Thinking Out Loud: On The Personal, The Political, The Public And The Private (v5.0)

by Anna Quindlen

  Pee-wee, of course, was history. This is a very unforgiving country, particularly after you’ve been famous enough to be made into a doll and sold at Toys ‘R’ Us.

  So when the Barbie story broke big, it occurred to me that I might be witnessing the twilight of a career. I was not sorry. I had never wanted American girls to have a role model whose feet were perpetually frozen in the high-heel position.

  Well, as you know, that’s not the way it turned out. The next day Barbie’s agent started spin control, and before you could say “dream house” there was a Sad-n-Sorry Community Service Barbie, with the navy blue shift and the open letter about how even dolls make mistakes. Little girls read it in the toy aisles and their eyes filled. “It wasn’t a cry for help,” I said. “It was a public relations stunt.” But by that time the little girls I knew had gotten Community Service Barbie from their grandmothers, and they didn’t care.

  MOMMY DIMMEST

  May 10, 1992

  I think sometimes about a girl I met in Brooklyn. She was fourteen, and pregnant, and philosophical. “If Vanise does it, I can,” she said, Vanise being the neighborhood dim bulb, the girl whose conversation ranged from a giggle to a shrug, whose own mother said that if you looked in one of her ears you could see daylight.

  Vanise had had a baby, and she was so dim that it was commonplace for her to order a slice at the pizza place and then discover she had no money and be obliged to cadge a buck from a boy. (There was some suggestion of a causal relationship between the slice, the cadging, and the baby.) The bottom line was this: if Vanise could do motherhood, then motherhood couldn’t be too tough.

  I guess the girl is nineteen now, and the baby five, and Lord knows what happened to Vanise. I thought about them both, and about all the rest of us who produce hostages to fortune, when some manufacturer unveiled a pregnant doll called Mommy-To-Be, a Barbie wannabe with country-western hair and a swelling midsection. What do you think it means that mine was delivered barefoot?

  The doll reminded me of Vanise for two reasons: because it shows the world is full of people who don’t have good sense, and because it suggests that having a baby is easy. It has a removable belly, and when you take out the baby—anatomically correct, which is a whole lot more than you can say about the mother—a nice flat stomach pops up in its place, thereby reinforcing the belly-button theory of birth so beloved by five-year-olds.

  The process is a cross between a C-section, a tummy tuck, and an Easter-egg hunt. This isn’t the way I remember it, but I guess there wasn’t a big market for a sweaty wild-eyed doll with a hospital gown up around her armpits shrieking. “The next person who tells me to breathe is dead meat!”

  It’s always been this way. Our toys taught us that being a mother was simple. Betsy Wetsy, Tiny Tears—what easy babies they were. Today dolls are more sophisticated, but no more realistic. They have a baby doll that crawls and falls, but it does not fall against the leg of the coffee table, gash its little head and need to go to the emergency room at the same time that the twins are in the tub.

  No Colicky Cathy, who wails all night unless you walk her. No Adolescent Alex, who does not speak for six months and then breaks the silence with a call at 1:00 A.M. informing you that he’s gotten popped on a D.W.I. No real-life Mommy games.

  (I never knew any boys to play Daddy when I was growing up. What kind of game would it have been to walk out the front door and make yourself scarce for ten hours?)

  The job that seemed so easy when the babies were plastic turns out to be the hardest one you’ll ever have when they’re flesh and blood. The world is full of women blindsided by the unceasing demands of motherhood, still flabbergasted by how a job can be terrific and torturous, involving and utterly tedious, all at the same time. The world is full of women made to feel strange because what everyone assumes comes naturally is so difficult to do—never mind to do well.

  No doll teaches this. The best exercise in understanding it is one sometimes given high school kids. They’re handed an egg on a Friday and told that they have to take care of it all weekend. Most of them start with enthusiasm, naming their eggs, dressing them, drawing little faces on their blank whiteness.

  But soon it begins to pall. They hunt around for someone to leave their egg with so they can go to the movies. Some of the guys try to talk girls into tending their eggs. One boy I read about hard-boiled his egg and then carried it around blithely in his pocket. I’m nervous about his prospects as a father, but I’m convinced he’ll become a United States senator.

  By Monday morning the eggs are broken.

  We rarely admit that carrying something fragile with you, in your hands and your heart every minute of your life, is one tough task. I wonder sometimes how the fourteen-year-old and her dim friend wound up managing it, or if they did. The thing I find most annoying about this Mommy-To-Be doll is that she has a smile frozen on her face. Take off her big belly, pop out her baby, and she smiles and smiles. Motherhood is a snap. So simple. So easy. No stretch marks. No varicose veins. No potbelly. No problem. No way.

  NAUGHTY AND NICE

  December 21, 1991

  Dear Ms. Quindlen,

  The other day at the mall a little boy passing by my throne said that if he didn’t find Game Boy under the tree somebody was going to be in big trouble, adding a word that in my day was spelled *#!!@**&! What happened to the nice little boys and girls of yesteryear? Are there any left?

