Shake Zone
29 Minutes Read Time

I am seventeen and driving fast on a two-lane highway with the windows open. It’s late afternoon, that hour when the day’s edges are singed gold. I’m alone, and because I’ve just recently gotten my license, this aloneness is a thing of wonder. The light in the Long Island sky seems to be telling me something, promising me something. I press my foot to the pedal of my mother’s ancient Volvo station wagon, barreling headlong into this promise, into the golden wildness of it.
In a few weeks, I will leave home for college. Maybe it’s the closeness of this freedom I feel as I turn up the radio and sing along to Pearl Jam’s “Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town,” banging my hand against the dashboard, knowing with certainty as I zoom past the Rite Aid and Joe’s Pizzeria that Eddie Vedder is singing to me—to me. His thrashing plaid-shirted body, the same one I’ve watched him hurl into a mosh pit dozens of times in the “Even Flow” video, is here in this car with me, but instead of falling into the arms of a concert crowd, it is falling into me. I can feel Eddie Vedder against my chest, Eddie Vedder on my skin, and I press my foot down harder on the gas, my heart the most powerful pumping thing in the world. I have shed all that I was just minutes ago: dutiful girl, rule-loving girl, girl with the anxious knee bouncing, with something inside that needs to get out.
I am heading to a party where anything could happen. I could drink a Smirnoff and orange juice, or I could not. I could let my hand brush against Nick Meyer’s hand as if by accident, or I could not. I could dance, or not dance, barefoot on the grass with my head tilted back and my arms stretched up to the moon. What I know is that I have endless days, months, years ahead to rub myself up against the moment, to grab the moment by the back of the neck and pull its forehead to mine, to press our mouths hard together.
The AC is broken, and the backs of my thighs stick to the car seat, which is hot and seamed with sand. I turn up the volume. I am nearly screaming now. I can feel the bass in my ribs and something spreading deep in my belly that’s like joy, but dangerous. Power? Desire? Maybe both. This is what it is to be seventeen years old, the whole night—and my whole life—ahead of me.
There is no precise moment when my whole life stops being ahead of me. This girl in the car believes she will never not be this young. And for a long time, she is nearly right.
In college, she is young, with her full round face and her late-night conversations she’s certain no one has had before and her pack of Marlboros a day because only old people die. She dances on tables, takes road trips to Montreal on a whim, flirts with her English professor, has sex on the Arts quad in the middle of the night. In her midtwenties, she is older, but barely. At night, she wears stilettos with dagger-sharp toes and jeggings that cling to her hips. And in the day, when she stands in front of a classroom of high school juniors teaching Othello, she feels she is playing make-believe, for she knows inside she is pretty much still one of them.
Meeting the man who would become her husband doesn’t age her, nor does marrying him. You should have seen her gown! In that period of the early aughts when all the brides wore satin A-lines, her dress is drapey and diaphanous, with a plunging open back that requires she go braless. This works because her breasts are young and pert and can hold their own.
Turning thirty barely registers. And while she knows on some level when she becomes pregnant and gives birth at thirty-three that she has reached a new life stage, it’s easy to believe she’s still more or less young. There’s so much newness in having a child, after all, so much abundance. She has another baby, and then another, which means she spends most of her thirties with her belly swelling or a baby at her breast, her body reminding her, over and over, that it’s luxuriant and fruitful.
Then one morning, after all her babies have left her womb, she walks from the train to work through downtown Boston. She feels fresh and brisk, her hair smelling of peach shampoo, the coffee in her hand filling her with certainty that the day is hers to conquer. She crosses Tremont Street and bounds onto the sidewalk, where she comes face-to-face with the glass facade of a building and the reflection of a woman she is startled to discover is her. Could this possibly be her mouth? On either side are two grooves she’s never noticed before, the skin around them slack and slightly drooping. She touches her fingers to her face to confirm. These eyes are her eyes, all right—they’re looking right at her—but the half moons below them are darker than she’s ever imagined possible. She walks on, eager to put distance between herself and this evidence that somehow, somehow, time has reached her. She knows, of course, that no one escapes time. But she sees, in this moment, that she has until now held a buried faith that maybe she could escape it—that her minutes might magically slip past her body unregistered.
