High Tide in Tucson (13 page)

So what was the point, exactly? I found myself brooding a lot, those first early mornings in my Boston hotel room. Why go public with something you know perfectly well you're not doing all that well? Why should good writers play mediocre music? If this is multitasking, I might as well go home and sing “Dock of the Bay” while doing something useful, like banging on the washer.

 

My rationale, which came to me long after the fact, has to do with a desire to jump fences and graze a lot of pastures, both greener and thornier than the one where I supposedly belong. It looked as if we could raise a huge amount of money to promote literacy, and also I did need a break from an unhappy, hardscrabble time in my life. But those aren't reasons enough. I did it because I want to be exactly what I am—a writer who does other things. Not just a soup-of-the-day double-tasker, Breadwinner Mom;
that's the default option. If I can also be, for one brief moment, Literary Rock Goddess, why not go for broke?

I've spent my life hiding a closetful of other lives. When I entered graduate school in biology in my early twenties, my committee looked long and hard down their noses at my interest in creative writing. And now that I make my way mostly as a writer, it's considered comical or suspect that I have degrees in science. When I speak in public, I'm frequently introduced by someone who will make a point of revealing my checkered past: archaeologist, typesetter, medical technician, translator, biological field researcher, artist's model. The audience generally laughs, and I do too. It seems ridiculous to add music to the list, but it's on there. In 1973, I went to college on a music scholarship. I studied classical piano performance, music theory, and composition at DePauw University for two years, until it occurred to me that all the classical pianists in the U.S. were going to have a shot at, maybe, eleven good jobs, and the rest of us would wind up tinkling through “The Shadow of Your Smile” in a hotel lobby. So I switched to zoology. It seemed practical. I could just as happily have gone over to literature or anthropology or botany. I'm in awe of those people who seem bent from early childhood upon a passionate vocational path. My father, the M.D., tells me that as a first grader he blew up his toy soldiers for the sole purpose of patching them back together. When
I
was a child, if anyone asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would reply first of all that I didn't think I would grow up, but on the off chance it happened, I planned to be a farmer and a ballerina and a writer and a doctor and a musician and a zookeeper.

This is not the right answer. I know that now. “Philosopher-king,” you might as well say. “Sword swallower—stockbroker. Wrestler-art historian.” A business card that lists more than one
profession does not go down well in the grown-up set. We're supposed to have one main thing we do well, and it's okay to have hobbies if they are victimless and don't get out of hand, but to confess to disparate passions is generally taken in our society as a sign of attention deficit disorder.

For all the years I studied and worked as a scientist, I wrote poems in the margins of my chemistry texts and field notebooks. But I never identified myself as a poet, not even to myself. It would have seemed self-indulgent. Thoreau was unabashedly both scientific and literary; so was Darwin. But something has happened since then. Life is faster and more streamlined, and there is too much we have to know, just to get the job done right. To get
one job
done right, let alone seven or eight. And certainly we are supposed to get it right.

For all the years I've worked as a writer, I've also played at keyboards and the odd wind instrument, and lately even conga drums. I have sung in the shower. (I sound
great
in the shower.) I have howled backup to Annie Lennox and Randy Travis and Rory Block in my car. I've played in garage bands and jammed informally with musician friends, and with them have even written and recorded a few original songs. But I've
never
called myself a musician. It's not the one thing I do best.

As I get comfortable with the middle stretch of my life, though, it's occurred to me that this is the only one I'm going to get. I'd better open the closet door and invite my other selves to the table, even if it looks undignified or flaky. Possibly this is what's regarded as midlife crisis, but I'm not looking for a new me, just owning up to all the old ones. I
like
playing music. The music I make has not so far been nominated as a significant contribution to our planet, but it's fun.

I've seen those books on multigenre genius: paintings by
Henry James, poetry by Picasso. But I'm not talking about them, I mean the rest of us. I'd like to think it's okay to do a lot of different kinds of things, even if we're not operating at the genius level in every case. I'd like to think we're allowed to have particolored days and renaissance lives, without a constant worry over quality control. If the Rock Bottom Remainders were a role model of any kind, I think that was our department: we went on record as half-bad musicians having wholehearted lives.

 

Thursday night, before our opening show at Shooters Waterfront Café, I bore well in mind the Richard Nelson scenario of What Is the Worst That Could Happen. But that doesn't begin to cover it. You have to picture the whole thing: in our jitters, the men have turned to alcohol and the women to makeup. We have regressed to Girls in the Bathroom mode—sharing hair stuff, asking if this looks okay, relying heavily on each other for fashion advice and kind oversight. This, I imagine, is what other girls did in high school before a big date. I didn't. I skipped the Junior Prom and read Flannery O'Connor. In 1972 I was into blue jeans and defiance, having found that the best defense, where an uninspiring social life was concerned, was a good offense.

