I’m not thrilled about looking older. But I realize what unsettles me most about becoming “madame” is the implication that I’m now a grown-up myself. I feel like I’ve been promoted beyond my competence.
What is a grown-up anyway? Do they really exist? If so, what exactly do they know? And how can I make the leap to become one of them? Will my mind ever catch up with my face?
You know you’re in your early forties when . . .
Your age feels like a secret.
You become impatient while scrolling down to your year of birth.
You’re surprised when a saleslady steers you to the “antiaging” cream.
You’re surprised to learn that a friend has a child in college.
People are surprised when you reveal that you have three kids.
1
how to find your calling
WHEN I WAS GROWING UP, my family didn’t do bad news. My maternal grandmother responded to everything from family squabbles to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by declaring cheerfully, “I’m sure they’ll work it out!”
There are worse things for a child to endure than relentless optimism. My plight wasn’t even unique: lots of middle-class Americans grow up in sunny, nonintrospective homes. But I suspect that mine was more relentlessly positive than most. In order to avoid unpleasant subjects, we didn’t go into much detail about anything, including our own ancestry. I was nearly a teenager when I discovered that two of my grandparents and all of my great-grandparents came to America as immigrants, mostly from Russia. Since no one had said otherwise, I’d assumed that we’d been Americans forever.
Even our immigration story was vague. My grandmother said her parents came from a place called “Minski Giberniya.” But she didn’t know exactly where this was, and when she once searched the Ellis Island records, there was no trace of either of them. And after her family settled in South Carolina, they instantly went native. My grandmother became a Southern belle and a sorority sister who lived by the local maxim: If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything.
No one in my family ever mentioned that we had close relatives who stayed behind in “Minski Giberniya.” When I eventually questioned my grandmother about this, she acknowledged that her mother used to send care packages of dried beans and clothing to siblings and cousins who’d remained in Russia. But after World War II, she didn’t send them packages anymore.
“We lost touch,” my grandmother said.
This is how my family explained the fate of relatives who were probably rounded up and murdered in the Holocaust: we lost touch.
This extreme positivity seemed to run in my maternal line, with each generation shielding the next from bad news. I first noticed it at my father’s fortieth birthday party, when I was six. We were celebrating at home in Miami, the city where I grew up. Guests were having drinks on the patio, around our swimming pool. I was in the house when I heard a splash and saw a commotion.
“What happened?” I asked my mother.
“Nothing happened,” she assured me.
For the record, my mother was loving, warm and well intentioned. She was trying to protect me. But I suspect I’d be a different person today—perhaps working in a different profession—had she simply said, “Larry Goodman got drunk and fell in the pool.” Then we could have agreed that bad things sometimes happen, and that I was a reliable witness of them.
Instead, I came to feel that bad things occur in a fuzzy far-off dimension, always patio-distance away. If you don’t examine them too closely, it’s as if they never happened.
This view of life was easy to sustain in Miami. The city is perpetually sunny, and was literally invented out of air, since it only started to boom once air-conditioning became widely available in the 1950s and ’60s. Years later, when my future in-laws visited one of Miami’s oldest homes—now part of a historic state park—they pointed out that it was roughly the same age as their house in London.
People are often surprised to hear that I spent my childhood in Miami. They think it’s a city of grandparents. But that’s mostly Miami Beach, a slender island off the city’s eastern coast. There’s a whole other hot, unglamorous inland area where most inhabitants live.
My parents bought their first home on land that had previously been a mango grove. The mango trees were still there, and the fruits would splatter on our cars, ruining the paint. Like the other homes in the neighborhood, ours was concrete, air-conditioned and built to keep out the salamanders, the burglars and the weather. Occasionally, a black ringneck snake would slither inside through the vents. We almost never saw the beach.
Practically everyone in Miami was displaced. Our Cuban neighbors were certain that they would soon be returning to Havana. Most of my parents’ friends had Brooklyn or tristate accents. We pretended that South Florida had the same seasons as New York, though in department-store photographs of me with Santa Claus, I’m tanned and wearing shorts.
Miami’s lack of context and aura of wishful thinking suited us perfectly. When my mother had to disclose any unpleasant news—say, that someone we knew had cancer—she’d sandwich it between reports of dinner plans and cheerleading practice. The bad news would flash by so quickly, I’d doubt whether I’d really heard it.
It was the 1980s and the peak of the American divorce boom, so I’d often learn that grown-ups I knew were splitting up, but never the reasons why. My parents didn’t say much about people they knew, or describe relationships between our family members. I once noticed them whispering about an alcoholic aunt, but when I asked for details, they went silent. (I learned years later that the aunt would launch into anti-Semitic rants after her first Bloody Mary.)
Such facts weren’t considered child friendly. In fact, almost nothing was. We described world events, new outfits and summer vacations with vague catchphrases like “It’s terrible,” “That looks adorable” and “We had the best time.” People we approved of were “fabulous” (one of my mother’s friends liked to call pretty women “delicious”); those we didn’t like were “annoying.” Someone who spoke about any one subject for too long was “boring” or “not regular.” (I would later realize that these “boring” people were the semi-intellectuals in our midst.)
