Fear of Fifty (52 page)

I look around me in America and madness reigns. The antisex league is in charge. Some feminists of my generation have rallied mightily to the antisex cause. The truth is: Sex is terrifying, full of uncontrollable darkness and illogic that it is far easier to suppress. Easier to scream
Rape!
than admit complicity in desire, easier to claim the moral high ground of victimhood than to admit to our own desires to victimize others, easier to project the evil outward than recognize it as a part of the anarchic self.

Shall we burn the flesh rather than allow it to bubble from within? Women are so moved by sexuality, so unable to compartmentalize it, that we are always fair game for mortification of the flesh, and America is still a puritan country. We worship not Mary but Cotton Mather, not the mother but the mad eviscerated Virgin, the preadolescent who pronounces all human effluvia
yucky
and is willing to kill all the
yuckiness
in herself—and in others.

What I have fought for in my life and in my books—irony, the double vision that sees good and evil as flip sides of the same human coin, the integration of body and brain, sensuality and spirituality, honeyed voluptuousness and philosophical rigor—these are the things most endangered today. In Catharine MacKinnon we have a contemporary version of Savonarola—ready to sacrifice art to the flames because it might “harm” women, women who have been harmed for centuries by their deprivation of this very nourishment. But there is no way to argue this in a world that knows no linguistic precision nor irony nor satire, a world where video snippets measured in milliseconds pass for communication.

I have been writing books now for over twenty years, and each time I let go of one it gets harder. I see the publication process as a Shirley Jacksonesque lottery in which every reaction is a hurled stone. Not that only stones are tossed. There is great appreciation—even love—from readers. But to get to them, I find I must run a kind of gauntlet. It is precisely this mockery, ridicule, and humiliation that makes women tremble at the presumption of leadership (or authorship). The hatred is so great, the anger so unforgiving, the self-loathing so bottomless. What is the crime? Daring to have opinions? Daring to be exuberant, sexual, funny, opinionated, excessive? If you doubt these things are seen as criminal, look at the things that have been written about women's exuberance, sexuality, humor, and excess! They will shut you up.

The whole point seems to be to shut us up by getting us to shut each other up. When will we stop playing this coward's game?

 

It is that time of year I most dislike: the parenthesis between Thanksgiving and Christmas. The days are short. Darkness slices into the afternoon. The city doesn't move, mired as it is in false gaiety and empty ritual.

It has been almost a year since Kitty was admitted to the Hebrew Home for the Aged. She is complaining that they are giving her pills to take away her memory, and perhaps that is as good an explanation as any. She is unable to paint. Her social worker explains to me that perhaps it makes her too upset to paint or perhaps she doesn't remember
how
to paint and
that
is upsetting her. Nobody seems to know. If she is no longer painting, then I think she has outlived her time. But I do not say so. I merely make an appointment to meet with her and her “support team” and go back to my struggle with my book.

 

At the end of November, there is an eclipse of the moon. Ken and I have driven all the way back from Vermont under its full golden disc and, at midnight, we climb up the back stairs of our apartment building to the twenty-ninth floor, exit the stairwell at the roof level, and walk among the stars. The city is still. The roof looks like a lunar landscape. The traffic noises seem suddenly stopped. And we stand alone in the middle of the roof, heads tilted back until they hurt, watching a dark shadow encroach across the face of the moon. It takes an hour and a half for the eclipse to be total. We stand transfixed and shivering, unable to leave until the whole disc is closed in darkness. When a sliver of light emerges on the other side, I say, “I'm glad I saw that.”

“So am I,” says Ken.

Neither of us could tell you why.

 

After the eclipse, I find myself unable to sleep. Basil the cat and Poochini the bichon frise have found a warm hollow between me and Ken and are sleeping peacefully. Ken is out cold, his breathing shallow, his bearded baby face serene. I am slightly hungry but too lazy to get up. Suddenly the taste of fresh farmer cheese and homemade plum jam with shriveled skins comes into my mouth—and my grandparents are here.

