Stuck in the Muck
A few years before I was born, sculptures by artist Howard Ball were installed at the La Brea Tar Pits depicting a "family" of Columbian mammoths. The adult male and child stand watching from dry ground as the adult female struggles helplessly, half-submerged in the asphalt sludge. Women. Can't take them anywhere. The display is eye-catching and iconic. It also is wildly inaccurate. The Tar Pits organization says as much on the accompanying signage. This tells us that science conducted since Ball created his work reveals that mammoths lived in female-led herds which remained separate from males except for mating season. It also presents the inconvenient detail that most of the mammoths found trapped in the tar thousands of years later actually were male. There is an attempt to suggest this could be because male mammoths were loners with no one to save them, but I think we all know the females were smart enough to steer clear of the tar in the first place.
The women I grew up seeing, in life and in art, often were similarly stuck in the muck, not that I viewed it this way at the time. Marriage was the center of female life. If women weren't married, they were in various stages of being pre- or post-wedlock. One of my grandmothers covered all the bases. By the time I was in high school, I had seen her married, then widowed, then married again (I was a flower girl), then divorced. We pretended divorce was rare (it wasn't) and spoke about it in hushed tones, like cancer.
In school, I read books like Anna Karenina, in which the character Kitty expresses "terror and humiliation" at the prospect of being an old maid; and, when I started college, people still talked about women pursuing higher education to earn an "M.R.S." degree. I never really bought into all of this, but I didn't not buy into it either.
It wasn't until I was twenty and happened to join my roommate, Claire, for a free meal in New York City that I became aware of an enticing alternative. In a lot of ways, it was an uneventful evening. Claire and I walked from our NYU student apartment to a beautiful restored brownstone in Chelsea. Claire's aunt, whose name I can't remember, greeted us at the door and ushered us up to a rooftop deck where she grilled tuna steaks wrapped in tin foil. The three of us ate and chatted in the light of the surrounding buildings; and my main takeaway was that grilling truly is the best way to cook fresh tuna.
Over the next few days, months, years, my mind kept going back to that meal. Were the tuna steaks really that good? Yes! But, no. It was something else. That brownstone, with the rooftop deck, it belonged to Claire's aunt. Not as in "it's where she lives with her husband/boyfriend/significant other," or "it's what she got in the ugly divorce." It simply was hers, where she resided, unattached and all alone, in the middle of New York City.
How had I not encountered this before? It was crazy to think I ever would be in a position to afford a brownstone anywhere, let along in New York, but what it represented? The independence, the control, the calm; the ability to close the door at the end of the day and have your life be your own. THIS was possible. It became the baseline against which I assessed all forks in the path and, so far—for me—the brownstone remains the uncontested winner.
The La Brea Tar Pits property soon will undergo a major overhaul. Design firms are competing for the job and eventually the public conversation will turn to the mammoths. Should they stay or should they go? After 50 years of photo ops and appearances in film and television, the mammoths are celebrities in their own right. We are accustomed to seeing the female stuck in the muck and parting with her represents a jarring change. I, for one, am open to compromise, perhaps a reconfiguration? Whatever happens, I hope we can agree on one thing: it's time to get the woman out of the tar.
