The Long Journey Home

by Margaret Robison

  Given the lack of support and my loss of confidence, it didn’t feel like a huge sacrifice when I gave in to John’s insistence that I change my major from painting to education, so that I could teach while he got his degree in theology. I agreed to do as he wished and pushed thoughts of being a painter from my conscious mind.

  I continued to talk with John about philosophy and theology, but he became angry when I didn’t accept some of his theological beliefs as my own. During one heated discussion about predestination and free will, he slapped me hard across the face because I disagreed with him. Stunned and frightened, I asked him to take me back to my dormitory. As soon as he parked his car, I opened the door and walked quickly to the safety of the building. John came rushing behind me, apologizing, begging me to stop and talk with him. I walked hurriedly through the lounge and up the stairs to my room.

  Later that night John called and asked me to talk with him.

  I said no.

  The next evening he came over to the dorm and called me on the house phone, begging me to come down and talk with him for just a few minutes. He told me that he was horribly sorry about slapping me and needed my forgiveness. If I would only come down to the lounge for a few minutes. Please.

  “For a few minutes,” I agreed, “but I’m not going out with you again.”

  We sat across from each other near the housemother’s office.

  Of course he said he was sorry. He didn’t know what had gotten into him. Of course he said he would never do it again. Then he begged me to go out with him one more time.

  “No.” I was afraid to go out with him.

  “Only to talk,” he pleaded.

  “No.” I was afraid I would give in to him.

  “I love you. At least do this one thing for me.”

  “No.”

  “Please, Margaret.”

  He drove us to Posse’s Barbecue Drive-In several miles from town. We sat in the parked car and talked. He wanted me to come back to him. He reminded me of how he had talked to no one but me since his Grandfather Elder died when he was just a twelve-year-old boy. He couldn’t live without me. He would kill himself if I left him.

  I steeled myself against his pleas. “No,” I said, “I can’t continue this relationship.” I was not going to give in to pity. Or to guilt. I had to get away.

  “I’m not going to come back to you. I can’t.”

  He grew quiet. Then he began to mutter nonsensical sentences. “The old yellow dog jumped over the stile,” he said. And “Catsup is spilling out of the airplane.” Then he stared out the front windshield, saying nothing. I felt afraid and puzzled.

  He started the car and headed back to town but took the long way. The dirt road was desolate. Fields of corn spread on either side, and there was an occasional shack, dimly lit and set back from the road. As soon as we were at some distance from the restaurant and traffic, and alone on the road, he began to mutter other nonsensical phrases, so nonsensical that I couldn’t even then hold them in my mind.

  Again he grew quiet.

  After a few miles of silence, he suddenly slumped over the steering wheel as if unconscious. I struggled to get control of the wheel, then pressed my body close against his so that I could reach the gas pedal and brake. I drove the rest of the way back to town with him stone silent beside me, his head knocking against the glass of the closed window every time I went over a bump.

  When we arrived at the house in which he had rented a room, I was able to rouse him and walk him to the door. He swayed from side to side as he walked and had a strange dazed look in his eyes. I drove his car back to my dormitory.

  The next day he claimed to remember nothing of his behavior the night before. But he still insisted he would kill himself if I left him.

  I stayed. I stayed because I didn’t know how to leave. I stayed because I cared about him. I stayed because I was terrified that he really would kill himself. I stayed, hoping that come summer, I could persuade Mother and Daddy to let me drop out of college and go to art school like I’d wanted to do from the beginning.

  III

  1956

  My sister, Harriet, died of pneumonia in late February. She was only nine years old.

  “It’s a blessing,” Aunt Bama said when she and Uncle Earnest came to Athens to drive me home for the funeral. I didn’t smoke cigarettes in front of them, so I was glad when we stopped at a filling station. I squatted over the toilet and peed, then stood and lit a cigarette, sucking the smoke into my lungs and expelling it into the small airless room with its dirty sink and stench, while Uncle Earnest and Aunt Bama waited in the car, the attendant pumping gasoline and cleaning the windshield of smashed bugs and bird droppings.

  “A blessing,” my aunt had said almost as soon as they had picked me up at the dormitory. I took another drag from the cigarette and threw it into the toilet. My sister’s death a blessing? A relief, she meant, like peeing. Now Mother could go back to teaching. My aunt talked constantly as my uncle drove in silence. “A blessing,” she repeated until the drive was finally over and I was standing in my front yard in my mother’s arms.

  “It was either her or me,” Mother said, her face colorless and drawn. “I’d reached the end of my endurance.”

  When I went into the house, I walked through the living room and stood at the door to the dining room looking across at my sister’s bent arms and clenched fists rising from the coffin. When I walked closer and looked down at Harriet’s body, I saw that her hair had been brushed away from her head and arranged around her face like a halo. It looked grotesque.

  “Please brush her hair down like she wore it,” I said hoarsely to the undertaker and turned away quickly, smelling the scent of the funeral wreaths that didn’t mask the odor of formaldehyde. I felt like I might vomit.

  The undertaker, a kind man with large blue eyes, a man I’d known since we were in high school, did as I asked. Then he apologized for Harriet’s bent arms. He explained that he would have had to break her bones to get her arms to lie down in the coffin.

