Rebels in White Gloves (53 page)

Her classmates’ sojourns into the New Age also perplex her. “Angels?
Well, what’s the theology here? Are they just benign spirits? From where? These people seem to have no questions. On other subjects they’ll be scientific and rigorous; on this they lose their critical faculties. From what I’ve seen, the goddess movement does no grappling with tough issues. You still have the issue of evil and suffering no matter who you put up there. Make it a goddess. If she’s a real goddess, she’s been there all along, so why hasn’t there been all this peace and ecological harmony? And why were all those pagan goddess worshipers, like the Canaanites and Egyptians, not terribly nice? If you start making up your religion, it’s shallow. I’m always looking at the dark side. How does this work on the dark side? I take it deadly seriously.”

Nancy’s story is more harrowing than the stories of most in her class, but in midlife she feels their same mixture of sorrow and acceptance. “Sometimes I think, Shit, why haven’t the things that have come to others also come to me? Why don’t I have children? Such a natural thing. I’d love to have some kids around, to have a sense of life on the upswing and not just in decline. Why doesn’t my life make sense, have some coherent direction? Why have I had this incredible amount of illness? It never stops, you know. I’ve had carpal tunnel surgery. Now a doctor wants to operate on my sinuses, and I think, Leave me alone. But I don’t cry much, not too much. Oh, I cry over day-to-day disappointments. But I don’t wake up in panic; I don’t often feel overwhelmed. I’ve accepted that I live in a new place, that I can’t go back to where I was. My life has been shipwrecked. Illness has thrown me out of the ship onto some other shore. All I can say is, ‘Well, who am I now, and what do I have?’ and go forward from there.

“The cancer diagnosis forced me to come to grips with deep wounds. Knowing I might die very soon, I wanted to make peace with all that I’d hardened my heart to. I tore the cover off a lot of things where the story had been written, realized I couldn’t hold on to the set stories that protected me from having to reevaluate my life.”

“I wanted to understand my parents and not hate them anymore. I found I could love them even with all their limitations. I try to help my mother, who nearly died from a thoracic aneurysm and is by herself. I’ve quit being angry at her for not developing her mind more. I see now that her father was so intimidating—he would not have permitted her to do other than what she did. When my father left her, she was fifty-eight and
had never worked, but she got a job at Filene’s and became a terrific saleswoman, working till she was seventy-three. She made the steps she could, and was forced to, make.

“She was ghastly when I was in the hospital. She talked about what a hassle it was to get into town to visit me. I finally said, ‘Look, my life is in jeopardy here.’ And she said, with this look of utter terror on her face: ‘I just ask God, Why didn’t this happen to me? You’re a young person, and I’ve lived my life.’ I was touched by her wish to sacrifice herself for me, the ultimate motherly impulse. I saw that she really does have feelings she can’t ordinarily articulate. It would have given me a lot of consolation along the years to know that she was behind me in that way.

“My father, I also realized, has had a fairly miserable life. He was acutely unhappy with my mother. He’d loved being an auto mechanic and would have loved to go to college, but he felt forced to do things he didn’t love to make more money, to satisfy my mother’s desire to be more securely middle-class. He considers himself a failure; to me, he no longer seems a villain, but a victim of the times and men’s assigned roles. That he had to be the sole breadwinner limited his life terribly.

“He waited a long time to leave my mother, feeling it a bad thing to do, a great taboo. He’s a pretty tightly bound person. He wouldn’t be in the vanguard, but then the changes initiated by our generation rippled upward. He finally left, and moved into a one-room apartment, and has been married three times since, not so happily. His second wife died. His third was a disaster: He was with her when I had cancer, which seemed to make no impression on them at all. His fourth, well, with her he seems pretty happy. He’s certainly ended up in a far better place than he ever would have with my mother, which I guess is an argument for people to make the changes necessary to try to keep some happiness for themselves. He calls a lot now, and I go to see him.

“My parents are in their eighties, but there’s this funny bond, like we’re all old people wondering how much longer we have. I drew up my will and then made sure my mother’s was in order. I jumped into their generation. Everyone will enter this place in time. But somehow a young person faced with her mortality, well, I speak from a place most people my age don’t know.

