well, more up than down.

Faye loved to eat and never lost weight without fierce determination and control. Usually she weighed the most in early January, after the ounces and inches from the feasts and celebrations of Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s had accumulated, like a confetti of cellulite, onto her hips. She weighed the least in the summer, when the combination of dread of appearing in public in a bathing suit, and anticipation of light, floaty summer dresses, had driven her to diet down a size or two.

But three years ago, she’d had a hysterectomy for fibroid tumors—that had been wonderful, she’d lost several pounds while lying down! On doctor’s advice, she took the hormone replacement therapy that had been touted as a wonder drug until, a year ago, the same HRT was suddenly reviled as toxic by a hysterical press. She stopped using it, and now she weighed as much as she had when she was nine months’ pregnant.

She hadn’t been eating more than usual or exercising less. Just the opposite: Determined not to go creakily into old age, she exercised regularly. In general, she led an active life. In spite of that, and her increasing attention to what she ate, fat collected around her arms and thighs, under her chin, on her bottom and hips, and rose on her stomach, warm and rounded, like a freshly baked loaf of bread.

Long ago, Faye had vowed not to compare her physique to the skeletal models in magazines—her healthy body provided her with so many pleasures, why should she criticize it? She decided she’d try to cut down on fats and eat more veggies.

And she was trying.

But another loss had struck her, hard. Faye hadn’t told anyone about this, not Laura or her closest friends, because speaking of it might make it real, might make it lasting.

For thirty years, Faye had been a talented, respected artist whose contemporary Impressionist still lifes sold as fast as she could fin- ish them, making her quite well off, which she didn’t even need to be, since Jack, a successful corporate attorney, made more than enough money. It wasn’t the money that mattered anyway, it was the work, it was the daily mix of discipline, inspiration, knowledge, and risk that made painting so important to her. Through her painting, she interpreted the world. Through her painting, she expressed her gratitude for the luminous mysteries of any normal day.

Nine months after Jack’s death, Faye decided she must put an end to her grieving and try to paint again. After all, painting was one of the joys of her life. Jack would want her to paint. So she climbed the stairs to her third floor studio, set up a still life of red pears in a silver bowl, pulled on her smock, readied her paints, and lifted her brush. Several hours later, she stood perplexed and more than a little frightened by what she saw on the canvas. It was muddy, thick, dull.

She waited a few days, then tried again. But for the first time ever, painting was work, and at the end of the day, what she’d accomplished was not even mediocre.

Have patience, she told herself. Her mind needed time to remember its talents.

But time didn’t help, nor did patience. Playing Rachmaninoff in her studio didn’t help, nor did so many infusions of ginseng and other helpful herbs that she expected little green twigs to curl out her ears. The gift of painting, which had sustained her all her life, had simply vanished, and she had no idea whether it would ever return.

She refused to believe this loss was connected to Jack’s death. Her love for Jack had been the main catalyst for her work. Even though he was gone, her love for him remained as constant as it had when he was alive, and she believed that somewhere he knew this and continued to love her, too.

No. She was certain the loss was connected to her age, to her failing hormones, to the same physiological changes that added weight to her body and blotted her memory like random whiteouts of Liquid Paper.

Because she believed that happiness was at least in some part simply a choice, she refused to mope about it, she didn’t mention it to anyone, and she kept trying, climbing up to her studio, stand- ing in front of a canvas with her paints. She could joke about the changes in her appearance—the increasingly white hair, thinning lips, and her weight—but her inability to paint was a real source of concern. Was her artistic talent shrinking, shriveling, curling up and dying, like a brilliant older friend of theirs crippled with Parkinson’s? If she couldn’t paint, she couldn’t be herself, Faye. It was a terrifying thought.

Shortly after she stopped hormone replacement therapy, a new torment appeared in her life. Hot flashes. At unexpected times of the day, an invisible match slashed up her body, igniting her into such incandescence she was always surprised smoke didn’t come out her ears. It also fried her brain, disconnecting reason from emotion. No matter how firmly her mind assured her it would pass, her instincts told her she would detonate unless she ripped all her clothes off now. During the day she dressed in loose layers of cotton she could tear off in a moment, and in the winter, she often stepped out on her back porch in her cotton tank top, luxuriating in the freezing air.

It happened at night, too. She’d awake in a panic of heat, and after she’d thrown off the covers and flung off her nightgown, she’d lie there ...

From the bestselling author of Between Husbands and Friends and An Act of Love comes a wise, wonderful, and delightfully witty “coming of age” novel about four intrepid women who discover themselves as they were truly meant to be: passionate, alive, and ready to face the best years of their lives.

Meet Faye, Marilyn, Alice, and Shirley. Four women with skills, smarts, and secrets—all feeling over the hill and out of the race. But in a moment of delicious serendipity, they meet and realize they share more than raging hormones and lost dreams. Now as the Hot Flash Club, where the topics of motherhood, sex, and men are discussed with double servings of chocolate cake, they vow to help each other . . . and themselves.

Faye, the artist. A determinedly cheerful widow and connoisseur of control-top pantyhose, she’s struggling with creative block and an empty, lonely house. Now she’s got a tricky problem to bring to the club’s table: how can they catch her perfect son-in-law cheating on her only daughter Laura?

Shirley, the healer. Though her yoga-slender body belie her years, decades of dating losers and the strain of being broke make her feel her age. Shirley has a secret dream: a wellness spa that nurtures body and soul. But first she needs to believe in herself, in her abilities, and in her friends at the club.

Marilyn, the brain. A paleontologist who has spent so many years looking at dried-up fossils, she’s almost become one herself. Worried that her brilliant but nerdy son is about to marry the very wrong woman, she gets some help from the HFC, who transform her from a caterpillar to a butterfly, with amazing results.

Alice, the executive. Black and regal, she soared to the top of the corporate ladder. Now her shoes are murder on her arthritic back and the younger jackals are circling in for the kill. But as the inspiration behind the HFC, she’s about to discover something extraordinary: contentment.

For Faye, Shirley, Marilyn, and Alice, the time has come to use it or lose it—be it their bodies, their brains, their spirits, and their sense of fun. Together they realize that they can have it all, perhaps for the first time in their lives. And though what sags may never rise again, feeling sexy has no expiration date— and best of all, with a little help from her friends, a woman can always start over . . . and never, ever, give up what matters most.

From the Hardcover edition.