“Listen to him,” she told me one time, “ranting on about bullshit. He hasn’t a clue how he’s boring everyone.”
“I think he bores himself and doesn’t know it.”
“Well, if he bores himself, the message ought to seep in. Quit! Hang it up! I can’t stand it.”
I remembered how she first giggled at one of my questions she considered inane, and was fearful (my problem, I knew) that she would leap on this dude and excoriate him in front of the whole group. I tried to tell myself it was his issue and I was not at risk, but it illustrated how conflict was an anathema for me. I began chewing my tongue.
That particular evening, before Abby could rev up enough exasperation to go on the attack, our sometimes buddy, Kentucky Prism, who, for the third meeting in a row wore ruby studs in each ear, leaped into the fray. His thrust, unfortunately, prolonged the disturbance.
“When you say that Hemingway would outlive Steinbeck because he broke away from the long descriptive styles of Fitzgerald and Henry James, you are ignoring Steinbeck’s social themes. Steinbeck was a commentator on the times. Hemingway merely wrote shorter sentences.”
The other man, who had made the comments in the first place, bristled and said, “There are numerous social critics. The purpose of fiction is to communicate clearly and with imagination. Hemingway mastered the art of crisp, pointed communication.”
“He was a souse, and likely wrote succinctly because his brain was too fogged to elaborate.”
“If you think that, your brain is too fogged to think straight. For Whom The Bell Tolls illuminated the Spanish Civil War. The Old Man And The Sea addressed the triumph of the human spirit.”
“The Old Man And The Sea was maudlin.”
“It was the crown in Hemingway’s scepter.”
“It was the final gasp in a sick man’s labored breathing.”
“Hemingway was….”
Abby’s voice cut through the beat of both men’s banter.
“Stick a sock in it, both of you. It’s the speaker I’m interested in, not your uninformed jabbering.”
There was a hush in the room.
The anonymous guy looked wounded, perplexed, stuttered for a moment, then shut down. Ken, all too familiar with Abby’s bite, stood at his chair and said loudly and with his accompanying tics, “Bitch!”
The specter of him standing there, under public scrutiny, vulnerable in all his compulsivity, was more than ignominious; it was likely that many in attendance had never noticed his repetitive behavior, but now it was clear and compelling.
“Screw you,” Abby muttered softly, at least aware that it was partly a private matter between them.
The moderator on the platform stepped to the mike. “Please, let us be civil. This is not an alley fight. We are here to understand the art of literary expression. I ask you to be calm and hold your collective tongues.”
The guest speaker also interceded. “You all have a right to your opinions. No one has a market on truth. Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and any of the newer people, Michener, Capote, Toni Morrison, E.L. Doctorow, Saul Bellow, and a myriad of others, are distinctive and have legitimate claims to fame.”
Ken turned toward the speaker and said with acid in his voice, “The woman who told us to shut up must believe she does have a market on truth.”
This frosted Abby and she yelled out, “Not on truth, you imbecile, but on good taste. I know when to turn it off. Like right now.” She rose and stalked out of the room. I followed her.
It was obvious and painful to me that this conflict would not die an easy death. Abby was less concerned than I. She was prone to forget the event and Kentucky Prism by relegating both to—there it was again—her unconscious mind. To me, that meant they would contaminate her dreams….
Sure enough, when I saw her next she was somber and said, “I’m being punished at night.”
“Tell me,” I said.
“I’ve had this dream twice now. My kitten—her name is Flower—is up in a tree, but she’s tiny and afraid to jump down. I want to climb up to get her, but heights scare me. With a big sigh, I bury my fear and start up the tree. It takes me a couple of minutes to access her limb, and she is huddled in the crook of two branches, clearly frightened, unwilling to go in any direction. I crawl carefully out on the thicker, adjoining limb, set myself so I am secure, then reach with my right hand for Flower while holding on to a bough with my left. When I touch her, she acts in a crazy way—as if she doesn’t know who I am—and hisses and scratches at me. I recoil without thinking, too fast, too hard, and lose my balance. Before I can grab on again, I am plummeting toward the ground some twenty feet below. Both times I wake up screaming, saturated with perspiration, and instantly begin to sob.”
