Copyright © 2008 Judith J. Bentley
It was the standard teaching to mothers in the first half of the twentieth century that they should not spoil their babies by holding them or giving them too much attention. I was born in March of 1945 in the Jefferson Memorial Hospital in Roanoke, Virginia. To this day, I have no memory of my mother ever holding me or giving me a hug during my early childhood years. Because I never felt close to my Mother, I decided to ask her about my early years and about her concept of what a mother is. Although Mother told me that she couldn't remember her mother ever hugging her either or saying "I love you" to her, she knew her mother loved her.
"How did you know?" I asked her.
"Because she did things for me." When I told her that the guards at the Virginia State Penitentiary "do things" for the inmates but that doesn't mean they love them--it's their job, Mother told me that she never held me during the first 18 months of my life because she had undulant fever which she had contracted from spoiled meat and she was afraid she would give me the fever. Unfortunately, I didn't learn this until I was in my thirties and I had believed all my life that my Mother didn't love me or want me. She did help me learn to ride a bicycle during my preteens by walking beside me while I fell into the ditch until I could learn to keep my balance.
During a visit with my parents after I had turned 30, I found my baby book, a lock of my baby hair, my report cards and several photos taken of me. One of the photos was of me when I was three. I was sitting alone in a metal swing on the front porch in Hamilton, Virginia with a frown on my face. Another photo was of me dressed in an Easter hat and suit, standing in the front yard. I remember the hammock that hung in the side yard between two trees. I used to love to rock back and forth in it and look up at the sky. I remember warm gentle breezes as I swayed under a canopy of green. One day, I ventured out too far by myself and a large dog bit me, leaving a scar on my left hand. This turned out to be a blessing because when I was in first grade the teacher insisted we learn our left hand from our right and I couldn't remember which was which. Mother reminded me of the scar. "Just remember to look at it when she asks you which hand is your left hand." These were my first lessons in the usefulness of boundaries and scars.
Mother had been preoccupied in her role as a Methodist preacher's wife. She attended numerous nightly church meetings during the week in addition to the Sunday school and church services on Sundays. She was a career woman too so was not at home with us during the day before we started school. She taught high school students math, chemistry, biology, French and German for years until she received her master's degree in guidance counseling and left the classroom for the guidance counselor's office.
Mother employed a series of maids as housekeepers who were to look after us while she was at work. My favorite was a black woman named Lizzy whose two front buck teeth had a sizable space between them. Lizzy smoked a lot, chewed gum, and generally goofed off most of the day. She wasn't physically affectionate, but I have one memory of her letting me sit on her lap. I remember the very red lipstick she wore and her laughter that would always wind up in rounds of wheezing coughs and spasms. Mother wasn't fond of housekeeping but she would do it if she had to, especially when it came time to move to another town which was every four years in the Methodist Church. My father would get his new appointment at the annual conference held in June and then we'd have to pack up and move. As soon as she could teach my sister and me how to dust and vacuum, we had household chores to do every weekend which we had to complete before we could play. We took turns cleaning the upstairs and downstairs of the parsonages where we lived and before our big moves, Mother would make sure we left each parsonage a whole lot cleaner than we found it. I remember one floor we waxed on our hands and knees and then polished with a sweeper that made a lot of noise and was hard to control. It seemed to have a mind of its own and would was always trying to head for the wall.
When Mother was home, she was always busy. She sewed some of our clothes, especially our Easter dresses, because we didn't have a lot of money to buy clothes and she was a very good seamstress and taught my sister and me both how to sew. She would stay up all night sewing just so we'd have a nice Easter dress to wear on Easter Sunday. I admit that I resented the effort she put in to make us appear presentable to the community since she never put forth that much effort to spend time with me. Keeping up appearances was very important to her.
I developed an early resentment that Mother didn't seem to have much time for me and I took that to mean that she preferred not to spend time with me. On another visit with her, when I told her how I felt about my childhood years, she explained tearfully that she thought it was her duty when she married my father to fulfill her role as a Methodist minister's wife and that that came first before her children and she was sorry if she hadn't been the mother I had needed. As an adult with a child of my own, I couldn't imagine anything more important that being a mother, definitely not a career, so it has always been a mystery to me how some women can be have children and then abandon them.
In spite of her busy work schedule and church responsibilities, Mother always managed somehow to have breakfast ready for us during the week before she left for school. When she came home in the late afternoons, she made our dinners and on the weekends, she'd make wonderful Sunday dinners that sometimes included hot home-made rolls. I remember the wonderful aromas of her pot roasts and fried chicken. She made delicious frozen fruit salads and all kinds of cakes, pies and cookies for dessert.
In the summer, Mother would do a lot of canning. She'd sit on the screened-in back porch and shell butter beans and peas and snap string beans and sometimes she'd let my sister and me join in. This was one way we got to spend time with her. She kept a well-stocked pantry and we'd eat all year long from her summer canning. She made cucumber and watermelon rind pickle which I loved mostly because it was so sweet and juicy. She canned tomatoes and peaches. I used to enjoy standing inside the pantry on the back porch and gaze at all the Mason jars loaded with peaches, tomatoes, string beans and pickles. The pantry was the preferred spot for Snowball, our white Manx cat, to hide her new-born kittens too. Snowball was the most unusual cat we ever had. She wasn't one bit scared of the dogs in the neighborhood. When we heard a dog yelping, we knew Snowball had jumped on his back and was riding him out of our yard. We had seen her do it more than once.
Sometimes in the evenings, Mother would sit with me and read a story out of some ugly orange colored child care books that I hated. I don't know why I hated them so much. I think it was that I didn't like the stories I had to sit and listen to until she decided she'd read enough of them for one sitting. I remember having difficulty learning to read in grade school so she would have me read to her from the Weekly Reader I would bring home. I am glad she did that because with practice I learned to read really well.
Though Mother always kept herself busy doing something, she didn't seem to be happy with her life. She didn't smile alot and seemed sad sometimes though she didn't ever talk about her feelings. In fact, she was often silent as she went about her chores. Keeping busy probably kept her from having to think much about her life or about who she might have been. She had wanted to become a medical doctor and had been a pre-med student in college but some male doctor had convinced her that medical school would be too stressful for her. When I asked her why that was, she said it was because she had a heart murmur. So she became a teacher instead and a Methodist preacher's wife. I used to wonder what her life might have been like had she become a medical doctor. I wondered if she would ever have married my father.
Mother could speak French and German fluently. In college she had lived in a French-speaking dormitory where no one was allowed to speak English so that's how she learned to speak French. I never found out how she learned to speak German. After World War II, my family took in a Hungarian refugee to live with us for a while. Her name was Emma a Contesse. She could not speak a word of English and my mother couldn't speak Hungarian, but they could both speak German so that's how they communicated.
When my sister and I were in high school, my mother up and decided we should be home-schooled in German. She obtained the State Department of Education's approval of our home studies, ordered our textbook and began giving us lessons in the evenings at the dining room table. I didn't understand why we had to study German. I didn't like its harsh sounds or mile-long words that were hard to pronounce or spell correctly. My sister and I were fiercely competitive and would argue with Mother if one of us scored even a point higher than the other on tests. After only a few weeks and to our great relief, Mother gave up in frustration. I don't think we even made it through the first half of the textbook.
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In the Fall of 2006 the loss of several members of my extended family through death triggered deep grief that lasted several weeks. A grief support group through a local hospital helped me process my feelings of loss. One of the exercises the counselor asked us to complete was to write a letter of gratitude to a person we had lost. Because I never felt close to my Mother and felt she had abandoned me during my childhood and early adolescence, I chose to write a letter to her to let her know, nevertheless, that I now realize the positive difference she made in my life and the many fond memories I had of things she did for me for which I am grateful.
When I was a small child, maybe two or three years old, I was bitten by a dog while playing in the front yard of the home where we lived in Covington, Virginia. In my early elementary school days, I was required to distinguish my left hand from my right and I never could get them straight. I must have told Mother about my difficulty because she had an easy answer ready for me. "Just remember it was on your left hand that the dog bit you." Sure enough I could look at my hands and see which one had the scar right below the thumb. I used Mother's suggestion many times after that. I still have that scar though it is faint now, but it has served me well over the years as I discovered I have absolutely no sense of direction.
I am grateful that Mother loved kittens and allowed us to have pets early so that we learned how to care for them. I remember a favorite fearless female Manx cat of hers named Snowball, who used to jump on the backs of roving dogs, driving them yelping out of the yard. When Snowball had kittens, Mother tenderly nursed them and gave them warm milk. I have remained fond of cats and kittens to this day and feed neighborhood strays but take care of two indoor cats who offer unconditional love and companionship.
Mother used to prepare delicious, mouth-watering Sunday meals in the parsonages where we lived, especially when guests were invited, as well as at the cottage on the Chesapeake Bay that Pop had built. We all relished her home-made rolls, pies, cakes and cookies. I have rich memories of the auromas from the cottage kitchen of fried fish, hush puppies and oysters and visual memories of the fresh fruits and vegetables she spread out on the cottage porch table, the crab pots she set out in the evenings to retrieve in the early mornings loaded with fresh crab. Pop had the month of August off from church responsibilities, and the family spent the entire month at the summer cottage living carefree, enjoying the beach and salty warm bay waters, collecting sea shells and driftwood. We were a middle class family but because of my parents' hard work, frugality and vision, the family lived "high on the hog."
From childhood through my teen years, Mother and Father provided piano lessons for me. They purchased an old upright Steinway piano with its original ivory keys for me to practice on. I took piano lessons from my elementary through high school years. My parents also provided ballet lessons and by the time I was in high school, they bought an Armstrong flute for me so that I could play the flute in the high school marching band, which performed in parades, at football games and special school concerts. They gave me the Steinway piano when I became an adult and it traveled with me from place to place until I sold it to a family of musicians. At an auction, I purchased a Werlitzer piano - solid cherry - and have had it tuned. I still enjoy playing the piano. I am grateful that Mother and Father recognized musical ability in me and encouraged me to develop that talent.
Mother taught me how to sew, knit and crochet as soon as I could hold needle and thread. I learned to make my own clothes. I took pride in my handiwork and when Juanita was born in 1975 I knitted and crocheted sweaters and ponchos for her and sewed a number of outfits for her during her growing up years. Passing on these domestic skills was one of the greatest gifts my mother gave to me.
Mother had gotten her Master's Degree in Guidance and Counseling and was working as a high school guidance counselor when I entered college. In my sophomore year at Pfeiffer College, a Methodist related liberal arts college in North Carolina, I felt stifled and unhappy and knew there had to be more to college life than studying. Mother brought from her office a batch of college catalogs and spread them out on the dining room table of the parsonage. I settled on the University of Kentucky and was accepted in 1965 as a transfer student in my junior year. At U.K. I experienced a much happier college life, greater freedom, and cultural opportunities not available at Pfeiffer. My last two undergraduate years to June of 1967 were my happiest and best.
In the summer of 1973, I became so ill that my parents drove to Atlanta. I recall the long ride back to Virginia. At a rest stop I was so weak that I could hardly walk and had to lie down on a park bench. Mother sat beside me to comfort me. Once in Virginia, I was admitted to the Williamsburg Community Hospital and spent several days there for various tests before being diagnosed with clinical depression. My sister and my parents came to visit me. That hospitalization was the impetus for me to seek therapy several years later and begin a lifelong road to recovery.
In 1974 I was married in Atlanta at the Unitarian Church. I wrote to Mother how much it meant to me that she attended my wedding, wearing a beautiful blue lace dress, and that my sister was my maid of honor, and that my brother and sister-in-law also attended. When our daughter Juanita was born a year later, I had a difficult delivery which extended my recovery time. My mother-in-law came to take care of our baby during the first week at home and Mother came from Virginia to spend the second week while I rested.
In 1980 when my husband and I divorced, our daughter Juanita was 5 years old. I moved with her from our home in the Brookbury subdivision on Richmond's Southside to a low rent, small two-bedroom apartment. I had left the teaching profession in 1978, entered paralegal school and took classes at night while working during the day at local law firms as a temp until I could find full-time employment. Since I did not earn sufficient income as a temp to cover my moving expenses, Mother offered to help me. Years later she assisted me again when I moved into a nicer two-bedroom apartment located near the middle school Juanita attended. It had a fireplace in the living room and sliding glass doors that opened onto a patio facing the backyard of filled with beautiful hanging branches of trees. I remember Mother came to visit me after I had moved in and commented on how amazed she was that I had signed the contract without having seen the apartment itself.
