I See You Made an Effort: Compliments, Indignities, and Survival Stories from the Edge of 50 Read Online Free PDF

purchased that one. It seems like the last stop on the line before I start making animal sacrifices and sleeping in a hyperbaric chamber. But I am not immune to the seductive powers of the adjectives and adverbs that promise miracles, and I have spent so much money, I deserve samples, damn it.
    But she doesn’t want to just give me a sample. No, Marte is personally going to make a sample for me. As she scoops a minuscule amount of a vanilla pudding–like substance into the smallest plastic container in the known world, I shudder picturing the factory that produces these miniature pods. I say a silent prayer that they’re not sorted by the tiny hands of child workers, and I promise myself I will reuse them when traveling. I try to make my features appear interested when she recites the antiaging qualities of this particular elixir, though I know perfectly well I have no intention of ever purchasing it. Depositing the teeny treasure into my purse, I move toward the door, but she is following me and subtly blocks my exit, positioning herself by another counter, manned by a slightly more mature version of herself. Marte tells me that her colleague Older Marte will show me that fruit exfoliant. Cornered. Matronly Marte takes my right hand and begins rubbing a fruit exfoliant on my skin. It’s mango, or pomegranate, or watermelon, and she’s massaging and massaging this cucumber, or papaya, or was it sweet potato? I have no idea, because the circular motion is starting to make me feel nauseous. She stops scrubbing and for some reason the skin on my hand looks brighter, shinier, whiter—how did she do that? “It’sonly fifty dollars,” she tells me with an inflection that suggests that she is handing me fifty dollars.
    “Oh, that’s a bargain,” I hear myself say in agreement. “Only fifty dollars.”
    It’s made by a doctor, a doctor from New York, she tells me in the same voice my grandmother used to describe men who were good marriage material—
a doctor!
Marte says to Older Marte, “Tell her about the deal she can get.” They’re double-teaming me now.
    “If you spend two hundred dollars, you get this bottle of oxygenated, harmonized water for free.”
    My grandmother Rebecca, from Minsk, would have liked the sound of that water. In the summers during the 1940s, our entire clan traveled by Greyhound bus from where they had settled in Mobile, Alabama, a few hours to the north, to take the waters at Healing Springs. For centuries, the Muscogee people visited this site, where the mineral water was said to cure everything from dyspepsia to eczema. You would not only bathe in the springs, you’d drink its curative properties as well. My grandmother had lived through pogroms and the Depression, so she expected a lot of value from everything she purchased.
    “But will it keep my vagina from being so dry?” I blurt out. The Martes look at me blankly. “I was joking,” I say. “JK, as the kids say—just kidding.” But they just stare at me and I know I’ll be going home with Dr. Colbert’s Intensify Facial Discs, because they don’t know me or my sense of humor, because I said “dry vagina” and because she spent so much time on my hand.
    This time the financial exchange is rapid. Surgical, really. Inthat moment, I recall shopping when I was a kid, my mother holding her breath as each credit card she’d hand over would have to be tried before a sale could be completed. I would look around, hoping no friends from school were there to witness this ritual. At forty-nine, I have discovered that age gifts you with invisibility in all but monetary transactions. It’s also given me compassion for my mother. I have it covered, barely. Cash extracted, I leave.
    Arriving at home, I rush upstairs past my teenage son. “I’m working on a deadline,” I yell down to him, which is sort of true when you think about it. I immediately strip off my clothing and step into the shower, pushing aside the upside-down bottles