What If This Were Enough?

by Heather Havrilesky

  A lot can happen in ten years. You can’t be carefree forever. But when I was just thirty-three, I thought that I would never have the bad taste to grow old, let alone allow it to depress me. I thought I was better than this. What is youth, but the ability to nurse a superiority complex beyond all reason, to suspend disbelief indefinitely, to imagine yourself immune to the plagues and perils faced by other mortal humans? But one day, you wake up and you realize that you’re not immune.

  When my driver’s license photo arrives a week later, it feels like an omen of my impending decline. My hair is limp and scraggly. I have dark circles under my eyes. I look like the “after” photo in one of those photo-essays on the ravages of crystal meth. I have the blank but guilty look of a sex offender.

  It’s maybe the shittiest photo of me ever taken, and now I have to carry it with me everywhere I go. On the bright side, my husband and I spend a good half hour passing the license back and forth, laughing at how hideous it is. But privately, I wonder if I have the face of a woman who missed out on something. This is the shape my mid-life crisis is taking: I’m worried about what I have time to accomplish before I get too old to do anything. I’m fixated on what my life should look like by now. I’m angry at myself, because I should look better, I should be in better shape, I should be writing more, I should be a better cook and a more present, enthusiastic mother.

  * * *

  —

  Sometimes I go online looking for inspiration, but all I find is evidence that everyone in the world is more energetic than me. Thanks to blogs and Twitter and Facebook, I can sift through the proof that hundreds of other people aren’t slouching through life. They’re thriving in their big houses in beautiful cities, they’re cooking delicious organic meals for their children, they’re writing timely thank-you notes to their aunts and uncles and mothers for the delightful gift that was sent in the mail and arrived right on time for Nina’s third birthday.

  Facebook makes me forget those weary strangers at the DMV. Suddenly it feels like the whole world is populated by highly effective, hip professional women, running around from yoga classes to writing workshops, their fashionable outfits pulled taut over their abs of steel, chirping happily at each other about the upcoming publication of their second poetry chapbook—which is really going to make the move to the remodeled loft a little hectic, but hey, that’s life when you’re beautifulish and smartish and hopelessly productive!

  It’s not enough that I know all about their countless hobbies and activities and pet projects and book clubs. I’m also treated to professional-looking shots of their photogenic families, their handsome, successful husbands and their darling children who are always hugging kittens or laughing joyfully on pristine beaches, children who are filled with wonder around the clock. Their children never pee in their Tinker Bell undies by accident and then whine about going commando, just for example. But maybe that’s because their children have parents who never lose their tempers or heat up frozen fish sticks for dinner or forget to do the laundry. Their kids have parents who let them sleep under the stars at Joshua Tree, and no one soils her sleeping bag or has a bad trip from too many corn-syrup-infused juice boxes.

  Dear sweet merciful lord, deliver me from these deliriously happy parents, frolicking in paradise, publishing books, competing in triathlons, crafting jewelry, speaking to at-risk youth, painting birdhouses, and raving about the new cardio ballet place that gives you an ass like a basketball. Keep me safe from these serene, positive-thinking hipster moms, with their fucking handmade recycled crafts and their mid-century-modern furniture and their glowing skin and their optimism and their happy-go-lucky posts about their family’s next trip to a delightful boutique hotel in Bali.

  I am physically incapable of being that effective or that effusive. I can’t knit and do yoga and smile at strangers and apply mascara every morning. These people remind me that I’ll never magically become the kind of person who shows up on time, looks fabulous, launches a multimillion-dollar business, and travels the world.

  When I was younger, I thought I might wake up one day and be different: more sophisticated, more ambitious, more organized. Back then, my ambivalence and my odd shoes and my bad hair seemed more like a statement. When you’re young, being sloppy and cynical and spaced-out looks good on you. But my flaws don’t feel so excusable anymore. “I need to fix everything,” a voice inside keeps telling me. It’s time to be an efficient professional human, at long last, and a great mother and an adoring wife. It’s time to shower regularly while I’m at it.

