Fear of Fifty (40 page)

My generation grew up with an imposed myth: the myth of happily ever after—always implying a man—a prince who someday comes (and makes you do the same).

Whether we wrote this myth or its opposite—there is no prince, and even if there is, he never comes, and even if he comes, he never makes you come—we were still seeing our lives in terms of this myth. Pro-prince or anti-prince, the terms of the debate were defined—and not by us. We tried to write other myths—someday my princess will come, or I am my own princess, so there—but they were all derivative. The armature of plot was the same. We were
reacting,
not creating. We had not expanded the terms in which we saw our lives.

Is there only one story? The prince comes or does not come? The princess replaces the prince? Solitude replaces them both?

Couldn't we find a story that has nothing to do with that, a story in which neither relationship nor renunciation of relationship was the be-all and end-all?

Apparently not. Our writers and philosophers thrashed through this territory and came up with new versions, not newly created myths.

Even our hypothesizers of cronehood and older womanhood had no new wrinkles on this old theme. Gail Sheehy said: You can still attract men after men-o-pause; Germaine Greer said: Who wants to anyway? But relationship was still the theme. Even Gloria Steinem admitted that she couldn't live just for The Movement. And Betty Friedan said that though old age was great, she wasn't giving up dancing. The women who had given up men had always liked women better anyway, or now discovered more kindness there, not realizing that after fifty, there's more kindness
everywhere
and even relationships with men, if you can find any, are kinder.

Perhaps in letting my unconscious dictate a picaresque model, I was reaching for a woman's life as rich, heroic, and many-splendored as an old-fashioned hero's life (even men rarely have such lives anymore), but my heroines also kept getting bogged down in relationships. Isadora learns about life after being ditched by a heartless bastard; Fanny learns heroism by rescuing her daughter; and Leila gets sober by sobering her impossible boyfriend.

Where is the woman who
self-
starts, who doesn't merely react, who lives her life for an ideal
apart
from relationship? Can we even imagine such a woman? And if we did imagine her, would our readers identify with her?

Last summer I found myself reliving my picaresque life—but this time with a difference.

My daughter and I had rented, sight unseen, a house on a hill of olive and cypress trees, in Tuscany, near Lucca. We were to arrive at the end of July, after two weeks of a teaching stint in Salzburg, and several days in Venice, Milan, Portofino. Two of Molly's friends were to join us, then Margaret, then my best friend. My husband was coming later, and eventually other friends.

We had rented near Lucca, not Venice (where I had spent so many years), because our friends Ken and Barbara Follett had rented there the previous year and had invited us to be houseguests in their grand villa. They never budged in August without their mingled brood of children, godchildren, nephews, in-laws, and children's friends. They also became a traveling Labour party conference, with people like Neil and Glenys Kinnock popping down for pasta, vino, and polemic.

We loved the sweetness of the countryside and the fact that it was not yet a ruined museum of death like Venice. We also liked the fact that Molly, my lonely-only, was with a crowd of kids. We loved Ken and Barbara, who are not only smart and talented but extremely kind and loyal.

Hot with the dust of the road, in a rented Opel wagon with a faulty shift and so-so brakes, Molly and I had made our way to Lucca. We had spent two days with the Folletts in their rented splendor in a nearby village. We had picked up Margaret and all her luggage at the Pisa airport and now we were bound for our Tuscan farmhouse with expectations higher than Miss Havisham's expectations of marriage. (Surely she'd be called Ms. Havisham today and would be in a twelve-step program to cure codependency.)

From the beautiful walled city, we headed north on an old road and began counting villages and vineyards, wine factories and farm-houses.

Turning right at what seemed to be a Tuscan Dogpatch on a road that kept falling away at curves over a dried-up river, we started up a rutted muddy road, made of loose rocks and irregular irrigation ditches, and promptly ran into a ditch. The Opel wagon stalled, started up again, hunkered down with a weary crunch. We three got out and pushed it back on the road only to drive into the next ditch—and the next.

An enormously fat fireman, still wearing his rubber gear and hat, ran out onto the cinder-block porch of Dogpatch Manse and started screaming in his pure Tuscan dialect, “
Questa macchina non va su quella strada
,” which we had figured out anyway.

