by Lorraine Ray
Did I hop up? Did I blurt out "goodness!" in a surprised mousy squeak? Was it really me scrambling ecstatically on my hands and knees across the floor to the battered cardboard box where she kept them? And is that my voice I hear raving on and on, calling them the sweetest, most darling little things, pressing them in pairs against my cheeks?
Somebody should have clobbered me over the head. Somebody should have put me out of my misery. Maureen, as I recall, simply stared. But did I notice the frosty look she fixed on me? Apparently not. I played with them. With her kittens. At a consciousness raising forty years ago I lavishly and tenderly nuzzled teeny meowing kittens.
Raucous were the chuckles that rocked me over and the hearty teary guffaws that I later experienced whenever I remembered that consciousness raising I went to in 1971. Between sips of steaming oolong, with a friend hearing my tale, I would screech: "Comic!" "Misadventure!" Or managed: "Such a boob!" The absurdity of that consciousness raising, of my actions and the actions of my weird host, amused nearly everyone I told. How could I know then what I know now: that the single painful visit of slightly more than an hour's duration portended worse things to come. After twelve years of torment and a failed marriage, that consciousness raising haunts me, horrifies me now, for had I truly awakened then I would have been spared so much. Those are eerie things, the future consequences, the coincidences, and the pairing of past incidents.
I'll blame it on youth, for I was scarcely sixteen at the beginning of my story when I sat late one afternoon in my parents' home. As it was an Arizona afternoon in June I spent it indoors with the curtains drawn and the air conditioner on high. In that cool, cavernous environment throughout the long summer months I intended to read the world's great literary works, though I had been out of school a week and hadn't begun yet, to teach myself Latin and Greek, and to become an expert appraiser of art.
"Do you want anything from the grocery?" my mother asked on her way out the door.
"Oh, nothing in particular. Nothing I can think of," I said, perching on the piano bench in our living room. What I really needed was a European education, a visit to one decent art museum, thousands of Cliff Notes, and access to a library with more than the collected works of Owen Wister. None of this was available at Food Giant.
"Suit yourself," Mother said, closing the door. I listened vaguely as her car crunched the fan of turquoise gravel on the drive in front of our small 1950s, ranch-styled tract home. Freedom. The summer of accomplishments could begin. But which of my many challenging tasks should I take up first? I was stymied when the phone rang and I picked it up.
"Je voidrais le parle de femmes importante cette. Quelle?" These extraordinary words, or something like them, greeted me.
My heart began to pump as though a harrow were passing over it again and again. "Huh?" I managed.
"Je pardonnent parle femmes importante y cette?"
Gibberish. I could read the French language, but I was utterly hopeless hearing it spoken by a living person who wasn't recorded on a cassette in the attitude of an overindulgent uncle speaking to a four-year-old. "I'm sorry, I can't-"
"Forget it," said a woman, cutting me off. "Am I speaking to Brenda Bennett?"
"Yes."
"I'm calling on behalf of a group of activist women. We plan to begin an Arizona branch of the Chicago Women's Liberation Union. We hope to hold feminist consciousness raising. There are over 100,000 women nationwide participating in consciousness raising meetings. One of our members mentioned your name-possibly-as a new member. Our next meeting is this Saturday at one. Do you think you can attend?"
"Yeah sure. I guess so."
The caller gave me the address. I hung up and immediately shouted a war whoop. How thrilling! A phone call from a French-speaking intellectual. I wondered what a consciousness raising meant; the term was fairly new then. Would it do me a great deal of good? Needless to say, little was done toward my self-improvement that day; I bounced off the walls instead.
As the week went on and the event approached, however, I began to have real doubts. A consciousness raising sounded a little scary, what was I supposed to do? Who would be there? I wished I had asked the mysterious caller more questions. And when I looked up the address that I'd been given, I saw that I was being sent to a home in the Davidson Addition, a very wealthy subdivision of old adobe mansions. Impressing someone who lived there seemed far-fetched when the most common reaction to me at high school was outright prolonged laughter. Ordinary people thought me stuffy and peculiar, wealthy people thought me poorly educated and goofy. If the invitation wasn't a mistake, could it be a cruel hoax? The whole thing was vaguely discomforting.
