Manhattan, When I Was Young

by Mary Cantwell

  My dreams, I told Dr. Franklin, were awful. In them my husband and father were so confused that I did not know which was which, or who had died, or what was dead. Describing them, I became even more confused. I said “When I died” when I meant “When my father died.” I would start to say “B.” and it came out “Papa.” I babbled, but I never really talked—except, maybe, about others. By now everyone I knew had a psychiatrist—always called a headshrinker—and where once what was said between the two of you was as sacred as confession, it had now become the stuff of lunch-hour conversations. But not my conversations. Even if I had wanted to, I would not have known what to say. Because I never really said anything, besides those curious slips of the tongue, to Dr. Franklin.

  Introspection, I figured, was a luxury reserved for those who could afford a peek into the subconscious. I could not. Better I should allow myself the pleasure of opacity and, with Dr. Franklin’s help, scuttle along as best I could. Otherwise, like a child taking a watch apart to see how it works, I might stop the tick.

  Dr. Franklin had become impatient—I think—and he had changed, presumably with the times. Where once he had sat silent, his notebook in his lap, he was now vocal, even physical. When I cried so hard I bent my head to my knees and wet my skirt with tears and the run from my nose, he put his arm around my shoulders and raised me back into the world. When I tried to run from his office, enraged because he said that now I seemed a woman, and a sexy one at that, compared to the sexless child he had once treated, he wrestled me back to the chair, locked the door, and said, “You’re going to sit there and tell me why being called a sexy woman terrifies you.”

  I did not tell him, because I pretended I did not know. But I did have half the answer. Being told I was sexy made me sick to my stomach, partly because it was my psychiatrist who said so and mostly because it was anathema to someone who was, however lapsed, a true child of a church that was far more Irish than it was Roman. But a woman? What was that? My secondary sex characteristics were not such as to drive the point home, and the brain, I had assumed, was androgynous. The discrimination practiced by New England Protestants in the name of God and by New York Jews in the name of Spain had kept me aware that I was a Catholic. But an education at a women’s college and jobs on a women’s magazine had kept me innocent of sexism. My father’s daughter, oblivious of my mother, I inhabited an indeterminate sexual territory, not wholly female, certainly not male, unconsciously neuter. If anyone had ever asked me what I was, I might have replied, “A Mary.”

  Some women at the office were joining consciousness-raising groups. When they suggested my coming along, I drew back, afraid to have anyone but Dr. Franklin picking at my head. I was interested in feminism as a subject to be explored and exploited for magazine articles, but faced with a crusade, I was, as ever, detached. The only authorities I had accepted were God the father and God the husband, and I felt a chill—still do—whenever I heard someone preaching. So if I embraced feminism, I did so in the name of economics and editorial intelligence and not for the sake of illumining the inner life.

  One day a minor movement star came to the office. Pretty, articulate, impassioned, she was a thorough fraud. On being introduced, she snubbed me until she found out who my husband was, then cozied up like a cat looking for a scratching. Thanks to a man whom she knew to be successful, I had acquired an identity—his—and was thus a desirable acquaintance. She was forming a new consciousness-raising group that night, and asked if I would like to sit in at the birth.

  There were about twenty women in her apartment, but I recall only three. A belly dancer who said that she used men sexually as casually as men used women, and that it was a sensible arrangement, on the whole. A recent medical school dropout, dropped out because she could not stand the jibes and pressures from her male teachers and fellow students. A young, well-dressed mother who was eager to join a group in New York because the summer she had been part of one on Long Island had been the happiest of her life. “We petitioned the mayor to let us parade on Equality Day and we won. It was the first time I’d ever really defied a man, and I was so proud.”

  I could not identify with any of the women. In fact they puzzled me. I did not believe that the belly dancer was as casual about sex as she claimed. It was unlikely that any male could have driven me out of school, and the only men I was conscious of having had power over me were my father and my husband, neither of whom I lumped with men. A few months later, however, when I wanted to tape a group for an article, I called one of the women. Would the group allow it? And would they discuss their sexuality?

