I got better and Daisy didn’t and I can’t explain why. Maybe I was just flirting with madness the way I flirted with my teachers and my classmates. I wasn’t convinced I was crazy, though I feared I was. Some people say that having any conscious opinion on the matter is a mark of sanity, but I’m not sure that’s true. I still think about it. I’ll always have to think about it.
I often ask myself if I’m crazy. I ask other people too.
“Is this a crazy thing to say?” I’ll ask before saying something that probably isn’t crazy.
I start a lot of sentences with “Maybe I’m totally nuts,” or “Maybe I’ve gone ’round the bend.”
If I do something out of the ordinary—take two baths in one day, for example—I say to myself: Are you crazy?
It’s a common phrase, I know. But it means something particular to me: the tunnels, the security screens, the plastic forks, the shimmering, ever-shifting borderline that like all boundaries beckons and asks to be crossed. I do not want to cross it again.
Farther on, Down the Road, You Will Accompany Me
Most of us got out eventually. Georgina and I kept in touch.
For a while she lived in a women’s commune in north Cambridge. She came over to my apartment one day and terrorized my upstairs neighbor, who was making bread.
“You’re doing that wrong!” Georgina said. She and I were having a cup of tea upstairs while my neighbor kneaded the dough.
“Let me show you,” said Georgina. She pushed my neighbor out of the way and started flinging the dough around on the counter.
My neighbor was a mild-mannered woman who never did anything graceless or rude. Consequently, most people were polite to her.
“You really have to beat it up,” said Georgina, doing so.
“Oh,” said my neighbor. She was about ten years older than Georgina and I, and she’d been making bread for all those years.
After she’d given the bread a good beating, Georgina said she had to leave.
“I have never been treated that way,” said my neighbor. She seemed more astonished than angry.
Then Georgina got involved in a consciousness-raising group. She pestered me to come. “You’ll love it,” she said.
The women made me feel inadequate. They knew how to disassemble car engines and climb mountains. I was the only married one. I could see that Georgina had a certain cachet because of her craziness; somehow, this cachet did not apply to me. But I went often enough to become suspicious of marriage, and of my husband in particular. I picked stupid fights with him. It was hard to find something to fight about. He did the cooking and the shopping, and he did a fair amount of cleaning too. I spent most of my time reading and painting watercolors.
Luckily, Georgina got herself a husband as well and dropped out of the group before I could pick a really destructive fight.
Then we had to go visit their farm in western Massachusetts.
Georgina’s husband was pale and slight and unmemorable. But she had also gotten a goat. Georgina, the husband, and the goat lived in a barn on a few acres of scrub land at the foot of a small mountain. The day we visited was cold, though it was May, and they were busy fitting glazing into their windows. They had six-over-six window frames, so this was quite a chore.
We watched while they puttied and fitted. The goat stood in her room near the door and watched as well. Finally, Georgina said it was time for lunch. She made a pressure cooker full of sweet potatoes. That was lunch. There was some maple syrup for topping. The goat had bananas.
After lunch, Georgina said, “Want to see the goat dance?”
The goat’s name was Darling. She was the color of ginger and had long hairy ears.
Georgina held a sweet potato up in the air. “Dance, Darling,” she said.
The goat stood on her hind legs and chased after the sweet potato, which Georgina kept moving away from her. Her long ears swayed as she hopped, and she pawed the air with her front legs. Her hooves were black and sharp; they looked as though they could do a lot of damage. Indeed, when she lost her footing, which she did a few times, and a hoof grazed the edge of the kitchen counter, it cut a groove in the wood.
“Give it to her,” I said. Something about the goat dancing made me want to cry.
They moved west, to Colorado, where the land was better. Georgina called once or twice from a pay phone. They had no telephone of their own. I don’t know what happened to the goat.
A few years after Georgina went west, I ran into Lisa in Harvard Square. She had a little toast-colored boy with her, about three years old.
I hugged her. “Lisa,” I said, “I’m so happy to see you.”
“This is my kid,” she said. “Isn’t it crazy that I have a kid?” She laughed. “Aaron, say hello.” He didn’t; he put his face behind her leg.
She looked exactly the same: skinny, yellow, cheerful.
“What have you been doing?” I asked.
“The kid,” she said. “That’s all you can do.”
“What about the father?”
“Later for him. I got rid of him.” She put her hand on the boy’s head. “We don’t need him, do we?”
“Where are you living?” I wanted to know everything about her.
“You won’t believe this.” Lisa pulled out a Kool and lit up. “I’m living in Brookline. I’m a suburban matron in Brookline. I’ve got the kid, I take the kid to nursery school, I’ve got an apartment, I’ve got furniture. Fridays we go to temple.”
“Temple!” This amazed me. “Why?”
“I want—” Lisa faltered. I’d never before seen her at a loss for words. “I want us to be a real family, with furniture, and all that. I want him to have a real life. And temple helps. I don’t know why, but it helps.”
I stared at Lisa, trying to imagine her in temple with her dark-skinned son. I noticed she was wearing some jewelry—a ring with two sapphires, a gold chain around her neck.
“What’s with the jewelry?” I asked.
“Presents from Grandma, right?” She addressed this to the kid. “Everything changes when you have children,” she told me.
I didn’t know what to say to that. I’d decided not to have any. And it didn’t look like my marriage was going to last, either.
We were standing in the middle of Harvard Square in front of the subway entrance. Suddenly, Lisa leaned close to me and said, “Wanna see something fantastic?” Her voice had the old quiver of mischief in it. I nodded.