My position in this band is ideal: I'm not a Remainder-ette, so I don't do gold lamé and I don't have to be called upon by Al, in rehearsal, as “
Girls!
” At sound check I always tune up with the guys. But on the bus and in the hotel and right now in the dressing room I am definitely
girls
. Lorraine Battle (wardrobe roadie) is giving me a lesson in remedial makeup. I look in the mirror, blink twice as my glamorous big sister smiles back at me. Finally we leave this war-torn dressing room and crowd out onto the back
stage bridge, and the guys all hoot at us. I find out what I was missing, in 1972, while I had my nose in a book.

We line up and wait for Roy to introduce us, so that one by one we can run out on the blinding-bright stage and be socked with a roar of cheers. I am invulnerable and supremely transformed: I take the stairs by twos, land onstage in my black lace leggings and long black no-finger gloves, and blow a kiss to the audience. I can't
wait
to sing “Dock of the Bay.” I could dance on a table tonight, or roll the Big Boy down the street with impunity. I feel overtly beloved. I lean into my piano and lead out on “Money,” and when the bass and guitar kick in I am moving dead center with the In Crowd. I am a river in spring flood season. I may not stop this, ever.

Listen, I could have stayed home and read a book, or plugged earphones into my synthesizer and played “Nadine” to myself, after I put my kid to bed. I almost did. But how many times in your life do you get to be audacious? And really, if you were a kid, would you mind so much if your Girl Scout of a Mom just
once
ran off to be a rock star for two weeks, as long as you got to see the pictures? Think of the ammunition you'd have against her, when your time came.

My daughter thinks it's way cool that I did it. And now that it's over, so do I. The thrill of the Rock Bottom Remainders, for me, was that a crew of mild-mannered writers were audacious
together
. We loved each other for the risks we took, and liked ourselves all right too. I must have sought it out in the middle of my winter, like a seedling straining for sun, because somewhere in my heart's damp basement I knew it's what I needed: Tad's enormous eyes, wide and starry with mascara, smiling at mine in the dressing-room mirror as we prayed we'd hit our notes. Amy in her leather, chin tipped up, glancing over at me for her cue. Steve's
little wink when he takes over the whistle reprise on “Dock of the Bay.” Dave's grin and Ridley's smiling nod as we look at each other and move, smooth as silk, from A major into the F sharp minor bridge that we
always
screwed up in rehearsal.

Look at us, we are saying to each other. This is really happening. This amazing and joyful noise that has got all those people jammed together and sweating and howling and bumping and grinding is coming from
us
. We are here, right now. We are the ones.

In the catalog of family values, where do we rank an occasion like this? A curly-haired boy who wanted to run before he walked, age seven now, a soccer player scoring a winning goal. He turns to the bleachers with his fists in the air and a smile wide as a gap-toothed galaxy. His own cheering section of grown-ups and kids all leap to their feet and hug each other, delirious with love for this boy. He's Andy, my best friend's son. The cheering section includes his mother and her friends, his brother, his father and stepmother, a stepbrother and stepsister, and a grandparent. Lucky is the child with this many relatives on hand to hail a proud accomplishment. I'm there too, witnessing a family fortune. But in spite of myself, defensive words take shape in my head. I am thinking: I dare
anybody
to call this a broken home.

Families change, and remain the same. Why are our names for home so slow to catch up to the truth of where we live?

When I was a child, I had two parents who loved me without cease. One of them attended every excuse for attention I ever contrived, and the other made it to the ones with higher production values, like piano recitals and appendicitis. So I was a lucky child too. I played with a set of paper dolls called “The Family of Dolls,” four in number, who came with the factory-assigned names of Dad, Mom, Sis, and Junior. I think you know what they looked like, at least before I loved them to death and their heads fell off.

Now I've replaced the dolls with a life. I knit my days around my daughter's survival and happiness, and am proud to say her head is still on. But we aren't the Family of Dolls. Maybe you're not, either. And if not, even though you are statistically no oddity, it's probably been suggested to you in a hundred ways that yours isn't exactly a real family, but an impostor family, a harbinger of cultural ruin, a slapdash substitute—something like counterfeit money. Here at the tail end of our century, most of us are up to our ears in the noisy business of trying to support and love a thing called family. But there's a current in the air with ferocious moral force that finds its way even into political campaigns, claiming there is only one right way to do it, the Way It Has Always Been.

In the face of a thriving, particolored world, this narrow view is so pickled and absurd I'm astonished that it gets airplay. And I'm astonished that it still stings.

