It’s odd how we approach all those things we want for the next generation, the things we say we value most. We want them to have children of their own, but much of our discussion about childrearing makes it sound difficult and terrifying. We want them to have work they find satisfying, but we complain often about our own jobs. Americans of a certain age are disgruntled about how they are treated by younger people, and to ensure that those younger people understand that growing older carries clear benefits, perspective, experience, freedom, self-awareness, they talk about how horrible it is.
This is one of the surefire ways to tell if you’re truly getting older: if you complain constantly both about aging and about how little aging is valued and respected. We all do it, and we all rue it, too. There are other markers of age, of course: lunch conversation about ailments, prescription meds, and surgery, the watching of the Weather Channel and the reading of obituaries. The obvious antidotes: a shaggy haircut, a sharp jacket, and downloaded music.
My own mother used to totally rock out to my brother Bob’s Led Zeppelin albums, and the very fact that I offer that example today illustrates another problem of aging: the terror that you’re turning into what you once considered the lamest aspects of your parents. When was the first time I did this? I can’t remember the exact occasion, only the physical sensation of uncomfortable recognition, even horror. My words hung in the air, echoing through a filmy curtain of déjà vu: “Because I said so.” I also said, “Wait until your father gets home.” I said, “Your face will freeze like that.” Now I’m hoping that lightning will strike me if I ever utter the phrase “When you’re my age.”
Some lines from my parents’ past I can’t use; they are past their sell-by date. Please get your hair out of your eyes, my mother would say, you look like Veronica Lake. That’s another hallmark of the divide between the generations, the evocation of cultural landmarks that mean nothing. My daughter looks up from the crossword puzzle and says, “Television show named My Little what?” Margie, I reply. Vietnamese festival and American military incursion? Tet. Ronald Reagan’s attorney general? Meese. The gap between us yawns. One day, doing laundry, it occurred to me that the continuum in which I found myself included the demise of women’s underwear. I had stacks of my own bikini pants on top of the dryer, and I was comparing them in my mind to my mother’s remembered granny panties and my daughter’s own barely-there lace thongs. If you laid that lingerie in a line, it not only gave you a road map of the differences in sexual mores and openness through the years, it also suggested that the next generation of young women, my granddaughters, would wind up going commando. “Ew,” Maria said when I shared my thoughts with her. I imagined her begging her own daughters to wear underpants, throwing up her hands and saying “Your grandmother said it would come to this” while her girls rolled their eyes dismissively: Oh, well, Nana. She’s ancient. What does she know?
The similarities echo down the years as each group learns from and then dismisses its elders, as each group passes judgment on the one that comes after. We insist on talking about why young people will never amount to anything, and they insist on talking about all we’ve done wrong in our lives and how they will do things better. I’m part of the generation that said it wanted to change the world, and it did. We insisted we wanted more than our mothers had, and we got it. We let the forty-hour work week morph into the sixty-hour work week and even the eighty-hour work week, and in between those hours at the desk we had those hours in the kitchen and the car, overseeing homework, making the rounds of athletic fields. For those of us who feared as girls that our lives would be empty and boring, the crazed timpani of our existences at least meant that we were not in some domestic dead end. But I’m not sure, if we are being honest, that we would consider our alternative ideal. I’m developing a certain comfort level with the criticisms of those young women who will make a different sort of life for themselves. If their experience of their exhausted, insomniac, dispirited elders makes them decide they’d prefer not to go straight from the classroom to the cubicle to the coffin, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re ungrateful. Maybe it means they’re sane.
Or maybe it just means that they’re different, and that we can learn from them. Change, as we all know, is the great constant. There’s a quote I like from Mark Twain: “They didn’t know it was impossible, so they did it!” Remember when we were those people? We were certain that we’d discovered freedom, possibility, new ways of living, loving, raising families. And we were right. Our parents were, too, and the same is true for the generation to come, and so on and so forth.
