Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake by Anna Quindlen
Statisticians say our houses are almost twice as large, on average, as they were forty years ago. So much stuff, rotating rooms of it: cribs, big-boy beds, changing tables, desks, new linens, new window treatments, new rugs. When my kids got their own places, they went shopping in the junk shops in the top and bottom stories of our own homes. My husband says that when you go to their apartments it’s like a walk down Memory Lane, that little table we never really found a place for, the coffee mugs that take both of us right back to the era when there was scarcely time for coffee because someone always needed a glass of milk or a story read. “Take more!” I kept saying, but they demurred, not wanting to seem greedy. The odd frying pan, the chipped bowls. Quin cleans, Christopher cooks. Chris called one night and asked how to drain spaghetti if you don’t have one of those things with the holes in it. Next time he came over I gave him one of my four colanders. Or maybe it’s five. I like the old enameled ones.
The nicest thing you can say to me about my home is that it’s homey, and people say it all the time. I like it. And at a certain point, I can’t say when, I realized I didn’t really give a damn about any of it. If there were a fire, what would I save? We all used to say it was the photo albums, but with digital photography we all have our photographs on our computers, on Facebook, in emails to our families and friends. My cookbooks are well thumbed, but I know the best recipes by heart now, and the bad recipes I’ve either discarded or adapted.
I can’t even say I would reach for the wedding album; it seems so long ago, and so many of our friends didn’t come into our lives until afterward. There’s a porcelain bird I gave my mother the Christmas before she died, which she owned for less than a month, that I’ve wrapped carefully in tissue and taken with me from the small apartment to the bigger apartment to the brownstone to the nicer brownstone. There are the letters my kids write each year to Santa Claus, even now that they no longer watch me seal them in envelopes and address them to S. Claus, North Pole, 99705 (which is really the zip code of North Pole, Alaska, not the real North Pole), even now that my daughter has learned to write to Santa online and to insert a web link so you can click on the letter to Santa and go directly to the dress she wants from Saks in the correct size and color. There’s the mink coat my husband gave me when our first child was born, which I haven’t worn for years because our kids are bothered by fur but which I treasure because it made me feel prosperous, elegant, and wifelike for perhaps the first time.
If there were a fire I’d probably just grab a few old pictures and the Labradors. I’d be wearing the watch and the rings my husband gave me for the big birthdays. I haven’t removed my wedding ring since the day he put it on me and the priest blessed it. I’d miss the rest, but I wouldn’t mourn it. Except for the Christmas ornaments, I guess. My entire family is pretty attached to the Christmas ornaments.
It could be that I’m fooling myself about all this, the way I tell myself that if I didn’t have so much on my plate I would spend six months living in London or Virgin Gorda when the truth is that if I didn’t have so much on my plate I would watch more old movies and forward lots of stupid Internet jokes to my children. It’s not that I want to trade the old stuff for new stuff. Every time I try that, I wind up re-creating what I already have; I swear that I’m finally going to have furnishings that are soft and serene, cream and ecru, and before you know it everything’s red again. Besides, I’m always mesmerized by those women who completely redecorate. The room was blue and yellow with overstuffed sofas and distressed pine, and then one day it’s off-white and celery (which is what shelter magazines call pale green) with low chaises and glass tables. My house is not like that; no clean sweeps for me. The brass bed in Christopher’s old room is the one Gerry and I slept in when we were first married. The mahogany bowfront chest under the windows in the den is part of what used to be called a bedroom suite that belonged to my parents. The furniture in the country house mainly came with it; I still have the engraved stationery of Mrs. Frederick W. Trumpbour in one of the cubbyholes in the cherry drop-front desk. The china cabinet in the New York City living room I bought for twenty-five dollars at a legendary flea market in Englishtown, New Jersey, and drove through the Holland Tunnel with its mahogany pediment jutting from the back of the car. It’s never closed that well, but still! Twenty-five dollars!