In the 1980's when my parents were living in West Point, Virginia in a house they bought on 5th Avenue after Pop retired from the ministry, I often visited them. On one of those visits, the three of us set out for a long walk one afternoon. Pop walked ahead of us while Mother and I strolled along looking for 4-leaf clovers. This was the only time I could remember that my Mother and I walked together and I wished we could have shared other walks through the years. I was amazed that we found several 4-leaf clovers along the sidewalk. Later I gave away all the 4-leaf clovers we found that afternoon to friends. That walk is stored as a special memory not just because we found so many 4-leaf clovers but because it was with Mother.
My parents were generous in sharing the fruits and vegetables from their backyard garden each summer. Mother would always load up the trunk of my car with bags and bags of goodies from the garden - as much as I wanted - tomatoes, corn, cucumbers, squash, beans, canteloupe, figs and blueberries. Pop had rented a plot from the Chesapeake Corporation in West Point and bought a tractor to work the field with rows and rows of vegetables. When I visited them in the summertime, we'd often drive up to the "big garden" where I'd help them pick from the bountiful supply of fresh vegetables. Pop had turned working in this big garden into a serious hobby during his retirement years and he found immense pleasure in what became a kind of return to the farming days of his youth.
Of all the things I recall my Mother did for me, I am most grateful that she did not pass on to me the racial prejudice she was exposed to and grew up with in her South Carolina home. When I was about 5 years old, Mrs. DuBois who lived next door passed by with her grocery sack as I sat beside the child of my mother's maid on the parsonage's front steps. She called to us in an angry and threatening voice, "You shouldn't play with a nigger!" I was upset that somehow we were guilty of doing something wrong by sitting on the steps and went inside to ask my Mother why Mrs. DuBois had spoken to us so harshly. Her only reply was simply, "She's just ignorant." Until then, I had never heard the word "nigger." I was to hear it many times after that but never from my Mother.
Friday, August 29, 2008
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Musings on Endless Growth by Eckhart Tolle
from Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose
Ego-identification with things creates attachment to things, obsession with things, which in turn creates our consumer society and economic structures where the only measure of progress is always more. The unchecked striving for more, for endless growth, is a dysfunction and a disease. It is the same dysfunction that a cancerous cell manifests, whose only goal is to multiply itself, unaware that it is bringing about its own destruction by destroying the organism of which it is a part. p. 37
The physical needs for food, water, shelter, clothing, and basic comforts could be easily met for all humans on the planet, were it not for the imbalance of resources created by the insane and rapacious need for more, the greed of the ego. It finds collective expression in the economic structures of this world, such as the huge corporations, which are egoic entities that compete with each other for more. Their only blind aim is profit. They pursue that aim with absolute ruthlessness. Nature, animals, people, even their own employees, are no more than digits on a balance sheet, lifeless objects to be used, then discarded. p. 48
Ego-identification with things creates attachment to things, obsession with things, which in turn creates our consumer society and economic structures where the only measure of progress is always more. The unchecked striving for more, for endless growth, is a dysfunction and a disease. It is the same dysfunction that a cancerous cell manifests, whose only goal is to multiply itself, unaware that it is bringing about its own destruction by destroying the organism of which it is a part. p. 37
The physical needs for food, water, shelter, clothing, and basic comforts could be easily met for all humans on the planet, were it not for the imbalance of resources created by the insane and rapacious need for more, the greed of the ego. It finds collective expression in the economic structures of this world, such as the huge corporations, which are egoic entities that compete with each other for more. Their only blind aim is profit. They pursue that aim with absolute ruthlessness. Nature, animals, people, even their own employees, are no more than digits on a balance sheet, lifeless objects to be used, then discarded. p. 48
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Grandma's Taffy
Copyright © 2008 Judith J. Bentley
My sister and I were still little children when Grandma Creighton, my mother's mother, used to ride the train all the way from South Carolina by herself to visit us in the summertime in Highland Springs, Virginia where my father was the Methodist minister at the local church and my mother taught chemistry, biology, and math at the high school. The fact that Grandma Creighton was in her '80s didn't seem to deter her one bit from those long train rides. She was a large woman and had a musty smell the way some old people do, but it wasn't too noticeable after she had doused herself with plenty of sachet and bath powder. She tried to help my mother with the meals, but they'd get into arguments in the kitchen about how things should be done so eventually Grandma Creighton retreated to her bedroom rocking chair and crocheted little doilies instead. Sometimes while waiting to eat the next meal, she'd stand at the dining room window looking out into the yard while mumbling to herself about how awful President Eisenhower was. I later learned that there was a solid line of Democrats drawn on both sides of the family, but as a child in the '50s, I couldn't understand why Grandma Creighton didn't like our President.
The best part of Grandma Creighton's summertime visits was the taffy she would make for my sister and me to "pull" in the afternoons. We waited eagerly as Grandma Creighton stirred it in a big pot on the kitchen stove until it was just right. Then out into the backyard we'd fly where she had set up a fold-out table just for our party. We stood side-by-side at the table in jubilant anticipation until finally Grandma Creighton appeared at the back screened door holding the long metal tray containing the hot taffy. She had us grease our hands good with butter and then stood by watching as we scooped up a big glob of the hot taffy and pulled it between us like a giant rubber band, back and forth, till it would "make" into long golden strands of delicious taffy all covered in butter. My sister and I never knew what all went into Grandma Creighton's taffy because she didn't tell us but that was okay. We knew we had helped her in the process of making the taffy with our backyard pulling sessions and we always got to eat as much of it as we wanted. When it came time for Grandma Creighton's visit to end, we'd take her back to the train station and say our goodbyes. Our mother would always cry when she left which I thought was strange since they didn't seem to get along so well in the kitchen.
The year the news came that Grandma Creighton had died, we all drove to South Carolina for the funeral. My Aunt Rebecca greeted us at the door. Inside in the living room which was called the parlor, there was Grandma Creighton laid out in an open casket with a few strangers standing over her. I had never seen a dead person before and Mother had not explained anything to me about what had happened to Grandma Creighton or why she was inside an open casket in her own living room and wasn't saying anything to anybody.
It was the custom in the South to "display" the body of the deceased in the home. This was called a "viewing." I was so frightened as I passed the living room and saw the casket with Grandma Creighton in it that I ran and hid in a back room with my cousin till my mother came and got me and made me go out into the living room and stand in front of Grandma Creighton and look at her. That was the absolute worst part. I thought it was mean of my Mother to make me do that, and I didn't understand why I had to. My Mother even took pictures of her lying in the casket still and silent, her hands folded across her chest. She had on one of those dresses she used to wear when she made us taffy in the summertime. All I knew was the Grandma Creighton wouldn't be coming to visit us anymore in the summertime and we'd never get to pull her taffy again either. I didn't think we'd ever get to go home.
My sister and I were still little children when Grandma Creighton, my mother's mother, used to ride the train all the way from South Carolina by herself to visit us in the summertime in Highland Springs, Virginia where my father was the Methodist minister at the local church and my mother taught chemistry, biology, and math at the high school. The fact that Grandma Creighton was in her '80s didn't seem to deter her one bit from those long train rides. She was a large woman and had a musty smell the way some old people do, but it wasn't too noticeable after she had doused herself with plenty of sachet and bath powder. She tried to help my mother with the meals, but they'd get into arguments in the kitchen about how things should be done so eventually Grandma Creighton retreated to her bedroom rocking chair and crocheted little doilies instead. Sometimes while waiting to eat the next meal, she'd stand at the dining room window looking out into the yard while mumbling to herself about how awful President Eisenhower was. I later learned that there was a solid line of Democrats drawn on both sides of the family, but as a child in the '50s, I couldn't understand why Grandma Creighton didn't like our President.
The best part of Grandma Creighton's summertime visits was the taffy she would make for my sister and me to "pull" in the afternoons. We waited eagerly as Grandma Creighton stirred it in a big pot on the kitchen stove until it was just right. Then out into the backyard we'd fly where she had set up a fold-out table just for our party. We stood side-by-side at the table in jubilant anticipation until finally Grandma Creighton appeared at the back screened door holding the long metal tray containing the hot taffy. She had us grease our hands good with butter and then stood by watching as we scooped up a big glob of the hot taffy and pulled it between us like a giant rubber band, back and forth, till it would "make" into long golden strands of delicious taffy all covered in butter. My sister and I never knew what all went into Grandma Creighton's taffy because she didn't tell us but that was okay. We knew we had helped her in the process of making the taffy with our backyard pulling sessions and we always got to eat as much of it as we wanted. When it came time for Grandma Creighton's visit to end, we'd take her back to the train station and say our goodbyes. Our mother would always cry when she left which I thought was strange since they didn't seem to get along so well in the kitchen.
The year the news came that Grandma Creighton had died, we all drove to South Carolina for the funeral. My Aunt Rebecca greeted us at the door. Inside in the living room which was called the parlor, there was Grandma Creighton laid out in an open casket with a few strangers standing over her. I had never seen a dead person before and Mother had not explained anything to me about what had happened to Grandma Creighton or why she was inside an open casket in her own living room and wasn't saying anything to anybody.
It was the custom in the South to "display" the body of the deceased in the home. This was called a "viewing." I was so frightened as I passed the living room and saw the casket with Grandma Creighton in it that I ran and hid in a back room with my cousin till my mother came and got me and made me go out into the living room and stand in front of Grandma Creighton and look at her. That was the absolute worst part. I thought it was mean of my Mother to make me do that, and I didn't understand why I had to. My Mother even took pictures of her lying in the casket still and silent, her hands folded across her chest. She had on one of those dresses she used to wear when she made us taffy in the summertime. All I knew was the Grandma Creighton wouldn't be coming to visit us anymore in the summertime and we'd never get to pull her taffy again either. I didn't think we'd ever get to go home.
Friday, August 22, 2008
Summer of '73 - Part 1
Copyright © 2008 Judith J. Bentley
I was 28 years old in the summer of '73 when just wanted to go to sleep and never wake up. I didn't know what was wrong with me, but I was sure it had to be some terminal illness and that I was dying a slow death. I was tired all the time and had no energy. I did not know why I felt so bad. My parents were concerned and drove to Atlanta to bring me back to Virginia. I remember little of the drive to West Point, the town where they had retired, except that we had to stop at all the rest stops so I could lie down on a picnic table and try to keep on breathing. Although I had registered and been accepted at the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference in Middlebury, Vermont as a contributing writer for the August 1973 conference, I didn't know whether I'd be able to make it because of my health. About two weeks before the conference was to begin, I entered Williamsburg Community Hospital for observation, testing and diagnosis and was placed on a hospital ward with two other women.
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"You might as well put that curtain from around your bed over there, honey. We're all in here together."
"That's right. We wannt meet our new roommate. Old Sara and me, we fuss all the time and we need somebody to referee. Ain't that right, ole Sara? Well, ain't you gonna let us see who we got in here? You been hidin' behind them curtains all morning."
The words startled me awake. My pillow was soaked on both sides of my head from tears that I couldn't stop. I tried to focus. The room smelled of alcohol and disinfectant and a light green curtain surrounded my bed. I sat up, wiped my eyes, leaned over, and grabbed the curtain, pitching it around till it came to the middle of the foot of my bed. I could see a young Black woman propped up diagonally across from me and an old while woman lying on her side directly in front of me.
"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to be rude; I just don't feel so good. My name is Judith."
"That's okay. I'm Cookie and this lump of lard over here is ole Sara." Cookie let out a cackle.
"I wish you'd hush your mouth. Just wait'll I get my gall stones and you get your innerds cleaned out. I'll get you back then. You won't feel like talkin' to nobody then, and I'll be talkin up a storm about my gall stones and you won't be able to do nothin' about it cause you won't be able to move hardly, I reckon."
"Woo, ain't she mean!" Cookie looked at me and grinned.
