Living Out Loud

by Anna Quindlen

  Sometimes the baby slips out with the bath water. I wanted to throw confetti the day that a family of rough types who propped their speakers on their station wagon and played heavy metal music at 3:00 A.M. moved out. I stood and smiled as the seedy bar at the corner was transformed into a slick Mexican restaurant. But I liked some of the people who moved out at the same time the rough types did. And I’m not sure I have that much in common with the singles who have made the restaurant their second home.

  Yet somehow now we seem to have reached a nice mix. About a third of the people in the neighborhood think of squid as calamari, about a third think of it as sushi, and about a third think of it as bait. Lots of the single people who have moved in during the last year or two are easygoing and good-tempered about all the kids. The old Italians have become philosophical about the new Hispanics, although they still think more of them should know English. The firebrand community organizer with the storefront on the block, the one who is always talking about people like us as though we stole our houses out of the open purse of a ninety-year-old blind widow, is pleasant to my boys.

  Drawn in broad strokes, we live in a pressure cooker: oil and water, us and them. But if you come around at exactly the right time, you’ll find members of all these groups gathered around complaining about the condition of the streets, on which everyone can agree. We melt together, then draw apart. I am the granddaughter of immigrants, a young professional—either an interloper or a longtime resident, depending on your concept of time. I am one of them, and one of us.

  TUNING FORKS

  During our college years, I asked the man who is now my husband for the same gift for Valentine’s Day, my birthday, and Christmas. He would say, “What do you want?” And I would reply, “An engagement ring.” And he would laugh. In no time at all this became a standing joke, which is why, on my twenty-fifth birthday, I opened the latest in a succession of tiny boxes that had previously contained earrings, lockets, and the like with an air that was just a little bit lackadaisical. Inside the box was an engagement ring. Life had sneaked up behind me and planted a kiss on my cheek just as I had finally stopped straining to hear its footfalls. I wasn’t looking for it, and so it came.

  I know there are people who never strain, who go to look at houses they want to buy armed with a notebook, a list of practical questions, and a dignified, slightly critical manner. I know there are people who can argue about salary at job interviews and those who can greet a blind date—even one described by friends as a tall neurosurgeon with a great sense of humor—with a firm handshake and a level look.

  And then there are people like me. I like to think of us as the tuning forks. When we are in the market for anything of substance—an apartment, a job, a relationship, a dress to wear on New Year’s Eve—we give off a high-pitched tone akin to that emitted by dog whistles. This tone sends one of two messages to people: stay away, or take us for all we are worth. Most women have known a fair number of allegedly eligible men in each category (and some who started out in the second and then moved rapidly to the first). But of the rental agents and personnel managers I’ve known, most were the take-’em type. The only exception was the wonderful, cynical man who once interviewed me for a reporter’s job and who, when I said I would work for free, answered coldly, “Don’t be dramatic.”

  The tuning-fork phenomenon gives life an interesting quality, which, according to some friends, was introduced early in their own lives by their mothers. If you want something, it will elude you. If you do not want something, you will get ten of it in the mail. I have become such a firm believer in this that now that I have a place to live I half expect doormen all over New York City to dart forward as I pass by, grab my arm and say, “The penthouse just opened up—it has four bedrooms and a terrace, and the fireplace works.”

  This is in sharp contrast to the search for my first apartment, which took place with my pupils permanently dilated with desperation and desire, one of the telltale signs of tuning forks everywhere. I told agents that I didn’t care if the bathtub was in the kitchen, didn’t mind if there wasn’t a kitchen at all, and thought the walk-in closet would indeed, with a little work, make a lovely bedroom. When I finally found a human habitation for rent, nothing could dissuade me. The delay on delivery of the refrigerator? (I’m getting a refrigerator? God! How great!) The hole in the bedroom ceiling? (I’ll only see it when I’m lying down.) The rent? (It’s reasonable. Or it would be if I had it. But I’ll get it.)