Obviously I don’t need stuff to remind me of my own life if I can remember how much I paid for a not-quite antique on a Saturday morning thirty-five years ago. I’m not certain I need the stuff anymore at all, except maybe my collection of nun paraphernalia, a gift from Christopher that I intend to leave to the weirdest of his children. The doctor checks my height every time I have a physical, and I’m a little shirty about it, bound and determined that I will stand tall, that my bones are brilliant, that I will not shrink. But somehow I feel a pronounced urge now to shrink my surroundings, to stick to just a few comfortable rooms, to have less instead of more. I feel as though I am at the peak of a progression, and from here I should follow another gentle downward slope: smaller, tighter, cleaner, simpler. No clutter. Less stuff. I’m not sure why this is the case. Maybe it’s because I now feel I know the truth about possessions, that they mean or prove or solve nothing. Stuff is not salvation.
My friend Susan is my role model in this. She and her husband and their three boys have somehow forgone the entire era of crazed consumerism. When they have stuff, it has a purpose, a point; when they acquire something, it has resonance and meaning, whether it’s a dirt bike or a new television. They get honey from their bees, eggs from their chickens, venison the way you do out in the country, where hunting trumps the supermarket. Susan and her many sisters have swap meets each year in which they shop around among one another’s clothing. And on Christmas several years ago her youngest, Willem, then a very little boy, was permitted, in his family’s fashion, to open one gift on Christmas Eve. The next morning, when he saw his stack of presents under the tree, he said, “But I already have one.”
Do I need to mention that they are a happy family?
I’m not sure I could have seen that when I was younger. I somehow believed that if you had matching side chairs and a sofa that harmonized and some beautiful lamps to light them all and some occasional tables with family photographs in frames scattered around them that you would have a home, that visual harmony and elegance promoted happiness. I fooled myself into thinking that House Beautiful should be subtitled Life Wonderful. I don’t know why I thought this, since the home in which I grew up as the oldest of five was always pretty topsy-turvy, the dining room table turned into a fort with blankets, the chunk-chunk of someone jumping on the bed upstairs. I should have learned my lesson years ago, when we went to the grandest wedding imaginable and the couple divorced within a few years, or when we went to dinner at an apartment on Fifth Avenue that was so beautiful and bright it was hard to know where to look and our host and hostess spent the entire evening sniping at each other. Maybe it took me a long time to get over the afternoon when I dropped one of my mother’s Royal Doulton figurines and she burst into tears. She had so few nice things, so few things that weren’t grubby with fingerprints or sticky with jelly.
But there’s so much responsibility to stuff. I should have realized that at that moment, seeing the little dancing Doulton woman in Regency garb headless on the kitchen floor. Stuff needs to be dusted and insured and willed to someone without hurting someone else’s feelings. (Those of you with one daughter and two sons surely know the look of incredulous horror that accompanies the suggestion that your jewelry will be divided three ways. “But the boys’ wives won’t even really be your family!” your daughter shrieks.) You have a nice chair, and then one day the fabric is in tatters and it all begins: swatches, furniture trucks, upholsterers, weeks and weeks of waiting, weeks and weeks of peering at it afterward and wondering if you’ve made a mistake.
And what does any of this have to do with real life? Real life is relaxed, as I was after the Corian countertop ha
Here’s what it comes down to, really: there is now so much stuff in my head, so many years, so many memories, that it’s taken the place of primacy away from the things in the bedrooms, on the porch. My doctor says that, contrary to conventional wisdom, she doesn’t believe our memories flag because of a drop in estrogen but because of how crowded it is in the drawers of our minds. “We women today have more on the hard disc than any women at any time in history,” she says. Between the stuff at work and the stuff at home, the appointments and the news and the gossip and the rest, the past and the present and the plans for the future, the filing cabinets in our heads are not only full, they’re overflowing.
