And for my classes, I was often up in the air. Classes at the Sorbonne are given in large amphitheaters; due to my schedule, I was never able to get there early enough to get a seat. My solution was to ask a taller male student to lift me up and place me on a window ledge, so I ended up having the best seat in the house!
I know that many people in that situation would never have the nerve to ask for such help or put themselves on display like that. They’d just stand in the back, not being able to see anything. But obtaining joie de vivre takes some courage. I’m short, so I always push myself toward the front. I see no reason why I should be held back by my height. Sometimes it’s even an advantage, because people let me push through because of my size, and being in the front allows me to interact more than if I were somewhere in the middle. Plus, once you push yourself forward a couple of times and see that it works, it makes it easier to do again and again. You gain experience and learn that even when it doesn’t work, it’s not the end of the world. But you can’t hesitate when pushing yourself. You have to know that you’re going to do it and just act. If you go back and forth in your mind, playing a game of “Should I or shouldn’t I,” you probably won’t push yourself. You know the saying, “He who hesitates is lost”? Well, it’s true. But once you get a taste for winning because you pushed a little harder, you won’t hesitate because you won’t want to put up with feeling less than a winner.
I was at Madison Square Garden when Bill Clinton accepted the Democratic nomination the first time he ran for president. Not only was I there, I was sitting right in front with the Arkansas delegation. I’d told Bill to run, so I was sharing fully in the excitement of the moment, not somewhere up in the balcony with the television network that had brought me there. That’s how you grab the most intense sensations that life has to offer, by going after them, not waiting for them to miraculously land in your lap. Every once in a while the lottery might hit your lap, but more often than not it’s those who go after what they want that get it.
As I said earlier, joie de vivre also includes some sadness, because if you’re living in the real world, not everything is going to go perfectly. And so it was with my marriage to David. He’d decided that he didn’t want to be a doctor and went back to Israel to get a master’s in Middle Eastern studies. I went with him, but when the semester started again at the Sorbonne, I went back to Paris. Some long-distance relationships can work but ours wasn’t meant to be. David’s father had been right; we were too young. We eventually got a divorce, by mail.
If there’s one lesson that life has taught me, it’s to waste as little time as possible. No matter how long you live, the years go by so quickly that to waste even seconds is a pity. And that’s why when a couple comes to my office and it’s obvious that they’re not right for each other, I tell them to separate as quickly as possible. Why waste more of your precious life being miserable when there’s another way? Being able to cut one’s losses is vital to experiencing the most joie de vivre. There’s some misery that’s unavoidable, such as having a terrible disease, but marriages can be dissolved and if that’s going to be the ultimate decision, then it should be done quickly. I’m still friends with my former husbands—perhaps in part because we didn’t stretch out our marriages to the point where they became painful, so there was very little bitterness.
I met my second husband, Dan, at a coffeehouse in Paris through some Israeli friends. He didn’t have a career, but he was good-looking, kind, and sweet, and so we started a wonderful love affair. And then, even though I just told you not to expect anything to drop into your lap, a gift dropped into mine. I had not asked Germany for any reparations, but I was sent a check for $1,500 from the West German government to those who had suffered Nazi war crimes and not finished their education. While I hadn’t asked for anything from Germany, I wasn’t about to send such a sum of money back.
“Dan, look at what I received in the mail.”
Dan looked at the check and whistled. “You were wondering how you were going to pay for the rest of your education. Now you know.”
“I’ve been thinking about it, and I’ve come to the decision that since I intend to go back to Israel, what’s the use of working so hard for this French degree?”
“But you’ve been telling me how important getting an education is. In fact, just the other day you were scolding me for not going back to take classes.”
“You don’t necessarily need to be in a school to get an education.”
“Now you’re sounding like me.”
“And maybe you’re a bad influence on me, but I’ve decided to use this money to go to America. I have an uncle in San Francisco whom I haven’t seen since I was three years old, and some of my friends from Heiden are there, and I just feel drawn to visiting the United States.”
“Really.” Dan looked a little sad as he said this.
“Oh, I didn’t tell you the best part. I want you to go with me!”
We bought fourth-class tickets on the Liberté. Even though we weren’t supposed to be on deck, we snuck up and stayed up waiting all night to see the Statue of Liberty. We met some friends in New York and stayed in a hotel the first night but knew we couldn’t afford that option for very long. I knew there was a German Jewish newspaper called the Aufbau, and I bought a copy, hoping to find a cheap room advertised. But what caught my eye was a large ad placed by the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science of the New School for Social Research announcing a scholarship open to Nazi victims seeking a master’s degree in sociology. I went right down there, and within twenty-four hours, I had the scholarship. We also found a small room to rent in Washington Heights only four blocks from where I live today, which is not so surprising since Washington Heights was a German Jewish enclave.
Since the scholarship only paid for my tuition, we needed money to live on. Our landlady knew of someone looking for a housemaid. I may not have had any degrees, but I did have that certificate as a Swiss housekeeper. The couple that hired me—at the whopping price of seventy-five cents an hour—was from Frankfurt; she had even attended the same school I had. But my days as a maid wouldn’t last long. Soon after, Dan found both of us jobs at the French embassy, and I got a 25 percent raise, to a dollar an hour.