  I do not know why they permitted the intrusion. Perhaps it was my unexpected eloquence when, at a prior confrontation (we used that word a lot then), I said, “I’ve never known the left or the right not to grab a soapbox when it was offered to them. So here you are—you call yourselves the mainstream of feminism—turning one down. No wonder the people in the middle aren’t heard. You don’t know how to use the media.” “Media” was another word we used a lot. So, for that matter, was used.

  We met in an apartment on East Ninety-sixth Street, which is the great divide. Cross it and you’re in Harlem. The group, shrunk to eight women, was so uniformly white, middle-class, clean, and well syllabled that we looked like a Junior League steering committee. I could not imagine any dialogue coming out of this evening that could not be reported in an alumnae magazine.

  The first speaker, the woman I had met at the office, had separated from her husband a few months previously. In the interim she had gone to bed with her husband’s closest friend (“He kept making noises— unh, unh, unh —and it was wonderful”) and nine other men. Only one experience had been unsatisfactory: “He came like within a minute or two, like immediately.” Temporarily between men, she had mastered masturbation. “Now I feel autonomous, my own woman. Besides, any way you get it, it’s nice.”

  Another woman, blond, pink-cheeked, a monument to Peck & Peck, was a teacher at the city’s fanciest girls’ school. She had been taught to masturbate when very young by her boyfriend and could not attain orgasm any other way, although she had tried every other way with all kinds of men, one of whom said she reminded him of his daughter. “I think he was using me,” she said.

  A third, the ex-wife of an editor I knew slightly, had spent her childhood in closets and under bushes with a flashlight, checking out male and female genitalia; her adolescence in bed with other girls; and her maturity in bed with men other than her husband. The last, she told us, was “purely satisfying.”

  The fourth . . . no matter. For years I kept the transcript in a file, and now it is hidden, assuming it still exists at all, in a place always referred to as “Forty-fifth Street.” Forty-fifth Street is where Conde Nast sent old manuscripts and letters to die. This manuscript, however, should be in a time capsule. Words jump out of it, I remember—“orgasm,” “autonomous,” “beautiful, that’s really beautiful”—that mark its year, 1970, as surely as a date stamp.

  Now I would not be surprised by what was said that night, but I was then, because I discovered that I did not know much about women. That nobody knew much about women. I began to think about myself as a woman. What is one, besides the obvious? Or is the obvious what one is? Where did I fit in? Did I fit in? If feminism did nothing else, it gave me a sex, my own. Whether that is one step forward or one step back depends, of course, on how you look at it.

  Because I found working easier than living (I was still making a distinction between the two), I assigned myself and a close friend, Amy Gross, to an article about Stephen, a former semanticist who, guru to hundreds, had piled his disciples into schoolbuses and led a caravan across the United States, preaching the gospel according to himself. His lesson was that “we are all monkeys living on the same rock” and that we have to keep the rock clean or die in the garbage. I could not fault the message, but Stephen’s disciples were dismaying. They sat numbly, dumbly during his discourses, they followed him as donkeys would a carrot,
they had given themselves up to his Word. They were kind, sweet people, and talking to them was like eating air.

  All the long train ride to Providence, where Stephen was speaking, Amy and I played the sixties games. We compared our horoscopes to our photographer’s: the conjunction promised perfection. We tossed the I Ching: the goat was, as usual, in the brambles. And, graduates of the same college, we tried to dig up what little we remembered about Jung and the collective unconscious. When Stephen made his entrance into Brown University’s Sayles Hall—so skinny that he looked pumiced, and soaring on peyote—and took off his boots, lotused himself onto the floor, and sounded his ram’s horn, my “Ora” was as sonorous as any in that perfect Episcopal room.

  The next day I was sitting cross-legged on one of the mattresses that carpeted Stephen’s bus, tape recorder between my thighs, dodging the ritual joint, nervously eyeing the dope box, praying the state police wouldn’t come over the hill and cart me to jail (“Editor held on drug rap,” the headline would read. “Estranged husband sues for child custody”), and listening to Stephen talk about tantric yoga, satanism, Freud, Hindu chakras, acid, energy, and craziness.