"Nothing more'n you deserve." Sara turned toward me to see if I was showing any signs of life yet.
"Well," Sara continued, "it's just real nice to have another roommate -- a live one, that is. The last two we had came in live and went out dead. They were in that bed over there next to yours, honey. My God rest their souls."
I stared at the empty bed on my left. I was glad I hand't been put in a room by myself. It was good to have these women to talk to. They obviously enjoyed each other's company and were determined to get me to speak. I pulled the bed sheet up tight around my neck and lay back against the pillow. I looked at Sara and tried to be pleasant.
"I heard you mention something about gall stones? Is that what you're in here for?"
"That's right, honey. I'm in her to get my rocks out, and the doctor says he'll give 'em to me, too, if I want 'em, and of course, I do. I plan to take 'em home and keep 'em in my kitchen winder over my sink. They'll be my consolatin prize for puttin' up with old motor mouth over here. If angels had kidneys, she'd likely give them gall stones. Her mouth makes you long to be deaf as a rock."
Cookie ignored Sara's remarks about her mouth. "Yea, I bet there's real strange things in your house, ole Sara. Judith and me, we gonna cover over when we get outta this palce and see them rocks you got in your winder."
"Lawd, " Sara replied in exasperation, "it's enough to have to put up with you in here. Now you gonna invite yourself over to my house too. I wouldn't mind if you come, Judith, but motor mouth won't let an old woman have any peace."
I smiled at Cookie. "What're you in here for, Cookie?"
"Well, like ole Sara says, I'm in here to get me a good cleaning out--they call it a hysterectomy."
"I'm awfully sorry," I replied trying to be sympathetic.
"What for?" I already got six kids and no husband to help me take care of 'em. I don't need none of that equipment no more; anyhow, it's gone bad on me, and I like my good times too much to be worryin' 'bout havin' another youngun."
"Cookie's trying to tell us that her mouth ain't all that's motorized; other parts of her got connections--all over this city, I reckon." Sara kept on teasing Cookie. "It's a downright crying shame to be stuck up in a hospital room with a hopeless and lost sinner like ole motor mouth, and even though I read my Bible and have my devotion every morning and every night and pray hard as I can for her,it don't look like it done no good. She justkeeps on having a wild hankering for the men folk."
"Ole Sara's just jealous," said Cookie between chuckles, "and wishin' she could get some."
"Hump," Sara croaked as if in disgust, "I'm too old for such foolishness."
They had succeeded. I was laughing.
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The nurse wheeled into the room with her cart of pills and needles.
"All right, ladies, it's time to shape up. The doctors are making their rounds now, and the way you ladies carry on, they'd never believe anybody in here was sick." She lifted two small white paper cups from the tray and stood beside Sara's bed.
"Let's see if we can get these down this morning." Sara let out a moan as she flipped herself over on her back and then with both arms raised herself up. She reached for the pills and popped them in.
"The food service around here sure is lousy. All I get to eat are these durn pills." Sara enjoyed grumbling whenever the nurse showed up with her daily dose of pills.
"Well, you know your doctor wants you to drink lots of liquids today so you'll be ready for your operation tomorrow. You'll be getting some noodle soup for lunch."
Sara scowled at the nurse who had pulled her cart over to Cookie's bed and handed Cookie her cup of medicine.
"There goes ole Sara, again, griping about the service," said Cookie between sips of a white liquid. "You'd think she wants to keep them gall stones."
The nurse started over to my bed.
"And how is Miss Bentley today?"
"Well, considering my leg has been cut wide open, I've got a hole in my chest, and the blood sucker went out of here this morning with four more vials of my blood, I can't exactly say I feel fine. I think I might be anemic because I'm just tired all the time. It seems like I haven't had any energy in years. Is my doctor coming today?"
"Oh, yes," the nurse replied reassuringly. "He'll be around this morning in a little while with your diagnosis and you can tell him all about the way you feel then. In the meantime, he wants you to take these." She handed me a cup that contained a long yellow pill and a round white one.
"What are they?" I asked even though I didn't really care.
"Oh, just something to calm your nerves."
"Yeah, but what do you call them?"
"The yellow one is Vivactil and the white one is Valium. They are tranquilizers, and they'll help you feel better."
I was glad to hear that. I had been shaking for weeks and didn't know why. Sometimes I felt my blood trembling. I swallowed the pills with a sip of water just as the door swung open and a nurse pulled another bed into the room. The nurse at my bedside pushed her cart to the side wall and assisted in lifting an old Black woman--bony, emaciated, and unconscious--into the bed next to me. The nurses began whispering to one another as they pulled the green curtains around the old woman. Then they rolled the pill cart and emergency room stretcher out, leaving an invisible curtain of silence.
I felt tears trickling down my cheeks again. I had crying spells often for no apparent reason. I felt nervous and frightened much of the time. I felt sorry for myself and for the whole human race, too, thinking that we are all like store signs, with not particularly interesting advertisements, having to be here for a time, until the weather had worn us out and we were taken down and scraped. The image of trees in an endless forest came to my mind. Maybe we were like the trees, stuck in one place unable to move, having to endure whatever the weather brought whether we were up to it or not. I thought some were lucky to be cut down without warning. Others had to live into old age until the bugs ate clear through them and they crumbled in decay. After all, life was difficult to stand up to sometimes. I was 28 years old and divorced already. My ex-husband had been a professional seminarian who hadn't wanted a job in the real world. I had supported him financialy for the four years of our marriage which had soured early. I recalled my wedding day, how bizarre it all had been.
*****************************************
My mother had made most of the arrangements for my wedding. In fact, I felt I had very little to do with any of it, but I had made my wedding dress, a white, floor-ength gown with a long satin train which I covered in expensive French lace. My mother hadn't had a formal church wedding herself but had married at home in a Sunday suit. I wondered if my mother's excitement and fuss wasn't twenty-eight years late. Maybe my wedding was really for her. I would play bride for my mother's sake. Maybe that would bring her some happiness.
I took the long walk down the church aisle on my father's arm. Could I hold up through the ceremony, the meaningless rehearsed words, the turning this way and that, the exchange of rights, the reception's congratulations? If I could pretend hard enough that the total stranger waiting at the pulpit railing in his black tuxedo was someone I loved, maybe I could be a good bride for my mother. My mother's eyes were somewhere behind me, watching through all the years of dark shadows. I had always tried to be a good girl for her but I never felt I measured up. I couldn't make my mother happy. I recalled the words of a favorite Pulitzer-prize winning poet, Anne Sexton, who in describing a miller's daughter, was describing my mother. She was also describing me.
"Poor grape with no one to pick.
Luscious and round and sleek.
Poor thing.
To die and never see Brooklyn."
The grand pageant hadn't work for me. I was in this hopsital room now with a team of medical specialists turning me inside out, naming the parts of me that might still work. I hoped they wouldn't find any. I hoped for the cool, clammy arms of Death. I would at last be held by someone who really wanted me.
I reached for the book of poems on the nightstand that I had brought with me to this hospital. I opened to a poem titled "Rumpelstilskin" and began reading it aloud to Cookie and ole Sara. The poem referred to a Doppelganger.
Cookie and Sara wanted to know what a Doppelganger was.
"It's the ghost inside each of us," I explained," and whenever it decides to come out, Death will show up to meet it. He already came for the two women in her before me and carried off their doppelgangers."
"Ah, shush, Judith, what you want to make up all that silly stuff for?" asked Sara. Cookie was laughing, enjoying the story.
"Just listen to Judith," Cookie said to Sara. They must have thought I was just making something up or maybe I was just nuts because neither had ever heard of a doppelganger before.
Suddenly the light over the ward door began flashing. Cookie saw it first.
"What's going on now?" She sat straight up in bed staring at the door. The three of us could hear feet running to the door. Suddenly it burst open and three nurses rushed in heading for the old woman's bed. One grabbed the curtain pulling it around them while the others hooked up equipment. Then one of the nurses called out, "Ready?"
I could hear a bolting sound and a pounding, followed by silence, then the nurse's "ready" again. I guessed what this meant--one nurse was applying electrical shock to the old woman's chest. This went on for what seemed like several minutes. Then there was only silence. The nurses began whispering again as one pulled the curtains back while the other two rolled the bed out of the room, the old woman covered in a white sheet.
A moment later a middle-aged Black woman entered the room and walked over tot he empty space where the bed holding the unconscious old woman had been. She simply said, "My mother's belongings," as she bent down, picked up a sweater and pocketbook from a chair, and quietly walked out of the room.
******************
The evening before Cookie's scheduled surgery, the nurse came in to deliver Cookie's usual cup of pills and to remind her that she could have water but was to have no solid food the rest of the evening. It wasn't long after the nurse left that Cookie began to fill in some of the details about what Sara had mentioned about Cookie's "connections" and "wild hankering for the men folk." Cookie let it be known that she was on a first name basis with most of the male chefs in the City of Williamsburg, had been out with most of the single ones and probably some of the married ones, and wasn't about to let her connections go to waste while she was in the hospital. She kept a telephone close at her bedside. It was about 10:00 p.m.
"Ya'll want somethin' to eat? I'm hungry," Cookie said.
Ole Sara piped up. "You know what the nurse just told you about not eating anything else tonight."
"Phoey. I ain't studyin' that nurse," Cookie exclaimed. "If I'm going to get cut on, I think we should have a party while I'm still conscious 'cause after tomorrow morning, I probably won't feel like partying for a long time."
"Okay. Be hard headed then. Can't nobody tell you nothin' anyways." Sara waved at Cookie as if trying to push her away, then rolled over and closed her eyes.
"Whatcha want to order, Judith? Got a hankerin' for anything in particular? I know where the best food in this colonial city is. My fellas'll bring us anything we want."
"I don't care," I replied curious as to how Cookie was planning to manage delivery service in her room this time of night without anyone seeing her."
"Well, in that case, here goes." Cookie picked up the phone and dialed one of her "connections." I couldn't make out what all she said on the phone but when she hung up, she announced that we'd be getting a delivery at midnight sharp.
I liked Cookie and Sara both because they both were always trying to make me feel better, but Cookie was my favorite. She didn't pay too much attention to the house rules if they didn't suit her and the hospital's rules regarding food in-take prior to surgery were getting in the way of Cookie's plans for our party. I was glad we were going to do something sneaky. I couldn't wait. Cookie had already instructed the chef where to bring the food -- to the back door of the hospital.
"Yeah, but how are you going to get it without anyone seeing you?"
"Oh, don't worry about that. I've got it all taken care of."
We were in our pj's when Cookie's phone rang a few minutes before midnight. Cookie hopped out of bed.
"Come on, Judith. Let's go get our food."
I couldn't believe what we were about to do - intentionally defy hospital rules with the high probability that we would be caught. I was too doped up on tranquillizers to consider the consequences. I came into the hospital in a wheelchair, but Cookie's escapade had motivated me to get out of bed and follow her down the dark hall to the back of the hospital. Sure enough, a tall black man was standing at the door with a large round silver tray in his hands. Cookie opened the door and reached for the tray, a smorgasbord of an assortment of cheeses, crackers, fresh strawberries, pineapple and grapes, slices of deli meat, and some chocolate brownies.
Miraculously, we made it back to our room without detection by the hospital staff. Cookie placed the large tray on her bedside table. She couldn't convince Sara to sample the gourmet goodies.
"Okay, ya'll are goin' to be sick as dogs in the morning and I don't want to hear a peep out of you either."
"Don't worry, ole Sara. I ain't even goin' to be in here when you open your eyes in the morning."
Cookie couldn't have a party all by herself, could she? I didn't know you could have so much fun in a hospital when you were supposed to be sick.
******************
I had pulled the curtains around my bed again and was starring at the ceiling when my doctor came in carrying a clipboard of papers. Dr. Mercer was a specialist of internal medicine, a man in his early thirties who drove a black Jaguar to his office very day, who had a wife and two children, along with a private cub plane and a resort home in New Hampshire. His piercing blue eyes distracted me from noticing his short statue and blonde hair. The nurses had forewarned me that he had an abrupt bedside manner.
He brushed back the curtains in a flurry, stood at my bed looking at his clipboard and began reading his report.
