Saturday's Child (76 page)

Unforeseen influences: For me, work has a temporary shape. It arrives in projects, each of which, while part of the consistent vocation, is discrete unto itself: a play, a film, a radio or television one-shot; even a TV series's run is limited. The cast and company become friends, a colleague-family with flirtations, rivalries, enmities, in-jokes, traditions—society in microcosm. This way of working imprinted on me early and deep. Writing each book is such a project, has its own world, is peopled by its own real, fictional, or metaphorical companions as much as each political project is, whether that's organizing a campus or a Dalit group, planning a guerrilla-theater action or helping to draft legislation. Each of the anthologies had its cast of thousands. So did
Ms
. But this was another reason why I couldn't see myself editing the magazine for decades, just as I've always found it preferable to live with financial uncertainty rather than spend years at a steady job. The work itself is too important. It demands and bestows fresh starts with each new effort.

Mine are hardly the only politics influenced by theatrics.
The scene
: Bella's last campaign, to regain a seat in Congress. The first day back on the campaign trail after a month's pause following Martin's sudden death by heart attack and Bella's subsequent collapse. She's finally decided to continue because he would have insisted she do so, because her dear grown daughters, Eve and Liz, will keep her going, and because she can't stomach stopping. We're at a school in Westchester, trailed by press. She slumps into a kiddie seat to rest before her speech on education. She looks old now, and unspeakably weary, but she continues to talk ceaselessly of Martin. We can hear the introduction of her rising to a climax. She looks at me, her eyes glittering with sorrow, and smiles crookedly. “I guess,” she sighs, “this is what they mean by being a trouper.” Then she heaves her bulk to her feet and walks to the podium—where she comes alive. The audience is on its feet, transfixed, roaring.

All the world's a set. Nowadays audiences join the cast. Scriptwriters strive to forge realistic dialogue imitative of ordinary people, but those people now speak in ways saturated by television, movies, news, popular culture. So there they are on TV, after yet another bombing or school massacre—heaping
another memorial with mawkish toys, flowers, prayers, and balloons—local people now using such terms as “seeking closure,” “not wanting to speculate,” and “constructive dialogue.” The egg cackles and lays the chicken.

We know the basic political plot, and time is on our side, though exasperatingly slow. The
how
is where suspense, dramatic tension, and comic relief play out. I know it's unfashionable to believe in progress, but I think we
are
evolving. A more humane politics does eventually win out and will continue to do so (barring an ultimate catastrophe born of human stupidity), and historical perspective helps us tolerate the wait. But how tedious to have to wait at all, much less be warned we should consider giving up. (That must be how the blasé tide regards sandbags and dikes.) In 1979, Gloria and I co-wrote an article for
Ms
. on female genital mutilation that most people found shocking;
²
twenty years later, FGM is formally opposed in UN resolutions. The official document of the Year 2000 UN Beijing-Plus-Five Conference affirms the word “herstory,” thirty years after I was called silly for having coined it. The senators and congressmen who castigate progressives now are the same breed (in a few cases the same men) who in the 1950s attacked Euripides, Christopher Marlowe, and Mark Twain as communists and in the 1960s predicted racial segregation would endure forever. When table utensils were invented in the 1100s, the Catholic Church condemned them as obscene and heretical, claiming “God gave us fingers with which to eat.” And we're supposed to get politically discouraged? Oh please. We're being opposed by people who denounced the fork.

Politics helped me perceive the world, and sent me around it. Acting gave me entree into different roles: organizing, editing, teaching, being a tactician or a spokesperson—what Susan Brownmiller (flatteringly if inaccurately) called being feminism's “most valuable player.” But the MVP label has a flip side: virtuosity can be dilettantism—and dangerous for a writer.

“I'm helplessly suspended between the creator in me and the performer in me,” groaned Leonard Bernstein. I know what he meant, though in my case the contention certainly has involved less celebrity and less opulence. (I'm not so sure he was being honest about the helplessness, anyway.) I like to think that in my case the creator has prevailed, and has in this memoir even managed to expose the performer, revealing some of what goes on offstage. There's a catch, of course, or there wouldn't be irony. The memoir will require a book tour, TV talk shows, signings, readings. You have to laugh. If you don't, you find yourself back at drama.

