Flawless

I may be going to some sort of hell where feminists send other feminists when they misbehave. Yesterday, for a belated birthday present, I took Leibovitz’s eleven-year-old daughter to the Clinique counter for a make-over. While she looks older than your average Chinese Olympic gymnast, she is, after all, still a girl. Eleven is not a milestone birthday and so did not deserve this premature ushering into womanhood, and even if it were a milestone birthday, I should have done something more empowering like rock-climbing or chemistry experiments or volunteering the two of us for a day of nail hammering for Habitat for Humanity. But I didn’t do these better things. Instead, I led a fresh-faced lamb of a child to the slaughter-house so she could start obsessing now about flaws she does not have. This is the legacy of womanhood I have willingly chosen to pass down.

And the reasons I did it are more shameful than the act itself. The reasons I did it were because I was too lazy to think of something substantive and, more importantly, because I wanted to be cool.

To a ‘tween.

In my defense, it wasn’t even my idea. It was her mother’s. And in my further defense—in case Leibovitz had gone momentarily off the rails because it is the end of summer and she’s ready for the kids to go back to school—I called the Clinique counter to make sure this was an accepted practice. The Clinique woman assured me it was done often and she scheduled an appointment with Amanda, the Clinique Make-over Expert. So my conscience was clear. For awhile.

When I handed my protégée over, a look of horror swept across Amanda’s face. “A makeover? On her?!” she asked. I told her I’d been assured by the voice on the phone that they do this all of the time, and Amanda said in a near wail, “I’ve never done one on an eleven-year-old.” I looked at Little Leib, who looked back at me as if to say, Are you going to make her give me my birthday present or what? I set my mouth and raised an eyebrow. Amanda straightened her faux lab coat and directed us to the make-over station while she fussed with cotton balls, Q-tips and her composure. Still, she questioned me. Was I sure we wanted to do this? It was only just that the child’s skin was so beautiful, and what if she had a reaction (even though Clinique products are hypo-allergenic, she was quick to add). I questioned Little Leib about what make-up of her mother’s she had played with.
“Pretty much all of it,” she said.
I nodded at Amanda and said, “She’ll be fine.”
Amanda set her mouth, as if I’d asked her to pierce the child’s eyebrow, and opened some powder.
“Well go with a natural look,” she said. And the make-over began.

To Amanda’s credit, once we chatted a bit and she discovered that this was just for some fun, that I was absolutely not going to be driving the child to auditions for a remake of Pretty Baby, and I would be buying a few Clinique products for myself, she relaxed, and did the thing I did not do. That is, she did some good. Virtually everything she applied she explained to Little Leib that she really didn’t need it because she had such beautiful skin, such pretty eyes, such nice lips, and because Amanda is probably only 22, she knew exactly how to say these things without sounding like an adult trying to dissuade a girl from starting down a path that could end up looking like Joan Rivers (which is probably exactly where Leibovitz and I are going to end up because we’re a little worried about our eyes and age spots and are thinking maybe some treatment is needed).

Little Leib did look very nice when Amanda tossed her last cottonball in the waste bin. She had not been transformed into a Lindsay or a Britney, but was very tastefully highlighted. It seemed to put an extra spring in her step to be a little closer to womanhood, though I can't say if I gained any cool points. I bought her some pink translucent lip color that I’m pretty sure she’ll have smacked off before anyone notices given the veracity with which she chews gum. Amanda threw in a trial-size mascara but withheld the bag for a moment and reminded us that it was “just to play with.” Little Leib nodded solemnly and no doubt made a mental note to apply it during lunch break on the first day of sixth grade next week.

Maybe I’m gong to feminist hell. Probably not. The kid would have gotten her fingers into the bronzer pot with or without me. But I do feel a little guilty. Her naked face reminds me of her baby face that was a force to be reckoned with about six seconds after she was born, and I really don’t want her to ever feel she has to hide it behind a layer of powder and sparkle to make it more acceptable to the rest of the world. For that matter, I hope Leibovitz and I can withstand the siren song of the Botox needle for the exact same reasons.

Girls Gone Wild

Here’s a question: when you are supposed to write 25 pages + every four weeks to send off to your mentor, when exactly are you supposed to blog? Bigger question: if you blog, will you give away your good ideas and send your mentor 25 pages of crap?

