Only love was different. But love was not part of my portion. I did not deserve it. I did not know how to keep it when I had it. I had a career—I used to have a career—and that was all I was allowed. I had failed as a mother, failed as a wife, failed as a lover, all because I was a carrot and not a celery, I was an egoist, ambitious, willful, wanting my own in everything, insisting on my own will, way, desires….
Now all of it was gone. All my late-night hootin’ and hollerin’, my singing and laughing fests, all my falling onto strange mattresses ebullient with strange men, all of it had fallen away from me like wisps of cobweb in a wind, nothing clings to me, I roar too fast through life for anything to stick….
Only the work is left, and my pleasure in that. When I am working, I have energy, drive, I know what I want and I get it. I thank the powers who require thanking for my work. When I am not working, I am tired, I am bored, I am going through motions. I often want to die. I wake up in the pale sick morning light and lie there trying to force my eyes to remain open. Franny has gone to school and Alaia has brought my coffee in on a tray. I pull myself up and look at the clock. I don’t want to get up. It is time to get up, but what for? What is there waiting for me out there in the day that is worth such an effort?
I do get up eventually, and go through the requisite motions to prove to the world that I am alive. And then I fall into bed at night, and if I have not drunk enough, or have not exercised enough, I lie there plunging into the black hole that is my heart, plunging deeper, dizzy, hoping that this time it will be permanent, that I will not have again to face the morning, not again have to face another night.
I cannot cry. I think of Arden and Billy and I feel I have a sponge for a heart, a sponge that is squeezed, squeezed, so tightly it compresses to the size of a marble, cold and hard and impregnable in the palm, and the pain of that is unbearable, unbearable. Why do we do it, I wonder. Why have children, give them so much…well, perhaps they would say I did not give them so much, I did not give them enough. But me, I, I feel as if I gave them everything, squeezed myself, my sponge heart dry over and over in worry and caring and attention, to make them happy, to make them able. But they swallowed me up and stayed hungry, they never had enough mother, there is never enough mother, don’t I know? And they stand unforgiving, glaring at me. And I can’t cry.
I want to die. It is true I lost Brad, but that was long ago; and true I lost Toni, but I conspired in that. And I lost World, too, but that was reparable. But to lose them that way, those babies who came out of me, who were literally fed by my body, my blood, no symbolic communion wafers and wine here, the real thing, body and blood, who went on being nourished by my body and blood, or at least heart and mind and soul and sweat, how could it happen, how can it be explained?
Why do we go on doing it? Why didn’t Frances leave those children in the orphanage and go off and make a new life for herself? She was only thirty-two, hardworking and skillful and responsible, sweet, attractive to men. She earned her own living, she might have found a better man that time, or just forgotten about men and made herself a better life. Why? Why did Belle stay with Ed when he was showing her he wanted more, when he forced her to swallow the bitter pill of her need for him? Why didn’t she leave him, us, go off and make a new life for herself, create a career? she was attractive, smart, able. Why? And here we were, another generation, why were we repeating this past? Why did Joy live as poorly as Mother, as Grandma ever did? Stinting on food, living in tight unpleasant quarters, scrimping on everything, wearing old clothes to keep her kids, keep her kids. Why didn’t she just send them to Justin and the hell with it?
For generations—for centuries—for millennia women have dedicated their lives to saving the kids and we were continuing the tradition. Sweet, martyred and sighing; honest, angry and yelling; tender, tough and mean, whatever, however they acted, women gave up their lives, any hope of a life, to raise the kids, to make things better for the kids, to preserve the children. And the children, in their turn, turn: the mother was martyr, screamer, a calculating bitch. She was not what was wanted. There is no end to the bitterness in their hearts against the mother, no end in mine, no end in yours, no end in theirs.
Why can’t I leave my children who have left me? Why can’t I find the right-sized knife to carve them out of my heart? or a potion that will make them fade, as Brad and Toni have faded, pass off into memory, become just two more portraits in my album? Why do I continue, in my crowded space, to reserve a space for them? to give them house room, who have repudiated my house? Why do they lie undigested at the top of my stomach, burning? How can I so much love them, who hate me?
I will not love. I will not feel. There is a place beyond pain and pleasure, I intend to find it, perhaps I have found it. My mouth tightens, my cheeks sag, my chin droops in disappointed sacs. I am developing my mother’s aged face sooner than she developed it. Already my hair is greyer than hers. Perhaps I will die before her, too. It would be a gift.
XIV
NOVEMBER 21, 1977. I am forty-eight today. I have just opened this journal—the first time in over a year—and what I saw on the first page made me shiver: “I feel that when I finish this volume, I will die.” The book—crimson covers with black leather edges, where did I get it?—is nearly full. When did I write that? The entry isn’t dated. Why did I write it? I am not usually superstitious, but this prophecy makes me uncomfortable. Maybe because it is traditional for a book to end with a death—unless it can end with a marriage. Yet here I am, continuing to write, steadily, tensely filling the last few blank pages.