“Oh, Abby. That is awful. I know that feeling. Helpless. I’ve had falling dreams too. They’re the worst. Completely out of control.”
“But what happens is that, each time, my thoughts wriggle over to that confrontation I had with Ken at the Guild. I tell myself I am being punished.”
“Better to be punished in a dream than in real life,” I said, then sensing I may have misspoken, interjected, “I think.”
“Fear is not something I like to live with.”
“He’s just a frustrated, addictive personality. I don’t think he’d hurt you physically.”
“He’s already hurt me. My nights are ugly, and I wake up unsettled.”
I wanted to attend to her, offer my compassion, but my own vexatious night visitations absorbed my attention, got restimulated every time she brought hers up. We were, I realized, quite a beleaguered pair.
“You know, Abby, in your dream you were trying to help your kitty and she turned on you. At the Guild, you wanted to save the audience from a tedious experience and Ken turned on you.”
“Hard to do a good deed, isn’t it?”
I didn’t know if I should say it, but I took the risk and, aware that it might come across as preaching, half whispered, “Sometimes it’s style; how you say something is as critical as the meaning.”
She looked sharply at me, but mellowed at once and said, “I know I’m blunt. Never learned the niceties of how to challenge. I just pour it out, and like with Flower in my dream, I’m likely to get clawed.”
“I like your frankness, but it can also get you in trouble.”
She looked at me with what I read as a bemused smile; she knew me, knew my cautious nature, was aware that, with my overprotected childhood, I recoiled from conflict of any kind, would rather conciliate than confront, preferred tact over candor.
“Trouble I’m used to. Fear is a new sensation for me. I grew up having to dispel fear, thrust it aside. I couldn’t indulge in fear. I was too busy focusing on survival—and finally on escape.”
Damn, but I liked her! She was so aware of her own idiosyncrasies, what shaped her and how she handled her life crises. I found myself wishing I could understand myself as well.
This whole conversation took place in a city park, among weeping willows that looked like floppy lime hairpieces, and pepper trees, less dramatic but droopy as well, where we had hiked with the intent of communing with nature. Annoying how, no matter the pristine nature of the environment, one’s woes come along as burdensome baggage.
I hugged her and felt a powerful sexual urge, but realized it was hardly the time or place….
SIXTEEN
My two stepsisters, Stevie and Jeri Hawn, were growing up. I was about four and a half years older than Stevie, who had just turned eighteen, and five and a half older than Jeri. I mentioned before about their astonishing sapphire eyes, Stevie’s matchless beauty, now radiant with young adulthood, and Jeri’s left-side dimple, which accented her more rounded countenance. What was there not to like about them? Well, Stevie still seemed bent, though benignly, upon stalking me. She would show up without warning, her yellow Toyota Corolla rolling up next to my car at a stop sign, or parked behind mine at the library. I was good-natured about it, but found myself ge
tting a trifle annoyed, since I wanted some semblance of privacy without wondering if she were watching over my shoulder.
Jeri was a different kind of cat. At seventeen, her oval face had also lost its childhood appearance and taken on the look of a woman. She still was passionate about writing, and, one evening called and asked if she could join Abby and me at the Writers’ Guild lecture. Of course, we were delighted.
The speaker was holding forth on a writer named Howard Fast, who wrote thirty novels from the sixties on, including several that spawned movies: Spartacus, The Immigrants, The Last Frontier. He also wrote My Glorious Brothers, Moses: Prince of Egypt, Citizen Tom Paine, and other historical pieces.
“The villains in Fast’s work,” the woman speaker said, “were people who had gone wrong, not odious through and through, but rather failed aspirants in some difficult enterprise. Different from many characters in novels, the Fast people were fully developed folks, intricately drawn with a palpable sense of his affection for humankind. Actually, Fast was one of the Hollywood group attacked by the McCarthy committee for left-leaning politics. And yes, he was a member of the communist party. When you read his work, you get a feel for his humanism more than his political agenda; all his characters, from right-wingers to communists, are portrayed with a sense of compassion for their life predicaments. It is rare to find that in fiction.”
