That much you should know. I have left you out of love for another. Your own 'genteel atrocities of coldness and blindness toward me were not by themselves enough. I was too stoical, too Puritan, too much a creature of my society for solitary rebellion; I needed another. Who he is, and where we are together, I will trust you not to seek out. Your dignified useful life, of which I was an ever smaller and less significant adornment, surely will forbid any ugly vulgar furor of detectives and lawyers and warrants. Let me become truly nothing to you, at last. I will change my name. I will change my being. The woman you 'knew' and 'possessed' is no more. I am destroying her. I am sinking into the great and beautiful blankness which it is our European/Christian/Western avoidance maneuver to clutter and mask with material things and personal 'achievements.' Ego is the enemy. Love is the goal. I shed you as I would shed a skin, with some awkwardness perhaps and at first a sensitivity to the touch of the new, but without pain and certainly without regret. How can I-we-regret a phase of life that is already dead? Are not all oiir attachments, in truth, to things that are already dead?
If you decide to sell the house or any part of our joint holdings, I of course expect-my legal half. If in time you wish to remarry (and I expect you will, not out of any great talent for uxoriousness but because the ferocious sea of seeking women will at some point overpower your basic indifference; the only bulwark against women is a woman, and a wife is convenient, especially for spoiled and preoccupied men of middling years) I will ask an appropriate settlement in exchange for your freedom. The affront, to your pride and convenience, of my desertion should weigh little, in any wise court, against the nearly twenty-two years of mental and emotional cruelty you with your antiseptic chill have inflicted on me. More than twenty-two-since I date my bondage not from that rather grotesquely gauzy and bubbly and overphotographed August wedding at King's Chapel the year our fathers were all for Goldwater but from the moment when you, with the connivance of my parents, 'rescued' me from what was so generally deemed to be an 'unsuitable' attachment to dear little Myron Stern.
But enough, my once and only husband. No grudges. Between us the scale is fairly balanced. Darkness, though the plane has moved west with the sun and given us a sunset in slow motion, has at last come, and little unknown cities twinkle below. We are descending. The human pilot has resumed the controls and the pretty little Filipino has reappeared, checking our seat belts with mock concern for our well-being. The fat man has stopped pretending to be asleep and is leaning his bulk into me, straining to see out my window. He fears for his life. In his gross voice he has the temerity to tell me I should put up my tray. I hope he reads this sentence. That is not my hand trembling, but the sudden uncongenial mixture of air and metal-the shaking of the plane. No-I am suddenly terrified to be without you (interruption: we have landed and are taxiing)-to be without you now that dinner hour has properly come, and our windows will be black against the yews outside, with the lights of a lone boat moving across the cove, and the automatic garage door will be grinding upward to receive your Mercedes, and rumbling down again, and the stairs up from the basement will resound with your aggressive footsteps, and there you will be, so solid and competent and trusting and expecting your quick martini before dinner. But then I realize that this happened-darkness came to you, you found the house empty, you read my horrible hasty note-hours ago, in quite another time zone.
Love,
S.
April 22 Dearest Pearl -
Perhaps by now you will have heard from your father. He was always less afraid of the transatlantic telephone-those strings of dialled numbers, those crackling foreign accents-than I was. My wiggles, you used to call my writing. When you were two, and we were still living in the little Brighton house, you would crawl up on my lap expecting to see a drawing on my desk as when we crayonned together, and were so disappointed to see just my wiggles, little crooked lines all in one dull color.
