RELATIONSHIPS Off With the Girls… Uh, Women

“YOU’RE ACTING LIKE A GOLDEN girl,” one of my sons said when we I returned to our family room in the lodge. We were vacationing with another family in New Mexico. The mother of the other family, whom I see only twice a year, is one of my dearest friends. What my son dubbed a grade-B sitcom was in truth his mother having a great time with an old friend. “Too much talk,” he said, “too much laughing.”

My sons don’t really know the girly me. When it became clear that I was destined to live in a household of males, a male friend observed that women with sons seemed either to retreat to utter manicured, ruffled femininity or to throw in with the guys and become what he called an “astronaut’s wife,” with a sensible short haircut and running shoes. I didn’t want to be the astronaut’s wife, but for maximum rapport in a locker room, one does trim and edit a certain amount of female behavior. (“Cutting the crapola,” I believe, is the phrase of choice around here.) I am accustomed to after-school conversations that consist of nothing more than grunted monosyllables: “Bull.” “Kicked butt.” “Swear?” The vicarious experience of growing up male has been enlightening, but rarely uplifting and strangely isolating. “Now, tell it like a girl,” I sometimes beg when a report on a school outing has been reduced to the monosyllable “Sucked.”

Something catches in my throat when over the fence I hear the little girls next door singing the sweetest made-up songs to their Pretty Ponies. In April I watched them twirl and flit like butterflies in their pastel cotton-voile Easter dresses, Some brief wave of nostalgia and self-pity washes over me when I see a mother and daughter beside the soccer field playing some sort of hand jive rhyming game that I think I used to know. “Down by the river where the green grass grows…” I probably couldn’t even select a decent hopscotch rock, I miss the company of females.

Women getting away together is a relatively new phenomenon for my generation. Less than a decade ago, an all-female dinner party was downright exotic. Our mothers had to wait until they were widowed. Men have had their poker nights and fishing trips, but women traditionally have headed to the beach or the mountains with the whole family in tow. The change of scenery is nice, but routine housekeeping chores are unavoidable and often must be performed with primitive appliances.

An occasional getaway with women friends is a marvelous respite from the constant surveillance of other people’s physical and emotional needs. Women my age with an overdeveloped sense of responsibility rarely take the time to do as they please, but mid-life seems to be an important time to indulge ourselves in whatever experiences strengthen female friendships.

Most of my friends figured this out years ago. I revel in their tales of raucous pre-Christmas road trips to Laredo. I have a couple of friends who admit to having graduate degrees in border shopping. As one who invariably emerges from the mercado with two bullwhips. a switchblade and four masked rubber wrestlers, I marvel at the exquisite bracelets, folk art, linens and pottery that their well-trained eyes instinctively select. “Too much laughing,” my sons would say of the female camaraderie fueled by too many margaritas in the Cadillac Bar after a shop-till-you-drop marathon. They do not want to hear that proper ladies who went without lunch have been known to slide right under the table clutching painted boxes and murmuring, “I’m just sick about the way we’re acting.”

Some of my best memories are female getaways to foreign climes. Once I joined II women on the all-night train from Laredo to San Miguel de Allende. The train was dirty and the toilet facilities didn’t work, but with ample food and limited drink, we rumbled comfortably enough through the moonlit desert and mountains. We still giggle to remember the porter, David (Da-veed), in starched white coat, who with some flourish folded down my bed as if we were on the Orient Express. He gestured grandly toward the small lavatory, demonstrated the tap, which did not respond, shrugged, bowed, and said with great dignity, “Buenos noches, Senora.” One bed fell off the wall during the night, but no one was crushed. On the third day, we wore rubber animal noses to dinner, and on the final night, all of us performed a spontaneous talent show, to die delight, F m sure, of the other hotel guests. One of them, a Canadian fellow, said to me at breakfast, “I have never seen women have so much fun. Is it only Texas women who can do this?” Maybe.

Foreign travel with male companions is invariably fraught with a layer of tension that makes real vacation difficult. He worries about getting taken in the money exchange. “I thought your French was better than this,” he says, “Actually, I seem to remember your fluent Spanish couldn’t even prevent the jefe in the parking lot in Matamoros from washing our car a second time,” she counters. “We’ve been through this roundabout three times. Shall I drive?” he asks. “Please don’t ask the guard if the fishing is good at Giverny. We’re here to see the Monets.”

None of this petty stuff with women. The week I spent in Paris with my college roommate in August 1985 deserves stars in the Michelin Guide. After accompanying our husbands to the American Bar Convention and traveling the English countryside with five reluctant, ungrateful sons, we felt unleashed sans famille in France. She had a good sense of direction, and I spoke enough French to get us in trouble.

We paid homage to the shimmering Impressionist painters, heard Bach, Telemann and Vivaldi in the perfect acoustics of St. Etienne du Mont, and pillaged the lingerie department at Au Printemps. In the Jardin de Luxembourg, a young Sartre in a black coat too heavy for August tried to sell us his French edition of Ulysses.

We sat in the Tuilleries with cappuccino and tarte Tatin as often as we pleased. We made up stories about the people passing by and wondered if we had ever been young enough, tall enough or thin enough to wear a black leotard minidress topped by a wrinkled linen blazer and a hank of wildly tangled long hair like the pouty French ingenue we observed in the mirror of our favorite bistro. Could we yet become me world-weary but still sexy femme à ’un age certain who dined alone at a table near us under the solicitous and affectionate eye of the handsome maitre d’?

