Hungry Heart

by Jennifer Weiner

  “Swim,” I think, is allegorical, a stand-in for all the other stuff parents need to teach their children to keep their kids afloat in the world, but my parents took the swim part literally. It was my dad who actually taught all of us how. We used inflatable armbands back then, yellow plastic doughnut-shaped things with a hole in the middle, called Swimmies. First, Dad would have you swim with just your left Swimmie in place. Then you’d paddle around with just your right Swimmie. Then you’d leave the Swimmies on the shore. Dad would toss a silver dollar into the deep end, and down you’d go. My mom has taken over duties for the next generation. Both of my daughters learned to swim in Gull Pond, in Wellfleet on the Cape. Fran would carry them into the water, put them down, show them how to put their faces in the water and blow bubbles. “Kick! Kick! Scoop! Scoop!” she’d call, and hold out her arms to catch them when they jumped off the dock.

  When I think of my mother, I see her in the water, in the pool or in the bay on the Cape, holding baby Lucy or baby Phoebe under her armpits, keeping her afloat. My mother taught both of my daughters to swim, and taught them both, along with my half brother David, how to ride bikes. She doesn’t believe in training wheels or inflatable vests or rings or any of the modern inventions designed to keep kids safe (she has, I am happy to note, made a concession for helmets). When it comes to bikes, her method is ingenious: she takes the pedals off and lowers the seat so that the kid can reach the pavement with his or her feet. “Glide!” she’ll call as the kid pushes off and glides for an instant, then wobbles, then slams his or her feet back down.

  “Don’t worry!” I will yell, slightly out of breath from running alongside. “Just try again! It’s okay! I’m right here! I’ll catch you!”

  “Jenny, get back here,” my mother will tell me, exasperation and affection mingling. “You will NOT catch that kid. You’ll hurt your back. Just let them go.”

  “But . . .”

  “Just. Let. Them. Go.” She’ll wait until I’ve walked back to stand beside her, then call to the kid on the bike. “Try again! Push! Push! Push! Now glide!”

  Eventually it always works. I back off. Fran reads her book, keeping one eye on the kid as they glide up and down the parking lot, sometimes wobbling, sometimes falling, sometimes crying. There are scrapes, there are wails of pain, there are exclamations of “I hate this!” and “I’ll never learn!” But eventually everyone gets back on the bike and tries again. When the kid can glide the length of the Corn Hill Beach parking lot, the pedals go back on the bike. As it turns out, balancing is the hard part, and once a kid can do that successfully, pedaling and steering are no big deal. With Lucy, then Phoebe, then David, I’ve watched as each kid yells, “I’ve got it!” and then, with decreasing wobbles and increasing confidence, goes pedaling away.

  It’s a metaphor, of course. Teaching a child to swim means learning to let go. If you hold on too tight, the child won’t figure it out, or be able to trust in her own ability to keep herself afloat. If you’re always there to catch and comfort and soothe and smooth the way, the child never learns how to catch herself, how to comfort herself, how to get back on the bike or in the water and try, once more, to do the thing that scares her. There have been times I wished my mother had stepped forward to defend me or fight for me or move mountains to make sure that I got what I needed. Now that I am a mother myself, though, I can see the benefits of parenting with an open hand. Some say you should teach a child to swim . . . but the Talmud doesn’t say anything about testing the waters for them, or clearing obstacles out of the way, or making sure the other swimmers won’t be unkind. You teach them how, as best you can, and then you let them go.

  • • •

  Fifteen years after my first book was published, my mother, like many animals whose environments have changed, has adapted. She can enjoy a Four Seasons with the best of them, but the frugality that underpins her behavior and informs her life view has not budged. She will insist on carrying her own luggage (currently a donated duffel with a Teamsters’ logo on the pocket). She’ll tell people that my books are “page-turners” and extol the virtues of whatever she’s currently loving, from Eloisa James’s memoir of Paris to Geraldine Brooks’s newest novel.

