The Long Journey Home (24 page)

Kay visited me only once more, but Dee Waterman was a faithful and supportive friend. She was neither judgmental nor overtly afraid, though she later told me that her husband, Bob, had waited in the hospital parking lot for her during each visit. Afterward they went out to lunch while she recovered from the shock of seeing me psychotic, as well as seeing the other patients—the thin young woman who sat alone all day rocking and rocking, chin resting on her folded legs held together by her frail arms; the old woman who paced and babbled incoherently while bouncing a red rubber ball; and the woman who pleaded into her mirror for the long-dead John Kennedy to save us. “See! See!” she’d exclaim. “He’s right here in my mirror. If only he’d come out and help us. Oh, Mr. President, please!”

Despite the upset, Dee came. She came bringing me bags of nuts
and fruit. She came bringing me books. She came with her exuberance and her deep summer tan, silver earrings catching the sunlight, soft rose nail polish gleaming on her toes.

Judy, a friend I’d met through Dr. Turcotte, came and brought me a blank journal, but after that, she left for her family vacation and I didn’t see her until I was home from the hospital.

During the time when John and I had been meeting with Dr. Turcotte, Judy and her husband, Tom, had begun to go to him too. I met them at a dinner that the doctor arranged for a large group of his patients at the Northampton Hilton. Judy and I were seated next to each other at a long table. I was surprised when she leaned over and asked in a whisper, “Will you go with me to the bathroom?”

“Of course,” I replied, pushing my chair from the table. As soon as we left the table, she began to cry, the story of her troubled marriage spilling out in sentences punctuated by sobs. By the time we got back to the table, I knew more about her and her family than I knew about some friends I’d had for years.

Judy had spent weeks staying at the motel along with other patients. I’d often visited her when I went there to meet with John. Some weeks after she was able to go home, Judy had invited me to her beach house for the Fourth of July weekend.

“You can’t leave me here alone,” Mother had protested. “I’m afraid of John.”

Hurt and anger rose inside me. Mother and John. Mother, who forbade Daddy to drink, had jokingly commented to John, “Your new house would be perfect for you if only all the faucets ran with liquor.” John, who waited for Mother to go to sleep before he began tormenting me with his drunken forced sex and false accusations.

“If you’re afraid of John,” I said to my mother through clenched teeth, “go to a motel for the weekend.”

I brought Chris with me to the beach house, and Judy brought her son too. Judy’s sister, Martha, was there also, along with their mother, Mabel, who, according to Martha, roamed the house at all hours of the night, carrying on animated conversations with herself
or her long-dead husband. Mabel was a warmhearted woman, and I enjoyed sitting on the porch with her talking, as we four women drank whiskey sours while the children watched the fireworks in the distance.

“See that blue light blinking across the bay?” Judy said to me, pointing in the opposite direction of the fireworks. “It marks the place where the house stood that Eugene O’Neill lived in when he wrote
Long Day’s Journey into Night
. The house was destroyed in the hurricane of ’thirty-eight.”

Mabel sighed. Light from the fireworks sparkled for a moment on her earrings, tiny carousels that made gentle tinkling sounds like miniature wind chimes. She turned to face me. “You know,” she announced with sad appreciation, “I’ve always loved Eugene O’Neill and musical comedy.”

Fireworks burst again in the night sky above the water. The children yelled exuberantly while we chain-smoked and drank. My broad-brimmed hat was lying on a table, and Martha asked if she could try it on. “Of course,” I replied, then felt my heart plummet when I saw how charming she looked with my hat tipped back on her head, revealing her smiling face. It had never crossed my mind to wear my broad-brimmed hats—and I had many—tipped back. I always wore them low over my forehead, shading my eyes.

“Keep the hat, Martha. It looks much better on you than it does on me,” I said.

“Are you certain?” Martha asked, surprised.

“Of course I’m certain. The hat looks wonderful on you.”

I felt miserable. I wore my hat as if to hide from the world, as if to conceal my fear and sorrow in the shadow of the brim. Suddenly I felt totally undeserving of it. Why wasn’t I refreshingly pleasant like Martha? I accepted another drink when Judy offered it.

