Fear of Fifty (41 page)

In love with the landscape again, with the pleasures of blackish green, silver green, and the differing deep purples of the grapes and berries, I know why Italy always lured the poets. Death is not too great a price to pay for this beauty. I go to sleep with the full moon shining in my window and all the men I've loved on my dream dance card and invited to visit my bed. I miss my husband, but I know that it's important for us to spend some weeks apart every summer. It's a way of remembering who we are without each other. It enables us to have lives and fantasies that are not always interlocked.

The next morning, I am expecting my best friend to arrive from New York. Suddenly a panicked call comes from the Rome airport.

“I missed the plane to Pisa and I've rented a little disco-dude car to drive to Lucca. The only problem is, I'm so weak, I don't think I can make it....”

“What's the matter?”

“I'm bleeding,” she says worryingly. And then an explosion of static and we are cut off by the sadists who run—or fail to run—the Italian phone company. I pace around the pool waiting for the phone to ring again. I pull the phone outside by the pool and stare at it, hoping to make it ring. I putter in the hot sun, watering geraniums, slathering on sunblock. I pace and think. Since Gerri's husband died, I have felt responsible for her, yet there's no way I can reach her if she doesn't call back. I imagine her driving down the
autostrada
in the baking sun—even though she's too weak to drive. She will have rented an inexpensive car with no air-conditioning. Even sick, she could not be persuaded to hire a limousine and driver—since Gerri prides herself on her self-sufficiency. The “disco-dude car” probably has iffy brakes and a gearshift on the dashboard.

And then I look out over the Tuscan hills with their black cipressi and a feeling of peace comes over me.

Of course she's all right, I tell myself.

And I take a deep breath and begin scribbling in my notebook everything I remember about my years of friendship with Gerri.

 

We call each other best friends.

It is like being twelve, but strangely it is not. We share illnesses, breast lumps, houses, neurotic fears about our children, real fears about our children. We tell horrible secrets about our husbands, ex-husbands, dead husbands. We know the size of their cocks and how much money they make/made and whether they are/were glum or playful in bed and whether they snore/snored, whore/whored, and whether they remind/reminded us of long-dead/still-alive grandfathers, fathers, uncles, or brothers.

I have no brothers. She had two. One, funny and beautiful, died of AIDS. And she was the one elected to help him die. Her older brother alone remains. Gerri is a middle child like me.

But I had two sisters who often envied me, and she was always my good sister, who knew I had problems too. There's still sibling rivalry, but it rarely goes entirely unchecked. Not that we don't scream and fight and say horrible things to each other. In seventeen years, you'd have to say horrible things. But the other one always looks beyond the screaming. How we know to do that, I cannot say. I cannot always do it with my real sisters. Though lately, propelled by our sense of midlife mortality, we are building new bridges to each other.

Gerri and I met on a Sunday afternoon in the seventies. I was wearing an ivory crocheted string bathing suit with more holes than string and she was wearing a tank suit—probably Speedo. (She is a jock and I am not. She can never believe the blank looks I give her when she mentions famous ball players. Her whole family is composed of jocks. When they aren't throwing balls or watching people throw balls, they invest money: a world that baffles me as much as sports.)

When I met Gerri, the first thing I noticed were her enormous gray-green twinkly eyes, her curly red-brown hair, which surrounded her face like a coppery halo, her high cheekbones, her full mouth, which looked like an edible plum.

In a lot of ways we were opposites. She had three children and I then had none. She had always wanted to be a mother and was perplexed after motherhood stopped being a full-time job. I had never wanted to be a mother, but took her word that it was great. She was verbally quick and clever, but didn't feel my need to get everything down on paper. She was an athlete and I was a desk person. I could hardly believe she was Jewish. She skied like a WASP.