Sometimes they appear to be full of random stuff anyhow, the name of the actress who played Scarlett’s sister in Gone with the Wind (Evelyn Keyes) and the area code for the city where I went to convent school (314) instead of the name of the restaurant where I’m supposed to be meeting a friend for lunch in an hour or the location of my keys. My mother just had to keep the home stuff straight, my father what was going on at work. But women today need to keep track of both, along with what’s going on in the world and what’s going on with the kids. The birthday party, the husband’s mother, the friend’s book party, the work deadlines, the grocery shopping, the bills. Stuff stuff stuff stuff.
Maybe my overstuffed brain makes me want to have barer surroundings, more space, to shuck the Ali Baba cave of my own existence. Everything that was once the right size for five people is too big for two. Lots of people tell me to wait awhile and I can put my grandchildren in their parents’ old rooms when they come to stay. I wonder what they’ll find in the backs of the closets and the bottoms of the drawers. Oooh, Dad, rolling papers and dirty magazines.
One day I saw a modular house in the newspaper. It was built of metal and glass in some Scandinavian country (of course) and sent here by freighter boat, complete with some Scandinavians to assemble it on-site for the buyer. A big living room, a tiny kitchenette, a small bathroom and bedroom. We could clear a space in the woods across the road from our big old house, furnish it with a few modern pieces. Perfection.
“I already have a house,” my husband said flatly when I was finished rhapsodizing.
This is what he says each time I want to change where and how we live: I already have a house. My husband doesn’t care about stuff. Here’s what he needs: A comfortable chair in which to read and watch TV. Sharp knives. A bottle opener. A pillow that, per the Goldilocks story, is neither too soft nor too hard. When he breaks a bowl while he’s doing the dinner dishes, he always gets a terrible look on his face, but it’s not because he is thinking, imported Italian Deruta in the Orvieto pattern. He always says, “I’m so sorry. I know you really liked this one.” He’s said it a dozen times.
It’s Thoreau who wrote about this most indelibly and directly: “Simplify, simplify.” (He also said, “It is a great art to saunter,” which I think of from time to time when I walk down the street at a double-time city clip.) Tocqueville was more expansive: “Americans cleave to the things of the world as if assured they will never die. They clutch everything but hold nothing fast, and so lose grip as they hurry after some new delight.”
And then there’s Bob Quindlen, my father, who some years ago started to divest, sending and bringing me things, things that were either part of the past or forgotten gifts: framed photographs of his grandchildren, an old pitcher in the shape of a pig that had been in my mother’s kitchen, an antique butter press designed to emboss the butter with the letter Q, which, believe me, is a rare alphabetical find. It still has the gift card I placed inside it years ago, so faded that I can read only the first few lines, which begin, “This has no practical use in the 20th century.” I was a little miffed that my father had given it back to me; now I’m figuring exactly when I should give it to our elder son, whose first name is the same as my last and who knows from experience how hard it is to find anything with a Q on it.
The sampler I like best is over the stove, where I spend a lot of my time, poaching eggs, poking a fork into the pot roast. I’ve committed its words to memory: WORK LIKE YOU DON’T NEED THE MONEY. LOVE LIKE YOU’VE NEVER BEEN HURT. DANCE LIKE NO ONE’S LOOKING. It could go up in flames with all the rest. I don’t need stuff to remind me of that. That’s a lesson I learned over time, when I wasn’t distracted by acquisition. When I fall back into the old ways, I remember Willem saying on Christmas morning, “But I already have one.” That’s my new mantra, and it applies to almost everything.
Next of Kin
One August evening in 1978 my husband got a wonky serving at the Clam Shack and was so ill by 2:00 A.M. that I woke our friend David to drive him to Nantucket Cottage Hospital. A nurse took Gerry away looking like what an English acquaintance once called “death eating a cracker,” and David and I sat slumped sleepily, silent, in the empty waiting room. The only magazines were Highlights for Children and Sports Illustrated. The nurse returned with a clipboard and said, “Are either of you related to him?” and we both shook our heads until David gave me a searching look. “Oh, oh, I’m his wife,” I said, as though “wife” was a relationship somewhere south of third cousin once removed.