"Well, and how's my patient this morning?" My eyes filled up instantly. He didn't wait for me to finish saying "I don't feel so hot."
--"Well, I've got some good news and some bad news. I'll give you the good news first. All your tests are in. The chest bone marrow revealed no presence or history of anemia. Aren't you glad to hear that?" He continued without pausing for my reply or looking up from his clipboard.
"And all the blood tests indicate a healthy balance of red and white blood cells. According to the X-rays, your vital organs are functioning normally, and the muscle biopsy on your right leg showed no muscular malfunction. Reports from the EKG came in this morning negative which means we could find no irregularities in your brain operations. In short," Dr. Mercer went on, taking a seat now on my bed and finally looking into my eyes, "we could find nothing physically wrong with you."
He took my right hand and placed it in his. My hand lay like some dead thing unattached to my body. He slowed his words and his voice took on a softer quality.
"Now for the bad news. Your parents told me of your divorce a few years ago. Your marriage must have been a big disappointment and you're probably carrying around a lot of hurt feelings you've had to repress all this time so you could continue to teach school. But those feelings are still there inside you because you haven't let them out and they're eating you up like a cancer. So you've got to do something for yourself now, Judith. You've got to take your head to the dry cleaners."
I was shocked. "What do you mean?" I had been set on his diagnosis of a terminal disease, even looking forward to it.
"I mean that you are experiencing a chronic anxiety depression, what we call a clinical depression. You need another type of doctor to treat that." He hesitated to say anything else.
"You mean a shrink?" I blurted out, tears welling up. "You mean you want me to see a shrink?"
"Well, I know a very good doctor I would like to refer you to." My head was pounding and his calm, quiet voice did nothing to assuage the pressure I felt in my chest.
"I'm not going to any shrink," I said emphatically. "My father has told me all about shrinks and what they do to people. They just use people and squeeze you dry of all your money and then pronounce you cured and let you go. They even force their patients to have sex with them and I'd be expected to cooperate. I'd be a whole lot sicker when I was 'cured' and more confused. Besides, the people I know who've been to a shrink don't seem to be any better. They're just as neurotic as they were before."
I had managed to work myself into a state of high anxiety and I was on a roll. "Let me tell you about a shrink I read about in Atlanta, Georgia," I began. "He was considered by his colleagues as an up-and-coming psychiatrist, just 26 years old, with great promise. He was said to have had a brilliant mind. He had graduated from medical school summa cum laude. You know what happened to him?"
Dr. Mercer shifted his weight on the bed. I went on.
"One morning he jumped out of his twenty-sixth story apartment in the DeKalb Towers and splattered himself all over the pavement. Then there's a poet I know about whose been going to a shrink for years, even signed herself into a mental hospital. You think it's done her any good? She's still going and she's in her forties. And I remember reading an interview with Tennessee Williams whose shrink told him he'd have to give up writing if he ever wanted to get well. Isn't that the dumbest thing you've ever heard of?"
All this time I had kept my eyes on the ceiling. I turned them now squarely on Dr. Mercer.
"I'm not going to a shrink and that's that!"
Dr. Mercer took in a long breath.
"Judith, you don't have to see a psychiatrist. I was only suggesting it to help you. You certainly don't have to do anything you don't want to do. Since our tests show you are sound physically, I'm releasing you this afternoon. I'll leave a prescritpion for you at the nurses' station. Be sure to pick it up when you check out. It's what you've been taking here for tension. I hope you'll work on getting out the feelings you've been holding in about your marriage, and I want you to call my secretary in about two weeks and set up an appointment to come in. I want to check on your progress from time to time."
I told Dr. Mercer that I had been accepted at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference which was to begin the following Monday in Middlebury, Vermont and that I wanted to go with his permission.
"Sure. I don't think it will hurt you and it might help, but I don't want you to stay for the entire two-week conference. I think it would be too much for you right now. It would be better if you left early to allow yourself a leisurely trip home and time to rest before taking up your teaching assignments, okay?"
I nodded in compliance. "Now you get some rest and after lunch you can get your things together and we'll get you checked out."
"Thank you, Dr. Mercer," I replied as he stood up, carrying his clipboard firmly under his arm. Without another word, he was gone and I felt a strange sensation in my heart. I think it was joy.
My blood was shaking again, but I didn't care. I was elated that I had Dr. Mercer's permission to go to Bread Loaf. Anne Sexton was expected to put in an appearance during the week. I packed what little I had brought with me to the hospital, said goodbye to Cookie and Sara and promised to keep in touch. I wished them well in their recovery. Cookie invited me to lunch the next time I was in Williamsburg and gave me her phone number. Sara promised to pray for me and think about me when she read her daily devotional. "I just wish you could stay to seek my rocks," she said.
"Well, maybe Cookie and I will surprise you and show up at your doorstep, Sara. How'd that be?" Sara groaned.
"Judith, we'll miss your ghost stories. Now we know why we had so many women dying on us in here. Hey, but we did have a good time, didn't we?"
"We sure did," I said. "You two made great roommates." I picked up my suitcase and hobbled to thedoor, dragging my bandaged right leg. I looked back at my now empty bed, then at Cookie and Sara.
"Well, goodbye, ladies." I raised my hand to wave to them as I opened the door and slipped out.
****************************************************************
I was 28 years old in the summer of '73 when just wanted to go to sleep and never wake up. I didn't know what was wrong with me, but I was sure it had to be some terminal illness and that I was dying a slow death. I was tired all the time and had no energy. I did not know why I felt so bad. My parents were concerned and drove to Atlanta to bring me back to Virginia. I remember little of the drive to West Point, the town where they had retired, except that we had to stop at all the rest stops so I could lie down on a picnic table and try to keep on breathing. Although I had registered and been accepted at the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference in Middlebury, Vermont as a contributing writer for the August 1973 conference, I didn't know whether I'd be able to make it because of my health. About two weeks before the conference was to begin, I entered Williamsburg Community Hospital for observation, testing and diagnosis and was placed on a hospital ward with two other women.
**********************************
"You might as well put that curtain from around your bed over there, honey. We're all in here together."
"That's right. We wannt meet our new roommate. Old Sara and me, we fuss all the time and we need somebody to referee. Ain't that right, ole Sara? Well, ain't you gonna let us see who we got in here? You been hidin' behind them curtains all morning."
The words startled me awake. My pillow was soaked on both sides of my head from tears that I couldn't stop. I tried to focus. The room smelled of alcohol and disinfectant and a light green curtain surrounded my bed. I sat up, wiped my eyes, leaned over, and grabbed the curtain, pitching it around till it came to the middle of the foot of my bed. I could see a young Black woman propped up diagonally across from me and an old while woman lying on her side directly in front of me.
"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to be rude; I just don't feel so good. My name is Judith."
"That's okay. I'm Cookie and this lump of lard over here is ole Sara." Cookie let out a cackle.
"I wish you'd hush your mouth. Just wait'll I get my gall stones and you get your innerds cleaned out. I'll get you back then. You won't feel like talkin' to nobody then, and I'll be talkin up a storm about my gall stones and you won't be able to do nothin' about it cause you won't be able to move hardly, I reckon."
"Woo, ain't she mean!" Cookie looked at me and grinned.
"Nothing more'n you deserve." Sara turned toward me to see if I was showing any signs of life yet.
"Well," Sara continued, "it's just real nice to have another roommate -- a live one, that is. The last two we had came in live and went out dead. They were in that bed over there next to yours, honey. My God rest their souls."
I stared at the empty bed on my left. I was glad I hand't been put in a room by myself. It was good to have these women to talk to. They obviously enjoyed each other's company and were determined to get me to speak. I pulled the bed sheet up tight around my neck and lay back against the pillow. I looked at Sara and tried to be pleasant.
"I heard you mention something about gall stones? Is that what you're in here for?"
"That's right, honey. I'm in her to get my rocks out, and the doctor says he'll give 'em to me, too, if I want 'em, and of course, I do. I plan to take 'em home and keep 'em in my kitchen winder over my sink. They'll be my consolatin prize for puttin' up with old motor mouth over here. If angels had kidneys, she'd likely give them gall stones. Her mouth makes you long to be deaf as a rock."
Cookie ignored Sara's remarks about her mouth. "Yea, I bet there's real strange things in your house, ole Sara. Judith and me, we gonna cover over when we get outta this palce and see them rocks you got in your winder."
"Lawd, " Sara replied in exasperation, "it's enough to have to put up with you in here. Now you gonna invite yourself over to my house too. I wouldn't mind if you come, Judith, but motor mouth won't let an old woman have any peace."
I smiled at Cookie. "What're you in here for, Cookie?"
"Well, like ole Sara says, I'm in here to get me a good cleaning out--they call it a hysterectomy."
"I'm awfully sorry," I replied trying to be sympathetic.
"What for?" I already got six kids and no husband to help me take care of 'em. I don't need none of that equipment no more; anyhow, it's gone bad on me, and I like my good times too much to be worryin' 'bout havin' another youngun."
"Cookie's trying to tell us that her mouth ain't all that's motorized; other parts of her got connections--all over this city, I reckon." Sara kept on teasing Cookie. "It's a downright crying shame to be stuck up in a hospital room with a hopeless and lost sinner like ole motor mouth, and even though I read my Bible and have my devotion every morning and every night and pray hard as I can for her,it don't look like it done no good. She justkeeps on having a wild hankering for the men folk."
"Ole Sara's just jealous," said Cookie between chuckles, "and wishin' she could get some."
"Hump," Sara croaked as if in disgust, "I'm too old for such foolishness."
They had succeeded. I was laughing.
*********************************************************
The nurse wheeled into the room with her cart of pills and needles.
"All right, ladies, it's time to shape up. The doctors are making their rounds now, and the way you ladies carry on, they'd never believe anybody in here was sick." She lifted two small white paper cups from the tray and stood beside Sara's bed.
"Let's see if we can get these down this morning." Sara let out a moan as she flipped herself over on her back and then with both arms raised herself up. She reached for the pills and popped them in.
"The food service around here sure is lousy. All I get to eat are these durn pills." Sara enjoyed grumbling whenever the nurse showed up with her daily dose of pills.
"Well, you know your doctor wants you to drink lots of liquids today so you'll be ready for your operation tomorrow. You'll be getting some noodle soup for lunch."
Sara scowled at the nurse who had pulled her cart over to Cookie's bed and handed Cookie her cup of medicine.
"There goes ole Sara, again, griping about the service," said Cookie between sips of a white liquid. "You'd think she wants to keep them gall stones."
The nurse started over to my bed.
"And how is Miss Bentley today?"
"Well, considering my leg has been cut wide open, I've got a hole in my chest, and the blood sucker went out of here this morning with four more vials of my blood, I can't exactly say I feel fine. I think I might be anemic because I'm just tired all the time. It seems like I haven't had any energy in years. Is my doctor coming today?"
"Oh, yes," the nurse replied reassuringly. "He'll be around this morning in a little while with your diagnosis and you can tell him all about the way you feel then. In the meantime, he wants you to take these." She handed me a cup that contained a long yellow pill and a round white one.
"What are they?" I asked even though I didn't really care.
"Oh, just something to calm your nerves."
"Yeah, but what do you call them?"
"The yellow one is Vivactil and the white one is Valium. They are tranquilizers, and they'll help you feel better."
I was glad to hear that. I had been shaking for weeks and didn't know why. Sometimes I felt my blood trembling. I swallowed the pills with a sip of water just as the door swung open and a nurse pulled another bed into the room. The nurse at my bedside pushed her cart to the side wall and assisted in lifting an old Black woman--bony, emaciated, and unconscious--into the bed next to me. The nurses began whispering to one another as they pulled the green curtains around the old woman. Then they rolled the pill cart and emergency room stretcher out, leaving an invisible curtain of silence.
I felt tears trickling down my cheeks again. I had crying spells often for no apparent reason. I felt nervous and frightened much of the time. I felt sorry for myself and for the whole human race, too, thinking that we are all like store signs, with not particularly interesting advertisements, having to be here for a time, until the weather had worn us out and we were taken down and scraped. The image of trees in an endless forest came to my mind. Maybe we were like the trees, stuck in one place unable to move, having to endure whatever the weather brought whether we were up to it or not. I thought some were lucky to be cut down without warning. Others had to live into old age until the bugs ate clear through them and they crumbled in decay. After all, life was difficult to stand up to sometimes. I was 28 years old and divorced already. My ex-husband had been a professional seminarian who hadn't wanted a job in the real world. I had supported him financialy for the four years of our marriage which had soured early. I recalled my wedding day, how bizarre it all had been.
