by
Elaine Dundy
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I tried to remember one minute that whole week end when Marion and I weren’t either feeding people, or clearing up from doing it, or preparing to do it again. And presumably she never stopped doing it. But I couldn’t quite see why just because she did, I should. I mean, here was I practically fresh out of the egg, everything was so new to me, and here was everybody telling me to stop driftingy and start living in this world; telling me to start cooking, and sewing, and cleaning, and I don’t know what. Taking care of my grandchildren.
I sat in the studio lost in thought, watching the evening get darker and darker and colder and colder, unable to move. Finally I roused myself and went to look for Jim. I found him wandering aimlessly around the kitchen, peering every now and again into one of the empty cupboards, hoping as if by some miracle to find that particular one filled.
“What is it, Jim?” He looked so forlorn.
“I’ve … I’ve already invited them to dinner on Thursday.”
I took a deep breath.
“O.K.” I said. “Which is the stove and how do you light it?”
that's like my gas pedal / brakes joke lmao
When did all those nightmares begin? My mind keeps going back to that Christmas vacation, sophomore year, when I had an English paper to write and spent most of my time in the Public Library. People kept mistaking me for a librarian. They kept coming up to me and asking me for books and things. I thought it was maybe because I didn’t wear hats and at first I was merely annoyed. Then I became frightened. I somehow became obsessed with the idea that the reason they kept mistaking me for a librarian was because that’s what I really was meant to be, and instinctively they knew it. It was sheer fantasy, of course. I mean they probably asked dozens of other people as well and I just didn’t notice. But it started to prey upon my mind. Then I began having this nightmare. Actually I have it so often I’ve even given it a name. It’s called the Dreaded Librarian Dream.
It’s all very vague. It takes place in sort of a vast hall, in the center of which sits a girl behind a desk, or rather a circular counter, which completely surrounds her. It’s funny about that desk: I’ve seen it somewhere before, I know I have, although it’s quite unlike any desk I’ve ever seen in a library. Anyway, the closer I get to this girl, the older she becomes, until she turns into a middle-aged spinster librarian. Then I see that it’s me. People keep coming up to her from every direction asking her for books. They are all going somewhere. In fact it isn’t a library at all, it’s more like a station. Everyone is in a hurry. They are all going somewhere except me. I’m trapped. One of the worst aspects of this dream is that from the very first time I dreamed it I’ve known, within the nightmare, so to speak, that it was one I’ve had before—an old, old nightmare of long ago. That gives it its special ageless, timeless, hopeless quality. When I awaken from it my space urge is upon me stronger than ever.
some unneeded repetition here but i like it a lot
NOW HERE’S THE heavy irony. So I went back to New York to become a librarian. To actually seek out this thing I’ve been fleeing all my life. And (here it comes): a librarian is just not that easy to become. I’d taken my lamb by the hand to the slaughter and nobody even wanted it. Apparently there’s a whole filing system and annotating system and stamping system and God knows what you have to learn before you qualify. So I finally found a little out-of-the-way, off-the-beaten-track library downtown and they let me put the books away.
We were very hungry but we didn’t want to leave, so we ate there. We had chicken sandwiches; boy, the chicken of the century. Dry, wry, and tender, the dryness sort of rubbing against your tongue on soft, bouncy white bread with slivers of juicy wet pickles. Then we had some very salty potato chips and some olives stuffed with pimentos and some Indian nuts and some tiny pearl onions and some more popcorn. Then we washed the whole thing down with iced martinis and finished up with large cups of strong black coffee and cigarettes. One of my really great meals.
