Fear of Fifty (51 page)

“In dreams begin responsibilities,” says the poet Delmore Schwartz. In games begins the serious business of our lives. Still the messenger, still the provider, I am still hiding in the scented cave of the linen closet to write, then rushing out to gather sustenance from the world, then running back to feed the baby and myself.

The baby that I feed is sometimes my daughter, sometimes myself, sometimes my books. But the model of frenzied survival is clear. I alternate between periods of calm and periods of maximum stress. World War II still rages in my head.

 

I try to imagine my grandmother's life compared to my own. Born in the 1880s in Russia, raised in Odessa, she came to England in her teens, married and had two daughters before World War I began. In the twenties, she raised two small children in New York, having survived pogroms, prerevolutionary unrest, the influenza epidemic, tuberculosis, the First World War, displacement, emigration, two new languages, two new lands. And I, the second daughter of a second daughter of a second daughter, bear her burdens in my soul.

I seize them as opportunities. I embrace the courage and tenacity she passed along to me. But I have won the right to speak of it—a right she never dreamed of.

 

Where do all the memories go?

Now that my mother knows I am writing an autobiography, she brings me notes on little yellow Post-its. The latest Post-it note reads: “DeeDee, Funalike, and the Famous Guy.”

“I have only the vaguest recollection,” I tell my mother. “Who were they?”

“Oh—they were your imaginary friends,” she says. “You used to converse with them for
hours.
You never went
anywhere
without DeeDee, Funalike, and the Famous Guy.”

I am standing in the middle of a cemetery. Every day, another person younger than I dies. Every day the obituaries bring news of someone from college or high school or camp who
died
at forty-seven or -eight or -nine or even at fifty. Sometimes I see classmates of mine on TV and they look like old men or old women. And sometimes I meet people and don't remember their names at all. When do I get to be like Aunt Kitty? When do I forget it all?

And now even my beloved imaginary friends from childhood have bitten the dust. All I have are their names on a Post-it note. I remember nothing whatever about them. Who on earth could they have been? Shall we reinvent these friends from the names up?

“The Famous Guy” is, I suspect, some sort of sneaky stand-in for my father. He wears an ice-white tux with a bright blue cornflower boutonniere. His hair is slicked back with Brylcreem and he reeks of ice-blue Aqua Velva. The smell evokes tinkling pianos in the next apartment and midnight-blue limousines with phallic fins. He dances like a dream, gliding over floors of polished anthracite in his polished anthracite shoes. He is desire, love, luck, a trip to the moon on gossamer wings. He can play anything from his fake book—forgotten songs like “So Many Memories” or “The Jersey Bounce,” and famous songs like “Love Walked In” and “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” He can dance the tango, the mambo, the rhumba with an h, and when he leaves, he gives you the blues (but you'd rather have the blues than any other guy). He is Daddy and the wild redheaded boy with the Harvard scarf who held the doors of the subway train on Seventy-eighth Street and Central Park West. Once, he sweated into a T-shirt, left it in your hamper, and you pulled it out and never washed it. You have been sleeping with it ever since.

Everyone else you have loved or married is a stand-in for the Famous Guy. His eyes are blue and green and brown and warm gold all at once. He can change heads faster than Princess Langwidere. As you get older, you meet him less and less often. A snatch of melody wafting through a wall, a scent of sweat and sweet cologne, and you seem to see him. Once, you cruised the city in a midnight limousine looking for him, sure that when you found him you would drag him into it and make love right there on the floor, while the chauffeur with the Braille eyes and the crystal skull drove like wet velvet, giving you the chance to do the same.
Oh, Famous Guy
—
when will you come to live in my life?

“Never.”

“You
know.”

Because desire is a limousine that never stops moving, a flying carpet gliding over the chimney pots as seen by an airborne Peter Pan, a fragment of song to which you cannot remember the release.
Ah. Famous Guy, come and make love to me right now.

“I am. I am doing it by dictating these words.”

