The Princess and her house

The New York Times tells me today that President Obama and guests celebrated Passover on Thursday evening, April 9.

On the same page of the hard copy of the paper is a picture of the beautiful princess Michelle in her garden on the south lawn of the White House. A princess should live in a white house. She says, “Every single person from Prince Charles on down was excited we are planting a garden.”

Today is Good Friday. In 1865 on this day President Lincoln was shot at Ford’s Theater. This weekend Easter and Passover meet as they did that weekend when the lilies were painted black.

I live a block from Ford’s Theater in a condo I bought when D. and I sold the old lady of a house in Adams Morgan. But I was not there for the leaving of the house. I took a cab to the airport and flew to Columbia, Missouri, for a visiting writer's job. On the curb stood my daughter Sarah and her husband Ryan and my husband D. In the trunk was the big suitcase with as many clothes and books I could fit. In another truck owned by Town and Country Movers—the moving company that moved us into the house and would move us apart—were all my files, my computer, the chair I sit in now to write at the computer and one stuffed chair from my attic study. I was moving to what I thought was a furnished house.

D. would move the furniture and dishes and paintings and photos we had into our two separate condos two and a half blocks apart. But I would not live in mine for one academic year.

And what an education that year was.

In olden times, when wishing still did some good, there lived a king whose daughters were all beautiful, but the youngest was so beautiful that the sun itself, who, indeed, has seen so much, marveled every time it shone upon her face. In the vicinity of the king's castle there was a large, dark forest, and in this forest, beneath an old linden tree, there was a well. In the heat of the day the princess would go out into the forest and sit on the edge of the cool well.

And so The Frog-King begins, and, yes, this is the same story as The Frog Prince.

We are in the game of Charades. Two different versions of the same tale: when wishing still did some good …

In June 2006, two months before I moved to Missouri to teach, two months before the actual physical separation, when our house in Adams Morgan was sold and I moved out of town, I made up a vignette, something I do (I don’t know why but I do it) and save for later use:

Dreamlike.

A house in suburbia, two dreams overlapping, The house in suburbia that I am moving into is brand new but looks like the house in Olney where I used to live with my first husband, not the house but the surrounds. The house itself horrifies me because the stovetop and oven are next to the wall at the end of the kitchen—no counter space on my right, concern that whatever I cook will splatter onto the wallboard. The rooms in the house are squared off, cut out of the box that is the house, the way rooms must be made but without imagination that is open space, without possibility that fewer doorways paradoxically offer.

And then I am living in a dream house in a dream neighborhood where the grass is lime green and the outdoors are struck by sun. Always. This house seems dropped into a Connecticut movie-like set, a township where the husbands take their bikes to the train or their wives pick them up in cars, where the storefronts have signs that say things like Simply Good or Hats Galore or Pink and Blue, where tiny baby dresses sit in the window in the detail of their complicated pattern and beribboned shoulder straps, embroidered and smocked bodices that a baby will wear for less than a month or two before outgrowing and that will cost what my first adult, business dress that I wore to teach school cost.

In the vein of truth is stranger than fiction: D. and I visited my daughter Sarah and her husband Ryan in Chicago a month before her baby was due and we, somewhat accidentally, bought for our unborn grandchild just such a dress. Sarah liked it. I threw the loved little dress on the pile of baby clothes and snuggly toys we were buying and the total of the items began to log in to the register and our heads. For the record, I am glad we bought the dress anyway.

Back to the vignette I made up three years earlier:

In this less-than-perfect perfect town, the dream of adultery understood begins to unfold: A woman is having an affair with her best friend’s husband. They live next door to each other in the less-than-perfect perfect town. During a party that, let us call her, Skilly is having, Lilly sits on Gordon’s lap. Gordon is married to Skilly. When Gordon looks down into Lilly’s crotch at the white silk panties she is wearing, Lilly is reminded of the way he had taken them off yesterday in the hotel room, of the way he wanted to kiss her vulva, was desperate to see her vulva, to look at her and how her husband Fergus has never wanted her with this kind of ardor. Gordon goes to her not to “service” her but to satisfy himself. They become entwined rapidly whenever they are together and they hide, skulk—a word she heard in a British movie that describes what they must do to be together. But at the party Skilly who is married to Gordon can be seen more often than usual with Fergus who is married to Lilly.

Lilly goes up to the bathroom and sees that Skilly has redone it. The sink is a marvel with a cupola shape and a second bowl smaller, attached to the side and that appears to be for the soap. When Lilly turns the water on, it runs through this smaller bowl in a swirl like the swirl one sees in the dentist’s spittoon. The water in the swirling bowl, swirling not just with water but with the colors of the ceramic, swirling pale peach and beige and brown, the colors pulled from the fruit, its pit, the feathering around the pit and the flesh and the skin. The water swirls onto and around the soap in the same shaped but smaller-than-the-sink bowl, allowing Lilly to easily pick it up and wash her hands in the larger bowl whose water offers a larger swirl of warm water. When she leaves the bathroom, overwhelmed with its beauty and cost, she sees Fergus with Skilly, his hand in hers.

It is a hold that reveals and suddenly she knows that they are all free.

The next day the adulterous pair Lilly and Gordon take in the new art film at the Bethesda Row Arts theater where the crowd is older than they are though they are no kids themselves. Couples all are in this audience and the film recounts the story of two married couples who are having secret affairs, each with the other’s spouse. Lilly and Gordon laugh at the spoof the movie makes of these betrayals, of the foolish games of hiding the partners must make, of the obvious lies and the overt pleasures, of the hedonism the film uncovers. But they are the only ones laughing. The somber faces of the others on leaving the theater show disgust, along with overheard comments about offenses taken.

