Our Bodies Are Not Our Own

            By the time we had our talk, relations had regained their suppleness.  Monday was a blowout.  When I picked Katya (Kat) up from seeing Suicide Squad with two girlfriends, as I trusted, I looked in the plate glass window of the theater to see her bending over kissing a seated boy, who was wearing neon green—frogman (let’s call him).  “You are in big trouble,” I said unsubtly.  Later she confessed that when she heard me say that she thought of the children’s book Countdown to Kindergarten with the little girl’s running refrain—“I am in big trouble”—because the first day of school is coming and she doesn’t know how to tie her shoes.  Kat may be fourteen, but she is still my baby, and frogman is seventeen and drives!  Yes, she was in big trouble.  After a night of screaming, cutting, and threatening, the upset subsided into days of suspicion and disappointment until, to make peace and preserve my relationship with her, I offered a possible way that she might see frogman.  The proposal was no sooner out of my mouth than she texted it to him and her mind turned to wedding dresses—mine of all things.  And funnily enough, Friday of this week from hell was my seventeenth wedding anniversary.  “It’s probably yellow by now, huh?”  “Maybe not.  It’s folded up in a pillowcase somewhere upstairs.  I’ll see if I can find it.”  I was quite surprised that she would care about my wedding dress, especially since she seems to know that my marriage has been less than ideal.  At dinner that night (to celebrate), we were also working hard to make light of the heaviness that was past, and it was fun to re-tell the way Frogman’s Flint-tough mother showed up to scream at me for implying that her son was wrong to sneak off to the movies with a young girl.  “I know why she was so upset,” I said.  “The 17-14 age difference potentially makes what he did illegal—statutory rape … if anything happened.”  My daughter’s face turned serious before she popped the question.  “Mom,” she began, “I was going to ask you earlier what would be okay.”  I knew at once what “what” she meant:  what level of physical contact would be permissible?  I almost choked.  “But we can talk about it later,” she added, glancing at my husband, who clearly had no clue what she was asking.

            Later came sooner than I was ready for.  But when would I be ready?  She settled down into the red armchair in my office, facing windows open to the night air.  With little premeditation, I told her things that I hope she remembers like she remembers what I said about kissing one day driving home from school—“everything depends on the playfulness of your mouth.”  She loved that and has brought it up many times since.  “The thing about sex,” begins Mary Jo (not Mom), “is that it is too easy to get caught up, swept along from kissing to touching to sucking to oral to vaginal … you get the idea.  But if you get to the end of the story too quickly, there is no more mystery (even though when done right the ride is different each time).  So you don’t want the story to end too soon; you must take time to savor each chapter or, better yet, each word.  It would be fine to hold hands, to hold him … for days, weeks, years.  Let the boy’s ‘vegetable love grow vaster than empires and more slow.’”  Oh, no, I didn’t really say that.  That is Andrew Marvell’s seduction line from “To His Coy Mistress.”  But I did say, “let the feelings grow,” and I was thinking about Juliet’s metaphor ‘this bud of love may prove a beauteous flower when next we meet.’  “Because here’s the truth about sex:  excitement is a mystery that has as much to do with the mind and the feelings as it does with lips, breasts, and genitals.  If you can’t kiss a boy for a year, then maybe he isn’t playful enough or creative enough.  Test him.  See if you feel comfortable showing yourself, expressing your self in words, in smiles, in gestures.  Sex is a language or a dance that involves the whole person.  See if he wants all of you before you give away the parts.”  I said these kinds of things, derived from all the bad experiences, half-lived dreams, and still undiscovered country that exists for me somewhere over the rainbow.  I, too, am young in this.

