Letters 1981-1983

During these years, Jack frequently joined CS for lunch in midtown Manhattan, or for supper on the upper west side with MLB, so there was little need for written correspondence. Hence there is a two-year gap in the letter archive.

The years from 1979-1982 are significant in the life of CS for these reasons:

—It was the only time when CS held a professional job, as opposed to a secretarial job.

—After six years together, CS and JL got married at City Hall on August 31, 1979. MLB was their witness.

    
CS and John in Soho around the time of their marriage

—CS entered psychoanalysis in September 1980. The treatment would end badly three years later, as the “Impossible Epistles” attest.

—Edward Shaw, CS’s father, died suddenly in November 1980.

     
Left: Nephew Damon saying goodbye to his grandfather  Right: Mother preparing to enter the funeral home

Though outwardly coping well, inwardly CS was under great stress and distress in the early months of 1981. Still mourning her father, she was also her mother’s only source of companionship.

Career anxieties were mounting. CS was confident in her editorial skills but out of her element when it came to decision making, career building and office politics. She felt embarrassed when she was given books to edit that were not of high literary quality.

April 19, 1981 (Easter Sunday)

Dear Jack,

No one in the Bronx seems to dress up for Easter anymore. I’ve just been out walking here and boys are playing roughneck basketball in the local park, as ever, and teenage girls are be-jeaned, as always, and only a nearby Episcopal church, swollen with Alleluia singing, reminds me what day it is. I shot a roll of film but ran out of pictures just as a procession of worshippers streamed out of that lovely neighborhood church, followed by three priests in elaborate robes . . . . So I’ll have to be content with a pile of photos I’ll collectively call “Bronx Gothic”—pictures of white iron gates and aqua garage doors and more shrines to the Blessed Virgin and other saintly types than I’d think possible in a three-block area. Next to these gloriously tacky items you’ll find less glorious statuary: plastic flamingos, pie-eyed tipplers—that sort of thing. And this is the soil from which I sprang . . . .

I brought my Halston blouse and a pleated skirt and high heels—but I switched to jeans and a sweatshirt, alas, and spent a huffy-puffy hour raking up tree defecation—you know, burrs, leaves, etc. My father used to tend to the yard work; already the lawn is a wreck. As I was raking up, I had the awful feeling I’d uncover some horrible thing—and I was right. I found a dead blue jay and an even deader squirrel. Such putrefaction for a fine spring day!

Janice is down from Maine, with the kids. It was a marvelous excuse for me to raid my local chocolate emporium—I bought a fine milk chocolate hen (she’d laid four chocolate eggs) and an irresistible dark chocolate Snoopy lying on his doghouse, nose and toes to heaven. And two clear candy lollipops, shaped like bunnies. I’m on a diet, as luck would have it! Even today’s lamb will be extravagant

. . . . how I go on! It’s all that free-associating on the couch, no doubt. I’ve tapped into something unstoppable there.. One night, I swear, I had a string of birth dreams—images of cylindrical caves and high cliffs and bloody hands and muffled noises, all of it violent, vibrant. Who knows what it all means? My psychologist is so beautiful!

Here in my Bronx backyard, the apple tree is gone, and also the blue spruce that was no higher than 5-year-old me when we moved in but grew to 20 feet. (A tree grows in the Bronx.) Mother had them chopped down; she said the apple tree had gone to rot and the spruce was threatening the electrical wires. How often I watched my father hacking at that poor old appler, and how very many Christmases that spruce shone with colored lights . . . everything is passing. My mother has shrunk to 99 pounds, flying ants are swarming on the back porch, the floor boards are eroding, the squirrels, the jays are dying . . .All this, all of it, I must put behind me.

December 16, 1981

[To MLB, then in a regional production of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol]

Dear MLB (Mrs. Crachit? Tiny Tim?)

How pretty Virginia must be at Christmastime. If you get a chance, hie yourself hence to Colonial Williamsburg where they celebrate an authentic American Yule. How I wish I could join you there for a taste of the ol’ wassail bowl; Xmas in the BronX is dreadful!

