Thinking Out Loud: On the Personal, the Political, the Public and the Private

by Anna Quindlen

  Ms. Benten brought the ban on RU-486 to the public’s attention. Sadly, the attendant fuss may also have reinforced Roussef Uclaf’s dedication to conflict avoidance in the United States, at least for the time being.

  But contained in this episode are the seeds of a powerful lobby: women who want abortions to be performed as early and as safely as possible; women who have lost mothers to breast cancer and are at risk themselves; women who believe that health care should be separate from a political agenda.

  Oh, and women who vote. Those familiar with the politics of RU-486 believe that it could be licensed in short order if the political atmosphere changed. Not in time for Leona Benten, but not a moment too soon for millions of other women who must be less patient and more militant about health care.

  BEARS WITH FURNITURE

  October 18, 1990

  Some of the best comedians right now are women, and the best of the women comedians is named Rita Rudner. She does great bits on men, and in one of them she says: “Men don’t live well by themselves. They don’t even live like people. They live like bears with furniture.”

  I always wondered about that furniture part.

  Since the observations of female comedians, women lawyers, my aunt Gloria, the entire membership of the Hadassah, the League of Women Voters nationwide, and the woman who lives across the street from me don’t count as empirical evidence, researchers at the University of California at San Francisco have done a study that shows that men need to be married or they starve to death. They studied 7,651 American adults to come to this conclusion.

  This is why we think scientists are wasting their research money. This study says that men between the ages of forty-five and sixty-five who live alone or with somebody other than a wife are twice as likely to die within ten years as men of the same age who live with their wives. “The critical factor seems to be the spouse,” said a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics who, incredibly enough, seems both to be surprised by these findings and to be female. She also noted that researchers were not sure why men without wives are in danger of an earlier death, but that preliminary analysis suggested they ate poorly.

  Let me explain how you might do a study like this. Let’s say you have a package of Stouffer’s macaroni and cheese, a tomato, and a loaf of French bread. Let’s say that it is seven o’clock. Pretend you are a researcher for the University of California and observe what the woman between the ages of forty-five and sixty-four will do with these materials:

  1) Preheats oven according to package directions. Puts package in oven.

  2) Slices tomato and sprinkles with oil, vinegar, and ground pepper.

  3) Slices bread and removes butter from refrigerator.

  In about an hour the woman will eat.

  At the same time researchers can observe a man between the ages of forty-five and sixty-four living alone using the same materials:

  1) Reads package, peers at stove, rereads package, reads financial section of paper.

  2) Looks at tomato, says aloud, “Where the hell’s the knife?”

  3) Places tomato on top of frozen package, leaves both on kitchen counter, watches Monday Night Football or a National Geographic documentary on the great horned owl while eating a loaf of unsliced French bread.

  This can be compared and contrasted with the man living with his wife. When the wife goes out, the result is exactly the same as in example 2, except that when the wife returns and says, “Why didn’t you eat dinner?” the husband between the ages of forty-five and sixty-four will say, “I wasn’t hungry,” in exactly the same tone of voice he would use if he were to say, “I have bubonic plague.”

  (These results are occasionally skewed by observed occasions on which wife returns home and finds house full of smoke. Such incidents are particularly reliable indicators of longer life for men between the ages of forty-five and sixty-four, since they enhance the well-documented “I told you not to go out and leave me alone” effect, which promotes a generalized feeling of well-being and smugness.)

  Every woman I know finds the California study notable only because the results seem so obvious. But I find it helpful to have anecdotal observations confirmed by scientific analysis, and besides, it gets me off the hook. I am frequently accused of feminist bias for suggesting that the ability to do a simple household task without talking about it for weeks is gender-based.

  If I were to suggest that a man without a wife is a man over whelmed by dust balls, pizza cartons, and mortality, I would get an earful from the New Age men. The New Age men appear in many stories about life-style matters; there are five of them, and they are the guys who actually took those paternity leaves you’ve been hearing so much about. One of them makes a mean veal piccata, which is habitually featured in stories about men who cook.

  If they’re unhappy with this conclusion, they’ve got science to arm-wrestle with. E = MC2, some guy once said, perhaps while eating a loaf of French bread and wondering why his wife had to visit her sister. And 1 man minus 1 wife = bad news, according to researchers at the University of California at San Francisco. Bears with furniture. Rita and I have biostatistics on our side.

  DIRT AND DIGNITY

  July 22, 1990

  She walked into the courtroom, which was an accomplishment all by itself. “She looked great,” said one observer, “for a person who’s been beaten to death.” By the time she testified, wearing a purple suit and assorted scars, it had become almost fitting that the only thing we did not know about her was her name.

  She has taken on mythic proportions, this woman who was found with more of her blood on the ground than in her body, whose face was shattered like a china cup. Her survival became a resurrection, and she became an archetype: the Central Park jogger. And the trial of the teenagers accused of her destruction is a microcosm of city living at its worst: sordid, mean, racially charged. The proceedings are reminiscent of the crime. There is dirt everywhere.

