The Golden Dream (23 page)

Just the other day, Suzie Myers relates, her daughter approached her and said, “Mom, isn't it true that this house usually goes to the
girl
in the family?”

WEST

17

“
A Feeling of Separation
”

Single women, it was agreed, should not move to Los Altos. Divorced and widowed women should move away as quickly as possible. The suburbs offer hostile territory to the unattached female. The occasion for these observations was what an earlier generation might have called a coffee klatsch—a morning gathering of five neighborhood women, the wives of a dentist, a drug company vice-president, a commercial artist, a United Airlines pilot, and a radiologist. But since the setting was California, the klatsch had a decidedly West Coast flair. Instead of coffee, the tanned and well-scrubbed ladies were sipping tall glasses of iced tea graced with sprigs of mint, in front of a garden table set out with watercress sandwiches, thin pralines, Monterey Jack cheese and biscuits, and strawberries the size of a child's fist. Of course there was a pool. “Everyone has a pool,” said the drug vice-president's wife.

The “problem” of the single woman in Los Altos had come up because, it seemed, the single woman was the only serious problem that Los Altos faced. Los Altos is one of a string of pretty to prettier towns that dangle, like beads, along the old Camino Real as it winds down the San Francisco Peninsula—Burlingame, Hillsborough, Atherton, Redwood City, Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Mountain View, etc. Some of the towns—Burlingame and Hillsborough in particular—are quite grand, and politically quite conservative. Others, like Palo Alto with Stanford University at its heart, are considered more intellectual and liberal. Menlo Park is
regarded as a somewhat substandard Palo Alto. Redwood City, Mountain View, and Sunnyvale are ranked below Menlo Park on the intangible social scale. Los Altos—socially about midway between blue-jeansy, pipe-smoking Palo Alto and marble-colonnaded Hillsborough—is a
cozy
town, a family town, a town of largish, well-manicured, but unpretentious California one-level houses with redwood-fenced backyards, gardens, terraces, barbecues, and the inevitable swimming pools. Because of the recent California drought, water to fill these pools must often be brought in, expensively, in large trucks. Lawns in certain areas which have had to ban the use of sprinkler systems may now be only hose-watered, leaving grass thirsty. It is a town that seldom bothers to lock its doors when it goes out of an afternoon. Entertaining here is casual, spur-of-the-moment, drop-in-anytime. “It's a town,” as one Los Altan puts it, “where we all own good crystal, but almost never take it out.” The air, for the most part, is clear, cool, and sunny all the year around—the Peninsula escapes San Francisco's chilly summer fogs—and smells of lemon eucalyptus.

This is shopping-center country. Nowhere on earth, they say, are more shopping centers more heavily concentrated than in this long, wide Santa Clara Valley. At latest count, there were 135 shopping centers between Palo Alto and San Jose. More are being built, and still more are on the drawing boards and in the endless dreams of the developers. They proliferate like suburban weeds. Where fruit orchards once stood, these new landmarks proclaim themselves with towering neon signs: Blossom Valley, Valley Fair, The Prune Yard, Oakridge Plaza, Seven Trees, East Ridge, and so on. East Ridge, in fact, is the largest shopping center on the West Coast, with 160 shops, eight banks, four department stores, and fourteen restaurants. Kathleen and John Stolp got married in an open-to-the-public ceremony on the mall of East Ridge, drawing an audience of thousands. It was a first, a milestone in the history of consumerism. Robert Redford filmed part of
The Candidate
in the East Ridge shopping mall, drawing even more spectators and potential shoppers. When the San Jose Symphony Orchestra performed Symphony No. 26 by the American composer Alan Hovhaness on the East Ridge mall, it drew an audience of over five thousand—the largest in the orchestra's history—even though most of the listeners had never heard of Hovhaness. Before, during, and after the concert, business boomed. Today, the shopping centers compete with
one another for “attractions” and “events,” which range from wedding receptions, fashion shows, art shows, to cake shows, dog shows, and frog-jumping contests. “We try to create the atmosphere of small-town U.S.A.,” says C. W. Rowan, West Coast manager of the Taubman Company, which built, designed, and operates East Ridge and fourteen other centers across the country.

