Break Every Rule

by Carole Maso

  Somewhere she must have, certainly she must have still longed for that thing—wanting to hear as she once did—perfectly through water.

  The parts that got lost.

  She felt she was expected to follow the normative, asked, over time, since high school really, to put away the world’s strangeness, its silences, its dark, its mystery and melancholy and fall into mindless, cheerful line—until the intensity of the strangeness—fear and awe, wonder and sorrow and everything you felt in silence, in the depth of your being, the power, the oddness, the truest, most important, original part of you—the part you could least afford to lose—was lost, socialized, little by little, almost entirely away.

  She was asked to conform in absolutely every aspect of her life. Even when it did not appear so. Even in one’s artistic choices—the place of so-called freedom.

  Male editors at major houses are saying—female editors, who have embraced entirely the whole nine yards are saying:

  Exactly what one should write. If you want to get published at any rate. And exactly how. So that even one’s creative life was prescribed. In order to be published you must…orders coming down as if from on high. Place a character in a conflict and then resolve. Get the reader’s attention through blah, blah, blah… Engraved on a kind of tablet. Serious fiction is. Serious fiction must. If you want to be reviewed. If you want to be taken seriously. If you want to publish with us. The promise of publication keeping everyone in some useless line. Everyone is gray and sounds the same.

  Even the book is a box.

  Do not take even this. Even this away. The one hopeful place. Even the book.

  How to imagine shedding convention then? As insidious as it was, as ingrained. As ubiquitous as its message. Coming from every direction at once. What a novel is—what a family is—what a life is—what a woman’s life must be—where was this voice coming from—it seemed it came from everywhere and nowhere at the same time. An admonishing figure.

  All the diminishment. Her pale white universe. Slipping into a white shift, against white skin, and the hair prematurely turning white—don’t go, someone whispers, but she can’t do anything else really…

  The thousand inappropriate ways one tried to get free back then.

  The thousand less-than-perfect, oh yes, less-than-effective ways to try to wriggle free—or if not that—at least to forget a while.

  I went to therapy finally as the result of an ultimatum. Helen said go or I will leave you. She said someone could help you. She said. And I could not fathom the idea of the world without her. She said. And because I loved her I said yes. Though she did not understand. Though I did not believe there was help for me. Though the very idea of therapy made me cringe—all that talking—I loved her. She said we can’t live like this anymore.

  She said, severely depressed, disoriented, out of control, she said. Suicidal. No, not that. It would have taken far more engagement I believed to have pulled off such a feat. Far more moral courage. Still it could happen perhaps—one liaison, one toxic narcotic cocktail away. I protested when she began the litany against me, but still I understood it as such: I was suffering, had been suffering a long time—in this time before real writing—when I was lost. A debilitating depression, a world hermetically sealed off—punctuated by episodes of high mania: sleeplessness, delusions, rage.

  A string of sexual encounters. Did it not suggest I was still alive?

  Get help.

  Through the estrangement, through the isolation I could hear her—but muffled.

  She said or I will leave

  And that I had to go further and further, look for more and more elaborate, lavish, excessive, intense experience, more dangerous, more thrilling to prove—to prove what?

  How had I gotten that way—that dangerously happy little girl, hour after hour, year after year, engrossed in her make-believe world? In love with the solitary place of her imagination.

  She said. When the world was white and sorrow fell like snow, and nothing, nothing seemed familiar anymore.

  And I said yes. Because my life had become utterly unrecognizable, not only to those who felt they knew or loved me, but also to me.

  And on a day where the whiteness lifted, if only slightly, stumbling through drifts and drifts of oblivion in my pale shift, I went.

  With real misgiving, trepidation dread even, a deep wariness. On an animated day I might have said how I detested psycho-babble, how skeptical I was of the whole endeavor. How suspect I found much of Freud—all the nonsense on women, on dreams. How hopeless, how useless. How much more clever I believed myself to be than anyone I could possibly find to work with. I went because I was forced to.

  To the woman’s office in her apartment on the Upper West Side. I sat glumly across from her. I don’t know what to say.

  Where to even imagine beginning? All that would be reduced or left out. Or overemphasized because language could best speak to certain things, but not others. The belief that words have stable meaning and can in ordinary speech convey what one is feeling struck me as naive and really quite quaint. And wasn’t that how therapy was supposed to work? I was and am deeply suspicious of language, as I think any serious writer must be. My reverence for silence, and for what cannot ever be known or understood, made this therapy business a very dicey proposition indeed. The tendency to impose false shapes, the simplistic desire for the assignment of cause, one’s hunger for why, one’s need for motivation, then solution. The preconceptions, the generalizations, the summing up—all worrisome, worrisome. And the language—oh God—dyfunctional this and that, empowerment issues, abandonment issues—how awful. The one absolutely intolerable thing. The debasement of the language. I braced myself for the absolute worst.

  Born in Paterson, New Jersey.

  The oldest of five children.

  Educated…

  Have I mentioned my penchant for privacy, for solitude? To be left alone.

  Who is that woman standing off to the side, so detached, so removed from herself, narrating the events of her life as if recounting another life altogether? Why is she so filled with caution, with reservation?

