Fear of Fifty by Erica Jong Page B

would do what I didn’t do—and in a way you have—all except for the PR.
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    How can I explain to him that the vicissitudes of my career cannot be undone by mere “PR.” I have broken rules that are invisible to him because he is a man: written openly about sex, appropriated male picaresque adventures for women, poked fun at the sacred cows of our society. I have lived as I chose, married, divorced, remarried, divorced, remarried and divorced again—and, still worse, dared to write about my ex-husbands! That is the most heinous of my sins—not having done these things, but having confessed to them in print. It is for this that I am considered beyond the pale. No PR can fix this! It’s nothing more or less than the fate of rebellious women. They used to stone us in the marketplace. In a way, they still do.
    And he’d still send me to medical school! Should I consider that an insult or a compliment? And should I take him up on it? I might love being a doctor for the second part of my life. Writing is not an easy way to make a living.
    And then it is late—3:30 almost, and we have to fly. My father pays the bill and we walk back to the showroom. I catch a cab and head uptown, with my reams of indecipherable notes and a tape recorder that, I realize, didn’t pick up a word.
    Very well. I will reconstruct the conversation as I always do anyway, writing fiction. It’s all made up anyway. Especially the parts that sound real.
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    Looking back over this dialogue, I fear I may have made my father sound a bit too much like Mel Brooks’s 2,000-Year-Old Man. But something else emerges, something that seems to have escaped me when I was younger. My parents each gave up an artistic ambition—his music, her painting—to create a family and a business together. And the business used both their talents—her designing and drawing and modeling and his knack for guessing trends and his salesmanship. The dolls became their joint product, like their daughters. It was a mom-and-pop operation. At the end of it all they still had each other—and nine grandchildren—and plenty of money. For kids who started out in the Depression, with parents who spoke Yiddish and Russian, that was nearly a miracle. More than that, it was their ideal of marriage: a partnership, a compromise, and, of course, a communist enterprise—from each according to his or her capacities, to each according to his or her needs. Neither one felt cheated at the end. (The middle is another story.) Each took credit for the other’s success. Not many people in my generation have marriages like that. I never thought I would. And getting there was the hardest battle of my life. But I am getting ahead of the story. First, I have to tell you about my mother.
    How hard it is to write about her and how necessary. And where do I begin? Then or now? And do I tell the story from my point of view or hers? We are so linked that it’s hard to know the difference. I tell myself that my mother would never agree to be interviewed, that she would bitterly mock the idea. (I am to be proven wrong.) But I believe it was her frustration above all that propelled my success. Then she was both jealous of me and fiercely proud. She made me everything I am today—warts and all.
    When did I first understand female limitations? From my mother. And when did I first understand I was destined in some way to become my mother? At puberty. Until then I was unfettered in my ambition and enthusiasm. I expected to be Edna St. Vincent Millay, Madame Curie, and Beatrice Webb all rolled into one. I expected to take the world by its ears and shake it until it said, Yes, Erica, yes, yes, yes, yes. And now I understand that my mother had had the same experience. But that because of the times in which she lived, she had gotten stuck in that experience as I did not—and her stuckness was one of the things that set me free.
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