by Meg Wolitzer
“She’s an important writer,” one of the other men insisted. “I teach her every year in my course on the grotesque. She’s the only woman on the list; there’s really no one like her.”
“But Miss Flannery O’Connor has something going for her that I don’t,” Elaine continued. “Her Southernness gives her this ready-made, colorful region to write about, and for some reason it always seems so incredibly exotic to people.” She paused and let one of the men fill her glass again. “The public likes to hear about the crazy old South, and they certainly may admire Southern women writers,” she continued, “but they don’t want to know them, you know? Because they’re strange creatures, O’Connor and that squirrelly little androgyne Carson McCullers. I don’t want to be a strange creature. I guess I just want to be loved.” She took a deep drink and then added, “You know, I wish I was a lesbian, I really do.”
There were murmurs of protest again. “You don’t mean that,” I heard a timid female dean say, but Elaine Mozell overrode her.
“Oh, in a way I do,” she said. “The problem is that I love men passionately, even though they don’t deserve it. But if I happened to be one of those literary lesbians, I wouldn’t give a goddamn about what the rest of the world thought of me, or whether it even thought of me at all.”
There was more response, more talk, and eventually the others turned away; the night was growing late and I could see the janitors waiting outside the room with their mops, and I stood crumpling a Smith-crested paper cocktail napkin in my hand, also waiting, though what I was waiting for was obscure to me. Elaine Mozell saw me waiting, and suddenly she took me by my arm, pulling me aside into a small alcove so quickly I couldn’t even express surprise.
“You’re talented, I hear,” she said.
“Well, maybe,” I began.
“Don’t do it,” she said. No one else heard this; we were surrounded only by marble busts of commendable, long-dead women.
“Don’t do what?”
“Don’t think you can get their attention,” she said.
“Whose?”
She looked at me sadly, impatiently, as if I were an idiot. An idiot with a safety pin plunged into her skirt. “The men,” she said. “The men who write the reviews, who run the publishing houses, who edit the papers, the magazines, who decide who gets to be taken seriously, who gets put up on a pedestal for the rest of their lives. Who gets to be King Shit.”
“So you’re saying it’s a conspiracy?” I asked gently.
“If you use that word it makes me appear envious and insane,” Elaine Mozell went on. “Which I’m not. Yet. But yes, I guess you could call it a conspiracy to keep the women’s voices hushed and tiny and the men’s voices loud.” She raised up her own voice on this last word.
“Oh, I see” was all I could say, vaguely.
“Don’t do it,” she said again. “Find some other way. There’s only a handful of women who get anywhere. Short story writers, mostly, as if maybe women are somehow more acceptable in miniature.”
“Maybe,” I tried, “women are different from men. Maybe they try to do different things when they write.”
“Yes,” said Elaine, “that could be true. But the men with their big canvases, their big books that try to include everything in them, their big suits, their big voices, are always rewarded more. They’re the important ones. And you want to know why?” She leaned closer and said, “Because they say so.”
Then she abruptly left me, and I walked back to my dormitory, but all night I felt sickish, restless. As it would turn out, Elaine Mozell’s writing wouldn’t last. Her novel would go out of print and would never be reprinted; it would disappear, becoming a curiosity, the sort of moldy, obscure title that people buy for twenty-five cents at a tag sale on the side of a road in Vermont, and then put on the shelf of their guest room, but no guest ever actually takes it down to read.
I’ve occasionally wondered what became of Elaine Mozell, because after Sleeping Dogs, I don’t believe she ever published another novel. Maybe it was too hard for her; maybe she got married and had children and life intruded and there was simply no time for her work; maybe she became an alcoholic; maybe every publisher turned down her manuscripts; maybe she had “no more books left inside her,” as people often sorrowfully say about writers, envisioning the imagination as a big pantry, either well stocked with goods or else wartime-empty.
Maybe she died. I never found out, for her novel joined the vast, rolling graveyard of unloved books, and perhaps she threw herself on top of the grave, inconsolable.