Back on the streets of the Left Bank, we squinted to read the tile street signs on the buildings and worried that the next time we saw Paris, it would be through bifocals. Rebelling against that day, we smiled and flirted shamelessly with a table of young Frenchmen at the tiny restaurant Pantagruel in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. The only sustained attention we attracted was that of a 10-year-old boy, who acknowledged our broad smiles by making monster faces-an appropriate response, as we later discovered in our hotel mirror that the blueberry coup de glace Vosgienne dessert had turned our teeth a ghastly shade of blue.

My good friend did not kick my ankle, as my husband surely would have, the night we dined with French friends. With one preprandial champagne, my French was so improved that I attempted to tell en francais a joke with a punch line that relies totally on an English pun for its humor. By the end of the evening, after a Cognac, she says, I resorted to speaking in English with a French accent. I am certain that she is wrong about my singing “The Seine” in the Metro at 2 a.m.

Even physical hardship apparently cannot detract from the pleasures of an all-female romp. I know of eight women, a.k.a. the Wilderness Warriors, who have taken these getaways to new heights. They have hiked and camped in Colorado, New Mexico, the High Sierras, Montana and Wyoming. Their mountaineering and white-water rafting are all the more remarkable because most of them grew up, as I did, when only boys merited the real school gym and one could earn pocket money by forging gym class excuses for your girlfriends. For our generation, cheerleading was the only respectable physical workout; basketball, even half-court, could mess up your hair. Approaching 50, these Warriors now consider a bicycle trip through New England a little too soft. The year their husbands lovingly insisted that they hire a guide for their yearly trek (they had been lost in the Rockies for 24 hours the year before), one indignant member of the group distributed strings of faux pearls at the first campfire, to be worn with their khakis. “If we’re going to be treated like debutantes,1” she explained, “we might as well look like them.”

As rough as these trips have been, they are nevertheless distinctly female in their high silliness, intimacy and sense of purpose. Martha, June and Susan become ’Queenie,” “Moon Rocket” and “Snakes” when they’ve trenched their tents.

If there is girly giddiness in such outings, there is also a peculiarly female sense of purpose, an aura of self-improvement. These women are not flaunting their physical prowess, although it is a point of pride; nor are they interested in one-upmanship, They are determined to increase their physical and mental endurance, to improve their tolerance, to strengthen their bond of friendship, and to keep a sense of anticipation about life by learning something new. Together once a year, they shed all of their urban sophistication to recapture the goose-bumpy sense of wonder that they knew as little girls.

When some women head for the hills, they also journey back in time. Harvard psychology professor Carol Gilligan has pinpointed age II as a time when many women experience what she calls “a moment of resistance, a sharp and particular clarity of vision, and almost perfect confidence in what they know and see.” In mid-life, it is sometimes restorative to go back to the places where we first experienced that vision and confidence.

For a number of Texas women, the place is summer camp. Each fall. Camp Walde-mar in Hunt, Texas, offers a week of retreat and recreation for former campers and their friends. For most of the women who attend, it is a week-long slumber party full of practical jokes, costumes and surprisingly serious athletic competition. For others it is a nostalgic re-examining of a place where time once seemed measureless, friendships were instantaneous, and promises were forever and ever. Inspiration untainted by cynicism left us breathless, and life was so full of discovery and abandon that we wrote letters home like this one:



Camp Waldemar Alameda 4, Summer 1995



Dear Mommy.

We elected leaders last nite. Mimi got senior Aztec leader! I love our counselor Barbara. Our whole kampong is members of the Inca, a tribe we made up. We are crazy.

We were going to play some tricks on G., like sewing up her p.j. ’s. We exchanged her drawers with F.C I’s. When she saw Clare’s drawers where hers was supposed to be she said, “I don’t give a dam whose clothes these are! ” and threw the whole drawer down. She cusses. We all don’t like her.

Saw a baby snake, found a skull and some bones. Betty got a leech on her toe. It’s pretty boring so to liven things up I’ve been riding “Delilah. ” our dustmop, around.

Did you know that somebody and her boyfriend eloped the other day and got as far as Lancaster and decided to turn back. Isn’t that stupid? Some girl here’s sister-in-law is expecting in five no four days. She and her husband are 17. That ’s also stupid.

Yesterday we had more fun in riding. We went on top of Tejas riding hill, It’s beautiful there. It was raining all around us. We were laughing and talking and suddenly drip, drip, splash. Boy! We got down (hat hill fast. When we got on level ground we went faster than I’ve ever gone at camp. I was riding “Tony” who’s real smooth. We ran, actually ran! It was thundering and Barbara was afraid the horses would shy. They didn’t but they were very spirited and we could hardly hold them. It rained harder and harder and we went faster and faster. We were laughing and screaming and singing. Mud clods from the horses hoofs hit us hut the rain washed it off. We looked like drawned rats. Our hair was plastered down and our shirts were sticking to us. We rode in singing “Why don’t it rain on me Mother? ” At the kampong we were wild. We had water fights and washed our hair in the rain.

Send me some cream stuff called “Nair” (No hair.)

Love, Ellen



Being off with the girls can never be quite like that again. My own Mexico traveling companions were reunited at a South Texas ranch. It was no one’s birthday, but a pina-ta swung from the tree. Our good friend who sees to it that we never take ourselves too seriously must have surveyed the gathering of 11 women and surmised that we needed to whack something hard. “Okay,” she barked, “line up according to your handicaps. Let’s have the most recent divorce up front. Next, anybody with less than two breasts. Somebody with a kid in rehab? Great! How about most recent hysterectomies, then grown kids living at home, followed by parents with pacemakers? Bad real estate investments? Prudence, to the end of the line. You’re just worried about your son’s SAT scores.”

I’m still wondering how much laughter is too much.