Too Much Of Nothing: Notes on Feminism, Identity, and Womanhood

HELMER.

[walking about the room]. What a horrible awakening! All these eight years—she who was my joy and pride—a hypocrite, a liar—worse, worse—a criminal! The unutterable ugliness of it all!—For shame! For shame! [NORA is silent and looks steadily at him. He stops in front of her.] I ought to have suspected that something of the sort would happen. I ought to have foreseen it. All your father’s want of principle—be silent!—all your father’s want of principle has come out in you. No religion, no morality, no sense of duty—. How I am punished for having winked at what he did! I did it for your sake, and this is how you repay me.

NORA.

Yes, that’s just it.

HELMER.

Now you have destroyed all my happiness. You have ruined all my future. It is horrible to think of! I am in the power of an unscrupulous man; he can do what he likes with me, ask anything he likes of me, give me any orders he pleases—I dare not refuse. And I must sink to such miserable depths because of a thoughtless woman!

A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen

IN THE BEGINNING WAS OUR END

Ionce went out on a date with a man who had been married to the same woman for nearly forty years. If I chose to enter an affair with him, he said, I would be the third woman with whom he had had relations on the side. I probably should have been appalled, but I simply nodded in recognition. Long marriages are hard, and every person has to choose how to cope . . . or how to accept that coping is not an option, that leaving is the only way to go on living.

Before I left my marriage, I never thought I could do it. Pick up, walk away from the secure life I’d been living more than half my years, give away my rights to all that was in our four-bedroom-brick-and-wood Cape and its two-car garage. When I was married, singledom was a stigma, a curse. I knew of no precedents to guide me.

People call me gutsy; I wasn’t, really. At the time, I was, rather, simply broken. I had lost myself somewhere between I can be a good wife and mother and I should never have been born. I wanted more than what I had, but I was not entirely sure what that was. And the barriers were solidly placed so I could not ferret out my truth. I had that so-called Einstein’s Theory of Insanity running through my head, When you keep doing the same things over and over hoping they’ll get better, and they don’t, but you carry on, that’s insane. There was nothing left unshattered inside me, and I was never going to be able to glue myself back together. Instead, I had to rip up my life and begin a new one.

It wasn’t like I woke up one day and decided to leave, but if you ask the husband I was abandoning, he would tell you that’s how it felt to him. He wasn’t aware of how unhappy, how exhausted I was, and that was the problem. From my perspective, he had stopped seeing me at all, was unable to show me any appreciation, could not understand that I was suffocating. I felt unloved, unvalued, unable ever to do enough. I chronically failed to satisfy his demands and felt damaged by his demeaning verbal abuse. But to the extent that there was no build-up to my decision – I basically blurted one morning that I was about to depart – his shocked surprise was justified.

Our life had turned into vignettes where I felt increasingly extinct-ed.

Hindsight allows me to see that the vignettes began almost immediately, from the moment of our decision to marry. My children love to point out that their father and I grew up together, and that is accurate. We embarked on a happily ever after at an age when we were probably far too young to determine who we would eventually become, and in that way, my development was stunted then and there. Richard was just 21, an engineer, with a clear purpose and direction, and I was 24, a failed actor, an aspiring writer, a creative, abstract, random thinker with no clue as to what my capabilities were. In 1973, when I got married, I was no different from most women, who were not taught to be self-sufficient. We were raised to let our fathers govern our lives until we found husbands, and then, we were to turn all decisions about the business of the household over to them. Women who were not wealthy or ultra-successful were required to have co-signers on bank accounts and were not allowed to own credit cards.

I had no smarts where money was concerned, could barely balance a checkbook. Though I was always very frugal, I didn’t understand the concept of a budget. Richard, on the other hand, had a relationship with money similar to an anorexic’s with food: he understood that so long as he deprived himself, he would always remain in control.

Clearly, we completed each other.

When I was an actor, I wanted more than anything to play Nora in A Doll’s House. I discovered the play as a teenager, and the protagonist Nora exemplified for me the strongest kind of woman. Married for all of her adult life, Nora is convinced that her husband Torvald’s incessant demands will eventually lead to his making the ultimate sacrifice for her. She adamantly believes that he will forego his honor and social status in order to save her from ignominy. Her transgression, for which she fears societal punishment, is that she did a very unwomanly thing and forged her father’s signature in order to borrow money to save Torvald’s reputation. In Nora’s mind, Torvald will realize his enormous gratitude and will do whatever he must to keep his little squirrel happy. Over and over through the course of the play, it is obvious to the audience that what Nora persistently refuses to recognize is that Torvald will do nothing to compromise his own comfort and complacency. 

