The Bride of Catastrophe

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  I was fourteen—Charles (my poet) called it the Age of Consciousness. He’d talked about poetry as if it were a religion, but a plain, hardworking religion in which transcendence would be attained through the daily effort at seeing deeply and transmuting that vision into words. His hair was thick and unwashed; his face pale and puffy, with dark circles under the eyes. Every one of my hungers was engaged: he’d show me the marvels he had discovered in sorrow; he’d let me bathe him. He recognized my avidity (my eyes were like an infant’s hands—sticky from grasping at things to suck). “You with the red sweater and the … cheeks, can you give me an example?”

  The other teachers were too polite to mention my blushing, or the inner state it revealed, so I assumed that Charles, as a poet, was more deeply perceptive than they were, and I blushed worse, watched closer, listened more carefully …

  * * *

  “EDUCATION IS naturally an erotic process,” Philippa said.

  “It is?” I blinked and looked across the desk at her. In my trance, I’d almost forgotten who I was talking to.

  “Of course!” she said, eyebrows slashed in amazement at my ignorance. Everything about her face—thin straight nose, high cheekbones, lips set in amusement or disapproval, and especially those sharp eyebrows—was definite, and her expressions always seemed to telegraph her thoughts precisely.

  “What about schoolmarms, and glasses, and everything?”

  “Have you ever seen Mäedchen in Uniform? The movie about a girl’s school?”

  I shook my head.

  “I think you’d like it.” She laughed a little, rueful and tender, as if she knew all too well what I’d like. “They’re all locked up in this school together, smouldering…”

  I took a quick look at her and rushed back to the subject of Charles’s place on East Third Street. It was nearly without furniture, just like home. There was a waterbed, a park bench to be used as a sofa, an immense red and purple painting that seemed to pulse when we were high, and the mimeograph machine on which Charles printed Walleye, his journal. The apartment was infested with rats and cockroaches instead of mice and chickens, and its oracle was not a woman but a three-dimensional astrological calendar on which the ephemera were meticulously charted in relation to Charles’s own personal cosmology. His boyfriend, Barry, a set designer for an avant-garde theater company, was in and out, carrying the necessary objects for the current production, which centered on a few moments in the life of a geisha, during which she was masturbating in a rain barrel.

  It was not, in short, “a farm.” But, a cocoon—we drifted home from the theater in the middle of the night, amid the stragglers hanging around the Fillmore in hopes of a last glimpse of Janis or Jimi, got high and fell asleep curled together on the waterbed, in our clothes, with the record player set to repeat so Van Morrison was still singing “Caravan” when we stretched in the morning light (the apartment had once been someone’s wide-windowed parlor), and tumbled out onto Second Avenue for a hot bialy from Ratner’s. I have never lived anyplace more benign. I knew I ought to go home, but days passed and I felt too cozy. Then somehow I’d spent my return money on a Burmese llama coat, and safe in the llama’s stench, my own hair as wild and matted as its fur, my glasses looking Ono-ish rather than owlish, settled in for another happy East Village evening.

  “You’re further gone than I am!” Charles had just said, with a mad laugh that had engendered a madder one in me (despite the fact that he’d had five mushrooms and I’d only nibbled the edge of one), when the phone rang. Charles’s face went white as if slapped when he answered it, and he handed it to me.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” my mother asked me, in a voice straight out of a Bosch painting (Charles liked to dazzle me, and the day before, we’d gotten high in the women’s room at the Met so as to try a new perspective).

  “Ma,” I said. “I—”

  “You what? You couldn’t care less about me? There’s no need to explain that, it’s perfectly obvious. Do you know how hard it was to get this number?”

  How had she managed? I tried to remember if I’d told her Charles’s name.

  “How dare you just walk out like that? What were you thinking?”

  “I … I told you I was going,” I protested, feebly.

  “You did not tell me you weren’t coming back!”

  “I was coming back … just…”

  Didn’t want to. But Charles gave me the money for the ticket, and in the station he kissed my forehead and said, “Stay well, my conscious one.”

