Fear Of Flying Read online

  Was any of that my fault?

  I had spent my whole life feeling that it was. And maybe I was responsible, in a way. Parents and children are umbili-cally attached and not only in the womb. Mysterious forces bind them. If my generation is going to spend its time denouncing our parents, then maybe we should allow our parents equal time.

  “I would have been a famous artist except for you kids,” my mother said. And for a long time I believed it.

  There was always, of course, the problem of her own father: an artist too and fanatically jealous of her talent. She had gone to Paris to escape him, so why did she come back to New York, move in with him, and live with him until she was forty? They shared a studio, and from time to time he painted over her canvases (only, of course, when he had no clean canvas). She had become a cubist in Paris and was on her way to developing a style of her own in some contemporary vein, but Papa, for whom painting began and ended with Rembrandt, mocked her until she gave up trying; she just kept getting pregnant.

  “Damned modern smudging,” Papa said. “Phony baloney.”

  Why didn’t she move out? I say this with the full weight of ambivalence behind it, knowing that then I might never have been born.

  We grew up in a sprawling fourteen-room apartment on Central Park West. The roof leaked (we lived on the top floor), the fuses all blew when you pushed the toast down in the toaster, the bathtubs were claw-footed and the plumbing rusty, the stove in the kitchen looked like something out of a TV commercial for old-Grandma-something-or-other’s-pre-serves, and the window frames were so old and cruddy that the wind whistled right through them. But it was a “Stanford White building” and there were “two studios with north light” and the library had “paneled walls” and “leaded windows” and the “forty-foot ceiling” in the living room was “real gold leaf.” I remembered these real-estate phrases echoing through my childhood. Gold leaf. I imagined a maple leaf which was made of gold. But how did they stick the leaves on the ceiling? And why didn’t they look like leaves? Maybe they ground them up and made them into paint? Where, I wondered, could you pick a “real gold leaf”? Did they grow on real gold trees? On real gold boughs? (I was the sort of kid who knew words like “bough.”)

  There was, in fact, a fat, darkly printed book in my parents’ library called The Golden Bough. I used to look in vain through its pages for any mention of “real gold leaf.” But there was plenty of sexy stuff in there. (Those were also the days when I used to hide Love Without Fear in my dresser drawer-beneath my undershirts.)

  So we stayed with Mama and Papa for the sake of “good north light” and “real gold leaf-or at least my mother said so. And meanwhile my father traveled around the world for his tzatzka business and my mother stayed home and had babies and screamed at her mother and father. My father was designing ice buckets which looked like beer steins and beer steins which looked like ice buckets. He was designing families of ceramic animals chained together with tiny gold chains. And he was making quite a fortune at it-amazingly enough. We could easily have moved away, but obviously my mother would not or could not. A little gold chain chained my mother to her mother, and me to my mother. All our un-happiness was strung along the same (rapidly tarnishing) gold chain.

  Of course my mother had a rationalization for it all-a patriarchal rationalization, the age-old rationalization of women seething with talent and ambition who keep getting knocked up.

  “Women cannot possibly do both,” she said, “you’ve got to choose. Either be an artist or have children.”

  With a name like Isadora Zelda it was clear what I was supposed to choose: everything my mother had been offered and had passed up.

  How could I possibly take off my diaphragm and get pregnant? What other women do without half thinking was for me a great and momentous act. It was a denial of my name, my destiny, my mother.

  My sisters were different. Gundra Miranda called herself “Randy” and married at eighteen. She married a Lebanese physicist at Berkeley, had four sons in California, and then moved her family to Beirut where she proceeded to have five daughters. Despite the seeming rebelliousness of a nice Jewish girl from Central Park West marrying an A-Rab, she led the most ordinary family life imaginable in Beirut. She was almost religiously in favor of Kinder, Küche, and Kirche-especially the Catholic Church which she attended in order to impress the Arabs with her non-Jewishness. Not, of course, that they liked Catholicism that much, but it was better than the other alternative. Both she and Pierre, my brother-in-law, believed in Robert Ardrey, Konrad Lorenz, and Lionel Tiger as if they were Jesus, Buddha, and Mohammed. “Instinct!” they snorted, “pure animal instinct!” They came to hate the Berkeley beatniks of their college days and to preach territoriality, the immorality of contraception and abortion, and the universality of war. At times they honestly seemed to believe in the Great Chain of Being and the Divine Right of Kings. And meanwhile, they just kept on breeding.