Well, darling, I am doing my wiggles now in a motel in Los Angeles, and have left your father. It was nothing he did, or that I did, suddenly-it was more a matter of what he and I had been doing for years and years, or not doing, rather-not even paying attention. You remember how conscientiously I used to tell him, at dinnertime, of my day?-the little tail-wagging housewife-puppy, whimpering and drooling, offering up her pathetic worried bones and chewing sticks, her shopping trips to Boston and her excursions to the plant nursery in Wenham, her tennis games and her yoga lessons and her boozy little lunches at the club with the same women she played tennis with yesterday, as if to say to this big silent he-doctor, this gray eminence, 'Look, dear, how hard I've been working to enhance your lovely estate!' or 'See, I'm not wasting your money, I couldn't find a thing I wanted to buy at Bon-wit's!' or 'Every hour accounted for-not a minute of idleness or daydreaming or sleeping with all these dark handsome strangers that came today to pump out the fat trap!' Well, I recently tried an experiment. I didn't tell your father a thing about my day. And be never asked. Not once, day after day of biting my tongue-he utterly didn't notice. That settled it. So absent from his perceptions, I might as well be absent in fact.
Of course, there is a little more to it than that. We of the frailer sex have to have some wild hope, something to go to-otherwise a million years of slavery has conditioned us to huddle by the hearth, stony as it is, and pound some more millet, and get pounded in turn by way of thanks, and commune with the moon. I speak as one of my generation, that came of age just as the Fifties ended-I was nineteen when Lee Harvey Oswald shot them dead-and then by twenty I was married to your father and working too hard to support him really to notice that a revolution was going on, and all the old barriers were down. With your generation, dear Pearl, the barriers are not just down but forgotten, trampled into history. The harvest is in. How thrilling it has been for me-I almost wrote 'us,' still thinking in the plighted plural-to see you grow, tall and fearless and carrying your femaleness like a battle flag! Even when you were tiny I saw you as a soldier, your hair pale and straight and shiny as a helmet-magical blond child of a dark mother and prematurely gray father. I had been a tall girl too but had always to fight the impulse to hunch. Your father, to give the devil his due, loved you extravagantly. He didn't want a son-when you were born he confessed to me he couldn't have tolerated sharing me with another male. That was still in his chivalrous days. To your generation his remark will sound chauvinistic but at the time it expressed our happiness, our three-cornered joy. My own bliss, holding you even that first hour with your pulsing hot bald skull and freshly unfolded hands that even then had a bit of a grip, was that of seeing myself extended, my womanhood given a second try. My genitals had always been presented to me subtly as a kind of wound and you I vowed would never feel wounded. Daughter, your father liked to say. Just the word. It is a much more satisfying word, with those mysterious silent letters in the middle, than simple little son. So now you can see how I have this fear of being locked out by you two. I am in disgrace, I have flubbed my r &le. You have been so admirably the daughter-lisping your first words ('Dada,' 'Mama,' and then 'coogie' from the Cookie Monster on 'Sesame Street'), mastering toilet-training and small-muscle motor control just when Dr. Spock thought you should, pitching for that mixed-sex softball team that went all the way to the semifinals in Danvers when you were thirteen, growing flaxen-haired and just the right amount of buxom and getting into Yale so smartly when Harvard couldn't accept any more legacies and now for your junior year abroad pondering the Metaphysicals (your grandfather would be so proud!-he doted on them, and Milton and Spenser and Marvell) in some fogey old don's musty digs with its electric fire (this is more my imagining of it than anything you've written in your I must say very few letters) and lighting up High Street and Carfax with your wide-eyed long-haired easy-striding American beauty and on weekends having champagne and strawberries with the sons of the nobility just as in 'Brideshead Revisited,' which you will remember we enjoyed so much, you and I together, you staying up to watch it even though it was school the next day, not so very long ago. (Am I wrong to date your passion for things English from those shows?) You have played and are playing so splendidly the role of Daughter and your father impeccably assumed the part of Dada but I seem to have forgotten my lines and wandered offstage. Will you forgive me? (Your father's forgiveness, oddly, doesn't interest me at all.)
Twenty is an age when your parents still think of you as a child and if you were to die or get married one would sadly say 'only twenty' but as I recall that age there is little 'only' about it and I must appeal to you as another woman to understand me, to simply know. And having so appealed I realize, or seem to realize, in this rather terrifying motel room where the air-conditioner rattles as if mounted off-center and people seem to keep bumping against the door as they go by in the hall to the ice machine, that of course there is no question of condemnation, that you and I will continue to love each other as we did that first minute, when you gripped my finger with this little violet baby hand the texture of a wilted flower, because we are aspects of the same large person, that even in that first minute all your eggs (this is an incredible physiological fact I recently read in The New England Journal of Medicine which your father gets) were tiny and perfect in you and you were my egg, tiny and perfect. I am crying as I write this and perhaps make insufficient sense in the fashion of maudlin people but do beg you to believe that I am your mother still.
