Sister Mother Husband Dog: (Etc.) - Softcover

My twenties were one big walkabout. There is, on television, a series called Girls about young women floundering in their twenties. It is written, directed, and acted by Lena Dunham, who is not on a walkabout. Nevertheless, she captures the very special misery of being in your twenties. Of being clueless, desperate, lost. Looking for love, settling for crazy. Grabbing at solutions because they are solutions, just not to your problem. Being in your twenties has changed a lot since I was in my twenties, but it is still a time when everything awful that happens is awful in a romantic way, even if you don’t admit it (and you can’t admit it because then you would be less important in the tragedy you’re starring in, your own life) . . . because in your twenties you know, even if you don’t admit this, either, even if this is buried deep in your subconscious, that you can waste an entire decade and still have a life.

College did not prepare me for anything. At Barnard I majored in European history because my roommate, brilliant at history, always accurately guessed the exam essay questions. That is really the only reason. It was the easy way out. As I write this, I am struck by how shallow I was. A truly empty-headed thing. I was quick with a comeback, but a comeback is most emphatically not knowledge. Also when I was at Barnard, a European history major, unlike a political science or English major, was not required to take comprehensives, a general examination in your major at the end of your senior year. I knew I would flunk comprehensives. I retained nothing.

Recently I found a paper I wrote in college. “The Causes of the Franco-Prussian War.” I got a B on it. I wondered if I pulled an all-nighter writing it. If I took NoDoz. If Susan, my roommate, told me the causes and I parroted her. Today all I know about this war is who fought it, and that is only because of the war’s name. I wasn't interested in European history. It didn't cross my mind—this is so basic, it’s embarrassing—that I was supposed to major in something I was interested in.

This is probably my mother’s fault. Isn't everything your mother’s fault in some way? At this point in life I forgive her everything and besides am deeply grateful to her, but she picked all my high school classes: two years of Latin, three of French, four of English and history, journalism as an elective. No science except what was absolutely required. Or art. She was raising writers. She had stern notions of what constituted an education for her daughters.

However, no one ever asked me—no parent, no teacher, no high school or college counselor—“What are you interested in studying?” I didn't connect interest with school. Or passion with school. In high school, the only class I liked was journalism. Not because I was writing. Because, for some reason, at Beverly Hills High School—a privileged place if ever there was, with its very own oil well polluting the environment and a basketball court whose floor parted in the center (if someone pushed a button or pulled a crank or lever) and retracted under bleachers to reveal a swimming pool—at this very fancy public school there was a linotype machine.

We’re talking pre–computer age here—whenever you read a book, a newspaper, a magazine, it was because the words were set with actual lead type. The linotype man would type my stories. The machine would convert my words to metal type, slugs of which, as I recall, came sliding down a shoot. Lead type is heavy. If you carried a lot of type in your shoulder bag—not that you would—it would break your shoulder. How wonderful that it was heavy, that I could hold words in my hand and they had weight. I was the front-page editor, and Thursday nights I would go to the typesetting building next to the gym, collect my type, and arrange the page as I had designed it. After tightening the frame to hold the type in position, I would ink the whole shebang, place paper on top, and roll a heavy roller over it to get an impression. Then I would proofread my page, replace typos with new type, and take a final proof. It was the most fun in the world. It was craft satisfaction. Craft satisfaction comes from actually making something with your hands. It terms of education, it is practically obsolete.

In college the only thing that interested me was dating. Being in love. In the library I had a reward system: ten minutes of studying, ten of daydreaming. Mostly about whatever boy I was obsessed with, reliving the last weekend, planning the next. I have to say college completely cooperated here. Classes provided no competition for my yearnings. I took a course in plays, a foray out of history. We had to read a play a night. Strindberg, Ibsen, O’Casey, O’Neill, Wilder, went whizzing by. It’s hard to read a play. Seriously hard to understand what is happening, what the playwright intends. Reading one a night was ludicrous. I still have trouble reading them, still have trouble now and then figuring out what the hell is going on. The final exam was a slew of multiple-choice questions. There was one about pork chops, which went something like this: “In which of these plays did pork chops figure?” All I knew about pork chops was, at my house, they came breaded with applesauce on the side. I had no idea what play featured pork chops. I still don’t, but I remember the question. It was ridiculous. I retained ridiculous.

