Black Milk Part 9

"What are you reading?" I ask.

"The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt," she says.

Little Miss Practical casts a confused glance over my shoulder. "Another fisherman's story?"

"A book by the French critic Julia Kristeva, who happens to be one of the leading thinkers of our times," says Miss Highbrowed Cynic.

"Smart cookie, huh?" asks Little Miss Practical.

"She sees the Oedipus complex as a key to understanding women," continues Miss Highbrowed Cynic, her tone not so much annoyed as haughty. "A young girl adores her mother, copying everything she does. But then she finds out that she does not have a p.e.n.i.s, and feels flawed and incomplete, like a eunuch. To compensate for this deficiency, she attaches herself to her father. The mother who was loved and admired until then is now pushed aside, seen as a compet.i.tor. There are girls who from this stage onward develop a hatred for their mothers."

Little Miss Practical and I listen, without a word, without a breath.

"Women writers are affected by the Oedipus complex more than you may think. Did you know, for instance, why Sevgi Soysal became a novelist? She began to write at age eight because she was jealous of her father's affection for her mother. She saw her mother as a rival, and through her writing and imagination she wanted to win her father's favor."

"Oh, really?" I say.

"Oh, yes, she writes about this in her memoirs," Miss Highbrowed Cynic says, with her know-it-all att.i.tude. "Every child wants to rejoin her mother's body. This is an impossible wish, of course. That 'oneness' is long gone, severed forever, but the child cannot help longing for it. The 'symbolic order' represented by the father awaits the individual who cannot rejoin his mother's body."

"Come again?" says Little Miss Practical.

Miss Highbrowed Cynic volleys on. "In order to survive in this order, we suppress our imagination, temper our desires and learn to be 'normalized.' No matter how hard we try, however, our imagination can never be stifled. In the most inopportune places and at the oddest times, it surfaces. The mother's semiotic rises up against the father's symbolic order."

"Such confusing things!" says Little Miss Practical. "What's the point of making life so complicated? These French thinkers are not practical in the least. No wonder French movies are so depressing."

Miss Highbrowed Cynic stares at the other finger-woman with an air of condescension but says nothing. Instead she turns to me. "Kristeva talks about three ways for a child to create her ident.i.ty. First, to identify with the father and the symbolic. Second, to identify with the mother and the semiotic. Third, to find a shaky balance in between."

I pretend to follow what she is saying, but Miss Highbrowed Cynic doesn't fall for it: "Don't you get it? If you pursue the third option, you could use the father's symbolic order and the mother's semiotic in your work."

"Hmm . . . Is there a writer who has ever done that?" I ask.

"Yes, Sis. Take a closer look at Virginia Woolf's The Waves. She was writing precisely in that precarious balance."

I don't object. It might or might not be true. Writing fiction is a tidal river with strong currents. While flowing with it, one doesn't think, "Let me now add a splash of symbolic order and a dash of the mother's semiotic." You don't chew on such things when developing a novel. You are too busy falling in love with your characters.

That is what Miss Highbrowed Cynic doesn't understand. Novelists write without thinking. It is afterward, when literary critics and scholars weigh writers' every sentence that theories are applied. And then when people read those theories, they get the impression that novelists were purposefully creating their stories in such a way-which is not true.

"There's something I don't get," Little Miss Practical says.

"Why am I not surprised?" scoffs Miss Highbrowed Cynic.

"You're so into the theory of motherhood. All this semiotic, symbolic, bucolic . . . But when it comes to the practicalities, I am sure you'd fall flat on your face."

"My knowledge would guide me," says Miss Highbrowed Cynic.

"Whoa, come on, Sister, you couldn't even change a diaper. I may not know anything about your theories, but I can get the hang of motherhood faster than Speedy Gonzalez runs."

The shape of her eyebrows indicates that Miss Highbrowed Cynic doesn't appreciate the remark. I leave them quarreling, and walk out of the library.

I wander around the campus. Being rid of the finger-women-if only for a short while-lightens my heart and my mood. Like a walking sponge, I soak up every detail I see, every sound I hear, every smell I sniff, and store it all away inside me. That is what happens when you are a foreigner; you collect details as if they were seash.e.l.ls on a sh.o.r.e.

In the cafeteria, I get in line and end up standing in front of a lesbian couple. One of the women is short and has spiky, carroty hair. The other is quite tall and heavily pregnant. We move forward, pushing our trays along inch by inch. Just when we reach the dessert display, the short woman chirps up.

"Ah, would you mind if we take that, since there is only one left?" There on top of a gla.s.s shelf, where the woman is pointing, is one lone piece of raspberry cake. I move back.

"Of course, go ahead."

"Thank you, thank you! Shirley has been craving raspberries since this morning," says the woman, giving me a wink.