            But there was a lot that I didn’t say and, perhaps, should have said.  Today I feel all those unsaid words jostling around inside me as I sit in the bleachers of Mt. Morris High School waiting for her team, the Kearsley Hornets, to play again.  “That’s my girl,” I say to Stacia’s mom and every time my girl serves, my eyes tear up.  She didn’t get to play the first round, and I felt dispirited but tried hard not to let my face register the disappointment.  At such times, I feel her feelings, smart at her rejection.  At these times, I feel like we share a body—that mine is not mine alone and hers is not hers alone.  After I shared my thoughts with her about boys and sex, I wanted to say something that perhaps doesn’t make sense or wouldn’t have been helpful to her:  “Remember: our bodies are not our own.”  This may seem counterintuitive and a far cry from the liberal feminist emphasis on a “woman’s right to choose” what’s good for her own body.  But I am, first and foremost, a Shakespearean; and the self-fashioning credo sounds dangerously close to Iago’s belief that “our bodies are our gardens, to the which our wills are gardeners.”  Iago, for those of you who don’t know, is devious, plotting, self-interested, jealous: the snake in Othello’s paradise.  Shakespeare is consistent across all the plays:  the villains never feel the “deity” in their “bosoms” called soul or conscience, only the humble characters (the murderers and slaves) hear their consciences accuse them when they steal, swear, lie with their neighbor’s wives, or even think to do such things.  Any man that seeks to live well, says one of the poor men hired by the evil Richard to kill brother Clarence, must live without this “blushing shame-fac’d spirit.”  All of Shakespeare’s simple men know that a demanding immortal spirit dwells in each one of us.

            I could have avoided Shakespeare and employed the easy phrases—oft heard in Catholic schools—to make my point:  “you are a temple of the Holy Ghost” or “you are made in the image of God” or “we are parts of the body of Christ.”  Even though these statements may be true, they sound like church irrelevancies, abstracted from the texture of real passion and real searching.  Who am I?  How can love be wrong?  Go girl, seek happy nights to happy days.  Had I said these things to my daughter, she would have rejected them, as you, reader, may be rejecting them, now.  I could not then and cannot now rely on trite Christian truisms, to gain her attention and move her to reflection, I have to find words for real experiences.  I remember something that my little sister said a very long time ago.  She was describing an early experience of sexual shame: after going down on a guy in a casual hook up, she remembered feeling that “the woods woundn’t look at [her] anymore.”  I can recall countless moments of estrangement after sex—the first and worst followed an anal rape when the unknown man dropped me in the middle of Athens, and I made it back to my hotel room where I cried, tucked into crisp white sheets, too shocked to feel anything much except horrified numbness.  Sex can render us faceless.  We cover our faces quicker than our loins so that our humiliation expressed in vacancy, disappointment, and deep sadness doesn’t show.  The deity leaves the facial threshold to hide out in the depths of the body.

            Disappointing sex proves better than many other experiences that we have souls, and those souls play across faces involuntarily if they are coaxed out, breathed out, shared delicately.  Doctor Faustus (from Christopher Marlowe’s play) was plagued by his soul because he could find no way to express it in the external world of work or love.  His solution is to dispense with it; and, in a chilling scene, he attempts to sign his soul away to Mephistopheles in exchange for twenty-four years of unlimited power.  As he tries to write the deed of gift in blood, his own blood congeals.  Mephistopheles must fetch a brazier of coals from hell to get it flowing again.  Even more frightening is the writing that appears on his arm—“Homo fuge!” (O man fly!).  If we listen, our own bodies (like Faustus’) tell us when we are desacralizing them, using them in ways that sever the connective links with mysteries of spirit and cosmos.  Faustus knows, as soon as he hands over the deed, that he got the short end of the stick.  “Give me a wife,” he demands and gets a hot whore.  Tell me about the stars, and Mephistopheles hands him a book of diagrams.  When he asks to be initiated into the secrets of nature, he is directed to the same book … as if a book could contain the experience of being alive and surprised by joy and pain.  At the limit of his twenty-four years of power, Faustus seems to understand that he could not get rid of the immortal part of him.  He wishes that he was a body without soul because then there would be some limit to what he must suffer in hell. 

            How could I say all or any of this to my fourteen-year-old daughter, who just wants to go out with frogman?  Yet, my body insists on saying one more thing:  a jock in a neon green shirt who continues to fiddle with his phone, after being kissed by my beautiful blue-haired daughter (nymph or naiad) wearing a fetching black camisole, is probably not be good enough.  Who could be good enough?  No one this mother knows.  Even if Kat and I never shared a body literally (she is adopted), we share one now.  I held her, rocked her, spooned her while singing lullabies.  When the dentist said, “open,” I opened my mouth.  When the doctor gave her a shot, I flinched.  When she got her ears pierced, I squeezed her hand hard.  And when she sits on the bench in her first tournament at the beginning of her freshman year in a new high school, my heart hurts.  “That’s my girl,” I say proudly.  She is worth her weight and more in joy, in fun, in playfulness.  And I want her to find someone that helps her become her whole immortal self.  “Hey, Mom,” she says to me today while helping me clean up my school office in preparation for the start of school, “wasn’t it weird seeing the other volleyball girls with their Moms.”  Why?  “Well, they just kind of sat there, and they seemed distant … mature.  I’m glad I’m not mature.”  It occurs to me that I was not alone yesterday in feeling that we shared a body.  The simple explanation is that she is still dependent on me, but I prefer to take the coincidence as proof that our bodies are not our own but meant to be shared.  And we must listen oh so carefully to our fleshed selves as we struggle to share them only with those who will wait for the monarch to appear on the balcony of the palace and be graced by a smile that comes from God knows where.

