Ashamed, I dropped the class.
Something was really wrong.
“She’s crazy,” people said. Yet I intrigued them. “Tell us … tell us …” other girls would say with curiosity when we sat at one of the round tables in the dining room. “Tell us about the nightclub where you sang last night … your views on Kierkegaard … how you read Strindberg in the bathroom at a party.”
“Are you a virgin?” I asked an older girl one day.
“None of your business.”
What an imbecile I was! I lacked the most elementary social skills. I had no idea how to be close to anyone, except through sex.
I began to doubt I was attractive in any way at all. My breasts were small. My features were striking rather than classic and my hair was a wild black tangle. Whatever magnetism I possessed came from voltage I had no idea how to control. It was destroying me, because the stronger the electricity grew, the more I stared at the walls as if paralyzed. I couldn’t study. Couldn’t concentrate. Rarely made my morning nine o’clock Greek class. The fear of flunking out loomed huge. It would annihilate me. Why? I didn’t reason about this but felt a dark mass of panic. As if affected by my turbulence, the Picasso posters began to loosen from their adhesive backings and fall to the floor. Electric lights blew when I flicked the switch.
Although I wrote and wrote, I could not easily get beneath the surface of words. I could not get into the layer between words and essence that rushed up like volcanic lava in dreams and anxiety and hysteria.
I fucked strangers. I didn’t know how else to get my body touched, to feel real, to keep from going crazy. I sought the touch of strangers in taxis, buses, underground train stations, hotel rooms, anywhere at all, while I yearned for my married lover.
I had the strangest sense that I was living out some dream of yours.
Yet the more secretive my adventures, the more I felt that I was somehow gaining strength and creating my own identity. Despite this, I still felt I had no real existence without your approval and Dad’s. How to get this approval? It was like walking through a mine field, trying to avoid explosives. On the surface you were both kind and gentle. But you had a way of smiling—a half smile, an averted glance, words not spoken—that conveyed far more.
I felt as if I fit in nowhere.
No one could connect with me in the same way the musician did. But he was hundreds of miles away. I desperately needed physical contact. Once again, I began to dream of tidal waves engulfing me, as I had when I first began to menstruate.
Years earlier I had come into your bedroom one day while you were resting. We talked about sex, and you said, “It’s like shaking hands. At times, it’s no more than that.” You went on to say, “Your father is not the best lover I’ve ever had.” I realized then that you had a secret life of which I had caught only glimpses.
Another memory: An afternoon in late August. The musician, a solidly built man of medium height, accompanies me to an Italian film. You’re there in a navy shantung dress and white summer beads. You don’t see us, and I don’t approach you. I’m afraid you’ll jinx things if you meet him. You look sad, as if you need time alone, and once again I realize that you have a secret life.
Invisible structures of steel-like strength constrict us or let us flow. These structures guide our movements and our thoughts, form our beliefs, form our sense of what is possible. These structures can be built on subtle as well as overt happenings—a glance, a smile, a tone of voice, what is spoken of or ignored. All these elements, combined with a strong dose of isolation, create constructions that are as strong as steel. These invisible constraints are every bit as effective as the forest huts to which menstruating girls are confined among certain tribes. They are stronger than physical blows to the body.
As for rape or incest, it need not be physical. It can be a penetrating gaze, an invisible chastity belt locked by an invisible key. Touch made me feel real. But prolonged intimacy was unbearable. It was too much closeness. It was invasion.
Was there a connection between my modeling jobs that summer and Dad’s nudes with their huge buttocks and tiny heads? The way he used to stare at me. His eyes would caress every curve of my breasts and buttocks. He would stare this way at girls in their bikinis on the beach. He gazed at me as if I were a piece of clay to be modeled with his fingers. This stare of his—hungry, furtive, yet impersonal.
