Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake

by Anna Quindlen

  Giving up booze didn’t change my life in any essential way. I did things that were stupid and things that were thoughtless, even sometimes at parties without the excuse of having had one too many. It turned out that I’m loud even when I’m not drunk, and it turns out that I feel like I’m hungover when I simply haven’t gotten enough sleep. There’s pretty good alcohol-free champagne for New Year’s Eve, although it wouldn’t fool anyone who drinks real champagne. For a long time I substituted caffeine for alcohol, although I like to say that no one ever crashed into another car and killed its occupants after having a double espresso with a latte chaser.

  Now, in one of those cruel tricks of biology, I drink much less coffee because my aging body has become so sensitive to caffeine that if I have so much as a piece of chocolate cake after noon I will find myself buzzing at midnight. My substitute for alcohol today is what my kids have learned to call fizzy water, which is carbonated water at an absurd markup. At restaurants in Europe they refer to it as avec gaz, which always makes me a little uneasy. If I had known when I was young that three-dollar water and five-dollar coffee would become not simply popular but commonplace, I might have gone into a different line of work. But, like most people, I was dumber then. I remember teaching myself, as a young woman, to like the taste of scotch. But now I’ve forgotten it.

  Mirror, Mirror

  So many decades looking into the mirror as my eyes look back at me, and I’m still not sure precisely what I’m seeing or how I feel about the result. Especially now. More than anything, it is our faces that tell us the story of the passage of time. We never actually see them the way others do, which may be why we care so deeply what others see when they look at us. The mirror is a poor second to the real thing because it’s not transactional, only ourselves facing an inanimate object. Over the years we’ve learned to edit what we see.

  Every face is both a mystery and an identity. We realize this when we try to capture a face in a photograph. It is like taking a picture of the sunset. What you wind up with is a trite arrangement of pink sky and pillowy clouds when what you felt was something else, something greater. Whenever I see a picture of myself I have the same feeling I have when I hear my own voice recorded: My senses have played a trick on me. My ears say I don’t sound like that. My eyes say I don’t look like that.

  But I do. In some way I always have. I suppose it’s my good fortune now to have always had the prominent nose, the square jaw, that seem much more suited to an older woman, or how we think of an older woman. Perhaps part of the reason I’ve been relatively sanguine about aging is because my face was never my fortune, and it was never really young. And, to be frank, I was never pretty. Cute sometimes, when I was younger. Handsome on occasion, as I aged. But not pretty. “Pretty is what changes” goes the Sondheim song. My face hasn’t changed as much as it might have, not because I’ve aged well but because I’ve aged into how I always looked.

  Not long ago I read a biography of Mary Anne Evans, more commonly known as George Eliot, that suggested she’d written Middlemarch, one of the greatest novels in the English language, because she was so unattractive, that had she been more pleasing to look at she would have married, had a brace of children, settled in the English countryside, never become George Eliot at all. Instead she got the message that she would need to use her mind to make up for her face. In other words, a woman can have a Cupid’s-bow mouth or an enduring literary reputation, but not both. In the long term most of us will take the reputation, but sadly, in the short term the pretty mouth is what’s desired.

  This simplistic characterization of George Eliot’s life makes a crazy kind of sense for many women. It’s the apotheosis of personality in lieu of prettiness that we girls have known about since we cleared the hurdle of fifth grade and our features began to sharpen and harden. Or perhaps I’m hypersensitive because I myself am a person who grew up with the message that I might want to keep on reading those books and honing that mind. As a girl I had the strongly marked face of a grown woman, fourteen cut out to be forty. Which, by the time I was actually forty, was quite a good thing.

  This is one of the trade-offs of aging or, if you’re what I once called the chocolate-box girls, one of the tragedies. One group grows into their faces and another grows out of them. Well into her eighties, my grandmother used to reprise the days when she was hotly sought after on the Atlantic City boardwalk, a pink-skinned pretty young woman with fair hair waving around her face. As any actress knows, being the ingénue is risky business, short-lived and undependable. A character actress has a much longer shelf life.

  When the British actress Harriet Walter curated an exhibit of photographs of older women, she wrote, “Young women and girls are conditioned to aspire to look like other people.” One study showed that as many as eight out of ten women are unhappy about their own appearance, while men are either delighted or agnostic about their own; in fact, one study of men showed that some of them overestimate their attractiveness.

  Meanwhile, what passes for the baseline for women has become increasingly impossible. More and more obituaries are using photographs of the deceased at a much younger age than the one at which he or she died. And women were twice as likely to do this, which means either they were convinced that the world should see them for the last time in their physical prime, or their family was, or they’d refused to have their picture taken after they’d reached a certain age.