*****************************************
My mother had made most of the arrangements for my wedding. In fact, I felt I had very little to do with any of it, but I had made my wedding dress, a white, floor-ength gown with a long satin train which I covered in expensive French lace. My mother hadn't had a formal church wedding herself but had married at home in a Sunday suit. I wondered if my mother's excitement and fuss wasn't twenty-eight years late. Maybe my wedding was really for her. I would play bride for my mother's sake. Maybe that would bring her some happiness.
I took the long walk down the church aisle on my father's arm. Could I hold up through the ceremony, the meaningless rehearsed words, the turning this way and that, the exchange of rights, the reception's congratulations? If I could pretend hard enough that the total stranger waiting at the pulpit railing in his black tuxedo was someone I loved, maybe I could be a good bride for my mother. My mother's eyes were somewhere behind me, watching through all the years of dark shadows. I had always tried to be a good girl for her but I never felt I measured up. I couldn't make my mother happy. I recalled the words of a favorite Pulitzer-prize winning poet, Anne Sexton, who in describing a miller's daughter, was describing my mother. She was also describing me.
"Poor grape with no one to pick.
Luscious and round and sleek.
Poor thing.
To die and never see Brooklyn."
The grand pageant hadn't work for me. I was in this hopsital room now with a team of medical specialists turning me inside out, naming the parts of me that might still work. I hoped they wouldn't find any. I hoped for the cool, clammy arms of Death. I would at last be held by someone who really wanted me.
I reached for the book of poems on the nightstand that I had brought with me to this hospital. I opened to a poem titled "Rumpelstilskin" and began reading it aloud to Cookie and ole Sara. The poem referred to a Doppelganger.
Cookie and Sara wanted to know what a Doppelganger was.
"It's the ghost inside each of us," I explained," and whenever it decides to come out, Death will show up to meet it. He already came for the two women in her before me and carried off their doppelgangers."
"Ah, shush, Judith, what you want to make up all that silly stuff for?" asked Sara. Cookie was laughing, enjoying the story.
"Just listen to Judith," Cookie said to Sara. They must have thought I was just making something up or maybe I was just nuts because neither had ever heard of a doppelganger before.
Suddenly the light over the ward door began flashing. Cookie saw it first.
"What's going on now?" She sat straight up in bed staring at the door. The three of us could hear feet running to the door. Suddenly it burst open and three nurses rushed in heading for the old woman's bed. One grabbed the curtain pulling it around them while the others hooked up equipment. Then one of the nurses called out, "Ready?"
I could hear a bolting sound and a pounding, followed by silence, then the nurse's "ready" again. I guessed what this meant--one nurse was applying electrical shock to the old woman's chest. This went on for what seemed like several minutes. Then there was only silence. The nurses began whispering again as one pulled the curtains back while the other two rolled the bed out of the room, the old woman covered in a white sheet.
A moment later a middle-aged Black woman entered the room and walked over tot he empty space where the bed holding the unconscious old woman had been. She simply said, "My mother's belongings," as she bent down, picked up a sweater and pocketbook from a chair, and quietly walked out of the room.
******************
The evening before Cookie's scheduled surgery, the nurse came in to deliver Cookie's usual cup of pills and to remind her that she could have water but was to have no solid food the rest of the evening. It wasn't long after the nurse left that Cookie began to fill in some of the details about what Sara had mentioned about Cookie's "connections" and "wild hankering for the men folk." Cookie let it be known that she was on a first name basis with most of the male chefs in the City of Williamsburg, had been out with most of the single ones and probably some of the married ones, and wasn't about to let her connections go to waste while she was in the hospital. She kept a telephone close at her bedside. It was about 10:00 p.m.
"Ya'll want somethin' to eat? I'm hungry," Cookie said.
Ole Sara piped up. "You know what the nurse just told you about not eating anything else tonight."
"Phoey. I ain't studyin' that nurse," Cookie exclaimed. "If I'm going to get cut on, I think we should have a party while I'm still conscious 'cause after tomorrow morning, I probably won't feel like partying for a long time."
"Okay. Be hard headed then. Can't nobody tell you nothin' anyways." Sara waved at Cookie as if trying to push her away, then rolled over and closed her eyes.
"Whatcha want to order, Judith? Got a hankerin' for anything in particular? I know where the best food in this colonial city is. My fellas'll bring us anything we want."
"I don't care," I replied curious as to how Cookie was planning to manage delivery service in her room this time of night without anyone seeing her."
"Well, in that case, here goes." Cookie picked up the phone and dialed one of her "connections." I couldn't make out what all she said on the phone but when she hung up, she announced that we'd be getting a delivery at midnight sharp.
I liked Cookie and Sara both because they both were always trying to make me feel better, but Cookie was my favorite. She didn't pay too much attention to the house rules if they didn't suit her and the hospital's rules regarding food in-take prior to surgery were getting in the way of Cookie's plans for our party. I was glad we were going to do something sneaky. I couldn't wait. Cookie had already instructed the chef where to bring the food -- to the back door of the hospital.
"Yeah, but how are you going to get it without anyone seeing you?"
"Oh, don't worry about that. I've got it all taken care of."
We were in our pj's when Cookie's phone rang a few minutes before midnight. Cookie hopped out of bed.
"Come on, Judith. Let's go get our food."
I couldn't believe what we were about to do - intentionally defy hospital rules with the high probability that we would be caught. I was too doped up on tranquillizers to consider the consequences. I came into the hospital in a wheelchair, but Cookie's escapade had motivated me to get out of bed and follow her down the dark hall to the back of the hospital. Sure enough, a tall black man was standing at the door with a large round silver tray in his hands. Cookie opened the door and reached for the tray, a smorgasbord of an assortment of cheeses, crackers, fresh strawberries, pineapple and grapes, slices of deli meat, and some chocolate brownies.
Miraculously, we made it back to our room without detection by the hospital staff. Cookie placed the large tray on her bedside table. She couldn't convince Sara to sample the gourmet goodies.
"Okay, ya'll are goin' to be sick as dogs in the morning and I don't want to hear a peep out of you either."
"Don't worry, ole Sara. I ain't even goin' to be in here when you open your eyes in the morning."
Cookie couldn't have a party all by herself, could she? I didn't know you could have so much fun in a hospital when you were supposed to be sick.
******************
I had pulled the curtains around my bed again and was starring at the ceiling when my doctor came in carrying a clipboard of papers. Dr. Mercer was a specialist of internal medicine, a man in his early thirties who drove a black Jaguar to his office very day, who had a wife and two children, along with a private cub plane and a resort home in New Hampshire. His piercing blue eyes distracted me from noticing his short statue and blonde hair. The nurses had forewarned me that he had an abrupt bedside manner.
He brushed back the curtains in a flurry, stood at my bed looking at his clipboard and began reading his report.
"Well, and how's my patient this morning?" My eyes filled up instantly. He didn't wait for me to finish saying "I don't feel so hot."
--"Well, I've got some good news and some bad news. I'll give you the good news first. All your tests are in. The chest bone marrow revealed no presence or history of anemia. Aren't you glad to hear that?" He continued without pausing for my reply or looking up from his clipboard.
"And all the blood tests indicate a healthy balance of red and white blood cells. According to the X-rays, your vital organs are functioning normally, and the muscle biopsy on your right leg showed no muscular malfunction. Reports from the EKG came in this morning negative which means we could find no irregularities in your brain operations. In short," Dr. Mercer went on, taking a seat now on my bed and finally looking into my eyes, "we could find nothing physically wrong with you."
He took my right hand and placed it in his. My hand lay like some dead thing unattached to my body. He slowed his words and his voice took on a softer quality.
"Now for the bad news. Your parents told me of your divorce a few years ago. Your marriage must have been a big disappointment and you're probably carrying around a lot of hurt feelings you've had to repress all this time so you could continue to teach school. But those feelings are still there inside you because you haven't let them out and they're eating you up like a cancer. So you've got to do something for yourself now, Judith. You've got to take your head to the dry cleaners."
I was shocked. "What do you mean?" I had been set on his diagnosis of a terminal disease, even looking forward to it.
"I mean that you are experiencing a chronic anxiety depression, what we call a clinical depression. You need another type of doctor to treat that." He hesitated to say anything else.
"You mean a shrink?" I blurted out, tears welling up. "You mean you want me to see a shrink?"
"Well, I know a very good doctor I would like to refer you to." My head was pounding and his calm, quiet voice did nothing to assuage the pressure I felt in my chest.
"I'm not going to any shrink," I said emphatically. "My father has told me all about shrinks and what they do to people. They just use people and squeeze you dry of all your money and then pronounce you cured and let you go. They even force their patients to have sex with them and I'd be expected to cooperate. I'd be a whole lot sicker when I was 'cured' and more confused. Besides, the people I know who've been to a shrink don't seem to be any better. They're just as neurotic as they were before."
I had managed to work myself into a state of high anxiety and I was on a roll. "Let me tell you about a shrink I read about in Atlanta, Georgia," I began. "He was considered by his colleagues as an up-and-coming psychiatrist, just 26 years old, with great promise. He was said to have had a brilliant mind. He had graduated from medical school summa cum laude. You know what happened to him?"
Dr. Mercer shifted his weight on the bed. I went on.
"One morning he jumped out of his twenty-sixth story apartment in the DeKalb Towers and splattered himself all over the pavement. Then there's a poet I know about whose been going to a shrink for years, even signed herself into a mental hospital. You think it's done her any good? She's still going and she's in her forties. And I remember reading an interview with Tennessee Williams whose shrink told him he'd have to give up writing if he ever wanted to get well. Isn't that the dumbest thing you've ever heard of?"
All this time I had kept my eyes on the ceiling. I turned them now squarely on Dr. Mercer.
"I'm not going to a shrink and that's that!"
Dr. Mercer took in a long breath.
"Judith, you don't have to see a psychiatrist. I was only suggesting it to help you. You certainly don't have to do anything you don't want to do. Since our tests show you are sound physically, I'm releasing you this afternoon. I'll leave a prescritpion for you at the nurses' station. Be sure to pick it up when you check out. It's what you've been taking here for tension. I hope you'll work on getting out the feelings you've been holding in about your marriage, and I want you to call my secretary in about two weeks and set up an appointment to come in. I want to check on your progress from time to time."
I told Dr. Mercer that I had been accepted at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference which was to begin the following Monday in Middlebury, Vermont and that I wanted to go with his permission.
"Sure. I don't think it will hurt you and it might help, but I don't want you to stay for the entire two-week conference. I think it would be too much for you right now. It would be better if you left early to allow yourself a leisurely trip home and time to rest before taking up your teaching assignments, okay?"
I nodded in compliance. "Now you get some rest and after lunch you can get your things together and we'll get you checked out."
"Thank you, Dr. Mercer," I replied as he stood up, carrying his clipboard firmly under his arm. Without another word, he was gone and I felt a strange sensation in my heart. I think it was joy.
My blood was shaking again, but I didn't care. I was elated that I had Dr. Mercer's permission to go to Bread Loaf. Anne Sexton was expected to put in an appearance during the week. I packed what little I had brought with me to the hospital, said goodbye to Cookie and Sara and promised to keep in touch. I wished them well in their recovery. Cookie invited me to lunch the next time I was in Williamsburg and gave me her phone number. Sara promised to pray for me and think about me when she read her daily devotional. "I just wish you could stay to seek my rocks," she said.
"Well, maybe Cookie and I will surprise you and show up at your doorstep, Sara. How'd that be?" Sara groaned.
"Judith, we'll miss your ghost stories. Now we know why we had so many women dying on us in here. Hey, but we did have a good time, didn't we?"
"We sure did," I said. "You two made great roommates." I picked up my suitcase and hobbled to thedoor, dragging my bandaged right leg. I looked back at my now empty bed, then at Cookie and Sara.
