I’m in a birthday club that meets monthly for
lunch. We’ve been doing this for over
ten years, long enough to get to know each other pretty well, to be completely
free and comfortable around one another.
Which is a beautiful thing. And
much cheaper than therapy. When we first
started getting together our children were younger and we were always harried,
barely able to spend an hour without having to jump up to go collect a child or
hurry back to work. Now our lunches can
drag on for close to three hours, long enough for our waitress to go off shift
and the restaurant to empty and the busboy to stand yawning in a corner.
We are beautiful, self-assured, completely natural
women, meaning there’s not a size two among us.
We’ve lived long enough to be comfortable in our own skins, to accept
the sags and wrinkles and wobbly thighs that come with being mature, natural
women. So far, we’ve resisted the siren
call of plastic surgery.
I tell you all of this because my husband always asks
with astonishment, “What do you find to talk about for three hours?”
Here’s a sample:
“I ran into Lucy Dillard.” Eye roll. “She and Jack are
getting ready to go to the Bahamas
and she was bragging about having her bikini area waxed so she can wear her new
thong.” (We hate Lucy.)
“I tried some of
that Nair stuff once. It was so painful,
y’all.”
“Is that the
stuff that smells like rotten eggs?”
“See, if you
wear a swim skirt you don’t have to worry about hair.”
“Not unless it
hangs down below the edge of your skirt.”
Laughter.
“When Scott and
I were going to Mexico
on that business trip last year, I went to Target and bought one of those cute
little elastic waist skirts that go over your suit. It was in a zebra print, which for some
reason I thought was stylish. Apparently
I was wrong. Anyway, by the third day
the elastic had stretched out so bad one side hung down lower than the other,
which made me look kind of like a wounded zebra dragging a leg. Trust me, it
was not a good look. So I just pulled on
a pair of shorts and told Scott he better not say a word.”
“Did y’all hear
they’re coming out with a line of Spanx swimsuits?”
Much
excitement here.
“I tried one on
but the problem is it squishes the fat from your waist down over your hips
which is not really a good look either.”
“Kind of like a
reverse muffin top?”
“Exactly.”
If laughter truly
is the best medicine, we should all live to be ninety.
