Looking Back (4 page)

And maybe, reading this, a young person will be moved to consider not only the kinds of events that I talk about here, but the kind I didn’t: the small personal truths that require the most courage to uncover and are the most valuable to explore. I’ll leave it to the sociologists to draw the sweeping pronouncements about where some segment of our culture or another may be headed and how they got that way. All I do these days is tell my own story and let the reader make of it what she or he will.

Joyce Maynard

April 2012

T
O MY FRIEND
H
ANNA
, at five, I am a grown-up. I do not feel like one—at nineteen, I’m at the midway point between the kindergartner and her mother, and I belong to neither generation—but I can vote, and drink in New York, and marry without parental consent in Mississippi, and get a life sentence, not reform school, if I shoot someone premeditatedly. Walking with Hanna in New York and keeping to the inside, as the guidebooks tell me, so that doorway muggers lunging out will get not her but me, I’m suddenly aware that, of the two of us, I am the adult, the one whose life means less, because I’ve lived more of it already; I’ve moved from my position as protected child to child protector; I am the holder of a smaller hand where, just ten years ago,
my
hand was held through streets whose danger lay not in the alleys but in the roads themselves, the speeding cars, roaring motorcycles. I have left childhood, and though I longed to leave it, when being young meant finishing your milk and missing “Twilight Zone” on TV because it came on too late, now that it’s gone I’m uneasy. Not fear of death yet (I’m still young enough to feel immortal) or worry over wrinkles and gray hair, but a sense that the fun is over before it began, that I’m old before my time—why isn’t someone holding
my
hand still, protecting
me
from the dangers of the city, guiding me home?

I remember kneeling on the seat of a subway car, never bothering to count the stops or peer through all those shopping bags and knees to read the signs, because
she
would know when to get off, she’d take my hand; I remember looking out the window to see the sparks fly, underpants exposed to all the rush-hour travelers and never worrying that they could see, while all around me, mothers had to cross their legs or keep their knees together. And later, driving home, leaning against my mother’s shoulder while her back tensed on the seat and her eyes stared out at the yellow lines, it was so nice to know I was responsible for nothing more than brushing my teeth when we got home, and not even that, if we got home late enough.

Hanna doesn’t look where we’re going, never bothers to make sure she can find her way home again, because she knows I will take care of those things, and though I feel I am too young to be so old in anybody’s eyes, it’s just a feeling, not a fact. When it rains, she gets the plastic rain hat, and when the ball of ice cream on her cone falls off, I give her mine. But if Hanna uses my ice cream and my hat, my knowledge of the subways and my hand, well, I use Hanna too: she’s my excuse to ride the Ferris wheel, to shop for dolls. And when the circus comes to town—Ringling Brothers, no less—and I take her, everything evens up. Walking to Madison Square Garden, stepping over sidewalk lines and dodging muggers, she is my escort more than I am hers.

I think of one time in particular.

There we sat, in our too-well-cushioned seats, Hanna in her navy blue knee socks and flower barrettes, I beside her, holding the overpriced miniature flashlight she had shamed me into buying (because everyone else in our row had one), earnestly obeying the ringmaster’s instructions to wave it when the lights went out—frantically, a beacon in the night—because Hanna’s hands were too full of other circus-going apparatus: a celluloid doll whose arm already hung loose, the Cracker Jack she wanted for the prize inside, the Jujubes that she swallowed dutifully like pills. We all seemed a little sad, Hanna and me and all the other flashlight wavers who surrounded us, like people I’d see in a movie and feel sorry for—the grown-ups, the ticket buyers, because the admission fee hadn’t really bought us into youngness again, even the little kids, because most of them had barely had it to begin with. We grew up old, Hanna even more than I. We are cynics who see the trap door in the magic show, the pillow stuffing in Salvation Army Santa Clauses, the camera tricks in TV commercials (“That isn’t really a genie’s hand coming out of the washing machine,” Hanna tells me, “it’s just an actor with gloves on.”) So at the circus, there was a certain lack of wonder in the crowd, a calm, shrugging atmosphere of “So what else is new?” She leaned back on her padded seat, my four-year-old, watching me twirl her flashlight for her (“Keep up with those flashlights, kids,” the ringmaster had said), chewing her hot dog, anticipating pratfalls, toughly, smartly, sadly, wisely, agedly unenthralled, more wrapped up in the cotton candy than in the Greatest Show on Earth. Above us, a man danced on a tightrope while, below, poodles stood on their heads and elephants balanced, two-legged, over the spangled bodies of trusting circus girls, and horses leapt through flaming hoops and jugglers handled more balls than I could count and never dropped one.