Near Miss
One evening I sat at her kitchen table with a friend who had been widowed the year before, talking about this and that and how she was getting by, when suddenly she said, “I figure, here’s the good news: at least we never got divorced.”
I went home that night thinking about what she’d meant by that, whether the marriage had been rocky in its last years, if there’d always been internal upheaval that none of us had seen. But what she meant, of course, was simply that we all have a list of bad things that can happen, dark roads we can wander down, and she’d realized that there was at least one of those that she had avoided forevermore.
We build our lives bit by bit of small bricks, until by the end there’s a long stretch of masonry. But one of the amazing, and frightening, things about growing older, about seeing yourself surrounded by the Great Wall of Life, is that you become aware of how random the construction is, how many times it could have gone a different way, the mistakes that you averted, not because you were wise, perhaps, but because you were lucky. You didn’t get pregnant when you didn’t want to be, and you did when you did, and at the time you think that’s just how it is. And then years after, when you consider all the ways in which things went differently for people like you, you wonder.
What if? You can get a whole table of girlfriends going with that one question. What if? If I’d gone to a different college I would never have met my husband, never had this life or these children. If I hadn’t been a babysitter for the two couples I chose from the college file box, I wouldn’t have gotten that first newspaper job in New York. And that first job led to the next, and the next, and so much that came after. The whole thing holds together; take one brick out and you can see it come tumbling down around your ears.
We often think of turning points as monumental events, but in retrospect they are so often minor moments: a lunch here, a drink there, a chance meeting, a fluke. When we were first married, my husband persuaded me that I could learn to be happy in the suburbs, which reminds me yet again of how clouded your judgment can be when you’re young and in love and have been preapproved for a mortgage by the bank. We made an offer on a sweet little house, but the roof, it turned out, was shot, and we walked away. My whole life might have been different if the roof on that house had been sound. I know now that I’m just not a suburban person.
All the stories and songs, they talk about the lost opportunities. “The Ben I’ll never be, who remembers him?” asks a character ruefully in the musical Follies. And we do have to make our peace with diminished expectations, bit by bit, the road not taken, the role not filled.
But sometimes I think that the emphasis on those moments that have passed us by obscures our gratitude for those pitfalls we skirted. Life is full of close calls, jobs that seemed like a good idea at the time but in retrospect would have been a bust, relationships that were so, so seductive but that today seem like moments of sheer madness. Being smart about life, and about ourselves, means that we know that it wasn’t that we were savvy, or strategic; sometimes we just lucked out. Or not.
It’s all so random. Some of my good luck, for instance, was that there were lots of bad things I wasn’t good at. I took up smoking during a sabbatical from school during which I was working as a newspaper clerk and tormented by doubts about who I was and where I was going. Sometime in the spring the city editor, whose phone I answered and mail I open
ed, decided I could start doing some stories, and to mark the moment I bought some cigarettes and a leather messenger bag large enough to hold a dozen reporter’s notebooks. I smoked the way I swung a bat, as though I was doing a bad imitation of something I’d seen on film: Dunhills, because everyone would take me seriously if I smoked cigarettes that were strong, had no filters, and were imported from England in a burgundy-and-gold box. This was when smoking was not only permitted in newsrooms, it was almost encouraged. In fact, even if I had not smoked, I would have been smoking, given the gray fug that hung over the room. The secondhand smoke probably did more to my lungs than my own passing habit, since I’m pretty sure I never learned to inhale properly.
My history with drugs was even more short-lived and strange, although I was a teenager and then a young single New Yorker just at the moment when so-called soft drugs were in fullest, most conspicuous, most jubilant flower. For years I put the fact that I never dropped acid or snorted coke down to a night, my third time smoking pot, when I apparently got a joint with something stronger in it, became almost terminally paranoid in a bar, went home, pulled the covers over my head, and slept for the better part of a day. I think of it every time George Bailey gets freaked out by Clarence the angel in It’s a Wonderful Life and brays, “Ernie, straighten me out here, I’ve got some bad liquor or something.” Now it seems like a lucky break, but in the moment I was tormented by the notion that I couldn’t even be cool enough to get high.