Fighting my way out of Far Rockaway

            “I can’t keep seeing myself dead.”  This was what the medic in Tim O’Brien’s book about Vietnam, The Things They Carried, says when he has picked up the pieces and plugged up the holes of too many bodies to count and he’s beginning to imagine his friends dead and finally himself as nothing more than meat for jungle bugs.  Brian, a student of mine is writing about this book in a thesis that analyzes the ways writers use humor to cope with horror.  The book is very moving but not funny … not to me.  I feel like I have just come through a struggle that for five years has felt like I was battling for my own life.  The battle ended with a sabbatical during which I was using an academic project to free myself from dependence on an abusive therapist, but he called every day and tried to insert himself into every thought, every insight.  He even called himself the “midwife” of my project.  Even though I was working well and keeping him at bay, the nightmares worsened.  I could taste something rotting in my body.  The taste (or was it a smell?) worsened at night.  I felt like I was dying inside.  I tossed and turned, imagining the feeling of being buried, in a casket, watching my funeral from a distance.  The image of myself dead met me everywhere.  I concluded that I was damned and that God was punishing me through my own body.  I knew that whatever was causing these thoughts had to stop.  I knew that somehow I had to get out, get free—of him.  The only way I could stop the thoughts was by working.  Writing—about Shakespeare and the Bible—was my way to hold onto my life.  So I understand what Rat Kiley, the medic, was going through when he said, “I can’t keep seeing myself dead.”  Rat shot himself in the foot to get helicoptered out of the jungle to a hospital in Japan.  “I thought I could be a good friend to you,” said my abuser, who, at the end left me to live or die … alone.  “No one gets out of these situations without external help.”  “He confabulated everything, making himself your husband, father, even God, how could you have chosen?”  “But you were working yourself free.”  These are the things people (counselors) say to me to help me live.  Jesus walked into the house where a young girl had died, “Get up,” he said with authority; and she lived.  For years I’ve imagined myself as Jacob wrestling with the angel.  Now that I am beginning to read the New Testament, I am trailing Jesus, longing to touch the hem of his garment, believing that with just one touch I, too, might live and stop seeing myself dead.

            The second time I saw S-----, I told him about the way my father died—in his sleep when “us kids” (myself, three siblings, and our Florida cousins) were in a rental cabin in the Adirondacks.  We found him.  I touched death and drew my hand away quickly.  Horror.  Liveliness gone.  Dead.  There was no more warmth in my life.  Childhood ended when my mother came to pick us up, pack up, and soldier on.  We carried away from that cabin more than clothes, towels, lamps, pots and pans.  No time to unpack the emotions.  No grieving and no depression allowed on Mom’s watch.  “This happens to lots of other families.”  Reality hit.  I hated myself for the selfish thought, “how will I go to college?”  I told all of this to S----- and cried.  Years later, he told me that the story of my early loss moved him because he, too, had lost a parent early.  His mother.  He felt bonded to me.  As the years went by, we often spoke about the losses that bound us to each other.  I wrote him a letter once in which I tried to explore our different ways of handling loss:  I held mine close (to the point of writing a dissertation about elegy and the female complaint) while he ran from his loss (leaving Far Rockaway far behind).  "I didn't know how sad I wanted to get," he said when I pressed him to explain why he had never helped me with my problems.  He brushed them aside and redirected me to focus on him, "us," and our study of philosophy, literature, and finally, the Bible.

