HERE I AM, THE GIRL WHO USED TO SIT ON THE SMALL landing at the top of the stairs that led to our bedrooms and stare out the window there. When I look back at that girl, I picture her there. I could see rooftops of houses, including my uncle Joe’s across the street; when the trees were bare I could see all the way to the mall; on clear days I could see the community college buildings and vague roofs in the next town. I played a game: Someday, I will go beyond all of these buildings. Beyond Providence, which was ten miles away. Beyond Boston, which was fifty miles away. Someday, I will go farther than I can even imagine. Farther than anyone can imagine. I meant that both literally—I would leave this small town, this small state, New England, maybe even the United States—and figuratively. How far I wanted to go!
As I watched cousins getting married in heavy white beaded wedding gowns, I vowed to wear champagne or even pink. Their husbands were all nice guys from town who ran delis or worked at Electric Boat or as electricians or plumbers. I would find a poet, I decided, maybe even someone from England or France. We would name our children Summer or Sage, live by the beach or in a loft. We, I, would be different.
Much of this thinking I attribute to growing up in the 1960s. Around me, the world changed while I watched. Men still wore hats; teenagers grew their hair long. My mother wiggled herself into a girdle every morning; other women burned their bras. People bucked the system, lived on the land, had sex before marriage, hitchhiked, bought Eurail passes and backpacks while fathers still pulled their Chevys into their driveways at five o’clock and walked into a home they’d bought with a wife making dinner and two kids watching television. We Shake ’n Baked our pork chops, made Hamburger Helper, and ate TV dinners, but health food stores were opening and there were suddenly granola and yogurt and lentil burgers. All of it confused me. Where did I fit into this shifting landscape?
This question haunted me for many years. I considered marriage young, but opted to move away and live alone in a city. I considered going to graduate school, but instead went to work for TWA as a flight attendant. Always a push and pull, never certain I’d chosen the right way, which most times was the unconventional one. Recently I heard Gloria Steinem interviewed by Terry Gross on Fresh Air, and she described the cause of her mother’s depression as patriarchal tyranny. I wished I could point to something like that for what I’d always felt, but nothing fit. That yearning I could not name, the same one that kept me looking out that window as a teenager, never left me.
To me, one movie and one novel captured what I felt, and I turned to them again and again for validation and even solace that I wasn’t alone with this feeling. The Graduate came out in 1967, and while I’m certain I didn’t see it when I was only ten years old (even though my parents never restricted what movies I saw or what books I read, I doubt even they would have let me go see The Graduate), I know I did see it young, at thirteen or fourteen, perhaps at the Midland Cinema. Oddly, our mall had a small movie theater that showed foreign and independent films. I loved going there, loved how what I saw often confused or embarrassed me, how the movies there made me think in ways that only books did. I saw Women in Love and Le Genou de Claire and, I think, a rerelease of The Graduate in 1970 or ’71. From the moment Dustin Hoffman’s face appears in close-up as the airline captain announces landing and Simon and Garfunkel start singing “The Sound of Silence,” I loved that movie. I thought, as crazy as it sounds, that it was a movie about me.
Around the same time I read a novel about a young man who wants to escape, who wants freedom from the moral and societal expectations placed on him, who wants to run. I had never even heard of John Updike when I took the green, yellow, and blue striped book off the library shelf. But just like that opening sequence of The Graduate, the opening pages of Rabbit, Run drew me in and held on to me until its final words: “His hands lift of their own and he feels the wind on his ears even before, his heels hitting heavily on the pavement at first but with an effortless gathering out of a kind of sweet panic growing lighter and quicker and quieter, he runs. Ah: runs. Runs.” From my perch at the top of the stairs, that’s what I imagined. Running.
RABBIT, RUN WAS published in 1960, over a decade before I read it. John Updike said that when he looked around in 1959, he saw a number of scared, dodgy men who could not make commitments, men who had peaked in high school and existed in a downward spiral. Their idea of happiness, Updike noted, was to be young. Harry Angstrom, Rabbit, Run’s eponymously nicknamed protagonist, is only twenty-six, yet on page two of the novel he refers to himself as old. Updike himself was only twenty-eight when he wrote the book. At the age of fourteen, I was more than willing to accept that Rabbit was indeed old. Twenty-six? Definitely old. In fact, rereading the novel recently I was stunned by how young he actually is in it because he feels so old, so disheartened and beaten.