"Well, goodbye, ladies." I raised my hand to wave to them as I opened the door and slipped out.
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Thursday, August 21, 2008
Summer of '73 - Part 2
Copyright © 2008 Judith J. Bentley
I was 28 years old in the Spring of '73, teaching in the public schools in Atlanta, Georgia, and had taken some of my gifted high school English students to Georgia State University to hear Dr. John B. Stone, a physician at Grady Memorial Hospital, who was giving a reading of his poetry as part of the University's arts festival. It was a rare event for me to hear a live poet reading from his own work. I closed my eyes and listened to the words that pouring from his lips like gentle rain. After the reading, some of my students trailed off to the art department while a few remained to hear Dr. Stone's comments on "The Emperor of Ice Cream." He could not recall offhand who the author was. Fortunately, I had just taught the poem.
"Wallace Stevens wrote that poem," I chimed in. Dr. Stone turned to me. A smile came over his face.
"My dear," he said, "I believe you will pass your bar exam."
"Oh, I hope so," I replied as I clasped my hands gleefully under my chin.
He had mentioned the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference earlier in his reading, and I asked him if he had ever heard of Anne Sexton, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who had once held the Robert Frost Fellowship at Bread Loaf. She was the only other person besides Albert Schweitzer I had ever really wished I could meet. I had read most of her poetry. Her book of poems Live or Die, which was published in 1966, had won her the Pulitzer Prize, but I sensed she might give it all up any day. After all, no sugar daddy in the sky was giving out guarantees on the good life to anyone.
"Yes, indeed, I know Anne Sexton. In fact, one of her friends, Maxine Kumin, a poet and novelist, will be at the conference this summer, and I have heard that Ms. Sexton might put in a guest appearance."
I felt my heart racing.
"I write a little myself." The words had slipped out.
"In that case, you might be interested in the conference yourself. I just happen to have an application at home and I'd be glad to send it to you."
My hands were shaking as I gave him my address, thanked him and rejoined my students in the art department. While they were sharing their reactions to the art exhibit, I contemplated this evening's encounter with Dr. Stone and his remark about my bar exam. My life seemed to be a perpetual bar exam. There were things to account for and I was constantly feeling the pressure to measure up to someone else's expectations.
In a few days I received the application to Bread Loaf from Dr. Stone. As I began to fill it out, I came to the reason for attending. I doubted I'd be admitted if I just wrote that I'd heard a rumor that Anne Sexton might make a guest appearance, so I decided to submit some of my poems and apply as a contributor.
Several weeks went by before I received a letter from the conference director informing me that the poet Robert Pack had read my poems and had accepted me as a contributor to the 1973 Bread Loaf Wrters' Conference at Middlebury College in Vermont for the August 14th through 26th summer session. Dr. MacRae, the superintendent of the Fulton County Schools in Atlanta, excused me from the teacher pre-planning week, and the principal at College Park High School where I taught reluctantly gave his permission. I got out the five volumes of Anne Sexton's poetry I had collected and began rereading them.
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It was a long trip from Atlanta to Vermont, nearly 1400 miles by car. I allowed myself five days to make the trip in my 1962 Karman Ghia Volkswagen. I stopped in Hershey, Pennsylvania and toured the chocolate factory. I rode through Hartford, Connecticut, the home of Mark Twain. In Boston, Massachusetts, I made a wrong turn and got lost in a maze of slums. When I arrived at Waldon Pond where Henry David Thoreau had found peace, I stood at the edge of the Pond looking out over it, aware that I was standing on historical if not sacred ground. I put my feet in the warm water hoping the Pond would bless me with a spiritual baptism. I knew Anne Sexton lived not too far in Weston, Massachusetts and on an impulse, I decided to drive to Weston hoping I might find her at home and get to meet her in the flesh.
It was early on a cloudy Sunday morning when I pulled into Weston. All the shops were closed. I inquired at a local service station where she lives and the attendant gave me directions to Anne's house on Black Oak Road. When I pulled into her driveway, got out of my car, and knocked on her screened front door, I felt like an idiot. Some force had compelled me to find her door without invitation. My standing there certainly ran counter to all the rules of social decorum of my Southern upbringing, yet I felt I had to be there. I could see through the screened door to the swimming pool in her backyard. She had guests.
A young man in wet swim trunks holding a martini in one hand came to the door. I had picked up my copy of Anne's latest collection of published poems, The Book of Folly, and stood at the door with it in my hand.
"Hello. My name is Judith Bentley and I am on my way to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. I understand Ms. Sexton might be coming to the conference and I was hoping she would autograph my copy of her book. "Is she here?" I asked awkwardly. He eyed me for a moment as if trying to decide what he'd say to this uninvited guest. He chose to be courteous.
"Yes, she is here, but it is doubtful she will make it to Bread Loaf this summer. She just got out of the hospital."
Well, that's something we have in common, I thought.
"In that case, would you please ask her if she'd be so kind as to autograph my book." I held it out to him and he hesitatingly opened the screened door.
"You wait here," he said, and he walked back to the swimming pool with my copy of her book in his hand. I stood at the door feeling ashamed of my impulsiveness yet hopeful too. In a few minutes, the young man returned.
"She signed it for you," he said, handing the book back. I thanked him and once back in my car and not yet out of her driveway, I opened to the inside front cover where her name was scrawled in black ink, still wet and slightly smeared from the pool water. I pulled out of the driveway disappointed that she might not make it to Bread Loaf after all, that I might not get to meet her, but at least I had her autograph and I had been to her home. I would have to be content with that.
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The experience at Bread Loaf was intense, electrifyhing and exhausting all at once. Each day during the first week, guest artists lectured on some aspect of their craft, and each evening one of them would read from his or her work in progress. Harry Crews, who had just hiked the entire Appalachian Trail in time for the conference, read from his novel, The Gospel Singer, set in Enigma, Georgia. Vance Bourjaily read from a novel he was working on. I listened with relish to other writers there including George Elliott (poet, novelist, and critic who was teaching at Syracuse University), Anthony Hecht (another Publitzer-prize winning poet), Mark Strand and Robert Pack, both poets, and Walter Goodman, Seymour Epstein and Peter Schrag.
After the readings, I went to the campus barn where there was a spacious reading room with a fireplace and a Baldwin baby ground piano. Other writers and contributors talked quietly in groups or read alone. They did not seem to mind that I was playing music from memory at the piano--Bach's "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring," a Chopin Prelude, a Beethoven sonata, and some spirituals I could play by ear. I felt I needed to do something physical with my hands to thank whatever spirit it was that had brought me to this place. I had not given myself permission to see myself as a writer though everyone else there acknowledged that I certainly was one of them.
One morning at breakfast, Maxine Kumin joined us at a long table. Unable to restrain myself, I hollered down to the opposite end where she sat, disregarding everything my mother had taught me about table manners and Southern etiquette.
"Ms. Kumin, do you know if Anne Sexton is coming to this conference or not? I stopped by her house on the way up, but no one could give me any assurance."
"Oh," she replied, "so you're the one. I was embarassed that Anne had mentioned my impulsive stop to Maxine. As we were leaving the table, Maxine announced, "If Anne does make it up, I am sure everybody'll be duly notified." Well, I was just going to have to wait and see. And hope.
The second week was given to workshops in which selections of contributors' manuscripts were studied and read aloud by our assigned critics. I had been assigned to Mark Strand, a poet who had taught at Yale, Princeton and Columbia. Mr. Strand soon let it be known, however, that he was a ghost and it was his ghost who was writing his poems. I sure hadn't planned to talk to any ghost about my poems so I avoided him at mealtimes when the artists and contributors mingled informally. I chose, instead, to sit at a table with Peter Schrag, who was writing a book about the Pentagon Papers and the trial of Daniel Ellsberg. I also sat at the table with Maxine Kumin, who had just won the Pulitzer Prize for her poetry and was a personal friend of Anne Sexton. When it came time for my scheduled appointment with Mark Strand, I hid out in the barn's reading room and played tunes on the Baldwin baby grand.
My doctor had released me from the hospital to attend the conference provided I would not stay the entire two weeks, so on a Wednesday morning of the second week, I packed and left my manuscript with Mark Strand's ghost to return to me by mail. I never got it back. At breakfast the conference director announced that Anne Sexton would be arriving that evening to give a reading of her poetry. I felt a hard knot in my stomach. I knew she despised poetry readings and would usually get herself good and drunk just to get through them. Still I knew I'd miss my chance-in-a-lifetime to meet her.
At sunrise that Wednesday morning, I walked across the campus to a field and sat down on a bench to gaze at the Vermont mountains. The sky was streaked with the colors of rose and lavendar and the mountains were a deep blue, almost purple. This was the place where Robert Frost himself had been, where countless writers known and unknown had come each summer to refocus, to find what they would give their energies to, to share in the fellowship with other writers, to celebrate as artists together doing their work, and this was the place that had welcomed me.
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When I got back to Atlanta, I wrote Anne a letter even though I knew she read very little of the mail she received. I chose to write in a Southern dialect I could hear in my head, one I had heard in Virginia towns where my father had been a Methodist minister and where I had spent my childhood and teenage years. I didn't really expect a reply of any sort, but I just wanted her to know how much her poetry had meant to me.
Dear Missus Sexton,
When I pulled into yo yard this summa in my old rattletrap all the way from Atlanter, Georgia 'n saw them nice cars in yo garage 'n yo beautiful house, I was plum ashamed tuh be there cause I knowed I ain't got no money 'n no nice house like you got, but I wanted tuh meetcha just the same as much as I wanted tuh meet Mister Schweitzer when I were a child. Well, them older folk told me I couldn't cause he were in Africker. After I had growed up some, I read how he loved people near as much as Missus O'Connor loved them forty peacocks she kept in her backyard tuh fly in her winders whenever they tuk a mind tuh 'n then I was sure I had tuh meet 'em, but those grownups said hit weren't no use tuh be whinin' 'bout meeting' Mister Schweitzer cause he were dead. Well, I thought they's just lyin' cause they's mean 'n I cried somethin' awful, but then they showed me in the newspaper where hit said all about his death 'n afta I seen it, I neva felt like meetin' nobody f' days 'n days. Thatus all befo I read yo poems.
Well, Missus, I hope tuh see you someday in the flesh. You ain't never gonna have no friend tuh read yo poems more'n I have, 'n even though I ain't somebody yit, I's gonna visit you agin someday 'n I hope you is still alive by then.
Sincerely,
Judith J. Bentley
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After I'd signed my name and mailed the letter to Anne Sexton, I considered my experience as a contributor to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference concluded. My father referred to such an event as a "mountain top experience," after which one must inevitably return to the valley below. I had returned to my valley, teaching my thirsty students who seemed to expect me to bring buckets of spring water every day.
It was the second week of the Fall quarter on a Friday evening around 7:00 o'clock p.m. when the phone rang. The operator's voice came over the line.
"Long distance for Miss Judith Bentley."
"This is she speaking."
I then heard the operator say, "Go ahead, please."
And then, a deep alto voice came over the line. "Judith? This is Anne Sexton." She had gotten my letter in the mail and had read it.
"You're absolutely mad to write me such a silly letter." I knew from her poems and articles that she used the word "mad" to apply to the antics of her beloved brother or herself and she was giving me a compliment. I was overjoyed. I don't recall all she said, but she told me not to allow her refusal to see her at Weston nor my missing her reading at Bread Loaf spoil whatever meaning and pleasure I had derived from her poems.
"They stand on their own merit," she said.
I thanked her for calling and for reading my letter. When I hung up, I knew one of my life's dreams had finally come true, though not as I had expected.
That was the summer of '73, a magical time in my life.
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In the Spring of 1974, I married and my husband and I lived in College Park, a suburb of Atlanta. I had written Anne Sexton and sent her a prose poem I had been working on titled "The Red Shoes." Three days before the birth of our only daughter, I received Anne's reply.
April 24, 1974
Dear Judith,
Thank you for your thoughtful letter, so sensitive, and that The Book of Folly has meant something to you. I kind of hope that you'll be able to get hold of the other seven books (paperback $2.95), but it is indeed strange about the red shoes. They seem to have a life of their own. Your prose piece on them is all rage and all truth. Please hid the red shoes. I will help you with my long fingered hands, and we will bury them.
