by Miriam Horn
The summer before she met Susan, while vacationing at a country motel with her children, Nancy had read Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. Thomas wasn’t with them; he’d had too much work to come along. Nancy read the book in a single night, sitting alone on the porch amid Maine’s pointed firs, listening to the sighs of the sea and her sons asleep in the room. She was moved by the heroine’s decision to leave her wealthy husband’s mansion and move alone into a small “pigeon house,” animated by her recognition that “she must free herself of that fictitious self which we assume like a garment to appear before the world” and claim “that which her newly awakened being demanded … all life’s delirium.”
Simone de Beauvoir deplored the fact that women were relieved of the existential struggle; a woman did not find herself or forge herself but gave over that responsibility to a man, who defined her by making her his wife. “Man … will undertake the moral justification of her existence; thus she can evade … the metaphysical risk of a liberty in which aims must be contrived without assistance.… It is an easy road; on it one avoids the strain involved in undertaking an authentic existence.” Though nearly all the women in the class of ’69 would balk at that surrender, for a few, the quest to discover or build an authentic identity and life would entail truly radical risks and change.
As a girl, Nancy Young dreamed of joining a convent. She took her Catholicism deeply to heart and suffered that no one else in her family seemed to. “My parents went through the motions. They went to church every Sunday and didn’t eat meat on Friday, but it was just a way of keeping on the right side of the debit-and-credit ledger. The church they raised me in was a collection of laws you had to obey; I didn’t learn for a very long time that I could turn to God for help.” At Wellesley’s church, she found the same rigid stance. “Sometime in my first year, I was struggling and went to confession at St. Theresa’s in town. I told the priest I could not find meaning in the mass. He reprimanded me and told me that attending mass was a law of the Church. Being strong-minded, I stopped going to mass and no longer considered myself a Catholic.”
Nancy found a new spiritual path in the commune in Cambridge where she lived while working on a master’s in drama at Tufts. “We were all in a women’s group and belonged to a food co-op. This seemed like real life. We had our own drug dealer right in the house, and we all smoked up a storm. People were dropping Owsley acid [LSD made by the man who supplied psychedelics to the Grateful Dead], though I backed off: I was a little scared of acid after one of my close friends had a breakdown and was hospitalized. But we’d drop Quaaludes and run around naked and have sex with everyone in sight. I was completely into sexual freedom. I did everything my father never wanted me to do.”
Though she continued acting in repertory companies, Nancy finally had to quit when she fell seriously ill. She had long struggled with her body. While at Wellesley, she never had periods; she was always too thin and stressed to have normal cycles. Senior year, doctors had put her on massive doses of hormones, birth control pills ten times the potency they are now. They left her sick every morning, and scared, in retrospect, that she had soaked her body in such hormone baths. Now, in graduate school, she began developing ovarian cysts, which twice burst and sent her rushing to the emergency room with life-threatening peritonitis. “I was so frightened. My body seemed out of control. And my whole thing with acting got derailed.”
Nancy’s spiritual teacher arrived a month later, in an unlikely guise. “I was in a fragile, confused place. And none of the fellows I was meeting really captivated me. They were all too privileged—Harvard and Yale types. Then one day, when I was working on a hot line for street people, this wasted-looking guy showed up, with long hair and a beard and almost no teeth: He’d lost them because of all the speed he’d done. He was divorced and had never graduated from high school, a tough kind of guy. He’d been going to Canada, armed and transporting drugs, until he got deported as an undesirable after selling to the Canadian police. When I brought him home to meet my parents, my father hated him on sight. I’d known him for six weeks, decided he was perfect, and married him. Really, it was Barry’s idea; he didn’t want a flaky relationship. He was a Jewish guy from the Brooklyn projects. These people weren’t hippies. They didn’t march for peace; they were into the hard-core drug thing.
