Expensive People

Long time no post. I keep meaning to write a 'One Year On' post but have nothing much to add. I debated just leaving it here but decided I would keep up with my 'Menopause in Literature' posts, just because it amuses me when I come across them. This one is from 'Expensive People' by Joyce Carol Oates, reviewed today over on Silencing the Bell. It was written before she had experienced menopause so I guess she just had to go with the cliché.

"'My mother is inclined to hysteria,' Gustave explained. 'It's the change of life, you know. You can't be too careful with them at that time.'
'What's wrong with her?'
He stared at me coldly. 'It's a biological condition,' he said.
Biological conditions of mothers always frighten me, so I said nothing.
'It began a few months ago, and I knew at once what it was. I had had sense enough to be reading ahead. Father doesn't have the slightest idea what's going on - he wouldn't want to admit his own age - and I can't possibly tell him. How could you tell your father anything so personal? I've left a copy of the Reader's Digest around with a lead article on the subject, but ... My mother gets upset all the time, she cries if the toast is cold for Father, she's always picking on our maid Hortense, and she's always on the telephone, it's embarrassing, and yesterday her parakeet Fifi died and she spent all day crying, then accused Hortense and me of not giving a damn about the parakeet. so she took the corpse into the kitchen and put it in the garbage disposal, and before I could stop her she had turned it on. She was hysterical about that. This is a difficult time of life for both of us,' Gustave said vaguely." (p.55)