I spent yesterday, Tuesday, in Boston where I met the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective—I’m editing the revised OUR BODIES, OURSELVES, due out in spring 1983. We all met for brunch at one member’s charming but disheveled house in Cambridge (bay windows to die for, a big kitchen, clutter everywhere) and ate baked apples, bagels, melon, croissants, and drank tea. Picture eight of us around the kitchen table—three women are crocheting, one’s pregnant, one’s nursing an alarmingly large baby—it was very Age of Aquarius. I . . . . watched with admiration as these women went about their business in their non-hierarchical way, each woman calmly and respectfully airing her views. It was impressive—and about a hundred light years away from Simon and Schuster!

. . . . The most remarkable thing is happening in my analysis now. A few weeks ago I told my psychologist—well, to be blunt, I told her to shut up! I said that for a while I wanted to try being entirely in charge there and that the new rules were that I would talk and she would quietly listen. And (she is so brilliant) she’s trusting it, trusting me. Now, lying there on that Spartan little couch, I sometimes feel like some reclining god . . . and sometimes like a naughty child. Whatever it is, it feels very, very brave—indeed, it’s probably the bravest thing I’ve ever done. The transference is very heavy these days!

I saw Jack the other day; we met over cocoa and an ice cream soda in Rockefeller Center . . . . Did you know that his wife is going to China? And that Jack got a $1,500 bonus and is feeling rich?

It sounds as if I’ve been doing a lot of interior “work” lately, yes? As for work work, it’s going fairly smoothly. I’ve been working intensely with Peter Davis, the filmmaker who made Hearts and Minds. He has written a book for us called HOMETOWN, which is on a rush schedule (we want to get it out in time for his Middletown documentaries on WNET this spring) and which has had so many legal problems, I really am quite exhausted. My Chicano writer is almost finished with his luminous first novel, and two of my books (A LIFETIME OF SKIN BEAUTY and AFTER A LOSS IN PREGNANCY) have gotten favorably reviewed in this week’s Publisher’s Weekly. Not so bad, eh? . . . .

Have a very merry.

CS quit her job at Simon and Schuster in March of 1982, giving as her reason a desire to freelance write and edit from her home. In reality, she was feeling agitated and fearful, and experiencing difficulties concentrating on her work. The raw emotions being dredged up in analysis were the source of her “work problem.”

Despite misgivings, CS bought herself an IBM Selectric typewriter and set up a home office. Over the next few years, S&S gave her editing assignments, as did Macmillan and Writer’s Digest Books. She was hired by Mark and Judith Meshorer to assist in the writing and editing of their book EASILY ORGASMIC WOMEN, and by speech consultant Lilyan Wilder for editorial assistance on a book called PROFESSIONALLY SPEAKING. CS also wrote several articles which were published in Glamour magazine and Bruce Jenner’s Better Health and Living magazine. She wrote a children’s story in verse, PHYSTY: A WHALE OF A WHALE, but an agent told her that its mix of the real and the fanciful made it unpublishable so she tucked it away.

Under the pseudonym Laurel Wright, CS wrote and packaged a humor book called WHEN BAD DOGS HAPPEN TO GOOD PEOPLE, published by Crown. The advance of $5,000 was shared equally with the illustrator. The humor market became saturated and a second book, ASK DOCTOR CROCK, did not find a publisher.

Complications in her mother’s life affected CS’s life. Her mother’s sisters Helen and Alice died, and an indigent, alcoholic nephew (Helen’s son) kept pestering her mother for money. Janice finally persuaded their mother to leave the Bronx and settle in Maine. In May of 1983, at the height of the real estate market, her mother sold her house for a pittance and moved to Belfast, Maine. For a few months she lived in Janice’s rural home, then took the first of two charming apartments in town.

CS strenuously dieted during this time and got herself down to 114 pounds. Her world was diminishing along with her body. From late 1982 to summer 1983, she took on fewer and fewer projects until the analysis itself became her whole reason for being. With her analyst’s blessing, CS took the month of August off (the analyst did not take the month off herself as many do) and visited her mother and sister in Maine. CS was hoping the break would ultimately profit the analysis, which had grown stagnant. However, when she returned to the office in September, Dr. B terminated the treatment without warning. See Impossible Epistles.