She returns that evening to her three kids, a porch littered with strollers, a pile of school forms. In the kitchen cabinet is the bottle of Caltrate 600 her internist has prescribed to prevent osteoporosis. On her desk calendar is an appointment for a mammogram. On her head are so many gray hairs they can no longer pass as highlights. When she undresses for bed, she notices, most of all, the way her breasts lie flat against her rib cage.
There’s no graduation from youth, no clear before and after. Her whole life, she was not in the after, and by the time she realizes she is in the after, she is already squarely there.
One afternoon, my friend Michelle calls to tell me a story. The night before, she’d been walking to meet friends for dinner. An evening away from her kids is a rare treat for her—as it is for all my mother-friends—and she’d dressed for the occasion: lipstick, knee-high boots, and her favorite jacket, a creamy suede number with a faux-fur collar. As she crossed through the park, passing the basketball court, a boy who looked around fifteen suddenly appeared before her. “Excuse me,” he said. “Are you a MILF?”
“I was so caught off guard!” Michelle tells me. “Clearly, his friends had put him up to this.”
It’s been so many years since I’ve heard this term that it takes a second to register. MILF, I say to myself. MILF. And then, I think, MILF?! This acronym for “Mother I’d Like to Fuck” is exponentially more jarring to me now, as a mother, than it was in adolescence. My girlfriends and I didn’t use this term back then. It belonged to the boys, and they alone had the power to bestow it, or not bestow it, on our mothers. Lindsey Corvolo’s mom, with her endless legs and frosted blond highlights, was a MILF, as was Amy Pollack’s, who once famously danced with the DJ while chaperoning our eighth-grade mixer. My own mother was occasionally deemed a MILF—“in a Charlie’s Angel sort of way,” my friend Danny Farber once said.
Did it matter that Danny was fourteen and had never had sex with anyone, let alone a grown woman? No. The point wasn’t that such an encounter was possible. The point, for these boys on the cusp of manhood, was to claim the full breadth of their right to define the female body, to show that no woman fell outside the range of this right, even those thirty years their senior. The word fuck is key here. Have sex with wouldn’t do. The crudeness of fuck, with its hard consonants and their connotations of force, provides the necessary contrast with mother and all the virtue and tenderness that word implies, upending the common understanding that a mother—by dint of her age, her experience, her matronly status—is no longer an object to be desired.
“Wow. I haven’t heard that term in so long,” I say. “It’s such a sexist term, if you think about it.”
“I know!” says Michelle.
“And sort of disgusting.”
“Seriously.”
“What did you say back?”
“Nothing, really. I just sort of smirked and walked on.” We’re both quiet for a moment, and then she says. “I wonder what it was that made him single me out.” And then, “I did feel sort of sexy in that jacket.”
When we end our call, I scoop globs of Nutella onto three plates and herd my children into the kitchen for their snack. My daughter Leah comes to the table with her comic book and starts to read me a funny bit, but I can only half listen. What I’m thinking about is this: If it had been me walking through that park last night, would I have been called a MILF?
For the next few hours I am preoccupied by this question, until it becomes impossible to hide from myself that, while I categorically object to the term MILF, I very much want to be a MILF. For it is one thing to know something intellectually, and it’s an entirely different thing to know it in the part of you that makes you crane your neck to see yourself from behind in the mirror or spritz yourself with Victoria’s Secret Eau So Sexy body spray before leaving your house. I look down at my soft thighs in their faded leggings, the raised veins crossing the backs of my hands. I run my palm over the pleated skin of my stomach. I cannot assess what it is that I am.
That night, I turn to my husband, Paul, as we’re washing up for bed.
“Do you think I’m a MILF?” I ask.
“A MILF? Of course you’re a MILF.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Well, you’re a mother,” he says, as if this is the simplest, most obvious truth in the world, “and I want to fuck you.” He is being funny, but also dead serious. Standing beside my husband at our sink, I feel desired, loved, grateful anew that I have chosen this man to be my life partner. But I do not feel my question has been answered.
A few months before my fortieth birthday, I decide I would like to run the Boston Marathon in under four hours. I have never before been moved to run a marathon, let alone swiftly, and I can hardly understand what motivates the nubile college women who breeze by me during Saturday training runs up Heartbreak Hill. What could they have to prove? My motivation has everything to do with the fact that I’m done having babies, which means I’m no longer a “new mom,” dewy and radiant, but simply a “mom.” I do not long, generally, to run a marathon. I long to be a sleek Lycra-encased, gravity-defying mother of three who is running a marathon.