I had trouble with the classes because of the language barrier, until in one class I discovered two German students who were taking notes in a language that I could actually comprehend. On the one hand, you could say that fate was smiling down on me, but if I hadn’t turned around to ask for their help, I wouldn’t have seen that smile. Life can be beautiful, but you have to be ready to grab those brass rings as the carousel swings you around and around.
Fate had another surprise in store for me: I was pregnant. For some reason I’d assumed that I couldn’t get pregnant, maybe because I was so short. (I always talk to students about sexual myths, such as having hair grow on the palm of your hand from masturbating, but ironically I never mention this particular myth that snared me. Since my parents were both short, maybe they fell into the same trap!) Because of the coming baby, Dan and I decided to get married. I was in heaven despite the fact that I was throwing up every morning. To me, that nausea was absolutely an integral part of joie de vivre, both for me and my baby, and I never once complained. And the joy I felt when Miriam was born was unbelievable. I’d lost my entire family to the Nazis, but now I had started a new one of my own.
When Miriam was one year old, Dan and I separated. What we’d had was a great love affair, but there wasn’t enough of a connection to sustain a marriage that would last a lifetime. One of the missing ingredients was intellectual stimulation. I often speak about sexual boredom, and it’s certainly a topic that magazines like Cosmo address regularly, but in my opinion, sexual boredom is only a minor aspect to a couple’s not having a satisfying sex life. Intellectual boredom with each other is a much bigger culprit.
There are some people who have developed a certain style of reaching orgasm that requires them to act in
a certain way each and every time. Now, couples where one or both have this issue can use other positions and try out other ways to boost their sex life, but in the end they’ll have to have sex using that one tried-and-true way in order to both end up sexually satisfied. So you might think that such a couple’s relationship wouldn’t be stable since their sex life is so predictable. But that wouldn’t necessarily be true at all. If the rest of their life together is filled to the brim with intellectual stimulation—which could mean that they are constantly going to concerts and visiting museums and reading and discussing books, or simply sharing a hobby, like gardening, and spending hours poring over seed catalogs—then their relationship would be a strong one. And that strong relationship would spill over so that their sexual attraction for each other would also remain potent. On the other hand, a couple whose sex life resembles a porn movie but who, outside of the bedroom, bore each other to tears, just wouldn’t last.
Here I’ve given you extremes, which was not the case for Dan and me. But young mother that I was, I was wise enough to see into our future, and I didn’t see it being a fulfilling one. Even though it meant that I was going to have to raise Miriam by myself, or at least until I’d found someone else, I knew the right move was to divorce Dan, who went back to France and wasn’t a part of Miriam’s or my life anymore. I knew he had no money and was unlikely to have any soon, so I didn’t expect or ask for support. In those days, the only possible form of communication was by letter, and frankly, between raising and supporting Miriam and going to school at night, I didn’t have a free moment to put pen to paper, and I suppose neither did he. After a time I took Miriam to Mexico, where I obtained a divorce. Dan and I didn’t entirely lose touch, though having the Atlantic Ocean between us didn’t serve to strengthen our relationship any.
Was there sadness in our parting? Of course—but mostly for what might have been. I knew I’d be happier without Dan tagging along because the potential for the rest of my life had improved. And in that knowledge I found joie de vivre. I didn’t know where I was heading but at least I wasn’t stuck in a rut going nowhere. Was I worried about being a single mother? I’d had to take care of myself since the age of ten, so I was used to shouldering the responsibility of day-to-day existence. I’d never had very much in terms of financial resources, but I’d always managed to get by and so I was confident that I’d be able to support myself and Miriam, who was the joy of my life.
CHAPTER V
Going After What You Want in Life
Having walked firsthand in a single mother’s shoes, I know how difficult it can be to balance life and work. I didn’t have any family to help me raise Miriam—a grandmother or two to fall back on, or even a distant cousin—so I had to rely on friends when the need arose. And it’s this experience that led me to speak out when the lead character on the TV show Murphy Brown became a single mom. On TV, she could make it look easy, and that might convince some single women that they could follow in Murphy’s footsteps without significant consequences. While I never regretted a second of my years raising Miriam by myself, given the difficulties, it’s important to me to try to discourage anyone else with the idea of charting the same course. And at the top of my own list was to find someone who could join with me in the raising of my family.
My favorite word in the English language is “done.” I dislike having things that are not completed littering my mind. To fully enjoy life, it’s better if you don’t have an overflowing to-do list constantly rattling around in your brain. Of course, some items on your list are easily taken care of, such as doing the dishes, while others take more time. More important, you also have less control over certain items, and finding a husband certainly falls under that category. So on the one hand, you mustn’t become obsessive about it—that will only remove all possibilities of having joy on a day-to-day basis. But you also can’t just leave it to chance. So whatever may be preventing you from saying “Done” needs to be neither at the front of your brain or way in the back, but somewhere in the middle so that you have enough incentive to push toward obtaining your goal—but not so much that you’re miserable until you do.
