Clear Springs (24 page)

In Binghamton, New York, in a small apartment with pink walls, I listened to Motown and the Beatles on a late-night Boston station and wrote papers on Milton’s
Paradise Lost
and Yeats’s Fergus poems. To earn extra cash, I typed term papers. I bought my first car, a 1952 Chevrolet.

Working on a fan magazine had hardly prepared me for the rigors of postgraduate education. The English department had sent me a reading list of books I should know before arriving. There would be no exam, just an expectation of mastery. The list was a daunting array of over a hundred books, ranging through Western civilization.
The Decameron
,
Humphrey Clinker
,
Tristan and Isolde
, Augustine’s
Confessions
. Previously, I had read a handful of books from the nineteenth century, but hardly anything farther back in time. Earnestly, I labored over the list as if I were laying up a woodpile for the winter. I was stranded at a small, isolated institution in the snow belt. The snow was deep, engulfing, like my innocence.

At Harpur College, my professors—all very large men—were tweedy impresarios. Professor Bernard Huppé spun his students
through the dim beginnings and dark ages of England. Being in his class was like drifting past dioramas in a museum: Beowulf fighting Grendel; the wars of the Angles and the Saxons against the Danes; sassy pilgrims on donkeys hightailing it to Canterbury. Professor Huppé, whose white forelock bounced along with his enthusiasms, guided us on our journey through the history of the English language with joy in his heart. Professor Seymour Pitcher spent a trimester toiling over his translation of Aristotle’s
Poetics
with us. “Was this word a happy choice?” he inquired. The exact word for what is usually translated as “catharsis” troubled him throughout the term. What was a catharsis anyway, I wondered. Does art make us feel blown out and purified, as from a purgative? Or is it intended to have a calming effect, like that of cows chewing cud in a more complex digestive process?

I wasn’t ready for the elusive and false trails of advanced learning. From the depths of the roaring river of illusions and prismatic images of literature, I was expected to gig a metaphorical frog, color it, name it, and defend it—all out loud, with a Northern accent. There was no joy in that challenge, in that realm of territorial skirmishes—scholars clashing on a darkling plain. I loved books, but I didn’t want to argue about them. Instead of embracing what they read, other graduate students, in their competitiveness, rejected. They would say “Fitzgerald’s vision was limited by his status consciousness” or “Nabokov’s introverted style prevented him from being universal.” How could a novice blithely quibble with greatness? How could anyone even hint at superiority to those supreme artists? I balked. There seemed no room for genuine admiration in this new game. Bob Hazel had revered the great writers; he invited his students for strolls through the pantheon. I began to see what he had meant about academic study. It was adversarial. It assumed no heroes. The pressure to speak up made me feel, not for the first time in my life, that the cat not only had my tongue but had eaten it. Everybody was smarter than I was! I was sure this was so, since I couldn’t think of what to say. I had had no practice in debate and discussion. Other students spewed out opinions, stating positions in the time it took for me to say, “Huh?” I felt soft-headed, like those tiny soft-shelled eggs that hens sometimes laid by mistake. There I was, in the North—disoriented, out of my element, but determined to plow through.

From the South I brought an ingrained sense of shame. The mannerisms came with me—the disingenuous smile and “the down look,” the lowered eyes of self-effacement. My overconfident self, forged on
the farm and at Cuba School, shattered in that Northern intellectual climate. I was invisible, voiceless, stupefied by my naïveté. All around me were Yankees, the foreigners of the Little Colonel books. If they noticed me at all, they gazed at me penetratingly, pinning me on the spot as if I were a specimen of bug. My accent betrayed me.

Worst of all, I was expected to teach. I was a teaching assistant, assigned to conduct a freshman survey of Western literature from Homer on up. In sweet little wool suits and breakneck heels, I faced a classroom of fiercely bright kids from New York City. Some of them were only sixteen or so; they had skipped grades. They dressed sloppily, they wore long hair in the Medusa mop-top style, and they were glib and serious. I had had no teacher training, but suddenly I was supposed to be a guide to the great books of Western civilization. My students zigzagged around me like the Jets from
West Side Story
as I stumbled and bumbled in incomplete sentences, trying to recall my diligently prepared notes.