Perhaps it was that we had too much to look at and so weren’t awed by any one thing. But even more, it was that we had seen greater spectacles, unmoved, that our whole world was a visual glut, a ten-ring circus even Ringling Brothers couldn’t compete with. A man stuck his head into a tiger’s mouth and I pointed it out, with more amazement than I really felt, to my cool, unfazed friend, and when she failed to look (I, irritated now—“these seats cost money …”) turned her head for her, forced her to take the sight in. The tiger could have bitten the tamer’s head off, I think, swallowed him whole and turned into a monkey and she wouldn’t have blinked. We watched what must have been two dozen clowns pile out of a Volkswagen without Hanna’s knowing what the point of all that was. It isn’t just the knowledge that they emerge from a trap door in the sawdust that keeps Hanna from looking up, either. Even if she didn’t know the trick involved, she wouldn’t care.

I don’t think I’m reading too much into it when I say that, at five, she has already developed a sense of the absurd—the kind of unblinking world-weariness that usually comes only to disillusioned middle-aged men and eighty-year-old rocking-chair sitters. I sometimes forget that Hanna is just five, not eighty; that she believes she will grow up to be a ballerina and tells me that someday she’ll marry a prince; that she is afraid of the dark, she isn’t big enough for a two-wheeler; her face clouds over in the sad parts of a Shirley Temple movie and lights up at the orange roof of a Howard Johnson’s. Maybe I’m projecting on Hanna the feelings I have about my own childhood and growing up when I say that she seems, sometimes, to be so jaded. I think not, though. I watch her watching the monkeys dance and, sensing my eyes on her, and for my benefit, not from real mirth, she laughs a TV-actress laugh. She throws her head back (a shampoo ad) and smiles a toothpaste commercial smile so that baby teeth show—sex appeal?—and says, for my benefit, “This is lots of fun, isn’t it?” the way people who aren’t enjoying themselves much, but feel they should be, try to convince themselves they are.

What all this has to do with growing up old—Hanna and me, five and nineteen, watching the circus—is that Hanna has already begun her aging and I, once having aged, am trying to return. We’re different generations, of course, but—though Hanna doesn’t know what Vietnam is, or marijuana—we’ve both been touched by the sixties or, at least, its aftermath. I’ve grown up old, and I mention Hanna because she seems to have been born that way, almost, as if each generation tarnishes the innocence of the next. In 1957 I was four going on twenty, sometimes; Hanna at the circus borders on middle age … I feel the circle—childhood and senility—closing in.

A word like
disillusioned
doesn’t apply to a five-year-old’s generation or—though they call my generation “disillusioned” all the time—to mine. I grew up without many illusions to begin with, in a time when fairy tales were thought to be unhealthy (one teacher told my mother that), when fantasy existed mostly in the form of Mr. Clean and Speedy Alka-Seltzer. We were sensible, realistic, literal-minded, unromantic, socially conscious and politically minded, whether we read the papers (whether we could even read, in fact) or not. The Kennedys were our fairy-tale heroes, integration and outer space and The Bomb the dramas of our first school years. It was not a time when we could separate our own lives from the outside world. The idea then was
not
to protect the children—“expose” them, that was the term, and surely there’s some sense, at least, in that—but it was carried too far with us. We were dragged through the mud of Relevance and Grim Reality, and now we have a certain tough, I’ve-been-there attitude. Not that we really know it all, but we often think we do. Few things shock or surprise us, little jolts our stubborn sureness that our way is right or rattles our early formed and often ill-founded, opinionated conclusions. We imagine hypocrisy in a politician’s speeches. We play at vulnerability—honesty, openness, the sensitivity-group concept of
trust,
but what we’re truly closer to is venerability. I think of the sixteen-year-old McGovern worker who tells me she was an idealistic socialist when she was young, and of the whole new breed, just surfacing, of drug users who have come full circle and, at twenty, given up dope (before some of us have begun, even).

