One Year Earlier
Come Sunday morning, I wanted to go home.
And by home, I meant Tarble. Wisconsin. The Midwest. I wanted to go where memories of my father had been suppressed, where my guilt had been tamed, where I had felt sane. I hoped what happened in New Orleans—seeing Virginia Woolf in the courtyard and Charlotte Perkins Gilman in the cemetery, not to mention misplacing my thesis notes—was due to a temporary state of stress, provoked by mere proximity to the city. When I left New Orleans, my mental clarity would be reinstated.
And it was, at least at first. In the weeks following our trip, I drowned myself in research, trying to make up for losing my notes—I never did find them—and read much more than necessary or required: two biographies on Woolf and Gilman each, one on Sylvia Plath, articles on Anne Sexton and Sarah Kane, and three psychology texts on female depression and suicide. To those who noticed and subsequently questioned my compulsion—mainly Heidi, and sometimes my mom, when I went home or she came to visit—I explained the importance of these books to the success of my thesis, all the while avoiding their gaze. The only person who could tear me away from my work was Mark. But I spent most of our time together talking about Woolf and Gilman and Plath; too much, it seemed.
“Ruby, I’m starting to feel like a polygamist,” Mark said one November night, after we’d finished making love at his cabin.
“Why? Because you haven’t divorced Meryl yet?”
He shook his head so solemnly, I wondered if he ever intended on leaving her. Whenever I’d asked about divorce he always said, these things take time.
“Because when I’m with you, we’re not alone,” he said, pulling himself to a seated position, a pillow between his back and the wall. “Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath always tag along. It’s getting a little crowded for my tastes. I’m a one-woman man.”
I questioned his choice of words. He was still married to Meryl, after all.
“You know what I mean,” he added.
It was true; I was obsessed. I couldn’t keep Virginia Woolf and the others off my mind, even at night. As soon as my head hit the pillow, as soon as I closed my eyes, I saw Woolf draft her suicide letter in drippy ink before loading stones into her pockets; I saw Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s fragile white hands administer a lethal dose of chloroform; I saw Sylvia Plath wetting dish towels in the kitchen sink, wringing them out, placing them under the door jambs so the gas from the oven would not seep into the rest of her house, where her two children slept. Just like the nightmares about my father, these visions prompted me to swallow a sleeping pill before bed each night. But I never stopped working on my thesis. Because reading, taking notes, constructing theories, and supporting those theories with concrete information from concrete materials made me feel rational. It made me feel sane. And if I stopped my mind from this cerebral process, I worried I’d see another dead woman writer in time. The irony did not escape me. In order to keep myself from going crazy, I had to study women of questionable sanity.
“I’m sorry,” I told Mark. “I’m almost done. You’ll have me all to yourself soon.”
“Don’t get me wrong, I love your dedication. It’s every teacher’s dream to have a student so fixated on research. And I’m not asking you to slow down your efforts. Actually, I was thinking we should take a break, just until your thesis is complete.”
“A break?” My voice cracked.
“Not break. Wrong word. I just meant you should put your thesis first, and let me come second. Just for now, just until you finish.”
I sat up then and pulled the sheets up tighter over my bare breasts, suddenly feeling vulnerable and exposed.
“Why do I have to put one before the other?” I asked. “I can do both—work on my thesis and spend time with you.”
“I know you can. But you’ve been . . . I just want you to know I understand if you can’t see me much the next couple of weeks. My feelings won’t be hurt. In fact, I have a lot of research to do too, before all your papers come in and I’m knee-deep in grading.”
“Research? For what?”
“A paper for a literary journal. When the tenure committee reviews me next semester, I have to look prolific. Sadly, it’s all about quantity not quality.”
“What’s your paper about?”
He cringed. “I’d rather not say, until it’s completed. It’s a creativity thing. Talking about it somehow negates it. You understand. I guess I’m superstitious.”
I didn’t think Mark believed in superstition.
“Okay,” I auto-replied, and then: “Why do I get the feeling that something’s changed? Between us? All of a sudden?”
“Nothing has changed.” He kissed me then, quick and hard and dry, his lips barely moving. “This is just a stressful time of year, as we near the end of the semester. It always is. But we’re grown-ups, right? We understand that sometimes work has to come first. That doesn’t change how we feel about each other. Actually, it strengthens our relationship.”
