![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
My mother always defined herself as a writer, although her published writings were sparse. She wrote one book under her own steam, a memoir about her time in Paris the year before I was born, and then, after my father died, various small books about personal health, which were an assignment from a publisher. Otherwise she mostly just wrote encyclopedia entries. She was always pushing me to write, something in which I had minimal interest. I hated school and I hated writing term papers, but I will always be eternally grateful to her for (after watching me struggle – at the age of 10 – to write a rather lengthy term paper by hand, in what’s now referred to as “cursive”) walking me over to her manual typewriter and showing me that even if I only typed with two fingers, I could put thoughts on paper faster than I would if I wrote by hand, and my hand would get less tired. A few weeks later, she started teaching me how to touch type. Many people my age brag about how they refused to learn to type because they did want to be (eeew) secretaries, but I can say with gratitude that because I learned to type, I got a good job as a secretary, which led to a decent job as an editor, with nothing but a high school diploma, and that I never had to work in food services or retail at a minimum wage with no benefits.
I think my mother had dreams and projections not so much about my writing, as about my being a writer: the kind who didn’t care about fashion and didn’t wear makeup, but rather wore large hoop earrings and hideous open toe sandals in the summer, and grew into young adulthood dating scruffy men with beards (when I was in grade school, a number of college-age girls we knew who wrote poetry were this type). To me this would have been a fate worse than death and the thought of ending up this way just compounded my dislike of schoolwork (although as I got older I read quite a lot of serious literature).
The only thing I remember working hard at as a teenager (other than my three or four unsuccessful attempts at dieting; I would lose 30 pounds and gain it back every other year until I was 18) was playing the piano. I practiced really really hard and entered several competitions for young people. I even got to the semi-finals in one. I was also interested in singing and had spent my childhood imitating Julie Andrews, but wires got crossed and when I was 13 or 14, a few weeks after a music teacher friend of my mother’s told us that I had an exceptional singing voice, I started smoking because I had heard that it would spoil my appetite. (I returned to singing twice: once at 26 after I quit smoking the first time, and again, permanently at 54, and it has been an obsession ever since.)
I also began writing when I was 54. I was in a state of unrequited lust over the gay man who had encouraged me to sing,* and the story of him and me was spinning around in my head, but I couldn’t talk about it out loud because I didn’t know anyone who didn’t either know me in connection with my partner Betty or know me from work. So I turned the episode into a play. The play mirrored the real situation almost word for word (this man had said some absolutely ridiculous and smarmy things, and it was healing to read them out loud and laugh), but I didn’t think any audience would believe that a woman in her 50s living in New York could be that stupid or naïve, so I changed the demographics so that the heroine was in her 20s and living in Texas. The play turned out to be a rather amusing RomCom and was produced at a community theater in Texas. (It has since languished because I just don’t think it will pass muster during the Me Too era.)
I gave my mother a copy, which she kept in her bedroom. As a point of comparison, she kept a young male friend’s novel-in-progress, which she and I both agreed was pretentiously opaque, on her coffee table in the living room, perhaps because it was “postmodern” and added to her image of herself, whereas having a daughter who wrote the theatrical equivalent of a “chick flick” did not.
As I was writing the play, I certainly didn’t think of myself as having homework. I felt that a devil was behind me with a pitchfork, and maybe one was: the man I was writing about looked a lot like Mephistopheles even down to owning an orange leather suit! I felt so compelled to write that I spent my lunch hours and time on subway platforms scribbling in a notebook and then came home and transferred what I had written to a computer file.
My first experience with writing-as-homework was when a therapist told me I would feel less blocked (as a person working at home in a dull job, not as a writer, per se) if I “did” The Artist’s Way**. This program included writing three pages in longhand (which considering the size and childishness of my handwriting meant that they would contain less prose than most people’s) every morning. I suppose I “cheated” because I had coffee and fed the cats first, but it was a useful exercise. Doing that led me to decide to write a memoir.
I now write something every day: a bit of memoir, a blog post, pieces for this writing competition. I found that it is not that hard if I just sit down and do it. On the other hand, if someone asked me “who are you?” “a writer” is probably the last thing I would say. And if someone asks me “what do you doooo” (an irksome question for those of us who may have had interesting lives but never had an interesting job) I say “I sing”. I probably spend more hours of the day writing, or copy editing to earn money, than singing, but never mind. It is when I am singing that I feel most alive. Most people I meet for the first time ask me if I am some kind of performer because I always wear “stage makeup,” even to the laundry room. If I were going to “be” something I would much rather be a singer (big hair, perfect posture) than a writer (snarled hair, round shoulders). Although of course the world has moved on and writers look all sorts of ways, particularly since many of them these days end up as talking heads on television.
The best thing about writing is it is a way to leave a legacy. I wouldn’t even have to be published; I could just put instructions on how to access my computer files in my will. Mostly I write because I don’t want to die anonymous. Which is a good reason for giving myself “homework”.
[*He is mentioned at the beginning of my earlier piece “Periphery”babydramatic-1950.dreamwidth.org/4090.html
My Happy Place
Mar. 10th, 2019 03:52 pmBy the time I was in my teens, my vision of paradise was The Perfect English Village. I had an image of this in my mind long before I actually saw one. I spent most of the summer I turned 14 reading Agatha Christie, and the images of Miss Marple’s Saint Mary Mead were at least as compelling as the murder plots. I could see the cottages made of Cotswold stone, which as J.B. Priestly said, “...has no color that can be described. Even when the sun is obscured and the light is cold, these walls are still faintly warm and luminous, as if they knew the trick of keeping the lost sunlight of centuries glimmering about them.” All these cottages were adorned with carefully tended flowers, and commerce was limited to small shops: bakeries, butchers, places to buy wool for knitting.
And then there were the “virtues, values, and customs” of village life, so perfectly depicted by Christie: People dropping in to visit and gossip, tea or sherry served, rations stretched, garden produce exchanged, the occasional black market item hidden [she mostly wrote about the years before and after World War II], and, of course churchgoing. And these virtues, values, and customs existed against a backdrop of leisure, seemingly for people of all classes, “unless you were a doctor, a vicar, or a servant.”*
These were also the virtues and values that I saw in Brooklyn Heights growing up. It was, in essence, a small, walkable village, with only one commercial street, and that lined with small shops. The pace of life was slow, partly because of the large number of stay-at-home mothers, quasi-bohemians living (albeit elegantly) from hand to mouth, and single women employed in low-stress secretarial or editorial jobs. Neighbors were neighborly.
My mother, despite her “modernism” (alluded to in earlier writings†) embodied these “village virtues”. She visited the sick, brought needed items to the poor, invited lonely people to dinner. She made a point of knowing all her neighbors.
Now, over 60 years later, I think and speak of myself as having grown up in “New York”, but Brooklyn Heights was really quite different. Subway stations were at the periphery, and the Heights was spared the hustle and bustle ensuing from people pushing and shoving their way back and forth to work.
Perhaps my bond with English villages grew out of happy childhood memories.
At the age of 34, after scrimping and saving from my meager Editorial Assistant’s salary for about two years, I managed to amass $2000 (not an insignificant sum in 1984 and enough for a nice vacation) and decided to take my partner Betty to England for her 50th birthday. I did not do this to be generous, and in fact when people praised me, I felt uncomfortable. I did it because I had yearned to go to England since I was young and I didn’t want to go alone. I was working and she wasn’t, so she paid in labor for at least some of her airfare and bed and board by looking through the mountain of catalogues we had picked up at the British Tourist Authority, as well as through the book on English villages that we had bought, and coming up with some ideas for our trip.
There were so many choices of tours, and so many were associated with beloved authors! James Herriot’s Yorkshire; Beatrix Potter’s Lake District; Bronte Country; Bath, where Jane Austen’s heroines spent a “season”. And of course Scotland with its magnificent lochs and highlands. As we had to budget sparingly we had to narrow things down. Eventually we decided on an informal tour of “Constable Country” (with a car and driver) and a three day coach tour of the Scottish Highlands. We could bracket our trip with a few days in London at each end. And then, spontaneously, we added one more gem. Betty mentioned the fact that as I would be spending vacation days and vacation money on this trip, we wouldn’t be going to the seaside anywhere that year. So she found a wonderful little seaside town in Norfolk called Cromer so that we could have a bit of seaside in England! We could travel there on the train after our Constable tour on our way to Scotland. The 10 day vacation plan was now complete.