“I never thought I’d go back to a Wellesley reunion, but for the twenty-fifth I sought them out. I was apprehensive, but wanted to understand
why I’d hated it so badly, why it had been so traumatic. I ended up loving it, and came to think less about how fucked-up the college had been and more about who I was when I arrived there. I saw myself as a victim: that they were privileged and I was not, which I now think was mostly my inherited paranoia. And as much as I wish it had been happier, given who I was and my family, it was the only experience I could have had.

“In many ways, the sad tone of my life was set there. I hoped I’d find a place, and didn’t. To me it felt like a cul-de-sac, that things were closing down instead of opening up. Other people whose families thought they were great had a stronger sense of themselves, and just flowered. Martha Teichner knew she was a good storyteller and found her place in TV and … zoom. I wish I’d had that sense of myself early on, but I couldn’t have: My father was too critical of who I was, and what he told me about life was too poisonous and frightened. I thought you had to sell your soul to have a secure life. I felt alienated and lost, and that feeling stayed with me.

“At reunion, I stood up and said, ‘Here’s the most important thing that’s happened to me,’ and told them about my cancer. People were really moved, which moved me to tears. I thought, How kind to give me that recognition, to offer courage. And what a shame I had felt so isolated as a student, when I feel so close to these women now. What a terrific community I might have found. All the time I thought we had nothing in common, that they all had it made. Now I see they’ve struggled, too, that their lives played surprises on them, that everyone has endured grief. No one has gone unscathed. We had more choices than we knew how to deal with, and most of us still are confused. Should I be doing this, or that?”

The story ends where it begins, with most questions unanswered and with these women crossing thresholds once again: into empty nests, menopause, late pregnancies, altered ambitions, new reflections on their past, gentled relations with their parents, and deepened friendships with each other.

At Wellesley, they had crossed the threshold between the personal
and the political. One by one, they had left the domestic shelter of their childhood families for a larger world. Together, they had enacted the same leave-taking on a historic scale: ending a long epoch of women’s confinement to the private sphere and marking out the forward edges of a new era, when women would take their full place in public life. They began, at Wellesley and in the years after, mixing the language of the two realms, bringing the vocabulary of maternity and nurture to the workplace, the language of power and justice home. They began publicizing their private confusions and struggles, and also requiring of themselves that their political values be enacted in their personal lives.

In midlife, the thresholds they are crossing again bridge the boundary between private and public life. Some are, at age fifty, only now completing that earlier crossing: coming out of their homes into school and work, or deepening their public commitments; more than half say they are more ambitious now than at graduation. Some are working for the first time, or again, or more than before out of a legitimate fear of poverty in old age: Their part-time and short-lived jobs and lower wages have left many ill prepared for retirement. Others are being pushed outward by menopause and empty nests, which foreclose for good their reproductive and maternal roles. A few are reversing the motion: Having rushed into the world after graduation, they are turning back to home and their inner life. Nearly all feel as Lonny Laszlo Higgins described feeling each time her family set sail, leaving a familiar island for some unknown part of the archipelago: filled with terrible nostalgia and exhilarating freedom.

For the moms in the class who spent their years mostly at home, the new beginnings at midlife have usually meant a return to school or to work. Fifteen years after leaving her vice-presidency at the bank, Jan Mercer has started a landscape-design business, just as her husband decided “by merger” to start a new career. She is torn about whether to expand the enterprise. “The overachiever says crank up to something that will impress everyone. But I don’t feel the drive like I used to. I used to love the adrenaline rush. Now yoga deep breathing feels much better.” Kathy Ruckman, with just one of four children still at home, has entered George Washington University’s night law school. She was not, after all, immune to the frustrations that had plagued her mother. “I realized that I was bored and going nowhere with my tutoring job, that I wanted
something exciting instead of make-do work. I gave up the bell choir and my other volunteer work, quite happily. Then I tried writing a résumé, which was tricky. If you’ve run a household you have managerial skills, but that’s hard to put in. I tried to make my volunteer things look like executive work. I finally faced that I needed some real skills to do a real job. I don’t think teaching ever really did captivate me. What I’d love to do is work for the Children’s Defense Fund, making a difference and using my brain. Roger’s glad. He’s seen my frustration, which would sort of boil over periodically. He knows he’s had all these wonderful opportunities to develop a career and that I’ve not had intellectual excitement or any of the outside encouragement that comes with a career.”

