Carly Simon

The former Marion Bouzek and I drove to Maryland this past weekend to visit three of our grandchildren and their parents.  I was driving, Marion was reading the paper and we were listening to a Carly Simon tape.  At one point Marion said, “That is just the saddest song.”

I must have heard the song a hundred times and even knew some of the words, but somehow I never really listened to it.  The song that had caught Marion’s attention was, “That’s The Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be.”  I started the song over so I could listen to it from the beginning.  

The singer is a woman who has come home and walked past her father sitting in a dark living room, smoking a cigarette.  He doesn’t acknowledge her.   When she goes upstairs, her mother is alone in her bedroom, reading a magazine and calls “sweet dreams” to her. 

In the next verse we learn the singer is considering a proposal of marriage.  A man has said ‘It’s time we
moved in together and raised a family of our own, you and me” and our singer responds, “That’s the way I’ve always heard it should be.” 

Next our singer tells us that all of her friends from college are married and have their homes.  But their children hate them for the things they’re not and they hate themselves for the things they are.  Even so, her friends
seem to find a way to live their lives.

As she weighs the proposal she says, “All I know is what I see – the couples cling and claw and drown in love’s debris.”  Next she says that “soon you’ll cage me on your shelf – I’ll never learn to be just me first, by myself.”  The final lines of the song are, “You want to marry me, we’ll marry.  We’ll marry.”  Carly Simon co-wrote this song with Jacob Brackman in 1970. 

The song paints a pretty bleak picture of married life and I appreciate why Marion thinks it’s a sad song.   Our singer has looked at her parent’s marriage and sees distance and loneliness.  Her college friends, probably her closest friends, are struggling in their marriages.  She understands that courtship is different from marriage and
marriage means less personal freedom.  Still, in spite of everything, she accepts the proposal.  There’s something hopeful about this. 

Our singer is not some dewy-eyed young thing in love with the idea of being in love and thinking that the way she feels this moment is going to last forever.  Her marriage may flounder or fail, far too many do.  But it’s not likely to fail because she was disillusioned.  I like her chances for a lasting marriage.

It’s a three and a half to four hour drive to Bethesda and the next singer we listened to was Jackson Browne.  When Fountain of Sorrow played, the line, “You’ve known that hollow sound of your own steps in flight” seemed especially poignant.  Naturally, I thought about Jennifer Wilbanks, the young woman from Georgia who had agreed to marry and later thought better of it.  She is in her early thirties and would seem to have much in common with Carly Simon’s singer.

I wonder how her story will play out.  Engagements get broken and people, in time, recover.  The end of Fountain of Sorrow leaves the listener with the feeling that the woman who heard those hollow steps is recovering and is going to be all right.  Ms. Wilbank’s flight became much too public and the media portrayal of her was devastating.  She may not recover.
 
Carly Simon’s singer and Ms. Wilbanks would probably agree with Helen Rowland, a feminist from long ago.  She wrote, “Marriage is a bargain, and somebody has to get the worst of the bargain.”  Simon’s singer knows full well that marriage is a bargain and Ms. Wilbanks was clearly uncomfortable with the bargain she was about to strike. 

Marriages last when both parties to it are comfortable with their bargain.  Is it possible that in the best and happiest of marriages each party continues to believe they got the better of the bargain?  I’m not sure, but I like the thought.