They used to have this for breakfast: fresh rye bread or challah, fresh farmer cheese, sliced in a crumbly rectangle, cold, sour, and faintly chalky to the tongue, my grandmother's garnet damson plum jam with the shriveled skins left in, and sometimes a stone. The cheese went on the bread, was spread slightly, and the jam was dripped over that. You ate it quickly so as not to make a mess. Tea with milk and honey was the beverage.

My grandparents are sitting at their little breakfast table, feeding themselves and me.

“Patriotism is the memory of foods eaten in childhood,” said Lin Yutang.

And suddenly I remember disposing of my grandfather's things after he died. And I realize I will have to do the same for my parents and for Kitty, and Molly will have to do the same for me. And the taste of these foods will be gone—as vanished as the moon during eclipse.

What will bring them back? Nothing.

We are creatures whose memories are too big for everyday use—until they are too small. During this moment of insomnia, my brain aches with the fullness of past, present, and future. But already I feel sleep coming.

 

I go to visit Kitty at the Hebrew Home for the Aged and find her sitting between two men. One of them introduces himself as a dentist and admires my bicuspids. “The incisor is the strongest tooth in the body—didja know that?” he asks. The other man, a certain Mr. Goldlilly, has his hand on Kitty's thigh. She seems to have forgotten she is a lesbian.

“Darling,” she says, “I'm so glad to see you.” She looks well—hale, even plump. She calls everybody “darling” to cover the loss of names. (Perhaps this explains the widespread practice of
darlingfication
in the theater too.) Leaving her two male admirers, Kitty walks with me to another lounge area. We sit down, looking out at the river, glinting in the December light.

“I'm so glad to see you,” she says.

“Me too,” I say. And I am glad to see her.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“Nothing much. Just living from day to day. But I worry about my apartment.”

“Don't worry, Kitty, I'll take care of it.”

I don't tell her that we will have to sell it to pay her bills in this glamorous old age spa.

“Why don't you take the apartment, honey, and rent it out? Then I could live with you. All I need is a nice room with north light, a bathroom. I'm not the sort of person who imposes. We could see each other from time to time.”

Suddenly, there is a commotion in the unit. Molly and two of her friends come running down the hall. With their long hair, ripped jeans, big workboots, grungy checked shirts, they change the energy in the place. They are all so
tall.
Kitty has been shrinking as they have grown.

A baby-faced white-haired woman wielding a walker has been circling the hall as Kitty and I have talked. Now she stops and asks Molly, “Where is my room? I don't know where my room is.” Molly gently takes her to the nurse's station and asks for the location of her room. Then I see her guiding the old woman there.

“Who's that? Who's that?” says Kitty when Molly and her two friends walk over. Molly introduces her friends, Sabrina and Amy.

Kitty says, “Pleased to meet you.” Her memory is gone but her charm is intact. She smiles lovingly.

“Darling,” Kitty says to Molly, “I can't live here the rest of my life, can I? I want to live with you.”

“No, Kitty,” says my daughter, “you're much better off here. You were so lonely and scared in your apartment.” She is very strong and very direct. She is much braver than I am. “I think Mommy will have to sell your apartment,” she says.

“And what about my paintings?”

“I will take care of them,” Molly says. “I love your paintings.”

In the year that Kitty has been here, my daughter has become a mensch.

“I guess you're right,” Kitty tells her.

When I leave to drive Molly, Sabrina, and Amy back to the city, Kitty returns to her two dazed men friends.

“That's my niece,” I hear her saying to the dentist and Mr. Goldlilly. But she still does not remember my name.

 

My mother celebrates her eighty-second birthday on December tenth. Surrounded by her grandchildren, she is laughing and looks almost happy. Seeing my mother relaxed, something in me also relaxes. If she will only embrace her life with joy, then so can I. I feel that all my life I have tortured myself because I feel she has been tortured. All my life, I have suffered because somehow I sense she wants it that way.
Be happy,
I think, watching her among her grandchildren.
Please be happy so I can be.

