Character meditations (Sally)
Thursday, February 3rd, 2005 06:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chanaleh[Filtered at first only to Dave and Elizabeth. Which perhaps means that I might as well have just e-mailed it around; but this way I can continue to revise it. And also, I'm willing to add in other people you think might be interested enough while we're still in process.]
I was trying to frame out where Sally's head has been, before, during, and since meeting Matt. I could do more to flesh out the tangle of emotions of the intervening year, but this is a start.
July 3, 1944
Early July is the height of summer in Laclede County. The hospital in Springfield is stifling; we throw open the windows as best we can. Dad tends the factory; Momma tends the house; Olive tends her fretful babies and waits for Buddy to come home. Aunt Lottie finds business to take her out of the house much of every day. And so, I suppose, do I. The war is in that sense almost a mercy.
The drive to Springfield is fifty-seven minutes down Route 66. I rise at five o'clock; Rachel's car appears at the foot of the drive promptly at five-thirty, which at this time of year is getting on for dawn. We stop at Ida's house last, on the side road out to the highway. This system allows us to split the gas money three ways; conservation is paramount now in wartime. More importantly, it gives us a precious hour each way to talk and laugh like schoolgirls, instead of grown women facing down death and misery every workday.
Most evenings, before or after supper, I go down to the river and sit in the boathouse. It is an escape; it lets me think. Most evenings, Auntie Lottie sits with her knitting -- in the parlor, or out on the porch when the weather is fine -- and after the sun is down, I often join her. Unlike most of the family, she respects me enough not to ask the wrong questions. Besides, she doesn't need to; she sees far more than she acknowledges. I read or I write, and at nine o'clock I go up to bed. But when I cannot sleep, I sit in my room and pull out the box of Matthew's letters.
It is nearly a year since the dance at the Shriners' hall in Lebanon where I first laid eyes on him, prowling uncomfortably around the punchbowl in his brown suit. Even before I heard him speak, he was so clearly a stranger there, so alien to the corn-fed Missouri landscape -- and all the more after I heard him speak. Not just his accent, but the things he said, the things he saw, and the ways he constructed them. Nowhere in my landlocked life had I encountered such a mind. Talking to him was like seeing the stars.
Before long we found our way out of the hot, dark, crowded hall onto the front porch, and there we sat talking for so long that Rachel finally came out and whispered in my ear. Ida had to get home, it was nearly ten-thirty, and was I going to be ready to leave anytime soon? And before I could give the question a thought, the practical forefront of my brain was already saying yes, yes, of course, look at the time, very nice to have met you, Mr. Friedman. But he looked at Rachel, and then at me, and then at Rachel again, and offered with great European courtesy to see Miss Talley home in his own car if she cared to stay longer. Rachel looked back at me, a little unnerved; and though I don't know what she saw in my face, it seemed to reassure her that yes, this was perhaps strange, but it was all right. I still don't know why I thought it was all right, except that somehow I knew I was in no danger with him; I could trust him. He was my kind.
We stayed out on the porch until the music ended and the lights came up in the dance hall, which was not a sight I had ever seen before. It was eleven-thirty. By rights, I should have been home before midnight; but a tire blew out, and we spent another hour by the side of the county road, he in his shirtsleeves with his hat off, struggling to put on the spare. He wouldn't let me near the tire jack in my dance dress, but neither did he know what to do with it; he was an accountant and worked in an office in St. Louis. I tried to talk him through it, first with a failing battery-operated flashlight, and then with the better part of a box of safety matches, which thankfully did not run out before he got the lug-nuts replaced and tightened up.
He drove more slowly the rest of the way home, and pulled cautiously up to the house. He got out, opened my door, and then stood with me under the porch light for some time, talking quietly in the grassy silence. That was when we saw the silver thing rise up, what looked like right out of the river, and flash away across the sky. Matt was halfway down the hill toward the river before I caught up to him. I led him down the dirt path to the boathouse; we lit the lantern and poked around the shore for a while trying to find any traces, but there was nothing. But when we gave up, he followed me into the boathouse to put the lantern away. And when I blew it out and hung it up on its hook, the darkness settled around us, the rippling noise of the river suddenly that much louder. And suddenly I was terribly, burningly conscious of him standing in front of me, and I could do nothing but step closer.