  Be good for goodness’ sake,

  Santa Claus

  Dear Mr. Claus,

  Yes, Santa Claus, there is a Virginia. And despite everything you’ve seen on television and read in magazines, the amazing thing about her is how little she’s changed since she asked for an orange in her stocking so many years ago. The boy you mention is exactly the sort who once would have said, “Your mother wears army boots.” He would not have said it in front of you, however, because he believed that you knew who was naughty and nice.

  The world they live in has changed plenty. Master Mall probably learned that word at home. A lot of us moms are more loose in our language than in the days when my mother once said “Oh, hell!”—she probably had just broken her toe at the time—and then clapped her hand over her mouth.

  Our children’s speech is anatomically correct, which seems like a good idea until the moment, in a crowded restaurant, when a two-year-old announces stereophonically, “Grandmom, I have a penis!”

  Today’s children inhabit a far harsher place than the world in which I waited for you each year. Five million of them under the age of six are living in poverty, which means that their toys may come via some church collection program rather than the traditional chimney route.

  Fifty years ago teachers said their top discipline problems were talking, chewing gum, making noise, and running in the halls. The current list, by contrast, sounds like a cross between a rap sheet and the seven deadly sins: drug abuse, absenteeism, alcohol abuse, vandalism, assault, teenage pregnancy, suicide, gang warfare, rape, and arson.

  But let’s not fall prey to good-old-days-ism. Let’s not pretend that none of the children you visited fifty years ago had abusive parents or empty stomachs. Let’s not pretend that the world of Bedford Falls was perfect. I grew up safe, secure, and insulated in a suburb in which a Protestant was a rarity and a black family an impossibility. At this holiday season, my kids consider it one of my great shortcomings that I am ignorant of how to spin a dreidel.

  This is a good thing.

  They grow up faster, Santa. Too many of the Virginias of the world have babies when they are still babies themselves. Too many of them equate maturity with cynicism and hope with disappointment.

  But there is a part of many of them, even some of the most superficially sophisticated or the most deeply scarred, that accounts for the continuing existence of you in a world that seems at odds with everything you stand for. It is that sense of infinite possibility, the genuine “Wow!” It is that sense that the blinds are not yet drawn between the wi
ndows of their eyes and the houses of their hearts.

  The preternatural maturity we see in so many of them comes from us adults. It is our response to raising them in a world in which people die from sex and kill for pennies. It is to protect ourselves—we trade their innocence for street smarts for our own sake.

  The Virginias of the world will tell you they want a Madonna cordless microphone and a pair of hoop earrings. But it is amazing how many of them still sleep with a tattered fur thing, part bear, part bunny. You may be conscious of how many of them no longer believe. I marvel at how many of them do.

  I marvel at the pain it causes even the toughest customers to see beneath your beard and discover you are only a man in costume. It will be many, many years before some of them understand that you are a stand-in for what is best within themselves.

  Those are the Virginias who grow wise but never weary. My New Year’s resolution is to try to be one of them.

  May your days be

  merry and bright,

  Anna Quindlen

  ENOUGH BOOKSHELVES

  August 7, 1991

  The voice I assume for children’s bad behavior is like a winter coat, dark and heavy. I put it on the other night when my eldest child appeared in the kitchen doorway, an hour after he had gone to bed. “What are you doing down here?” I began to say, when he interrupted: “I finished it!”

  The dominatrix tone went out the window and we settled down for an old-fashioned dish about the fine points of The Phantom Tollbooth. It is the wonderful tale of a bored and discontented boy named Milo and the journey he makes one day in his toy car with the Humbug and the Spelling Bee and a slew of other fantastical characters who change his life. I read it first when I was ten. I still have the book report I wrote, which began “This is the best book ever.” That was long before I read The Sound and the Fury or Little Dorrit, the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries or Elmore Leonard. I was still pretty close to the mark.

  All of us have similar hopes for our children: good health, happiness, interesting and fulfilling work, financial stability. But like a model home that’s different depending on who picks out the cabinets and the shutters, the fine points often vary. Some people go nuts when their children learn to walk, to throw a baseball, to pick out the “Moonlight Sonata” on the piano. The day I realized my eldest child could read was one of the happiest days of my life.

  “One loses the capacity to grieve as a child grieves, or to rage as a child rages: hotly, despairingly, with tears of passion,” the English novelist Anita Brookner writes in Brief Lives, her newest book. “One grows up, one becomes civilized, one learns one’s manners, and consequently can no longer manage these two functions—sorrow and anger—adequately. Attempts to recapture that primal spontaneity are doomed, for the original reactions have been overlaid, forgotten.”

  And yet we constantly reclaim some part of that primal spontaneity through the youngest among us, not only through their sorrow and anger but simply through everyday discoveries, life unwrapped. To see a child touch the piano keys for the first time, to watch a small body slice through the surface of the water in a clean dive, is to experience the shock, not of the new, but of the familiar revisited as though it were strange and wonderful.

