Consciousness Raising Read online

house. I thought about kittens and Plath and big fat moths. But the farther I went—out the front door, out the thick garden walls, out into a squalid patch of desert—the freer I felt. The humor struck me. A feminist consciousness raising that no one but me attended where the host had badgered me? How bizarre! And I didn’t believe the other women she’d invited had gone to hear Plath read; they’d simply stayed away. Why hadn’t I been as wise? Oh, Maureen was an intellectual snob: the worst thing in the world. She lacked charity, humor, grace, and humility. Her irritability with the mistakes of others betrayed her own insecurities. I never wanted to be like her.

  I lashed a creosote bush with one hand. Then I noticed the damn book. I still had her copy of The Bell Jar. With a mighty hand I squashed the thing, rolled it up tightly and choked the life out of it. Under a scabby, black mesquite and quite near an overturned barrel cactus, I jammed the book in a snake hole. It fit exactly. But for good measure, and in a parting gesture, I kicked dirt on top and stomped it down with my foot.

  I never again spoke to Maureen. She was in a different French class the next year, and in the hot noisy halls of our school I studiously avoided her. Her brother, I gleaned from various newspaper accounts, ended up in the Florence Penitentiary. And once someone casually mentioned that Maureen had become an experimental psychologist, no doubt performing vivisections on chattering, unsuspecting monkeys.

  As I look back on it, I now know that was not the end of the story; God or his grim ilk had a surprise hidden up his capacious sleeve.

  Two years later I graduated from high school and enrolled in our local university. In the spring of my freshman year I signed up for the required second-semester English course, the section I chose having been given the cheerful title “A Journey Toward the Heart of Darkness.” Late one January afternoon, with the lowering sun full upon the palm trees, making crisp elongated Mickey Mouse heads out of the shadows of prickly pear cacti, I entered a chilly classroom at the top of a windowless concrete cube only to find it packed already with angry and aggressive marketing majors, agricultural students who were doodling on the desk tops (cartoonish bulls mounting cows), and bored nurses who appeared to be fantasizing their impending marriages to handsome doctors. I squeezed into a seat, and immediately the door swung open. In strode our professor.

  At the podium Morris Mitchell commanded attention. He was tall, sandy haired, with a droopy blonde moustache and a scholar’s oversized nose. Dressed in a rumbled khaki suit (the style of an English gentleman tomb robber), markedly pale and proud, he looked a great deal like a large mobile marble statue—with just as much personal warmth. From the first day he impressed me with his great intellect, reading us passages from Beowulf, slipping in and out of Old English, showing slides of battle axes and various Grendel-like monsters rendered in gold.

  In the next months my admiration grew. While the other students read Absalom, Absalom with absolute disinterest, and wrote appalling extemporaneous essays on Antigone, I worked hard and cherished every moment there. I felt superior to my classmates and I am horrified to say I enjoyed the ways he skewered them for their disinterest. He was magnificent when he humiliated some unsuspecting undergraduate who had failed to complete his reading assignment. He was merciless, unrelentingly confrontational, smug and comfortable in his self-assured mastery. Did it ever occur to me that he lacked respect and kindness? Did I see the flickers of cruelty so reminiscent of Maureen Maywood? The same glimmers of laughter under half-closed lids before he attacked his victim? How quickly I had forgotten my big conclusion, my natural abhorrence to cruelty. Morris’ course became my favorite and at the classes’ conclusion I knew I was his prized pupil.

  One summer afternoon, two weeks after the semester’s end, I sat at a glimmering oak table in the second story of the college library (near the old archives of Arizona’s past, the deprecations, lost gold mines, and gunfights) lost in an odd reverie, tracing and retracing the lined margin of my notebook, thinking episodically, and very romantically of Morris. An azure sky and the wispy indistinct green of a palo verde tree had amalgamated on the table top in front of me when all of the sudden another element entered the picture. Something white and blurry. A face. I was all agog when I glanced up and discovered Morris, smiling rather coyly, seated directly across from me.

  “At work again, Brenda?”

  “I had a few things... I was interested in some things.”

  “Not coursework? You are an exemplary student. Will you allow me to buy you a cup of coffee?”