All of which adds to this aged, weary quality I’m talking about. Oh yes, I know we are the Pepsi Generation. I know what they all say about our “youthful exuberance”—our music, our clothes, our freedom and energy and go-power. And it’s true that, physically, we’re strong and energetic, and that we dance and surf and ride around on motorbikes and stay up all night while the parents shake their heads and say “Oh, to be young again …” What sticks in my head, though, is another image. I hear low, barely audible speech, words breathed out as if by some supreme and nearly superhuman effort, I see limp gestures and sedentary figures. Kids sitting listening to music, sitting rapping, just sitting. Or sleeping—that, most of all. Staying up late, but sleeping in later. We’re tired, often more from boredom than exertion, old without being wise, worldly not from seeing the world but from watching it on television.

Every generation thinks it’s special—my grandparents because they remember horses and buggies, my parents because of the Depression. The over-thirties are special because they knew the Red Scare and Korea, bobby socks and beatniks. My older sister is special because she belonged to the first generation of teen-agers (before that, people in their teens were
adolescents
), when being a teen-ager was still fun. And I am caught in the middle. Mine is the generation of unfulfilled expectations. “When you’re older,” my mother promised, “you can wear lipstick.” But when the time came, of course, lipstick wasn’t being worn. “When we’re big, we’ll dance like that,” my friends and I whispered, watching Chubby Checker twist on “American Bandstand.” But we inherited no dance steps; ours was a limp, formless shrug to watered-down music that rarely made the feet tap. “Just wait till we can vote,” I said, bursting with ten-year-old fervor, ready to fast, freeze, march and die for peace and freedom as Joan Baez, barefoot, sang, “We Shall Overcome.” Well, now we can vote, and we’re old enough to attend rallies and knock on doors and wave placards, and suddenly it doesn’t seem to matter any more. My generation is special because of what we missed rather than what we got, because in a certain sense we are the first and the last. The first to take technology for granted. (What was a space shot to us, except an hour cut from social studies to gather before a TV in the gym as Cape Canaveral counted down?) The first to grow up with TV. My sister was eight when we got our set, so to her it seemed magic and always somewhat foreign. She had known books already and would never really replace them. But for me, the TV set was like the kitchen sink and the telephone, a fact of life.

We inherited a previous generation’s hand-me-downs and took in the seams, turned up the hems, to make our new fashions. We took drugs from the college kids and made them a high school commonplace. We got the Beatles, but not those lovable look-alikes in matching suits with barber cuts and songs that made you want to cry. They came to us like a bad joke—aged, bearded, discordant. And we inherited the Vietnam war just after the crest of the wave—too late to burn draft cards and too early not to be drafted. The boys of 1953—my year—will be the last to go.

So where are we now? Generalizing is dangerous. Call us the apathetic generation and we will become that. Say times are changing, nobody cares about prom queens and getting into the college of his choice any more—say that (because it sounds good, it indicates a trend, gives a symmetry to history) and you make a movement and a unit out of a generation unified only in its common fragmentation. We tend to stay in packs, of course—at rock concerts and protest marches, but not so much because we are a real group as because we are, for all our talk of “individuality” and “doing one’s thing,” conformists who break traditions, as a rule, only in the traditional ways.

Still, we haven’t all emerged the same because our lives were lived in high school corridors and drive-in hamburger joints as well as in the pages of
Time
and
Life
and the images on the TV screen. National and personal memory blur so that, for me, November 22, 1963, was a birthday party that had to be called off and Armstrong’s moon walk was my first full can of beer. But memory—shared or unique—is, I think, a clue to why we are where we are now. Like overanxious patients in analysis, we treasure the traumas of our childhood. Ours was more traumatic than most. The Kennedy assassination has become our myth: talk to us for an evening or two—about movies or summer jobs or the weather—and the subject will come up (“where were
you
when you heard …”), as if having lived through Jackie and the red roses, John-John’s salute and Oswald’s on-camera murder justifies our disenchantment. If you want to know who we are now—if you wonder whether ten years from now we will end up just like all those other generations that thought they were special—with 2.2 kids and a house in Connecticut—if that’s what you’re wondering, look to the past because, whether we should blame it or not, we do.