Read The Summer Without Men Online
Authors: Siri Hustvedt
Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #Contemporary Women
With the exception of myself, there wasn’t a woman in the room under seventy-five. The two schoolteachers, three housewives, and part-time greeting card wit may all have been born in the Land of Opportunity, but that opportunity had been heavily dependent on the character of their private parts. I remembered my mother’s words: “I always thought I’d go on and get at least a master’s degree, but there was so little time and not enough money.” A sudden image of my mother at the kitchen table with her French grammar book came back to me, her lips moving as she silently repeated the verb conjugations to herself.
Harville brings out the BIG GUNS to refute Anne, albeit in a highly civil manner.
“… I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman’s inconstancy. Song and proverbs, all talk of woman’s fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men.”
“Perhaps I shall.—Yes, yes, if you please, no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.”
Of course, the pen that inscribed those words was in Austen’s hand, and a neat hand it was, too. The woman’s handwriting had all the clarity and precision of her prose. And the pen, as it were, Dear Reader, is now in my hand, and I am claiming the advantage, taking it for myself, for you will notice that the written word hides the body of the one who writes. For all you know, I might be a MAN in disguise. Unlikely, you say, with all this feminist prattle flying out here and there and everywhere, but can you be sure? Daisy had a feminist professor at Sarah Lawrence, most decidedly a man, married, too, with children and a Yorkie, and on the rampage for women, a noble defender of the second sex. Mia might really be Morton for all you know. I, your own personal narrator, might be wearing a pseudonymous mask.
But back to our story: Not surprisingly, the women of Rolling Meadows are in Anne’s corner. Even our Peg of Permanent Sunshine allows that there were times at home with her five “wonderful children” when she longed for some diversion, when
her
feelings preyed upon
her,
and then, in a moment of startling revelation, the resident optimist confesses that there had been days when she had been “pretty darned tired and blue,” and that in her experience far more men have the gift for forgetting women than women have for forgetting men. Weren’t they the ones who turned around and got married just months after their wives “passed away”? (I suppressed comment that Boris hadn’t even waited for me to die.)
Betty offers humorous quote: “I am woman. I am invincible. I am pooped!”
Laughter.
Rosemary notes the exception to the rule of women waiting, pining, hoping: Regina.
Titters.
My mother rises to fellow Swan’s defense: “She had fun, though!”
Abigail nods, regards my mother lovingly, and says in a loud, if hoarse voice, “Who’s to say we shouldn’t all have had more fun!”
Who is to say? Not I surely. Not my mother, not Dorothy, not Betty, not Rosemary, not even Peg, although the latter proffers the buoyant comment that they are having fun, well, aren’t they, right now, at this “very minute”? And the
carpe diem
sentiment does, in fact, brighten the entire room, if not literally, then figuratively.
After that, there was some pleased nodding, some silent sipping, and some tangents onto the movie being shown in the screening room at seven,
It Happened One Night,
followed by some mooning over Clark Gable and chatter about how films used to be so much better and, good grief, what had happened? I volunteered that Hollywood films were now made exclusively for fourteen-year-old boys, an audience of limited sophistication, which had drained the movies of even the hope of sprightly dialogue. Farts, vomit, and semen had taken its place.
I seated myself beside Abigail then and held her hand for a little while. She asked me to come see her. The request was not casual. She had some urgent business to discuss, and it had to happen in the next couple of days. I promised, and Abigail began the protracted rigors of pulling her walker toward her, getting herself into a standing position, and then moving, one small, careful step after another, toward her apartment.
Within minutes, the book club was over. And it had ended before I could say that there is no human subject outside the purview of literature. No immersion in the history of philosophy is needed for me to insist that there are NO RULES in art, and there is no ground under the feet of the Nitwits and Buffoons who think that there are rules and laws and forbidden territories, and no reason for a hierarchy that declares “broad” superior to “narrow” or “masculine” more desirable than “feminine.” Except by prejudice there is no sentiment in the arts banned from expression and no story that cannot be told. The enchantment is in the feeling and in the telling, and that is all.