The evening became a whiskey-soaked blur.

Mabel, Martha, and the children went to bed. Somehow—I’ve no idea how—Judy and I ended up lying on the living room rug with me unbuttoning the five or so buttons at the top of her blouse. She
fumbled at the buttons, pushing each clumsily back into its buttonhole as I slowly became aware of another presence in the room. I looked up to see Tom, Judy’s husband, towering over us. He had never looked so tall.

While Judy screamed furiously at Tom for having come to the beach house uninvited, I sat up, overcome with embarrassment. How could I possibly have dared to do such a thing as to unbutton those buttons?

Judy demanded that Tom sleep on the couch in the living room. She and I slept in her bed. By the time we’d gotten undressed and crawled in, a storm had risen. All night, a hard rain beat at the windows while a wild, howling wind ripped at the roof shingles.

By daybreak the storm had subsided, while the storm in my mind raged more furiously than ever. My thoughts were racing wildly. I remember only one thought, and that was vaporous and fleeting like the tail end of a dream caught just after waking. I was thinking about reality and how most of us are unconscious that we are living in a dream from which we are waking, if at all, so slowly we can hardly notice the changes taking place in ourselves and the world around us.

Tom made a phone call to Dr. Turcotte, but I heard nothing of the conversation. I only know that, after their talk, we all got ready to drive back to Northampton. I packed Chris’s and my clothes.

Then I waited, sitting on a large stone in the water thinking about how Shakespeare said life was a dream within a dream, and wondering when I might wake from the dream altogether. My feet dangled in the surf, while an empty beer can made a knocking sound as the water sloshed it against the stone.

Tom called out to me that everyone was ready to leave. I wanted him to come to where I was sitting so that I could tell him that I truly understood Shakespeare’s meaning and that I was waking to a whole new level of consciousness and feeling elated at my new insight. Then I thought better of telling him. He wouldn’t understand what I was trying to say. I would end up looking like a crazy fool.

Tom, Judy, and I rode in one car while Martha and the children
rode in another. I sat in the front seat with Tom, and Judy sat in back. All the way home, I talked at a manic pace, wildly spilling out metaphors and similes in an attempt to explain what was happening in my mind.

Two days later I was in the insane asylum.

Now Judy was gone. Paula was at home, unable to visit me. Ruth was in Italy, drenching her soul in opera. Dee would come on Thursday. But now I was alone, and being alone, I sat at a little table in the ward lounge, splashing violent reds and purples on a sheet of watercolor paper and—with a fine-pointed sable brush—defining the features of the patient across from me, who sat caressing a large wooden cross in her hand.

I again remembered the weekend at the beach house, and my humiliation at unbuttoning Judy’s blouse. I’d revealed a part of myself that I had denied, rationalized, or buried all my life. I remembered how the young and ailing Edmund Tyrone had loved the way the fog hid him from himself and the world, but the fog in my own life was growing thinner and thinner.

“Bisexual.” I tried the word out in a whisper. “Bisexual?” The old rationalizations and denials began playing themselves out in my mind. Once again I was the young teenager listening to Mother telling Daddy that she didn’t know how she could live if I was a lesbian. I slung a thick blob of scarlet on the painting. Again, I felt the shame that told me that Mother and John were better than I was, that I deserved the pain that life had given me. But even as I felt these negative things about myself, I also felt an acceptance I’d never known before. Even as I was forced by the nurses and attendants to obey the hospital rules, I felt a new freedom growing inside me.

I
N AN OLD MAGAZINE IN THE OCCUPATIONAL THERAPY ROOM
I
FOUND A
color print of Vincent Van Gogh’s
Wheat Field with Crows
, one of his last paintings before he put a pistol to his chest and pulled the trigger. It is a painting filled with turbulence of brushstroke and thick pigment. In it a road curves through a field, then stops as if at some invisible barrier. A chaos of black wings rises from the wheat. The painting inspired the attempt at black humor that caused me to title my hospital journal
How Not to Paint Blackbirds
.