As soon as we got onto a coach at Heathrow Airport, making our way to our hotel, I saw that everything was every bit as wonderful as I had dreamed it would be! I don’t remember that much about our time in London but the two things that stand out were seeing the Dickens museum and eating in the tea shop on the ground floor of the Victoria Thistle, our hotel. Probably if I could take one hour of my life and save it forever it would be our time having lunch in that tea shop. Everything was dusty rose or Wedgwood blue; the curtains were heavy and the walls were wainscoted. The menu was totally Miss Marple: tiny sandwiches with the crusts cut off, served on Spode. For the hour we were there, stress of all kinds just evaporated. There was no work, no money worries (which we did have plenty of on that trip; I was too poor to have a credit card – banks were much fussier then about whom they would give them to – and so I was eking out Travelers Checks), no housework. We just sat there, nicely dressed in slacks, tailored shirts, and blazers, sipping tea and looking out the windows, chatting about what we had seen and what we looked forward to seeing, like two characters in a pre-1960s English novel.
Our tour of Constable Country was a feast for the eyes. We saw all of the places he had painted: Willy Lott’s cottage, the River Stour, with boats moored; Dedham Village; Lavenham; Kersey, where people gave the right of way to ducks; Long Melford. And they had hardly changed at all in the ensuing century! I don’t remember where we stayed overnight but it might have been The Swan in Lavenham.
Cromer was the biggest surprise. Not just the seaside, with buildings of a kind of stone I’d never seen anywhere before or since, but the large rectory turned B&B where we slept (it was freezing) where we met a number of other paying guests. Here we met a young couple (at the time Betty was 50, I was 34; this couple was in their late 20s) who would remain friends and traveling companions of ours for several decades. The woman, Rhona, looked like she had stepped out of the pages of an Agatha Christie novel set in the 1940s. She had on a skirt and heels, even for a walk at the seaside, which, having spent most of my social life since the late 60s with a slovenly casual crowd, I found quite charming. She worked for a jeweler but dreamed of being the “manageress” at a store (which she eventually became). Kevin, the man, looked like Paul McCartney and loved cameras. In the most natural way in the world (and remember, this was before New York City even had a gay rights bill!) we split up as regular married couples might have, with Betty talking to Kevin about cameras and maps and me talking to Rhona about hairstyles and makeup.
One afternoon they took us for a drive throughout Norfolk and we stopped at King’s Lynn, a seaside town where they eventually moved. (We visited them there a few years later.) As we were driving Rhona confided to us that she was so happy we had all met. She said that most of the guests at the B&B (where they had been for about a week when we arrived) were old, reactionary, and stuffy. She said she was thrilled to meet people with whom they could have fun.
Then it was on to Scotland. Betty and I took a train to Edinburgh, stayed for a night in the North British Hotel (which had the largest bathtub either of us had ever seen), went to some museums the following morning, and then caught the train to Inverness where we would meet our coach tour. I will have to say that the Scottish Highlands are the most magnificent bit of “nature” that I have ever seen. Mountains that are one minute green, the next purple, and the next dark and cratered like shots of the moon. You can drive for miles and miles in the highlands and see nothing but the tiniest crofters’ cottage and sheep. No people to speak of. We saw the deepest lakes, including Loch Ness. Shops near Loch Ness had turned “Nessie” (the imaginary monster who was said to live at the bottom of the Loch) into an entire industry. There were Nessie tea towels, stuffed toys, and of course T shirts. We saw the battlefields at Culloden and felt our hearts leap into our mouths as we crossed the swinging rope bridge (on foot) at Fort William. The tour ended at the magnificent Inverewe Gardens, after which we turned around, went back to Edinburgh, hopped on a train, and spent one last night in London.
We went back to England several more times after that. The last new village we stayed in was Clovelly in Devon. The streets were cobblestone and to get to the water you had to walk down a steep incline. This was in 2004 and by that time Betty was not mobile enough for the trek so she stayed in the coach while I explored the town. That is the last time to date that I have been out of the country.
Since I left my last full time job in 2009 I have not had the money to travel and Betty is now bedbound (see some of my earlier writings about Betty‡), but we still vicariously enjoy time in an English village, most recently by watching the great British actress Penelope Keith’s program “Hidden Villages”. We watch an episode and then snuggle and reminisce about our happy times.
[*From Marion Shaw and Sabine Vanacker, in their book Reflecting on Miss Marple.
†See “A Modern Child in the 1950s https://babydramatic-1950.dreamwidth.org/2099.html
‡See “Inkling” https://babydramatic-1950.dreamwidth.org/4478.html]
I worked in publishing throughout my prime middle age (in the 1980s and 1990s). When I would meet someone and tell them I worked in publishing they would assume that I was wining and dining authors on a company credit card, or perhaps later holding some of these authors’ hands as I shepherded them through the publishing process. That I would be knee deep in manuscripts by people like Toni Morrison or Philip Roth–or Doris Kearns Goodwin. Or that I was some kind of subject expert who knew other subject experts who wanted to write books (in psychology or economics). That I would always be on the cutting edge of a topic that interested the punditocracy and could hold forth at a cocktail party. That I might even one day become part of the punditocracy myself.
But no. I worked in Production, I told them. For people who don’t know much about the publishing business (as it was in the days of print, in any event) it is not all about the authors and the specialty editors. Most of the work that gets done could be going on anywhere else. Most people who work in publishing are not particularly interested in reading or in books (the people in Fulfillment, for example, who spend their days keeping track of names and addresses and generating labels). A publishing company has to run efficiently and most of that falls on the shoulders of Production. A production department at a publisher is the white collar equivalent of a factory (and not all that white collar: when I started out the acquiring editors and marketing managers – who dealt with the public – wore suits; people in Production wore jeans). Or it’s like the infrastructure of one’s bathroom. Material flows through a pipeline. “Where in the pipeline are the manuscripts for Volume X Issue Y?” I would be asked.
Like other pipelines, production pipelines could get clogged. The people most likely to clog the production pipeline were perfectionists. Often these were people who had gone to elite colleges and thought that they were real editors who needed to polish and perfect everything for the third and fourth time even after the company had paid someone to do it the first time. Manuscripts could disappear into the black hole of a perfectionist’s work area for weeks.
The archetype of this was “Slow Richard”*. Richard was not “slow” in the euphemistic meaning of the word: unintelligent. He was very intelligent and had gone to an elite college. When I say he was slow what I mean was he belabored everything. Every word, every punctuation mark. No matter how many eyes had gone before, Richard couldn’t skip anything. There was one year when, by October (the do or die month for material that had to be published in the calendar year), an enormous “fatberg” of manuscripts, over a foot high, was piled up in Richard’s in-box.
Anyone who had worked in the department for a while knew that the problem with Richard wasn’t Richard, it was Dorothy, the woman who had trained Richard (most of the rest of us had been trained by our current boss). Dorothy was much older than most of us and had been a real research biologist. Why she finally changed fields after 20 years is a mystery, but apparently she got a job in publishing after having written a book (about the research she was doing). She knew a lot of the authors and journal editors we worked with and talked shop with them, so as a “perk” our boss let her go to various society meetings during the year. Often these were in Europe. Dorothy humblebragged endlessly about how onerous it was to have to go to, say, Leipzig, and make a speech, for which she also had to buy a new dress because the society members had all seen the one she wore last year – in Paris. Of course we were all envious, but we also secretly laughed because Dorothy was the only person who didn’t realize that (when she was in the office, at least) what she had was simply a glorified clerical job. Handling the actual meat of these publications was the purview of the subject editor’s office, not the production department. Nonetheless Dorothy read every word of every copyedited manuscript that crossed her desk and taught Richard to do the same thing. The problem was that Dorothy understood what the articles were about, so she could read them as quickly as most people could read a newspaper. Richard did not, so it was heavy slogging. (Which is why the rest of us never did more than scan our manuscripts, assuming that the journal’s Editor-in-Chief, the peer reviewers, and the copy editor had done enough.)