I survived the ten-day residency, but not without some serious teeth gnashing. Who knew Maine in July does not look and feel like the Christmas cover of the L.L. Bean catalog? I knew there wouldn’t be snow, but I think I was expecting reindeer and the need for crewneck sweaters and wool socks. Instead, what I got was heat and humidity and a dorm room without AC that was on the first floor, so if I opened the windows the smoke from various nicotine addicts (poets, mostly) wafted into my room.

Also, it turns out when you are middle aged the cozy, good times of dorm life feel a bit more like prison, including the 1” foam mattress and communal showers. I did get compliments on making my room extra cozy with cardboard fold up iPod speakers, postcards pinned to the bulletin board for artwork, a scarf stretched across the jail house bed, and Petey, the stuffed parrot that Z won for me in Oregon last month, resting patiently on my pillow. This decorating was not because I’m a Martha Stewart wannabe, so much as it was that I was miserable for the first four days and thought making the space mine might help deal with the homesickness. It turns out, the room still looked like something from “Oz” (Unit B, not Em City) and it didn’t help much.

Basically, I felt like I was in prison for the first three days because of the digs and having virtually every moment of my day structured. So to survive, I had long phone conversations with friends, my mother, and Z, who is in Zimbabwe, and was so busy whining and being miserable and giving in to crying jags in the privacy of my cell that I failed to notice a lot of first semester students were miserable too. I also didn’t take in to account the beauty that surrounded me and the excellent opportunity for learning and communion with other writers that I’d paid good money to experience. I’d like to tell you that I had an epiphany that led me to some Zen-like, be-here-now state, but what I had that made it okay is this: a lot of stout and a tequila shot.

That’s right. I graduated from college without one drunken episode to my name, which had more to do with my not really liking the taste of alcohol (when compared with, say, Coke and Pop-tarts) than it did the temperance oath I signed when entering my alma mater. And then at 41 I discovered that the secret to surviving dorm life and new-experience social anxiety is to get drunk with some people in your “major”, go to a talent show, drink some more, hug people you just met like they are long lost friends, sing Stevie Nicks songs in the women’s room with two poets, some novelists, an essayist, and an erotica writer, and then stagger off to bed.

If only I had known this in 1985.

Aside from reliving a youth I never had, the program ended up feeling like a perfect fit for me. There is warmth but nobody will be blowing sunshine up my nether regions. The faculty appears to be supportive and is focused on practical matters like publishing as much as they are “Art.” My contemporaries feel like just that—most of us are coming in on equal footing, with a variety of strengths and weaknesses.

It’s going to be a lot of work. It’s going to cost a lot of money. It’s going to be the genesis for some angst-ridden blogs. But I think it will be good, and in January I’ll get to find out if Maine in winter lives up to those L.L. Bean covers when I return for my second residency as a seasoned pro.

Best of all, in January I’ll be in a hotel and not in a jail cell.

What Not to Wear

I’m on my way to Maine to begin a low-residency MFA program in nonfiction. I’m not what you would call a person who plans ahead (hence my antiquated age when finding true, excellent love and deciding I needed a more substantial degree to support my career), so it’s hard for me to fathom the next ten days here, let alone the five semesters it will take before I can add the F to my earlier M and A. Last night, however, I was planning ahead. I planned ahead for the rough, industrial sheets I’d be warned would be on the bed in the dorm I’ll be sleeping in for 9 nights. I planned ahead for the possible muggy, breezeless weather with a sexy little red mini fan. I planned ahead for a tight schedule and wrote up reading assessments on evaluations forms I’ll be expected to complete at the end of the sessions I attend.

I also planned my outfit for today. Celery cropped pants and an apple green sweater. It seemed like the right mix of I’m-not-a-total-slob and I’m-too-buys-with-my-writing-to-be-a-fashionista. I felt quite good in it until I caught a glimpse of the mirror in the airport women’s room and realized the look I’d accomplished was really just good old Midwestern Jolly Green Giant.

And so the journey begins.