This much I know: many skins of the performer—child professional or adult activist—were flayed away during my anointment with solitude that was depression's gift. Apparently, it was necessary to unmake my present self in order to unmake my former selves. I could never become an apolitical nonactivist. But from here on in, for whatever time is left, the words take precedence.

Revision: “The Story of an Actor Who Becomes a Writer.”

(Note: Has a
much
a better model. Shakespeare.)

3. One Last Late Lifetime

“A Portrait of the Artist as an Old Woman.”

It's getting less odd not to be the youngest in a room—often now the oldest, certainly when with friends who are young feminists (and thus, according to the press, nonexistent). But though baby-boomer feminists have been writing about age as if they'd invented it, the subject doesn't carry the same fascination for me. Aging is no distinction. Turtles do it better than anyone. I don't have time for it.

What does give me unease is the slide toward religio-cultural epiphanies many of my contemporaries seem to be suffering. These are women who've led lives of secular integrity and a deliberately chosen non- or multi-ethnic identification summarizable by that defiant cry of Woolf's:
“As a woman my country is the whole world.” Yet age seems to have sent more than a few of them into ethnic flounderings and spiritual face-lifts: an almost indiscriminate reaffirmation of the past, with disturbing results that range from a sudden keeping of kosher kitchens to attending mass. Some embark on a key-to-the-universe search (as if the universe were locked), the key revealing itself as a copy of Deepak Chopra's syrupy maxims—this in the hands of women whose tastes previously ran to the vinegar-tart existentialism of de Beauvoir. I do understand that an increasing proximity to history fosters interest in it; people who didn't give a damn about ancestors suddenly care when they realize they're getting closer to becoming ancestors themselves. I also respect the importance of learning about the past—but reenacting it is something else. Most of these retreats and reconversions seem driven by the engines of guilt or fear, and while I want to shrug, “Whatever gets you through the night,” this development saddens me. Whatever happened to Elizabeth Cady Stanton's vow that we adopted back in our twenties? “
I will not grow conservative with age
.”

Granted, such reactions to getting old are typical in the United States where, given the cult of eternal youth, age is ignored unless it can be sentimentalized. Venice reminds us that it's possible to approach age with less compromising clarity. There's a Giorgione in the Galleria dell'Accademia,
La Vecchia
(The Old Woman), which rooted me to the spot while other tourists were agog three feet away over his more famous painting
The Tempest
. The unflinching vision behind
La Vecchia
inspired one of the first poems to break through my personal perdition of silence.
³
The Accademia also is home to Tintoretto's last
Pietà
, which is massive, and so dark that parts are indistinct. Christ, just lowered from the cross, lies contorted in his mother's lap. Her face is a mask of utter despair—hopeless, graceless. Gradually, the viewer notices that off in the lower right-hand corner of the canvas there are paintings stacked against the wall of the tomb—Tintoretto's own works, you can recognize them—earlier depictions of the Crucifixion and the Pietà, each shot through with glorious shafts of light and gleaming with swarms of angels. These are the paintings of youth. Here they lie cast aside in a corner of the scene, while in the center a
shadowed, greasy cross looms over a real death agony—no shafts of light, no angels. This work, completed by the artist in his nineties for his own tomb, is exquisitely devastating.

Maybe it's perverse, but I'm grateful for such examples. My reality is somewhat different from that which mostly surrounds us, and I'm drawn to people whose reality is similarly skewed. Keats described it as “negative capability”—a poet's power to live simultaneously in real and fanciful worlds—and Marianne Moore named this phenomenon when she described poetry's terrain as “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” In that sense, writers really write only for each other. So Keats quotes Shakespeare and I quote Keats … we even write for each other across centuries—but perforce only in one direction, futureward.

