by Nancy Pearl
She recited all the Housman poems she knew but had to stop when she got to “Stars, I Have Seen Them Fall” because it took her thoughts back to the last night with Jack, which was disastrous. When that happened she’d get up and smoke some of James’s ample supply of pot, but at the beginning of the summer it did ruinous things to her, it made her paranoid, made her heart beat erratically. Her eyes, already red from crying, became even redder.
Those summer nights nothing helped. The minute she got into bed her sadness began to smother her. She’d toss and turn, trying not to panic at the thought of a Jack-less future.
Much later, when Marla got home, she’d peek into Lizzie’s room and, seeing that Lizzie was still awake, she’d come sit next to her and hold her hand, and quietly say, “Come on, now, breathe with me,” and, holding Marla’s hand, breathing along with Marla’s breaths, Lizzie could finally let go of another day without Jack and sleep.
When Marla couldn’t be there, James sat at the side of her bed, breathing her to sleep. When he took her hand one night, he said, “Lizzie, listen. Jack is an asshole. I never liked him and I thought he was totally wrong for you. You’re better off without him.”
Lizzie wanted to insist James didn’t know what he was talking about, but she couldn’t formulate the right words to contradict him. It was extraordinarily comforting to have James and Marla with her, knowing they loved her. Even at the time, and more so as the years went by and she looked back on those summer months of Jack’s inexplicable silence, Lizzie knew that this was a great kindness Marla and James were doing her.
“Lizzie, why don’t you just write Jack? Or even better, pick up the phone and call him,” Marla asked one night in July. And then Lizzie had to admit to her that they’d never really talked about things like what town in Texas he grew up in, or what his father did, or if he had brothers or sisters. Lizzie realized that she really didn’t know much about him, except that he loved poetry and hated football. She knew it was a small town in Texas, near nowhere in particular, and that was about it. Marla sighed. You could eliminate Dallas and Austin and Fort Worth and Waco and San Antonio and Lubbock and Houston and there were still a lot of places in Texas fitting that description.
“How could you not know where he’s from? Surely that would come up in the conversation one time or another. You were inseparable for the whole quarter.”
Lizzie felt obscurely ashamed. “I don’t know, James. We didn’t talk about things like that. I didn’t ask him about it, I guess. I don’t know why. We were too busy doing other things.”
“So now he’s back home in Podunk, Texas, about to marry his high school sweetheart, who waited four years for him to graduate and come back to her and make babies together.”
Marla wasn’t happy with this. “God, James, shut up, that’s really cruel and you’re totally not helping, you know,” but Lizzie only shook her head, defeated. What was there to say? That was as likely a scenario as anything she could think of. And she had thought of it.
By the middle of August, when they felt they’d taught Lizzie how to breathe herself to sleep, Marla and James asked if she would be okay staying by herself so that they could go home for a couple of weeks. Although Lizzie dreaded being alone, she felt she could hardly tell them not to go. Final exams began later in the week, and maybe the concentrated study she’d need to do would either exhaust her into sleep or at least keep her mind on a non-Jack track.
The first night they were gone was the worst night she’d so far had that summer. Her eyes felt too gritty to close and she felt too jumpy to settle down. She got up and drank a cup of warm milk with brandy and went back to bed. An hour or so later she got up and had a cup of chamomile tea and went back to bed. An hour or so after that she got up to pee and came back to bed, straightening her pillows so she could sit up and reread her favorite sections of I Capture the Castle, which she normally found extraordinarily comforting. Then she turned out the light and played the easiest variant of “A . . . My Name Is Alice.” Then she started reciting all the Housman poems she knew. Then she got up again to check on some verses in “Shot? So Quick, So Clean an Ending?” that she’d forgotten, probably because they were too sad. Then she got back in bed and recited the corrected verses to herself. Then she got up to pee again. Then it was morning and Lizzie had to get up for good and go to her geography class.
As she sat down and took out the textbook, the girl sitting next to her said, “You look terrible.”
“I know,” Lizzie said, appreciating the frank assessment. “I can’t fall asleep anymore. It’s been like that for months.”
“You should go to Health Service. I hear they’ll give you sleeping pills if they think you really need them.”
Okay, Lizzie thought, I can do that.
