Bitch

by Elizabeth Wurtzel

  The one thing they are not is Heidi, the heroine of The Heidi Chronicles, Wendy Wasserstein’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play. They are not vibrant and accomplished art history professors at Barnard with personal magnetism and prominence and position to spare. They are not too good to be true. Such men do not find themselves in their forties facing single parenthood in a newly acquired apartment on the Upper West Side. Such men find wives. They just do.

  Anger is probably the most direct emotion that human beings are capable of. “I have never felt my mind so clear and certain as tonight,” Nora said as she walked out on Torvald. Anger, hate, feelings that create boundaries and barriers between us and others, that cut us off from all other ecosystems—these allow us to experience clarity.

  Love ought to be an emotion with similar lucidity because it is that strong and that powerful. But let’s face it, love cannot exist by itself; it requires response, it makes us porous and permeable. Unrequited love, if it does not die of its own accord, becomes obsession and sickness. The purest experience of love a human being can have is probably with infants and very young children, and with pets: all of these beings are not autonomous or capable enough to return the love we lavish upon them for no reason other than that they exist and we adore them and we can’t help ourselves; we ask nothing in return—only that they let us love them without condition, that they accept this gift with grace. But grown-up love requires, in many cases, more peace treaties, both tacit and spoken, than it would take to make sense of the whole Middle East. It’s about drawing lines in the sand and moving them around a million times. It is the hardest and greatest thing most of us will ever do, the challenge of finding those boundaries and watching them blow around and blur and re-form and mess up as if we were all just little specks of sand in the Tunisian desert—I mean, that’s pretty much what we live for.

  But I don’t know what went wrong with me. I think maybe I was blown around too much as a child, but for some reason the painful clarity and righteous indignation I experience whenever I get very angry, the sense that the whole world had best stay away from me, the sense that no one else and nothing else matters—well, I’ve come to enjoy it. Most men, I think, find it so natural to just make certain decisions for themselves unilaterally and arbitrarily and then—gosh golly gee—find themselves lucky enough to find some woman willing to hew to their will that they cannot possibly understand why my anger is so precious to me. I’m not saying that most women will go along with men’s autocratic decisions when it comes to concrete things like where to live or where to work—we have learned to fight for our rights on that front. But in emotional terms, mostly we let them do what they want and then we solve the discrepancies. I think feminism has really taken us to the point where we cannot possibly discuss who does the dishes or who folds the laundry one more time. I don’t give a shit. It’s all the emotional figuring, the tallying of who is more in pursuit of whom this week, and how do we keep the romance alive, and am I being a nag, and are you tired of me darling—it’s all this obsessive, circular, insomnia-driven dread that is still mostly women’s work, and it’s fatiguing as hell.

  This is how it is for me: I can’t do that anymore. I am too tired. I am not selfish, but I know what’s right and what’s wrong, I know it with a certainty and fealty that I think is fucking awesome, and I consider this a massive feat of my own psychic system because everything in my past should only have left me blurry, muddy and confused. Mostly, I live in those gray zones, but more and more I am itched by a feeling that something isn’t right, something feels wrong, I don’t like it, I won’t have it—and I am very, very angry. And I love it when I get to that point. Because I see clearly and nothing anyone says or does can possibly intrude.

  No means no.

  That’s where I am. I am so angry that nothing could possibly keep me from doing what I want when I want it. I am refusing to go under, resisting arrest, denying psychic death.

  I don’t particularly want to be alone the rest of my life, I’m looking forward to getting married and having babies like everybody else. But if the last thirty years of my life and of the simultaneously unfolding third wave of feminism have not made that possible and it takes another thirty or thirty thousand more, then it will be my lot in life.

  And I will accept it.

  But whenever I am honest enough to see life as more than an academic exercise—to admit it matters for how it feels daily, that the cosmic outlook is not really worth shit—I feel terrible longings. Whenever I hear songs like Jimmy Webb’s “If These Old Walls Could Speak” or Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon,” I really feel deeply and viscerally the awe and wonder of matrimony, and I am certain it is not something I want to miss out on. Especially the lines: “Here’s someone who really loves you / Don’t ever go away.” Or: “Because I’m still in love with you / I want to see you dancing on this harvest moon.”