  “What’s insanity?” I asked.

  Insanity, it seemed, was optional. “I’ve been crazy every way imaginable, and I found insanity’s just like ticktacktoe. After you’ve been through it enough times, you know who starts, who finishes, and where it all goes—and it’s no longer insanity. It’s more of your head. There’s a choice about going crazy. You decide it. It’s not something that just happens.”

  Remembering the bed rails, the nurse telling me to pray, that splat when my baby’s body and mine hit the pavement, the horror ten years back, I told him that he was wrong, that once I had had the choice taken from me, that—and then I stopped, because Amy and the photographer were overhearing something I had not wanted anyone to know. Stephen did not count. More priest than person, he had heard everything. Once again I was trying to confess.

  “You’re afraid sanity is a little teacup that you carry around like this”—his hands cupped—“but sanity is really tough. The secret about the mind is, you can’t blow it. I can’t cop to insanity, and I can’t cop to anything that human beings can’t handle. There’s no refuge outside yourself.”

  But there was. There was Stephen, at least for the disciples who sat in a circle with us, sipping peppermint-alfalfa tea, sticking wood in the little stove, silent as Trappists. I looked around the bus and imagined giving up the books, the furniture, the job, and moving the children and myself into narrow wooden bunks, leaning on Stephen’s perceptions so I would not have to grapple with shaping my own. Stephen was better than opium. I wish I could say it was self-reliance that finally made me turn my head. It was not. It was a sudden desperate wish to be out of that pond and back in the maelstrom, back in the place where there were lots of people like me.

  We are in that place, Amy and I, sitting at my dining room table, the pages of the transcript scattered about us, cursing the vagaries of the typing service and chortling as we listen to the tapes with their undersounds of kindling being halved and teacups rattling. Throughout them my voice is a brisk, clear soprano, rather snotty; Amy’s is slow, sonorous, sexy. “You see what marijuana does to you,” I am shouting. “You see!” Amy laughs. We bend our heads to our lined yellow pads, congratulating each other when we hit a phrase we think especially apposite.

  Without work, who or what will tangle your head, your hands? Everybody needs a tangle. Especially when she can no longer depend on a sideways glance and a cute little laugh to act as a grappling hook.

  Women without tangles. Once, on the Costa del Sol, I met three of them. The first had a son in Hong Kong, a daughter in Manhattan, a small condominium on the beach, and a little alimony. She went on quickie package tours (“Badly arranged, my dear, I can’t tell you how badly arranged”) of Tangiers and Gibraltar and points south, never missed a maid’s wedding or a baby’s baptism (in a flowered hat and a garden-party dress), and started with gin before noon. She called it “Mr. Juniper.”

  There was a plump blonde in her fifties who hung out in the midnight bars, the young Spanish fishermen clustered about her like flies about fruit. There had been an evening when she had changed her mind, I was told, and the man who had taken her home bit her naked breast. From then on I never looked at the woman’s face. My eyes were fixed on her caftan’s deep V, hunting for the scar.

  A third, another blonde, had the older woman’s little potbelly, that false pregnancy that blossoms after menopause. Her long thighs shook when she walked, and no amount of swimming, jogging, compulsive housework, and compulsive dieting could bring her back to what she had been. She was not one for Spanish fishermen. She inquired after widowers.

  Women without men, women without work. There but for the grace of good typing go I. “But you’ll never be like that, Mary,” the people whom I was with protested when I confided my fear of ending up on a Spanish barstool with teethmarks on one breast. “I am, I am,” I insisted, laughing. They thought I was kidding. I was not.

  But I am jumping. Spain and ten days on the Costa del Sol came later. Now I am at 44 Jane Street, bent over a table and a transcript, afraid to look up, because if I do I will see a house with no husband in it and two confused children, one of whom clings to me, the other of whom is slowly, too slowly for me to catch the motion, drifting out to sea.

