Nancy Thayer - The Hot Flash Club

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FOR Deborah Beale, Mimi Beman, Charlotte Maison, and Pam Pindell Je tadore!

Praise for Nancy Thayer and

TheHotFlashClub

Bestselling author Thayer fashions a delightfully quirky look at the pains and the passions of middle age.... This humorously poignant tribute to women of a certain age has the potential to charm readers of all ages and both sexes.

Booklist

The Hot Flash Club is a powerful novel about women everywhere, no matter what their age, and how uplifting it is to have close friends.

Romantic Times

Women of a certain age... will chortle knowingly at her all-too-vivid depiction of the multiple tolls that age takes on the female face, form, sex life, and self-worth. Thayer lays it all out with perverse relishaches, pains, incontinence, hormone surges, sagging this and bulging that.

The Boston Globe

Time after time, [Nancy Thayer] makes me laugh, makes me think, makes me appreciate that she understands what women want to express. Thayers writing often reminds me of Elizabeth Berg, Jeanne Ray, and Anne Tyler.... [The Hot Flash Club] will stimulate a delightful discussion, especially among women in the hot flash stage of life.... Its a funny, sassy novel with some creative solutions to lifes problems.

Womens Lifestyle

Enormous thanks to my agent Meg Ruley, my editor Linda Marrow, my brain trust and inspiration Josh Thayer, Casey Sayre, Sam Wilde, David Gillum, and Jill Hunter Wickes, and my steady light Charley Walters.

FAYE

It was while Faye was gathering donations for the community tag sale that she realized, with a shock, that any stranger going through her house would think she was obsessive, anal-retentive, or, at the very least, eccentric.

Although, if the stranger were a female around Fayes agefifty-five she would probably understand what could appear to others as an unhealthy mania for clothes.

Naturally, Fayes clothing hung in the large walk-in closet of her bedroom.

Also, in the guest bedroom closet.

And in the closet of her daughters bedroom, for Laura was twenty-eight, married, and had left only a few of her favorite childhood things at home.

Fayes clothes did not hang in the attic, because when she and Jack bought the house thirty years ago, they converted the attic into a studio where Faye painted. But more of Fayes clothes were hung, folded, or bundled in plastic wardrobes in the spacious linen closet at the end of the hall.

So much clothing!

She felt appalled, and slightly guilty.

It wasnt just that Faye, like most women, changed her wardrobe for summer and winter and fall, or that, like many other women, she had casual clothes for daily life and some elegant suits for the various committees she sat on, and a few gorgeous dresses for the events she had attended with Jack, a corporate lawyer and head of his own prestigious Boston firm. It wasnt only that she had Christmas sweaters and tennis skirts and the black velvet evening cloak that had been her mothers, so how could she possibly part with it? Or that shed kept the expensive, elegant raincoat shed bought on a trip to London with Jack, where shed torn the hem, stepping out of a black cab on the way home from the theater. She intended to mend it, but she hadnt yet found time to do so. In the meantime, shed bought another raincoat or two, to serve until she mended the London one. It wasnt that during this long, gloomy spring, shed bought, on an impulse, another raincoat, a rain slicker of cheery, cherry red.

It was that she had so many clothes for so many seasons and reasons in so many different sizes.

The size 12s were in Lauras bedroom.

The size 14s were in the guest bedroom.

The size 16s were in the linen closet.

The size 18s were in her own closet, right next to her husbands clothing. It was his clothing that had gotten her started on this spree in the first place.

One long year ago, Jack, her darling Jack, had died of a sudden heart attack, at the age of sixty-four.

In the middle of the night, Jack had sat up in bed, turned on the light, and said to Faye, Dont forget then clutched his chest and fallen on the floor.

Dont forget what? Faye wondered. It kept her awake at night, it made her walk right past her townhouse, it bit at her thoughts like a tack in her shoe. Dont forget I love you? Dont forget to tell Laura I love her? Dont forget to look in the secret door in the Chippendale cabinet? (Shed looked there and found nothing.)

He was sleeping, her son-in-law Lars assured her. He might have been dreaming. He might have been thinking something nonsensical, the way dreams can be, like dont forget to feed the giraffe.

Now, a year after his death, her friends, and Laura, too, insisted that it really was time to part with his things. Laura and Lars had taken what they wanted. The rest, they reminded her, should not languish in her house when they could be useful to so many others. So Faye was diligently preparing to donate his clothes to the community fair. Most of them, anyway. She would keep a few items: his old robe, worn at the elbows, no good to anyone else, and so comforting to her, and the blue Brooks Brothers shirt he looked so handsome in. The rest she really would give away.

And she absolutely would give away some of her own clothing, too. At least the size 10s.

Although, Faye wondered, collapsing on the carpet and leaning against the bedpostbecause her bedroom chairs and the bed were covered with clothing shed sorted throughwould giving away the size 10s be admitting shed never be that size again? Would it be like giving up?

All her life, her weight had gone up and down more than the scales of a Tchaikovsky concerto.

Well, more up than down.

Faye loved to eat and never lost weight without fierce determination and control. Usually she weighed the most in early January, after the ounces and inches from the feasts and celebrations of Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years had accumulated, like a confetti of cellulite, onto her hips. She weighed the least in the summer, when the combination of dread of appearing in public in a bathing suit, and anticipation of light, floaty summer dresses, had driven her to diet down a size or two.

But three years ago, shed had a hysterectomy for fibroid tumorsthat had been wonderful, shed lost several pounds while lying down! On her doctors advice, she took the hormone replacement therapy that had been touted as a wonder drug until, a year ago, the same HRT was suddenly reviled as toxic by a hysterical press. She stopped using it, and now she weighed as much as she had when she was nine months pregnant.

She hadnt been eating more than usual or exercising less. Just the opposite: Determined not to go creakily into old age, she exercised regularly. In general, she led an active life. In spite of that, and her increasing attention to what she ate, fat collected around her arms and thighs, under her chin, on her bottom and hips, and rose on her stomach, warm and rounded, like a freshly baked loaf of bread.

Long ago, Faye had vowed not to compare her physique to the skeletal models in magazinesher healthy body provided her with so many pleasures, why should she criticize it? She decided shed try to cut down on fats and eat more veggies.