  No matter how hard I try to will myself into some productive adult’s reality, though, I’m still that forty-three-year-old superfreak in my driver’s license photo. Someday, one of my daughters will hold this license in her hand and feel sorry for me, long after I’m gone. “She was only forty-three in this one. But, Jesus, look at that awful hair. And that expression on her face. Why does she look so upset? Or is that fear? What was she so afraid of?” I don’t want my daughters to look at me—then or now—and see someone who’s disappointed in herself. At the very least, I have to change that.

  * * *

  —

  Early one Sunday morning, when I was running out to get some groceries, I saw a woman standing on the sidewalk, waving a Yard Sale sign around. She was smiling as she shook this big piece of cardboard with something scrawled on it. You could barely read the words. The writing was in ballpoint pen, and maybe she ran out of room for the address because the last part was squeezed in below, and there was a huge space under the words anyway. But she seemed pleased with her sign. This confused me, because if I had made a sign like that myself, I would’ve ripped it up, declaring it unacceptable. After that, I probably would’ve complained about how I didn’t have any more goddamn poster board to start another sign, and I probably would’ve blamed my husband for not buying more poster board at the drugstore. “When I say get some poster board, that word ‘some’ means more than one piece.”

  I would’ve panicked and started a fight, over something as small as a Yard Sale sign. But I also wouldn’t have agreed to stand on the curb with my bad sign, drawing attention to myself. No way. If I were her, I would’ve made my husband stand on the corner with the sign. And I still would’ve blamed him when the yard sale got too crowded and hectic. “Where have you been? I can’t handle this whole thing on my own! This was YOUR IDEA IN THE FIRST PLACE!”

  That morning, I sat at the intersection in my idling car and watched the woman jumping around, looking thrilled about her newly improvised role as street barker, and even though I was in a bad mood, she made me smile. She had swagger. She didn’t care that her sign sucked. And the drivers in the cars next to me were smiling, too. Her raw joy was infectious. We all gave her appreciative, you-made-my-morning waves. We liked the cut of her jib.

  I used to be more like that woman, having fun with whatever task was in front of me instead of freaking out about how I looked to other people. I need to figure out how to get back there. My life has turned out great. So why am I comparing myself to some perfectly styled, enviable, energetic professional in my head? It’s like I keep ripping up the stupid sign and starting over. I keep saying to myself: “This is all wrong. You are all wrong.” I keep saying: “You should be a shiny, infallible adult by now. Why are you still such a mess?”

  I want to be more like that woman on the curb—or the way I imagine that she must be, based on my brief sighting of her, jumping around on that gray sidewalk in the dim light of the early morning. She isn’t afraid of falling short. No one can tell her what she can and can’t do, what she should and should not expect. She’s not losing sleep over the mid-century-modern furniture she doesn’t own, or the organic dairy farms in Wisconsin she hasn’t visited. Maybe her house needs to be vacuumed, or maybe it’s spotless. Maybe she dresses fashionably and does her makeup perfectly every morning, or maybe her hair color always needs a touch-up. It doe
sn’t matter either way, because she doesn’t view these things as verdicts on her character. She knows how to savor what she has. She doesn’t ask herself whether or not she has it all. She has more important things to do.

  haunted

  Haunted houses are designed to make their guests feel small and powerless, but also a tiny bit titillated in spite of themselves. Suspense builds slowly. Each creepy revelation incites curiosity first, then dread, then horror. The point is to seduce these unsuspecting mortals into exploring their darkest corners, only to reduce them to a quivering pile of nerves. The best haunted houses don’t murder their guests. Instead, they slowly and sublimely drive them mad.