But on the day itself, bravely dismissing my fears, I told my mother I was shopping at Sav-Co and left for the feminist consciousness raising. After a baking trek through scalding cul-de-sacs, there remained a large squalid patch of desert to cross. Past the rusty carcass of a truck and above the prismatic glare of a fine pavement of broken bottles, I finally saw the high ground of the Davidson Addition. Nearing the address, I was amazed to discover that I had been sent to what was unquestionably the largest mansion, one resembling an immense disintegrating wedding cake. The sheer bulk of the white tower on the north end staggered me. Inside the mansion's outer walls, a black Lincoln straddled the drive. There were no other cars. Though this relieved some of my anxiety, I was still intimidated; the porch light had been left on all night, and a huge moth clung to the screen door quite near the bell. I hated moths and stood watching it, weighing my dread of the soft fat moth body against my concern that someone inside the house might see me acting oddly. At last I crept onto the porch and felt for the bell while holding my body well away from the moth. The chimes reverberated solemnly inside and I was wishing the sound were more muffled in order to reveal any approaching footsteps, when the door opened and a hectic man, a woman, and the moth shot past me without the slightest acknowledgement. "Maureen," the woman said curtly to someone in the house, "one of your little friends is here. Do try and deal with the mess in the kitchen." The man and woman slipped into the Lincoln, the solid doors thumping with the finality of a vacuum seal, the tires spinning a stinging barrage of dust at me as the car tore away.
I was stunned. Were these French intellectuals? Surely the woman was a parent speaking to a child. And then the answer came to me. The name Maureen could mean Maureen Maywood, a fellow high school student, a terrifying girl from my fifth period French class the prior school year. Maureen conjugated the French language without error, never mispronounced anything, and received such perfect grades that she'd been exempted from the final exam. Maureen and I traveled in different leagues intellectually. Though only sixteen herself, she exhibited distressing symptoms of a lifetime spent actually knowing things. I, on the other hand, specialized in mnemonic devices. Given her obvious superiority, I was uncertain whether to stay or return home as quickly as possible.
The issue was decided for me. The hazy figure of Maureen materialized behind the screen door. She wore a purple tie-dyed caftan and Fry boots; her long black hair, having just been washed, hung in a frazzled mass, and a squint troubled her goat-like, gray-green eyes.
"Hello Maureen. Is everyone in the backyard?"
"Since you're here, you may as well stay," she said, shoving the screen door open in my face.
"I'm sorry," I said, mincing my way around the screen. "Am I here at the wrong time? Wasn't the consciousness raising today at one?" I edged past her into the dark house. An icy air-conditioned downdraft raised goose bumps on my arms and legs, and I became temporarily blind, a common condition when coming indoors in Arizona in June.
"I should have realized when I called you that the turnout would be abysmal," said Maureen. She shut the door. "Of course everyone wanted to hear Plath read at Kachina Hall."
Not knowing what she referred to, I changed the subject. "How many people are here?" I asked, peering around, groping for a guiding wall.
"You're the first," said Maureen. She vanis
hed through a swinging door.
I followed her and found myself in the Maywood kitchen. Under a ceiling of fidgety fluorescence there were piles and piles of dirty plates. I watched Maureen chose a single red apple from the foggy depths of a sliding vegetable drawer in the bottom of the refrigerator. As she casually slumped away, I trotted after her, noting a thick volume of Rabelais in French beside the toaster. I suddenly remembered that Maureen's mother was a published French translator, and I sighed, yearning for just such an intellectual home life, though I was rather glad my middle class mother cleaned up after herself.
Chaos in the form of horsehair sofas and overstuffed ottomans greeted me in the vast Maywood den; I had difficulty keeping up as Maureen zigzagged ahead. When she suddenly plopped onto a rocking chair, I spun around in a frantic search for a suitable seat. I picked a nearby sofa. It wasn't long before I regretted my choice, horsehair having an undesirable quality when one is wearing shorts.
