So there they are in the middle of the night, drawn together because none of them can sleep, and that stuff they're pouring into the caldron is a desperate attempt at relief. Menopausal women will ingest an astonishing array of weeds and herbs. Need proof? Go to any health food store and look down the most crowded aisle. There you'll find middle-aged women offering advice and criticism, sharing experiences and demanding information from the woman at the store who has been assigned this detail. At the Whole Foods Market near me this woman has gray hair and the pale calm of someone who eats a lot of grains and sips lukewarm herbal tea, slowly.

But back to "Macbeth." The crones are gathered there feeling sweaty; they are not in a good mood at all, and the thought of all that passion between Macbeth and his lady is agitating. They can remember what it was like to be young and wait for your man to come home, to brush your long thick hair until it shined and rub scented oil into firm breasts and upright nipples. They can remember when their husbands could sit through a whole play without getting up to pee, and when the guys' slightly enlarged prostates didn't cause the same need five times a night. The crones' fragile grasp on sleep has been more than one time ruined when their men clomped to the privy, banging doors and making the stairs squeak as they lumbered down the hall. In winter the men simply use the chamber pot, and the weak stream trickling against the porcelain has a sad sound to it, yet another reminder of the indignities of age.

So the crones know that men have a hard time, too. But they don't really care. What men endure does not come close to menstruation, childbirth and menopause. And anyway, Macbeth and his lady are not concerned with any of that right now. They are thinking about wet mouths and other parts. They have that tense feeling in their lower abdomens. The tingling too. The crones know that the best way to soothe your own suffering is to make sure somebody else is having a worse time. There has to be a way to curse this reunion, and the crones find it. They meet Macbeth in the forest and plant fear. This always works. Bravado is only veneer, easily peeled away once you loosen the edges. The rest follows a predictable course. Shakespeare always punished greed, ego and passion.

I was thinking about all this at 3:30 in the morning. I woke up at 2, covered in sweat, and I pulled back all the covers. By 2:20 I was shivering and I pulled them back over me and went to sleep. At 2:45 my husband started tossing and turning and that was it. I could give up on sleep for the rest of the night. It occurred to me then that God doesn't like women. God likes bears. Four-hundred-pound bears give birth in their sleep to cubs weighing 8 ounces. They don't even know that anything has happened until this cute little thing crawls up to nurse. I don't know what happens to them at middle age. Not much, probably.

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