Richard was no longer working for Dorothy at the time I am referring to (and for what it’s worth she couldn’t keep an assistant for very long; there had been four since Richard and that covered a period of only 5 years.) But even though Richard was no longer working for Dorothy, he had been permanently scared by her into thinking that if he didn’t read every word of every manuscript at every stage of the production process, someone might die if one of the drugs mentioned in the article was given at the wrong dose (due to a typo) or someone’s research grant might be scrapped if an obscure scientific term was misspelled. Of course these things would be a tragedy, but most of us comforted ourselves knowing that somewhere in the “Instructions to Authors” that appeared in the back of every journal issue there was a statement saying “errors are the responsibility of the author.”
And anyhow, to everyone else in the department, errors great and small paled in comparison to the bottom line; i.e., making sure that the company could book the revenue for all those December issues that had to mail out of the warehouse before December 20. A frequent saying around the office was “Don’t look too hard for mistakes. The journal has to be published in December; if there’s a mistake you can publish an erratum in January.”
The year that the fatberg of manuscripts was discovered in Richard’s in-box was the last year that working in that office was “fun”. Along with the final issues of at least three of his journals that were not going to make it (an “all hands on deck” approach dealt with most of the fatberg but not all of it), we also discovered some other, equally serious, problems: another production editor had lost an entire issue of manuscripts and had not told anyone, and someone else was on the verge of publishing an article that had been published before (the issue was intercepted after it was printed and had to be recreated from scratch at huge expense) because he had no filing system.
So everyone in the department, from top to bottom, ended up on the hot seat with the Vice President. As is so often the way, the casual relaxed atmosphere that allowed competent (albeit lazy) people like myself and some others to thrive (ah, those two hour lunches spent shopping at Lord & Taylor!) also prevented people with poor organizational skills from acquiring any. So going forward, there was a strict check-in system up and down the chain of management and people’s tiniest movements were now closely supervised.
About a year later our company merged with another company and our fun-loving boss (who by that point had been seriously chastened) was gone. And the following year I left.
[*All names have been changed.]
A Wednesday in June 1983
6:00 a.m.
I bolt out of bed ravenous. I hop on the scale. 139 (I am five foot six inches tall). It is now almost 8 years since my last drink and 12 months since my last cigarette. I am 33 years old. Despite religiously following a “meal plan” that I found in the back of one of Jane Brody’s cookbooks, I weigh 14 pounds more than I did when I smoked, although still 16 pounds less than I did in high school. If nothing else, I should be happy that even at this weight, I am now thinner than at least half of my peers (because they got a lot fatter not because I got a lot thinner), many of whom have had children, many of whom never battled weight as a child and are now mystified by how the pounds have piled on, many of whom like being larger and feeling like a “force to be reckoned with” (fat is a feminist issue?) But things feel out of control. I yearn for that lung-deep, dark sucking in of nicotine and tar, that hunger-killer. Since I quit smoking, even after a year, I am ravenous every minute.
Tearing my way to the kitchen (which is also the living/dining room in my East Village flat) I find a box of cold cereal, pour it into a measuring cup (can’t have more than a half cup), then into a bowl, add low fat milk, grab a spoon, and scarf the mixture down in 30 seconds. I welcome the warm grounded feeling of having something in my stomach. This will keep me sane, focused, and on task (whatever that task is) for a few hours at least. Then I boil water for tea. No coffee, because I can’t drink it black. No fruit; I have to save that for my mid-morning snack.
The night before I had promised myself that I would wake up and take a jog, but one needs to do that on an empty stomach and there is no way I could have done even so much as wash my face let alone dress in such a state of hunger, not to mention that I would most likely have been unable to turn my key the right way in the lock on the way out, because hunger often causes me to lose muscle memory. (When I’ve been that hungry I’ve lost ATM cards, broken typewriter ribbons, become disoriented and confused in familiar spaces, screamed for help because I thought I was locked out of my apartment. Once, thinking I could do an errand at noon before eating, I lost a package I was supposed to take to FedEx.) And I hate running. As a child I was teased because I couldn’t run. It made my chest burn and the backs of my knees ache. Later, maybe when I was in my 40s, I learned that this was because I had both scoliosis and asthma. I can walk faster than I can run. So I will walk to work (distance being about a mile and a half). Payday is not until Friday and I only have $5 left anyhow.
After breakfast I pull on jeans and a T shirt and take my beagle Paulie out for a walk. When I come back I put food for him in a dish on the floor and food for my Siamese cat Blito in a dish on the dining table (too high for Paulie to reach). I don’t worry that I have tormented Paulie with the wait; he won’t be that desperate because, since I live in dangerous “Alphabet City”, and never am outside past 9 pm unless I am brought home from somewhere in a taxi who waits until my key is in the lock, he has done his night-time “business” on some old newspapers.
****************************************************************************************************
11:00 a.m.
I am at my desk in the Flatiron Building, at my job as a Production Editor. I have been hungry since 10. I had a half a banana, but that has done nothing. I know now that no work will get done until I can have lunch, the earliest “allowable” time being noon. Trying to proof an article, I see that I have read the same sentence over and over. My mind spins toward memories of all the miseries of having been fat – well, not really fat, just too fat to pass muster as an upper middle class child in the 1950s. All the dresses that “spanned” on me, the jiggly bits on my thighs five years before anyone else had them, children making ugly jokes. Mind chatter kills hunger but doesn’t expedite the work on my desk. Well, when I pick it up at 1 pm I will do it fast.
AA and OA say “pick up the phone before you pick up the…” Great! So I will call my sponsor, or one of my friends who works at home, or one of my friends who is as bored in her office as I am in mine. We can commiserate about how hard life is without booze, cigarettes, enough food to make us feel full. I will stare at the proofs in case anyone comes by. I always finish my work on time. I have never had to be reprimanded.
****************************************************************************************************
12:30 p.m.
It has taken me less than 60 seconds to dispatch my made-at-home tofu and brown rice with steamed veggies, sitting on a bench in Madison Square Park. The weather is lovely. If I can’t eat enough to satisfy me for more than an hour or two after a meal, and my work is dull, I can fill myself up with other things. I watch the squirrels in the park. They make me smile. I think of my beautiful Paulie and wonder what he is doing. Then I walk over to Teddy Roosevelt’s Birthplace near Gramercy Park. It is a historic brownstone that looks like the homes that all the (mostly thin) old money girls I went to elementary school with lived in in Brooklyn Heights. The furniture and the old photographs recreate the era when the young Teddy was growing up. Children were kept apart from their parents. Not allowed in nice parts of the house. I see that Teddy was sickly as a child and grew to love the great outdoors. He took on physical challenges because he knew he could, even if they didn’t come naturally: an object lesson that I will remember.
****************************************************************************************************
6:00 p.m.
I am sitting in my 12 step meeting, in a room with about 25 other women. Most have been sober for several years, at least half have stopped smoking, and about three quarters of the women who have stopped smoking have gained a minimum of 30 pounds. This puts things in perspective. Because I have always been vigilant, sacrificing several hours a day of productive work and sane thinking to hunger, I have only gained 14. In the sharings, alcohol is rarely mentioned. The primary topic seems to be food. Food slips, binges, eating “forbidden” food. The nightly pint of ice cream is a recurring character as is the whole pizza eaten alone. I can pride myself on not having done any of those things since I was 18, before I started taking diet pills and then drinking. For me, binge eating was a gateway into substance abuse. For a lot of these other women, it seems to be a gateway out. When I “cheat” (at least once a week if not twice) this entails only minor infractions: having creamy dressing on my salad or butter on my broccoli.
At the moment I am not hungry because before I left the office, I drank a packet of instant Miso soup dissolved in boiling water, my one allowed between-meal snack of any substance.
