Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake

by Anna Quindlen

  Returning to a single-sex environment in college, at Barnard, would seem to have been the antidote, and in some ways it was. It was a place that valued those qualities that adolescent social intercourse, not to mention the nuns at convent school, had not: opinions, opposition, argument, innovation. My time there dovetailed with the beginning of the second wave of feminism and the last gasp of the student struggles of the sixties, and a certain woman-warrior culture prevailed. It was the making of me as a human being, but it did not lead to an immediate resurgence of my friendship gene. The atmosphere was competitive and balkanized: the premeds, the radical feminists, the prospective writers. It should have been a safe place to be authentic, but I’m not certain many of us were. We’d merely taken out the part of the self that hadn’t been safe to air in a more homogenized world and made her all in all, gone from the thesis of the compliant good girl to the antithesis of the self-possessed individualist.

  Maybe that’s what happens to all of us, why friendship ebbs and flows in many of our lives. That kind of connection to another human being is both soothing and scary, at once threatening and essential, because it reflects the tension in all of our lives between individuality and community. It’s when we are young that we want to make certain the world understands we are absolutely and utterly distinct—it’s why we mess around with the spelling of our names, wear strange clothes, streak our hair, get in trouble. When I was sixteen I was too busy telegraphing the fact that I was unique to want to embrace the notion of commonality. True friendship assumes a level playing field—no one is up, no one down, no one the queen bee or the drone. But young women often try to establish themselves as individuals by defining themselves in opposition to other women, which lends itself to exactly that kind of hierarchy and competition. The queen bee in the middle school classroom doesn’t really have friends, she has followers. If the teenage girl had an ancestral crest, its motto would be “I am not you.”

  As we grow older the mythology has it that female friendships falter because we compete, for everything from the alpha job to the alpha male, but I didn’t find that to be true. What I did find was that a frantic existence left too little time for friendship as it ought to be configured, deep and consistent. For decades I was focused on my work, my kids, my routine. I couldn’t get out of my own head, much less my own house. The friends I made then were friends of proximity, other mothers on the playground, women whose husbands were friends of my husband. Some were office friends at a time when there were few women in the newsroom, and it was in the bathroom stall that I suppressed rage or tears. Some were political activists whose causes intersected with my writing and my inclinations. Those friendships that stuck were the ones in which one area overlapped with another, the fellow reporters who had children at the same time as I did, the playground moms whose husbands became friends with my husband. But when the proximity faded, some of those friendships did, too. There’s an apt quote from Virginia Woolf: “I have lost friends, some by death, others through sheer inability to cross the street.”

  As we grow older we weed out our friendship circles the way we do our closets. Most women have a story about the friend who truly wasn’t, whose calls and visits left her feeling dreadful, the friend who dined out on other women’s shortcomings and mistakes. There are the friends that our spouses cannot bear, with whom we have lunch but rarely dinner, or the friend who drops us when someone better comes along. There are women who have serial best friends and those who stick with a childhood friend long past the time when they have anything in common except the memory of slumber parties and a mulish, uncompromising, enduring affection.

  Sometimes I will see a photo of an actress in an unflattering dress or a blouse too young for her or a heavy-handed makeup job, and I mutter, “She must not have any girlfriends.” We trust our friends to tell us what we need to know, and to shield us from what we don’t need to discover, and to have the wisdom to know the difference. Real friends offer both hard truths and soft landings and realize that it’s sometimes more important to be nice than to be honest. That, too, is knowledge that often comes only with age. Henry James wasn’t exactly a warm fuzzy, so I think it’s significant that even he once said, “Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind, the second is to be kind, and the third is to be kind.”

  This is how the days begin for me now: I rise at 6:00 A.M., which would have been as improbable to my young self, who could roll over and go back to sleep with unconsidered ease, as would those evenings when I think idly, Is nine-thirty too early to go to bed? (No.) I go down to the kitchen, make enough coffee for several people even though I am the only one who drinks it, make the same breakfast every morning, either Greek yogurt with a little granola blended in or whole-grain bread with almond butter. Again, I can feel my younger self looking over my shoulder, making a face. During college she grew accustomed to sleeping in, waking only when her boyfriend came to the room with a cardboard container of sweet and light coffee and a Danish from the Chock full o’Nuts across the street. He always brought the newspapers, too, and he still does; he was such a completely satisfactory boyfriend that he was promoted to husband, although it took a lot of convincing to persuade him to accept the position. I read the paper and do the New York Times crossword puzzle. Then I power walk for an hour, almost exactly four miles, either in Riverside Park or on a hilly loop at the house in the country.