  People talk about never losing their childlike sense of wonder; of wanting always to see the world with a kid’s innocence and delight. For me, it’s different: I always want to see the world the way my mother does, where it’s one adventure, one wonderful new experience, one delicious meal after another; where there are no strangers, just people you haven’t recommended Richard Russo’s book to yet, and where it’s never embarrassing if you’re having a good time.

  Years ago, we were traveling between Philadelphia and Florida. The night before, to kick off our vacation, we’d gone to the best Mexican restaurant in town and ordered, basically, everything—the spicy street corn, the ceviche sampler, the guacamole with pistachios and chili flakes, empanadas filled with this and burritos full of that. It was way too much food, and I thought it was only a reflex when my mom asked them to pack up the leftovers, even though no one would be home to eat them.

  The next morning we boarded a plane. I’d gotten my daughters settled, with my mom and my sister a few rows behind us. The plane took off, we reached our cruising altitude, the captain turned off the FASTEN SEAT BELT sign, and all was well. Until I started smelling garlic. Lots of garlic. Plus chilis and black beans.

  “What is that?” I whispered. Lucy unbuckled her seat belt, clambered onto her knees, and turned around, peering through the crack between the seats.

  “Fran is eating nachos!” she reported.

  “The nachos from last night?”

  “Yes!”

  I stood up, squinting. Fran, with a Styrofoam clamshell open in her lap, gave me a cheerful wave. I spent the rest of the trip reviving a skill I’d perfected as a child, when she’d pull the jar of peanut butter out of her tote bag during, for example, the changing of the guard at Arlington National Cemetery. “Is that your mom?” the woman sitting beside me asked. I smiled and shrugged and said, “I’ve never seen her before in my life.”

  Mean Girls in the Retirement Home

  New York Times, January 2015

  About eighteen months ago, my ninety-seven-year-old grandmother went out to dinner with some friends. As Nanna got out of the car, she tripped over her friend Shirley’s cane, fell to the pavement, and came down hard on her elbow. Back at home, she headed to the kitchen to get some dessert—“and my left leg just crumpled.”

  At the hospital, the doctors ordered X-rays but couldn’t see anything wrong. After two weeks of therapy, Nanna was sent home, but she’d made up her mind. After thirty years of living in Florida, twenty-eight of them as a widow, and most of those spent insisting that the only way she’d go back to her native Michigan was “in a box,” Nanna asked her older daughter, my aunt Marlene, to find her a sunny place near Detroit.

  Last summer she moved into an independent living facility with access to a range of services and activities. She has her own apartment with a kitchen, but can eat her meals in a dining hall. After giving her a few days to unpack and settle in, I got her on the phone. How was it going?

  “Well,” Nanna began. Her apartment was lovely. The food was just fine, and there were all kinds of classes and courses to while away the hours. “Have you made any friends?” I asked, in the same chipper tone I used when my younger child returned from her first day at kindergarten.

  There was a pause. Then: “They won’t let me sit at their table!” Nanna cried.

  “Wait, what? Who won’t let you sit at their table?”

  “You try to sit and they say, ‘That seat is taken!’ ”

  “Oh my God,” I said, instantly thrust into a painful flashback of junior high, when I walked into the cafeteria and was greeted with the sight of leather purses looped across the chair backs and the sound of one girl with dramatically plucked eyebrows announcing, “Those seats are taken!” I hadn’t known enough to carry a
purse. I had a lunchbox. (And it would take me another decade to figure out the eyebrow thing.)

  “And just try to get into a bridge game,” Nanna continued. “They’ll talk about bridge, and you’ll say, ‘Oh, I play,’ and they’ll tell you, ‘Sorry, we’re not looking for anyone.’ ”

  “Mean girls!” I said. “There are mean girls in your home!”

  “It’s not a home,” Nanna said sharply.

  I considered. “Here’s my advice,” I said. “Find a bridge foursome. Figure out which one of them looks weak. Then hover.”

  When I was young and innocent—say, last summer—the idea of ninety-year-olds in pecking orders, picking on those at the bottom, was a joke. Everyone knew that the real danger to the elderly came from unscrupulous relatives, con artists, or abusive caregivers. We’ve all heard sad tales of senior citizens being beaten, starved, or neglected by the people paid—usually underpaid—to care for them.

