Authors: Laura Fraser
The ones who seem the most successful at second glance are
the ones who seem to have figured out, with some equanimity, that midlife is never all you expected it would be, especially when your college years were so bright, but getting older brings a few satisfactions of its own. Instead of comforting me, this just adds to the list of things I’ve failed at: marriage, having children, making money, and now, having a mature perspective about it all.
As the evening wears on, it strikes me that while most of the men are as clever and confident as they were in college, full of ironic observations and witty word play, several of the women seem to have sipped some of the same punch I did that gives you a sneaking suspicion that you’re a disappointment at forty, that things haven’t turned out the way you might have hoped.
I run into Kate, with her mesmerizing blue eyes, who was a brilliant actress in college, talking with Chloe, who manages to run an environmental nonprofit while raising three children. Chloe asks Kate if she’s still acting, and Kate shrugs it off. “Not with the kids.” She seems content, but as she moves on to greet someone else, I ask Chloe if she thinks that deep down, Kate is genuinely happy exploring other talents—or whether she’s acting.
“Hard to say,” says Chloe, as we watch Kate sparkling in the center of another little group. Chloe shakes her head. “Everyone was in love with her in college.”
“And with you,” I say.
Chloe laughs and Ellen comes up, someone I envied for her effortless beauty and long-term boyfriend, whom she married after college. She was fun: we traipsed around a carnival doing interviews with the hard-living carnies to make a documentary
for film class and once secretly drank bottles from our birth year from her parents’ stash (since she’s a few months older than me, we had to pop open both the ’60 and ’61 Bordeaux, a first experience with French wine that definitely beat my first experience with sex). She and her boyfriend were both talented writers. Now she tells me she’s read my book and marvels that I have done so well in my career, getting so much published. “You have such a great life,” she says, almost wistfully, “traveling all over the world and writing about it.”
“It’s true,” says Chloe. “The farthest we ever travel is to Long Island.”
This makes me uncomfortable, because while I’m grateful that I’ve had adventures, I’m also thinking that
they
have such great lives, with their smart husbands and adorable kids and ability to work part-time. It’s not that the grass is greener, it’s that you can never be on both sides of the lawn at the same time. Ellen tells us an idea for an article and asks if I think she could get it published in a women’s magazine. Of course, I say, that’s a piece of cake for someone like you. I can’t fathom why she sounds so uncertain. She sighs. “It’s been hard for me to get back into that world, I’ve been so busy with the kids,” she says. “I don’t know where to start.”
Ellen waves at a friend across the room, kisses us good-bye, and Chloe whispers that Ellen’s husband is at the top of the media food chain—almost as if, by some necessity of gender physics, their careers had to go in opposite directions.
Susan taps me on the shoulder and pulls me away from Chloe. Like me, she’s working on her second or third gin and tonic. I
used to marvel at Susan for being able to discuss
Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism
during the day and then go off and capably flirt with guys at frat parties. She had been fiercely optimistic that we could have it all, sure that we would be free and creative and sexy and self-actualized, all while raising kids, sharing the chores, and making a lot of money. Now she’s a lawyer with a big corporation, single, and not dating anyone. “It sucks,” she says, taking a long sip of her drink. “I work too hard. I never have time to meet anyone.” I nod along as she tells me how she stays late at the office, later even than the men who go home to their families, since she has no excuse to go home early at all. She finishes her drink, turns her head for a moment, then flashes a smile as big and bright as the diamond on her right hand. “But I’ve made partner.”
“Congratulations,” I say. “I’ll have to put that in the class notes.”
As we leave the cocktail party, I picture these extraordinary women from my class, loading up their minivans or catching planes, scattering across the country. Most have made uneasy choices in the intervening years. Certainly they’re coping and taking great pleasure in parts of their lives, but many feel like something is missing. They are exhausted. They are frantic to finally get pregnant, and some are having fertility problems. They aren’t passionate about their work but want to be. They love their spouses and kids, of course, but either they want more in their lives or they’re overwhelmed with too much. Or, like me, they’re single and doing satisfying work but dogged with a vague sense of defeat about their relationships.
