Fear of Fifty (32 page)

In Greenwich, there lived a married friend who was the high priestess of adultery. She was the perfect exemplar of Southern womanhood moved North. Her husband was a chilly surgeon who did only high-profile sports medicine. He was never home. She appeared to be
always
home. She seemed to spend the day antiquing furniture, restoring antique quilts, and keeping creative house à la Martha Stewart—the woman who earned her freedom by glorifying the slavery of Home.

In reality, the surgeon's wife spent many weekdays from eleven to four in a hotel room in Stamford with a variety of swains half her age. She was adept at keeping adultery neat and separate—as you must when it is your “lifestyle.” She was blonde, but she drove to Stamford wearing a pepper and salt wig. She always brought her own vintage champagne, Beluga caviar, home-baked pumpernickel, home-cured capers, homegrown shallots and onions—chopped. The napkins were linen, the flowers fresh from her cutting garden. Ms. Stewart would have approved.

She kept a file of special resumes for friends newly widowed or divorced. She graded them from A to E for bed skills, coded the skills according to the first letter of
her
term for them—C, F, H, B, which turned out to mean cunnilingus, fucking, hugging, and backrub.

That tells you something about her priorities.

I got seven resumes with pictures attached (head not cock shots), clear descriptions of the man and his body, and cautionary words about never meeting him at home. Rubbers were suggested, but, in 1982, still optional.

Two of these guys tided me over for a couple of months. One was a trucker, another a disk jockey. In
Parachutes & Kisses,
I called him my “Dick-Jockey,” making fun, as usual, of my own pain. But each proved hard to get rid of.

Men say they want sex only, but when women
give
only that, it turns out they want more. Possession. Marriage. Community property.

When
you
want sex without home phone numbers given, they often get huffy and don't want to put out. Sometimes, they wilt.

This is another reason men and women will never work: power. A woman wanting sex only has all the power, and many men prefer to detumesce rather than have a woman dominate. She's too much like Mommy. The men who are exceptions to this rule often turn out to be utterly dependent and almost incapable of blowing their own noses. Eventually you send them packing because they're much more work than babies. Or dogs.

Role playing is a different story. A man may love playing little bedwetter, little beggar, little badboy with a paid dominatrix. Men understand such bargains. The power game is clear. But to be dominated by a woman he shares a life with is disturbing. When role playing turns to reality, the problems start.

Is this an absolute rule? No rules are absolute. But it's a general enough condition to be worth noting.

Many men prefer strong women but they must nonetheless assert
some
area of control. Without it, sex is impossible and his eyes wander.

As a single breadwinner-mother I was about to learn all the things my fifties girlhood had failed to teach me. This was the most critical period of my life—the years in which all my body and brain cells changed and I became the mistress—not to say dominatrix—of my fate.

But before I could move into myself after divorce, my body had to shed its toxins. The years of dependency on parents, on grandparents, on men, manifested themselves in one colossal headache that was to last six months. Nothing got rid of it—not aspirin, not codeine, not Tofranil, not Nardil, not booze, not pot, not men.

For sleeping with men I didn't like enough to sleep with, there was pot. For hanging out with friends who weren't friends, there was booze. For the mornings, there was aspirin. For the night, there was Valium and codeine. My head rebelled. It throbbed like a pulsar in space. Every anodyne made it more determined to ache. It
needed
to feel this pain. That was the cosmic message. As long as I failed to listen, it beat invisible drums on my skull.

The body is wiser than its inhabitant. The body is the soul. We ignore its aches, its pains, its eruptions, because we fear the truth.

The body is God's messenger.

I found a young medical student with a splendid appendage and a refrigerator full of magic mushrooms. With him, I dived into the salad days I'd never had in school. The salads were black and fungoid, bitter to the tongue. But they brought oblivion. I had missed the sixties. This was my way of recapturing my youth.

But the medical student, sweet as he was, couldn't cure my headache. It was bigger than I was. It was Gogol's nose—a metaphysical headache. It was the headache of my destiny. It was the headache my life had become.

The headache was a sign of blocked self-knowledge. Where was Dr. Mitscherlich now? Too far away to help me. III in Germany. Soon to be dead.

My head was bursting; did someone want to be born? Was Athena getting ready to burst forth? Or was it Pandora? Was I to be a warrior woman or only the bearer of a box of ills?

Perhaps depression in women is an unacknowledged passion for rebirth. Something is pressing to appear. It is not the baby; it can only be the mother.

Motherhood stimulates all our old fears of abandonment. When motherhood leads to divorce, abandonment is proved not merely a fear but the deepest truth we know. Spelunking through the primal caves of myself, I found a crying infant. It was not my daughter. It was me.

So the odyssey began—a seven-year cycle of death, resurrection, and birth. The last seven-year cycle had produced Molly. The next produced me.

At thirty-nine, I learned how to change a tire, how to shovel snow, how to stack wood. I learned how to meet a deadline without a shoulder to whine on. I became obsessed with firewood. If only there was always a fire in the fireplace, I knew that everything would be all right.

Prometheus must have been a woman. I reverted to my ancient nature: inventing fire all day, having my liver plucked out all night.

Before departing, Jon had fired Lula. He fired her because he knew my work depended on her. Two writers in one house is hardly comfortable. When one is a man and the other a woman, the nanny, as well as the child, becomes a pawn.