  The notion that a threat to seniors is their peers is somewhat new, and usually played for laughs. It goes against a truism handed down from mothers to daughters for generations: this, too, shall pass. Mean girls are not girls, or mean, forever. High school doesn’t last forever; everyone grows up. But Nanna’s experience suggests otherwise. It says that the cruel, like the poor, are always with us, that mean girls stay mean—they just start wearing support hose and dentures.

  A recent Cornell University study by Karl Pillemer proves the point, showing that aggression among residents in nursing homes is widespread and “extremely high rates of conflict and violence” are common. According to the study’s news release, one in five residents was involved in at least one “negative and aggressive encounter” with another resident during a four-week period. Sixteen percent were cursed or yelled at; 6 percent were hit, kicked, or bitten; 1 percent were victims of “sexual incidents, such as exposing one’s genitals, touching other residents, or attempting to gain sexual favors”; and 10.5 percent dealt with other residents’ entering their rooms uninvited or rummaging through their belongings.

  Whether you’re brawling on the playground or battling over the best seats in chair-cercize, bad behavior is constant, and the rituals for trying to get in with the in-crowd don’t change much. Nanna’s quest for “the Cadillac of walkers,” a four-hundred-dollar number not covered by Medicare, mirrored my search a decade ago for the nearly thousand-dollar Bugaboo that would signal to my urban-mommy cohort that I belonged.

  What transforms with age are the criteria for judgment: not looks, not wealth, not the once-coveted ability to drive at night. When you get to be Nanna’s age, you’re reduced to a number—the younger the better. Even in a residence for the elderly, the eightysomethings will still be cold to the ninety-five-year-olds. Now ninety-nine, my Nanna is completely cognizant of what’s going on. Her memory, both short- and long-term, is excellent. But once her new neighbors heard her age, they knew they didn’t want her at their table.

  “My question is, are they rude? Are they nasty? Or is it that she’s not hearing, or is interpreting something that’s not really something? I can’t tell,” says Aunt Marlene. “I think there’s definitely cliques. I don’t know if there’s a way to alleviate the feeling of being left out. At ninety-nine, do you end up with a group? Does that happen? I don’t know. At first I thought it just takes time. Now I wonder—maybe this is the way it is. Maybe you can’t expect anything else.”

  Bad behavior doesn’t change. Nor does the response from the ones on the sidelines, watching and hoping for the best. Even with lowered expectations, it’s hard. I fret about my first-grader getting shut out of the Four Square game or my sixth-grader sitting alone at lunch. My mom and her sister wonder if their mother is suffering the same kind of isolation, exclusion, and loneliness; the pain of having outlived every single one of your contemporaries, of having lots to say and no one to listen.

  Nanna tries. Every day, she takes a class: Yiddish, current events, even iPad 101. She gets dressed up for dinner, with a pretty scarf, a new sweater. She’s gotten to know her neighbors, table-mates, even the one who forgets her name between one dinner and the next, and she’s joined a mah-jongg game—“even though I haven’t played in years.” The ledge outside her front door is home to a little stuffed bear, dressed in University of Michigan regalia, a hopeful sentry, and maybe a conversation starter.

  I try, too. Over Thanksgiving, we celebrated Nanna’s ninety-ninth birthday, with all twelve of her great-grandchildren on hand to tour the new apartment. Down in the lobby, my six-year-old, Phoebe, and I met a beautifully dressed, immaculately made-up woman sitting on a bench with a cane, waiting for her niece to take her to Thanksgiving dinner at five. It was two. “Do you want to see my kitty?” she asked, and my daughter happily agreed. I learned that, like Nanna, the woman had moved in over the summer, was a Michigan native, and seemed sharp and aware. Feeling like a guy at a bar—another echo of another acceptance-and-rejection ritual—I asked for her number.

  Then Phoebe and I took the elevator back up to Nanna’s apartment, where the refrigerator door is covered with pictures of her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and I announced, “Nanna, I think I made you a friend.”

