I KNOW that I am a
disappointed woman and that nobody cares at all about it, not even Henry; and
if anybody thought of it, it would only be to think it ridiculous. It is
ridiculous, too, with my waist, and not knowing how to do my hair or anything.
I look at Henry sometimes of evenings, when he has his feet on the fender, and
wonder if he has the least idea how disappointed I am. I even have days of
wondering if Henry isn’t disappointed, too. He might be disappointed in
himself, which would be even more dreadful; but I don’t suppose we shall ever
find out about each other. It is part of my disappointment that Henry has never
seemed to want to find out.
There are people who
think it is somehow discreditable to be disappointed; and whatever comes, you
must pretend to like it, and just keep on pretending. I don’t know why. It must
be that some things are right in life and some others are not, and unless
somebody has the courage to speak up about it, I don’t know how we are ever to
find it out. I don’t see, if nobody else is hurt by it, why we shouldn’t have
what we like out of life; and if there’s a way of getting or not getting it,
people have a right to know. Sometimes I think if I’d known a little more, just
a very little . . . !
It all began, I
suppose, in the kind of people I was brought up among. They’d none of them had
the kind of things I wanted, so of course they couldn’t tell me anything about
the way to get them. There was my mother. She had to work hard, and had never
been anywhere but to a Methodist conference and once to the capital when father
was a delegate or something, and her black silk had been turned twice; but she
didn’t seem the least disappointed. I think it must have been the way things
were between her and my father. Father died when I was sixteen, so I couldn’t
tell much about it, but I know mother never so much as thought of marrying
again. She was like a person who has had a full meal, but I--I am just kind of
hungry . . . always. My mother never talked to me about her relations to my
father. Mothers didn’t; it wasn’t thought suitable. I think sometimes, if she
had, it might have made a difference about my marrying Henry.
The trouble was in the
beginning, that though I knew the world was all full of exciting, interesting
things, I thought they came to you just by living. I had no idea there was a
particular way you had to go to work to get them. I think my people weren’t the
kind to make very nice discriminations about experiences or anything. They
wouldn’t have thought one way of being in love, for instance, was much better
or different from another. They had everything sort of ticketed off and done
with: such as that all church-members were happier than unbelievers, and all
men naturally more competent and intelligent than their women. They must have
known, some of them, that things didn’t always work out that way; but they
never let on about it--anyway, not to us young people. And if married couples
weren’t happy together, it wasn’t considered decent to speak of it.
I suppose that was what
got me to thinking that all the deep and high and shining things that I had a
kind of instinct went with being married, belonged to it naturally, and, when
you had found a suitable man, came along in their proper place without much
thinking. And that was about all I knew when Henry proposed to me at the Odd
Fellows’ Festival. We were both on the decoration committee, and drove out to
the old Lawson place that afternoon for roses. I remember the feel of them
against my cheek, hot and sweet, and the smell of the syringa, and a great
gold-and- black butterfly that fled and flitted down the green country road,
mottled black and gold with shadows. Things like that gave me a strange kind of
excitement, and yet a kind of lonesomeness, too, so I didn’t mind Henry holding
my hand between us in the buggy. I thought he must be feeling something of the
same sort, and it didn’t seem friendly to take my hand away. But I did take it
away a moment later when he proposed. It turned me kind of cold. Of course I
meant to accept him after a while. I liked him, and he was what my folks called
suitable; but I seemed to want a little time to think about it.
Henry didn’t want me to
think. He kept hinting, and that evening under the grape-arbor at the minister’s,
where we had gone to get the sewing society’s ice-cream freezer, he kissed me.
I’d heard about engaged kisses, but this wasn’t anything but just a kiss--like
when you have been playing drop the handkerchief. I’d always had a feeling that
when you had an engaged kiss something beautiful happened. There were times
afterward when it almost seemed about to, and I would want to be kissed again
to see if the next time . . . Henry said he was glad I had turned out to have
an affectionate disposition.
