Fear of Fifty (42 page)

In the mid-seventies, when Gerri and I became friends, the women's movement was in the midst of this very crisis. The heady enthusiasms of the late sixties and early seventies had inevitably waned and it was time for the movement to embrace the average woman with children rather than alienate her. The failure of Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem to forge an alliance was symptomatic of the problem. Women who had rejected family life despised women who had embraced family life. Perhaps the hatred was partly sour grapes. The urge to have children is so strong that you renounce it in yourself only at great cost.

My best friend understood all this long before I did.

“How can I identify with a movement that says I have to be childless or a lesbian in order to be a feminist?”

“You're exaggerating the problem,” I told her. “You're part of the constituency too.”

But she
felt
excluded. And so did many women. I meet them everywhere—these passionate feminists who love men and children. Until we openly acknowledge the mistakes feminism made before the backlash decade, we cannot prevent backlash from happening again.

As women we still need practice in making alliances with other women. We still tend to see other women as competitors to be eliminated. We still act out
All About Eve.
Younger women plot to replace older women; older women find it hard to praise younger women. Men are led up the success ladder by male mentors, while we find ways to put down members of our own sex. We are not even allowed to admit to this sabotage because it is officially nonexistent. But we have all experienced it. And the more we keep silent about it, the more we prolong its power over us.

David's death. How did I hear of David's death?

It was March—that wet gray month that brings my birthday, Passover, Easter. Usually I feel reborn in March as the days grow longer and lighter and my birthday approaches. But this particular March was to have a winter sky that would not lift. Halfway into the month, I was on the phone with my old friend Arvin Brown, discussing casting for a workshop of my musical of Fanny Hackabout-Jones, when suddenly another call came through.

“Can I put you on hold for a sec?” he asked.

“Sure.” Then I waited for what seemed a very long time.

Arvin's voice came back—utterly changed.

“I just heard a horrible thing,” he said in a low, hesitant tone, “and I don't even know if it's true.”

“What?”

“David was killed.”

“How? Where?” I asked.

“That's all I know,” Arvin said.

I told him I'd call him back and pressed the button that speed-dials Gerri in Colorado.

“What's happened?”

“David is dead,” she said as if from some space in the sky where the phone lines stop.

“David was in an avalanche ... Jesus God . . . ,” she said. There was finality in her voice as if she always expected this to happen.

“Good God!” Arvin exclaimed when I called him back. “Good God,” he said again, hanging on the line as if waiting to be told it wasn't true.

Arvin was David's best friend, and knowing that, some acquaintances who had another friend on the same heliskiing trip had called him with the horrible news. The word was crisscrossing the country by optical fiber.

The way a tragedy first makes itself known to a group of friends: like poison seeping into the groundwater. On a certain day everyone knows. The well is poisoned. The calls come from all over, first informing, then verifying, then sharing feelings. Each of us shivers in the punishing wind of mortality. It is our Big Chill moment. Beautiful David is dead.

We were all just about the same age as David—David who snowshoed up Ajax just to warm up for a day of downhill skiing. We never dreamed we would outlive him. David was rock solid, fearless, with a perfect body. David should have buried us all. Now he no longer
had
a body.

It was staggering and unbelievable. The fact could not quite penetrate anyone's understanding.

Day by day the puzzle began to unpuzzle. But it was still beyond our comprehension. Factoids accreted like crystals on an orange stick thrust into sugary water.

He made one last run down the virgin snowbowl. He was too tired to carry the emergency backpack, so he passed it to another skier—who lived. The ground vibrated, but no sound was heard. The guide yelled “
Slide!
” and the first few skiers on the glacier missed the onslaught of snow traveling a hundred miles an hour with the weight of wet cement.

Somehow the guide swam her way back up and out of the snow, but David was crushed on impact, carried by that tidal wave of snow, and slammed into a tree. He hung upside down, entangled in its branches, his transmitter emitting its dismal signal. Nine people died. David was the only one not decapitated or dismembered. Most of the victims were held together only by their ski suits.

What was once David came home—or at least to Frank E. Campbell's funeral home. The message was: Flesh is an illusion. Spirit alone is real.

“It was murder,” says my broken friend. “They taught the
guide
to swim through the snow, but not the paying customers. His face looked like he was saying
‘Shit!'
His beautiful back was broken, his lungs crushed, his aorta burst. His chest felt spongy to the touch—his strong beautiful chest. He must have died on impact. He didn't even know what hit him.” She sobs in my arms as if all the tears in the world are hers. And they are. Inexhaustible, these tears.

“At least he died instantly,” I offer, feeling so damned useless. “He didn't suffer.”

“He
knew
,” she says. “He knew.”

The funeral takes place where we buried her younger brother and her father.

We all stagger through the motions like sleepwalkers.