In architectural style, the shopping centers run the gamut from California Ranchero to Hacienda Moderne to Adobe Op, and a map of the Santa Clara Valley shopping centers would resemble a well-planted minefield. They are larger, more numerous, cost more money to build, and consume more acreage than the Pyramids, and more people visit them each day than have ever visited Egypt. If all 135 centers were bunched together, their commercial space would cover thirty square miles, with over fifteen million square feet of shops surrounded by enough asphalt to provide free parking for 93,858 automobiles, and every year some three billion dollars changes hands in this vast bazaar. The shopping centers, which did not exist twenty-five years ago, are now a major part of the Peninsula's way of life. Some shoppers have their favorite centers. Others play the field, going from one to another. A great many people confess that they spend much of each day in this or that shopping center—not really to buy, but just to stroll, look at the changing window displays, and watch the other shoppers. These shopping-center wanderers, most of them women, are an increasing phenomenon as they move through the glassed-in malls, past fountains that flow out of futuristic sculptures, past reflecting pools, past tall indoor stands of tropical trees; up and down the automated stairways they travel, their eyes glazed as if in a hypnotic trance. Mrs. Babette Markel, who has made it her practice to visit each of the 135 shopping centers on a rotating daily basis, is typical. “Each one is like a different fairy tale,” she says, “and every four months, when I start out all over again, there's nearly always something new.”

Sociologists disagree about the social value of the Santa Clara County shopping centers. Dr. Thomas Tutko, a psychologist at San Jose State University, is enthusiastic. Shopping centers, says Dr. Tutko, “serve our individual needs for security and satisfy our needs for material objects to make us feel worthwhile. They provide the opportunity to show others that you've ‘made it.' Shopping centers seem to combine old psychology with new psychology. The new psychology is that you need things that are convenient, all in one spot, in the hustle-bustle present philosophy of life. But more
importantly, on another level, they epitomize the old family square. It's a return to the old marketplace, where the community really meets. We need a sense of protection and security. In the old days, we built forts.” On the surface, of course, these observations seem somewhat contradictory. Is a shopping center more like a down-homey family meeting place or an armed encampment?

Donald Rothblatt, a Harvard University scholar of urban affairs who came to California a few years ago to study Santa Clara County's galloping shopping-center syndrome, has a different view. “Shopping centers offer a false sense of reality,” Professor Rothblatt says. “They blur the focus on the human condition, don't accommodate the full range of people, and fail to provide a sense of centrality.” Professor Rothblatt feels that any metropolis needs “a concentration of activity at the center which creates an intensity that is urbane. It captures the historical image we have of civilized man, and gives an identity—visually and spiritually.” As for Santa Clara County, he says: “I have yet to find the essence of this place. It lacks identity, a sense of where you are. There's no
here
here.”

The shopping centers, meanwhile, are distrusted by the more family-oriented Peninsula-ites. Because it is here that the unattached woman—the widow, the divorcee, the single girl—often plies her unsettling trade. Some of the merchandise that the shopping centers offer is human. The Peninsula used to consist primarily of bedroom communities for men who commuted back and forth to “the city,” as northern Californians like to call San Francisco. Today, commuters represent a much smaller proportion of the male population. The Peninsula has become industrialized, particularly by electronics companies. In addition to branches of the big San Francisco stores and the dog-grooming shops and beauty salons, the shopping centers contain banks, insurance companies, brokerage houses, lawyers' and doctors' offices, where professional men who used to commute to San Francisco now find it more convenient to have their practices. The shopping centers contain bars and restaurants where such men have lunch or stop for a drink before heading home on the freeway, and the single women have learned that these are excellent places to encounter temporarily unfettered men. The men they find, of course, are often husbands of dutiful housewives in communities like Los Altos.

Without ever discussing it, therefore, the wives of Los Altos and communities like it have devised tactics designed to protect their property, and to make single women feel as uncomfortable and
unwelcome as possible. It boils down to an effort to keep the single woman from entering the community. Many home owners, for example, out of fear of neighbor pressure, will refuse to sell their house if the prospective buyer is a single woman. It also involves a not-so-subtle campaign to drive out the newly single woman, whether widow or divorcee. One recently divorced woman describes it this way: “It was really the Big Freeze. When it happened, I couldn't believe it. I suppose in any divorce, your friends choose sides. But I thought that at least my
women
friends would stand by me. Oh, they were loyal and sympathetic enough while I was going through the separation and the divorce—as long as I was still technically married. But the minute I had my decree, the phone stopped ringing. It was as though I'd become a nonperson. My neighbors stopped smiling and waving when we passed on the street. One woman, whom I used to think of as my
best
friend, now absolutely cuts me dead. I hear about her parties, parties I always used to be invited to, but I'm never asked. When I tried to ask her and her husband to dinner, she told me very coldly that they were busy, though I found out later that they weren't. At one party that I
was
asked to, none of the women spoke to me, and neither did most of the men. When they did, they were embarrassed and self-conscious, as though afraid of what their wives might say. I spend my evenings now doing things I never did before—going to lectures, concerts, or to the movies by myself. I refuse to go to the bars; I'm not ready for that scene. At home at night, I watch television, eat supper over the kitchen sink. I've read more books in the last six months than I did in twenty years of being married. I used to love this little town, but now I think I hate it. It's been terribly lonely. I've practically decided to sell the house and move to the city, though I don't know anyone there. My ex-husband, meanwhile, has taken an apartment in another part of town. And he gets asked out all the time!”