While I suffered prickly tickles on my thighs and calves, and nervously awaited more company, Maureen rocked herself, content to munch her apple. Her eyes had a creepy, smug look, exactly resembling a horned toad lounging atop an anthill. Under half-closed lids, she seemed to be studying me and, in evil glimmers, laughing. Flinching at the unwelcome scrutiny, I comforted myself with the thought that my mysterious benefactor would arrive soon. After a few minutes the silence between us became embarrassing, so I made small talk-mostly about school. When Maureen replied in monosyllables, I concluded that she was angry. "I'm sorry if you stayed here for me. You probably wanted to go to the reading instead, but I'm sure the others are on their way."
"Perhaps," said Maureen to her apple. "On the other hand maybe nobody but you will bother coming." With a sharp flick of her wrist she turned the apple and bit it.
"Oh. I'm sorry," I said. I didn't like the way she said "you," and it shocked me to hear that the person who had nominated me might stay away. "Did you say a lot of the women you invited went to hear Plath read out loud? I've heard of her-Plath-didn't she write The Glass Jar or something?"
Maureen, her mouth agape over the apple like a snake's jaw dislocated before its prey, halted the chair in mid-rock. "You mean The Bell Jar."
I grinned at my mistake. "Oh yeah. Same thing."
She studied me with real disgust. "No. There's an idea incorporated in the title. If you think they're the same, you may as well call her book The Peanut Butter Jar or The Big Bread Box."
I chuckled.
Maureen rolled her eyes and emphatically snorted. She tossed her apple in a wastebasket; the fruit had become an hourglass-shaped corpse. "I suppose you've never read it."
"Well, actually, somebody told me it's pretty good."
"You've heard it's pretty good," Maureen said in a mocking tone. "You don't hear Plath is good. You've got to read her. Come on." She launched herself out of the rocking chair. I stayed on the sofa, my hands in my lap, and cringed as she stomped by. "Shouldn't we wait for the others?" I asked, leaning forward, my body willing her to return. "Can we hear the doorbell from there?"
Frowning, at a loss for what to do or say next, I studied the high, beamed ceiling made of saguaro cacti ribs and an enormous, apocalyptic oil painting of an erupting Mexican volcano. In the painting, screaming peasants with their backs aflame fled a fiery caldron. Somehow at that moment that world seemed rather inviting.
"When the others arrive we'll want to be able to hear the doorbell," I ventured plaintively. "Maureen?"
I got up.
"Maureen? We'll want to hear the others when they come." I crept across the room toward the threshold where Maureen had disappeared. Summoning all my courage, I discreetly peeked around the doorjamb and found myself inches from Maureen's scathing face.
"It's twenty minutes until two o'clock," she said in a withering whisper. "I think we can safely assume they're not coming."
"Not coming-?"
"We're going to have to stay in my room, so I'll loan you my personal copy of The Bell Jar." She spun around and pounded up a flight of stairs.
I hesitated, then followed. "Why do we have to stay in your room?"
"Because my stupid parents let my stupid brother come back from the Desert Arbor, that's why."
The Desert Arbor? That was a reformatory!
Trailing Maureen through a high-ceilinged hallway on the second floor, I glanced into a bedroom where a huge adolescent male with corpuscular acne saw us and shouted, "Brought home another palsy-walsy?"
"Drop dead!" Maureen yelled, charging back to kick his doorjamb.
My chest throbbed; I was hardly breathing. "How did he end up at The Arbor?"
"Attempted suicide, threatened murder, and beat up the idiotic bag full of God called my father." She ushered me majestically into her room. "That's from Plath. The bag full of God part, I mean. You'll read it, of course. Plath hated her father, and I hate mine." Maureen slammed the door and immediately leaped on a step stool and stretched her arm toward a spot in the towering shelves of books. "There are frequent references to this hatred of her father in The Bell Jar. Watch for them when you're reading and jot them down. Then we'll discuss what you find. The Bell Jar is an important book for you to get acquainted with right away," she said, half to herself. As I watched Maureen gliding her hand back and forth in front of the shelves, I saw her lips moving, and I had the uncomfortable feeling she was devising a whole series of books and lectures to educate me. Given time to think, it was becoming clear that Maureen had planned the feminist consciousness raising herself; there was no group of activist women and no woman-other than Maureen-who had nominated me. The whole thing was depressingly similar to a detective club, called The Secret Eye Club, which I had unsuccessfully tried to organize when I was eight. I felt a twinge of pity for Maureen. Well, now she had me and I was going to be an interesting experiment for her; she was going to be my same-sex Professor Higgins, or my mesmerizing Svengali. "Voila!" She pounced on a thin paperback.