Like Nora, I was used to being charged with making adjustments and compromises. As the oldest of seven children, I was expected by my parents to be responsible for all the younger kids. By the time I reached the seasoned age of 17, I understood how desperately a woman might crave liberation. My father and mother taught me to bend my will to accommodate the needs of others, and it has taken me nearly my entire lifetime to realize I was in an endless cycle of co-dependency.

On the eve of my 25th anniversary, I begged Richard to do something special with me, to spend two days in London or New York City. Actually, I argued (I thought) reasonably, It makes sense to go to New York, to return to the place where we began so we could rediscover one another.

He laughed at me. No, he said definitively. I don’t do New York.

But this would be different. We could stay in a hotel for a night, go to a show, just be at large in the city. Like we were when we were kids, except now we can afford more than a shared beer and burger.

His eyes flared and became instantly bloodshot. Stupid. So stupid. You know me better than that. I won’t throw my money away like that. I don’t see what’s wrong with going camping.

And that is just how we celebrated our milestone anniversary: camping in a lovely park near my hometown. While I did not dislike everything about that weekend, it did nothing to revitalize my enthusiasm for being Richard’s wife. And on our way back to Connecticut from the sojourn, I remember thinking, I’m Nora. He’s Torvald. What happens now? 

It was at that moment that I realized our marriage was approaching its endgame. But I wasn’t ready to let go. After all, things weren’t always as they had become.

In fact, it began quite sweetly.

UNTITLED

NORA.

It is perfectly true, Torvald. When I was at home with papa, he told me his opinion about everything, and so I had the same opinions; and if I differed from him I concealed the fact, because he would not have liked it. He called me his doll-child, and he played with me just as I used to play with my dolls. And when I came to live with you⁠—

HELMER.

What sort of an expression is that to use about our marriage?

NORA.

[undisturbed]. I mean that I was simply transferred from papa’s hands into yours. You arranged everything according to your own taste, and so I got the same tastes as you—or else I pretended to, I am really not quite sure which—I think sometimes the one and sometimes the other. When I look back on it, it seems to me as if I had been living here like a poor woman—just from hand to mouth. I have existed merely to perform tricks for you, Torvald. But you would have it so. You and papa have committed a great sin against me. It is your fault that I have made nothing of my life.

MAHLER MAKES ME SIGH

Technically, Richard was not my first husband though the fact that I got through the first one without losing my virginity says everything there is to know about that. I had dropped out of school to follow some ill-advised urge to pursue an acting career in New York and had married a gay man in order to get an apartment without risking illegal cohabitation.

That escapade lasted three years though the mask of marriage faded in less than ten months. I adored the man. I knew he was gay. He told me. But I was a naif, had no real knowledge of what sexuality was, let alone homosexuality and how it would affect the love we shared. I had never experienced any kind of sexual desire, and I thought that we would cuddle and be happy. It never occurred to me to consider what it would feel like to want him and to be rejected. I never imagined his nighttime forays cruising the Greenwich Village piers, the clandestine bars, the secret assignations with closeted others would hurt me as they did. After he left, I wallowed in self-pity for nearly a year, then eschewed the company of men for another year. By the time I met Richard four years later, I had dated, had finally lost my virginity, had dodged a wedding proposal from a mama’s boy with serious OCD, and had managed to survive the casting couches of tawdry LA. My self-esteem was in so many shards I despaired of ever liking me again. I had drifted into a dead-end job in New York City, where a friend loaned me her shrink. After two sessions, I saw clearly that he was a genius. 

You’ll be fine, you know, he said, once you go back to school and remind yourself of how intelligent you are.

The doctor told me about Columbia’s School of General Studies, a program designed originally for GIs returning to school after service and had evolved into a welcoming institution for prodigals like myself. Then, he wrote me a letter of introduction to the college’s dean. Within a few months, I was working full time in the Mechanical Engineering Department of Columbia’s School of Engineering and earning enough money to support myself while I took the two free classes full-time employment afforded me. I supplemented my tuition waiver with a student loan so that I could take two additional classes, which added up to a full-time class load. Thus, once I had a semester under my belt, Columbia gave me free tuition and a job in the Dean’s Office of the Engineering School. After that, I was able to increase my load to eighteen credit hours a semester, and I finished my Bachelor’s Degree in three years. 

 That’s when I met Richard. At a party. Where I was among 18- and 19-year-old engineering school sophomores, feeling very out of place. One of the kids asked me in an awestruck voice, Are you really 20?

No, I answered disdainfully. I’m 21.

It was true. I was already approaching 22 and had been at loose ends since my 18 th birthday. I felt old and jaded and used up, and then, Richard approached me and asked me if I liked Mahler. 

Just like that. Do you like listening to Mahler? Most people don’t.

It was such an endearingly nerdy way to open a conversation that I think I knew right away I couldn’t resist him. He was barely 18 and obviously brilliant and cuter than the men who usually pursued me. Also, he was tall.