  The jury has seen videotapes that detail a night of Clockwork Orange adolescent fun: beating up a vagrant, chasing bicyclists, gang raping an investment banker. Videotape is the prosecutor’s friend. You can see with your own eyes that no one is holding sixteen-year-old Antron McCray down as he talks, that his face is not bleeding, that his answers are not punctuated with a love tap from a billy club.

  Instead, he sits with his parents at his elbow, looking like every kid called on the carpet in the principal’s office, fidgety as he talks about kicking, grabbing, climbing on top. His mother and father let him talk to the police. This is the mistake parents make at precinct houses. They let their children talk when any good defense attorney would tell them to keep their mouths shut. Without a confession, there would have been no case here. With a confession, there is only coercion as a defense.

  The defense says the confessions were coerced. It has also suggested that there was no rape. Some supporters of the defendants have suggested even worse than that. They talk in the corridors of the courthouse about how this is a racist frame-up against the black teenagers, about how the investment banker jogged north in the park to buy drugs or to seek exactly the kind of trouble she found. They see nothing perverse in the suggestion that a woman would want to be hunted down and torn apart. They call her filthy names.

  Even prosecutors had a piece of the victimization. Forensics have failed them. To show that a rape was committed, the prosecutor asked the victim about her sex life, about her method of birth control, about whether she was wearing the same jogging pants she had worn the last time she had sex with her boyfriend. We do not print her name, but we know that she used a diaphragm. You have to wonder about women out there, recently raped, still undecided about going to the police, reading all this and thinking, “Forget it. Not me.”

  Only one person has emerged from this mess pristine in the public eye, and ironically it is the person who is best known covered with blood and mud, whose white running shirt was stained that rusty brown that shouts “evidence.” With most horrific
crimes we remember the criminals. Richard Speck. David Berkowitz. The Boston Strangler. In this crime, everyone thinks first of the victim. She had all the best things—the right schools, the Phi Beta Kappa key, the fast-track job, the athlete’s discipline and devotion to her running—until the moment when her life became defined by one of the worst things that could happen to a human being.

  She refused to die. By most medical standards, the charge in this case should have been murder. The doctors said that perhaps her will saved her, the same will that powered her running and twelve-hour workdays. For years we have been wondering what the point is to lives that lead us like carrots on a stick always a little ahead of our noses. Here was an answer. You could use the energy to save your own life.

  She has not sold her story to a supermarket tabloid, and she has not made a jeans commercial. Her mother turns away interviewers with a dignified demurral: “We are united in our silence.” The silence was broken for twelve minutes. There was no cross-examination. This was the smartest thing the defense has done so far.

  It would have been easy to cry about the double vision, the loss of balance, the month she can’t remember, the people who did this. But she didn’t cry. She took the witness stand, and then she left. Maybe she ran that evening. In a city that can turn a person into a celebrity overnight, she has become that strangest of things, a celebrity nobody knows. And she has become New York rising above the dirt, the New Yorker who has known the best, and the worst, and has stayed on, living somewhere in the middle.

  THE CEMENT FLOOR

  August 28, 1991

  Women prospered cute in the 1980s. Every time you turned around, there was some cute story about a woman high school quarterback, a woman sanitation worker, or a woman hard hat.

  Eventually, after the sideshows were over, real life went on. Women were admitted where their talents could take them, and their talents took them far. There were more women in all walks of life, many of them places from which you could draw a decent paycheck.

  This makes equal opportunity sound simple, and it never has been. There emerged a plateau for women on their way up, between the push of progress and the peak of the male hierarchy. This week the Feminist Majority Foundation released a report saying that less than 3 percent of the corporate officers at the country’s biggest companies are female. There seems to be an invisible barrier to the ascension of women, a barrier we call the glass ceiling.

  There are also cement floors.

  Until recently Teresa Cox was a baseball umpire and, by most accounts, a very good one. Women umpires refused to be novelty acts. Pam Postema, the best known, once said of players’ taunts, “If you’re black, they key on that; if you’re fat, they say you’re too fat to see the play. And if they insult you personally, and keep it up, that constitutes abuse, and you throw them out.” Nice matter-of-fact attitude. It didn’t do Ms. Postema any good; she was let go in 1989.

  During the 1980s, four women umpired in the minor leagues. None ever made it to the majors. Ms. Cox, the latest to be thrown out, will argue the call. She is suing, saying that the good old boys who run umpiring have decided women don’t belong, no matter how able. I can’t tell you what the good old boys say, because their good old representative refused to talk.

  But I have some sense of the other side from Harry Wendelstadt, the veteran umpire who trained Teresa Cox and calls her “the best female candidate I’ve ever had.” He says he’s trained twenty-eight women and maybe five thousand men, and that there just haven’t been enough women in the pipeline leading to the major leagues. That’s what we hear about the executive suite, too—that it’s a pipeline problem.

  “I don’t think there’s bias,” Mr. Wendelstadt says. “I have no doubt that someday there’ll be a woman umpire in the major leagues; I just hope I’m the one who trains her.” Mr. Wendelstadt sounds O.K. and then he misses a high hanging curveball; he adds, “I don’t know why a young lady would want this job.” They should have this line printed on a T-shirt for men in traditionally male fields, they say it so often. Why does anyone want any job? Because it’s suited to her skills, well paying, interesting. Because it’s there. Hormones have nothing to do with wanting to feed your family or use your talents.