  And when I get home I call Janet. Not every morning, but most. Sometimes we have lots to discuss, about what we’re reading, about what’s in the papers, about our families, about our other friends. Sometimes we don’t because we’ve sent each other emails all afternoon the day before, or it’s a slow news day, or one or both of us are out of sorts. Only once, in all these years, has my husband said, “What do you and Janet have to talk about? You just talked to her yesterday.” It actually was kind of great to hear him say that, because it was such a word-perfect blast from the past. I could hear my father saying the same thing as I lay on the kitchen floor, my feet propped against the wall, curling the long cord of the wall phone around my finger with its ragged bitten nail. This was when talking on the phone was different than it is for my children, when a cellphone was the kind of thing you saw in a sci-fi film, when a cordless phone was a phone that wouldn’t work, when there were only one or two phones in the entire house and God forbid you used one to make a long-distance call, even to one of your friends at the Jersey shore, because if it was person to person instead of station to station it would cost real money and show up on the bill and your parents would say “Long distance?!” as though you’d piled money on the patio and set it afire.

  “What do you and Donna have to talk about?” my father would say. “You just saw her at school.” Sometimes he’d just hang the phone up, and I’d stalk off and slam the bedroom door. “Don’t slam that door,” my father would shout.

  Donna was my best friend, what my daughter calls her bestie, what is now referred to as a BFF, or Best Friend Forever. Who knows what we talked about? The Beatles, her older sisters, Robert Ferreri, Mother Marie Therese, the matinee upcoming at the Waverly Theatre, what we wanted for Christmas. When we moved away, it was leaving Donna that was the worst part. And that’s just how I feel about Janet today. Neither one of us likes it much when the other goes on vacation. For most women my age, friends are an essential part of our daily lives—the phone calls, the emails, the coffee, the lunch, the glass of wine. Today we have the time. Once I threw cereal bowls on the table and stuffed gym clothes into backpacks in the morning, rushing out the door, always late, telling myself I owed a phone call here, a card there, and I would get around to it in a few days, which became a few weeks, and even sometimes months. But I don’t do that anymore.

  When I was young I used to make fun of older couples, with the two guys in the front seat of the car and the two women in the back, used to wrinkle my nose at parties where the men were in the living room with beers and the women in the kitchen filling platte
rs with cold cuts. But now I totally get it. I love hanging out with other women. It’s just that feeling that there’s someone not obliged by bonds of blood or marriage to support, advise, and love you. My kids learned long ago to like a feather bed atop the mattress, and that’s how I think of friendship. Even if your life is comfortable, it’s great to have some extra cushioning.

  The women I know who are happiest today are the ones who have close female friends. Maybe that’s true of men, too, but essentially it’s different. I used to have a line in a speech about my editor’s advice to write columns about what I was talking about with my friends on the telephone. “If my husband had to write a column based on his phone calls with friends …” I would begin, but I never got to finish the sentence because every woman in the audience would start laughing. They all knew that male phone conversations were designed to make plans, while their own were intended to deconstruct the world.

  One study of college students showed that both men and women valued friendship, but they were deeply divergent when asked what friendship entailed. Guys thought it meant doing things together, women that it meant emotional sharing and talking. Another study showed that while stress produced the old familiar fight-or-flight response in men—or, as we women often think of it, lash out or shut down—it produces what the researchers termed a tend-or-befriend effect in women. When things go wrong, they reach for either the kids or the girlfriends. Or both.

  In other words, friends are what we women have in addition to, or in lieu of, therapists. And when we reach a certain age, they may be who is left. An analysis of census results shows that more than half of all American women are living without a spouse, because of either choice or circumstances. While marriage was once the norm and unmarried somewhere between sad and tragic, staying single is now a considered decision for many women, particularly those who are divorced and feel liberated by being on their own. My single sister has the best take on this one; once, when asked why she was still unmarried years after the end of a brief marriage, she responded, thinking about her ability to do what she likes when she likes, “It would take a helluva man to replace no man at all.” Or maybe I should quote the contentedly divorced woman who told a reporter for The New York Times, “One night I slept on the other side of the bed, and I thought, I like this side.”

  My daughter and her friends are better at this friendship stuff in a lot of ways than we were. They have the same mean-girl gene that we had, at the same time—Maria once told me she was worried about having a daughter someday herself because of having to get her through seventh and eighth grade relatively unscathed. But they are more honest than I remember being, willing to confront one another about disloyalty or bad behavior. Perhaps it’s a function of their upbringing during a time when talk show guests regularly argued about their family relationships and marriages, when it’s become gospel that silence is not golden but toxic. When I once mentioned that among my youthful girlfriends the idea of having an intervention about a slight would have been unthinkable, Maria was incredulous. “How did you work stuff out?” she asked. “We didn’t,” I replied.

  They are savvy enough to understand that there are friendships worth fighting for. And sometimes, of course, there are those that are not. Over the course of our lives friends fall away, sometimes because they were never really more than friendly acquaintances, sometimes because of differences in circumstance. There were friends we lost when we had children and they did not, and friends we lost and then found again when they had children of their own. There are those divorces in which one friend was chosen over another, and those remarriages in which the chosen friend drifts away because the new spouse is hostile or threatened.

