the age of forty-five, and had a double appointment with her GP, where she had cried, “But no one ever said it was like this!” For now they were monitoring things. She was taking supplements, cutting back on alcohol and spicy foods. Ha ha.
“So you’re okay,” said the man. He looked up and down the highway as if for help.
“I really am perfectly fine,” said Frances. Her back gave a friendly little spasm and she tried not to flinch.
“I didn’t realize that hot flashes—flushes—were so …”
“Dramatic? Well, they’re not for everyone. Just a lucky few.”
“Isn’t there … what’s it called? Hormone-replacement therapy?”
Oh my Lord.
“Can you prescribe me something?” asked Frances brightly.
The man took a little step back from the car, hands up in surrender. “Sorry. It’s just, I think that was what my wife … Anyway, none of my business. If everything is okay, I’ll just be on my way.”
“Great,” said Frances. “Thank you for stopping.”
“No worries.”
He lifted a hand, went to say something else, evidently changed his mind, and walked back toward his car. There were sweat marks on the back of his T-shirt. A mountain of a man. Lucky he decided she wasn’t worth killing and raping. He probably preferred his victims less sweaty.
She watched him start his car and pull out onto the highway. He tipped one finger to his forehead as he drove off.
She waited until his car was a tiny speck in her rearview mirror and then she reached over for the change of clothes she had waiting on the passenger seat ready for this exact situation.
“Menopause?” her eighty-year-old mother had said vaguely, on the phone from the other side of the world, where she now lived blissfully in the South of France. “Oh, I don’t think it gave me too much trouble, darling. I got it all over and done with in a weekend, as I recall. I’m sure you’ll be the same. I never had those hot flushes. I think they’re a myth, to be honest.”
Hmmph, thought Frances as she used a towel to wipe away her mythical sweat.
She thought of texting a photo of her tomato-red face to her group of school friends, some of whom she’d known since kindergarten. Now when they went out to dinner they discussed menopause symptoms with the same avid horror with which they’d once discussed their first periods. Nobody else was getting these over-the-top hot flushes like Frances, so she was taking it for the team. Like everything in life, their reactions to menopause were driven by their personalities: Di said she was in a permanent state of rage and if her gynecologist didn’t agree to a hysterectomy soon she was going to grab the littler fucker by the collar and slam him up against the wall, Monica was embracing the “beautiful intensity” of her emotions, and Natalie was wondering anxiously if it was contributing to her anxiety. They all agreed it was totally typical of their friend Gillian to die so she could get out of menopause and then they cried into their Prosecco.
No, she wouldn’t text her school friends, because she suddenly remembered how at that last dinner she’d looked up from her menu to catch an exchange of glances that most definitely meant: “Poor Frances.” She could not bear pity. That particular group of solidly married friends was meant to envy her, or they’d pretended to envy her anyway, for all these years, but it seemed that being childless and single in your thirties was very different from being childless and single in your fifties. No longer glamorous. Now kind of tragic.
I’m only temporarily tragic, she told herself as she pulled on a clean blouse that showed a lot of cleavage. She tossed the sweaty shirt onto the back seat, restarted the car, looked over her shoulder, and pulled out onto the highway. Temporarily Tragic. It could be the name of a band.
There was a sign. She squinted. Tranquillum House, it said.
“Left turn ahead,” said her GPS.
“Yes, I know, I see it.”
She met her own eyes in the rearview mirror and tried to give herself a wry “isn’t life interesting!” look.
Frances had always enjoyed the idea of parallel universes in which multiple versions of herself tried out different lives—one where she was a CEO instead of an author; one where she was a mother of two or four or six kids instead of none; one where she hadn’t divorced Sol and one where she hadn’t divorced Henry—but for the most part she’d always