We have only to study ourselves, our friends, and the world of amateur and professional psychologizing in which we all live to know that parents someday will be cited as the cause of their children’s (choose as many as you like): inability to open up, affinity for people who belittle and hurt them, vulnerability, inferiority. Occasionally—very occasionally—their accomplishment and their strength. We need to find our weaknesses outside ourselves, our strength within. I knew that. I read Portnoy’s Complaint, D. H. Lawrence, and Eugene O’Neill. And yet I had managed to depersonalize the message until nights like this one, when I wake up with the moon shining through the window and stare back at a person who, staring at me, seems to be saying, “You are, therefore I am.”
I am not comfortable with this, which is a little like saying I don’t like having green eyes. “Remember that you are the world to your child,” one pamphlet I was given says. Oh, great. After a lifetime of yearning for egalitarian relationships, of trying to eschew power plays with other human beings, I find myself in a relationship which, by its very nature, can never really be equal nor free from a skewed balance of power.
We dwell so often on the harm that can be done by exercising that power malevolently, by those people who hit their children, or have sex with them, or tell them day after day that they are worthless and bad. Free of those things, I am more troubled by the subtleties. Raising children is a spur-of-the-moment, seat-of-the-pants sort of deal, as any parent knows, particularly after an adult child says that his most searing memory consists of an offhand comment in the car on the way to second grade that the parent cannot even dimly recall. Despite what the books suggest, you usually do not have several weeks to puzzle out how to separate battling siblings or what to say about death. So it is inevitable that, after a hard day, I occasionally sit back and think about whether I made any crucial mistakes between the chocolate pudding and the hide-and-go-seek. The answer is probably no. But still I consider the question—of passive power, of the power of suggestion, imitation, reaction.
Perhaps I have been preoccupied with all this lately because, despite the difference in their ages, my sons have dovetailed in a developmental stage and have both fallen in love with me. I can see it in their eyes. For the elder one, this is the grand passion before he lets go, flies off into the male world, switches his identification to his father. For the younger, this is the cleaving to me absolutely which anticipates that process. It is all in the books. Spock says it’s fine as long as the child does not become “too close” to the parent of the opposite sex. “In that case, it’s wise to get the help of a child guidance clinic,” he adds.
There’s not much to cure what ails me. I am aghast to find myself in such a position of power over two other people. Their father and I have them in thrall simply by having produced them. We have the power to make them feel good or bad about themselves, which is the greatest power in the world. Ours will not be the only influence, but it is the earliest, the most ubiquitous, and potentially the most pernicious. Lovers and friends will make them blossom and bleed, but they may move on to other lovers and friends. We are the only parents they will have. Sometimes one of them will put silky arms around my neck and stare deep into my eyes like an elfin Svengali and say with full force of the heart, “I love you.” The vowel in that middle word dips and lengthens, like a phrase in a Brenda Lee song. My first reaction is to be drowned in happiness. My second is to think: don’t mean it so much. Don’t feel it so deeply. Don’t let me have so much influence over you. Of course, I have no choice. And neither do they.
FOOLING
AROUND
GOSSIP
So I’m reading about Joan Collins, who got married last year in Las Vegas to a man fourteen years her junior whose only resume description was “former Swedish pop star.” And I’m reading about Sylvester Stallone, who married a woman usually photographed wearing no more than the equivalent of a bandanna, who introduced herself by sending a photograph to his hotel room after she had ditched her baby and her first husband in Denmark. (I mean, what are they feeding them in Scandinavia? Human blood?) And I see that these people are getting divorced.
Somehow I am no more surprised than I was to hear that people claiming to be Elvis’s love children are sprouting like soybeans all over the South. As the Everly Brothers once said so wisely, love is strange. Particularly when you live in Hollywood.