Lorna Rinear has been a single mom since 1976; she sought a divorce after moving seven times to new horse farms with her volatile husband, who verbally warred with his bosses and his eldest son. Her mother, still living in Manhattan opulence, told Lorna after the divorce, “You’ve made your bed and you should lie in it,” and suggested she apply for welfare. Lorna did, unsuccessfully, then spent the next fifteen years supporting her sons by working in electronics factories, sometimes holding down two or three jobs. At forty-seven, she returned to Wellesley to finish her degree, with her son footing the bill. She is now pursuing a Ph.D. in nineteenth-century women’s history. For her fiftieth birthday, she bought herself a retired racehorse to ride. “This is a wonderful time. I had the life of being the perfect child, the wife, the mom; now I’m not responsible for anyone but myself. Of course I have regrets. When my son would ask me to play badminton, I wished I’d done more of that, because now there’s no one to play badminton with. But people think I put myself places inadvertently, and I say no, I chose this.”

When Betty Demy’s children left home for school, the prospect of living alone for the first time frightened her: “It’s much easier for me to take care of others than to take care of myself.” She was in a job she didn’t like, trapped there by her need to keep her health insurance. She was dreading menopause, “which for married women may be liberating, but for women who aren’t is just another reminder that you feel less desirable.” Though she always had a “strong and rich group of women friends,” she was unsuccessful at meeting men. For years, she had traipsed to singles’ events, but found the men there to be “professionally single.” After a while, she gave up. “I hadn’t had positive experiences,
and kept being drawn to smart, screwed-up men. Why be masochistic and keep seeking experiences that don’t feel good? The prospect of being alone for the rest of my life isn’t very happy, but I’ve pushed it aside. I have to build a life for myself without depending on someone else to make it good for me.”

Betty has succeeded in beginning anew. After “talking to Prozac” for a while, as she put it in a letter to her classmates, she dusted off an old fascination, returning to school for a master’s in museum professions. She is now director of external affairs at a girls’ school, which her son calls her “mini-Wellesley,” and has been traveling extensively, to Moscow, Paris, and Prague. “I come and go as I please, and do what I want to do, which is incredibly liberating. I’d always regretted that I hadn’t made a giant professional splash, and now I’m thinking it’s not over.”

A number of women in the class are scaling new professional heights in their fifties. In 1998, Susan Graber was confirmed for the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, one step below the Supreme Court. The same year, Crandall Close Bowles, ’69, was made chairman, CEO, and president of Springs Industries, a $2.5 billion textile company, leading
Business Week
to name her “one of the top two or three women executives in the country.” (Her husband, Erskine, was until 1998 Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, and has had to testify before the grand jury as to why he tried to line up work for Hillary’s old law partner, Webster Hubbell.) Pam Colony, after more than twenty years, won tenure at last. She now directs the histotechnology and Women in Science programs at the State University of New York. She also, after her second marriage came to a horrible end, moved with her two sons to a farm and spent her fiftieth year building a barn, lifting and nailing the six-foot boards herself. Nancy Gist manages the largest grant-making organization in the U.S. Justice Department, dispensing nearly $2 billion a year to state, local, and tribal criminal justice systems. Because she is doing “the people’s business,” she travels widely to learn from communities how they are solving their problems. When she traveled to Oregon, her classmate Kris Olson picked her up at the airport. “Here comes the U.S. attorney with the Grateful Dead blasting on the car radio. We were hooting with laughter. Everywhere we went, people were so solicitous, as they tend to be with people who have power or money. We never imagined that either of us would have any power or money, much less official photos in front of the American flag.”