Modern Poetry was similar. Wednesday Wallace Stevens, Friday Ezra Pound. A person could spend a lifetime trying to understand Stevens, and Pound is mind-bendingly obtuse. In Medieval History, there was so much required reading, all in books the professor had written, that no one could accomplish it, especially someone like me who had required daydreaming. I did love Art History. I have never met anyone who didn't. I still remember the rush I got from correctly identifying a geometric shape at the bottom right corner of a Picasso as a cornucopia.

I hope kids are smarter about college now and colleges are smarter about educating them. I am longing to believe it (especially given how much college costs). When I was there, the sheer volume of homework made learning or getting excited about learning a steep uphill climb. My husband insists, even though I don’t admit it, that I was learning—to think better, research, organize information, meet the demands of a deadline. At Connecticut College, where I spent two years before Barnard in small classes, that might have been true. But still I was wasting my parents’ money. Wasting it big-time. It was, in retrospect, the life of a spoiled girl.

Getting married was a big part of my fantasy life. There was a card game called Old Maid that we played as kids. Each card had a partner card except one. The loser would be stuck with a card depicting a funny-looking gray-haired woman with glasses and a hat. The hat was especially sad—sort of a pillbox with a fake flower in it. Old Maid the card game struck terror in me. I was a superstitious kid, and getting left with that card seemed prophetic. There was also a song that freaked me out: “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?” Ella Fitzgerald sang it (quite inappropriately, in my opinion) on a record of Christmas songs. When the record (what we now call vinyl, and why do we, it’s so pretentious) got to that song, I would pick up the needle, very carefully so as not to scratch the record, and skip it to the next song. I couldn't bear to listen to it if I didn't have a date. Not having a date on New Year’s Eve was like being an old maid. It was being an old maid every year.

This absurd hysteria about New Year’s Eve stayed with me for much longer than I’d like to admit. Whenever I read about how people in their twenties don’t date anymore, they travel in hoards, it makes me happy. Maybe this group thing has taken the sting out of New Year’s Eve.

So, on the one hand, my mother was drilling me daily from the time I could hold a spoon: “You will have a career like me. You will work. You will be a writer. You will leave Los Angeles. You will go to New York City. You will work. Career, career, career.” On the other hand—driving me as powerfully with no help from her—was simply wanting love.

I blame this on the movies. I blame it on one movie in particular: Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.

There were lots of messages keeping women domestic then, every message actually—lack of opportunity, advertising, the women’s magazines like McCall’s, La­dies’ Home Journal, Redbook, Seventeen, which  glorified the stay-at-home wife and which I devoured each month when they arrived at our house. But really the thing counteracting my mother’s teaching, trumping it, was a singing and dancing 1950s romantic comedy starring pert blond Jane Powell.

In Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Jane Powell is the cook at a roadhouse in a wild west town when How­ard Keel, big and handsome, rides in, shaves while he sings, samples her stew, and proposes. This is my favorite line: When he asks for catsup, she replies, “My stew can stand on its own feet.” She agrees to marry him—it’s love at first sight for her—and he takes her to his ranch in the backwoods, where she discovers he has six uncivilized (but sweet) brothers. It turns out she was looking for love, but he was looking for a servant. Boy, did I want to be that servant. Lucky Jane. She gets to rise at dawn, make flapjacks, eggs, bacon, biscuits, and coffee for eight (including her), wash their filthy clothes, and teach them to dance. Once cleaned up, they are gorgeous, and then— excuse me for telling the plot of this movie I love as much as I love my dog—she takes them to a barn raising where they meet other town girls and fall in love. Those girls, however, are promised to less attractive town boys who wear stiff suits with dorky stitching on the lapels, while the brothers wear britches with wide leather belts and cool blousy shirts. The barn-raising musical number, choreographed by Michael Kidd, a dance-off between the townies and the brothers, is the greatest dance sequence in a movie ever. In my opinion.

