The Lost Journals of Sylvia Plath

A Novel

Kimberly Knutsen

• Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781609091842
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Finalist, 2015 Midwest Book Award Chicago Book Review Best Book of 2015 Set in the frozen wasteland of Midwestern academia, The Lost Journals of Sylvia Plath introduces Wilson A. Lavender, father of three, instructor of women's studies, and self-proclaimed genius who is beginning to think he knows nothing about women. He spends much of his time in his office not working on his dissertation, a creative piece titled "The Lost Journals of Sylvia Plath." A sober alcoholic, he also spends much of his time not drinking, until he hooks up with his office mate, Alice Cherry, an undercover stripper who introduces him to "the buffer"—the chemical solution to his woes.

Wilson's wife, Katie, is an anxious hippie, genuine earth mother, and recent PhD with no plans other than to read People magazine, eat chocolate, and seduce her young neighbor—a community college student who has built a bar in his garage. Intelligent and funny, Katie is haunted by a violent childhood. Her husband's "tortured genius" both exhausts and amuses her.

The Lavenders' stagnant world is roiled when Katie's pregnant sister, January, moves in. Obsessed with her lost love, '80s rocker Stevie Flame, January is on a quest to reconnect with her glittery, big-haired past. A free spirit to the point of using other people's toothbrushes without asking, she drives Wilson crazy. Exploring the landscape of family life, troubled relationships, dreams of the future, and nightmares of the past, Knutsen has conjured a literary gem filled with humor and sorrow, Aqua Net and Scooby-Doo, diapers and benzodiazepines—all the detritus and horror and beauty of modern life.

Part One

In the Vagina

 

“When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall . . .”

—T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

One

Wilson

2002

In a crappy condo in Kalamazoo, Wilson and his family slept. Wilson’s wife, Katie, had chosen the place—she’d lived there with her son before they met—and at first, he found it charming. It was nice the way the pitched rooftops rose black against the evening sky, the way the boxy brick buildings glowed orange in the afternoon sun. But lately, with the winter days bleak and gray, what the neat rows of fourplexes resembled most was a military base. It was called the Reserve, and each street was named for a bottle of wine. Wilson and his family lived on Merlot Court. This, though, he only presumed, as the street sign had been missing since he met Katie. They had a horrible time ordering in pizza.

“Maybe we live on Mogen David Street, or Night Train Lane,” he said once, trying to be funny. And wasn’t it funny? Only a couple of years earlier, before meeting Katie and promptly making two babies with her, he was a drunk. Now he lived, sober, in a wine cellar. Katie didn’t like to talk about the drinking. She preferred to think of it as a momentary lapse rather than what he feared it was—his calling in life. Katie liked to talk about the condo. She hated the carpeting, wanted glass doors on the fireplace and new medicine cabinets in both bathrooms. “It’s a rental for Christ’s sake,” he said, but she was adamant that they fix it up.

“It’s important,” she said. “Where you live means something, it’s an echo of who you are on the inside.”

“Then I’m a freaking eight-year-old girl.” He sighed, closing his eyes to the ballerina-pink walls surrounding him. After the wedding in Las Vegas the previous summer (the three kids in tow), and before she let him move in, Katie made him paint. He sometimes wondered if she would’ve agreed to any of it—the marriage, the living together—if he hadn’t. She was stubborn and self-sufficient. What did she need with a clown like him?

Maybe it was the ring. Would she have become his wife without the antique blue-diamond and platinum ring? Every time he saw it, blazing like a blue bumblebee on her pretty hand, he felt sick.

“You’re supposed to spend six months’ salary,” she’d reminded him. “Don’t forget, it’s forever.” Since his six-month “salary” as a graduate assistant at Midwestern came to a little under five hundred bucks, he’d bought the ring on credit. When his office mate, the imposing Dr. Gloria Gold, laughed meanly and told him that you traditionally spent only two months’ salary, Wilson had felt duped. How would he ever pay it off? He couldn’t even think of their collective student-loan debt of nearly ninety grand. And it wasn’t like they were neurosurgeons. They were English majors, professional students with seven degrees between them—eight if you counted Katie’s cosmetology “degree,” which he didn’t—who found it easier to start yet another program than to find a job.

Painting the marital home—permission secured from management—was a rite of passage, a way for him to make his presence known in the family, and a way for Katie to let go of her fierce single motherhood. When he’d finally finished, after her silent and thorough inspection—“Is that a smear on the ceiling? Is it supposed to be bumpy here?”—she’d announced that she loved it. “Soft and pink on the inside, spiny brick on the outside, and here we are, safe as baby pearls,” she’d cried, hugging him hard.