  The business of appearance stops being a level playing field some time after college, when suddenly a man’s face is less important than his professional stature and bank balance. Who among us has not seen the photos of a short bald man with the face of a basset hound and an arm around a young creature who would have been declared a goddess in some ancient culture? On the other hand, a woman’s professional stature continues to be paired with her appearance, so that it is still commonplace to see descriptions of captains of industry that include hair, suit, and shoes in the unlikely event that the captain of industry is female. There will usually be a mention of her children, too, if she is a mother. If she quits, it will be said that she wanted to spend more time with her family. Sometimes this is even true.

  In terms of my own appearance it has been instructive to have a daughter around the house. There are two ways to go if you are lucky enough to have one: You can resent the fact that she easily, effortlessly, has what you once had, that no matter how hard you exercise she will look better than you in a bathing suit, that she rubs on face cream despite the fact that it is manufactured with the promise of giving her exactly the sort of skin she already has. Or you can let her appearance release you from something, something challenging but reassuring, too. You can embrace the fact that you are not that person anymore, with all its surface rewards and all its internal battles. I suppose you could make the argument that various professionals could narrow the gap between the young woman and the older one. Lift it, tuck it, laser it, dye it. You’ve seen those photos, of the mother and daughter whose time line has been narrowed through the blandishments of many professionals. Except that if you look closely it hasn’t, not really. A very famous actress, a woman whose restaurant meals and shopping trips are constantly punctuated with fan babblings and requests for autographs, notes that when she wants to move around the city unmolested, she merely walks with her daughters in a phalanx in front of her. “It’s better than sunglasses,” she says. Even her golden aura disappears in the shadow of youth.

  Her girls and my own have something no colorist, no dermatologist, no makeup artist, no surgeon can provide. It’s simple: they look as though they’ve just been taken out of the gift box, just unwrapped from the tissue and the ribbons. In other words, they’re young. Of course, that means they’re too young to appreciate the unsolicited gifts that that brings. I remember all the impedimenta we rushed toward, openhanded, that we thought would make us grown-up, or at least female: the stockings, the heels, the makeup, all part of this horrible pantomime. It says everything that they are the thin
gs we begin to throw off as we grow older. The heels are uncomfortable, the makeup aging. I hate control-top panty hose. They were invented by sadists.

  All the plastic surgery in the world cannot conceal the fact that the smooth taut skin of a twenty-year-old is lost to a fifty-year-old, whose body and face show length of service. When I began my annual pilgrimage to the Fountain of Botox—later supplemented with one to the Shrine of Facial Fillers—it wasn’t to make me look young again. I’m not that delusional, and no doctor is that skilled. It was to make me look less crabby. The 11 between my brows, the furrows from the corners of my nose to the corners of my mouth: in photographs I could see that they made me look as if I was in a very bad mood. And I wasn’t. Now my appearance matches my affect, if not my thirties.

  We don’t really have any idea of how we ought to look anymore, just how we’re told we ought to want to look. Women were once permitted a mourning period for their youthful faces; it was called middle age. Now we don’t even have that. Instead we have the science of embalming disguised as grooming. A lot of plastic surgery is like spray tan. It doesn’t look like a real tan at all. It looks like a tan in an alternate universe in which everyone is orange. It’s a universe in which it seems no one has gray hair, except for me.

  When I was young my mother spent a lot of time on my hair. Although I spent hours complaining, wriggling in a dining room chair, sometimes sitting on a phone book or two, deep down I liked it. It was single-minded attention from a person who was frequently pulled in so many directions that she was psychologically drawn and quartered. In the mirror above the sideboard I would see her staring down at my part, like the bright dividing line on the highway. I felt sorry for those girls who went to the hairdresser before the prom, and not simply because half the time they were so appalled at the result, the hair equivalent of those big ugly funeral flower arrangements, that they pulled it all down and raked a brush through the sticky teased mess. My mother did my hair to match my dress. The yellow eyelet with the puffed sleeves called for long waves with the sides lifted into a grosgrain bow, the navy and white empirewaisted dress required something sleeker, a tight bun at the base of my neck capped by a snood dotted with pearls. No hairdresser would ever look out for my hair the way my mother did, and so I listened carefully to her advice for its care, although eventually I gave up on the Alberto VO5.

  But I absorbed her warnings about hair coloring. When she talked about hair coloring, my mother made it sound like communism. It wasn’t until she was too ill to do it herself that I found out that her ebony color was courtesy of Clairol’s Nice ’n Easy. It was perhaps my most unforgettable experience with the parental dictum “Do as I say, not as I do.” Without comment I dyed her hair for her a month before she died, and I was sad to see, once she’d lapsed into unconsciousness in the hospital, that her roots were creeping back, the color of steel. The color my hair is turning now.

  At first glance I suppose it’s still brown, which is what my driver’s license says. It’s taking its sweet time making the change. In my early forties the grays started to appear, and I did what almost everyone does: I pulled them out. It wasn’t simply that they were gray but that they were kind of berserk, boing boing boing into some strange awry corkscrews that refused to lie down with the rest. But at a certain point they began to relax, and so did I, and they multiplied, and I had a vision. By fifty my hair would be silver, like the hair of an editor friend who has had a mane of incandescently white hair ever since I first met her. I’ve always assumed that in her bedroom her hair glows in the dark like a night-light.

