Looking Back Read online

  I was a slave to fashion—chopping off my hair one year to look like Twiggy, sweltering under a Dynel wig the year wigs were being worn, disappearing altogether for a while beneath an eye-obstructing curtain of bangs. Even when straight hair became fashionable, when girls slept on tin cans and ironed out their curls and when, presumably, I should have felt free to be myself, I felt, instead, the need to change my hair some other way—to alter the color or the length, to bleach a racing stripe down one side or tint it some other shade of brown, no better, maybe, but different. I grew up a believer in variety above all else, in quantity over quality, in “change of pace” (I heard that in a Lipton tea commercial and it stayed with me). No matter what you looked like, the way to improve your looks, I believed, was to change them. All through the sixties I fought nature, wore my face like a mask, my clothes like armor and my hair, that pinned, clipped, rolled, taped, teased, washed, set, sprayed mass, meant to hang straight forever—I wore it like a hat.

  Oh, the money that went into make-up! We never bought the cheap Woolworth’s stuff, my friends and I, because you don’t skimp on Beauty, and the more expensive the make-up, the better it must be. Mostly we paid for the packaging: blusher (that was 1960s talk for the unthinkable—rouge) in a tiny thumb-sized compact with a little swivel-out brush attached with a chain; false eyelashes that we never really wore except in the bathroom, packed in pastel carrying cases; lip glosses arranged like paints in a water-color box; face powder with silver sparkles; cheekbone contour brushes to give us the emaciated look. Lipsticks sometimes came in flowerpots and doll shapes (that’s what they were—toys, finger paints you applied to skin instead of paper). Eyeshadow swung in colored globes and psychedelic buckets from the belts in our hip-hugger bell bottoms.

  Make-up was joyously synthetic back then, before the natural look, before organic skin creams and lipsticks whose aim was to be invisible and ads for “down to earth” cosmetics filled with genuine Arizona mud. It was the era of fads, white lips and rainbow eyelids and, for one brief period, an idea that never caught on—body painting. Yardley sold (or didn’t sell, but tried to) buckets of purple, pink, orange and green paint and rollers to apply it with—to legs (instead of stockings) and arms (instead of sleeves) and even faces. No one at my school wore it because along with the desire to be the first one to get noticed, we were all afraid of going too far, and we stood for hours in front of the mirror, making sure that our see-through blouses (with strategically placed pockets) didn’t show too much, agonizing over the exposure of a garter or a slip. (“Your slip is showing”—that dread whisper—always seemed a bit silly to me, when one of the big fashion fads of that year was dresses with matching bloomer-pantalets whose ruffle trailed at least an inch below the hem.) Those were loud, unsubtle, get-attention days, when wild and crazy and eye-catching meant fashionable.

  Days that added up to the junk era. Every decade has its celluloid dolls and baseball cards, of course, and there are plenty of them still—overpriced, overpackaged make-up and flimsy toys that always look better in the catalogue, and breakfast cereals that taste like strawberry and marshmallow and chocolate. But we are more quality-conscious now, I think, aware, at least, of what it is we lack, and longing for a return to natural ingredients, solid old-fashioned construction and practical function. In the sixties it always seemed that we had money to burn; our quarters, like everything else, were disposable—you spent what you got, and never thought of waiting for dimes to become dollars, or dollars to turn into bank accounts. I shopped for the sake of shopping, always looking for new things that I didn’t need, with new needs constantly being invented. What I bought one Saturday would be gone by the next. Giant plastic earrings, glow-in-the-dark Yo-yos, posters, paper dresses, paper flowers, papier-mâché bracelets, polka-dotted knee socks, issues of Mad magazine.