I walk across the campus lawn to dinner with Barbara, a psychologist, who has been in love and married twice since we were in school, one union ending in tragedy. She has always been soulful and perceptive. I make some crack about the singles table at dinner, and though we haven’t seen each other in a decade, she sees right through me. “I know you’re sad about being single,” she says. Happily, she doesn’t try to diagnose the problem, or give me any pat advice about how I ought to learn to be more open to a relationship, make a list of all the qualities I want in a man and visualize him arriving at my doorstep, or put pink candles on my bedroom windowsill to attract him with feng shui. “Enjoy being single while it lasts,” she says, letting me in on the secret that being married and having children isn’t all I romanticize it to be. There are plenty of days when she’d like to be single just for a few hours, not to mention have a sexy fling with a man on an Italian island. Not that she would trade it all, not for the world.
“We can’t have it all,” I say, trying out some of that mature perspective.
“Maybe we can’t have it all at once,” she says. “But there are phases in life; maybe we can have it all, just one thing after another, serially.”
“You think?”
“It’s like the Manhattan trifecta,” she says. I raise my eyebrows; she’s from New York, and I have no idea what she’s talking about. “In Manhattan, it’s impossible to get the great relationship, the great job, and the great apartment all at once,” she says.
I smile. “I do have a great job and a great apartment.”
“Then if the right man comes along, you’d better be careful about your lease.”
I laugh and give her a hug. Maybe the right guy will come along, although I realize that two decades after college, you have to expect that everyone you meet will have difficult traits, awkward histories, and annoying habits (I know I do). In any case, looking around at my classmates seated so smartly at the white linen tables set up on the lawn, I still have twinges of regret that I didn’t eventually marry one of these amazing college men, these funny, high-SAT-scoring guys who were always asking thoughtful questions and called themselves feminists not just so they could get laid but because they honestly respected women.
But you can’t second-guess history. During dinner, an accomplished and engaging guy comes up to me while I’m in line for a drink and confesses, tipsy, that he once had a huge crush on me. I’m flattered and floored. “That,” I finally muster, “is a painful thing to hear from such an attractive, married man.” I find myself fantasizing about the men at the reunion—How did I overlook this wonderful guy? Why can’t we run off together now and try again?—but most are married; and not only are there rules about married men, there are delusions, on both sides, about still-single women they may have gazed at in government class or smooched and never slept with decades ago.
After dinner, I walk back to my dorm room, which is in the same complex of buildings where I lived as a sophomore, the year I had the most trouble with men, food, sex, pot, paranoia, personal style, and everything but my classes, whose challenges I could at least work through if I tried hard enough.
I brush my hair and freshen up for the party that starts later on, then stop at my reflection in the mirror. Here I am, with my prospects for finding a mate heading steadily downhill on the
graph of time, and I suddenly look older and fatter, with wiggly arms and creases on my face like I’ve slept wrong. I have never been full-on beautiful, so losing my looks isn’t going to be as hard for me as for someone who always relied more heavily on her physical charms. But still.
As I stare in the mirror, I remember another party and another black dress, slinky with spaghetti straps. It was sophomore year and I was unhappy with how I looked. “You’re beautiful,” a woman next to me said to my reflection. “Just forget about it.” That moment, with my protruding collarbones, tiny waist, smooth skin, and long blond hair, was probably when I looked my most conventionally attractive. But I got there by extreme dieting and purging (I thought I’d invented bulimia) and felt anything but beautiful inside. There were so many pressures on me—thrown into a situation where I thought I had to be thin, witty, East Coast–smart, sexually experienced, invulnerable—that something had to give, and it ended up being my self-esteem, along with my lunch. The campus therapist asked why I couldn’t just control myself—this being the Dark Ages in the history of eating disorders—and I told him that that was exactly the fucking problem. So many of us young women could have earned PhDs in eating issues, or in anything else, for all the time we wasted on our unhappy relationships with food and our bodies. Not to mention how much joyful eating and delicious sex we missed out on.