  For headstrong women who know their own desires, growing up in conventional society sometimes feels like inhabiting a haunted house. At first, there is so much promise, mysterious and tantalizing. As you pull open that heavy wooden door with the gargoyle knocker, you feel flattered by its intimidating proportions—you are necessary and important, maybe for the first time ever. But soon you catch fleeting glimpses of dark spirits who whisper in douche-bro baritones that you don’t belong and never will. You develop a recurring suspicion that you’re merely a pawn in some elaborate game, that even if you’re brave you can never be a real player. The floor shifts under your feet, the walls shake, you awake at midnight to heavy breathing. “She was asking for it” is scrawled across the wall in blood. You tell your story the next morning, but no one believes you. Did you imagine the whole thing? Is some unearthly force trying to make you feel weak and lost? Or are you just losing your mind?

  This kind of suspenseful badgering, with its malevolent and condescending patriarchal undertones, pervades Shirley Jackson’s work. In the novels and many of the stories she wrote in the middle of the twentieth century, the polite banter of seemingly innocent common folk develops into outright mockery, subterfuge, or even violence. When confronted by an unexpectedly hostile world, Jackson’s female protagonists experience a climactic rush of bafflement and betrayal that inevitably spills over into a more private realm of second-guessing, self-doubt, and paranoia.

  Jackson relished untangling the process by which women lose themselves. She could stretch the ordeal out over the course of an entire novel, as she did in The Haunting of Hill House (1959), with the slow unraveling of lonely thirty-two-year-old Eleanor Vance. Or she could foreshadow the whole harrowing experience in forty-odd pages, as she did with the start of her novel Hangsaman (1951), which reads like a modern parable of disempowerment.

  Jackson took ordinary settings—a mundane California suburb, an ordinary small town—and transformed them into eerie and frightening places where regular people were unable to overcome their worst impulses or push back against the malevolent initiatives of the mob. In Jackson’s vision, even smart bystanders could be at once suspicious of and vulnerable to the delusions, false gods, and blunt weapons of the rabble. Reading her work today sometimes feels like discovering a detailed prophecy not just of rape culture but of the vitriolic thugs who seem to rule the internet and have somehow invaded our politics. Seven decades before Donald Trump’s outraged mobs in MAGA hats, Jackson unveiled the brutality and contempt that lurk beneath the surface of neighborly human interactions. From “The Lottery,” her seminal portrait of a murderous horde of ordinary folks published in The New Yorker in 1948, to her final chilling novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), in which a hostile gaggle of villagers harasses two sisters isolated in their dead parents’ lonely house, Jackson felt compelled to sound the alarm on humanity: Individuals might have unseen talents and untold potential, but groups, under the sway of pernicious traditions and narcissistic leaders, inevitably become unruly, self-serving, and hostile.

  Jackson came to such stories honestly. According to Ruth Franklin’s biography, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, Jackson’s mother hectored her mercilessly about her weight and bad habits from the time she was a child until the last days of her life. (Jackson died of an apparent heart attack in 1965, at the age of forty-eight.) The importance of keeping up appearances in polite society was central to Jackson’s affluent upbringing in Burlingame, California, and Rochester, New York. Her mother’s family was firmly grounded among San Francisco’s wealthy elite, and her father was an executive in the printing business. But appearances were something Jackson rejected from an early age with her unruly auburn hair, unconventional style of dress, caustic wit, and swagger. And even though Jackson was confident and outspoken, she could find intimacy dangerous, a dark realm of judgment and scrutiny and deeply personal insults that—not surprising, given her mother’s fixation on social standing—seemed to carry the verdict of the wider culture.

  By the time Jackson, then twenty-one, met her husband, the New Yorker writer and literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, she was primed to accept condescension, belittling, and neglect as her natural habitat, according to Franklin. Early letters show that Hyman loved Jackson dearly and admired her work enormously—maybe that wasn’t so easy, considering that his own writing career, though impressive, stalled just as Jackson’s was taking off. For her part, Jackson was sure at the start of their relationship that she could control Hyman, and he didn’t dispute that claim. “I am proud, and completely powerful,” Jackson wrote of one of their first nights together.