  And in the end we wind up with the friends who really stick. Being female, we pride ourselves on doing for them, on listening to them complain or cry, on showing up with a cake or a casserole and taking charge when disaster strikes. But the measure of our real friends, our closest friends, is that we let them do the same for us. We’ve been taking charge for decades; to let go, to take help instead of charge, is the break point of friendship. And it comes to us, finally, when we are older and wiser, when we’ve got bigger things to think about than where to buy a coffee table or whether the new guy at work will be collegial. One of the most important parts of tending our friendships is working our way, over time, into the kind of friendships that can support cataclysm, friendships that are able to move from the office or the playground to hospital rooms and funerals. Some of my married friends are widows now, and some are single, and some have lost parents and had kids who were lost to them for a while. And even those of us who so far have been relatively unscathed know how important the bonds of love are, how they make a net so we don’t hit the ground when we fall from the wire. We’ve all prevailed on the individuality front, know without thinking that we are distinct, specific, perhaps even at this time in our lives a little on the eccentric side. So we’re free to embrace community, that sense of being part of something bigger and more powerful than ourselves. Or perhaps it’s that we stand between two enormous forces. On the one side are the difficult and demanding events to come, the losses, the illnesses, the deaths. You can see them out on the horizon like a great wave, its whitecaps approaching. But on the other hand is a levee that protects us, that of the women we can call anytime, day or night, to say, “I’m drowning here.”

  And so the morning goes like this: at some point I say to Janet, “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.” It’s not that there’s anything really to discuss. Or maybe there will be. Maybe over those twenty-four hours one of us will have bad news, or just a bad day, or something great will have happened and we can crow over it together. Maybe the scaffolding of professional confidence will sag, or one of our other friends will be hurting, or hurt us. Or maybe we will just have one of those desultory conversations friends have: What are you doing? Not much. How’s your cold? Better. What’s on for tonight? Nothing.

  What will we talk about? What did we talk about? Who knows? Who cares? It’s the presence at the other end of the line that matters: reliable, loving, listening, caring, continuing. What would I do without her?

  PART II

  The Wisdom of Why

  I should have liked, I do confess, to have had the lightest license of a child and yet been man enough to know its value.

  —CHARLES DICKENS,

  A Christmas Carol

  When we were in college one ubiquitous bumper sticker read, QUESTION AUTHORITY. It was a good piece of advice, but at the time we interpreted it too narrowly: don’t trust the power structure, the politicians, the parents.

  Today we have a fuller, more satisfying sense of the meaning of those words. We’re unlearning so many lessons, about how we should live, be, work, feel. We hold our fingers up to the prevailing winds of custom and behavior and think, nope, that’s an ill wind. It’s not that we question authority, it’s that we question who gets to be an authority in the first place. The notion of what it means to be a woman, a mother, even a human being, has changed so much during our lifetimes. For every incarnation there was a set of shalt nots, and as each became obsolete, we became more skeptical about the commandments. Who says? By what authority? Why this way and not that one?

  For me, one of the greatest glories of growing older is the willingness to ask why and, getting no good answer, deciding to follow my own inclinations and desires. Asking why is the way to wisdom. Why are we supposed to want possessions we don’t need and work that seems besides the point and tight shoes and a fake tan? Why are we supposed to think new is better than old, youth and vigor better than long life and experience? Why are we supposed to turn our backs on those who have preceded us and to snipe at those who come after?

  It’s a sure bet that when we were small children we asked “Why?” constantly. Why is the sky blue? Why does the stove burn? Why can’t we eat grass? Then, of course, it was a constant voyage of discovery, parsing the known universe by inches. Asking the question now is mor
e a matter of testing the limits of what sometimes seems a narrow world, a world of unrealistic expectations, of conventional wisdom. One of the useful things about age is realizing that conventional wisdom is often simply inertia with a candy coating of conformity.

  It’s funny how this works. When we’re little we want to do what we want to do when we want to do it. Slowly but surely we learn to set our body clocks to some standard time. Then a moment arrives when we learn to say “Why?” again, and to balk if the answer is unsatisfactory. Maybe it’s because we know there’s no heft behind the consequences; at this point if someone says to me, “You can’t do that,” I’m perfectly capable of smiling, shrugging, and going full speed ahead. The hard-and-fast rules don’t seem so hard and fast. That’s how we get a handle on what we want to keep and what we can afford to jettison. There’s a fearlessness to our lives now that comes from knowing that the authorities we can accept and trust are close to home: the women who went before us, the friends who confide and support, the voice inside that says, Ah, go ahead. What have you got to lose?

  Generations