Living Out Loud

by Anna Quindlen

  Last year she fell on the street and broke her hip, but while she was in the hospital, they found that she had fallen because she had had a stroke, and she had had a stroke because of brain cancer. I went to see her in the hospital, and brought a picture of my son. She propped it against the water pitcher. She asked me to take care of her parakeet until she came home, to look in on her husband and to feed the cats. At night, when I came back from work, they would be prowling the yards, crying pitifully. My dogs lunged at the back windows.

  When the ambulance brought her home, she looked like a scarecrow, her arms broomsticks in the armholes of her housecoat, her white hair wild. A home health-care aide came and cared for her and her husband. The woman across the street told me she was not well enough to take the bird back. The cats climbed the fire escape and banged against the screens with their bullet heads, but the aide shooed them away. My son would stand in the backyard and call “Bop Bop” at the window. One evening she threw it open and leaned out, a death’s head, and shouted at him, and he cried. “Bop Bop is very sick,” I said, and gave him a Popsicle.

  She died this winter, a month after her husband. Her son came home for the funerals with his wife, and together they cleaned out the apartment. We sent roses to the funeral home, and the son’s wife sent a nice thank-you note. The bird died the next month. Slowly the cats began to disperse. The two biggest, a torn and a female, seem to have stayed. I don’t really feed them, but sometimes my son will eat lunch out back; if he doesn’t finish his food, I will leave it on the table. When I look out again it is gone, and the dogs are a little wild.

  My son likes to look through photo albums. In one there is a picture of her leaning out the window, and a picture of him looking up with a self-conscious smile. He calls them both “Bop Bop.” I wonder for how long he will remember, and what it will mean to him, years from now, when he looks at the picture and sees her at her window, what reverberations will begin, what lasting lessons will she have subliminally taught him, what lasting lessons will she not so subliminally have taught me.

  BOOKWORM

  I came late to the down comforter. I thought it was a fad. Ducks have never looked particularly warm and cozy to me, and two hundred dollars seems like an awful lot to pay for a blanket. Now I admit I was wrong. Even on summer nights I lie beneath its featherweight and feel secure. Over the intercom on the table just next to my left ear, I imagine I can hear the sounds of the children snuffling softly in the rooms on the floor above. There is pink fiber-glass insulation in my crawl space and an infrared light illuminating the backyard with a bulb the electrician says may last my lifetime, if I don’t live too long. And downstairs my bookshelves are filled with books.

  Strange things make me feel secure. I can’t honestly say how much money is in the savings account, and I still think of an I.R.A. as some black hole that I throw $2,000 into each year, like the mouth of some big carnivore at the zoo. But I couldn’t get along without the cream pitcher shaped like a cat that my mother got as a shower gift, or the omelet pan that my Aunt Catherine gave me when I graduated from high school, or my books.

  I moved a fair amount when I was a kid. I wasn’t exactly an army brat, but I didn’t even come close to being married in the house where we lived when I was born. So I have a tendency to assemble all these talismans, wrap them in newspaper, and take them from place to place. The books were always most important because they were not simply objects, but portable friends. Sometimes at night I lie in the dark beneath my insulated crawl space and these words come to mind: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” It is the first sentence of Pride and Prejudice. It is the only sentence in any book in the English language I know perfectly by heart, except for the beginning of the Gospel of John, the part about, “In the beginning was the Word.”

  Pride and Prejudice is not really my favorite book, although it is definitely in the top ten, along with Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, Sons and Lovers, Anna Karenina, Gone With the Wind and a series about two girls in Minnesota called the Betsy-Tacy books. But it is the book that makes me most feel that everything is going to be all right, that the world is a hospitable place and that, as Anne Frank once said, people are really good at heart.

  Why it should do this when it was published in 1813 and those feelings in the late twentieth century are so patently untrue, I do not know. Part of it is that Pride and Prejudice has been with me for a long time, since I was twelve. Part is that it is about a young woman named Elizabeth Bennet, who I have always felt would have been my best friend if she hadn’t been fictional. Part is that it is about the right things happening in the wrong way—chance meetings leading to rapprochements, misunderstandings leading to marriages—in just the way you wish would happen in real life.

  Most important, I feel at home in this book. There is a great short story by Woody Allen called “The Kugelmass Episode,” in which a college professor arranges for a conjurer to let him become a character in Madame Bovary and have a love affair with her. All over the world Flaubert scholars start wondering about this guy Kugelmass on page 94. I feel that I could just slip unnoticed into Pride and Prejudice. Elizabeth and I could sit around jawboning about what a pain Mr. Darcy is, while all the time I’d be secretly thinking he is just the guy for her.

  I never tire of Elizabeth Bennet or her family, even her silly mother. One summer my family moved to West Virginia—and, believe me, I was not West Virginia material. The Bennets saved my life. They moved with me, and I spent all my time with them until, finally, I made some friends. The only thing I don’t like about Pride and Prejudice is the ending, because then it’s over.