The brothers return to the backwoods heartsick, so heartsick they can barely lift a pitchfork of straw. At Howard Keel’s urging—stirring them to action as only a song can—they return one night and kidnap the women. A cute kidnapping, if you consider putting a bag over the head of someone you love cute. My favorite kidnap-cute from the film is not the bag-over-the-head, but this: When one young woman sets a hot pie on the windowsill to cool, she is whisked right out the window. I don’t want to tell you the end of this movie in case you haven’t seen it, although given the title, you can probably guess.

The movie came out when I was ten, and by the time I was twenty, I had seen it sixteen times. The last viewing was in Madrid. There were no subtitles, but it didn't matter because I knew it by heart.

It is the only movie of which I have counted my viewings. All sixteen were in one movie theater or another. I can’t emphasize how important this is. Watching a movie in a theater is to enter a dream state. In The Purple Rose of Cairo, Woody Allen perfectly captures the transporting power of film. When Mia Farrow goes to the movies and is captivated by the glamorous world so different from the dismal small life she is living, her yearning is so great that the hero on-screen is pulled right out of his cinematic reality into her prosaic one.

I was young and vulnerable and innocent when I first saw Seven Brides. I took my heart into that theater and lost it.

Loving a movie is not about logic. If a movie “gets” me, I forgive it anything. If it doesn't, I sit there cold, critical, poking holes. I’m amazed that many sane people claim that violent movies don’t make people more violent. This seems the delusional, self-serving justification of people who make violent movies. If violence excites you, a violent movie will nurture that. It must. Movies invite you to dream, change your dreams, become your dreams. Recently I was reading in the New York Times about Aton Edwards, a leader of the prepper movement. Preppers are people who spend a lot of time preparing to survive a catastrophe, natural or terrorist, that results in an all systems failure (banks, phones, food, transportation, breathing, whatever). Mr. Edwards said he went to see the movie Deliverance when he was ten years old . . . went in, according to the article, a fairly regular kid and emerged a Prepper.

“Ten” did pop out at me. I was ten when Seven Brides overwhelmed, seduced, and altered my life. He was ten when he saw Deliverance. I asked a developmental psychologist about ten. A big year, it turns out, when children first begin to think for themselves, entertaining ideas different from what their parents tell them. Budding sexuality, too. First feelings. Deliverance has a male rape in it—no wonder Edwards emerged a Prepper. I’m surprised more men didn't, but then it had an R rating. Ten-year-old Aton Edwards never should have been in that theater.

I do wonder if you spend your life preparing for disaster if you are disappointed if a disaster doesn't happen. If you are hoping for a disaster so you haven’t wasted your time or can prove you’re right or can finally have the adventure you crave or get to watch everyone else go down while you inflate your raft, load it up with gas masks and cans of tuna fish, and sail off Manhattan island (row actually—row across the Hudson to New Jersey, are they kidding?).

The impact of Seven Brides was undoubtedly greater because I saw it in a theater as opposed to on a DVD, as opposed to lying on a bed where I can say to whomever I’m watching with, “Would you please pause it? I want to get an apple.”

As for romantic films being denigrated as chick flicks, consider this. My adolescent yearnings aside, when you’re looking for love, aspiring to love, hoping for love, dreaming of love, movies are where it seems possible. When you’re past the “falling” phase and in the calmer yet more complicated “being in love” (assuming you’re committed to it), the only place you ever fall in love again is at the movies.

That is no small thing.

I blame my entire twenties walkabout on Seven Brides. On hoping some man was going to whisk me out a window and in the spring we would be singing with little baby lambs on our laps. (That happens, too, in Seven Brides. Oh God, I really do hope I haven’t ruined the movie for you. I haven’t even mentioned the fantastic sequence when the lonely brothers in the dead of winter sing “I’m a lonesome polecat.” There, I've mentioned it. Although there is no ruining this movie. Trust a woman who has now seen it thirty times or more. I did eventually stop counting.)

When Howard Keel didn't show up, I pretended he did. I married the first man who asked me and began living someone else’s life. Not Jane Powell’s, but sort of. Marrying this man for misguided reasons wasn't the nicest thing to do to him, but, like Howard Keel, he had ulterior motives. Not wanting to be alone, I think. Besides, as you will soon see, while I wasted six years of his life, he wanted to wreck mine completely.

He was a professor at Brown University. Given how little I liked college, this was even weirder—I was a faculty wife l...