Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake

by Anna Quindlen

  Copyright © 2012 by Anna Quindlen

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Quindlen, Anna.

  Lots of candles, plenty of cake / Anna Quindlen.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-679-60400-6

  1. Quindlen, Anna. 2. Authors, American—20th century—Biography.

  3. Women—United States—Biography. 4. Parenting—United States. I. Title.

  PS3567.U336Z46 2012

  813’54—dc23

  [B] 2011034972

  www.atrandom.com

  Jacket design: Tom McKeveny

  Jacket image: Robert Hunt

  v3.1_r1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION: Life in the Fifties

  PART I The Laboratory of Life

  Stuff

  Next of Kin

  Girlfriends

  PART II The Wisdom of Why

  Generations

  Near Miss

  Mirror, Mirror

  Solitude

  PART III The Element of Surprise

  The Little Stories We Tell Ourselves

  Older

  Push

  Expectations

  PART IV The Be-All and End-All

  Faith

  Step Aside

  Mortality

  To Be Continued

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Life in the Fifties

  It’s odd when I think of the arc of my life, from child to young woman to aging adult. First I was who I was. Then I didn’t know who I was. Then I invented someone and became her. Then I began to like what I’d invented. And finally I was what I was again.

  It turned out I wasn’t alone in that particular progression.

  I began to discover that twenty-five years ago, when I created a column about my own life for The New York Times called “Life in the 30’s.” The thirty-four-year-old mother of two little boys, I was shaky and unsure, wondering whether their stories of sibling rivalry and toilet training, my stories of household juggling and family accommodations, would have any resonance outside the walls of our home.

  I got the answer to that question soon enough. From kitchens in Winnetka and Austin and Westport and Chevy Chase the messages arrived: You are writing my life. My sons do the same thing yours do. My friends offer the same solace. The moms in my playgroup have the same advice and issues. Sometimes people would suggest I must have been eavesdropping in their living rooms. Often they would report that they had put a particular column on their refrigerator. “Fridgeworthy,” one woman said of a piece I wrote about lightning bugs. As I sat in front of my primitive computer, typing as fast as I could because I never knew when I would be interrupted by the appearance of the toddler in the home office or a howl from the baby from the floor below, I could imagine that fridge, a fridge like the one in my own kitchen, with its collection of Sesame Street magnets and blurry family photos, emergency phone contacts and preschool schedules.

  “I feel like I’m not alone,” some of those who wrote to me said, and that sentiment changed my life. That’s what’s so wonderful about reading, that books and poetry and essays make us feel as though we’re connected, as though the thoughts and feelings we believe are singular and sometimes nutty are shared by others, that we are all more alike than different. It’s the wonderful thing about writing, too. Sometimes I would think I was the only person alive concerned about some crazy cul-de-sac of human behavior. Then I would get the letters from readers and realize that that was not the case, that we were not alone, any of us.

  Often we felt as though we were. We were living odd patchwork lives in those years because of an accident of timing. We were the daughters of women who had moved directly from their parents’ homes to those of their husbands, gone right from high school to marriage and motherhood. But my friends and I had gone to college, entered the work world, under the rubric of the New Woman, suddenly able through vast changes in societal mores to use our abilities in the world and combine them with a domestic life at home. We were the heiresses to a women’s movement that had broken the world wide open. But we were completely making it up as we went along, at work, at home, in our own minds, trying to be both our mothers and our fathers simultaneously. That wasn’t easy.

  One of the great unspoken effects of all this was a vast loneliness that went untouched because it went undiscussed. The women’s movement had famously created consciousness-raising groups in which feminists discussed their grievances, but there was no corollary for those who had found so many of their wishes fulfilled and yet found this unfulfilling, exhausting, or even impossible. While the women of our mothers’ generation felt constrained not to complain that no-wax floors and bridge parties were not exactly stimulating, we didn’t want to admit that trying to balance a couple of challenging full-time jobs was kind of a stretch. We were all a little happy and a little crazy and a little sad and a little confused. And we all thought it was just us. That’s what makes life so hard for women, that instead of thinking that this is the way things are, we always think it’s the way we are.

  My last “Life in the 30’s” column began with a one-sentence birth announcement: “Her name is Maria”—the news that Quin and Chris now had a little sister and I was going to be too addled, with a newborn and two little boys, to write for a while. I moved on, and so did the readers. Our kids grew up and our marriages matured or, in some cases, imploded. We got promoted or didn’t, stayed where we were planted or went somewhere else.

  Time passed, almost imperceptibly. First we were so young and then we were so busy and then one day we awoke to discover that we were an age we once thought of as old. When I wrote about my life and discovered that it intersected with the lives of so many women like me, most of us were concerned with just managing to hold things together, managing to move from school drop-off to work assignments to making dinner to homework supervision to nodding off over the evening news, with the occasional truncated conversation thrown in, or not. We were trying to make it through each day, and then suddenly we looked around and realized the days were months, were years, and, almost magically and unconsciously, we had made it through a couple of decades.

