Authors: Nancy Thayer
The symposium passed by me in a blur: mornings and afternoons spent listening to papers and discussions; lunch and dinner spent trying to be charming and complimentary to the others at my table; evenings—evenings were best—spent simply watching the famous people get drunk and show off or argue or tell long intimate, personal tales. I tried so hard to absorb all that knowledge that my head continually ached, and I faithfully scribbled notes in a small red binder, but what I carried away from that 1966 conference was a knowledge that I couldn’t yet assimilate, couldn’t yet understand, couldn’t yet use.
I learned that many famous intellectuals are silly little babies, full of pride and defences and wanting more than anything else some sort of woman to take care of their typing, plane schedules, laundry, and sexual needs, not necessarily in that order of importance.
I learned that a naïve young woman can deserve the company of a Nobel Prize winner if she’s pretty, and young, and willing to listen with a look of total awe on her face.
I learned that at symposia there were several sorts of men but only two kinds of women, excluding the hotel waitresses. There were the smart ones, who were the participants, and there were the pretty ones, who were the wives.
When I first entered the dining room, I felt relieved to see women sprinkled here and there among the men. Back home there had been only three women in a master’s program of twenty-two. The odds here seemed about the same, and it didn’t surprise me. What did surprise me, what did ever so slowly sink into my thick skull as the days passed and the participants were introduced to deliver their papers, was that there was not one woman participant that I would have wanted to be. There was a sweet, tired, serenely grieving nun, Sister Grace Anthony Morrow, a specialist in linguistics. There was a tall, wide woman from the U.S. Army, specializing in foreign affairs; she was forty-one and
single and wore thick glasses and heavy dark suits and had her hair cropped like a man’s. There was a German woman, who wore her hair pulled back into a tight bun and who never smiled. She was a specialist in education, as was her husband, who was also at the symposium. They had written several books together, but they never smiled at each other, or touched, or even sat together. They were competitive with each other; sometimes they argued with each other in a language other than English, snapping at each other sharply, quickly, like a pair of rival dogs. There was a small Japanese woman whose lecture I didn’t attend. She was older, and she was exceptionally quiet. I don’t think she understood English very well. And there was an almost pretty sociologist, a woman who hid herself behind loose dark clothes and glasses that kept falling off. She trembled so much when she stood to present her paper that no one could understand what she said. She took her lunch in her room, and went to her room every night right after dinner, and left the symposium a day early. A famous woman anthropologist had been planning to come, but had fallen ill, and her huge, amusing, genial, womanizing anthropologist ex-husband came instead.
I learned that I liked being considered pretty, and I liked being smiled at by men. I liked being cheerful and helpful and warm. I liked having Charlie look at me in a special way, touch me in a special way; I liked having Charlie love me. If a woman had to lose all that in order to reach the top of her profession, I wasn’t so sure I wanted to start the climb.
The most attractive woman there was a wife. Other wives were there, of course, mostly following their husbands around saying, “Of course, dear, I’ll run back to the room and get it for you,” or, “Do you need a pill, dear? I’ve got one right here in my purse.” But the most attractive woman there didn’t do that. She smiled at her husband and leaned against him fondly when they were together, but she didn’t fetch and carry for him. She was a tall, slim woman in her late thirties who had long blond hair and eyes as blue and warming as a summer sky. Men congregated around her; she was witty and intelligent and kind. And she seemed wonderfully together, wonderfully self-sufficient. She attended only a few of the lectures, and spent most of the days reading by herself in the hotel’s wicker and green solarium. I admired her for three days, almost wanting not to get to know her, not to ruin the spell. I wanted to be like her, obviously beautiful, warm,
confident, serene, and obviously, kindly, intelligent. When I finally got up the courage to interrupt her reading in the solarium, I was amazed at what she revealed.
“How nice of you to come chat with me,” she said. She put her book down and pulled some bright yarns out of a batik bag. “I’ve been ignoring my knitting. I love to read, but I’ve got to get this sweater done.”
