A man on the pavement met my gaze as I waited for a light to change. He was walking a golden retriever. He seemed an intelligent, kind man, somebody’s husband. The light turned green and I sped on. When I become involved with someone else, I vowed, I will try not to zone out again, no matter the cost. The key on the typewriter case scratched as the car traveled, swinging and scraping against the nubbled-plastic case. My car took an abrupt turn. There was a moment’s pause. Then the little key struck hard before gradually resuming its steady, restless creak. Who was to protect me? I had to trust my own gut sense of things.
I was always stricken, as a child, at the moment when the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz cried, “I’m mellllting!” The shocked anguish on her face, the way she crumpled to the floor—guilt overcame me. As much as I’d hated her before, suddenly, to my surprise, remorse washed over me, and painful sympathy: She was my own mother, dissolving!
Quick, she mustn’t be let die! Prop her up! A terrible mistake must have been made. And the moment I had expected to feel thrilled triumph (as we would have if this were a boy’s story: We’re glad the knight slays the dragon) turned out to be spiked with a baffling sense of betrayal. But wasn’t the girl supposed to win? Wasn’t the Wicked Witch evil? And how had my mother snuck into it all?
The boy’s coming-of-age story is about leaving home to save the world. The girl’s coming-of-age story is about relinquishing the world beyond home. It is about finding a way to sacrifice one’s yearning for the larger world and to be happy about it. At its center is the image of the hungry woman, the desirous, commanding, grasping woman who shows herself, with a blow to our heart, to be the woman we love most.
Or is she?
As a child, I wasn’t sure. Watching the witch dissolve, I knew I’d glimpsed something. I was snagged. Distracted. The story stopped for me right there; I was no longer immersed. Because, wasn’t one meant to vanquish the dragon? Should one have despised that witch so much? Maybe, maybe . . . and a sort of unraveling happened—one had misunderstood, one had got one’s signals crossed, one was too impulsive, eager, girlish. Precisely because it never got looked at—in girls’ stories and in my own life the plot rushed on—that unease remained: a suspicion of one’s flaring impulses. A tendency to go vague. The sort of dubiousness that makes a student shoot her hand up in class, but then, quite slowly, lower it, and afterward trail home unsettled, head bent.
At a certain point in my own life, everything partook of this same confusion. I had gotten something I craved—a writing contract, a broomstick of my own—only to find, to my dismay, that apparently it wasn’t what I’d wanted, after all. I was blocked, locked, grounded. After ten years of writing, suddenly I could not work. Why had my yes turned into a no? How had I learned to be paralyzed? In the absence of any pertinent memory, I found myself obsessed with the great cultural memory of Dorothy in Oz. Besides the moment the witch’s face alters, I kept thinking about the scene in which Dorothy is imprisoned in the witch’s keep. “Auntie Em!” she cries, in Judy Garland’s signature throbbing voice, while Em, in the crystal ball, calls “Dorothy! . . . Where are you? We’re trying to find you!” peering and turning and vanishing into Kansas.
“Oh, don’t go away,” moans Dorothy. But it’s too late. How far the daughter has traveled from her mother—into realms unimaginable, like a girl who leaves home for verboten erotic love and can’t return, or a daughter whose ambitions transport her far from her mother’s values. “Oh, don’t go away!” rang in my mind, and my eyes dripped. Locked in my own situation, I identified, not understanding quite why. It was late November, a month since I’d signed the contract, and still no words came, or rather no words came and stayed. I seemed under a spell. I crossed everything out; nothing was what I meant anymore.
I was living at the time in the town of Salem, Massachusetts, on Pickman Street, a narrow, weathered passageway of saltbox houses near Collins Cove. Each morning I hunched at my keyhole desk as if wedged in a kayak. I set down words, then retracted them, ignoring the visitors who strolled past my first-floor window hauling chaise longues to the curve of beach at the end of the street. Even in winter people sunbathed on the mudflats and dug for crabs in shallows that extended for a mile when the tide was out. One late-November dusk after a particularly frustrating day, a day when more words than ever presented themselves but were always the wrong ones, the ones that didn’t lead where I needed to go, I abandoned my cross-outs and wandered to the shore.
It looked freshly troweled, it was so smooth. A plump woman lay on a pink lawn chair in the gusting wind, beach towels covering her from toes to chin, eyes fixed on a fluffy-paged bestseller. Beside her on the sand sat a dirty-haired child who glanced up at me with the triangular, sullen, pretty, kittenish face of a minx. I liked her instantly, and smiled. She stuck out her tongue. Then, clasping her red metal shovel, she returned to her labors, digging restively in the sand. There was no one else. The shore was so saturated that it shimmered a reflective sky blue, inducing an upside-down sensation. The low sea here sloped deeper by the most infinitesimal degrees; you could walk out to the horizon, and still be wet only to your knees. Across the muck near my sneakers tiny beasts had dragged unwieldy claws, leaving momentary gnomic communications. It seemed to me for an instant as if the girl herself, isolated beside her mother, bored and in a rage, had forced up onto the sands themselves the thwarted message, this scrambled rune.
I sighed, and the solitary woman glanced up blindly and flipped her page, then continued reading, a Picasso goddess pursuing the gossip of Olympus, incurious about meager mortals. The child heaved a heap of dirt over her shoulder. An oily, metallic tang arrived: rife, fulsome, making my gorge rise. I dug my hands deep into my pockets, and walked back to the sidewalk. When I regained it, I turned. A trail of footprints held the precise waffle grid of my sneakers. Within seconds the prints blurred, though, already beginning to be subsumed by the smooth sand, and inducing a panic within me. I walked quickly home.
The next day was even worse. A headache split my skull. After an hour I thrust the page of cross-outs away and grabbed my coat. I would go to Blockbuster Video. Perhaps seeing the Oz story again would help me understand what was wrong. The day was again cold. It came as a relief, as I shut the door behind me, to step into raw, stinging gray air.
I’d been inside too much. Now I trod hastily past the historic federalist brick manses that framed the town green. A neighborhood realtor in a silk scarf and earrings, her face heavily but expertly powdered, coasted by at the wheel of a Mercedes. Her car seemed not to roll so much as eventually migrate past, bearing clients who gazed steadily out at the museum-like edifices with their hoop-skirt chandeliers and ponderous, tasseled curtains. Soon the streets descended. Far beneath us lay the remnants of the town’s weary commercial district. Here a Greek-temple-front post office presided over a central parking lot, adjacent to which stood a decaying grocery store that sold iceberg lettuce and tough tomatoes packed three to a box under crackly cellophane, and where, in the aisle, I’d once, memorably, seen a pudgy pink man wearing a T-shirt that read: “Is that your face or did your neck throw up?”
A particular flinty population shared the town. They interested me, as they were so at odds with both the showcase element and the sunny, touristic day-trippers. I had no proper context for them—the Bronx didn’t seem to have a precise equivalent. Some of these people (my landlady, a gaunt, quivering woman, among them) often seemed to be seething. Many survived the dark New England hours aided by alcohol. It was not uncommon to see a pallid person rattling a shopping cart piled impressively to the brim with empty beer cans over the cobblestones to the redemption center. Many people had bumper stickers on their old beaters: EXPECT THE RAPTURE. The town, which was becoming ever more discernible to me, had at least four distinct districts—the patrician boulevards lined with the first millionaires’ mansions in America, their existence due to the pirating of British ships and to the whaling trade; the funky weather-beaten wood houses huddled by the sea and now subdivided