The nannies came and went. They didn't like being stranded in the country any more than I did. They didn't care whether I finished a book or not. They had come to America to find husbands or get degrees or green cards or stoned—the young ones anyway. The older ones were either as bizarre as recently released mental patients or else were chronically depressed. The rest left if you refused to pay them cash.

W. H. Auden once wrote that in his utopia, all the public statues would be of defunct chefs rather than condottieri. In my utopia, the public statues will be of women who led both public and private lives with equal zeal: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Margaret Mead, Hillary Rodham Clinton. (Zoë Baird is the Joan of Arc of having it all. She found child care, but the
wrong
child care. The only wonder is she found
any.
)

Of course, I suffered over paying another woman to watch my child—but how was I to feed us if I didn't work? I had become both my father
and
my mother. And both parents warred with each other inside my head.

All this is mundane: merely the ordinary experience of my whiplash generation. Caught between our mothers (who stayed home) and the next generation (who took the right to achieve for granted), we suffered all the transitions of women's history inside our skulls.
Whatever
we did felt wrong. And whatever we did was fiercely criticized.

A woman's ability to achieve depends on childlessness or child care. In America, where we don't believe in an underclass to do “women's work,” women themselves become the underclass. For love.

Nobody doubts the love is real. It's for our children. But we are supposed to do it invisibly and never mention it. Alfred North Whitehead, who wasn't a woman, after all, said that the truth of a society is what cannot be said. And women's work still cannot be said. It's called
whining—
even by other women. It's called
self-indulgence—
even by other women. Perhaps women writers are hated because abstraction makes oppression possible and we
refuse
to be abstract. How can we be? Our struggles are concrete: food, fire, babies, a room of one's own. These basics are rare—even for the privileged. It is nothing short of a miracle every time a woman with a child finishes a book.

Our lives—from the baby to the writing desk—are the lives of the majority of humanity: never enough time to think, eternal exhaustion. The cared-for male elite, with female slaves to tend their bodily needs, can hardly credit our difficulties as “real.” “Real” is the deficit, oil wars in the Middle East, or how much of our children's milk the Pentagon shall get.

This is the true division in the world today: between those who carelessly say “Third World” believing themselves part of the “First,” and those who know they
are
the Third World—wherever they live.

Women everywhere are the “Third World.” In my country, where most women do not think themselves part of it, they are mostly third, trapped in the myth of being “first.”

Before I had a child I was trapped in that myth as well. I took my privilege for granted. Only after Molly's birth did I know it for the myth it was. Only then did I merge with my mother.

After Lula, there were several nannies I would not leave my daughter with, and then came Mary Poppins, aka Bridget-from-Brighton. Bridget-from-Brighton had big boobs, black hair, red lips, and a pretty heart-shaped face. She soon fell in love with the electrician who was helping to build my treehouse study. Soon after, they left for New Hampshire with his six-packs, his truck, his tools, her recipes for tomato quiche, lemon curd, and flan, and her willingness to serve (if not me) a man. Her boyfriend was jealous of Molly;
he
wanted a nanny.

How else could these two fairly responsible young people have left my baby sitting in the bathtub and gone downstairs to load a truck? With that maternal sixth sense that lives in the adrenals, I raced out of my study to find my daughter gurgling and cooing at the bubbles in her bath. What if I had found her under them? As the nanny and the electrician departed, they ran over my beloved Poochkin—my first child, my familiar. Yelping like a lost soul, he died on the vet's table. I hardly knew if he had died or I had.

Poochkin was gone, but Molly got older, as children do. I learned to write from dawn to dawn on her weekends with her dad. I changed my hours of tranced concentration by sheer will. (Like George Sand, like all writer-mothers, I wrote all night and collapsed on the divan at dawn.) I stopped sleeping. But what is sleep when your bichon's ghost whimpers at the door through long, rainy nights? Buffy had departed with Jon; Poochkin died under the wheels of the babysitter's boyfriend's van (to be replaced—but of course never really replaced—by Emily Doggenson, a champion bichon bitch, and Poochini, the sweet runt of her litter). Of course, you can't really replace dogs any more than you can people; each one has its own special personality and smell. No wonder our deepest losses are always heralded by dogs. We make them into poems and we go on.

And then the Mother Goddess—oddly absent for a time—returned, relented, and sent me Margaret.

She came, I later discovered, because her daughter, who is psychic, had seen an ad in the
Bridgeport Post.
“I think that's for you, Mom,” she said.

“A nanny?” said Margaret. “I have no training as a nanny.”

“But you raised four children, Mom, and you love to read.”

Apparently the agency had run an ad with “famous writer” in the lead. Kim and her mother perhaps expected a man. Or maybe not. The vibes were right. Kim foresaw some light for us all in the next few years. Molly would grow. I would write. No dogs would die.

When I met Margaret I knew she was for real and I was blessed. She had clear blue eyes that instantly met mine. Widowed almost a year, having nursed “my Bob” through Lou Gehrig's disease, Margaret needed a child to raise as much as I needed a Margaret. Her husband had fallen ill almost as soon as he retired. Two years of degeneration followed, then his drawn-out dying.

Depressed and lonely in Florida, Margaret was deep in grief when I met her. She went to Al-Anon meetings to learn how to stop raging at God. She learned how to affirm, not deny.

As the wife of a long-distance trucker who drove an eighteen-wheeler, she was used to running everything and making quick decisions. She had lost one baby and kept four others. She had surrendered to her life as I had not. She was sent to teach me how.