"Ah," I said when she handed me it. Reverently I cradled the book and nodding, backed onto a canopied bed. It was another bad choice for a seat; over and over, the pink silk duvet conveyed me downward. I nervously riffled The Bell Jar. In a series of furtive glances I canvassed her shelves for a book we might have in common. Why hadn't I read the entire contents of the world's great literary works the prior summer?
Things were quiet, too quiet. I sensed someone lurking outside the door, but no, I was only jittery. Then I heard something odd. A mew. Meowing sounds came from somewhere behind me. Glancing around, I saw a tortoise-shell cat in a cardboard box. The cat reclined in squint-eyed pleasure while six kittens lapped her pink, protruding nipples.
At last here was something I could relate to! Our two cats were grown, and it had been years since I'd seen kittens. "Goodness!" I exclaimed. I leaped up and instantly dropped down to scramble toward the box on my hands and knees. "Aren't they the sweetest most darling little things?" I knelt beside the box and chose one kitten. Laughing at the tiny claws that clung to the toweling, I draped the kitten over my leg. The small gray blind thing, hot under its soft fur, breathed hard and fought to return to its mother.
"I'm sorry today didn't turn out the way you planned," I said, letting the words out freely once I held two other kittens against my cheeks.
Maureen contemplated me as though I were subhuman. "You're sorry a lot, aren't you?"
"No, not really."
"You say 'I'm sorry' a lot, though. I noticed that about you. What do you have to be sorry about?"
"Nothing really."
"Then, may I suggest, you're feeling rage instead of sorrow? C'est vrai, n'est pas?"
"When I say I'm sorry? No. I think it's just a tick. An unconscious habit."
"Hmm, no. Frankly, I'm afraid your self-esteem isn't adequate."
I was about to protest strenuously when someone rapped their knuckles against the door, and Maureen's brother barged right in. "Oh, I see you're busy playing with the itty bitty kitties."
He bounded across the room and, with an enormous hurdle, flopped on her bed. "Some big feminist consciousness raising."
"Get out of here," hissed Maureen. "I mean it. Mother said you were supposed to stay in your room."
"Listen, Maureen," I began, "I've got to go." I hastily shoved the three kittens in their box.
"Don't go. I'll get rid of him."
"Do you want to know why women can't achieve anything, won't every achieve anything?" said her brother, cocking himself up on one elbow, his strange glossy face grinning happily at me as he addressed me in a croaking voice.
"Get out of here," said Maureen.
"Get out of here. Get out of here," parroted the brother. "If you think that's going to make me go, you're more lamebrain than I thought, but then all women strike me as lamebrain because they're constitutionally..."
I didn't stay to hear his theory of female shortcomings. "Goodbye Maureen," I said with a weak, blundering wave.
"Don't go!" she shouted and turned upon her brother. "Once and for all, get out of here."
"Get out of here. Get out of here."
The last thing I saw was Maureen lunging at him.
Everything that had happened ran through my mind as I left that horrible house. I thought about kittens and Plath and big fat moths. But the farther I went-out the front door, out the thick garden walls, out into a squalid patch of desert-the freer I felt. The humor struck me. A feminist consciousness raising that no one but me attended where the host had badgered me? How bizarre! And I didn't believe the other women she'd invited had gone to hear Plath read; they'd simply stayed away. Why hadn't I been as wise? Oh, Maureen was an intellectual snob: the worst thing in the world. She lacked charity, humor, grace, and humility. Her irritability with the mistakes of others betrayed her own insecurities. I never wanted to be like her.