  I was struggling against every stricture—it exhausts me now to think of. But it was more than that—it had always been more than that. Impossible to describe. Did I actually think that this very pleasant woman was ever going to be able to help me with any of this? Of course not.

  That white world where I yearned to go forever. Never come back.

  Why is she there at all?

  The problem was I was hurting those around me including those I loved—there was the real problem. Was I hurting myself—not really—no, not intentionally. To break out of the habitual, the deadening—in expectation, in habit, in pattern, it seemed necessary to cause some violence, some harm to oneself. But not to others. I had been asked to go because of the damage I had done to others, and I went because I recognized that damage—and desired not to do that anymore. I wanted to be free, but not at any cost—to lose those I loved would be impossible—my last connections to this world. And of course, as it is now all too clear, I was not free in the least.

  I go I suppose because I am unwell mentally, I do not say it, but dying in fact, I feel myself at twenty-six to be dying. In a stupor much of the time, with an impossible sadness—the grotesque, thudding afternoons, slow and dull, how to make them pass? Unable to speak, to rise, to move. For weeks and weeks sometimes.

  And on other days, without middle ground, turned on a dime, without a break, I am so manic, so hyperactive and sick with it, so unable to focus, to sleep, to eat, filled with every delusion and plan; I am genius, utterly estranged, outside, writing such astounding work and so quickly, works of art, only when I look back at them to find page after page of virtually straight lines. Impossible, obviously, to even decipher. Let alone genius.

  I seduce everyone in sight. Without much feeling. Going to the next adventure in search of someone or something to hold back the dead feeling. And it works. At least
for awhile.

  And the raining—what’s that raining sound? Then snow. Don’t go. Last bit of world. Last blue shadow.

  Week after week I wrestled with it—if I could only describe to you, dear woman show you the contours of that world—drained of all color where I lay entombed, Dr.E. I can’t breath or move.

  Most people live lives of desperate accommodation I find. Overloved as a child I did not have the need to be loved or to please. I just wanted to live on my own terms.

  Just.

  Even the book is a box in this world.

  First inklings of the box—of the dimensions of the thing—its shallow sides, its heavy lid makes a horrifying sound—and the early attempts to resist—there were signs early on—trouble early on in the refusal to assume the ordinary way of things: the prom, the driver’s license, the National Honor Society—teenage rebellion? Yes, at the time it certainly looked that way. All the small refusals, the casual, seemingly casual, sloughing off of the prescribed identities, of the ways to behave.

  Oldest sibling—but no role model, my sisters and brothers watched me in dismay. And entering the working world—appalled by the tedium and the language—that bantering all day long—that horrendous small talk—the clichés, the hundred abuses. I sat in mortal misery, suffering it—incapable of entering their various pacts.

  Is she making sense? Is she making any sense?

  The original self slowly usurped. Without exactly noticing at first. It was just a hollow feeling, a feeling of something being taken slowly away, pulled gently from you as you watched, half-cognizant but helpless. The wild self being normalized. How difficult to retrieve a life, once it is relinquished. One felt someone somewhere getting a sinister pleasure from this. She is paranoid. The more you balked, the more exhausted you became. All part of the plan.

  My parents next to me—people I desperately loved—and yet could not follow. Their dreams and ambitions seemed to me not their own but something they had borrowed, a weird loan that they had accepted without much question. I loved them but could not love their assumptions. I would have to break their cherished, their given—not because I wanted to—but in order to survive. It sounds perhaps melodramatic, but it was the terms of the struggle then.

  The struggle against those forces was the fight literally for one’s life. I sat across from her. You are up to it, she seemed to be saying. She gave me a taste for it. Don’t give up.

  And to not somehow fill that vacuum, that loss of coordinates with cynicism, disengagement, withdrawal, self-protection, guilt. Somehow.

  We sat there together and circled it week after week, year after year. Through the thousand retreats and reversals and dismissals and setbacks.

  As I walked yet again into another darkened bedroom, another alleyway—begin again. Back to my white world. Begin again. Back into the silence.

  The struggle to freedom.

  The struggle not to emerge already constructed.

  To walk away from all oppression in full knowledge of the consequences. To live outside the usual tyrannies, conventions. To separate finally not from those one despises or is indifferent to—that is easy enough—but from the ones one most deeply loves—so as to be autonomous. To walk out of every enclosure. Fluent at last in your own language. One felt often in that room the strictures of language, the strictures of all existing forms: literary, emotional, social, political. The limits.

  Put something down.

  Put something down some day.

  Put something down some day in my.

  In my hand.

  In my hand right.

  In my hand writing.

  Put something down some day in my hand writing.

  Those lovely lines of Gertrude Stein.

  I was unable to live within the expected perimeters, tired of the usual assignments. I am more lucid about this now than I was then; forgive me, I do not mean to reduce or trivialize, and I do wonder whether it is therapy after all that has made it possible to say these things: facile, useful, but perhaps not entirely true.

