BLAME IT ON THE MOVIES My twenties were one big walkabout. There is, on television, a series called Girls about young women floundering in their twenties. It is written, directed, and acted by Lena Dunham, who is not on a walkabout. Nevertheless, she captures the very special misery of being in your twenties. Of being clueless, desperate, lost. Looking for love, settling for crazy. Grabbing at solutions because they are solutions, just not to your problem. Being in your twenties has changed a lot since I was in my twenties, but it is still a time when everything awful that happens is awful in a romantic way, even if you don''t admit it (and you can''t admit it because then you would be less important in the tragedy you''re starring in, your own life) .
because in your twenties you know, even if you don''t admit this, either, even if this is buried deep in your subconscious, that you can waste an entire decade and still have a life. College did not prepare me for anything. At Barnard I majored in European history because my roommate, brilliant at history, always accurately guessed the exam essay questions. That is really the only reason. It was the easy way out. As I write this, I am struck by how shallow I was. A truly empty-headed thing. I was quick with a comeback, but a comeback is most emphatically not knowledge.
Also when I was at Barnard, a European history major, unlike a political science or English major, was not required to take comprehensives, a general examination in your major at the end of your senior year. I knew I would flunk comprehensives. I retained nothing. Recently I found a paper I wrote in college. "The Causes of the Franco-Prussian War." I got a B on it. I wondered if I pulled an all-nighter writing it. If I took NoDoz.
If Susan, my roommate, told me the causes and I parroted her. Today all I know about this war is who fought it, and that is only because of the war''s name. I wasn''t interested in European history. It didn''t cross my mind--this is so basic, it''s embarrassing--that I was supposed to major in something I was interested in. This is probably my mother''s fault. Isn''t everything your mother''s fault in some way? At this point in life I forgive her everything and besides am deeply grateful to her, but she picked all my high school classes: two years of Latin, three of French, four of English and history, journalism as an elective. No science except what was absolutely required. Or art.
She was raising writers. She had stern notions of what constituted an education for her daughters. However, no one ever asked me--no parent, no teacher, no high school or college counselor--"What are you interested in studying?" I didn''t connect interest with school. Or passion with school. In high school, the only class I liked was journalism. Not because I was writing. Because, for some reason, at Beverly Hills High School--a privileged place if ever there was, with its very own oil well polluting the environment and a basketball court whose floor parted in the center (if someone pushed a button or pulled a crank or lever) and retracted under bleachers to reveal a swimming pool--at this very fancy public school there was a linotype machine. We''re talking pre-computer age here--whenever you read a book, a newspaper, a magazine, it was because the words were set with actual lead type.
The linotype man would type my stories. The machine would convert my words to metal type, slugs of which, as I recall, came sliding down a shoot. Lead type is heavy. If you carried a lot of type in your shoulder bag--not that you would--it would break your shoulder. How wonderful that it was heavy, that I could hold words in my hand and they had weight. I was the front-page editor, and Thursday nights I would go to the typesetting building next to the gym, collect my type, and arrange the page as I had designed it. After tightening the frame to hold the type in position, I would ink the whole shebang, place paper on top, and roll a heavy roller over it to get an impression. Then I would proofread my page, replace typos with new type, and take a final proof.
It was the most fun in the world. It was craft satisfaction. Craft satisfaction comes from actually making something with your hands. It terms of education, it is practically obsolete. In college the only thing that interested me was dating. Being in love. In the library I had a reward system: ten minutes of studying, ten of daydreaming. Mostly about whatever boy I was obsessed with, reliving the last weekend, planning the next.
I have to say college completely cooperated here. Classes provided no competition for my yearnings. I took a course in plays, a foray out of history. We had to read a play a night. Strindberg, Ibsen, O''Casey, O''Neill, Wilder, went whizzing by. It''s hard to read a play. Seriously hard to understand what is happening, what the playwright intends. Reading one a night was ludicrous.