For a big girl, which is how I defined myself, tall was a must. I would have preferred that he had more meat on him so I didn’t always feel so wide standing next to him, but I didn’t have any design options. He was fine. And despite the fact that I wore a size 18, had a broad back, long arms, mannish hands and size 10 feet, he found me attractive. That was intoxicating.

I was hungry for security, in search of a refuge. My job and classes were validating, but I knew that with a Bachelor’s in Comparative Literature, my options would still be limited when I left CU. Besides, it had been a long time since anyone interested in anything so delicious as Mahler, whose music I loved and loved to argue about, was also interested in me as a possible partner.

We sat on the couch all evening singing phrases to one another.

"I still can’t listen to the Lied von der Erde, I remarked, wondering if anyone listening thought we were the most pretentious idiots at the party. It makes me cringe."

But it’s gorgeous, he said earnestly. He sincerely loved Mahler.

Which was one of the many things that made him exactly the man I needed. The fact that he wasn’t a man yet had not eluded me. Still, I was drawn to him. He was gentle to the point of near shyness, smart, well-read, and both respectful and ardent in his pursuit of me. 

So I sent him away.

For the rest of that school year, I insisted he date other people. I even fixed him up with my sister, and they went out for a while. I have never felt right about that, but I was a child myself, despite my illusions of maturity. It seemed to me that I was keeping us both safe from a terrible mistake, and I was glad for my decision to avoid him.

When summer came, I took stock of my finances and saw that there was a goodly amount of money left from my student loans. I decided to go to Europe. Fares were exceedingly low, and student rail passes, which provided unlimited travel throughout Europe, were even cheaper. For ten weeks, I wandered, at first fairly aimlessly, around Belgium, France, Germany, Italy; in Italy, I met an American on his way to study mating habits of lizards on an island in the Jugoslav Adriatic, and I followed him. We had a lovely, very brief affair during which I lived on his boat and listened at night to his Croatian crew reciting epic poetry over gusla accompaniment, which is where I found my calling to Serbo-Croatian literature. I also found my inner Isadora Zelda White Stollerman Wing.

I hadn’t read Fear of Flying yet because it had not yet been published, but when I did, I recognized my European persona immediately in the protagonist Isadora. She was the woman my European self aspired to be: a liberated woman ever on a quest for the zipless fuck, the sexual encounter that caused no guilt, no commitment, no harm, no foul. Out there in the continent of my mother’s birth, far from the harsh judgment of my father’s Protestantism, I found my groove. I joined the sexual revolution with ardor and formed fleeting relationships with young men in Austria, Germany, Switzerland, the Riviera.

Then one day, I decided it was time to go home. I was exhausted and ready to process all I’d seen and learned. Upon my return, however, I was chastened.

The minute my feet touched the tarmac at the airport I reverted to my repressed self. Something about being at JFK – to which I still referred as Idlewild because I couldn’t reconcile myself with the reason for the name change, which still stung like a new wound – made me feel guilty, and I wanted to be clean again.

The next day, when I reported to work in my office, Richard was there. Waiting for me. In him, I saw my redemption.

Richard represented every kind of safety and dependability I could never have provided for myself, and he was an innocent. He still had the scrubbed look of the Catholic Boys’ School scholar he had been only three years before, and he insisted that we marry when I said I would prefer to just live together for a while.

I believe in making a commitment, he said in his pitch to get me to say yes. If you’re willing to live with me, you should be willing to marry me. After too much flitting from man to man in a time when common wisdom recommended if you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with, his words were smooth, liquid reassurance. Absolution.

Besides, I had no real faith in my ability to do anything that would pay the bills. Acting had been my avocation, and though I was a talented writer, I had no confidence. Or any real clue how to pursue a career. Though I had been successful at Columbia, I was pretty naïve about self-promotion. In fact, I thought it was folly to promote myself. What I really dreamt of was writing a column, a book and drama review column, where I could show what I knew, which was substantial, and bask in the pleasure my brisk writing style gave my readers. Unfortunately, I had no idea where to start to make that happen, and I certainly didn’t trust myself enough to believe I could succeed. I was terrified of facing my future of bill paying alone. It is possible that if I’d had had female friends or if I had known anyone in exactly that same boat in which I found myself, I might have talked myself out of the idea of marriage, but I didn’t.

None of my friends could help. There was the Engineering professor I dated until I took up with Richard. A brilliant player, he found me amusing but was not about to settle down and at the same time not about to treat me platonically. Even at his most objective, he’d counsel me to remain his playmate. My closest friends were a married couple, who decidedly disliked Richard. I could not trust their judgment. I tried to get the husband to explain their negativity toward Richard, but what he offered sounded unfair, like empty judgment. If I had been more mature and more confident, I might have pressed for more specificity. I might have admitted I needed guidance. I did neither.

