Fear of Fifty (50 page)

 

It is a beautiful Indian summer day in mid-September—about a year after I have interviewed my father. We are at my house in Connecticut. My mother has been talking into a tape recorder at my urging. She has unwittingly spilled the beans about the feud with Kitty.

“So we all owe her a lot,” I say. “Without her, we wouldn't be
here.
”

“I suppose so,” says my mother, not meaning it.

There is another old quarrel between us: She resents my idealization of my grandfather, feeling I got the best of him somehow and never having resolved her bitterness toward him. She wants me to think of him as she does.

“But he was
different
to me,” I protest. “Can't I have my own view of him?”

Apparently not. Even when I'm fifty, interviewing my mother, hoping to get it straight for an autobiography, she is pissed off at my having my own point of view. Her viewpoint is the only right one.

“Why did you stay with them if you hated it so much?” I ask.

“It was the path of least resistance,” says my mother. “Eventually, we got away. And we never let them move back in.”

There is the smell of old blood in this feud, and I feel I will never get to the bottom of it. My grandparents are dead, but the feud remains alive. It has sapped all our energy for years and it remains memorialized in the names we call each other. I call my grandparents Mama and Papa—and my parents Eda and Seymour. In adulthood I have tried to call my parents Mother and Dad, but it feels like a secondary accretion—unnatural somehow. My grandparents still rule the roost—even though they are long dead.

My father has been itchy as my mother and I have sat together over the tape recorder. He has felt excluded. Now he wanders in, holding a card on which he has written a longish quote. He reads it aloud to me and my mother, as if it is a poem:

“Do you know who that is?” he asks.

And before either of us can answer, he replies, “Gore Vidal. A great writer. From his book 1876.”

“He's also had a tough time with the critics,” I say, hoping to comfort my father.

“Fuck ‘em,” my father bravely says. “You beat the odds once, you'll beat 'em again.”

“You nearly
died,”
my mother says, “being born.” Then she pauses and adds gravely: “But I wouldn't let any of my children die.”

It has been an extraordinarily mellow day. My mother has painted out on the deck—painted a watercolor of an overflowing barrel of nasturtiums. Ken has made everyone lunch and we have been comfortable in each other's company in a way that would have been impossible before I married him. Yet the divisions remain. I cannot truly imagine the limitations of my mother's or my grandmother's life and I cannot answer the perplexing question of why I have been so much freer than my mother and grandmother. I know there is something in the beating of daughters against maternal limitations that pushes us to find out who we are. I see my own daughter demolishing me, deconstructing me. She has to do this to get free of me. She mocks my absentmindedness, my tendency to worry, my perennial deadlines. She makes fun of my marriages, my friends, my ignoble reputation as a pornographer. She has to do these things to establish her identity in opposition to mine. This is the way she grows. I am the ground from which she pushes off. She has to tear me down to build the edifice of herself. For her, I am only a building site—which is how it should be.

 

Is love freedom or is it bondage?

This was the argument Ken and I had whenever we discussed getting married. And it is the essential argument, isn't it? “Love versus Freedom,” I wrote somewhere in the notes for this memoir: “How to remove the
versus.”

“If we know we love each other, it will be freedom,” Ken used to say. “What freedom to know who you are coming home to at night! What freedom not to have to fuss and fret about the basics of your life! What freedom to know that somebody loves you for who you are!”

At first, I fought him on this, thinking
how like a man.
Marriage, to me, had always meant bondage and submission, from which I could never wait to escape. A man might feel grounded in the same marriage a woman experienced as a trap.

But this time I swore it would be different. Our basic rules were different. I got married determined not to be that dread thing—a
wife.
I insisted on equal partnership, knowing that otherwise it would not work at all.

Yet early on in the marriage I found myself—despite all my self-promises—drifting into the role of wife: focusing on the renovations of the apartment, doing silly little domestic things instead of writing, using the wife role as cop-out from my work, my work which had always involved me in so much controversy and which some part of me longed to retreat from. I could blame Ken for this, but it was not Ken's fault. Rather, it was the wife-tropism in me. Even when I was forty-seven, full of my own power, my own identity, something in me
wanted
to escape from the fray and dwindle into a
wife.
It seemed so comfy, so safe. I was so tired of fighting. I drifted through the days, sleeping and shopping. I did not want to carry on the war.

Many fighting women have related this passage—the desire to subside and hide, the desire to let a man lead. Until I bearded this particular dragon in her cave, how could I even pretend to speak for other women?

I have asked myself again and again how it is possible that the women's revolution has started and stopped so many times in history—beginning with the suddenness of an earthquake and often dying away just as quickly. Women spill oceans of ink, change some laws, change some expectations—and then subside and become their grandmothers again. What is this dialectic that drives them? What is this guilt that causes them to sabotage their own gains? Or maybe it is not guilt. Maybe, as Margaret Mead says in
Blackberry Winter,
“the baby smiles so much.” Or maybe it is the emotional strain of having to fight the world every day.