One day, a month into the semester, having had three conferences with Professor Castleman during office hours, each one held aloft by his elaborate praise, he called my name at the end of class and I walked up to him, brimming, steadying myself.
“Miss Ames, I wanted to ask you something,” he said. “Would you walk out with me and we can talk?”
I nodded, seeing the way the others took note of this moment. One of them, Rochelle Darnton, whose short stories featured inevitable surprise endings—“Just like O. Henry!” Rochelle had explained in her own defense—sighed as she shrugged into her coat, watching student and teacher lingering together, as though she knew that she would never be asked to walk out with Professor Castleman, that she would never be asked to linger, to loiter, to give more of herself than she already did.
I thought Castleman might be about to tell me that he was nominating me for a $100 college literary prize. Or maybe, I thought, he wanted to ask me to have dinner with him, to go out on a clandestine date, the way a girl who lived on my hall had done with her chemistry professor. I wasn’t sure which it would be: art or love. But with someone like J. Castleman, love of art could transform quickly into human love, couldn’t it? I hoped this was true, but was immediately mortified by my own thoughts, which seemed both delusional and deeply corrupt.
We’d arrived at the middle of the campus when he said to me, “I was wondering, Miss Ames, whether by any chance you’re free Saturday night.”
I told him I was. All around us, girls trudged past.
“Good,” he said. “Would you be interested in baby-sitting? My wife and I haven’t gotten out since Fanny was born.”
“Sure,” I said flatly. “I love children.”
Which wasn’t even true. I felt a flush of humiliation about what I’d imagined, and how different the truth was, but still this was better than nothing, better than being ignored by him. So on Saturday night I declined to attend Northrop House’s big band party, walking away from the sounds of “String of Pearls” cranked loud on a phonograph, and the parry of male voices in the snapping air, and instead headed along Elm Street until it shook off its collegiate feel and became simply part of a neighborhood where families lived.
Bancroft Road was dark, with no streetlamps, and I could see into front windows where faculty members and their wives and children shuffled around living rooms. Was this the epiphany of adult life, that it actually wasn’t exciting and vast in possibilities, but was in fact as enclosed and proscribed as childhood? What a disappointment, for I’d been looking forward to the open field, the imagined release. Or maybe, I thought as I watched a young mother stride across her living room, then suddenly stoop down to pick something up (A shoe? A squeak toy?), only men ever felt that release. For women in 1956 were always confronting boundaries, negotiations: where they could walk at night, how far they could let a man go when the two of them were alone. Men hardly seemed troubled by these things; they walked everywhere in cold, dark cities and pin-drop empty streets, and they let their hands go walking, too, and they opened their belts and then their trousers, and they never thought to themselves: I must stop this right now. I must not go any further.
Here on Bancroft Road, it appeared that I was in a land in which everyone seemed to have stopped themselves from going too far. This was Smith, not Harvard; prestigious but not of high academic voltage. The men who held these faculty positions would initially feel relief at being her
e, and would settle in for the long run, but something would probably steal over them eventually, a desire to move on, to burst out into bigger cities, to not waste their Ph.D.’s and carefully composed lectures on girls who would dutifully absorb everything and then immediately go get married and reproduce, inevitably beginning the long process of forgetting.
The Castleman house was a gray saltbox, set back from the street behind a bumpy lawn. The bell on the front porch made a halfhearted blat when I pressed it. In a moment Professor Castleman himself was at the door, lit from behind by a yellow bulb.
“You must be freezing,” he said as he let me in. He wore a half-opened dress shirt, an unknotted tie draped around his neck. “I’m warning you, it’s chaos here,” he said. He smelled of some sort of shaving balm, and a spot of blood was on his chin. The record album from South Pacific was playing distantly, and from somewhere behind him a baby rhythmically cried, and then a woman’s voice called out, “Joe? Joe? Could you come up?”