Pretty soon we discovered that we were almost the same age, that we had both gone to the same summer school in Florence, that we both loved Italy, ribald jokes, and vodka and orange juice on summer afternoons by the pool. We swam through pools of vodka like John Cheever's swimmer. We lived down the street from each other in Connecticut (where I lived all the time in those days). She was a weekend Connecticut person then.

I was living with Jon, and our relationship was then entirely blissful. We hadn't committed wedlock yet. We wrote all day at home, practiced yoga, took care of our two dogs and each other. She was married to David, a gorgeous hunk with muscles like Michelangelo's David, green eyes (one of which wandered—though not in the biblical sense), and she had three fabulous children: an athletic (and poetic) little girl named Jen and two raving boy jocks called Andy and Bob. They were the best kids I ever met: rambunctious, loving, smart.

We adopted each other at once.

Regarding my friend as an expert on motherhood, I asked her if I ought to have a baby. (Of course I already knew the answer. We never ask for advice otherwise.)

Unhesitatingly she said: “You'll never regret it.” Thus she became Molly's godmother—Jewish style—whatever that means. (I think it means trustee.)

When I was pregnant with Molly the following summer, she helped make the pregnancy into one long celebration. I remember days by her pool, with families mingled, and nights in my hot tub, when all four of us took sidelong glances at one another's naked bodies and decided our friendship was more important.

When Molly was born, Gerri and I bonded more closely. I understood now how she had spent what she considered the best days of her life. At that point, I was terrified of caring for an infant. I tried to imagine I was Gerri, but I was not. I could not always give that unbroken concentration children demand, but at least I had a model for it.

My own mind was chronically divided. When I was singing to my child, I heard the siren song of my book. When I was immersed in my book, I missed my child. Only occasionally did I fall into that rapt listening that is the principal gift of motherhood.

From the start, Gerri and I respected in each other talents the other had yearned for. She loved books and would have loved to make them. I read chapters of Fanny to her, and she encouraged me to keep going. Later, she invested the money it took to workshop the musical version. Whenever my work was endangered, she was there to rescue it.

I loved children and would have loved more of them. I adopted hers.

I got divorced; she never did. She turned fifty first. She lost a sibling first, a father first. She nursed me through divorce. I nursed her through her bereavements, crying with her for years after some of her other friends thought the crying should be over.

I went through terrible times with men, and she was always there. After her husband died, she was the only person besides Molly and Ken who could interrupt me when I was writing.

She felt stalked by death. I felt stalked by upheaval and abandonment. Sometimes the abandonment was at least partly of my own making, but I could not say the same of hers. I needed solitude just as much as she hated and feared it. Sometimes I drove men away so I could write. But she clung to her marriage, making it good even when it had the potential for going bad.

We shared an analyst—our own Mother Sugar—a sumptuous mama doll full of soothing bromides and fierce insights; she had tiny feet and flowing robes like a Delphic oracle. She was the high priestess of self-esteem and getting married. She also had an aversion to saying good-bye to patients.

With her Botero body and her tiny legs and feet, her serene, beautiful, aging face, she would cry when you told her sad stories about your life, met a special man, or made a “breakthrough.”

“I'm so proud of you,” she would say. She was the good mother nobody ever thought they had. She was perfect at everything but letting you go.

Who, anyway, can wholly be the mother you need? You can't even be your own mother. And with your own child, you find yourself doing all those terrible things your parents did. Sometimes I find myself screaming at Molly in my mother's voice.

“You sound like Grandma,” she says. “This is child abuse. I'm going now.”

Did I
really
say that she ought to be grateful for school because children in Bosnia can't go to school? Did I
really
tell her that Benetton, the Gap, and Calvin Klein were not spiritual destinations? Did I
really
say that at fifteen I was not allowed to buy custom-blended makeup? Did I
really
say that she was a spoiled brat?

Apparently, I did. The term “child abuse” did not exist in my time. Nor did “date rape,” “incest survivor,” and “politically correct.” How did we manage with only “Freudian slip,” “making out,” and “Momism”? We must have been verbally challenged. How did I ever stop my mother from yelling at me without the term “child abuse”?

