Fear of Fifty (31 page)

But wasn't that better than not being allowed to publish books at all?

Do I regret my drivenness? How can I? I was on trial for my life. Women's right to create both life and art was still questioned everywhere. In many ways, it still is.

“Family leave” never even occurred to me. I felt so lucky to be a woman and
allowed
to work that I had no intention of rocking the boat. They'd throw me overboard without a line.

When Molly was basket-sized, I'd sometimes bring her to my study to sleep on the floor under my desk as I wrote. But she was soon too big and hungry for that. The La Leche League somehow neglects to tell you that big babies like to suckle every hour or so. She was trying to sit up, look around, grab for things, monologue. The baby nurse went and Lula took her place. Lula was everybody's dream of a nanny.

Lula was a former numbers runner who had sinned and loved many sinners before she came to Christ, but by the time I met her, she was a God-fearing church lady, whose pastor was the center of her life—she played me his take-home tapes—and who had a great knack for sweet-potato pies, pigs' feet, collard greens, and babies. She sang to Molly, rocked her, greased her with Vaseline to ward off flu—“Colds don't
like
grease,” Lula said—and took her to church in Harlem “to have her blessed.” My mother found out and was not amused. But I figured you could never be blessed
enough.

“Dat baby clap hands and praise Jesus,” Lula said. “Dat baby shout
‘Hallelujah.'”

“I know, I know, Lula,” I said, “but my mother worries.”

“What she got to worry about?” Lula asked.

“She doesn't
need
anything,” I said.

“You Jewish people is crazy,” Lula said.

“You said it,” I agreed.

Lula could send headaches “back to the pit,” cure colds with lemon juice and Vicks, and pray books up the bestseller list. She was a triple-threat, all-purpose household goddess. With Lula around, you never felt scared. If Vicks couldn't cure it, Jesus could.

Lula came and I finished my novel. By the time it was published, Molly was two.

One blessing of writing an eighteenth-century novel while having a baby was the gratitude it gave me for merely being alive. If I were really Fanny and had my obstetrical history, I'd be dead and Molly would be, too. Whatever science has done to destroy the world, it has unquestionably saved the lives of women and their babies. Nature is
not
gentle with us when left to her own devices. Now we survive childbirth and face the dilemma of turning fifty. Mary Wollstonecraft never trod this path.

Greedy for more and more life, we seldom appreciate what we have. Many of my friends have become mothers in their forties and their babies are beautiful and smart. We have extended the limits of life, yet we dare to rage at growing old.

It seems damned ungrateful. But then we baby boomers are a damned ungrateful bunch. Nobody gave us limits. So we are good at squandering and complaining, bad at gratitude. And when we discover life
has
limits, we try to wreck ourselves in anger before we learn the importance of surrender. We are the AA kids, the qualification generation. We have to be hurled to the bottom again and again before we come to understand that life is
about
surrender. And if the bottom doesn't rise to meet us, we dive into it, carrying our loved ones with us.

Only a lucky few swim back up to air and light.

Everything changes but the human heart, say the old sages, but they are wrong.

—Denis de Rougemont,
Love in the Western World

 

 

This is a chapter I don't want to write. But it has to be a part of
Fear of Fifty,
because divorce is my generation's coming of age ceremony—a ritual scarring that makes anything that happens afterward seem bearable.

It surely has to do with how long we live. All those women who died in childbirth didn't
get
to have more than one husband, and all those men, if they didn't die of smallpox or fever or gout or shipwreck or rum, got to marry over and over again guiltlessly and with no alimony.

We marry as if our lives were theirs, but by thirty or forty or fifty, when they would have been dead, we find ourselves different people. Our values have shifted: Our pleasures seem sweeter, our pains seem sharper, but also less neurotic. We now want different lives with different loves. We outgrow mates as eighteenth-century people outgrew their families' graveplots. We were never
meant
to live this long.

