Black Milk (18 page)

Finally, in June 1930, after months that included a nervous breakdown, hallucinations and an attempted suicide, she was diagnosed with schizophrenia and taken to a hospital. She spent the rest of her eighteen years under psychiatric care. There is a letter she wrote to Scott shortly afterward that says a lot about not only her psychology at the time but also her vivacious and tempestuous style: “No matter what happens, I still know in my heart that it is a Godless, dirty game: that love is bitter and all there is, and that the rest is for the emotional beggars of the earth. . . .”
¹⁰

Nonetheless, staying at the clinic seemed somehow to have triggered her productivity. She wrote constantly during this period—diaries, stories, letters. Not only did she make beautiful paintings, but she also wrote a semiautobiographical novel,
Save Me the Waltz
. In utmost sincerity she wrote about the fun-loving, inventive, but also hardworking Southern belle she had been, and the inner transformation that came with marriage. She also elaborated on the two conflicting sides of her personality: one independent and carefree, the other in need of love and security.

As soon as she finished the novel Zelda sent it to Scott’s publisher. Her husband had not seen it yet and when he found out, he was furious. At the time he was working on
Tender Is the Night
. As they had made use of similar material (the story of Zelda’s mental illness and the years they had spent together in Paris and on the Riviera), the two books largely overlapped. A great fight ensued, with marital and artistic repercussions, at the end of which Zelda agreed to revise her manuscript. When the book came out it was not well received by literary critics, selling only a limited number of copies. Demoralized, Zelda did not publish another novel.

Her husband rented houses near the various clinics she resided in so that he could still be close to her while he was writing. They spent the following years seeing each other only on visiting days, between pills and doctors and treatments. He died in 1940 from a heart attack. Eight years later a fire erupted in a mental institution in Asheville, North Carolina. Among the patients who lost their lives in that fire was Zelda Fitzgerald.

Faulkner once said that a writer’s obituary should be simple. “He wrote books, then he died.” But what about a woman writer like Zelda Fitzgerald: She sat on the edge, danced herself to heartbreak, painted the world in 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.

T
he 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’état, 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
, I
should be asking that question. In all this time, why didn’t you ever tell me about Mama Rice Pudding?”

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?”

Miss Highbrowed Cynic and Milady Ambitious Chekhovian cast guilty looks at each other.

“Time for some real talk! Let the cat out of the bag!” says Little Miss Practical, shrugging nonchalantly.

“Okay, it might as well come out,” says Milady Ambitious Chekhovian. She turns to me, her eyes blazing with fire. “I don’t know if you recall, but sometime ago you were traveling on a steamboat and this plump woman with two sons sat beside you.”

Of course I remember. I nod my head.

“Well, you might not have realized it, but you were profoundly moved by your encounter with that woman. She was young and pregnant with her third child. When you looked at her you lamented the opportunities you lost. You almost wanted to be her. If I hadn’t acted at once and made you write “The Manifesto of a Single Girl,” God forbid, you were going to get trapped in your dreams of motherhood.”

“So I wrote that manifesto because of you?”

“Yes, of course,” says Milady Ambitious Chekhovian, as she paces up and down. “I thought that would be the end of the story. But when Mama Rice Pudding noticed you were curiously watching pregnant women and mothers with their babies, she decided it was high time for her to come out of hiding and introduce herself. We tried to reason with her, and then we threatened her. But she didn’t budge. She was going to upset the status quo, so we performed a military takeover. We forced you to leave Istanbul, but apparently Miss Nuisance followed us here!”

“But, if she is a member of the Choir of Discordant Voices, she should have an equal say in all matters,” I venture.

“Thanks, but no thanks. We can’t let that happen,” Miss Highbrowed Cynic says, rubbing her temples as if on the verge of a migraine.

“We are not a democracy, okay? We were always a monarchy, and now we are a tight military regime,” roars Milady Ambitious Chekhovian. A spark flickers in her eye as she turns to her chum. “Let’s have an emergency meeting.”

As the chairpersons of the High Military Council’s executive committee, Milady Ambitious Chekhovian and Miss Highbrowed Cynic move to a corner, whispering in fierce tones. After what seems like an eternity, they walk back, their footsteps echoing their determination, their faces grim.

“Follow us outside,” says Milady Ambitious Chekhovian.

“Where on earth are we going at this hour?”

“Move!” she scolds me, and then calls out to the others: “All of you! On the double!”

At three-thirty in the morning, under the watchful gaze of the braver squirrels, we march in single file in the snow. Our teeth chattering, our fingertips numb, we pass by the library and the dormitories.

“How serene the universe seems tonight,” mumbles Dame Dervish as she takes a deep breath.

How she’s able to find something positive to say even under the most stressful circumstances is a mystery to me. I pick her up and put her inside my sweater so she doesn’t catch a cold. We move along in this fashion until we arrive under a massive tree.

“What is this?” I ask.

Miss Highbrowed Cynic delivers the answer: “I discovered this tree when we first arrived here. On sunny days, it’s a perfect place to read. I would have much preferred to show it to you in the daylight, but I need to do it now. Pay attention to the tree trunk. What does it look like?”

Oddly enough, a mammoth balloonlike lump bulges out of the tree’s thick trunk. It looks like a giant shriveled-up prune or a huge wrinkled walnut with ridges. Or else—

Miss Highbrowed Cynic gives me a sidelong glance. “Tell me, what does that mass resemble from afar?”

“Well, I don’t know. . . . It’s almost like . . . like a brain. . . .” I say.