Living Out Loud (5 page)

I
came late to the down comforter. I thought it was a fad. Ducks have never looked particularly warm and cozy to me, and two hundred dollars seems like an awful lot to pay for a blanket. Now I admit I was wrong. Even on summer nights I lie beneath its featherweight and feel secure. Over the intercom on the table just next to my left ear, I imagine I can hear the sounds of the children snuffling softly in the rooms on the floor above. There is pink fiber-glass insulation in my crawl space and an infrared light illuminating the backyard with a bulb the electrician says may last my lifetime, if I don’t live too long. And downstairs my bookshelves are filled with books.

Strange things make me feel secure. I can’t honestly say how much money is in the savings account, and I still think of an I.R.A. as some black hole that I throw $2,000 into each year, like the mouth of some big carnivore at the zoo. But
I couldn’t get along without the cream pitcher shaped like a cat that my mother got as a shower gift, or the omelet pan that my Aunt Catherine gave me when I graduated from high school, or my books.

I moved a fair amount when I was a kid. I wasn’t exactly an army brat, but I didn’t even come close to being married in the house where we lived when I was born. So I have a tendency to assemble all these talismans, wrap them in newspaper, and take them from place to place. The books were always most important because they were not simply objects, but portable friends. Sometimes at night I lie in the dark beneath my insulated crawl space and these words come to mind: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” It is the first sentence of
Pride and Prejudice
. It is the only sentence in any book in the English language I know perfectly by heart, except for the beginning of the Gospel of John, the part about, “In the beginning was the Word.”

Pride and Prejudice
is not really my favorite book, although it is definitely in the top ten, along with
Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, Sons and Lovers, Anna Karenina, Gone With the Wind
and a series about two girls in Minnesota called the Betsy-Tacy books. But it is the book that makes me most feel that everything is going to be all right, that the world is a hospitable place and that, as Anne Frank once said, people are really good at heart.

Why it should do this when it was published in 1813 and those feelings in the late twentieth century are so patently untrue, I do not know. Part of it is that
Pride and Prejudice
has been with me for a long time, since I was twelve. Part is that it is about a young woman named Elizabeth Bennet, who I have always felt would have been my best friend if she hadn’t been fictional. Part is that it is about the right things happening
in the wrong way—chance meetings leading to rapprochements, misunderstandings leading to marriages—in just the way you wish would happen in real life.

Most important, I feel at home in this book. There is a great short story by Woody Allen called “The Kugelmass Episode,” in which a college professor arranges for a conjurer to let him become a character in
Madame Bovary
and have a love affair with her. All over the world Flaubert scholars start wondering about this guy Kugelmass on page 94. I feel that I could just slip unnoticed into
Pride and Prejudice
. Elizabeth and I could sit around jawboning about what a pain Mr. Darcy is, while all the time I’d be secretly thinking he is just the guy for her.

I never tire of Elizabeth Bennet or her family, even her silly mother. One summer my family moved to West Virginia—and, believe me, I was not West Virginia material. The Bennets saved my life. They moved with me, and I spent all my time with them until, finally, I made some friends. The only thing I don’t like about
Pride and Prejudice
is the ending, because then it’s over.

I don’t feel this way about anything written much after 1940. I’ve always liked to hang around bookstores; among other things, I like the way they smell. But nowadays I stand in front of the fiction shelves and feel like a stranger in a strange land. I picture myself showing up in one of these books in which people sit around their kitchens and talk to their cats about what they bought at Bloomingdale’s, and I figure readers would just think, “Who’s that weird woman sitting over in the corner with the paperback copy of
Pride and Prejudice
, looking so sad?” I feel much the same way about objects, too, which is why I seem to buy so many antiques, even though they’re uncomfortable and often appear to have no function whatsoever.

Maybe I just haven’t given the modern enough time to make me feel at home. Maybe twenty years from now I’ll look at a Dansk vase on a shelf, and it will make me feel warm all over.
Maybe there will be some new hip modern novel that will take me in its arms and make me part of it, give me a new best friend and a first sentence that will make me feel as good in the middle of the night as the sound of the person in the room above me turning over in his crib. After all, I came late to down comforters. In the meantime, Elizabeth and I are really worried about her sister Jane. She’s stuck on this guy named Bingley and things don’t look good. But trust me, we’ll work it all out in the end.

