All About Women

by Andrew M. Greeley

  It was at Glacier Bay that Liz Kearney, a normally circumspect and soft-spoken young matron, told Patty, if excellent sources are to be credited, that she should “fuck off,” and that Bill Kearney, himself a psychiatrist, used the words obsessive and compulsive and—it is reported—“anal-retentive bitch”: striking evidence of how distraught this normally quiet couple had become. It is also reported on good authority that Bill suggested five years of classic analysis as the only hope for Patty.

  Actually she had seen a therapist for years without any positive result.

  Her husband’s reaction is not recorded in the received version of the adventure. However, some of the more cynical women of the parish argue that he doubtless did what he always did when “Patty flakes out” (their words): “Not one damn thing.”

  In any event, the friendship was over, definitively. According to the aforementioned parish harpies, it served the Kearneys right for getting mixed up with Patty in the first place.

  It is generally believed that upon returning, Patty dispatched a vicious and outspoken letter to Liz Kearney, describing in considerable detail what was wrong with her as a human being and as a wife and freely predicting that her husband would leave her if she did not mend her ways. Liz, reverting to type, had the good sense not to answer, though she did indulge herself to the extent of showing the text to some of the aforementioned harpies. Which was the equivalent of publishing it in Kup’s column.

  Patty’s letter illustrates an unfortunate aspect of her indecisiveness, one that grew worse with time: she would explode with anger against any available target when the strain of choice became unbearable. The clergy and the religious were excellent targets, especially since their behavior often made them suitable inkblots and because they were usually in a poor position to defend themselves.

  Patty’s anger was fearsome, especially when she put it on paper. Heaven knows she had reason to be angry—at her parents, who had shortchanged her in her preparation for life, and at her husband, who tolerated her flakiness, but she was unable to direct the anger at appropriate targets. So God help the surrogate targets.

  Since she was durably attractive, the major, if discreetly asked, question in the parish was, of course, about sex: what was Patty like in bed? One school thought that someone as flaky as Patty would surely be frigid. Another, more sophisticated view was that once she was properly stirred up, Patty would be spectacular as a bedmate. She was good at everything else, why not sex, especially since beyond a certain point, that activity requires very little in the way of decision making. Getting her started, according to this opinion, might be hard work, but after that, the rewards would be substantial.

  Certainly this perspective would explain why her husband so readily accepted her decision-making daffiness.

  Patty was born thirty years too late. In the 1950s a matron of her age—careful homemaker, excellent mother, faithful and helpful wife of a successful professional man, arguably a skilled lover—would have been entitled to relax, accept the accolades her accomplishments had merited. She might have consumed a few too many martinis, played bridge a little too much, flirted more than was acceptable, and eventually worn too much makeup, but there would be no denying the achievements of her life.

  Two social changes intervened—feminism and physical fitness. Together they caused Patty’s downfall.

  Patty was of the first generation which came out of college with the conviction that a woman ought to be something besides a wife and a mother. She was ambivalent about this point, severely criticizing most of the successful working women of the parish for neglect of their children, but envying their cool professional competence.

  Hence the terrifying question which had plagued her since she dropped out of college after her sophomore year (unable to decide whether the final two years were worth the money it would cost her parents): what should I be?

  She could no more dismiss the question and accept the carefree answer of her mother’s generation (nothing else besides a wife and mother) than one can avoid jamming one’s tongue against what might be a sore tooth.

  The problem, as noted above, was that she might have done a score of things well. If her abilities were limited to secretarial work, she might have moved into her husband’s office (though whether he wanted her around during the day was problematic) or that of some other lawyer—part-time at first and then full-time as the nest emptied.

  Or if her abilities were limited to teaching, she could have taught religion in the local Catholic boys’ high school, where she was a great success as a temporary substitute. (And as evidence that she was not a prude, one may cite the fact that she rather enjoyed the students’ attentive admiration.)

  But the Lord God, something of a trickster, it is to be feared, gave her a long menu from which to choose and no obligations outside herself to impose choice.

  So she tried everything—she did part-time secretarial work in our suburb, abandoned that to return to school, quit school to take up real-estate sales, left that to teach at the high school, and departed from the school when they offered her a full-time job with pay for finishing her college and M.A. coursework. Then she turned to volunteer work, first with the parish women’s society as vice-president (she turned down the presidency, which she could have had without opposition), then with the local community organization. She left that to sell women’s dresses in a tony shop in our local mall. She quit that to take up piano lessons and abandoned them to return to school, since a degree was more important than music, should she ever need to go back to work.

  Each time she abandoned a project, Patty would get on the phone and tell all her friends, “I’m just not ready for that yet.”

  No one ever asked her when she would be ready.

  So it went, a charming and graceful woman in an awkward and seemingly frivolous dance step, not lighthearted enough to be musical comedy and not tragic enough to be serious ballet.

