Of course both of us fell in love with certain characters because some detail about them broke our hearts. We worried about Charlotte, who sat around airports in Didion’s A Book of Common Prayer, because she fastened her torn skirt hem with a safety pin, listed her profession as MADRE, and carried a designer handbag with a broken clasp. And we roared when Sukie noticed that Joan Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, had both used the same “sit on my face and see if I can guess your weight” joke in recent novels. Missing from Sukie’s collection, I knew because she’d told me, was a certain male writer (whom she refused to identify for purely selfish reasons) who thought all erected penises had a bend or curve in them. Sukie believed this author ignorant of comparative anatomy and was going to play dumb—but go for him if they ever met—just as she planned to do with Harry Reems.
In Guerrillas, V. S. Naipaul wrote that the skin that showed within the V-neck of his heroine’s blouse was darker and coarser than anywhere else on her body, since that area was more frequently exposed to the elements. We would flinch from the impact of such a detail and then retell it to each other to demonstrate that some men saw and perhaps understood some things. Sukie believed that it was the second refrigerator in Philip Roth’s Goodbye Columbus and the medicine cabinet in his Letting Go that unleashed the “telling” detail in American fiction. Also, since Sukie had actually known the redhead in the beginning of Letting Go—who wore her Phi Beta key on a chain around her neck even when she was naked, and carried her own special shampoo around in her purse to be prepared for unexpected stays at different men’s apartments—she credited Roth with the early recording of female characteristics that, whether or not he “understood” them, ensured their survival.
So both Bellow and Roth were grandfathered into her short list of contemporary male authors who she believed wrote well about both women and children. Sukie kept André Dubus, Frederick Barthelme, Robert Stone, Kem Nunn, Russell Banks, Elmore Leonard, John Updike and Raymond Carver on her highly valued eye-level shelves because she thought they got right down there where women really lived. She loved Barthelme’s motel sex, which she saw as a metaphor for our times, and the Carver hero who was shamed by the stench he left in his own bathroom on a morning when a sleep-over female visitor still had to take a shower.
Gradually Joanne and I move toward Sukie’s desk and begin to browse through the pile of disks beside the computer. All of the envelopes are cryptically labeled JRN I, II, III, and on to X. Eventually, Joanne turns on Sukie’s Kaypro, the same model she herself owns, and inserts one of the JRN disks into the machine. Then we stand side by side as Sukie’s personal notes begin to unroll before us in green letters on the black screen. Hypnotized by the scrolling text, we huddle together as we absorb her pain.
OCTOBER, 1981
I am ill.
I lie on the sofa suffering strenuously.
Waking this morning I felt fear spreading through me like a tide oozing across a beach, erasing the damp sand castle of my identity.
From my sofa, I look around the living room at the furniture I know so well. So. These will be my chairs and lamps for the rest of life. I know their shapes and colors, their wounds and stains. I will sit, or lie, and gaze upon this furniture forever. How it is that I acquired these particular pieces for eternity escapes me at the moment. Even less explainable is why they suddenly seem unfamiliar.
I get up to turn on the phonograph, but the needle is bent and Jackson Browne wails instead of sings. I had wanted to hear some of the sad songs from Running on Empty, but like a lot of other things in my house, the phonograph isn’t working.
I return to my nest.
Often when I lie on the sofa like this, I feel as if I’m in a hospital. I half expect someone to walk unannounced through the doorway, like a doctor making rounds. This hospital feeling always makes me want to suck ice cubes. During summers in the sixties, when we were all pregnant a lot of the time, we loved to spend long, lazy afternoons at each other’s houses, lying outside on drugstore chaises, trying to get backyard tans while chewing on ice cubes. That memory always pleases me even though some medical person later told me that ice-cube cravings indicate a calcium deficiency.
I have been humming “Time on My Hands” all morning. Before, I seldom had a minute to myself; now vast wastelands of emptiness sprawl ahead of me each day. I frequently find myself humming or whistling old songs from the fifties.
