The first time Bert, white-faced, shrieked at me, “Can’t you keep that brat quiet, woman!” in a contemptuous tone of voice, I made an instant decision: I would leave him as soon as possible. After Bert went off to his afternoon shift, I felt cheerful for the first time in almost a year, so I knew that leaving was the right thing for me to do. I knew women were not supposed to leave a marriage, they were supposed to find some way to make their husbands happy, but my determination made me feel—for the first time since I had found myself pregnant—like a human being with a future, instead of a dumb animal caught in a trap.
It was fortunate that I had already accepted that I was not a good person, because if I had had ambitions of goodness, I would have been tormented. As it was, my decision made things considerably easier between Bert and me. I stopped getting upset that he noticed Lettice only when she cried, that he refused to change her diaper, that he never held her. I knew it was just as well he didn’t care about her, because he wouldn’t miss her and I wouldn’t feel guilty taking her away. And while he more and more often treated me with an easy, arrogant contempt, I could keep my temper, reminding myself that it wouldn’t be long.
But of course, it was a pipe dream, because how was I going to get away? I took to reading the local paper every day, poring over the want ads. The jobs for women ranged from clerk to typist to stenographer to secretary. Only top-notch secretaries could earn enough to support themselves. And I did not want to leave Bert to move across the street or across town; my goal was New York City! I began to push Lettice’s carriage to the public library every day and read the want ads in The New York Times and the Herald Tribune. But they were the same as the local ads, only somewhat higher paid. There were no interesting or well-paid jobs for women. I thought about my mother creating her own business, without money, with just her skill and energy and drive. But I didn’t have any skill at all. I couldn’t do anything.
I walked to the laundromat several times a week, piling the bag of laundry on top of Lettice in her carriage. I always took a library book with me; I still entertained notions of improving myself. But the truth was, I could no longer concentrate on serious literature. My mind rejected it. I wanted trash, I wanted escape. So I often picked up one of the tattered “women’s” magazines lying around the laundromat—movie magazines and True Stories, Modern Romances, and True Confessions. Rocking Lettice’s carriage with my foot, I would leaf through it idly, adopting an attitude of superior contempt. But the stories caught me, and I began to read them with a growing fascination. I read them the way I watched television (when I was forced), like an anthropologist studying the customs of an alien people. Yet the people in these magazines were not alien; they were women just like me.
One after another story was about women who had “fallen,” who had given in to a night of passion and ruined their lives. The question was, what did they do then? Only a few tried to raise the baby themselves. Some of them gave their babies up for adoption and tried to go back to their old lives. But they were forever haunted by their dark secret, which would rise to crush them just when they thought they were safe. Often, a poor girl fell in love with the boy from the big house on the hill, who was a spoiled brat and denied any responsibility for her; sometimes the girl was from the big house on the hill, and she had a mad passion for the dark-haired angry boy who lived near the railroad tracks. But in the end, through sincere repentance and good behavior, some women were redeemed! A redeemed girl learned to speak and dress and act properly, so she could marry a man with a little money and pass into the middle class.
On the back pages of these magazines, there was always a true account, written by an ordinary girl about her sufferings. You wrote your story and sent it in, and if it was chosen, you got a hundred dollars. A hundred dollars! That was a fortune. In a fit of daydreaming, I had checked out the price of a tourist-class ticket on the Île de France: it was $165. If I could win two of these contests (and of course, if I did not have Lettice), I could go to Paris. Paris! That was even better than New York!
I began to spend the hours I walked Lettice back and forth in our attic room imagining my own story. Not my real story, of course: it was too bleak. But suppose Bert and I had found after we married that we really did love each other. It was possible, wasn’t it? He could be a little nicer than he was, a little less stupid, a little more educated; I could be a good person like Delia and a little less educated, not quite so bright. We could learn through suffering.
I decided to try my hand.