"Oh," I say. "You're expecting a baby, how wonderful."

"Yes," says Shirley as she pats her belly. "Six feet one, chess and amateur tennis champion, professional artist, IQ over 160, interested in Buddhism and Far Eastern philosophy-"

"Excuse me?"

"The father," she says. "We picked him out of thousands at the sperm bank. . . . He's going to be a very special baby."

There is something in all this meticulous advance planning that freaks me out. Perhaps it is not surprising that women would look for athletic, charismatic, wealthy and influential sperm donors. But as someone who has grown up without a father, I am thinking, what does that ultimately mean to a child who will never know his or her biological father? Besides, the things we lack in life-such as blue eyes, a muscular body or conversational eloquence-might help us to develop other qualities that are dormant inside. Many talents are born in the shadows, out of necessity. The search for perfect babies misses the surprising role of oddities, coincidences and absences in our personal development.

In the evening I return to my room. The place I am staying in is about 130 square feet. It has the tiniest kitchen counter and a shower so small you can wash only half of yourself at a time.

Before me, there was an Indian painter residing here-the walls still smell of her paints. And before her, a Zimbabwean sociologist. The room has seen dozens of women from all over the world. The Indian artist left behind paint stains and an intricately designed rolling pin. The Zimbabwean scholar left a scary mask on the wall, which casts a long and thin ebony shadow.

What will I leave to next year's fellow? "Before me, there was a Turkish author staying here," she will say. I can't find anything but words to hand down to her. Perhaps I can leave one of my favorite Turkish words, which also exists in English: kismet.

I lie down on my bed. The solitude that I so enjoyed only this afternoon now darkens my mood. What am I doing here so far away from Istanbul, from my loved ones, from the place where my novels are set, from my friends, my mother and my mother tongue? Am I throwing myself into unknown waters just to see if I can swim?

What if I can't?

I recall my mother telling me I was too good at being alone. "It is as if you don't need anyone," she had said. "But you should. Too much independence is not good. You should be dependent, even if a tiny little bit."

This, coming from someone who had refused to remarry at the expense of being "a woman without a male protector" in the eyes of the society, had surprised me. But now I find myself thinking of her advice in another light.

Women of my age have husbands, children and picnic baskets. They don't hop on Peter Pan buses and go roaming Neverland. You should do that in your early twenties, when you are fresh out of school and your "life" hasn't started yet. But you don't do it in your midthirties. There should have been some order and stability in my life by now. Women my age have scrambled eggs in the mornings with their families and social rituals they like repeating. I'm still being dragged around by the winds, like a kite whose string has snapped.

The members of the Choir of Discordant Voices seem pleased to be here, doing their own thing. Miss Highbrowed Cynic doesn't look like she's ever going to leave the library. When she has a spare moment she attends either a workshop or a conference. Little Miss Practical keeps taking computer cla.s.ses-PowerPoint, Excel, Linux. The last time I saw Dame Dervish she was meditating in this place where nature is so beautiful. As for Milady Ambitious Chekhovian, she is always on the Internet writing, applying for this and that, finding things to do.

Everyone is in their own world. But where is Mama Rice Pudding?

I haven't seen her since the airplane. Maybe she didn't come to America. Maybe she couldn't get through pa.s.sport control after all. Or maybe she got lost somewhere in New York. . . . Suddenly my heart aches. Can a person miss a side of her whom she doesn't even know? I do.

As I fall asleep, I think of Mama Rice Pudding. I wish I knew her better.

Normal on the Outside Courtney Love once said: "I like to behave in an extremely normal, wholesome manner for the most part in my daily life-even if mentally I am consumed with sick visions of violence, terror, s.e.x and death." Everything is normal, as long as we appear so on the outside. But what is normal? And who exactly is a normal woman? Which womanly attributes are natural? Which others are cultural? Are girls genetically predetermined to be maternal, nurturing and emotional, or do their families and societies mold them that way? Or else, are the natural and the cultural qualities so intricately interwoven that there is no telling which characteristics shape whom anymore?

Adjectives come in pairs. For every beautiful, somewhere there is an ugly. Perhaps, in preparation for the Great Flood, adjectives, like animals, boarded Noah's Ark in twos. That's why we always think in terms of dualism. If there is an established definition of what const.i.tutes "ideal womanhood," it is thanks to a similarly entrenched definition of "ideal manhood." Both definitions, and the expectations that ensue from them, can be equally harrowing for real women and real men.