  I don’t feel this way about anything written much after 1940. I’ve always liked to hang around bookstores; among other things, I like the way they smell. But nowadays I stand in front of the fiction shelves and feel like a stranger in a strange land. I picture myself showing up in one of these books in which people sit around their kitchens and talk to their cats about what they bought at Bloomingdale’s, and I figure readers would just think, “Who’s that weird woman sitting over in the corner with the paperback copy of Pride and Prejudice, looking so sad?” I feel much the same way about objects, too, which is why I seem to buy so many antiques, even though they’re uncomfortable and often appear to have no function whatsoever.

  Maybe I just haven’t given the modern enough time to make me feel at home. Maybe twenty years from now I’ll look at a Dansk vase on a shelf, and it will make me feel warm all over. Maybe there will be some new hip modern novel that will take me in its arms and make me part of it, give me a new best friend and a first sentence that will make me feel as good in the middle of the night as the sound of the person in the room above me turning over in his crib. After all, I came late to down comforters. In the meantime, Elizabeth and I are really worried about her sister Jane. She’s stuck on this guy named Bingley and things don’t look good. But trust me, we’ll work it all out in the end.

  HALLOWEEN

  When I was a little girl, I loved Halloween because it was the only day of the year when I was beautiful. I had friends who went out dressed as hobos and clowns and witches, but I never would. I was always a princess or a ballet dancer, Sleeping Beauty or Cinderella. (One year I wanted to go as Barbie. “Out of the question,” said my mother flatly, and it occurs to me now that her reply worked on several levels.)

  It was the only day of the year when I wore satin or net or hoops, the only day of the year when my thin lips were carmine and full and the mole on my upper lip, blackened with eyebrow pencil, became a beauty mark. I remember one Halloween, when I wore my cousin Mary Jane’s flower-girl dress, blue net over blue chiffon over blue satin, with a skirt as big around at the bottom as a hula hoop, as one of the happiest nights of my life. I had a wand with a silver star on the end made of tinfoil, and a tiara that was borrowed from a girl down the street who was last year’s prom princess. My hair had
been set in pin curls, and waves rose all over my head like a cross between Shirley Temple and Elsa Lanchester in Bride of Frankenstein. I looked in the mirror on the back of my closet door and saw someone I was not, and loved her. The night was sharp, as perfect Halloween nights always are, but I would not wear a coat. I caught cold, and didn’t care.

  I suppose one of the things that makes me saddest about modern life, right up there with the fact that most of the furniture is so cheesy, is that Halloween has fallen into some disrepute. The candy is not good for you. The store-bought costumes stink. And behind every door a mother is supposed to imagine that there’s a man with candied apples whose recipe for caramelization includes rat poison. My children don’t go far on Halloween, at least in part because they are city kids. They visit a few neighbors, get just enough stuff to make a kind of promising rustle in the bottom of their bags. They are amazed at even this much license; the rest of the year they live with a woman whose idea of a good time is a bag of yogurt raisins. They must think I’ve lost it when I stand before the jack-o’-lantern at the kitchen table, grinning maniacally at one of those miniature Mr. Goodbars. I have never in my life eaten a Mr. Goodbar, except in the aftermath of Halloween.

  In the way they do—must, I suppose—my children are galvanized by Halloween because I am, just as they make a big fuss about throwing autumn leaves up in the air and letting them tumble over their heads. They take their cue from me. The little one is still a bit confused, but the elder caught fire last year. “I want to be a clown,” he said. And even though, throughout the month, he ricocheted between wanting to be a bumblebee and a bunny, he always inevitably came back to wanting to be a clown. His cheeks were painted with red circles, the tip of his nose was blue, and although he was sick for four days beforehand he insisted on dragging himself around to a half-dozen houses in his satin clown costume with the pompons and the big ruffle around his reedy neck. A sensitive, thoughtful little boy, who loves to laugh but never likes to feel laughed at, he looked in the mirror and saw someone he was not. “I look really great,” he said.

  (By contrast, the little one was a bunny, quite himself in artificial white pile. “Hop, hop, hop,” he said for three hours. “Hop, hop, hop,” he said for two weeks afterward. Of course, I chose the costume, and when he chooses for himself perhaps he will choose something more contrary to his essential nature. Like a clerical collar. This year he is a black cat, which is just right.)

  This year the elder boy is a witch, which is just right, too. He says he loves witches because they are mean and nasty, although he is not mean and nasty at all. He will wear a black robe, a pointed hat, and wrinkles made of eyeliner. A broom but no wig. “I am a boy witch,” he says with dignity.

  I, of course, go along for the ride, at least for the next few years, until the day when they say “Mo-om!” in that unpleasant, whiny voice and march off by themselves with their pillowcases, their voices muffled behind their masks. Last year I thought seriously about dressing up as something for the sake of verisimilitude—I’m short, I could pass!—but abandoned the idea in a rare moment of complete and total common sense. This year I will not be so foolish.

