Part 1
2005
We have just moved back to Chicago from a year spent in London. Most days I cannot be alone in my little red office, my hermitage on Hermitage Avenue in the Ukrainian Village neighborhood, trapped like a Trappist, as Djuna Barnes quipped of her monkish isolation at Patchin Place in the Village, in the years after Paris, after Thelma Wood and Nightwood. I am trying to learn how to be a serious writer and write important books, yet I cannot deal with all of the silence. All summer accompanying John to the Newberry Library, limping in my new sandals, bathing my bleeding sweaty feet in the downstairs sink like I am some homeless woman, changing the bandages that melt off in the heat. I sit in Washington Square Park and write in my notebook, unable to last for long taking notes in one of the libraryâs reading rooms. Johnâs job is to sit in a glassed-off cell and watch people to make sure they donât steal any rare books. I escape downstairs to the visitorsâ room, observing people as they buy Snickers and sodas from the vending machines. I am always unable to endure institutional settings. I usually find more alienation in the deadly quiet of such environments, like the girl-opposite of the narrator in Sartreâs Nausea. A flĂąneuse, I stroll around the Gold Coast and go in and out of shops, buying nothing, maybe a lipstick at Marshall Fieldâs, feeling the cool of the AC alternate with the heat of outside.
Yes, this is when I first became enthralled by the mad wives, my eternal reference point; when I began reading the lives of these women often marginalized in the modernist memory project. They have been with me for as long as I have tried to writeâlike ghostly tutors. Never having taken creative writing, save for one disastrous workshop as a journalism undergrad, I felt alone and friendless in the process of attempting to create myself as a writer. Minus a community, I invented one. âI entered into alliances with my paper soulmates,â writes HĂ©lĂšne Cixous in her essay âComing to Writing.â These women served as an invisible communityâlike in Susan Sontagâs play Alice in Bed, about the brilliant letter writer and diarist Alice James (sister-of-Great-Men, Henry and William), except Iâm the neurasthenic, and they are all hovering over me. Or like in Judy Chicagoâs 80s installation The Dinner Party, where she lays out place settings for famous heroines both real and fictional.
My invisible communityâyes, they too were made invisible.
I recently saw Chicagoâs installation at the Brooklyn Museum, and what struck me was how cheap the silverware seemed. And yet the tapestries were so lovingly and laboriously woven.
2009
Akron, Ohio. John has been hired to curate and organize a small collection of rare books at the university here, the centerpiece of which was the gift of a rubber industrialist, who owned a great deal of the book collectorsâ canonâa few early Shakespeare folios, Samuel Johnsonâs Dictionary, two first editions of Walt Whitmanâs Leaves of Grass. The position is tenure-tracked (which, in the rules of marital chess, trumps a fairly satisfying slate of adjunct work back home in ChicagoâKing takes Queen).
The wife will just have to find something, of course. Adjunct, adjunctive.
We live in a squat Victorian building near the university. We move in sight unseen (this has become a habit for us). The adjacent building and ours are the only apartment complexes on our rather suburban street. Backyards littered with all the paraphernalia of childhood, as Esther Greenwood observes with a shudder in Sylvia Plathâs The Bell Jar. Children with their shattering screams. Vivien(ne)âs line added to âThe Waste Land,â should be delivered in your best imitation Cockney screech: What you get married for if you donât want children.
My office is the apartmentâs solarium framed by light and windows. At first I thought, yeah, alright. A sort of writing retreat. A room of oneâs own. All that. Virginia Woolf prescribed the bucolic of the country. A calm respite from the cityâs hysteria. (I was so panicky all the time where we last lived, on 18th Street in Chicago, a man murdered on our street the week we moved out, children playing calmly near his chalk outline. Always our moves seem like sudden, frantic escapes, not properly considering the next because we are so anxious to remove ourselves from the former.)
I am told, rather abruptly by the head of the English department here, that I am not qualified to teach literature. Male professors with no interest in the subject teach womenâs literature instead. I am reminded of my lack of a terminal degree. (Why does the idea always feel like a death?)
I find work teaching Introduction to Womenâs Studies, writing SUFFRAGE on the board to bored and sometimes bemused and occasionally bitter faces. Packed classrooms. A campus diversity requirement. The university here is alarmingly Christianâa megachurch dubbed The Chapel, one of the universityâs benefactors, sits on the edge of the campus. One of their ministries is a Pray Until Youâre Straight program called âBonds of Iron.â The working conditions here are much worse than in Chicagoâit is illegal for part-timers to unionize in Ohio, so I have no office or even much of a communal workspace, and the pay is dismal.