It was much harder than I imagined. The hardest thing was to get the tone right, to have it sound like the work of a sweet, honest, well-meaning girl who wasn’t too smart—yet without sounding like complete drivel. Day after day, I worked on it, concealing my efforts from Bert. I never threw scratched-out sheets into our garbage but folded them and the good pages and slid both into the Kotex box I kept in my bureau drawer. I knew Bert would never look there. When I went out each day, I took the bad pages and, tearing them up, threw them in a Dumpster near the supermarket. After a month, I had a story I thought was passable. I sent it off to True Stories. You had to include a self-addressed, stamped envelope if you wanted your manuscript back—which I did, figuring I could send it to the others—so I used my name and Jerry’s home address, and called to warn him that something might come for me in the mail.
I was too nervous to sit around waiting for the results, so I immediately started another story. This one was different: in this one, the girl was in college, had come from a more middle-class background, and so was even more reprehensible. It was harder to write, because the girl was bright and a little privileged and had to be so penitent. In one night of sordid passion with a boy who works in a gas station, she blows her future with handsome, wealthy Clarence Bellows, a Harvard junior who is in love with her. Giving up her baby to a woman who has longed for a child for years, she ends in quiet, patient acceptance of her sin, working in a maternity hospital to help others like herself, hoping for redemption. It was truly sickening.
All I had to do to write these things was to imagine what a good woman would do, or feel, or say about the single most loaded situation women seemed to face. And I knew plenty of good women: my mother had been one. Delia was a good woman, so was my sister Merry, and most of the women in Delia’s family and in Bert’s were good women. At least, they tried to be. They thought they were. I just had to conjure them up, with sentences out of their own mouths. Now, when Bert and I had Sunday dinner at his mother’s house, I took interest in what was going on, I paid attention; if someone said something especially typical, I dashed into the bathroom to jot it down. Whatever happened with the stories, my new project was making my life a bit more bearable.
I must have done something right, because the third story I sent in won. I wrote more, under different names, and won again later that year. I had two hundred dollars! Enough to go to Paris, but not enough to get me and Lettice out of Bridgeport.
In the spring of 1950, a little bookstore opened in the same strip mall as the supermarket. It offered new and used romances, mysteries, and adventure tales, like the shop Merry used to patronize. In those days, public libraries did not carry romances, on the ground that they were not literature. But books were bound in paper now and could be bought new for twenty-five or fifty cents, returned for a dime, and bought used for twenty or thirty cents. Passing the shop, I remembered how romances had gotten Merry through a hard time of her life. Vaguely wondering if they could do the same for me, I suddenly found myself inside.
I didn’t know how to choose from so many books, all bearing similar covers—most often, a young woman with a ripped bodice, and a dashing man in boots, carrying a whip. A glance at the back cover suggested that they all had the same plot too. But certain authors seemed more popular than others—the shelves held tens of books by them. I decided to go with those and chose one by Barbara Cartland. One was all it took to hook me. Feeling alone and unloved, unlovable even, living a life of suc
h tedium that a telephone call was an event, I was sucked into the heroine’s passionate adventures as into quicksand.
Having completed only two years of college, I couldn’t claim to be an educated person. But I was aware that the book I was reading offered a false vision of reality. Yet there was some kind of reality in it, one I couldn’t pinpoint or name, a kind that was somehow tied to what I’d been reading in the magazines. I had a vague sense that women’s lives lay untouched, unseen, like tiny violets covered with snow. No one knew they were there, and no one cared, really. No one was interested in depicting them. The closest anyone came were these sweetish teary books that were soaked in fudge or caramel or strawberry sauce, allowed to dry, cut into pages, and sold. I felt I understood both the books and the thinking behind them, understood them with some part of myself, not necessarily my intellect.
I fell into the habit of getting a book each time I went to the market. I could easily have gulped down several of these confections a day, but I couldn’t afford to. I had to make the book last a few days or be without one.
In time, I became quite knowledgeable about the genre and knew the names and pen names of the better-known authors. I felt I could tell if the author was male or female (all the authors’ names were female), and I was familiar with the plots, basic morality, and taboos that characterize romance fiction. I became aware when an author was stretching convention—by introducing a mixed-color or mixed-religion relationship, for example. It occurred to me that these books could be agents of moral change—although I didn’t use such an exalted phrase at the time.