  It was a time for fads, the little interval before what we loved most was permanence. First Hula Hoops (two, three, four at once—little ones for arms and ankles and necks); mine always dropped early like horseshoes clanging as they landed in the dust around their target. Then there was Silly Putty, Super Balls, hi-riser bikes and bike motors, whose only function was to make a noise (Varooom!) when you rode, plastic trolls with glassy eyes and long ratty hair; Vac-u-form mold sets and a machine that made toys you could eat, and something called Super Stuff, a pink powder you added water to until it made a jelly-like pink goop. For about two weeks everybody at school had it. One boy I knew brought his stuff to Sunday school and threw it in the waist-length blond hair of a girl in his class, the kind of gesture that’s as close as sixth-grade boys can come, perhaps, to demonstrating love. That day her hair was finally proved to be natural gold and not a dye job, as I, and the other mousy brunettes had hoped and hinted to the world—we had ample time, in the hours that followed, picking the Super Stuff out of her curls, to study the roots. (They were whiter than ever against the screaming pink of the Stuff.) We gave up in the end, and the girl got a haircut. About a month later I found my old bag of Super Stuff, with a funny green mold that seemed to be crawling all along the bottom.

  And all that junk—the flashy make-up and jewelry and fashions and the gadgets—all that has affected even our eating. We are the snack food generation, raised on potato chips and Orange Crush, Cocoa Puffs and Froot Loops, popsicles and a new type of peanut butter (why, among all the other things, does this especially shock me?) that comes with marshmallow fluff mixed in, right in the jar. Our hamburgers are so well-done they’re black, our orange juice is dehydrated, our vitamins come in the form of colored pills shaped like the Flintstones. Everything seems to be dried up or carbonated, colored, fancily packaged and, naturally, sugared.

  The effects of all that on our physical well-being is bad enough, but what concerns me even more has to do with what all that junk-consuming, junk-food eating has done to us mentally and—if this doesn’t sound too lofty—spiritually.

  There is a slackness to our will, a numb, unthinking indifference in our grandstand munching—the way we reach for crackers on a plate simply because they’re on it, the way we forget what flavor of ice cream we’re licking, the way we finish a meal and can’t remember if we’ve had dessert or not.… And the gum, always that gum in our mouths, because even after the food is gone and the stomach filled, we still possess the need to chew. When—except when we diet, in which case we fast only so that we can, once we have finished, chew again—when do we ever feel hunger? It’s always appetite, the desire to taste, to be diverted. Every week there is some new cracker on the market, there not so much to feed us as to entertain, more pastime than sustenance. We are, in the fullest sense, consumers, trained to salivate not at a bell but at the sight of a Kellogg’s label or a Dunkin’ Donuts box.

  I CAN UNDERSTAND THE Jesus freaks turning, dope-muddled, to a life of self-denial and asceticism. The excesses of eighth-grade psychedelia left me feeling the same way and I turned, in 1967, to God. To the church, at least, anxious to wash away the bad aftertaste of too many Cokes and too much eyeshadow. The church I chose, the only one conceivable for a confirmed atheist, wasn’t really a church at all, but a dark gray building that housed the Unitarian Fellowship. They were an earnest, liberal-minded, socially-conscious congregation of thirty-five or forty. If I had been looking for spirituality, I knocked at the wrong door; the Unitarians were rationalists—scientists, mostly, whose programs would be slide shows of plant life in North Africa or discussion of migratory labor problems. We believed in our fellow man.

  We tried Bible reading in my Liberal Religious Youth group but in that mildewed attic room, sitting on orange crates in a circle of four, the Old Testament held no power. We gave up on Genesis and rapped, instead, with a casual college student who started class saying, “Man, do I have a hangover.” Sometimes we sang in a choir made up of one soprano, two tenors and a tone-deaf alto, draped in shabby black robes designed for taller worshipers. After one week of singing we switched, wisely, to what Unitarians do best, to the subjects
suited to orange crates. We found a Cause.