Greed

In the last six weeks this is what I have had:

--Z’s love
--a negative result on a test for lymphoma
--a trip to Alaska with Z
--a trip to the Oregon coast with Z
--five weeks in Seattle with Z
--a week in Indiana with Z at my love nest/Scottie dog house
--a stimulus check from George W. Bush

This is what I’m feeling today on the occasion of Z’s departure: greed. I’ve had everything I could want, but I want more.

Recipe from a Domestic Goddess

For years I have watched my mother cook big portions of Midwestern meals with annoyance. She is not one of those women who enjoys time spent in the kitchen or who delights in feeding the masses. I’m fairly certain when she thinks about the Adam and Eve story it is not just the pain of childbirth that Eve is cursed with for canoodling with that serpent, but also the agony of the kitchen.

Mom is a good cook but she would rather be reading. I don’t blame her. At a wedding shower several years ago, the guests were given an index card and were instructed to write down their favorite recipe to give to the bride. Mine was for the World’s Best Cheeseburger. 1. Get in car. 2. Drive to McDonald’s. 3. Order Cheeseburger. 4. Pay 5. Serve in wrapper. Seriously, why slave away in a kitchen for hours when there are fine dining establishments and a grocer’s freezer full of delectable meals?

And so it happens that I am 41 and I do not know how to cook. Even macaroni is problematic. The water shows no sign of boiling, so I start reading my book, and the next thing I know the water has boiled over or if I remembered to pour the macaroni in, it has burned to the bottom of the pan. I scramble eggs at the highest possible temperature because I see no reason not to treat the stove like the microwave. It could be because I’m absent-minded, but I prefer to think of it as my own silent, feminist protest. For awhile I really wanted that T-shirt with the 1950s woman on it that said, Don’t assume I cook.

So, I have mixed emotions about the fact that I cooked my first ever pot roast for Z this week. While he was at work I marched myself down to the market with my Baggu bags like a real, environmentally conscience gourmet, and I bought a hunk of meat that was too big for two people, some carrots, some potatoes, some Lipton soup, some Kerry Gold butter (because potatoes without Irish butter are a sin), and a bottle of red “Mad Housewife” wine. I came back to the flat where I discovered that roast comes from an actual, bloody, dead animal, which was a shock to my system. Also, I discovered that Z did not have a lovely Faberware roast pan like Moms, but instead a 2 quart Pyrex baking dish meant for cheesecakes and casseroles instead of roasting. I could not find his paring knife (end table with last night’s peach), so had to peel the potatoes and carrots with a giant blade meant for chopping vegetables Benny Hana style. I imagined Z coming home at 6:00 only to find me in a pool of blood on the kitchen floor because I’d sliced open my carotid artery. (I brought the portable phone into the kitchen just in case I needed to call 911 with the stub of what might be left of my dialing finger.) I arranged the potatoes artfully and popped the thing in the oven, praying for the best, expecting the worst.

My sense of accomplishment for what my mother assures me “is not rocket science” caused me some stress. I felt good about being a ‘real’ woman, about surprising Z with an actual (hopefully edible) meal when he came in from his hard day at work. I took a shower while the pot roasted and had phrases from 1950s marriage manuals for women going through my head about always making sure when your husband arrives home that you are “fresh” and have brushed your hair and have wiped the children’s faces and instructed them to play quietly while Daddy unwinds and while you, the good housewife, listen and do not bother him with your petty frustrations of the day out of respect for the hard day he has had, working to provide for you and the children. And then I felt really annoyed with myself for falling into the cooking trap that I have so carefully avoided for over four decades. Even more annoyed that it had pleased me more than a little to have finally done something like a “normal” woman for once in my life.

But then the pot roast started smelling good and Z was coming home soon and I forgot about my feminist ideals. Despite cooking an hour longer than it needed to while Z distracted me upon his arrival, the roast came out tender and juicy and just the right amount of doneness.

It’s a slippery slope now. If he starts expecting big meals awaiting him when he comes home from work, I’ll have no one but myself to blame.

Yesterday I heard on NPR that the Irish writer Nuala O’Faolain died Friday at 68 of lung cancer, and my first thought was, “Why didn’t she tell me that she was was sick?!” This was followed quickly with the realization that though I did have a very brief conversation with her in 2005 during the Aspen Summer Words Writers’ Conference, I don’t actually know her. Then I did the next logical thing, which was burst into tears.