  Once again we were improvising: our grown kids still living at home or needing support, our aged parents requiring care. The most liberated generation of women in American history, raised on the notion that they could be much more than caregivers, became caregivers cubed. Because of longer life spans and different ways of living and working, once again we were pioneers. The year I was born, the average American lived to be sixty-eight; today that’s closer to eighty. We’ve added a decade to our body clocks. But that extra time comes not at the end, when things are pretty much what they always were—physical degeneration, systematic loss, more of a look back than a look ahead; it comes now in the years between sixty and seventy, years that feel like an encore instead of a coda.

  Many of us have come to a surprising conclusion about this moment in our lives. No, it’s not that there are weird freckly spots on the back of our hands, although there are, or that construction guys don’t make smutty comments as we pass, although they don’t. It’s that we’ve done a pretty good job of becoming ourselves, and that this is, in so many ways, the time of our lives. As Carly Simon once sang, “These are the good old days.” Lots of candles, plenty of cake. I wouldn�
�t be twenty-five again on a bet, or even forty. And when I say this to a group of women at lunch, everyone around the table nods. Many of us find ourselves exhilarated, galvanized, at the very least older and wiser.

  The fridge looks different now. The college calendar, the kids’ business cards, the number of Dad’s cardiologist, the invitation to the bridal shower for the daughter of a friend, and a magnet that says YOU’RE NEVER TOO OLD … TO TRY SOMETHING STUPID. I have that magnet. I have that fridge. Photographs of friends now gone, squiggle drawings by genius grandchildren—they wait in the wings. What comes next? Who knows? It’s a long story, the story of our lives—the friends, the families, the men, the jobs, the mistakes we made and the ones we avoided, the tedium, the drama. Some things I took a long time to figure out, and others I’ll never understand. All I can say for sure is that I want more.

  To be continued.

  PART I

  The Laboratory of Life

  Life must be lived forward

  but understood backward.

  — SØREN KIERKEGAARD

  Recently my twenty-two-year-old daughter asked me what message I would give to my own twenty-two-year-old self if I could travel back in time. I instantly had two responses, one helpful, one not. On the one hand, I would tell my younger self that she should stop listening to anyone who wanted to smack her down, that she was smart enough, resourceful and hardworking enough, pretty terrific in general. On the other hand, I would have to break the bad news: that she knew nothing, really, about anything that mattered. Nothing at all. Not a clue.

  You don’t know what you don’t know when you’re young. How could you? People who are older nod sagely and say you’ll learn—about love, about marriage, about failing and falling down and getting up and trying to stagger on toward success, about work and children and what really matters, in general and to you. It’s not, they’ll say, what’s on your business card, at a moment when you don’t even have a business card. I recall hearing this message constantly when I was younger, and thinking that I was getting older as fast as I could. In retrospect this seems a bit of a shame as well as a vainglorious task. You’re like a cake when you’re young. You can’t rush it or it will fall, or just turn out wrong. Rising takes patience, and heat.

  It’s nothing short of astonishing, all that we learn between the time we are born and the time we die. Of course most of the learning takes place not in a classroom or a library, but in the laboratory of our own lives. We can look back and identify moments—the friend’s betrayal, the work advancement or failure, the wrong turn or the romantic misstep, the careless comment. But it’s all a continuum that is clear only in hindsight, frequently when some of its lessons may not even be useful anymore.

  Maybe that’s why we give advice, when we’re older, mostly to people who don’t want to hear it. They can’t hear it because it’s in a different language, a language we learn over time, the language of experience cut with failure, triumph, and tedium. We finally understand childrearing when our children are grown. We look back on our work and know now how we would have altered plans and strategies, realize that some of what seemed inevitable at the time could have been altered, different. We understand ourselves, our lives, retrospectively.

  There comes that moment when we finally know what matters and, perhaps more important, what doesn’t, when we see that all the life lessons came not from what we had but from who we loved, and from the failures perhaps more than the successes.

  I would tell my twenty-two-year-old self that what lasts are things so ordinary she may not even see them: family dinners, fair fights, phone calls, friends. But of course the young woman I once was cannot hear me, not just because of time and space but because of the language, and the lessons, she has yet to learn. It’s a miracle: somehow over time she learned them all just the same, by trial and error.

  Stuff

  Time is at once the most valuable and the most perishable of all our possessions.

  —JOHN RANDOLPH,

  colonial member of Congress

  I have a lot of stuff. I bet you do, too. Sofas, settees, bureaus, bookshelves. Dishes, bowls, pottery, glass, candlesticks, serving trays, paperweights. Beds, chests, trunks, tables. Windsor chairs, club chairs, ladder-back chairs, folding chairs, wicker chairs. Lots and lots of chairs.