My self-pride teeters a bit when I see Bonnie (not her real name). She is a “type” that I have envied since childhood. She comes from a very wealthy family but has no contact with them. But her “breeding” tells. She has a “straight” body build (no saddle bags, no large breasts, no crooked knees) and perfect cheekbones. Like many of the other women, she is sporting a crew cut but she is the only one on whom it is flattering. Bonnie never talks about food. She rails against patriarchy, capitalism, men (whom she calls “non-women”), her father, his new wife, and her boss. She is a fierce warrior. She and I have often bonded around how little money we make doing low-level editorial work. She inherited good bones, but gets no money from her family. It is hard to tell if her family rejected her for being gay or if she rejected them for being bourgeois. In any event, she has the confidence that only freedom from being parented can bring a woman in early adulthood. But there is a tripwire here. She still smokes. She has not yet said goodbye forever to the seductive hunger-killer. Is dropping the fourteen pounds I gained worth dying for, I ask myself? No. I remember hearing about a woman my age who died of lung cancer from smoking. That is why I quit.
****************************************************************************************************
10:00 p.m.
I snuggle under the covers in my East Village flat. No matter how fat I think I am, because I am considerably below my genetically preprogrammed “set point,” I am always cold (it is 62 degrees out but I am under two blankets) – although tonight I am not hungry. I ate some poached fish and greens at 8 pm. I wrap my arms around Paulie. Blito lies on my back. I do have a human loved one but we don’t live together. This is one of my nights on my own, which I enjoy. I fall asleep thinking of Jane Eyre living on starvation rations at Lowood School, yet nonetheless staying alert enough to learn and eventually become a teacher, and about the thin, rich girls I went to school with whose proto-Victorian parents often punished them by sending them to bed without supper. I have had a happy day but a hard one. Maybe tomorrow will be easier.
LJ Idol Week 17: Salad Days
Feb. 27th, 2019 07:16 pmWhen I met Betty, she had been actively involved in a Lesbian video group. This was in the mid-1970s and to the group’s knowledge, up to that time there had not been one. Video in those days meant carrying huge cameras to your location and shooting film that would later be played for viewing on old reel-to-reel devices. Those videos represented the pinnacle of Betty’s creative achievement, but were never in her possession. When the group broke up and the work was discontinued (and many of the women had stopped speaking to each other), Betty feared that the person who had possession of these fragile tapes had not stored them properly, a topic that she would refer to intermittently over the years, sometimes angrily, and sometimes sadly. Then miraculously, sometime in the early Millennium, the tapes were rescued and a few remaining members of the group began the arduous task of converting them to a digital format. They now reside somewhere on a Web page accessible through, among other portals, Facebook. Of course Betty did not know about any of this because she has never been computer literate. And I did not know about it because I was never personally friendly with those people.
A few years ago, two old friends of Betty’s from the group contacted me out of the blue (I think they had heard through the grapevine of Betty’s decline) and asked me if they could come visit Betty and show her the newly converted videos on a laptop that they would bring with them. They also wanted to interview her and record it. Of course I said yes. If nothing else, I knew that she would welcome the company. During my conversation with these two women, they gave me the link for viewing the old videos on my laptop at home.
Although I was not in any of the videos (I had gotten involved with the Lesbian Pride movement a few years later) viewing them elicited an enormous wave of nostalgia.
Mostly, I was struck by the youth and innocence of it all. There was a fairy tale quality to this life, which I think is what drew me in all those decades ago. Of course in the immediate sense, what drew me in was Betty, but quite aside from the transformation of self that occurs when one is in love, I was fascinated by this world that seemed to exist totally apart from “reality” as I knew it: office jobs, nuclear families, middle class “homemaking”, traditional rules of dress, and most of all, contact with one’s parents.
Here was a group of women, I see now mostly white and middle-class born, and mostly under 45 (Betty was one of the oldest) who had found a way to live, like Peter Pan and the Lost Boys, in a never-never land. I don't think I had ever quite envisioned anything of this kind. Several years earlier, when I had initially discovered my own Lesbianism, my hero[ine] had been Elinor Eastlake from The Group (too smart and glamorous to bother with men, and snapped up like arm candy by a rich cross-dressing baroness, but nonetheless moving in conventional society) and most of the Lesbians I knew in real life, although often frequenting gay bars, or socializing with each other in places like Provincetown, otherwise pretty much existed alongside of everyone else, working in ordinary jobs and attending family functions.
In many ways, these Lesbian-Feminist-Separatists reminded me not only of Peter Pan and his Lost Boys, but also of all the orphan children in novels by Dickens and the Bronte sisters who had fascinated me throughout my adolescence. These putatively adult women were like girl-boy children who seemed not to have grown up and who managed to live a life quite apart from "adults". Most of them were on strained terms with their own parents if they communicated with their parents at all, which many did not, mostly because their parents disapproved of their “lifestyle”. My mother, on the other hand, did not particularly care if I was a Lesbian, but I found her to be so soul-crushingly overbearing and suffocating that my new life seemed as good an excuse as any to “divorce” her, at least for the moment.
The world I now inhabited had its own choruses, printing presses, art schools, coffee houses, food coops, movers, painters, exterminators, and others. We had our own holiday celebrations (including a "solstice party" in late December, to avoid mention of "patriarchal" holidays). We had our own doctors and lawyers, too, but these were the "bridge" figures: they were of us but also of the world.
And there was our "Wendy". Not me. I was a token "pretty girl" but most of my clothes still came from thrift shops and I was not a successful professional nor did I have a middle class home. "Wendy" was a pretty, blonde schoolteacher, a "bar femme" from the era when Lesbians were sexy, not political. (She had once been hauled off to jail with her butch lover, wearing a red baby doll nightie). She adored butches of all sorts and in exchange for their flirting outrageously with her she allowed them to sponge off of her. (I remember one of them musing once “I wonder if Wendy will buy me a sweater this winter.”)
****************************************************************************************************
Of course it was not all a sweet fairy tale to remember with fondness. As I have often recalled with bitterness, it was these very women who discouraged me from trying to seriously pursue an opera career (if I would even have been able to at the late age of 26 with no music degree and poor health habits, but who knows; with different influences and a true "champion", maybe I could have). They told me not to "invest myself in a patriarchal art form like opera." They made me so phobic about straight men that I was unable to act the roles I should have been singing. (Actually I was not afraid of straight men; I was afraid of these women’s disapproval.)
How different things are now! Upwardly mobile professional Lesbians of subsequent generations are all marrying, finding high tech ways to procreate (don't ask!), and being house proud. They are less angry, and on the whole much mentally healthier that the "Lost Boys." Maybe because the world of the trans continuum has siphoned off most of the would-have-been butches, and possibly some of the women who swore that they would never take a job, even a dream job, where they would have to wear a skirt, most of the Lesbians I meet now appear to be indistinguishable at first glance from most of the straight women I meet, comfortable wearing dresses and socializing with straight men (I see this at the Lutheran church where I sing for example.)
But I miss Never-Never Land. Eventually it vanished, and I was left as a middle aged woman who had never really grown up, scrambling to make something of myself in the economically ruthless world of the twenty-first century.
https://therealljidol.dreamwidth.org/1045468.html
At 25, clueless after awakening from the drug, alcohol, and apathy-induced fog of what people refer to as the “Sixties” (which actually ended in the mid-1970s), I fell in love. Betty was 15 years older than I and probably hadn’t had a real job in 7 or 8 years. Her apartment was full of broken furniture, outmoded business attire, and antique china from old, discarded selves. She dined on tinned soup but always had money for a theater ticket. Knew all the places you could get free clothes. Was a perennial guest at other people’s holiday parties.
As madly in love as I was, the idea of marriage never crossed my mind. As a girl I had read Jane Austen and knew that one of the main reasons for a woman to marry was to “better herself”. When I was growing up, 150 years later, friends used to joke “Marry a nice Jewish dokta”.
There were people you married and people you didn’t. Other girls may have wanted children and a house. I wanted an earth-shattering romance, excitement, danger (not too much, of course), and surprise.
“An army of lovers cannot fail”. That was the mantra that kept us Amazon Dyke Warriors going throughout the 1970s. There was even a T shirt. Our army was fighting for anti-discrimination laws, staging sit-ins, boycotting Florida orange juice when Anita Bryant was the spokeswoman (for those too young to remember her, Anita Bryant, a pop singer from the 1960s, ran the "Save our Children" campaign in 1977 to repeal a local ordinance in Dade County Florida that prohibited discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation). Laughing when we were offered orange juice in a restaurant and saying “only if it comes from California. We don’t drink Florida orange juice, sorry.” Wearing a button saying “Boycott Florida Orange Juice” and giggling at our big secret.
