Surrendering Oz - Bonnie Friedman

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exaggeration, incessantly misleading. And yet, what else did I have to go by if I ignored them? I’d been waiting for my feelings toward the man I was involved with to change for years, and they hadn’t. They only became sharper, more intense. My heart beat so hard, sitting in that library, that the stacks of books jumped away, came back. My moist palms clung to my tissue-thin Oedipus Rex. I would almost rather be numb forever than have to talk to my boyfriend about this problem.

      I love him, I love him, I told myself as I walked across the battered campus toward home, and felt sicker and more frightened the closer I got to our apartment, but also somehow angrier, too. Had I really been so mysterious? Had he really been so unable to see my unhappiness? Or was he like Stacy somehow, the mean friend, ignoring what was obvious, which was the girl making faces over her shoulder, hurrying up the street both smiling and grimacing?

      That night, in bed, I whispered to him, “No, I did not enjoy buying those underpants. And I feel worried about what’s wrong between us. I feel unloved, living with you. It’s so lonely.” Around three or four in the morning he woke me abruptly from a profound sleep, a sleep I’d been sunken so deeply inside it felt like being drunk. “There’s something I have to tell you,” he intoned in a dull, zombie voice, standing beside the bed, a look of horror on his face. His skin glowed silver in the streetlight. He wove in place, as if about to collapse.

      “Tell me right away. You’re scaring me!” I said.

      He revealed he’d been having an affair. He needed me to know. It was standing in the way of his feeling his love for me. And the words I’d said that night about feeling unloved—they broke his heart! He knew he had to tell me. It was the only way ahead, he felt. It was our only hope of real intimacy. He had to tell me what he’d done, who he was. He stood pale, shaking with fear.

      I was shocked and furious—and relieved. At least I no longer felt insane. At least the world again made sense. At least I had all the information, or enough of it.

      We sat close. We were both frightened. It was the dawn of something new. “I felt so awful,” he told me softly. “So far away from you.”

      I nodded, sighing. How could I be angry at him (although I was)? For months I’d felt the bone-deep cold within myself. I’d known it without knowing it, his affair, his lack of attraction, the isolation, the sense of being unloved, and I’d swiveled my head the other way, not wanting to see. I’d ignored his secret. I’d kept my complaints weak, I hadn’t demanded more. I’d chosen calm and coma, as had he. Now we clenched hands hard across the space between us. We stayed up until the apartment buildings acquired tall peripheries, their rims brightening, sharpening, and the night began to fade to gray, turning the same color as the apartment buildings.

      He sat before me, a young man, eager, energetic—as if he’d dropped a weight of years! How different he looked! A beautiful young man, a fawn, with gleaming large eyes and long eyelashes and pointed ears, excited, turned on to me, and I was shocked by my response. He was perfect—for someone else. Perhaps there was something wrong with me, but his eagerness, his freshness, his smiling, doe-eyed glance felt wrong for me. I didn’t want it. I felt like some sort of villain. How much he was bringing me! The banquet of his entire eager, undefended self. But he seemed a nubile boy. Oh, I needed to set him free. For it felt just like another kind of blackmail, his radiant eagerness, which asked me not to spoil it. It invited me to go mute again. In fact, his pliant, gentle lips, his doting, wet eyes, his tongue which lay in my own mouth like a sponge—inspired in me a kind of rage.

      No more lying. No more zoning out, I told myself. Go with the twists and turns, the blazing maze. Trust that your truth will unlock the other person’s. And even if it doesn’t, at least it will unlock your own. The living room had grown larger, its corners swabbed with daylight. And, when I looked outside, the buildings no longer stood in hues of monotone gray. My heart beat hard in my chest.

      “Oh, baby, I’m so sorry,” I began. “It just doesn’t work between us. Don’t you feel it?”

      Soon we were weeping—terrified, and sad to inflict so much pain on one another. We’d been together for years. A sharp awareness of time itself swept in—I felt as if I were inflicting time itself on my boyfriend. “I’m sorry,” I said again. But color was seeping into things, the russet brick of the neighboring buildings, the silver zigzag cascade of the fire escapes, and I could finally see, closer, oh, the particular, killing handsomeness of this man before me.

      I ultimately left, packing my green camp trunk, lugging down the stairs the old Smith Corona typewriter with its key the size of an eyelash at the end of a string. I drove away in my burgundy VW that had no heat, my body trembling. The windows of stores flashed a sea blue. The sun saturated the sky. Energy that had been trapped in our relationship seemed to have been let loose. I noticed a tree with acorns as big as plums and jagged leaves the size of handkerchiefs. 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,

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