My parents weren’t my only source of information, of course. I knew about AIDS, political prisoners and the fact that Colombian drug cartels murdered people in Miami. I read books in which characters had backstories, contradictory qualities and inner lives. But as an obedient oldest child, I also believed that what happened at home was real life. And in our house, we didn’t gather facts into patterns, analyze our own experiences or speculate about other people. Nor did we discuss our own history, ethnicity or social class. Pointing out complicated truths just made everyone uncomfortable. It was like saying that Larry Goodman fell in the pool.
As I grew older, I came to assume that a separate grown-up conversation about life went on when I wasn’t there, or that all this small talk was a prelude to the day when we would finally sit down and discuss everything. I was relieved when, on successive trips to the supermarket, my mother brought home volumes of a down-market encyclopedia. Finally, there were some facts in the house. (We had to wait for certain popular volumes, like “S,” to be restocked.)
The irony is that my childhood was a cover-up without a crime. I’m pretty sure that Larry Goodman climbed, unharmed, out of our swimming pool. He probably didn’t even have a drinking problem. For the most part, behind the smoke screen of pleasantries and good news, nothing terrible was happening.
My parents did have one dark secret: we weren’t rich. Unlike many of their friends, they worried constantly about money. By any reasonable standard, we weren’t poor, either. But it felt like we were, because we were clinging to the bottom of the upper middle class.
Money mattered tremendously in Miami. Regardless of your social skills, o
r even your criminal record, being wealthy gave you status and mystique. (Florida has always attracted people with “an inordinate desire to get rich quickly with a minimum of physical effort,” the economist John Kenneth Galbraith said.)
And in the 1980s, Miami was on its way to becoming one of America’s most unequal cities. Friends of my parents sold their starter homes near us and built larger ones closer to the bay, with wet bars and tennis courts. Soon they were dressing up for charitable galas, driving Mercedes and summering in Colorado to escape Miami’s heat.
My family was left behind in the mango grove, and we were perplexed. Where did all this money originate? How exactly did someone come to own a bank, as several of my friends’ parents did?
My father was old-world. He was born in Brooklyn just before World War II, to working-class immigrant parents who lived next door to relatives with names like Gussie, Bessie and Yetta. His own father, Harry, had dropped out of school at age twelve to deliver newspapers—first from a horse-drawn wagon and later from a truck, and usually with a cigarette in his mouth. One day, when my father was a teenager, he turned up at the truck after school to help out. He found his father in the back, hunched over stacks of newspapers, dead of a heart attack.
My father did a couple years of college, then got a series of jobs in TV production. When my mother met him in New York City, on a blind date, she saw a handsome, appropriately aged man who wore a suit to work, and who—unlike a recent succession of boyfriends she’d had—was actually nice.
That was all true. But what she didn’t see, in her optimism, were the vast differences between them. My mother’s branch of the family had bounced cheerfully out of the shtetl and into the sunshine. Her American-born parents were established, canny and successful.
My father was patriotic, nostalgic, dreamy and loyal. Though dazzled by my mother’s social skills and fancier family, he would always long for the old neighborhood.
They moved to Miami, where my mother had grown up. There weren’t many TV jobs in town, so my father opened a small advertising agency, and made commercials for flea markets and local horse-racing tracks.
“Nice” melted in the sun and became depression. He was good at the creative part. But to get more business, he had to sell himself to potential clients. And to be good at sales, either you have to see into people’s minds to know what they want or you must be so magnetic that they want whatever you’re selling.
My father had neither quality. He enjoyed going to bed early, and making puns and canned remarks. (A favorite of his, to this day, is “Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.”) Countless fights erupted between my parents either because my father drove too slowly, or because he’d fallen asleep at a dinner party again. “I was just resting my eyes,” he would say.
He was also, perpetually, down to his last advertising account. And he blamed himself for this. We’d have a kind of absurdist daily dialogue, in which I’d ask him how his day had gone, and he’d reply, shamefully, that he’d been “busy.” Even then I realized he wasn’t, and that my parents’ arguments weren’t really about his slow driving; it was that he wasn’t in the fast lane of life.
My mother was his opposite: outgoing, charismatic, confident and able to sell anything. Popular and pretty, she’d been voted best dressed in high school, then earned a degree in retail at Ohio State. She was interested in whatever was new: the newest clothing styles, the latest restaurants. She turned our living room into a gallery and hosted shows for up-and-coming artists. She and a partner opened a successful women’s clothing boutique that served as a kind of clubhouse, where women came to talk as much as to buy. Miami’s climate is technically “tropical monsoon.” But since it was always freezing inside from the air-conditioning, her customers stocked up on cashmere sweaters.
I grew up in my mother’s world. When I wasn’t at her boutique, I was tagging along with her in department stores to see what the competition was carrying. Age eight, while other kids were breaking bones on the sports field, I got a shopping injury: my brother and I were horsing around in the ladies’ sportswear section of Burdine’s, when a cart holding the cash register fell over and fractured my wrist.
