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No ExpectationsJanuary 10, 2011 At long last, another segment of To Be Rather Than to Seem. This one was hard to write. I think of this period as my "lost year," but it's more like a winter that went on for 18 months. Something was going on deep underground, but that didn't become apparent until spring finally arrived. When I returned to my hometown from England in late November 1976, I crashed. The crash wasn't spectacular. No one saw or heard it. Looking back on my life, though, I can see it coming. I see a young woman who was either very brave or very clueless, or perhaps a messy mishmash of both. Finally, at age twenty-five, I was done with school. Pursuing a master's degree at Sussex University, I'd decided that an academic career was not for me. I could think, I could write, I could do research, but I was already starting to chafe at the restrictions of academic writing. I could build a logical, well-supported case as well as anyone, but my best insights usually came from juxtaposing images and ideas that didn't usually hang out together. My long self-study of the Arab world had ranged across politics, history, religion, economics, psychology, sociology, literature, and art with little awareness of the boundaries between the various fields. In the mid-1970s academe considered these distinct disciplines and built sturdy walls between them. The separation didn't come easily to me. I'd already ruled out law school, the other obvious option for a bright, articulate female college graduate with a liberal arts degree. I was drawn to law as a tool for fighting injustice, but I also knew that the practice of law involved building logical cases that were rooted in and supported by existing law. Law school meant three years of intense immersion in that law. After several years of antiwar and student organizing, not to mention my ongoing interest in cultures that were on the losing side of Europe's imperial adventures, I suspected that the law would change me far more than I could ever change it, and not for the better. Like my father, I was willing and able to use my intellect and verbal prowess to bully, silence, and ridicule. I'd grown up watching my father use his superior knowledge to humiliate my mother, and once I was old enough I did likewise. In the college classroom this was a useful skill: I used it to skewer pompous students and impress my professors. I was well on the way to becoming what novelist Joanna Russ called a "female man" when my nascent feminist consciousness started whispering that I had at least as much in common with my mother as with my father, and what kind of person got satisfaction from squelching those who couldn't or wouldn't fight back? So I turned away from both law school and grad school. These were good calls, both of them, but they brought me to the brink of uncharted territory: the rest of my life. Finally I understood why so many of the grad students I'd known remained within the university's gravitational pull. Some never managed to finish their dissertations. How did they finance their unending studies? Fellowships didn't last forever, and teaching assistantships didn't pay much. Family money? Invisible, endlessly patient wives? Since I moved in left-of-center circles, no one ever copped to inherited wealth, and by the early 1970s most right-on male radicals could talk a good line against the assumption that a woman's role was to put her husband through school. I had neither family money nor a long-suffering and employable spouse. None of the perpetual grad students I knew were female. At best, graduate study might lead to a Ph.D. and a college teaching job. Did I really want to stay in school for the rest of my life? For women the default option once schooling was done -- including college-level schooling -- was still marriage and motherhood. If you married and had kids, you didn't have to worry what to do with the rest of your life, or at least the next twenty-five years or so of it. Once you struck off down the marriage-and-kids road, other options vanished off the map. In return, marriage with kids, or even without, provided structure in an otherwise mysterious, mist-shrouded landscape. On December 20, 1972, during my junior year at Penn, Grandma threw a twenty-fifth anniversary party for my parents. I begged off, saying that my last exam was on the 21st. This was a lie. My father had a girlfriend. My mother was an alcoholic. My parents' relationship was bicker, bicker, bicker, punctuated by the occasional explosion. I didn't want to be anywhere near a party celebrating my parents' miserable marriage. I and many of my peers had been raised by mothers whose lives were accurately sketched in Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique, and not a few of our mothers were in the process of being dumped by our fathers for younger women with wider horizons. Some were sure that they could and would do it differently: they wouldn't get trapped, they'd never turn into their mothers. I had no such faith. As I saw it, getting married was one thing if you had no other options. If you did, it looked like a classic Faustian bargain: in return for something attractive in the short term, you gave up your soul. I did have other options, I was sure of it. I just didn't know what they were. I was back in suburban Weston, where career options did not grow on trees. I hadn't gone to the public junior high or high school, and all through college I'd come home as seldom as possible. As a result, I knew almost no one in town. Having no money and nowhere else to go, I was back under my parents' roof, a long way from the scenes of my adult life and caught up in family dynamics that for years I'd managed to avoid. I'd just spent three months hitchhiking solo around Great Britain and Ireland; I couldn't imagine hitching anywhere in the United States, except on Martha's Vineyard. Slowly I started to slide backward. Soon I couldn't see over the edge of the hopelessness I was mired in. There was a world out there, but before long I could barely remember it, or imagine any way that I could find it again. One evening in early February Grandma and my uncle Neville stopped by, chilled but exhilarated by the first of our town's bicentennial celebrations. I still remember them framed in the front doorway: Uncle Neville on the right, slight and pale in a dark wool coat and muffler, holding the door open for Grandma, who was bent slightly forward with the mild stoop that my father and two brothers would later develop and telling