by Angela Starita
Before I’d seen “Barbie,” my sister told me she’d liked it but hated the last scene, which she went on to describe. Oblivious to the concept of “spoiler alerts,” she spoke with considerable disgust about the lunacy of a doll who lived in a perfect world of clothes, sparkling beaches, and dance parties choosing to become a human woman. It didn’t make sense. And of all places to end this witty homage to MGM technicolor—a gynecologist’s office?! Such a disappointment, and utterly illogical. Mysterious even.
This was the tenor of her review, minor outrage on the part of a doll we’d both loved. Even though we’re eight years apart in age, we’d played with some of the same dolls when I had inherited hers, a brown-haired Barbie with a bouffant and a Francie doll, her small-breasted friend who sported a blond flip do. I got the white carrying case too and whatever clothes Jeanette had collected. Under my tenure, the Barbie world grew exponentially and entered the 1970s. I made a town for her in the space under the steps going into our basement. Its central feature was the three-story town house where my main doll, Malibu Barbie, a blond with a deep tan, lived. The others had various apartments around town and the gang would travel around the country in Barbie’s camper. I wasn’t allowed to have a Ken doll, so if a romantic plot line ensued, another Barbie would temporarily take the trouser role for a heated make-out scene.
When I did finally see the movie, I found it surprisingly moving, tearing up when Barbie realizes she has to leave Barbieland, that in fact, she’s stopped being a doll. I suppose that when she chose to end the movie at a doctor’s office, Greta Gerwig had in mind the start of adolescence and the painful end of childhood. But I also wonder if she had remembered a late scene in The Bell Jar when Esther gets fitted for a diaphragm. It’s a moment of power for a character who for much of the book feels utterly defenseless. For me, at least, the final scene of Barbie had much the same tone, the melancholy of saying goodbye.
So why my sister’s strong reaction to this moment of female manifestation? I’m torn between two theories, though I’d guess the answer is some combination.
In 2018, Jeanette was treated for advanced ovarian cancer, which had spread to her uterus, spleen, gall bladder, liver, and the membrane around her lungs. (As one surgeon put it to me, think of this form of ovarian cancer as forming in the fallopian tube and then spreading its cells like the fluff of a blown dandelion.) She underwent a 9-hour surgery, chemotherapy, and an immunotherapy clinical trial. All in all, treatment lasted for a year and a half. Despite skin-of-your-teeth odds, though, she’s survived with no relapses. But she will never be the same energetic woman who charged into her surgeon’s office after an “off” pap smear, a person deemed in good enough shape that her body could withstand a 50% increase in chemo drugs to hit the cancer as hard as possible.
That certainly could provide a decent explanation for her disgust when, expecting a nostalgic, doll-sized romp through mid-century excess, she smacked into beige Barbie in a non-descript office building in a non-descript gynecologist’s office, so bland and so dangerous.
But there’s more to it, I’m betting, something about our age difference and even more about where we grew up. Until I was 10, my family lived in Jersey City, a medium-sized city on the other side of the Hudson from lower Manhattan. Jeanette attended an all-girl’s Catholic academy from second grade until 12th, a place that fulfilled all the stereotypes of parochial schools of the era—ancient nuns, minor corporal punishment, lousy education. I was a first grader there the year my sister and two of her friends tried out for the school’s variety show. Their act consisted of lip synching to the Fifth Dimension’s version of the “Age of Aquarius” while wearing sequined, floor-length sheaths my mother had made them. At the school-wide assembly, I happened to be near Sister Alice — the mostly silent, very old principal—when she turned to a colleague and shook her head severely, a gesture I noted then announced at the dinner table that night. As anticipated, the number was cut from the next week’s show. So, though Jeanette was there from 1964 until 1975, norm-shattering years in the popular culture, to be sure, those shifts were forcibly ignored in a Catholic school in Jersey City, a place that however close to New York—and really could you get any closer?—remained insulated in a transparent but impermeable skin. It was like one of those Bucky Fuller drawings showing a gelatinous bubble sealing parts of Manhattan. But the Jersey City version, instead of protecting against nuclear destruction, stalwartly prevented the entry of updated sexual mores or any check on the ingrained corruption of everyone from mayor to meter readers.
There may have been an abundance of Cutlass Supremes and POW-MIA flags, and other signifiers of the ’70s, my sister’s youth was shaped by a city functioning, more or less, as it had since the 1920s and ’30s, only, I guess, dirtier, less hopeful, its racial and class lines more rawly exposed. I’m reminded of recollections of one Benny Brookstone, an elderly habituée of a Jersey City diner I used to frequent as an adult in the 1990s, who would talk about his long-time girlfriend, a local madam, whom he’d pick up on her days off to go out for a meal of whiskey and medium rare steak. I always imagined this rendezvous taking place at a restaurant just a few blocks from my sister’s parochial school and that feels about right, like one world was merely the inverse of the other. In Benny’s telling, Jersey City of that era was the good life.