In the spring of 1982, near the Museum of Natural History

September 8, 1982

Dear Janice,

. . . . Mother is doing fine and ought to be proud of herself. For almost two years she’s been taking care of business. She’s just had some work done on the house, new aluminum gutters and such, and she’s considering getting a new roof. I think mother is strong and spry and looks wonderful. She was, for a time, cranky and hard to get along with, but our last few visits have been lots of fun. What she has to grow out of is this idea that she can’t reach out to anyone, that everyone must come to her. That is a sure prescription for despair. There was a Shaw family barbecue recently, which she wouldn’t attend despite offers of door-to-door service.

As for me, I left Simon and Schuster last April, after three exciting years, to pursue freelance writing and editing. I’m in a freelance frame of mind!

Of course, the best thing to happen is that I sold my first article, making my first dollars as a writer, to Glamour magazine [“What I Learned From My Father's Death”]. It’s a personal piece about Dad’s death, how it affected me, and how it started me reinterpreting our relationship as father and daughter. I hope you like the piece; I can’t imagine that it wouldn’t have meaning for you too.

. . . . John got his driver’s license and this past weekend so we rented a car and drove to the Bronx to see mother, and then up to New Paltz for a craft’s festival . . . . That was Saturday; on Sunday we drove to the Meadowlands Hilton to attend a brunch given by John’s boss, then drove down to Sea Girt on the Jersey shore and stayed with our friend Steve overnight. I took a plunge into the suddenly frigid Atlantic and still have goosebumps. John is especially handsome these days. He just shaved his beard, but kept his mustache and sideburns. It’s a nice compromise between woolly and neat.

I am typing this on my own IBM Selectric, my most loved possession; owning a Porsche wouldn’t make me prouder.

Yes, there’s something about that little girl in blue on the card you sent that suggests a junior me. I wore pigtails sometimes, I tugged on my index finger for reassurance. I was so unhappy when I was little, everything was fear and confusion. Was I really your toy, your joy? Yes, Damon was as much to me, the only clean thing in my 11-year-old life. And you, my dear, you were the enchanted princess, blooming so miraculously under your blue plaid maternity blouse, giving birth, giving milk. You ate from black plates and bought artichokes and owned mandolins. I couldn’t have had a better beacon, lighting the way to a larger life.

December 1, 1982

Dear Janice,

Mother and I tried calling you on Thanksgiving without success. Hope it was a good holiday for y’all. I would have written sooner ‘cept I’m not in the best of moods these days and am liable to fill any page with woeful scratchings and howlings. Aah-oooh! . . . .

FYI, the article about Dad has not yet been scheduled for some reason (why would they explain such things to a mere author, eh?); perhaps they’re saving it for June and Father’s Day. I haven’t heard a word from Glamour on the other piece they contracted for, which I delivered at the end of October, two days before my deadline. All of that is simply LIFE for the beginner writer; once you develop a name, a reputation, you have more clout. It’s a matter of patience, I guess, patience and persistence and belief in yourself no matter what. The old story: confirmation must come from within not from without. But inner firmness isn’t inborn; one’s parents are largely responsible for instilling it, for communicating in the early years of our lives that we are worthy and competent and able to reach for things, don’t you think? That’s when we learn too that setbacks are OK, merely part of the thrust forward. Did you receive these crucial confirmations? I did not.

I’m not trying to damn anybody here, least of all two downtrodden people, Kitty and Ed, who never received from their own parents what I wish I could have received from them. But facts are facts. I know I must have been a sensitive, creative child, but all I heard were messages of my own inadequacy and failings. If I spilled milk, “Daddy” screamed bloody murder; how, with one small vagrant motion of the wrist, had I caused such pain and chaos? When I fell and skinned my knee, he screamed again: double pain. When I was afraid of things—a noise, a nun, a test—mother told me I was being too fearful or too silly. All my life she has been telling me I’m too this or too that—too forgetful or too timid or too stupid for math or too lazy or too fat or too thin. She’s still doing this. It was only on Thanksgiving Friday, at the age of 32, that I turned to her and said, “You’re the one who’s too too, so lay off.” (It wasn’t as acrimonious as it sounds; it was rather funny and freeing.)

