Just As I Thought (33 page)

Since I’m a writer, I will end this talk by telling a story—to go from talk of war and responsibility to a storytelling description of daily life in my city, New York.

Three Days and a Question

On the first day I joined a demonstration opposing the arrest in Israel of members of Yesh Gvul, Israeli soldiers who had refused to serve in the occupied territories. Yesh Gvul means:
There is a limit.

TV cameras and an anchorwoman arrived and
New York Times
stringers with their narrow journalism notebooks. What do you think? the anchorwoman asked. What do you think, she asked a woman passerby—a woman about my age.

Anti-Semites, the woman said quietly.

The anchorwoman said, But they’re Jewish.

Anti-Semites, the woman said, a little louder.

What? One of our demonstrators stepped up to her. Are you crazy? How can you … Listen what we’re saying.

Rotten anti-Semites—all of you.

What? What? What? the man shouted. How you dare to say that—all of us Jews. Me, he said. He pulled up his shirtsleeve. Me? You call me? You look. He held out his arm. Look at this.

I’m not looking, she screamed.

You look at my number, what they did to me. My arm … you have no right.

Anti-Semite, she said between her teeth. Israel hater.

No, no, he said, you fool. My arm—you’re afraid to look … my arm … my arm.

*   *   *

On the second day Vera and I listen at PEN to Eta Krisaeva read her stories, which were not permitted publication in her own country, Czechoslovakia. Then we walk home in the New York walking night, about twenty blocks—shops and lights, other walkers talking past us. Late-night homeless men and women asleep in dark storefront doorways on cardboard pallets under coats and newspapers, scraps of blanket. Near home on Sixth Avenue a young man, a boy, passes—a boy the age a younger son could be—head down, bundles in his arms, on his back.

Wait, he says, turning to stop us. Please, please wait. I just got out of Bellevue. I was sick. They gave me something. I don’t know … I need to sleep somewhere. The Y, maybe.

That’s way uptown.

Yes, he says. He looks at us. Carefully he says, AIDS. He looks away. Oh. Separately, Vera and I think, A boy—only a boy. Mothers after all, our common trade for more than thirty years.

Then he says, I put out my hand. We think he means to tell us he tried to beg. I put out my hand. No one will help me. No one. Because they can see. Look at my arm. He pulls his coat sleeve back. Lesions, he says. Have you ever seen lesions? That’s what people see.

No. No, we see a broad fair forehead, a pale countenance, fear. I just have to sleep, he says.

We shift in our pockets. We give him what we find—about eight dollars. We tell him, Son, they’ll help you on Thirteenth Street at the center. Yes, I know about that place. I know about them all. He hoists the bundle of his things to his back to prepare for walking. Thank you, ladies. Goodbye.

*   *   *

On the third day I’m in a taxi. I’m leaving the city for a while and need to get to the airport. We talk—the driver and I. He’s a black man, dark. He’s not young. He has a French accent. Where are you from? Haiti, he answers. Ah, your country is in bad trouble. Very bad. You know that, miss.

Well, yes. Sometimes it’s in the paper.

They thieves there. You know that? Very rich, very poor. You believe me? Killing—it’s nothing to them, killing. Hunger. Starving people. Everything bad. And you don’t let us come. Starving. They send us back.

We’re at a red light. He turns to look at me. Why they do that? He doesn’t wait for me to say, Well … because … He says, Why hard.

The light changes. We move slowly up traffic-jammed Third Avenue. Silence. Then: Why? Why they let the Nicaragua people come? Why they let Vietnamese come? One time American people want to kill them people. Put bomb in their children. Break their head. Now they say, Yes, yes, come come come. Not us. Why?

Your New York is beautiful country. I love it. So beautiful, this New York. But why, tell me, he says, stopping the cab, switching the meter off. Why, he says, turning to me again, rolling his short shirtsleeve back, raising his arm to the passenger divider, pinching and pulling the bare skin of his upper arm. You tell me—this skin, this black skin—why? Why you hate this skin so much?