  Of course I adored that apartment because I had wanted it so badly, wanted it for no reason except that I was looking and it was there, which as many women can tell you is a key to some inexplicable and horrible relationships. During a time when I was in flux on just about every level, that apartment was my safe haven. I remember how, starting off from that apartment, I would take long walks around the city streets, in jeans and sneakers, buying flowers and food, window shopping, watching the pickup basketball games and the kids in the park. I thought this was all quite casual and continental, and that if I did it long enough I would meet some people. One morning a coworker said he had seen me walking the evening before and that he almost hadn’t recognized me. “You looked so intense,” he said. “You sort of looked like a cross between one of those kids with the big eyes in Keane paintings, and a serial murderer.” No wonder I wasn’t meeting anyone.

  I was thinking about this the other night because of what happened on the bus. A man sat down next to me. I was reading my newspaper and he was reading his, and after a few minutes he started an idle conversation about some news event. That’s when I noticed how handsome he was. In the course of the conversation, it also occurred to me that he was quite smart. When he asked if I had had dinner, I realized he was trying to pick me up.

  Under other circumstances—say, if I had not had a husband and two small children at home waiting for me—this would have been marvelous, but under other circumstances this would not have happened. It crossed my mind that it was a function of age, that I was only so crazed when I was younger because I was younger, but I don’t believe it’s so. If I were still looking, that man would have changed seats or feigned sleep or keeled over in a fake faint rather than talk to me. He would have heard the hum. He would have known that he could tell me he’d like to have dinner, but wanted to warn me that he was leaving the next day to join the Green Berets for a secret training mission in Lebanon, and that in response I would have said only two words: “Which restaurant?”

  ALONE AT LAST

  I got in a lot of trouble when I was a kid for not getting enough fresh air. There was a big chair in our living room, overstuffed and worn, and even on the nicest day of the year I could be found there, my legs draped over one arm of the chair, reading. I read a great deal, with no particular sense of originality or discernment. I read the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, C. S. Lewis and Robert Louis Stevenson, A Little Princess and A Wrinkle in Time. I read pretty awful stuff, like teen magazines, and I read pretty adult stuff, like Wuthering Heights. I still remember reading Ulysses when I was thirteen and thinking “What a weird book.”

  My mother was thinking “What a weird child.” When the sun was shining and the neighborhood kids were playing Monkey in the Middle, my mother was always yelling at me to go outside and get some fresh air. She did not think it was healthy to stay inside and read so much. One summer, to force me into the great outdoors, I was sent to camp in the mountains. Thinking of it even today is, as Evelyn Waugh’s Bright Young Things say, “too, too sick-making.” All those people and all that activity all the time: my God, I’ll never forget it.

  I still read constantly: if my kids ever go into analysis, I’m sure they will say they don’t really remember my face because it was always hidden by a book. Obviously this is in part because I like books. But another reason is that I like to be alone. I like to go deep inside myself and not be accompanied there by anyone else. But I am the oldest of five children, and when I was young I had about as much chance of being alon
e as I did of being a lion tamer. Reading was for me then a way of lifting myself out of a crowded environment into a place where I could be by myself. No wonder my mother was concerned. Being by yourself was considered, at my age and in my family, an aberrant behavior. Camp was normal. Camp was fun. Camp was crowded. Camp was horrible.

  We pay lip service to a notion that privacy is important, but I don’t really think we believe it much. When anyone lives alone we have a tendency to think they are just waiting to meet the right roommate; we have an impulse to pair our friends off or introduce them to others. Single people eating in restaurants are assumed to be there for lack of a companion, not because they like their own company. It is difficult for us to accept that a great many gregarious people are often, also, quite private inside, that they have a chocolate-covered almond kind of character. This happens to be the case with me, although societal conditioning has made me think about these two parts of myself as a little like the geography of the state of Michigan. I am so gregarious that I once went to an Irish wake and was the perfect mourner, even though I realized when I approached the casket that I was in the wrong viewing room. And I love solitude so much that easily one of my favorite parts of the week is when I have somehow finished my work before the sitter is due to leave and I can hide out in my room for half an hour and read a Lord Peter Wimsey mystery.