About a month after Max left, I became a refugee. I slept in my clothes, unwilling to separate the day from the night. I carried all my essentials in my purse while I roamed through the city, often sleeping at other people’s houses. I wrapped my toothbrush in tinfoil and tucked it inside a pocket of my purse.
On nights when David went to visit Max, I would drop in to a friend’s house as humble and beseeching as if I were going to church. I would arrive around dinnertime so they would invite me to eat with them. After dinner I would drink so much they would be afraid to let me drive home and suggest that I sleep over. I always accepted their invitations gratefully since that saved me from another night at home alone.
I want my friends to help me. Sometimes they do, but most of the time they don’t because they can’t. If someone puts up a fight—says a reconciliation with Max is impossible or wrong—I get angry and cry. If no one protests, I wallow in my pain. What I want is my husband back and none of them can deliver. When my friend Jane, of the clear face creased only by laughlines, asked me to come live with her for the summer, I almost fainted from gratitude.
I want to hear about Them. I am not ashamed to ask. She is not well liked, but occasionally a friend will say something that wounds me. They say she is organizing some event for him and handling the details he can’t manage alone. This makes me crazy.
My odysseys become longer and longer. I drive around town dropping in on people I haven’t seen in years. I tell each person something different. Old chums are called upon to remember the past, to testify to lost moments of happiness they’d witnessed, to confirm the years of comradeship, the decades of sharing. I demand that they protest Max’s terrible betrayal. I insist on the injustice of his action. People are required to sympathize, whether or not they know the particulars.
I am shameless, unembarrassed by my excessive determination to publicly assess the damage Max has wrought.
After a while, however, my friends become tired of my unannounced visits. My plight is no longer new or newsy.
I am, however, interested in nothing else.
When I have no parties to attend or appointments to keep or people to meet, I begin to dissolve. My incipient hysteria is stirred up whenever a block of time materializes without any human parameters.
Suppressed hysteria impairs my perceptions. While drinking coffee this morning, out of the corner of my eye I saw a crumpled napkin on the floor and thought it was a mouse. All morning long, I saw stationary objects moving. Also, my aural sense is off. I have always heard voices, but now I hear people calling me. A child of mine who was once small calls “Mommy,” and my bodily processes pause. But the child has been grown and gone for a long while now. She no longer cries out for me and anyway now she calls me Mother.
When I come off my uppers or downers and stop eating for a minute, I realize that I am burning all my bridges. Whenever I’m drunk, I announce that I married Max only because he was the first man who asked me. Even though I was only twenty-three when he proposed, I hadn’t had time yet to know many men. Perhaps that’s why later I felt so gypped.
Lying on the sofa, I open my pink flowered notebook which I keep nearby. I have divided it into various sections called things like Love Notes, Class Notes, Sour Notes, Bank Notes, etc., etc. I also have parts called Here Are Some Things That Have Happened to My Friends; Here Are Some Things That Have Happened to Me; Here Are Some Things That I’ve Heard Recently; and Here Are Some Things That I Did Back When I Was Still Me.
Like some character in a Russian novel, I have begun keeping a list of slights
and grievances in my notebook. This section is quite full. A lot of it is devoted to Miranda and how she betrayed me. Betrayals always drive me wild; I can neither forget nor forgive them. I nurse my grievances, explicate their details, contrive imaginative confrontations and plot my revenge.
This morning, instead of writing anything, I close my notebook and think about Her. I saw Her going into their apartment yesterday. She slipped into the entrance hall very quickly. She knew her way. She moved with authority. She looked efficient about going to visit my husband. Why not? He is hers now.
Her existence is an incitement for me to trash my own life.
I thought of her pride in getting my husband away from me—her taste of triumph at my torment. I imagine them discussing me in great detail, probing my motives for behaving insanely. My feigning madness terrifies Max. Actually, it scares me too; when I act that way, I believe it. In truth, although internally I am in total disarray, with some effort of my ever-weakening will, I can contain my craziness. When I purposefully unleash it, in order to punish Max, the real iguanas that slither out of my mind to scream insanities through my mouth terrify me as much as anyone else.
