I’ve got the sitter, all right, but I also have the job. The last time I looked at wallpaper, I took the kids along, which shows that even fairly intelligent people are sometimes rendered unbelievably stupid by their own competing interests. And I thought seriously about killing three birds with one stone and writing a piece about selecting wallpaper.
Occasionally, over the last ten years, I have met a woman with children in school all day and no job, and I have thought, quite uncharitably and almost reflexively, what in the world does she find to do with herself all day? I don’t think that anymore. Now I imagine lunch with a friend, considering slipcovers, doing a little gardening, spending an hour working on dinner before everyone arrives home. That life—of ladies’ lunches, of appointments with the upholsterer, and shopping trips stretched to fill the empty hours—is something I ran from with furious little feet when I was growing up. It’s something that barely exists now, except among the very rich; it’s something that’s barely tolerated by men—or by women. It’s not that I would like it as a way of life. I’d just like a little fling with it every once in a while.
I’m making this sound a bit too much like an alternative to work. And it’s quite distinct from that, and from home decoration, and from having children. (I am sure, for example, that the reason you have such a manic urge to nest the day before you give birth is that it is nature’s way of telling you you will not be able to so much as purchase pillowcases for six months.) The word “nesting” is right for it—the sporadic assemblage of small bits and pieces, woven together, arranged correctly, until you are comfortable sitting amidst them. Or perhaps the precise word is something that’s almost become an expletive in recent years. I know a fair number of women who wouldn’t mind spending just a little more time being homemakers. Making a home. Getting all the fine points right. Surrounding themselves and their families with a cosy twig house of gimcracks and linens and plastic containers filled with good things to eat, in the mistaken belief that this will make everyone happy and safe. It’s not a big thing. But I’m tired of big things. Sometimes I just want the time for the little ones, the hours to feather my nest.
THE COMPANY OF WOMEN
It was not until my last year in college that students could live in a coeducational dorm. As with the inauguration of any social experiment, there was a fair amount of press coverage and a lot of alarmist talk, mostly about how we would all wind up swinging from the doorjambs naked and giving birth to unwanted triplets.
This could not have been further from the truth. Instead of orgies, the arrangement bred familiarity. Our tiny tubs of yogurt commingled on the windowsills during the winter. And on a few occasions, a member of one or the other sex ignored the elaborate system of signs rigged up for the bathroom doors and some slight shrieking ensued. It was, in some ways, good preparation for marriage, but not in the way our parents feared.
Nevertheless I came away, unfashionable as it was, thinking that there are still times when I prefer the company of women, particularly when I am in pajamas. I have recently returned from a week of female bonding, and remain convinced of this. A friend and I flew south with our children. During the week we spent together I took off my shoes, let down my hair, took apart my psyche, cleaned the pieces, and put them together again in much improved condition. I feel like a car that’s just had a tuneup. Only another woman could have acted as the mechanic.
And yet it is still widely assumed that a woman who goes off on a trip with other women missed the booking deadline on something else, or is contemplating divorce and has gone away to think things over. Women without men are still thought to be treading water. Men without women have broken loose.
There was much general sympathy for my situation, in which my husband and my friend’s husband were too embroiled in their work to lie on the beach and chase children around the swimming pool. We tried to cajole them, but to no avail. “I can’t believe the two of you are going alone,” said a friend, as though we were fourth graders taking the crosstown bus for the first time.
So we went alone, and each night re-created our personal universes. I cooked, she cleaned. I blathered, she analyzed. Neither felt the need to be sociable, or polite: more than once, we picked up our respective books and started to read at opposite ends of the couch. Most of the time we talked and talked, not in a linear way, but as though we were digging for buried treasure. Why did you feel that way? And what did you say then? What are you going to do about that? How long did that go on? It was an extended version of the ladies’ lunches in which we bring our psyches out from inside our purses, lay them on the table, and fold them up again after coffee—except that I shuffled around in a T-shirt and underwear, my ensemble of choice.
It wouldn’t have been the same if our husbands had been along, and not just because I would have had to put on some decent clothes. The conversation would have been more direct, less introspective, less probing for probing’s sake. That’s not to say I don’t have probing conversations with my husband. But they usually revolve around a specific problem; they are what management consultants call goal-directed, not free-floating attempts to make order out of daily life.
I sometimes think the prototype was a conversation we had about the Miranda decision. What was Miranda’s first name? I asked. I can’t recall, he answered. Was he married? I don’t know. Did he have kids? Why is that important? Where did he live? Who cares? Is he still alive? WHO CARES! By the time we had finished the conversation we were about as irritated with each other as two people could be. He was oxford cloth, I embroidery. We simply weren’t in the same shirt.
My friends who are women are mostly embroidery, too. Perhaps it is a legacy of childhoods in which it was our mothers who explained why flowers die in the fall, why you can sometimes see the moon during the day, and why boys don’t ask you to dance. Perhaps it is a legacy of girlhoods in which it was our mothers, with hours to spend with us, who followed their own mothers’ leads and talked about this and that and became, if not the storytellers of our lives, at least the narrators and analysts.