I grew up seeing two different types of womanhood. On the one hand was my mother-a well-educated, modern, Westernized, secular Turkish woman. Always rational. Always to the point. On the other hand was my maternal grandmother, who also took care of me and was less educated, more spiritual and definitely less rational. This was a woman who read coffee grounds to see the future and melted lead into mysterious shapes to fend off the evil eye. Many people came to see her, people with severe acne on their faces or warts on their hands. My grandmother would utter some words in Arabic, take a red apple and stab it with as many rose thorns as the number of warts she wanted to remove. Then she would draw a circle around each thorn with dark ink.

Some of the most vivid memories of my childhood are about red apples, rose thorns and dark circles. The truth is, of all the people who visited my grandmother for their skin conditions, I didn't see anyone walking away unhappy or unhealed. I asked her how she did this. Was it the power of praying? In response she said, "Yes, praying is effective, but also beware of the power of circles." From her I learned, among other things, one crucial lesson: If you want to destroy something, be it a blemish, acne or the human soul, all you need to do is to surround it with walls.

It will dry up.

There are many similarly "irrational" lessons from my life that I greatly cherish today. To a strictly logical person they might seem pure nonsense, even crazy. Society and culture teach us what exactly is normal and acceptable. My grandmother's cures were "commonplace" for many people in a middle-cla.s.s neighborhood in Ankara in the early 1970s, although to someone in Vienna they might have looked pretty bizarre. But individuals also differ in their perceptions of normal and abnormal. My mother never believed in the superst.i.tions my grandmother held dear. "Coffee is for drinking, not for reading," Mom said. As for me, I deeply suspected that there were sprinkles of magic in life and love, and that someone who looked like a handsome prince at first glance could easily turn into an ugly frog.

As every writer of fiction knows, when we are developing a story we do not need to be constrained by the limits of logic. Just the opposite, we can dive headfirst into that bottomless lake of irrationality. We can write about superst.i.tions, magic and fairies. There is room for all in literature. This despite the fact that in our daily lives we conform to a different set of rules, moving in a solid and rational world.

For many centuries all around the globe, girls and women have been expected to conform to one set of attributes, while men and boys measure up to another. If and when the traits of an individual included elements from both sets, life became much more complicated. Even today, a woman who is thought to be "manly" can face a bulwark of reactions, as can a man who is deemed "womanly." The more conventional the society is, the less likely the two sets intersect-at least outwardly. But the exclusivist approach to gender relations is by no means specific to traditional societies. Though constantly changing, it is fundamentally universal. From ancient myths to modern graphic novels, from folklore to advertis.e.m.e.nts, this dualistic way of thinking has infiltrated many areas of our lives.

Oddly enough, women, too, are used to thinking of themselves in these terms. The relationships we build with one another, the talks we have among ourselves and the way we raise our own daughters are overshadowed by the dichotomy of gender patterns.

How much of my womanhood is biological, how much of it is socially learned? Of the will to become a mother, which part is innate, which part is imposed? Is it sheer coincidence that I have started contemplating motherhood in my midthirties? Is it because my biological clock is ticking? Or is it because the social chronometer, which continuously compels us women to measure ourselves against one another, is speeding ahead?

When everything is so culturally loaded, how am I going to know what is really natural and what is environmental?

Sitting on the Edge Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald was born on July 24, 1900, in Alabama. She was a fearless, bouncy kid who received much love from her mother, perhaps at the risk of being fairly spoiled. As for her distant father, who was a formidable judge, she got far less affection and attention from him. Her childhood vacillated between these two emotional extremes. A vivid ill.u.s.tration of her personality lies in a small predicament she caused when she was just a child.

One morning the local police received a call that a child was walking across a rooftop. When the officers reached the address, they found little Zelda sitting on the roof waiting for them. After a lot of ha.s.sle, they managed to get her down. The truth behind the story was discovered a bit later. It was Zelda who had called the police. First she had made the phone call, then climbed onto the roof, crept right to the edge and sat down and waited to be rescued. This, more or less, remained the modus vivendi in her life. Even as a grown-up woman, she continued to go to the edge and then calmly watch the panic she had caused.

The essays and books written about Zelda Fitzgerald almost always revolve around three points: 1. She was the wife and greatest love of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

2. She was a gifted artist herself.

3. She had extensive therapy, suffered from depression and ended up dying in a mental inst.i.tution.

Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald met toward the end of the Great War. Each had a different memory of their first encounter. The man found the woman attractive and smart, but he was disturbed by the way she constantly flirted with other men. His first impression of her was a mixed one.

The woman, on the other hand, found the man charismatic and talented with a dazzling mind. Zelda was the kind of woman who had to love a man's brain before she could fall for him.

They got married in April 1920, carried by the winds of mutual attraction and pa.s.sion. When asked by a journalist what his greatest ambition in life was, Scott Fitzgerald said it was to write the best novel that ever was and to stay in love with his beloved wife forever. Yet from the very start, they saw each other as potential rivals. The fact that both had a tendency to take to the bottle at the sight of the slightest distress did not help their marriage. In time, their disagreements grew more violent and hurtful.