  I don’t remember what the preacher said to those of us gathered in the living room that day. I only remember hearing a high school friend—dead for many years now—singing “Jesus Loves the Little Children,” her beautiful soprano voice filling the house while I stood, silent, dry-eyed, and numb. Nor do I remember the drive on the Thomasville highway to the new cemetery, where my sister’s coffin was lowered into the earth on the barren hill that rose across the road from where the slaughterhouse once stood.

  I flew to Atlanta, where John met my plane and then drove me back to Athens. I told him about Harriet’s bent arms and clenched fists, an image that I would carry inside me for the rest of my life. Then, for the first time since I’d seen my sister’s dead body, I cried.

  IV

  Harriet was dead. Depression gnawed at Daddy’s days. His heart disease was getting worse. He was no longer able to bring in enough money to pay the utilities bills. Aunt Bama often paid them while wringing the last drop of self-respect from him by not giving him the money but writing checks to the utilities companies herself.

  “I’m only a shell of a man,” Daddy would groan. “Only a shell of a man.”

  He talked of suicide. But as sick and miserable as he was in his life, he was more afraid of death. Often he stretched out on his bed and talked about his fear of dying. I lay on Mother’s bed, watching the play of late-afternoon light on the walls. I no longer screamed at him like I’d done when I was younger—“Daddy, you’re too afraid to live!”—but listened to him with an intense sorrow I couldn’t touch with words.

  In her forties, Mother was attending college again. She went to Valdosta State to renew her teaching certificate. Some weekends we drove over to visit her. More often than not, she stayed in her dormitory and studied.

  My memories of that summer are a blur of Daddy’s talk about death, mounds of dirty dishes, burnt food, line after line of laundry, wet fabric clinging to my arms. By that time I smoked in f
ront of my parents. Nicotine dulled my feeling of despair. The next cigarette became one of my major reasons to live through the days. Daddy, a heavy smoker most of his life, seemed happy to have the company. It was the thing we did together. That, and talking about death.

  I’d done little of the housework or cooking in the past. “You’ll have the rest of your life to do such things,” Mother had always said to me with a sigh. “The whole rest of your life.” That summer I learned by trial and error what it was to run a house for two adolescent boys and a depressed man. At nineteen, I was initiated, taken through my rite of passage to being a Southern housewife in the 1950s.

  It was a long summer, with its hot and humid days, the air outside filled with gnats and mosquitoes, and inside the faithful drone of electric fans. Nights, our dog, Trixie, sat in the driveway howling at the moon.

  When Mother came home for a weekend, I pleaded with her not to send me back to the university. I had to get away from John, I said. He frightened me. And I told her about his slapping me, and about his bizarre behavior at Posse’s that night.

  Didn’t she hear what I was telling her? Didn’t she believe me? Certainly she didn’t want to believe me. How could the refined, soft-spoken John that she had met possibly do those things? Perhaps she thought I was being dramatic about nothing. “Such a flair for the dramatic you have,” Mother had exclaimed much of my life. “Such a flair!”

  Whatever her reasons, after listening to my story she said in her usual controlled tone: “Margaret, if you don’t want to go with John, just tell him.”

  Just tell him. But I knew she didn’t mean it. And I wished it had been that simple. I wished I had the self-confidence, wished I didn’t have the guilt and feeling of responsibility that kept me with him. I wished I didn’t love him. And did I have a right to do other than what I knew Mother really wanted? I was her daughter. And Daddy’s daughter too. Someplace deep inside me I felt I was more their property than my own person.

  I knew Mother wanted me to marry John. Then I would not go off to New York City to be a painter and live the life of a bohemian artist in Greenwich Village. “My daughter, Margaret,” she could say. “The minister’s wife.” I would be like the wooden bride doll that she had given me, the only doll of mine that she never gave away.

  Now I stood ironing Bubba’s summer shirts, two each day—one for work and another for going out in the evening. He kept bringing them back to me—a wrinkle in a collar, a puckered hem. That summer something took my dreams away. I learned to iron a shirt without a single wrinkle. In my mind my sister’s clenched fists were always rising from the coffin.

  I made plans to marry John, who said he needed me, who said he’d take his own life if I didn’t give him mine. But now so little about that summer stands out—ironing mostly, and my embarrassment when my father asked me to cook his hamburger again because blood kept leaking onto his plate.

  Chapter Seven

  I

  1956–1957

  JOHN AND I WERE MARRIED ON SEPTEMBER 15, 1956. BY THE TIME WE finished college I was several months pregnant. The day of our graduation ceremony I felt nauseated and didn’t want to face the crowd and the heat. I couldn’t have cared less about receiving a diploma for a degree in education. If anything, it embarrassed me, since I had little respect for the course requirements for that degree. Mother was pleased though. She and Daddy attended along with John’s parents. I stayed home and cooked dinner for all of us. I was upset when I burned the carrots, but John’s father said he was glad I burned them because he hated carrots more than anything. When I remember that day, the first thing that always comes to mind is the image of those carrots at the bottom of the burnt pot.