* * *
Daisy sent this:
Hi, Mom. Dinner with Dad was okay. He seems a little better. He was shaved at least. I think he’s really, really embarrassed. He said he hoped that you would be able to see his “interlude” for what it was. He also mentioned “temporary insanity.” I said that’s what you had, and he said, maybe he had it, too. Mom, I think he’s sincere. It’s been awful for me to have you two against each other, you know. Love and kisses, Daisy
And yet, I could not leap at Daisy’s father. As I meditated on our story, I understood that there were multiple perspectives from which it could be viewed. Adultery is both ordinary and forgivable, as is the rage of the betrayed spouse. We are not unworldly, are we? I had endured my own French farce, starring my fickle, inconstant husband. Was it not time “to forgive and forget,” to use that inveterate cliche?” Forgiveness is one thing, forgetfulness another. I could not induce amnesia. What would it mean to live with Boris and the memory of the Pause or Interlude? Would it now be different between us? Would anything change? Can people change? Did I want it to be the same as it had been? Could it be the same? I would never forget the hospital. BRAIN SHARDS. For better or for worse, I had become so entwined with Boris that his departure had ruptured me, sent me screaming into the asylum. And wasn’t the fear I had felt old, the fear of rejection, of disapproval, of being unlovable, a fear that may be older even than my explicit memory? For months, I had drowned in anger and grief, but over the summer my mind had unconsciously, incrementally begun to change. Dr. S. had seen it. (How I missed her, by the way.) Reading Daisy’s letter, I felt those subliminal, not yet articulated thoughts rise upward, form sentences, and lodge themselves securely somewhere between my temples:
Some part of me had been getting used to the idea that Boris was gone forever.
No one could have been more shocked than I by this revelation.
* * *
And now the curtain must rise on the following Monday, when seven uncomfortable girls and a poet, laboring to hide her own anxiety, sat around a table at the Arts Guild. A torpor seemed to have taken hold of all seven young bodies, as if an invisible but potent gas had been unleashed in the room and was swiftly putting them all to sleep. Peyton had folded her arms on the table and laid her head down. Joan and Nikki, seated side by side as always, sat in heavy silence, eye-lined lids cast downward. Jessie, elbows propped on the table surface, rested her chin in her hands, a vacuous expression on her face. Emma, Ashley, and Alice all appeared limp with exhaustion.
I looked at each of them for a moment and, on a sudden impulse, burst out singing. I sang them Brahms’s lullaby in German: “
Guten Abend, gute Nacht, mit Rosen bedacht…”
I don’t have a sweet voice but my ear is good, and I let the vibrato go so it sounded suitably absurd. The look of surprise and confusion on their faces made me laugh. They did not laugh with me, but at least they had been rattled out of their fatigue. It was time for my speech, and I made it. The gist of it was that a single story with seven characters can also be seven stories, depending on the identity of the narrator. Every character will regard the same events in her own way and will have somewhat different motives for her actions. Our task was to make sense of a true story. I had given it a title: “The Coven.” This was met with a round of wordless murmurs. We would meet every day this week to make up for the lost classes. Today each girl would read her text and we would talk about it, but in the following four days, we would trade places and write the story from the point of view of someone else. Jessie would become Emma, for example, and Joan, Alice, and Jessie, Ashley, and I, Nikki, and so on. Eyes widened, worried looks exchanged across the table. By the end of the week, we would have a story authored by the entire class. The trick was, we would have to agree, more or less, on the content.
To be honest, I had no idea whether this would work. It was not without its risks. Note: The now famous psychology experiment at Stanford in 1971. A group of young men, all college students, took on the roles of either prisoners or guards. Within hours the guards began tormenting their prisoners and the experiment was stopped. The theater of cruelty made real? Performance becomes the person? How malleable were the seven?
I began with a short summary of my experience: my suspicions during class, my bafflement about the Kleenex, and my dim awareness that some plot was cooking. I also mentioned my involvement in a similar story as a girl. I did not say which role I had played. You, friend out there, will mostly be spared the tedium of early adolescent prose; it is worse than the poetry. (Not one child chose to describe the hex scandal in verse.) Suffice it to say that the clumsy and often ungrammatical narrations were not harmonious. After every reading, the refrains “I never said that!” “It was your idea, not mine!” “That’s not how it was at all!” rang out loudly. Some of the tiffs were of no importance, when and where and who. “You put the dead cricket in the formula, not me!” “Ask my mom. She saw you coming out of the bathroom with blood running down your arm, remember?” Nevertheless, there were recurring justifications for the plot: They had all liked Alice at first, but then, as time went on, she had distinguished herself in ways they didn’t like. She had been Mr. Abbot’s “pet” in history class and was always raising her hand with the answer. She bought her clothes in Minneapolis in a
department
store, not at the Bonden mall. She read all the time, which was “boring.” Ashley’s synopsis included the fact that Alice had been given a starring role in the school play, and after this “lucky break,” she had metamorphosed into “a big snob.” What had begun as a “little fun” among the conspiratorial witches to “get back at Alice” had somehow, mysteriously, run wild, of its own accord. There were no agents in this version of the story, just currents of feeling, very much like spells, that had pulled the girls hither and yon. Bea and I used to have a phrase when we were growing up that described such actions well: “accidentally on purpose.” When I mentioned this, there were sheepish smiles all around, except of course from Alice, who was hard at work scrutinizing the table’s surface.