I still have trouble reading them, still have trouble now and then figuring out what the hell is going on. The final exam was a slew of multiple-choice questions. There was one about pork chops, which went something like this: "In which of these plays did pork chops figure?" All I knew about pork chops was, at my house, they came breaded with applesauce on the side. I had no idea what play featured pork chops. I still don''t, but I remember the question. It was ridiculous. I retained ridiculous. Modern Poetry was similar.
Wednesday Wallace Stevens, Friday Ezra Pound. A person could spend a lifetime trying to understand Stevens, and Pound is mind-bendingly obtuse. In Medieval History, there was so much required reading, all in books the professor had written, that no one could accomplish it, especially someone like me who had required daydreaming. I did love Art History. I have never met anyone who didn''t. I still remember the rush I got from correctly identifying a geometric shape at the bottom right corner of a Picasso as a cornucopia. I hope kids are smarter about college now and colleges are smarter about educating them. I am longing to believe it (especially given how much college costs).
When I was there, the sheer volume of homework made learning or getting excited about learning a steep uphill climb. My husband insists, even though I don''t admit it, that I was learning--to think better, research, organize information, meet the demands of a deadline. At Connecticut College, where I spent two years before Barnard in small classes, that might have been true. But still I was wasting my parents'' money. Wasting it big-time. It was, in retrospect, the life of a spoiled girl. Getting married was a big part of my fantasy life. There was a card game called Old Maid that we played as kids.
Each card had a partner card except one. The loser would be stuck with a card depicting a funny-looking gray-haired woman with glasses and a hat. The hat was especially sad--sort of a pillbox with a fake flower in it. Old Maid the card game struck terror in me. I was a superstitious kid, and getting left with that card seemed prophetic. There was also a song that freaked me out: "What Are You Doing New Year''s Eve?" Ella Fitzgerald sang it (quite inappropriately, in my opinion) on a record of Christmas songs. When the record (what we now call vinyl, and why do we, it''s so pretentious) got to that song, I would pick up the needle, very carefully so as not to scratch the record, and skip it to the next song. I couldn''t bear to listen to it if I didn''t have a date.
Not having a date on New Year''s Eve was like being an old maid. It was being an old maid every year. This absurd hysteria about New Year''s Eve stayed with me for much longer than I''d like to admit. Whenever I read about how people in their twenties don''t date anymore, they travel in hoards, it makes me happy. Maybe this group thing has taken the sting out of New Year''s Eve. So, on the one hand, my mother was drilling me daily from the time I could hold a spoon: "You will have a career like me. You will work. You will be a writer.
You will leave Los Angeles. You will go to New York City. You will work. Career, career, career." On the other hand--driving me as powerfully with no help from her--was simply wanting love. I blame this on the movies. I blame it on one movie in particular: Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. There were lots of messages keeping women domestic then, every message actually--lack of opportunity, advertising, the women''s magazines like McCall''s, Ladies'' Home Journal, Redbook, Seventeen, which glorified the stay-at-home wife and which I devoured each month when they arrived at our house.
But really the thing counteracting my mother''s teaching, trumping it, was a singing and dancing 1950s romantic comedy starring pert blond Jane Powell. In Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Jane Powell is the cook at a roadhouse in a wild west town when Howard Keel, big and handsome, rides in, shaves while he sings, samples her stew, and proposes. This is my favorite line: When he asks for catsup, she replies, "My stew can stand on its own feet." She agrees to marry him--it''s love at first sight for her--and he takes her to his ranch in the backwoods, where she discovers he has six uncivilized (but sweet) brothers. It turns out she was looking for love, but he was looking for a servant. Boy, did I want to be that servant. Lucky Jane. She gets to rise at dawn, make flapjacks, eggs, bacon, biscuits, and coffee for eight (including her), wash their filthy clothes, and teach them to dance.
Once cleaned up, they are gorgeous, and then-- excuse me for telling the plot of this movie I love as much as I love my dog--she takes them to a barn raising where they meet other town girls and fall in love. Those girls, however, are promised to less attractive town boys who wear stiff.