  Reading has always been life unwrapped to me, a way of understanding the world and understanding myself through both the unknown and the everyday. If being a parent consists often of passing along chunks of ourselves to unwitting—often unwilling—recipients, then books are, for me, one of the simplest and most surefire ways of doing that. I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves. That would give them an infinite number of worlds in which to wander, and an entry to the real world, too; in the same way two strangers can settle down for a companionable gab over baseball seasons past and present, so it is often possible to connect with someone over a passion for books.

  (Or the opposite, of course: I once met a man who said he thought War and Peace was a big boring book, when the truth was that it was only he who was big and boring.)

  I remember making summer reading lists for my sister, of her coming home one day from work with my limp and yellowed paperback copy of Pride and Prejudice in her bag and saying irritably, “Look, tell me if she marries Mr. Darcy, because if she doesn’t I’m not going to finish the book.” And the feeling of giddiness I felt as I piously said that I would never reveal an ending, while somewhere inside I was shouting, yes, yes, she will marry Mr. Darcy, over and over again, as often as you’d like.

  You had only to see this boy’s face when he said “I finished it!” to know that something had made an indelible mark upon him. I walked him back upstairs with a fresh book, my copy of A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L’Engle’s unforgettable story of children who travel through time and space to save their father from the forces of evil. Now when I leave the room, he is reading by the pinpoint of his little reading light, the ship of his mind moving through high seas with the help of my compass. Just before I close the door, I catch a glimpse of the making of my self and the making of his, sharing some of the same timber. And I am a happy woman.

  MR. SMITH GOES TO HEAVEN

  April 7, 1991

  Jason Oliver C. Smith, a big dumb guy who was tan, died March 30 of lung cancer and old age. He was thirteen years old and lived in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and the back section of the minivan, behind the kids’ seat.

  He was the son of somebody or other, but it was probably somebody with a name like Champion Snowfall’s Big Brown Bear or Lancelot Smith of Sunnybrook. No one knew what the C. stood for, although there was speculation that, like Harry S. Truman’s middle initial, it was an attempt to seem more dignified than he really was. He was called Mr. Smith only when he was reprimanded for eating the coffee cake off the kitchen counter and when he went to Washington.

  He was born a golden retriever, although he never appeared in a Ralph Lauren ad, never gamboled through a field of daisies and high grass by the side of a slim woman with a picture hat in a television commercial for feminine-hygiene products.

  He appeared in only one music video, Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, and fogged up the camera lens by licking it.

  His pedigree was a source of some discomfort for his people, who acquired him just at that time when everyone who had been born between the years 1950 and 1955 and who had a four-wheel-drive vehicle and 2.2 children was acquiring a retriever. They were concerned lest other people think he was a status symbol. Luckily his behavior belied such a thing, and it was with great pride that they occasionally heard people say, “Gee, he acts just like a schnauzer.”

  With his passing, his people took stock of the relationship between man and animal and considered that people acquired dogs for the purposes of keeping in touch with their distant ancestors and of learning to remove hair from napped fabrics. People who wish to salute the free and independent side of their evolutionary character acquire cats. People who wish to pay homage to their servile and salivating roots own dogs.

  (A friend and mourner recalled that, growing up, she believed cat and dog were the same animal, but that cats were the females and dogs the males. This is entirely credible.)

  By human standards, Jason was a great success professionally. He was servile to the point of embarrassment, and was incapable of looking anyone in the eye for more than a few seconds, with the exception of insects. He frequently licked babies, and only an hour before he died he assiduously marked the trunk of a maple tree.

  He was well known for his guilty expression, and on those occasions when he had rifled through the garbage it was not uncommon for him to look as though he deserved the death penalty.

  His career as a retriever coincided with a period of cataclysmic change. The New York City dog-waste statute, commonly known as the pooper-scooper law, was enacted the year he was born. Late in life the animal rights movement swirled around him, and his master routinely threatened to make him in
to a coat.

  His last illness came on the eve of the recent decision that stringent regulations governing pit bulls were discriminatory because they were breed-specific, and he seemed pleased when My Life as a Dog was critically acclaimed, although it was a little hard to tell since he was exhausted that week from treeing squirrels.

  He lived in the city for most of his life, but he never wore a little plaid coat or a leather collar with fake gemstones, and he was never walked by a professional.

  Although he began to visit the country only in middle age, he was able to find and flush quail, rabbits, and other small game. Nevertheless, he remained utterly incapable of getting within twenty feet of any of them.

  At the time of his death his license was current and he had had all of his shots.

  He is survived by two adults, three children, a cat named Daisy who drove him nuts, and his lifelong companion, Pudgy, whose spaying he always regretted, as well as a host of fleas, who have gone elsewhere, probably to Pudgy.

  At the combined family Easter Egg Hunt/Memorial Service held in his honor, he was remembered by one of the children as “a really smart dog.”

  Unfortunately this was inaccurate.

  Burial was behind the barn. A monument made of a piece of slate that had fallen from the roof was erected, bearing his name, a lopsided heart, and the initials of his people.

  He will be missed by all, except Daisy.

  He never bit anyone, which is more than you can say for most of us.

  ON THE NEWS

  There are three questions people always ask about writing a column:

  Q. Where do you get your ideas?

  A. The same places that you do.

  Q. How long does it take to write a column?