Two Girls
Every story worth telling is a love letter.
In 1972, I was teaching two sections of English literature at Hunter College. It was how I was supporting myself, and my rent, which was $200 a month, cost half my salary. I had separated from Bruce, and I was living in a small apartment in a brownstone on Charles Street. I loved the tightrope feeling of my life in those days. I loved it then, in a fluttery, expectant way, and I love it now, looking back, because I can so easily see that girl who was not ever, really, going to fit the category of something other than girl. Woman? Well, sure, as a political category. As an emotional category, today anyway, I like girl. I like girl in the sense of who are you, and what is going on in that girl suit?
This was before I was publishing my writing regularly. I was still working on a dissertation to complete a PhD at Columbia. I didn’t want to write the dissertation. I didn’t want to produce academic-speak on the page. I didn’t finish the dissertation. I regret not finishing it because mostly I finish things.
Maybe this isn’t accurate. Maybe I only finish things I feel a strong desire to do in the first place. At some point in my life, I became a person who told others: “Don’t write anything you don’t really want to write. There will be no energy or pleasure in it for you. You will produce a dead thing.”
I remember liking the students I taught at Hunter. Most of them were younger than me by a few years. Several were older, and I tried with each class to create a subculture of camaraderie and openness. I consider myself not a very good teacher. I’m not a great listener, and I have too much to say about writing that’s pushy. I enjoy teaching with Richard because he’s good at listening. He’s good at figuring out what other people want, and he isn’t pushy about his style of prose.
Maybe the way I am a good teacher is this thing about the friendliness in a group of people. Allowing them to feel relaxed about what they may say. I don’t know. I’m thinking about these things in response to a notebook entry I came upon written in 1972. It concerns a student who came to see me one day. Here is what I wrote:
“A student came to see me after a three-week absence from class. The student said, ‘I didn’t want you to think I’ve been away because I didn’t like the class or you. I have long depressions. Two weeks ago, I tried to kill myself with pills, fourteen Nembutals, but right after taking them I went straight to the hospital. My psychiatrist says I didn’t really want to kill myself, but I really did. I’ve done it before. Once, I stayed in bed for a year, gently touching my arm. You’re very nice. I don’t mean to burden you’. She said she liked the course very much, but she had no desire to do anything. She felt numb. ‘Sometimes, I don’t feel anything when I pinch myself’, she said. I started to respond and stopped. I understood she was speaking intimately about herself, only herself. She said, ‘My doctor says I think I’m sicker than I am’. Her hands looked tiny. She said, ‘I’m amazed you can stand up before a whole group of people and be so energetic and coherent’” I told her, ‘Often, I don’t know what I’m doing’.”
Now, as I read this passage, I don’t see the classroom filled with students, or the windows, or 67th Street where Hunter College is located. I don’t see the student, except her small hands, as noted. I see two people—two female humans—sitting in an empty room with a desk and chairs. I see them trying to see the other as separate, whole, and unknowable—and that project joins them.
Why did I write the scene down? I wasn’t good at writing scenes and looking out, not in my memory of my abilities. When, every so often, I read through old notebooks, for no reason I can tell you, maybe looking for new material that is old material I can write again for the first time. When I read through old notebooks, a scene will jump out because good scenes are rare. What makes this a good scene is that the narrator is looking out at another person and taking her in. If I were going to fictionalize the moment, because my memory has stopped, honestly it’s stopped, if I were going to fictionalize the scene, what would I want to add to bring it more to life?
A perfume she’s wearing? The shine of her hair? The sound of children laughing on the street as they walk home from school? The sandwich she’s carrying and doesn’t eat? How would each of these additions, invented in the moment, work as prompts to think further about the depressed girl and the way the depressed girl makes the narrator feel about her own life?
I found myself comparing us even without these fictional additions. What is it like to take pills in order to die? What do all the people I have known feel, the people who have told me they were depressed? As I sat with the girl, who was maybe a few years younger than me, I felt amazed she was trusting me with this much of herself. I wondered why her doctor had told her, in effect, she was dramatizing her unhappiness. I didn’t see how anyone could think that about someone who had taken that many pills or stayed in bed for a year. I didn’t see how someone could say that to another person, even if they meant to be encouraging about their illness. Was the shrink a woman or a man? In my mind, in the past and now, the shrink is a man, telling a female person she doesn’t feel the way she knows she feels.
Maybe the reason I am still a girl is that, in my mind, women are the females of my mother’s generation, an army of women who are depressed. You can feel it rising off them, the entire generation tottling along under flop sweat and sodden disbelief there isn’t more for them in life. What about the relationship between these women, these mothers, and the state of mind of the girl who came to see me—all of them pressured to lie about being happier than they are? Did the girl’s depression have anything to do with those understandings, weighing on women, or was it independent, a buzzing insect of brain chemistry that builds different nests in each mind?
The advantage of seeing another person in psychological terms is it’s easier to feel empathy with them. You try to imagine what it would be like to be them. The disadvantage of seeing people frozen in their separate psychologies is we lose sight of how the giant forces of the zeitgeist produce our feeling states.
I feel love for the student who came to see me. I felt love for her then, and I feel love for her now. Who are we to one another, I feel the narrator of the passage wondering. That day, I knew I was seeing something outside myself that was also in my life in ways I could not collect. My inability to collect those things was why I’d written the incident down and why, now, I wanted to return to the passage that seems like it could have been written yesterday—the paired sense of connection and respectful distance, on both our parts.
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There's so much truth in this. So much strange pain and even joy. There's permission in it, too. I wrote this down: “Don’t write anything you don’t really want to write. There will be no energy or pleasure in it for you. You will produce a dead thing.”
I can relate to this on so many levels. I haven’t the patience or persistence to keep a journal but I often write random (or not-so-random) notes to myself about my thoughts or interactions. The other day I came across one about a woman in a GED class I was teaching. She had four children and had decided to go back and get her GED. She had dreams! Shortly into the class she privately told me that she was pregnant. According to her, her husband did not want her getting “too far above him”. He thought she would quit now. She would not! I can still see her with tears in her eyes and her fists in her lap. Eight months later she got that GED and the next month she had that baby!