  I have needlepoint pillows everywhere: camels, chickens, cats, houses, barns, libraries, roses, daisies, pansies. I needlepoint while I watch television. I have a vision of my children, after I’m gone, looking around and saying, “What are we going to do with all these pillows?” I don’t mind. My best friend, Janet, has more pillows than I do, and more platters, too. Once I bought some plates and knew instantly that she would love them. “Where did you get those?” she asked, and I lied to her and then bought some for her birthday.

  “Did she need more plates?” asked my husband, whose idea of need is different from my own.

  In the city I have lots of stuff on the walls. Modern art, traditional art, landscapes, photographic prints. Eclectic. In the country I have samplers. THE BLESSING OF THE HOME IS CONTENTMENT. THIS IS OUR HOUSE / THE DOOR OPENS WIDE / AND WELCOMES YOU / TO ALL INSIDE. I have a large piece of framed embroidery that shows a woman with bobbed hair and an apron holding a tray with a tea service. A GOOD HOUSEWIFE MAKES A GOOD HOME, this one says. Lots of people who come to our house, knowing my politics, think it’s ironic.

  It’s not ironic.

  I didn’t have all this stuff when I was young and single. None of us did. It was a big deal to have blinds and coffee mugs. Many of the guys I knew didn’t; they’d tack a sheet over the bedroom window, drink from Styrofoam. My first apartment was pretty typical; I had a small uncomfortable sleeper sofa, a bentwood rocker, a coffee table that was actually a trunk—didn’t everyone in 1976?—and a set of bookshelves. I was proud of those bookshelves. Many of my friends still used plastic egg crates, or plywood and cinder blocks.

  In the bedroom I had a chest of drawers and a desk that was too low for an adult, at which I would hunch over my old manual Smith Corona typewriter, my knees contorted beneath. I had swapped the twin bed of my girlhood for a double bed, which children nowadays, raised on queen-size beds from seventh grade, the first generation of middle-class kids who trade down when they arrive in college dorms, can scarcely imagine. I was proud of that double bed. Many of my friends had futons.

  That was more or less it. My stuff then would all fit in the back of one U-Haul, and not the big one, either. None of us used movers when we changed apartments, just called around and got a group together for pizza and beer and haulage. A lot of stuff wound up on the sidewalk for the sanitation truck.

  But then we got married and we got carafes, chafing dishes, and china. We bought matching love seats for the living room in the row house that had once been a rooming house. (“Your grandfather worked hard all his life so his grandchildren wouldn’t have to live in a place like this,” my father said, sitting on the stoop, but he still lent us money for the renovation.) I trawled junk shops for oak furniture too old to be new but too young to be antique. I had a brief flirtation with Fiesta ware and Roseville pottery, never met a big old bowl or platter I couldn’t love. When we were in Sicily for his sister’s twentieth birthday and I halted, transfixed, before a window display of Italian pottery, our older son said, deadpan, “Mom, why don’t you get one of those so you can put it on a little stand on a shelf somewhere?” I’d never really thought they’d noticed, much less passed judgment.

  And that’s not even counting the stuff in my closet. One day I peered inside and realized it looked like it belonged to someone with multiple personality disorder. The bohemian look, the sharp suits, the frilly dresses. Those days are behind me, and I finally know who and how I’m dressing. I’m dressing a person who has eighteen pairs of black pants and eleven pairs of black pumps. Of course, that number is illusory, since it includes the black pants I never felt looked great but purchased on sale, the pair that never seem to be the right l
ength, and the two pairs that fit funny. Not too big or too small, just funny. Naturally there are two pairs of the shoes that I wear all the time, because they’re comfortable, and one pair that I wear on occasion because they are great-looking and my toes don’t go entirely numb for at least three hours.

  I prefer not to dwell on the purses and the white T-shirts. You know, fashion magazines always say you can never have too many white T-shirts.

  Yes, you can.

  It wasn’t always like this, was it? At some point in America, desire and need became untethered in our lives, and shopping became a competitive sport. I can’t recall my mother spending much time spending, although of course she predated that black hole of consumption, the shopping website. It was generally agreed in our family that my grandmother Quindlen was a world-class shopper, and there was a much-repeated, often-embellished story about one of my aunts arriving early enough at a big sale to score a spot at the front of the line and still finding my grandmother already inside the store when she’d breached the doors. But there was always an object to the hunt: a Hitchcock chair, a pair of Naturalizer pumps. Sometimes I feel as though credit cards have helped us concentrate on quantity, not quality; the other day a financial adviser on TV said that if people were using cash for purchases, they tended to be much more abstemious. Plastic is magical, as though the bill will never come due.

  I have too much plastic, too, in my wallet.

  What do we notice when we drive down the highways of our adolescence and measure what’s changed? We now have the big-box stores, the home emporiums, the fast-food places, certainly, but the weirdest addition is the thousands of storage facilities that loom, bunkerlike, windowless. When we were kids, storage was the basement and attic, a broken chair, an army trunk. Today we rent facilities for the stuff we’re not currently using, probably will never use again.