I lashed a creosote bush with one hand. Then I noticed the damn book. I still had her copy of The Bell Jar. With a mighty hand I squashed the thing, rolled it up tightly and choked the life out of it. Under a scabby, black mesquite and quite near an overturned barrel cactus, I jammed the book in a snake hole. It fit exactly. But for good measure, and in a parting gesture, I kicked dirt on top and stomped it down with my foot.
I never again spoke to Maureen. She was in a different French class the next year, and in the hot noisy halls of our school I studiously avoided her. Her brother, I gleaned from various newspaper accounts, ended up in the Florence Penitentiary. And once someone casually mentioned that Maureen had become an experimental psychologist, no doubt performing vivisections on chattering, unsuspecting monkeys.
As I look back on it, I now know that was not the end of the story; God or his grim ilk had a surprise hidden up his capacious sleeve.
Two years later I graduated from high school and enrolled in our local university. In the spring of my freshman year I signed up for the required second-semester English course, the section I chose having been given the cheerful title "A Journey to the Heart of Darkness." Late one January afternoon, with the lowering sun full upon the palm trees, making crisp elongated Mickey Mouse heads out of the shadows of prickly pear cacti, I entered a chilly classroom at the top of a windowless concrete cube only to find it packed already with angry and aggressive marketing majors, agricultural students who were doodling on the desk tops (cartoonish bulls mounting cows), and bored nurses who appeared to be fantasizing their impending marriages to handsome doctors. I squeezed into a seat, and immediately the door swung open. In strode our professor.
At the podium Morris Mitchell commanded attention. He was tall, sandy haired, with a droopy blonde moustache and a scholar's oversized nose. Dressed in a rumbled khaki suit (the style of an English gentleman tomb robber), markedly pale and proud, he looked a great deal like a large mobile marble statue-with just as much personal warmth. From the first day he impressed me with his great intellect, reading us passages from Beowulf, slipping in and out of Old English, showing slides of battle axes and various Grendel-like monsters rendered in gold.
In the next month my admiration grew. While the other students read Absalom, Absalom with absolute disinterest, and wrote appalling extemporaneous essays on Antigone, I worked hard and cherished every moment there. I felt superior to my classmates and I am horrified to say I enjoyed the ways he skewered them for their disinterest. He was magnificent when he humiliated some unsuspecting undergraduate who had failed to complete his reading assignment. He was merciless, unrelentingly confrontational, smug and comfortable in his self-assured mastery. Did it ever occur to me that he lacked respect and kindness? Did I see the flickers of cruelty so reminiscent of Maureen Maywood? The same glimmers of laughter under half-closed lids before he attacked his victim? How quickly I had forgotten my big conclusion, my natural abhorrence to cruelty. Morris' course became my favorite and at the classes' conclusion I knew I was his prized pupil.
One summer afternoon, two weeks after the semester's end, I sat at a glimmering oak table in the second story of the college library (near the old archives of Arizona's past, the deprecations, lost gold mines, and gunfights) lost in an odd reverie, tracing and retracing the lined margin of my notebook, thinking episodically, and very romantically of Morris. An azure sky and the wispy indistinct green of a palo verde tree had amalgamated on the table top in front of me when all of the sudden another element entered the picture. Something white and blurry. A face. I was all agog when I glanced up and discovered Morris, smiling rather coyly, seated directly across from me.
"At work again, Brenda?"
"I had a few things... I was interested in some things."
"Not coursework? You are an exemplary student. Will you allow me to buy you a cup of coffee?"
"Of course you can!" I said, springing up and hurriedly disposing of a pile of books beside me. As I nervously stacked the volumes on a nearby cart, I turned the spines away so that Morris wouldn't notice that every book related to his class.
"I think, Brenda," began Morris, rising and coming around the table to take my elbow, "mine was a question of permission, not ability or possibility, therefore 'may' would be preferred. In everyday life, however, such informal uses of 'can' now occur all the time. But in any context in which politeness or formality is of overriding consideration, 'may' is still the better choice. Perhaps formality is not at issue here. Perhaps. Politeness, however, certainly is."