*   *   *

Question: Those gestures, those arms, the three consecutive days thrown like a formal net over the barest unchanged accidental facts. How? Why? In order to become—probably—in this city one story told.

—1991

Questions

A picture of peace—what is that? Is a picture of peace a peaceful-looking picture, or any photograph taken during the absence of war? Is it that we need to give peace a good name? Why do we have to? Isn’t it always better not to be killing others or mutilating them? Are there perfectly good reasons not to be living in peace? When we say peace, do we mean the absence of all conflict, nonviolent struggles, which are often quite fierce? Do we mean no pushing in the playground, no throwing sand in the sandbox? Do we mean peace except for “Oh well, boys will be boys”?

Do we think war is more exciting? Well, hasn’t it been made to appear the most interesting moment in the bonding of men? Aren’t there novels and autobiographies by men who’ve been to war that tell the young how interesting and exciting and important it was to have been at some particular battle, even though many of them say they are now opposed to all war?

Haven’t we lived through one of the strangest years in our lives and our country’s coinciding life? Isn’t it true that in the winter of ’90–’91 a great many Americans (the majority women) were opposed to going to war and hoped for initiatives for alternative peaceful actions? Wasn’t the feeling somewhat pacific even in Congress, which also hated the possibility of losing absolutely all its power to the determined President? Was this really because of the Vietnam Syndrome? Was this particular syndrome a collection of symptoms, like the questioning of authority? Did it also include a preference for mutual consideration and fear of the military and war in general? As syndromes go, wasn’t that a good one?

Was it the day the President decided to go to war or a couple of days later that yellow ribbons appeared on trees and doorways and people? Did those ribbons really mean we had suddenly accepted authority? Can it be that overnight the country was wild for war, eager to censor disagreement? Is it true that this included an eagerness to
be
censored? What does all this mean? What is its sorrowful meaning? How long before we take our syndrome back?

This book is called
Pictures of Peace,
a large, hopeful, international project. About twenty-nine years ago our small neighborhood peace group, the Greenwich Village Peace Center, organized an event called exactly that: Pictures of Peace. Since I always think it is worthwhile to tell an old story on the way to the future, this is what we did:

Schoolchildren in the public, parochial, and private schools in the neighborhood were asked to draw an idea of their own peaceful world. There would be no winners. Actually we had planned at first to suggest a little competition, but one of the elementary-school teachers explained our own politics to us. Most of us hadn’t grasped it earlier, then we understood it forever. So there would be an exhibition in one of the gyms, and finally Mrs. Kennedy and Mrs. Khrushchev would each be given a painting. These were graciously received at a poorly attended press conference.

What made us undertake this complicated project? We had been thinking mostly of the last decade of deadly nuclear tests and arms buildups. But the nation of Vietnam had just begun to sneak into our consciousness. At the same time, advisors, politicians, generals were sneaking into the Vietnamese countryside and the back pages of our newspapers. We were more worried than usual.

The girls and boys that took part in our project were between six and fourteen years old. The Vietnam War, which had barely begun in their childhood, would last another thirteen years for us and the Vietnamese. Did those labored-over drawings and paintings, those talking, explaining mothers and teachers, the word “peace” said over and over again—did any of that help a couple of youthful idealists against the recruiters and war makers who had been waiting for years for those children to become the right age and size for war?

Modestly, we believe that neighborhood of attention had to have been useful. So, with this book in 1991, these
Pictures of Peace,
rare in our time, we add year by year, image by image, to the struggle for peaceful, just lives. We say, Hold these pictures in your thoughtful heads. If you love this world, make use of them.

—1991

How Come?

About a year ago a friend, a woman, a writer, called long distance to ask, How come you’ve never written anything about menopause? I don’t mean to be critical, she said, I’m just asking. I decided it was a critical statement and immediately added it to other important life facts and worries I hadn’t written about yet. Life is complicated and so short, I thought, and I’m not getting anything done. But really, what about menopause?