“An army of wives” doesn’t quite sound the same really.
As the decades went by I became a suit. Not one trapped in a closet, but a suit nonetheless. If I hadn’t been so obviously the “girl,” I suppose I would have been the traditional working husband to Betty's stay-at-home perpetually unemployed something, but I didn’t want to think about that. True, some of my heterosexual friends, stuck with older bohemian husbands they had acquired in another life, were in a similar position, going to work every day year after year while their husbands lounged about drunk or depressed (or thought that they were too “artistic” to pull up their socks and go to work), but in my situation it was harder to keep things clear. So the less Betty worked, the more skirts and dresses I wore. Breadwinner or no, I couldn’t bear anyone to think that I “wore the pants in the family.”
In 1993, after 17 years of couplehood, we had an informal ceremony, where I got to be a bride in a dress, complete with a bouquet, which I tossed toward the prettiest-looking femme in the room. Betty and I exchanged vows: for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health.
Another decade went by and the army of lovers was gone. Many married (it was beginning to be legal in several states), birthed or adopted children, and bought houses. For us, nights at women’s dances and weekends spent at consciousness-raising workshops were replaced by calls to social workers about how to help Betty apply for various benefits. The bohemian of yesterday had become the supplicant of today.
If you and your loved one are poor, (on paper) it’s better to be single. If you’re middle income, and your loved one is older and poorer, (on paper) it’s better to be single. It’s really only better to be married if you have children or own property and we had neither—or if the richer partner is older and is likely to die first. While so many of my friends were jubilant about US v. Windsor, the case that in essence legalized same-sex marriage nationally, I felt that as it was first and foremost about a six figure tax payment, required because the two women were deemed legally single, it was really not about people like me or Betty. We already had wills, power of attorney forms, and healthcare proxy forms. What Edie Windsor had to pay in taxes was close to twice my and Betty's net worth combined. And as far as my self-esteem was concerned, I realized that if I had married charming, funny, sweet, work-averse Betty, I would have had to admit that I had “married down,” whereas as things were, I could relish the warm glow that one feels giving selflessly to someone who has less.
As a legally single person, she was able to do a Medicaid spend-down. She now has 24 hour home care and everything she needs. Barring a twist of fate, she will die first, and I can grieve with my meager savings intact.
So if you see this, please read my entry and consider voting for it. Singers especially. Old LJ friends and frenemies! This piece is an overview of my experiences over the 15 years since my voice was discovered at 54.
https://therealljidol.dreamwidth.org/1041730.html
LJ Idol Week 15: Periphery
Feb. 7th, 2019 04:04 pmOn February 15, 2004, a man whom I refer to only as “The Mentor” (who a few months earlier had gotten me to sing for the first time in over 20 years, telling me I had a gift that I could not run away from) sang Samson to my Dalila in the aria/duet "Mon Coeur S'Ouvre a ta Voix" at a church service on Valentine’s Day, ending with his spinning me around in his arms, bending me over backwards, staring into my eyes like Svengali, and changing me forever. Since then it has been a long and painful journey, but I would never want to go back.
Not shortly thereafter, I sank into despondency that the feelings The Mentor had stirred up in me were misplaced; he was gay. (Although I thought to myself if I, who had never been attracted to anyone male, could be attracted to him, couldn’t the reverse also be true, that he, who had never been attracted to anyone female, might be attracted to me? He certainly behaved as if he was.)
But there was worse to come. Because I could sing an aria in a pretty dress and garner a few “bravas”, I assumed that I could readily gain a toehold in the universe of amateur opera. I wasn’t expecting a big career. It was too late for that. I was 54. But I did think I could sort of pick up where I had left off in 1980; singing a leading role occasionally with an opera company that did not pay people. I had done that then, when my voice was much smaller and my stamina minimal. Returning to singing in my 50s, now 30 years away from my last alcoholic drink and almost as far away from my last cigarette, my voice was bigger, more beautiful, and more easily managed than it had been in my 20s. When I was in my 20s, many of the people singing leading roles in those amateur companies had been as old as I was now and many had had a variety of vocal flaws. Most did not have a music degree, had minimal sight reading skills, and occasionally mispronounced the odd foreign word. They stuck to the standard repertoire and had mostly learned roles from coaches. So the path forward seemed clear.
Sadly, I couldn’t have been more wrong. To my bitter disappointment, I found that no matter how well I sang, I simply had no place in the twenty-first century “world” of singing, particularly in New York, where I lived not because I sang, but because the maternal half of my family had been here for three generations. The opera companies I had sung with (now defunct) had become the punchlines of jokes. Now you were nobody if you hadn’t been a vocal performance major (or at least a music major of some kind), preferably at a “name” college or conservatory. Everybody knew everybody and behaved in that “clubby with each other and dismissive of outsiders” way that people do who bond over shared experiences in a rarefied environment.
Over the course of 7 or 8 years, I applied to sing at (and was rejected by) every non-paying opera company in Manhattan and some beyond. One outfit called me up and screamed at me for “wasting their time” sending them a resume. What on earth would have made me think they would have been interested in me? Another outfit complimented me on my singing but told me tactfully that they could not use me; I was not a “future investment”. (I was 58; 10 years later I sing 20 or 30 times better.) Everyone who came to those auditions knew each other. Most of the people auditioning were in their 20s and 30s. The oldest people were in their 40s and these had had years of experience on these audition rounds. In all honesty, most of these people were not going to have major careers. Most would sing the occasional paid gig, a number of unpaid gigs, maybe teach a little, and have a day job. But there was nobody there like me. And no, I wasn’t going to sing in the chorus (or what a singing blogger calls a “che avvenne”* role) for free. Time was running out.
I went to my last audition about 5 years ago, for a woman who has people sing through an opera from a score in her living room for a fee. Surely (I thought) that would be just about my speed. But no. She decided to give the opportunity to a woman who was going to sing that role in a real performance. I learned then, unequivocally, that even the humblest of venues are really just test drives or rehearsals for the pros. Not for amateurs. Not for me.
Somewhere along the way someone suggested “Meeups”. So I joined two, thinking, again, that a get-together for people to sing arias for an entry fee of $25 to pay for an accompanist would not exactly be catering to the stars of tomorrow. I thought it might be a place to get my feet wet. Um, no. These meetups were places for “emergings” (an industry name for singers in their 20s and 30s who hope to have a career) and the odd 40something wanting to test new repertoire to practice for auditions. So the older people extended mentorly advice to the younger people and the younger people were all over the older people with questions and I just, well, hung out on the periphery. Occasionally someone said I sounded nice, but the one time there was a sort of agent there (he was the husband of one of the other singers) he walked out of the room when I was singing, presumably for a bathroom break.
If I felt isolated and without a role (no pun intended) at auditions and meetups, I felt even worse once I stumbled upon online forums. I had (again stupidly) thought that the kind of people who had the time and lack of confidence to frequent these places would be people like me: amateurs who were obsessed. Wrong. These forums were mostly ruled by disgruntled semi-professional singers (or professionals who didn’t think they were getting the gigs they deserved) and a handful of voice teachers. Snark ruled. If someone asked a “stupid” question s/he was laughed at. I was mostly ignored. I felt like I was back in junior high school, with the popular girls talking around me and giving me looks (yes, talking “around” someone in a thread in an online forum is giving someone a “look”) or telling me if not directly then by implication that I was too big for my britches.
The low point came when I sang in a bookstore for free. The (very low budget) publisher, who had posted an initial invitation on this forum, hadn’t intended to pay anyone, which was hardly surprising as this gig involved singing for less than 10 minutes as a publicity stunt. I jumped at the chance, had a ball, and got a free video out of it. No, it wasn’t the most professional of videos; if I had had a “screen test” for example, I would have worn a different top and remembered to put makeup on my arms (I was singing the “Habanera” from Carmen), but at that point I didn’t have any videos so I was thrilled to have this one. (To date, it has 12 “likes” and 4 “dislikes” on Youtube. Which is fine. I would rather have a video with “dislikes” than none at all. I would rather have sung this gig, despite all the vitriol, than have spent another afternoon singing in front of my mirror.)