  After graduation we moved to Ila, a small town near Athens in which John had served for the past year as student minister in the Presbyterian church. A perceptive member of the congregation told me that she believed he would end up being a teacher rather than a minister, which is what happened. While John enjoyed preaching, he found visiting members of the congregation at home and relating to them burdensome and uncomfortable. By the time we moved into the manse (the house supplied by the church for its pastor), John had already received a Danforth Fellowship to do graduate work in philosophy. He agreed to preach Sundays until he finished his master’s at Emory University on the outskirts of Atlanta. In the meantime, he continued his study of logic with Rubin Gotesky, one of his professors at the University of Georgia. They spent an evening each week together.

  Our son John Elder was born August 13, 1957. He was named after the grandfather John had loved so dearly. There were no tests then to determine the sex of a baby before it was born, but almost from the beginning I felt certain our baby was a boy, and we named him before seeing him.

  Waking the morning of the twelfth, I knew he was coming soon. I packed my bag, including an outfit for him to come home in. Then I spent much of the day washing clothes, cleaning the house, and packing maternity outfits away in boxes. After dinner I took a shower and changed clothes for the trip to Athens.

  John left me with friends for several hours while he had his weekly meeting with Professor Gotesky. I remember nothing about my time spent waiting for John except that I was having contractions. When he picked me up, we immediately went to Saint Mary’s Hospital.

  The contractions had grown intense and my doctor insisted on giving me “twilight sleep,” a combination of morphine and scopolamine that was supposed to give me amnesia so that I wouldn’t feel or remember the pain of childbirth. I was in extreme pain and still remember most things about the labor and my baby’s birth. I also remember the doctor telling John that I would remember nothing and that he should go home to bed. Which he did.

  It was a long, lonely, and torturous night. Shortly before breakfasttime I was taken to the delivery room. My feet were fastened in stirrups and my hands were strapped down. I felt frantic with claustrophobia. After struggling unsuccessfully to free myself of the constraints, I calmed myself as I watched the doctor lift the baby by his feet and smack him hard on his bottom, eliciting a piercing howl. I flinched at what felt like a violent act.

  “Is he all right?” I asked.

  He was born two weeks late, just as my sister had been, and I’d spent those long two weeks praying that he wouldn’t be brain-damaged.

  “He’s fine,” the doctor replied, and a nurse whisked him out of my sight.

  It was much later before a nurse brought him to me and I saw the deep forceps marks on both sides of his extremely elongated head. His experience of his birth had to have been at least as difficult as mine, probably more so. The thought haunted me. But more than anything, I clung to the doctor’s words that he was “fine.”

  After our first night in the hospital, the nurse who brought him to me told me he’d screamed all night. She had never heard a newborn scream as much and as loudly as he did; it was the topic of talk among the nurses that night. She didn’t mention anyone holding him, and certainly no one brought him to me. It hurt to know how much he’d suffered. When I finally saw him he was exhausted. He didn’t have the energy to nurse but fell asleep in my arms.

  II

  Mother came to help me for a few days when we went home to Ila. John Elder screamed or cried much of the time. I was breast-feeding him, and Mother was convinced that he was crying so much because my breast milk was inadequate. Desperate, I came to believe her, stopped breast-feeding him, and gave him a bottle. Mother went home to Daddy, and I finished packing our belongings for our move into an apartment in Mudville, a group of old army barracks that had been made into apartments for graduate students at Emory University.

  When John Elder was two weeks old we moved. We had a small bedroom, a small living room, and a breakfast bar separating it from the kitchen, where my old wringer washing machine stood next to the sink.

  John Elder continued to cry and scream.

  I was puzzled, frustrated, and exhausted. When he was six weeks old, I took him to a pediatrician. I told
the doctor that he screamed or cried much of the time and I didn’t know what to do. He responded: “Just get used to it. He was born this way.”

  I had no other place to turn for help.

  I thought of Harriet, who spent the early weeks of her life screaming because of pressure on her brain. By walking back and forth in my parents’ bedroom I had been able to calm her so that she fell asleep in my arms. Now I held my own baby in my arms and walked back and forth in our Mudville apartment. My baby screamed. I sat down and rocked him. He screamed. I got up and walked him. He screamed. I walked him some more. He screamed. He must have given up and fallen asleep eventually, but what I remember now is the screaming. That, and my despair.

  John couldn’t tolerate our son’s screaming. By this time he had begun to drink, and he stayed out late nights, talking with his fellow philosophy students and drinking in a local tavern. Once he came home late, hit me, and threw me to the floor. When I tried to talk to him about what he’d done, he went to bed and uttered nonsensical phrases the way he’d begun to do when, according to his mother, he was a child wanting to escape his alcoholic father, who physically abused both of them. There was no way to get through to John. After sitting in the living room for a while, smoking a cigarette to calm myself, I too went to bed, and eventually to sleep.

  That year at Emory, John’s anger intensified as my sense of resignation settled in. I wouldn’t have called myself depressed at the time; I was too busy to know how I felt. But looking back, my depression is evident. When I got up in the night to feed John Elder, I began to feed myself as well. I ate cookie after cookie, as if cookies could comfort my lost, lonely feeling.