There are seven books on the shelf. The first one is not dated, I often forget dates, but I think it was in 1972 that I started writing down fragments of—well, feeling, I guess, although I was convinced I no longer felt. Just around the time that Billy started medical school: fall of ’72. After my father retired—that was when?—’71. Arden was married in August of ’71, a beautiful wedding on the broad lawn of my parents’ house out in Suffolk, a green-and-white-striped tent, rowboats on the lake. Brad was there, heavier, red-necked, face swollen, suffused with pink, biting his lip—I knew the look, it meant that he was controlling himself, keeping in the rage and sorrow he felt at what I’d done to him. But he had his wife with him and I was alone: he didn’t think about what that meant. After all, he has had the life he wanted; as I did. What we have now is the consequences of having wanted what we wanted, and those are always sorrowful. For matter is never lacking privation; and inasmuch as it is under one form, it is deprived of another.
This journal-keeping isn’t a regular occupation, months go by and I don’t open the notebook, but then the day will present itself—there will be a little blue visible in the sky behind its usual pallor, or maybe it will be an especially dark day on which it is impossible to take photographs—and I will sit down at my desk and write for an hour or two, lifting my head often to look at the closed-in sky. I would like to move away from here, to a place where the sky is huge and spreading and deep and you can see the stars at night, but I have to stay here, this is where I get work.
I get mostly commercial work; I have enough assignments to get by. I still live simply, so I can afford to pay for Franny’s school tuition, which is expensive. Toni isn’t doing so well in Hollywood just now; he says he’s nearly broke. Whereas we can live on three or four assignments a year. Last year I photographed an offshore oil rig for an oil company ad, and earned enough to live for six months. That was good; because I didn’t get another assignment for six months. The great advantage to this moderate poverty is that I have time to do my own work.
My name is still associated—to the degree anyone remembers it—with the heroic, the large-scale, man’s domination of nature. This makes me uneasy, I feel like a spy, a pretender, because I no longer find humans heroic. I find most of the works of human hands pathetic or absurd; only the beautiful—in whatever way—seems admirable to me. Shooting grandiose structures feels like prostitution, wage labor. I
do it competently; I have enough experience to hand clients what they want. But I hate it and myself for doing it. I do only as much as I need to for survival.
I still photograph for myself, as I always did, and in my personal work, it is the private, the daily, the small acts that make up the texture of a life that interest me. I go to Harlem, the Bronx, or Little Italy, I seek out places where women still hang wash on the line, children play in the streets or sit, large-eyed and vacant, on the steps of ravaged brownstones; where the young of both sexes adorn themselves like tropical birds and flaunt themselves along the sidewalks. I photograph butcher shops where meat hangs on hooks in the front window, and vegetables piled with proud artistry on stalls in front of grocery shops. These become, daily, harder to find in Manhattan. They are completely gone from the suburbs.
I go to Coney Island and shoot elderly people sitting on benches on cold sunny days—I like photographing two old women schmoozing with all the sharp expressiveness of age in their faces and gestures. I take the ferry to Staten Island and shoot people coming home from work. I especially like to shoot people with children—talking to them, playing with them, ignoring them, comforting them, scolding them, raising their hands to them—when they are unaware of the camera. I feel I am recording the ethos of a time.
I think about things more now. I have the leisure and the solitude. Only Franny breaks in to remind me that I am not living in an isolation cell. We no longer have Alaia, alas. I couldn’t afford her when I started paying for Franny’s school. And once Franny was fourteen, she didn’t absolutely need a woman of Alaia’s great talent. But we were both distressed saying good-bye to her, and once in a while, she stops in to see us. Now when I have an assignment that takes me out of town, Franny goes to stay with her friend Jillian, whose parents are happy to have her.
I don’t really have anything to write today, I don’t know why I opened this book. Maybe because it’s my birthday: one more. Franny is taking me out to dinner tonight to celebrate, if that is the right word. She is dear, as always. She clings to me, I cling to her. There is a great vacancy in my mind, in my heart. All I can think of are facts, the kind you write in a letter to be mimeographed and sent to all the old friends and relatives along with the Christmas card.
Dear________, (Name to be filled in by hand)
Billy did very well in college and has gone to medical school at Harvard. We are very proud of him.
Arden is married to Jacob. They live on their farm (social/poetic license) outside of Ithaca. Arden has had two babies, two boys, Jeremy and Jeffrey, who are now three and one, respectively. She is expecting a third child next month. The babies are adorable. We are very proud of her and them.
Joy has also finished college and has a job she enjoys as business manager in an insurance company in Huntington, which pays more than teaching. Her children are all fine. Jonathan got a football scholarship to Ohio State, and wants to be a coach; Julie got a scholarship to Stony Brook, where she is majoring in psychology. Jennifer is fourteen now, and a cheerleader, just like her mother! We are very proud of all of them.
Belle and Ed are still living in Brightwaters, and they keep busy. We are proud of them for managing to live so long.
Franny is fifteen now and a sophomore in prep school. She loves to play basketball and she makes excellent grades. We are very proud of her even if she is mad for the Rolling Stones.
I am fine too. I have just come back from photographing a plant in California, part of a new burgeoning business, computers, for a business magazine. It was interesting and very lucrative. We are very proud of me.