  (“Why should people with superior genes use contraception when all the undesirables are breeding the world into extinction?”-the old refrain whenever Randy was announcing a new pregnancy.)

  Lalah (the other middle daughter after me) was four years younger and had married a Negro. But as in Randy’s case, the unconventionality of the choice was misleading. Lalah went to Oberlin where she met Robert Goddard, easily the whitest white Negro in the history of the phrase. My brother-in-law Bob is actually cocoa brown, but his mind is white as a Klan member’s member. I don’t know about his member. How he got to a school like Oberlin rather perplexes me, as it perhaps perplexed him. After college, he went to medical school at Harvard and quickly decided to head where the bread was: orthopedic surgery. He now spends four days a week setting legs and pinning hips (and collecting huge fees from insurance companies). The other three days are spent jumping horses at an exclusive club in the fashionable but integrated Boston suburb where he and Lalah live.

  And how they live! Surrounded by the most extensive array of electrical gadgets outside of Hammacher-Schlemmer: electronic ice crushers, wine coolers, bedside machines which make synthesized sea noises, automatic egg-decapitators, humidifiers, dehumidifiers, automatic cocktail shakers, lawn mowers which move by remote control, hedge clippers programmed to make topiary designs, whirlpools which whirl the bathwater around, bidets which swirl the toilet water around, lighted shaving mirrors which pop out of the wall, color TV sets concealed behind framed copies of the most banal modern graphics, and a bar which pops out of the wall in the foyer when the front doorbell rings. The doorbell, by the way, plays the first few bars of “When the Saints Come Marching In”-Bob’s one and only concession to negritude.

  With all these gadgets and horses and three cars (one for each of them, and one for their white.South American housekeeper), we all assumed that they hadn’t time even to consider having children-to my parents’ relief, I suppose. Arab grand-children are one thing, but at least they have straight hair.

  However we were wrong. Lalah was, in fact, on fertility pills for two years (as she later informed us and all the newspapers), and last year gave birth to quintuplets. The rest (as they say) is history. You may even have seen the Time Magazine article about the “Goddard Quints” in which they were described as “cute, coffee-colored, and quite an armload.”

  “Wow!” reacted Mother Lalah Justine Goddard (née White), twenty-four, when told she had given birth to quints.

  And now Lalah and Bob have their hands full with broken bones, gadgets, horses, social climbing, and the quints (who, incidentally, they named the most ordinary names they could think of: Timmy, Susie, Annie, Jennie, and Johnnie). And Dr. Bob is making more money than ever, since it appears that having mulatto quints is the greatest way of building up a medical practice since Vitamin B shots. As for Lalah, she writes me once a year to ask why I don’t stop “farting around with poetry” and “do something meaningful” like have quints.

  After Randy’s Arab and Lalah’s Negro and my first husband’s convic
tion that he was Jesus Christ, my parents were actually quite relieved when I married Bennett. They had nothing whatsoever against his race, but they greatly resented his religion: psychoanalysis. They suffered from the erroneous impression that Bennett could read their minds. Actually, when he looked most penetrating, ominous, and inscrutable, he was usually thinking about changing the oil in the car, having chicken noodle soup for lunch, or taking a crap. But I could never convince them of that. They insisted on thinking that he was looking deep into their souls and seeing all the ugly secrets which they themselves wanted to forget