  The other day on the telephone a friend recalled one of the saddest moments of her youth: the night when her sister came home in tears and announced that she had become too old to go out on Halloween. I remember it, too—that night looking into the mirror at a Gypsy, with hoop earrings and a rakish headscarf and an off-the-shoulder peasant blouse, and knowing in a kind of clear, horrible grown-up way that it was something I was not. And getting door duty from then on in, giving out M & M’s to kids who were rowdy, jubilant, somehow freed from themselves, and happy not to find behind the door one of those moms who gave out apples. I’ve been on door duty every Halloween since. Last year I suppose I wanted to make one last stab at the magic. But the wand’s been passed.

  BEING

  A

  WOMAN

  WOMEN ARE JUST BETTER

  My favorite news story so far this year was the one saying that in England scientists are working on a way to allow men to have babies. I’d buy tickets to that. I’d be happy to stand next to any man I know in one of those labor rooms the size of a Volkswagen trunk and whisper “No, dear, you don’t really need the Demerol; just relax and do your second-stage breathing.” It puts me in mind of an old angry feminist slogan: “If men got pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.” I think this is specious. If men got pregnant, there would be safe, reliable methods of birth control. They’d be inexpensive, too.

  I can almost hear some of you out there thinking that I do not like men. This isn’t true. I have been married for some years to a man and I hope that someday our two sons will grow up to be men. All three of my brothers are men, as is my father. Some of my best friends are men. It is simply that I think women are superior to men. There, I’ve said it. It is my dirty little secret. We’re not supposed to say it because in the old days men used to say that women were superior. What they meant was that we were too wonderful to enter courtrooms, enjoy sex, or worry our minds about money. Obviously, this is not what I mean at all.

  The other day a very wise friend of mine asked: “Have you ever noticed that what passes as a terrific man would only be an adequate woman?” A Roman candle went off in my head; she was absolutely right. What I expect from my male friends is that they are polite and clean. What I expect from my female friends is unconditional love, the ability to finish my sentences for me when I am sobbing, a complete and total willingness to pour their hearts out to me, and the ability to tell me why the meat thermometer isn’t supposed to touch the bone.

  The inherent superiority of women came to mind just the other day when I was reading about sanitation workers. New York City has finally hired women to pick up the garbage, which makes sense to me, since, as I’ve discovered, a good bit of being a woman consists of picking up garbage. There was a story about the hiring of these female sanitation workers, and I was struck by the fact that I could have written that story without ever leaving my living room—a reflection not upon the quality of the reporting but the predictability of the male sanitation workers’ responses.

  The story started by describing the event, and then the two women, who were just your average working women trying to make a buck and get by. There was something about all the maneuvering that had to take place before they could be hired, and then there were the obligatory quotes from male sanitation workers about how women were incapable of doing the job. They were similar to quotes I have read over the years suggesting that women are not fit to be rabbis, combat soldiers, astronauts, firefighters, judges, ironworkers, and President of the United States. Chief among them was a comment from one sanitation worker, who said it just wasn’t our kind of job, that women were cut out to do dishes and men were cut out to do yard work.

  As a woman who has done dishes, yard work, and tossed a fair number of Hefty bags, I was peeved—more so because I would fight for the right of any laid-off sanitation man to work, for example, at the gift-wrap counter at Macy’s, even though any woman knows that men are hormonally incapable of wrapping packages or tying bows.

  I simply can’t think of any jobs any more that women can’t do. Come to think of it, I can’t think of any job women don’t do. I know lots of men who are full-time lawyers, doctors, editors and the like. And I know lots of women who are full-time lawyers and part-time interior decorators, pastry chefs, algebra teachers, and garbage slingers. Women are the glue that holds our day-to-day world together.

  Maybe the sanitation workers who talk about the sex division of duties are talking about girls just like the girls that married dear old dad. Their day is done. Now lots of women know that if they don’t carry the garbage bag to the curb, it’s not going to get carried—either because they’re single, or their husband is working a second job, or he’s staying at the office until midnight, or he just left them.

  I keep hearing that there’s a new breed of men out there who don’
t talk about helping a woman as though they’re doing you a favor and who do seriously consider leaving the office if a child comes down with a fever at school, rather than assuming that you will leave yours. But from what I’ve seen, there aren’t enough of these men to qualify as a breed, only as a subgroup.

  This all sounds angry; it is. After a lifetime spent with winds of sexual change buffeting me this way and that, it still makes me angry to read the same dumb quotes with the same dumb stereotypes that I was reading when I was eighteen. It makes me angry to realize that after so much change, very little is different. It makes me angry to think that these two female sanitation workers will spend their days doing a job most of their co-workers think they can’t handle, and then they will go home and do another job most of their co-workers don’t want.

  THE JANE

  One day I was standing in a bathroom in City Hall washing my hands when the city council president stepped up to the sink beside me. (I will stop here, lest I precipitate another city scandal, to say that at the time the city council president was a woman.) We began to chat, and eventually our chat turned to matters of moment, and eventually the matters of moment became newsworthy. I left the bathroom with a story. After years of worrying that the best stories were coming out of conversations in the men’s room, I also left with the conviction that journalism was going to be all right for women after all.