One important resource that got me through this period was my circle of friends. Even as a single mother, I wasn’t one to sit at home. If there was a party, I took Miriam and put her on the bed amid all the coats to sleep while we danced and talked in the next room. One of my friends, Dale Ordes, once suggested a ski weekend. I got some other friends to watch Miriam and off I went. Another friend on the trip was a Dutchman who worked with me, named Hans. We went up the mountain together, but the lift was a T-bar—which works fine when you’re similar in height, but Hans was over six feet tall, and the combination just wasn’t successful. When we got to the top, I was introduced to the president of the ski club we had joined for the weekend, Manfred Westheimer. Fred was short, and since he wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, I could tell he was single.
“Hans, you know how you say I talk too much at work and you can’t get your work done?”
“Ja, it’s true.”
“As it turns out, we’re also not a great fit on a T-bar.”
“Ja, I noticed that. Either it is under your neck or my ankles.”
“Exactly. So you won’t mind if from now on I go on the lift with that short one over there, Manfred.”
“Ruth, I think that is an excellent idea.”
I put the time Manfred and I shared on the T-bar to good use, and not only did we spend the day together, but we kept talking until two in the morning. The next day I called a friend and said, “I found the guy I’m going to marry.” The only problem was that there were two other women in our group with the same idea, plus they had a head start. In fact, one of them was the woman I was sharing a room with, and she told me to keep my hands off her man. If you haven’t noticed by now, I have a bit of a competitive spirit in me, and so her words had the opposite effect. Had she just looked sad, I might have felt sorry for her; but once she issued a challenge, I was even more eager.
Fred was an engineer, meaning he had a steady, well-paying job, which was reason enough for every single Jewish woman he met to start plotting how to land him. But he was also good-looking, friendly, and a great talker—and he played the guitar and the harmonica. He had a habit of telling stupid jokes that I didn’t understand, but in the beginning I laughed anyway.
If there’s something that you want out of life, half measures won’t do, especially if you know that someone else wants the same thing that you do. Let me give you an example. Fred had left his guitar in the apartment of my main competitor. The last thing I wanted was for that guitar to be an excuse for Fred to go back there. What was I to do? I called Dale.
“Dale, I need to buy a guitar. Where should I go?”
“Ruth, what do you need with a guitar? You don’t play and I doubt you ever will.”
“Fred left his guitar at that other woman’s place.”
“And . . .”
“And I’m going to buy him a new one so he doesn’t go over there to pick it up.”
“Ruth, that’s crazy.” This from a man who would risk life and limb to ski down the mountain like a madman so that he could get as many runs in as possible to fully amortize his lift ticket.
“You say it’s crazy, I say it would be crazy to let Fred anywhere near this woman’s apartment. Where should I meet you?”
The guitar cost twenty-eight dollars, which to me was a small fortune. I didn’t look at it as spending money but rather as an investment. By buying Fred a new guitar, not only was I keeping him out of the clutches of that other woman, but since Fred didn’t have a clue as to why I bought him the guitar, I also scored brownie points for my generosity.
There’s that saying again, “He who hesitates is lost.” I saw danger in Fred going to that apartment, and I made sure to head it off at the pass. I could have hoped for the best, and maybe nothing would have happened—Fred would have picked up his guitar and come back to me, and I’d be twen
ty-eight dollars richer. But now weigh those twenty-eight dollars against the opposite scenario, losing Fred to the competition. That was not an acceptable outcome, so I made up my mind and carried out my decision.
I sometimes feel sorry for men who have to ask a woman out on a date. Often they get rejected, and that’s hard to accept. I can see a man who’s been turned down several times becoming gun shy, hesitating to ask the next woman out and thus letting opportunity after opportunity slip through his fingers. You can’t really enjoy life if you’re always hesitant. You have to make decisions, and while some of them won’t turn out as planned, at least you’ll know who to blame—and when they turn out to be right, you won’t have to share the credit!
Fred and some of his German Jewish friends had “discovered” a lake community in upstate New York called Lake Oscawana. Because the lake was rimmed by hills, to them it had a European feel, and they loved it so much that they wouldn’t speak about it, afraid that outsiders might come and ruin it for them. Fred had a share in a summer house there; my rival had a share in the same house. That wasn’t acceptable. I couldn’t join their group because they wouldn’t accept children and I couldn’t leave Miriam on weekends. Then I discovered that the summer cabin next door was for rent, but the amount was way above my limited budget. I started calling friends to let them know of this great opportunity, and soon enough I’d lured in enough people that I would be spending the summer at Lake Oscawana. Little did I know at the time that one day I’d be calling the lake Fred’s mistress, as he seemed to love it almost as much as me! But my first foray up there was successful. I couldn’t keep Fred all to myself, because he had paid for his meals in his cottage—that wasn’t something he would give up. So while he slept in our cabin, he ate next door!
The Doctor Is In Page 7