  “Of course you can!” I said, springing up and hurriedly disposing of a pile of books beside me. As I nervously stacked the volumes on a nearby cart, I turned the spines away so that Morris wouldn’t notice that every book related to his class.

  “I think, Brenda,” began Morris, rising and coming around the table to take my elbow, “mine was a question of permission, not ability or possibility, therefore ‘may’ would be preferred. In everyday life, however, such informal uses of ‘can’ now occur all the time. But in any context in which politeness or formality is of overriding consideration, ‘may’ is still the better choice. Perhaps formality is not at issue here. Perhaps. Politeness, however, certainly is.”

  I sputtered. Looking back on it now, I see how thoroughly he iced the situation. Speaking more plainly, I see what an amazing asshole he was. Though I didn’t then. “Well then—of course you may!” I said, correcting myself.

  What was wrong with me? How I wish two years earlier at the consciousness raising that my consciousness had truly been raised! I’ll always wonder if that strange consciousness raising of Maureen’s hadn’t lowered my resistance to intellectual snobs. Had her odd personality distracted me from the importance of what had happened? Had I simply forgotten my conclusions about her while remembering the humor? At any rate, two years later, it was as though God had set in my path an exact double of Maureen Maywood, albeit in male get-up. How did I miss it? But if the similarity between Maureen and Morris occurred to me then, it must have been deeply subconscious for it did not govern my heart. His self-assured superiority thrilled me. I hung on his every word—his every, measured, and irritatingly precise word, and he, in return, incessantly corrected my speech. Morris and I dated; we were lovers; I moved into the apartment he was renting. Pygmalion, that was what I was living, and Morris was my crusty Professor Higgins.

  At my insistence he compiled ponderous lists of books for me to read; my goofy reactions to the classics were met with amused and tolerant forbearance. I enjoyed his superiority to his fellow graduate students, and his uncharitable assessments of professors..I remember we attended a certain party together, and I can see the salt-rimmed margarita seas tilted precariously over piles and piles of small plates, each smeared with black guacamole. At poolside, in a circle of leather equipales, we cornered a old western author and under a black, starry sky Morris feigned interest in his work and flattered the silly old fool telling him his pedestrian works were shadowing some unheralded brilliance which Morris alone had seen. A red ristra, a string of dried chili peppers, hung on a mailbox and rustled an eerie clitter-clatter. Afterwards Morris sat in his chair giggling about how he had destroyed the old gentleman whose ridiculous novel of innocent maidens and honorable cowhands enflamed Morris’ critical sense. The next year I married him and we left Arizona for his new faculty appointment in Mississippi. How I was to suffer in Morris’ rigid academy.

  I put the onus for the first incident on the rather mournful way the saguaro cacti saluted Morris and me as we left Tucson and drove east early one summer morning. Those saguaros had been my childhood friends, and the visceral pangs of sorrow I felt leaving them seemed to be mutual, reflected in the saguaros’ stiff farewell. The sight of hundreds of cacti standing at the side of road, their many arms raised in a tragic goodbye, caused the reality of what I had done to sink in. I suppose I harbored suspicions even then that I had entered into a joyless marriage.
I reacted by becoming giddy and carefree; Morris, however, grew silently sullen.

  That night we reached Carlsbad, New Mexico. We pulled into the motel parking lot near the famous caverns beneath a neon sign of an Indian jumping through hoops, the colors changing each time he jumped, his many unlit legs waiting to be lit. The hoop colors kept coming down, red, yellow, green, purple. After dropping our luggage we drew open the curtain in anticipation of the nightly spectacle: bats leaving the cave. We were quickly rewarded; the vortex of bats made me squeal with delight. With his back to the window, Morris eased himself into a tatty armchair.

  “Do you know the author I really, really hate?” I tittered once I was seated atop the bed.

  “No, who would that be?” he said testily. A huge spiral of bats began blackening the air above his head; they seemed to be flowing directly out of a secret egress at the top of his skull.

  “Oh, that guy, you know, who wrote..oh...the...ah...you know, the one who punched his wife?”

  “I think you might be referring to—”

  “It doesn’t matter.” I dismissed him with an airy, absent-minded wave of one hand.