I may not be a fresh-faced ingenue, or a supple twentysomething, or a glowing bride or new mama, but I’ve begun to see that all hope of feeling young and relevant isn’t lost—as long as I can conquer the last bastion of female desirability available to mothers and become a “hot mom.” This won’t be easy, given the significant investment of time and capital being a hot mom requires. But my mind keeps replaying a comment my friend Laura made when we moved our family from Boston to the suburb where she lives with her family: “It’s so depressing how all the mothers out here have let themselves go. You’ll see,” she said. “It’s like they’ve all just given up.” I picture a line of pouchy women in salt-stained snow boots, waiting at school pickup for the children into whom they’ve siphoned all their verve. I feel, suddenly, that it is vital I not become a mother who has given up.
Laura wears fingerless gloves and motorcycle jackets and goes three times a week to the local Pure Barre studio on her way home from work. What I know of barre, a high-resistance exercise regimen based loosely on ballet, calls to me in the same way actual ballet called to me as a little girl, as a doorway to feminine litheness and grace. One evening, I accompany Laura to a class, and though I’m technically past the one-year postpartum mark, I’m offered the special “Baby Bounce Back” package, which helps me believe that the outlandish sum Pure Barre will still cost me is reasonable. Plus, isn’t it only right that I prioritize my wellness so I can remain healthy and able for my loved ones far into the future?
I enter the dark, carpeted studio and join the corps of women lined up at the barre. I learn that to “tuck” means to curl your pelvis under; that to “pulse” means to stand on the balls of your feet and bounce your knees; that the “ledge” is the place where the back of the thigh meets the butt, and that by working this area hard enough, I might develop the trademark “Pure Barre Ledge,” defined and taut. I learn that the goal of every exercise is to reach the “shake zone,” which is when your muscles start trembling and your limbs start wobbling, proof that your body is transforming.
As I attend more classes, I notice that no matter which instructor I have, she is always twenty-four years old, with flawless skin and shiny hair. The health and gleam of the Pure Barre instructors’ hair is so consistent that I begin to wonder if this is a requirement of the job. I can think about things like this during Pure Barre because, for the most part, it’s very repetitive and predictable. Unlike other group-exercise experiences—Zumba, with its collegial dance routines, or even yoga, with its open-hearted reaching toward transcendence—Pure Barre is only what it is, a formation of women staring at the mirrored wall as they “Lift, Tone, and Burn” themselves into shape.
I do not like the parts of class when we look in the mirror. I like the parts when we close our eyes and the techno swells and we push through the “final ten” counts, working “deeper and deeper,” “burning it out,” until my upper lip is sweating and my muscles are quivering and my bones are shaking and I can feel my ledge lifting higher and my hair growing thicker and my skin turning smoother as the years burn and burn and burn and burn away.
For it isn’t long-term wellness, of course, but this that brings me back to this dark room again and again. Even as I question this use of time, knowing there are far worthier things I could be doing with it. Even as the blue sky outside shouts to me like a reprimand. Even as part of me also burns with shame.
I am forty-three when I begin to wake up sweating—though this word doesn’t fully capture what my body is doing. No athletic endeavor or feat of endurance has ever produced from me such relentless sopping wetness as I now produce while I sleep. Sweat runs in rivulets from my chest to my stomach; it trickles down my back and thighs, drenching my comforter. When I peel off my nightshirt, it drops like a used dish towel from my hands to the floor.
Some of my friends have also started sweating in their sleep. A few of us compare notes during a birthday dinner and determine that we’ve entered “perimenopause,” which is one of those phenomena you don’t know about until you’re living it yourself. A woman’s fertile years, I now know, don’t come to a sudden end but a protracted, sputtering, sweating one. We sip our drinks and talk about how getting older is terrible, pointing out our lines and creases and grays, as if comparing battle scars. There’s comfort in this camaraderie, and the tone at the table becomes confessional. Meg leans in and points her finger toward the plane of skin between her eyebrows. “Can you tell?” she stage-whispers. “Last week, I got Botox.”