Lifestyles of the Rich and Predictable—I love them. I read People magazine every week, and believe me, I don’t read it for those dumb Q and As about how stress can make you sick, or the pieces about the Johnsons, who run the biggest little pig farm in Iowa. I read it for Joan and Stallone and Farrah and Ryan and Tatum and Liz. I love the way these people live, because there’s such an incredible logic to it all: love children, the Betty Ford clinic, personal relationships with the spirit world. If you get married in Las Vegas and the groom wears white and carries a simple bouquet of premarital contracts, common sense tells you that a divorce will follow in very short order, and that someone will be represented by Marvin Mitchelson. You know what to expect from Liz Taylor’s life. First she shows up at something with a guy. Then she gets some large jewelry from the guy. Then she marries him. Then she divorces him.
Yes, these people lead lives with definition and norms. It’s the rest of us who have weird, off-the-wall ways. In my circle it is not totally uncommon for a man to come home one night after fourteen years of marriage, two children, two renovations, three attempts at the Scarsdale diet, a stint at Smokenders, and one midlife crisis, and say, without warning, on a day no better and no worse than thousands of others, “I don’t love you. I never loved you. I’m leaving.” And there you are, ditched by a person who is not even Scandinavian, with no jewelry, and no premarital contract, hit up side of the head.
In Hollywood, I am sure you would expect this. Your husband would open his mouth and before he got a word out you could just say, “I’m not stupid. I saw in the Star while I was in the supermarket line that Priscilla is having your love child.”
My husband is appalled—not by Joan’s ex-husband’s little passionflower or those wild accusations about Sly’s estranged wife and her secretary, but by the fact that I am interested in it all. He’s even threatened that if I abdicate my responsibilities and order too much Chinese takeout he’s going to tell the world that I can’t get going in the morning without a cup of coffee and a gossip column. Let him. Where else am I going to get this stuff? Here at home? This is not a life that is going to wind up in the full-color tabloids, no matter how you cut it. “Quin and Christopher in Backyard Wading Pool—AS YOU’VE NEVER SEEN THEM BEFORE!” “Gerry: There Were Never Enough Clean Socks.” “Love on the Rocks: Bottled Salad Dressing the Last Straw.” Circulation plummets.
The appeal of these people is that they are not at all what I find at home. (For one thing, they decorate in all-white.) It’s a great combination—glamour and predictability. We’re not strong on either one of them around here. My kids might turn out to be architects, or heavy metal drummers (please, God, no), or farmers, or lawyers. They may be good or bad or good and bad. This is different from the kids of celebs, who are either very, very good (“LISA MARIE PRESLEY: ‘I’ll never be like my father.’ ”) or very, very bad (LISA MARIE: ‘She’s just like Elvis,’ says Priscilla.”).
My friends don’t have glamorous predictable lives, either; they have to make do with their relationships instead of figuring they’ll meet someone better on the set of their next film.
Maybe I’d be more tolerant of, say, the Princess of Wales’s problems if she was a friend of mine. She might call and say, “He’s too old, he’s never home, all he wants to do is garden and go to swamis, his mother thinks she runs the world.” And I would tell her, “Look, Diana, he’s a great father, he never embarrasses you in public, he wears nice clothes, and he keeps the garden looking great. Plus you have a terrific house and great jewelry, and anyhow, when was the last time I met Rod Stewart or Timothy Dalton?”
/>
Whereas when I read about her in the tabloids (DI DISGRUNTLED, DANCES AT DISCO) I just think, “It’ll never last. And anyhow, what did she expect?” She should have known that there are standards in the public eye. I’ve learned them just by keeping tabs on the divorce courts and the columns.
Let’s say Sly calls me up and says, “I met this girl. She’s seventeen years younger than I am, six feet tall, and she’s usually sort of seminude and draped all over me. Her acting credits could fill a matchbook, but I’m going to put her in my next movie, and also marry her.” What could you say, except: Get a premarital agreement and insist on having People shoot you on your good side when the separation is announced.