  A true compliment, and from a Poet-in-the-Schools. When I looked out to wave to him from the train, I saw he was panhandling. He flashed a bill to show me the train fare was no problem, and I fell into a sleep full of magical dreams, as if I’d just left an enchanted forest such as childhood is said to be.

  * * *

  THE COAT frightened people; seeing me in it, they knew I didn’t mind being stared at, so they couldn’t guess what I might do. I was of course the same good girl I’d always been, just trying to be what my mother wanted—flamboyant, beyond the pale. A layered look—hairy coat, timid girl, and then, so deep only a Poet-in-the-Schools could see it: a dragon of ambition, who would singe whatever she breathed on! No wonder my cheeks were blazing. I walked the halls of Wononscopomuc Regional High dogged by the vice principal, who had sniffed out the secret drug references in popular music—the scent of llama meant danger to him.

  These were the times into which I, strange fiddlehead, unfurled: I wore the coat to the weekly peace vigil on our village green. Ma didn’t like it: true, a nation was burning, but then she herself was liable to burst into flame any minute and would I have kept vigil for her? Stricken, frozen, she gave me that mad look and I kept a light, friendly tone and got the hell out, into a cold, clear spring day, the kind that brings everyone out for a demonstration. The flower children arrived in their VWs, the democratic ladies came down the hill in their Volvos, we were all together, we had a clear purpose for once. One of my friends from school brought a thermos of milk and a hash brownie in tin foil, and there we stood on the threshold of life, giggling ever louder. “Please, this is a silent vigil,” the minister’s wife kept saying.

  “Have you ever heard the word love?” I asked, with a delicious combination of insolence and sanctimony, “because that’s what this is supposed to be about.”

  If there was one thing more fun than baiting the vice principal, it was making a liberal chase its righteous little tail!

  Repeating this story for Philippa, I looked up, expecting to see her stern finger pointing toward the door, but she was smiling, with something like glee.

  “There is that,” she said, catching my eye, and there was an air of conspiracy between us suddenly—we’d have liked to build a little cherry bomb together and set it off under some pious ideal. Amazing, to have a meeting of mischief like this, with a teacher.

  After all, education is naturally an erotic process—from the time of Miss McGinty, I had studied in order to bring myself close enough to the teacher that I could catch a hint of her perfume. My high school English teacher, a nice man in Sansabelt slacks, had read Faulkner’s Nobel speech to our class with great feeling, so that I credited him with those sonorous ideals and had set out to consume him. He wanted to go over my midterm paper and help me refine my understanding of verisimilitude, but I rejected the chair he offered me and knelt on the floor at his feet. I could barely keep myself from running my hands up his thighs. He’d inch his chair back, then I’d shuffle, on my knees, a little closer, then the chair would do its little hop, until he was up against the bookcase and decided to lose the verisimilitude and let my peculiar notion of reality stand.

  I did not think of this as a sexual passion—more religious. Education was equivalent to seduction for me; Philippa had, as usual, been right. As soon as I fell in love with the teacher, the book of the subject would fly open and I’d begin to understand. After all, it was the thing this teacher most loved
, and you are what you love. My boyfriend would have read Faulkner aloud to me every night if he’d understood this, but for some reason he saw sex as a physical thing. I was reading modern novels in the hope of learning to fit in with him, with my times. I had no better grasp of Goodbye, Columbus than Madame Bovary, but I could feel it, and it felt so good. The New Jersey heat, the blazing blue suburban swimming pools, the cherries spilling out of the refrigerator … it was all about longing, just like everything else.

  I’d just gotten to the place where Brenda says: “Make love to me on this cruddy, cruddy sofa…” when my mother came into my room with Time magazine rolled up in her hand and said, “If you want to have sex, go to the doctor and get something, but I don’t want to hear anything more about it, do you understand?”

  I did not. I was the age she’d been when she met my father; I hardly understood anything at all. But I nodded vigorously and called the gynecologist first thing in the morning, just as, if she’d offered me a plane ticket, I’d have called TWA. It seemed that the great true danger facing me was my longing for safety and comfort, for the peculiar stillness of home. If I gave in to it, I’d be lost, like my parents. I had to meet the world and let it change me, no matter how much it might hurt.