How about a few memories? I don’t know how old I was—three or four. It was nighttime, my bedtime, but no one was paying me any attention. Mother and Dad were having one of their famous fights, only this one was worse than usual. This one was violent. I was terrified—I hid my head in a cushion and held my hands to my ears. When I screwed up enough courage to look around, Mother was on the couch, blood cascading from her nose. A lamp had tipped over. Dad was on the way out the door. I tiptoed over to Mother, hoping, I guess, for some word of reassurance. She was weeping loudly and bitterly and all but told me to get lost. I put myself to bed. Do you remember anything of this? I found out later that Mother was extremely angry at Dad around this time; he’d been staying out late at bars every night with that pal of his, Billy F., coming home drunk and leaving Mother all alone with a small child (guess who—and guess who took on a shitload of guilt when she heard her little name dragged into these terrible fights?).

Memory 2. Again, I am somewhere in those crucial years between three and five. It is daytime. Mother and I are in the kitchen and she has before her a tin box filled with razor blades. I have an imprecise idea about what razor blades are; mother tells me they are dangerous and not for children, only for grownups. She tells me she is putting them out of my reach in one of the kitchen cabinets and she proceeds to do so. She leaves the room. All I’ve heard is that I am to be deprived of these shimmering objects and I set out to prove her wrong. I move a chair over to the magic cabinet and climb up on it. I reach—it is too much, too high. I lose my balance and fall, and as I fall my legs spread open and I bang my genitals against the sharp corner of the chair, or perhaps its leg—bang them with the full force of my falling body. The pain is everywhere; I am doubled over and howling. Mother tries to comfort me. She’s being as nice as she can and doesn’t scold me for disobeying her. She tries to tell me I’m all right and not badly hurt. At bedtime, we notice a big stain of blood in my panty. Odd, but something in me is vindicated. “You see,“ I exclaim, all excited, “I really was hurt, I was hurt!”

Such a senseless thing, a dumb accident, and how it has stayed with me. It comes up in my analysis again and again, both memories do, so many things have crystallized around these two events.

I was interested to hear your memory of mother’s brief leave-taking, her aborted rebellion. Something similar happened with me too, though I was older than you were at the time—10 or 11. You were living downtown. I really wanted to leave home with her that time, I wanted to see some change, and for once get away from all the arguing . . . . We got as far as Castle Hill and Westchester. We had dinner at a place called (are you ready?) The Flaming Pit (which was across the street from a place called Christ and Company). I remember skinny French fries and a salad that came with oil and vinegar in cruets, a new idea for me. I was cheery, Mother was antsy; after dinner, we went right home.

My memories of you are mostly good ones, of course. You were living proof that one could really outgrow childhood! You had girlfriends, boyfriends, pretty clothes, jewelry—I think of you every time I hear Carly Simon sing “My Older Sister.” You played piano and drew such beautiful pictures and sometimes you’d set the table, transforming it from Melmac mediocrity to something crystalline, urbane. I remember your Sweet Sixteen party—so many spiffy teenagers, a real live band, Chinese lanterns strung in the yard, everybody rocking around the clock. There were some real happy times.

And some real unhappy times. I want, I will, make peace with my childhood but I’m still at war with it. What about you? I know you’re angry at some things; you’ve said as much. We both deplore the poor foods we were fed (I was sick all the time, it seemed—and thought of myself as flawed, frail; what I was, was malnourished). I know you have deep anger over breaking your nose—a day when no one was paying you any attention and disaster struck (I reached for razor blades, you for a stranded cat in a tree!). I know you resent the bad sunburns. And how can we forget their letting Damon stay at home for days with a broken leg? My own appendicitis wasn’t taken seriously for days either. These are obvious instances of neglect; there were many more subtle instances and psychological harm was done to us.

I can’t help thinking this is common ground for us. We did have the same parents. I don’t think that either one of us got a better deal. And I believe in airing it all, studying it all, and, in the end, accepting it all with a cosmic smile. My past has weighed, is weighing me down. Isn’t yours? My God, Janice. We’re both intelligent, creative people. We ought to be using our gifts to the fullest. Even some money and fame are within our reach—if we’d only stop equating reaching with something horrible. We won’t fall off chairs or out of trees and be mutilated!