Her name was Alice. And she had six children. She was enjoying a week away from them; it was a bliss to have someone else cook, not to wake up in the night, but she had to confess that she missed them all dreadfully.
“But—but—” I stammered, and then blurted honestly, “You’re always throwing out the most marvelous quotes from Plato or Montaigne! How can you—”
Alice laughed, delighted. “I’m a Leader of a Great Books Discussion Club for teenagers,” she said. “This is my fourth year of doing the classics. After four years things start to stick. It certainly does fool everyone, doesn’t it?”
Alice thought that children were endlessly fascinating, and actually pitied the intellectual men for their dried-up, fusty-dusty, nitpicky lives. She liked to cook and bake and make jelly, to sew, to touch and mold textures and colors into something unique and new. She loved being pregnant, giving birth, nursing, playing with the children.
“Oh, I love to read and think,” she said, “but I infinitely prefer
life
.”
I fell in love with her, a little bit. We traded addresses and secrets and agreed to correspond. It wasn’t until years and years had gone by that she accidentally let the secret of her maternal joyfulness slip. Actually, she hadn’t intended for it to be a secret, she hadn’t really thought about it at all as entering into the picture. What it—her secret, was, was money. She was married to a professor, and professors seldom make much money. But she was the daughter of a New England insurance executive and she had lots and lots and lots and lots of her own money. Which she spent for babysitters and household help. Whenever she wanted. So that there was actually a world of difference between her and any other mother who on any given day cannot afford to say, “Connie? Come over and watch the children today, will you? I think I’m coming down with a little cold; I’m going to make some rose hip tea and go read a book in bed and see if I can’t get rid of it before it gets worse.”
But I didn’t know that then. I was desperately searching for models, I suppose. I
suppose that’s why I fell in love with her. Of course I wasn’t the only woman, or man, who did. Several of the famous men practically fell over their feet trying to offer her a chair when she entered the room. Two of the most famous men, men so big in the intellectual world that they would have to be called planets rather than simple stars, brought her drinks and beamed down on her with open admiration. Years later I discovered why, yet another secret: Alice had been sleeping with them at the symposium. She had gone to their rooms—on two different nights, of course—and shared a bottle of gin with one and two bottles of champagne with another and screwed them both silly. Alice loved to screw strangers, especially important ones. She always had fun at conferences; she had a powerhouse of memories that she savored like Polish vodka on a cold rainy day.
But at the symposium in 1966, I wasn’t aware of all of Alice’s secrets; those wouldn’t be revealed for years. I was aware of only the obvious: there were smart women; there were pretty women; and the only woman who combined both qualities was a woman who had six children.
“Women are concerned with the interior of things; men with the exterior,” a famous psychologist told me gently, benignly, like God talking to a child. “This is only right, only natural, my dear. Think of your body.”
I was too dazzled by his mere presence to question or argue. One of the other things I learned at the symposium was that although famous intellectuals might be silly little babies, demanding and egotistical, arrogant and defensive, they could also be wonderfully handsome and rivetingly powerful. Age only made them more distinguished; fat tummies made them seem only more solid, more significantly secure. The Europeans especially had beautiful, expensive, elegant clothes and charming courtly manners. If my mind said, What a prick that guy is, my body still said, Oh, you bet, pant, pant, let’s just go stand near him some more and let the radiation jingle over us.
I learned that my body quite often disagreed with my mind. I was just twenty-three. I thought I’d develop more control over my body as I got older. What a fool I was.
So I learned nothing at the symposium that really helped me at that time of my life with my own personal problems. Charlie, of course, always tried to help in his own vague, preoccupied way, but I knew he didn’t understand my problem. I could barely
come clear about it myself; it had something to do with wanting to see the famous woman intellectual the summer before. It had something to do with being a smart little female Methodist from Kansas.