This news shocks me. I have always associated Botox with fading celebrities and the coiffed ladies with fancy handbags who walk around the Bloomingdale’s in Boca Raton, Florida, where my mother-in-law lives. Injecting oneself with nerve-blocking toxins for the sake of appearance, I’ve always thought, is for the vapid and desperate. But Meg, who runs publicity for a nonprofit and spends Saturday mornings with her children at the local food pantry and always has excellent book recommendations, has never struck me as vapid or desperate. Her forehead glows in the restaurant candlelight, smooth as pressed satin.
It’s around this time that the skincare products in my medicine cabinet begin to multiply. Not with Pond’s and Cetaphil but with rarefied emollients with vaguely medical-sounding names, all of them calling to me with their peptides and antioxidants, their firming, plumping, antiaging promises. How easy it is to believe that each will do what the last one has failed to, which is rewind time. I am lured, again and again, by that potent prefix “re-,” which whispers to me from each “reversing,” “revitalizing,” “restoring,” “resetting,” “renewing,” “resurfacing,” “recovering,” “rejuvenating” jar and tube. My skin tingles as these concoctions sink in, and I imagine that my collagen has been shocked awake, setting my skin aglow.
My wardrobe also begins to glow. Without exactly setting out to do so, I become the owner of a pewter tank top laced with silver threads, a packet of gold lamé hair ties, iridescent sneakers. When my old black winter jacket starts trailing feathers, I purchase a new one that is also black, but glossy, with silver zippers. My new jacket reflects light boastfully, and when I walk out my front door wearing it, I gleam like a brand-new sports car, all shining lacquer and chrome.
In 1546 German artist Lucas Cranach the Elder painted “The Fountain of Youth,” a four-by-six-foot depiction of the age-old human fantasy of reversing time. I last saw this painting decades ago, during an undergraduate art history exam, and I can hardly imagine what I made of it as I sat in that dark lecture hall, twenty years old and saturated with youth. One night, sitting at the kitchen table after the kids are asleep, I search for it online. I look at it for several minutes, taking in every detail, seeing what this painting might have to show me.
At the left of the composition, a caravan of wrinkled peasant women enter, pushed over barren terrain in carts and stretchers. They undress and step into the fountain, crossing naked through its waters to the other side. Their hunched figures transform along the way, becoming rosy, fleshy, and full. But it’s not just the women’s appearance that changes. As their wrinkles wash away, freedom seems to rise up from within them. They splash and frolic and glide their hands over their bodies with joyous abandon.
After exiting the water, the women change into sumptuous gowns. On they go from here to a banquet table flanked by dashing men. We see them enjoying an evening of merriment, dancing, and—if the duo hiding behind a bush are any indication—carnal delights. Even the landscape has changed: the boulders on the left have given way to lush rolling hills and open sky. This fountain has granted the peasant women far more than youth: it has granted them wealth, nobility, romance, delight, and endless new vistas to dream upon.
Why are there only women in Cranach’s fountain? Surely sixteenth-century men, too, must have craved rejuvenation from time to time or longed to be restored to some earlier version of themselves. There seem to be heightened stakes for these women, as if their access to pleasure and possibility hinges entirely on youthful beauty.
In this regard, not so much has changed. My husband is also getting older. But his wardrobe hasn’t gotten shiny; his medicine cabinet hasn’t filled with jars of creams. He registers his body’s shifts, most strikingly, in the way it feels and what it can accomplish. “My pace per mile has gotten slower,” he says, tapping his watch as he climbs our front steps after a run. “I don’t sleep the way I once did,” he tells me, recounting last night’s multiple wakings. “I wish,” he laments, “that I could enjoy a tequila and soda at night like I used to, without it doing me in the next day!”
When it comes to our experience of aging, the difference between Paul and me is the difference between a person at one with his desires and a person trained to confuse desirability with desire. A woman who has spent her life jumping through the prescribed hoops of female relevance and who is now on the brink of aging out of this hoop race faces something far more formidable and terrifying than a crisis of vanity. For this woman, vitality, zest, heat—the very flare and crackle of life as it announces itself inside of her—has depended for years on external stoking. What happens to this vitality when the stoking stops? What stirs in a female body when it no longer stirs others?
Sometimes I think Oprah might help me answer these questions. Oprah and Meryl Streep and Halle Berry and Helen Mirren—the small cadre of female celebrities the aging woman can look to for inspiration. But even these luminous elders, when they gaze at us encouragingly from magazine covers, often appear in airbrushed form, all signs of history and living wiped from their faces. Is it vitality or a trick of the camera that makes them glow so brightly?
