Living Out Loud (30 page)

F
or most of my adult life, I have been an emotional hit-and-run driver—that is, a reporter. I made people like me, trust me, open their hearts and their minds to me, and cry and bleed onto the pages of my neat little notebooks, and then I went back to a safe place and made a story out of it. I am good at what I do, so often the people who read those stories cried, too. When they were done, they turned the page; when I was done, I went on to another person, another story—went from the cop’s wife whose husband had never come home to the impoverished eighty-year-old Holocaust survivor to the family with the missing child. I stepped in and out of their lives as easily as I did into a pair of shoes in the morning, and when I was done I wrote my piece and went home, to the husband who had not been killed, the bank account that was full, the child safe in his high chair. Sometimes I carried within me, for a day or a week or perhaps
even longer, the resonances of their pain. But they were left with the pain itself.

It was not always as bad as I’ve made it sound. On occasion I covered people who wanted to be covered and wrote about things that were not arrows to the heart: pothole programs, town meetings, the cost of living, the GNP. But I was good at something called human interest reporting, just at the time that human interest reporting became the vogue, and so I have spent a good deal of time in the homes of vulnerable strangers, setting up a short-term relationship, making them one-shot friends.

While they were lowering their defenses, I was maintaining my objectivity, which made it possible for me, in a kind of shorthand reminiscent of the “if u cn rd ths” ads on the subway, to put down in my notebook observations like “strokes baby’s head and starts to cry” or “removes pictures of parents from drawer and tells how they were killed by SS.”

I am proud of what I do, and I am ashamed of it, too. I am reasonably sensitive and not too ruthless, and so I have sometimes saved people from their own revelations and sometimes helped them by giving them the feeling that they were talking to someone who thought they were unique. I have never really understood why they talked to me. I am in one of the few businesses in which a service is provided, not to the people we deal with directly, but only to the faceless thousands who read about them. Sometimes reporters call our house to talk to my husband, who has tried newsworthy cases, and I do not miss the irony of the fact that I find them more or less a nuisance, depending on whether they call in the middle of dinner and how officious they are about the absolute necessity of their task.

Some people I have interviewed told me they thought they could help others know they were not alone, and I suspect they were right, and some people said they thought publicity might help them, and they were right, too. Occasionally I would write
a story about a person in a bad spot and I would get checks for them in the mail, and I’d pass them along and think, “Well, that’s good.” But that wasn’t why I did the stories. I did them for me.

I still do, although not on a regular basis. I still write stories and some of them are pithy explorations of unspeakable pain. I did a magazine piece not long ago about breast cancer and I sat one night in a conference room listening to eight women talk about the feeling of taking off their blouses and seeing the zipper of the scar, and I sat there, my two perfectly good breasts slowly swelling with milk for the baby at home, and felt like the worst sort of voyeur, a Peeping Tom of the emotions. Afterward some of them came to me and said how glad they were that I was writing about them, so that others would understand, and I tried to take solace from that. But all I felt was disgust at myself.

I know there are good reasons to do what I do. The more we understand worlds outside our own orbit, the better off we will be. I know there are people who do not believe reporters feel any of these things, that we file our feelings with the clippings, that both are soon dried out beyond saving. That’s not true. The problem is that some time ago we invented a kind of new journalism and then tried to play it with old journalism rules. We approached a rape victim with the same feelings about objectivity and distance that we had brought to a press conference, and that was not fair—not so much to the rape victim, but to ourselves.

Some years ago I did a story about Stan and Julie Patz. Their names are probably familiar; their son, Etan, age six, disappeared in 1979, and they have opened their door to reporter after reporter because anything might bring him home. I interviewed Julie several years after he had gone, and at some point during our conversation my eyes filled and tears began. I thought I felt her pain—now that I have children of my own,
I realize I hadn’t a clue to what her pain was—but I was also angry at myself for being, after years of practice and journalism review articles, so unprofessional. I thought that what was the right response for a human being was the wrong response for a reporter.