  I have been uneasy from the start about writing this piece. I am not a procrastinator and yet have put it off countless times. It troubles me. The danger of this kind of writing and of all writing to some degree is all too evident, all too present at every turn. And it in some ways resembles the dangers of therapy. What is this desire to become comprehensible to one’s self? To net the escaping one, haul her in to dissect and understand and to finally display. The temptation, the risk is to assign meaning, motive, cause, in an attempt to feel a little bit better. Not so amorphous, not so out there. To fix the elusive self. To invent a character—and a role to play. The “I” stabilized, fixed on the page now, feigning illumination—What violence do I do to myself and to language, and to the magic of those afternoons with her? What did I learn there? What happened in that room? Well one can well understand the trepidation in writing any of it—What do I change or give up or alter in ways I may not even be aware of—what will I say here in the attempt to communicate something?

  How improbable that she met me in snow offering a bouquet of brilliant reds and greens and gold—an offer to return—

  Not possible.

  Why not? she asked.

  Her good sense. Her strange faith. Her practicality. It was a consolation like no other. Certain things could actually be done, could be controlled, demystified. When her colleague, a psychiatrist I had been sent to see, decided to try to seduce this seducer, seduce this basket case in the usual business-as-usual, garden-variety abuse of power, she reports him, without hesitation, to the proper people. Her clear-thinking, straightforward sense of things. One could not help but be impressed. She acts swiftly and without fanfare. And that is it.

  And how, and I do not know how exactly—that Upper West Side address over time became a saving thing—a place to go—a place to look forward to in the way I look forward to that which is extremely difficult, challenging, and mysterious and essentially impossible—what I mean is—the way I look forward to writing.

  How did she reach me in time? The charm of this life. How did I find her? This one particular woman—who never uttered a word of psycho-babble, who never pretended there were answers, who never displayed anything but wisdom and care.

  Her cat, her sullen teenage daughter, her lovely husband, who would from time to time make appearances—the magic of those afternoons in that prewar Upper West Side building—it was a weird bliss—even when I left frightened, or in tears.

  Never known such respite.

  What was happening to me?

  Here is a crimson dress.

  Yes?

  And I stepped out of my white shift.

  A memory, a pressure. Color—in a world bereft of color. Red. Timbre of blue. Touch of ochre. The beloved world—a slow coming to.

  I did not dare to hope. A memory of vibrancy. Step. Ascent. Motion. Memory of motion. Not dare. Memory of scent. Of collecting mosses in the forest. Plush. Green. Once she dreamed. Grace notes. Moments of grace. I did not dare. My father and I again in the moody Saturday afternoons listening to music. Every flower. Each and every. Blooming in the snow white of my mind’s eye. Like a rose in winter opening.

  Blue and red and gold brocade, stitch.

  Streamers flying after.

  Here is a wish, stitch.

  What happened there?

  Two women sitting together in a dark room on the Upper West Side of Manhattan on those days of bottomless misery when nothing seemed to give way.

  We make a dress together. Something it might be possible to wear. Invent a room. And imagine somewhere it might be possible to live again.

  There was safety there in that place with her, harbor, rest, comfort. Intimations of limitless possibility, integrity, pure health. Creating a place for one’s deepest longings—a child perhaps, a piece of writing never seen before. The wanting comes back. It took years. All the hope. I scarcely can believe.

  In that world completely drained of color we ch
oose red. Here is a thread.

  Pass the black line through the needle’s eye and watch. Be patient. Here is a silver fish, a star, a sequin, released on a red velvet sea, swim to it. A bead of blue glass.

  Two women in the perfection of the struggle. To be alive. One guiding the other. One older, wiser. Here is a strand of gold.

  To live outside the thousand impositions. To live one’s life without inordinate fear, without needless apology. To invent oneself from scratch, if necessary. Against a field of possibility. Against the promise of green.

  Accretion of the afternoons, years. Time passes. Years pass. Something happens. Impossible to describe or quite understand.

  That opening. That clearing in the woods.

  Gertrude Stein: When she shuts her eyes she sees the green things among which she has been working and then as she falls asleep she sees them a little differently.

  The incredible dimensions of her kindness and intelligence and discretion. Her compassion, her intuition, her open-mindedness. Utterly free of dogma or cant. The exact opposite of what the young woman expected, grimly waiting in that foyer the first day.

  To examine calmly all the destructiveness—and to look at it as if from a distance—and not judge.

  When the world is snow, is flat, is cold, when all you want to do is to lie down and die into it—step into that dress.

  Stitch all your wishes, fears, and the words you love most. Inscribe a hope, a worry, a sentence of your own.

  Embroider your name someday. In your own handwriting.

  Yellow flowers—those were buttercups. Do you like butter?

  Running through a field of green.

  No epiphanies, no closure, just patterns, trends, an inkling of a design. No reasons. The embracing of complexity, ambivalence, contradiction. No false crescendos. Only one’s life there, there—stretched out before one—open again. Given back. Taken back. Those endless afternoons.

  Blue and green and gold brocade. Feathers, bells, someday.

  The soul’s journey toward small light—the struggle toward freedom. The same journey I continue on now alone, as is necessary, as it must be.