A sales clerk offered the writer more than a good deal on anti-aging cream.
Sometimes there are significant moments in life that you almost miss if you are not paying attention. Take what happened to me, for example. Like so many, I have multiple roles – a 46 year old mother, daughter, wife, and cop who loves to entertain and decorate.
I recently created one beautiful, perfect room in my house, to replace the chaotic mess of a dining room I had lived with for nine years. Wood shades, soft yellow walls, and lush greenery make it soothing and restful. Antique lithographs of ducks and egrets hang in their light wood frames. It is a soft and organic space. I am sitting in the room as I write this, sipping wine and watching the late afternoon autumn sun streak in. It is a haven away from the stress of the job, a place where I don’t think about growing older and wondering how long I can go on wearing body armor and a gun belt without my knees and hips giving way under the strain. Sometimes when I am sitting in my squad car between calls for service, I wonder too how long can I endure other people’s pain and keep my head above my own sea of pain, my bipolar disorder. Then I drag myself home and sit in my dining room and it goes away as I sip wine and listen to my son talking from the kitchen where he is supposed to be doing his homework.
During a recent dinner my multicolored lucite salt shaker fell apart, leaving a big pile of salt on the table. I wasn’t sorry to see it go. The matching pepper grinder had cracked some time ago and the cheery red, green, blue and yellow did not look right on my sage table cloth with its natural woven rope place mats.
I went off to the mall in search of a simple wooden salt and pepper set like the one my mother had on her table when I was growing up. My quest led me to a kitchen store that sold high end knife sets and Le Creuset pots. As I was about to enter the store a short, slender, dark-haired young man approached me from one of those kiosks that have sprung up in the center of the causeways, gypsies hawking a disparate variety of wares.
"Can I show you something?" he asked in a thick accent, approaching my personal space. Being a cop, I immediately thought he was going to expose himself and that I would have to call mall security and have him arrested. After a half second I realized that my instinct was completely wrong and that he wanted to sell me something.
I held up my hands in a defensive posture in front of my face and said, "I’m not buying anything." Expensively packaged eye cream was stacked on the kiosk in a seductive, alluring fashion. The sign said it was made in Israel of mineral salts from the Dead Sea.
"Let me just show you," he urged. I had the day off and no responsibilities other than to seek out a salt and pepper set. Something in his voice, or a "why not" inside my head allowed me to let him take me gently by the arm.
"I know I look tired," I said, as if that is why he had singled me out. He probably saw a worn-out looking woman who surely yearned for her unlined youth and would pay money to get it.
He stared into my face. "You look fantastic."
My beauty regimen consists of washing my face with a mild scrub, slathering sunscreen on in the morning and topping it off with a thin layer of Nivea to seal in the moisture. At night I run a few drops of retinol gel over my face and seal it with more Nivea. The retinol is for my menopausal acne but my dermatologist assured me it would work on the ever deepening lines around my eyes. Crow's Feet. Laugh lines. I also had noticeable worry lines between my brows. I called it aging, bipolar style. My face told my secret story. The manic happiness created the laugh lines and the desperate depression the worry lines.
There is growing understanding of mental illness being no different from physical illness. Chemical imbalances and nerve pathways going awry. But the idea of a bipolar cop alarms people, like I am always about to go off the deep end and start shooting. In the very dark times the only person I wanted to shoot was myself. That was before proper medication and regular sleep. But I will always walk a precarious line, fighting to keep the panic, the anger, the self-pity at bay.
The young man told me his name, which I immediately forgot. I told him my name was Tove (pronounced Tovah).
His face lit up. "You’re Jewish?" he asked excitedly.
In Hebrew Tovah is a relatively common female name. Tove is Danish. The Danes pronounce the letter ‘e’ as ‘a’.
I said, "Sort of."
He persisted. "Is it your mother or your father who is Jewish?"
At that instant I decided to prevaricate in order to simplify things. I did not feel like saying, my name is Danish and it just happens to also be a Hebrew name. My father named me after a friend of his because he loved the name. My mother thought he named me after an old girlfriend so she called me "hey you" for the first six months of my life. I have always wanted to change the spelling so it is easier to pronounce. I am married to a Jewish man which is where the "sort of Jewish" comes in. I have always wanted to be Jewish because I had no Gentile identity to call my own. My parents were socialists who did not believe in God. I wanted God and I liked the Jewish one. Unfortunately the Jew I married also did not believe in God and we were raising our son without religion or culture just as we were raised. Too much information for a chance meeting with an Israeli eye cream salesman at the mall, especially one who was so excited to meet one of his own.
"My father was Jewish," I said simply. My father would not have minded this--some of his best friends in his academic world were Jewish. He probably would have found it funny."That’s why I said sort of," I told him, "because the line goes through the mother."
The salesman dismissed this with a shrug. Blood was blood."Do you know what Tovah means?" he asked me.
"It's from tov - it means good." He beamed at me. I had passed the test.
He reached into a jar on the counter and put a dab of clear eye serum on his hand. He scooped a little onto his finger.
"Look up," he told me. He smoothed the stuff under my eye. "From the Dead Sea," he said. "Have you heard of it?"
I felt the serum tingle on my skin. "I’ve been there. A long time ago". I was eight and my family was visiting friends in Israel. We drove from Tel Aviv to the Dead Sea and I marveled at the white, salty sand and the way the concentration of salt in the water made you extra buoyant, water so thick with salt you could not possibly dive under it. I could tell he was impressed.
"I’m a cop," I said, unsure why I had said it. To validate the lines on my face?
"So you work the night shift," he said. "That’s why you are so tired."
"No, I work days, but I am tired anyway."
He applied a second layer around my eye, the consistency of a thick, milky cream. "You’re tired because you drink too much."
"Yes, I drink too much," I admitted to this stranger who was standing so close to me, touching me, reading inside me. I was not insulted. We looked at each other sadly. Yes, I drink too much. Told to me by a soothsayer, a potion-maker, a reader of faces.
He held up a mirror for me to see the effect. I was surprised to see there was an actual difference. The side he applied the cream and serum on was smoother, less lined. For one wild moment I thought I had found the answer to my lost youth. Then I came back down to reality. "How much?" I asked. He showed me his price list. $195 for the serum and $135 for the cream. I started to back away and shook my head.
He took my arm again. "This is a secret. A secret between you and me, because you are Jewish," he said in his thick accent. He repeated, "A secret, a secret, shh." He took out his calculator and started to punch in numbers. He showed me the calculations. "I give you both," he said. $59.99.
I got out my Mastercard.
"Do you like pink? He asked, opening the drawer beneath the register.
I shrugged. "Sure."
My living room has lightly pink tinted walls that cast a rosy glow at night but I didn’t have much other pink in my life. He pulled out a gilded bright pink bag and placed the magic potions inside. I knew I would keep the bag forever. Then he put his arm around me and gave me a half hug. I accepted it and hugged him back. As I walked away I turned to wave at him. He looked as if he was seeing right through me to a point on the other side.
The wooden salt and pepper set looked perfect on my dining room table. In the strong light of my bathroom, I put the potions under my other eye. I saw no difference, only that the whites of my eyes were yellowed, with tiny red lines running through them. Fatty deposits rested on the surface. Yes, I drink too much. Not hard for anyone to see, really. I glanced at the label for the first time. It read, ObeyYourBody.
Obey your body.