  The parish took Patty’s dance for granted and watched each new movement in her waltz with sympathy and amusement. “Have you heard what Patty’s done now?”

  The kids were the final excuse for her twirling away from one position to another. She quit the community organization because it would have interfered with the family summer vacation—which by now the kids looked forward to as they would to a case of mono. She abandoned her real-estate job (at which she was reportedly making astonishing amounts of money) so that she could devote all the Christmas season to her children returning from college, a presence which did not particularly enthuse the kids.

  Such amusements would have been relatively harmless if Patty had lived in a world in which there was no time to slip through your fingers. But the kids grew older, the nest emptied completely, life forged beyond the most generously estimated halfway mark, and Patty saw time running out on her. If she didn’t become something, then she wouldn’t be anything. Her waltz became panicky, frantic, and her outbursts of anger more frequent.

  In a few years, as she saw it, instead of having too many choices, she wouldn’t have any.

  That’s when physical fitness intervened.

  Patty leaped from fad to fad as she had from career to career. There had been a meditation phase, a biofeedback period, a health-food kick, a yoga interlude. She soon found that she “was not ready” for those activities.

  Then came running.

  While her body continued to be appealing at an age when many women would have longed for such an attractive figure, Patty gave it little heed. Indeed, she condemned those women whose preoccupation with physical fitness caused them to neglect their children.

  Then one of her friends persuaded her to accompany her on her training runs for the Chicago Marathon.

  As the pastor of the parish remarked, it was a good thing that she turned to running instead of to cocaine, because the result was instant addiction.

  She had found in the runner’s high (whose existence she denied) another biological imperative, another irresistibly impose
d external demand which became a life-shaping program for her. To her husband’s astonishment and her kids’ delight, they were no longer the most important elements in her life. She missed a graduation to compete in a race and refused to accompany her husband to a bar association dinner at which he was being installed as an officer, because she might break training.

  The family loyally supported her efforts, returning the favor for all the basketball and volleyball games she had attended in earlier years. The kids cheered, made banners, celebrated with victory parties. Her husband was inordinately proud to be married to a woman who won the Chicago Marathon in her class after less than a year of running.

  She was good at it, you see. Patty was good at everything. And in the world of runners and her running team she was praised for being good at it, praise which she had never permitted herself to receive for anything else in her life.

  Her husband was also pleased with Patty’s physical transformation. Poor Pathetic Patty disappeared, to be replaced by self-possessed, self-reliant Patty. Her slumped shoulders straightened, her bent head tilted up, long unused and flabby muscles became firm. Habitually a little underweight from her expenditure of nervous energy, Patty put on ten well-distributed and solid pounds because of compulsive care about her “training table.” In a running suit, she caused cars to slow down, and in shorts and T-shirt during the marathon she attracted the lingering, if chauvinist, attention of TV cameras from two different channels. If she minded the replays on the ten o’clock news, she certainly did not protest very loudly.

  Those of us who care about Patty were delighted. Marathon running might not be exactly high-level intellectual or religious activity, but it gave her something to live for and to keep her happy, so why knock it? The dance from career to career to career had ended, thank heaven. Patty had found her identity in the deepest biological constraints of our species: she was a runner.

  Moreover, perhaps just to prove that She can plant grace anywhere, God managed to slip Sister Claire Marie into Patty’s story.

  There are not many Catholic college presidents who run in marathons, and Sister is probably the only one with a D.Phil. from Oxford. Those who know how anticlerical Patty had become insist that she and Claire had become friends before Patty discovered that she was a college president and a nun.

  “Poor woman needed someone her own age to talk to,” Sister later said. “I listened and we became friends. She didn’t hold my religious vocation against me. Furthermore, hope is never over till it’s over.”

  When asked if running is not an addiction for her like it is for Patty, Sister snorts, “Problems I have but addiction isn’t one of them. I run because I like to. Poor Patricia runs because she has to.”

  Sister looks like Patty, a little less sexy perhaps and a little more determined, but same slender, fragile Irish-linen sort of woman. She’s one of those brilliant, gifted, sensitive women who make you regret that the religious life is fast disappearing. Those of us who were pulling for Patty thought that Sister’s intervention in her life would turn everything around.

  As it turned out, we had misread the situation. Patty’s increasingly confident self-awareness was the first step in a belated construction of her own identity. She attempted no second steps.

  The women who raced with her were not just runners. In addition to Sister, they were lawyers, doctors, accountants, teachers—and mothers, too, if not always wives. As fellow runners—members of the sisterhood, so to speak—they were immune to the charge of neglecting their offspring. Some of them must have staged informal consciousness-raising sessions, which brought Patty’s only occasionally expressed rage boiling to the surface.