I don’t know what time it was when we went into the bar, but it was dark when we came out. We went to a movie and he kissed me for the first time. We kissed right through it. Coming to life in a movie house on West Fourth Street is an apotheosis I’d have to leave to one of those mad seventeenth-century mystics like Herbert or Vaughan to do justice to. It’s the end.
cute
Henry and I had plans to meet that afternoon in a park where we sat side by side under a tree to watch people as they passed by, and I was glad not to have to look at him because I feared I would faint, though I had never been that sort of woman, a fainting woman. In past relationships I’d been accused of being cold, of being distant, of never loving anyone as well as they had loved me. I’d never known what to make of those accusations, had never been able to discern my own coldness or distance, but as I sat there talking with Henry, his mere presence pressing me so firmly and warmly into the present, it became clear to me that this was it, this was love, and all those past partners had been right—I had never loved them. I must have believed love was something that arrived in your life and told you what to do with it.
I learned how to block out the sound of a cheering crowd and his occasional howls as I read. Henry was such a remote, dispassionate person that I enjoyed seeing him experience an extreme emotion, even if the feats of strangers were the only thing that seemed to rouse such feelings from him. The fact that I wrote all day and came home to read, he said, proved that being a journalist wasn’t taxing in the same way that being an artist was. I never disagreed with him. I did not understand what Henry did in his studio or why. At home, we spent our time together engrossed in opposite things, and this had seemed like one of the things a person had to do in marriage—accept differences, block out certain noises, be alone. There may be nothing inherently wrong with living a life like that, and perhaps I could have safely remained married and had his children and gone along with the original plan. It’s not as if I would have died from it. Not immediately.
good point for BH
When I arrived at the address she’d given I found nothing but an empty lot. I checked the note again—I was in the right place. I waited a few minutes; then, as I turned to leave, I noticed a rope ladder swaying from the abandoned elevated track that ran above Tenth Avenue. One bare arm waved at the top, then slid out of sight, and even now, all these years later, I do not understand how I had the nerve to climb that ladder. It was the first time since childhood that I discovered I was capable of more than I’d previously believed, an expanding sense of possibility that defined my years with her—a stark contrast to the smallness I felt in Henry’s home. Once I reached the top of the tracks she helped me over the edge—her hands on my arms and back. I stood and looked out over an impossible sight—a long, narrow meadow running through the city, overgrown with vines and tall grass.
When I got out of the taxi minutes later, I realized I’d mistakenly given my old address, on East Second and Bowery, an efficiency studio with wonderful light and terrible everything else. I looked up at the windows where I’d lived in such happy squalor, and cried. How completely idiotic I was being. It makes no sense to grieve years. Be reasonable. Go home.
As I walked north toward our building, I lingered at each of my private graves on Second Avenue—the bench where I’d had the relationship-ending fight with a girlfriend several years ago, the bar where I’d read The House of Mirth for the first time, the café where I’d once met my estranged father for a painful coffee, and the Italian restaurant where Henry and I had soberly discussed the decision of marriage. I’d always been someone over whom the past had a powerful hold, easily importuned by nostalgia, but that evening each of these locations seemed to have lost their power. I walked right into the café where I’d had that coffee with my father, though for years I’d crossed the street to avoid passing it. I ordered a glass of wine as if I belonged there, had belonged there all along.
:(
I repeated that I was leaving, but he scoffed, almost laughed. Not just like that you’re not, he said, and we walked in silence for several blocks and I wondered whether there was any ideal criteria for this, whether there was a correct way to end a marriage on nothing more than an amorphous sense of another life just out of reach, a life that might kill me, it seemed, if I didn’t live it. Once inside our apartment again, he asked me to at least keep living with him for another month, to accompany him to his cousin’s wedding, to give him a chance to make the case for our life together, and I agreed to it, hoping that it would make sense, that the simpler course—staying together, staying the same—would come to seem to be the correct course.
X was not exactly a person to me yet, but a possibility, a different way of life. I deified her then and for a long time after, believed her to be an oracle, almost inhuman. Now it is so clear to me that love is the opposite of deification, that it erodes persona down to its mortal root. She was always human, difficult as it was for me to admit that; I made so much trouble for myself by refusing to see it.