I nodded, even though my head and my heart were still trying to make sense of the conversation. “So we’re okay?” I asked.
“Absolutely.” He patted my shoulder, the way you pat someone’s back during a hug, a gesture that always seemed reserved for acquaintances, not friends. “But I should drive you back soon. It’s almost midnight.”
I swallowed a lump of disappointment. “I thought I was going to stay.”
“Did you?” He stood to slide on his jeans. “It’s just that I have an early meeting tomorrow morning. And to be honest, I haven’t been sleeping well.” He pulled his T-shirt on, then ran a hand over his hair to smooth it. “But you can stay. I mean, if you really want to.”
“No, I’ll go.” I stood but covered my body with the sheet until I found my crumpled clothes on the floor. “I need a good night’s sleep too.”
“See? You get it. Sometimes you need to take care of yourself first, so you can be your best for others, right?”
I nodded hesitantly.
“Right,” he repeated, checking the time as he fastened his watch. “Now, let’s get you back to campus.”
I didn’t see Mark much the next few weeks; well, I saw him, but only during senior seminar, to which he always arrived late or let us out early. A few days, he even canceled class, saying we could work on our papers instead. While in class, I tried to get his attention—catch his gaze, share a smile—but he never looked at me. I wanted to believe he was stressed-out from his research and end-of-semester grading. But he showed no signs of anxiety. In fact, he seemed abundantly happy and carefree, with a spring in his step, a glint in his eye.
Since I had no interactions with Mark, my thesis became my one and only concern, and I continued to read, research, write, and revise without abandon, even staying up all night. I submitted my paper early, hoping Mark would see me then, if he knew my work was complete, and I was free and clear of academic obligations. But nothing changed after I turned my thesis in. Actually, it got worse. He flat out ignored me in class, calling on another student when I raised my hand, pretending not to hear me when I called after him in the hallway. When I finally cornered him one afternoon in the faculty parking lot, he apologized, and told me to hold on just a little bit longer. Once the semester was over, things would change, he said.
On the day we were to receive our thesis grades, my mother called in the morning with surprise news: she was flying us to Paris for winter break. We’d leave in two days and be there for two weeks, for Christmas and New Year’s. It was not only my Christmas gift, she said, but also a congratulatory vacation for working so diligently on my thesis all semester.
“I don’t know how I did yet,” I said.
“You always get an A,” she teased.
I knew the trip was more than a holiday gift, more than a reward for studying hard. It was an escape—from a Christmas without Dad. We were quickly approaching the one-year anniversary of his death; that was evident everywhere, from the strands of red and green lights lining dorm room windows to the holiday songs blaring inside the local Piggly Wiggly grocery store. If we went to Paris, thousands of miles away, Christmas wouldn’t hurt as much. At least, that was the idea.
I’d never been to Paris, and though I’d always wanted to go, I also didn’t want to leave Mark. With the papers finally graded, the semester officially over, I hoped time would once again be ours, and I wanted to make up for what we’d lost. But I couldn’t say no to my mother, so I reluctantly started packing for two whole weeks without him. If I packed that morning, I rationalized, I’d have more time to spend with Mark that night. Problem was, I didn’t have a big enough suitcase. Fortunately, Beth Richards, who lived a few doors down, gladly handed over her paisley print luggage, in which she normally stored extra blankets for chilly Wisconsin nights. I filled it to the brim that morning, even writing my name on the luggage tag, so there would be nothing to do later, so there would be nothing to pry my attention away from Mark, now that the semester was over, now that we could finally be together.
Heidi walked in while I was folding clothes.
“What are you doing?” she asked, hands on her hips. “Are you moving out?”
“Moving out? Why would I be moving out?”
“Then what are you doing?” she asked again.
“Packing. My mom is taking me to Paris.”
“You’re joking.”
“Why would I be joking?”
“I can’t believe your mom doesn’t—” she started but stopped. “Ruby, what’s going on with you?” she asked matter-of-factly.
“What do you mean?”
She drew her head back and flitted her eyelids. “Do you know you left our door wide open yesterday?”
“Did I? Sorry.” I walked behind my dresser, where I’d hid from her in the past.
She followed. “I know the anniversary of your father’s death is coming up. I think you’re depressed.”
The thought had crossed my mind too. “You’re crazy.”
“I’m crazy? I’m not the one who tore up the room last week looking for my keys, which ended up being in my pocket. I’m not the one collecting rocks on the windowsill.”