My family thought I was
doing well to marry Henry. He had no bad habits, and his people were
well-to-do; and then I wasn’t particularly pretty or rich or anything. I had
never been very popular with young men; I was too eager. Not for them, you
understand; but just living and doing things seemed to me such a good game. I
suppose it is difficult for some folks to understand how you can be excited by
the way a shadow falls, or a bird singing on a wet bough; and somehow young men
seemed to get the idea that the excitement had something to do with them. It
made them feel as if something was expected of them; and you know how it is
with young men: they sort of pull back from the thing that is expected of them
just because it is expected. I always thought it rather small, but I suppose
they can’t help it. There was a woman I met at Fairshore who explained how that
was; but I didn’t know it then, and I was rather sensitive about it. Anyway, it
came about that I hadn’t many beaux, and my mother was a good deal relieved
when I settled down to Henry. And we hadn’t any more than got the furniture as
we wanted it when I discovered that there hadn’t anything happened at all!
Instead of living with my mother, I was just living with Henry; I’ve never done
anything else.
There are things nobody
ever tells young girls about marriage. Sometimes I think it is because, if they
knew how to estimate their experience in the beginning, there is such a lot
they wouldn’t go on with; and when I was married, nobody ever thought of anything
but that you had to go on with it. There were times when it seemed as if all it
needed was just going on: there was a dizzying point just about to be reached
from which Henry and I should really set out for somewhere.
It took me fifteen
years to realize that we hadn’t set out for anything, and would never get
anywhere in particular.
I know I tried. Times I
would explain to Henry what I wanted until he seemed to want it as much as I
did; and then we would begin whatever we had to do,--at least I would
begin,--and then I would find out that Henry had forgotten what we were doing
it for-- like the time we saved to set out the south lot in apricots, and Henry
bought water-shares with the money. He said it would be cheaper to own the
water for the apricots; but then we hadn’t anything left to pay for the
planting, and the man who had sold Henry the shares turned out not to own them.
After a while I gave up saving.
The trouble was, Henry
said, I was too kind of simple. It always seemed to me, if you wanted things,
you picked out the one nearest to you, and made a mark so you could keep tab on
whether you were getting it or not; and then you picked out the next nearest,
and went for that, and after a while you had all of them. But Henry said when
it came to business it was a good deal more complicated, and you had to look on
all sides of a thing. Henry was strong on looking on all sides; anybody that
had any kind of reasonableness could always get over him, like that man with
the water-shares. That was when I was trying to make myself believe that if we
could get a little money together, we might be in things. I had been reading
the magazines, and I knew that there were big, live things with feelers out all
over creation, and if I could just get the least little tip of one. . . . But I
knew it wasn’t money. When I wasn’t too sick and overworked and worn out trying
to keep track of Henry’s reasons, I knew that the thing I was aching for was
close beside me . . . when I heard the wind walk on the roof at night, . . . or
heard music playing . . . and I would be irritated with Henry because he couldn’t
help me lay hold of it. It is ridiculous, I know, but there were times when it
seemed to me if Henry had been fatter, it would have helped some. I don’t mean
to say that I had wanted to marry a fat man, but Henry hadn’t filled out any,
not like it seems men ought to: he just got dry and thinner. It used to make me
kind of exasperated. Henry was always patient with me; he thought it was
because I hadn’t any children. He would have liked children. So would I when I
thought I was to have one, but I was doing my own housework, and I was never
strong. I cried about it a good deal at the time; but I don’t suppose I really
wanted it very much or I would have adopted one. I will tell you--there are
women that want children just for the sake of having them, but the most of them
want them because there is a man-- And the man they want gets to hear of it,
and whenever a woman is any way unhappy, they think all she needs is a baby.
But there’s something else ought to happen first, and I never gave up thinking
it was going to happen; all the time I kept looking out, like Sister Anne in
the fairy-tale, and it seemed to me a great many times I saw dust moving. I
never understood why we couldn’t do things right here at home--big things.
