Camelot

by Caryl Rivers

  “No, it’s too early. I’ll go later.”

  “Is it OK for us to be doing it? Now that you’re pregnant?”

  “Oh yes, it’s fine.”

  At the end of the month her period had not come. She went to the doctor, and he did a test, and a day later he called to give her congratulations. She hung up the phone, laughing and crying until she was near hysteria. Two months later, she miscarried.

  Harry embraced her tenderly in the hospital and said, “Don’t cry, we’ll have another baby. I’ll give you another baby, I promise.” But her womb lay empty and cold as a glacier. Perfidy had killed her baby; a lie lived at the heart of her life. She fell into a deep depression and looked at the doctor dully when he said, “This is normal in cases like this. It will pass.” She wanted to laugh. It was God’s judgment, and did that ever pass? She took the tranquilizers. She wanted to confess to Harry but didn’t dare. The lie sat in her innards like a great mass of tumor, malignant and growing. There was nothing to do but live with it.

  The more Harry worked at the shoe store, the more he hated it. The job was not the golden life he had believed would be his. He could not scream at his customers, so he screamed at his wife, and he started going out with his old drinking buddies. But despite Mary’s certainty that God was punishing her, she got pregnant again. That, she thought, was very strange. Could God have missed her? As He did His savage arithmetic on punishing sinners, could He have misplaced the page with her name on it? Where did that got I know it was around here someplace. Goddamn it!

  A daughter, Karen Amy, was born the following year. Harry was marvelous with Karen. He loved to pick her up, swing her around and hold her against his chest in wonderment. “Look at what we made, Mary! God, can you believe it? We did this!”

  For a time life was good, and Mary was content. This was what life as a woman was about: a loving husband, a baby she adored. But even fatherhood could not extinguish the growing rage in Harry about his lost glory. When Greenway’s folded, a victim of a national recession that hit small cities especially hard, Harry was promised a coaching job at the high school, which seemed a lot more fun than the shoe store. But the funds were cut and the job never materialized. When nothing in town opened up, he prowled the retail stores in Silver Spring and Bethesda, but a bumper crop of high school students had been there before him. The federal government had jobs for janitors and secretaries, but he wouldn’t do the former and couldn’t do the latter. He took the civil service exam and failed it because his grammar and math were atrocious. No one had worried when he got C’s and D’s in high school, when he was the captain of the baseball team.

  By the time he had been out of work for five months, things were terrible between them. He spent too much time out with his friends drinking, and she didn’t know what to do but nag, and after a while, she stopped caring about how she looked or how the house looked. She started taking the pills again.

  “This place is a pigpen. You don’t do anything all day, you could at least keep the place neat.”

  “So you’re up. It’s only noon. I suppose you want breakfast.”

  “I’ll go out and eat. Who wants to stay in this mess!”

  “You could help out. You haven’t got anything to do but lie around.”

  “For your information, I have an interview today. A sporting goods store. Right up my alley.”

  “You still smell of booze. Who’s going to hire somebody who stinks

  Even when they tried to be nice to each other, it ended up in a fight.

  “I am trying, Mary, I really am.”

  “I know, Harry, maybe — maybe we ought to move. To D.C., maybe it would be better.”

  “We’ve got the house here, we can’t afford to move.”

  “What about the coaching job}”

  “Nothing’s moving there.”

  “You have to follow up on these things. You’ll never get anything if you don’t follow up.”

  “What do you know? Have you ever tried to make a damn nickel in your life! It’s hard out there.”

  “I know if I’d been out of work for five months I wouldn’t be drinking myself into a stupor every night and sleeping till noon.”

  Their sex life dissolved into nothingness, between his booze and her pills and, once again, her growing panic.

  “You’re not always asleep when I come in. You just pretend to be.”

  “Yes, I pretend. You go with whores, you smell of booze. So I pretend.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “You think you’re invisible, Harry! People love to gossip. They love to come up and tell me you’re sleeping with some pig!”

  “Shut your mouth!”

  “It’s true, isn’t it?”

  “It’s true. You don’t want me. So I buy it. You think I’m a goddamn monk?”

  “That’s not fair!”

  “There’s a goddamn judge inside you, Mary, always waiting to see when I’ll screw up again. You watch me with those goddamn eyes of yours. I know what they say. I don’t measure up. I’m not a man. Well, I was man enough to marry you when you got knocked up. You might remember that!”

  “Harry, please, let’s not fight…”

  “Jesus, let me out of here. I feel like I’m choking in this damn house. And you can go to hell!”

  One day, when she was talking with another woman at the supermarket, Mary heard there were openings for typists at the new newspaper in town. Her mother said that she could arrange her hours so she could take care of Karen while Mary worked. Harry was not enthusiastic, but finally he agreed.

  “What am I, some bum who has to let his wife support him?”

  “Plenty of wives work these days. I can make seventy-five dollars a week. At least we can keep up with the mortgage, until you get a job.”

  “Hell, go take the job if you want to, I don’t care. I’ll have a job pretty soon. And it won’t be for any crummy seventy-five bucks a week, either.”