“We got married in a church in Harvard Square, with witnesses we pulled off the street. I was wearing a ridiculously short Mexican Indian dress with a red woven belt. The minister was dour and told us the marriage wouldn’t last, but he did go with us to a deli afterward for beers and sandwiches—that was our reception. We’d packed up my Volkswagen and after the wedding we headed for Colorado, doing our Kerouac thing. I called my dad from a Howard Johnson’s along the way to say we’d gotten married. It was the perfect revenge.
“At the time, I didn’t see it that way. I was drawn to Barry because he was working-class and I identified with him and, even more, because he seemed to have figured out how to leave an unhappy past behind him and find his way into a spiritual life. He’d given up drugs after years and years because he’d gotten into Meher Baba, who was a Sufi teacher from Puna, India, and called himself the avatar. Meher Baba’s followers believed he was a realized soul; they would pass out cards to strangers that said, ‘Don’t worry, be happy.’ He had taken a vow of silence; for most of his life he would spell out what he wanted to say on an alphabet board, and a close disciple would speak for him. He had washed lepers and was beloved in India. I still consider him the real thing, a genuine teacher, a genuinely advanced soul. And I admired that Barry so much loved this person that he had gone to India and changed his whole life. Meher Baba was completely opposed to drugs. People were taking psychedelics and having mystical experiences; we all got way deluded that because we could have these experiences, we had arrived on some different plane. Meher Baba was one of the few saying drugs are not the way to satisfy this craving; the soul does not evolve that way; you’re doing damage because you’re going someplace you haven’t earned. Drugs had been alluring to me, and I was drawn to Barry because he’d worked through it, investigated, and came out the other side. After we got married, he took the Owsley acid I’d tucked away for later and put it down the toilet. He also dumped all my medicine. He said, ‘Your problems are because of your head.’ Remarkably, my health got much better, in spite of our rugged lifestyle. I was initiated into transcendental meditation, read about Hindu masters, did yoga. In Colorado we were planning to live at the Naropa Institute in Boulder and become Buddhists.”
The couple stayed just one afternoon in Boulder. Barry decided it was too fancy, and turned the car toward New Mexico. A month later they were back in Brooklyn, as resident staff at a home for delinquent boys. That ended a week later, when Barry got in a fight with the director. “By that time I was beginning to realize that he fought with anyone for any reason.” After a couple of weeks in a commune in New Haven, the couple finally returned to New York so Barry could finish his education (he had dropped out after eighth grade). Their VW had given out by then, so a friend drove them to the city, dropping them off in Hell’s Kitchen outside their new apartment, a fifth-floor walk-up with a shared shower in the basement and gaps in the wall so wide the snow came in.
“In New York, I was supporting us, and there was no way I could do that with an acting career. Barry’s only income was federal money, a grant from the Higher Education Opportunity Program that he got by persuading them that he was underprivileged. He never paid back those loans; he declared bankruptcy instead.”
Nancy became a waitress, a children’s librarian, a counselor in a Jewish group home for kids, an assistant editor on an encyclopedia for Columbia University Press. Though she was accepted into a master’s program in counseling, Barry pressed her to go to business school so that she could earn more money. She finally gave in, quit the counseling program, and got an MBA at New York University at night. “It was a time when women were going to business school in droves. It was
a way of mounting the barricades: ‘We’re going to be decision makers, become empowered. You’re not going to hold us back from those incomes.’ ” Nancy also became a CPA, again at Barry’s urging, “though a less CPA-like person than me would be hard to imagine. That was the stupidest choice. Accounting really does attract microminds—not stupid, but just not interested in most of life.”
While Nancy was still at work on her degrees, Barry decided he wanted children. “I thought it’d be neat even though we were totally unprepared; I didn’t yet know that the cysts had scarred my fallopian tubes and left me infertile. It’s just as well, since the marriage was falling apart by that time and I didn’t want to be a single mom. He was at Columbia working on a master’s in social work and struggling; he thought the stuff was horseshit and was terribly frustrated; really, really angry. I suspected he was having affairs. And he was controlling and had a terrible temper. He threw things, usually at me. I’d be screaming. He’d be throwing. We had no glassware; the TV and every plate and lamp in our house were smashed to smithereens. I had to move out.