The nurse took Lizzie into an exam room. “Dr. Teacher will be in soon,” she said as she closed the door. There was no chair, so Lizzie perched somewhat precariously at the edge of the examination table while she waited. She was all ready to have a light introductory exchange with him about what it was like being named Teacher and choosing to be a doctor, but it was clear as soon as he came into the room that there wouldn’t be any light conversation forthcoming. He studied her chart for a few minutes, although what there was to study on it was a mystery to Lizzie; it was the first time she’d ever gone to the clinic.
Finally he looked up at her. “Bultmann,” he began. “Any relation to—”
Lizzie didn’t let him finish. “My parents,” she said shortly.
He looked a shade more interested in her. “Lovely people,” he said. “Simply brilliant, both of them. You’re very lucky, you know. They’ve both made significant contributions to the field.”
Lizzie’s heart sank. This was already not going well.
“The nurse says you’re interested in some medication for sleeping.”
“Yeah,” she began. “It’s just that finals are coming up and I haven’t been able to sleep and if I could just get some sleep . . .”
“Ah, you’re taking some advanced psychology courses, I presume, to follow in your parents’ footsteps?”
“No, no.” Lizzie knew she sounded horrified but couldn’t help herself.
“If not psychology, then what?”
“Uh, a grammar class, and another one in, you know, geography.”
“Those must be fascinating,” Dr. Teacher said in a tone of voice that made it clear he didn’t think it was fascinating at all. “By the way, I’ve always wondered what your mother’s maiden name was.”
Lizzie was bewildered but still game. “LeVine.”
“Ah,” he said triumphantly, making a note in the chart. “Well,” he went on, “do we have any idea of what’s causing this inability to sleep?”
At this point the last thing Lizzie wanted to do was talk to Dr. Teacher any more than she absolutely had to.
“No, not really. It’s just become a lot harder to fall asleep recently.”
“Ah. Do you have a boyfriend?”
“A boyfriend? Um, I guess not, no, not currently.”
“But you did have a boyfriend?”
“Well, yes, I guess so.”
“Recently?”
“Sort of recently. Sure.”
“But you don’t any longer. What happened?”
Lizzie stopped to think. How could she answer that? She didn’t know what had happened.
“He graduated.”
“This past May?”
Lizzie nodded.
“So you broke up?”
Yes, she admitted, they’d broken up.
“He with you or you with him?”
Would this never end? Why did he need to know this? She felt she was entitled to some tactical lying.
“Mutual. It was a mutual breakup. Look, all I want is, like, five sleeping pills, just so I can sleep the nights before the exams.”
“How about if I give you three?” he offered.
This was insane. Were they actually bargaining over t
he number of sleeping pills he’d prescribe for her? Maybe they’d split the difference and he’d give her four.
“Sure,” Lizzie answered wearily. “Three is fine.”
Dr. Teacher stared at her stonily. “I’m going to give you a prescription for five pills,” he said sternly, “but I’m going to put down on your permanent record . . . your permanent record,” he emphasized, “that you’re suffering from insomnia due to an unsuccessful love affair.”
Lizzie left the clinic with five sleeping pills and what, even in her misery, she recognized was a terrific and endlessly reusable sentence.
“Where is your permanent record, anyway?” James asked when they’d returned from Cleveland and she told him and Marla about the visit to Dr. Teacher. “Do you think it’s what Saint Peter looks over when he decides whether you’re fit for heaven or bound for hell?”
Or Marla’s mother would send her a particularly unattractive sweater as a gift, one with, say, reindeer on it. Obviously this fashion blooper on Mrs. Cantor’s part would end up on her permanent record.
James wondered if good things also went on your permanent record. “I won the fourth-grade spelling bee. Do you think that’s on it?”
“Gosh,” Marla said, “I think that’s the year I lost because I couldn’t figure out how to spell ‘niece.’ I remember asking myself if the i-before-e rule worked in this case, or if niece was an exception, like in ‘neighbor.’ Not, as I came to find out, an exception. Do you think that’s on my permanent record?”
“Do you think the permanent records are kept in a huge bank vault in Washington? Who has the key? What if they lost it? Would that go on their permanent record? Would they have to start setting up all-new permanent records, sort of a clean slate for everyone?” Lizzie wondered.
They could go on for hours like this. And frequently did.