Two nights later, a call comes from my father in the emergency room of New York Hospital.

“Mother collapsed,” he says. “We're in the emergency room. Don't come.”

If I take that at face value, he will be furious, I know. But for once I defy him by taking him at face value. Later, I call him at home to ask him how my mother is.

“She's furious at you,” my father says, “for not coming.” And he hangs up on me.

I sleep the sleep of a dead person, hoping never to wake and have to face my parents again. I dream I am wandering the Elysian fields among my ancestors, asking each one, “Am I dead yet?”

In my pocket, I have a dried embryo the size of my index finger. It is a child I never had—or else it is me. Its legs have crumbled away. Also its arms. Why did I never have this baby? Why is it crumbling in my pocket?

In the morning, I go to New York Hospital, walking like a zombie in the cold air. I have no makeup on and I wear black leggings, a black turtleneck sweater, and black hooded jacket as if already in mourning. Very well, then, if I am the bad daughter, let me be the bad daughter. I wander the labyrinthine passages below the street level, wondering which corridor will take me to an elevator that will take me to the cardiac unit. Eventually I find it. I ascend to the third floor, make my way into my mother's room, and greet her snarling face.

“Why did you come at all?” she asks.

“Because I love you,” I say.

“Hah,” she says. “Where were you last night?”

“Daddy told me not to come.”

“He's upset,” she says. “You can't listen to that.”

“I know,” I say.

But I am waiting, waiting for some big book of rules for living (or dying), waiting for some huge assurance of love, some final nourishment, some epiphany, some spiritual transcendence. My mother leans back on her pillows, her hair straggling behind her, her eyes at once cold and kind.

“It is not pleasant,” she says, “to contemplate your own death.”

And I think, if I could take my years and give them to her like some latter-day Alcestis, would I? Would I trade my life—what's left of it—for hers? No. I would not. I would snatch my remaining years with greedy hands. I would finish this book and go on to the next and the next. I would cast off my secret delight in my own paralysis.

Generations of women have sacrificed their lives to become their mothers. But we do not have that luxury anymore. The world has changed too much to let us have the lives our mothers had. And we can no longer afford the guilt we feel at
not
being our mothers. We cannot afford
any
guilt that pulls us back to the past. We have to grow up, whether we want to or not. We have to stop blaming men and mothers and seize every second of our lives with passion. We can no longer afford to waste our creativity. We cannot afford spiritual laziness.

My mother will not give me rules for living—but perhaps I can give them to myself.

“What are you thinking?” she asks.

“That I love you, that I don't want you to die.”

“I won't die,” she says, suddenly brightening.

The blood fills her face; the tears stream down my cheeks.

When I leave the hospital, I go home and get drunk on red wine for the first time in ages, while waiting for my husband and father to join me for dinner.

“My mother's going to die,” I blubber to myself, getting blurrier and blurrier. “If not now, then next time, or the time after....” I am waiting for the wine to give me inspiration, but all it gives is numbness.

By the time we all sit down to dinner, I am thick and headachy and I miss most of the conversation. It happens at the periphery of my awareness. Ken and my father are singing Yiddish music hall songs together as a bonding ritual. I begin drinking coffee to sober up. By the time I am fully awake, my father is ready to go.

In the morning, I get up to have breakfast with Molly as I usually do, and then I go back to bed. Eight o'clock gives way to nine, nine to ten, ten to eleven. I lie in bed as if I am dying—in place of my mother. And of course I
am
dying. We all are, at every moment. But my separation from myself is extreme. I am ferociously angry, depressed and stuck, not wanting to release this book.

What's the point of loving my mother since she is only going to die and what's the point of loving myself since I am only going to die and what's the point of loving this book since it is only going to go out into the maelstrom of publication?