  “I want to have sex,” I explained to the doctor. He was slightly hard of hearing. His eyes widened and he asked me to repeat myself. I looked past him to the huge needlepoint picture hanging on the wall: a storm at sea. He was working on a new one, of a night-blooming garden. It was folded on his desk.

  I felt embarrassed, but considered this was because of my age and tried to speak up like an adult. “I want to have sex,” I proclaimed, loudly enough now I remembered how my mother had wanted to keep it all for herself.

  He looked weary, as if there were no end to the demands people made on a country doctor.

  “Actually, my boyfriend wants to,” I admitted.

  Relieved, he peered inside me, wrote a prescription, and said in a courtly manner: “Your boyfriend is in luck.”

  Hello, love! I liked sex, it made me feel grown up. I knew, from the movies, that the condition of true adulthood was cold desolation (being accustomed to molten desolation, I mistook the icy sort for maturity and poise), and my boyfriend knew an abandoned house with an unlocked window. I’d stand (gingerly; it was easy to put a foot through the floor) beside the torn curtain in the streetlight, to see how I moved him, before we sank into the old striped mattress together. We were both in love with my body, its happy buoyancy and smoothness, the way you could probe into it for secrets—but I loved it more than he did. Anatomy is destiny; I couldn’t wait to see where mine would take me.

  The silence of sex unnerved me, though, and I was always asking him what he was thinking, while he was sucking my nipple, or when he was just about to come.

  “I’m not thinking,” he’d say, for the fiftieth time. I could not understand this. I’d be thinking of Goodbye, Columbus, their last embrace with the bulk of their winter coats between them, or of Levin in Anna Karenina, beating out the cadence of will you marry me? hoping Kitty would guess the words as they were too precious to be spoken aloud. There I lay, pondering, with a mildewed pillow under my ass to promote deeper penetration. Soon, he’d drive me home and go back to his own house, a neat colonial whose walls his mother had stenciled with grape and wisteria vines: a display of bourgeois enterprise that my mother viewed with absolute scorn.

  Which just made me love him worse: I wanted to climb into his life, share his dinner—Hamburger Helper. I envied his mother’s ironing board.

  At our house, we’d forgotten we’d ever had furniture—we believed we didn’t need any, because we lived in a world of pure feeling and spirit, not crowded with material goods. How cashiers must sneer as they rang up their sales—another poor fool with her hopes pinned on an ironing board. We ironed on a towel spread out on the floor, and tore up old clothing for menstrual rags. We were above things.

  For Ma’s thirty-fifth birthday, Pop bought her a gift, a big, store-wrapped gift such as we had rarely seen. She took it with a wondering smile, praising the paper and ribbon, exclaiming at its weight—it was one of those times when her rages abated and she seemed like a little girl. Opening it, she looked surprised at first—it was a cut crystal punch bowl—but she blinked back her skepticism and smiled up at him, too grateful, her eyes welling. She understood, he was trying to show her that he did love her, that he had all along. She was ready to take him back into her heart, to pour her hopes and griefs out to him finally, to do anything, anything at all for his love’s sake … but that was how it always went: one drop started a flood with her, one spark and the world exploded.

  Pop froze, as one endangered, and became warily casual. When she said, “Why this one? Why a punch bowl?” he shrugged and said the salesman had told him punch bowls were all the rage.

  He must have been as stupid as she said. Or maybe he really was an emotional Nazi, because he could hardly have found a more effective way to remind her what heights he’d fallen from in marrying her.

  “Yes, the Academy girls all drink their punch this way, don’t they?” she said, “punch” coming out as an epithet somehow. “Tell me, how do they pop their pills? I wish to God you’d married an Academy girl, so you could have lived the empty life you were destined for, and left me alone!”

  And out she went through the kitchen door, where, as we gathered at the window, she lifted the bowl over her head and dashed it on the stone path with all her considerable strength.

  It almost seemed to bounce, and Sylvie and I looked at each other with horror, because we barely remembered which were our feelings and which hers … and we knew nothing infuriated her more than things that refused to shatter. On the third try it cracked down the middle and she gave up, looking at it with absolute disgust. Had he deprived her even of this, a full annihilation?

