“Yes,” says Shirley as she pats her belly. “Six feet one, chess and amateur tennis champion, professional artist, IQ over 160, interested in Buddhism and Far Eastern philosophy—”
“Excuse me?”
“The father,” she says. “We picked him out of thousands at the sperm bank. . . . He’s going to be a very special baby.”
There is something in all this meticulous advance planning that freaks me out. Perhaps it is not surprising that women would look for athletic, charismatic, wealthy and influential sperm donors. But as someone who has grown up without a father, I am thinking, what does that ultimately mean to a child who will never know his or her biological father? Besides, the things we lack in life—such as blue eyes, a muscular body or conversational eloquence—might help us to develop other qualities that are dormant inside. Many talents are born in the shadows, out of necessity. The search for perfect babies misses the surprising role of oddities, coincidences and absences in our personal development.
In the evening I return to my room. The place I am staying in is about 130 square feet. It has the tiniest kitchen counter and a shower so small you can wash only half of yourself at a time.
Before me, there was an Indian painter residing here—the walls still smell of her paints. And before her, a Zimbabwean sociologist. The room has seen dozens of women from all over the world. The Indian artist left behind paint stains and an intricately designed rolling pin. The Zimbabwean scholar left a scary mask on the wall, which casts a long and thin ebony shadow.
What will I leave to next year’s fellow? “Before me, there was a Turkish author staying here,” she will say. I can’t find anything but words to hand down to her. Perhaps I can leave one of my favorite Turkish words, which also exists in English: kismet.
I lie down on my bed. The solitude that I so enjoyed only this afternoon now darkens my mood. What am I doing here so far away from Istanbul, from my loved ones, from the place where my novels are set, from my friends, my mother and my mother tongue? Am I throwing myself into unknown waters just to see if I can swim?
What if I can’t?
I recall my mother telling me I was too good at being alone. “It is as if you don’t need anyone,” she had said. “But you should. Too much independence is not good. You should be dependent, even if a tiny little bit.”
This, coming from someone who had refused to remarry at the expense of being “a woman without a male protector” in the eyes of the society, had surprised me. But now I find myself thinking of her advice in another light.
Women of my age have husbands, children and picnic baskets. They don’t hop on Peter Pan buses and go roaming Neverland. You should do that in your early twenties, when you are fresh out of school and your “life” hasn’t started yet. But you don’t do it in your midthirties. There should have been some order and stability in my life by now. Women my age have scrambled eggs in the mornings with their families and social rituals they like repeating. I’m still being dragged around by the winds, like a kite whose string has snapped.
The members of the Choir of Discordant Voices seem pleased to be here, doing their own thing. Miss Highbrowed Cynic doesn’t look like she’s ever going to leave the library. When she has a spare moment she attends either a workshop or a conference. Little Miss Practical keeps taking computer classes—PowerPoint, Excel, Linux. The last time I saw Dame Dervish she was meditating in this place where nature is so beautiful. As for Milady Ambitious Chekhovian, she is always on the Internet writing, applying for this and that, finding things to do.
Everyone is in their own world. But where is Mama Rice Pudding?
I haven’t seen her since the airplane. Maybe she didn’t come to America. Maybe she couldn’t get through passport control after all. Or maybe she got lost somewhere in New York. . . . Suddenly my heart aches. Can a person miss a side of her whom she doesn’t even know? I do.
As I fall asleep, I think of Mama Rice Pudding. I wish I knew her better.
Normal on the Outside
Courtney Love once said: “I like to behave in an extremely normal, wholesome manner for the most part in my daily life—even if mentally I am consumed with sick visions of violence, terror, sex and death.” Everything is normal, as long as we appear so on the outside. But what is normal? And who exactly is a normal woman? Which womanly attributes are natural? Which others are cultural? Are girls genetically predetermined to be maternal, nurturing and emotional, or do their families and societies mold them that way? Or else, are the natural and the cultural qualities so intricately interwoven that there is no telling which characteristics shape whom anymore?
Adjectives come in pairs. For every beautiful, somewhere there is an ugly. Perhaps, in preparation for the Great Flood, adjectives, like animals, boarded Noah’s Ark in twos. That’s why we always think in terms of dualism. If there is an established definition of what constitutes “ideal womanhood,” it is thanks to a similarly entrenched definition of “ideal manhood.” Both definitions, and the expectations that ensue from them, can be equally harrowing for real women and real men.
I grew up seeing two different types of womanhood. On the one hand was my mother—a well-educated, modern, Westernized, secular Turkish woman. Always rational. Always to the point. On the other hand was my maternal grandmother, who also took care of me and was less educated, more spiritual and definitely less rational. This was a woman who read coffee grounds to see the future and melted lead into mysterious shapes to fend off the evil eye. Many people came to see her, people with severe acne on their faces or warts on their hands. My grandmother would utter some words in Arabic, take a red apple and stab it with as many rose thorns as the number of warts she wanted to remove. Then she would draw a circle around each thorn with dark ink.