I had turned twenty-three that winter, and had begun work on my master’s degree, and after the first excitement died down and I realized I could easily handle the work, I looked around the department and noticed that all the professors, every single one, were male. And there were only two other women entering the master’s program. One was named Sylvia. Sylvia was skinny and homely and intense. She had a wart, an honest-to-God wart, on the end of her nose. Poor girl. She looked like a comic book witch. She wore nothing but gray, brown, or black. She was fiercely unfriendly and competitive. To be fair, I think she was very poor, and this was her only way up and out. Also, to be fair, she knew a great deal more than I, was a much more serious student. I always thought that love was the most important thing; I still do. Love, first. And also laughter. But Sylvia put literary criticism first, with her teeth clenched. She had no laughter, not even for Chaucer. She did not talk to me, not even if I started the conversation. She never sat next to me in class, as if I had something hideously contagious about me. I thought she was more amusing, in her own wart-nosed way, than anything else.
In fact Linda, the other woman MA candidate, used to laugh with me about Sylvia behind Sylvia’s back. Linda was a real whiz kid, a woman much quicker than either Sylvia or I. Her brain was always racing, zip, zing, zap; she could make analogies and describe similarities between any two poets or dramatists or novelists one could name. She operated on instinct, mostly. And she was gorgeous, in a strident, plump way. She was wealthy. She was like a great big red-haired sexpot running on a Mercedes 450SL engine. She didn’t belong in a master’s program. She didn’t give a shit about her studies. Nothing was serious to her: she had all that money, and a big diamond ring from a law student, and she was just filling time until her fiancé got out of school and they could have a large expensive wedding. She wrote her papers on topics such as “Metaphors in Ben Jonson’s Plays: Scatology, Bugs, Muck, and Gore.” She openly flirted with the professors and the other graduate students. She attended all kinds of rallies and sit-ins, not out of concern but out of boredom. She was a high-powered lady, but a high-powered
lady
all the same: there were vestiges of the old South in her wealthy family, and she had
been brought up to be a tease, a flirt, a wife, a mother, and a generally good-looking sweet-talking amusing little thing who always kept her white gloves clean. It was almost too bad that she was so brilliant; it only made her flighty and discontented with everything. She would have gone nuts teaching the freshman courses I loved; nothing that routine could have held her interest. In a way I felt more sympathy for her than I did for Sylvia: Sylvia would eventually find a job, and would turn out one well-researched and yawningly dull but thorough paper a year. She would be stolidly content. But Linda was like a flamingo on a farmyard pond. She would never be content. Not with anything. It was only a matter of months, I knew, before she’d get herself knocked up simply to get some action, have a new experience, create a little drama, and force a big showy wedding out of everyone before her fiancé finished law school and she finished her master’s. Then she’d be home with a baby for entertainment. I wouldn’t have wanted to be that baby.
I wouldn’t have wanted to be Linda, or Sylvia, and that was the point. Some of the nineteen male graduate students were married, some weren’t and liked to flirt, some were smart, some were dumb, but they were all set on some kind of track that they’d seen other men run first. As a Methodist from Kansas, I had already derailed myself enough by marrying a divorced man fifteen years older than I and leaving the safety of my sorority and home. I knew what I wanted to do, but I was rather afraid that the sky might fall in. My best friend from college had stopped working on her master’s in psychology in order to have babies and work in her home as a typist to help meet the expenses while her husband went through med school. My own mother was now a successful research administrator for a hospital, but she hadn’t begun her work until all of her children were happily at high school or college and so almost out of the cozy nest she’d built for us. My grandmothers had both gone to college, which had been unusual in their times, and my mother’s mother had even published a few essays on the history of Oklahoma and Kansas in historical journals. But both grandmothers had married and had children and kept house all their lives, with church and book club meetings as their only outside activities. When I married Charlie, my mother’s mother said to me, “Honey, I know your parents are upset about your marrying this man, but you just hurry up and have a baby and everything will be fine. There’s nothing like a nice new baby to get everyone to make up.” And the minister of the church we belonged to, the nice Methodist minister, said to
me the week before I married Charlie, “Well, my dear, since you are so set on doing this thing, see that you do it well. Marriage is a sacred trust. It will be up to you as the woman to create a home, a loving atmosphere for you and your husband and your children—”