Neither will it be easy. But I’ll cheer you on if you cheer me.

July 12, 1983

Dear Mother,

I didn’t think you’d gotten lost in the woods—but neither did I think you’d jumped in a lake! Did you bring a swimsuit or swim au naturel?

I’m glad you’re all settled in and have decided to stay with Janice for a while. I miss you but am much relieved to know you have a safe, secure home now, and good company, and no worries about holes in the floor or who is going to ring the doorbell. A little temporary plumbing inconvenience seems like a small tradeoff. Of course, I know you like your independence, but I also feel certain that you can find a way to be interdependently independent, you know? Remember me ten years ago? In the name of my precious independence, I took a room in somebody else’s apartment, but I felt so much better—and smarter—when I decided to come home to live with you and Dad again. The two years that followed were the happiest in my life. I felt I had everything—John on weekends, college on weekdays, and a nice, grownup relationship with my parents.

Anyway, down here on Columbus Avenue nothing is ever quiet. In the summer, the street performers emerge from the woodwork (or is it the brickwork?). On a casual, three-block walk you are likely to encounter a jazz group, a brass band, a sidewalk comedian, tap dancers, girl singers, a violinist, you name it. There is also a balloon man who outfits children in balloon disguises, mostly with those funny long sausage-like balloons. They walk off looking like buoyant little dragons. Strange white-clad fellows on weird space bicycles sell chocolate chip cookies. The atmosphere puts me in a festive mood and makes it extremely difficult to concentrate on serious matters, such as building a freelance career. Right now I am busy at home not writing.

    
Left: Mother’s last walk down her side yard    Right:  Janice and CS close the moving truck

. . . . Most of the pictures I took on your moving day came out great. I’ll get some duplicates and send them up. I still can’t believe we all survived, nay, triumphed on that crazy morning. I felt quite teary-eyed when you all drove off and couldn’t quite integrate the fact that I was waiting for the Bronx-Manhattan bus for the last time. I also had the melancholy sense that selling the house was a curtain call to a play that had already ended. By that I mean that the neighborhood wasn’t ours anymore, and the house was no longer much of a home since Dad died. I was surprised I didn’t feel more mournful about the house itself; as much as I always complained about the drafts and the dark, it was my home and it is the place I dream about. The other night I only dreamed about the backyard, though—as if I was locked out of the house and couldn’t get back in. And then in the dream you drove off to attend some ceremonial occasion and left me behind to wander around the Bronx like a lost soul.

Miss you.

September 1, 1983

Dear Mother,

It’s September 1st, a day I always think of as a New Beginning. Pretty soon there’ll be cool air, kids in school clothes with new notebooks, and red rustling leaves.

I don’t know what to make of last night’s phone calls except that there sure must be a lot of misunderstandings among us all. I think it’s time we started listening to one another, don’t you? The only person I can speak authoritatively for is myself, of course. . . . I’m back from a marvelous visit to Maine. I feel as if my world is peopled, that I’m not alone. . . . The only thing that was missing in Maine was more of my mother, who seemed to spend most of her time in her room. That doesn’t anger me, Mother. Believe it or not, I respect your right to do what you want to. The only thing I find unacceptable is what I mentioned on the phone last night. I can’t be your confidante against anybody. That is simply an impossible position.

. . . I said I could only speak authoritatively about myself. That’s true but let me hazard one observation about Janice. From the evidence I see—the nice room she set up for you, the hunk of presents on your birthday, the way she goes out of her way to accommodate your desires from the store—that she really is trying hard, not because it’s a burden for her (as you seem to worry) but because she is desperately trying to win your love and approval. I think she wants to be close to you, Mother, and there’s been so little opportunity for the two of you to be close in recent years. You don’t want to miss that opportunity, do you? It is very paradoxical, I know—but even though it is Janice who has opened her home to you, it falls on you to be welcoming.

You won’t lose me in the process. It is my inalterable opinion that we humans have room in our hearts for plenty of people. Think how we would have stretched if there had been ten kids in the family instead of two!

Okay. End of sermonette.