  That only leaves Chloe Camille, born in 1948 and six years my junior. The baby of the family. Chloe with her sharp wit, sharp tongue, and utter lassitude about doing anything with it. Plump, beautiful Chloe, with her brown hair and blue eyes and perfect skin. With the only really gorgeous set of knockers in a fairly flat-chested family. Chloe, of course, married a Jew. Not a domestic Jew, but an import. (Nobody in the family would stoop to marrying the boy next door.) Chloe’s husband, Abel, is an Israeli of German-Jewish ancestry. (Members of his family once owned the gambling casino at Baden-Baden.) And Abel, of course, went into my father’s tzatzka business. To a business dominated by former Catskill Mountain comedians, he brought lessons learned at the Wharton School. My parents rebelled at first and then virtually adopted him as everyone got richer. Abel and Chloe had one son, Adam, who was blond and blue-eyed and obviously the favorite grandchild. At Christmas reunions, when the whole family regrouped at my parents’ apartment, Adam looked like the sole Aryan in a playground of Third World children.

  So I was the only sister ohne kinder, and I was never allowed to forget it. When Pierre and Randy last visited New York with their brood, it was just during the time my first book was being published. In the midst of one of our usual noisy fights (about something unmemorably idiotic), Randy called my poetry “masturbatory and exhibitionistic” and reproached me with my “sterility.”

  “You act as if writing is the most important thing in the world!” she screamed.

  I was trying to be rational and calm and well-analyzed about my family that week so I was painfully withholding the explosion I felt coming.

  “Randy,” I pleaded, “I have to think writing is the most important thing in the world in order to go on doing it, but nothing says that you have to share my obsession, so why should I have to share yours?”

  “Well I won’t have you putting me and my husband and my children in your filthy writing-do you hear me? I’ll kill you if you mention me in any way at all. And if I don’t kill you myself, then Pierre will. Do you understand?”

  There ensued a long and fear-splitting discussion of autobiography versus fiction, in which I mentioned Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Boswell, Proust, and James Joyce-all apparently to no avail.

  “You can damned well publish your filthy books posthumously,” Randy screeched, “if they contain a word about any character who ever remotely resembles me!”

  “And I assume that you are going to kill me so as not to delay publication.”

  “I mean after we die, not after you die.”

  “Is that an invitation to a beheading?”

  “Stuff your literary allusions up your ass. You think you’re so goddamned clever don’t you? Just because you were a grub and a grind and did well in school. Just because you’re ambitious and go fucking around with creepy intellectuals and phonies. I had as much talent to write as you and you know it, only I wouldn’t stoop to revealing myself in public the way you do. I wouldn’t want people to know my secret fantasies. I’m not a stinking exhibitionist like you, that’s all… Now get the hell out of here! Get out! Do you hear me?”

  “This happens to be Jude’s and Daddy’s house-not yours.”

  “Get out! You’ve already given me a splitting headache!” Holding her temples, Randy ran into the bathroom.

  It was the old psychosomatic side-step. Everyone in my family dances it at every opportunity. You’ve given me a splitting headache! You’ve given me indigestion! You’ve given me crotch rot! You’ve given me auditory hallucinations! You’ve given me a heart attack! You’ve given me cancer!

  Randy emerged from the bathroom with a pained look on her face. She had pulled herself together. Now she was trying to be tolerant.

  “I don’t want to fight with you,” she said.

  “Hah.”

  “No, really. It’s just that you’re still my little sister and I really think you’ve gotten off on the wrong track! I mean you really ought to stop writing and have a baby. You’ll find it so much more fulfilling than writing…”

  “Maybe that’s what I’m afraid of.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look, Randy, it may seem absurd to someone with nine children, but I really don’t miss having children. I mean I love your kids and Chloe’s and Lalah’s, but I’m really happy with my work for the moment and I don’t want any more fulfillment just now. It took me years to learn to sit at my desk for more than two minutes at a time, to put up with the solitude and the terror of failure, and the godawful silence and the white paper. And now that I can take it… now that I can finally do it… I’m realty raring to go. I don’t want anything to interfere right now. Jesus Christ! It took me so long to get to this point…”

  “Is that really how you expect to spend the rest of your life? Sitting in a room and writing poetry?”