His name was Joe. I didn’t known this, and I’d been afraid to attach a specific first name to him. His wife descended, carrying the baby over her shoulder. I lifted my eyes to look. The baby was quiet now, though bright red in the face. Mrs. Castleman wasn’t beautiful; she was a small, frazzled woman in her middle twenties, with boyish brown hair and darting eyes. What did he see in her? I imagined my professor in bed with this unglamorous little woman. Mrs. Castleman was so different from the Smith girls who grazed all around the campus like gazelles nibbling foliage. She stood with her hand reaching up the back of the baby’s outfit to check the status of a diaper, and she gave the appearance of a puppeteer in that moment, the hand inside the cloth, the baby entirely under her power, at least for now.
“Hello,” Castleman’s wife said without much interest. “I’m Carol Castleman. Nice to meet you.”
I tried to appear neutral, cheerful, a Smithie straight out of a college brochure. Autumn leaves should have been falling all around me as I stood at the foot of the uncarpeted staircase. “You, too,” I said. “Hello, honey,” I forced myself to say in the general direction of the baby. “Aren’t you adorable.”
“We haven’t left her with a sitter before,” Mrs. Castleman explained. “But she’s still so young, I can’t imagine it’ll scar her for life, regardless of what I’ve been trained to think.” The professor’s wife shifted the baby to her other arm and explained, “I’m studying to be a psychoanalyst.” Then she added, “Let me show you around.”
The rooms of the house were disorganized, with piles of books and toys and tilting lamp shades. Carol Castleman didn’t seem to care, or to feel the need to apologize. The baby slept in her parents’ room, and I was taken up there, knowing that I was about to enter the place where Castleman lay each night with his wife. The bed was made, though clearly in a hurry, and beside it was a white wicker bassinet. On one of the night tables was a scattering of walnuts. Joe came out of the bathroom and stood in the doorway, now fully dressed. His hair was wet and pushed back off his face, and his tie was knotted. From the record player, a dreamy, tropical female voice sang, “Here am I, your special island, come away, come away. . . .”
“Carol,” he said. “Is the tour over? We should get going.”
His wife took his arm, and in that frozen pose they appeared to be a clean, presentable young faculty couple going out for the night. They clearly received something from each other, a reciprocity that was founded on things I couldn’t even imagine, for he was so handsome and she so shrunken and ordinary. I thought of my own parents, who were as remote as two stalactites hanging side by side in the same cave, never touching in public, my father in his dark suits that smelled leafy and masculine, my mother in her dresses with patterns that gave them the appearance of tablecloths. My parents had separate beds made of dark, shellacked wood, and once, after she’d had a lot to drink at a dinner party, my charity-addled mother swept into my room late at night and confided that my father had recently been “rough” with her “in a marital way.” I only understood this much later, though simply the idea of it was awful: my big, impersonal, corporate father roughing up my slender, tablecloth-wearing mother as he mounted her in one of their high twin beds. Here in the presence of this husband and wife who were not my parents, and who lived in a world much more complicated than mine, I felt retarded and slack-jawed. I’d called Fanny “honey,” but I hadn’t meant it at all. The nucleus of attraction was the baby’s father, a man who ate walnuts and read James Joyce aloud to his students.
“Good-bye now!” the Castlemans called as they left, leaving telephone numbers and bottles and clean diapers behind. “Good-bye!” they sang as they headed into the night air to a faculty dinner party.
When they were gone, I gathered up the loose sack of baby and explored the bedroom in depth. Here were the clues to this man, all the evidence I’d ever need. Here in the closet were his shoes, lined up and worn, and here on the dresser was a bottle of his aftershave. Then, on a table, I saw a copy of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, with my professor’s name on the flyleaf. “Joseph Castleman,” he’d written with big flourishes, “Columbia University, 1948,” as though he was guaranteed to be famous some day, and to excite someone who would eventually open this book and come upon his name. By 1956, of course, he still wasn’t famous, but the signature excited me anyway, and I ran a finger along it, tracing the curlicues. Then I put the book down and sat on his side of the bed, laying the baby beside me. I picked up some walnut shells, letting them sift through my fingers, and for a moment Fanny and I regarded each other coolly.