Underground passageway between the subway and the Long Island Railroad in Queens. A stranger rubs against me. My arms enclose him. Swift unzipping of trousers. His cock presses between my thighs. I am wet with desire. His hair is black and thick with gel. His features pallid and Italian. Bushy brows. Swiftly he penetrates, standing me with my back against a tile wall. And frantically circling my pelvis, I come. Why?
I am like a Kewpie doll, brain anesthetized.
Afterwards I feel filthy, ashamed, and as if I cannot stop.
The secret: he was a stranger, and this gave me freedom.
Had I known him, I might have said no.
For years, I could only experience orgasm with strangers.
Images of violence emerged. A gleaming knife slits a man’s penis, as if it were gutting a fish. In the subway, an urge to fling myself down across the path of an oncoming train. What if I climb down and touch the electric wire?
“Do you have thoughts of suicide?” asked the psychiatrist.
“Yes,” I murmured.
“Do you hear voices? Do you see visions?”
“Yes,” I murmured, not quite sure if this were true or not.
“I think she should be hospitalized,” he said.
I wonder what my life would be like if I had fled—as I almost did—on the eve of my incarceration. That night I packed my suitcase and took the train into Manhattan. I had fantasies of living cheaply, working as a waitress, putting myself through City College while continuing to write at night. I would free myself from the family who had caused me such pain.
But then I began to worry that I had left behind my little red address book with the musician’s name and address. If I had, you would learn about our secret affair, my last magic stronghold. Anxiety came over me in huge waves. Crazy unreasoning anxiety. I phoned you from Queens and traveled home again. When I unpacked, I found the incriminating address book among my carefully folded skirts and sweaters.
CHAPTER 18
THE INSTITUTION, 1958
The mental hospital was in a part of Queens with which Eleanor was unfamiliar. Ward E had pale green walls, and the air was thick with cigarette smoke. Female patients with glazed eyes sat in front of a TV screen. One woman stared out of the window, hugging her knees to her chest and mumbling to herself. Another was masturbating, her skirt pulled up and pubic hair exposed as if no one else were there. Someone screamed, and attendants rushed towards the source of the disturbance.
Rosa stood beneath an archway like a slender flower. She wore black tights, a long gray blouse, and her dark hair billowed out in clouds. Rosa had been in the hospital for over a month now. A breakdown they called it. Psychiatrists had assured Eleanor and Aaron that the recovery rate at this hospital was “Very good … over fifty percent.”
But what if she became one of the number who grew progressively worse, dull-eyed with Thorazine, immured for the rest of her life between the walls of a state hospital? This thought was too dreadful for Eleanor to endure. Because some did get worse. Sometimes the shock treatments, the tranquilizers, the therapy, none of all that worked.
“She was so bright, so talented,” the dean said after Rosa left college.
1mages of the past year flashed through Eleanor’s mind: Rosa’s haphazard grooming, too much makeup and tight dresses. A social life when she was at home into which Eleanor did not pry. Strange phone calls from young men with Bronx voices. All this added up. At the time she had not consciously put together these details. Ah, Rosa!
Rosa, I did not mean to hurt you. Your pain, your awkwardness, your breakdown hurt me as if I too were break
ing down. Do you know how many sleepless nights I was tormented by thoughts of you? Your failures were my own—dark forces that blocked me from the light.
She and Aaron met with Rosa’s doctor, a thin, slightly stooped psychiatric resident with dark hair. Rosa was schizophrenic, he said in a flat voice.
“What does that mean?”
“She is not integrated, not whole. There are many parts of her in conflict. She has no sense of identity. She is out of contact with reality. … They used to call it dementia praecox. … If untreated, it can result in mental deterioration. … Today we have hope with new methods of treatment.”
Eleanor’s cigarette ash dropped onto the bosom of her sweater. She felt faint. Her child, Rosa, lost forever in an inferno. Mad people howl in chains. They howl with despair. They howl at the moon. She thought of old etchings of inmates at Bedlam with their matted hair, transfixed eyes, and hands rigid from clutching their chains. How often she herself had been tempted to follow her voices and visions into a shadowy underworld. Perhaps it was her mother’s clear voice inside her mind and her mother’s strict rules of deportment that restrained her. At times the barrier seemed as thin as a veil. Eleanor made a pact with God, although dubious about his existence. If Rosa recovered, she vowed to change.