Alcohol, cigarettes, night life . . . They were no strangers to life in the fast lane. But perhaps their greatest addiction was to their love. Zelda and Scott adored, fought and marred each other in a roller-coaster relationship. They were aware of each other's weaknesses and knew how to hurt. One moment they would scream war cries and the next they would jump into the car and drive dangerously fast on sharpcurved roads. They loved to challenge fate. Being a creative, famous, high-flying and self-destructive couple, they became the focus of the media. Unsurprisingly, not everything written about them was true. There was much gossip and speculation, and few reporters had the time or the will to separate the facts from the lies.

In the years that followed, Scott Fitzgerald became increasingly famous, swiftly climbing up the gla.s.s staircase of the literary pantheon. Strikingly, the characters he wrote about and the themes he tackled were often inspired by Zelda. Some of his characters spoke just like Zelda. Did he "steal" ideas from his wife? Did he pilfer parts of her writing? From time to time Zelda would mockingly talk about how entries in the diaries she kept at home would end up in her husband's novels-sometimes entire paragraphs. In a review she wrote of The Beautiful and d.a.m.ned for the New York Tribune, she made this insinuation public: "It seems to me that on one page I recognized a portion of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage, and also sc.r.a.ps of letters which, though considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar. In fact, Mr. Fitzgerald-I believe that is how he spells his name-seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home."8 Perhaps every writer is a pickpocket of some sort, stealing inspiration from real life. Like magpies that can't resist making off with shiny objects, authors flap their wings across the boundless sky looking for themes to write about. And when they find one, they s.n.a.t.c.h it up. Whichever way we see it, the extent of the "literary patent" between Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald has not been fully resolved even today.

Fame and recognition brought little happiness for Scott Fitzgerald. Surrounded by women who admired him, critics who applauded him and reporters who saw in his every move juicy material to write about, he began drinking heavily. When not thinking about his next novel, he was shutting his mind off to the world; when not writing, he was imbibing, sometimes falling asleep in random places. Zelda was at least as unhappy as he was. They couldn't make each other happy, but they could not possibly let each other go their own separate ways. Like two kites whose strings had intertwined, they kept twisting and turning in each other's arms.

The friendship that grew between Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway during this time is something that bemuses literary historians. The two of them were inseparable for a while-two bohemian writers who would pa.s.s out together. It was the kind of friendship that did not sit well with Zelda. She found Hemingway too macho, his ego too inflated. She believed he wasn't a good companion for her husband. In time, the friendship fell apart.

Zelda's jealousy was legendary. In fit after fit of envy, she burned her clothes, destroyed her possessions and even damaged her surroundings. Once at a crowded, chic party, she took off the jewelry she was wearing and threw it into hot water in an attempt to make "jewel soup." She was often blinded by rage. Another night, after she noticed her husband paying lavish attention to the famous Isadora Duncan, she made a scene by throwing herself down a set of marble stairs. When they picked her up off the floor, she was covered in blood.

They had one daughter whom they both loved dearly-Scottie, who was born in October 1921 and was given to the care of a nanny. While she was still partly anesthetized, Zelda murmured, "I hope it is beautiful and a fool-a beautiful little fool." The same expression would be repeated in The Great Gatsby when Daisy talked about her own daughter. As always, life inspired fiction.

After Scottie, Zelda had three abortions. As much as she loved her daughter, she did not want to have another child, at least not so soon. The baby neither slowed down their lifestyle nor tempered their arguments. In the later stages of their marriage, Zelda always searched for something she could do that would be outside the realm of her husband's interests. For a while she tried taking ballet cla.s.ses. Her husband scorned her interest, calling it a waste of time. In the end ballet couldn't make Zelda happy.9 That was when she started to feel jealous-not of another woman this time, but of her husband's writing. More and more often she tried to distract him during the hours he was working on his fiction. It was obvious to everyone but them that they could not stay in the same house any longer. Scott Fitzgerald wanted to keep his wife at home. He was worried that if she went out alone, she would flirt or even find a lover-just to get back at him, to relieve the pain in her heart.

Rumi likens the mind to a guesthouse. Every morning we have a new, unexpected visitor, sometimes in the form of joy, sometimes dressed up as sorrow. For Zelda Fitzgerald her guesthouse entertained all kinds of unpleasant guests: Mr. Anxiety, Miss Panic Attack, Mrs. Resentment, Sir Bitterness . . .

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 G.o.dless, 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 ma.n.u.script. 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 inst.i.tution 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 pa.s.sion, 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 pa.s.sivity 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 nutsh.e.l.l 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.