  The job at the Blade, tedious as it was, burned off the torpor that Mary had fallen into at home. She no longer took the pills or complained of headaches. Suddenly she had lots of energy, and when one of the proofreaders was taken ill, Mary filled in for her. English had been her best subject, and she had a firm command of grammar and spelling. She was given the job permanently, with a raise in pay. Reporters started checking in with her not only on spelling but with local geography and history, and she often caught errors that had slipped by editors in the city room.

  In high school, she had held a minor position on the school paper and had thought idly about being a journalist, but that had seemed impossible for a girl from Belvedere. When she first came to work as a typist, she’d looked at the reporters with awe. They seemed giants, possessed of some magical conduit between their brains and the tips of their fingers, through which words flowed onto the paper. When she began to correct their spelling and grammar, they shrank to mortal size. Soon she was reading their copy critically and rewriting their stories in her head. She checked out every book on journalism she could find in the library and read them avidly.

  As she read, something very peculiar happened; the boundaries of the world began to expand; she was pushing them outward, the way she moved the metal slats on her typewriter to get more words on a line. A sudden hunger for life came upon her, so urgent that it sometimes seemed to make even the bones of her hands vibrate. Where on earth did it come from? Everybody said that a woman’s creativity was purged with the creation of a child, that any woman who wasn’t satisfied with that was not a real woman at all. Maybe that was her problem. God, first she was frigid and now she was ambitious. What was wrong with her? Sigmund Freud would be appalled.

  A classic case, students, of Oedipal fixation and penis envy. Her inability to have vaginal orgasms —

  Dr. Freud, sir, I can’t have orgasms of any kind.

  — to have orgasms of any kind is due to a misplaced and abnormal fixation on her father
—

  Dr. Freud, my father died when I was six.

  — to an unnatural fixation on the memory of her father, from whom she never separated adequately.

  Sir, I separated pretty good. He’s fucking dead.

  Watch your language!

  Sorry.

  — from the idea of her father, and his loss has created a psychic wound that will never heal, and she has been unable to transfer to her husband her sexual yearnings.

  Sir, I try. I really do, but maybe some of it’s his fault!

  She is unable to sublimate herself to her husband, seeking instead gratification through naturally male activities, such as employment.

  We couldn’t pay the mortgage. We were going to lose the house.

  — a clear example of penis envy and how if it is not dealt with by psychiatry, it will make her an unhappy, unfulfilled, neurotic, woman.

  OK, so she was a freak, a mismade woman. It didn’t matter. Ambition claimed her; there was nothing she could do about it.

  One day she got a notice in the mail that her favorite English teacher in high school had been teaching for thirty years, and there was going to be a party for her. Mary had loved her Shakespeare class. The teacher had turned the strange, old-sounding words on the page into passion and poetry. Billy Sampson might have been snapping Barbara Brownlee’s bra, and Joey Motherwell been carving rude words into his desk with a paper clip, but Mary sat transfixed, lost utterly in a Danish castle where a tormented son saw the ghost of his father.

  On her night off, after she had fed Karen and put her to bed, she drove over to the teacher’s house, and they talked for three hours, about teaching and Shakespeare and literature in America. Mary took careful notes; then she drove home and worked at the kitchen table until dawn, writing in longhand. Then she typed three drafts on the old Remington her mother had bought her for typing class. She was too exhausted to do more. It seemed a poor, threadbare story. There were patches she liked, where the woman came alive, but they seemed so few. Despair gnawed at her. She was a fool; she had imposed on a friend for nothing.

  You see, students, that penis envy is not a substitute for talent.

  She started towards Charlie Layhmer’s office three times, and three times she backed away. She was trembling when she walked through the door on the fourth try.

  “I don’t care if I get paid or anything, Mr. Layhmer. If you think it’s good enough to stick in someplace, fine, but if it’s no good, say so, don’t be polite.”

  He read the story while she waited; now her legs were shaking. She was light-headed with her own daring, awaiting sentence with a mixture of fear and dread.

  My dear, these are things that men do, you should go and just find some man you can subordinate yourself to … Why did Charlie Layhmer look exactly like Sigmund Freud?

  Charlie Layhmer looked up at her in surprise, appraisal in his eyes. He liked surprises. They made the days bearable.

  “I’m going to run this as the lead in the women’s section tomorrow. You’ve got a nice touch.”

  He gave her five dollars for the story and said she should write others. She walked out of his office and went directly out the door, to the small park behind the Blade building. She wanted to scream, to whoop, but she was too inhibited for that. So she ran around and around in a little circle laughing, then fell to the ground laughing some more and lay flat on her back. A woman passing by stared in disapproval, assuming she was drunk. Finally, she allowed herself a very small whoop. Then she picked herself up and walked back into the building, knowing that her life had suddenly veered off in an unexpected direction.

  The story appeared the next day, with her name, and under it the words Contributing Journalist. She stared at it, ran her hands over it, transfixed. Had there ever been words so glorious in the history of the world? Never. There it was in glorious black and white, nothing could undo it, nothing.

  Of course, students, I could be wrong about this penis envy thing.

