What Do Women Want? (5 page)

I predict that Hillary Rodham Clinton is eventually going to make as much of a difference as her role model, Eleanor Roosevelt. By acting as a lightning rod for all of us, she has fully expanded the possible roles for American women. Perhaps her position remains controversial, but it may end up changing the course of women’s history. If America eventually has a woman president, the credit will be, in large part, Hillary’s. She is getting us ready to accept female leaders who don’t hide their brains. She has gotten us ready to accept women who talk back in public. She has single-handedly revolutionized the political marriage.

I want to say,
Bravo, Hillary; you’re the latest incarnation of Ms. Liberty.
Thank you for enduring the slings and arrows of your outrageous fortune. Because of you, someday—as in Britain, Ireland, India, and Israel—even backward America will be able to elect a woman chief of state. It may even (Goddess willing) be you!

This essay has gone through many incarnations. Originally, I wrote about Hillary for the
New York Observer,
then for
The Sunday Times,
then again for the
New York Observer,
then for
What Do Women Want,
my book of essays, and now for a new edition of my essay book.

In the beginning she was trashed by the predictable female journalists who rose to power by attacking other women—a time-honored strategy. What gives with these dames? (I will not name them. They know who they are.) Don’t they know how hard it is to be a public woman? Is it the Queen Bee syndrome made famous by Claire Booth Luce? “I got up here. Now watch me kick any climber who tries to get to the top with me”? This is an old-fashioned shtick. Today’s young feminists know that collaboration,
not
competition, is the name of the game. Women need to support other women and criticize only with affection and concern. Of course we can disagree, but we must disagree with respect, not slander. There’s room for all of us at the top—not just the Queen Bee.

Sadly, our political system favors those
born
with money. Look where it got us with George W. Bush! And his father! And his grandfather! (See Kitty Kelley’s
The Family
for the complete history of those hypocrites.) But Dick Cheney, who was born middle class, may be even worse. So money is not alone the problem.

The Hillary birthday was part of a weeklong Clinton Cashonalia. Even the faithful claimed to the
New York Times
that they were “Clinton-ed out.”

And I was a
pisher
with my two-thousand-dollar contribution. I tried to get my writer friends to come and make a writers’ table, but not one of them had the requisite dough. Cultivating the rich has never been my forte, but then, I’m not a politician. My tendency is to love those who are richer in words than money. I’ve always been out of step in America in loving poets more than politicians.

—SHOLEM ALEICHEM

 

 

 

All we know of love
comes from our mothers. Yet we have buried that love so deep that we may not even know where it comes from. If we have been wounded and have grown scar tissue over our hearts, we confuse the scar tissue with the heart itself, forgetting the wound that caused it.

My first memories of my mother come from the year my younger sister was born. I do not remember
ever
being the center of the universe, because when I came into the family, my older sister—four and a half to my zero—was already there.

I am four and a half when my younger sister is born, and my mother lies in bed like a queen receiving guests, children, parents, friends. She is beautiful and brown-eyed, with reddish-brown hair, and she wears a padded silk bed jacket over a silk nightgown. The women in my family wear bed jackets only in times of great ceremony—childbirth, illness, death—and we rarely spend daylight hours in bed. We are all so energetic that we clean up after our housekeepers, word-process for our secretaries, and instruct caterers in how to cook—though cooking is not exactly a family talent. So if my mother is in bed wearing a bed jacket, it
must
be important. And it is: Daughter number three has just been born.

The baby has a cold caught in the hospital, and four-and-a-half-year-old Erica has ringworm caught from her best friend’s cat. She is forbidden to touch the baby—who is guarded by a dragonlike baby nurse. Erica feels contagious to the point of leprosy, so superfluous, she thinks no one will even
care
if she runs away. At four and a half, she can only conceive of running away to her best friend’s house, on the floor below—but that is where she
caught
the ringworm in the first place. (In later days she might have run around the corner to the candy store—though every time she did
that
she ended up using one of her sweaty nickels to call home from the musty, cigarette-smelling phone booth. Invariably the adults wheedled her into saying where she was. She wanted to be found so badly she always
told.
She let them convince her to come home, though it meant crossing the street like a big girl.)

So she stays in the apartment, a rambling dilapidated West Side palace whose double-height front windows give north light—many of the people in the family are painters.

Erica’s mother will not remain in bed wearing that quilted bed jacket for long. Pretty soon she will be up and running around, doing a “quick sketch” of the infant in her crib, telling the nurse how to care for the baby, stuffing the chicken to be roasted, and cutting together the butter and flour for the crust to enclose the apple pie she has told the housekeeper to make. Then she will dash to ballet school or the park or the ice-skating rink at Rockefeller Center with her two “big girls.”

But the time—a day? two days? a week?—her mother stays in bed seems endless to four-and-a-half-year-old Erica. Especially after the dragon screams at her:
“Don’t you
dare
touch the baby with that hand!!!”