I had kissed no one since I was twenty: the last time that Harley (still so young and rangy and golden-limbed; home from Princeton for good by then) guiltily drove with me out to the very back of his widowed mother's field. Ten years ago last summer. Three months before his wedding -- which would, a lifetime previously, have been mine. His New Jersey bride would never know (although, then again, she did leave him only three years later, so one assumes she came to know some things). He did not love me; then, as ever, he was too self-absorbed to feel any emotion that properly qualified as love. It was never that he could not, as his parents had made patently clear was expected, let me go. But I was as familiar to him as any of his childhood possessions, and on the surface still desirable, and he always was one to take whatever he could get away with. And I was willing. I still had hope then that the doctors were wrong, that the decree regarding my "female trouble" (of which no one spoke except in hushed tones) was not irrevocable, that the consumption which had burned through me with its fever might not have dried up every fruitful cell in my body. I had nothing to lose except those hopes. Part of me even relished the notion of the scandal that would surely have ensued, just when the detente between the families was beginning -- at the expense of my pride -- to stabilize. But nothing came of it. Harley took me deftly and coolly, one last time, and I howled his name in the tall grass, and did not truly begin to hate him until afterwards. I look at him now, growing as beefy and red-faced as his own father (rest his soul) or mine, and wonder at the destiny I escaped. I suspect this is what Aunt Lottie sees, too, when she looks at him, which (as my staunchest ally) she never does if she can help it.
When Matt kissed me, there was no skill, no bravado; only a depth that was like falling into a well. And fall we did. The eastern horizon was paling by the time we brushed each other off, found all the clothes that had gone straying, righted the old rowboat, and stumbled back up the hill to the house. I was afraid the sound of his car engine would bring someone down from the house, but no one came, nor said anything to me three hours later at Sunday breakfast. I went off to church with the feeling that the previous night's adventure must be blazoned across my forehead -- especially when the Old Testament lesson was read; but no, our secret was technically safe.
Except that he rang up that afternoon, offering to escort me to the band concert that evening in Gasconade Park, in town. Olive had answered the telephone and proceeded to listen, wide-eyed, around the corner, so that I had no choice but to explain afterwards... about the dance and the blown tire and the nice accountant from St. Louis. (All that was controversial enough without my going anywhere near the important things: Europe and art and politics and war and Judaism -- nor the putative omen of the flying saucer, nor, most certainly, the boathouse.)
The car broke down for real that night, on the way back from the park, two miles from home; after much consternation he ended up actually walking me all the way to the house, and presumably back again. But somehow he got the car fixed, and every night that week, he came to the house to take me out after I got home from work. Rachel and Ida were agog, hanging on as much detail as I would consent to give them about this exotic (if clumsy and, in public, slightly tongue-tied) stranger from the big city. By Tuesday my entire family was pressuring me to have him in for dinner, which we settled on for Thursday (as much of a fiasco as that turned out to be). Friday evening was the last I saw him. And on Saturday he drove home to St. Louis.
The thing to understand is how completely I had given up any thought of romantic love in my life. I had become an old maid in an instant at eighteen, betrayed by my damaged body as it was barely ripening into womanhood. Freud wrote reams about the castration complex, and I read a lot of it after that; but there is no word, no concept, for a woman whose mutilation is all internal. The family I would have someday created -- those little Campbell heirs to the garment empire, or those of any other alternate future shaped by as-yet-unseen twists of fate -- died there in the hospital, before I had really begun to imagine them. It took another few years before I could grasp that loss deeply enough to fully grieve it. But by the time Matt came to Lebanon, that was all long past and dried up inside me. So I believed.
The week that he was here, I allowed myself to live in a sort of dream, without (for once) clamping off the feelings in my heart. He was something outside my life. When he left, I would step back into the confines of the life that was left to me, and not think about it again. When he left, I bid him farewell and did not weep.