  “Well why not? What makes it any worse than having nine kids?”

  She looked at me with contempt. “You don’t know a thing about having kids.”

  “And you don’t know a thing about writing.” I was really disgusted with myself for sounding so infantile. Randy always made me feel like five again.

  “But you’d love having kids,” she persisted, “you really would.”

  “For God’s sake, you’re probably right! But you’re enough of an Ethel Kennedy for one family-why the hell do we need any more? And why should I do it if I have so many doubts about it? Why should I force myself? For whose good? Yours? Mine? The nonexistent kids? It’s not as if the human race is about to die out if I don’t have kids!”

  “But aren’t you even curious to have the experience?”

  “I guess… but the curiosity isn’t exactly killing me. Besides, I have time…”

  “You’re almost thirty. You don’t have as much time as you think.”

  “Oh, God,” I said, “you really can’t stand anyone to do anything but what you’ve done. Why do I have to copy your life and your mistakes? Can’t I even make my own damned mistakes?”

  “What mistakes?”

  “Like bringing up your children to think they’re Catholics, like lying about your religion, like denying who you are…”

  “I’ll kill you!” Randy shrieked, coming at me with her arms raised. I ducked into the hall closet as I had so many times in childhood. There were days when Randy used to beat me up regularly. (At least if I have kids I’ll never make the mistake of having more than one. Being an only child is supposed to be such a psychological hardship, but it was all I ever wished for as a child.)

  “PIERRE!” I heard Randy Screaming outside the door. I turned the lock and pulled the light cord. Then I backed into my mother’s sable coat (smelling of old Joy and stale Dioris-simo) and sat beneath it cross-legged among the boots. Above me were two more racks of coats going up high into the ceiling. Old fur coats, English children’s coats with leather leggings, ski parkas, rain capes, trench coats, autographed slickers from our camp days, school blazers with name tapes in the necks and forgotten skate keys in the pockets, velvet evening coats, brocade coats, polo coats, mink coats… thirty-five years of changing fashions and four grown daughters… thirty-five years of buying and spending and raising kids and screaming… and what did my mother have to show for it? Her sable, her mink, and her resentment?

  “Isadora!” It was Pierre now. He rapped at the door.

  I sat on the floor and rocked my knees. I had no intention of getting up.
Such a lovely smell of mothballs and Joy.

  “Isadora!”

  Really, I thought, sometimes I would like to have a child. A very wise and witty little girl who’d grow up to be the woman I could never be. A very independent little girl with no scars on the brain or the psyche. With no toadying servility and no ingratiating seductiveness. A little girl who said what she meant and meant what she said. A little girl who was neither bitchy nor mealy-mouthed because she didn’t hate her mother or herself.

  “Isadora!”

  What I really wanted was to give birth to myself-the little girl I might have been in a different family, a different world. I hugged my knees. I felt strangely safe there, under my mother’s fur coat

  “Isadora!”

  Why did they have to keep rushing me and trying to cram me into the same molds that had made them so unhappy? I would have a child when I was ready. Or if I wasn’t ever ready, then I wouldn’t. Was a child any guarantee against loneliness or pain? Was anything? If they were so happy with their lives, why did they have to proselytize all the time? Why did they insist that everyone do as they did? Why were they such goddamned missionaries?

  “Isadora!”

  Why did my sisters and my mother all seem to be in a conspiracy to mock my accomplishments and make me feel they were liabilities? I had published a book which even I could still stand to read. Six years of writing and discarding, writing and changing, trying to get deeper and deeper into myself. And readers had sent me letters and called me in the middle of the night to tell me that the book mattered, that it was brave and honest, that I was brave and honest. Brave! Here I was in a closet hugging my knees! But to my family I was a failure because I had no children. It was absurd. I knew it was absurd. But something in me repeated the catechism. Something in me apologized to all the people who complimented my poems: something in me said: “Oh but remember, I have no children.”