Looking Back (11 page)

I
CAN’T SAY THAT
none of us read books, but certainly we weren’t a Generation of Readers. We never
had
to read—there was always TV, and so we grew accustomed to having our pictures presented to us, our characters described on the screen more satisfactorily, it seemed to many of us, than five pages of adjectives. Once accustomed to television, we were impatient with book dramas: they moved so slowly, took so much effort, required us to visualize things and cluttered the story, as I saw it then, with the superfluous details writers put in only to please English teachers. I skipped over descriptions of people’s eyes or their sitting rooms or the sunsets they walked through, moving instead straight to the action, which could never compete with what I got watching “Highway Patrol” and “Wagon Train.” Having witnessed on the screen whole armies marching, lions moving in on their prey, ghosts, monsters, witches, Martians, nothing that we merely read about could shake us much. Anybody could
tell
us on paper that something happened (showing it on TV was more respected) but how could we believe it just from wordy hearsay? And for us, believing—having the conviction that what we read was really true—mattered a lot.

Because the main function of television and movies was, for us, to get the story told, we came to see the arrival, and not so much the journey, as the important part of all fictions —of everything in life, in fact. We are outcome-conscious, we watch or read to see how it all turns out, just as we play to win (it isn’t
really,
we all know, how you play the game that matters) and enter college to graduate, and graduate to get a job or to get into graduate school. So the purpose of books seemed often simply to move us toward the ending, and if we could have read the last page without plowing through all the others and still have understood what happened, we would have done it.

When we read the book it was because we couldn’t see the movie, or because we’d seen it already and wanted to recapture something of the movie experience. (Just as you read a keepsake menu, sometimes, to summon the memory of a good meal.) We’d open
Gone With the Wind
knowing what Scarlett O’Hara looked like, and what color her dresses were in every scene, and how Melanie wore her hair. The easy short-cut method of description made possible by cameras came to influence our writing and our speech, I think. We lost something of the power to describe from scratch because we no longer needed to. Instead of telling what a friend looks like, we have only to show his photograph and say “He’s really great.” Or that he looks exactly like Steve McQueen. One picture is worth a thousand words. Sometimes we read books less to evoke the characters and settings than to evoke the theater we saw the movie in.

I ordered stacks of school book club paperbacks, “for junior readers,” each month—abridged classics, joke books, high school romances, biographies (Clara Barton—Angel of the Battlefield, Nellie Bly—Reporter. Wernher von Braun, I seem to remember, was Father of Rocketry, or maybe King of Lightning). I lined them up along my bookshelves (alphabetically, by author), but few were ever read. What I liked best was the
idea
of reading. Wrapped up in quilts before the fireplace, with thunder and lightning pounding outside, and a cup of cocoa or an apple or a bowl of popcorn in one hand,
Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase
in the other, I would stop and think, every other sentence, how nice this was, and that I should do it more often. Like a kid on a rusty Ferris wheel at a just-about-deserted amusement park, screaming “Isn’t this fun?” more in an attempt to believe than in the conviction it was true. I got my pleasure from the image I’d acquired (on TV and in the movies) that things like this were full of
atmosphere.
The act itself—moving my eyes across the page—almost always put me to sleep. Even Nancy Drew seemed too abstract—words, no pictures.

From the dubious lessons of TV I’d swallowed the old saw that seeing was believing (and even in seeing, you had to take things with a grain of salt. Studying the TV superman as he flew and the announcer read, “It’s a bird, it’s a plane …” I had my doubts, searching for the piano wires I’d found in Mary Martin’s
Peter Pan,
or evidence of trick photography. “He just lay down on a table, like he was flying,” we decided). But as for books, less real-life, even, than film—why should I trust their honesty? And if they weren’t honest and true to life, they were nothing. The improbability of Mr. Ed, the talking horse, was ten times greater than paperback biographies’ distorted picture of Wernher von Braun, of course, but because the shows were acted out by real actors and a real horse, they seemed more immediate and therefore (by sixties-logic) more trustworthy.

Immediacy and newness were terribly important. That’s what I liked about my book club paperbacks and why, if I didn’t read them within the first week I got them, I never would; I liked new things—this year’s copyright marks, just out this month, if possible. We were raised without much feeling for history and oldness, and books, to many of us, were like fashions. Anything written before 1960 seemed hopelessly out of date. We had little patience for last year’s model (it isn’t totally unrelated that every September found me battling for a new car—bucket seats, a sunroof, a “fast-back”), and had no patience, as a rule, for anything predating us. As far as I was concerned, anyway, the world didn’t exist until November 5, 1953, when I was born.