She pulled up her shirt, a T-shirt advertising a bagel shop in Brookline, and grabbed hold of the flesh of her abdomen. Then she pulled. Her skin was like an accordion; it kept expanding, more and more, until she was holding the flap of skin a foot away from her body. She let go and it subsided, somewhat wrinkled at first but then settling back on her bones, looking perfectly normal.
“Wow!” I said.
“Kids,” said Lisa. “That’s what happens.” She laughed. “Say good-bye, Aaron.”
“Bye,” he said, surprising me.
They were going back to Brookline on the subway. At the top of the stairs Lisa turned around toward me again.
“You ever think of those days in there, in that place?” she asked.
“Yes,” I answered. “I do think of them.”
“Me too.” She shook her head. “Oh, well,” she said rather jauntily. Then the two of them went down the stairs, underground.
Girl, Interrupted
The Vermeer in the Frick is one of three, but I didn’t notice the other two the first time I went there. I was seventeen and in New York with my English teacher, who hadn’t yet kissed me. I was thinking of that future kiss, which I knew was coming, as I left the Fragonards behind and walked into the hall leading to the courtyard—that dim corridor where the Vermeers gleam against the wall.
Besides the kiss, I was thinking of whether I could graduate from high school if for the second year in a row I failed biology. I was surprised to be failing it, because I loved it, I’d loved it the
first time I failed it too. My favorite part was gene-recession charts. I liked working out the sequence of blue eyes in families that had no characteristics except blue eyes and brown eyes. My family had a lot of characteristics—achievements, ambitions, talents, expectations—that all seemed to be recessive in me.
I walked past the lady in yellow robes and the maid bringing her a letter, past the soldier with a magnificent hat and the girl smiling at him, thinking of warm lips, brown eyes, blue eyes. Her brown eyes stopped me.
It’s the painting from whose frame a girl looks out, ignoring her beefy music teacher, whose proprietary hand rests on her chair. The light is muted, winter light, but her face is bright.
I looked into her brown eyes and I recoiled. She was warning me of something—she had looked up from her work to warn me. Her mouth was slightly open, as if she had just drawn a breath in order to say to me, “Don’t!”
I moved backward, trying to get beyond the range of her urgency. But her urgency filled the corridor. “Wait,” she was saying, “wait! Don’t go!”
I didn’t listen to her. I went out to dinner with my English teacher, and he kissed me, and I went back to Cambridge and failed biology, though I did graduate, and, eventually, I went crazy.
Sixteen years later I was in New York with my new, rich boyfriend. We took many trips, which he paid for, although spending money made him queasy. On our trips, he often attacked my character—that character once diagnosed as disordered. Sometimes I was too emotional, other times too cold and judgmental. Whichever he said, I’d comfort him by telling him it was okay to spend money. Then he would stop attacking me, which meant we could stay together and begin the spending-and-attack cycle on some future trip.
It was a beautiful October day in New York. He had attacked and I had comforted and now we were ready to go out.
“Let’s go to the Frick,” he said.
“I’ve never been there,” I said. Then I thought maybe I had been. I didn’t say anything; I’d learned not to discuss my doubts.
When we got there I recognized it. “Oh,” I said. “There’s a painting I love here.”
“Only one?” he said. “Look at these Fragonards.”
I didn’t like them. I left the Fragonards behind and walked into the hall leading to the courtyard.
She had changed a lot in sixteen years. She was no longer urgent. In fact, she was sad. She was young and distracted, and her teacher was bearing down on her, trying to get her to pay attention. But she was looking out, looking for someone who would see her.
This time I read the title of the painting: Girl Interrupted at Her Music.
Interrupted at her music: as my life had been, interrupted in the music of being seventeen, as her life had been, snatched and fixed on canvas: one moment made to stand still and to stand for all the other moments, whatever they would be or might have been. What life can recover from that?
I had something to tell her now. “I see you,” I said.
My boyfriend found me crying in the hallway.
“What’s the matter with you?” he asked.
“Don’t you see, she’s trying to get out,” I said, pointing at her.
He looked at the painting, he looked at me, and he said, “All you ever think about is yourself. You don’t understand anything about art.” He went off to look at a Rembrandt.
I’ve gone back to the Frick since then to look at her and at the two other Vermeers. Vermeers, after all, are hard to come by, and the one in Boston has been stolen.
The other two are self-contained paintings. The people in them are looking at each other—the lady and her maid, the soldier and his sweetheart. Seeing them is peeking at them through a hole in a wall. And the wall is made of light—that entirely credible yet unreal Vermeer light.
Light like this does not exist, but we wish it did. We wish the sun could make us young and beautiful, we wish our clothes could glisten and ripple against our skins, most of all, we wish that everyone we knew could be brightened simply by our looking at them, as are the maid with the letter and the soldier with the hat.
The girl at her music sits in another sort of light, the fitful, overcast light of life, by which we see ourselves and others only imperfectly, and seldom.
Acknowledgments
My thanks to Jill Ker Conway, Maxine Kumin, and Susan Ware for their early encouragement; to Gerald Berlin for his legal help; and to Julie Grau for her enthusiasm and her good care of both book and author.
I am most grateful to Robin Becker, Robin Desser, Michael Downing, Lyda Kuth, and Jonathan Matson for their insights, humor, and true-blue friendship.
A new novel from
Susanna Kaysen
CAMBRIDGE
From the bestselling author of Girl, Interrupted: a funny, deeply moving story of a young girl’s growing up amidst the academic and artistic elite of Cambridge, Massachusetts in the 1950s and ‘60s.
Coming Spring, 2014 in hardcover and eBook from Knopf
Please visit aaknopf.com
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