As soon as we land here I begin wishing ardently to get out of this black-and-white Midwestern landscape, a town formerly industrious, its factories now sit like the vacant, rotting husks of industry. The sad Wizard of Oz window display for Christmas in one of the emptied downtown storefronts. Clark Gable once worked here in one of the tire factoriesâit was a step up from his fatherâs farm but he too left for dreams of grandeur. Who wouldnât leave? Everyone asks: Why? About our move. The economy, you know. I mumble. A great job. (I want to really say: I DONâT FUCKING KNOW. But I donât. I tell the mutual lie of marriage.)
The nearby Cuyahoga Valley is beautiful in its autumnal blaze. But the city itself so often Midwestern gothic. Strange sightings. The woman wandering into the Radio Shack with a half-eaten hot-dog in one hand, fingering the merchandise with the ketchup- and mustard-stained other. Another woman padding down the emptied-out Main Street with duct-tape over her face, clutching a Big Gulp (John observes: the kidnapped on her lunch break). We bond more intensely in our mutual dystopic vision. (Our favorite shared writer of the moment is Thomas Bernhard, when we first met it was Beckett.) A different sort of alienation than when we lived in London, or moved back to Chicago.
I am an alien here. My short cropped hair and my black Joan of Arc jacket, shiny from years of wear, the interior all torn out and replaced, a remnant from our splurges on his student loans in London department stores. I feel myself stared at in the grocery store, on campus. Iâm also going through a butch phase, all tight menâs jeans, perhaps a sartorial revolt from my new, more feminine role. John is stared at too with his longish hair and darling dandy vests. He does not care. Although most days I donât even leave the house, and lounge around in what Iâve been sleeping in for days, in the blink and the glare of the outside world I do not often wear my faded and cherished articles of clothing. Except when we make regular trips to Chicago to visit my father or occasional ones to New York. I feel they would be wasted here. This wasteland.
I have become used to wearing, it seems, the constant pose of the foreigner.
Chicago now our pilgrimage, which we once wanted so desperately to escape. In Chicago, New York was our Moscow, like in Chekhovâs Three Sisters. It is our pattern: we forget so soon what made us want to flee, we cover it over with nostalgia, Zelda writing her novelist-husband wistfully of their honeymoon days while in the asylum. This shrine we build to our own shared origins. Vivâs shrine to Tom, once he had abandoned her, next to her framed picture of Sir Oswald Mosley, head of the British Union of Fascists. (Does every woman, really, love a fascist?)
Iâve tried to block out the local uproar dealing with Akron native LeBron James leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers. Iâve always found it pernicious, how those in the Midwest criminalize those who leave, as though it were some rejection of their own lives. Unlike the ambivalence towards their now-prodigal son, rock musician Chrissie Hynde of the 80s group The Pretenders is a much loved celebrity here. âChrissieâ this. âChrissieâ that. The vegan Italian comfort food restaurant she owns in town has become our culinary sanctuary.
As a girl I remember reading an interview with Chrissie Hynde in Rolling Stone about how she left this city in Ohio when she was young and moved to London. I remember thinking of her as this example of what I could do myself one day. That I could leave Chicago, leave the family, leave the Midwest. And I did. For a little bit. But now I am back here. The eternal return. (To write, perhaps, is to always return.)
So many of the gods of modernism hailed from the Midwest. Scott Fitzgerald from St. Paul. Ezra Pound fired from the college in Indiana. Tom Eliot of the lofty Eliots of St. Louis. And they all escaped, to Europeâthey became expatriate, cosmopolitan. They managed to shed their origins, their Midwestern skin. Hemingway years earlier attended the same high school in Oak Park, Illinois as my father and his siblings. God, I idolized Hemingway when I was in journalism school. Now I hate his guts because of how he demonized Zelda in his memoir A Moveable Feast. And for how he treated his wife Hadley. She, summarily dismissed.
(I am now in another union. It is a union of forgotten or erased wives. I pay my dues daily.)
In Cleveland the local bibliophilic society explicitly prohibits women from joining. John attended a meeting at the invitation of his colleague at Oberlin. (I was not happy.) One of those quasi-secret societies of rich white men with bizarre rituals, held in some grand Victorian home. The series of tableaux that begin Virginia Woolfâs A Room of Oneâs Own, her treatise on the material conditions that could allow a woman to write, to write well. Her scenes illuminating women banned from the grounds and libraries and luncheons of the fictional college Oxbridge, to show that a woman of her time would be banne...