Free Fear of Dying by Erica Jong

beautiful? I hated Detox but then I fell in love with the place. I almost didn’t want to leave when they said I could.”
    â€œI know. You were terrified to go there and terrified to leave.”
    â€œI wish we could go there now—for a retreat weekend—but there’s this to think about.” She taps her belly with a swollen hand.
    â€œI love you with all my heart, Glinda.”
    â€œMe you too, Mommo.”
    â€œLet’s pay the check and go buy baby clothes.”
    â€œYesssssssssssss!” says Glinda.
    We leave the restaurant and plunge into retail therapy.
    Even at the worst moments between mothers and daughters, shopping is the cure-all. I love seeing Glinda looking beautiful in a new dress. There’s almost nothing a new dress can’t solve. Until the bill comes.
    But retail therapy is hardly easy with a daughter who’s already five months pregnant and getting bigger. Nothing fits as you go into the baby-growing stage of pregnancy. We all end up wearing the same tattered sacks or jeans with the fronts cut out and replaced with elastic—or leggings made for a giantess. Or various elasticized schmattas. Who was it who said if pregnancy was a play, you’d cut the last act? Maybe we all have. You can’t sleep, can’t wear anything elegant, can’t fit behind the wheel of a car, and you waddle like a duck rather than glide like a princess. It seems like it will never end. Only amnesia would make any woman do it again. Though we love our children beyond all imagining, beyond all expectation. Nature is a very clever mother.
    So we slide into a pricey boutique and buy baby clothes made by impoverished ladies to feed their own babies and emblazoned with labels in French and Italian, mostly bearing the names of men who would never bear babies themselves.

 
    5
    Money Is the Root
    Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,
    Before we too into the Dust descend;
    Dust into Dust, and under Dust to lie,
    Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and—sans End!
    â€” The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
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    When I met Asher Freilich I was forty-five and living with an actor young enough to be my son. My daughter was thirteen and more grown up than my twenty-six-year-old lover. I liked to think of Nikos as a Greek American reincarnation of Colette’s Chéri, but actually he was far more comfortable in the diner in Astoria where he’d grown up than he’d ever be wearing my pearls in a drawing room near the Bois de Boulogne. I had taken up with him purely for his James Dean looks and the indefatigability of his cock. Somehow, he drifted from staying overnight into never going home. But I was busy with my soap and never really had the time to properly kick him out and retrieve my spare key.
    I met Asher at a theatrical AIDS benefit. Thousands of young and beautiful gay actors, and there was Asher—the silver-haired father figure. Handsome and tall with golden brown eyes, he won my heart by remembering all my movies—even some I would rather forget! He was the sort of man I never would have considered in my younger days—solidly responsible, owner of stocks and bonds and companies that did arcane things like build pipes and purify water. For someone who loved theater and movies, he had an inborn knack for business. He was a bereaved widower (before that married and divorced almost as much as me), loaded, but that was hardly what I liked about him—I who had always supported artistic losers. What I liked about him was that he reminded me of my father. They even shared the same Leo birthday—August 10—and they both had the same ferocious energy and Catskill Mountains humor. Asher was so unlike my type that I told my analyst-of-the-moment—a mountainous gray-haired woman named Bobo Bressler (née Barbara Neuwirth, who wrote sexual self-help books; How to Be Your Own Sex Therapist was the most famous)—that I could never be with