By the time I was 11, my family had moved to a farm in central New Jersey, and Jeanette was away at college. I went to a public school with kids who’d never been to New York or Philadelphia, thought the NJ Bar Association regulated alcohol sales, and got high on pills or Jimson weed growing in the woods. It was a sorry bit of culture shock for me, but once I finally found friends with a modicum of ambition, the move let me grow up in a setting more in tune with the present. The town had its own anachronisms to be sure, but at least by high school my peers attended rock concerts, stuck pins in their cheeks, and bought marijuana instead of foraging in the woods. I hated the place and paid a fairly stiff price in a loss of confidence since I’d arrived, more or less, from another planet in terms of behavior, expectations, and fashion. But by the time I was leaving for college, I understood that, given my sister’s experience, I’d been lucky to be there. By any metric, my second hometown offered way more perspectives on life, some downright bizarre but undeniably different from what my mother called the “hot house roses” grown at the Academy of St. Aloysius, pretty but subtly stunted and ill-equipped for the world outside Jersey City’s borders.
But even an hour’s drive from the deteriorating storefronts of Journal Square, the 1930s died a slow death in my world, this time in the form of a direct collision between my mother’s high school hygiene class and the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, authors of the 1971 classic Our Bodies, Ourselves. It happened when I was 17, and my mother took me, for the last time, to a pediatrician’s office. To the doctor’s credit, he’d hired a nurse practitioner, Patsy Deal, to talk to girls who already had their period. After he’d conducted most of the physical, Patsy came in and…talked. She didn’t give you a pap smear or a pelvic exam. She asked you questions. At the time, I had no context–no knowledge of the women’s health movement– for understanding this gangly, highly enthusiastic woman who wanted to know, I guess, how regular my periods were? I don’t know because none of it made an impression on me, and I strongly doubt I’d remember her name today if it hadn’t been for a small remark my mother, who’d been present for the whole scene, made afterwards. One of Patsy’s questions had been if I’d ever looked at my vagina? I probably said yes since, after all, I lived with it every day. Could I have not looked at it? No, she meant really looked at it. She suggested I get a hand mirror and see my vagina from below. I’m sure I duly nodded and the whole thing went out of my head. I certainly wasn’t mortified or embarrassed by the exchange: my mother always approached medical concerns with a matter-of-fact, clinical tone. When she’d had to have a hysterectomy seven years earlier, she didn’t demure to euphemism even with a 10-year-old. She hated, really despised, when pregnant women referred to “the baby in my tummy.” The cloying tone coupled with inaccuracy offended her pragmatic sensibility.
So a small alarm must have gone off in my head when, as we waited for Patsy to come back armed with pamphlets, she said to me, “I never look down there. I only let the doctor.”
Even my oblivious 17-year-old self, already making an inventory of my room to locate any portable mirror, understood the repressed, all together fucked up genesis of this sentiment. Here was a woman who never avoided hard reality, drilled in me the need to have regular check-ups, to face whatever unpleasantness that meant with resigned stoicism. None of this was stated directly but, predictably enough, through what she herself did. She was careful to see her gynecologist each year, going into Manhattan after a long day of teaching. She’d wait sometimes for hours, for the kingly Dr. Jordan to finally make his appearance, a man who would shout at his patients, including my mother, if during their pregnancies they’d gained more weight that he deemed correct. You weren’t going to use pregnancy as an excuse to get fat on Dr. Jordan’s watch. After giving birth to me, a premature baby born with pneumonia, my mother weighed less than before her pregnancy. Despite this trauma, she continued to be his patient until he retired some time in the early 1980s. I’ve puzzled over why she stayed, someone so off-handedly bright who could cut through pretense and false arguments without effort, someone with no patience for euphemism: what made her stay?
I suppose she expected men to have power, to lord it over you, and you needed to accept it. That’s not to say that my mother didn’t essentially believe in this power arrangement. Or, more accurately, she was deeply ambivalent about equality, wanted it and feared it. She once told me about her adolescent rage at my uncle never having to do house work. In her anger, she threw a wooden brush on the ground that ricocheted against sensitive veins on my grandmother’s leg, which immediately swelled up. In the telling, my mother had no sympathy for her younger self, just shame that she’d inflicted pain.
That same grandmother and her husband insisted that all three of their daughters attend college, a notion their Depression-era neigbhors scoffed at. Their reasoning was blunt: you make your own money so can stay in a marriage because you want to, not because you have to. She was among the first four women admitted to Fordham University in the school’s early experiment with coeducation at its business school. She majored in accounting, but after graduation in 1948, no one would hire her. Finally, an office manager, an older woman, told her: they won’t want to hire you because if you have to go on a business trip, the company would have to pay for a separate hotel room. End of story. Full stop. My mother headed uptown to Columbia, got a master’s in education—classes she hated—and then built a career teaching bookkeeping and business law at a public high school in Staten Island, where I imagine her discipline and smart aleck teasing was put to good use.
But outside of school, there were plenty of spheres where she questioned her right to take the lead. Visiting Dr. Jordan fell into that category: he had a stellar reputation, he knew her and her various gynecological woes, and I’m sure she had no expectation that any other doctor would treat her differently. That is, she saw no point in fighting what she perceived as unavoidable reality. Her comment that day, as we waited for the ardent Patsy Deal to return, didn’t come from a woman divorced from the world as it existed in 1982, but one who’d concluded that 1948’s limitations on women’s lives were permanently in place, our vulnerability situated precisely between our legs. Why hold a mirror up to that?