  Actually when I lived alone I was lonely a fair amount of the time, but it felt somehow restorative. Perhaps I was making up for all those years of living in a crowded house, and all the years to come when, I suspected, I would live in one again. Because of youth or duty or love I have most often lived in crowded houses, in which a book was partly an excuse for staring into the middle distance, zoning out, being inside your own skin. I have cultivated pastimes that make this kind of behavior socially acceptable. I do needlework, watch television, and, yes, read—all excuses for chewing the cud, ruminating over whatever crosses my mental screen. Or, like a narcoleptic, I can simply lapse into my middle distance attitude. My eyes unfocus and my mouth drops open just a bit. I look like a fish who has just been sideswiped by the QE II and never knew what hit it. My family calls this my “zone look.” It means do not disturb.

  I wonder if this is hereditary, or whether I simply belong to a family made up of essentially solitary people placed by fate within large and voluble groups. My father, for example, fishes; it is a pursuit some people don’t understand, luring a stupid cold-blooded animal to its death on the end of a piece of string. But fishing has very little to do with fish, at least the way my dad practices it. It has to do with sinking within yourself, charting your course. And I’m all for that.

  I also have a child who habitually lapses into the zone look, although at his age I cannot imagine what he is thinking. Friends have started to ask me when he will begin lessons: swimming, piano, art, and the like. I want him to have the best of everything, but the best of everything for me was often staring off into the middle distance. I want him to have lots of time for that. If I were asked what I am most afraid of his missing in life, I think I would answer “Solitude.” I would say the same for me.

  RAISED ON ROCK-AND-ROLL

  Mister Ed is back on television, indicating that, as most middle-of-the-road antique shops suggest, Americans cannot discriminate between things worth saving and things that simply exist. The Donna Reed Show is on, too, and My Three Sons, and those dopey folks from Gilligan’s Island. There’s Leave It to Beaver and The Beverly Hillbillies and even Lassie, whose plaintive theme song leaves my husband all mushy around the edges.

  Social historians say these images, and those of Howdy Doody and Pinky Lee and Lamb Chop and Annette have forever shaped my consciousness. But I have memories far stronger than that. I remember sitting cross-legged in front of the tube, one of the console sets with the ersatz lamé netting over the speakers, but I was not watching puppets or pratfalls. I was born in Philadelphia, a city where if you can’t dance you might as well stay home, and I was raised on rock-and-roll. My earliest television memory is of American Bandstand, and the central question of my childhood was: Can you dance to it?

  When I was fifteen and a wild devotee of Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, it sometimes crossed my mind that when I was thirty-four years old, decrepit, wrinkled as a prune and near death, I would have moved on to some nameless kind of dreadful show music, something akin to Muzak. I did not think about the fact that my parents were still listening to the music that had been popular when they were kids, I only thought that they played “Pennsylvania 6-5000” to torment me and keep my friends away from the house.

  But I know now that I’m never going to stop loving rock-and-roll, all kinds of rock-and-roll: the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Hall and Oates, Talking Heads, the Doors, the Supremes, Tina Turner, Elvis Costello, Elvis Presley. I even like really bad rock-and-roll, although I guess that’s where my age shows; I don’t have the tolerance for Bon Jovi that I once had for the Raspberries.

  We have friends who, when their son was a baby, used to put a record on and say, “Drop your butt, Phillip.” And Phillip did. That’s what I love: drop-your-butt music. It’s one of the few things left in my life that makes me feel good without even thinking about it. I can walk into any bookstore and find dozens of books about motherhood and love and human relations and so many other things that we once did through a combination of intuition and emotion. I even heard recently that some school is giving a course on kissing, which makes me wonder if I’m missing something. But rock-and-roll flows through my veins, not my brain. There’s nothing else that feels the same to me as, say, the faint sound of the opening dum-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo of “My Girl” coming from a radio on a summer day. I feel the way I felt when I first heard it. I feel good, as James Brown says.