  At long last, she knew who she was. Mary Springer.

  Journalist.

  Journal: Donald A. Johnson

  We are supposed to write about the fears or prejudices of our childhood. My essay, I’m sure, will be different from the others in the class, because they are white. They are going to write about how they encountered a member of a despised group, perhaps how they came to the understanding that the people they were taught to hate were not so bad after all. But I am not a member of the dominant group, so I have a somewhat skewed take on the issue. Those white kids will never imagine a world that floats in space above them, one which they will never be privileged to enter, and one which must be so wonderful that it makes your own life seem tawdry and dull beside it. I expect they cannot imagine such a thing. But I can. Oh, yes, I can.

  The red convertible is seared into my brain cells, its color as fiery and tantalizing as the day I first saw it. It was old and dented, and the muffler must have been peppered with holes, because the roar sounded like an airplane engine. But it was as red as fire engines, as blood, and it was going sixty or better.

  “Damned fools,” my father muttered, as the convertible sailed by us. Inside were six Negro men — I saw them as men, but I guess they were barely out of their teens — wearing bright-colored Hawaiian shirts and men’s hats scrunched far down on their heads so as not to be ripped away by the wind. A car radio blared a raucous rhythm-and-blues song, and beer cans were held aloft like banners.

  My father frowned, but I — oh, I was enchanted. That was freedom — a red convertible going sixty, beer, music, wild shirts and men’s hats. Oh, how I wanted to grow up!

  My father’s frown was echoed, I knew, in the other cars on the one-lane highway that wound through the Maryland countryside, loaded with kids and inner tubes and picnic baskets. White fathers would certainly mutter, “Damned crazy niggers!” and their offspring would peer through the open windows of backseats at the disappearing convertible as they might at the elephants at the National Zoo, to see exotic and mysterious creatures pass by.

  I, meanwhile, was gripped by a mysterious schizophrenia. While I desperately wanted to be in that red convertible, I was also seized, even at my young age, with a responsibility for my race. I instinctively knew that such behavior, exhilarating though it might be for the individual, was bad for us as a whole. What one Negro did reflected on all of us. White kids could skylark around in convertibles and there would be no consequences to Caucasianhood proper. But in my family, at least, we knew the rules. One must be A Credit to Our Race. I always thought of it that way; and I was sure red convertibles were not a part of it. We could be A Credit to Our Race by knocking out hulking German fighters or sliding hard into second base, but those were about the only fun ways to do it, and how many of us could be Joe Louis or Jackie Robinson? Mainly, we had to be boring and polite and get good grades.

  But such thoughts did not occupy me for long. We were on our way to Sparrows Beach, and soon I would be floating in my inner tube in the warm, brackish water, keeping a wary eye out for any U-boats that might venture past, happy with the world and my place in it.

  Sparrows was our beach. The other cars, with the whites in them, would turn off on the roads to Scientists Cliffs or Mayo Beach or Beverly Beach. They were for whites only. Sparrows Beach was for Negroes, and every Saturday on hot summer days we were on the road before eight for the thirty-mile ride to Chesapeake Bay, a trek we shared with at least a third of the residents of Washington, D.C., or so it seemed on the jammed and winding road.

  My mother packed the lunch — ham-and-cheese sandwiches on white bread lathered with mayonnaise or chicken salad creamy with mayo that crunched with little bits of celery. My parents were second-generation Washingtonians and proud of it, and we ate what most middle-class Americans ate. (I mean, it was really very strange; we were exactly like the white people in the cars that were all around us, but they didn’t know that.)

  My mother, of course, was in ch
arge of making sure we didn’t starve on the trek to the beach. She knew that spoilt mayonnaise could kill; but without it the sandwiches tasted like cardboard, so it was a necessary evil. My mother kept a sharp eye on the hamper, putting it in the shade and checking it every so often as anxiously as she would a sick child. She watched me and Darlene as we ate our sandwiches, a flicker of fear in her dark brown eyes. Despite the ice, and the wax paper, had lethal bacteria stolen between the two pieces of Wonder bread?

  The result of this was that I was probably the only kid in America who had mayonnaise nightmares. It was mortifying. What a stupid thing to be afraid of. Snakes or demons or witches were respectable terrors, but how could I tell my parents I had mayonnaise nightmares? In them, I inadvertently ingested rancid Hellmann’s, and I fell to the ground, mortally wounded by mayonnaise. My eyes bulged from my sockets, my tongue grew black and swelled to fill my throat, my stomach burst like a balloon at a birthday party. My mother sobbed, and the other adults stood sadly by and watched my death throes.

  “Should have been more careful with the mayonnaise,” said our neighbor, Mr. Williams, as I groaned and thrashed and croaked; with my tongue the size of a sneaker, that was the only sound I could make. It was at that point that I would wake, soaked with sweat.

  Occasionally the nightmares would have an added feature, jellyfish. At Sparrows Beach, there were nets to keep out the millions of jellyfish that spawned and bloomed in the bay, especially in August. Sometimes I would float right up to the edge of the nets in my inner tube, to mock them, packed in quivering masses on the other side.