W
HEN
I
THINK OF
1966, I see pink and orange stripes and wild purple Paisleys and black and white vibrating to make the head ache. We were too young for drugs (they hadn’t reached the junior high yet) but we didn’t need them. Our world was psychedelic, our clothes and our make-up and our jewelry and our hairstyles were trips in themselves. It was the year of the gimmick, and what mattered was being noticed, which meant being wild and bright and having the shortest skirt and the whitest Yardley Slicker lips and the dangliest earrings. (We all pierced our ears that year. You can tell the girls who became teen-agers in 1966—they’re the ones with not-quite healed over holes in their ears.)
Seventeen
that year was full of vinyl skirts, paper dresses, op and pop, Sassoon haircuts, Patty Duke flips and body painting. My own outfits would have glowed in the dark. I remember one, a poorboy top and mod Carnaby Street hat, a silver micro skirt and purple stockings. (Pantyhose hadn’t been invented yet; among our other distinctions, call us the last generation to wear garter belts. I recall an agonizing seventh-period math class in which, ten minutes before the bell rang, my front and back garters came simultaneously undone.)

It was as if we’d just discovered color, and all the shiny, sterile things machines made possible for us. Now we cultivate the natural, homemade look, with earthy colors and frayed, lumpy macramé sashes that no one would mistake for store-bought. But back then we tried to look like spacemen, distorting natural forms. Nature wasn’t a vanishing treasure to us yet—it was a barrier to be overcome. The highest compliment, the ultimate adjective, was
unreal.

I
NEVER REMEMBERED, IN
May, as I counted the days till school got out, what summer vacation was really like. After the excitement of the first swim and walking barefoot and going for picnics on our bikes, it came to us (each year, as if we’d hit on some new discovery) that school, much as we hated it, gave form to our lives. What summertime was meant for, more than anything else, was growing up. Soaking up sun and eating carrots so you’d have long hair—lightened, if you dared, with a lemon—when school began again. Summertime was when the changes happened, and why the first day of school was so much fun, with everybody telling everybody else how different they looked—and it was true.

Waiting for the changes to happen, though, was like watching corn grow. By August I would miss the tug of my leash and collar, with nothing, no commitments, to keep me from sleeping through the best hours of sunlight, rising late and eating soggy Cheerios by the TV set, glued there for hours (just one more program, I kept telling myself, still in pajamas) like an addict. After TV there might be waiting for the mail, then reading
TV Guide—
next week’s menus—and all the advertising circulars the discount stores sent out. (Sales on men’s underwear and clock radios I studied, rapt. I knew the retail price of everything, just as I came to know the stars of every TV show, the time it came on and the channel. My stores of useless summer information accumulated like algae in a swamp.) Often I’d look forward to rain—thunder storms especially—because it gave me an excuse to stay inside and make popcorn. Sometimes, when the sun was shining, I’d pull the blinds and feel guilty, or I’d rally to the weather, put on my bathing suit and bike to the town swimming pool, transplanted, in the space of half an hour, from stretched-out-on-the-couch to stretched-out-on-the-sand. Transistor radios were more in fashion then than now. (Now it is quiet we treasure. Back then it was little palm-sized boxes with wrist straps and earphones, held to the ears of teen-agers while they walked, as if without the sound of J. J. Jeffrey and his Solid Gold or Big Bud Ballou with this week’s Top Ten, breathing would be impossible.)

Teen-agers seemed more
teen-age
then. They all seemed older-looking and more on top of things. It isn’t true that the closer you get, the better things look. (I often think in TV jingle terms. My sentence rhythms come from Maybelline and Crest.) The closer I got to teen-age, the less grown up it seemed. Partly it was that college students came into their own during my teens (after years of isolationist scholarship, a sudden burst of
relevance
) so the action switched from us to them. It seemed unfair that I should have spent so long marking time, holding my place in line, sleeping (wake me up when I’ve grown up—that was my summer attitude) only to discover when finally I reached the ticket booth that no more seats were left or that, in fact, the concert had been canceled. A perpetual summer pre-teen, always on the brink, it seemed, I spent Junes, Julys and Augusts waiting for my bathing suit to fill out, for the time when I’d lie on a “Surf’s Up” towel, or one that read “Drive Slow—No Parking—Soft Shoulders Ahead,” rubbing suntan lotion into some lifeguard’s back while, more romantic than violins, his transistor pounded out the Beach Boys’ “Surfer Girl.” Annette and Fabian, transistor radios and polka-dot bikinis, were gone by my first real teen-age summer. By then I dreamed of being college age and spent my summer as a babysitter, changing diapers.

