SANDY
How much longer are you going to be tempted by this firm young flesh?
TEDDY
Until you’re eighteen and over the hill.
I remember, and the calendar pages of my young life are fluttering by: I menstruate, I am planning for college, I am almost of legal age, for heaven’s sake. How much longer do I have, to offer my firm young flesh, to tempt in this so specific way?
And I think back to the film Manhattan, which I saw a few years earlier.17 When the film starts, forty-two-year-old Isaac (Woody Allen) is dating seventeen-year-old Tracy (Mariel Hemingway, mouse-voiced and luminous), and he feels both pride and some awkward shame at this relationship: “I’m older than her father,” he sputters to his friends. “I’m dating a girl wherein I can beat up her father.” Isaac eventually dumps Tracy for the urbane, neurotic, challenging Mary (Diane Keaton), but when Mary dumps him to return to her married lover, his nostalgic longing for the simple pleasures of a romantic and sexual relationship with a teenage girl consume him; he finds Tracy, just as she is about to leave for school in London for six months, and begs her not to go:
ISAAC
Do you still love me, or what?
TRACY
Do you love me?
ISAAC
Yeah, of course, that’s what this is all about. .
TRACY
Guess what, I turned eighteen the other day. I’m legal, but I’m still a kid.
ISAAC
You’re not such a kid. Eighteen years old, you know. . they could draft you, in some countries. .
She’s correct that she’s still a kid, but she’s also, paradoxically, the adult now; the more Isaac tries to convince her to stay — while we all know what’s best for her is to leave — the more he sounds like a manipulative child, wheedling to get back a once-promised treat now denied.
TRACY
We’ve gone this long. What’s six months if we still love each other?
ISAAC
Hey, don’t be so mature, okay? Six months is a long time. . You’ll change. In six months you’ll be a completely different person. . I just don’t want that thing about you that I like to change.
Of course he doesn’t. When I first saw Manhattan, at fifteen, I found this scene so romantic; see how much he cherishes her, he cannot bear to lose her again—“A mature man can find love in the arms of a young girl, a very young girl. .!” as Miss Brodie rejoiced about Dante and Beatrice. But now that I am seventeen — Sandy’s age, Tracy’s age, tick tick tick—I see it quite differently. The fire in Isaac’s loins is not due to love, or even to lust; it’s about that ticking clock. That thing he loves about her is elusive, fleeting, is slipping away each day: Her luminous youth. It is his own fragile tether to a life still on the upswing, full of vibrant promise and fresh discovery, and without that, or when that tether snaps, when Tracy is more than a technically legal adult, when she has, with even just six months’ more experience, fully transitioned from girl to woman, he will officially begin coasting downward into the denouement of his own existence. Maurice Chevalier sings “Thank heaven, for little girls! For little girls get bigger everyday. .” but the implied cautionary lesson is to thank heaven for them now, appreciate them now, get them while you can. . because they do get bigger every day, and then the thing about them that allures, charms, revitalizes, is gone forever. When Tracy is older, Isaac will officially become old; her value will plummet, and he knows he better soak up that rejuvenating life energy while it lasts.
Tracy doesn’t understand this yet — but at seventeen, I believe I do. The enchanting illusions of Sandy and Iris and Violet and Tracy and Dolores Haze will remain preserved, resin’d forever on-screen, but these films have made clear there is a shelf life to my own Loliltahood; that fragile construct is perishable, has a “sell by” date. As Teddy says, I will be over the hill any second now, my alluring little-girlness expired, and my crème, no matter if it’s been the freshest best, will soon curdle and go sour. What will I have to offer, then, what new role will I play? How will I ever be famous for sex?
I will have to find a new source of desirability, I tell myself. A new way to beguile, to be magnificently, unordinarily elevated. But I have no idea how, or what that might be. I’m still only seventeen.
10The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (20th Century Fox, 1969): screenplay by Jay Presson Allen, adapted from her play, based on the novel by Muriel Spark; directed by Ronald Neame; with Maggie Smith, Robert Stephens, and Pamela Franklin
11Taxi Driver (Columbia Pictures, 1976): written by Paul Schrader; directed by Martin Scorsese; with Jodie Foster, Robert De Niro, and Harvey Keitel
12Bugsy Malone (Paramount Pictures, 1976): written and directed by Alan Parker; with Jodie Foster
13“My Name Is Tallulah,” music and lyrics by Paul Williams
14“Thank Heaven for Little Girls,” written by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe
15 Pretty Baby (Paramount Pictures, 1978): written by Polly Platt; directed by Louis Malle; with Brooke Shields, Susan Sarandon, and Keith Carradine
16Lolita (MGM, 1962): screenplay by Vladimir Nabokov, based on his novel; directed by Stanley Kubrick; with Sue Lyon, James Mason, Peter Sellers, and Shelley Winters
17Manhattan (United Artists, 1979): written by Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman; directed by Woody Allen; with Woody Allen, Mariel Hemingway, and Diane Keaton
HOW TO BE A JEW
QUESTIONS AND COMMANDMENTS, MATZOH, MEZUZAHS, MENORAHS, AND A CRASH COURSE IN CHRIST
Fiddler on the Roof
The Ten Commandments
Jesus Christ Superstar
The Odessa File
The Chosen
It is 1971, and I am a seven-year-old girl living with my parents and four older sisters in our small sepia-toned village of Anatevka, somewhere in Russia, sometime in the very early twentieth century. Our life here is hard but merry; we are always singing. Papa is the head of the household, of course, the Papa, the Papa! we sing, who day and night must scramble for a living, feed a wife and children, say his daily prayers! But Mama, aproned and head-scarfed, always pounding bread dough or stirring pots of soup, is the one who is really in charge, we all know, the one who must raise the family and run the home, so Papa’s free to read the holy book, and our home is redolently female: even from here, munching popcorn and watching us rapturously from my scratchy red velvet seat in the dark, I can smell the warm milk from our cows in the barn, the potato-starched laundry flapping sun-hot dry on lines in our chicken-scratch’d yard, the linen pillows oiled with our long brown hair. Our hovel of a house is flurried and flounced with petticoats, it glistens with brass lamps and bubbles of chicken fat goldening those pots on the stove, and the two precious silver candlesticks Mama brings out for our Sabbath prayer, and which she will give to my oldest sister Tzeitel on her wedding day. (Only my three older sisters Tzeitel, Hodel, and Chava appear to have names; we younger two, it seems, are interchangeable.) Our rickety wooden synagogue gleams with the gold Star of David and the shining Torah, is made warm by our heated devotion and our beloved Rabbi, who is all bicker and josh. Somewhere else in our village are glimpses of an expansive cold gray church where cold gray people worship a dead man hanging on a cross, somewhere there are Russians, all of them are the “Others,” but as Papa says, We do not bother them, and so far, they do not bother us. We keep to ourselves and our traditions, our Tradition! Somewhere out there in the world there is, or there will be, revolution, men and women dancing together and peasants rising up against a tsar and the sound of metal swords and screaming horses and people trying to change the workings of the world. .