I spent a large part of my life in the struggle to become a painter. My effort had raised questions and conflicts, confusing and frustrating me. When I wasn’t painting but filling my days with cooking, sewing, knitting, gardening, reading, and being mother to my two sons, I wondered why I ever put myself through the inevitable emotional pain of trying to be a painter. When I was painting, the process itself felt like life to me, no matter how poor or ineffectual the final product.

There was no confusion or frustration about writing or being a writer. I
was
a writer. Whatever I didn’t know about myself, I knew this as surely as I knew that day follows night. A dream gave me this
realization, though I have no recollection whatsoever of the content of the dream. I dreamed it one late afternoon while taking a nap on the living room couch in Shutesbury. I woke with the certainty that I, Margaret, was a writer. I felt my identity as a writer with the same assurance that I felt my identity as a human being. Though I had no idea how I could know that with such certainty, I had no doubt that the revelation that waked me from my nap was true.

After the nap, I felt disorientated and a little crazy. Since my marriage, my only writing had been academic papers and letters to friends, especially to Pat King. Those things didn’t make me think of myself as a writer, only as a person who sometimes wrote.
If I’m a writer
, I said to myself,
then I want to see what I can write
. I went to the desk, got a pen and a legal pad, and sat back down on the couch. Without thinking, I scrawled on the first line of the legal pad: “A lost skate key.”
How odd
, I thought. “A lost skate key.” Then I remembered the many afternoons of skating back and forth on Grandmother’s paved sidewalk with my cousins and neighbors. All the bruised knees and bending down to tighten the skates with a skate key came rushing back to consciousness. “A pittosporum bush,” I wrote, remembering biting through the dark green leaves on the bush growing at the edge of Grandmother’s yard. I wrote: “June bugs. Roscoe the pig. Grandmother churning butter on the shady side porch.” One after another I wrote images from my childhood: “… the mimosa tree, mint leaves wet with faucet water, my sister’s shoes, handfuls of dirt …” But what did they mean? Was this being a writer? I felt awkward and puzzled. Still I wrote: “Old wallpaper and spider webs. A bicycle. Bamboo and starlings.”

Then I heard John’s car turn into the drive. Quickly I jammed the legal pad under the couch. I would have been embarrassed to have him see what I’d written. In the morning, after he left for work, with shame I destroyed the writing, an action I grew to regret years later when I discovered that what I’d written had been a list of the key images of my first book of poems,
The Naked Bear
.

Now I was in the state hospital with doctors who—with the exception of the young Filipino doctor—paid no attention to me, and nurses and attendants who were insensitive and sometimes abusive. I sat at a table in the lounge of the new ward, my journal open in front of me. Until now I’d not kept a journal since I was a startled teenager facing my distraught mother lying on my bed, arm thrown over her eyes, body shaking with sobs. “What have I done to deserve such a daughter?” Mother had wailed, clutching my diary in her hand. She’d read that I’d had a beer on the beach with the girls. She was also hysterical about what I might have meant by “being indiscreet” with the boy I’d been dating and whom I adored. I lied to her, saying that I had been “indiscreet” about something I said about his former girlfriend. I had in fact let him touch my breast through my sweater, and—though I felt terribly guilty for having committed such a mortal sin—it mattered so much to me that I felt compelled to acknowledge it in my diary, even if I had to conceal the real event and its excitement in formal and vague language. But watching Mother in her misery, I felt sick with guilt. Guilt for letting the boy touch my breast, guilt for drinking the beer, and—most of all—guilt for upsetting Mother.

But whatever anger I might have felt at Mother’s coming into my room and reading my diary evaporated when the back door slammed. Someone had forgotten: because of the sharp and sudden sound, my sister, Harriet, would be having a convulsion. Mother jumped up and ran down the hall to her. Had Mother said these words to me, or had they just repeated themselves in my head again as they so often did? “You with your mind, you with your talents and gifts and your sister lying up there in that bed unable to raise her head or utter a word. You with your mind …”

Except for a few abstract poems that would have made no sense to Mother, I destroyed all my writing that day. After that I only wrote an occasional poem, making certain that my words were vague enough to keep her from understanding what I was talking about. In
time, I pushed writing from my mind altogether until madness broke through the thick walls of repression and gave me back that forgotten and essential part of myself.