Behind him came Signora Fireman with
la bambina
—who was howling because we'd awakened her.

We puttered up the hill, then stalled again, got out of the car, and were riveted by a precipice, nicely spaced with olive trees, underneath us.

I froze. A phobic driver at the best of times, I backed down the hill, hit a cinder block, and banged the rental car into submission. Then I sputtered into the by now very familiar ditch.

The fireman and his wife and baby were laughing.

But Molly persevered.

“I'm going up the hill to check it out, Mom,” she said, getting out of the car. I saw her broad shoulders and mane of red hair disappear around the curve of the rocky road. Ever since she grew four inches taller than I, she has been hard to dictate to. “Molly,” I screamed.

“Cool it, Mom!” she screamed back, like any picaresque heroine.

Presently, she rode back down the hill in a Land Rover, driven by a robust gentleman, the owner of the house. Molly was grinning. He looked perplexed.

“How curious,” he said. “Nobody has problems with this hill. C'mon, jump in, luv!”

“The rental agent never said we needed a jeep,” I said glumly, with what I hoped was an edge of menace. I already had thoughts of papers being filed for “non-disclosure,” but who would dare sue in Italy? It would take the rest of your life. I leapt in the Land Rover, and rode up the rutted hairpin hill to the Englishman's castle at the top.

It was a beamed Tuscan farmhouse with a view of heaven
—all
'
italiana.
I stared in awe. Then our landlord went down to rescue Margaret and our luggage.

“Hello, dearie!” said the lady of the house, as Molly and I trudged up the three flights of slate stairs to the Chiantishire dreamhouse.

Soon hubby returned driving our wagon—with Margaret in it—up the hill.

“Even with this car, it's a piece of cake,” says he.

“Nobody ever complained about the road before,” says the wife, looking like Mistress Quickly in her stretch bathing suit covered with cabbage roses. She had a double chin and a pouchy belly that none of the fitter menopause cheerleaders would approve of—nor would Lotte Berk and her fashionably anorexic East Siders. But she was comfortable with herself.

I start toward the house to take possession of what my shekels have leased.

“No you don't,” says Missus. “Not in my kitchen till the maid's mopped the floor. Not for love nor money, house proud little me.”

Her husband restrained me with a glass of white wine and bubbly water, and we sat down to a nice chat about how the real estate agent had rooked us both, overcharged me (six months in advance) and not paid
them,
but they hoped we liked the place anyway.

“Beautiful,” I said, and it was true.

Mr. and Mrs. couldn't have been more solicitous as we sat out there two more hours in the sun, with Margaret making conversation about the Queen, the Queen Mum, Princess Di, flaunting her membership in the Daughters of Scotia, and describing in detail the home of one of her aunts who lived in the heather and gorse country of the highlands and how her Scottish uncle passed away and when and where he was buried and what they all ate for tea after.

Conversation. It fills a lot of life's little gaps.

Eventually, toasted by the Tuscan sun, and addled by its grapes, we were ready to inspect the house.

“We built it out of a ruin,” said the husband.

And indeed, you could still see the chrysalis from which this butterfly had sprung. A shepherd's cottage on a hillside had become a bastion of Britishness, complete with Sky TV, MTV, CNN, shelves of videos, and road atlases, but few books except cookery and home repair (and the usual shelf of abandoned bestsellers left by the motley renters). There were celebrity ghostwritten tell-alls, books by generals and surgeons general, novels by fading movie stars, former cabinet ministers, and television evangelists. (Some were even current.) But the house was not less lit'ry for all that, since John Mortimer had rented it one year to write a book on Tuscany.

“I told you you should have studied Summer's Lease,” my husband heckled on the phone from New York.

“Who can
read
in New York?” I countered. “You have to go to Tuscany for that.”

In due time we were admitted to Weetabix Wonderland, with its astonishing views from all over the house. Cypress trees stepped down the hill, dark and spearlike against the leafy chestnuts and the silvery olive trees. Fuchsia and wisteria grew in profusion everywhere. Swallows careened from hilltop to hilltop against a broad expanse of pure blue sky. Who
wouldn't
have moved here from London? It was an English poet's dream of Italy.