            Reading scripture together, working on a project with a completely engaged older man could not help but remind me of those lost days when I suggested to my father that we build a greenhouse, and we did it together, raising plants from cuttings in a little house (90 degrees in March, heated by a chicken brooder).  Being with S----- was a fantastic way of resurrecting the dead parts of my life:  he played my father—magically returned—and my husband full of desire for me.  “All kinds of feelings come up in therapy.  The patient transfers her attachment from people in her life to the therapist, and those feelings should get talked about.”  S----- did not help me talk about the holes in my life, he filled them with fictions and with promises of an impossible future … because nothing is impossible with God.  To disconnect was to suffer the loss of my father all over again.  To succumb to him (as I did) was to lose myself, to die.  

            The war is over.  But is war ever over?  Do we ever forget the comrades we’ve lost?  My new therapist urges me to grieve.  She is different from my mother.  Tim O’Brien helps me to understand how soldiers, whether or not they have been directly responsible for death, absorb responsibility.  Several different men in his company believed they let his friend, Kiowa, sink into a field of shit where he suffocated.  They didn’t do it but they did.  In a similar way, I assume blame for what happened.  I chose to go.  I chose to let him use me.  I chose him over God.  Even though people say that I could not choose.  Even though I was battling.  Even though I was open about my struggle.  He was the therapist, and I kept turning to him for help, but he never reached out a helping hand, only a grasping violating one.

            After probing my wounds with my new therapist last week, on the drive home to Flint my mind drifted back 36 years.  I was in the car, riding shotgun.  Pop was driving through the village of Warrensburg.  We were headed back to Indian Lake where he would die that night—just hours away.  I remembered vividly the black thunder clouds over the mountains.  I remember the chill that comes before a summer storm.  From the backseat, my little cousin, David, asked me why I didn’t go to my Junior Prom, and my father, who understood my shyness, reached over and squeezed my knee.  He had just taken me back to Glens Falls to have my nose cauterized because it had been bleeding for days.  Driving north to Flint, I marveled at how vivid the sights and feelings from the last bit of time I would ever spend with him still were.  That sky was the last evening sky my father would ever see.  The night of August 18, 1980, it poured all night.  We were stuck in the cabin (no late night fishing off the dock), and he talked to neighbors about his recent (minor) heart attack and, unbeknownst to me said (I learned later) that he was ready to die … that he had raised four good kids.  I had had insomnia all week.  This was my first experience with sleeplessness which has become chronic.  The night he died, although I had not slept in five nights, I lay awake in the loft of Camp Mary listening to rain fall on the tin roof.  I heard Pop fiddle with the stove somewhere around 4:00 and imagined him in the kitchen of the cabin, the ash on his cigarette glowing in the dark.  The next morning, the coroner said he probably died around 5:00, which would have been just when I fell asleep.  I’m not aware of feeling guilty, but perhaps the guilt is too deeply buried.  What I think about is that I felt the coming storm—lay in wait for it, bled beforehand—but was helpless to do anything about it. 

            For years I knew that there was something very wrong about the relationship with S-----, but I couldn’t do anything to save my soul and myself.  I had thoughts of death.  I considered taking my life.  I imagined myself damned in hell.  But I kept dutifully writing him letters and kept reluctantly making the drive to East Lansing.  Long ago in graduate school, I had an Irish classmate.  We agonized about boyfriends and oral exams over beers in the Irish pubs of Brighton, surrounded by very drunk and rowdy guys who painted houses for a living and did other hard labor.  “You have an amazing survival instinct,” she told me once.  I caught the echo when my new counselor said, “You are a survivor.”  What triggered my survival instinct that got me out of hell (I hope) was S----’s carelessness.  In a phone conversation after his wife had discovered some emails and determined to put an end to what she concluded was an “emotional affair,” he told me that he would be devoted to my memory and compared himself to Joe DiMaggio, who took flowers to Marilyn Monroe’s grave five years after her suicide.  That remark told me that, on some level, I had become his mother, and he wished I would just die.  The impact of that bullet, made me realize that, more than wanting him as a friend, more than anything else, I wanted to live.

            I asked him to mail back some special things that I gave him:  a picture of me as a child, a wooden pen box from Kazakhstan, a silver filigree pointer for reading the Torah, a patchwork quilt, and a framed postcard of the Tent City (circa 1915) at Far Rockaway Beach.  Seeing the returned postcard hurt most of all.  It was something like a relic or the sign of my absolute devotion.  I’d fallen in love with the idea of him and with the sound and smells of his seaside home.  “Just a finger of sand at the edge of Brooklyn,” where he was taught by Irish nuns, where he found a rowboat in the reeds, where he loved a girl across the street, where he swam across the channel, where his mother got sick.  When he saw her in the hospital for the last time, she came down to the lobby looking tired.  She died.  He did not seem to know exactly what killed her.  But he went to the synagogue three times each day. It was the right thing to do.