  “Lead crystal is certainly durable,” he remarked, heading upstairs. As if he’d given up on her, on us. Who’d have blamed him? Or her?

  * * *

  “BUT THEY were stuck with each other less out of love than suspense,” I told Philippa. “They wanted to know what would happen.” It was sacrilege to talk about them this way, but Philippa made me bold, and every time she laughed, she reduced their power a little.

  She was shaking her head—“God, these people who want to make sex nice and tidy,” she said. “As if it wasn’t pure unconscious mayhem, just barely under control!”

  “It’s not sex,” I said.

  She darted me an amused look and asked: “No?”

  “No,” I persisted, without certainty. Philippa was always sure of things; she was standing on her father’s solid brick foundation.

  The 1972 election—Pop stuck with Nixon, Ma was a Democrat in a micromini. As it was ten miles to the polls, they agreed not to vote; they’d only cancel each other out. At a quarter to eight, when he went up the back path to shut the chickens in for the night, I saw the old Jeep fishtail out of the front driveway and peel out down the dirt road. Pop just sat at the kitchen table and laughed.… It was November, of course, but Ma’s defiance felt like spring in the air. She was going to chop a hole in the wall around our family and let us out, blinking, into the light.

  And then it was 1973 and I was standing, in my llama skin coat, at the edge of an abyss. Watergate was seeping out into view, and, Pop having meant to vote for Nixon, Ma was now able to trace a direct line from Hitler to the White House, and now she who had disdained the television realized it was our civic responsibility to learn from it every nuance of Republican depravity.

  “Never forget,” she intoned. They decided, finally, to divorce, put the house up for sale, go forward in some new way. But at the first breezy phone call, announcing a prospective buyer, Ma’s face went white, and the next thing I knew, she was backing down the hill with a handful of cracked corn, to lure the chickens into the house. She would keep her family sheltered and whole, until such time as she cared to destroy it
.

  My father showed me the doomsday clock on the cover of Harper’s. Four minutes to nuclear destruction, did I understand? We live to no purpose. Even the dearest hope, realized, would be dust soon enough, so why bother? Have another! Live to enjoy! The ping-pong ball orders piled up but he wasn’t in the mood to fill them. He was in the mood to plan a family trip to the Seychelles. He believed in existential hedonism, not existential despair.

  “We’ll be together, we’ll really have gotten away from it all,” he said, leaning back in his low chair, pushing his dinner plate away. He didn’t look at us; he wanted to imagine us rapt at his idea, though it seemed to me he was inviting us into his grave. He didn’t see that we were growing up, we were going to go away and start our own lives. Or maybe he saw it quite clearly. “Curieuse, for instance, was a leper colony until the middle of the century,” he said. “Now the population is—well—it’s mostly sea turtles. We’d have the place completely to ourselves, wouldn’t have to see another soul except when we went into Mahé for provisions once a month.”

  His fingers were laced behind his head, and he was smiling with perfect satisfaction and closed eyes. Sylvie and Dolly were pretending to wash their hair under a waterfall. My heart beat like it was about to be caged. Any day now I was going to be a woman, one of those utterly alluring creatures you saw in the movies, so soft and beautiful that love protected them everywhere they went. But he wanted to take me where there would be no one to love me, and if I said I didn’t want to go, he’d count it as a betrayal, a new reason to despise me.

  “And the world could do what it wanted,” he finished. “As long as we had a source of fresh water, we could live for months there, for years.”

  I dreamed that night of a strange, ragged boy from school, a boy who, being an outcast, struck me somehow as kin. He just barely touched his mouth to mine, and at this shock I woke with the ancient cry in my throat and a great electrical tree branching along my nerves, and I understood finally about sexual desire, and what my boyfriend had been “thinking” all that time. A door sprang open, into a magical world, the world of dreams that had always been there, in those summer evenings thick with fireflies, in the cold swirl of the rain-swollen brook over the stones.… It had been there, but I’d known it only as a picture, not a dimension. One entered it (of course!) through touch.