Kentucky Prism was not there. I, for one, was glad. He had been showing up off and on, avoiding us physically, but glowering at Abby. It was eerie and concerned me. That night, with Jeri present, it was just as well that the tension of him in the audience was absent.
On our break, Jeri was ecstatic. “I’ve got to read that man’s novels. Is he still alive? Is he still writing?” I noticed for the first time how full Jeri’s lips were; reminded me of the Hollywood star, Angelina Jolie.
At that time, Howard Fast was quite elderly, and his last couple of books had not received strong reviews. I told Jeri, “In my opinion, his greatest contributions were in his early works, the historical novels about the American experience. His book The Last Frontier was about a callous Indian massacre by soldiers—a movie was made about it, called Cheyenne Autumn. It was sensitive and poignant. Freedom Road was about reconstruction after the Civil War and a heroic black man named Gideon Jackson. And My Glorious Brothers was about the five Jewish Macabee brothers who held out against the Greeks in Judea for dozens of years. I loved all those books.”
I could see that Jeri was impressed with my knowledge, and I felt instantly ashamed at showing off. Abby caught the whole thing and laughed.
It was the first evening we had spent any significant time with Jeri, and Abby and I agreed she was a sparkling personality and likely would be successful as a writer or anything else she undertook.
What filled me with a certain odd wonder––and I did not share this with Abby––was how healthy this young woman seemed. I couldn’t be sure, but her wide-eyed spontaneity and sheer energy looked as if they came from an internal place that was self-approving. Naturally, that made me curious to know if she were plagued by nasty dreams the way Abby and I were. I didn’t ask.
“When my sister and I were in junior high, we each had the same teacher for American history, and we studied about the movement westward, how vile the colonists’ treatment of Indians was, and how the government broke treaty after treaty, sometimes for the gold, sometimes for the land. It made me sick.”
“Yes,” Abby said, “there were close to four million native people in what is now the US when the Europeans came, and after the explorers and settlers reached the west coast only half a million remained. Most of those were not warriors, but hunters and gatherers, like Navajos or Piute. The Sioux, Apache, Comanche, Iroquois, and others who resisted, were almost decimated.”
I saw that Jeri was also stimulated by Abby’s knowledge. The two women, perhaps six years apart in age, were a sight to behold: one the dark-eyed beauty with flowing ebony hair, the other a spring look, fresh as April, blue as sky. I felt, all at once, privileged to be in the company of such radiance. If I had the courage I would have commented on it, but instead I simply took it in with warm, private pleasure. I know, now that I’m in my thirties, how insubstantial my reservations were, how deprived they kept me from the true stuff of intimacy, which is mutuality.
The lecturer, a writer named Carolyn Gast, was a clever speaker, and certainly knew her authors. She concluded the evening with a challenge: “Those of you out there who are intrepid writers, do not get discouraged. The mountain may seem formidable, the walls sheer, the going slippery and tenuous, but remember this: the agents and publishers are nothing without you; they do not write their own pieces; they are imperfect as selectors; their profession is awkward and tenuous. Stay with it, hone your skills, send off your manuscripts. The next one may be the one that hits!”
To my surprise, and I’m sure Abby’s, Jeri shouted out, “Yes, I will!” The audience chuckled, not with derision, but approval.
With amazement, the next morning I awoke keenly aware that not only was there no troublesome dream, I could not remember having any at all. I wracked my brain to understand the reason, and since Dr. Sophie was to see me that day, decided to explore it with her.
SEVENTEEN
I sat in the soft blue chair across from hers—it had become a familiar roost, and I felt a deep comfort easing myself down into its pillows. Dr. Sophie Agutter (I tended to want to call her Dr. Sophie) spoke first, which was rare.
