Mary Ann Caws, "Walking (Even Now) With Carolyn"
(page 3 of 5)

So then this fictionalized person goes away, falls in love with somebody at Yale. He is the other - he's British.

Peter didn't know American rules for anything.

Anyway, it's about the guy I married and how he played games, always, with his own rules.

I will do your mopping and cleaning for you,

I heard myself saying one day. I was thinking then that I would never long for a career. How could that have been? My friends knew I did; Peter knew I did; How could I not have known?

We were both finishing our theses, his, a dense five hundred pages of philosophy of science, and mine, a mere ninety-six pages on what I called the poetics of possibility, comparing the surrealist writer André Breton and the philosopher Gaston Bachelard. (61)

I was interested at that point, as I still am, in Surrealism because it's not supposed to make any sense. And so, with my usual chutzpah, I wanted to make sense of what you couldn't make sense of. So that's why I wrote that.

Easy stuff,

said Peter with a quiet smile, about my thesis. (61)

Easy stuff. And that's what happened to me in my entire career. "Easy stuff. You literary people, easy stuff." Philosophy is hard. Well, maybe that's true.

I would always rather concur than confront. If it was all that obvious, I was unlikely to find anyone to publish it, but I scarcely cared. I was, after all, in love with Peter. What did the rest matter? (61)

And then it goes on, and my father meets this man and says, "He doesn't have all his cards on the table." (laughter) Then he looked back at his newspaper. So, what I remember of my marriage are these few things like this:

We are in Paris, we are taking the children to the Luxembourg to play in the Jardin d'enfants. But we have forgotten their goûter for midafternoon, that sacred snack of chocolate and bread; I know it is my fault. Hilary's frog has escaped from the log of wood we have in our apartment. We are having a picnic by the Seine and looking for it there, improbably. Peter and I are arguing, somewhere on the Left Bank between the streets Gay-Lussac and Saint-Jacques. We separate, furious, and turn back, laughing, and embrace.

We are holding the children on our shoulders during the peace parades in Washington, during the Vietnam war; we are worrying about their nightmares after the fires in their school during the disturbances following Kent State; and we are eternally, in New York, going with them to the boathouse in Central Park, them on the back of our bikes, them on their own little bikes. We feel ourselves a family.

Our boathouse. We lock our bikes to the rail or to each other's, side by side, the little red plaid seat and the little green plaid seat on the back of our black bikes, Matthew behind me and Hilary behind Peter.

In the big freeze, we are walking, all four of us holding hands, across the lake by the boathouse, surrounded by snowshoes and short skis. This is the clearest of the memories. (95)

It all went by so quickly, leaving memories and nothing more.

So then there is this awful divorce and so forth.

In my room, the answering machine, never turned off, kept its light steady. It had flickered less and less as the days went on. The little red light had replaced my husband. When I would lie down in half of my bed, I wouldn't even undo the spread. I'd leave the rest made up while I myself took up less and less room.

If I don't talk to this self, no one will.

I am talking to myself, I say.

This was not the "I" that learned to speak in those pages I scribbled or typed in my journal like some dutiful schoolgirl, the ones that were supposed to show "improvement" after much anguish. (128-9)

I love it - everybody always said, "Therapy, you're writing - wonderful. Your improvement must be getting underway." It never got underway. No.

These were not concerned with narration, with the outside real. In this dryness of love, in which I never wept, I felt nothing at all.

What is real is this. A nightmare, but imageless. A war rages and I think: it will finish this. I see doctors, lawyers, can't remember why, they too all wear wedding rings. How can you say what it's like to tear your wedding ring off? It is like killing a child. Not to have done that is not to have understood. I wore one for almost thirty years, and pulled it off. How to understand that?

Someone reading this might say:

Yes, I understand. I mean, I haven't gone through it exactly, but I understand how it must be.

They may have a little smile of recognition.

Oh, yes, I see.

What do they see? Nothing would appease this panic - this emptiness. I downed hot liquids: coffee, hot lemonade, tea, nothing filled that void inside. (129)