She read last. Despite the ugliness of the tale she had to tell, the girl had cast herself as its heroine in the mode of Jane Eyre or David Copperfield, those wronged orphans I had loved so much when I was her age, and she had worked hard on the story. Heavily adjectival and hyperbolic though it was, and not free of diction errors (“torturous” for “tortured”), it articulated both her intense need to be inside the group and the agony of being an outcast. Listening to her, I guessed that although her dramatis persona would not endear her to all the members of the Coven, finding it had been a boon for her. The victim came out well in her version of events, if only because Alice had dressed up her alter ego in gothic conventions that had been conveniently aided by the memorable storm that had cracked the heavens as I lay in bed that night in June. Apparently, while “hanging out” at Jessie’s house, the girls had jointly decided not to look at or answer Alice when she spoke, to behave as if she were both invisible and inaudible. After half an hour of this treatment, our heroine had escaped into the “pelting rain, weeping violently, her hair whipping in the wind” while “lightning flashed crooked in the sky.” When she arrived home, this tragic creature was “soaked to the skin and frozen to her bones with crazily chattering teeth.” Although Alice may not have enjoyed the Coven’s version of Meidung, she had certainly taken pleasure in writing about it. Alice the literary character served a redemptive function for just plain Alice, who was going into the seventh grade. Her narrative ended with the words “Never before have I felt such deep, unbearable despair.”
I did not smile. I remembered.
Poor Peyton, whose remorse was already in full bloom, cried and blew her nose.
Jessie did not look at Alice, but she apologized in a mortified whisper.
Nikki and Joan wriggled with unease.
Ashley and Emma remained implacable.
I sent them off with their assignments. I gave Ashley and Alice to each other, paired Peyton and Joan, Nikki and Emma, and because seven is uneven, I took Jessie for myself, and she was given the task of writing as the mostly ignorant poetry teacher.
* * *
Boris wooed.
Mia,
I was just a fat-headed guy full of pain.
Boris
(Reference: T. R. Devlin, played by Cary Grant, to Alicia Huberman, played by Ingrid Bergman, near the end of
Notorious
. The hero is, if I remember correctly, carrying his drugged-by-poison beloved down the stairs when he makes this remark. Boris and I had seen the film at least seven times together, and every time B.I. had become tearful over this succinct explanation for Mr. Devlin’s genuinely wretched treatment of the divine Miss Huberman. I was not unmoved by this bit of wooing. No, I won’t hedge: I was moved. It would never do to replace Cary with Boris or me with Ingrid. When I imagine my slightly rotund in the middle, bespectacled neuroscientist puffing and groaning as he bears frizzy-headed fifty-five-year-old versifier down enormous Hollywood staircase, the illusion is lost. But that is not the point. We must all allow ourselves the fantasy of projection from time to time, a chance to clothe ourselves in the imaginary gowns and tails of what has never been and never will be. This gives some polish to our tarnished lives, and sometimes we may choose one dream over another, and in the choosing find some respite from ordinary sadness. After all, we, none of us, can ever untangle the knot of fictions that make up that wobbly thing we call a self.)
* * *
From Bea, after having been informed of the Boris/Mia developments:
Just remember, Baby Huey, we all screw up. Love, B.
* * *
From Nobody, finally:
Kidney stones.
Poor Mr. Nobody, my high-flying partner in dialogue, had been brought down by those excruciating pebbles. I wished him a swift recovery.
* * *
I had learned to wait for some time after knocking for Abigail to appear at the door. My visits had been fairly regular. I had gone either alone or with my mother, and we had both worried about our mutual friend since her fall. She seemed to dwindle daily, and yet, the force of her personality remained strong. In fact, what attracted me to Abigail was her rigidity. This is not usually regarded as a desirable feature in human beings, but in her it seemed to have developed as resistance to a particular midwestern ethos of frightened conformity. Abigail had sewn and embroidered and appliquéd in quiet but adamant insurrection. I now knew the story of Private Gardener. She had married him on an impulse just before he headed off for the Pacific, but when he returned after the war, he brought the war back with him. Plagued by nightmares, fits of rage, and bouts of ferocious drinking to the point of unconsciousness, the man who had come home bore little resemblance to the boy she had vowed to “love, honor, and obey,” but then, as she put it, “I didn’t really know him from a hole in the wall to begin with.” One day, to her immense relief, her spouse went AWOL. A year later, she received a letter of contrition from the ex-soldier asking her to join him in Milwaukee. Because the very thought of it turned her “cold as an ice cube,” Abigail refused, asked for a divorce, and the grade school art teacher was born.
