Fear of Fifty (7 page)

 

They thought I wasn't good enough, but they kept leaving us alone in the apartment.

 

I wrote some songs that got published, but I knew I was no Cole Porter or Lorenz Hart. No Irving Berlin. No Gershwin. Those were my gods. Look—I would have sold my soul to write “Mountain Greenery” or “Isn't It Romantic?” but all that came out was “The Lonely Little Music Box.”

 

I always hid my fear when I went out to sell myself. I expected to feel fear, but I knew never to let that control me. Everyone feels fear. In Jubilee, the biggest stars would drink out of silver hip flasks before the curtain went up. They were a mess. Fear was expected, predictable. You never expected not to feel fear. But you went on anyway. When I left show business and became a salesman, I never expected not to succeed. And when I started this business and figured out how you make money, I never expected not to make it.

 

I gave you what my parents couldn't give me—an education.

 

That. You can't win against powerful daughters who have their own opinion and you can't tell them who to marry—but you can make them get an education. At least that. If you wanted to go to medical school now—I'd still send you.

 

Maybe you'd feel differently about it now.

 

Look, you're a terrific writer, but you need a PR agent. It's all in the PR. And you got lousy PR. Look at Madonna. She's got no talent, but great PR. Why don't you call that Della Femina guy? He'll advise you.
He's an ad man, Dad, not a PR agent. He's an old friend of mine, but PR is not his line of work.

PR is everybody's line of work today. And somebody ought to handle you. What about the movie rights? How come they never made that movie? Books are fine, but who reads anymore? You need more than books to make a career.

 

I don't seem to be very lucky in show business. Every time someone wants to make a movie or play of my work, I waste years of my life and wind up in some legal mess. I can't communicate with Hollywood people. They don't speak my language. Or maybe I don't speak theirs. They can't understand why I'm attached to small details in my books
—
like the story or the characters
—
and I can't understand how they make so much money for being on the telephone. It's not a match.

Nonsense, you just have the wrong PR.

 

So we have made the same trip we always make: from him to me. Since I am the part of him that was meant to go out and conquer show business, he is critical of me, as he would be critical of himself. I bear the burden of his dreams and so he pushes and prods, never dreaming that I feel it as criticism. Once, when one of my books seemed not to be performing as predicted, I screamed at him on the phone: “You'll just have to love me whether or not I'm on the bestseller list!” I think the message got through. Never before had my father understood that when he tried to push me, I felt criticized. But parents can't help themselves. They see so clearly what their children can be, and they are so invested. I probably do the same thing with my daughter—pushing, prodding, seeming to be discontented with her, when in truth she is everything I wanted her to be and more: outspoken where I was shy, tough where I was timid, full of my dreams and ambitions, but with her own special spin. In short, she is my arrow into eternity—but she cannot see it that way.

 

I do? Well, I always thought you would do what I didn't do—and in a way you have—all except for the PR.

 

How can I explain to him that the vicissitudes of my career cannot be undone by mere “PR.” I have broken rules that are invisible to him because he is a man: written openly about sex, appropriated male picaresque adventures for women, poked fun at the sacred cows of our society. I have lived as I chose, married, divorced, remarried, divorced, remarried and divorced again—and, still worse, dared to write about my ex-husbands! That is the most heinous of my sins—not having done these things, but having confessed to them in print. It is for this that I am considered beyond the pale. No PR can fix this! It's nothing more or less than the fate of rebellious women. They used to stone us in the marketplace. In a way, they still do.

And he'd still send me to medical school! Should I consider that an insult or a compliment? And should I take him up on it? I might love being a doctor for the second part of my life. Writing is not an easy way to make a living.

And then it is late—3:30 almost, and we have to fly. My father pays the bill and we walk back to the showroom. I catch a cab and head uptown, with my reams of indecipherable notes and a tape recorder that, I realize, didn't pick up a word.

Very well. I will reconstruct the conversation as I always do anyway, writing fiction. It's all made up anyway. Especially the parts that sound real.

 

Looking back over this dialogue, I fear I may have made my father sound a bit too much like Mel Brooks's 2,000-Year-Old Man. But something else emerges, something that seems to have escaped me when I was younger. My parents each gave up an artistic ambition—his music, her painting—to create a family and a business together. And the business used both their talents—her designing and drawing and modeling and his knack for guessing trends and his salesmanship. The dolls became their joint product, like their daughters. It was a mom-and-pop operation. At the end of it all they still had each other—and nine grandchildren—and plenty of money. For kids who started out in the Depression, with parents who spoke Yiddish and Russian, that was nearly a miracle. More than that, it was their ideal of marriage: a partnership, a compromise, and, of course, a communist enterprise—from each according to his or her capacities, to each according to his or her needs. Neither one felt cheated at the end. (The middle is another story.) Each took credit for the other's success. Not many people in my generation have marriages like that. I never thought I would. And getting there was the hardest battle of my life. But I am getting ahead of the story. First, I have to tell you about my mother.

How hard it is to write about her and how necessary. And where do I begin? Then or now? And do I tell the story from my point of view or hers? We are so linked that it's hard to know the difference. I tell myself that my mother would never agree to be interviewed, that she would bitterly mock the idea. (I am to be proven wrong.) But I believe it was her frustration above all that propelled my success. Then she was both jealous of me and fiercely proud. She made me everything I am today—warts and all.