Our fear and erasure of the aging woman runs deep, permeating our most basic folklore. She’s the crook-fingered hag who kidnaps Hansel and Gretel, the jealous stepmother who plots Snow White’s murder, the wizened sea-witch who steals the Little Mermaid’s voice. Several times a few weeks ago, my six-year-old daughter appeared at my bedside in the middle of the night, panicked and sobbing: Ursula, she choked out, was under her bed with a knife, waiting to stab her. In the months before that, it had been Maleficent. And before that, Baba Yaga from her brother’s A World Full of Spooky Stories. The monsters haunting my daughter’s dreams have always taken the form of aging women: she has learned, already, to dread her future self.
If they aren’t demonized, older women are often stereotyped as bumbling bit characters—or, in the words of the late ageism-activist Maggie Kuhn, as “dependent, powerless, wrinkled babies.” The protest group Kuhn founded fifty years ago, the Gray Panthers, fought for the dignity of all older people, male and female. But as a feminist, Kuhn was particularly interested in challenging assumptions about older women. Since women tend to outlive men by several years, she even celebrated the idea of older women forming sexual relationships with younger men, or with one another. “Our sexuality is so influential in determining who we are and how we relate to others,” she wrote. “Indeed, it is the material of life and to deny it in old age is to deny life itself.”
Last fall, I attended a talent show at my children’s elementary school. Sandwiched between a piano performance and a martial-arts demonstration was a skit called “The Granny Olympics.” A group of fourth-grade girls doddered onto the stage in frumpy sweaters, holding pretend canes, their hair in buns, their skin creased with face paint. They fumbled through a series of sad athletic feats: clearing a two-inch hurdle, racing one another while hardly moving. The audience laughed. I laughed. Only later did I see how in our purportedly justice-minded community, we all wholeheartedly agreed: old ladies are funny!
That aging is shameful and laughable—and the latter years of a woman’s life a descent into caricature or obscurity—are truths so commonly accepted they’re barely discernible. But they take their toll on women, nevertheless, wearing away at our sense of possibility, narrowing our imaginings of who we are yet to become, mentally shortening our life spans, leaving us frantic that with every turn of the calendar page, part of us is evaporating.
When I say that I don’t want to be a mother who has “given up,” maybe what I’m saying is I don’t want to stop believing my next hour could hold something more electric than my last. When I say I want to be a “hot mom,” maybe what I’m saying is I don’t want stop feeling the knock of my heart in my chest, the touch of the breeze on my legs, the caress of the sun on my neck, the flare of want in my groin. When I say that I want to be a MILF, maybe what I’m saying is time is running out, and I can feel my grip sliding, and Please god, please, I’m just not ready to go.
Maybe I’ve given the impression that I spend my days at my mirror, charting the shifts in my skin and contemplating the ticking of the clock. Far from it. For there are bills to be paid and meals to make and children to raise and a marriage to nurture. The thing about aging is that it happens, mostly, in life’s background—and yet, its presence murmurs on in the consciousness, like the low buzzing of a broken appliance, constant and quietly draining.
But there are moments—moments I’m training myself to notice—when the buzzing pauses, and a surprising quiet opens up. One morning, reading a review of a new Emily Dickinson biography, I start thinking about my eighth-grade English teacher, Mrs. Rinden, who introduced my class to Dickinson and had us write imitations of her poems. I remember the day she hauled in armloads of her own journals to share with us, and how she urged us to start our own, and how I did—right away—determined to fill my pages as densely and triumphantly as she had. Suddenly, I’m startled by a realization: I must now be nearly the same age Mrs. Rinden was when she stood before us, silver-haired and smiling, with secrets to tell, igniting that place in my brain that hungers for metaphor.
It occurs to me, then, that I must alsobe nearly the same age as Lydia Fakundiny, my favorite undergraduate English professor, who took her students so seriously she scared us into taking ourselves seriously. And nearly the same age, too, as Susheila Mani, my first teaching mentor, when she revealed to me, through her regal example, the power of calm. I’m close to the same age now, it dawns on me, as most ofthe bona-fide grown-ups I looked up to in young adulthood: the dignified and self-possessed women—for they were nearly all women—who saved me from self-destructive paths, pointing me toward better ones. When my mind does this temporal somersault, it’s not loss I feel but a quiver of hope: maybe I’ve lived my way closer to their wisdom and wholeness.