“It’s not our fault,” said Aaron, as they drove home.
“There’s some connection. We bear some responsibility.”
“No!” He was driving too fast, and he barely missed hitting the car in front of them when it stopped for a red light. The station wagon skidded as Aaron hit the brakes.
Later that week a social worker named Miss Bliss interviewed Eleanor and Aaron in her office. Eleanor thought the name was incongruous. Miss Bliss appeared to be in her thirties, dark-haired with a pale complexion, thick magenta-painted lips, round eyes, and a receding chin. How very inquisitive she was, thought Eleanor. Too inquisitive. She asked all sorts of questions about their families, about Rosa’s birth and early toilet training, about all kinds of things. Were Howard and Jesse happy at school? How did the children differ?
“Rosa is isolated, while you and Aaron are a couple, and your sons are close in age.”
“I never thought of it that way.”
“I don’t understand how all this happened!” Aaron burst out. “She seemed fine.”
“Really?” Miss Bliss leaned her chin on her cupped hand. She wore coral polish.
Aaron had read an article about chemical imbalance causing schizophrenia. “Perhaps drugs would help.”
“Perhaps,” said Miss Bliss dubiously. “At this time she needs psychotherapy.”
“I see,” said Aaron, clearly disturbed.
Afterwards as they were getting ready for bed, he said, “If that woman had a more prominent chin, she would have found a husband. She wouldn’t be asking us all these questions.”
“Then someone else would,” said Eleanor in an icy tone. She folded her beige cashmere sweater. It had a burn from the cigarette ash. While she continued undressing, he went on at length about the woman’s unfortunate bone structure, as though that negated anything at all she might have to say.
When Eleanor was alone with Miss Bliss, the social worker asked more personal questions. Were she and Aaron sexually compatible? In strictest confidence Eleanor told her about Heinrich. She felt she must atone somehow by confessing the truth.
Miss Bliss was sympathetic. She suggested therapy. But Eleanor was afraid of all this. She did not want her coverings torn open, as she was too afraid of what might emerge. Beneath the covering lay the shadowy voices. Beneath lay shame, all encompassing, annihilating shame.
“Of course I’ll keep this in confidence, Mrs. Bernstein” said the social worker.
“Aaron too has had affairs. He still does, but I don’t believe he’s serious about anyone.”
“His are more casual?”
“‘Casual’ is not a word I would use because he is so intense. I would say his affairs are more of the flesh.”
“So the two of you have a mutual understanding.”
“There are things we don’t discuss. Perhaps Aaron, too, is seriously involved with someone else.” Her voice dropped. “But I think I would sense …”
“Yes, I think you would,” said Miss Bliss. She looked at Eleanor in such a comforting way that Eleanor would have liked to lay her head on the social worker’s shoulder and cry like a child.
“You do make an attempt to understand your daughter. Mr. Bernstein is very closed.”
“Yes, he is,” said Eleanor, hating him at that moment.
She and Aaron had both contributed to Rosa’s suffering. This was so painful to realize that she could only acknowledge it in brief flashes. Then the trivia of everyday life, providing a kind of amnesia, covered the awareness. Nevertheless, the knowledge Rosa was suffering, the awareness of what she might have become under different circumstances, all this was with Eleanor like a flame in darkness, and it seared her so that at times she wanted to die. It gave her no peace, even in dreams.
Rosa showed Eleanor a painting she had done in Creative Therapy. It was dark in tone, except for a pale nude girl who was falling through space while an older woman watched.
“The woman is a witch,” said Rosa.
The woman is me, Eleanor thought.