Over time it developed that my real issue is not that I’m not cool, although that is true. It’s that I am what might kindly be called a control freak. This makes me not singular, but typical. The illusion of control is the besetting addiction, and delusion, of the modern age. We now have so much information, so many safeguards, so much statistical data about everything from car crashes to investment formulas that we’ve convinced ourselves that we can control our environment. Modern life tells us that this is so. Rooms that are always cool even in a desert setting that is mostly over 100 degrees, New York to Beijing in half a day, three-dimensional scans of the heart, online dating, in utero photography: What in the world is not within our grasp? So much information, and information is power, the power to believe that if we follow certain prescriptions, certain events will follow. In other words, life as mathematical equation: If Ivy League, then success. If high fiber, then low cholesterol. If parental involvement, then happy children.
And then the randomness of events intercedes, and the illusion of control crumbles. A pleasant flight attendant, watching me wedge myself against the back of the seat in front of me during a bout of turbulence, once said that she thought I was the kind of person who would be fine with flying if I could just pilot the plane myself. (Never going to happen.) That’s what we learn as we grow older: That we are not always piloting the plane. That unexpected things occur. That control is a nice concept, little more.
So we control, in the parlance of the prayer, the things we can, which usually means inanimate objects, and ourselves. I’m that woman who had the hysterectomy with local anesthesia. General anesthesia is for some of us with control issues what being locked in a basement closet is for claustrophobics. So I found a doctor who was not only uncommonly gifted and highly recommended but also willing to operate with only a local epidural anesthetic to render me numb from the waist down. Because she had met with me on several occasions, she had one proviso: “You can’t talk to me while I’m operating.” Because you know I wanted to.
I acquired a guided-imagery tape narrated by a woman named Belleruth Naparstek, whose name I will never forget because you never forget the person talking inside your head as you’re looking up at the big lights in the operating room. She gave me the impression that I could control what was going on. She told me to imagine my body helping to heal itself, to imagine all the people I loved standing around the surgical table. She told me I might become emotional, even weepy, and I thought, Oh, hooey! as I imagined my mother and my kids—I’m sorry, but I just didn’t think my husband and father could handle it—circling the table on my side of the surgical drape. That was something else: the surgeon said I couldn’t watch her. Because you know I wanted to.
“Anything above the waist, you’re going to have to have a general,” she said kindly afterward, perhaps recognizing me as a special kind of superannuated control freak.
I wonder—does every control freak have something they clearly cannot control? For me that something was booze. I love booze. Or at least I think I do. I’ve now spent more of my adult life without it than I did with it, so it’s difficult to tell. Maybe it’s like that old boyfriend you remember so fondly; if you met him again, you might still think he is handsome, witty, so much fun. Or you might wonder: What was I thinking? Scotch tastes like turpentine. Wine is nothing but an invitation to stomach acid.
Do all of us, by the time we’re grown-ups, have something that was our signal lucky break? Sometimes it’s marrying someone, sometimes divorcing them. Sometimes it’s finding a lump when it’s small, or getting the meds that turned a ravening monster of depression into a medium-size dog on a short leash. Sometimes it’s getting lost on a back road and passing a house with a FOR SALE sign.
For me it was giving up booze, and giving it up early. None of my three adult children has the faintest memory of Mommy pounding down a bottle of wine or a six-pack, which of course is why I stopped in the first place when my youngest was a baby. I think parents are often confusing for kids—I discovered the other day that my eldest can recite from memory the excellent Philip Larkin poem that begins “They fuck you up, your mum and dad,” despite the fact that he allegedly thinks we are good parents—and I therefore think it’s much too hard for any child to have several mothers over the course of a single evening. “My mother was a drunk” is one of the harshest, saddest sentences in any language.
