High Tide in Tucson

by Barbara Kingsolver

  There's a simpler way to sum up the "is-ought" problem. A man I know, whenever he hears a story about philandering husbands or conniving wives, pipes up: "Sociobiology could explain it!"

  And I intone: "Explain, maybe, but not excuse."

  A creature with a big enough head to make a contract should have the sense to make one it can keep.

  Of course, "See you later!" does not mean the same thing as "See you in court!" We make contracts on dozens of different levels. Hierarchies of urgency are understood, and so are the intrinsic values of different loyalties. Athletic contests are not marriages, although both are sweated out within bell jars of arbitrary rules. The advantage of sports is that they are quick--you decide what's important, stake your claim, and win or lose, you still go home unscathed. It might not look possible to an anthropologist from Venus, but life here really does last beyond the Super Bowl.

  In a book called The Stronger Women Get, the More Men Love Football, Mariah Burton Nelson points out that sports are also about distinction, and perhaps that is why they assume such importance in our culture. "Who is better?" she writes. "One inch, one point, or one-hundredth of a second can differentiate winner from loser." Nelson lists at least six sports in which women and men now compete together at the elite level (dog-sled racing, horse racing, marathon swimming, equestrian events, rifle shooting, and auto racing), and many more recreational sports in which a wife and husband can typically find themselves evenly matched. And yet, she says, many people continue to rely hard on five games that showcase upper-body strength (football, baseball, basketball, boxing, and hockey) as reassurance of a certain order, gender-wise, in the universe.

  Me, I bear in mind that women live seven years longer than men, on average, and figure that's the sport I'll sign up for.

  So pick the rules that suit you, but just remember a game is no more than the sum of its parts: a stick, a ball, half an inch, two hundredths of a second. A cubic millimeter of muscle, or skull. A point of IQ. Come to think of it, things not much bigger than ants running into their hole.

  All right, then. Back in your den, the game is winding down. Here is what you do: remind yourself that what you've been watching is a rigged arena. It's vastly popular simply because people flopped supine on furniture get to be muscular and sweaty by proxy and, for a short time, contrive their own rules about what makes who the best. Every day will dawn on a different "best," so the proxy contestants get to hitch their wagon to a new set of stars each time around. This says worlds about human nature, and nothing about real life. Game over, the river flows downhill again, and all the blue-eared pupfish go home to their mates.

  You can give him a test, to make sure. "If I weren't around," you ask casually, "would you go out with my cousin Gloria? We're related--members of the same conference, you might say."

  Your cousin Gloria is a blue-eyed version of Sonia Braga. Your sweetheart, though, is no fool. He gives you a hug and answers, "Don't be ridiculous. She's bowlegged."

  Those are the rules. So what if there is no joy in Mudville, if at your house there's a place for everything, and every tentacle in its place.

  THE MUSCLE MYSTIQUE

  The baby-sitter surely thought I was having an affair. Years ago, for a period of three whole months, I would dash in to pick up my daughter after "work" with my cheeks flushed, my heart pounding, my hair damp from a quick shower. I'm loath to admit where I'd really been for that last hour of the afternoon. But it's time to come clean.

  I joined a health club.

  I went downtown and sweated with the masses. I rode a bike that goes nowhere at the rate of five hundred calories per hour. I even pumped a little iron. I can't deny the place was a lekking ground: guys stalking around the weight room like prairie chickens, nervously eying each other's pectorals. Over by the abdominal machines I heard some of the frankest pickup lines since eighth grade ("You've got real defined deltoids for a girl"). A truck perpetually parked out front had vanity plates that read: LFT WTS. Another one, PRSS 250, I didn't recognize as a vanity plate until I understood the prestige of bench pressing 250 pounds.

