Consciousness Raising

by Lorraine Ray

“You know who I mean. The one who wrote the autobiography of Marilyn Monroe and claims they’re soul mates because they have the same initials or something.” I laughed at my opinion, so certain was I of my new husband’s agreement.

  A stony silence followed during which Morris pressed his finger tips together and ominously tapped his lips here and there as though he were trying to contain the awful oncoming outburst. Bats practically boiled out of his brain.

  I was mystified. What offense had I perpetrated? Was it something about Marilyn Monroe? Was the author whose name I’d forgotten his favorite?

  “Autobiography?” blurted Morris vehemently. “An autobiography is the written history of a person’s life narrated by himself. Marilyn Monroe did not write an autobiography. Therefore you must be mistakenly referring to her biographer.”

  I was horrified by my gaffe, but decided to be honest. “I don’t know why, but I often confuse the two—autobiography and biography—when I talk. Not in my mind, but when I speak.”

  “Out loud,” I said.

  “To people.”

  “Occasionally.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  That night in the hotel bed Morris made certain our bodies never touched.

  Like most marital fights, this one was short-lived; by eastern Texas we were friends again. Although I felt a slight change in Morris’ attitude toward me when we arrived in Mississippi, beautifying our new home in Oxford became my principal preoccupation. Should the small bathroom above be papered in blown red roses? Or gardenias and gaudy butterflies? These vacuous concerns filled my head and in my spare time I made the friends whom I amused with my stories of life in Arizona, including the consciousness raising. I still enjoyed my husband’s superiority to his colleagues and graduate students.

  I can still see us at the tenure party I gave him four years after our arrival in Oxford. Never had any little professor’s wife more proudly planted her sensible heels in her crowded kitchen. Boiling a colossal pot of worm-like spaghetti, my hands held captive in large red lobster claws (pot holder wedding presents), I tried to stop our son from dashing about, and steadied our second, unborn child who whirled in my big belly under my apron. Several of my husband’s colleagues who had gathered there shouted “Speech, speech!” meaning me. But Morris intervened. “Brenda give a speech? Believe me, this girl hasn’t produced a witty thought in her entire life!” He hugged my sagging shoulders.

  What a blunt blow that was. I plastered a broad, inane grin on my face. And the rising steam from the spaghetti masked my tears.

  At this point in our marriage his once gentle chiding changed into a continuous, short-tempered scold. If I were so bold as to ask to read the articles he was working on, he would disconnect from me with quick derisive snort. And Brenda attend faculty seminars? Even quailing in a darkened corner? What would be the point, he’d scoff.

  By the eighth year of our marriage it had become clear that this superior being’s opinion of me was largely derogatory! Like some hideous oversized crow, he picked at me while I was imprisoned in an intellectual gibbet, a situation likely to continue for the rest of our marriage. Contumely: there’s the word for the dish he served up daily, though I can’t be relied on to pronounce it correctly twice.

  Cocktails dulled my pain. In my drunken state Morris made jokes at my expense in front of our children, belittled my attempts at self-improvement, criticized my every action and expression. He berated me with voluble streams of denunciatory Old English; I never quite knew what he was saying.

  What my husband thought of me became tangled up with the scent of magnolias and traveled throughout the big house. Dreadful were the ways Morris mimicked me, lampooned my feeble attempts to improve myself or take an interest in anything scholarly. Finally, one night after our eleventh anniversary, and for the first time in our relationship, I objected, rather mildly, to his reproach. Morris reacted by exploding out the front door, pacing our grassy green lawn, and slicing the night air under the ghostly, blooming magnolias with flailing, angry arms. “Master modern English!” he roared over and over. “Master modern English!” “Master modern English!” he shouted again and again until the terrier next door was driven into a yapping frenzy. From our second story bedroom I listened as this continuous, terrifying tom-tom gradually addled, and became: “Monster, monster English. Monster, monster English.”

  I can’t say I was terribly surprised when Morris moved out the next morning and subsequently sued for divorce. After eleven protracted and unpleasant years of marriage, he dumped me for Rowena Rood, a graduate scholar of his, now the preeminent authority on Saxon syllables. Their joint articles pile up, citations upon citation, and together, like dusty paper silhouettes, they pertly pirouette in some lofty sphere of wretched academic excellence.

  I’m back in Arizona now and Morris and I share custody of our grandchildren. For six years I’ve been sober. On the way to my dentist I skirt the Davidson Addition and the desert where I rid myself of Maureen’s book. So much has happened since that triumphant act; it makes me wince to think of the girl who stuffed The Bell Jar into a snake hole. That’s one of the world’s great literary works I’ll never have the heart to read.

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  Lorraine Ray is an avid reader and writer. She lives in an old adobe home in the center of Tucson, Arizona with her husband and daughter.

  Connect with Lorraine Ray at Twitter: https://twitter.com/@LoRay00.