Life's Afternoon

Rebels in White Gloves: Coming of Age with Hillary's Class - Wellesley '69
by Miriam Horn

When the women of the Wellesley class of 1969 entered the ivory tower, they were initiated into a rarefied world. Many were daughters of privilege, many were going for their "MRS." But by the time they graduated four years later, they faced a world turned upside down by the Pill, NOW, student protests, the counterculture, and the Vietnam War.

In this social history, Miriam Horn retraces the lives of women caught on a historic cusp. This generation was the first to test-drive modern rules that remain complicated and contentious regarding sexuality, marriage, motherhood, paid work, spirituality, aging, and the difficulties of reconciling public and private life. The result is a story of uncommon subtleties and vibrancy that reflects this generation's fateful choices.

The year that Hillary Clinton moved into the White House, Nancy Young was passing the hours watching chemicals drip into her veins, poison for the cancer that had overtaken her ovaries. It was another extreme turn in a life that had always seemed wilder and harder than her classmates': from her blue-collar childhood to her volatile husband, her night school MBA to tantric sex at the Rajneesh ashram to the illness that had suddenly accelerated her life, leaping her twenty years ahead of her generation.

Nancy's life may have been an exaggerated version of her classmates' - more damned with men, more misfitted at work, more ceaseless in her search for meaning, more fragile in her health. But it has confronted her with the same essential and complicated negotiation between the personal and the public that has shaped all their lives. Like all of them, Nancy would struggle to reconcile her own values - etched into heightened clarity by her cancer - with the values of the wage-paying world. She would grapple with the official stories - medical, theological, psychological - that describe her place and her prospects. She would seek communities of support. She would insist on being loved, and also try to transcend her small, needful self.

When she found the lump in her breast, the size of a coffee bean and rock hard against her rib cage, she was living with Steve but deeply unhappy and close to leaving. "I was tired of having always to be the emotional leader - this will be the universal story. I kept saying we should commit ourselves. He would be, like, 'What's the hurry?' Even when I got him to agree to buy a condo together, we had to draft an agreement so he could get out of it the minute he wanted to. He kept saying he wanted time alone, and to see old friends by himself, many of whom were women. It was a game, a head trip to say, 'You're not going to run my life.' But I also think that commitment is genuinely harder for men. Women are better at knowing what we feel, so we can say, 'This relationship has enough that is good.' Men don't pay the same attention to their feelings; their inner dialogue does not include the constant examination of where they are emotionally. I see so many relationships where the women do all the emoting while the men watch TV and go to work. I'm not talking about dumb guys. I'm talking about my own relationship. I'll think, 'Today I have this little edge of feeling.' Steve thinks you deal with emotions when there's a crisis but it's not something you work on all day long."

Over time, Nancy's dissatisfaction grew. "Steve continued to insist on his independence and remained fairly closed off from me. I felt I still didn't really know who he was." Frustrated, she turned her attentions to her old, crippled dog, a German shepherd she had carried with her from her first troubled marriage. "Over time I became more and more the dog's nurse - I couldn't bear to put her down or leave her - and Steve spoke to me less and less. By the summer of 1986, when I finally put her to sleep, Steve and I had become strangers. Our relationship lacked life; it still had little intensity or commitment. And it had not healed by the following March, when I found the lump."

The doctor ordered a biopsy, which brought good news: The tumor was benign. A week later, Nancy went to have her stitches removed. The doctor met her with an apology. He'd been wrong. The growth was malignant. "I started pounding the table and screaming. 'It can't be; it can't be.' I was totally unprepared and furious. This had totally derailed my plans. I was only thirty-nine; I was just starting a new job; I thought Steve and I were going to split and I was going to have to build a new life." The doctor listened, then told Nancy that while she was in the recovery room, drugged and gape-mouthed and drooling, Steve had turned to him and said, "You know, I really love her." This is not the time, the doctor told Nancy, for you to leave this man.

"I went crazy, and turned on Steve. He wanted to be in there with it. I told him to go away, that this was a poisonous relationship, that I'd put enough into it and didn't get anything back and wasn't impressed with his eleventh-hour protestations of how he really cared about me."

The doctor sent her to a breast surgeon, who advised a mastectomy. Though the tumor was small, he believed that it wouldn't respond to radiation. Nancy refused and went to a doctor at another hospital, who told her that the idea of a mastectomy was "off the wall" and ordered a lumpectomy. Nancy had a stage-one cancer with no lymph node involvement, the doctor said, and would probably not need radiation. Days later, she called to say she'd made a mistake; there were cancer cells on the margin and they might need another lumpectomy. They finally decided on radiation - every day, all summer long. It exhausted Nancy and burned her skin, but she never missed work. "Right away you're looking for lifeboats. I was utterly uninterested in my job but grateful for someplace to go.

"Then it was pretty much over and done. I had an 80 percent chance of surviving, which I thought nice odds. And I knew at last that Steve really did care about me; I finally had what I wanted from him. When I finished treatment we went to California, to a beautiful inn by the Pacific, and decided to get married." A justice of the peace performed the ceremony in their apartment, witnessed by Nancy's brother and his boyfriend and a few friends.

For the first time in her life, Nancy felt that she wanted children. She went to a fertility doctor and learned that her tubes were scarred and could probably not be unblocked. In vitro fertilization seemed to her too much like the hospital again; she was not prepared to "pay any price" to have kids. "I wasn't terribly disappointed, because I'd never really expected it to happen. My life had never had the stability children need, and my own miserable upbringing had convinced me that you should only have kids when you can make the right environment for them. I wasn't heartbroken. But as time goes on, I grow more sad about it; having children is such a big part of being a human being."

The day Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, Nancy got much worse news. For fifteen months she'd been having a heavy vaginal discharge, enough to soak her underwear, and long painful periods. They'd done Pap smears, but found nothing until an ultrasound located a mass the size of a grapefruit on one of her ovaries. Told she would need immediate surgery, she left the doctor's office and ran as fast as she could all the way home, desperately trying to outrun her terror.

Her doctor sent her to a gynecological oncologist. "He had a horrible personality and was not the least bit reassuring. I wanted him to leave an ovary, because I knew I couldn't take estrogen, which tends to grow tumors in the breast. I tried writing an agreement: 'If you find this, then you can do that.' He was bullshit about it. Going into surgery, he was furious at me and I was terrified. I had to give this guy I didn't like, who seemed to have no feeling whatsoever, a blank check. When I woke up from surgery, he said: 'This was quite an afternoon you gave me. The tumor was cancerous. The lymph nodes were full of it. There was a second tumor. It took me four hours to clean it out.' He really was a dodo. I had stage-three ovarian cancer." For a tumor so advanced, the doctors told her, the survival rate was 10 percent.

For the next six months Nancy had chemotherapy, an "unbelievably horrible" experience. Each time, it took an entire day to get the full dose. The drip burned out all the veins in her hand, and several times she had to be hospitalized and given intravenous fluids, because she couldn't keep anything down. Her hair thinned and the weight on her five-foot-seven frame dropped to 105 pounds. Every tremor in her body became a cause for alarm that the cancer might be coming back, in her bladder or her colon.

Copyright © 2000 by Miriam Horn

About the Author

Miriam Horn writes for U.S. News and World Report. She lives in New York City with her husband.