Surrendering Oz - Bonnie Friedman

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of wisdom—Hades being a god of wealth as well as death. It is to this place that Psyche must descend. And so the woman whose name means “soul,” frightened, alone, summons her courage. She is on a quest to get a container of beauty. Sacred beauty! Beauty from a goddess. The queen sets a box of it in her hands.

      On her journey back, how can Psyche not peek inside? Who wouldn’t want to know the secret? Yet the box marked “beauty” actually contains sleep, and so the heroine stumbles, tumbles, lies comatose. “Poppies!” the Wicked Witch had crooned, swirling her wand, setting her trap. And, racing merrily across that brilliant red field, Dorothy gradually slows, and then comes to a stop, wavering, limbs drunk with languor. She yawns. A blissful smile stretches across her face. Asleep, the young woman can dwell in Oz forever. Asleep, she need never liberate the poor mortal behind the curtain from his own servitude as the wizard, she need never confront the reality that the fantasy must end. Down she sinks, and nestles her head in the scarlet blossoms. Her friends cannot break the thrall.

      What does? The gift of the immaculate white witch: pricks of stinging snow. Icy truth, brisk logic—these are the traits that open Dorothy’s eyes, at last. Here is adulthood. Here is the force of bracing reality. The heroine hoists herself out of her delirium and sets off on the last stage of her journey. She must surrender toxic fantasy so that she can at last handle potent, gritty, black-and-white-spectrum reality, with all of its limitations and powers. She must surrender the Oz of dreamland stupor in order to become the master of her own life.

      We thought what was in the box was beauty but it was sleep. We thought it was perfection but it was a trance. Where is your anger, friends routinely ask. Why aren’t you angry at your mother for how she treated you as a child? And why aren’t you angry at me when I don’t do what I say I will, a particular childhood girlfriend inquires. I just am not. Instead, I’m enraged at the dog that barks in the neighbor’s yard and the leaf blower that bellows for an hour at a stretch, and the universe itself that has conspired to steal from me my voice—which I had believed was something until I convinced myself it was nothing.

      To gain their independence, boys must steal the key hidden under their mother’s pillow, according to Robert Bly. And girls? He doesn’t say. Our key, I think, is not hidden under the mother’s pillow. It is hidden in the voice of the barking dog, in the smug, envied ogre who sashays about, in our irritation at the day itself for having so few useful hours in it, in the antique but nevertheless commanding conviction that our needs are ugly and excessive, in the exquisite trances we still inhabit.

      Although—wait. Come to think of it, the frozen drowse did contain an eerie beauty. There Psyche lies in a ditch. Her estranged husband, Eros, comes upon her, and, surprised into pity, touches her with the tip of his arrow—echoing the way she wounded him earlier, while he slept, with a scald of candle wax. Awakened, she is granted eternal life for the risks she undertook, and indeed she remains alive today in her famous story. Underworld beauty was both the occasion for the stupor and ultimately its cure. Taboo knowledge, fetched from the depths, resists being brought into ordinary consciousness and yet is the cure for the dissociative dream state.

      The essays in this book all have to do with encountering an underworld beauty, an estranged, buried, yet magical and long-missed, unintegrated aspect of oneself. My own life story has been a series of expansions and expansions, and then almost stunned languors, marvelous times of discovery followed by comatose episodes that summoned the next stage of growth. Sometimes I had to learn the same lesson twice, the second time at a more elemental level.

      And often I was staring in one direction only to discover that my salvation came from another quadrant entirely. Luckily, a fresh, strange guide always eventually appeared, answering a call I didn’t even know I was making, stepping out of some realm of experience about which I’d previously been blind.

      These essays do two things. They examine telling aspects of my own story and they tacitly reflect on themes in women’s lives today. They are all about yearning for the missing element. One writes to discover how one has gotten lost, and to forge out of language a magic key. Often the key to one locked soul turns out to be the key to another, for we are not so different. Beneath the disguise of our faces are common conflicts, common struggles. Perhaps you, the reader, will find in these essays some keys to your own lost zones, and a way to be roused from your own transfixed dream states, the particular stuck places on your own journey.

      I knew I was back in New York when I saw children walking to school with books open in their hands. I’d lived away for fifteen years. Now down the streets of Brooklyn they drifted, novels spread wide between their palms, the actual world comprising a mere running margin of asphalt and high-heeled shoes and honking cars. The massive knapsacks sagging off their backs seemed a wise precaution against the danger of the children floating right off into the realms of imagination that lured them down the street transfixed, one foot set absently in front of the next.

      I’d been the same way not long ago. Growing up in the Bronx, I read myself to P.S. 24 in the morning and read myself home each afternoon. My best friends were fanatical readers—Emily, a science wizard who used wads of pink Kleenex for bookmarks, and Stacy, who, despite our apartment life, penned guides on the best way to lay out an herb garden and how to ride horses in proper English style, ramrod straight, a moss-velvet riding helmet on one’s head. She read me her work leaning against the cyclone fence in the J.H.S. 141 school yard near the kids slamming handballs.

      It seemed perfectly natural to us that our parents owned novels set in our own city—The Chosen, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Where Are You Going? Out. What Are You Doing? Nothing, and a bevy of Mafia tales. Even then we sensed that the city was always being reinvented and pulped. The streets were jackhammered constantly; we looked for squares of fresh cement in which to finger our names. New York was book country because it was half real and half imagined, as were we ourselves. Hadn’t a storybook boy spent the night at the Metropolitan Museum? Didn’t my brother tell me about a young man in a novel who worried about the ducks in Central Park—where did they go in the winter? After that, I worried about them too.

      Every book was a book of spells, and we longed to transform ourselves. My friends and I were like James Gatz, yearning to climb up the moonlight ladder to where blond gods quaff nectar in spangled rooms. How tired we were of long division and ink splotches, of tedious pretests and retests, and of being chosen almost last in gym games. The girls chosen first read Seventeen, not The Island of the Blue Dolphins. And they smelled of Herbal Essence, not the stone halls of the Cloisters, where we drifted about in states of mystical transport on Sunday afternoons.

      We longed for adventure, and the revelation of one’s true inner identity, which had nothing to do with the face in the mirror or popularity or grades, but with the crown tips of letters themselves and the perpetual twilight in the original old-growth forest maintained deep in the Botanical Gardens—leaf-mold scent drifting up, shadow doorways appearing and vanishing.

      My friends and I passed around Act One by Moss Hart, a Bronx boy who ended up living at the Waldorf. His wife, Kitty Carlisle, on To Tell the Truth, always clasped an invisible martini in her hand. You’d never have known she’d been raised Cohen. My friend Stacy’s father brought us all to the Tiki Room at the Plaza for her eleventh birthday, and we ate with chopsticks and sipped virgin pineapple blender drinks, and the reek of the Bunsen burners was the most sophisticated scent I’d ever inhaled.

      The other patrons glowered. We were a table of shrieky girls. I longed to be a grown-up with a long white cashmere dress like the woman across the room, for a man to notice me through the candlelight. And yet the theatricality of the marble-corridored hotel made me consider the presence of its invisible author—the person who put the waiters in tuxes and who arranged the palms in the Palm Court, where a storybook girl ate lunch. Even then it seemed clear that Manhattan was composed and calculated, like a wildly concocted plot, but that I would get to play a part in it merely by maturing, as if the city were something I would grow into like a shoe.

      Every other issue of New York magazine in those days—the early seventies—carried,

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