“Hello, you,” I said. “I’m falling in love with your daddy. And I’d really like to go to bed with him.”
In a final burst of nerve, I sprang up and opened the night table drawer. It was as though I needed to find out what it meant to be a wife, to have a life spent beside a man. And sure enough, I found something: a white plastic diaphragm case nestled against a tube of the cream that had to be squirted in along with it, as well as an applicator, all of it making me uneasy, forcing me to imagine the wife of my professor sliding plastic and potions into a deep slot in her body, preparing herself for him. There was a dental pick with a rubber tip in the drawer, too, and a single walnut. I picked up the walnut and looked at it; a red heart had been painted on it, and beneath it were the words: C., I love you true.—J.
The walnut was more disturbing than the diaphragm. A diaphragm was a necessary, impersonal device, the sort of thing that Smith girls obtained by taking the bus to Springfield and visiting an old female gynecologist from Vilna who barely spoke English and asked few questions. But the inscribed walnut was much more intimate, and therefore somehow perverse. It even looked female, I thought, observing the lips of the nut and the grooves in the shell and the cold silk of the bumpy surface with its red-painted heart. I placed the nut back in the drawer and turned my attention to Fanny, who was suddenly crying and in need of something: A bottle? A change? Who the hell knew? Her crying was an irritant, sand in the pants, and I couldn’t understand the universal fetish surrounding babies, why they were the prize I would supposedly desire in a couple of years.
I picked the baby up and held her, ineffectually shushing and rocking her. I had no power here, no authority, not even the secret kind like that of a newly sexual girl with a diaphragm buried deep inside her.
Still, though, when the Castlemans returned later, I pathetically tried to make Joe more aware of me. He thanked me and paid me and even offered to give me a lift back to Northrop House, but when I said that I’d be fine on my own, he didn’t insist. Instead, he seemed relieved to return to the quiet disorder of his dim house and the now-unconscious baby in the bassinet, and I was relieved, too, for what would we have talked about? How would we have survived the awkwardness as we sat on the cold, bouncy front seat of his car, heading for my dormitory, a place that I didn’t want to be? Where did I want to be? Not there, but not here, either, living life as a sleep-starved faculty wife and envious of the way m
y husband simply wandered in and out of our house whenever he chose. So I wandered out of their house on my own, too, trying to give the appearance of independence instead of loneliness.
The next morning, returning to my library carrel, I wrote about a small, furtive faculty wife about to go out with her husband for the evening, walking down a flight of stairs with her baby over her shoulder, the woman’s hand inside the baby’s sleeper like a puppeteer at work, imagining that she might be able to control her child for years to come. The mother trades the shadows and smells of her faculty house for the cold night air and a brisk walk with her husband toward another house, where all the lights are on, and music is playing, and faculty couples stand in hopeful clusters.
When I was done, I tried to write from the point of view of the husband, including his thoughts as he stood beside his wife, his hand on her elbow as though women might need help navigating any new living room they entered. But something stopped me. I didn’t really know what men thought, or how they thought, couldn’t imagine what powered them, what steered them, and so I decided not to try.
Several days later, after I’d handed in my writing exercise, Castleman asked me to come see him during office hours. I climbed the wide stairs of Seelye Hall knowing that he’d either praise me as he usually did or else tell me I’d invaded his privacy by writing this piece, which the class would read. When he ushered another girl out and let me in, he sat holding my story in his hand.
Finally he leaned forward and said, “Miss Ames, I want you to listen to me. I’ve already told you that your work is good. But I’m not sure that I got through to you. The way you probably see it, my class is just like any of the others: French, or Renaissance art, or whatever it is you’re taking this semester. You’ll be very happy to get an A, and that will be that. But I guess I feel it’s important for you to understand that you can really do something with this, if you choose to.”