The rocks. Ever since I submitted my thesis, I’d started taking long walks on the beach. And every time, I found a smooth, skipping stone I liked. I kept them on the windowsill next to my bed. I liked rubbing their cool, hard, even exterior.
“Let me help you,” Heidi said, sweetly. “Talk to me.”
“There’s nothing to talk about.”
“Really? What about your desk?” She gestured to the books upon books, the Internet articles, the notes covering every available inch of my desktop. “That’s hoarding.”
“That’s research,” I argued.
“For a paper you already wrote, already turned in. What is it still doing there?”
I didn’t answer.
“Fine, you don’t want to talk about the desk. Have you seen yourself lately?”
I stole a look in the mirror. Dark circles rimmed my eyes. My hair shined, but not in that healthy just-out-of-the-salon way. It was oil buildup—I hadn’t washed it in five days. My skin seemed a shade lighter than usual. I’d eaten Skittles for lunch three days in a row.
“I haven’t slept much lately, that’s all,” I told Heidi. “Everyone looks like shit lately. It’s that time of year. Those of us who have real majors had actual papers to turn in.”
Heidi, a public relations major, didn’t react to my insult. “Had papers to turn in. Had. You said it yourself. Past tense, Ruby.” She stared at me. “Do you need help? Are you crying out for help?”
“I’m not crying.” To prove the point, I dramatically pulled at the skin below my eyes to show they were dry inside.
I looked into Heidi’s brown eyes and saw her love for me, the depth of her care, what was missing from Mark’s eyes of late, no matter how long I looked, no matter how often. Had he noticed the same changes, the same behaviors in me? Was that why he didn’t want to look at me? See me? Did he think I’d let myself go?
“Why are you so angry?” I charged. “What do you care if I wash my hair?”
“Because I’m your best friend.” She grabbed my arm. “Or I guess I was your best friend. Before you started hanging out instead with Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath.”
“You’re a bitch,” I said.
Heidi shook her head, her eyes brimming with tears. She released her grip. “I’m moving into the quad with Rachel and Joy and Amanda,” she said. “I’ll take my stuff this afternoon when you’re at class. I’m sleeping there tonight.”
“Fine,” I said.
“They’ll assign you a new roommate next semester,” she added.
I’ll pay extra for a single, I thought. Without a roommate, Mark could call me anytime.
“Whatever,” I said.
“Whatever,” she repeated, before slamming the door.
That afternoon Mark returned our papers, facedown on each of our desks. And then he abruptly ended class, claiming the English department was hiring a new professor for the coming school year and he had to sit in on interviews. I wondered if that was true, or if he was simply afraid of confrontation, afraid I was going to be angry with him.
He’d given me a D, after all.
I should have been angry, hot-cheeked and fuming, but I wasn’t. Instead, I walked back to my room in a daze, disoriented by the bold dismissive consonant Mark had written on the front of my thesis. The grade felt less like an appraisal of my work and more like a punishment, a cold slap on the hand. The fury would come later, once the initial sting wore off. But first, I felt something worse than rage. I felt unworthy of his love.
I prepared to call Mark on his cell phone as soon as I got in. But he’d already left a message on my machine, something he never did, for fear Heidi would hear.
“Ruby, it’s me,” Mark said in his message after an initial pause. “We can’t see each other. Not anymore.” His voice was higher pitched than usual. “It’s the best thing. For you. Right now. You need . . . I’m a distraction, aren’t I? You have graduate school ahead of you. And I’m an anchor weighing you down. So it’s over. It has to be over. I’m working things out with my wife. She’s coming here for Christmas. It’s the right thing to do.”
I felt as if a string had been looped around my throat, then tied through the very holes of my nostrils. It stung. I stood there unable to move but unable to cry, and I listened to the message again, hoping I’d heard wrong, hoping I’d misunderstood. But the conclusion was the same: he’d broken up with me.
But why did he do it? I thought. Not because he didn’t love me. And not because he loved Meryl. But because it was the right thing to do and he was an anchor weighing me down. He was more concerned about my future—my studies, my getting into graduate school—than he was about his own feelings, what he wanted. He wasn’t being selfish; he was being selfless.
Or had he fallen out of love with me? I wondered. I noted the growing distance in his eyes, his voice devoid of its once earnest tone. And in his message, how he said, “You need . . .” What did he think I needed? Professional help? Had I somehow driven him further away these past few weeks? Because I was paranoid and anxious from his lack of attention?