“Her work is tormented,” said Aaron in a detached way, as if he were looking at the work of a stranger in a gallery. The coldness at his core struck Eleanor with the force of a revelation.
He continued to sculpt and teach as though nothing at all had happened, while Eleanor frequently found it difficult to concentrate. Once Clyde found her in tears when she was alone in the Drama Department Office. He put down the books he was holding, and he wrapped his arms around her. His body felt so comforting. “Are you really gay?” she asked, smiling through her tears, hoping that despite his male lover he might feel a glimmer of attraction for her. “Yes,” he said, kissing her gently on the forehead, then releasing her.
Making love with Aaron became unbearable. She pleaded backaches. She took long hot baths. She went to bed only after he had fallen asleep, and she developed the habit of staying up until one or two in the morning. When he came home with telltale traces of affairs—a smudge of lipstick on a shirt, unusual lateness, mysterious errands—she no longer felt jealous but relieved. His mistresses, although they did not know it, were doing her a service!
She bought twin beds at Bloomingdales. She could no longer endure sleeping with him “Separate beds! I’ll get a divorce!” His face hardened with rage. “Do so, if you wish.” He was cold, darkly handsome, she thought, as he paced back and forth in their bedroom.
“What will we do with this bed?”
“Donate it to charity.”
He didn’t speak to her for the rest of the day. Then after dinner he said, “A divorce would be like chopping off an arm or a leg.” The dish she was drying slipped from her hands and shattered on the linoleum.
Knives in the kitchen rack. She could slit her wrists. Perhaps she deserved to die, because she had failed as a mother and as a human being. Would Rosa ever be normal, or would she spend the rest of her life in an institution?
One night Aaron so enraged her by the way he pushed a morsel of meat with his fingers while he was eating that she threw her knife at him right there at the kitchen table in front of Jesse and Howard. It barely missed his left ear. Her fingers vibrated with the sensation of hurling it. The room swirled around her. They all stared at her in shock. It was as though a mad woman were lurking beneath her surface, and Rosa’s madness had activated her own.
Barely seeing or hearing, she left parcels in shops. She lost her wallet. There were times when she walked into a department store and, under the bright lights she would fall into a sort of trance, totally forgetting what she had come to buy.
“Mom, why do I have seventeen white shirts and only one pair of trousers?” asked Jesse one evening when she came into his room to say goodnight.
“Do
you?” asked Eleanor, taken by surprise.
“Yes,” he said. “One pair of Khakis, and they’re ripped.” He looked up from his book. “I need another pair of pants because I’m going to a Seder next week.”
“A what?”
“A Seder. A Passover dinner.”
Eleanor’s hands trembled. She had just come from the attic and was holding a soft black Persian lamb coat, handed down to her from Aaron’s mother many years ago, which she had taken out of its wrappings. It felt alive beneath her fingers. A malignant softness.
“My friend Sylvia invited me to a Seder!”
“But you’re not Jewish.”
“What am I then?”
He had grown tall and gawky. With a slight shock, she realized how Jewish he actually looked with his black hair, thick glasses, his fleshy lips.
“You can’t go.”
“What’s the problem?”
“It’s just … that you’ve been raised as an American. You’re Jewish only by origin.”
“That’s just it, Mom. By race we’re Jewish. Hitler would have put us all into concentration camps. He wouldn’t give a damn that you’d rather be Episcopalian. I’d like to celebrate being Jewish, instead of pretending I’m something I’m not.”
“Celebrate?” Her face turned pale. She felt a rip in the fur fabric. She had never worn this coat and had taken it down from the attic on a sudden impulse, thinking she might wear it on a raw March day.
“Your friends probably laugh at you behind your back.”
“Don’t be absurd!” Tears welled up in her eyes. Melanie, her closest friend from the old Nursery School days, invited her to Saint Paul’s Episcopalian Church every Christmas Eve, and the minister always welcomed her. She felt such comfort and beauty in the ritual, with the music and the singing and the lights.
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