  There are lots of people who don’t feel this way about rock-and-roll. Some of them don’t understand it, like the Senate wives who said that records should have rating stickers on them so that you would know whether the lyrics were dirty. The kids who hang out at Mr. Big’s sub shop in my neighborhood thought this would make record shopping a lot easier, because you could choose albums by how bad the rating was. Most of the people who love rock-and-roll just thought the labeling idea was dumb. Lyrics, after all, are not the point of rock-and-roll, despite how beautifully people like Bruce Springsteen and Joni Mitchell write. Lyrics are the point only in the case of “Louie, Louie”; the words have never been deciphered, but it is widely understood that they are about sex. That’s understandable, because rock-and-roll is a lot like sex: If you talk seriously about it, it takes a lot of the feeling away—and feeling is the point.

  Some people over-analyze rock-and-roll, just as they over-analyze everything else. They say things like “Bruce Springsteen is the poet laureate of the American dream gone sour,” when all I need to know about Bruce Springsteen is that the saxophone bridge on “Jungleland” makes the back of my neck feel exactly the same way I felt the first time a boy kissed me, only over and over and over again. People write about Prince’s “psychedelic masturbatory fantasies,” but when I think about Prince, I don’t really think, I just feel—feel the moment when, driving to the beach, I first heard “Kiss” on the radio and started bopping up and down in my seat like a seventeen-year-old on a day trip.

  I’ve got precious few things in my life anymore that just make me feel, that make me jump up and dance, that make me forget the schedule and the job and the mortgage payments and just let me thrash around inside my skin. I’ve got precious few things I haven’t studied and considered and reconsidered and studied some more. I don’t know a chord change from a snare drum, but I know what I like, and I like feeling this way sometimes. I love rock-and-roll because in a time of talk, talk, talk, it’s about action.

  Here’s a test: Get hold of a two-year-old, a person who has never read a single word about how heavy-metal musicians should be put in jail or about Tina Turner’s “throaty alto range.” Put “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” on the stereo.
Stand the two-year-old in front of the stereo. The two-year-old will begin to dance. The two-year-old will drop his butt. Enough said.

  CHRISTMAS

  We will have a cold antipasto and chicken parmigiana for dinner tonight. I could have told you this a week ago. I could have told you this in March. It is an Italian tradition to feast on Christmas Eve, to crowd the table with calamari and scungilli, bacalla and pieces of fried eel.

  But my husband does not eat any of those traditional dishes, so I have adapted the menu. Afterward we will read “A Christmas Carol,” alternating chapters. I realized years ago that he got the best chapters. He gets the first, gets to intone, “Marley was dead, to begin with.” And he gets the last, so that at the end he can say, “God bless us every one!” But it has always been so. It is too late to change now.

  Christmas is the mainstay of my year because tradition is the mainstay of my life It keeps me whole. It is the centrifugal force that stops the pieces from shooting wildly into the void. The only way I can bear the changes that grind on inexorably around me is to pepper the year with those things that never change. Bath and books for the boys before bedtime. Homemade cakes on their birthdays. The beach in August. Chestnuts roasting on an open fire. Jack Frost nipping at your nose. You name it, I do it.

  We buy our tree at the same lot every year. “Where’s the biggest tree you’ve got?” I ask, and as though he knows just what I need, the man who runs the place repeats the same performance every year, looks askance and says, “The biggest?” Then we grin at each other, because we know he will never find a tree higher than the ceiling in the corner of our high-ceilinged Victorian parlor—the traditional place for our tree. It will be decorated, not with any kind of theme or special color, just the hodgepodge of glass balls, pressed tin ornaments, and little stuffed figures I’ve collected over the years. Each year I buy two new ones.