“You have to decide how you want to meet this,” Catherine says when I tell her I’m considering a mini-facelift, a little liposuction, and maybe some bio-identical hormones. “This is a natural process,” she says. “Something is coming to an end; something else is beginning. Do you want to interfere or do you want to support it?”
I know the right answer here. Catherine has taught me that, from the perspective of Chinese medicine, “Everything has a front and a back.” Everything we do to the body—anything we swallow or rub into our skin—stimulates a response: an equal and opposite reaction. Life is beautifully, perfectly balanced.
“This is a blood deficiency,” Catherine says.
“I’ve always been anemic.”
“Well, yes, from a Western perspective, you’re anemic. From the Chinese, it’s about blood volume.”
“Blood volume?”
“Your liver is starving,” she says. “There’s not enough blood in your body.”
“I’m sorry? How can a person not have enough blood and still be walking around?”
She smiles. “We can build more—with leafy greens, Chinese herbs, and lots of water.”
She tells me I’m at the beginning of my Wisdom Phase—the end of the seventh seven-year cycle of my life. But I don’t feel wise. I feel desperate—a winged thing trapped between two panes of glass.
My children, almost grown, are scanning college catalogs at the kitchen table: study- abroad programs, summer institutes. My son considers sports medicine, international business, neuroscience. My daughter, two years younger but more certain, is interested in one thing only: film.
My friends are traveling. Japan. India. Even my parents are starting over—getting a divorce, selling the house.
“You’re kidding,” friends ask. “Why now?”
“Let’s open up some closets today,” Catherine says, placing needles along my body. One in the center of my chest, one in the valley between my fourth toe and little pinky, and the last at the midpoint between my pubic bone and belly button.
Afterwards, I scan my body as I walk to the car. Do I feel different? This treatment is supposed to open the “closets” where we stash un-metabolized trauma, the pain and energy we couldn’t process when we were too young, too vulnerable.
Is it working? Nothing happens. Nothing happens. And then, three days later, I burst into tears in a meeting at work. “I’m sorry,” I gasp, rushing from the room. Horrified. Mystified. What the fuck?! The tears come for no reason, with no pattern. At the grocery store. In a yoga class. At the dentist. Huge waves of raw emotion sweep through me, moving upward, pouring outward.
When the tears stop, the agitation begins. I argue with my husband. I am restless at my desk. It feels as if there is a new and completely separate body inside of my usual one, and it is made of bees. They are buzzing. Constantly. They are moving around.
Something is happening. I feel frightened but also, incredibly alive.
I take my daughter practice driving. She giggles as the car lurches forward on the dirt road behind our house, down a hill past the stable to where the woods meet Saddle River Road, and back up past the riding ring.
The horses watch as we pass, again and again. As we loop around, she starts to sing, belting out the theme from Wicked: “Something has changed within me; something is not the same…”
The car windows are open. It’s spring.
In the middle of the night, I wake suddenly. Red lights swirl across the ceiling of the bedroom. Matthew leaps out of bed, shouting. “Get up! Get up! Get up! The barn’s on fire!”
Bleary with sleep, I peer outside as a fire engine roars up the driveway. The digital clock glows in the dark: 2:17 a.m.
“Wake up! Get out of the house!” Matthew bangs up the stairs, rousing the children.
We move in darkness, stumbling to find shoes and pull sweatshirts over our pajamas. I can feel the heat through the walls as we reach the back door. Just 200 yards from our home, the barn is a wall of white, hot fire.
“Go back upstairs and take the things that matter to you,” I tell the children.
Katie freezes. “You mean, we might not come back?”
“I don’t know, honey. It’s a big fire. If it spreads to the house... I don’t know. Let’s just be sure we take what we couldn’t bear to lose.”
She runs upstairs. I grab my sisters’ artwork, a drawing from my mother, the necklace I made of pink pearls and my grandmother’s Swarovski crystals. I put on the earrings Max gave me last year—glittery, Indian chandeliers, the first gift he purchased with his own money. I slip my engagement ring back onto my finger and stuff two shopping bags with photos.
Katie returns with her laptop, her video camera, a stack of journals, and her stuffed dog. Max holds a framed photo of his girlfriend Jackie, his cell phone, and his track team sweatshirt.
We step, star-struck and dazzled, into a night on fire.
“Move the cars,” Matthew calls.
Firefighters, silhouetted against the bright backdrop, run back and forth, shouting over the hot white roar that shakes the ground as if a train is rushing through.
Neighbors cluster around our landlord. She’s staring at the fire, shivering, stiff as a sail in high wind. Matthew wraps his jacket around her shoulders.
Hoses snake across the lawn, spraying streams of water at the barn, the surrounding trees, the cottage closest to the blaze.
Helicopters circle the house. News vans pull to the curb across from the farm.
“This is your house?” my friend Hank appears beside me in the dark. Like a phantom hero, materializing out of the dark, dressed in his firefighter gear. The feeling of his hand on my arm reminds me this is real.
Three hours later, when the blaze is under control, Katie shows me the footage she’s taken on her video camera. In the recording, the fire is thirty feet high. In the real, glowing red embers smoke and steam.
The fire chief walks over. “Can we go in the house?” Matthew asks. The chief nods solemnly, clamping a hand on Matt’s shoulder.
We go inside and climb into bed, leaving the cars—packed with our most precious possessions—parked willy-nilly on the other side of the lawn.
This is a scene from The End of Men, a memoir I started years ago. I’ll tell you more about it as we go along. For now, I’m getting it set up over on my second Substack, All The Books I’m Writing. It’s one of several books I am making there, one chapter at a time.
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