stunning colors, raised a daughter, loved with great passion, wrote stories, then she died.
Scott and Zelda left a huge unanswered question behind: If they hadn’t worn each other thin, would they have lived longer, and produced greater works? I don’t know. Some days I feel like it would have made a big difference if they had made life easier on each other; then other days I suspect the effortlessness of daily life wouldn’t have mattered at all. The outcome would have been the same.
Zelda Fitzgerald was not a “normal” woman who conformed to conventional gender roles. Neither modesty nor passivity was her cup of tea. But if she had been the opposite, if she had been capable of living a more settled and secure life, would she have written better books, more books? Would she have been remembered more highly today?
As I write this now I suspect the opposite is true. Maybe through their constant wars and ups and downs, and their daring to swerve miles away from a conventional marriage, Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald were able to write, love and live to the best of their ability.
Brain Tree
The Center for Women’s Studies at Mount Holyoke College is situated in a large, beige, three-story typical New England house, in which I occupy one room on the first floor that has a separate entrance. The second floor houses the offices of the faculty and other fellows as well. The walls and ceilings are so thin I can easily hear their conversations, and more than likely they can hear me shouting at my finger-women-explaining in part why I catch some of the faculty looking at me, at times, with concern.
Connecting my room with the center is a door that is so flimsy, the first time I cook cauliflower in my kitchen, the entire department stinks for days. The smell seeps through the cardboardlike door into every nook and cranny. I try preparing other simple but less smelly recipes-always with the same outcome. In a place where everyone drinks organic, fair-trade, antioxidant herbal teas, even the aroma of my Turkish coffee is too much. And so, I abandon the kitchen altogether, and stick to fruit, crackers and water.
In the evenings, when everybody leaves the building, I remain. There is something creepy about being alone in such a big house that suddenly becomes so quiet and dark. At night, when I try to sleep, I find myself disconcerted.
But not tonight. This evening in my nutshell of a bathroom, in the faint glimmer coming through the open window, I watch snowflakes fall from the deep sky onto Mount Holyoke’s campus. The blanket of snow makes the world seem like a different planet, and I sit here feeling calmer and more composed than I have been in months.
The bathroom may not be the most appropriate place to observe a landscape this romantic, but it is the only place in the entire building where I can have a cigarette-without the others, and, most important, the fire alarms detecting my smoke. The healthy-life-happy-minded feminists may forgive me for my cauliflower, but I don’t think they will pardon me for my Marlboro Lights.
But necessity is the mother of invention. Shortly after I arrived here, I set up a mini ironing board in the bathroom as a desk and closed the lid of a storage bin, making it as comfortable as an armchair by tossing a cushion onto it. This is where I write my newspaper column and stories. I lock myself in here, and eat red apples for breakfast, lunch and dinner, smoking to my heart’s content.
So on this snowy night, I am here again, looking out the window as I write, when a loud scream yanks me out of my reverie:
“Help! Help! There’s a thief!”
I put the cigarette out, leave the bathroom and check the clock by the corner of the bed. It reads 3:08. I grab the African mask on the wall and dash forward without thinking about what I am doing. Not that I am made of hero material. If I am brave at this moment it is precisely because I don’t have a clue what is going on. And there is no time to stop and be frightened.
“There is a thief on the roof! Help!”
Now I recognize the voice. It is Miss Highbrowed Cynic who is screaming. I find her perched on top of a vase like a wingless chickadee, hiding among Christmas flowers, her face as pale as a ghost.
“What is it? Why are you yelling?”
“I just got back from the library. I was walking alone in the dark and then I saw it! Her! Someone is walking on the roof!”
“Maybe it is one of the other finger-women.”
“No, it can’t be. All three of them are here, don’t you see?”
I flick a glance over my shoulder. It is true. Having rushed out of bed, they are all lined up behind me-Dame Dervish in her long nightgown, Milady Ambitious Chekhovian in her dark green commando pajamas, Little Miss Practical in her comfortable sweatpants. Straining our ears, we listen to the strange sounds echoing from somewhere else in the house.
“Yo, let’s call the police,” says Little Miss Practical. The day we moved here she wrote down the numbers for police, fire and ambulance on a piece of paper and stuck it on the fridge.
“Wait, don’t rush. Let me go and take a look,” says Dame Dervish.
But Milady Ambitious Chekhovian doesn’t approve. “No way, you are the last person to do this.”
“And why is that?” Dame Dervish asks calmly.
“I know you. Whoever you see on the roof, you’ll say, ‘God must have sent us this thief for a reason,’ and you’ll end up inviting the thug for dinner! You are too soft-hearted for the job. It’s best if I go.”
She has a point, I admit. Milady Ambitious Chekhovian has always been the bravest of the Choir of Discordant Voices. But since she masterminded a coup d’etat, her audacity has tripled.
“All right, you go, then,” I say.
Fully focused on her mission, she grabs a plastic fork as a weapon and goes off into the dark.
Milady Ambitious Chekhovian has no sooner disappeared than a commotion erupts on the roof, piercing the night’s stillness. The squirrels inhabiting the trees around the center stick their heads out of their holes, trying to understand what is going on. A few of them jump down and vanish.
We hear Milady Ambitious Chekhovian’s voice crack as she shouts at someone. The perceptible alarm in her tone is quickly replaced by anger and aversion. Whoever the other person is, she doesn’t seem to quarrel, doesn’t retort.
Ten minutes later Milady Ambitious Chekhovian comes back downstairs and attempts to stab a tangerine with her fork, fuming and furious. We all watch the fork break into two pieces.
“What is it? What happened?” I ask.
“See for yourself,” she says. Then she turns toward the door, almost hissing. “Are you coming or not?”
Slowly, shyly, as if willing herself to disappear into the thick night, a finger-woman walks in. I recognize her immediately. It is Mama Rice Pudding.
“Hello there!” I pick her up and place her on my palm.
“You two know each other?” Milady Ambitious Chekhovian asks.
“Well, hmm… We’ve… m-met once,” I stutter.
“Oh, yeah? When was that?” Miss Highbrowed Cynic asks, frowning. “And how come we don’t know about it?”
Deciding that the best defense is a good offense, I snap: “In fact
Milady Ambitious Chekhovian briefly considers the notion. “What do you think would have happened if we told you? What good would it have brought?”
“I have a right to know that I have a maternal side,” I insist.
“Great, just what we needed,” says Miss Highbrowed Cynic, grumbling to herself. “We crossed an entire ocean to get rid of this sticky miss. Alas, she found us here as well!”
Suddenly it dawns on me. Does my leaving Istanbul in such a hurry have anything to do with this?
“Wait a minute, hold on,” I say. “Is this why you brought me all the way here to America?”