We are proud to announce that everyone is fine. Everything is great here. (Can you say the same? Aren’t you jealous?) Have a happy Christmas!
Love, as always….
It sounds wonderful. I am impressed myself. It sounds like a happy ending. It seems you can always have a happy ending, no matter what really happens, simply by selecting what you choose to leave out. You leave out the fact that Billy and Anastasia see each other rarely, and that this grieves the mother; that the same is true of Arden and Anastasia, an even deeper grief because when they do see each other they fight, sometimes violently; and that Jacob is ethereal to an extreme, flaky is the word. He doesn’t look Anastasia in the eye, ever, and rarely looks at anyone else either. He doesn’t walk, he floats; his body seems attached to his head by thin, loose wire. When he speaks, he speaks to Arden, who translates for him to the world. And you leave out, entirely, all of Joy’s suffering and struggles, her problems with Jonathan (drugs) and Julie (hostility to her mother, sullenness) and Jennifer (a sense of not belonging, unhappy shyness).
Besides that, you must be careful to end your book in time, before terrible new things occur. I think I will end this one here. It seems right.
DECEMBER 1, 1977. I’ve started a new book: Book Eight. I decided not to risk finishing the other one. Besides, it is time for a new book since I seem to have been given a second chance. It arrived last month, on my birthday, actually. This magazine called me, a feminist magazine called Woman, and asked me to fly to Houston to photograph the women’s convention that was being held there. Because they called me so late, I figured I was their second or third choice, and considered standing on my pride and refusing. But I was feeling so low I thought it might do me good to get out of the house and shoot something that wasn’t machinery for a change. And besides, even if I am not a member of any organization, I am certainly a feminist at heart. So I went.
It was spectacular. Partly it was a war, involving strategy, alignments, and regrouping. First A struggled against B, then when A was defeated it decamped; leaving B against C, then BC against D, while X waited over the next hill, preparing a massacre. Men are probably used to things like that, but women aren’t. And partly, it was a religious ceremony.
The beginning was bad. A convention of furniture manufacturers, all men of course, had been meeting at the hotel where most of the women had reservations. When the men heard who was coming next, hundreds of them decided to keep their rooms an extra day. So when the women arrived, there were not enough vacant rooms for them. The hotel didn’t want to offend the furniture manufacturers, who might want to return, whereas the women certainly wouldn’t, so they were gentle with the men who were overstaying. The result was that for two days there were huge lines of women winding several times around the lobby, with their baggage heaped in the center.
This confusion was complicated by the fact that many of these women had never traveled far before and didn’t understand the system. They were delegates elected by local women’s organizations, and their way was being paid by government agencies. Many of them were poor, black, old, impaired, and/or did not possess credit cards. No CREDIT CARDS! How can you expect to stay in a hotel without a credit card? the hotel clerks gasped. The women intended to pay in cash. That was unheard of, put a crimp in the system, and took hours.
Most of the women found beds. Only a few slept in the lobby, curled around their bags on the cold marble floor. The rest doubled up with friends or strangers, or took cabs to seedy motels on the other side of town. No room lacked a crowd, women slept on the floor without complaint. And they all stayed up all night talking, laughing, sipping wine. The next day, the women were incredibly bouncy—proud of their resourcefulness, joyous at sharing and from their talk sessions—tired as they were, and even though most of them had once again to stand on the endless lines in the lobby. They didn’t get angry, they coped.
“Typical,” Clara said dryly.
Dialogue overheard: Standing in an elevator crowded with furniture manufacturers and their wives—the men wearing name tags on their lapels. Tom Brokaw gets in. The men recognize him.
“Hey, Tom Brokaw, nice to see you.”
“Yeah, we watch you all the time.”
He nods, agreeably.
“You here for this bunch of broads?”
“I’m covering the women’s convention, if that’s what you mean.”
&
nbsp; “Oh you poor guy!” Guffaws.
“I don’t know why you say that, I’m finding it fascinating,” he says stiffly, and gets off at the next floor.
Silence.
What are they thinking?
Fascinating it is. Thousands of women from all over the country, all ages, colors, sizes, shapes, classes, together in as democratic a spirit as I have ever seen in a large group, mixing, merging, talking, laughing, arguing about points in the document they are about to vote on, a document answering the age-old question, What do women want? This will be sent to President Carter to help him in making policy; it will be a public document, so anyone who really wants to know what women want can find out just by reading it. The women believe, utterly, that what they do there matters, that it will inform government policy-making for the decade. They meet in caucuses, they argue, debate, weep, scream, fight each other, fall into each other’s arms. They gather in the great hall, hushed, awed by their own participation in the democratic process. I am moved, watching them. They have so much energy, so much faith.
The two most debated points are abortion and lesbianism. The deck has been stacked by the right, which started early to form local organizations, so that as many delegations as possible be made up of religious women—Mormons, and those Catholics and Protestants who could be trusted to vote against these issues. Some of the delegates want to yield these points, fearing a walkout, a ruinous split in the convention; others accuse them of cowardice, of selling out. Passions simmer, rise, boil over. For the delegates it is a struggle between life and death, good and evil.