We were not alone in our female bonding at the beach. The older women did the same, sending their husbands off to the golf course, dishing their daughters-in-law. There have been times when I might have felt sympathy and a slight contempt for these women without men, but those were times when I was young and stupid. Those were times when nearly all my friends were men, after the coeducational dorms and before I was at ease with the femaleness in me.
Those times ended when I got a job at an institution as unequivocally male as a pair of black wingtip shoes. When I arrived I was desperate, not to make friends, but to make female friends. One day I met a young woman at the photocopying machine, and struck up a conversation. We became friends; in fact, she is the friend with whom I took the trip. I still remember the lunch at which we narrated the bare bones of our life stories. We have spent the last ten years filling in the blanks, shading, excavating. She probably knows more about some parts of my life than my husband does: nothing critical, just little bits here and there, some of the tiny dots that, taken together, make up the pointillistic picture of our lives.
PUTTING UP A GOOD FRONT
I am going to a business lunch, and I look good. I have on a plaid blazer and a print dress; I have successfully mixed patterns, and my jewelry is adequate and real. I am also wearing nice brown boots. They are not exactly right with the clothes, nowhere near as nice as my brown shoes would be, but I am wearing the boots because I am wearing my husband’s socks because there are no pantyhose.
Do you understand? If you do, then you are like me. You are Putting Up a Good Front. This is capitalized because it is not a phrase, it is a way of life. I am sorely disappointed to be Putting Up a Good Front at this time of my life. In various other incarnations I believed that the fact that my bed was never made (although I had anemones on the coffee table) and my hems were hemmed with rubber cement (although the skirt was made of imported wool) was a function of either mo
ney or age. On the one hand, I believed that if I made a good deal more money I would be able to purchase new things or pay people to tend the old ones. On the other hand, I thought that I was simply a flibbertigibbet, and that sooner or later I would acquire an attention span, and a sewing kit.
Well, I am older and more affluent, and the result has been that I am Putting Up a Good Front better than ever before. I wear nicer clothes, but my scatter pins are still scattered to cover missing buttons. The pantyhose I thought were in my drawer but turned out to be stuffed inside the head of a sock doll were made by a famous designer and were of that wonderful sheer variety that run when you so much as walk past the bureau in which they’re nestled. The man’s socks were cashmere. I believe they also matched one another, although not my outfit.
It’s easy to tell if you are Putting Up a Good Front. For example, your Mastercard will be rejected for cause in elegant restaurants, but you will successfully convince the maître d’ to accept a check. Your children will take elaborate sandwiches of English muffins, tomatoes, sliced chicken, and chutney to school because you were too busy preparing Tarte Tatin to buy bread, mayonnaise, and peanut butter. And there are other telltale signs:
—Your living room furniture is upholstered in the currently popular adobe/guacamole/Coppertone shades. Beneath the cushions, there are two felt-tip pens without tops, seventeen raisins, about fifty cents worth of loose change, and the check that you were supposed to mail to the insurance company four months ago. The side of the cushion that is facing down has a long stain of grape juice on it. The arm of the couch has a matching stain, which is covered by a casual hand-loomed throw or an American country quilt.
—Your purse is made of good leather and has a long strap to be slung stylishly around your shoulders. Inside there is an expensive datebook in which nothing is arranged in alphabetical order, as well as two Lego blocks, the carbons from 142 credit card transactions, a folded crayon drawing purported to be of a witch eating at McDonald’s with a dinosaur, and half a bagel with cream cheese. There should never be keys inside your purse, since they might tear the silk lining and enable you to enter your house or your car.
—Your car is a nice car, rather new, with four-wheel drive. However, the maps in the glove compartment are all folded the wrong way, the registration is in the pocket of your coat in your upstairs closet, and there is rarely sufficient gas. If you live in New York, the maps will generally be of New Mexico, Alabama, and downtown Houston. If you live in Seattle, the maps will be of Maine and the Florida Panhandle. In your datebook, however, will be the map you are never without, that all-important map of the London Underground.
All of these things may seem like superficialities, but of course we all know that the purse is the mirror of the soul, and that people whose closets are filled with old tennis racket cases although they have never played tennis are hiding something in their psyches, too. People who are Putting Up a Good Front are often serene, good-humored, and pleasant. So, too, are their refrigerators, until you open the Tupperware.
If you are ever tempted to say to a friend, “God, you really have it all together,” this probably means you are dealing with a Good Front, or perhaps even a Great Front. There is a small possibility that a person who appears to have it all together may in fact have it all together, but you won’t want to be friends with that person long, anyway. If in doubt, try this test: When you are in their simple but stylish country-warped-beat-up-distressed pine and teeny-tiny cotton prints living room, lovingly smooth the door of the armoire and say, “My, this is pretty.” The sentence will be drowned out as the door swings open and things—copies of Cosmo, wire whisks, cashmere socks, boots, pantyhose, even a small child—come tumbling out. Just don’t do it in my house or you could be injured in the crash.