When did I first understand female limitations? From my mother. And when did I first understand I was destined in some way to become my mother? At puberty. Until then I was unfettered in my ambition and enthusiasm. I expected to be Edna St. Vincent Millay, Madame Curie, and Beatrice Webb all rolled into one. I expected to take the world by its ears and shake it until it said, Yes, Erica, yes, yes, yes, yes. And now I understand that my mother had had the same experience. But that because of the times in which she lived, she had gotten stuck in that experience as I did not—and her stuckness was one of the things that set me free.

 

I go back, back, back in time. I try to transcend the family myths and the communal screen memories and transport myself to a time I know chiefly through Henry Miller's life—not my parents' life—the Jazz Age, the Crash, the speakeasies, rolled stockings, and bootleg gin: 1929.

My mother was in art school at the National Academy of Design. A brunette with bobbed hair and big brown eyes and a fast mouth, she was the best draftswoman and painter in her class and she had every reason to win the top prizes—including the big traveling fellowship—the Prix de Rome. “Watch out for that Mirsky girl,” her art teacher used to say to the guys: “She'll beat you all.”

And my mother felt teased and tantalized by this because she knew (yet did not know) that her sex precluded her from ever being sent to Rome. When she won the bronze medal and was told—quite frankly (no one was ashamed to be sexist then)—that she hadn't won the Prix de Rome because, as a woman, she was expected to marry, bear children, and waste her gifts, she was enraged. That rage has powered my life—and also, in many ways, impeded it.

“I expected the world to beat a path to my door,” she always says. “But the world never does that. You have to make them come.”

Feminism was hot in my mother's time too. The twenties were a time of hope for women's rights. But those rights were never codified into law. And without law, feminism never sticks. My mother blamed herself for “her failures.” She never thought to blame history. And I never wanted to be as consumed with anger as she was. I wanted the power of sunlight, not the power of night. I wanted abundance, not scarcity; love, not fear. Sometimes I think my mother made my father quit show business so he would have to make the same renunciation she had made. If children were to hobble her, they should also hobble him. She would not accept the “womanly” role of enabler. She would not let him be an artist if she could not let herself be one. So the mother-daughter dynamic is a subject I can't avoid if I am to tell “all that David Copperfield kind of crap.” My mother's frustrations powered both my feminism and my writing. But much of the power came out of my anger and my competition: my desire to outdo her, my hatred of her capitulation to her femaleness, my desire to be different because I feared I was much too much like her.

Womanhood was a trap. If I was too much like her, I'd be trapped as she was. But if I rejected her example, I'd be a traitor to her love. I felt a fraud no matter which way I turned. I had to find a way to be like her and unlike her at the same time. 1 had to find a way to be both a girl and a boy.

In this I may be most typical of my whiplash generation. The models of motherhood we had did not serve us in the lives we led. Our mothers stayed home, but we hit the road. We were often the first female members of our families to stay in hotel rooms alone, to raise children alone, to face tax problems alone, to stare at the glass ceiling alone and wonder how to crash through. And we were guilty, and therefore ambivalent about our lives, because many of our mothers never got even that far.

When I talk to the members of my college class, the theme that comes up again and again is guilt toward our mothers.

“We are the sandwich generation,” one member of my Barnard class said at a little pre-reunion dinner we had to celebrate our fiftieth birthdays. “Our generation suffered because our mothers had nothing to look forward to at fifty,” said another. “We held ourselves back so as not to lose our mothers' love,” said another. “Mixed messages,” we all agreed. Mixed messages about competing and not competing, about making money and not making money, about assertiveness and subordination. These are the earmarks of the whiplash generation.

We held ourselves back in misplaced loyalty to our mothers, I think. Since they were not fully free to be assertive, we stayed chained to their limitations as if this bondage were a proof of love. (Often, in fact, we equated bondage with love.) In midlife, with time beating its wings at our backs, we finally snatched the courage to break free. We finally let go of that ambivalence that was our mothers' collective lot—and we crashed through the glass ceiling inside ourselves, to real freedom.

Contemporary American feminism pays a terrible price, I think, for its rejection of Freud. By labeling Freud a sexist and nothing more, and throwing out his revolutionary concept of the unconscious along with his sexism, we lose the very tools we need to understand what goes on between ourselves and our mothers. And without that understanding, it is hard to make feminism stick. A great undertow of ambivalence threatens us in all our achievements. Guilty about succeeding where our mothers failed, we sometimes unconsciously sabotage our success, just as we are about to taste its fruits. I fear that if we don't look at the generations psychologically, we are doomed to keep replaying the same old cycle of feminism and backlash in alternating generations.

In 1929, when my mother graduated art school and failed to win the prizes she deserved, the world was on a similar pivot between the newness of feminism and the old accustomed ways of male chauvinism. But ideas are only abstractions. They do not enter the body politic until they are carried along in the hearts of individual human beings. And those human beings were raised by parents of a different generation, with a different set of assumptions. Every person carries on an inner war between generations. And it is the outcome of that war that determines how and whether the world changes.

With women, this war is particularly acute. Women identify with their mothers automatically and powerfully, but they must also overthrow their mothers to become themselves. If each generation does the opposite of its mothers' generation, we shall continue to have the alternation of feminist generations and backlash generations we know so depressingly well. We shall continue on the same little toy track, never getting anywhere but going round and round.