Her mother had taught her to embroider, but it wasn’t until after her marital debacle that she had joined the sewing group, understood that “she needed to do it,” and her double life began. Over the years she had created many works, both conventional and subversive or, as she put it, “the real ones” and the “fakes.” She sold the fakes. One by one, she had been showing me the real ones, and the strangeness of Abigail’s project had become more and more apparent. Not all of them were spiteful or sexual in nature. There was an embroidery of delicate mosquitoes in various sizes, replete with traces of blood; a joyous image of a figure straight out of
Gray’s Anatomy,
organs exposed but dancing; another of a gargantuan woman taking a bite out of the moon; a large and oddly poignant tablecloth that featured women’s underclothing: a corset, bloomers, a chemise, stockings, panty hose, a thick brassiere of the old style, a girdle with garter belt, and a baby doll nightgown; and there was a remarkable portrait sewn into a pillow in tiny crosshatch stitches she had done years before of herself in a chair weeping. The tears were sequins.
When she opened the door, my friend looked tiny. The tremor had gone to her head, and her chin wobbled as she stood in front of me. She was beautifully attired in narrow black pants and a black blouse covered with red roses. Her short sparse hair was combed behind her ears, and through the lenses of her narrow glasses her eyes were as intensely focused as I had ever seen them.
That afternoon, Abigail and I made arrangements. She reclined on her sofa and spoke to me about her death. She had no one but a niece, a dear woman, but she would never understand the amusements. “She’ll get my money, what there is of it.” She then quoted a line from my first book of poems:
We were mad for miracles and ships with lace
. “That’s us, Mia,” she said. “We’re two peas in a pod.” I was flattered even though I was forced to see us round and green in the pod on a kitchen counter. Then she abruptly shifted metaphors, from the organic to the mechanical: “I’m an alarm clock, Mia, ready to go off, and when I do, there’ll be no going back. I hear myself ticking.” She had made it all legal in her will, she said. I was to have the secret amusements and do with them whatever I wanted. The papers were in the top drawer of her small desk. I should know. The key could be found in the little Limoges egg box, and I was to take it out now and open her drawer; there wasething she had to show me, a photograph slipped inside a manila envelope right on the top.
Two young women wearing tuxedos are standing with their arms over each other’s shoulders, grinning, one dark, whom I guessed had to be Abigail, and one blond. The blonde has a cigarette in her right hand. They look giddy and jaunty and careless and enviable.
Abigail lifted her head. Then she nodded. She nodded for several seconds before she spoke. “She had the same name as your mother. Her name was Laura. I loved her. We were in New York. It was nineteen thirty-eight.”
Abigail smiled. “Hard to believe that whippersnapper is me, huh?”
“No,” I said, “it’s not hard at all.”
When I embraced her before I left, I felt her bones under the rose-covered shirt, and they felt no larger than chicken bones, my Abigail, who couldn’t sit up straight anymore, who had the shakes and had once loved a girl named Laura in New York City in 1938, a remarkable woman, an art teacher for children and an artist, an artist who knew her Bible. The last thing she said to me was: “He shall come down like rain upon the mown grass: as showers that water the earth.” Psalm 72:6.
* * *
Being the other is the dance of the imagination. We are nothing without it. Shout it! Shimmy, kick your heels, and leap. That was my pedagogy, my philosophy, my credo, my slogan, and the girls were trying. I can say that for them. Their “I”s had been scrambled, and they worked to find the meaning that comes with another role, another body, another family, another place. Their success varied, but that was to be expected.
Jessie as Mia wrote, “I had some kind of feeling about the girls’ problems, but they didn’t tell me. I remembered going into seventh grade and the messy stuff that happened to me, but it was a long, long, long time ago…” (Fair enough.)
Peyton as Joan wrote, “I’ve been Nikki’s best friend since first grade and I basically do what she does. When I saw she wasn’t afraid to cut herself, I decided to do it, too, even though I felt pretty yucky about it.”
Joan as Peyton: “I want to be a cool girl, but I’m immature. I like sports better, and I went along with doing bad things to Alice on account of I wanted to be cool.”
Nikki as Emma: “I suck up to Ashley because I think she can make me feel better about myself and it’s fun to be around her because she doesn’t really care about getting into trouble. When she decided to make me swallow that part of the dead mouse’s tail, I did it, even though it was disgusting. I’m like her slave. She dares people and I like falling for the dares. My little sister has muscular dystrophy and it worries me a lot so being with my friends and doing stupi things helps me not think about it.”
