I took deep breaths of Aleyt, held on to her too long, knew it was time to change the trajectory of our conversation, I had already rambled to the borders of embarrassment, although the last thing I wanted was to hear how she had become this reindeer-sweatered largeness across from me, and so, when she had resettled into her seat, I began asking after a number of old high-school classmates I couldn't have cared less about, people I had until a week ago put out of my mind completely for more than half my life, their parents, their parents' pals, their parents' parents, their girlfriends and boyfriends, each of whom Aleyt knew almost as little about as I did, which made me feel at least minimally better.
Jerry and she weren't very sociable, she confessed. They tended to keep to themselves, and, when they did go out, it was usually without spouse because they didn't particularly enjoy each other's company anymore, an observation which might sound peculiar to a single person's ears, Aleyt said almost lightheartedly, as if she were talking about a missed appointment with the dishwasher repairman, but isn't, really, not as married couples go, given how many eternities they have to endure each other's tics and noises and odors and pet anecdotes. Jerry was a one-time jock who liked to golf, tinker with things that didn't need tinkering with around the house, sprawl formulaically in his recliner before the plasma screen, a bowl of nachos and an open jar of salsa in his lap, watching big boys in tight uniforms run up and down green fields and bumble into each other homoerotically. When Aleyt and he did occasionally get together, they found themselves talking about who was going to take their son Ryan to the next rugby match, their daughters Brooke and Brianna to the next ballet class, about how they were going to deal with the next bill from the dermatologist or drama coach — until, that is, their kids spun off to college, after which, more disconcerting still, Jerry and Aleyt found themselves with nothing important to confer about at all.
They went out to dinner and a movie together once every week or two because Aleyt had read somewhere it was a good idea to apply a dose of dates to ailing relationships, but ended up eating in silence, having run out of things to say by the time their water glasses were tinking with ice. Gradually, amicably, they drifted away on different currents toward different islands in different oceans. She said she felt dumb to admit it, sounding as it did like the echo of a dramedy, but it may have had something to do with Jerry's increasingly hairy shoulder blades, swelling belly, way he didn't care enough about her to shave for whole weekends at a pop or take his eyes off the TV when asking her to nuke another meatballs-and-mozzarella Hot Pockets for him, okay, hon, how it turns out that one can often become undeserving of love, it happens every day, everywhere, who would have thought it, but may have had equally as much to do with the arrival of The Change, good grief, and wasn't that a hoot, Aleyt said, pardon my French, and why in the world didn't it ever occur to our mothers to pull us aside and warn us about that inescapable squall speeding toward us across the years so we could at least contemplate beginning the slow toil of climbing to higher emotional ground in preparation for its arrival?
Oprah talks about menopause as passage, some courageous phase in the life-voyage. It can teach you things. It can transform you in mysteriously redemptive ways. Oprah is full of beans. Oprah is so wrong it hurts. What menopause does is remind you of your own mortality at unpredictable moments — as if your ruining body hadn't reminded you of it enough over the course of the last forty-some-odd years, five-hundred-some-odd periods, that rowdy cluster of kids of yours coming and going, and going, and going till they were gone. Menopause transforms your youth into a phantom limb. For Aleyt, it had commenced little by little, perhaps a dozen years ago, no more than a nuanced deceleration of her metabolism, a wattle that wouldn't recede, some graying at the temples, a growing lack of interest in the treadmill, and she told herself not to worry, she could deal with it, here was one of those noteworthy wheat-from-chaff character-building chapters in her daybook, only then the fiery surges she couldn't believe the rest of the planet wasn't sharing howled in. She was avalanched by awakenings at two in the morning, sheets sweat-soppy; breakthrough bleeding; achy breasts; gyres of dizziness; heart palpitations; realizations about how on a whim — sliding out of her car, chopping chives at the counter, standing over there ordering her Toffee Nut Crème, for godsakes, which, by the way, is dreamy, you should try it — the universe could abruptly slope and all of a sudden seem grossly, inexpressibly unfair, to the point of stamping in frustration, to the point of tears.
We commiserated. We consoled. We talked in our own way about how dying is proof against all theories except the theory of termination, which isn't a theory. We snorted at where we'd ended up, look at us, look at us, our respective destinations turning out to be not so very far apart from each other after all. We spoke about how men no longer took us seriously, how nobody knows what's going to happen, how buying makeup that feinted at covering your crow's feet without caking turns into a joke somewhere in your late thirties, even though you say it doesn't matter, even though you say it's just part of that routine called wearing out, even though you say bring it on, sure, you're ready, because you're never really ready, you can't be, that isn't how this game goes, every day of it a bitch slap, excuse my grief.
I heard myself admitting I could understand why Aleyt had chosen film studies back at Sarah Lawrence, that was the easy one, but I couldn't locate the thread in her story that led from our sleepovers to her psych major. Aleyt took a long swig of her elaborate coffee, contemplated my question, leaned forward, hands cradling her cup between her knees like a construction worker on a mid-morning break, and answered that the thing was this: that seven hundred and fifty milliliters of blood wash around your brain's one hundred billion neurons every minute, Plato believed your gray matter the most divine part of people, Aristotle figured that batch of sticky wrinkles in the cranium accomplished exactly nothing save cooling hot blood on its rush from the boiling heart— and, well, learn stuff like that, and you're lost for life.
The thing was this: some globs in our heads glow with awareness when we perform mental tasks while others grow dim. If you sit at your school desk waiting for instructions about how to take your SATs, the dark network is as active as a psychedelic beehive, but the second those instructions arrive, and you set in fighting for your academic survival, the bees freeze, the network hushes. Which is to say when we're doing nothing, we're doing something — but what? Time travel, Aleyt explained. Time travel! Our ability to close our eyes and picture the pleasures of last Saturday's chocolate truffle, or fret about what our broken children will tell their therapists about us Monday, is a fairly recent evolutionary development. Contemplate futures that don't include us (will a fresh earthquake judder Jakarta this month?), and the dark network dozes, but begin moving ourselves through time inside our noggins, and it's alert as your tabby on the tree stump out back the second she spots a rustling in the grass. Weirder still, the dark network is the brain's default mode — that is, the thing was this: we're wired to spend more of our day away from the present than in it.