Living Out Loud (2 page)

It was a lucky coincidence for me that this impeccable superstructure and my own private frame of reference came tumbling down at about the same time, since I like to take all my medicine at once rather than have it doled out in dribs and drabs. My mother began to die on the cusp of the sixties and the seventies, at the same time that the religion and the rules
that had circumscribed her life and mine died, too. And I was left with a self to do with what I pleased. I felt as though someone had handed me a grenade with the pin pulled.

Now I know that I was one among many, that all over America and indeed the world women were beginning to feel this same way, beginning to feel the great blessing and the horrible curse of enormous possibility. “Oh, you girls,” an elderly woman once sighed, talking to me of my job and looking down at my belly big with child as we sat together in a nursing home in New York City. “All these choices for you.” I smiled, and she sighed. “I feel so sorry for you,” she added, and I smiled again, for I knew she was right.

I knew that in the years following that January night I had been numb with fear at some simple truths: that I was going to have to find a way to earn a living, make a decision about what I wanted to do and how to go about doing it, find a home and make it my own. That was the only response I could find to the scent of death, sticking to my clothes, rising from my hair. The house in which my mother had sickened and drawn near to death was sold not long after she died, and so in every sense I was adrift. I felt orphaned, cut off from the past. It was many years before I would know that I had found both feelings liberating.

It was perfectly valid to feel adrift. There were few role models. The women of my mother’s generation had, in the main, only one decision to make about their lives: who they would marry. From that, so much else followed: where they would live, in what sort of conditions, whether they would be happy or sad or, so often, a bit of both. There were roles and there were rules. My mother did not work. The money she spent was earned by my father. Her children arrived as nature saw fit. I assumed that she never used birth control, although when I was eighteen she set me straight. “Yes, we did,” she said. “Rhythm.”

My father often says today that he believes their marriage would have been sorely tried by the changes which became my birthright. And I think he is right. When I was younger and saw the world in black and white, I believed the woman my mother was was determined by her character, not by social conditions. Now that I see only shades of gray, I know that that is nonsense. She would have gotten her second wind in the seventies. She would have wanted the things I have come to take for granted: work, money, a say in the matter, a voice of her own. She would have wanted to run her life, too. Instead she was born and died in an era in which her life ran her.

I have rarely felt that way about my own life. I have mostly felt free to do and be what I wish, and I have felt compelled to analyze endlessly what and who that is. I would like to be able to say it is because I am a thoughtful and analytical person, but this is not true. It is because, in the hard and selfish way in which—usually covertly—the living view the dead, I realized after my mother died I was salvaging one thing from the ruin of my life as I had known it. And that was that I was still alive. I know now that on some unconscious level somewhere in the long and gray months left in that horrid winter, I determined I was going to squeeze every bit of juice from the great gift of a beating heart within my body.

It was only coincidental that, not long after my mother died, I found an unusually safe way to do this. I had wanted to be a writer for most of my life, and in the service of the writing I became a reporter. For many years I was able to observe, even to feel, life vividly, but at secondhand. I was able to stand over the chalk outline of a body on a sidewalk dappled with black blood; to stand behind the glass and look down into an operating theater where one man was placing a heart in the yawning chest of another; to sit in the park on the first day of summer and find myself professionally obligated to record all the glories
of it. Every day I found answers: who, what, when, where, and why.

But in my own life, as I grew older, I realized I had only questions. For a long time this made me feel vulnerable and afraid, and then suddenly, as though I had reached a kind of emotional puberty, it made me feel vulnerable and comfortable. It is too easy to say that this great change came about when I had children, although having them, discovering that the meaning of life is life, trading in the indelible image of my mother swollen with death for one of myself big as a beach ball with possibility, certainly contributed to the change. What was more important was that I finally realized that making sense of my life meant, in part, accepting the shifting nature of its sands. My religion changing, one step forward, two steps back; my marriage always in a state of re-creation and refinement; my children changing constantly, as children always have: I had nothing but questions. It was terrifying and fascinating.