I’m doubly aware of this now, at my age, so many years past that last drink—a Heineken beer—because I’ve begun to realize how bad habits seem worse when the habitué is of a certain age. We harden as we grow older; our behaviors are less water-color, more etching: The control freak becomes an obsessive. That charming guy who can’t help himself, who hits on virtually any woman with a pulse, is a stud at thirty-five and nothing but a terrible lech thirty years later. The woman who has always been an inveterate storyteller begins to seem, when she’s aged, nothing more than a garrulous pain. And the lively, charismatic, sociable thirty-year-old who regaled the entire bar with terrific stories over the course of a long night becomes, as time goes by, nothing more than an object of pity. His friends lower their voices, lean in hard: “He drinks.” What was once a description is now an indictment.
The truth is that if I’d gone to AA meetings, I wouldn’t have had very much to say. I never drove into anything, never missed work, never fell into a restaurant table or threw up at a dinner party. But one day in the dentist’s office I found myself taking a quiz in a woman’s magazine about whether you had a drinking problem. And with a blinding flash of duh! I understood that if you were even bothering to take the test, you already knew the answer. I was one of those women who were exquisitely sensitive to how others saw them, who spent all their time looking over their shoulder at themselves. That’s a form of contortionism that comes at a cost. I suppose I loosened up when I drank and stopped, like the White Rock girl, looking at me looking at me looking at me.
With age I truly stopped doing that, stopped worrying so much in every crowded room about whether I was wearing the wrong dress, saying the wrong thing, making the wrong impression. So perhaps I would have slowly become one of those creatures, miraculous to me, who can nurse one glass of white wine for an evening. But maybe not. Moderation and I have always had an uneasy relationship. And perhaps that’s truer now than ever. It may be that all people become more of whatever they mostly are as they grow older, the good as well as the bad: more outspoken, less inhibited, funnier, more gregarious. Sometimes it seems as though age strips away the furbelo
ws, the accessories, and leaves just the essential person, the same way that as you get older you learn to dispense with ruffles and fancy buttons and just wear a black sheath dress. I had an aunt who, among other things, was known for a tongue so sharp that it sometimes qualified as a lethal weapon. As she developed dementia and her world shrank to a pinhole view, like that last frame in a Looney Tunes cartoon, she recognized no one but her husband and she lost most of her personality except for the occasional whipsaw of sharp words.
I think of giving up drinking as a little like passing an intersection where someone has blown through the red light, smashing up his own life and that of whoever was in that crumpled can of a subcompact, realizing as I survey the carnage that if I’d left the house a minute earlier it could have been me: got lucky, beat the reaper, just in time. But, looking around at the landscape of my friendship circles, I don’t think that’s specific to alcohol abstinence. So many of us know where the fault lines lay, the things we managed to do, or change, or avoid, almost without knowing what we were doing, or why. All the things that, looking back, meant the difference between one life and another. It’s why a certain kind of movie has always been so popular, the one that includes a chance encounter on a train or the near miss in the revolving door. Life is haphazard. We plan, and then we deal when the plans go awry. Control is an illusion; best intentions are the best we can do. I remember imagining that I could chart a course that would take me from one place to another. I thought I had a handle on my future. But the future, it turns out, is not a tote bag.
Many years ago I decided that I didn’t want to be any worse than my shortcomings made me if I could possibly help it. At the end of a dim tunnel I could see the possibility of a life in which I would be defined not by who I was but by what went from a bottle into a glass and then into my mouth. Worse still, I imagined the lives of those I loved being defined by it as well. It’s not insignificant, the number of people who have said to me over the years, with a particular kind of anguished thrum to their voices, “My mother had a drinking problem.” But it’s a terrible mistake to think that taking care of one thing is taking care of all things. I’m not sure if it’s true, but an AA stalwart once told me that more marriages broke up after sobriety than before, simply because it became obvious that the booze wasn’t the problem, the relationship was. One of my friends once said sadly of her mother, who had stopped drinking, “I thought she was mean because she drank. But she’s just mean.”