  Judging Women

  A young woman stands on a stage in an emerald-green bikini. The legs of the bottom are cut high enough to put any hint of upper-thigh jiggle or pucker on display. The wired cups of the top hoist her breasts toward her chin. Her high heels turn her posture into an S-curve—hips thrown backward, chest thrust up. She shakes her glossy ringlets down the tanned skin of her back, and as up-tempo pop plays, she struts across a makeshift stage in a hotel ballroom in Boston. Hitting her first mark, a masking-taped X on the wooden boards, she stands, hands on her hips, legs apart, eyes on the crowd, trying to project poise and command and looking, instead, slightly angry and maybe even the tiniest bit deranged. “What’s wrong with being . . . what’s wrong with being . . . what’s wrong with being con-fi-dent,” Demi Lovato asks rhetorically as the woman spins in a slow, graceful turn. The crowd—two hundred people, almost all of them female—squeals its approval. A young man with a hoarse voice shouts her name.

  I bend over my scoring sheet and write down “10.” In the Miss America scoring system, “physical fitness in swimsuit” counts for only 15 percent of a girl’s final score (the pageant people are trying mightily to refer to the contestants here as “women,” with mixed results, and, at the end of close to nine hours in Pageantland, despite forty-five years as a feminist, I’m having trouble not thinking of them as girls myself). “This isn’t about judging the girl’s body,” we’ve been told by our shepherds for the night, two middle-aged men named Rocky and Dana, both longtime Miss A. volunteers, both warm and enthusiastic and gay. “You’re looking for confidence. Poise. Does she command the room? Does her personality come through? Is she a standout? Is she our Miss Massachusetts?” Rocky and Dana have also told us, repeatedly and insistently, that they don’t want us to merely pick their Miss Cambridge and Miss Boston, the titles the two winners of tonight’s pageant will eventually hold. They want their winner to ultimately be crowned Miss Massachusetts, to be the girl who will win the title this July in Worcester. The one who will head to Atlantic City in September. The one who will do what no Miss Massachusetts in the ninety-five-year history of the Miss America competition has ever done—bring home the crown.

  Going into my inaugural judging experience, I’ve decided to give all the girls a ten in swimsuit, with the belief that A) you can’t judge physical fitness just by looking at someone (“Have them run a mile!” I’ve joked. “Make them do a barre class!”) and B) the idea of handing out scholarship dollars based, at least in part, on how good a girl looks in a bikini is absolute bullshit and in complete contradiction of my deeply held belief, communicated at least once a day to my daughters, that It’s What’s Inside That Matters.

  But now that I’m sitting here, with the girls on the stage and my pen in my hand, I don’t want to give all
of them tens anymore. The twenty-year-old with the tiny, tight body, strutting like she grew up with a catwalk in her living room? Easy ten. But what about the high school senior whose orthopedic condition was misdiagnosed, who spent four years in a wheelchair and is onstage, in a blue bikini, with twelve-inch surgical scars visible on both of her hips? What about the MIT graduate who lost fifty pounds and is still much curvier in her swimsuit than her competitors . . . but is up on the stage anyhow, with her eyes bright and her shoulders thrown back and a big I’m-the-one-that-you-want smile on her face?

  And what about the redheaded teenager, so scared she’s practically trembling, who is in recovery from anorexia, whose platform is about eating-disorder awareness and whose performance was a dance set to music, and her own voice speaking over the beat, telling the story of the director who told her “you’re too fat to wear that costume” and set her on a road of obsessive calorie and carb counting that ended with her hospitalization? What courage does it take for her to be on this stage, in scraps of nylon and Lycra, letting us look at her body and rate it?

  I give the redhead a ten. I give the curvy girl a ten. I give the girl with the scars a ten. I give the girl with the perfect body and composure an eight. I tell myself that I’m doing what second-wave feminists called “unworking,” where you’d get hired at a sexist corporation and then screw up your job so badly you’d cause the place to rot from the inside out, but the truth is, I’m not sure what I’m doing anymore, if I’m taking the Miss America pageant seriously or if I am seriously trying to undo it; if I want to burn it all down, or get someone to give me a crown of my own.