and a new, young, burgeoningly healthful business-school element living in spiffy renovated condos, all permeated by a daily influx and outflow of tourists, and all cheek by jowl. I was always glad to have a reason to walk through; the sheer amplitude was heartening, the sense that there were myriad ways one could live. Now, as I walked, something punitive and exacting—something that seemed to hold life itself as the enemy—eased in me.
The Blockbuster was a vast, blue-carpeted space that seemed to have few videos, and favored the very most recent. Still, it did have what I’d come for. I rented it, and bought a packet of stale, brittle, brilliant orange peanut-butter-and-cheese crackers, then began to wander back through the bluish slate streets, munching as I strolled. An optimism took me—simply from holding the movie. A cardinal perched on a picket fence, I noticed, its triangular crest bright in the gray air. A black-and-white cat with a jingling collar crouched down and then slunk into a busted basement window. I smiled. Somehow I’d been recently myopic, gazing into dull gauze, lost in a troublesome middle distance. Now charming particulars glinted out—the yellow beak of the bird, the hunch of the cat. For an instant I felt as if the world itself were the key to a giant, encoded cipher. That cardinal was both itself and a signifier of something else—something that was, somehow, also only itself, the cardinal. You needed to go no further than what was before your eyes. It was all here.
The truth of the world is inherent richness, I felt. There isn’t one right way! I can get where I need to go by myriad paths, myriad sentences—for I suddenly understood that, as soon as I’d received the writing contract, I’d craved to write something truer than I’d written before, something more significant and odd.
This was why my permission had turned to prohibition! There was something more important to me than the book I’d outlined, although I hadn’t quite known it earlier. Once I sold the proposal, though, this more important thing, to my surprise, announced itself and demanded expression. It was a relief now finally to realize this. Here was my problem. I momentarily had the mad sensation that the cat had told it to me, and the cardinal. Tomorrow would be different when I sat down to work.
At this thought, a jolly creaking rose to my ears. It had been accompanying me, I suddenly realized, for quite a way. Companionable. Cheery. There it was. There! It sounded like the rasping meow of a very old cat. It made me want to dance. I moved my leg, and there was the creak. I stopped, and all was silence. Why, it came from the rollers of the cassette! They were loose, and wobbly, and registered each step, as if I were being accompanied by a companion made of jointed plastic. How goofy! How fun! And this hilarious sound kept me, as I strolled up the cobblestones, merry, dear company all the way home, assuring me that I was not alone, that I ought to be of good cheer, and that tomorrow really would be different.
I woke however to an inhospitable world. The streets were glazed. A freezing rain had fallen overnight, and then the temperatures plunged. Icy air seeped in around the old window casings. I tried to write. My sentences shattered. My stiff, cold fingers seemed to be the problem. I shook them until they batted one another. I held them under the hot water but they wouldn’t sufficiently warm. To my dismay, I was still stuck in my writing. In the early afternoon, I let my pen drop. Then I drew the curtains shut, inserted the videotape, and, with a sigh of relief, plumped down to watch The Wizard of Oz.
And the movie did let me see, quite soberly, why I was still transfixed. The clues were everywhere. I hadn’t watched it in twenty years but my mouth uttered key lines along with the characters. The movie’s rhythms were in my body like the pulse of a song that’s on the radio so low you don’t notice it, yet your feet tap to its beat and you are nodding your head.
Dorothy is racing up the road, all in a frazzle. “Auntie Em!” she cries. “Uncle Henry!” Her little charge, Toto, has gotten into some natural, even hormonal mischief, chasing Miss Gulch’s cat. Yet the punishment will be dreadfully severe. It just doesn’t seem fair! But Dorothy, a quintessential adolescent, comes off as all elbows and histrionic gasps. She’s only in the way. “Dorothy, please! We’re trying to count!” her aunt chastises. “Don’t bother us now,” says Uncle Henry. They’re gathering up eggs, and Dorothy will make them lose track. Financial troubles threaten the farm; there’s no time for Dorothy’s breathless complaints.
The situation is the same with the rest in this dusty, grim world; the farmhands are all busy or give silly, heedless advice. “You going to let that old Gulch heifer buffalo you? Next time she squawks, walk right up to her and spit in her eye. That’s what I’d do,” advises Zeke.
“Aw, you just won’t listen, that’s all,” says Dorothy. Her sense of what’s crucial is so different from the adults’. Her aunt seems impatient for Dorothy to grow up and realize what matters (counting eggs; maybe it’s time for Dorothy to take notice of her own incipient fertility), to give up childish concerns and take responsibility for the womanliness her body suggests she already possesses. Dorothy wears a pinafore that crams her breasts against her and spills into a frothy white yoke of blouse while every other woman in the movie wears a dress. Dorothy seems to have outgrown her childish frock without noticing, or perhaps she’s installed in a sort of transitional training dress, like the training wheels on a bicycle before a child knows how to maintain her balance, or like a “training bra,” those concoctions of padding and lace meant to train—not one’s breasts, certainly. Well, then, one’s mind into an acceptance of one’s breasts. Or the boys in one’s class into an acceptance of one’s acceptability.
How tired Aunt Em looks. One of the characters describes her face as “careworn,” as if she’ll soon be erased, rubbed away. Perhaps Em would like Dorothy to fill in for her. Instead, the girl frolics, indulging her high spirits. In her exuberance, she tries idly walking the balance beam of the fence top between the animal enclosures, but tumbles right into the hogs’ slovenly pen. The big loud beasts start to trample her, and she shrieks. Finally a man rescues her; the other farmhands rush up. Their circle of warm laughter is descended upon by the irate Em.
Dorothy’s first fall is due to her carefreeness, her animal high spirits (like Toto, she wanders after “trouble”). Dorothy can’t keep her balance; she is not used to the weight of being a woman yet. And her burgeoning, fence-flouting femaleness lands her flat in the mire. The farmhands all come running. She gets them to show concern when Aunt Em won’t. Unrescued, though, wouldn’t she be a “Miss Gulch”?
The word gulch comes from the Middle English word meaning to gulp. It refers to “a deep or precipitous cleft or ravine, especially one occupied by a torrent” and “containing a deposit of gold.” The word gulch also meant “to swallow or devour greedily,” the way a glutton or drunkard might, and the act of “taking a heavy fall.”
A woman who is a gulch is a devouring, appetitive, carnal woman, a torrential woman who will swallow you up into her vacuumous cleft. (She recalls Shakespeare’s weird sisters on the “blasted heath,” that gashed, watery waste whose hags draw their power from arousing taboo cravings.) Kansas’s particular Gulch is an aging spinster, which in the era of the movie meant she occupied a certain realm of death—undesired, sterile and thwarted. And yet, unlike Aunt Em, she pays a lot of attention to Dorothy.
We know from the start that Miss Gulch is a wanting woman—it is her demands that set the world of the movie in motion, that set Dorothy rushing up that road of dust. The very first words of the picture are “She isn’t coming yet, Toto. Did she hurt you, Toto? She tried to, didn’t she?” with Judy Garland’s frightened face staring straight into the camera toward the impending, wrathful She. In fact, the real, scarcely noticed precipitating event is Dorothy’s decision to go past Miss Gulch’s house on the way home. Couldn’t she predict that Toto would once again invade Miss Gulch’s garden? When a farmhand suggests she simply choose a different route home, Dorothy exclaims, “You just don’t understand.” But what exactly doesn’t he get? That Dorothy wants to explore Miss Gulch’s garden?
When