The battle for women's rights has not yet been
won.
Women cannot see how cunning the patriarchal traps are until they season a little. Younger feminists like Naomi Wolf have underestimated how entrenched patriarchal power is and how often women assent to it in their own souls. They are not yet considering the whole arc of a woman's life. We assent to wifedom because we are so used to having someone to blame and so unused to freedom. We prefer self-punishment to the conquest of our fears. We prefer our anger to our freedom.

If women were totally conscious of the part of themselves that gives away power to men, the prediction of victory might prove true. But we are far from this self-knowledge. And we move further and further away as we retreat from the psychoanalytic model of the self. As long as we disclaim the importance of unconscious motivations, of the existence of the unconscious itself, we cannot root out the slave in ourselves. Freedom is hard to love. Freedom takes away all the excuses.

If this were conscious, everything would be easy—and easy to change. But it is deeply buried. We do not usually know that we value the male and devalue the female. We do not usually know that we are divided against ourselves. We do not know that we have internalized Papa as right and Mama as wrong.

Every book I have written has been written on the bleeding corpse of my grandmother. Every book has been written with guilt, powered by pain. Every book has been a baby I did not bear, ten thousand meals I did not cook, ten thousand beds I did not make. I wish, above all, to be undivided, to be whole (this, in fact, is the theme of all my work), but somewhere I remain divided. Like a person who once committed a terrible crime that went unpunished, I always wait for the ax to fall. In this, I suspect I am not unlike other women.

My grandmother died in 1969. Ten years later I wrote this poem, attempting to capture something of the feelings her example raised in me:

Now, decades later, these feelings are even stronger.

Where does this leave the female creator? In a quandary, as usual. My grandmother sits on my shoulder and I seek to silence her. She is reminding me of my duties: the school conference, the marketing, the creation of a nest, the care of the private sphere. But I need to work and to say no to my child. My husband has to cook and nurture too. He has to clean up too. Is there an androgynous freedom beyond female and male? Women and men both need it.

A memory from childhood drifts back through the synapses. I am lying in the big bed between my parents. Perhaps I am four or five. I have awakened with a nightmare, and my sleepy father has carried me into bed and placed me between himself and my mother.

Bliss. A foretaste of heaven. A memory of the amniotic ocean—the warmth of my mother's body on one side and of my father's on the other. (Freudians would say I am happy to separate them, and maybe they are right, but let us shelve that question for now.) It suffices to say that I am happy to be here in the primeval cave, bathed in the radiance of paradise.

Back, back in time. I lie looking up and the ceiling seems a kaleidoscope of diced peas and carrots—nursery food—comforting and warm. My parents' mingled smells and mine. Family pheromones. Familiar smells out of which we are born. For the moment, there is no world but this, no siblings, no teachers, no streets, no cars. Eden is here between my sleeping parents and there is no banishment in sight. I deliberately hold myself awake to savor the moment of
paradiso
threading through the
purgatorio
of everyday life, the inferno of school and sisters, of competitive sandbox wars, and of the cruelty of other children.

This is where we all begin—in the
paradiso
of childhood. And it is to this place that poetry seeks to return us. The poles of our being—love and death: the parental bed and the grave. Our passage is from one to the other.

My grandmother on my shoulder is upset. She doesn't want me to write these things. She believes the course of wisdom in a woman's life is to keep silent about all the truth she knows. It is dangerous, she has learned, to parade intimate knowledge. The clever woman smiles and keeps mum. My problem is that books don't get written that way. Especially not books containing any crumb of truth.

So we come back, inevitably, to the problem of women writing the truth. We must write the truth in order to validate our own feelings, our own lives, and we have only very recently earned those rights. And only provisionally. Dictators burn books because they know that books help people claim their feelings, and people who claim their feelings are harder to crush.

Patriarchal society has traditionally put a gag on women's public expression of feelings because silence compels obedience. My grandmother thinks she wants to protect me. She doesn't want to see me stoned in the marketplace. She doesn't want me pilloried for my words. She wants me safe so that I can save the next generation. She has a matriarch's interest in keeping our family alive.

Hush, Mama, the world has changed. We are claiming our own voices. We will speak not only for ourselves but also for you. And our daughters, we hope, will never have to kill
their
grandmothers.

 

I make a foray into the kitchen for butter-applesauce-and-powdered-sugar sandwiches while my older sister holds the fort (and the baby).

“What are you doing?” asks my grandmother.

“Oh, nothing,” I say, running back for cover with the sandwiches.

“Children!” calls my grandmother. “Children!”

We pretend not to hear.

“Children,”
she calls. “What are you playing?”

“Oh, nothing,” we say, munching our sandwiches in the closet, hiding from imaginary Nazis.

We cannot say that we are playing love and death. We would not even know how to form the words. But we are playing for our lives, playing for time, and playing as a way of learning life.

My older sister, who originated this game, was born in 1937. The world was on the edge of war when she first emerged into it, and she absorbed the threat of danger with our mother's milk. I followed her lead, as second children do. The details obsessed me: the baby bundled in the doll carriage, my mission to the kitchen to snatch the sandwiches, my mad dash back down the hall through imaginary woods, filled with imaginary Nazis, shouldering imaginary machine guns, my sense of my own importance as a survivor, provider, purveyor of food.