Baby Erica has never forgiven her mother for this abandonment. Pointless to explain that the obliviousness of the baby nurse to the teachings of Freud was hardly her mother’s fault. Useless to say that the baby nurse was probably a poor soul who earned her meager living going from household to household, from baby to baby, without hope of a household or a baby of her own. It was an abandonment, and abandonments are, by definition, always your mother’s fault. In my grown-up mind, I am strong and successful. In my baby mind, I am an abandoned child.

These are merely some of
my
memories of my younger sister’s entrance into the world. Surely my mother’s are entirely different. My older sister’s are surely different, too. And as for the baby, what does she remember of those days except what we tell her? But somewhere in the most primitive part of my brain lies the fierce sense of betrayal my baby sister’s birth must have provoked. I have never quite forgiven my mother for it. Even after years of lying-down analysis and sitting-up therapy, I still, at times, feel like that abandoned four-and-a-half-year-old with ringworm all over her arms and torso.

My mother and I have long since reached a truce. She turned eighty-six this year, and I have endured and surpassed my fear of fifty, so we are very tender with each other, like glass unicorns who might break each other’s horns by kissing too passionately.

Now that I have a nineteen-year-old daughter myself, I understand all my mother’s difficulties raising us. I have even been moved to fall to my knees before my mother and say: “You are my heroine simply for
surviving
three daughters!”

My daughter now rails at me as I once railed at my mother. When Molly monologues, sparing no one with her barbed wit, my mother and I look at each other and smile.

“Tell her you’re sorry you were such a
dreadful
mother,” my mother says, her voice dripping with irony. “And
apologize.
” I even
listen
to my mother now.

“Molly,” I say, “I only did the best I could. I’m sure I made plenty of mistakes. I
apologize.
”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” says Molly, impatient. She looks at me with the sheer contempt that is grounded in excessive love. To myself I may sometimes be a four-and-a-half-year-old with ringworm, but to her I am Kali with a necklace of skulls, or the giant statue of Athena that once stood in the Parthenon, or snake-headed Medusa guarding the Golden Fleece. Just wait till
you
have a daughter, I think. But I am too wise to say it. And my mother and I grin at each other like co-conspirators. Raising a daughter requires superhuman patience. Raising a daughter is definitely tougher than writing.

I recently published a novel about mothers and daughters. In
Inventing Memory,
I traced the mother-daughter daisy chain through four generations, showing how we are shaped by both our mothers’ yearnings and our own desperate need to break free of them. The dynamic between these two powerful forces is largely what molds our lives as women. Yes, our fathers and grandfathers matter, but what we learn from our mothers and grandmothers stays in the bone marrow. It surfaces as soon as you become a mother yourself. And what you sow as a daughter, you will inevitably reap as a mother.

My mother was brilliant in setting me free. Or maybe I was tenacious in demanding my freedom. With mothers and daughters you never really know
whose
is the initiative. We are so interwoven, so symbiotic, that you cannot always tell the mother from the daughter, the dancer from the dance.

Of course, I barely understood any of this about my mother and me in my teens or twenties or even thirties. I was locked in mortal combat with her, denouncing her to her face and behind her back, pillorying her in my novels—even as they betrayed my passionate love for her. Of course, I thought I was the first daughter in history to have these tumultuous feelings. Of course, I thought my mother was oblivious of my needs, hypocritical in her life and in her art, and desperately in need of enlightenment by me. I must have been insufferable. But she greeted most of my excesses with love. And it was her love that set me free.

For how is the gift of freedom bestowed
except
by love? By never letting me doubt that I was loved, my mother fueled my books, my life, even my own parenting. Though I was fiercely independent and refused to take financial support from my parents after college graduation, I always knew I
could
go home again. When I wrote painful things about my mother in my novels, she simply said: “I never
read
your novels, because I consider you a poet first.” I knew I could write whatever I had to write and still be loved.

My mother had a benign relationship with her mother but a tortured one with her father. He was a brilliant artist, who was a relentless taskmaster to his two painter daughters. And because he considered my mother the more talented of them, he drove her mercilessly. He pushed her so hard that after she married my father, she escaped into the primal pleasure of having babies. By the time her art surfaced again, in middle age, she had three amazons—us—to distract her. It cannot have been easy to go on painting and also mother us all. But she did it. She still paints nearly every day of her life.

In our house, draftsmanship was held to my grandfather’s relentless standards. You had to draw from life before venturing into the world of the imagination. You had to master charcoal and conté crayon before indulging in color. You had to do hundreds of still lifes before you could draw “the model.” And you had to be able to draw a creditable nude before you dared paint people with clothes on. I found all this regimentation so daunting that I gave up painting. From the age of eleven, I had spent every Saturday at the Art Students League in New York, drawing alongside professional artists and holding myself to such impossible standards that I always felt like an abject failure. Though I painted all through high school and much of college, I relinquished painting with great relief when, in my teens, I discovered the obsession to write. Being an artist was too fraught with conflicting feelings for me.