Every parent has endured the arrogance of a child-unfriendly grump sitting in judgment, explaining what those kids of ours really need (for example, “a good licking”). If we're polite, we move our crew to another bench in the park. If we're forthright
(as I am in my mind, only, for the rest of the day), we fix them with a sweet imperious stare and say, “Come back and let's talk about it after you've changed a thousand diapers.”

But it's harder somehow to shrug off the Family-of-Dolls Family Values crew when they judge (from their safe distance) that divorced people, blended families, gay families, and single parents are failures. That our children are at risk, and the whole arrangement is messy and embarrassing. A marriage that ends is not called “finished,” it's called
failed
. The children of this family may have been born to a happy union, but now they are called
the children of divorce
.

I had no idea how thoroughly these assumptions overlaid my culture until I went through divorce myself. I wrote to a friend: “This might be worse than being widowed. Overnight I've suffered the same losses—companionship, financial and practical support, my identity as a wife and partner, the future I'd taken for granted. I am lonely, grieving, and hard-pressed to take care of my household alone. But instead of bringing casseroles, people are acting like I had a fit and broke up the family china.”

Once upon a time I held these beliefs about divorce: that everyone who does it could have chosen not to do it. That it's a lazy way out of marital problems. That it selfishly puts personal happiness ahead of family integrity. Now I tremble for my ignorance. It's easy, in fortunate times, to forget about the ambush that could leave your head reeling: serious mental or physical illness, death in the family, abandonment, financial calamity, humiliation, violence, despair.

I started out like any child, intent on being the Family of Dolls. I set upon young womanhood believing in most of the doctrines of my generation: I wore my skirts four inches above the knee. I had that Barbie with her zebra-striped swimsuit and a
figure unlike anything found in nature. And I understood the Prince Charming Theory of Marriage, a quest for Mr. Right that ends smack dab where you find him. I did not completely understand that another whole story
begins
there, and no fairy tale prepared me for the combination of bad luck and persistent hope that would interrupt my dream and lead me to other arrangements. Like a cancer diagnosis, a dying marriage is a thing to fight, to deny, and finally, when there's no choice left, to dig in and survive. Casseroles would help. Likewise, I imagine it must be a painful reckoning in adolescence (or later on) to realize one's own true love will never look like the soft-focus fragrance ads because Prince Charming (surprise!) is a princess. Or vice versa. Or has skin the color your parents didn't want you messing with, except in the Crayola box.

It's awfully easy to hold in contempt the straw broken home, and that mythical category of persons who toss away nuclear family for the sheer fun of it. Even the legal terms we use have a suggestion of caprice. I resent the phrase “irreconcilable differences,” which suggests a stubborn refusal to accept a spouse's little quirks. This is specious. Every happily married couple I know has loads of irreconcilable differences. Negotiating where to set the thermostat is not the point. A nonfunctioning marriage is a slow asphyxiation. It is waking up despised each morning, listening to the pulse of your own loneliness before the radio begins to blare its raucous gospel that you're nothing if you aren't loved. It is sharing your airless house with the threat of suicide or other kinds of violence, while the ghost that whispers, “Leave here and destroy your children,” has passed over every door and nailed it shut. Disassembling a marriage in these circumstances is as much
fun
as amputating your own gangrenous leg. You do it, if you can, to save a life—or two, or more.

I know of no one who really went looking to hoe the harder row, especially the daunting one of single parenthood. Yet it seems to be the most American of customs to blame the burdened for their destiny. We'd like so desperately to believe in freedom and justice for all, we can hardly name that rogue bad luck, even when he's a close enough snake to bite us. In the wake of my divorce, some friends (even a few close ones) chose to vanish, rather than linger within striking distance of misfortune.

But most stuck around, bless their hearts, and if I'm any the wiser for my trials, it's from having learned the worth of steadfast friendship. And also, what not to say. The least helpful question is: “Did you want the divorce, or didn't you?” Did I want to keep that gangrenous leg, or not? How to explain, in a culture that venerates choice: two terrifying options are much worse than none at all. Give me any day the quick hand of cruel fate that will leave me scarred but blameless. As it was, I kept thinking of that wicked third-grade joke in which some boy comes up behind you and grabs your ear, starts in with a prolonged tug, and asks, “Do you want this ear any longer?”

Still, the friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of dearer stuff than the one who stays away. And generally, through all of it, you live. My favorite fictional character, Kate Vaiden (in the novel by Reynolds Price), advises: “Strength just comes in one brand—you stand up at sunrise and meet what they send you and keep your hair combed.”

Once you've weathered the straits, you get to cross the tricky juncture from casualty to survivor. If you're on your feet at the end of a year or two, and have begun putting together a happy new existence, those friends who were kind enough to feel sorry for you when you needed it must now accept you back to the
ranks of the living. If you're truly blessed, they will dance at your second wedding. Everybody else, for heaven's sake, should stop throwing stones.