  Teresa Cox says that when she first started calling strikes, she was told that her voice was too high, and that when she used a lower register, she was criticized for sounding phony. She says she was told the umpire uniform looked awkward on women; I’ve seen guys wearing it who look as if they’re in the third trimester. She says that a league supervisor wondered aloud whether she was “queer.” She also says she was told she didn’t need the job because she’d just get married and have kids.

  Now, that’s an original line.

  “She was told by the supervisors that women in baseball were just a joke,” says Glenda Cochran, her lawyer.

  Mr. Wendelstadt says it must be that she wasn’t quite good enough, and in fact we’ve all heard of cases in which women cried sexism when the problem was skill. I always think that’s a little like faking sick with the flu; you can get away with it because there’s so much of the real thing going around.

  The glass ceiling gets more attention, but it’s good to remember the cement floor, to remember that there are still places that might as well have signs: GIRLS KEEP OUT! It serves to remind you of the bad old days, and of the fact that there’s nothing cute about trying to be treated fairly. Why would a young lady want this job? You’ll just get married and have kids! The reservations are couched more subtly now, but they’re there, like Burma-Shave signs along the highway of equal opportunity. What a long, strange trip it’s been. Some wins. Some losses. Some places where we just keep striking out.

  A TEAM DREAM

  July 8, 1992

  People talk about turning forty as though it were akin to having your wisdom teeth removed—exceedingly painful, the horrid loss of something grown in the bone. The loss of that gilded age called youth, which is wasted on the young and which many grown-ups wouldn’t have on a bet, knowing what they know today.

  So far, Day One, forty feels fine. The days of expensive fashion errors, crazed momentary friendships, and 2:00 A.M. feedings are over. Things are somehow settled. There are those who think set-ted is synonymous with death and stagnation; I’m the kind who thinks setted is synonymous with security.

  “It is in the thirties that we want friends,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote. “In the forties we know they won’t save us any more than love did.” This adds to my collection of things Fitzgerald said that are foolish. If not friendship and love, then what? Insider trading? The real wisdom comes from George Burns, who once said of growing old, “Consider the alternative.” Consider the alternative. There you are. The only real regret I feel today is that I am not a member of the United States Olympic men’s basketball team. No, this is not a woman/jock/empowerment fantasy, and no, I haven’t yet seen A League of Their Own. That’s women and baseball, and I don’t ever have to write about baseball.

  Somewhere in the contract of the male columnist it is written that once a year he must wax poetic and philosophic about baseball, making it sound like a cross between the Kirov and Zen Buddhism. This covers the baseball profundity axis more than adequately, which is a good thing. The connection between a base hit and karma eludes me.

  But basketball is something different, sweatier and swifter and not likely to be likened to haiku, thank God. And this Olympic basketball team is something different entirely. It is the best sports team ever, the equivalent of rounding up the greatest American writers of the last century or so and watching them collaborate: “O.K., Twain, you do the dialogue and hand off to Faulkner. He’ll do the interior monlogue. Hemingway will edit—no, don’t make that face, you know you overwrite. And be nice to Cheever. He’s young, but he’s got a good ear. Wharton and Cather can’t play—they’re girls.” On television they were running down the lineup: Larry Bird. Patrick Ewing. Michael Jordan. Magic Johnson. When they got to Christ
ian Laettner, the student prince of college basektball, I almost felt sorry for the guy because he was so outclassed, a mere champion among giants. We don’t see giants often, even one at a time, never mind en masse and in skivvies.

  Catholic school girls once played intramural basketball all winter long, and though it was with a smaller ball and slacker rules than the boys used—and though I traveled more often than I ever scored—it gave me a visceral feeling for the nonpareil grace, skill, and teamwork of the sport. Not to mention that glow in your chest when the ball leaves your hands, arcs through the air with all eyes following, and falls almost inevitably through the hoop. Yesssss.

  Take all that and elevate it to the level of, say, Frank Lloyd Wright, and you have this Olympic team. As good as it gets. There is pure pleasure in thinking about watching them play together. Each is accustomed to being a star; together they’re a firmament. The collaboration is one of the loveliest parts, a metaphor for the friendship whose salvation Fitzgerald so mistakenly denied.

  Twenty years ago I wouldn’t have noticed. I liked the figure skaters then, all sequins and spins and solitary splendor, the girls who epitomize the Victorian dictum that men perspire and women glow. I’ve lost my yen for sequins and developed a pure reverence for skill and sweat.

  Those guys won’t be out there getting rich or famous; they’re already rich and famous. Every lay-up, every rebound in Barcelona will be saying, “Look at what we know.” Not youth, youth, youth, although some of them are very young. Experience. There’s a moment when the ball arcs perfectly downward to the waiting web of the net—or when the words lie down just right on the page—that makes you feel as if you are going to live forever. The irony is that by the time you are old enough to appreciate the feeling, you’re old enough to know that it’s illusory. Experience. Experience. I never had a jump shot, and I’m no longer a kid. But experience I now have. Consider the alternative.