“I stayed with him for seven years. I stayed for the classic reasons women stay: I felt maybe I could help the guy. I loved him. I thought in some ways he was a good person, a bold, daring person, a real risk-taker. When my father left my mother, Barry was incredibly helpful to her. He loved crises. I thought that if he could finish school and get a job, he’d get better and settle down and be a mensch. I was naive. And I bought into the idea that I was doing something to provoke him. My father had told me I was provocative. I’d made my father angry, so why not this guy? Even if I did what he wanted, I was doing something wrong. I didn’t have a strong enough sense of myself. Since I didn’t believe I had much legitimacy, I was easily undermined. Two conversations were going on in my head at the same time—one said I had a right to be treated better, and two said, ‘Oh, you’re really fucked up.’ I was relieved when he left, though I still talk to him. With the O. J. Simpson thing, I said, ‘Barry, that brought back to me what our marriage was like,’ and he said, ‘What are you talking about? It wasn’t that bad. We just weren’t compatible. We didn’t have good chemistry.’ He’s been married more than once, sold insurance, and now does corporate training.
“I do regret the decision to marry Barry. It’s too bad I spent seven years in such a prison. Because of financial pressure, I made decisions I wouldn’t have made, that he foisted on me. If I hadn’t been supporting him, I would have done the NYU counseling program, just been a poor grad student doing what I loved.”
By the time the marriage ended, Nancy was an accountant with Peat Marwick Mitchell, and unhappy. She went to Chase Manhattan, and hated that; went to another job and was fired in a week; became comptroller at a consulting firm, then to a bank in mutual funds. “I kept getting bored and never felt a confluence of my values with my colleagues’. Everywhere I went, they all thought I was the weirdest person. I had aced business school, but I hated the environments it landed me in, which were steady but utterly colorless. The corporate world seemed stuck in the fifties. You had to look like everyone else, and if it took snorting coke to achieve that, then that’s what you had to do. A headhunter once told me that high-powered types want someone ‘in their likeness.’ But I could never be like the people I’ve met in business who spend sixteen hours a day thinking about the bottom line, and then consider themselves dedicated family men. More than intelligence, corporations want your endurance, a willingness to shut everything else out. Nothing in me could allow such single-mindedness about success. That always showed, that I did not consider these jobs the most important thing.”
In 1980, having just lost her fifth job that year and been dumped by her boyfriend, Nancy began reading the works of Baghwan Shree Rajneesh. “They seemed to cut through the bullshit of organized religion and get to the core of what the spiritual life was about. They stirred my spiritual hunger, and also appealed to the social critic in me, to my alienation from the business world. Baghwan is an anarchist. He doesn’t believe in organized religions or long-term relations. He did believe in getting high on meditation and sex, especially sex. I started hanging around the ashram in SoHo, where there were intense meditations every night and everybody was sleeping with everybody. At that point I had this ridiculous job at Citibank. I was wearing my dress-for-success suit and also the “mala,” the beaded necklace bearing the Bhagwan’s picture. My co-workers were always madly squinting trying to see what it was; with his long white hair and beard, some thought it was a picture of my Afghan hound.”
After a few months, Nancy was hired to be chief financial officer at the Baghwan’s ashram in Vermont. “I went in with both feet and became a disciple and changed my name to Nagara, which means ‘beautiful love,’ and wore nothing but red. In those first few months, I felt the most balanced, centered, chilled-out feeling I’d had in a long time. It was working. The dancing and music were really powerful; you’d come out of them high. Baghwan’s message was freedom. Instead of, ‘Here is the trinity and you have to align yourself with it,’ we were supposed to discover for ourselves what to feel and believe. We had some stupid arguments, like about why we all had to wear red—if we discover for ourselves what is right and wrong, why is there this heavy rule? But it wasn’t just lost souls; there were many well-educated people, professionals, passionate students of human nature, seekers who couldn’t see themselves in a traditional religion. Sexually, we were just insane; this was where God really took care of me. We were trying to reach enlightenment through sex, with tantric weekends, where we were all nude for days with something like thirty partners. Never again will anyone be able to do that. Just as I was leaving Vermont in 1981, someone started telling me about this gay virus.
