Upon arrival, the interior of the building could best be described as institutional — the white hallways and matching red doors. My office in the loft is a white cage without windows, except for a ceiling skylight. Boxes within boxes. It’s my room, yes, it’s my own. Yet a room of one’s own can feel like a prison if there’s no reason to leave it.
The complex is in a depressed, isolated area, with a project just down the street. Downtown Durham a curious mixture of farm-to-table restaurants written up in the Times (there’s a wonderful farmer’s market on Saturdays and an Italian sandwich place we frequent) in the midst of empty storefronts and then everywhere, just outside the frame, an abject, almost rural poverty. Nothing’s walkable from where we live. Lately I have been living indoors. The ghost train bellowing in the distance.
I am unable to find work teaching, or any work really. We find upon arrival that North Carolina is a “right to work” state (no unions) and in the midst of a budget crisis. I had an interview at a used bookstore in Chapel Hill, part of me fancied this, a return to being Woolf ’s girl behind the counter. Ultimately, though, I was not offered the $10-an-hour job after I tried to wrangle the starting date so I could go with John to Scandinavia for a conference where he was giving a talk.
I entertain entering a frivolous femme period. I take on new selves and lives. In Chicago I buy two amazing dresses from my favorite boutique, sort of goth-flapper creations — they are my Jeanne d’Arc dresses, as Zelda said of the blue number in which she sauntered down the Champs-Élysées. I bought the dresses so I could bear living here and being the wife-of, and having no employment possibilities to speak of, even though with losing my paltry teaching income we couldn’t afford them. I bought the dresses so I could start acting out some version of witchy debutantism or eccentric post-flapperism.
Of course I don’t wear them, because I don’t leave the house, and instead I lounge around braless in sweaty T-shirts and pajama bottoms, attempting to write something. Attempting to survive the room, the afternoon. And I don’t have any boulevard upon which to indulge in flânerie.
Days I feel like Maya Deren trapped inside the house in the Hollywood Hills in Meshes of the Afternoon, stabbing at ghosts and doubles.
I know I should leave the house when I am stuck, stalling, but I feel this clawing inside, like if I do not write well I do not deserve the day. I tend to slink into a slothlike demi-existence, watching things behind a screen. This as opposed to doing housework to fill up the time, which often terrifies me, the notion of filling up time, something about the silence and banality of the quotidian.
Some days the only way to escape from my life, and the screens, is to sink into a bath. Sylvia Plath writing in The Bell Jar about the spiritual effects of a hot soak. I gather up all my books and read them with wet fingers. Except we live in a green building, so the bathtub stops pouring hot too soon, leaving me only half-submerged, my breasts and stomach embarrassed, exposed.
I go under the water. Relax into blankness.
I am Ophelia, drowning in the pool of my own emotions.
Yet when things are too intense, when I cannot do anything productive, I can still blog the emotional upheavals and anxieties of my current and changing existence. I compulsively blog through the slog and sludge of my days. Anais Nin’s “opium habit” of her diary that Otto Rank wanted to cure her from. Gratifying to know I have readers at the other end, fellow writers from around the world writing me little notes of encouragement in the comments sections. The Internet cages me. The Internet also allows me to communicate through the day, a dialogue. It allows me to fight against my own erasure.
Online I write about my body, currently in revolt. Another reason for the constant hot baths: lately my periods have made me a prisoner of my body. Bowed over with cramps, I am now bedded for days, heating pad, drugs, moaning. Until it becomes too expensive to keep up I go for twice-weekly acupuncture appointments in Chapel Hill — at the beginning, this is what gets me out of the house. How exquisitively tender my body has become — the bruised acupuncture point over my uterus, the agony of my digestive tract. At the doctor’s office there are Audubon and bicycling magazines — a step up, I suppose, from the gendered periodicals of Akron, auto magazines and Ladies’ Home Journal or US Weekly. There is one Vogue with Anne Hathaway grinning horsily from the cover that I reread every time I am there.
They don’t know what the fuck’s wrong with me, it’s probably a combination of IBS and worsening endometriosis, but so far I have eschewed more surgical investigations (I AM MADAME OVARY). John and I endlessly discuss the state of my bowels like Tom with Viv. All the mad wives, once they are named as ill, obsessively recording every aspect of the organic. Following whatever routine they thought would provide relief — while all along it is impressed upon them that it’s probably psychological, the result of nerves.
Did Zelda think she was ill? She too became a patient-patient.
I have begun to watch minutely whatever I eat. I take notes next to a new list of potential supplements, the old diet of white soft digestibles thrown out, now I regard gluten as the new potential villain. Probiotics, evening primrose, enzymes, cal-mag. I consider going the raw food route for about a week, watching a stream of unintentionally hilarious videos on Youtube, featuring suburban housewives guiding me through making a raw kale salad with avocado, the diamond rings glittering on their hands, massaging the greens with oil. I wonder at the impetus behind these anonymous women’s elaborate diets. There are so many steps, soaking, dehydrating, sprouting, etc., one could spend all day preparing food that is demolished in minutes.
Sometimes I worry I have become one of those women I used to pity.
During the day I engage in my various obsessions with the lives of fictional characters.
Virginia Woolf begins Room circling around the topic of Women and Fiction, asking whether she is supposed to discourse about women who write fiction or women who are fictions. In her essays on literary women collected in Seduction and Betrayal, including an essay on Zelda, the critic Elizabeth Hardwick makes a similar move — all of these women are characters to her, and she’s interested in their analysis, whether they are Ibsen’s heroines or the Brontë sisters. But perhaps that’s because many of these women — especially the unhappy wives she circles around — were characters. Even if some later attempted to become authors. And she too was a character as well as an author: “Lizzie” in her ex-husband Robert Lowell’s poetic cycle The Dolphin, playing the abandoned, angry wife with such aplomb. It was in the aftermath of Lowell leaving Hardwick for another writer, the beautiful novelist-aristocrat Lady Caroline Blackwood, that Hardwick became a theorist of the literary wife, or as she put it, the “text of the family” (although she was really only interested in the dyad, the “bobbed coupling,” to use Lowell’s phrase in his Dolphin cycle, which vampirized both her voice and Caroline’s).
It is HIS book. She doesn’t write herself.
Zelda was always stuck as a character in his literature. Leaving her organza dresses and Montgomery, Alabama for Patou suits and Manhattan in that honeymoon year, abandoning her life as a local celebutante to a different, grander sort of celebrity, one where she was always inextricably linked to her husband, who was seen as her author.
Elizabeth Hardwick part of the exodus of American girls, the generation after Zelda, who traveled alone by train to the big city. Hardwick who came to New York from Kentucky to study the metaphysical poets at Columbia University, John Donne and the rest, and whose goal, she said, was to become a “New York Jewish intellectual,” later helping found The New York Review of Books, where most of the essays in Seduction and Betrayal first appeared. (I love that anecdote Hardwick tells in an interview, that she decided to study 17th century English literature because it was all the rage, because of T.S. Eliot maybe, but after her first seminar she woke up, panicked, that she didn’t know when the 17th century was, her literary knowledge beginning at 1920.)