Occasionally Max says mean things to me over the telephone and I go wild. I want to reach out and hurt him in some way, to break through the intolerable barrier of his indifference. I am pulsating with need, unable to contain my emotions, shriveled with frustrated rage. I hadn’t done anything wrong to him in any immediate sense. How could he do this to me?
For years he loved the enchantment of me—the heat of my insecurities, the mystery of my neurosis. He was enthralled like a fairytale prince by all that was wild and wicked in me. Then a bad witch came along, broke the spell I had placed upon him, and stole him away.
He was not my husband; he was my identity. My fusion with him was total. It wasn’t even a question of love; he was my life, the joys and successes, frustrations and banalities, irritations and insecurities that constituted my existence. I never tried to separate my private self or experience from him. Everything was irrevocably joined at the hips of our lives.
We live alone now, David and I. According to U.S. Census figures, we are not alone. Ha ha. There are many other mother-son units such as ours. I have become what is called, for tax purposes, a Head of Household. My heart aches for my son who has become a divorce statistic. He is the fourteen-year-old who lives alone with an unhappy mother and sees his father once a week. What does that feel like? What does he think about inside that silent cocoon in which he now lives? Is he in a panic? Is he painfully resigned to his fate, experiencing his emotions helplessly?
Once I invited a child psychiatrist for dinner and afterwards I left the kitchen and went upstairs. Later David and I changed places. I sat at the kitchen table with the doctor while David went upstairs to watch TV. I asked the doctor what had happened. “Nothing,” he said. “After you left, David said, ‘I know why she invited you here, and I don’t want to talk about anything. Everything’s okay.’”
Before, our house was full of life; now it vibrates with emptiness. Friends of mine who have already gone through this say that living alone is unnatural—an act against nature, like keeping wild animals in a zoo. People were not designed to live the way David and I are living.
Before Max left, we received the 1980 census questionnaire. It requested the names of everyone sleeping at our house the night that the form arrived. By chance, there were six visitors staying with us at the time. Five of them refused to provide the personal information that was required. Like many Puerto Ricans living in New York, my houseguests did not want to be counted in the census. Neurotic anarchistic intellectuals sleeping away from home were another “depressed” minority not included in the 1980 census. Walker Percy calls such people “malaiseans.”
Old friends find me wanting. I have apparently lost whatever qualities originally drew them to me. My house, which used to attract people like a brimming glass of wine, is now deserted. Fresh garden flowers no longer dance foppishly in vases set randomly around the rooms. Friends no longer fade in and out of my days. Kate and Diana and Joanne and Marlene and Aileen are all busy with their own lives. Diana has called a few times, obviously sensing my deterioration, but she’s teaching full-time now and can’t come here to be with me.
My house no longer summons anyone. If anything, we had too many wonderful friends. People frequently felt lost in our social shuffle. We liked our friends, but sometimes I grew tired of never being alone. Our friends often became wedges between us, draining our energies with demands to talk, smoke, drink, interact, relate, perform and give. Then I would complain to Max, saying I was wasting my time entertaining, making coffee and drinking, that I was tired of talking and putting out.
Usually after a night full of people we forgot to make love.
Making love. It was fraught with leftover feelings from the day—grudges, resentments, grievances. Being married makes it difficult to forget the days. The nights echo earlier commotion, the noise of the children, the unpacking of grocery bags, the emergency roar of a vacuum before the arrival of unexpected guests. Was it the work, the writing, the rush of life that distracted me from making love so that Max became only a target for my rage—a convenient outlet for all my complaints?
Will I ever feel like buying flowers again? Will I ever stop at the flower cart on Connecticut A venue and buy a bunch of daisies to jam inside a jar and set upon my kitchen table? Will I ever again place cloth napkins beside my pretty brown pottery dishes and use separate plates for salads despite the extra work they create?
How could he have left his wedding ring in the medicine chest as if it meant nothing, as if he hadn’t worn it on his hand for twenty years?