I sputtered. Looking back on it now, I see how thoroughly he iced the situation. Speaking more plainly, I see what an amazing asshole he was. Though I didn't then. "Well then-of course you may!" I said, correcting myself.
What was wrong with me? How I wish two years earlier at the consciousness raising that my consciousness had truly been raised! I'll always wonder if that strange consciousness raising of Maureen's hadn't lowered my resistance to intellectual snobs. Had her odd personality distracted me from the importance of what had happened? Had I simply forgotten my conclusions about her while remembering the humor? At any rate, two years later, it was as though God had set in my path an exact double of Maureen Maywood, albeit in male get-up. How did I miss it? But if the similarity between Maureen and Morris occurred to me then, it must have been deeply subconscious for it did not govern my heart. His self-assured superiority thrilled me. I hung on his every word-his every, measured, and irritatingly precise word, and he, in return, incessantly corrected my speech. Morris and I dated; we were lovers; I moved into the apartment he was renting. Pygmalion, that was what I was living, and Morris was my crusty Professor Higgins.
At my insistence he compiled ponderous lists of books for me to read; my goofy reactions to the classics were met with amused and tolerant forbearance. I enjoyed his superiority to his fellow graduate students, and his uncharitable assessments of professors. I remember we attended a certain party together, and I can see the salt-rimmed margarita seas tilted precariously over piles and piles of small plates, each smeared with black guacamole. At poolside, in a circle of leather equipales, we cornered an old western aut
hor and under a black, starry sky Morris feigned interest in his work and flattered the silly old fool telling him his pedestrian works were shadowing some unheralded brilliance which Morris alone had seen. A red ristra, a string of dried chili peppers, hung on a mailbox and rustled an eerie clitter-clatter. Afterwards Morris sat in his chair giggling about how he had destroyed the old gentleman whose ridiculous novel of innocent maidens and honorable cowhands enflamed Morris' critical sense.
The next year I married him and we left Arizona for his new faculty appointment in Mississippi. How I was to suffer in Morris' rigid academy.
I put the onus for the first incident on the rather mournful way the saguaro cacti saluted Morris and me as we left Tucson and drove east early one summer morning. Those saguaros had been my childhood friends, and the visceral pangs of sorrow I felt leaving them seemed to be mutual, reflected in the saguaros' stiff farewell. The sight of hundreds of cacti standing at the side of road, their many arms raised in a tragic goodbye, caused the reality of what I had done to sink in. I suppose I harbored suspicions even then that I had entered into a joyless marriage. I reacted by becoming giddy and carefree; Morris, however, grew silently sullen.
That night we reached Carlsbad, New Mexico. We pulled into the motel parking lot near the famous caverns beneath a neon sign of an Indian jumping through hoops, the colors changing each time he jumped, his many unlit legs waiting to be lit. The hoop colors kept coming down, red, yellow, green, purple. After dropping our luggage we drew open the curtain in anticipation of the nightly spectacle: bats leaving the cave. We were quickly rewarded; the vortex of bats made me squeal with delight. With his back to the window, Morris eased himself into a tatty armchair.
"Do you know the author I really, really hate?" I tittered once I was seated atop the bed.
"No, who would that be?" he said testily. A huge spiral of bats began blackening the air above his head; they seemed to be flowing directly out of a secret egress at the top of his skull.
"Oh, that guy, you know, who wrote..oh...the...ah...you know, the one who punched his wife?"
"I think you might be referring to-"
"It doesn't matter." I dismissed him with an airy, absent-minded wave of one hand. "You know who I mean. The one who wrote the autobiography of Marilyn Monroe and claims they're soul mates because they have the same initials or something." I laughed at my opinion, so certain was I of my new husband's agreement.
A stony silence followed during which Morris pressed his fingertips together and ominously tapped his lips here and there as though he were trying to contain the awful oncoming outburst. Bats practically boiled out of his brain.
I was mystified. What offense had I perpetrated? Was it something about Marilyn Monroe? Was the author whose name I'd forgotten his favorite?