  I personally couldn't bench press a fully loaded steam iron. I didn't join the health club to lose weight, or to meet the young Adonis who admired my (dubiously defined) deltoids. I am content with my lot in life, save for one irksome affliction: I am what's known in comic-book jargon as the ninety-eight-pound weakling. I finally tipped the scales into three digits my last year of high school, but "weakling" I've remained, pretty much since birth. In polite terminology I'm cerebral; the muscles between my ears are what I get by on. The last great body in my family was my Grandfather Henry. He wore muscle shirts in the days when they were known as BVDs, under his cotton work shirt, and his bronze tan stopped midbiceps. He got those biceps by hauling floor joists and hammering up roof beams every day of his life, including his last. How he would have guffawed to see a roomful of nearly naked bankers and attorneys, pale as plucked geese, heads down, eyes fixed on a horizon beyond the water cooler, pedaling like bats out of hell on bolted-down bicycles. I expect he'd offer us all a job. If we'd pay our thirty dollars a month to him, we could come out to the construction site and run up and down ladders bringing him nails. That's why I'm embarrassed about all this. I'm afraid I share his opinion of unproductive sweat.

  Actually, he'd be more amazed than scornful. His idea of fun was watching Ed Sullivan or snoozing in a recliner, or ideally, both at once. Why work like a maniac on your day off? To keep your heart and lungs in shape. Of course. But I haven't noticed any vanity plates that say GD LNGS. The operative word here is vanity.

  Standards of beauty in every era are things that advertise, usually falsely: "I'm rich and I don't have to work." How could you be a useful farmhand, or even an efficient clerk-typist, if you have long, painted fingernails? Four-inch high heels, like the bound feet of Chinese aristocrats, suggest you don't have to do anything efficiently, except maybe put up your tootsies on an ottoman and eat bonbons. (And I'll point out here that aristocratic men wore the first high heels.) In my grandmother's day, women of all classes lived in dread of getting a tan, since that betrayed a field worker's station in life. But now that the field hand's station is occupied by the office worker, a tan, I suppose, advertises that Florida and Maui are within your reach. Fat is another peculiar cultural flip-flop: in places where food is scarce, beauty is three inches of subcutaneous fat deep. But here and now, jobs are sedentary and calories are relatively cheap, while the luxury of time to work them off is very dear. It still gives me pause to see an ad for a weight-loss program that boldly enlists: "First ten pounds come off free!" But that is about the size of it, in this strange food-drenched land of ours. After those first ten, it gets expensive.

  As a writer I could probably do my job fine with no deltoids at all, or biceps or triceps, so long as you left me those vermicelli-sized muscles that lift the fingers to the keyboard. (My vermicellis are very well defined.) So when I've writ my piece, off I should merrily go to build a body that says I don't really have a financial obligation to sit here in video-terminal bondage.

  Well, yes. But to tell the truth, the leisure body and even the GD LNGS are not really what I was after when I signed up at Pecs-R-Us. What I craved, and long for still, is to be strong. I've never been strong. In childhood, team sports were my most reliable source of humiliation. I've been knocked breathless to the ground by softballs, basketballs, volleyballs, and once, during a wildly out-of-hand game of Red Rover, a sneaker. In every case I knew my teammates were counting on me for a volley or a double play or anyhow something more than clutching my stomach and rolling upon the grass. By the time I reached junior high I wasn't even the last one picked anymore. I'd slunk away long before they got to the bottom of the barrel.

  Even now, the great mortification of my life is that visitors to my home sometimes screw the mustard and pickle jar lids back on so tightly I can't get them open! (The visitors probably think they are just closing them enough to keep the bugs
out.) Sure, I can use a pipe wrench, but it's embarrassing. Once, my front gate stuck, and for several days I could only leave home by clambering furtively through the bougainvilleas and over the garden wall. When a young man knocked on my door to deliver flowers one sunny morning, I threw my arms around him. He thought that was pretty emotional, for florists' mums. He had no idea he'd just casually pushed open the Berlin Wall.