With best wishes,
Anne Sexton
I believed that somehow Anne meant what she said--that she would help me bury the red shoes.
One Sunday morning in October of that year as I was sitting at my breakfast table reading the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, my eyes fell on the headlines: "'Live or Die' Poet May Be a Suicide." My right hand flew up over my mouth. I began to feel my blood shaking as I read the words from the Associated Press article.
"Anne Sexton, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet whose work was preoccupied with death, has been found dead at her home and may have taken her own life, police said. She was 45.
"Ms. Sexton, who was recently divorced from her husband Alfred, was found Friday inside an idling car parked in her garage. She was dead at the scene.
"Ms. Sexton won the Pulitzer in 1967 for her book Live or Die, which was largely devoted to the subject of death. Her most recent work, The Death Notebooks, began with novelist Ernest Hemingway's exhortation to 'make a living out of your death.'
"'Life had a depressing effect on her,' said her friend Maxine Kumin.
"Mrs. Kumin, who won the Pulitzer for poetry in 1973 for Up Country, said she last saw Ms. Sexton alive when they had lunch together Friday afternoon.
"Ms. Sexton began writing poetry after suffering a nervous breakdown in 1957.
"'All her poems were marked by grave internal torment,' said Boston Globe reviewer Herbert A. Kenney of her latest book of published poetry.
"Ms. Sexton was born in nearby Newton. She leaves two daughters."
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While on a visit to Virginia that Fall, I took an afternoon walk with my mother and found nearly a dozen four-leaf clovers. I put one of them in the mail to Maxine, who wrote me that she had placed the four-leaf clover over her desk. She wanted me to know that Caedmon Records had recorded Anne reading her poems. It was one of Anne's proudest boasts, Maxine said, that she was one of a handful of living poets that Caedmon had put on record. My husband surprised me with that album for Christmas that year. Maxine wrote me about her close friend's death.
17 December 1974
Dear Judith:
It is still hard for me to face Anne's suicide and to find words to respond to letters like yours. Forgive me if I seem inept.... Certainly no one gave more to others than she did, but no one demanded, exacted and got more back, either. She was roundly loved and worshipped. The need was simply greater than any or all of us in the world could fill. She has been headed toward this end, indeed deflected from it not only by me personally several times but by others as well, all the years (18 of them) of our close personal friendship. So in that sense, although of course I'm not ready to say something stupid and pious like it was inevitable, I can come to terms with it. She had every right. I miss her terribly every day, my life is poorer without her, but she is done with the anguish, the misery, the self-inflicted but no less horrible pain of piling day on night on day. So take some comfort from that.
Yours,
Maxine Kumin
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I was 28 years old in the Spring of '73, teaching in the public schools in Atlanta, Georgia, and had taken some of my gifted high school English students to Georgia State University to hear Dr. John B. Stone, a physician at Grady Memorial Hospital, who was giving a reading of his poetry as part of the University's arts festival. It was a rare event for me to hear a live poet reading from his own work. I closed my eyes and listened to the words that pouring from his lips like gentle rain. After the reading, some of my students trailed off to the art department while a few remained to hear Dr. Stone's comments on "The Emperor of Ice Cream." He could not recall offhand who the author was. Fortunately, I had just taught the poem.
"Wallace Stevens wrote that poem," I chimed in. Dr. Stone turned to me. A smile came over his face.
"My dear," he said, "I believe you will pass your bar exam."
"Oh, I hope so," I replied as I clasped my hands gleefully under my chin.
He had mentioned the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference earlier in his reading, and I asked him if he had ever heard of Anne Sexton, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who had once held the Robert Frost Fellowship at Bread Loaf. She was the only other person besides Albert Schweitzer I had ever really wished I could meet. I had read most of her poetry. Her book of poems Live or Die, which was published in 1966, had won her the Pulitzer Prize, but I sensed she might give it all up any day. After all, no sugar daddy in the sky was giving out guarantees on the good life to anyone.
"Yes, indeed, I know Anne Sexton. In fact, one of her friends, Maxine Kumin, a poet and novelist, will be at the conference this summer, and I have heard that Ms. Sexton might put in a guest appearance."
I felt my heart racing.
"I write a little myself." The words had slipped out.
"In that case, you might be interested in the conference yourself. I just happen to have an application at home and I'd be glad to send it to you."
My hands were shaking as I gave him my address, thanked him and rejoined my students in the art department. While they were sharing their reactions to the art exhibit, I contemplated this evening's encounter with Dr. Stone and his remark about my bar exam. My life seemed to be a perpetual bar exam. There were things to account for and I was constantly feeling the pressure to measure up to someone else's expectations.
In a few days I received the application to Bread Loaf from Dr. Stone. As I began to fill it out, I came to the reason for attending. I doubted I'd be admitted if I just wrote that I'd heard a rumor that Anne Sexton might make a guest appearance, so I decided to submit some of my poems and apply as a contributor.
Several weeks went by before I received a letter from the conference director informing me that the poet Robert Pack had read my poems and had accepted me as a contributor to the 1973 Bread Loaf Wrters' Conference at Middlebury College in Vermont for the August 14th through 26th summer session. Dr. MacRae, the superintendent of the Fulton County Schools in Atlanta, excused me from the teacher pre-planning week, and the principal at College Park High School where I taught reluctantly gave his permission. I got out the five volumes of Anne Sexton's poetry I had collected and began rereading them.
***********************************************************************************
It was a long trip from Atlanta to Vermont, nearly 1400 miles by car. I allowed myself five days to make the trip in my 1962 Karman Ghia Volkswagen. I stopped in Hershey, Pennsylvania and toured the chocolate factory. I rode through Hartford, Connecticut, the home of Mark Twain. In Boston, Massachusetts, I made a wrong turn and got lost in a maze of slums. When I arrived at Waldon Pond where Henry David Thoreau had found peace, I stood at the edge of the Pond looking out over it, aware that I was standing on historical if not sacred ground. I put my feet in the warm water hoping the Pond would bless me with a spiritual baptism. I knew Anne Sexton lived not too far in Weston, Massachusetts and on an impulse, I decided to drive to Weston hoping I might find her at home and get to meet her in the flesh.
It was early on a cloudy Sunday morning when I pulled into Weston. All the shops were closed. I inquired at a local service station where she lives and the attendant gave me directions to Anne's house on Black Oak Road. When I pulled into her driveway, got out of my car, and knocked on her screened front door, I felt like an idiot. Some force had compelled me to find her door without invitation. My standing there certainly ran counter to all the rules of social decorum of my Southern upbringing, yet I felt I had to be there. I could see through the screened door to the swimming pool in her backyard. She had guests.
A young man in wet swim trunks holding a martini in one hand came to the door. I had picked up my copy of Anne's latest collection of published poems, The Book of Folly, and stood at the door with it in my hand.
"Hello. My name is Judith Bentley and I am on my way to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. I understand Ms. Sexton might be coming to the conference and I was hoping she would autograph my copy of her book. "Is she here?" I asked awkwardly. He eyed me for a moment as if trying to decide what he'd say to this uninvited guest. He chose to be courteous.
"Yes, she is here, but it is doubtful she will make it to Bread Loaf this summer. She just got out of the hospital."
Well, that's something we have in common, I thought.
"In that case, would you please ask her if she'd be so kind as to autograph my book." I held it out to him and he hesitatingly opened the screened door.
"You wait here," he said, and he walked back to the swimming pool with my copy of her book in his hand. I stood at the door feeling ashamed of my impulsiveness yet hopeful too. In a few minutes, the young man returned.
"She signed it for you," he said, handing the book back. I thanked him and once back in my car and not yet out of her driveway, I opened to the inside front cover where her name was scrawled in black ink, still wet and slightly smeared from the pool water. I pulled out of the driveway disappointed that she might not make it to Bread Loaf after all, that I might not get to meet her, but at least I had her autograph and I had been to her home. I would have to be content with that.
************************************************************************************
The experience at Bread Loaf was intense, electrifyhing and exhausting all at once. Each day during the first week, guest artists lectured on some aspect of their craft, and each evening one of them would read from his or her work in progress. Harry Crews, who had just hiked the entire Appalachian Trail in time for the conference, read from his novel, The Gospel Singer, set in Enigma, Georgia. Vance Bourjaily read from a novel he was working on. I listened with relish to other writers there including George Elliott (poet, novelist, and critic who was teaching at Syracuse University), Anthony Hecht (another Publitzer-prize winning poet), Mark Strand and Robert Pack, both poets, and Walter Goodman, Seymour Epstein and Peter Schrag.
After the readings, I went to the campus barn where there was a spacious reading room with a fireplace and a Baldwin baby ground piano. Other writers and contributors talked quietly in groups or read alone. They did not seem to mind that I was playing music from memory at the piano--Bach's "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring," a Chopin Prelude, a Beethoven sonata, and some spirituals I could play by ear. I felt I needed to do something physical with my hands to thank whatever spirit it was that had brought me to this place. I had not given myself permission to see myself as a writer though everyone else there acknowledged that I certainly was one of them.
One morning at breakfast, Maxine Kumin joined us at a long table. Unable to restrain myself, I hollered down to the opposite end where she sat, disregarding everything my mother had taught me about table manners and Southern etiquette.
"Ms. Kumin, do you know if Anne Sexton is coming to this conference or not? I stopped by her house on the way up, but no one could give me any assurance."
"Oh," she replied, "so you're the one. I was embarassed that Anne had mentioned my impulsive stop to Maxine. As we were leaving the table, Maxine announced, "If Anne does make it up, I am sure everybody'll be duly notified." Well, I was just going to have to wait and see. And hope.
The second week was given to workshops in which selections of contributors' manuscripts were studied and read aloud by our assigned critics. I had been assigned to Mark Strand, a poet who had taught at Yale, Princeton and Columbia. Mr. Strand soon let it be known, however, that he was a ghost and it was his ghost who was writing his poems. I sure hadn't planned to talk to any ghost about my poems so I avoided him at mealtimes when the artists and contributors mingled informally. I chose, instead, to sit at a table with Peter Schrag, who was writing a book about the Pentagon Papers and the trial of Daniel Ellsberg. I also sat at the table with Maxine Kumin, who had just won the Pulitzer Prize for her poetry and was a personal friend of Anne Sexton. When it came time for my scheduled appointment with Mark Strand, I hid out in the barn's reading room and played tunes on the Baldwin baby grand.
My doctor had released me from the hospital to attend the conference provided I would not stay the entire two weeks, so on a Wednesday morning of the second week, I packed and left my manuscript with Mark Strand's ghost to return to me by mail. I never got it back. At breakfast the conference director announced that Anne Sexton would be arriving that evening to give a reading of her poetry. I felt a hard knot in my stomach. I knew she despised poetry readings and would usually get herself good and drunk just to get through them. Still I knew I'd miss my chance-in-a-lifetime to meet her.
At sunrise that Wednesday morning, I walked across the campus to a field and sat down on a bench to gaze at the Vermont mountains. The sky was streaked with the colors of rose and lavendar and the mountains were a deep blue, almost purple. This was the place where Robert Frost himself had been, where countless writers known and unknown had come each summer to refocus, to find what they would give their energies to, to share in the fellowship with other writers, to celebrate as artists together doing their work, and this was the place that had welcomed me.
**********************************************************************************
When I got back to Atlanta, I wrote Anne a letter even though I knew she read very little of the mail she received. I chose to write in a Southern dialect I could hear in my head, one I had heard in Virginia towns where my father had been a Methodist minister and where I had spent my childhood and teenage years. I didn't really expect a reply of any sort, but I just wanted her to know how much her poetry had meant to me.