The fact is, I’m sixty-eight and I seem to have forgotten those years or maybe that year. They happened (in my optimistic reconstruction) between my late forties and my early fifties. On medical forms I have written forty-nine, fifty-two, fifty—whatever number was useful to that day’s mindset. I
did
write a review of Rosetta Reitz’s fine book on menopause when it came out and admired Paula Weidiger’s as well, so it must have been on my mind at some point.

I suspect that my menstrual periods simply ceased one month, having grown lighter and easier. That probable easiness was accompanied by something I do remember: heat, the taking off and putting on of shirts and sweaters; my face reddening first into rosy health, then into a fierce faceful of fever. A crazy barometer, I’d explain to people who thought I was about to faint—or had they insulted me? Give that barometer two degrees and it takes twenty, I said. I was joking, and it did have a certain comedy to it. Excess, when not dangerous, often does. I laughed. My friends laughed.

We could laugh, because the kids were just about grown. Something else was coming. We could laugh, because the years were lively, energetic, risky, hopeful; lots of politics, literature, friendship, love.

That was because of luck and the historical moment. This is what luck might have meant for some of us—fortunate family experience—maybe your mother and two aunts say, Oh, it was easy for me that change of life (that’s what it was called). Luck also makes itself known by inhabiting a gene or two. (This is how good teeth appear in certain generally toothless families.) But when luck is thickened with good food or bad, with early loving care or neglect, it becomes the historical moment. On the simplest level, when women’s lives were counted by their reproducing years, menopause was the end—the year no more children could be conceived. Those whose birth and nurture had used up days and nights were often gone into the life of their own purposes. Poor women! That public and psychological description—quite frequent when I was young—enraged me, disgusted me.

But I want to take the historic moment a little past that ancient idea—well murdered by the women’s movement of the last couple of decades, sometimes called the “second wave.” All in lucky time for my aging generation.

The historical moment(s) of my change of life
¹
occurred in the late 1960s to early ’70s, when those important communities of civil-rights activists and antiwar workers began to break apart dramatically, the women of those movements re-forming, reshaping into feminist organizations, thinkers, wild, delighted activists. Many (me included) retained old, sometimes angry allegiances to the other movements, in fact, brought new people, women people, into those movements, taking other women out. This prepared women and men for the connections they would have to be making in the years ahead.

The women’s movement, that world changer, had been scattering consciousness-raising groups all over the country. Concluding that the personal was political gave a way of speaking and writing and thinking, a way for women to make art, educate themselves, work at new kinds of work, rename time and themselves. A book like
Our Bodies, Ourselves
was almost enough to air out the last few dusty centuries.

I have written this little bit of history because I believe that the high anxious but hopeful energy of the time, the general political atmosphere, and the particular female moment had a lot to do with the fact that I can’t quite remember my menopause or, remembering it, haven’t thought to write much about it. Writing for me has always come from being bugged—agitated by a life, a speaking voice, an idea. I’ve asked some of my age mates, old friends, and they feel pretty much the same way. We were busy. Life was simply heightened by opposition, and hope was essential.

Now, I write this as the war in the Gulf, the Great American Gulf War, has ended and not ended. Hundreds of thousands have died by our high-flying hand—invisible to each other the killers and the killed. Our antiwar coalitions didn’t have time to set out branches and roots. They did well, but the war was so swift, so vicious, that many of us are left with considerable sorrow-despair. I think of women entering their period of menopause now and I wonder, Will it be different for them? I think it must be. Our insides
do
know something about what is happening to our outsides. We live in this world which takes our children and sets terrible barriers before them: war—a new one just for their generation; drugs; narrow nationalisms of hatred, poverty, absurdity. Our bodies live in this world and are picked up, shaken, and what is natural becomes difficult. What is difficult becomes painful and hopeless. If I were going into menopause now, I think I would remember it years later more harshly.