* A Letter from Jack *
It was December 8, and Lizzie’s last class on the last day of classes before finals week was just ending. It was also, if anyone was counting (and Lizzie was), six months to the day since Jack kissed her good-bye and vanished from her life. After the bowling debacle, she had tried to cut back on her marijuana intake, but wasn’t quite as successful as she might have wanted. Weed was a blessing and a curse, Lizzie thought, stoned, as she stood up from her desk and stuffed the Collected Chaucer into her backpack. Pot took away the immediate pain of Jack’s absence because all that she experienced in the present moment seemed so compelling that the fact of the loss of Jack was much less interesting than seeing the shape and shifting colors of the emptiness that surrounded that fact. And pot gave her so much more: she saw, for example, the scaffolding of crossword-puzzle grids. Certain words, like “ontogeny,” “regency,” and “exculpation,” delighted her, and despite having no idea when or even if she’d heard them before, she knew their meanings because of the sounds they made as they sang in her mind. When she was stoned she could study her toes, which she normally hated, for hours, and realize, as she wiggled them appreciatively, that in fact they weren’t any uglier than anyone else’s. They were just toes, and hers, and, in their own specific way, were quite lovely. When she was high she could tune out the voices in her head more easily, although one terrible night when she sat around with James and Marla, all of them high, the announcers started speaking in a slow, deadly voice. Every criticism was enunciated clearly: Horrible. Ugly. Stupid. Crazy. Inept. Selfish. Clumsy. Evil. It felt as though they were pelting her with bits of ice that had been sharpened to a point at one end.
Lizzie also knew that when you were stoned, all you could do was be stoned. You couldn’t study because you were hyperalert to every sight or sound. Classes were a joke because there were too many distractions. Being so stoned all the time didn’t have a salutary effect on her grades. She was perilously close to failing all her courses. She’d managed to eke out a C in her geography and grammar classes in the summer (blessed be the sleeping pills), but this quarter she’d taken a full load of five courses. Even the Chaucer, which she’d looked forward to because Jack had once told her how much he admired the teacher, didn’t hold her interest, whether she was stoned or unstoned. She’d tried it both ways. And without the pot the pain came back two- and threefold, a dreadful rebound effect from exiting the stoned world.
It was going to be a long weekend, trying to catch up with the readings so that she had a decent chance of passing an exam in anything but sadness. Already, most of what the teacher had said about Chaucer, his life and times, and his poems had faded away. She could remember only the first three or four lines from the Prologue (although she could recite them in a credible if midwestern-inflected Middle English). Her major takeaway from Chaucer’s life was his peccadilloes (or worse) with Cecily Champaign, whom Dr. Ragland referred to cheerfully as “Bubbles.” Bubbles Champaign. Lizzie did love that, stoned and unstoned. Her Literary Theory and second-year French classes had both become a blank. Did the semioticians have a theory of despair? Could she say it in French? Worse, she couldn’t at this moment even bring to mind the two other classes she was taking fall quarter.
Lizzie found herself outside, although she had no actual memory of leaving the classroom building. Indian summer had made an appearance after a chilly fall in Ann Arbor, and the brownish-colored leaves of the maples were still drifting off the trees. They made a satisfying crunch as she walked back to her apartment. It was warm enough for people to open their windows; she could hear music coming from the dorms. Lizzie stopped and listened to a woman singing a lightly jazzed-up version of “I’m Going to Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter.” She suddenly got a dazzling idea. Lizzie decided she was going to go home, sit right down at her desk, write herself a letter, and make believe it came from Jack. Reading it, she’d learn why, exactly, he never came back. Brilliant.
She dumped her backpack and jacket on the couch and sat down at her desk and began writing.
Dearest Lizzie (because you are):
I’m writing to apologize and explain—or try to explain—why 1) I didn’t come back to Ann Arbor this fall and 2) I haven’t written before.
I think that perhaps I gave you the wrong impression about me. Not the wrong impression about the way I felt about you. I loved you. I really did. I just realized, slowly and with difficulty over the quarter, that I simply couldn’t do it. I don’t even know if I can make you understand what it is I couldn’t do. I could love you (I do love you), most likely shall, as Millay says, love you always. I can write you love poems forever. But, Lizzie, oh, Lizzie, I don’t want—I can’t have—a relationship that’s so confining that I can’t breathe. I don’t want someone who’s everything to me and I don’t want to be everything to someone else, even you. I don’t want to be part of a great love story. It sort of reminds me of those lines by Auden that we read in Terrell’s class about not wanting everyone’s love but to be the only love of someone, that the person who loves you loves only you. Isn’t that how you feel? But I don’t. That’s not me. The thought of that makes me physically sick. And it was happening, Lizzie, it was. You know it was. We were just too entangled with one another. Every day, every hour, it was harder and harder to see where I ended and you began. I still feel like slitting my wrists when I even think about what was happening to us.