Terri Gross played a 2001 interview with her and I cried a bit harder. I’m not sure what it is about her writing that makes readers (some readers; this reader) feel that they not only know her but are good friends, but I suspect it has to do with the honest, unvarnished way she dishes up servings from her life. Hearing her responses on Fresh Air made me feel as if I’d just gotten a phone call from a friend, and so of course that made me cry a little harder.

Other authors I have adored have died, and though I might have a moment of sadness, I generally do not feel compelled to go into a period of mourning or a desire to send the family a floral tribute. But there was something about Nuala that made this feel like MY loss.

Possibly, my reaction is simply because her books are rich and smart and talk about a country that feels like my own home though it is not, and it is sad to know there will be no more of her words. It could be a sadness that so many of her “issues” appear to have gone unresolved. On a personal level, the fact that most of the attendees at Summer Words fell a little in love with her intelligence, wicked wit, and warmth. She did have a way of making you feel you’d known her your whole life, so perhaps that is why I was momentarily annoyed with her for not phoning to say she had terminal lung cancer so I could prepare myself and take her some chicken soup.

I have been drawn again and again to My Dream of You, her novel about a writer at middle age who, while researching a court case during the Famine, discovers more about herself, her country, women of her culture, and humanity than she does about the case’s outcome. The central mystery she tries to solve (aside from the one she is researching), is how a middle aged woman without a husband and, more importantly, without children, defines her purpose. During the Fresh Air interview, she speaks candidly about this, and how what all humans want is some sense of why they were put on this earth. She says to Terri Gross, What am I for?

For most people, the simplest answer (though there may be other answers as well) involves propagating the species, catapulting their own genetics a little further into the future, so in the face of personal annihilation, there is the hope that some little cluster of genes directly connected to them will see the next decade, the next century, etc. And also, there is the day-to-day sense of purpose. If a person has a baby that needs feeding or a five year old who needs reminding not to play in the street or a sixteen year old with a hand out for gas money, there is purpose. It may not be inventing a light bulb (or discovering a cure for the lung cancer), but you have contributed something that should last beyond you. This is a persistent theme in O’Faolain's writing, and even in the interview she gave on RTE just a few weeks before her death she comes back to the issue of what she has NOT done with her life, of who will mourn her, of who will not.

This is, I think, why I briefly considered wearing black today. In a world where women have stronger and more often heard voices than possibly any other time in history, there are not enough voices like this one. I could easily go to a bookstore and find books written by young women wondering about love and what sort of lives they might create for themselves, I can easily find authors who will tell a glamorous Sex and the City version of what it is to be single in their mid-30s. There are more than enough books about what it is to be a mother, both the frustrations and joys at all the different stages. But to find a woman towards the end of middle-age speaking candidly about choices and circumstances she made that affect her daily? It’s hard to come by. And it’s going to be even harder now that one of those few voices have been silenced.

Addendum

Z, ZiMa, and I are in Minnesota, where we met up so she could see the places Z haunted as an undergrad and graduate student, as well as meet his friends. She still seems lovely, still seems to like me, but when we are alone in our room, Z says something like, “I’m afraid I’ve discovered something that will add to your mortification.” It seems the ancient suitcase I loaned ZiMa when hers fell apart, and which Z has used to cart his belongings to Minnesota, had its own secrets. Z can’t be sure if his mother discovered them or not, but in its recesses were some maxi pads, one unwrapped (!) tampon, and two colored condoms that expired in 1999. It’s bad enough that Z knows about the latter items, but his mother! Oh, woe is me.

Z might have kept this information to himself to save me the embarrassment. Obviously, I have no need of expired condoms or unwrapped tampons or pads that were made back when they had the thickness of futons for Barbie dolls. He can’t help himself though. Last year he accidentally read an email from my mother that said something about the two of us together, and the knowledge that he had read it embarrassed me so severely I had to hide myself under my coat as we walked down Madison Avenue in Seattle. It delighted him to see me acting like a schoolgirl, and I know in sharing this information he is just hoping for a repeat performance.

The wages of sin are sometimes paid on the installment plan.