Guess what? Yesterday I was interviewed by a reporter at the Baltimore Sun—about WHEN BAD DOGS HAPPEN TO GOOD PEOPLE. He is doing an article about some new doggy books and mine will be one of them. It was a telephone interview and lots of fun.

BAD DOGS is in all the bookstores in N Y. I’ve been hovering around, watching to see if anyone buys it. God, how humiliating! Most people pick it up, flip through it for a second, then put it back. One guy was paging through the book with what seemed like appreciation so I offered to autograph it for him if he bought it. I think I scared the poor fellow half to death. He ran out of the store before I could say Boo.

Well, that’s it for now. I am off to mail this and then stop for breakfast somewhere. Then it’s back to my apt. to work for a while on an editing project. I am helping a Cleveland couple write a sex book! All about female orgasm. It’s a living.

November 16, 1983

Dear Janice,

It rains and rains, and tonight the N.Y. temperature will drop into the 30’s. I’ve got my down coat cleaned and ready for its third winter, and my new Maine-bought boots are broken in. But I don’t think I’ll really be ready for winter until I buy a pair of those furry slippers that look like bears or reindeer or bunnykins. They are all over the stores, adult-size kiddie slippers for the chilly child in us all!

Thank you for your letter.

Your comments about my feelings toward mother surprise me. Didn’t we talk about things last August? However, something did happen to me in September that shook me up and also helped me empathize more with her condition. I mean “condition” as in “the human condition.”

I don’t think I can explain what happened to me very well now. Nothing really “happened,” yet it was a deep crisis, like a death or a maiming. You’ll recall that last August I talked a little about something that happens to a psychoanalytic patient called “transference.” The doctor, about whom you know very little, becomes a kind of screen on which you project yourself. This is a slow process that develops over the years and continues to deepen. The thing is, you just don’t know what’s going on most of the time—and then, every so often, the scales drop off the eyes and you see something. I suppose it says something about human nature that what you see is seldom sweet.

I can’t go into the details and complexities now—it’s too near—but let me say that I met my secret self head on. I realized that even though I loved Dr. B—for one does love one’s doctor—I also wanted desperately to cheat her, spurn her, leech her, and there was no boundary between the loving and the leeching.

That is when I started to feel some empathy with Mother. She pushes you away instead of pulling you near. It’s as if she’s saying, “I don’t need you. You’re a brute, a heel, an entirely unsavory creature (fill in the blanks) and I am complete without you.” We both know that nothing could be farther from reality. She needs us deeply, now more than ever, and you more than ever, but she is determined to keep shouting “Go away.” Another way of saying this would be, “You can’t fire me; I quit (or I’ll fire you first).” I am convinced, convinced, that this is the truth. I understand it to the bottom of my being. And I know that no one goes around saying “You can’t fire me, I quit” unless deep down she believes there is a real danger of being thrown out first. To people like that (us?), dependency itself is suspect, interdependency an idea that just doesn’t compute. And people like that (us?) only know love by its tentativeness.

I just keep repeating to myself what I learned: no boundary between the loving and the leeching, and also no boundary between the wanting-to-pull-close and the needing-to-hold-away. I can change these tendencies in my own life, now that I understand them so well and am motivated to change, but there’s no way Mother can or will change these tendencies in hers. We must keep remembering that, and that, strange as it sounds, spurning us can be her way of loving us.

Janice, I could not deal with Mother’s bouts of mean-spiritedness when she lived near me; neither did I understand her then, though. Your friends have given you decent advice—adopt a stance of non-involvement and so forth—but it’s hard advice to follow and I bet that in your heart you don’t want to spurn her back. The best advice I can give you is to forgive her somehow in advance for her troublemaking and, without denying your true feelings, find some compassion for her strange neurotic plight. I promise you one thing. If you can do that, you’ll like yourself better too, because, as you yourself have said or implied, we do share in mother’s legacy. There’s no human way we could have avoided that.

Understand, too, that she’s real good at baiting us, and we’re real good at pouncing on that bait. We can hate ourselves for that, feel taken, feel unfree. Or, I suppose, we can try to be at peace with that, and maybe find something funny about it—as if it were a comedy of errors and not a heart-wringing tragedy. Hey, I just thought of that and it makes me grin. For a kid sister, I’m not so dumb, eh?