Dear Missus Sexton,
When I pulled into yo yard this summa in my old rattletrap all the way from Atlanter, Georgia 'n saw them nice cars in yo garage 'n yo beautiful house, I was plum ashamed tuh be there cause I knowed I ain't got no money 'n no nice house like you got, but I wanted tuh meetcha just the same as much as I wanted tuh meet Mister Schweitzer when I were a child. Well, them older folk told me I couldn't cause he were in Africker. After I had growed up some, I read how he loved people near as much as Missus O'Connor loved them forty peacocks she kept in her backyard tuh fly in her winders whenever they tuk a mind tuh 'n then I was sure I had tuh meet 'em, but those grownups said hit weren't no use tuh be whinin' 'bout meeting' Mister Schweitzer cause he were dead. Well, I thought they's just lyin' cause they's mean 'n I cried somethin' awful, but then they showed me in the newspaper where hit said all about his death 'n afta I seen it, I neva felt like meetin' nobody f' days 'n days. Thatus all befo I read yo poems.
Well, Missus, I hope tuh see you someday in the flesh. You ain't never gonna have no friend tuh read yo poems more'n I have, 'n even though I ain't somebody yit, I's gonna visit you agin someday 'n I hope you is still alive by then.
Sincerely,
Judith J. Bentley
************************************************************************************
After I'd signed my name and mailed the letter to Anne Sexton, I considered my experience as a contributor to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference concluded. My father referred to such an event as a "mountain top experience," after which one must inevitably return to the valley below. I had returned to my valley, teaching my thirsty students who seemed to expect me to bring buckets of spring water every day.
It was the second week of the Fall quarter on a Friday evening around 7:00 o'clock p.m. when the phone rang. The operator's voice came over the line.
"Long distance for Miss Judith Bentley."
"This is she speaking."
I then heard the operator say, "Go ahead, please."
And then, a deep alto voice came over the line. "Judith? This is Anne Sexton." She had gotten my letter in the mail and had read it.
"You're absolutely mad to write me such a silly letter." I knew from her poems and articles that she used the word "mad" to apply to the antics of her beloved brother or herself and she was giving me a compliment. I was overjoyed. I don't recall all she said, but she told me not to allow her refusal to see her at Weston nor my missing her reading at Bread Loaf spoil whatever meaning and pleasure I had derived from her poems.
"They stand on their own merit," she said.
I thanked her for calling and for reading my letter. When I hung up, I knew one of my life's dreams had finally come true, though not as I had expected.
That was the summer of '73, a magical time in my life.
**********************************************************************************
In the Spring of 1974, I married and my husband and I lived in College Park, a suburb of Atlanta. I had written Anne Sexton and sent her a prose poem I had been working on titled "The Red Shoes." Three days before the birth of our only daughter, I received Anne's reply.
April 24, 1974
Dear Judith,
Thank you for your thoughtful letter, so sensitive, and that The Book of Folly has meant something to you. I kind of hope that you'll be able to get hold of the other seven books (paperback $2.95), but it is indeed strange about the red shoes. They seem to have a life of their own. Your prose piece on them is all rage and all truth. Please hid the red shoes. I will help you with my long fingered hands, and we will bury them.
With best wishes,
Anne Sexton
I believed that somehow Anne meant what she said--that she would help me bury the red shoes.
One Sunday morning in October of that year as I was sitting at my breakfast table reading the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, my eyes fell on the headlines: "'Live or Die' Poet May Be a Suicide." My right hand flew up over my mouth. I began to feel my blood shaking as I read the words from the Associated Press article.
"Anne Sexton, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet whose work was preoccupied with death, has been found dead at her home and may have taken her own life, police said. She was 45.
"Ms. Sexton, who was recently divorced from her husband Alfred, was found Friday inside an idling car parked in her garage. She was dead at the scene.
"Ms. Sexton won the Pulitzer in 1967 for her book Live or Die, which was largely devoted to the subject of death. Her most recent work, The Death Notebooks, began with novelist Ernest Hemingway's exhortation to 'make a living out of your death.'
"'Life had a depressing effect on her,' said her friend Maxine Kumin.
"Mrs. Kumin, who won the Pulitzer for poetry in 1973 for Up Country, said she last saw Ms. Sexton alive when they had lunch together Friday afternoon.
"Ms. Sexton began writing poetry after suffering a nervous breakdown in 1957.
"'All her poems were marked by grave internal torment,' said Boston Globe reviewer Herbert A. Kenney of her latest book of published poetry.
"Ms. Sexton was born in nearby Newton. She leaves two daughters."
*************************************************************************************
While on a visit to Virginia that Fall, I took an afternoon walk with my mother and found nearly a dozen four-leaf clovers. I put one of them in the mail to Maxine, who wrote me that she had placed the four-leaf clover over her desk. She wanted me to know that Caedmon Records had recorded Anne reading her poems. It was one of Anne's proudest boasts, Maxine said, that she was one of a handful of living poets that Caedmon had put on record. My husband surprised me with that album for Christmas that year. Maxine wrote me about her close friend's death.
17 December 1974
Dear Judith:
It is still hard for me to face Anne's suicide and to find words to respond to letters like yours. Forgive me if I seem inept.... Certainly no one gave more to others than she did, but no one demanded, exacted and got more back, either. She was roundly loved and worshipped. The need was simply greater than any or all of us in the world could fill. She has been headed toward this end, indeed deflected from it not only by me personally several times but by others as well, all the years (18 of them) of our close personal friendship. So in that sense, although of course I'm not ready to say something stupid and pious like it was inevitable, I can come to terms with it. She had every right. I miss her terribly every day, my life is poorer without her, but she is done with the anguish, the misery, the self-inflicted but no less horrible pain of piling day on night on day. So take some comfort from that.
Yours,
Maxine Kumin
***********************************************************************************
The Red Shoes
Copyright © 2008 Judith J. Bentley
first written April 1974
To Anne Sexton, who wanted to help me bury the red shoes,
and to Ruth Jones, my old rain mother.
When I was a young girl,
my mother gave me a red pair of shoes.
They'd been hers, her mother's and grandmother's.
She said they'd never wear out no matter what.
They were worn and wrinkled and weren't my size,
but she said I should put them on
and dance in them as she had done
when a girl, young wife and mother.
I'd watched them make her dance,
and they never let her stop.
She danced before the endless guests,
the meals, the mending,
the many monotonous days.
She danced on dutifully,
and she never complained.
I saw the strain in her stride,
the hurt she tried so hard to hide.
"It is the dance to do," she said.
It was the only one she knew,
the one her mother had danced to.
"And now," she said,
"I give these shoes to you."
So I put them on because she had
and danced the dance reluctantly,
the silent ballet of my youth,
my first marriage failures,
the meals, the mending,
the many monotonous days.
The red shoes were dancing my life away.
Then one day a raging fire began to burn up
all the barren places.
It even burned the red shoes
till they stopped dead in their tracks.
My fingers, those queen crabs,
reached down and clawed and tore
till at last, they let go--
Oh, I lifted my burning feet
to an old rain mother who blessed them
with her eternal breath
and cooled them
with her loving kindness
till bloody, bruised and raw,
they began moving on their own.
And my hands, those celebrated sheriffs,
arrested the shoes, locked them
in a closet box and closed the door.
In time calluses grew and covered my feet
but I gave birth to a barefoot baby
who must not find the red shoes in her play.
She must not hear them rattling
in the closet box, calling her name.
I will dig down to their death
and bury them with my rage,
that good and righteous bulldozer.
And there will be another wearing,
another running, another dance.
Note:
Anne Sexton won the Pulitzer Prize for her book of poems titled LIVE OR DIE. She took her life in October of 1974, just 2 months after she had telephoned me to say she was sorry she had missed seeing me at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. She and I had a brief correspondence. When she called me "Judith," I was 29 years old then and heard my given name spoken for the first time.
Ruth Jones was my first therapist and emotional mother who reparented me. She was old when I first sought her out for answers. I call her my "old rain mother" because she helped me begin to wash away all the filth and shame I had felt as a child who had been sexually abused.
first written April 1974
To Anne Sexton, who wanted to help me bury the red shoes,
and to Ruth Jones, my old rain mother.
When I was a young girl,
my mother gave me a red pair of shoes.
They'd been hers, her mother's and grandmother's.
She said they'd never wear out no matter what.
They were worn and wrinkled and weren't my size,
but she said I should put them on
and dance in them as she had done
when a girl, young wife and mother.
I'd watched them make her dance,
and they never let her stop.
She danced before the endless guests,
the meals, the mending,
the many monotonous days.
She danced on dutifully,
and she never complained.
I saw the strain in her stride,
the hurt she tried so hard to hide.
"It is the dance to do," she said.
It was the only one she knew,
the one her mother had danced to.
"And now," she said,
"I give these shoes to you."
So I put them on because she had
and danced the dance reluctantly,
the silent ballet of my youth,
my first marriage failures,
the meals, the mending,
the many monotonous days.
The red shoes were dancing my life away.
Then one day a raging fire began to burn up
all the barren places.
It even burned the red shoes
till they stopped dead in their tracks.
My fingers, those queen crabs,
reached down and clawed and tore
till at last, they let go--
Oh, I lifted my burning feet
to an old rain mother who blessed them
with her eternal breath
and cooled them
with her loving kindness
till bloody, bruised and raw,
they began moving on their own.
And my hands, those celebrated sheriffs,
arrested the shoes, locked them
in a closet box and closed the door.
In time calluses grew and covered my feet
but I gave birth to a barefoot baby
who must not find the red shoes in her play.
She must not hear them rattling
in the closet box, calling her name.
I will dig down to their death
and bury them with my rage,
that good and righteous bulldozer.
And there will be another wearing,
another running, another dance.
Note:
Anne Sexton won the Pulitzer Prize for her book of poems titled LIVE OR DIE. She took her life in October of 1974, just 2 months after she had telephoned me to say she was sorry she had missed seeing me at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. She and I had a brief correspondence. When she called me "Judith," I was 29 years old then and heard my given name spoken for the first time.
Ruth Jones was my first therapist and emotional mother who reparented me. She was old when I first sought her out for answers. I call her my "old rain mother" because she helped me begin to wash away all the filth and shame I had felt as a child who had been sexually abused.
Ballad in B Natural
Copyright © 2008 Judith J. Bentley
My little bambino,
browse here where there is
no balderdash or baloney --
only this ballad
as bare as a beggar.
I was born in Babylon a beast of burden
I was bastardized from birth without a bill of rights
They said they were my benefactors
They said they were benevolent
They badgered and bantered
and bathed me in rituals of bondage
They hired a bandit barber to shave me bald
and forced me to kiss the Blarney stone
They baptized me into the blues.
I was baffled by their bizarre ballyhoo,
their barbarous beadledom
and all their bawdy binges
till I heard a bargeman singing in baritone
I saw him barefoot-- he saw my ball and chain
and took me off their blacklist
and gave me a boxing glove.
He became my ballast and bandage.
I became his after-dinner bride.
Now I am binary; now I am bittersweet.
Now, my bud, I build brackets around you.
May they be balances for your blossoming.
May your bloom be bounteous.
May you never be bewildered or bamboozled.
May you find your bailiwick outside bedlam.
I wish you bon voyage for you are on your way.
This bulletin is my only blueprint.
My blunders are by-gones buried in my bosom.
Remember my face if you need a barometer.
Balboa is the brother I would have given you.
He would never have betrayed you.
Bon soir, little blackbird.
My little bambino,
browse here where there is
no balderdash or baloney --
only this ballad
as bare as a beggar.
I was born in Babylon a beast of burden
I was bastardized from birth without a bill of rights
They said they were my benefactors
They said they were benevolent
They badgered and bantered
and bathed me in rituals of bondage
They hired a bandit barber to shave me bald
and forced me to kiss the Blarney stone
They baptized me into the blues.
I was baffled by their bizarre ballyhoo,
their barbarous beadledom
and all their bawdy binges
till I heard a bargeman singing in baritone
I saw him barefoot-- he saw my ball and chain
and took me off their blacklist
and gave me a boxing glove.
He became my ballast and bandage.
I became his after-dinner bride.
Now I am binary; now I am bittersweet.
Now, my bud, I build brackets around you.
May they be balances for your blossoming.
May your bloom be bounteous.
May you never be bewildered or bamboozled.
May you find your bailiwick outside bedlam.
I wish you bon voyage for you are on your way.
This bulletin is my only blueprint.
My blunders are by-gones buried in my bosom.
Remember my face if you need a barometer.
Balboa is the brother I would have given you.
He would never have betrayed you.
Bon soir, little blackbird.
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