BLIND AMBITION
Three times last year my elder son told his friends that his mother does not work. This may come as a surprise to you. It certainly surprised me. Yet the neighbors probably share his opinion and, deep in their hearts, so do some of my friends. I know what they mean: I do not hoist the briefcase each morning, take one last pull on the coffee cup, and head for an office in a building that looks like a chrome-and-glass étagère.
Instead, I shamble about here in a bathrobe, turn in the robe for sweat pants and, between trips to school and sessions playing trucks on the floor, drop into my office. It contains a file cabinet, a computer, and a copy of the inspirational “An Octopus and My Mommy Sleeping,” executed in green and black crayon. When I am blocked, I lean back in my chair and try to figure out which is the octopus and which is me.
It was almost two years ago, while awaiting the imminent birth of my second child, that I decided to start working part time. This would have been unthinkable to me when I was younger. At twenty-five I should have worn a big red A on my chest; it would have stood for ambition, an ambition so brazen and burning that it would have reduced Hester Prynne’s transgression to pale pink.
When I was in college I baby-sat, using spending money as my cover. What I would actually do was to look in the college’s client file box for the names of reporters who needed a baby sitter. I was a good baby sitter. But I also suspected I would be a good reporter, and I wasn’t a bit shy about apprising the appropriate people of that fact. In this way I got my first job on a New York newspaper.
I say these things as though they happened to someone else, because sometimes I feel as though they had.
I am not sure when or why it all changed. It is tempting to say it is because having children has reordered my priorities. That is partly true. I still think the quote of the decade was contained in a letter from a friend of Senator Paul E. Tsongas. When the senator decided to quit politics, the friend wrote: “No one on his deathbed ever said, ‘I wish I had spent more time on my business.’ ”
But the children are not the only factor. My work is a big part of my life, but experience has taught me that other things—friends, family, time alone—fill some of my deepest needs. My youthful infatuation with myself has, happily, cooled. The inchoate “I want … I want” that once filled my insides, lacking any sort of clear object for that awesome verb, is muted. I want to do good work. I want to play with my children. I want to enjoy myself. I want to be happy. I once wanted to be a personage. Now I am comfortable being a person.
I am a particularly lucky person. I had gone some distance up the job ladder before my kids were born. Economically, our family has been able to absorb my decision. Professionally, I have benefited richly from it. Many other women’s careers have been derailed by part-time work. But a writer’s profession is portable. I made the decision to work part time thinking I would stay home and hammer away, solitary and anonymous, on a novel. Now I hammer away on the novel, but I have another job, one without anonymity, one in which I have the company of readers, one I would have killed for when I was twenty-five.
There is a flip side to this, too. I suppose everyone who has ever worked part time has thought: If I can do this much at home in four hours, just think what I could do in an office in ten. I also miss the easy camaraderie of working around other people, in a place devoted primarily to work. There is nothing like ten minutes perched on the corner of a colleague’s desk to work out the kinks in a difficult paragraph. There is nothing like a leak in the dishwasher or a surprise attack by a boy armed with Babar the Elephant to derail a train of thought.
But I feel now that there is lots of time to get back on track, even though there are never enough hours in a particular day. When I was twenty-five, I always felt as if a bus were coming around the corner with my name on its front bumper, and that I’d damn well better have spent the day working on a good opening sentence for my obit. Now it seems as if there are so many years ahead to pick up where I left off, or backtrack if I need to, or change direction entirely. If I get the forty additional years statisticians say are likely coming to me, I could fit in at least one, maybe two new lifetimes. Sad that only one of those lifetimes can
include being the mother of young children.
That is one reason why part-time work is still largely the purview of women. Part of this may be because society still finds it acceptable for us and unacceptable for our male counterparts. There is also a school of thought that says it is because we are finally proving that biology is destiny, that we can’t or won’t cut the mustard, that men are born with a will to push forward and that women have tried to graft it onto an unwilling tree. I can never remember whether that is the fear-of-success school or the fear-of-failure school. In any case, it doesn’t apply to me or to many other women I know. I’m sure not afraid of success and I’ve learned not to be afraid of failure. The only thing I’m afraid of now is of being someone I don’t like much.
In the last month or so my son has finally decided I do work. He says I work upstairs at a “puter.” He says Daddy works at an office. When pressed, he occasionally says that Mom writes things and Dad helps people who are in trouble with the law. But mostly he sees it in terms of location: I’m upstairs, Dad’s at the office. Perhaps that’s how I should think of it, too. This is where I am right now. So far, it feels O.K.
STRETCH MARKS
For most of my life I have pursued a policy toward my body that could best be characterized as benign neglect. From the time I could remember until the time I was fifteen it looked one way, and from the time I was fifteen until I was thirty it looked another way. Then, in the space of two years, I had two children and more weight changes than Ted Kennedy, and my body headed south without me.