                        “… no matter where I wandered

                                                off the chart

                        I still would love to find again

                                                that lost locality

                        Where I might catch once more

                                                a Sunday subway for

                                                some Far Rockaway

                                                of the heart.”

            I made pilgrimages to Far Rockaway four times!  The first time I went was when my sister got married.  I’d ask S----- to try to draw a map of the world he inhabited at seven years old.  Holding tight to that map as I climbed off the train at the end of the line, I emerged into sunlight.  I felt like Gilgamesh who after an endless journey through dark mountains enters the garden of the gods.  It was magical.  When I found the postcard on ebay I was even more charmed.  The idea of a makeshift life on the beach, living in tents, like Israelites in the wilderness struck me as a beautifully impossible fulfillment of all my erotic and transcendent yearnings.  The tent symbolized sacred, moveable, space made in-between two people bound by countless silken ties of love and thought. 

            Before I unpacked the box of returned tokens, I bought I bottle of wine to dull the pain.  It was working.  I couldn’t look long at the postcard which once reeked of meaning.  Now it was just ephemera.  Gaudy colors on cheap paper.  Its living soul had dribbled away.  But I remembered that I had taped a quotation from Romeo and Juliet to the back of the postcard.  The line (still there in my handwriting) was Juliet's, spoken when she wakes up in the tomb after drinking the sleeping draught that makes her appear to be dead.  “I do remember well where I should be, / And there I am.”  When I selected that quote, I was really in love and committed to my pact with the impossible.  I never thought of Juliet as naïve; she was rock solid, real, pure, and took a courageous leap of faith.  Wide open and vulnerable—so many things could go wrong (and they do)—she trusts.  So did I.  When I gave him that card and inscribed the lines on the back side, I really believed that I would land in soft sand after my leap.  Things went wrong. 

            Now I wonder if, in choosing that line, I was prophetic.  The night Juliet drank the drug, she was full of anxiety and thought she might die.  The next morning, her nurse and family all believed she was really dead.  But she came through an experience that is only like death to LIFE.  She WAKES in the tomb: it is the faithless Romeo, the Romeo moved more by his own fantasies and fears than by the lively and loving Juliet, who is dead and can no longer feel the brush of parted lips.  My lips are still warm.  And I pray God will put a new song in my mouth and give me the courage to sing it.  My body will not be a sheath for Romeo’s dagger nor will I be any man’s dead mother or play Marilyn Monroe to his Joe DiMaggio.
 

            As I finish this blog, I see, more clearly than ever before, the dangers of loving literature.  I believe that fiction can be used to deepen our relationship to real life, but it must not become more important than life.  Literary characters can seem deeper and more beautiful than human beings.  We can know them in ways we often cannot know the people in our lives, and, as a result, they seduce us.  S----- turned me into Ruth (renaming me for the character in the biblical book).  Ruth is a loyal daughter and a lively redeemer whose redemption begins with surviving loss—the death of her husband and the bereavement of Naomi.  Ruth is a Moabite, and the women of Moab are, to the Israelites, whores capable of luring chosen men into the worship of idols.  But Ruth proves that the “other” is really the face of God and a force of God in the world.  Ruth teaches me many things, not least of all that I am Mary Jo and neither Ruth nor Juliet.  I am Mary Jo—daughter of Joseph.  Mary Jo, who worked with Joseph every summer to plant and tend the garden surrounding the statue of Mary at Our Lady of the Annunciation in Queensbury, New York.  Papa was a Lutheran, but he knew, without ever spelling it out, that it was more important to be in church—even a Catholic church—and to put his arm around the daughter next to him in the pew.  Being in the presence of God is what matters—in a church or in a garden.  It doesn’t matter if you fall asleep and even snore during the homily.  It doesn’t matter if the sun is hot and the weeding interminable.  What matters is being with God and with one another in His dazzling theater for worldlings, reading His book all around us.  Even in thrall to a false god, I never lost my love of His book.