But then the letters began to come.
The first one on Tuesday. Another that Thursday. Soon they were coming more often than not, sometimes five in a single week. Postmarked St. Louis, written in a fine, careful, rather foreign hand, all the same black ink on smooth cream paper. I took the first few to my room, indulged myself in a good cry over them, and hid them away without a reply. The girls asked me about him once or twice more, on the road to the hospital, and I refused to speak. By the second week, I knew I could not bear this indefinitely, and steeled myself to write a painfully curt response requesting that he discontinue his correspondence.
It didn't matter. The letters kept coming.
They aroused some commentary from the family, but not as much as I had resigned myself to expect. Some days, the postman would bring the mail to Momma or Olive at the front door, and there would be a grand ceremony at the supper table of presenting me with the offending envelope. Other days, it would appear silently on my bedside table; this grew more frequent as the months wore on. I suspected Aunt Charlotte -- based on her cheerful but determined silence whenever the topic of that Jewish Communist was raised -- of intercepting the postman down at the road on my behalf.
He spoke from time to time of seeing me again, as if it were something he fully expected to take place. In January, he began to write of an actual visit, naming a day in February. Rather than stop in Lebanon under the watchful eye of my family, he proposed to come all the way down to Springfield in order to see me at the hospital.
I arranged to trade with Ida for kitchen duty that morning, and did not watch for him to arrive, nor go out when they alerted me he had ensconced himself up in the dayroom. The girls hinted that they couldn't see why I wouldn't go to him, if I wasn't going to tell him off and send him away; but as I was determined, they did their best to support me. On the surface, I let myself be broadly annoyed at this gadfly who did not know how to take a hint from a woman. Deep down, I knew that if I went to him, my life would change in ways I was not prepared to face.
His next letters went on as if nothing had happened. Never remonstrated with me, never asked why I had failed to appear. I could not decide whether to be relieved or disappointed.
But in the early summer he began to write again of coming to visit. July 4th, it happened that he had a holiday from the office. The date would, perhaps, have some sentimental resonance? He would see me after work. He did not say where he intended that to be.
I still did not reply.
I was too afraid. I was too angry. Angry at him for having the gall and the presumption to just show up: uninvited, unencouraged, unrelenting. For conjuring up every feeling in my life that I thought I had successfully renounced. For refusing to be shut out. For not coming back for me sooner.
But last weekend, the last Saturday afternoon in June, I went into town. And I bought a new dress.
I was trying to frame out where Sally's head has been, before, during, and since meeting Matt. I could do more to flesh out the tangle of emotions of the intervening year, but this is a start.
July 3, 1944
Early July is the height of summer in Laclede County. The hospital in Springfield is stifling; we throw open the windows as best we can. Dad tends the factory; Momma tends the house; Olive tends her fretful babies and waits for Buddy to come home. Aunt Lottie finds business to take her out of the house much of every day. And so, I suppose, do I. The war is in that sense almost a mercy.
The drive to Springfield is fifty-seven minutes down Route 66. I rise at five o'clock; Rachel's car appears at the foot of the drive promptly at five-thirty, which at this time of year is getting on for dawn. We stop at Ida's house last, on the side road out to the highway. This system allows us to split the gas money three ways; conservation is paramount now in wartime. More importantly, it gives us a precious hour each way to talk and laugh like schoolgirls, instead of grown women facing down death and misery every workday.
Most evenings, before or after supper, I go down to the river and sit in the boathouse. It is an escape; it lets me think. Most evenings, Auntie Lottie sits with her knitting -- in the parlor, or out on the porch when the weather is fine -- and after the sun is down, I often join her. Unlike most of the family, she respects me enough not to ask the wrong questions. Besides, she doesn't need to; she sees far more than she acknowledges. I read or I write, and at nine o'clock I go up to bed. But when I cannot sleep, I sit in my room and pull out the box of Matthew's letters.