  But Hyman soon proved an emotionally inconstant mate, alternating between adoration and disdain. He regularly cheated on Jackson, then relayed the details of his dalliances in letters to her. There was the “Polish slut of twenty-six” who was “damned good-looking in a consumptive way”; the three bohemian girls he met at a party (“I fondled them all indiscriminately [and] called all three of them ‘baby’ ”); and the cute redhead in the apartment upstairs he romanced while Jackson was on vacation with her family.

  Like any critic worth his salt, Hyman found ready justification for his behavior in ideology. In his view, enlightened bohemians recognized that monogamy was a faulty construct designed for high-capitalist sheep. Jackson wrote him angry letters about his affairs, but rarely sent them. “You mustn’t be so timid with Stanley,” a mutual friend told her. “You let him categorize you and your emotions and your reactions just like he does his own.” Instead, Jackson endured Hyman’s treatment of her, as Franklin writes, choosing to “swallow her rage at his infidelity.”

  No slouch herself at compartmentalizing, Jackson managed to raise four children, mostly in a somewhat insular town in Vermont, the home of Bennington College, where Hyman taught literature. (Jackson once wrote of the faculty wife, “She is always just the teensiest bit in the way.”) By all reports, Jackson charted her own course through the domestic expectations placed on her. A great cook, she balked at cleaning or playing the traditional, self-sacrificing mother but spent lots of time singing and reading books to her children. And while Jackson relished the magic of two smart women bonding (a staple of her work), she didn’t seem to have that many close, lasting female friendships in real life—though not for lack of effort on her part. Even the pairs of women and girls in Jackson’s novels are inevitably threatened by jealousy, betrayal, and the larger forces (manipulative paramours, bloodthirsty mobs, supernatural beings) working against them. As Franklin keenly observes, “One of the ironies of Jackson’s fiction is the essential role that women play in enforcing the standards of the community—standards that hurt them most.”

  In a biography densely packed with anecdotes, letters, highly detailed descriptions, and lengthy, thoughtful analyses of most of Jackson’s work, Franklin paints a picture of Jackson as creatively fulfilled but isolated and unhappy. She relied on Hyman for critical feedback, but resented her dependence on him. She struggled with anxiety, struggled with her weight, struggled with nightmares and sleepwalking. Like many women of her generation, she was prescribed tranquilizers for her problems. Even as her work life began to thrive, and she eventually became the primary breadwinner—thanks in large part to her best-selling essay c
ollection on domestic foibles, Life Among the Savages—Jackson felt alienated and emotionally starved. She had difficulty trusting people. And with her husband pursuing an ongoing affair with her close friend, who could blame her?

  No wonder so many of Jackson’s works conjure a slow, simmering resentment that becomes almost hallucinatory, as if years of muting emotional reactions naturally warp perception, fueling a state of delirium. Franklin highlights this dynamic throughout her biography, tracing the lineage of belittlement from Jackson’s mother to her husband, and underscoring the ways that Jackson was “shamed…for legitimate and rational desires.” Indeed, Jackson often wrote in journals and letters that she felt tricked by Hyman: “You once wrote me a letter…telling me that I would never be lonely again. I think that was the first, the most dreadful, lie you ever told me.” It is grimly fitting that when one of her purest dramatizations of this feeling of being misunderstood and manipulated, The Bird’s Nest (1954), was adapted as a film (Lizzie), the heroine wasn’t depicted as “hysterical,” the victim of emotional strains, both familial and social. She was portrayed as a flat-out lunatic.

  But for Jackson, the heroine’s destruction always begins with false promises—from parents, from lovers, from society at large. The process is embodied perhaps most brilliantly at the start of Hangsaman. At her parents’ garden party, the seventeen-year-old ingenue Natalie Waite meets a strikingly confident woman named Verna, who tells her, “Little Natalie, never rest until you have uncovered your essential self. Remember that. Somewhere, deep inside you, hidden by all sorts of fears and worries and petty little thoughts, is a clean pure being made of radiant colors.”