  My inspiration down at the health club was a woman firefighter who could have knocked down my garden gate with a karate chop. I still dream about her triceps. But I've mostly gotten over my brief fit of muscle envy. Oh, I still make my ongoing, creative stabs at body building: I do "girl pushups," and some of the low-impact things from Jane Fonda's pregnant-lady workout book, even if I'm not. I love to run, because it always seems like there's a chance you might actually get somewhere, so I'll sometimes cover a familiar mile or so of our country road after I see my daughter onto the school bus. (The driver confessed that for weeks he thought I was chasing him; he never stopped.) And finally, my friends have given me an official item of exercise equipment that looks like a glob of blue putty, which you're supposed to squeeze a million times daily to improve your grip. That's my current program. The so-called noncompetitive atmosphere of the health club whipped me, hands down. Realistically, I've always known I was born to be a "before" picture. So I won't be seen driving around with plates that boast: PRSS 250.

  Maybe: OPN JRS.

  CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE AT BREAKFAST

  I have a child who was born with the gift of focus, inclined to excel at whatever she earnestly pursues. Soon after her second birthday she turned to the earnest pursuit of languor, and shot straight through the ranks to world-class dawdler. I thought it might be my death.

  Like any working stiff of a mother keeping the family presentable and solvent, I lived in a flat-out rush. My daughter lived on Zen time. These doctrines cannot find peace under one roof. I tried everything I could think of to bring her onto my schedule: five-minute countdowns, patient explanations of our itinerary, frantic appeals, authoritarianism, the threat of taking her to preschool exactly however she was dressed when the clock hit seven. (She went in PJs, oh delight! Smug as Brer Rabbit in the briars.) The more I tried to hurry us along, the more meticulously unhurried her movements became.

  My brother pointed out that this is how members of the Japanese Parliament carry out a filibuster--by shuffling up to the voting box so extremely slowly it can take one person an hour to get across the room, and a month or two to get the whole vote in. It's called "cow walking," he reported. Perfect, I said. At my house we are having a Cow Life.

  And that's how it was, as I sat at breakfast one morning watching my darling idle dangerously with her breakfast. I took a spectacularly deep breath and said, in a voice I imagined was calm, "We need to be going very soon. Please be careful not to spill your orange juice."

  She looked me in the eye and coolly knocked over her glass.

  Bang, my command was dead. Socks, shirt, and overalls would have to be changed, setting back the start of my workday another thirty minutes. Thirty-five, if I wanted to show her who was boss by enforcing a five-minute time-out. She knew exactly what she was doing. A filibuster.

  I'd been warned the day would dawn when my sweet, tractable daughter would become a Terrible Two. And still this entirely predictable thing broadsided me, because in the beginning she was mine--as much a part of my body, literally, as my own arms and legs. The milk I drank knit her bones in place, and her hiccups jarred me awake at night. Children come to us as a dramatic coup of the body's fine inner will, and the process of sorting out "self" from "other" is so gradual as to be invisible to a mother's naked soul. In our hearts, we can't expect one of our own limbs to stand up one day and announce its own agenda. It's too much like a Stephen King novel.

  Later in the day I called a friend to tell my breakfast war story. She had a six-year-old, so I expected commiseration. The point of my call, really, was to hear that one could live through this and that it ended. Instead, my friend was quiet. "You know," she said finally, "Amanda never went through that. I worry about her. She works so hard to please everybody. I'm afraid she'll never know how to please herself."

  A land mine exploded in the back of my conscience. My child was becoming all I'd ever wanted.

  The way of a parent's love is a fool's progress, for sure. We lean and we lean on the cherished occupation of making ourselves obsolete. I applauded my child's first smile, and decoded her doubtful early noises to declare them "language." I touched the ground in awe of her first solo steps, as if she alone among primates had devised bipedal locomotion. Each of these events in its turn--more than triumph and less than miracle--was a lightening, feather by feather, of the cargo of anxious hope that was delivered to me with my baby at the slip of our beginning.

  "We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up," claims Annie Dillard. That's just about the whole truth, a parent's incantation. Wake up, keep breathing, look alive. It's only by forming separateness and volition that our children relieve us of the deepest parental dread: that they might somehow not wake up, after all, but fail to thrive and grow, remaining like Sleeping Beauty in the locked glass case of a wordless infancy. More times than I could count, in those early days, I was stopped in the grocery by some kindly matron who exclaimed over my burbling pastel lump of baby: "Don't you wish you could keep them like that forever?" Exactly that many times, I bit the urge to shout back, "Are you out of your mind?"

