I work out at the Y five or six times a week, so I see a lot of naked women.
There are very elderly ones who stand crookedly in the shower,
bones protruding, washing their thinning, silver hair. Others have
bodies so wrinkled, the folds of skin fall like ripples from their
shoulders to their thighs. One woman of about 60 has had a double
mastectomy; she stands facing out under the hot air dryer on the wall,
scars running diagonally, like a geometry problem across her flattened
chest.
These women neither frighten nor repel me. But there are many who do.
They’re the middle-aged matrons who wriggle into stretched-out
nylon thongs and strut around the locker room with sad, flaccid butt
cheeks dribbling out. The ones who climb on the scale and stand for
full minutes, inching the weights backward an eighth of a pound at a
time, sweat breaking from their clenched foreheads. Those with hard,
synthetic breasts and nipples that point ahead like ray guns: strange,
white, manmade protrusions on bodies otherwise middle-aged, sun-worn
and tan.
“Never let me do that,” I’ll hiss at my daughter as we leave. “If I ever buy a thong, you have to shoot me. Promise.”
She rolls her eyes: an entire revolution, the way only teenagers can. “Don’t worry,” she’ll say. “I will.”
I understand the temptation, or at least, I’m beginning to. At
41, my gray hairs now number at least a dozen and despite the fact that
my weight is steady, my body somehow is becoming simultaneously bony
and too soft. Running hurts my knees. Caffeine keeps me up at night.
When I tell people I have a son who is going away to college next fall,
they rarely shout, “You? Impossible. You’re far too young!”
I’m hardly the first to be struck by this sudden sense of age.
Yet, I have to admit, cliché though it may be, all these changes come
as a rather jolting surprise. And I don’t want to turn out like those
sad thong-wearing women with the synthetic boobs and sagging butt
cheeks.
So I went in search of wisdom and grace.
rounded, like a sparrow in winter. Her hair is pewter and pure white,
cut in an old-fashioned bob. She wears bright clothes and oversize
glasses, like Angela Lansbury in Murder, She Wrote
(which remains, in syndication, Sullivan’s favorite TV show), and she
calls everyone either “Darlin’” or “Dear Heart,” depending on the level
of intimacy.
Among the people I know, she is universally loved.
“Faith has shown me how to be more than just a writer,” Kate
DiCamillo, the Newbury award-winning author, told me. “I remember being
in a bookstore in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Faith had been there
before me. They had a letter from her on the bulletin board thanking
them for the lovely time that she’d had reading. And I remember saying
to myself, all the bookstores I visit, they deserve thank you notes,
too.”
I’ve seen it myself. Sullivan’s last published work, Gardenias,
came out at exactly the same time as my first novel. I spent weeks
compulsively checking my book’s Amazon ranking, driving myself and
everyone who knew me crazy with tedious fretting about low sales, until
a luncheon at which Sullivan told me she didn’t even have an Internet
connection and wasn’t at all interested in anonymous reviews.
“I gave a copy to the lady who does my dry cleaning,” Sullivan
told me. “And she was just delighted. That’s what you have to do,
darlin’. You wrote a wonderful story; now share it with people who will
appreciate it.”
This is how she became popular: through word of mouth,
bookstore clerks who hand sold her first several novels, local reading
groups that bought her book en masse and told all their friends in
other states about Sullivan’s work.
“I’ve known Faith for ten years,” says the writer Kit Naylor.
“And she goes whenever a book club or a library asks her to speak. It
doesn’t matter where they are or how many people attend. And she’s
genuinely happy to do it.”
That’s how Sullivan behaved when her first three books were
published — a comedy, a mystery, and an experimental novel she
describes as “like magical realism” — in the early 1980s. All three are
out of print now, but her 1988 semi-autobiographical novel The Cape Ann continues selling today. And she’s written three more books, The Empress of One, What A Woman Must Do, and Gardenias picking up on storylines from Cape Ann.
She’s been married to former Los Angeles Times theater
critic Dan Sullivan for 43 years — since shortly after they met during
a rehearsal at what was then the brand-new Dudley Riggs Theater — and
has three children, ages 42, 40, and 37. They lived on the West Coast
for 20 years before returning to Minnesota (“home,” she says) in 1990.
Today, at work on a fifth about Hilly Stillman, a minor character from Cape Ann,
Sullivan is writing more slowly than before. Since July, she’s had
chronic headaches due to inflammation of the nerves at the base of her
neck and has been on a regimen of steroids and heavy-duty painkillers.
But when I call her to ask if she’ll have dinner with me, she accepts
on the spot and tells me cheerfully she’ll simply “take an extra pill”
before our meal.
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