LITMIR.BIZ

      1

      Wild Women Out of Control,

      or How I Became a Writer

      At four the little girl’s hair is a frizzy mass, a knot of tight curls around her head instead of the fine straight silk of other girls her age. Her mother makes a forlorn attempt to set it right, to put it in pin curls and smooth it out. But when the bobby pins come off, instead of the glossy curls the mother hoped for, the daughter’s frizz now stands up wildly all over her head.

      “Witch! You’re a witch!” Her older brother dances in a circle around her, pointing and doubling up in laughter.

      The little girl scowls. “I am a witch,” she says menacingly. “And witches know everything.”

      The brother’s laughter collapses. He races to the kitchen calling to his mother. “Sara says she’s a witch and witches know everything. She doesn’t really know everything, does she?”

      Their mother soothes him and tells him of course not, that his sister was just making it up, she doesn’t really know everything. That was my first story.

      Soon after that my mother, weary of my unruly frizz and the tears at shampoo time, cut my hair close to my head. If I tried letting it grow out my father would mock me at dinner, telling me I looked like a sheep dog and to get it cut. I wore it short for many years, like my four brothers, like a fifth son.

      In the stories I told in my head my hair was long and straight and glossy. In the sixties, when the fashion was for hair like Cher’s used to be—a heavy curtain down to her knees—I spent hours of misery putting chemical straighteners on my hair, only to have it flame out around my head like the burning bush. Now that I’m post-menopausal, the traditional time when women become witches, my hair has lost its zip; it’s thin and lanky and I would love to have my wild halo restored. I suppose that is the nature of the unsatisfied life, always to want what isn’t possible.

      Jewish friends of mine who grew up in larger communities tell of being taunted for having “mattress heads.” The first time I heard this, I imagined heads covered in grey-and-white striped ticking; I didn’t realize it was an insult, tossed at both Jews and Blacks, meaning our hair had the wiry quality of mattress stuffing. In my small town, no one called me that. My loathing was mostly internally induced, by parental strictures, and by isolation from the larger world; I came to adulthood feeling that a glass wall separated me from the universe of people who knew how to act, dress, feel pleasure. Even today, I often feel numb and bewildered. I try to believe it’s the result of my isolated upbringing, but it’s hard to believe that, deep down, I’m not a monster, a lusus naturae.

      My parents, both desperately needy, unable to help each other, laid on me, their only daughter, the role of domestic support. My mother was bitter over opportunities lost or denied and took a savage delight in the failures of other women. Such failures proved to her that she had been defeated by the System, not by her own fears or withdrawals from life. Accepted into medical school in 1941, when that door was closed to many women, she chose not to take the bus from her home town to the University of Illinois on the day she needed to report to class. She could never explain why she did that, only giving a rambling tale of expecting more from the school than being consigned to a bus journey. If I brought home any achievement from school, she was almost savage in her bitterness. I quickly learned to keep success to myself.

      Afraid of women and of female sexuality, my father, who thought it funny to wear a button demanding repeal of the 19th Amendment—which had granted US women suffrage in 1920—actually imputed minor witchlike powers to me. I could change traffic lights, for instance; my Gorgon stare could freeze men. I could do nothing to make myself an equal person.

      Male writers such as Sartre and Bellow have recorded knowing early in life that their destiny lay in literature. Bellow knew he was “born to be a performing and interpretive creature,” Sartre that he was born for words.

      I call myself a writer, but I do so without great conviction. Where did they get this sense, I wonder? Like them, I wrote from an early age, but I knew that as in all fields literature belonged to men. The history and biography we studied in school told tales of the deeds of men. We learned to speak of the aspirations of mankind and of “man’s inhumanity to man”—his inhumanity to woman not being worth recording.

      The literature we studied was all written by men. If they were like me Bellow and Sartre may not even have known that women wrote in a serious way, that the first novelist to treat psychology as a significant force in human life was a woman. Sartre claims his boyhood was spent with Flaubert, Cornelius, Homer, Shakespeare; Bellow, that he turned to Anderson, Dreiser, Edgar Lee Masters, Vachel Lindsay (I do always wonder about such grandiose reports. Like politicians on the morning shows who say they had yogurt and granola for breakfast when they were really eating fried eggs and bacon, was Bellow in fact lost in the Tom Swift tales?)

      The books Sartre’s grandmother read were feminine, he says, and he was taught by his grandfather to deem them inferior. By an odd chance I learned the same lesson. We studied only one novel by a woman in my school—and her first name was George.

      While Sartre’s mother fueled his childish ambitions by binding his writings and forcing them on the neighbors (“Regardez, how my Jean-Paul is a writer!”), all my childhood dreams were directed to the present, specifically to escaping it, until I learned escape wasn’t possible. My older brother and I would look at a picture of a ship at sea or a beautiful island, some strange wonderful place we wished to be. We would hold hands and run toward the picture and, by wishing hard enough, be transported into it. More often we climbed onto the two hitching posts in front of our house—remnants of the days when visitors had horses to tie up. After turning around three times we jumped, landing in a magic world where we fought dragons and elves came to our rescue.

      The walls of my bedroom were papered with cabbage roses and behind the roses lay an imagined corridor, a long hall whose windows looked on perpetual sunlight. After going to bed I would escape into this corridor and live a life of total secrecy.

      Little Women was the staple of my childhood, the book of girls, maternal love, women’s friendship. I read Little Women for the first time when I was eight, and out of school for three weeks with measles. I wept copiously over Beth, I worried about Jo’s temper, envied her for her attic room with its tin desk and pet rat, was put off by Amy and her stuck-up ways, and wished ardently, not just for a mother like Marmee, but for the rational calm of the March household.

      I revisited Little Women dozens of times in the next ten years. The book drew me for many reasons. Despite their earnest efforts to follow the progress of Bunyan’s pilgrim, the March sisters are no plaster saints. Each struggles with serious flaws—Jo’s temper, Meg’s vanity, Amy’s greed, Beth’s fear. They love and support each other, but also have the kinds of fights only siblings can produce. Indeed, their occasional fights make their intimacy more welcome. Their quarrels could assume alarming proportions, as when Amy burns Jo’s only copy of her stories, the careful rewriting of many years’ work. In retaliation, Jo lets Amy skate to her near-death in a spot on the river where Jo knows the ice is thin. I never thought Marmee made Amy express as much remorse as she should have—Jo had to assume an outsize mantle of contrition over her sister’s accident—but Amy was alive. Jo’s work was gone forever.

      Looking back, I realize that among the things which drew me to the March sisters was just that: their sisterhood. Sisterhood allowed them to fight, make up, share each other’s concerns. This was an intimacy missing from my own life. I have four brothers, but no sisters. (My mother also modeled herself, very consciously, not on Marmee, but on Don Marquis’s Mehitabel; she would look at us and snarl, “What did I do to deserve all those damned kittens?”)

      As a child I missed having someone who shared my most personal interests, not to mention my fears. If I wanted to play with my brothers, I had to act out the Korean war, not play dress-up. While I loved baseball, I liked dolls,

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