At thirty-eight, with a baby and a new bestseller, having delivered the eighteenth-century female in myself, I felt I could do
anything.
Jon, who was thirty-two, felt uncertain about his career, one-upped by the baby.

“I am always
third
in this house,” he said. “First the baby, then the book, and where do
I
fit in?”

Where indeed? He couldn't nurse the baby or support us. He wasn't publishing bestselling books. I must have been disdainful of his uselessness, but so was he. This was a time to nurture and reassure
him
—but I had an infant and a deadline, and for all my bravado, I couldn't do it all. We were both so thrown by the demands of the baby that we had little time to help each other. So we started doing the hurtful things desperate people do, both feeling burdened and misunderstood and alone.

More than ever we had a reason to be together; more than ever we drifted apart.

By the time Molly was three, we had accumulated enough grievances against each other to both feel righteous. The baby was the innocent bystander in all this.

I had been proud of being the main breadwinner; now I resented it. The pressure was too great. Jon had felt proud of being a nurturer; now he felt unmanned by it—or so it sometimes seemed. A baby throws all the parental roles you know from childhood back in your face. I wanted to be “taken care of”—whatever that means. He wanted to be “free” to fly away.

At a party for my thirty-eighth birthday (when Molly was one), the tension and exhaustion led me to play Russian roulette with my life. It was a Mexican party, so I drank dozens of margaritas and was already staggering when a “friend” came and offered me little blue pills as a birthday present. I took two and presently passed out.

The rest I can only reconstruct from rumor.

My pulse plummeted and I grew cold. I was immobilized on the bathroom floor and later on the bed. A doctor friend walked me and fed me coffee and vitamin C. I threw up, drank more coffee, and threw up again. A night of twisted dreams, and images of the Sahara in my throat.

When I finally awoke in the morning, the guests were gone. I was humiliated and sick. I had missed my own birthday. The end of the world loomed as a row of empty tequila bottles. The shame was immense.

Incredibly, the baby was fine. I suddenly thought of what might have happened to her and had a belated panic attack. I was in deeper trouble than I knew. The joy of having it all had turned to the exhaustion of having it all. I was so tired. The stress of wanting to give the baby what she needed, give Jon what he needed, and give myself what I needed, had brought me to this precipice. My addiction kicked in, wanting to be fed. My addiction turns to food or booze or workaholism with equal enthusiasm. Just when I start to understand her, she switches gear.

The addiction is also a part of the story I don't want to telt—and not only because so many have told it and boasted of finding “the Answer.” Partly from them, I have come to honor the power of not using words for everything. The soul can only hear in silence. Facing yourself cannot be done in public. And announcing your recovery is a sure way to lose it. There's an old witch saying, “Power shared is power lost.” In the matter of addiction, this is especially true.

Addiction is the disease of our age. It is cunning and powerful. It proceeds from our chronic spiritual hunger and is nourished by our focus on getting and spending, and on news and gossip outside ourselves. Everything we need is happening within us. The focus on reports of others is only a distraction from the needs of our own spirit. Addiction grows fat from our chronic quashing of the inner life. We believe the spiritual does not exist because we have made insufficient space for it to manifest in our lives. A self-fulfilling tautology.

We also give our marriages too little space for pleasure. The result is that we flee from them, searching for ourselves. We think we have lost our souls. And we have. But we probably could find them together—if only we knew how.

Regret is the most bitter pill of all. No wonder Dante made it the chief punishment in hell. I now regret my failure to make that marriage work—even though it was not within my power.

The summer Molly was about to turn three, I ran away from Jon to Europe, hoping he'd follow me. I went to my French translator's country house in Mayenne. But Jon did not come. Instead, he took off on his own odyssey, westward. We fought bitterly on the transatlantic telephone. During one of these fights, not meaning it, I angrily said, “Get out.”

He did. I came home to the wreckage of a broken household, with Jon moving out.