“I’ve been thinking about the tale you once related about taking on the role of lavatory guard at your school. Tell me about that.”
“I’d go in and it would stink. They’d pee and not flush. It drove me nuts.”
“And you wanted to … catch someone in the act, punish him, or what?”
“I wanted to stop it. To tell him it was a putrid thing to do.”
“That was it, that was your motive?”
“What else?”
“You tell me.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I’m interested in your motive. Was it prevention, punishment, or something else?”
“What else is there?”
She was quiet, waiting, as she often did. That made me squirm, but I knew from previous sessions that it almost always led to a new insight.
“Not punishment. I hated the idea of punishment. My mother was a punisher.”
“Your mother punished you for trespasses.”
“For lots of things. She hated me even joking about being a lavatory guard. High hopes is what she had for me, would constantly tell me I was a star, would call me an Adonis, and when I was little, squeeze me till it hurt.”
“You were her precious and precocious star.”
I thought about that for a moment, and answered, “I was her substitute.”
“For?”
“For my father. He split and she glommed onto me.”
“And that must have been quite a burden for a little boy.”
“Well, I liked it in some ways. I mean who wouldn’t like to be adored by your mother, put up on a pedestal and praised to the heavens?”
“You said ‘in some ways.’ You must have not liked it in other ways.”
That also made me think. Actually it made me sad, though I didn’t know why. Finally, I whispered hoarsely, “She smothered me. I didn’t have any room to breathe. It felt like I was in a kind of prison of affection.”
“That’s quite a concept: prison of affection.”
“My friends seemed to have a lot more freedom than I did. They’d talk about babes, and starting to date, and making out, and scoring. It all meant nothing to me.” I was quiet for a time, then said without a clear understanding of the impact of my words, “My mother was my date.”
“I’m curious,” Dr. Agutter said, “if you felt you had no choice.”
That caught me off guard. “Uh, well it was an expectation, and there were just the two of us, so I didn’t feel I could desert her.”
>
“A teenager, but no teenage revolt, no throwing off of parental rules and demands. You felt a compulsion to do what she wanted.”
“I guess so.”
“Another curiosity. When did that start? How old were you when you realized you were your mommy’s exclusive … property.”
I didn’t like the way she put that. Never thought of myself as her property. The question angered me—first time I felt real anger toward my doctor.
“Why do you say I was her property? I never said that. We were a family and had a mutual support system. Sure it was a little extreme, but what was I supposed to do? I couldn’t abandon my mother.”
“Couldn’t abandon her, because she didn’t have a life of her own.”
That also brought me up short. I hadn’t looked at it that way. Of course she could have gone out, made friends, dated. Instead, she hunkered down in our house and focused on me.
“Well, now that you bring it up, I can see that she didn’t try very hard to meet other people. She devoted herself to me.”
“What about my question? How old were you when you first felt you had to be your mother’s constant companion?”
“I’m not sure. When I was little she had to take care of me, my clothes, my teeth, going to the doctor, all that. So, I don’t remember even thinking about it then. But, maybe when I was—I don’t know—eleven or twelve, I started feeling deprived. I mean different from the other kids.”
“No specific incident, only a general buildup of feelings.”
“Uh huh, as far as I recall.”
That’s when Dr. Agutter grinned and said, “Enough. Let’s quit for today. You have plenty to think about.”
I left her office and stepped into a brisk wind, which almost tipped me over, not sure exactly what I needed to think about, but sure of one thing: I felt way off balance that day and it wasn’t because of the wind. Dr. Agutter seemed to know something I didn’t. What could have happened to me, what hurtful experience; perhaps like the childhood thrashing I took when those boys attacked me at the grocery store, or worse? Maybe some bad guys broke into our house. Maybe my father and mother had a huge fight, possibly physical, that I witnessed and decided to bury. Something was pushing up on me, like the magma in a volcano, and I began to worry about some eerie kind of eruption. In my car I felt a powerful pressure to crack my knuckles and blink my eyes. I already had been chewing on my tongue—I did that before and after every therapy session.
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