Some of the most vivid memories of my childhood are about red apples, rose thorns and dark circles. The truth is, of all the people who visited my grandmother for their skin conditions, I didn’t see anyone walking away unhappy or unhealed. I asked her how she did this. Was it the power of praying? In response she said, “Yes, praying is effective, but also beware of the power of circles.” From her I learned, among other things, one crucial lesson: If you want to destroy something, be it a blemish, acne or the human soul, all you need to do is to surround it with walls.
It will dry up.
There are many similarly “irrational” lessons from my life that I greatly cherish today. To a strictly logical person they might seem pure nonsense, even crazy. Society and culture teach us what exactly is normal and acceptable. My grandmother’s cures were “commonplace” for many people in a middle-class neighborhood in Ankara in the early 1970s, although to someone in Vienna they might have looked pretty bizarre. But individuals also differ in their perceptions of normal and abnormal. My mother never believed in the superstitions my grandmother held dear. “Coffee is for drinking, not for reading,” Mom said. As for me, I deeply suspected that there were sprinkles of magic in life and love, and that someone who looked like a handsome prince at first glance could easily turn into an ugly frog.
As every writer of fiction knows, when we are developing a story we do not need to be constrained by the limits of logic. Just the opposite, we can dive headfirst into that bottomless lake of irrationality. We can write about superstitions, magic and fairies. There is room for all in literature. This despite the fact that in our daily lives we conform to a different set of rules, moving in a solid and rational world.
For many centuries all around the globe, girls and women have been expected to conform to one set of attributes, while men and boys measure up to another. If and when the traits of an individual included elements from both sets, life became much more complicated. Even today, a woman who is thought to be “manly” can face a bulwark of reactions, as can a man who is deemed “womanly.” The more conventional the society is, the less likely the two sets intersect—at least outwardly. But the exclusivist approach to gender relations is by no means specific to traditional soc
ieties. Though constantly changing, it is fundamentally universal. From ancient myths to modern graphic novels, from folklore to advertisements, this dualistic way of thinking has infiltrated many areas of our lives.
Oddly enough, women, too, are used to thinking of themselves in these terms. The relationships we build with one another, the talks we have among ourselves and the way we raise our own daughters are overshadowed by the dichotomy of gender patterns.
How much of my womanhood is biological, how much of it is socially learned? Of the will to become a mother, which part is innate, which part is imposed? Is it sheer coincidence that I have started contemplating motherhood in my midthirties? Is it because my biological clock is ticking? Or is it because the social chronometer, which continuously compels us women to measure ourselves against one another, is speeding ahead?
When everything is so culturally loaded, how am I going to know what is really natural and what is environmental?
Sitting on the Edge
Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald was born on July 24, 1900, in Alabama. She was a fearless, bouncy kid who received much love from her mother, perhaps at the risk of being fairly spoiled. As for her distant father, who was a formidable judge, she got far less affection and attention from him. Her childhood vacillated between these two emotional extremes. A vivid illustration of her personality lies in a small predicament she caused when she was just a child.
One morning the local police received a call that a child was walking across a rooftop. When the officers reached the address, they found little Zelda sitting on the roof waiting for them. After a lot of hassle, they managed to get her down. The truth behind the story was discovered a bit later. It was Zelda who had called the police. First she had made the phone call, then climbed onto the roof, crept right to the edge and sat down and waited to be rescued. This, more or less, remained the modus vivendi in her life. Even as a grown-up woman, she continued to go to the edge and then calmly watch the panic she had caused.
The essays and books written about Zelda Fitzgerald almost always revolve around three points: 1. She was the wife and greatest love of F. Scott Fitzgerald.
2. She was a gifted artist herself.
3. She had extensive therapy, suffered from depression and ended up dying in a mental institution.
Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald met toward the end of the Great War. Each had a different memory of their first encounter. The man found the woman attractive and smart, but he was disturbed by the way she constantly flirted with other men. His first impression of her was a mixed one.
The woman, on the other hand, found the man charismatic and talented with a dazzling mind. Zelda was the kind of woman who had to love a man’s brain before she could fall for him.
They got married in April 1920, carried by the winds of mutual attraction and passion. When asked by a journalist what his greatest ambition in life was, Scott Fitzgerald said it was to write the best novel that ever was and to stay in love with his beloved wife forever. Yet from the very start, they saw each other as potential rivals. The fact that both had a tendency to take to the bottle at the sight of the slightest distress did not help their marriage. In time, their disagreements grew more violent and hurtful.
Alcohol, cigarettes, night life . . . They were no strangers to life in the fast lane. But perhaps their greatest addiction was to their love. Zelda and Scott adored, fought and marred each other in a roller-coaster relationship. They were aware of each other’s weaknesses and knew how to hurt. One moment they would scream war cries and the next they would jump into the car and drive dangerously fast on sharpcurved roads. They loved to challenge fate. Being a creative, famous, high-flying and self-destructive couple, they became the focus of the media. Unsurprisingly, not everything written about them was true. There was much gossip and speculation, and few reporters had the time or the will to separate the facts from the lies.