I never confused these books with mundane reality, never expected the glamorous men who inhabited my literary fantasy life to appear in actual life or let myself slide into delusions that I had any glamour myself. Only I did think that someday I would like to travel to the thrilling places in which many of these novels were set, places like Egypt, Rome, Paris, London, Singapore, Macao. (What a disappointment when I finally visited Macao!) I alternated romance with good fiction obtained from the library—that year, I read all of Trollope and Galsworthy—but the pull of romance was irresistible. When I was not reading a romance, I daydreamed one, sitting in the laundromat or ironing to radio music or on my knees, washing the bathroom floor. It’s true that during this time, I had a sense that I was wasting my life. I felt sickly sweet, like a child who’s eaten too much candy. I felt I was damaging myself.
After reading maybe forty romances and winning my second story contest, I was struck by the idea that I might be able to write a romance. My heart began to thump, the way it does when you stumble onto something that is absolutely right. I knew it was something I could do.
Bert and I didn’t go to the movies anymore; we would have needed a sitter, and he never suggested it. Neither did I. As a result, we didn’t have sex: the one seemed connected to the other in his brain. They were connected in mine too, which was why I didn’t suggest a sitter. Of course, for two months before and two months after Lettice was born, we were not supposed to have sex, so maybe he just got out of the habit. I don’t know; we never discussed it. But he was almost never home: when he wasn’t at work or helping his “pop” at the gas station, he was playing poker and drinking beer with other cops. He obviously didn’t miss me. I didn’t miss him. I could work seven days a week if I chose.
I determined to start writing immediately after New Year’s, but Christmas held me up. Somehow, without a car, a babysitter, or much money, I was expected to buy gifts for everyone, Bert’s family and my own. This led to much quarreling with Bert, whose help I absolutely needed. It all ended badly in every way; with great effort, I bought paltry gifts, which still nearly bankrupted us, and Bert and I were not speaking when we—or I—celebrated Lettice’s first Christmas. It took me some time to recover.
But the winter days were so dismal, so unvaried in their pallor and emptiness, that my mind drifted back to my project as the only cheerful or colorful element in a bleak life. By mid-January, I began to imagine characters and a plot—both severely limited by the genre. The style was another matter. I set myself to write paragraphs of description in different styles. I went to the library with Lettice in her carriage, and pulling a half-dozen novels from the shelves, I copied their opening paragraphs. I studied the styles of the romances I’d read. Finally, I decided on a sharp, edgy style rather than the breathy effusiveness or flowery emotionality of most romance writers.
What was most important, though, was my decision not to make my heroines good girls. Most romance heroines were simperingly good: they were a little sickening and, in my view, by my morality or amorality, whatever it was, a bad lesson for the reader. I would give my heroines the author’s imprimatur of moral rightness, but I would make them girls who thought about what they wanted, and saw sacrifice as an oppressive form of manipulation. I realized it might be wise to tone down this aspect at first and start with more conventional, less developed heroines. But from the first, I had a long-range plan.
By March, I had decided to set my first novel in a dilapidated antebellum mansion in the Deep South, a place I had never visited. I named the novel after the mansion, Willowand. It didn’t mean anything; I just liked the sound of it. My heroine, Elsinore (I was shameless, and snobbishly figured my readers would not know Hamlet; my fan mail showed that I underestimated them), was nineteen and an orphan, like me. But a great-uncle she has never met agrees to take her in and has her transported from the cold, rational Northeast of her childhood to a steamy, swampy, Spanish-moss-draped overgrown plantation in Mississippi. No, Louisiana. This first quandary—my ignorance of either state—sent me to the library to study the South. I didn’t take books out; Bert might just possibly notice them. I liked the library: I sat there, one hand rocking the carriage gently as Lettice slept, the other holding a book, happily reading in the quiet, sweet-smelling room. This was research! It was fun! I was having a glorious time; it was like being back in school.