  That’s not what happened to me, although I bought a special shampoo she recommended that keeps your grays from getting yellow and sternly told the hairdresser that I did not want to have yet another conversation about the healing properties of henna. There was a gray here, a gray there, a swath underneath on one side. People who are really nice, and who like me, say it looks like highlights. I think it looks like dust. But I am glad I followed my mother’s advice and didn’t start to color it. Between eyebrow waxing, exfoliation, and the occasional laser, I’ve got all the maintenance I can handle. As far as I know, my mother never exfoliated. Her beauty regimen seemed to consist entirely of Pond’s cold cream and Noxzema. Besides, my husband doesn’t seem to care about my gray; he only concerns himself with the length of a woman’s hair, his motto being “It can never be too long.” (His own gray is appearing as though it is being done by the makeup artists for a Broadway production in which the male lead is required to age gracefully between act one and act three. As Bette Davis says about her boyfriend in All About Eve, “Bill’s thirty-two. He looks thirty-two. He looked it five years ago, he’ll look it twenty years from now. I hate men.”)

  “I wish I could go gray,” a woman who works on Wall Street told me. “But that’d be the last straw.” It turned out that what she meant was that she’d been overlooked, marginalized, discounted, underestimated, passed over for years, and she couldn’t give the guys yet another reason to think she was neglible. That’s what changing her hair color from ash blond to ash would have meant to her, and to those around her. It’s not just the hair, but the clothes, the makeup, the shoes. One of my closest friends is a fierce dresser, and a fierce competitor, but one day she just got tired of torturing her feet with shoes that are the modern equivalent of the corsets and girdles of yore. She started wearing flats, and she’s never turned back. She even wore fancy flip-flops to her daughter’s wedding. “She can get away with it because she’s so powerful,” a younger woman said. In other words, if she was still in the fight she’d better strap on those stilettos, no matter how uncomfortable, to serve notice that she was a coming character, not a has-been.

  It’s so hard to tell how much of these assumptions are real and how much are our old insecurities wresting away the steering wheel and driving us down a bumpy road even though we’re old enough to know better. In her book Going Gray, Anne Kreamer decided that the only way she could challenge the working hypothesis—that gray hair inevitably leads to crippled sexual appeal—was to test it. She posted pictures of herself on an Internet dating site, some with brown hair, some with gray. “I assumed, as most might,” she wrote, “that men would be more interested in dating the brown-haired me. Well, I couldn’t have been more wrong. Turns out three times as many men were interested in going out with me with gray hair.”

  Bottom line is that none of this is about how we look, but about who we are. No, I’m not preaching the gospel of personality trumping appearance that I absorbed so completely when I was young; if I really believed that, then I’ve wasted an astonishing amount of money on lipstick and moisturizer.

  But I look sometimes at photographs of myself taken over the years, and what’s most important, and enduring, transcends my appearance. It is as though I can see not the aging of my face but the story of my life. There is the little girl with the dimples and the authentic and automatic grin. There is the teenager whose eyes are wary, who seems to be worrying about what the camera is seeing. There is the young woman whose mouth smiles but whose eyes do not, the tired young mother too worried about a toddler darting out of the frame to concentrate on her own expression.

  And then it is as though I’ve circled back through time, and the automatic grin has returned. A smile is nature’s face-lift, I like to say brightly, now that everything is sliding south. “Let’s try a few with a more serious expression,” the photographer will say, and I comply, lifting my chin, angling my face, but I know it’s the photographs with the smile that I will want. The line of my jaw is sharper, the cheeks fuller. While I eschew the scalpel, I will take cheery and fresh over dour and exhausted any day. And a big smile does that for me.

  My dimples are gone, or at least they have been replaced by something else, something less culturally adorable. What were once tiny divots are now deep furrows that stretch almost from cheek to chin. Gains and losses, I think sometimes as I look in the mirror. That’s my mantra now: gains and losses. I
know more but remember less. My muscles are tight but my skin is loose. I am physically fit but forever infertile. My hair is still thick, but much of it is gray.

  When I have my picture taken nowadays, it is most often my daughter who takes it, so the smile always extends to my eyes because it is she behind the camera, smiling back at me and editing as she goes: “Oh, no, that’s a bad one, this one I like but you’ll hate, yow, not that one.” In some strange way I feel as though I’ve resurrected the little girl from my childhood photos, even though her dimply dots have turned to dashes. I don’t think she considered for a moment how she appeared in her pictures, and I don’t think about it too much anymore. The difference between us is that she thought the world was wonderful, that everyone loved her, and that a tragedy consisted of having the ice cream tumble from her cone onto the hot macadam of the Dairy Queen parking lot. And I, naturally, know different. But she’s still in there, thank God, peeking out from time to time, smiling. She’s not pretty, that kid, but she has so much pizzazz. Is that me? That’s me, I guess.