Thank God those days and issues are out of the way. I look in the mirror, apply some bright lipstick, pat my belly, and decide there’s no way I’m going to waste any more of my evening with my sophomore self, who barely had a sense of humor (one of the
things that definitely improves with age). I’m taking my forty-one-year-old ass back out to a party.
The alumni fete is at one of the old fraternity houses, which smells faintly like twenty-year-old beer. A band is playing New Wave cover songs from the late seventies and early eighties, the Talking Heads and the Clash, which we all simultaneously enjoy and dimly, uncomfortably realize that the band is playing as oldies.
No matter. In the living room, on worn wooden floors, a group of us dance, warming up slowly, then moving and shaking through the strata of our bodies to an energetic, euphoric 1982. I am back in the body of the young woman who, no matter how confused she was about what it meant to be a feminist woman making her way in the world, could dance her way down to a truth, holding and expressing rhythm in every part of her being in a way that was completely, unabashedly female. Dancing kept me grounded in college and transformed me from a brain with a ponytail, supported by undifferentiated mass, into someone who inhabited her body with flexible, energetic assurance.
Just a few hours a week of dance class with a warm, exuberant, and challenging professor changed my body image: when we watched a videotape of ourselves leaping across the room, I wondered who that graceful woman was wearing the same color leotard I always wore. The subtler lessons of dance class were harder to learn, such as the idea that in order to improvise with someone else you have to really listen to them, to respond rather than react, a notion that has tickled my brain ever since but which I’ve rarely managed to embody.
I dance with these people I danced with so long ago, with no judgments, just joy. It reminds me of sunny days in spring when we’d dance in a circle to African drums, feeling ecstatic and tribal there in Connecticut, unleashing our bodies, passion, and energy. “That was better than sex,” I recall one guy remarking when the dancing stopped, and we all lay back on the grass, sweaty and spent.
A
FTER THE REUNION,
my head buzzing, I head to New York City for a few days, a city I love and lived in briefly during college, doing a magazine internship (I was Xeroxing for cokeheads at
Rolling Stone;
the only time an editor spoke to me except to give me shitwork was to ask, “Why is it all the women who work here are pears?” I was still too young and cowed by New York magazine editors to come back with a proper reply, which I’m still practicing in my head). I returned the summer after graduation, because it seemed like the place a real writer ought to live, even if it meant working three part-time gigs that were only distantly related to journalism and moving from one illegal sublet to another. New York was a feast, though—for art, cheap ethnic food, used bookstores, dance classes, and wonderfully complicated friends.
I left the city around the time I was offered my first full-time job in publishing, as an assistant on the advertising side of
Omni
magazine, owned by
Penthouse
, where you had to look at soft-core porn covers every time you stepped out of the elevator. I considered the offer, because it was a job, and you have to start
somewhere, especially if you have no contacts in New York, nor a trust fund, but it seemed to define soullessness. I’d have to put on an
outfit
every day, would come home too tired to write, never see the outdoors à la Colorado, and would face the distinct danger of turning into a bitch.
Just then my late Grandma intervened, leaving me that small inheritance, and I went for breakfast at the Greek diner near my apartment to mull things over. Before the waiter even poured the weak coffee, I decided New York City could live without me and I was leaving for Greece. (Who knows what would’ve happened if I’d been in a Chinese restaurant.) I spent the rest of the summer temping for an ad agency, which tried to hire me after I took advantage of a break from word processing to test their client’s new coconut liqueur, creating several new cocktails and marketing ideas just so I didn’t have to go back to typing. But I couldn’t see working somewhere you could get fired for drinking a Diet Coke if they shilled for Pepsi.
Nine months in the Mediterranean put to rights everything that had troubled me at Wesleyan or in New York. It awakened all my slumbering senses: I had my first fig from a tree in Greece, my first fat black olive in Spain, and my first simultaneous orgasm in Israel. I learned to dance flamenco and ride a camel, I saw the art I’d seen only on slides at Wesleyan, and I kept a journal along the way. When I returned to New York, I sensed right away that it was too confining a space; I needed some cross between the city’s culture and Colorado’s outdoors, and set out, on a hunch, to San Francisco. I cried as I crossed the Golden Gate Bridge and have felt at home ever since.