us who they'd seen in Weston Center. About two weeks later, with no warning, Grandma had a massive stroke. When my father and I visited her in the hospital, she couldn't speak and was only dimly aware of our presence. My father said, "I love you, Mother." I'd never heard him say that before. Ten days after the stroke, my Grandma died. Not long afterward, my uncle Neville had a nervous breakdown. I knew people who had had nervous breakdowns, but what did a nervous breakdown look like? Swinging fists, gnashing teeth, tearing hair, hysterical voices yelling gibberish? Nervous breakdowns, I learned, could be quiet. Nev, a quiet man, quietly committed himself to a psychiatric hospital. This turned out to be the beginning of a new and (I think) happier life for him, but at the time it raised a pressing question: Who was going to look after Max, Grandma's Labrador retriever? Who else? I moved in with Max. Grandma's house was much bigger and grander than any single woman needed. From South Avenue the driveway curved past old oaks bordering a meadow; above the meadow was a long neatly kept hedge, a wide but narrow lawn, and overlooking it all the house's elegant brick façade, tall windows flanking the rarely used front door. Behind the house the drive circled past a three-car garage and brought visitors to the door everyone came and went by. Shading house and garage was a huge maple tree. I had a place to live, a sweet foster dog, and the use of Grandma's Rambler sedan. I taught myself to bake bread in Grandma's big country kitchen, ever mindful that whatever bread had been baked there before had not been made by Grandma. But though I was no longer sleeping in the house I'd grown up in, it was barely a mile away. After I knew everyone was gone for the day -- my mother had just started working at Beacon Press in Boston, my father had an office in Cambridge, and my sister was in her junior year of high school -- Max and I would walk there through the woods. At the dining table I'd read the newspapers and play a few games of solitaire. Then we'd walk back to Grandma's, where I'd read and play a few more games of solitaire till it was time for supper. After supper I'd read, watch TV, and play some more solitaire. Once in a while I'd go to the movies in a neighboring town. Eventually it would be time for bed. Several years later, I described my routine to a friend who had done time in mental hospitals. She said it sounded very much like the repetitive and soothing activities mental patients were encouraged to pursue in hospital day rooms. Linda, my father's girlfriend, was the only one who realized that I was in trouble. She must have discussed it with my father, and somewhat insistently, because one afternoon in my grandmother's living room my father awkwardly broached the idea that maybe I should see a psychiatrist. My father would never, ever have come up with this idea on his own: New England WASPs don't take kindly to having outsiders muck around in our heads, and the resistance doubles if we're expected to pay for it. Linda, however, was very into psychoanalysis. She had lived in London and known Anna Freud. The suggestion blasted through my torpor like a fire alarm. I knew I was stuck, but maybe if no one else noticed, it wasn't all that bad? Linda and my father had not only noticed, they'd said something out loud. I had better get my act together. No way was I going to see a psychiatrist -- but it did occur to me that if I didn't do something, I might not have a choice in the matter. I started baby-stepping my way out of my lethargy. Linda enlisted me to help research an article she was writing, about England in 1776. I went to a campaign rally for Fred Harris, senator from Oklahoma, who was running for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. I became a full-time volunteer for the campaign to ratify the state ERA, equal rights amendment, which was going to be on that November's ballot. These baby steps were crucial. Working with other people; discovering or rediscovering that my skills and knowledge were useful, indispensable even; expanding my knowledge and learning to use new technologies -- the outside world suddenly seemed less terrifying, and I seemed more capable of dealing with it. The Susanna who had done interesting things in high school and college gradually coalesced as a credible memory, not a figment of my imagination. That Susanna had thrived in Washington, D.C. I returned to D.C. for the bicentennial Fourth of July celebration, stayed with old friends, and still have the T-shirt I got at the 1976 folklife festival on the Mall. The way out of depression, I became certain, led southward. To move back to Washington, I had to be able to support myself, which was to say I had to be employable. I'd been applying for jobs, mostly on newspapers; I didn't have a journalism degree, or serious newspaper experience, but writing was the only possibly salable skill I had. The response to all the résumés I sent out was not encouraging. I did get an interview and tryout, for a paper in the New York suburbs, but that left me dubious about both my aptitude and my desire to be a reporter. I didn't want to write stories about preteen piano prodigies, the subject of my trial assignment. I tended to sweat blood over every word I typed. Good reporters can turn out prose like yard goods even when phones are ringing off the hook. I couldn't then, and I can't now. My aptitude was more on the editorial side, but I didn't realize that then because I didn't know what an editor was. I did answer a classified ad and get hired as the part-time evening proofreader for the Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly, which was published by the same company that published the local paper. I liked the work and was good at it. With my earnings, I enrolled in an eight-week secretarial course for unemployable (female) college graduates. I finally learned to type competently and how to take shorthand well enough to put it on a job application. In April 1977 I headed south. Within a few days I'd found a room in a boardinghouse near Dupont Circle and a secretarial job at the national headquarters of the American Red Cross. The boardinghouse didn't allow dogs, but another home was found for Max. I returned to Weston, borrowed $200 from my father, rented a U-Haul, and moved the first week of May. Within days of my departure, a late-season snowstorm hit eastern Massachusetts and knocked a large limb off the huge maple in front of Grandma's house.
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