This is Getting Old

by Susan Moon

  The Tomboy Returns

  EVENTUALLY I LEARNED how to pass for a woman. I learned to brush my long blonde hair every day, and I wore contact lenses when I was trying to look pretty. From time to time, I even put on a dress without being bribed. I got married, gave birth to two children, nursed them, raised them. But there’s a nine-year-old inside of me who still remembers all the good climbing trees in the faraway neighborhood where I grew up, and which shrubs have the straightest twigs to make arrows out of. Surprisingly, the further I get from her in years, the more connected to her I feel. I wish I could make amends to her for the betrayals she suffered.

  My children have long since flown, and I’ve got nobody to make breakfast for. Ever since I passed through menopause, at fifty, and my female organs left me alone again, I have been getting reacquainted with my tomboy self. I honor her adventurous spirit, her brave refusal to be limited by social expectations.

  In third grade at school, I was the only girl in Joel’s Gang. In order to get in, you had to have a wrestling match with everybody who was already a member. We ran around pretending to be fierce, charging through the middle of the sissy girls’ hopscotch games. We practiced wrestling holds on each other and played mumbledy-peg in the forsythia bushes, where the teachers wouldn’t see our jackknives.

  In those days my mother used to pay me a quarter to put on a dress, on the occasions when a dress was called for—like the visit of a relative. Otherwise I wore dungarees—that’s what we called jeans—with a cowboy belt.

  With the boys in my neighborhood—Robert and Skipper, Evan and Sammy—I played cops and robbers, and cowboys and Indians: racist, violent games that, years later, I righteously tried to keep my own children from playing. We climbed trees and rode no-hands on our bicycles. I had cap pistols hanging on hooks on my bedroom wall. I traded baseball cards, memorized the batting averages of all the players on the Boston Braves, and played catch by the hour. I read the Hardy Boys mysteries and Lou Gehrig, Boy of the Sand Lots. I started the Pirate Club, the Walky-Talky Club, and the Cowboy Comic Collectors Club.

  I wore boys’ bathing trunks every summer, until I was eight or nine years old. I didn’t put on a girls’ bathing suit, with all that frilly and deceptive packaging that poked its bones into my flat chest, until another girl taunted me: You think you’re a boy! You think you’re a boy! I was so mad I got out of the swimming pool and hid her clothes in a closet. She had to go home in a wet bathing suit and I pretended I didn’t know anything about it.

  But why was I in Joel’s Gang, instead of playing hopscotch? Perhaps it was my way of refusing to submit.

  I think of my parents’ body language. My mother didn’t seem happy inside her skin. She moved as if trying to hide her body with her body. Other women, too, seemed to move in shuffle and shadow. But in my father’s body there was elasticity and readiness. He used to walk a lot, and ride a bicycle. When my mother wanted to go somewhere, she drove a car.

  Everywhere I looked, men were running the show, and women were just the helpers: the president and his wife, the school principal and his secretary, the dentist and his hygienist, the pilot and the stewardess. Though I couldn’t have stated it consciously, I breathed in the knowledge that a woman’s body was not a powerful place to live.

  As for me, I wanted to run and jump and climb over fences, even if it meant tearing my clothes. I didn’t try to pretend I was a boy, I just wanted to be ungendered, and therefore unlimited. I hated getting my hair cut, for example, and had a wild bush of hair, like a feral child. I didn’t want to have to look pretty, but I liked the way I looked in my classy felt cowboy hat—a “real” one like “real” cowboys wore. Far from being a denial of my sexuality, I think my tomboyhood gave me good practice at living in my body and finding pleasure there.

  My parents never objected to my bathing trunks or cowboyphilia, and my mother patiently quizzed me on baseball statistics when I asked her to. But I think it wasn’t quite OK for me to be a tomboy. I looked up tomboy in Doctor Spock, by whose lights I was raised, but he says nothing on the subject. I think my parents must have been at a loss. Perhaps they feared that I would never agree to brush my hair my whole life long and, by logical extension, that I would never become a wife-and-mother.