The beds were lumpy, and the pillows were apparently made of the local Carrara marble. There were four double bedrooms, not seven as promised, and the term “double” was a reach. Fifteen people could sleep in this house only if they were very rowdy people and if some of them were sleeping on the terrace, under the pergola, or in the pool.

No matter. We were here to stay. Molly's friends were flying over. I had already paid in full, and this homey couple needed to winter over on Weetabix with my
soldi.

“Don't you just
love
this house, Mommy?” says Molly, who really does love it.

“It's cozy, not spooky, Mom,” she says. She is remembering the place we used to call Palazzo Erica in Venice—that crumbling
piano nobile
, with its secret tunnel to Piero's palazzo.

Palazzo Erica had one main thing to recommend it—the proximity of Piero, and the tiny studio off the walled rose garden where we could tryst while the family was ensconced upstairs. With a teenager in tow, I would never risk that. Suddenly my teenager has made me into a model matron, and I don't know whether I like it or resent it. Children want nothing but
everything—
heart, soul, genitals, MTV, and CNN. (And we mostly want to give it to them, too.)

“I saw this article in
Elle Décor,
Mom, or maybe it was another magazine, which says that you should always move the furniture around in a rented house. You should give it your own personality, it says.”

Molly is on doily patrol, snatching doilies from under every plant, every arrangement of dried flowers, banishing all doilies (do they still call them antimacassars?) to the cupboard drawers.

Then she is lining up apples on a beam as she saw in her decorating magazine. Then she is pushing the huge ugly dining room table against a wall to make a desk for me.

“You can write here, Mom, I know it!” she says, having suddenly become my co-conspirator, not my saboteur. She has fish of her own to fry—a villa full of English and South African boys over at Vorno, friends coming, her stepfather's promise to teach her to drive in Italy. (“If you can drive in Italy, you can drive
any
where,” she proudly tells her friend on the phone.) She
wants
Mommy writing now and out of her hair. She's become expert at using my perennial deadlines as a way of getting rid of me, yet also having me there when needed. The writer's child is infinitely resourceful, the writer's best creation for sure.

Molly is the picaresque heroine now, and I am Sancho Panza.

She is fixing up her house for her friends, trying on bathing suits to wear around the pool with the boys, thinking about the boy she met last year in Lucca. Will she have a life not centered on relationships? I doubt it. Already, she takes her happiness or sadness from passionate friendships; she fantasizes about boys; she wants a cozy house to bring her loved ones to.

But she navigates the road like any picaresque heroine and she can find airports and
autostrade
unhesitantly. She zips through Italian supermarkets in under an hour. She's plotted the way to the other villa—where the boys are.

She's on her own picaresque journey now, but already the point of her quest is to make a new home. She has taken all my deficiencies and made them into virtues: I get lost, so she does not; I am passionate and romantic, so she is pragmatic and cynical; I have lived for writing, so she lives for living. I like her much better than 1 like myself.

A few days later I have rented a jeep, mastered the road, got used to the beds, adopted a couple of semiferal cats, stocked the house with food, picked up the first of Molly's friends, and I am sitting in the moonlight watching the full moon rise, skewered by a dark cypress. Swallows still careen from hill to hill. The olive leaves flicker silver in the moonlight. The supposedly half-wild black cat with the cropped tail pounces up on my lap, butts my belly with her pointed muzzle, then puts her head on my lap for stroking and starts purring like a coffee grinder.

I am sitting at the outdoor dining table with my pad and pen. The full moon seems to be trying to disembowel itself on the cipressi but soon it rises above their apical points and makes a slow, silvery arc across the sky. I sit, enthralled, the cricket serenade ringing in my ears, as the moon moves to the opposite hill. I glance at my watch and note that three hours have passed. I have not written a line. Time always plays tricks like this in Italy. The rutted road, the Dogpatch at the bottom, the rocky beds, are all forgotten as the moon guides my eye through eternity.