Related to him: it wasn’t what I’d imagined when I slid down the aisle of the shrine of St. Joseph in a lace gown with bishop sleeves that I found at Bergdorf’s. (For the record, if I had it to do over again it’s still the dress I’d wear.) I dated a guy; I fell in love with a guy. And I figured I was going to date him and be in love with him as long as we both shall live. You dream yourself a life out of bits of fantasy and imaginings, like cotton candy, pink and mostly air. And then you have an actual life that has almost nothing to do with the cotton candy one. I didn’t really think about the fact that we would be each other’s next of kin. I didn’t think about being kin at all. In some ways “kin” is the antithesis of “boyfriend.” It took me almost a year to call him “my husband” with any regularity. On our second date I told him that I wouldn’t change my surname if I ever married. “I don’t think you have to worry about that,” he said.
For our twenty-fifth anniversary a group of our friends gave us a tree. It sure has grown. It’s a model of what a tree should be, the kind of thing a seven-year-old girl draws, a nice straight crayon-brown trunk with an oval of green leaves and a ring of flowers around it. (Seven-year-old boys draw stick figures and dinosaurs that look like lumpy dogs. I’m sorry, but it’s true.)
“Oh, that’s a Bradford pear,” said the arborist who came to look at the finicky trees, the ones that get fungus and big long-fingered dead limbs. “It’s almost a weed, it grows so easily.”
Bad metaphor for marriage, although that’s not what you think when you’re young and it’s your first time out. If you’re getting married for the right reasons, because this guy keeps cracking you up and he has a great grin and he never says “How much money can you really make as a writer?” you think being married is going to be like a Bradford pear tree, green and happy, flowering and spreading. If you looked down the long corridor of life and imagined the two of you at forty driving a kid to the emergency room with blood on the backseat, or thought about what it would be like when you were fifty-five and one of you got pink-slipped, or conjured the new guy at your office who tells you he thinks you have great eyes or the young woman at his who hangs on every word he says at the Friday evening bar breaks, you’d begin to realize that it’s a different kind of tree altogether. But we don’t do that. We can’t. The best we can do is look at the long marriages of others. If they’re good, or seem good, we tell ourselves that’s how we’ll be. If they’re bad, it’s their own fault.
I don’t want to throw in my lot with the marriage-is-hard-work crowd, the ones who suggest you see a couples counselor before you send out the invitations, who seem to support the entire advice-book in
Part of the problem, obviously, is that we’ve gotten as greedy about marriage as we have about so much else. And because we are so invested in youthful behavior, we have youthful illusions abetted by a culture that insists that the conversation, libido, interaction, attraction, and relationship of two people who have been together for forty years should be more or less like that of two people who have been together for only a few months. This makes no sense, nor should it. What if I said that I still wrote in much the same way, about most of the same things, as I did when I was eighteen? What if my husband had developed no new techniques or strategies for trying a case after decades as a trial lawyer? That wouldn’t be seen as reassuring or normative but as terrible.
Perspective is a good thing. You can’t take the long view without it. And for an enduring marriage today, the long view is what’s required. In 1900, one estimate has it, the average marriage lasted twenty-three years. Today, unless divorce or untimely death intervenes, the average marriage can be expected to last more than twice that long. In fact, that’s part of the explanation for the boom in late-in-life divorces between people who have been together for decades. With longer life expectancies, a woman in her sixties who is unhappily attached is looking at another twenty years and decides to say “No way” despite the shock and dismay of family and friends. Monogamy sometimes seems designed for a time when life was shorter and expectations lower. When I was a child and people would ask my father how long he and my mother had been married, he would sometimes reply, “She was at my First Communion.” He seemed to find this absolutely hilarious, while I always found it puzzling. But I am married to a man I met my freshman year in college, and sometimes I look across the dinner table at him and think, “He was at my First Communion.”