“A baby pearl,” he said, annoyed. “Just what I’ve always wanted to be.” After weeks of backbreaking work, he realized he’d created a vagina, a great pink yawning vagina, in which to crouch humbly for the rest of his life. What had he done? Wasn’t it enough to be the happy visiting dad, the “household imp of fun,” as Katie called it, and leave the tough stuff to her? But even as he thought longingly of his former homes, a quiet lake-view apartment, and then a rented basement in Vicksburg with red velvet walls, a six-foot-tall stuffed bunny that often startled him, and a parade of shifty roommates, he knew it wasn’t enough. The family he’d created—four-year-old Paul, baby Rose, and Katie’s eight-year-old, Jake—deserved his full surrender.

Katie, not liking his sarcasm, had ignored him the rest of the night. And that was it: He was in. He was a family man, deputy to Katie’s sheriff, father of three, and co-owner of the beloved and elderly dog, Lovely. Who could forget Lovely? He was never to forget Lovely when doling out treats or love. If he did, Katie wouldn’t sleep with him for a week. Withholding sex was one of the few ways in which she was a typical female. In other ways, she was odd.

“In a fabulous way,” she’d add. She talked to herself, wore colors that didn’t match, and was far too sensitive about her living conditions. Everything had to be warm and cozy and sweet like a fucking Barbie doll dream house. As a kid she’d wanted to live in a bottle like the genie on I Dream of Jeannie, and as he saw it, her wish had come true. Their home was alive with oversized pillows and throws and rugs, all in wild dizzying colors—lemon yellow and fuchsia and her favorite battery-acid green—colors that made his heart beat fast and spots swim before his eyes.

In the bedroom, batik fabric rippled on the walls and swooped from the ceiling, and there were too many goddamn blankets on the bed. Their mattress on the floor wasn’t a “nest” as Katie claimed. With the kids and the dog and the unbelievably heavy Korean blankets—remnants of Jake’s hippie dad, no less—it was a kind of hell.

There, he’d said it. Hell. They warned you not to date in the first year of sobriety. He now understood that there was a reason for this, and that once again, he was not the exception to the rule. As terrifying as his life seemed, however, he slept peacefully. Flat on his back in his boxers, his hands folded on his stomach, he was sternly handsome, his body a perfect sculpture, inviting touch. Yet he liked to think of himself as untouchable, existing somehow apart from the ignorant culture that surrounded him in Kalamazoo, the Midwest, maybe the entire Western world. He never watched TV except for sports or Cops. He grumbled when Katie bought the kids Happy Meals, and he made fun of her when she read People magazine.

At thirty-three, he had a hard time believing in life. Even as a kid, he was the bad party guest, the jerk that refused to wear the pointed paper hat and sulked in the corner while the other kids, the normal ones, enjoyed a rousing game of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey. He’d thought about counseling, but it went against his belief that all answers to life could be found in literature. Katie was a habitual counselee. She’d gone, off and on, for nearly half her life. She liked to chat and communicate and reveal every secret part of herself whereas he was the opposite. Half the time he didn’t know who he was or what he was feeling. This made Katie furious.

When they first dated—those two magical weeks before he got her pregnant—she used to watch him sleep, sometimes nudging him awake to comment on his full pretty lips, his blond curls, his utter peacefulness. One night after they married, however, things changed. “I have no idea who you are,” she said, poking him hard in the ribs and making him yelp. “Do you ever cry? Do you have nightmares? Do you even dream?” There was an edge to her voice, and he realized that, beneath her vague cheeriness, she felt the same as he did, that they’d made a terrible mistake and were trapped.

What had brought them to the king-sized mattress on the floor of the overpriced condo in Kalamazoo? He was a good Midwestern boy. She was a single mom from the West Coast, a free spirit, he’d thought, although he quickly discovered how wrong he was. Neither liked condoms, and one or both were incredibly fertile. They had two babies in less than two years, and that was it, their lives were set.

“You are not going to believe this,” Katie said the day she discovered she was pregnant again, with Rose, their youngest. Her words had chilled him. He’d thought he was going to pass out, and could only stare as she squatted on the toilet, holding out the test stick with a nervous smile. It wasn’t that he didn’t love the kids. He did. It just seemed that, like in the John Lennon song, life had happened while he was busy making other plans.

“I’m perfectly human, the same as you,” he’d assured her the night she jabbed him so rudely awake. He’d wrapped her in his arms and pulled the covers over her shoulders. Beyond being human, he didn’t know. Sensitive genius that he was, his moods ranged from nervous to enraged and back again, with occasional uneasy stops at happiness. It was during these respites—when he touched baby Rose’s funny pointed ears, or watched Paul crayon wildly on the awful pink walls—that he felt as if something inside, something quiet and good, was awake for the first time since he was a kid.

Katie slept beside him, curled around the baby, her bottom in her big, white maternity underwear pressed into his side. She looked lost, even in sleep. Her long red hair hung in her face, and her body in the unattractive underwear made him sad. It was pretty, curvy and pale and sexy, but she sometimes seemed slumped in the middle, as if she were very tired. Her arms and legs were long and thin and were always entwining things—babies and chair legs, themselves when she did yoga, his back when they used to have sex—but she hunched over her full breasts, as if no one had ever told her to stand up straight. This, too, ma...