  Sister wasn’t part of these sessions. As she is said to have commented, “There’s nothing wrong with my consciousness.” You’ll never persuade her to break any of Patricia’s confidences. Women from the parish who were still close to Patricia at that time, however, insist that Sister was keeping her sane and forcing her to face reality. Some of them contend that if her husband hadn’t been so stupid, Sister would have eventually presided over a reconciliation. Others will tell you that it was too late even for such a vessel of grace as Claire Marie.

  As someone in the parish remarked after the event, when a woman’s midlife anger finally explodes, it almost always turns on the nearest target, her husband, regardless of how little or how much he is to blame. Patty’s husband had tolerated her flakiness, supported her various ventures into career and education, and never, as far as anyone knew, insisted that she ought to settle down and act like a good housewife. Compared with most husbands, he was a model of nonchauvinism.

  “A model addict, if you ask me,” Sister Claire Marie will tell you if you give her half a chance.

  But, poor dummy, he didn’t perceive that Patty was changing, that her new self-confidence had cleared a path for long-suppressed rage, and that he was the obvious target. He did not tread lightly, nor did he prepare to duck.

  Instead, in a model of male stupidity, he complained about her plans to travel, by herself, since he was on trial, to Los Angeles for the marathon there. He didn’t want his wife to be alone in that dubious and sinful city. Besides, wasn’t she pushing this running business a little too far? Why did she need national competition anyway?

  Well, that did it. All his life, he was told, he had used her to further his professional career, to maintain his house, and to raise his children. He had cheated her of the chance to become someone in her own right. She was sick of being known only as his wife. She wanted a life of her own, free from his exploitation and domination, he disgusted her, she did not care if she never saw him again.

  She stormed out of their bedroom that night and informed him that if he were in the house when she returned from Los Angeles, she would find herself an apartment “downtown.”

  She won in the thirty-five-to-forty class, competing defiantly with women who were often ten years younger than she was. Channel 7 sent a team to cover her. At the end of the race, looking exhausted, happy, and quite fetching with her sweat-drenched running shirt pasted against her chest, she was asked by the gushing woman reporter how her husband would react to her emergence as a successful national competitor.

  Patty smiled sweetly and said, “I don’t care how he reacts.”

  The few LaSalle Street lawyers who didn’t hear the remark on the ten o’clock Sunday-night news were informed about it before 8:30 the next morning.

  Her husband did not move out of the house. On the contrary, he was waiting for her when she returned from L.A. a week later, hoping for reconciliation, compromise, a new beginning, anything.

  He blew it, of course, as macho men do. “Where have you been,” he demanded sternly, “and what have you been doing?”

  Her answer, which he refuses to repeat, seems to have been obscene.

  There are two possible satisfactory closures to the story of Patricia, two reasonably happy endings.

  In one she leaves her husband and, strengthened by her athletic accomplishments, builds a new life for herself that is undeniably her own.

  In the other, perhaps with Sister’s help, she and her husband are reconciled and he actively supports her in her career choice; the two of them grow together, sharing strength instead of weakness.

  Unfortunately reality does not always opt between such neat closures. In fact, neither occurred.

  She did not move out of the house, but rather withdrew to the guest bedroom, where she still remains. She rejects all suggestions from her husband that they seek family counseling or talk to the parish priest or do something, anything, to save their marriage. “I’m not interested in that,” is her stock reply.

  She has stopped going to church and rarely speaks to her old friends in the parish. She evinces only mild interest in her children’s education, careers, loves. Running has become her life.

  She refuses to decide for separation or divorce or on a career which might provide her with income and financial independence. She earns
some money from endorsements of running equipment and has had a couple of modeling offers, about which she refuses to decide, so they slip away.

  One of the modeling offers, engineered by a friend in an ad agency, was from a famous national modeling agency which was desperately looking for “older” models. The guarantee for her first year was enormous.

  Patty replied that she wasn’t ready for that yet. Those who are down on her say that she never even told Sister about the offer before she turned it down. Another version is that she did and that Sister strongly urged her to accept the offer.

  “But, Claire, they might want me to model lingerie.”

  “You can always say no to that, Patricia; anyway, you’d look great in lingerie. It would be a great boost to your self-esteem.”

  There is some conviction that no nun would ever make a comment like that. These days, however, you can’t be sure what a nun might say.

  In any event, Patty rejected the offer without learning any of the details; her friendship with Sister seems to have waned after that.

  Patty seems quite content to accept her husband’s money as a matter of right and live in the same house with him. But she repudiated all obligations of a wife. “I’m finished with that,” she told him.

  Addiction to running gave her an outlet for her rage, but rage provided no further direction for her life or even the motivation to seek direction. She was content to be angry and to run. Everything has changed and nothing has changed. She still can’t or won’t make decisions.

  Occasionally she moves out of the house for a few days to visit a college friend or to stay at the apartment of a fellow runner (always female) who is out of town. She returns to her house after a few days, without apology or explanation. If she has any love affairs they are with men she meets on the marathon circuit; the parish, for all its intense curiosity, has been able to learn nothing about them.