THE PAINTERS
The painters. Don’t the very words strike fear into your heart? We’ve all seen it happen. A colleague comes into the office. His hair is standing on end, his tie is awry, and there is a pale swipe of primer on the cuff of his pants leg. He collapses at his desk. “How about a drink?” he says hopefully. “It’s ten o’clock in the morning,” you reply, and suddenly you know.
The painters. There’s the Stephen King mega-seller that would scare the overalls off me. Dropcloth. Woo.
The painters are going into their fifth week at our house, which is right on schedule, according to painter time, because they said they would be done in two. “There was a lot more work than we expected,” said the lead man, his hair prematurely white from plaster dust and homeowners. Why don’t they just have that line printed on their business cards? That and “We’ll just sheetrock it over”? I, for one, would not hire a painter who did not say at least once that they would just sheetrock it over. How much experience could he possibly have? Would he know to direct the entire team to leave their coffee containers and their Fritos bags on the floors to attract roaches? Would he know to paint the windows shut except for the window in the master bath, which must be painted open? Would he be the kind of guy who would get spackle in the sugar bowl? Would he charge enough, enough so that when I see a woman at the supermarket driving a Mercedes convertible and wearing a fun fur, I know without doubt that it is his wife?
Painters may think I am picking on them. I can only reply: it’s about time. Of course, they’re not alone. Think about the plumbers, for example, if it’s late afternoon and you can handle a major brainstorm. Perhaps we share the same one. He’s the guy who arrives and says “There’s nothing wrong with this furnace.” Except that it does not provide what we in the rank and file refer to as heat. “I can understand that that’s a problem for you, but there’s nothing wrong with this furnace.” The roofers are pretty terrific, too. I once had a roofer come down my fire escape and tell me he believed with all his heart that my roof was terminal. And I had an entire house, actually occupied by furniture, dependent on that roof. It makes you wonder why your place has a door. Why not just a huge yawning pit of a mouth, red, with teeth, that every once in a while bellows FEED ME MONEY!!
But somehow the painters are the worst. Maybe it’s because you remember them long after they are gone, when you can feel the grit of the plaster dust in your mouth and you’re actually grateful for it because you can’t afford groceries anyway. I once had painters I thought I could trust. It was in New York City, where I had an apartment the size of a luxury car. I hired painters to paint it, although by law my landlord was obliged to have it painted every millennium or so. This is a funny joke in New York, a frequent subject of cocktail party conversation and topical cartoons, because if painting is handled by your landlord, this is how it works: the painters arrive. They mix three cupfuls of white paint with a bathtub full of water. Then they throw it at the wall. Anything that drips to the floor counts as painting the molding. Then they stand at the door and bid you adieu for an extremely long time, usually longer than they spent painting. Then you hire real painters.
The painters I hired were feminist painters. That was their angle. There were three of them and we had a cordial conversation about the politics of the color peach for a bedroom (was it a capitulation to traditional female sex roles? Did it indicate a lack of commitment? Would it wind up looking pink?) before they began to spackle up a storm. They were excellent plasterers and painters, and when they were finished they gave me a bill so large that recently, some ten years after the event, I hypothesized that their contribution alone may have played a major role in the lobbying effort against Justice Bork. Friends thought I was looking a gift painter in the can. “You had a white couch and you still have a white couch,” one said. “Do you have any idea how rare that is?”
I guess they broke me in. I am reconciled to painters now. I understand their language. “It will look great” means “you will learn to live with it.” “We’ve got a problem with this spot” means “there will be a large mound on the wall.” Recently I was on a business trip to a country roughly five thousand miles from my home, and when I called, my husband informed me that the stock market had crashed and the painters had nicked a plumbing pipe in the wall. “Listen to me,” I said slowly and distinctly. “This is very important. Did you personally witness a nicked pipe or did the painters tell you they nicked the pipe?”
“Why is that important?” my husband said.
“Because if the painters told you they nicked a pipe what that means is that they ripped every inch of plumbing out of the house and threw the bathtubs out the windows onto the lawn.”