Shopping was one topic we discussed in depth. It was even a source of wisdom. “If you don’t love it, don’t get it,” my grandmother would say. Our retail equivalent of a Buddhist koan was “Why, once you bring an outfit home, doesn’t it ever again look as good as it did in the shop?”
When it was time to choose a theme for my bat mitzvah party, I eschewed the standard ones of the era—tennis, space travel, Hawaiian luau—and picked “shopping” instead. It was the only topic that I knew intimately. My mother and I made place cards shaped like credit cards, and hired a party planner to make centerpieces out of bags from Bloomingdale’s and Neiman Marcus. The planner looked surprised when we described the shopping theme, but no one in my family thought this was an odd way to mark my passage into adulthood.
They did mention that we couldn’t afford the party. In a rare disclosure of bad news, my mother called me into her bedroom one day and said we might need to cancel it, for lack of funds. (We downsized to a cheaper venue instead.)
Our lifestyle was made possible by my mother’s father, who paid for most of the party and for the new roof on our house. Though my grandfather, like my father, was the son of poor immigrants, he had the ability to connect with people, make deals and make money.
My grandfather paid for the private schools where I mingled with the offspring of Miami’s superrich. Some of my classmates lived in waterfront mansions on Miami Beach that they rented out as movie and TV sets. Some got Porsches when they turned sixteen. When my mother arrived at school once to pick me up in her Toyota, a boy sneered, “Is that your maid’s car?”
I never questioned this cosmology. I figured that an optimal outcome for me would be to marry a plastic surgeon. (Another of my grandmother’s maxims was “It’s as easy to fall in love with a rich man as a poor one.”)
Though I didn’t realize it at the time, my life changed when I discovered The Official Preppy Handbook—a satirical guide to the habits of old-money East Coast WASPs. It described a world in which people owned Irish setters, went skiing in Gstaad and wore duck-motif belts. (“The less an object has to do with ducks, the more it cries out for duck adornment.”)
Before reading the book, I’d barely clocked the fact that there were Americans who were neither Latino nor Jewish nor black. And I was unfamiliar with the WASP aesthetic: Who knew it was good to have used furniture?
I knew that I wasn’t preppy. I didn’t know anyone nicknamed Skip or Bink (though I had a Cuban friend we called “Juanky”). I could sail a bit, but my house wasn’t scattered with cigarette boxes that my father had won at regattas.
But the book confirmed my suspicion that there really was a lot my family wasn’t saying. Daily life—even mine—could be decoded and mined for meaning. Your clothes, your carpeting, the words you used and the objects scattered around your house all amounted to a kind of tribal map.
We never discussed what our tribe was, and our religious observance was bare-bones. (At my shopping-themed bat mitzvah, we served shrimp cocktail.) But when I walked into a restaurant with my parents, I could spot which women my mother would know, even if I’d never seen them before. They had the same faces, clothes and hairstyles that we did. Most of their parents or grandparents had come to America from the same general European vicinity as ours, at roughly the same time. It was as if entire Belorussian villages had been transported to South Florida, and their descendants were now having dinner in the same Italian restaurants.
I didn’t quite know it then, but I craved a Preppy Handbook equivalent of my own life, which would explain our ritual objects, outfits and customs. I wanted to know the invisible meaning of everything—from what we wore, to why we all had quasi–New York accents, to exactly where we all came from. But how could I do an an
thropology of my own life? I wasn’t even a reliable witness of who had fallen in the pool.
As I got older, I came to trust my own judgment more. At an airport about to fly home from a high school trip—financed by my grandfather—I ran into an older cousin’s husband in the departure lounge. Only he wasn’t with my cousin and their two sons; he was with a pretty blond lady and a similarly blond toddler. When he saw me, he looked panicked.
“Cousin Neil has another family,” I told my mother, when I got back to Miami.
“Impossible,” she said. (With no push from me, my cousin and her husband soon divorced.)
Once I’d had this taste of truth spotting, I wanted more. I began to read my mother’s Cold War spy novels, and to dream of having a piercing intellect that I would use to crack codes and solve crimes.
Never mind that I couldn’t even follow the plots of spy movies, and that I was unable to memorize a phone number or keep a secret. I imagined a future in which I remembered license plates as they flashed past me and I unraveled the motives of foreign agents. Surely the CIA would spot my talents and recruit me.
When I went away to college, I would have been a natural as an English major (the real takeaway from all those spy novels was that I liked to read). But literature seemed like too soft a subject. I majored in philosophy to hone my analytical skills. I stuck with this, despite having no talent for it and not enjoying my classes. When I asked a professor for a letter of recommendation, she wrote: Pamela will probably be good at something, but it’s not philosophy.
I got some perspective on Miami when I studied in Mexico for a semester. As part of a program called “La Realidad,” I lived with a family of seven in their cinder-block house off a dirt road. The one tap in the house had only cold water, so I bathed with heated water in a bucket. When they served an exotic mamey fruit after dinner one night, I devoured it. I looked up to find seven despondent faces; the one fruit was supposed to be dessert for all of us.
There Are No Grown-ups Page 2