You know something else? I think you knew that having Mother nearby wasn’t going to be easy, but you were willing to pay that price in order to reestablish your relationship with her before it was too late. You won’t regret it. Ever. I also think you knew that having her near would give you an opportunity, however painful, to find some answers about your secret self. You won’t regret that either.

The only peril for you, as I see it, would be to cling to the wish that you’ll be able to change her somehow, or that she will love you the way you want/need/deserve to be loved. She will only love you as she can—awkwardly, fearfully, grudgingly—but she will love you. By the way, I don’t romanticize mother, as you suggested, nor do I undervalue the challenge you are facing. I have phrased much of this letter in the “we,” as if we, you and I, share a common plight. We do surely, and yet I think Mother has you more “merged” in her mind with Daddy and that is going to cause you some special frustrations.

This letter, you should know, is helping me a little too. I have been utterly wasted of late, having a very hard time forgiving myself for my own grudging greeds and unfullfillable needs. I am not in analysis anymore, and the decision to terminate was not a freely made decision. I am left with crucifying feelings of having been cast out for my badness, and extreme rage and outrage too. It’s raw. Analysis is raw, and having been through it I’m not sure I’d recommend it to everyone. Among other things, the process is extremely infantilizing—but then again, you learn you are always infantilized, in a way, carrying around various terrors, hurts, hungers, various voraciousnesses and purple rages that go right back to the crib. Sometimes I think “I want my Maypo and I want it now” is the meaning of life. Hah.

On the other hand, I wouldn’t undo these last three years. I am, when all is said and done, happy to have uncovered the things that make me tick. Analysis is not moralistic or damning, by the way. I think one reason I’m being so hard on myself is that I haven’t purged away those deeply ingrained notions of sinfulness. As I wrote in a poem once, “Since I first came crawling when my mother called/I have lived in my heart with taint.”

Actually, I don’t want to purge anything from myself anymore; I just want to master the quicksands, contain them, so as not to be enmired. Janice, we both have sucking bogs to struggle out of. Shit’s Creek it is, but I’m sure we have the paddle.

As for my article [The Day My Mother Moved Away], it originally ended a bit cynically. My Glamour editor—a smart, supportive young woman who understands Irish angst—implored me to end on a positive note. It took me about a week to accomplish what amounted to only 2-3 paragraphs; that’s how resistant I was to being what-ya-might-call “nice.” But I’m glad I managed it. It was a healing endeavor. And you know what Mother said to me, twice? She said I make more of her than she is. In my view, I made much less of her than she is, given the limits of the genre—but I think this observation of hers speaks volumes. It signifies, doesn’t it, a rather sorry ego and, perhaps, a subliminal sense of not deserving to be written about with love and dignity? Isn’t it a mystery?—there she is, acting haughty and standoffish, living out her I-need-no-one fiction, but getting scared silly on a walk to the store? . . . .

November 22, 1983

Dear Janice,

I just got yours of the 15th. You certainly seem to be handling things well, though you’re going through some chilling experiences with Mother. The theme from The Twilight Zone must be bonging through your head regularly.

You’re right about the “sweet little old lady” persona, and that’s something brand new. She uses that one on me a lot lately, now that you’re her favorite fall guy. It scares me. I’m not sure who I’m talking to, but it doesn’t sound like my mother.

Janice, try not to drive yourself crazy. It isn’t worth it; the situation is so strange and sad it doesn’t warrant your feeling lacerated. Don’t you think? Just remember the reality—you’re in charge, not her, for she’s the needy one, and also much about the situation is simply inalterable.

One thing you don’t have to worry about is my believing everything Mother tells me. I know she distorts things. Back in October, she told me about the so-called spoon incident. It seemed so bizarre I didn’t even mention it to you for fear it would only upset you. Anyway, I wouldn’t have blamed you if you had chased her with a cooking spoon. Next time, let’s chase her with a runcible spoon—the kind with prongs, heh, heh, heh.