Long silence. “Why did we need the house painted?” said my husband, who will always go for the jugular.
“It is God’s way of cutting us down to size.”
“Aren’t you interested in the market,” he added.
“Did we lose any money?” I asked.
“No, but the painter did. He says he took a real bath on his blue chips and he won’t be able to finish the dining room.”
“How about a drink?” I asked my husband.
“It’s ten o’clock in the morning,” he said.
“Not where I am,” I replied, pouring the vodka and tossing my color chips into the trash.
HEMLINES
I see short skirts are coming back. This should make my husband happy. The first time he met me, I was wearing a skirt so short that if I had reached for something on a closet shelf it would have constituted a crime in some states. My hair was almost as long as my dress. In the years since, the trend toward shorter hair and longer skirts has often filled him with a deep sadness. He believes that women should show lots of leg and no ear.
I am of two minds. I love short skirts, although I have always had the traditional Irish girl piano legs, suitable for field hockey but not for display. But I feel as if I’m a little too something now to show my legs: too grown-up, too married and motherly, too old. Was it in an Agatha Christie mystery that the detective figured out a suspect was lying about her age by the condition of her knees? I’m haunted by that concept.
I wish this was about what I wear, but in truth it is about who I am, or at least who I want to appear to be. A friend of mine found herself adrift recently in a department store, wandering amid the racks in some distress. She finally had the money, but she didn’t have the self-image. A simple shopping trip had turned existential. For years she had been one kind of woman, but now she had become another. Who was this person she was attempting to outfit? And was that person a good candidate for knits?
I know just how she felt. Each month the catalogues come and I pick things out: clothes I would have worn ten years ago, clothes I think I should want to wear today, clothes for the collected person that I’ve always wanted to be. (I am waiting for the catalogue for the person I fear I have become. “Chaos,” it would be called. “For the woman who can never find anything clean in her bureau drawers.”) My closet has a dozen personas lurking inside: shoulder pads, little prints, pleated pants, pleated skirts, fuchsia, black, navy blue. The worst part about cleaning it is chucking unsuccessful past lives: the carefree peasant, the funky girl-about-town, the dress-for-success suits that for one brief horrible per
iod of insecurity and ambition I affected. You cannot give those suits away. You must drive a silver stake through their lapels.
I was a girl who spent ten years of her life wearing a forest-green blazer with a school insignia on the breast pocket, a plaid pleated skirt and saddle shoes, so I suppose I shouldn’t complain. Better this than my mother’s closet, filled with her own little uniforms: the nice suit with the shell blouse and matching pumps and purse for card parties, the pastel shirtwaist dress with Peter Pan collar and pleated front for dinner, the madras Bermudas and blouse for the backyard. The role defined the clothes. Betty Friedan wrote in The Feminine Mystique that the question for those times was “Is this all?” Now, of course, we feel differently. I hope this is all, because I can’t handle any more: so many roles, so many clothes.
I know there are people who will contend that how you look has nothing to do with who you are. There has been a recent exchange of letters about this in Dear Abby; a young woman who wears nothing but garments made of black leather wrote to complain that men got the wrong idea from her personal style. To this Abby replied in essence—and I’m with her all the way on this one—“Get real.”
Clothes are some kind of a mirror of what’s inside; otherwise, why would maternity dresses be designed to make you look like a baby? A Mohawk is a statement about how you perceive the universe. But young people make these kinds of mistakes unthinkingly. At a dinner several years ago, I ran into a politician I have known for ages. I was wearing my black dinner suit and so was he, and he began to reminisce to a group of people about the first time we had met. It was at a press conference at City Hall—my first press conference, my first visit to City Hall. I was so eager, he said, I appeared to be on drugs. I was so intimidated, he said, that I introduced myself twice to a minor functionary and then stuck to him like glue. And I was wearing hot pants, he said. Have you ever seen an entire decade’s worth of credibility crumble before your very eyes? Not pretty.