Quite shockingly, my singing this bookstore gig for free, which I had enjoyed more than I had enjoyed anything in a long time, and the video, triggered weeks and months of online snark (including a damning with faint praise magazine article) against people who ask singers to sing for free (from the same singers who take all the non-paying opportunities away from amateurs because they want to use them as rehearsals), against amateurs who have the hubris to call themselves “opera singers” (actually it was the publisher who called me that, not me), and by implication against every slightly unpolished performer who enjoys the opportunity of getting up and singing “well enough” to make an audience and themselves happy. So basically, the message I got from this whole thing was “How dare you be happy – you’re nobody;” an example being that when I used the word “fun” to defend my experience, someone snapped back with obvious contempt “Fun is for amateurs!”
******************************************************************************
That was in 2013. I sing much better now. One day in 2015 or thereabouts (possibly because I began keeping my sinuses cleared out) I noticed that singing seemed so much easier than it had been. Not long after, sometime around my 65th birthday, I found that I had magically added two or three notes to my upper register.
So even though no opera company wants me, I will not give up. I will not give up studying, I will not give up singing as a soloist in front of audiences where I can find them, and I will not give up singing the “big girl” operatic music that my voice loves, even if now I alternate it with art songs and Broadway show tunes. I believe that God wants me to sing, otherwise S/he would not have introduced me to The Mentor. I would not have found my voice in a church.
And there are tiny moments of optimism. I have mastered vocal skills that I never had before. Despite my body aging, I have more stamina to sing than I ever did. And more importantly, I have found places “on the periphery” where I can sing. I can sing in a church (as the daughter of two atheists, this is rather ironic). I am currently an unpaid choir member and soloist at a Lutheran church where I have made a lot of friends. And I can sing in nursing homes and senior centers. My voice teacher and I have put together a program of arias, songs, and duets, which is ever evolving. I have contacts at several of these places and I look for new ones all the time. I now have a mission and a brand. A room full of seniors, even on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, which is thick with music lovers, would be hard put to tell the difference between me and the women I used to meet at auditions. They don’t care whether I do or don’t have a vocal performance degree.
And most importantly, I now have a long-range plan, something that will be manageable and give my life joy and meaning. One day when my angel** gets her wings, I am going to work with seniors, singing with them at their bedsides, the way I now sometimes sing to my angel.
And I remind myself every day that a life of bringing music and love to people who are lonely and in need, a life of service through music, will never be a life on the periphery.
[*”Che avvenne” means “what happened” in Italian. A “che avvenne” role is a sarcastic nickname for a comprimaria role that only consists of a few sung lines, usually in response to a lead singer’s aria.]
[**When I speak of “my angel” I am referring to Betty, whom I have written about in previous Idol entries.]
[Videos available on request.]
LJ Idol Week 14: Firebreak
Jan. 31st, 2019 03:49 pm“She’s going home on the 29th.”
“No, please!” (a whisper).
“Other people need the beds more. People starting rehab. She’s done with rehab. Or else we need them for people who can’t be at home because they might hurt themselves or someone else; or wander.”
“But she will be alone…”
“No. That’s what we are going to talk about at the meeting on the 15th.”
“Meeting?” (a squeak).
“Discharge meeting. With me, to represent social work, the physical therapist, the lawyer I found you…”
“Lawyer??? Who can afford-“
“That’s what we’re going to talk about. The spend-down. Whatever she has…”
“About $30,000.”
“Half of it will have to go. So there’s the Medicaid eligibility lawyer – and then the clean out.”
I thought I was going to choke.
“A real clean out. A several thousand dollar clean out. Not ‘you move stuff around and hide it because the landlord is sending the fire inspector.’ (You told me about that incident!) I’m talking about professionals. See you on the 15th.”
****************************************************************************************************
“Before anyone says anything I want people to know that I don’t want Betty to go home. I’ve been so happy with her here. It’s clean and there are always people around if she needs something.”
“Do you want to go home Betty?” Judy, the social worker, asked.
“I don’t know.”
“When she’s home she doesn’t eat and doesn’t change her Depends, and screams if I try to throw anything out; even an envelope.”
“This is going to be a whole new ball game. This is Shelly.” (Judy gestured to the woman sitting next to her.) “She’s an attorney who specializes in Medicaid eligibility.”
“We’re filing an application today.” Shelly smiled at me. “Here’s my business card. I wrote the fee on it. It’s a flat fee for everything needed to get Betty on Medicaid with 24 hour home care—and beyond, if you need anything after that from time to time. Like the annual recertification. You have power of attorney so you can write a check on Betty’s checkbook.”
“No!!!!” Betty let out a howl.
“You don’t have a choice,” Judy smiled. “These are your conditions of discharge. Apply for Medicaid with a spend-down. If there’s any money left it will go to pay a 24 hour home health aide until you’re approved for care through Medicaid. And the apartment has to be cleaned out. I saw the pictures your partner showed me…”
“You rat!!” Betty screamed at me.
“Or she could stay here…” I proffered.
“Yes, but you’d still have to shovel all that junk out of the apartment, anyhow, right?” Judy pointed out. “Better to do it with a pleasant goal in mind. Betty coming home. You have two weeks. Here’s a business card from the cleaning service. They usually charge about $800 a day for two men and a van.”
Betty started screaming.
“If I have to supervise this I am going to pay myself $100 a day” I told Judy.
“Good for you!” she said. “That’s part of taking care of yourself.”
****************************************************************************************************
When the two men from “Home Sweet Home” showed up I knew they meant business. No more friends begrudgingly going through stacks of newspapers and junk mail, begrudgingly yet with reverence, because Betty would start crying and screaming if they started to toss something she thought she might want to read – someday. No more fights over whether or not she needed to keep an appeal from Yale, where she had been a student more than six decades ago (or from anyplace else.) No more paying a cleaning woman thinking she could work miracles and at the end of the day what you had were clean sheets and a clean sink and all the junk was still there, waiting to be negotiated over. No, these men would be ruthless.
A fire hazard. That was what the apartment had always been. Sometimes it looked a little better, sometimes it looked a lot worse. There were themes: unneeded furniture that she couldn’t bear to throw out, chairs stacked on top of chairs. Shelving. Brackets. Bags of soil bought for fantasies of window boxes (how old were these? 15 years or more?) Clothing that she had not worn in several decades and that did not fit. Old books. Piles of newspapers. Broken appliances that maybe someone could fix someday.
Of course there were precious mementos too. Things not to throw out. I found albums of photographs she had taken when she was in her 20s: photographs of LBJ’s inauguration and of freedom schools in the South. Portraits of her friends, many of whom I had met. Pictures of us on vacation. Pictures of Betty as a little girl. Letters from her mother and father. Bits of sweetness to make the mentally backbreaking job less hateful. Soon, instead of resenting this mission, I realized how privileged I was to be reviewing the fragments of more than eight decades of a life.
And even when I thought I was angry, I wasn’t really. Because this would be the last time. Oh I had “helped” at least eight times, the last being over two weeks of annual leave that I took because the landlord had threatened her with eviction over the “Collyer* type situation.” That had been around 2002. I said “never again”. Oh, and it hadn’t just been me. Friends had tried. There had been paid help. Getting Betty to relinquish anything was as exhausting as the scenes between Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke in The Miracle Worker.
Five days later ten van loads of shelving, unwanted chairs, broken appliances, and piles of magazines and worn out books had been removed. Sixty bags of shredded papers had been taken to the basement. Five bags of clothes went to Goodwill. The remaining bookshelves were organized prettily (one of the cleanup men was an artist and had a strong sense of aesthetics) showcasing Betty’s photographs and knickknacks. The kitchen countertop had a surface large enough to cut vegetables on. The dining table had nothing on it but a phone and a pad. And the floor! The dining room floor, yes, it was old and battered, but what a beautiful expanse of space! A paper- and wood-free oasis to run through from the bedroom on the way to the front fire escape if there was ever a fire and no one could get out the front door.