I had come to my senses and wanted him back. He didn't want to hear about it. He wanted to be kicked out. It gave him permission to be “free.” He had been in a deep depression almost since the baby was born. He'd felt displaced, abandoned, unloved. Surely I can understand that now. But
then,
the burdens on me were too great. I had no room for empathy except for Molly (and
Fanny).
I didn't even have empathy for myself.

It went on like that for a few months. He came home, went away, came home, went away, collecting grievances and meeting his next wife.

We had killed the trust between us. After that, everything became impossible.

The legal part of the divorce was over much too soon. I asked nothing. He asked nothing. We walked away as if there weren't a child between us. So we still have unfinished business. And since we have it, Molly has it too.

What happens when your partner and best friend becomes your enemy? You scream and hang up the phone in the middle of the night; throw yourself at cars and at men; drink too much; sue and get sued, discharging money—and rage.

You can't skip all that—even though it all seems so useless at the end. Unlike childbirth, it only ends in emptiness. As with war, you are happy simply to come out alive.

How I got through those blind bitter days of pain I have no idea. I stumbled through them with a fierce headache.

I remember going to teach at Breadloaf Writers' Conference, being given the honor of Robert Frost's white clapboard farmhouse to live and write in, and feeling nothing but despair. I dragged myself to classes (leaving Molly with Frost's ghost and an English au pair). I dragged myself back. I seemed to think that alcohol would help, and I was in the perfect place for it, because in those days you could major in alcohol at Breadloaf. The faculty meetings were exclusively about how to mark your bottles. The whole mountain needed a Twelve Step Program. Even the trees had wet brains. They bent and swayed. The maples were turning red with shame. There was alcohol on the Adirondack chairs, alcohol in the barn, alcohol in the faculty lounge. The sky was streaked with alcohol at dusk. The cycle was fixed: alcohol till unconscious (as my father used to say of the thirties music business), and sleep and coffee to get over it. Block out those bad thoughts at all cost. But then what do you have? Unconsciousness.

I called Jon from phone booths all over Vermont, hoping for a reprieve, but none was forthcoming. I wept until my eyes turned red. Then I wept some more.

Most people were at Breadloaf to get away from their spouses. I was wanting to get back. There was the usual drunkenness and bed-hopping with the noble excuse of Literature. There was the usual chaos masquerading as lust.

Time
magazine was lurking, doing a cover story on John Irving, who was about to publish the novel after
Garp.
John Gardner was blithely riding the motorcycle that would soon kill him. Hilma and Meg Wolitzer—that talented mother-daughter act—were both unfailingly kind to me in my messy grief.

A rumor reached me that
Time
was going to run a gossip item on my shattered marriage. I blew up at a lurking journalist, unwittingly confirming the rumor.

I began a harmless flirtation with a nice, married writer. We went to an inn one night and were both relieved he was impotent. He was thinking of his wife, who, at that very moment, was racing to Vermont to catch him. I was thinking of Jon, who wasn't. He kept reaching over her phantom body to touch me. I kept reaching over Jon's phantom body to touch him. After a while, we renounced our abortive attempts at sex, having at least validated each other's attractiveness. We became friends.

Sex remains a dilemma. Much as we need it, we can't just have it without feeling. Feeling always gets in the way, dammit.

After Breadloaf, things got worse.

The emptiness at home was terrible.

I was single again at thirty-nine, but this time with a child and a whole new set of circumstances to get used to. Dating rituals were different. The world of sex had changed
again.
Now it seemed you were
expected
to fuck everyone and think nothing of it.

Single at seventeen, I had wanted to get hitched and shut out all sexual distraction. Single at twenty-two, I had had a year or two of freedom, then panicked and got married to Allan. At thirty, I went from that marriage directly to the next romantic adventure, with Jon. But now, at thirty-nine, 1 could
live
my fantasies if I chose. Yet the prospect seemed suddenly bleak. Only to the married do fantasies seem like solutions.