It is nearly a year since the dance at the Shriners' hall in Lebanon where I first laid eyes on him, prowling uncomfortably around the punchbowl in his brown suit. Even before I heard him speak, he was so clearly a stranger there, so alien to the corn-fed Missouri landscape -- and all the more after I heard him speak. Not just his accent, but the things he said, the things he saw, and the ways he constructed them. Nowhere in my landlocked life had I encountered such a mind. Talking to him was like seeing the stars.
Before long we found our way out of the hot, dark, crowded hall onto the front porch, and there we sat talking for so long that Rachel finally came out and whispered in my ear. Ida had to get home, it was nearly ten-thirty, and was I going to be ready to leave anytime soon? And before I could give the question a thought, the practical forefront of my brain was already saying yes, yes, of course, look at the time, very nice to have met you, Mr. Friedman. But he looked at Rachel, and then at me, and then at Rachel again, and offered with great European courtesy to see Miss Talley home in his own car if she cared to stay longer. Rachel looked back at me, a little unnerved; and though I don't know what she saw in my face, it seemed to reassure her that yes, this was perhaps strange, but it was all right. I still don't know why I thought it was all right, except that somehow I knew I was in no danger with him; I could trust him. He was my kind.
We stayed out on the porch until the music ended and the lights came up in the dance hall, which was not a sight I had ever seen before. It was eleven-thirty. By rights, I should have been home before midnight; but a tire blew out, and we spent another hour by the side of the county road, he in his shirtsleeves with his hat off, struggling to put on the spare. He wouldn't let me near the tire jack in my dance dress, but neither did he know what to do with it; he was an accountant and worked in an office in St. Louis. I tried to talk him through it, first with a failing battery-operated flashlight, and then with the better part of a box of safety matches, which thankfully did not run out before he got the lug-nuts replaced and tightened up.
He drove more slowly the rest of the way home, and pulled cautiously up to the house. He got out, opened my door, and then stood with me under the porch light for some time, talking quietly in the grassy silence. That was when we saw the silver thing rise up, what looked like right out of the river, and flash away across the sky. Matt was halfway down the hill toward the river before I caught up to him. I led him down the dirt path to the boathouse; we lit the lantern and poked around the shore for a while trying to find any traces, but there was nothing. But when we gave up, he followed me into the boathouse to put the lantern away. And when I blew it out and hung it up on its hook, the darkness settled around us, the rippling noise of the river suddenly that much louder. And suddenly I was terribly, burningly conscious of him standing in front of me, and I could do nothing but step closer.
I had kissed no one since I was twenty: the last time that Harley (still so young and rangy and golden-limbed; home from Princeton for good by then) guiltily drove with me out to the very back of his widowed mother's field. Ten years ago last summer. Three months before his wedding -- which would, a lifetime previously, have been mine. His New Jersey bride would never know (although, then again, she did leave him only three years later, so one assumes she came to know some things). He did not love me; then, as ever, he was too self-absorbed to feel any emotion that properly qualified as love. It was never that he could not, as his parents had made patently clear was expected, let me go. But I was as familiar to him as any of his childhood possessions, and on the surface still desirable, and he always was one to take whatever he could get away with. And I was willing. I still had hope then that the doctors were wrong, that the decree regarding my "female trouble" (of which no one spoke except in hushed tones) was not irrevocable, that the consumption which had burned through me with its fever might not have dried up every fruitful cell in my body. I had nothing to lose except those hopes. Part of me even relished the notion of the scandal that would surely have ensued, just when the detente between the families was beginning -- at the expense of my pride -- to stabilize. But nothing came of it. Harley took me deftly and coolly, one last time, and I howled his name in the tall grass, and did not truly begin to hate him until afterwards. I look at him now, growing as beefy and red-faced as his own father (rest his soul) or mine, and wonder at the destiny I escaped. I suspect this is what Aunt Lottie sees, too, when she looks at him, which (as my staunchest ally) she never does if she can help it.