Unconditional love feels unctuous until it is lost.
So many sweet-sour memories—his fine, firm voice telling me things, teaching me, explaining. Why did I come to hate it then and yearn for it now? The resonance of his voice and its emotional tones haunt me. Now he talks like that to someone else.
What had I wanted from Max? Intimacy. But he couldn’t deliver anything but counterfeit concern. What else? Passion. But his was unilateral; he couldn’t inspire it in me.
One night at dinner I had seven glasses of white wine. Wine is worse than whiskey because it seems innocent. But wine is no more innocent than I am.
Hate corrupts and corrodes everything. Today I hate everyone. Mostly I hate myself—my face, my body, my breath, my weight, my anxiety, my self-indulgence, my neuroses.
Perhaps if it were a physical ailment I had, I would have more patience about going to doctors and clinics. Then I would probably want to get well. But taking an obsession around town, driving it out to the suburbs, sitting with it in waiting rooms, describing its symptoms to each new doctor, filling out medical office data forms, filing insurance claims—all of that is demoralizing. I created my own illness and now have to maintain it with constant medical care. I created my own madness and now must live with all that stems from its preposterous power.
Still I cling to my obsession, fearing its loss, liking its perks—the drinks and the drugs, the doctors and the dreams.
Was there ever a story written about a female Job—a woman blessed with everything, who lost it all within a single year? To me it happened very quickly, between one Christmas and the next. In 1979 I made a lovely pre-Christmas party for over a hundred people. In 1980 I went to a Christmas party where I got drunk in front of all my friends, wept, carried on shamelessly, lost one high-heeled shoe, and cut open my chin when I fell down the stairs while leaving. Because I couldn’t find my car, I hailed a taxi, threw up in the backseat, and, opening the door, ran away, with the driver chasing me almost all the way home.
Of course I was unable to sleep that night. Fear and anxiety tumbled through my system and I felt physically ill. My body trembled. Remorse and regret flooded me. I tried to tell myself that I hadn’t killed or maimed anyone, that I was just feeling ashamed of my behavior, but the panic persisted.<
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Hate, hate, hate. It’s boring. It’s monolithic. I feel so wronged that no one can do right by me ever again.
I slapped my son for saying I drank too much.
I hung up on my daughter who called from college.
I cut short a long-distance call from my daughter’s friend who was confined in a mental hospital after having a breakdown. She had found an unlocked WATS line in some office and chosen to call me. I told her I was busy. After she hung up, I began crying, hysterical with guilt.
I decided to let my father take a taxi in from the airport when he came to visit me. He has telephoned every night since Max left to check on David and me. He knows I am going under and, like everyone else, can find no way to help me. There is no way. With drugs and alcohol I can alter my identity in thirty minutes, erase the pain, release the rage.
I want my mother.
Something I’d been expecting all my life finally happened last year. My mother went someplace where she couldn’t take me. Of course she promised to come back soon, but she never did. I always knew someday she’d do that.
When I was little, she used to go downtown shopping on Saturday afternoons and leave me home with my grandmother. All during those dark and chilly winter afternoons, my conviction that she would never return argued with my certainty that she would. Even after she reappeared, I remained convinced that the next time she went away I’d never see her again.
So last year she went out (to Mount Sinai Hospital for a bypass operation) and she didn’t come back as she’d promised me she would.
I always knew that would happen. I always knew that she would leave me.
I don’t miss her; it’s simply that the sun doesn’t shine as bright as it used to and I have no one to whom I can tell certain things, such as the fact I have a sore throat when I do.
It seems to me that if you have no one to whom you can say your throat aches, your life is a sad and empty thing.
In the mornings I always used to serve juice in wineglasses when we had stay-over guests. Max liked that a lot. Now I drink two cups of black coffee and smoke three cigarettes for breakfast, which I take alone. At night, when I lie down in darkness, I take Madness as my lover and embrace him feverishly; in the morning, I drink my coffee alone on the terrace of my mind and wait until Memory comes to join me for a walk down to the shore.
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