The living room became the aides’ room. Betty came home with a hospital bed, so the aides got her old captain’s bed. The living room closet was now empty, so they could hang up their own clothes. There were still books, and albums of Betty’s photographs from the 1960s (the very old memorabilia went, carefully preserved and much loved, in boxes in the hall closet) but these were neatly put on top of an end table, next to the aides’ bed, available for me to show people. I showed them to Betty when she came home. She had forgotten about them.
****************************************************************************************************
After the fact, Betty was not angry that I had had her apartment cleaned out. She does not know that where she came back to from the nursing home is the apartment she has lived in since the 1960s. She thinks I brought her back somewhere new. Except to go out the front door on a gurney to a doctor’s visit (or to the emergency room) she does not leave the bedroom because she cannot walk and is afraid of the wheelchair. She does not know she has a dining table that people can sit at, or that her photographs have pride of place (although occasionally I have brought them in to show her, and one or two were later put in stand-alone frames so that they could sit on the bookcase that faces her bed now).
When they are not doing things for Betty, the aides lie on the large captain’s bed watching tv or talking to their families, in the now-spacious living room with the large windows looking out on a tree-lined residential Manhattan street. Betty’s pictures adorn their walls. Some mornings I sit at Betty’s dining table and handle her “business,” pleased to now have a sane and serene place to do that, flanked by huge photographs of her parents and grandmother.
Sometimes I put my head down on the table and weep for the new, beautiful home that Betty will never know she has.
********************************************************************************************************************************************************
[*The Collyer Brothers were two American brothers who became infamous for their bizarre natures and compulsive hoarding. For decades, the two lived in seclusion in their Harlem Brownstone at 2078 Fifth Avenue at the corner of 128th Street where they obsessively collected books, furniture, musical instruments, and myriad other items, with booby traps set up in corridors and doorways to crush intruders. In March 1947, both were found dead in their home surrounded by over 140 tons of collected items that they had amassed over several decades.]
LJ Idol Week 13: Enjoy Every Sandwich
Jan. 24th, 2019 03:14 pm Until I saw what I looked like waking up from the flu. So the challenge became: if I could be that thin sick, could I be that thin well? I mean “thin” is relative. My idol, Beth the Ballerina, was the same height I was and weighed 90 pounds. Even if I was no longer overweight (no longer overweight for an adult if I had been one, anyhow), I still had chunky thighs, and was still bursting out of a bra size 34B. I did not look like a ballerina or like the sort of “classic” 12-year-old who might be the heroine of a children’s novel. So I set out not just to maintain the weight that I had become, but to achieve “Beth-hood”. My mother found me a private ballet teacher. I made her take me to a fancy brassiere shop to buy a minimizer bra. I let my hair grow. I tried to live on 500 calories a day. I grew another inch and lost another 10 pounds. I had a nervous breakdown and ended up sitting in a psychiatrist’s office.
About six months later I gained back all the weight but—thanks to the ballet lessons, the fact that I was now five foot six, and the redistribution of weight that happens when you grow up—I had permanently lost my chubby awkwardness. I now looked like Kim Novak. I dyed my hair blonde. I looked like Jayne Mansfield. I was popular with boys. But I still longed for sveltitude (it was the era of Twiggy and Mia Farrow). I was no longer reprimanded for being greedy, but was told that I looked trashy. Girls from my social class didn’t have big boobs when they were 13 or 14. So I made friends with blue collar girls instead. Once my father died I was no longer an upper middle class girl anyhow.
I lost and re-gained 25 pounds again. I started smoking to spoil my appetite. A music teacher friend of my mother’s told me that I had an exceptional singing voice (I had spent my young childhood imitating Julie Andrews) but it was more important to me to smoke and be thin(ner).
Whatever I weighed that week, during those years I certainly never enjoyed food. I often ate nothing all day so that I could eat one of the nightly four course dinners my mother was famous for. Or I made my own meals (meat and veggies, no starch or sugar) and sulked over dinner (I was not allowed to go to my room.) Then, after a few weeks, not being able to stand it anymore, I went to the local candy shop and bought a pound of fudge. Or I went to a coffee shop and treated myself to a club sandwich with bacon and turkey. Did I enjoy it? Not particularly.
When I was 19 I discovered diet pills, which I washed down with copious amounts of alcohol.
****************************************************************************************************
At 25 I got sober. I was down to 125 pounds again. As was the case post-flu so many years earlier, I decided that if I could be that thin drunk, I could be that thin sober. This time I actually managed it for a few years. I was away from my mother and her cooking, I had rooms full of peers in recovery to emote to when I felt hunger pangs (I learned that drama was as successful an appetite suppressant as amphetamines), and I had just met Betty and we were madly in love.
Gradually my weight crept up. I stopped smoking (penalty: 15 pounds). So I was no longer at my thinnest, but not as heavy as I had been as a teenager. Also, the benchmarks had changed. As a 12-year-old I had been conspicuously heavy. As a 30-year-old (the age at which I had my last cigarette) I was about average. But I still didn’t enjoy food. Betty and I fought about what foods were “allowed” in the house. We fought about what time meals could be eaten. She had been extremely thin all her life. She didn’t get it.
****************************************************************************************************
I don’t remember when I began to enjoy food again. I was probably in my mid-forties. I was now in a senior management position and could no longer afford to spend large swaths of the day too hungry to think clearly. I still ate mindfully and ate sweets sparingly, but I noticed that I felt better if I ate six times a day and not three. I gained about five more pounds but not more. Now that I was no longer hungry all the time I was no longer obsessed with food, and the fear that I would keep eating and not be able to stop gradually dissipated. I had been away from my mother’s enormous dinners for several decades. Betty and I usually ate dinner in bed in front of the tv. We served ourselves a modest amount (she often left half of hers) and didn’t go back for “seconds”.
I discovered that in social settings as an adult, it was ok to talk about enjoying food. People said things like “I love mustard”. No one called them greedy or piggy. People talked about restaurants they liked. I joined in the conversation.
****************************************************************************************************
I am now almost 70 and Betty is 84. She is bedridden and has dementia. I believe that the progression of her medical conditions was hastened by her picky eating habits. The last time she was in the hospital one of her diagnoses was “severe malnutrition.” She weighs 90 pounds. She fights constantly with the home attendants (and me) about not wanting to eat this, that, or the other. I see that extreme thinness resulting from picky eating habits does not age well. My mother was four foot ten and weighed 180 pounds and she was fit and active until she was about 93. I still weigh 145 but am now only five foot two. So I am now overweight again. Tough tomatoes. I suppose I enjoy food, although I enjoy many other things more. I am still mindful of what I eat. I don’t eat sandwiches very often, certainly not at home because I don’t keep bread in the house. But there is a little French grocery store near where Betty lives that makes wonderful sandwiches on pumpernickel ciabattas. My favorite is Swiss cheese with lettuce and tomato – and mustard. And yes, when I have one I enjoy it very much!
My father’s death was traumatic, but it hardly left me feeling “orphan-like” or “Dickensian,” a prototype very much in my thoughts because by the time my father died I had read almost all of Dickens, fallen in love with his works, and been intrigued by the large number of orphans, or at least children without mothers, who seemed to have lives of freedom that I could only dream of. So our family was deprived of an upper-middle-class income and a stern patriarch, but, counterintuitively, “parenting” increased exponentially as my mother fearfully micromanaged everything I did, much more than she had previously, particularly as one of my father’s interventions had been “leave her alone!” not to mention that he wanted at least some of her attention on him, not me. And there were even more mountains of food than had been supplied by the lavish dinners my mother had served every night to welcome my father home, dinners which, from hors d’oeuvres to dessert, contained more than a day’s caloric requirement for a 14-year-old desperate to get her BMI below 25. Thanks to the endless hordes of friends and neighbors trying to be helpful and sympathetic, there was now a round-the-clock feast, and a house filled with round-the-clock guests. Fifty years later, I realized that by endlessly eating and socializing, my mother was dealing with grief, but certainly neither she nor I were “pining” which, as a euphemism for weight loss, was the prevailing stereotype of grieving.