I can’t let him put me first, I resolved as I prepared to drive to his cabin. He would be flattered by the gesture, my determination to talk to him in person. At home, off campus, he would not be able to deny his love for me.
I would break him.
I parked my car down the gravel road, so he wouldn’t hear the engine when I pulled in, and went by foot to his cabin, stuffing my hands into the pockets of my coat, bringing them forward to compensate for it being unzipped. My tears had left my skin vulnerable to the arctic blast, and the harsh wind whipped my cheeks like flags. In the dark, cold night, the cabin looked warm and inviting as an ethereal glow from the fireplace shone through the sheer curtains of the front window.
“Ruby, please come in from the cold” I imagined Mark saying, before hugging me until I returned to a normal body temperature. I would say nothing. One look in my eyes. That’s all it would take.
I knocked on the front door—Mark had never installed a doorbell—but my cold, gloveless knuckles only skimmed the surface, and the sound drowned into the heavy wood. I hadn’t heard it myself. Mark wouldn’t hear it, either. I moved to the front window then, and I saw the light grow brighter at the center of the room. I made out the back of Mark’s head a few inches above the sofa cushions. I saw his elbow rise, then fall. He was drinking something, drowning his sorrows, I presumed.
But just before my fingertip tapped the icy windowpane, I saw a second figure. It neared the couch and straddled Mark, creating a sort of Rorschach inkblot made blurry by the fire. I could no longer discern Mark or the back of his head. The two bodies became one. And then the figure emerged from the blob like a dolphin from water. It grew taller, towered above him. It blocked the firelight in some spots but not in others, smoothly like curves of an ornate wine glass.
Out then in, out then in.
The epitome of woman.
Meryl.
Ducking under the sill, I lost my footing and fell into a snowdrift, singeing my skin on the cold. My heart shattered with the realization: Mark really had gone back to his wife. And there, tucked in the alcove beside the house, was proof. The body of the car blended into the night. But in the moonlight, I could tell it was black, could make out the license applied for plate. Beneath my fingertips, the word Jetta graced the bumper. Obviously Meryl had driven up from Washington, D. C., to spend the holidays with him.
The sight of Meryl through the window, her car in the driveway, sent a heat through my chest into my throat. My cheeks flared. My hands, however, were frozen by that point, and I reached into my pockets to keep them warm. There I fumbled with my key chain and began to run the tips of my fingers along the jagged edges. And soon, I brought the key with the sharpest ridges to Meryl’s driver-side door and dug it deep into the finish until it caught in the groove. I did this more times than I can remember before the key finally slipped in my frozen hand, and I sliced my knuckle.
Sucking on the wound, I drove down the country road, away from Mark’s cabin.
It is a devastating taste—the bitterness of blood, the saline of tears.
I drove around for an hour but didn’t know where to go, so I returned to Tarble, parked my car in the lot, and walked back to the dorm. The lake appeared wild with rage that night. Thick, gray waves—topped with a white foam that reminded me of a dog with rabies, a sure sign of an impending winter storm—pummeled the rocky shore. Despite this, I decided to take a detour to the frozen sand beside the unruly waters.
Down on the beach, the wind off the lake, coupled by the spray of waves, seemed to drop the temperature another twenty degrees. After a few minutes, the cold actually felt warm against my exposed skin, as it burned my cheeks and mouth, and somehow, lessened the pain throbbing my gut. I was all out of tears by then, my eyes almost swollen shut from crying. I could barely see where I was going, and I didn’t care. If I tripped and fell into the water, so be it. The waves would carry me out to sea. I imagined loading the stones from my windowsill into my coat pockets, just as Virginia Woolf had.
I was halfway down the beach when I sensed I was not alone. And from a distance, I made out a figure walking toward me. Man or woman, I could not say at first, thanks to the veil of night, my swollen eyes, and the spray of water. But as it grew nearer, my pulse quickened at the form I eventually discerned.
It was a woman. Dishwater blond hair curled up on the sides, 1950s style. Even at night, her lips appeared dark with what could only be red lipstick. She was wearing a camel-colored peacoat.
I stopped, stared down at the sand, then looked up again. I shook my head, stomped my feet, even grunted, trying to make her disappear. But she came closer, and unlike Woolf and Gilman, she spoke to me.