  I think so because in the fourth grade, I was sent to dancing school—ballroom dancing!—years before my schoolmates had to undergo this humiliating rite of passage. I was taught to sit with my ankles crossed until a boy, in parallel agony no doubt, asked me to dance. I learned to do the “box step,” an apt name for a spiritless movement that had nothing whatever to do with dancing. (“Step-step-right-together-step-step-left-together.”)

  For a brief period, I was sent on Sunday afternoons to the home of an elderly Jewish refugee from Vienna who gave me sewing lessons, an activity in which I had no interest whatever. Because I suffered from night terrors and frequent nightmares, I was taken to a child psychiatrist when I was about ten. He asked me intrusive questions like, “Have any of the girls in your class at school begun to menstruate?” It was rumored that one particular girl had already gotten “the curse,” but I didn’t see that it was any of his business, and so I answered numbly, “I don’t know.” For Christmas he gave me a perfume-making kit, which I poured down the toilet in disgust.

  But there were contradictory messages in my own family. On the one hand, my grandmother told me that I should brush my hair one hundred strokes a day to make it shine. “On doît souffrir pour être belle,” she said, with a hint of irony in her voice. One must suffer to be beautiful. On the other hand, a photograph in a family album shows me and my two younger sisters marching around on the lawn at my grandparents’ house, pretending to be soldiers, drilling, with sticks over our shoulders for rifles, wearing three-cornered newspaper hats. Grandpa, who came from a military family, was our drill sergeant. We’re obviously having a great time, puffing out our childish chests.

  I always knew I wasn’t a boy. One day I went into the nearby vacant lot that we kids called “the woods.” I was carrying my precious handmade bow, and I was looking for arrows. I pushed my way through a tangled arch of bushes, and there was the neighborhood bully, sitting on a stump. He was an archetypal figure, like Butch, the leader of the West Side Gang, in the Little Lulu comics I read so avidly. “Give me that bow or pull down your pants,” he demanded. Girl that I was, trained to obedience, it never occurred to me that there were any other choices. I handed him the bow.

  Not long after, the neighborhood kids gathered in my friend Sammy’s back yard for a wrestling tournament. My turn came to wrestle the dreaded bully. I got him to the ground and held him down for the count of ten. I had won! Fair and square. But when I released him and we stood up, I saw that he wanted to kill me for defeating him in public. Terrified, I turned and ran, and he ran after me. I remember the rush of adrenaline that put wings on my heels. I made it safely home, locked the door behind me, and collapsed in fright. The fact that I had just wrestled him to the ground had no transfer value. As soon as the structured contest was over, I went back to being a girl who was scared of a bully.

  Another time, Skipper and Evan and I were riding our bicycles around the neighborhood, and we discovered an old carriage house behind a big Victorian house. Upstairs, in the unlocked attic, we searched shamelessly through boxes and found a huge purple jewel, which we stole and buried in Skipper’s back yard. We made a treasure map to record the spot—ten paces from the maple tree and fifteen paces from the corner of Skipper’s garage—and we solemnly promised each other we’d leave it buried there forever, or at least until we grew up. Then, if one of us was in trouble, we’d dig it up, sell it, and use the money to help that person.

  That night I couldn’t go to sleep for feeling guilty, and finally I gave in and told my mother about the stolen jewel. The next day, she made us dig it up and take it back and apologize. Luckily, the lady who lived in the Victorian house was not too mad. She explained that the jewel was a glass doorknob. She told us to
stay out of her carriage house, and she gave us some cookies. Skipper and Evan were not pleased with me, cookies notwithstanding. Why did I tell? Because I was the only girl? Is that why you shouldn’t let women into men’s clubs?

  Already, by the fifth grade, things had begun to change in ominous ways. Starting that year, girls had to wear skirts or dresses to our school. There was no rule against dungarees, however, so I wore both: the dress on top, the blue denim sticking out the bottom. From then on, I had to wear a dress to school. (It’s hard to believe now, but when I went to college in the sixties, we weren’t allowed to wear pants to class unless it was snowing.)