One bright fall morning, I arrive home from a run and see my neighbor Susan digging in her yard. She wears sneakers, a flannel jacket, glasses atop her short hair. I am happy to see her. Susan, who has two grown children, is a former rabbi, and the former editor of a Jewish feminist magazine, and a psychotherapist, and a writer. Today she tells me about the children’s book she’s working on. The knees of her jeans are caked with dirt, and I feel I could stand here all day as she squats among her chrysanthemums, patting them into the earth with her soil-streaked hands. I am drawn to Susan by a feeling I have no precise word for. Admiration, but not just admiration. Respect, but not just respect. In its thrill and intensity, it is, more than anything, like a crush.
“The Soul selects her own Society,” wrote Dickinson, in a poem I may have read in Mrs. Rinden’s class. My whole life, I think, as Susan stands to survey her work, I’ve been pulled toward women like her, women whose years curve like buttresses around them, women sturdy enough to set the terms of their mattering. Even as I’ve strained to meet our culture’s glossy standards, I have circled around these women without quite even knowing it, as if following some primal instinct or heeding the call of some archetypal figure of my unconscious: the wise woman, the crone, the great mother. Western culture doesn’t typically value or celebrate the female elder. But perhaps, beneath the spangled tank top and flashing parka and layers of skin creams, my soul has been trying to become her all along.
Sometimes, I can already spot her—as if from a distance, through a veil of haze. Her hair is gray, her skin free of makeup. She wears loose clothing and sensible shoes, and when she moves or thinks or acts, she takes her time, letting each moment settle before it passes through her. She eats and drinks with pleasure and relaxes with abandon, her head thrown back on the pillow, her feet on the arm of the couch. She listens fully when others speak, stepping into their words like a seasoned traveler, unburdened by petty distractions. When she speaks, she says only what she means, and her words carry the generous lucidity of truth. She sits down at her desk to write each day lightly, with none of the cramped, panicked hardness that followed her for years. People come to her for wisdom—and why not? She’s been gathering it up her whole life, after all—in the margins of books, in the pages of notebooks, on the surface of her skin, in the knowing folds of her flesh slackening with age. Some might look at her and say she’s giving up. But she knows that what she’s doing is letting go.
There is no true “re-” in life—no reversing, reliving, redoing. There is only this moment, carrying the embryo of the last as it unfolds into the next. The wise woman in the haze understands she can never fully return to the girl inside her. She can only take her by the hand and invite her along into the future, teaching her everything she knows.
On an early October morning, I drop my children at school and ease out of the parking lot. I feel a quiet excitement, as I do each weekday morning, in this release into solitude. The hours stretch ahead of me, and I am full of ideas for the article I’m working on. When I get home, I will pour a cup of coffee, open the shades, and get to it.
Steam rises off the reservoir as my car curves by. Sun burns through the clouds, flashing through branches. I open the window, breathing in the leaf-damp air as I stop at the light by the Mobil station. I turn on the radio. There’s a quick promo, and then the opening bars of a song. I know it within seconds, the clean acoustic chords accompanied by a searching baritone voice. I reach for the volume.
When the light changes, I press down on the gas, then press harder. The morning street is empty—only sky and tree-lined road ahead of me. Air gusts into the car, spilling like water over my neck. I am doing thirty-five, forty, forty-five in a thirty, but I don’t care because Eddie Vedder is building to something, the air of his breath pouring through the speakers, blowing my hair across my face. I can feel Eddie Vedder on my palms, Eddie Vedder along my spine, and I turn the volume higher as he wails to me about memory and return. The leaves wink orange, the drums bump in my sternum, and before I know it I am singing at the top of my lungs, my jaws flung open to the sky.. The words stream out as if they’ve been stuck in my throat for decades.
Who knows how fast I’m going now. My blood wobbles and my cheeks burn and my voice trembles and my thighs shake as I fly under telephone wires, my shoulders banging against my seat-back, my hands beating time on the steering wheel. The people in passing cars must think I’m crazy, a middle-aged woman thrashing back and forth in her minivan, but what do they know.
This is what it is to be forty-four years old, the whole day—and my whole life—ahead of me.