  We discovered the Welfare Mothers of America—one welfare mother in particular. She was an angry, militant mother of eight (no husband in the picture) who wanted to go to the national convention in Tennessee and needed someone to foot the bill. I don’t know who told us about Mrs. Mahoney, or her about us. In one excited Sunday meeting, anyway, the three of us voted to pay her way and, never having earned three dollars without spending it, never having met Peg Mahoney, we called the state office of the Unitarian Church and arranged for a two-hundred-dollar loan. Then we made lists, allocated jobs, formed committees (as well as committees can be formed, with an active membership of three, and a half dozen others who preferred to sleep in on Sundays). We would hold a spaghetti supper, all proceeds to go to the Mahoney fund.

  We never heard what happened at the welfare conference—in fact, we never heard from our welfare mother again. She disappeared, with the red plaid suitcase I lent her for the journey and the new hat we saw her off in. Our two-hundred-dollar debt lingered on through not one but three spaghetti suppers, during which I discovered that there’s more to Italian-style fund-raising dinners than red and white checked tablecloths and Segovia records. Every supper began with five or six helpers; as more and more customers arrived, though, fewer and fewer LRYers stayed on to help. By ten o’clock, when the last walnut-sized meat ball had been cooked and the last pot of spaghetti drained, there would be two of us left in our tomato-spotted red aprons, while all around, religious youth high on red wine sprawled and hiccuped on the kitchen floor, staggering nervously to the door every few minutes to make sure their parents weren’t around. I never again felt the same about group activity—united we stand … and that wonderful feeling I used to get at Pete Seeger concerts—singing “This Land Is Your Land”—that by working together, nothing was impossible.

  After the debt was paid I left LRY, which had just discovered sensitivity training. Now the group held weekly nonverbal communication sessions, with lots of hugging and feeling that boosted attendance to triple what it had been in our old save-the-world days. It seemed that everybody’s favorite topic was himself.

  OUR FIRST PARTIES WERE bow-tie-and-petticoa? affairs on birthdays, with paint-by-number kits, gift-wrapped, for presents and little baskets of jelly beans and Indian corn for favors, and inedible white cake (eaten nonetheless) with pink or green or yellow frosting for after-party stomach-aches. Until about second grade our parties were boy-girl—we never really thought about the distinctions, the only difference between us, outside of clothing, being whether we deflated our party balloons and took them home with us (the girls) or popped them in somebody’s ear (the boys).

  Then, when we were seven or so, the parties segregated. It strikes me as too bad, now. It wasn’t anything in us, but something in our surroundings that made us wary and imposed on us unnatural shame at being caught, after an especially noisy bellyflop in the town pool, with our bathing suits momentarily askew, exposing our tops (that’s what we called them—the real, clinical names for things always scared us). We would have been young enough to feel natural still with boys, except that we were all in such a hurry to grow up that we affected sexy feelings and the awkwardness of crushes long before we really felt them. By second grade, at any rate, our parties were strictly all-girl or all-boy. For my friends and me, many slumber parties and little slumbering. We rolled our hair and wore our baby-doll pajamas and compared sleeping bags and told ghost stories (the vindow vasher, the pickled hand). After one slumber party, though, stories began to circulate about a certain girl who had attended it and acted “queer.” Newly alerted to the existence of homosexuality, all of us imagined we saw signs of perversion wherever we turned. If you touched a friend of the same sex, by accident, you said “Excuse me”—we still do—and if it happened too often, you were a “homo” or a “queer.”

  Then in fifth grade, when the need for separation had perhaps become real enough, we were flung back together again, mostly by parents, into a boy-girl world. Buckled into garter belts, buttoned into suit jackets, we were deposited at the host’s house at seven-thirty by our parents, who watched us file stiffly through the doors leading to his basement recreation room, two by two, like passengers aboard the ark and set afloat for the express purpose of mating. Parents would smile and poke us in the ribs and say things like “Don’t come home without lipstick on your collar” (to boys—though fifth-grade girls never wore lipstick, and even if they did, would never have got it on the collar of any fifth-grade boy) or “Don’t be afraid of the dark, the boys will take care of you” (chuckle). Once, at a boy-girl fifth-grade Christmas party, I remember the host’s mother following me around holding a sprig of plastic mistletoe over my head and calling her son, “Look, you can kiss her” which eventually, he did. (Very few boys would have. I’m not sure if it was obedience or gallantry that made him follow through.) Afterward he looked embarrassed, but mostly just puzzled. Clearly he had imagined fireworks and dizziness and stars.