One of the most exhilarating parts of it was that my work became a reflection of my life. After years of being a professional observer of other people’s lives, I was given the opportunity to be a professional observer of my own. I was permitted—and permitted myself—to write a column, not about my answers, but about my questions. Never did I make so much sense of my life as I did then, for it was inevitable that as a writer I would find out most clearly what I thought, and what I only thought I thought, when I saw it written down. I suddenly knew that at some point in the fifteen years since that cold winter night, I had come back from the dead. I knew it because, after years of feeling secondhand, of feeling the pain of the widow, the joy of the winner, I was able to allow myself to feel those emotions for myself.

I had often felt alone with these feelings because of the particular circumstances of my own life. But over the last two
years, as I wrote my columns and read the letters they evoked, I realized more and more that what has happened to me has been typical. A kind of earthquake in the center of my life shook everything up, and left me to rearrange the pieces. Similar earthquakes were felt round the world, precipitated not just by the deaths of people but by the demise of rules, mores, ways of living and thinking. As the aftershocks reverberate, I have had to approach some simple tasks in new ways, and so have the people who have read what I have written. Looking back at my past. Loving my husband. Raising my children. Being a woman. It is no accident that each of those tasks is couched in the present participle, that lovely part of speech that simply goes on and on and on. Oddly enough, what I have learned since that January night many years ago is that life is not so much about beginnings and endings as it is about going on and on and on. It is about muddling through the middle. That is what I am doing now. Muddling through the middle. Living out loud.

LOOKING
BACK

T
he lightning bugs are back. They are small right now, babies really, flying low to the ground as the lawn dissolves from green to black in the dusk. There are constellations of them outside the window: on, off, on, off. At first the little boy cannot see them; then, suddenly, he does. “Mommy, it’s magic,” he says.

This is why I had children: because of the lightning bugs. Several years ago I was reading a survey in a women’s magazine and I tried to answer the questions: Did you decide to have children: A. because of family pressure; B. because it just seemed like the thing to do; C. because of a general liking for children; D. because of religious mandates; E. none of the above.

I looked for the lightning bugs; for the answer that said, because sometime in my life I wanted to stand at a window with a child and show him the lightning bugs and have him say, “Mommy,
it’s magic.” And since nothing even resembling that answer was there, I assumed that, as usual, I was a little twisted, that no one else was so reductive, so obsessed with the telling detail, had a reason so seemingly trivial for a decision so enormous. And then the other night, yellow bug stars flickering around us, my husband said, in a rare moment of perfect unanimity: “That’s it. That’s why I wanted them, too.”

Perhaps we are a reductive species, we human beings. Why else would we so want to distill the slow, often tedious span of our lives to three stiff portraits and a handful of candid shots? The Statue of Liberty is meant to be shorthand for a country so unlike its parts that a trip from California to Indiana should require a passport. In the same way, we all have neat little icons that stand for large, messy lives: a pressed corsage, a wedding dress, a birth announcement, a grade school drawing, a diploma. I look in my high school yearbook and from the picture, the messages, the words that describe me, I can reconstruct four years not unlike the ones little Richie spent in
Happy Days
. Of course, it was completely unlike the years I actually spent at high school. The question is, Do I want to remember it the way it was, or the way it should have been? Did Proust have his cake to inspire his memory or his fantasy?

I know my own answer. The lightning bugs are my madeleine, my cue for a wave of selective recollection. My God, the sensation the other night when the first lightning bug turned his tail on too soon, competing with daylight during the magic hour between dusk and dark. I felt like the anthropologist I once met, who could take a little chunk of femur or a knucklebone and from it describe age, sex, perhaps even height and weight.

From this tiny piece of bone I can reconstruct a childhood: a hot night under tall trees. Squares of lighted windows up and down the dark street. A wiffle ball game in the middle of the road, with the girls and the littlest boys playing the outfield.
The Good-Humor man, in his solid, square truck, the freezer smoky and white when he reaches inside for a Popsicle or a Dixie cup. The dads sitting inside in their Bermuda shorts watching
Car 54, Where Are You?
The moms in the kitchen finishing the dishes. The dull hum of the fans in the bedroom windows. The cheap crack of the wiffle bat. The bells of the ice-cream truck. The lightning bugs trapped in empty peanut-butter jars that have triangular holes in the lids, made with the point of a beer-can opener. The fading smears of phosphorescent yellow-green, where the older, more jaded kids have used their sneaker soles to smear the lights across the gray pavement. “Let them out,” our mothers say, “or they will die in there.” Finally, perfect sleep. Sweaty sheets. No dreams.