Living Out Loud (9 page)

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.

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 money 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.

T
hree 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.