Will you forgive me for being unable to talk to you about how I was feeling and just leaving? Can you forgive me for being the way I am? I hope so. I hope that we run into each other somewhere someday—leaving a movie, or more likely it’ll be at a poetry reading—and smile and remember how wonderful it could be when we were together, and not think about how it ended. I hope we can someday be friends.
With all the (imperfect) love I’m capable of, Jack
After she finished writing the letter, she folded it up and put it in an envelope and addressed it to herself. For the sake of verisimilitude (verisimilitude! great word!), she supposed that she should actually put a stamp on it and drop it into a mailbox so that she’d get it in a day or two,
but that seemed, even for her, a bit too much. Sealing and addressing the envelope would just have to be enough.
She walked around the apartment for a while, unpacking her book bag, getting a can of Diet Pepsi, and grabbing a handful of pretzels. She arranged her books on her desk in the order she’d need them for studying for her finals, which began on Monday and ended (for her) on Wednesday. Who makes up the finals schedule, anyway? She went into Marla’s room and felt her familiar awe at how neat Marla was. It looked as though no one had lived there for weeks or months. She walked around the apartment a few more times. She wished she had stocked up on champagne, just in case this moment—a letter from Jack—actually ever arrived. And now it had. She sat down on the couch and took a deep breath. Then she opened the envelope and started reading the letter. After encountering the first word, she got up, rummaged through her desk for a pen, which happened to be red, and sat down to finish it.
Dearest Lizzie (because you are): NO!!! YOU DON’T GET TO USE THIS WORD NEXT TO MY NAME. WHAT A LIAR YOU ARE.
I’m writing to apologize and explain—or try to explain—why 1) I didn’t come back to Ann Arbor in the fall and 2) why I didn’t write before this.
I think that perhaps I gave you the wrong impression about me. IT’S ALL TOO LATE NOW. CAN’T YOU SEE THAT? Not the wrong impression about the way I felt about you. I loved you. I really did. BULLSHIT. BULLSHIT. BULLSHIT. THEN WHY DID YOU WAIT SO LONG TO WRITE ME? WHY DIDN’T YOU CALL? HOW COULD YOU JUST LEAVE ME LIKE YOU DID??!!??? I just realized, slowly and with difficulty over the quarter, that I simply couldn’t do it. I don’t even know if I can make you understand what it is I couldn’t do. I could love you (I do love you), most likely shall, as Millay says, love you always. GOD, WHAT A BASTARD YOU ARE, JACK. I can write you love poems forever. I DON’T WANT THEM, NOT FROM YOU. But, Lizzie, oh, Lizzie, I don’t want—I can’t have—a relationship that’s so confining that I can’t breathe. I don’t want someone who’s everything to me and I don’t want to be everything to someone else, even you. I don’t want to be part of a great love story. YOU WERE NEVER EVERYTHING TO ME. NEVER NEVER NEVER. DON’T FLATTER YOURSELF, YOU ASSHOLE. It sort of reminds me of those lines by Auden that we read in Terrell’s class about not wanting everyone’s love but to be the only love of someone, that the person who loves you loves only you. Isn’t that how you feel? WHAT DO YOU CARE WHAT I FEEL? YOU KNOW, YOU’VE JUST RUINED AUDEN FOR ME FOREVER. But I don’t. That’s not me. The thought of that makes me physically sick. And it was happening, Lizzie, it was. You know it was. I DON’T KNOW THAT AT ALL. WE LOVED EACH OTHER. ISN’T THAT WHAT LOVE IS SUPPOSED TO BE? We were just too entangled with one another. Every day, every hour, it was harder and harder to see where I ended and you began. I still feel like slitting my wrists when I even think about what was happening to us. I WISH YOU HAD. I WISH YOU WERE DEAD. IT WOULD HAVE BEEN EASIER FOR ME IF YOU WERE DEAD.