There were those people I’d read about in Germany--just plain carpenters and
butchers and their wives--giving passion-plays. They didn’t know anything about
plays; they just felt grateful, and they did something like they felt. I spoke
to the minister’s wife about it once--not about a passion-play, of course, that
wouldn’t have done; but about our just taking hold of something as if we
thought we were as good as those Germans,--but she didn’t seem to think we
could. She kind of pursed up her mouth and said, "Well, we must remember
that they had the advantage of having lived abroad." It was always like
that. You had to have lived somewhere or been taught or had things different;
you couldn’t just start right off from where you were. It was all of a piece
with Henry’s notion of business; there was always some kind of queer
mixed-up-ness about it that I couldn’t understand. But still I didn’t give up
thinking that somehow I was going to pull the right string at last, and then
things would begin to happen. Not knowing what it was I wanted to happen, I
couldn’t be expected to realize that it couldn’t happen now on account of my
being married to Henry. It was at Fairshore that I found out.
It was when we had been
married eighteen years that Aunt Lucy died and left me all her property. It
wasn’t very much, but it was more than Henry would ever have, and I just made
up my mind that I was going to have the good of it. Henry didn’t make any
objection, and the first thing I did was to go down to Fairshore for the
summer. I chose Fairshore because I had heard about all the authors and
painters being there. You see, when you never have any real life except what
you get from reading, you have a kind of feeling that writers are the only real
own folks you’ve got. You even get to thinking sometimes that maybe, if you had
known how to go about it, you could have written yourself, though perhaps you’d
feel that way about bridge-building or soldiering, if it was the only real kind
of work you saw much of. Not that I ever thought I could write; but I had so
many ideas that were exactly like what I’d read that I thought if I could only
just get somebody to write them for me-- But you can’t; they’ve all got things
of their own. Still, you would think the way they get inside the people they
write about that they would be able to see what is going on inside of you, and
be a little kind.
You see, it had come
over me that away deep inside of me there was a really beautiful kind of life,
singing, and burning blue and red and gold as it sang, and there were days when
I couldn’t bear to think of it wasting there and nobody to know.
Not that Henry didn’t
take an interest in me,--his kind of interest,--if I was sick or hurt, or
seeing that I had a comfortable chair. But if I should say to Henry to lean
upon my heart and listen to the singing there, he would have sent for the
doctor. Nobody talks like that here in Castroville: only in books I thought I
had heard the people calling to one another quietly and apart over all the
world, like birds waking in a wood. I’ve wondered since I came back from
Fairshore if people put things in books because they would like to have them
that way.
It is difficult to tell
what happened to me at Fairshore. It didn’t really happen--just the truth of
things coming over me in a slow, acrid dribble. Sometimes in the night I can
feel the recollection of it all awash at the bottom of my heart, cold and
stale. But nothing happened. Nobody took any notice of me but one woman. She
was about my age, plain-looking and rather sad. I’d be proud to mention her
name; but I’ve talked about her a great deal, and, with all my being so
disappointed, it isn’t so bad but it might be worse if everybody got to find
out about it. She was really a much greater writer than the rest of them; but,
I am ashamed to say it, just at first, perhaps because she was so little
different from me on the outside, and perhaps just because she was a woman, I
didn’t seem to care much about her. I don’t know why I shouldn’t say it, but I
did want to have something to do with interesting men. People seem to think
that when a woman is married she has got all that’s coming to her; but we’re
not very different from men, and they have to have things. There are days
sometimes when it seems to me that never to have known any kind of men but
Henry and the minister and old man Truett, who does our milking, would be more
than I could bear. I thought if I could get to know a man who was big enough so
I couldn’t walk all around him, so to speak,--somebody that I could reach and
reach and not find the end of,--I shouldn’t feel so--so frustrated. There was a
man there who wrote things that made you feel like that,--as if you could take
hands with him and go out and rescue shipwrecked men and head rebellions. And
when I tried to talk to him, I found him looking at me the way young men used
to before I married Henry--as if he thought I wanted something, and it was
rather clever of him not to give it to me. It was after that that I took to
sitting with the writer woman. I’d noticed that though the men seemed to
respect her, and you saw them in corners sometimes reading manuscripts to her,
they never took her to walk, or to see the moon rise, or the boats come in.