“Ruby,” she said.
And that’s when I ran. I’m not sure if she chased me, because I never looked back, not until I arrived at the front steps of North Hall. By that time, no one occupied the sidewalk behind me, as far as I could see.
But the image of a young Sylvia Plath remained.
Don’t try to talk just yet,” the nurse whispered, her full lips pursed like a mother ready to kiss the forehead of a baby. “They pumped your stomach. The tube bruised your vocal cords. Your voice is probably hoarse.”
I saw the nurse write something on a clipboard, what I assumed was my chart, then made eye contact again. “You have a visitor,” she added. “But perhaps you should rest a bit more before seeing anyone.”
A visitor. Mark. He had heard what happened, had rushed to the hospital to apologize, to tell me he’d made a mistake. He’d almost lost me forever.
“Who is it?” I tried to sit up but lost energy.
“Trisha, your resident assistant. She was the one who found you and called 911.”
“No one else?”
“Your mother will be here shortly, and a few girls, about five of them I think, came right away, but we told them to go back to the college. We didn’t know how long it would be. They said they would come back.”
“Any . . . men?”
The nurse’s eyes filled with pity. “I’m sorry.”
A few minutes later, I watched the door inch open. My mother’s eyes were a bright green but softened around the edges by sadness or fear or maybe anger. When I saw her, I unraveled. I closed my eyes, but the tears continued to break through the barrier.
“It’s okay, sweetheart,” she said, getting into bed with me. Soon her arms encircled me fully. She squeezed me, held me in the strength and security of a mother’s love. “I’m here.”
We sat like that, me tucked into my mother’s body, and drew breaths in synchrony, like we must have done when I was an infant still learning how to breathe, still learning the rhythm of life.
“I’m sorry,” she said into the silence. “I knew something wasn’t right with you, but I just assumed you were stressed about writing your thesis. That’s why I wanted to take you to Paris. I thought you needed to relax. I didn’t realize . . .”
“I’m sorry about Paris,” I said. “Can you get your money back?”
She shook her head, as if to say that money should be the last of my worries. And then she took my hand and held it, securing me to her like the clasp on a mountain climber’s rope. “You are alive. By the grace of God, you are still here.” She looked into my eyes once more, tucked a hair behind my ear.
“I didn’t mean to do it, not really.” My voice was hoarse like the nurse had told me it would be. But it was also monotone and robotic, lacking an element that made it sound human. “I just wanted to sleep, so I took my pills. And then I took more. And then I couldn’t stop myself. I just kept swallowing pills.”
That was true. The sleeping pills were at first a practical idea. I wanted to escape the pain, hoping I’d wake up, and it would all be a nightmare, that Mark would still love me, that he hadn’t gotten back together with Meryl. I remembered taking pill after pill from the bottle, placing each on my tongue, counting the pills in my mind. Ten. Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen.
How far had I gotten? I couldn’t remember. I only remember seeing Sylvia Plath on the beach. Had she inspired me to do it, to kill myself just as she had?
I knew from my research that the notably bipolar Plath committed suicide at age thirty by sticking her head in an oven full of gas. Many blamed her suicide on the infidelity of her husband, the English poet Ted Hughes. But Plath had tried to kill herself before. While a student at the all-girl Smith College she had swallowed sleeping pills—forty-eight of them—in a failed suicide attempt. She later based her only published novel, The Bell Jar, on that experience.
Mom tightened her grip. “Why, Ruby?”
If I revealed who I really was, a woman without morals and values, a woman who sleeps with married men, my professor no less, I feared my mom might never look at me the same way. There would be a small speck of black in her green eyes, a shadow, a deep pocket of disappointment. So I told her everything then, just not about Mark. I told her how Heidi moved out; how I’d been feeling anxious and sad and depressed the past few weeks; how I’d left my dorm room door wide open and collected random objects like the rocks; and how I’d received a D on my thesis, a paper I’d given up a whole semester of my life to write.
“Maybe you can rewrite it,” she offered. “Resubmit it next semester?”
I bit my lip. Mark had to have heard the news by then, and he hadn’t come. I realized then that things would never be the same. Could I go back to simply being his student? Could I go back to Tarble, now that everyone knew I tried to kill myself?
I looked into my mother’s soft, forgiving eyes.
“No,” I told her. “I’m dropping out.”