Years have passed, and Julie’s son is still missing. In the meantime, I have had two sons of my own. For a while I looked for Etan’s face in every playground and schoolyard, but then I stopped. I am ashamed of that. I am proud of the story I wrote. I had the story, and Julie had the life. I still think of her sometimes, and of her pain. Now that I work as a reporter less, I am capable of bringing my emotions to it more.

Perhaps there are no unwritten rules that say you are not to feel these things. Perhaps I made them up out of my own insecurities and stereotypes, the way I insisted on drinking Scotch shots when I first got into the newspaper business, so that everyone would know I was serious stuff, not just a kid. Some of this is changing for the better, I think. The day the space shuttle exploded, at the end of the evening news, it looked to me as if Dan Rather was trembling on the verge of tears when he signed off. For a moment I was able to forget the cameras hovering over the faces of Christa McAuliffe’s parents as they looked up to see their eldest child blown to bits, and to forget that if I were still in the newspaper business I might have been there too, scribbling, “Mother lays head on father’s shoulder.” It appeared that his emotions and his profession were merging, and it made me feel a little better about myself. But the part of me that still looks at every disaster as a story wondered for just a moment if his contact lenses were bothering him, or if the light was in his eyes.

   FACING   
      THE       
WORST

I
n 1971,
The New England Journal of Medicine
reported the discovery of a connection between a rare form of cancer in young women and a synthetic estrogen called diethylstilbestrol. The drug, which became known familiarly as DES, had been given to pregnant women thought to be in danger of miscarrying, and the cancer was occurring in some of their daughters. It was not until two years after the reports that I found out I was one of the young women at risk. It would be natural to think that discovering I was a DES daughter radically changed my life, but it had already been so altered the year before by my mother’s death from cancer that this further fillip was only one small piece in the puzzle of why I was still alive.

At the time of my mother’s illness, there was not the kind of openness about cancer that there is today, and certainly not the kind of acceptance.
I knew well that there were a handful of people who did not come to visit her because they thought what she had was catching. If that had been true, of course, my father and I would have been goners. But deep inside, I, too, believed cancer was contagious—that is, you caught it from your parents.

“Interesting but not clinically confirmed,” said the emotionally dense oncologist whom I asked about hereditary links. By the time I found myself repeatedly tested for the effects of my
in utero
DES exposure, I felt like one of those teenagers in a horror movie: You don’t know which closet he’s in, but you do know that before the night is over he’s going to jump out of there and finish you off.

For a long time this made me feel different from everyone else I knew, but slowly over the years my circle has been filled by people who carry the same feelings within them. We’re not the first generation of people to feel this way; we’re just the first to be afflicted with such a profound dichotomy between how we tend our bodies and how they may turn on us, about our expectations of transcending our backgrounds and the seeming tenacity of their hold.

One day not long ago I had lunch with two friends and all three of us admitted we were people who believed that the disease of our mothers would be visited on the kids. “If I can make it past forty-seven,” said the one whose mother had died at that age, “then I’ll be home free.” And when I asked the other, whose mother had died of breast cancer, whether she did breast self-examinations, she said, in all seriousness, “No more than once a day.”

There are all sorts of other diseases that have this same effect, although cancer happens to be the most prevalent and the one we hear most about. A friend of mine had a mother who died of Alzheimer’s disease, and every time he misplaces
his car keys he is in a sweat for a week, wondering if this is the beginning of degenerative memory loss. Another friend, whose family has a history of heart disease, lay in bed one night thinking he was having a coronary when he had really strained a shoulder muscle playing tennis.

The cumulative effect is a feeling of loss of control and a heightened sense of mortality. The second can be useful. I’ve had a real good time for most of the last decade because I figured that I had better get going while the going was good. But I despise the sense of helplessness. I don’t know what caused my mother’s cancer. I gather no one really does. Was it the air, the water, a simple predisposition, a surfeit of some food or, as one doctor suggested to me with not the slightest thought that I might be scarred by the idea, too much child-bearing? Choose any or all of those things. I am still in deep trouble. My husband, whose father died of lung cancer after years of cigarette smoking and a sedentary life, does not have this sense of helplessness. He is appalled by cigarette smoking and runs four miles each morning. I wish I had such talismans.