The professor I assisted tried to share his passion for the Greeks with me, so that I could stimulate this sharp gang of valedictorians.

“I read Plato’s
Republic
to my wife on our honeymoon,” he said. “There are parts of it that are so beautiful.”

I couldn’t
imagine
reading Plato on a honeymoon. I couldn’t think of what to say to the professor. I studied
The Republic
assiduously. Plato said throw out the poets. He said nothing—a table, a refrigerator—was real, but it had an ideal form somewhere. I pictured the ideals in orbit, like Sputnik.

I had the wrong gear for this venture. I was like one of those catfish that can sort of walk on land—awkwardly, using their whiskers like elbows. Previously, I had floated from one enthusiasm to another, and I had often been in charge, with the illusion of power. Now I felt like Granny in Hopkinsville, or Daddy in the Pacific. I was in alien territory and there was a war on. But I persevered, while trying to lose my accent.

After the dramatic snow season, I expected daffodils and forsythia. Nothing happened. The days continued cold and gray. I yearned for the long, languorous springtime of Kentucky. I craved the mellow air that seemed to caress every pore. I wanted tulips and redbud and dogwood blossoms.

Except for my frivolous year in New York City, I spent the decade of the sixties in school. I didn’t know what to do except to continue my plodding
pilgrimage toward a teaching career. But graduate study at Harpur College was monastic, and I had little awareness of what was going on in the world beyond those wooded mountain ridges along Route 17. I was getting restless, worried that I faced a lonely future teaching at some junior college. I wanted some action—or at least a boyfriend. So I transferred to the University of Connecticut, a much larger school with less intellectual pretension and more mating possibilities.

But in Connecticut, I found myself wading into a maelstrom. Everything—even the worth of literary study—was in question. The growing youth rebellion against middle-class values gathered me up and whipped me around like a wind ripping into sheets on the clothesline. I had aspired my whole life toward such amenities as central heat and running hot water, and suddenly they were the wrong goals. The new goals included living in a yurt or a dome, dressing in ragbag fashion, randomly coupling, and just plain grooving. The Vietnam War twisted everything around. The prized became trivial, and the ordinary became exalted. The war itself seemed distant to me. I didn’t know a soul in it, and I still had no TV. I listened to rock-and-roll on WBZ and subscribed to
Newsweek
and
Life
. The images of mud-spattered, grungy G.I.s with their M16s, dazed or lying dead in a jungle, seemed unreal. Yet those soldiers were the same age as my freshman students, the same age as all of the vociferous, long-haired students around me. These kids looked dazed, too.

But not all of the shooting was overseas. Images of racial violence and bigotry flooded the newsmagazines—ugly scenes of beatings and murders, especially in my homeland. More than ever, I felt ashamed of being from the South. I feared that when people saw me, they imagined a walking, mute mannequin of Southern Gothic horror in high heels and a beehive—or worse, a baton twirler with a police dog. I was afraid my teachers and colleagues thought of hillbillies eating Moon Pies and swigging moonshine on the way home from a lynching. I remembered one of Daddy’s cousins talking once about the significance of the date August 8. “That was the day Abe let the niggers go,” he said, as if he actually remembered the emancipation. I didn’t want to be Southern anymore. But my metamorphosis wasn’t forthcoming. I was caught in a paralyzing culture shock.

It was stopping up my mind. I couldn’t think. I questioned my intelligence, my sanity, my identity. I believed wholeheartedly in my own inferiority, and people treated me accordingly, like a wadded-up dishrag. A few defining episodes stick out among memories I’d like to banish.

I became involved with a fellow graduate student I’ll call Larry. He was one of those guys whose soul was too sensitive for the Army to make use of him. He was an artist, passionate about what was tasteful and genuine. When he scoffed at the curtains I’d bought at a discount place, I saw instantly, through his eyes, that they were inauthentic, like something in Lucy Ricardo’s kitchen. The design was tasteless, the colors too loud.

“I want to show you my quilt,” I said to him a few days later, when he came over to my hopelessly bourgeois apartment for coffee. I brought out the star quilt I had helped Granny make when I was a child. It was supposed to be my marriage quilt, but she had given it to me when I left for college, perhaps to celebrate the opportunity for education that she had not had for herself. I had washed the quilt until the edges were frayed. I laid it across my bed. I wanted to impress Larry because he seemed to like things that were lovingly crafted. (He threw pots on a wheel.) But instead he was taken aback by this simple creation with its five-point stars, pieced from the print dresses I had worn as a child.