W
hen I was a little girl, I loved Halloween because it was the only day of the year when I was beautiful. I had friends who went out dressed as hobos and clowns and witches, but I never would. I was always a princess or a ballet dancer, Sleeping Beauty or Cinderella. (One year I wanted to go as Barbie. “Out of the question,” said my mother flatly, and it occurs to me now that her reply worked on several levels.)

It was the only day of the year when I wore satin or net or hoops, the only day of the year when my thin lips were carmine and full and the mole on my upper lip, blackened with eyebrow pencil, became a beauty mark. I remember one Halloween, when I wore my cousin Mary Jane’s flower-girl dress, blue net over blue chiffon over blue satin, with a skirt as big around at the bottom as a hula hoop, as one of the happiest nights of my life. I had a wand with a silver star on the end made of tinfoil, and a tiara that was borrowed
from a girl down the street who was last year’s prom princess. My hair had been set in pin curls, and waves rose all over my head like a cross between Shirley Temple and Elsa Lanchester in
Bride of Frankenstein
. I looked in the mirror on the back of my closet door and saw someone I was not, and loved her. The night was sharp, as perfect Halloween nights always are, but I would not wear a coat. I caught cold, and didn’t care.

I suppose one of the things that makes me saddest about modern life, right up there with the fact that most of the furniture is so cheesy, is that Halloween has fallen into some disrepute. The candy is not good for you. The store-bought costumes stink. And behind every door a mother is supposed to imagine that there’s a man with candied apples whose recipe for caramelization includes rat poison. My children don’t go far on Halloween, at least in part because they are city kids. They visit a few neighbors, get just enough stuff to make a kind of promising rustle in the bottom of their bags. They are amazed at even this much license; the rest of the year they live with a woman whose idea of a good time is a bag of yogurt raisins. They must think I’ve lost it when I stand before the jack-o’-lantern at the kitchen table, grinning maniacally at one of those miniature Mr. Goodbars. I have never in my life eaten a Mr. Goodbar, except in the aftermath of Halloween.

In the way they do—must, I suppose—my children are galvanized by Halloween because I am, just as they make a big fuss about throwing autumn leaves up in the air and letting them tumble over their heads. They take their cue from me. The little one is still a bit confused, but the elder caught fire last year. “I want to be a clown,” he said. And even though, throughout the month, he ricocheted between wanting to be a bumblebee and a bunny, he always inevitably came back to wanting to be a clown. His cheeks were painted with red circles, the tip of his nose was blue, and although he was sick for four days beforehand he insisted on dragging himself
around to a half-dozen houses in his satin clown costume with the pompons and the big ruffle around his reedy neck. A sensitive, thoughtful little boy, who loves to laugh but never likes to feel laughed at, he looked in the mirror and saw someone he was not. “I look really great,” he said.

(By contrast, the little one was a bunny, quite himself in artificial white pile. “Hop, hop, hop,” he said for three hours. “Hop, hop, hop,” he said for two weeks afterward. Of course, I chose the costume, and when he chooses for himself perhaps he will choose something more contrary to his essential nature. Like a clerical collar. This year he is a black cat, which is just right.)

This year the elder boy is a witch, which is just right, too. He says he loves witches because they are mean and nasty, although he is not mean and nasty at all. He will wear a black robe, a pointed hat, and wrinkles made of eyeliner. A broom but no wig. “I am a boy witch,” he says with dignity.

I, of course, go along for the ride, at least for the next few years, until the day when they say “Mo-om!” in that unpleasant, whiny voice and march off by themselves with their pillowcases, their voices muffled behind their masks. Last year I thought seriously about dressing up as something for the sake of verisimilitude—I’m short, I could pass!—but abandoned the idea in a rare moment of complete and total common sense. This year I will not be so foolish.

The other day on the telephone a friend recalled one of the saddest moments of her youth: the night when her sister came home in tears and announced that she had become too old to go out on Halloween. I remember it, too—that night looking into the mirror at a Gypsy, with hoop earrings and a rakish headscarf and an off-the-shoulder peasant blouse, and knowing in a kind of clear, horrible grown-up way that it was something I was not. And getting door duty from then on in, giving out
M & M’s to kids who were rowdy, jubilant, somehow freed from themselves, and happy not to find behind the door one of those moms who gave out apples. I’ve been on door duty every Halloween since. Last year I suppose I wanted to make one last stab at the magic. But the wand’s been passed.