  In sixth grade, the ground continued to shift under my feet. I made friends with girls, some of whom, to my surprise, turned out to have things in common with me. At recess, I sometimes played jacks instead of dodgeball.

  By seventh grade, my former playmates in Joel’s Gang had lost interest in me. They began dating the very girls whose hopscotch games we had disrupted a few years before—girls who whispered and giggled in the bathroom, girls who wore, to my disgust, tight skirts. Try to climb a tree in a tight skirt!

  And then puberty hit, like a curtain coming down. I grew breasts: tender objects which weren’t there before, bodies on top of my body. They came like strangers, and I was supposed to welcome them as part of myself, even though I’d lived all twelve years of my life without them. The left one started first, and I remember examining myself in the mirror and worrying that the right one would never catch up.

  Then, when I was thirteen, I woke up one morning with dried blood on my pajama bottoms. I didn’t know what it was at first, because I had imagined that the “the curse” would come in a red flood that would run out from under my desk and along the classroom floor. My mother gave me a pad, and explained how to attach it. Perhaps no one is still menstruating who remembers those horrible elastic belts with hooks in front and back. She was pleased and supportive; but I felt ashamed—I had been claimed by my tribe, marked irrevocably as a second-class citizen. I would be one of them after all. My tree-climbing days were over.

  I certainly couldn’t buck biology, and it didn’t occur to me until much later that I could buck the social definitions that went with it. And so I began to behave accordingly. I tried to please my teachers, to look pretty, to act polite. I grew my hair, and brushed it. At school dances I waited in silent terror that I wouldn’t be asked to dance. If asked, I danced in an agony of shyness, unable to think of anything to say. In high school, by a strange twist of fate, I was invited to a formal prep school dance by Joel, of Joel’s Gang. We had barely spoken to each other since the third grade. We fox-trotted together, speechless and miserable, no longer able to practice wrestling holds on each other.

  All during college and into my twenties, I spurned athletic pursuits as being somehow for stupid people, especially if those people were female. Enthusiasm for physical activity had come to mean the opposite of smart, hip, and sexy. Physical exuberance was gone. I wore constricting undergarments. I hoped I wouldn’t sweat, and that the wind wouldn’t muss my hair. I now see this as my betrayal of my sex—this nice resignation, this alienation from the body called “femininity.”

  Now I go to a gym and I lift weights. I want muscles—muscles that show. I like the way they look. I like to feel strong. I like to do the bench press, to shove that big heavy bar up off my chest. If I was wrestling with the bully, I probably couldn’t push him off me, but I’d sure try.

  As I get older I’m coming back around to where I was before puberty. I may not wear a boy’s bathing suit again, but I’m urging myself to ignore what’s considered appropriate. My body is no longer limber enough to climb trees, but it’s a good time to cultivate a limber and unladylike mind.

  I spent a huge chunk of my life trying to look attractive and more or less succeeding. The habit dies hard. Given a choice, I’d rather be pretty than ugly, but at this point the whole matter of physical beauty is becoming irrelevant—just as it was when I was nine—and in this there is some measure of relief.

  For years, one of my noticeable features was a great mass of thick blonde hair. Then the time came when I wanted, as Yeats said, to be “loved for myself alone and not my yellow hair.” I cut my hair short, and now I own neither hairbrush nor comb. This cutting off has been both liberating and terrifying.

  It’s not just a question of how I look. There’s the more important matter of behavior. When I was a tomboy, I organized cudgel tournaments. Now my creative projects are less athletic than when I was nine, but I try to rediscover that brave spirit, that determination to follow my heart. When I was nine I didn’t waste my time being nice. I didn’t do other people’s laundry, or read the manuscripts of people I’d never met, for free, just as a favor. My nine-year-old self thinks it might be fun to learn to play the drums, or go on retreat to a Benedictine monastery in northern California, where I can stay in a cottage made of a wine barrel and read about saints.