I am in charge of poetry and underwear for this melancholy occasion. I take Jenny to buy a black bra. She doesn't have one, being just a kid. “I miss my dad,” she says, stricken. We discuss what we are going to wear to the funeral and then I go home. I lock myself in my study in New York, pull the plug on the phone, and try to take my anarchic feelings and see if they will condense into a poem.

At the end of the service at Frank E. Campbell, after the kids and Gerri and other family members spoke, I read that poem—“the David poem,” I call it in my head. Crowds of people flowed into the streets. The funeral directors were unprepared with chairs. Even the famous—sometimes especially the famous—have few to mourn them but curiosity seekers. When their moment of heat has passed, nobody comes—not even a friend. But David had friends none of us even knew about. There were kids he'd taught, adults he'd helped, associates from years ago, college friends, and business associates he hadn't seen in years. They all stopped by to say why they were there.

My friend made a beautiful speech neither of us remembers. She and her children stood with their arms round each other, swaying slightly. Everyone was trying to find some humor in the unrelieved darkness, but we all knew we were next.

This was the death that made me know I was mortal.

I knew David had wanted to take the kids on this last trip and had been stopped by Gerri. I knew he wanted to take her and she had refused. She had been there once before and had felt death in the air. All I could think was he had never wanted to grow old. Some blind foreknowledge had restrained her, and now she knew the guilt of being alive.

I only saw the outside of the grieving, so it is hardly mine to claim with words. I noticed Gerri's reluctance to let go of him—as if letting him go would kill him permanently, as if she were the keeper of his sacred memory and if she stopped focusing on him for one second, he would slip away.

Emily Brontë knew this. It comes to us all in grief. We want to forget in order to live, but we are afraid forgetting will make the dead die again. And this death will be final.

The first few nights, Gerri and the kids slept in a love pile, like puppies or kittens. Then they all had to cope with their own grief—each in a different way.

The clothes came home, then the skis, then the “personal effects.” Legal things had to be dealt with: money, reams of useless paper. My friend staggered through it, not wanting to live. Sometimes the mornings were okay, but the nights were always bad. Sleep had also been murdered. She could not lose herself in sleep for fear of losing David, whose tenuous connection to life was now her memory.

What I remember most was how everyone wanted her to perk up, bury the dead, remarry. But she needed to mourn. Her need was made more painful by the denial of death that pervades our culture. She had to scream and rage and rend her hair. Both New Yorkers and Aspenites found this uncool.

“Dust yourself off and go on,” said the collective voice of collective wisdom. “Haven't you been grieving an awfully long time?” Implicit in this question was the idea that any mate was replaceable. Get another one—like you'd “get” a new dog. But even a dog can't be “replaced” till you have mourned enough. The new puppy can never be loved until you've cried enough over the old one to float it out to sea with your tears. The new puppy waits with watery eyes until you do this right. Only then can you embrace her with an open heart.

People whispered to me that two years were enough. How they dared to judge another's grief I did not know. Maybe no one's absence ever was allowed to hurt them very much—or else they believed you had to deny feelings to be hip. It was like fixing your eyes and chin, like staying fit; messy emotions were as unwanted as messy flesh.

I had never been widowed, but I knew how destroyed I'd been when Jon moved out. It had felt like widowhood to me. Awash in fluids and feelings I had never let myself know before, I didn't want to be comforted at first. The studs couldn't quite distract me, nor the old boyfriends, nor the medical student, nor Will. Sex was a temporary anodyne, but I still had to live till my flayed skin grew back. That took seven years. And I
did
marry again, exactly seven years later.

 

Barbara Follett suddenly rings. (I have been writing these notes in my journal, and when I look at the clock, I see that five hours have vanished.)

“I'm racing down to Lucca to get Gerri. She's lost your phone number and just found mine. She's lost the directions to your house.”

“How is she?” I ask.

“Weak with the flu and cystitis, it seems, but she'll be okay, I think. I need the doctor's number.”

I give it to her and sit immobilized by the phone again. I think it's funny that I no longer wait by the phone for men to call, but for my women friends to rescue one another. A startling ring, a very harried Gerri. “I'm in a hotel lobby in Lucca. Barbara just gave me your phone number. I had left it
and
the directions on the rental car desk in Rome. I was terrified. Then I found the Folletts' number on a scrap of paper.”

“Don't explain! Barbara's coming to take you to the doctor.”

About an hour later, a caravan of cars arrives, rearranging the rocks on our road.

A taxi driver leads (with Barbara and Gerri in the back), then a Follett godchild, driving Gerri's car, then the Follett caretaker, driving Ken Follett's car, with London plates.

Dazed by the sunlight and the view, Gerri collapses in my arms. I lead her to bed, bring plenty of water, mint tea, and her medicine. She looks weak and tired. Margaret and I transfer her bloody clothes into a basin of cold water.