"Autobiography?" blurted Morris vehemently. "An autobiography is the written history of a person's life narrated by himself. Marilyn Monroe did not write an autobiography. Therefore you must be mistakenly referring to her biographer."
I was horrified by my gaffe, but decided to be honest. "I don't know why, but I often confuse the two-autobiography and biography-when I talk. Not in my mind, but when I speak."
"Out loud," I said.
"To people."
"Occasionally."
"I'm sorry."
That night in the hotel bed Morris made certain our bodies never touched.
Like most marital fights, this one was short-lived; by eastern Texas we were friends again. Although I felt a slight change in Morris' attitude toward me when we arrived in Mississippi, beautifying our new home in Oxford became my principal preoccupation. Should the small bathroom above be papered in blown red roses? Or gardenias and gaudy butterflies? These vacuous concerns filled my head and in my spare time I made the friends whom I amused with my stories of life in Arizona, including the consciousness raising. I still enjoyed my husband's superiority to his colleagues and graduate students.
I can still see us at the tenure party I gave him four years after our arrival in Oxford. Never had any little professor's wife more proudly planted her sensible heels in her crowded kitchen. Boiling a colossal pot of worm-like spaghetti, my hands held captive in large red lobster claws (pot holder wedding presents), I tried to stop our son from dashing about, and steadied our second, unborn child who whirled in my big belly under my apron. Several of my husband's colleagues who had gathered there shouted "Speech, speech!" meaning me. But Morris intervened. "Brenda give a speech? Believe me, this girl hasn't produced a witty thought in her entire life!" He hugged my sagging shoulders.
What a blunt blow that was. I plastered a broad, inane grin on my face. And the rising steam from the spaghetti masked my tears.
At this point in our marriage his once gentle chiding changed into a continuous, short-tempered scold. If I were so bold as to ask to read the articles he was working on, he would disconnect from me with quick derisive snort. And Brenda attend faculty seminars? Even quailing in a darkened corner? What would be the point, he'd scoff.
By the eighth year of our marriage it had become clear that this superior being's opinion of me was largely derogatory! Like some hideous oversized crow, he picked at me while I was imprisoned in an intellectual gibbet, a situation likely to continue for the rest of our marriage. Contumely: there's the word for the dish he served up daily, though I can't be relied on to pronounce it correctly twice.
Cocktails dulled my pain. In my drunken state Morris made jokes at my expense in front of our children, belittled my attempts at self-improvement, criticized my every action and expression. He berated me with voluble streams of denunciatory Old English; I never quite knew what he was saying.
What my husband thought of me became tangled up with the scent of magnolias and traveled throughout the big house. Dreadful were the ways Morris mimicked me, lampooned my feeble attempts to improve myself or take an interest in anything scholarly. Finally, one night after our eleventh anniversary, and for the first time in our relationship, I objected, rather mildly, to his reproach. Morris reacted by exploding out the front door, pacing our grassy green lawn, and slicing the night air under the ghostly, blooming magnolias with flailing, angry arms. "Master modern English!" he roared over and over. "Master modern English!" "Master modern English!" he shouted again and again until the terrier next door was driven into a yapping frenzy. From our second story bedroom I listened as this continuous, terrifying tom-tom gradually addled, and became: "Monster, monster English. Monster, monster English."
I can't say I was terribly surprised when Morris moved out the next morning and subsequently sued for divorce. After eleven protracted and unpleasant years of marriage, he dumped me for Rowena Rood, a graduate scholar of his, now the preeminent authority on Saxon syllables. Their joint articles pile up, citations upon citation, and together, like dusty paper silhouettes, they pertly pirouette in some lofty sphere of wretched academic excellence.
I'm back in Arizona now and Morris and I share custody of our grandchildren. For six years I've been sober. On the way to my dentist I skirt the Davidson Addition and the desert where I rid myself of Maureen's book. So much has happened since that triumphant act; it makes me wince to think of the girl who stuffed The Bell Jar into a snake hole. That's one of the world's great literary works I'll never have the heart to read.