When Matt kissed me, there was no skill, no bravado; only a depth that was like falling into a well. And fall we did. The eastern horizon was paling by the time we brushed each other off, found all the clothes that had gone straying, righted the old rowboat, and stumbled back up the hill to the house. I was afraid the sound of his car engine would bring someone down from the house, but no one came, nor said anything to me three hours later at Sunday breakfast. I went off to church with the feeling that the previous night's adventure must be blazoned across my forehead -- especially when the Old Testament lesson was read; but no, our secret was technically safe.
Except that he rang up that afternoon, offering to escort me to the band concert that evening in Gasconade Park, in town. Olive had answered the telephone and proceeded to listen, wide-eyed, around the corner, so that I had no choice but to explain afterwards... about the dance and the blown tire and the nice accountant from St. Louis. (All that was controversial enough without my going anywhere near the important things: Europe and art and politics and war and Judaism -- nor the putative omen of the flying saucer, nor, most certainly, the boathouse.)
The car broke down for real that night, on the way back from the park, two miles from home; after much consternation he ended up actually walking me all the way to the house, and presumably back again. But somehow he got the car fixed, and every night that week, he came to the house to take me out after I got home from work. Rachel and Ida were agog, hanging on as much detail as I would consent to give them about this exotic (if clumsy and, in public, slightly tongue-tied) stranger from the big city. By Tuesday my entire family was pressuring me to have him in for dinner, which we settled on for Thursday (as much of a fiasco as that turned out to be). Friday evening was the last I saw him. And on Saturday he drove home to St. Louis.
The thing to understand is how completely I had given up any thought of romantic love in my life. I had become an old maid in an instant at eighteen, betrayed by my damaged body as it was barely ripening into womanhood. Freud wrote reams about the castration complex, and I read a lot of it after that; but there is no word, no concept, for a woman whose mutilation is all internal. The family I would have someday created -- those little Campbell heirs to the garment empire, or those of any other alternate future shaped by as-yet-unseen twists of fate -- died there in the hospital, before I had really begun to imagine them. It took another few years before I could grasp that loss deeply enough to fully grieve it. But by the time Matt came to Lebanon, that was all long past and dried up inside me. So I believed.
The week that he was here, I allowed myself to live in a sort of dream, without (for once) clamping off the feelings in my heart. He was something outside my life. When he left, I would step back into the confines of the life that was left to me, and not think about it again. When he left, I bid him farewell and did not weep.
But then the letters began to come.
The first one on Tuesday. Another that Thursday. Soon they were coming more often than not, sometimes five in a single week. Postmarked St. Louis, written in a fine, careful, rather foreign hand, all the same black ink on smooth cream paper. I took the first few to my room, indulged myself in a good cry over them, and hid them away without a reply. The girls asked me about him once or twice more, on the road to the hospital, and I refused to speak. By the second week, I knew I could not bear this indefinitely, and steeled myself to write a painfully curt response requesting that he discontinue his correspondence.
It didn't matter. The letters kept coming.
They aroused some commentary from the family, but not as much as I had resigned myself to expect. Some days, the postman would bring the mail to Momma or Olive at the front door, and there would be a grand ceremony at the supper table of presenting me with the offending envelope. Other days, it would appear silently on my bedside table; this grew more frequent as the months wore on. I suspected Aunt Charlotte -- based on her cheerful but determined silence whenever the topic of that Jewish Communist was raised -- of intercepting the postman down at the road on my behalf.
He spoke from time to time of seeing me again, as if it were something he fully expected to take place. In January, he began to write of an actual visit, naming a day in February. Rather than stop in Lebanon under the watchful eye of my family, he proposed to come all the way down to Springfield in order to see me at the hospital.
I arranged to trade with Ida for kitchen duty that morning, and did not watch for him to arrive, nor go out when they alerted me he had ensconced himself up in the dayroom. The girls hinted that they couldn't see why I wouldn't go to him, if I wasn't going to tell him off and send him away; but as I was determined, they did their best to support me. On the surface, I let myself be broadly annoyed at this gadfly who did not know how to take a hint from a woman. Deep down, I knew that if I went to him, my life would change in ways I was not prepared to face.
His next letters went on as if nothing had happened. Never remonstrated with me, never asked why I had failed to appear. I could not decide whether to be relieved or disappointed.