  The saddest thing about sorrow is that it is as evanescent as everything else. One day it dies, leaving a hole as empty as the socket left by an extracted tooth. You keep searching the socket with your tongue, hoping to lick a nerve, hoping for the old shock. But you feel nothing.

  A night in a church in Amsterdam, an afternoon in a guru’s bus, rise up and take line and color like the visions conjured by acid, but for the rest it is one long night. I snatch at rags. Myself sobbing, pleading with two women who had stolen the cab I had been hailing for blocks because I was late for Dr. Franklin and to miss him was to die. They stared and slammed the door, and the driver rolled up his window before they drove away. Dreaming the old dream about Papa met in a Manhattan crowd. Hearing the telephone ring after midnight, when the children were asleep and I was dozing into the darkness: he demanding a divorce, I alternately begging for another chance and scourging his secretary But they are rags, and they touch as lightly as rags now. Once snatched, they can be brushed away. They leave behind only a few fibers, little filaments of pain that twinge when I have forgotten to anesthetize myself with talk or work.

  A long night, a few rags, a few scenes, and, finally, a day when my head, my body, and—can I say my soul?—were once more in the same place.

  It was January, and my mother had been calling all week with reports of Peggy, relayed by Peggy’s sister Julia, Peggy was sixty-four, an art teacher in the public schools whom I had known since my childhood. She loved painting and reading and talking and Ireland and Portugal, and ran through life highlighting everyone she knew, like an artist touching up a sitter’s hair and skin. Because of Peggy, all of us became a little more beautiful, a little more romantic, a little more interesting, to ourselves as well as to others. To know her was to be presented with infinite possibilities. That was her gift to her friends.

  “Julia says Peggy is very tired. She sleeps a lot”. . .“Julia was at the hospital today. She said Peggy’s getting very quiet” • • • “Peggy asked Julia to brush her hair, but it hurt her scalp too much and Julia had to stop”. . .“Peggy died last night.”

  The evening before I went home for the funeral, B. called. Had I seen the lawyer, had I agreed . . . ? My eyes on the clothes I was packing and wet, for once, with grief for someone else, I snapped, “I’m not interested in our divorce or your marriage. Peggy is dead and I’m going home and that’s all I care about.” As I talked, I realized that Peggy was indeed all I cared about just then, that the death of my friend was more important than the death of my marriage. Of course, if I were married to a friend . . . but I was not, not a
nymore.

  As we walked up the aisle after the service the next morning, my oldest friend whispered, “Whenever I come to a funeral here, I think of your father’s and how beautiful it was. Do you remember?” ”Yes,” I said, and we went to the cemetery and stood by Peggy’s grave, a few hundred yards from Papa’s.

  It was a day like every January day in Bristol: no snow, bare black branches spearing the gray sky, matted brown grass underfoot. In this cemetery my married name was irrelevant, probably unknown or forgotten. I was the Cantwell girl, to some old-timers Mary Lonergan’s girl, Margaret Guinan’s grandchild. It is possible that someone there was old enough to know that I was Bridget McCarty’s great-grandchild. But for a chipped front tooth, I had no feature that had not belonged to them or to my father. My accent was theirs. I was as shocked by divorce as they would have been, and as little equipped to deal with it. I was all of them, and home again, I had slipped imperceptibly into the spin of their lives.

  Several days after the funeral, B. agreed to join me at Dr. Franklin’s. They had never seen each other, this man I had known for nineteen years and this man I had known for fifteen. My life was divided between the two, and they had never met.

  Again I talked and cried, and then I heard my husband’s silence, though he spoke, and watched his eyes, which, though they looked, could not see me. “You don’t know what it was like for me,” he had said a few months back, during one of his midnight phone calls. “All those years of Dr. Franklin and the migraines and that time after Kate was born.” And I, stung and sick with memories, said, “But you don’t know what it was like for me.” That’s all it was, really: neither of us ever knew what it was like for the other.