  I’m grateful for my tomboy time, because, as my grandmother used to say, “old age is not for sissies.” If I hadn’t had all that practice climbing forbidden trees, I might slip more easily into loneliness and fear as I grow old.

  The crone who’s knocking at my front door is not a stranger—she’s the girl in dungarees, her hair a glad tangle, come to guide me back to my bravest self. She says I never have to brush my hair again, unless I want to.

  PART THREE

  In the Realm of the Spirit

  Tea with God

  AS A CHILD, I worried about whether or not to believe in God. He was hardly ever mentioned in our family, except in my mother’s exclamations, so I didn’t know if he was real or not, but if he was and I didn’t believe in him, I thought it would hurt his feelings. I decided to try and make contact, by making a place for him where he knew he’d be welcome. It was under a forsythia bush in our back yard, in the cave formed by its hanging branches. Inside that dim chapel, I cleared the ground of leaves and, though I didn’t know what an altar was, I built a fairy table out of twigs and mud, about six inches high. I covered it with a tablecloth I made out of the heads of pansies, blue and purple, laid like overlapping shingles. I sat there in the close-to-dark, pleased with the holy place of mud I’d made. I wanted to talk to God, but I didn’t know what to say, so I just sat there.

  The next day I crawled back in and saw that the place I had fixed up for God was now alive with big black ants. They drove like tiny cars in a traffic jam across the top of the altar, dragging away with them large pieces of the pansy petals for their larder. They had wrecked it—it was gross, not holy at all. I didn’t think God would ever come to this place even if he did exist.

  When I was a teenager, I went to Quaker meeting and tried to talk to God there, but I only worried about my French homework. What was wrong with me? I found that if I closed my eyes and rolled them up inside my head, and aimed them at the place above my nose where Hindus put a red spot, I felt something new and strange—a vertigo, a lifting, verging on a headache. Could this be God? If so, he didn’t speak to me, nor I to him, and after a while I gave up that method.

  When my son Sandy was four, he said, “I just found out how you can see God.” He was lying down in the back seat of the car (in the days before car seats), on the way home from nursery school. “You squeeze your eyes shut, as tight as you can, and you see a blue light, and that’s God.”

  I tried it myself—later, of course, not while I was driving—but it didn’t work for me.

  When I began to practice Zen, it didn’t matter any more whether I could talk to God or he to me—Zen people don’t go in for that. It was a relief to stop worrying about God for a while, though now I worried that I didn’t know how to meditate. It looked like I was meditating from the outside, but I was just sitting there, thinking random thoughts, and breathing. Nothing was happening. That’s what I still do—just sit, and nothing still happens. By now I’ve gotten used to it. I’ve learned that that’s what Zen practice is: “just s
itting.” Still, sometimes it feels lonesome.

  I have no mate; I sleep alone. When I rise, I always drink a cup of green tea, and I watch the day begin. I brew the tea for four minutes in a red iron pot with dragonflies on it, and then I pour it into a white cup with a blue rim.

  On Sundays I don’t set the alarm. One Sunday not so long ago I opened my eyes to a foggy morning. The bed was warm, and I didn’t have any place I had to go. I thought with pleasure about how good it was going to be to drink my tea. But the catch was, I didn’t want to get out of bed.

  I had no idea I was going to speak, but suddenly, to my surprise, I said out loud, “God, I have a favor to ask you. Would you bring me a cup of green tea?” It seemed a small thing to ask, especially when you consider that I had never really asked God for anything before.

  Then God answered me, out loud, and that surprised me, too. His voice came out of my own mouth.

  “I’m sorry, Sue,” he said. “I would if I could, but I don’t have the arms and legs the job calls for. But I completely support you in getting yourself a cup of tea. I’m with you all the way!”

  I saw that he really wasn’t going to do it. “But God,” I said, “I don’t have anybody to bring me tea in bed.”