“I left after ten months because after the initial rap wore off, I realized a lot of these people were opportunists and Baghwan was a crook. The guy he had running it was a real operator. We had seventeen dollars in the bank and they’d brought up dozens of people, mostly women, and had no money to pay them or even feed them, and Baghwan was in Oregon buying up land and a Rolls-Royce fleet and I was chief financial officer, so the bankers were screaming at me. The people who went to Oregon had to sign over all their money and were defending the compound with AK-47’s.” (In an unwitting crossing of paths by class members, in 1995 Kris Olson would win a guilty verdict against Bhagwan followers, for conspiring to kill U.S. attorney Charles Turner, the man who had forced Kris out of her job.) “Our relationship with the outside world was increasingly tense. This was just a few years after Jim Jones and the mass suicide in Guyana, and the revelations that Rinpoche was an alcoholic and sleeping with his students; people were increasingly scared of cults. I finally got burned. They didn’t pay me, and stole my belongings, and a bunch of Senyassens [disciples] turned my apartment in New York into their crash pad, then told me I was negative. It took me a while to figure out what to do.”
While still at the ashram, Nancy had met a man named Steve, who’d reluctantly come to Vermont with his Boston-based management consulting firm. The firm’s senior vice-president, George Littwin, was also Swami Prem Dharmo; it was his idea that the firm get away to the ashram for a brainstorming session. Snowbound, the group had to remain for several days. Reclusive and shy by nature, Steve was embarrassed by the Rajneeshies’ antics; he told Nancy that he thought it was all bullshit, but he was also attracted to her wildness and joined her in the dancing every night. When Nancy abandoned the ashram, it was to Steve’s little Cambridge attic that she fled. She spent a month there, “a sweet, happy time,” while seeking a job and an apartment, then spent the next two years persuading him that they should live together. He would realize he wanted to spend his life with her only when crisis struck.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Life’s Afternoon
The year that Hillary Clinton moved into the White House, Nancy Young was passing the hours watching chemicals drip into her veins, poison for the cancer that had overtaken her ovaries. It was
another extreme turn in a life that had always seemed wilder and harder than her classmates’: from her blue-collar childhood to her volatile husband, her night school MBA to tantric sex at the Rajneesh ashram to the illness that had suddenly accelerated her life, leaping her twenty years ahead of her generation.
Nancy’s life may have been an exaggerated version of her classmates’—more damned with men, more misfitted at work, more ceaseless in her search for meaning, more fragile in her health. But it has confronted her with the same essential and complicated negotiation between the personal and the public that has shaped all their lives. Like all of them, Nancy would struggle to reconcile her own values—etched into heightened clarity by her cancer—with the values of the wage-paying world. She would grapple with the official stories—medical, theological, psychological—that describe her place and her prospects. She would seek communities of support. She would insist on being loved, and also try to transcend her small, needful self.
When she found the lump in her breast, the size of a coffee bean and rock hard against her rib cage, she was living with Steve but deeply unhappy and close to leaving. “I was tired of having always to be the emotional leader—this will be the universal story. I kept saying we should commit ourselves. He would be, like, ‘What’s the hurry?’ Even when I got him to agree to buy a condo together, we had to draft an agreement so he could get out of it the minute he wanted to. He kept saying he wanted time alone, and to see old friends by himself, many of whom were women. It was a game, a head trip to say, ‘You’re not going to run my life.’ But I also think that commitment is genuinely harder for men. Women are better at knowing what we feel, so we can say, ‘This relationship has enough that is good.’ Men don’t pay the same attention to their feelings; their inner dialogue does not include the constant examination of where they are emotionally. I see so many relationships where the women do all the emoting while the men watch TV and go to work. I’m not talking about dumb guys. I’m talking about my own relationship. I’ll think, ‘Today I have this little edge of feeling.’ Steve thinks you deal with emotions when there’s a crisis but it’s not something you work on all day long.”