  After all these years, still dancing by the dark light of the moon.

  At the end of the movie Heartburn—underrated in the Nora Ephron oeuvre—Meryl Streep leaves Washington, D.C., as a refugee from marriage to the inconstant journalist played by Jack Nicholson. As she boards the Eastern shuttle to New York—that old standby which has since been morphed multiple times into the Trump shuttle then the Delta shuttle with a few other carriers holding forth in between, a long sturdy marriage displaced by a pattern of serial monogamy with interim affairs—the credits roll and Carly Simon’s “Coming Around Again” starts to play. The song seems to both celebrate and derogate the movie’s theme, its depiction of the triumph of hope over experience that allows us to love again and again, against the idiotic odds. As Rachel, Streep’s character, sits down on the plane with her two children, she starts to sing “The Itsy-Bitsy Spider” with them, their little fingers pantomiming the creeping upward crawl. Now, as far as I’m concerned, Simon’s song is the worst in Lite-FM, but on an alternate version that includes a group of kids who sing “The Itsy-Bitsy Spider” as counterpoint to her very adult lament, it is just so sad. Because by teaching that ditty to little kids, we are basically preparing them early on for disappointment—over and over and over again. And because, after all, we are all of us just spiders climbing up a drainpipe.

  But there is some part of me that wants to believe that at some point it ends, that somewhere along the way life settles into some kind of comfort, into something more than just free-falling down the side of K2 and then picking up my pitons and rope and clambering right back up, in pursuit of my next notion of a nirvana that does not exist. I mean, I have been fighting the good fight long enough. I’d like quiet, I’d like to think I’m more than just a spider.

  But maybe I’m less than one. And maybe persistence is a virtue, plain and simple and not just Sisyphean idiocy.

  I don’t know.

  I don’t know if I can stand to fuck up one more time and have one more, as people politely put it, experience.

  “Experience,” which is just a euphemism for heartache and heartbreak, failed love and false promises, for every time you told yourself This is the real thing and Finally I’ve found my way home only to end up lost in a muck or lying across rickety train tracks, praying for deliverance and not knowing if that would mean getting run over or being spared; “experience,” which is a neutral word that most people know only means something good on a resume, a term that in the rest of life is more like a criminal rap sheet full of mishaps that cannot be expunged, this indelible quality made more frightening because there are no authorities keeping track, no one is forcing you to remember these things, it is all your own fault, it is only you who cannot forget; “experience,” which is supposed to be the playground and peep show and life-size labyrinth of adolescence, which can, when it occurs at the right time in life, if it is meted out by the proper source, if it is delivered in moderate and judicious measure—if it is the fender bender you suffer as a teenage driver that reminds you to keep your hands on the wheel and your eyes on the road—can make you a more capable lov
er and friend, spouse and partner. But for me and many my age, it’s been head-on collisions and near-death experiences, trauma, sustained damage, bruises to the brain, permanently hemorrhaging hearts. None of us are getting better at loving: we are getting more scared of it. We were not given good skills to begin with, and the choices we make have tended only to reinforce our sense that it is hopeless and useless. So years go by, and everything that happens only makes what has already happened more painful.

  “Experience,” Oscar Wilde wrote in Lady Windermere’s Fan, “is the name everybody gives to their mistakes.” How nice to know that one word covers an assortment of items that are so plentiful.

  In the end, with so many reasons to be bitter and exhausted, it sometimes feels like embracing life and love is the only answer. In the movie Blue, part of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s trilogy of films inspired by the colors of the French flag, Juliette Binoche plays a contained, carefully composed woman who loses her husband and child in an auto accident, and she is once again a single woman. Julie, as Binoche’s character is called, is austere and cautious with her emotions, carrying the grief and strength of young widowhood with great elegance, saving her unruly tears for private—and yet, this apparent dignity is a bit frosty, even a little warped: she is the kind of person that you would describe as perfect and mean it as an observation, not a compliment. The role of bereft woman is one she takes to naturally, which is why it is so dangerous for her: left alone, she will just stay that way, she will be reduced to the minimal self she once was. Her only sense of life was in her immediate family, and without them, every gesture and thought is all Julie can do to keep her loneliness from turning to terror and rage. Her alienation is symbolized by the cat she brings home to kill the mice in her apartment: as if to say, it’s a cruel world, and I can only add to the cruelty, turning small creatures on smaller ones (they are newborn mice).