Y’know, I’m a little terrified here, wondering if maybe Mother won’t be with us much longer . . . and when I think of how both Alice and Helen became at the end I get more terrified still. . . . God, I wish everyone could go like Big Ed, spirited and robust and raging right until the end. And completely independent.

December 15, 1983

Dear Jack,

How strange that we packed off our mothers at roughly the same time. My mother’s leaving affected me deeply, though I fairly sleepwalked through the event, and through the weeks before and after it. Then, in late July, I sat down and started to write the essay. I finished it in September. I like to think my writing “reads” easily but, alas, it seldom “writes” easily!

I am so relieved to hear you appreciate all those cats [in the essay]! (If it wasn’t bad dogs this year, it was pregnant-with-metaphor cats.) Because I worried I might be painting myself into a corner with those cats, making them bear too much freight. Still, I think children, who identify so strongly with pets, do keep a close eye on how their parents respond to small animals. And my mother’s creed was “Don’t dare love them; they will only die.” And with that attitude, of course they do die. They freeze on your back porch, or they get an illness that you refuse to have treated, or something. Janice says a traumatic event from her childhood was when the now famous Cindy had kittens and my father drowned them in the toilet! There is also a family legend that he shot a cat once, a mad creature which had been jumping at the window screens. He felt terrible, though. Apparently, after you shoot an alley cat between the eyes, there isn’t much of cat left.

Jack, it is wonderful to have your words of appreciation. Behind all my haughtiness (which is, thank goodness, making an exit), there lies a lot of self-doubt. I haven’t even taken much pleasure in my recent writing successes; it’s as if what I do is never enough. But things are beginning to dawn on me. I know I have begrudged my own talent, pushed it away, far away, because on some level it seemed dangerous to me. At the same time, I have wanted to cling to my insights and visions, and not share them, not put them into words, and this may signify a peculiar selfishness or a wild irrational fear of losing what I have. None of this makes “sense,” of course—but, dear friend, I have just spent three years of my life digging into the substratum of the unconscious and what I unearthed scared the daylights out of me. I thought I was in the process of searching for the light, but what I found was darkness. What did I call it the other day? A crater of need. For you see, I have indeed gotten “shrunk”; I got to a point in the analysis in which I was utterly infantilized (and didn’t know it). I was happiest with [my doctor] when I was lost. Do you remember, in my last essay, the story of the toy compass I had swallowed as a child? Well, Dr. B was also my compass in a way, but instead of using her as a tool for self-direction, I swallowed her whole. And last September she made me spit the compass out. And this is why her apparent cruelty in terminating me instantly makes a kind of sense. She made me spit the compass out, and now I can see the object plain, hold it in my hand, own it, and find my way.

Dear Jack, be tolerant of my infernal intensity for a moment. My eyes are wet. I did not realize this truth until I wrote it to you, just now!

You note that I write about the mundane in such a way that it points beyond itself, and that’s true, you know? That’s my vision. Nothing, not a damn thing, is without meaning, and I believe this is really true and not just a literary device. All one has to do, as in analysis, is peel back the layers of dull, blind rationality and take a look.

Like you, I always enjoyed finishing a piece the most. Dear Lord, I’ve done it and it’s over! And yet, I think, I at least am going to have to start looking at this differently and say, Thank God there’s more yet to do. The well is bottomless, and there for the drinking. All you need is the pail.

. . . . Well, for me, believe it or not, this has been a newsy letter. I’m alone so much, you see, and have been on a long retreat from the world. That is why I am considering going back to the world, as it were, and getting a “mundane” job. By the time you get this letter, I will have had an appointment at an employment agency which specializes in administrative assistant positions. I’m gun-shy of book publishing now, mostly because editorial jobs take virtually all your time. A good-paying administrative job may be just the ticket . . . . It might be good for me, working for some corporate bigwig, getting the world’s work done. I just don’t want a tote-the-briefcase-home job. Home is where the mundane transmogrifies. Home is where the writing is. I’ll also pursue that Ladies Home Journal lead, and I’ve got a freelance editing job on the horizon. I’m not into burning bridges these days, not to job opportunities and never again to good friends.

The employment agency did not send CS out on job interviews and The Ladies Home Journal did not offer her a job. She continued freelancing.