What Larry said was “Ugly!”

“My grandmother made it,” I said in a faltering voice. Of course I could see, now that he mentioned it, how crude and primitive it was. Granny hadn’t been to art school. I had so much to learn.

There was another contretemps with Larry. I made supper for him. In a new casserole dish I had obtained with Green Stamps, I baked chicken thighs and sliced potatoes in mushroom soup. My cooking was part imitation and part intuition. After we finished eating, Larry lifted the empty dish and walked around with it, talking about how he would have made the dish differently on his pottery wheel. We stood on a little balcony that extended outside my kitchen door, looking onto a lawn in front of birch trees. Larry held the dish out over the balcony railing as if he were trying to consider it as part of the landscape.

“I wonder what would happen if I dropped this dish,” he said in a contemplative voice. He was regarding the dish, turning it, judging it. Clearly, he disapproved of it.

“Why would you drop it?”

The dish fell from his hand, as if it had dived of its own accord. I watched in disbelief as it cracked on the concrete patio below.

“The dish won,” he said with a little blurt of laughter.

I was confused and hurt, but I didn’t show it.

“That’s all right,” I said. I dismissed Larry’s act, feeling I deserved
to have such an inferior dish broken, even though it was hard-earned and very useful. But Larry was testing me, cruelly and deliberately. I realized later that I was supposed to get angry, show some fire. I was supposed to be real, authentic. But Southern girls aren’t taught to be real. I had learned modesty and submissiveness, the veneer of my rebellious streak.

None of that was clear to me at the time. I grew ever more withdrawn and hesitant, fearful of saying the wrong thing. I learned, to my distress, that what was expected of me now was precisely the opposite of what I was equipped to do. Instead of expecting me to conform and please, people here expected me to be myself. But what was that? I seemed to have lost sight of who I was; I was only a vague presence. I felt I was judged for being a Southerner and then judged all over again for trying not to be a Southerner. Where did that leave me?

Then, at a particularly low point in my desperate postgraduate career, somewhere in the middle of American Romanticism 469, John and his girlfriend Carolyn appeared unexpectedly at the door of my apartment. I had attended a few gatherings at their apartment for antiwar discussions, and I admired them exceedingly. They were a striking couple, both lean and intense, with passionate ideas and appropriate hair. I especially loved Carolyn’s long, straight sheet of blond tresses that trailed nearly to her waist. I had gotten a Beatle haircut just before it became apparent that I should grow my hair long. I knew Carolyn had been sleeping with an undergraduate, but this fact did not seem to matter to anyone, even John.

John and Carolyn marched onto my hooked rug in their snowy Army surplus boots and came straight to the point. John said, “We’ve decided we can’t be friends with you anymore because we don’t think there is anything underneath the surface. You don’t reveal yourself. We feel you’re playing games with us.”

That was what Larry had said when he told me we shouldn’t see each other anymore. The same wording. “There’s no tension with you,” he had said. “You always try to agree with me.”

Grasping for something tangible, I petted my cat Blackie while John went on. “And so we don’t know where we are with you. We thought this could be a productive friendship, but We’re not getting much out of it.”

“You don’t assert yourself,” Carolyn said, casting a disdainful eye around my nondescript apartment. “You don’t take a stand on anything.”

“It’s a matter of honesty,” John said.

“You’re just not being honest with us,” Carolyn said.

I didn’t throw them out of my apartment. I nodded. What they said was true: I didn’t speak up for myself. Inside, I couldn’t even find myself anymore. Mumbling, I tried to explain how Southerners expressed themselves differently, but John and Carolyn were impatient with my mealymouthed defensiveness. Most of my real explanations came later, silently, in lucid afterthoughts. It struck me then that Southern behavior was devious, depending on indirection, a fuzzy flirtation that relied on strategic hinting. But it didn’t occur to me to wonder how I could let John and Carolyn form such a solid wall against me when they weren’t even faithful to each other. I admired their self-possession and style too much to question their motive for attacking me. At the time, I didn’t know they were both seeing psychiatrists and that their smug union would soon shatter.