And what about DeeDee? DeeDee is the all-American girl. She's the one who doesn't have Russian grandparents or Balinese batiks over the stair rail. She's the one who has ice-white refrigerator teeth and hair made of blonde Dynel. She has a candy-striped crinoline and over it a blue felt skirt with poodles—poodles chained to other poodles. You had a skirt like that too, but you never looked in it the way DeeDee looked. How was that?
Regular.
DeeDee was a
regular girl
and you would never be regular if you lived to be a hundred and six. You had the poodle skirt and the twin set and the pearls and the circle pin, but you fooled no one. You were definitely
irregular.
And do you know what? You are still irregular—even among writers, you are irregular. You will never be DeeDee. You belong nowhere, have a funny name, are seen always as something you're not. You cannot change your name to DeeDee, whatever you do. You are Erica, Erotica, Eroica—as they called you in high school. Or Isadora, Fanny, Jessica, Leila—as you called yourself in books. But never normal blonde happy DeeDee who marries the captain of the football team and never even longs for the Famous Guy, let alone cruises the city, searching for him and inviting him into that long limousine.

DeeDee had a white wedding and two-point-five kids. She never had anything she didn't want and never wanted anything she didn't have. What on earth was she doing playing with you? That's exactly it. She's taken her marbles and gone home, leaving no memory traces. Her mother wouldn't let her. She never belonged in your house in the first place. But you miss her. And she reads your books and tries to tell you in bookstores in shopping plazas that she is just as irregular as you are and that DeeDee doesn't really
exist.
She loves you for
not
being DeeDee, for having exploded DeeDee as a myth, for having taken her clothes and filled her head with wet dreams that never drive away.

Funalike was a name I made up for myself: middle child, me too, having funalike, bouncy, eager to please, a good kid who blended in, was polite, thanked parents for dinner, ate her peas, minded her Qs, and
never
made peepee in the bathwater. Funalike kissed boys she didn't like
that
much, because she didn't want to be considered un-funalike. She ran errands, saved quarters, shouted
Wagon, wagon!
at the Fire Island ferry dock until she had enough money to buy all the Nancy Drew mysteries. And then she read them one by one alike until she knew how a book got made and how you got the reader to turn the page—which was the most funalike Funalike ever had.

Oh
,
Funalike
,
will you ever marry the Famous Guy?
Only in books, said she, so that DeeDee can marry him too.

The fourth imaginary friend was not my invention but my mother's or my grandmother's or maybe even my great-grandmother's. This was Hashka the Meshugganeh. (She is not on the Post-it—but somehow the other three bring her along with them.)

Who was she? (For she definitely was a she.) She was invoked when somebody got herself up in mad get-up (a frequent occurrence in our house) and somebody else said, “You look like Hashka the Meshugganeh.” Was she an apparition from some distant shtetl? Was she the madwoman of Grodno or some ragpicker from the outskirts of Odessa? She wore a crazy hat—summer or winter. Her clothes were voluminous and black and hid owls, children, severed body parts. She cackled like a hen, flapped like a swan, and had glittering mad eyes. She told tales of babies made into fruit compote and sausages that sang and puppets that turned into real children.

She was on pretty good terms with the Famous Guy. He came for her nightly in his long limousine. (Nobody in that shtetl had ever even seen a
car,
let alone a limousine.) What he wanted with her, we didn't know, but what
we
thought was her madness evidently beguiled
him.

They got married and had various daughters. One was DeeDee—who was, of course, perfect. One was Funalike, who
tried
to be, by overachieving and spreading fun, fun, funalike. Another was Erica with the ambiguous last name. She kept changing her last name, in the hopes of capturing memory. But memory is a fickle friend. And, in the end, all that's left of it is what you read in books.

And so we see that the frayed thread of memory is likely to snag on any will-o'-the-wisp. If you have had a childhood in which no one punishes you for your fantasies, in which your mother even delights in remembering the names of your imaginary friends, you may grow up to be that trio of alter egos: DeeDee, Funalike, and just plain Erica. Of all the things I bless my mother for, it is this delight in fantasy, the right to dream, that she passed on to me. It is a gift—the greatest she gave.

