[Girls' Night Out]

I think I’ve seen everything, and then the mail comes, heady with invitation to drink and feast "the big girls way," this party where guest surgeon Dr. Harry K. will defy aging, tell me how to peel a decade off my face, answer all those plastic questions he believes I’m dying to ask. I imagine a room of my peers–women in their early forties–tipsy, high-heeled, prodding each other to peaks of cosmetic fervor–loathing and fear of philanderer husbands raw as crudités. But I want to be braver than this, like my friend Aviva who was 35 and dying, who feared only her children’s grief, not being there when they called her name in the friendless dark. Gone were the yellow curls that bubbled from her clever young head, the gentle arch of hip slowly eaten by the hungriest cells. In the end she weighed nothing, and what I can’t forget is her crazy laughter, telling us how Ron couldn’t keep his hands off her then–gray and bony, looking like a concentration camp survivor, the scars on her chest marking a harvest of sour lumps. How he wanted her all the time–stepping from the shower, lifting a spoon of cereal to the waning moon of her lips, he would suddenly seize hold, devour her like a starving man. That’s what love is, I thought, love that tunnels deeper than the grave, beyond the shallow margins of skin or earth. Anything less is just fucking imitation.