I finally chose Alabama, which would have more antebellum mansions than either of the other states but was equally steamy and swampy. In an illustrated study of the South, I even found a picture of the exact house I had in mind. I studied it for a long time, jotting down its features in an old notebook purchased for my lamented junior-year English course.
I started writing Willowand in April 1951. It began: “The girl woke with a start as the train lurched, and her eyes widened as she saw through the window a soft green land where even the houses lacked hard edges, blurring into the trees.” I was tentative and nervous. Though I wrote fast, each day I crossed out much of what I’d written the day before, so my progress was slow. Just as before, I hid my manuscript and crossed-out sheets. I enjoyed plotting this secrecy almost as much as I did the writing, and thought I would write my second novel about a girl who is imprisoned and under surveillance—albeit by superficially friendly forces—and uses such tricks to escape. It would be a romance, but it was also my life.
I finished my first manuscript in July. I was so pleased with myself for completing it, and for doing what I thought was a good job, that days passed before I realized I had no idea what to do next. I decided to consult my sisters, the New York sophisticates. As always when we called each other, they got on separate extensions, and we all talked at once. They squealed approbation when I told them what I had done.
“But I don’t know what to do now. I’ve made a list of the companies that publish romances, but they’re all in New York, and I don’t know how to get an entrée into them…”
“Arlene Scott,” Susan said. “She’s a secretary at a publishing house. I met her through Ginger, an old roommate, who worked at Stratford Books before she got married. She’ll know what to do. I’ll call her tomorrow and call you back.”
“Umm. One other thing…I haven’t told Bert about this.”
There was a long silence on the other end as this got digested.
“Okay,” Susan said finally. “So if he’s home, I’m just calling to see how
my one and only niece is. How is she, by the way?”
I waited in tantalized agony, pins and needles in my fingers and toes. But several weeks elapsed before Susan called with instructions to mail the manuscript to a friend of Arlene’s called Nadine, who was a secretary at Swan Books, which specialized in romances. “Nadine’s friendly with a couple of editors there, and she’ll ask them to read it,” Susan concluded.
It was my turn to squeal.
My brother’s and sisters’ lives had changed over the past two years. Tina had gone off to Hollywood to make her fortune, and we rarely heard from her. A few months after Lettice was born, a crumpled package arrived in the mail, containing a tiny outfit, already too small for her, with a card from Tina, but no news. Susan was now secretary to the vice president of her agency and made very good money for a woman. And she was engaged to a designer in the agency’s art department, Eldon Willis. Eldon owned a car and had driven Susan and Merry up to Bridgeport to welcome Lettice into the world. Merry was still the same, as she lamented. And she still read romances.
After Lettice was born, Jerry and Delia bought a house in the country, just outside Bridgeport, a wonderful big old place like our house in Millington. Delia had learned to drive and had her own car now, and Jerry, sounding cheerful, told me they were trying to start a family. I rarely spoke to Delia, but Jerry stopped over a couple of times a month and took me and Lettice out for a little drive, for ice cream or a trip to a park. He was a godsend. He knew I never went anywhere but the supermarket. Maybe he wasn’t a good person in the way Delia was, but in my book he was better.
The family had split apart in some ways. Living in New York, my sisters were exposed to things Jerry and Delia never thought about. They went to art museums once in a while, and to plays; they saw movies that didn’t come to Bridgeport; and their speech had improved. They acted and sounded like educated middle-class women, whereas Jerry’s speech had deteriorated from his working in a factory with uneducated people, and since he never went anywhere to speak of, he seemed sort of—I hate to say this—provincial. When they were all together, my sisters and Jerry, they seemed like members of two different classes. Yet Jerry and Delia were probably better off financially than Susan and Eldon and, certainly, than Merry, who was still just a secretary in a pool. Someday, though, Eldon might make more money than Jerry. Class was a subtle thing.
My Summer With George Page 17