  From the day she emerged open-mouthed in the world, I've answered my child's cries with my own gaping wonder, scrambling to part the curtains and show the way to wakefulness. I can think or feel no more irresistible impulse. In magnificent pantomime, I demonstrate to my small shadow the thousand and one ways to be a person, endowed with opinions. How could it be a surprise that after two years the lessons started to take? The shadow began to move of its own accord, exhibiting the skill of opinion by any means necessary. Barreling pell-mell through life was not my daughter's style; a mother ought to arrange mornings to allow time for communing with the oatmeal--that was her first opinion. How could I fail to celebrate this new red-letter day? There had been a time when I'd reduced my own personal code to a button on my blue-jeans jacket that advised: QUESTION AUTHORITY. A few decades later, the motto of my youth blazed resplendent on my breakfast table, the color of Florida sunshine. I could mop up, now, with maternal pride, or eat crow.

  Oh, how slight the difference between "independent" and "ornery." A man who creates spectacular sculptures out of old car bodies might be a wonderful character, until he moves in next door. Children who lip off to their parents are cute in movies because they're in movies, and not in our life. Another of my brother's wise nuggets, offered over the phone one Saturday while I tried to manage family chaos and pour a cement porch foundation, was: "Remember, kids are better in the abstract than in the concrete." Of all kid abstractions, independence may be the hardest one to accept in the concrete, because we're told how we'll feel about it long before it arrives. It's the mother of all childhood stereotypes, the Terrible Twos.

  Now there are stereotypes that encircle a problem like a darn good corral, and there are stereotypes that deliver a problem roaring to our doorstep, and I'm suspicious of this one, the Terrible Twos. If we'd all heard half so much about, say, the "Fat Fours," I'd bet dollars to donuts most four-year-olds would gain lots of weight, and those who didn't would be watched for the first sign of puffiness. Children are adept at becoming what we expect them to be. "Terrible" does not seem, by any stretch, to be a wise expectation. My Spanish-speaking friends--who, incidentally, have the most reliably child-friendly households in my acquaintance--tell me there's no translation for "Terrible Twos" in their language.

  The global truth, I think, is that the twos are time-consuming and tidiness-impaired, but not, intrinsically, terrible. A cow in parliament is not a terrible cow. It's just a question of how it fits in with the plan.
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  The plan in our culture, born under the sign of freedom with mixed-message ascendant, is anyone's guess. The two developmental stages we parents are most instructed to dread--the twos and teens--both involve a child's formation of a sovereign identity. This, a plumb horror of assertive children, in the land of assertiveness training and weekend seminars on getting what you want through creative visualization. Expert advice on the subject of children's freedom is a pawnshop of clashing platitudes: We are to cultivate carefully the fragile stem of self-esteem. We are to consider a thing called "tough love," which combines militarist affection with house arrest, as remedy for adolescent misbehavior. We are to remember our children are only passing through us like precious arrows launched from heaven, but in most states we're criminally liable for whatever target they whack. The only subject more loaded with contradictions is the related matter of sex, which--in the world we've packaged for adolescents--is everywhere, visibly, the goal, and nowhere allowed. Let them eat it, drink it, wear it on their jeans, but don't for heaven's sakes pass out condoms, they might be inspired to do it. This is our inheritance, the mixed pedigree of the Puritans and Free Enterprise. We're to dream of our children growing up to be decision makers and trend setters, and we're to dream it through our teeth, muttering that a trend-setting toddler is a pain, and a teenager's decisions are a tour down the River Styx. How, then, to see it through?

  The traditional camp says to hold the reins hard until the day we finally drop them, wish our big babies Godspeed, and send them out to run the world. I say, Good luck, it sounds like we'll have men and women with the mental experience of toddlers running domestic and foreign policy. (And, in fact, it sometimes appears that we do.) This is the parenting faction that also favors spanking. Studies of corporal punishment show, reliably, that kids who are spanked are more likely to be aggressive with their peers. For all the world, you'd think they were just little people, learning what they were taught.