  The parents at another party that I wasn’t invited to, but heard about, turned out the lights themselves once everyone was settled in the father’s cozy rifle- and fish-trophy-decorated den, then said “Have fun, kids,” and went upstairs to watch TV. I think parents liked the cuteness of our youth, enjoyed the comedy of our fumbling. Anything in the miniature version is adorable—toy poodles, little girls dressed up in high heels with smeary lipstick, musical prodigies with half-size violins and fifth graders playing at sex, affecting the actions of their elders, without the basic needs that stirred them on. (Our older brothers and sisters necked at parties because they felt like necking. We did because we felt we should.) Just as the Munchkins in the Wizard of Oz always get a condescending smile, and so do circus midgets and anyone else who is unthreateningly small, so did we because, I think, our comic inadequacies pointed up the grown-ups’ relative success. The truth is that very little went on in those first lights-out parties. Mostly we played records (Beatles, Monkees, Beach Boys, Mamas and the Papas) and ate pretzels. We usually ended up gathered around a miniature hockey set, the kind with little metal players and a plastic puck, controlled with levers on the sides, or playing a suggestive game called Twister that put us into funny positions, our legs and arms tangled, sprawled on the floor, or volleying a Ping-pong ball back and forth, using our shoes for paddles, glad to be barefoot and relieved to have something to focus our attention on besides each other.

  Later, when all their prodding finally took hold and when the party games we played had progressed beyond Pass the Orange (from girl to boy to girl, holding the fruit with just your neck and chin, and letting it slide, sometimes, to your chest), the parents might have liked to call the whole thing off. By then it was too late, of course. They’d launched the ark, but when we finally set sail, beyond their placid, chaperoned harbor waters, beyond hand holding and a couple of innocent, blushing, off-target kisses on the couch, then they became suddenly surprised and indignant, and wondered how we’d gotten that way. It was no wonder, really. If you start turning the lights out in fifth grade, you’re ready for something else by high school.

  The diary I kept all through eighth grade dwells for whole entries—page after page after page—on a single junior high school dance. There were three each year: one in the fall, a nervous gathering more like a meeting of two warring teams than a coming together of allies; one in winter (by that time a few precocious couples had paired up and came like newlyweds to show off before the multitudes who came alone); and one in spring, the mating season when, with caution thrown to the outfield, desperate for this one last chance before the long dull summer ahead, we tried to find Someone to spend June with so that, if we were going to be hot and bored, at least we would be hot and bored together. It was this last spring dance my diary dealt with. Not the happy recollections, but anxious discussions of an event not yet taken place.

  As secretary of the student council and chairman of decorations, it was my job to choose
a theme and transform the gym into a setting suitable for romance. (My perennial role was to decorate rooms for other people to dance in. I would do it again three years later as co-chairman of the junior prom.) The theme of this dance was somewhat confused—“Good Vibrations,” after a song by the Beach Boys (“She’s giving me good vibrations/she’s giving me ex-ci-ta-tions …”) combined with the idea, stolen from the latest fad, of computer dating. For this combination we hung streamers and dyed old sheets, and placed on a table underneath a basketball hoop the focal point of the evening: our computer. (Lit with Christmas tree lights, with two slots marked “boy” and “girl,” the computer was just big enough for me to sit inside, pairing up the couples and trying not to run my stockings.)

  It was just the kind of idea that someone who didn’t dance too regularly at dances would come up with—a guaranteed partner for everyone, a chicken in every pot. The girls who, like me, were used to taking many trips to the water fountain thought the computer was a great idea. So did the boys whose agonizing job of asking someone to dance was taken out of their hands by The Box. But for some—red-haired Kathy and Sally, who’d been readying herself for a career in cheerleading since sixth grade—for them, the computer was a raw deal.