They spent all that on the pretty women, young and kind of empty-headed. I’d
heard them talk when they thought I wasn’t listening. And the writer woman sat
about with the other women, and didn’t seem to mind it.
I hoped when people saw
me with her, they’d think it was because she was so famous, and not guess how
terrible it was to find yourself all at once a middle-aged woman sitting on a
bench, and all the world going by as if it was just what they expected. It came
over me that here were all the things I had dreamed about,--the great sea
roaring landward, music, quick and gay; looks, little incidents,--and I wasn’t
in it; I wasn’t in it at all.
I suppose the writer
woman must have seen how it was with me, but I thought at first she was talking
of herself.
"It’s all very
wonderful out there, isn’t it?" she said, looking toward the blue water
and the beach shining like a shell, with the other writers and painters walking
up and down and making it into world stuff. "Very wonderful--when you have
the price to pay for it!"
"It is
expensive." I was thinking of the hotel, but I saw in a minute she meant
something else.
"The price you
pay," she said, "it isn’t being fit to be in the Great World or being
able to appreciate it when you’re in; it is what you contribute to keep other
people in, I suppose."
I must have said
something about not being able to see what the kind of women who were in
contributed--just girls and flirty kind of married women.
"It’s a kind of
game, keeping other people in," said the writer woman. "They don’t
know much else, but they know the game. We are, most of us," she said,
"like those matches that will not light unless they are struck upon the
box: there is a particular sort of person that sets us off. It’s a business,
being that sort of person."
"If anybody could
only learn it--" I tried to seem only polite.
"It is the whole
art," she said, "of putting yourself into your appearance." She
laughed. "I have too much waist for that sort of thing. I have my own
game."
I seemed suddenly to
want to get away to my room and think about it. I know it is absurd at my age,
but I lay on the bed and cried as I hadn’t since they told me my baby hadn’t
lived. For I knew now that all that beautiful life inside me couldn’t be born either,
for I was one who had to have help to be worth anything to myself, and I didn’t
know the game. I had never known it.
All the time I had been
thinking that all I needed was to find the right person; and now I understood
that, so far as anybody could guess, I wasn’t the right person myself. I hadn’t
the art of putting myself into my appearance. I’m shy about talk, and my arms
are too fat, and my skirts have a way of hanging short in front.
I’ve thought about it a
great deal since. It doesn’t seem fair. Nobody told me about it when I was a
girl; I think nobody tells girls. They just have to sort of find it out; and if
they don’t, nobody cares. All they did tell me was about being good, and you
will be happy; but it isn’t so. There is a great deal more to it than that, and
it seems as if people ought to know. I think we are mostly like that in
Castroville: we’ve got powers and capacities ’way down in us, but we don’t know
anything about getting them out. We think it is living when we have got
upholstered furniture and a top buggy. I know people who think it is worth
while never to have lived in a house without a cupola. But all the time we are
not in the game. We do not even know there is a game.
Sometimes I think, if
it would do me any good, I could turn in and learn it now. I watched them at
Fairshore, and it seemed to me it could be learned. I have wild thoughts
sometimes,--such thoughts as men have when they go out and snatch things,--but
it wouldn’t do me any good. Henry’s folks were always long-lived, and there are
days when I am so down that I am glad to have even Henry. As long as people see
us going about together they can’t know-- I’m rather looking forward to getting
old now. I think perhaps I sha’n’t ache so. But I should like to know how much
Henry understands.