Thank
god
for the unsentimental Tintorettos, for the maker of Lear and mad old Queen Margaret. Being relatively young at aging, I don't yet know how to carry it off, at least not in the style I prefer. Models in my own culture are rare. I've been fortunate in knowing four: Barbara Macdonald, the brilliant political theorist who, with Cynthia Rich, wrote
Look Me in the Eye: Old Women, Aging, and Ageism
(San Francisco: Spinsters' Ink, 1983), and Simone de Beauvoir, who focused the laser of her intellect as ferociously on age as she had on sex. Then there's Katharine Hepburn. In 1981, when she was seventy-two, I interviewed her for a
Ms
. cover story.
⁴
Her film
On Golden Pond
had just been released, and she was starring in a new play,
The West Side Waltz
, about to have a Broadway run. As I reread our conversation now, three quotations shine out.

“When you've lived as long as I have, people assume you must be wise. They get very sweet to you, as if you were a monument. I'm just me.”

“The humor is important. I mean, you either laugh at it all—or else you blow your brains out.”

“Life is very hard, isn't it? It does kill you, after all.”

Then, closest of all, there was Bella. At this writing, she's been dead almost two years, yet I feel her loss as sorely as when it happened, though I've mostly recovered from my rage at the vulturous tributes that poured forth from people who, while she was alive, had ignored her once she no
longer held public office. (When
will
the world honor authentic greatness, not just after it's conveniently dead but while it still walks among us?) Bella was only seventy-seven, and in her case the “only” isn't meant facetiously. Her death hit me harder in a way than the loss of my blood mother, because Faith's mind had been gone for so much of the time before her racked body eventually followed, whereas Bella was intensely present up to the moment she was wheeled into the operating room at 6:00
A.M.
—sitting up on the gurney and swiveling around to wave back at us, one arm raised in the air with a clenched fist, and a grin on her face as we called out, “Give 'em hell!” Afterward, for weeks, she fought the odds in the intensive-care unit. Standing there talking and singing into her unconsciousness, I'd remember her shrewd aphorisms, the most merciless of which she'd delivered at my home two years earlier, when she'd joined a small group of us as we gathered to watch the 1996 election returns. The Democrats had kept the White House but lost both houses of Congress to ultra-conservative Republicans and suffered major blows in gubernatorial races, including the one in New York. We were nervously eating more and getting gloomier as the night wore on, Blake especially. He'd spent hours of his childhood volunteering in idealistic, losing electoral campaigns (three of which had been Bella's). Now, in his late twenties, he growled, “Goddammit, I want
us
to win for a change. I'm so
tired
of this. It makes you lose hope.” To which Bella replied, “Aw no, honey. You gotta live in hope.” She paused a beat before landing the punchline, “That's why you die in despair.” Then she laughed.

Those are my kind of models.

Suzanne thinks that people read memoirs to find models, hints on how to live their own lives. It would be pretty funny if you, dear reader, had slogged this far in hope of
that
. (Hepburn was right: it's eerie to feel others project wisdom onto one while mournfully aware of one's own inadequacies.) If by chance that
was
your motivation, sorry to have failed you. You should've come around when I was in my twenties, eager to tell
everyone
how to live. These days, I've had a hard enough time battling my own resistances to this book, two in particular.

(1) I feel I'm too young to write a memoir, though others disagree. This could mean I possess a humility I didn't realize I had, or it could mean
they're right and I'm older than I think. Either way, I turn out to be dumb.

(2) I'm preoccupied with what's happening now and what comes next. What's happened—
that's
stuff I already
know
. The future, on the other hand, feels palpable to me. I write for its readers. I feel their age.

Some things I
have
managed to figure out, however.

I do not want to be younger. I want to be exactly who I am now; I like her infinitely better than all the former me's. I admit it would be nice to be who I am
but
with my body the way it was at, say, age thirty-five or even forty—not nubile and ignorant but in its full ripeness, yet free of the current pains and creaks that inspired Bette Davis to snarl, “Old age is not for sissies”: while working out at the gym, for instance, it would be nice to bend over and not feel my face slide off my skull.
And
I'd like forty more years to live, be irascible, and write.