“I want to be you when I grow up” smiled the dark-eyed young woman in blue as she leaned over the table and handed me her copy of a book to personalize.
She meant to be nice. Maybe.
I was signing copies of Babes in Boyland after a talk I’d given on women, ambition, and education. I shouldn’t have been surprised to meet an educated and ambitious woman during the signing; what shocked me, however, was that her ambition was to be me.
Me? it sounded like a joke. I had one shoe off under the table because my pinkie-toe was throbbing like a maniac from being confined in patent-leather all evening. I was drinking wine from a box — a box, let me emphasize, and while it was terrible, what was worse was that I could only have one glass because I then had to drive a whole hour to get home.
And while I am duly and genuinely grateful for my life and appreciative of the luck that has come my way, if I were going to announce to the universe at large my deepest wish, it would be to inhabit the life of, let’s say, Margaret Atwood. Several bestsellers, a Booker prize, a magnificent imagination, and photographs on the backcovers of her books gorgeous enough to force men to fall in love with her both instantly and eternally.
To have written Alias Grace and The Robber Bride — now that’s worth a sense of longing. That you could understand.
Wanting to be me is wanting to be more or less the character played by Doris Roberts in Everybody Loves Raymond, except she writes instead of cooks. I mean, it’s a good steady gig, but hardly the choicest role.
In other words, I suspect that the young woman did not really want to be a middle-aged academic in a too-tight black suit, lipstick feathering at the end of a long day, longing above all else to be out of high-heels and home in pajamas, watching (you guessed it) Law and Order.
She wasn’t 12 years old, either, the lady in blue. Maybe she was in her mid-to-late twenties. Maybe even early thirties with really good skin. Had she been 12 or 15 — or even 20 — I could have smiled in return and given her my sincere, albeit standard, reply of “I’m counting on it. These books will need to be written by somebody.”
One likes to encourage the next generation and all that. Plus it’s easy to be nice to people who have the decency to be 30 years your junior. It’s tougher when they seem to be treading on your heels.
But this particular reader was too close to my real age, my real life, to be given the usual response. I paused, despite the queue of folks with books behind her, and looked up into her eyes. She grinned, yes, but her look was not entirely disarming. I shook her hand, signed her copy of Babes, and thought about her for the last two weeks. She got my attention, that’s for sure.
I’ve been wondering: Who exactly is this “me” she wants to be?
I bet the young woman does not want to be earning far less than a quarter of the salary earned by the coaches at her university. She doesn’t really want to make the hard deadline, grade the stacks of papers, clean the three-cat cat box, and go to physical therapy again on Thursday.
No, what the woman in blue wants is to be a writer. She wants to be signing copies of her own book. She wants to be invited to talk about her ideas and rewarded for doing so. Fair enough. What’s not to like? When you put it that way, it sounds terrific. And it is terrific — I have no complaints — but it isn’t what she thinks it is. To put it another way, I’m not who she thinks I am.
No doubt she figured she wanted to be me simply because I was within her range of vision. I was sitting there in front of a stack of books. I represented a picture of herself she could imagine becoming; seeing me was like seeing a later version of herself.
I didn’t tell her to raise her sights higher — all the way up to Canada, maybe, where the Great Woman lives — because it would have seemed ungenerous. Instead I wished her luck, smiled, and meant it.