I did not have a good relationship with my father during the last two years of his life. Only a few months before he died we had had a knock-down, screaming, physical fight over my anger that a classmate, Hannah (not her real name)—skinny, quasi-orphaned (her divorced mother had lost her job and had dispersed her four daughters to stay with various friends and relatives), bitchy, and oh, so Dickensian—had been living with us. My father told me to feel sorry for her. I called her a bitch (not to her face, but in a loud voice within her earshot, in a family argument) because not only had she taunted me for being fat, she had also cajoled and wheedled my mother into making a Laura Ashley type shift dress for her like the one she had made me, and then had preened around telling me how much better she looked in it than I did. In any event, my no-holds-barred rage at Hannah led my father to beat me (something he had only done once before, when, while on a crash diet, I had had a screaming tantrum—about nothing—fueled by low blood sugar) all the while telling me how fortunate I was compared with Hannah. In retrospect I realize that what hurt me more than the beating was the fact that he “just didn’t get it”. I did not feel more fortunate than Hannah. She was everything I wanted to be: thin (despite eating whatever she felt like), independent (even when she was living “at home” with her mother she mostly supported herself with babysitting money), self-confident, and skilled at squeezing sympathy and admiration out of other people. She might have elicited some sympathy from me if she had had any of the cultural markers of poverty that I had been taught to be aware of—poor speech, ignorance of books and of the arts, clothes of inferior make—but she did not. Really the only two things that set her apart from other girls our age whom I might have invited for a sleepover were her crooked teeth, and the fact that she did not own a pair of pajamas, but instead slept in frayed dungaree shorts and a t shirt.
It took me years to realize that the most critical sequela of my father’s death was not a reprieve from future beatings or my mother’s endless dinner parties mostly peopled by catty gay men and sexually exploratory girls in their twenties (not the best role models for a teenage daughter), but our permanent fall from the “professional middle class”. At first I did not notice it because the only things that ended were things I hated anyhow. I no longer went to a private school, and we stopped going away for extended periods during the summer. I was thrilled to be out of the private school where I was at the mercy of two girl cliques: the rich Jewish girls who showed off their clothes and social precocity, and the thin WASP-y girls who showed off their forever pre-pubescent thinness. And I couldn’t have cared less if we didn’t go away much. Who at 14 wants to take a vacation with her parents? Excursions out of town did still occur, but they were fewer and farther between. By that point, I hated them, even the summer weekends, because at the height of my obsession with my weight (whatever I weighed that particular month) I loathed and feared summer clothes and usually kept on a knee-length skirt and stayed away from the beach (and of course it was impossible to stick to any kind of diet if I was either someone’s guest or staying in a hotel). And even worse, my mother, with her misguided generosity, once or twice took Hannah on one of these trips, which for me was sheer Hell. My mother seemed to adore Hannah (this adoration took the form of a combination of pity and admiration), and the bitter irony of it all was that what my mother adored about Hannah was her feistiness, spunk, and independence, traits that my mother’s style of “helicopter parenting” made it impossible for me to develop.
Years later, a mentor of mine referred to women like Hannah as “killer waifs”, And reader, I ended up with one as a life partner, albeit one whose saving grace was that she adored me, thought I was gorgeous at any weight, made me feel like a princess, and was extremely generous with money when she had any.
Combining a casual elegance (she was of course very thin and ectomorphically built, and rarely ate anything substantial) with a chaotic lifestyle (her apartment was filled with junk and completely disorganized and she was always on the edge of financial disaster) she reminded me of the eccentric waifs all ages, genders, and persuasions who graced my mother’s dinner table after my father died. After she and I became an “item”, I felt that I was in a dream come true: in the midst of a whirlwind romance, living the sort of improvisational quasi-foodless lifestyle that I had longed for as a teenager immersed in Dickens.
Now almost 70, as a legally single woman in a studio apartment (I still have the same life partner but we do not live together) living on a very modest income, without any family, I suppose I am a kind of waif and orphan myself (when my partner dies I will have no one with whom to spend Thanksgiving, for example). But sadly, I am now much too old to be anyone’s Hannah.
https://therealljidol.dreamwidth.org/1033408.html
Despite my parents’ being militant atheists and my mother being ethnically Jewish, the “Christian assumption” ran through everything I was exposed to as a child, from literature (mostly British Victorian or Edwardian) to idioms (“christen” was a common synonym for “name” [as a verb], “Christian name” was a common term for “first name,” and “un-Christian” was a synonym for “uncharitable”) to the mother of all holidays, Christmas.
So I grew up amidst this “Christian assumption,” but my life as it was lived was not part of it. When I say “Christian” I am not speaking of deeply held faith, but of a culture. And it wasn’t my mother’s Jewishness that made me “not of” the culture I am referring to. What was at issue was that my mother was modern. From the time she was a teenager, her chief self-identifier had been that she was a “New Woman”. New Women did not attend houses of worship, believe in a deity, ascribe to a code of conduct that originated in the Old Testament, or use sentimental religious language to explain suffering or cushion the loss of a loved one. They did not believe in Heaven and Hell. They made sure that their children’s minds were “stayed” on the here and now, in other words, on science, progress, and, most of all, frank clinical talk about disease, death, and sex. My father, a midWesterner of Scots Irish descent, was a scientist who loathed religion as being at best superstition and at worst hypocrisy. He mentioned having been dragged as a child by relatives to a “hard shell Baptist” church where Jesus was often quoted, but “colored people” were not allowed. But what it all boiled down to for both of my parents was that to them, religion belonged to the past, and they belonged to the future.
For whatever reason, however, this did not stop my mother from immersing me in fiction where the Christian assumption ruled: Little Women, for example. The chapter in which Beth dies, many girls’ first exposure to reading while crying, takes its name “The Valley of the Shadow”, from the Twenty-Third Psalm. When Jo, the quintessential New Woman, cries to her mother that she misses her father, Marmee gives Jo a gentle sermon in which she refers to how she herself always derives comfort from God the Father. (And later in the book Jo says “If God spares Beth I will love Him and serve Him always.”)
Was Jo less of a “New Woman” because throughout the book she equated religion with goodness? There are few times now when I miss my mother, but as I write this, I wonder how she would have answered this question. Most likely, she would have said that Jo’s thoughts and feelings needed to be put in historical perspective. Her talking about God and religion were like her wearing a long dress. A New Woman in 1959 would not have worn such a dress, nor would she have talked about God or used religion as a framework for ethics and character.
For me, the dis-union between what I was encouraged to read and how I was encouraged to think and be was made more painful by the fact that most of my classmates (and their parents) seemed to have at least one foot planted in the nineteenth century. (Gertrude Himmelfarb, whose writings on Victorianism had a profound effect on me, said that the Victorian Era didn’t really end until 1962.) Not all of these families went to church, but somehow their children had absorbed a lot of religiously themed vocabulary. People who died went to Heaven. “Taking the Lord’s name in vain” was wicked. Prayer was mentioned if someone was ill. Probably most of these children had been baptized. Then of course there were the Jewish families but I was not “of” them either. They had Jewish last names (mine was Scots Irish) and the children stayed out of school (schools were open then) on Jewish holidays. Some belonged to synagogues. Many did not, but none had a Christmas tree the way my family did.
Along with a rejection of religion and its (mostly sentimental or punitive) vocabulary was a disapproval of anything “old fashioned”. This catch-all included everything from pink clothing and long loose hair for girl children (I was only allowed long hair if it was braided, and I was constantly nagged to agree to having it cut), to antique furniture (everything in the house was teak and chrome, and the color scheme favored sour greens, oranges, and turquoises).
So I escaped into stories set in bygone eras, about girls from large families, who lived in big houses, had long hair with big bows, and wore long dresses with pinafores and high topped shoes – and then opened my eyes in my ultra-modern bedroom, which I hated with its orange bedspread, metal framed butterfly chairs with removable canvas tops, and formica desk. In addition to my hating its lack of aesthetic appeal, it had no literary associations. At least in the late 1950s, there were no magical stories about apartment-dwelling only children raised as atheists and groomed to be “modern”.
[That was sixty years ago. Since that time I have been a serious student of the literature and culture of Victorian and Edwardian England, and in my 50s, I became a choir member and soloist in a progressive Lutheran church. I am not baptized, and don’t consider myself Christian, but I have somehow managed to find a home there.]