 

Arguing about whether nontraditional families deserve pity or tolerance is a little like the medieval debate about left-handedness as a mark of the devil. Divorce, remarriage, single parenthood, gay parents, and blended families simply are. They're facts of our time. Some of the reasons listed by sociologists for these family reconstructions are: the idea of marriage as a romantic partnership rather than a pragmatic one; a shift in women's expectations, from servility to self-respect and independence; and longevity (prior to antibiotics no marriage was expected to last many decades—in Colonial days the average couple lived to be married less than twelve years). Add to all this, our growing sense of entitlement to happiness and safety from abuse. Most would agree these are all good things. Yet their result—a culture in which serial monogamy and the consequent reshaping of families are the norm—gets diagnosed as “failing.”

For many of us, once we have put ourselves Humpty-Dumpty-wise back together again, the main problem with our reorganized family is that other people think we have a problem. My daughter tells me the only time she's uncomfortable about being the child of divorced parents is when her friends say they feel sorry for her. It's a bizarre sympathy, given that half the kids in her school and nation are in the same boat, pursuing childish happiness with the same energy as their married-parent peers. When anyone asks how
she
feels about it, she spontaneously lists the benefits: our house is in the country and we have a dog, but she can go to her dad's neighborhood for the urban thrills of a
pool and sidewalks for roller-skating. What's more, she has three sets of grandparents!

Why is it surprising that a child would revel in a widened family and the right to feel at home in more than one house? Isn't it the opposite that should worry us—a child with no home at all, or too few resources to feel safe? The child at risk is the one whose parents are too immature themselves to guide wisely; too diminished by poverty to nurture; too far from opportunity to offer hope. The number of children in the U.S. living in poverty at this moment is almost unfathomably large: twenty percent. There are families among us that need help all right, and by no means are they new on the landscape. The rate at which teenage girls had babies in 1957 (ninety-six per thousand) was twice what it is now. That remarkable statistic is ignored by the religious right—probably because the teen birth rate was cut in half mainly by legalized abortion. In fact, the policy gatekeepers who coined the phrase “family values” have steadfastly ignored the desperation of too-small families, and since 1979 have steadily reduced the amount of financial support available to a single parent. But, this camp's most outspoken attacks seem aimed at the notion of families getting too complex, with add-ons and extras such as a gay parent's partner, or a remarried mother's new husband and his children.

To judge a family's value by its tidy symmetry is to purchase a book for its cover. There's no moral authority there. The famous family comprised of Dad, Mom, Sis, and Junior living as an isolated economic unit is not built on historical bedrock. In
The Way We Never Were
, Stephanie Coontz writes, “Whenever people propose that we go back to the traditional family, I always suggest that they pick a ballpark date for the family they have in mind.” Colonial families were tidily disciplined, but their members
(meaning everyone but infants) labored incessantly and died young. Then the Victorian family adopted a new division of labor, in which women's role was domestic and children were allowed time for study and play, but this was an upper-class construct supported by myriad slaves. Coontz writes, “For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish or German girl scrubbing floors…a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making ‘ladies' dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.”

The abolition of slavery brought slightly more democratic arrangements, in which extended families were harnessed together in cottage industries; at the turn of the century came a steep rise in child labor in mines and sweatshops. Twenty percent of American children lived in orphanages at the time; their parents were not necessarily dead, but couldn't afford to keep them.

During the Depression and up to the end of World War II, many millions of U.S. households were more multigenerational than nuclear. Women my grandmother's age were likely to live with a fluid assortment of elderly relatives, in-laws, siblings, and children. In many cases they spent virtually every waking hour working in the company of other women—a companionable scenario in which it would be easier, I imagine, to tolerate an estranged or difficult spouse. I'm reluctant to idealize a life of so much hard work and so little spousal intimacy, but its advantage may have been resilience. A family so large and varied would not easily be brought down by a single blow: it could absorb a death, long illness, an abandonment here or there, and any number of irreconcilable differences.

The Family of Dolls came along midcentury as a great American experiment. A booming economy required a mobile labor force and demanded that women surrender jobs to returning soldiers. Families came to be defined by a single breadwinner. They struck out for single-family homes at an earlier age than ever before, and in unprecedented numbers they raised children in suburban isolation. The nuclear family was launched to sink or swim.

More than a few sank. Social historians corroborate that the suburban family of the postwar economic boom, which we have recently selected as our definition of “traditional,” was no panacea. Twenty-five percent of Americans were poor in the mid-1950s, and as yet there were no food stamps. Sixty percent of the elderly lived on less than $l,000 a year, and most had no medical insurance. In the sequestered suburbs, alcoholism and sexual abuse of children were far more widespread than anyone imagined.