Study well, my sweetheart. When I try to picture you to myself I see a shining blond head bent over a book. Your love of books, from Babar to Tolkien and romances with those embossed titles in lurid colors to Austen and Dickens on up to these unpleasant modern writers who try to make us all feel shabby was so intense your father and I used to whisper what had we done wrong, what parental failing of ours was to blame. When you were in your early teens, after your softball craze but before 'Brideshead' caught your fancy, I would sit and watch television-these very stupid well- intentioned shows with minority families cavorting around or police stations or high schools and the canned laughter heaving away-hoping you would be tempted to join me in that cozy corner room upstairs, with the heavy drapes and your father's old medical books and my father's priceless editions, because I imagined this was what normal American children should be watching. But no, my dear elf-child, you stayed in your room wrapped in lovely contortions around a book, while I of course got hooked and had to watch these idiotic stories to the end. Of course I used to worry at your snubbing television and me together but now I see that the children we have are just miracles like any other, like geysers or glass skyscrapers or mountains of maple trees in fall in Vermont, and that we have nothing to do with creating them-our job is to stand and wonder. Our job is to marvel and love.
Study well, and never be tempted by drugs. People (which I see only in the dentist's office, but must say I do devour eagerly there) and the National Enquirer (which Irving my yoga instructor is devoted to for its spiritual dimensions, its ESP and UFO news) are so full of these young English nobility and their dangerous drug habits that they pick up in imitation of the rock stars, out of class guilt and a subconscious Marxist wish to destroy themselves I suppose. But there's no reason for an American girl to get involved in any of that. Your mother's not a churchgoer as you know but I do believe firmly that our body as God made it, with no additives, not only lasts longest but is most fun. And along the same lines don't get too infatuated with male homosexuals. I know they must seem, especially with those English accents and marvellous high rosy complexions, very amusing and charming and unthreatening but remember, dearest, they don't really like women. They think women are strange, too strange to deal with, and competitors furthermore. Normal men think women are strange too but they don't try to steal other men from us and at least up to your mother's generation had developed a certain delusional system around our strangeness that could be quite touching-they treated us like handicapped persons, opening doors and explaining our needs to waiters as though we couldn't talk. Well that may be gone but I'm sure that enough of something similar remains for you to concentrate on nice normal boys if you can find any in that dear decadent old country.
I must be tired all my commas are dropping away. About an hour ago there was a strange kind of rodeo in the parking lot-low-slung cars covered with glittery paint prowling in noisy circles, and then there was a quarrel just outside my door in an appalling language I realized was Japanese! In'fact in the coffee shop I was surprised at how many Japanese there were, as if I had gone farther west than I wanted. Tomorrow I must head east again, driving into the desert in my rented car-not a dreadfully perilous adventure perhaps but enough to make a middle-aged lady's heart rise in her ' throat. I must end, darling. I must let you and me go to bed. I began by feeling quite prickly and apologetic and defensive toward you but now feel quite close. I feel you are with me. Part of you, of course, with part of me. Write me at this address: c/o Ashram Arhat, Forrest, AZ 85077. Doesn't it sound like the end of the world? Do try to be a more conscientious correspondent than you have been-I am so alone now. And don't give the address to your father.
Much much love,
Mother
April 23 Dear Dr. Podhoretz-
I am sorry, but I am going to miss my cleaning appointment next Tuesday the 29th and don't know when I can make another. As you can see from the postmark I am a long way from Swampscott. But I promise to keep flossing and using the rubber tip on my gums. I certainly don't want to undo your good work and go through all that oral surgery again! Once was enough!!
Cordially,
Sarah Worth (Mrs. Charles)
April 23 