But in the early summer he began to write again of coming to visit. July 4th, it happened that he had a holiday from the office. The date would, perhaps, have some sentimental resonance? He would see me after work. He did not say where he intended that to be.
I still did not reply.
I was too afraid. I was too angry. Angry at him for having the gall and the presumption to just show up: uninvited, unencouraged, unrelenting. For conjuring up every feeling in my life that I thought I had successfully renounced. For refusing to be shut out. For not coming back for me sooner.
But last weekend, the last Saturday afternoon in June, I went into town. And I bought a new dress.
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no subject
Date: Friday, February 4th, 2005 03:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Friday, February 4th, 2005 01:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Saturday, February 5th, 2005 04:40 am (UTC)So, OK, in the same spirit...
Date: Saturday, February 5th, 2005 06:00 am (UTC)Dear Sal --
This letter is not like the hundreds of others I have written you. I will not speak here of Mrs. Blumenthal's jokes, or our ecumenical iceman. In fact, I don't think I will mail it to you. If all goes well, you and I will read it together here St. Louis. If not, there will be no point to my sending it, I think, and no point to your reading it.
I am not the fool I may seem to you, Sal. I know both more, and less, than you may suspect... and I suspect more than you know. For a year now I have puzzled over your silence, and I have some theories.
There are days when I fear there is no puzzle at all, no deep dark mystery, just the banal fact that Sally does not care for Matt the way Matt cares for Sally. That is an old story, is it not?
But then I remember our talks together. I remember your face... how it brightened each night I picked you up at your house, how it shone in the lights as we danced together, and how it clouded at your brother's ignorant accusations that night at dinner. Most of all I remember how it opened up that night at the boathouse -- a year ago tonight -- like the morning sun blazing through a cloudy sky. And I remember that you, vital and brilliant and beautiful, have remained alone for so many years, pushed away the handsome soldiers and prosperous businessmen. I remember that you could not bring yourself to see me at the hospital... why not? Surely that is not how suitors are sent packing in the genteel South, with an army of well-meaning nurses telling stories on your behalf?
No, I do not think it is that simple. You feel something for me; this I know. And also I suspect you fear to feel it, fear being taken out of the life that has chosen you but that you have not chosen.
Charlotte says I must close off your line of retreat if you are to overcome that fear. I do not think I will do that; I think the choice must be yours. I hope she is wrong.
One thing gives me hope, and that is the secret you are keeping. It is a heavy thing, and a powerful one. I think possibly if I can understand your secret, I will understand what ties you to your secret woods, to that house on the hill. I think possibly, if I can pry that secret from you, I can bring you away with me.
But I think, also, that it is not fair to ask for your secrets without sharing my own. I have tried many times to write you of... of what I can and cannot offer. But I have not been able to. Tonight, somehow, I will speak of it to you. And then we will see. Perhaps, if I can trust you with my shell, you will learn to trust me with yours.
If you are reading this, then I was right... we have shared our pasts, and can look forward to sharing our future. If not... well, at least I will know that I did what I could.
Love,
Matt
Re: So, OK, in the same spirit...
Date: Saturday, February 5th, 2005 11:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Sunday, February 13th, 2005 06:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Monday, February 14th, 2005 09:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Monday, February 14th, 2005 09:33 pm (UTC)I have also ordered all the other plays now. I wish I'd done it a month ago, so I'd have had it as source material before we were done. But I still want them.
Thank you again for coming!
no subject
Date: Sunday, February 20th, 2005 07:17 pm (UTC)I had a terrific time watching you two become the characters and inhabit that play, and I feel grateful for getting to see you work.
I have one extremely little nit to pick: in 1944 the country was on a 2-hour daylight saving time (called "War Time") in the summer, so sunrise would have been an hour later. I think that's right up there with remembering how to quickly button the fly on a pair of trousers, or how to patch an automotive inner tube tire, in "things we're glad we've forgotten". :)
no subject
Date: Monday, February 21st, 2005 04:01 am (UTC)