Lilly then tells Gordon, “Skilly and Fergus. Yes, I know you don’t believe it, but yes, Skilly and Fergus.”

Gordon will ride his bike to the train in the morning but what will he do about Skilly when it is Lilly’s vulva that he craves?

Nietzsche says, But thought is one thing, the deed is another, and the image of the deed still another: the wheel of causality does not roll between them.

I knew in June when I made up the vignette that my husband did not want me—or so I thought, as I’ve said. I created a fantasy that we would each find other partners and simply exchange.

Do Sa Do. Change partners.

Here is what Dorothy Parker had to say:

General Review of the Sex Situation

Woman wants monogamy;
Man delights in novelty.
Love is woman’s moon and sun;
Man has other forms of fun.
Woman lives but in her lord;
Count to ten, and man is bored.
With this the gist and sum of it.
What earthly good can come of it?

I prefer D. H. Lawrence:

Kisses in the Train

I saw the midlands
Revolve through her hair;
The fields of autumn
Stretching bare,
And sheep on the pasture
Tossed back in a scare.

And still as ever
The world went round,
My mouth on her pulsing
Throat was found,
And my breast to her beating
Breast was bound.

But my heart at the centre
Of all, in a swound
Was still as a pivot,
As all the ground
On its prowling orbit
Shifted round.

And still in my nostrils
The scent of her flesh;
And still my blind face
Sought her afresh;
And still one pulse
Through the world did thresh.

And the world all whirling
Round in joy
Like the dance of a dervish
Did destroy
My sense—and reason
Spun like a toy.

But firm at the centre
My heart was found
My own to her perfect
Heartbeat bound,
Like a magnet's keeper
Closing the round.

Do Sa Do. Change houses.

Here is what I found in August 2006 in Missouri. Consider this a letter I wrote you after I’d arrived:

The furnished house I rented sight unseen turns out to be a pit owned by a tenured English professor and her poet husband—both writers. The first thing I had to do was buy a bed as they were sleeping on a 20-year-old futon and I woke the first night thinking I must be the princess and the pea as a stone is clearly sticking into my hip bone. But it was the futon that is hardened over the years into a substance not unlike cement.

Did you know that when you are desperate and have no car—am getting to that—you can order a bed over the phone? The kitchen did not have a working oven for three weeks. The owners didn’t want to fix it—but eventually came around—so as of today I do have an oven, only three of the four burners on the stove work, and the cabinets have virtually no glassware or dishes and every spoon is bent. They didn’t even leave me a can opener that works. But they did leave me the trash can in the kitchen—a metal outdoor can that is some twenty years old and filthy. The house is basically unfurnished and I brought with me only my books, my computer, an old stuffed chair and a small table that I was grateful for as I had a table for the lamp I brought—no side tables—no nothing.

They also left me their car as a gift: It had a flat tire when I arrived and did not have a rearview mirror on the driver’s side. It was filthy dirty, with no gas in the tank and a non-working muffler (I couldn’t hear if someone beeped; the radio was on but I couldn’t hear it except as some sort of odd additional noise and it wouldn’t turn off; only the window on the driver’s side operated. It cost me $125 to get it in some sort of order so that I could buy a few groceries. I then bought a used car by having the salesman drive to my house with whatever he had—desperate woman gives salesman the $5,000 she has saved in an envelope over 11 years of teaching and hoarding bits of cash (couple hundred bucks for my daughter, slipped in her palm, when she needed it, that sort of money)—and I gave him the car. The second day I drove the car, the air-conditioning died, but the salesman who actually stopped and bought me milk and orange juice when I asked came back and had it fixed (I hoped—not really) after I had signed the paper releasing him of all warranty and declaring the car I had just bought was a junker—a Missouri law. I am not making this up.

Then I drove to school: The university would not declare me as present and working without showing the strange fiscal officer for the English Department (everyone tells me she is OCD) my actual Social Security card. It did not matter to her that I know my number. She wouldn’t accept my passport or driver’s license. I had to come back to DC for settlement on the house in Adams Morgan and was able to locate my card, which I obtained when I began working at age 16—you do the math—and no one has ever asked me for and I have been working since age 16. As a result, I will now be paid eventually but I do not have the all-essential employee id number which would allow me to get paid and get an id card and use the library. Perhaps in a few weeks, I will have that number.

And G-d knows when I will get paid because I appear not to exist.

That is, I fear, a partial story, but here is the good news: I have held up, have only “hit the wall” so to speak once (cried all day the day I had no food, no car, and no way to get food—and that was one week after the initial move). But I love to teach and taught my first class this past Monday, and, as I said, I have a condo in the Penn Quarter (so does D; it is all very weird, I know) to which I will return as often as I can and permanently in mid-May.

But I love to teach and teaching began this Monday. I am writing this on Saturday morning as I wait for the cable guy for whom I waited last week from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. and who did not show up—no t.v. reception where I live without cable.

And the professor/writer Marly Swick has befriended me, read my collection and loves it, especially the story “Sine Die,” which everyone hates and I think is the best in the series of stories about one woman one day who could no longer cook. Marly has asked me to come speak to both her undergrad and grad writing students the first or second week of classes about that story and my book. I think I’ve made a true friend. (I did.)

And Missouri is unusually gentle: Yesterday, my mail lady rang my bell. She said, “I have been worried about you—the car was here but the mail was piling up. Are you okay?” I told her I had been briefly away, that I had been having a bit of a hard time here, but that she reassures me about the goodness in the world.

Nietzsche and the Brothers Grimm are not so different. This I am learning. I do wonder if Nietzsche is the reality check on wishes and dreams. I refuse to believe this while I consider the possibility.