In the years that followed, Scott Fitzgerald became increasingly famous, swiftly climbing up the glass staircase of the literary pantheon. Strikingly, the characters he wrote about and the themes he tackled were often inspired by Zelda. Some of his characters spoke just like Zelda. Did he “steal” ideas from his wife? Did he pilfer parts of her writing? From time to time Zelda would mockingly talk about how entries in the diaries she kept at home would end up in her husband’s novels—sometimes entire paragraphs. In a review she wrote of The Beautiful and Damned for the New York Tribune, she made this insinuation public: “It seems to me that on one page I recognized a portion of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage, and also scraps of letters which, though considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar. In fact, Mr. Fitzgerald—I believe that is how he spells his name—seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.”8
Perhaps every writer is a pickpocket of some sort, stealing inspiration from real life. Like magpies that can’t resist making off with shiny objects, authors flap their wings across the boundless sky looking for themes to write about. And when they find one, they snatch it up. Whichever way we see it, the extent of the “literary patent” between Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald has not been fully resolved even today.
Fame and recognition brought little happiness for Scott Fitzgerald. Surrounded by women who admired him, critics who applauded him and reporters who saw in his every move juicy material to write about, he began drinking heavily. When not thinking about his next novel, he was shutting his mind off to the world; when not writing, he was imbibing, sometimes falling asleep in random places. Zelda was at least as unhappy as he was. They couldn’t make each other happy, but they could not possibly let each other go their own separate ways. Like two kites whose strings had intertwined, they kept twisting and turning in each other’s arms.
The friendship that grew between Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway during this time is something that bemuses literary historians. The two of them were inseparable for a while—two bohemian writers who would pass out together. It was the kind of friendship that did not sit well with Zelda. She found Hemingway too macho, his ego too inflated. She believed he wasn’t a good companion for her husband. In time, the friendship fell apart.
Zelda’s jealousy was legendary. In fit after fit of envy, she burned her clothes, destroyed her possessions and even damaged her surroundings. Once at a crowded, chic party, she took off the jewelry she was wearing and threw it into hot water in an attempt to make “jewel soup.” She was often blinded by rage. Another night, after she noticed her husband paying lavish attention to the famous Isadora Duncan, she made a scene by throwing herself down a set of marble stairs. When they picked her up off the floor, she was covered in blood.
They had one daughter whom they both loved dearly—Scottie, who was born in October 1921 and was given to the care of a nanny. While she was still partly anesthetized, Zelda murmured, “I hope it is beautiful and a fool—a beautiful little fool.” The same expression would be repeated in The Great Gatsby when Daisy talked about her own daughter. As always, life inspired fiction.
After Scottie, Zelda had three abortions. As much as she loved her daughter, she did not want to have another child, at least not so soon. The baby neither slowed down their lifestyle nor tempered their arguments. In the later stages of their marriage, Zelda always searched for something she could do that would be outside the realm of her husband’s interests. For a while she tried taking ballet classes. Her husband scorned her interest, calling it a waste of time. In the end ballet couldn’t make Zelda happy.9
That was when she started to feel jealous—not of another woman this time, but of her husband’s writing. More and more often she tried to distract him during the hours he was working on his fiction. It was obvious to everyone but them that they could not stay in the same house any longer. Scott Fitzgerald wanted to keep his wife at home. He was worried that if she went out alone, she would flirt or even find a lover—just to get back at him, to relieve the pain in her heart.
Rumi likens the mind to a guest
house. Every morning we have a new, unexpected visitor, sometimes in the form of joy, sometimes dressed up as sorrow. For Zelda Fitzgerald her guesthouse entertained all kinds of unpleasant guests: Mr. Anxiety, Miss Panic Attack, Mrs. Resentment, Sir Bitterness . . .
Finally, in June 1930, after months that included a nervous breakdown, hallucinations and an attempted suicide, she was diagnosed with schizophrenia and taken to a hospital. She spent the rest of her eighteen years under psychiatric care. There is a letter she wrote to Scott shortly afterward that says a lot about not only her psychology at the time but also her vivacious and tempestuous style: “No matter what happens, I still know in my heart that it is a Godless, dirty game: that love is bitter and all there is, and that the rest is for the emotional beggars of the earth. . . .”10
Nonetheless, staying at the clinic seemed somehow to have triggered her productivity. She wrote constantly during this period—diaries, stories, letters. Not only did she make beautiful paintings, but she also wrote a semiautobiographical novel, Save Me the Waltz. In utmost sincerity she wrote about the fun-loving, inventive, but also hardworking Southern belle she had been, and the inner transformation that came with marriage. She also elaborated on the two conflicting sides of her personality: one independent and carefree, the other in need of love and security.
As soon as she finished the novel Zelda sent it to Scott’s publisher. Her husband had not seen it yet and when he found out, he was furious. At the time he was working on Tender Is the Night. As they had made use of similar material (the story of Zelda’s mental illness and the years they had spent together in Paris and on the Riviera), the two books largely overlapped. A great fight ensued, with marital and artistic repercussions, at the end of which Zelda agreed to revise her manuscript. When the book came out it was not well received by literary critics, selling only a limited number of copies. Demoralized, Zelda did not publish another novel.