Emma as Nikki wrote, “I like showing off and acting wild, dressing up in black clothes, putting on crazy makeup that makes my mom upset. Being mean to Alice was a way to show off.”
Ashley wrote, “I’m Alice, Miss Perfect. I like Chicago because it’s a big city with lots of stores and museums and my mom escorted me to those artsy, fartsy places and now we can’t go anymore. I used to be Ashley’s friend, but I think I’m too sophisticated for her. I’m an only child and my parents spoil me, buying me expensive clothes and sending me to ballet in St. Paul. I use words the other kids don’t know just to make them feel stupid. I’m so moral I don’t know how to have any fun, and I look all hurt and weepy whenever somebody says the tiniest little thing. If I hadn’t been such a wimp, the girls wouldn’t have been able to do anything to me.”
Alice wrote: “I hate Alice because she was Charlene in the play. It made me putrid with jealousy. She didn’t comprehend my deceit, and that made it smooth for me, as smooth as jelly from the jar. I could feign to like her, but injure her violently behind her back. My brothers and sisters are always kicking and hitting each other, slamming doors, and my house is a huge mess, and I have to take meds for a mood disorder, and my mom is always yelling at me for not taking them…”
Recriminations, disavowals, and gasps punctuated the entire hour, but the fact that Ashley had assigned her own disorder, whatever it was, to Alice was by far the most disquieting revelation. Neither Alice nor Ashley had been able to penetrate each other’s psyches or find any mutual sympathy, but when Alice, unknowingly or knowingly, let go of Ashley’s secret, all the girls were quiet until Peyton yelled, “But Ashley, you said Alice had a mood disorder, not you.” The trick of trading first-person subjects had doubled back on itself. Ashley, it seemed, had already been playing the game.
* * *
1. I will check the refrigerator for juice and milk and remember to buy them if we are low.
2. I will promise to read
Middlemarch
all the way through. (That goes for
The Golden Bowl,
too.)
3. I will not interrupt you when you are writing.
4. I will talk to you more.
5. I will learn to cook something besides eggs.
6. I will love you.
<Boris
I read the list several times. To be frank, I did not believe the first five. That would require a revolution of the sort I had ceased to believe in. My world turned on number six, because, you see, Boris had loved me. He had loved me for a long time and the question was not so much whether he meant it—I believed he meant it—but whether there was self-delusion at work. Could he really leave his explosive Interlude behind him or would her phantom be in residence with us for the rest of our days? But worse, if Boris had lurched out the door once, what would prevent him from doing it again? When I replied, that was exactly what I asked him.
* * *
Regina returned to Rolling Meadows, but not to the independent-living quarters. She was placed in a special unit on the other side of the grounds for Alzheimer’s patients, even though she hadn’t been diagnosed with the disease. After “the incident,” the powers that be (mostly benevolent, but by no means infinitely tolerant) had made the decision that she could not be trusted. She had to be watched. My mother and I found her sitting in a small bare room—nearly identical to my own hospital room at Payne Whitney but with no view of the East River—on a grim cot with a blue cover, her beautiful long white hair disheveled and hanging around her face. When my mother walked through the door, Regina cried out, “Laura!” and stretched her arms out for her friend. The two hugged each other and then, still in the embrace, rocked back and forth for a minute or so. When they separated, Regina looked at me as if she were searching, and I realized that the fallen Swan had forgotten my name, possibly my entire being, but my mother rescued her comrade by identifying me as soon as she understood that I was missing from Regina’s mental storehouse.
The two women talked, but Regina talked more. She chattered about her ordeal—the tests, the kind doctor and the nasty one, the endless questions about presidents and the time of year and could she feel this pinprick and on and on. She broke down and blubbered but recovered quickly and within seconds began to wax nostalgic. Hadn’t it been wonderful on the other side, in Independent? She had her apartment there with all her “lovely things,” and they had been only a short walk away from each other, and oh my dear, the spider plant, had anyone watered it? And now look at her, in exile with “the crazies” and the people who “drooled and peed and dirtied their pants.” If only she could get back to the other side. I saw my mother open her mouth and then close it. If Regina wanted to remember the “home” she had detested as a paradise, who was she to destroy the illusion? As we were leaving, the old woman lifted her head, tossed back her messy locks, and beamed. She blew kisses to us and sang out in a high brittle voice, “Come back, Laura. Won’t you? I’ve missed you terribly. You will remember to come back.”