The ladies of Los Altos agree that suburbs like theirs are much kinder to the single male. “He poses no threat,” one woman says. “And for some reason, an extra man at a party is much more welcome than an extra woman. An extra man is fun; an extra woman just seems in the way.” But divorced women complain that this attitude is grossly unfair. “A man doesn't even have to be
attractive
to be invited to all the parties,” the recent divorcee complains. “He can be a feeble-minded alcoholic homosexual with a wooden leg, and as long as he's recognizably
male
he's on everyone's list. I know of one man in particular who's such a bore and such a slob. He's
always sloppy drunk before dinner is served, and has to leave halfway through the evening. But he's still the darling of all our leading hostesses!”

Somewhat less easy to deal with—even in towns like Los Altos, which, on the surface at least, like to project a sober, “unswinging” image, and boast of a high degree of quiet domestic stability—is the phenomenon of the marauding
married
woman. “I blame the Women's Lib movement,” says one of the Los Altos wives. “A lot of women have decided that it's okay to be promiscuous—just the way it used to be considered more or less okay for men.” Recently, Los Altos was abuzz with events in a nearby Peninsula town. An attractive woman in her middle thirties, the mother of three children, had had a brief affair. Afterward, she had decided to tell her husband about it. The result of this information was that he became impotent. As the woman explained it to her friends: “As long as he's impotent, I don't see why I'm not perfectly entitled to have some fun of my own. The other night, in a bar at East Ridge, I met a terribly attractive man. He said he was going to San Francisco for the weekend, and asked me if I'd come up and have dinner with him. I said I'd think about it, and he gave me his card. The next day, I decided, why not? and called him at his office. He asked me to meet him at the Bourgogne, which happens to be my favorite restaurant. We had a lovely dinner, one thing led to another, and I found myself back in his room at the Stanford Court. The next morning, I had breakfast in bed for the first time since my honeymoon.”

This woman's friends are not sure what to do about these adulterous confessions. Her immediate neighbors, however, secretly hope that her behavior will lead to a divorce, and that she will get the house, sell it to some nice, solidly married couple, and move away.

The men of the San Francisco Peninsula, meanwhile, express doubts of another sort about the quality of the suburban experience, and what it sometimes dots to human relationships. Allan Benjamin, for example, is a prosperous physician who lives and practices in the area—“Nowadays we only get up to San Francisco a couple of times a year”—and who recently, in his spare time, built a fanciful gazebo out of slender redwood strips to add another touch of gaiety to his already very pretty backyard. “There's a feeling of
separation
here,” he says. “It's very hard to define, hard to put your finger on. It's a feeling of living apart from other people, even your closest
neighbors. It's not just that you don't borrow your neighbor's lawnmower—everybody knows that you mustn't do that. It's a feeling that you have to leave them alone in other ways. For example, if you hear a woman screaming in the house next door, you don't run over, or pick up the phone, to see if she needs help. You think it's probably just a domestic argument: stay out of it, mind your own business. Of course, she could be being raped or murdered. Still, you don't do anything. Or if you see a police car pull up in front of a house on the street, you don't go out to find out what's the matter. You don't phone. That would be considered nosy. You don't ask questions. You sit it out. If, later on, the neighbor wants to tell you what the trouble was, he'll tell you. Otherwise, you never know.” Not long ago, in one quiet neighborhood, a youth battled with his stepfather and broke the man's neck. Later, the boy boasted to his friends of what he had done, and how his stepfather's face “turned green, then white.” In very little time, the whole neighborhood had heard about the episode. Everyone was shocked. Everyone was sorry. But no one mentioned it to the boy's mother, nor did she mention it to them. No one had gone to see the stepfather in the hospital. He might just as well have been off on a routine business trip. As far as the beleaguered family was concerned, it was a private, closed affair. As far as the neighbors were concerned, it might just as well not have happened. Close the door. It will go away.