 

It was only after Ken and I had been married for a while that I reached this truce with my mother.

First, I feared I was
becoming
her—a natural enough evolution in a marriage that replayed many elements of my parents' marriage: the closeness, the fierce fighting, the sense of safety. I think it is not unusual for couples to go through a copycat phase of parental marriages, but it is important also to leave that phase behind. Otherwise, the marriage risks becoming permanently desexualized.

As a kid, I felt doomed to loneliness, a misfit, a martyr. Only with my parents, sleeping between them in that magic hollow, did I lose the loneliness. But I was, like all kids, an interloper. I had no partner of my own. For years I acted out variations of Oedipal dreams. My constant traveling, meeting men in distant hotel rooms, was, I realized in my forties, a disguised dream of meeting my father abroad on his endless travels. When I flashed on that—perhaps it happened on that fateful trip to Umbria—the game of hotel sex became suddenly superfluous. I was not going to meet and seduce my father in a foreign hotel. He belonged to my mother. When I gave up the fantasy of springing him loose and having him for myself, I could finally accept having my own partner and stop flying from city to city meeting man after man. (Maybe my choosing married men and then choosing
not
to let them leave their wives was another Oedipal undoing—I would have them and not have them, both at the same time.)

My mother accepted Ken as she had never accepted anyone before. It may have been merely exhaustion. Or it may have been the
mamaloschen.
Or maybe she knew that
I
had acknowledged her marriage at last. I was no longer her rival. I had my own man to love me every day. My mother and I talked in a new way. Perhaps I had learned to listen in a new way. I think we see our parents' lives differently at every stage of our journey, and at fifty, married to a friend and accepting being loved, I could look at my parents as people.

I had never thought my mother would agree to be interviewed, but it turned out I was wrong. I have been wrong about so much in my life—why not this?

My mother is now so frail that though I want to take her in my arms and hug her, I fear she will break. I walk on eggs around her—a funny metaphor to use of mothers. Even while I am interviewing her, I am trying not to offend. The truth is, I only got to this point because, once, when I was in my twenties, I
did
offend. I thumbed my nose at her life. I emancipated myself with
Fear of Flying
and cut free. I wrote a manifesto against my mother. And it was she herself who had given me the courage to do this.

“I feel that I have just read my obituary,” she used to say after reading certain poems of mine. As for the novels, she claimed never to have read them, preferring me to be a poet.

“That's not your obituary,” I said. “I love you.” But she was right and I was wrong. And anyway, what did it have to do with love? You can love and still kill, then mourn. When did love ever preclude murder?

Of course I wrote her obituary, just as she wrote her mother's obituary in that ghastly dream, just as Molly is writing mine. Writing your mother's obituary is a sign of being alive. It is the indispensable act. It is the way you steal a life.

And the mother whose heart has been plucked out to make a sacrifice on the altar of poetry or fiction or love or freedom still says, when the grown child stumbles, “Are you hurt, my child?”

To act and make flower ...

—Muriel Rukeyser,
The Life of Poetry

There is a final antidote we must learn: to love them and forgive them. This attitude comes hard and must be reached with anguish. —Louise Bogan,
Journey Round My Room: The Autobiography

 

 

As I come to the end of this book, something in me panics and wants to block. I stop writing forward. I go back and try to rewrite the old chapters of my life—recast them, hone them, change the episodes, the order, the ending. The truth is: I do not want to finish the book and let it go. It is like letting my life go. It will cease to be mine; it will go out into the world and become like a fire hydrant for any cur to piss on. It will begin its long journey from my will, my brain, my language, into the hearts of those who need it. But, in the interim, like a child, it may have to take a lot of abuse. Sometimes my books are messengers that people want to shoot. And then they linger on, despite the odds.