For a time, a longish time, it seemed to be a pattern in my life that the boys who liked me were not the ones I cared about. It was never the student council members and the sports stars who asked me to dance (the kinds of boys I wanted, more than to be with, to be seen with, boys whose acceptance of me would, I felt, make me acceptable). Instead, I had the impression, and a fairly elaborate one, that I was attracting a whole series of school misfits like me, boys whose own out-ness reminded me of mine. If they danced awkwardly—and they did—it was not the stiff, cool awkwardness of a basketball player who can’t afford to look too ballet-graceful, but the awkwardness of the boys who strike out in baseball and finish last, panting, in races. Looking back, it seems to me that my partners invariably danced with their mouths open. I can still see them loping across the dance floor to get me, presumably eager to lay sweaty palms on my organdy and velvet, bought for other, dryer hands.

I hated them, these misfits, for how alike we were. Seeing them, I imagined how I must have looked. I criticized them most of all for their taste in girls. For anyone I liked to like me back would make me like him less. Their having chosen me only went to show what losers they were.

It wasn’t that I didn’t have a pretty exalted opinion of myself—I did. The fact that I wasn’t wildly popular puzzled me for a long time. I decided that we weren’t seeing the same person—me, when I looked in the mirror, and the boys who said “Hey, did you get the license number of the tractor that ran over your face?” They convinced me finally that it must be so; if I wasn’t ugly, I was at least different, odd-looking, and that was maybe even worse. Mine was not the kind of face that reminds people of faces on TV. And it was those smoothly smiling faces that were my models. My face impressed me not at all favorably, as untypical; I fell far short, I thought, of prettiness, and no amount of experimenting with clothes or hair styles or eyeshadow colors (each one just the barest fraction of a shade different from the last) could turn me into Gidget. I grew up—we all did—to value the consensus. (What sex is the baby rabbit? Let’s take a vote …) My eye is trained not to aesthetic absolutes but to the culturally accepted thing. (Are shaven legs and plucked eyebrows really more beautiful, or is it just the habit of seeing them that way which makes me think they are?) My taste is no longer my own—that much I know. I’m not a rider of bandwagons, quite, but, much as I try to disregard them, to think for myself, the opinions of other people matter to me. I liked the kind of faces I saw in magazines, the kind of boys who were well-liked by all, and while I didn’t torment the ones many people made fun of, secretly I thought less of them for having failed to win majority approval. I thought less of myself too, for my own lack of popularity with boys, and so I scorned the boys who failed to scorn me because they liked a face I didn’t like, myself.

Why do looks
matter
so much?

I do not know a single girl who’s really satisfied with how she looks. Some toss their hair and smooth their skirts and stride like models, and I’ll start out envying them and mentally exchanging faces or shapes or hair color, but then I’ll watch them looking at other girls as
they
stride by tossing
their
hair, and I’ll see, in the faces I admired, the same sizing-up look that’s on mine (how much does she weigh? Does she color her hair? Curl her eyelashes?) and realize that not one of us feels really
safe.
I study my reflection in every full-length mirror and window and shiny toaster I pass (less from sheer vanity, I think, than from insecurity, a dissatisfaction about the way I look) and when I do examine myself, I almost always see, reflected next to me, another insecure, dissatisfied girl doing the same thing. We put on our mirror expressions and glance hurriedly—sidelong, out of guilt—jumping a little when discovered, bent over the sink in a department store ladies’ room, miming before the mirror. What we do before mirrors is an intensely private act. We are examining and repairing the illusions we’re attempting to maintain (that
we
don’t care about our looks, that how we look when we look good is just a lucky accident) and to be caught in mid-repair destroys the illusion. Like bald men discovered with their toupees off, women viewed early in the morning or at work before a mirror feel they can never regain, in the eyes of those who see them—
before—
the image of how they look
after.