Gerri and I had similar mothers: another bond. Both were loving but unpredictable wild creatures. Both could go off into the ozone. And suddenly come back. Both of us had to learn to live with this. Since we are both middle children, looking for our place in the family constellation, each of us found it by being the family clown. And neither of us has ever abandoned the
“Ridi, pagliaccio”
role. We both laugh to hide the pain.

And what is laughter anyway? Changing the angle of vision. That is what you love a friend for: the ability to change your angle of vision, bring back your best self when you feel worst, remind you of your strengths when you feel weak. And speak the truth—but without malice. Loving candor is the secret of friendship.

Our friendship began during the long green Connecticut summers and flourished like a big healthy weed. I was, I thought, only a passable mother (despite the fact that I won something called the Mother of the Year Award given by the Federation of Florists in 1982). But Gerri was one of the great mothers of all time. I was awed when I saw the way she could talk to a baby. I was so spastic with Molly at first. I was afraid that the key to the mystery of motherhood would be forever denied me. Molly was a robust baby, but I was always sure she would choke on a piece of bread or get a concussion tumbling from her crib. At about eleven months, she turned somersaults in her walker and flew down a stair onto her head on a tile floor. In a panic, I dialed the pediatrician.

“Does she have memory loss?” the pediatrician queried. Forgetting Molly was under a year, I quizzed her. She was crying. Was she remembering her birth trauma or was she brain dead? She cried more. Then she perked up and began to laugh.

“How do I tell if she has memory loss?” I asked the doctor.

“Make her count backwards.”

“She can't even count forward.”

“Oh. Who is this?”

“Molly—Molly Jong-Fast.”

“Oh, yes, that one, the redhead. I'm sure she'll be okay.”

How could I be a mother
and
a writer? I was always sure I couldn't be. The moment I stopped watching the baby, the baby would die. And the moment I stopped watching the book, the book would die. That was the way I lived the first decade of my daughter's life—both married and divorced. I was always sure I would be punished for my writing by having my beautiful daughter snatched away. When Jon began his crazy custody suit, I panicked.

I see the same fantasy of retribution in many women's novels. Usually it has to do with sex. In
August Is a Wicked Month,
Edna O'Brien's heroine goes to the South of France for her first holiday in years, and suddenly her son is killed. The son is on holiday with his father, but in women's fantasies, no one but a mother will do. In The Good Mother by Sue Miller, a similar archetype surfaces. The heroine reaches out for pleasure and thereby loses her daughter. The myth is deeply buried in our psyches. We cannot call it merely paranoiac because we are the generation for whom it often came true. We were punished for our independence and success with custody suits.

I half believed that ordinary things—like diagnosing a baby with fever—were beyond me. I was only put on earth to write, not to live, I thought. Gerri's greatest gift to me was giving me the courage to seize my life.

Gerri grew up in New Jersey, after all, so she knew things that a kid who grew up in Manhattan would never know—like driving at sixteen, buying wholesale, and how to be a
real
mother.

“Writing is easy compared to taking care of a baby all day,” I used to tell Gerri—who didn't think so. Soon after we met, she rented a little office and went to it every day, hoping to become a writer. I got pregnant with Molly. These were our tributes to each other.

She never became my competitor, nor I hers. An amateur mother with only one child, I never took even a month off from writing. And it was already too late for me to have three kids. For me, then, she was a road not taken—an earth mother like my older sister. She was proof that plenty of funny, literate, intelligent women might choose to focus their lives on motherhood.

Her life was a balance wheel to mine. From her I learned that feminism
had
to include women like her. From her I learned that just because a woman chooses to be a homemaker, it doesn't mean she wants an all-male Congress, or an all-male Supreme Court. My grandmother could have taught me that, but my grandfather had trained me not to listen to her.