  Then Julie finds out that her husband had a mistress and that the woman, an attorney, is pregnant. The mistress admits that he loved her.

  This discovery leaves Julie with many choices. It retroactively rewrites the story of her storybook marriage—although, this being France, it does not necessarily mean their life together was a sham. But it might mean that her chilliness left her husband lonely. In the process of trying to integrate with the world, to dispense with her gorgeous but miserable mystique, Julie slowly determines to be charitable and compassionate, even with predicaments that ought to bring her desperate pain. She chooses to give the mistress a house she owned with her husband to live in with the baby when it is born. While being shown around the house, the mistress says that the dead husband had told her a lot about his wife. “He said that you are good and that you are generous. That you want to be good and generous. Even to me.” In all the sorrow and death and discovered deceit, Julie chooses to be kind and loving and embrace life, to show decency and largesse to those around her.

  After dealing with the mother of her deceased husband’s future offspring, Julie next takes up the task of completing his last work as a classical composer, a symphony commissioned to celebrate the unification of Europe. Of course, it soon becomes clear that Julie was the one who really wrote the beginning of this composition, that she has always been the true creative force, hiding herself and her talent behind her husband’s name. This will be the first time that she takes credit. Into this large orchestra piece, Julie weaves the lines spoken by Paul in the Book of Corinthians, the words about how all is nothing without love: “Although I speak in tongues of men and angels, I’m just sounding brass and tinkling symbols without love. Love suffers long. Love is kind. Enduring all things. Hoping all things. Love has no evil in mind.” And in using these verses—the lines frequently read from at wedding ceremonies, the Bible’s aptest address on the matter of the union of souls and the glory of human communion—Julie gives the passage a new context and makes for herself a new understanding of what love is: it is not about romance or marriage; it is about living in a world without pity, with little sense of community, and choosing to reach out and show love to people who one might expect her to hate. “I continued to love despite all the traffic light difficulties,” writes Bob Kaufman in “Song of the Broken Giraffe,” which about says it all.

  And every day, despite an unforgiving and rapacious employment of the death penalty in our country, particularly in Texas and Florida, there are people who choose to be forgiving, who choose to be loving when no one would ever deny them the bitterness and horror that tragedy has given them the right to. I will never forget the man who lost his daughter in the Oklahoma City bombing and, despite dissent from every sector of the community of survivors, he parted company from all the victims’ rights fanatics to say that he did not want Timothy McVeigh to get the lethal injection because, he explained, “If I am ever going to forgive him, I need him to be alive.” And I will never forget SueZann Bosler, a hairdresser in Opa-Locka, Florida, who in 1986 watched a man stab her clergyman father to death in the church where he ministered. The murderer also stabbed SueZann once in the back and twice in the head, leaving her with a fractured skull that required six hours of surgery to repair. Nevertheless, at her assailant’s sentencing hearing, Ms. Bosler spoke out, entreating the court not to give him the death penalty, passionately passing along the simple message: “Why kill people to show that killing is wrong?”

  She has chosen forgiveness over vengeance.

  And that has to be the guiding principle, it is the only chance any of us has for happiness. It is so hard to be more and better than the terrible things that happened to you, but it helps to start seeing bad people as more and better than the worst things they’ve done. We may never be so near to the Lord in our capacity for joy that we would find ourselves, like the Hasidim in war-torn Europe, able to dance and celebrate our last bits of life when the Holocaust would destroy us. We may never be the African slaves who tapped out music with their feet when their instruments were denied them, making a noise of protest and ecstasy and existence when the day had been too long, with too much cotton, too many acres, too much sun, too many lashes, too much hunger. We may never, in the mundane monotony of our daily lives, know what it’s like to be cut down to so little, to be reduced to such a slight fragment of our own humanity that we are forced to use all that we have, to find the liveliest life force within what little is left—and to accept that the only choice that has still been granted us is whether to be bitter or gracious.

  All I would like in my life, what I wish for so very much, is to someday have the strength and be free of the resentment and anger that I carry around with me like Linus’ blanket for just long enough to become one of those people who is better than the worst thing that happens to her.

  How I would love to be that woman.

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