My boss in the Dean’s Office was someone I might have consulted. But she was having an affair with a married professor and at the same time indulging herself with every grad student who claimed to love her. She was desperate to be married to a promising young Mechanical Engineer. Every word of advice she offered had a decidedly, untrustworthy green hue.

Among my own classmates, I had found only one with whom I had anything in common. Like me, she was a former actor, whose experience was similar to mine. She had, by then, embraced Jewish Orthodoxy and was dating a law student, whom she had promised to marry. They were set to pursue a religious path, which took them to Israel. Another perspective on which I could not rely.

Finally, I had two roommates, whom I adored, in my downtown flat. One was a brilliant but entirely self-absorbed poet and the other a genius alcoholic, whose suicide I prevented just before I started at Columbia. Neither had the requisite insights to help me in any way. 

With no one to dissuade me, I was determined to stand by this man, who was not only brilliant and good looking but possessed of a future. He would find a job.

I agreed to marry him. Why not? I loved him, and I am sure that I believed I loved him enough. I hope I did. I am even sure that I believed he loved me enough to sustain a life-long commitment. I know he did.

UNTITLED

Winnie: I used to pray. (Pause.) I say I used to pray. (Pause.) Yes, I must confess I did. (Smile.) Not now. (Smile broader.) No no. (Smile off. Pause.) Then ... now . . . what difficulties here, for the mind. (Pause.) To have been always what I am - and so changed from what I was. (Pause.) I am the one, I say the one, then the other. (Pause.) Now the one, then the other. (Pause.) There is so little one can say, one says it all. (Pause.) All one can. (Pause.) And no truth in it anywhere. (Pause.) My arms. (Pause.)

Happy Days by Samuel Beckett

INTERFAITH MARRIAGE

It seems downright arcane these days to talk about interfaith marriages. The days when the mainstream was dominated by couples of the same religion, same culture, same ethnicity are over. Today it would be strange to hear someone say, I can’t marry that person – they don’t go to my house of worship.  But when I was young, my family was the odd one out.

Even before they fled Europe and hid themselves in carefully assimilated ambiguity, my mother’s family had accepted an outsider into their Jewish mix. My mother’s older sister was fifteen when she fell in love with her brilliant piano teacher, and the fact that he was of Serbian Orthodox faith and culture was never an issue for my grandparents. That he was a painter and a piano teacher with few prospects for financial stability was far more troubling. There was a moment, in fact, when he might have been banned from the home, but that was entirely because he insisted that there was no need for him and my aunt to emigrate. He argued that antisemitism was not a problem in Yugoslavia. She is safe here with me.

My grandfather’s reply was simple. Fine. You stay here, and I no longer support you.

They emigrated, and my uncle was free to adhere to whatever belief he chose.

My mother’s younger sister met the non-Jewish love of her life at a bowling alley. He picked her up, they fell in love with one another, and neither ever questioned which religion they would choose. He was an avowed atheist, and she adhered to no proscribed beliefs. Their children would never lose their weekend freedoms to religious instruction. Their shared prejudice against organized religion made them oblivious to any disapproval that might have come from his far-off relations. There was none from his parents, who adored my aunt.

When my mother met my father, they were both needy, broken, lonely people. They gravitated toward one another, and there was never a question that Dad’s religion would be the dogma of choice in their home.

Knowing what I know today about Dad’s WASP mother, I fear she may have had some reservations – good high-born Protestant women were impelled to support integration and voting rights for the formerly enslaved, but they were predisposed to reject Catholics and Jews. Dad would have been fueled by his mother’s disapproval in the same way he was when he married his dearly departed Irish Betty.

Mom had no need to rebel. Her father had already renounced Judaism along with the God he said he could no longer trust. Her mother, anesthetized in an alcoholic fog, was sanguine at worst. Mom must have felt safe hidden in Dad’s milky American persona. Knowing that her future children would never be forced to suffer the ignominy of antisemitism was incentive enough to bury her Ashkenazic roots deep below his. 

Until I met Richard, I was naïve enough to believe that in the liberated 1970s, all American families were as heterogeneous or at least as enlightened as mine was. My naivete still makes me blush to admit. 

Richard’s family was decidedly Polish Catholic. They went to confession then to mass, and they took communion every Sunday. They conflated their Polish culture – the songs, the dances, the food, the alcohol – with the Church, and they were sure they would all find a place to sit together once they all reached Heaven. That their Richie was aligned with a divorced woman of mixed cultural heritage – a Protestant and a Jew, of all things – was manifest blasphemy. 

They never got over the shock. Or the resentment. The last time she visited before she died, even Richard’s grandmother, our beloved Babci (sic) admonished me for teaching my children a heathen religion. 

I was singing my infant daughter a song called Dona Dona. It was one I often sang, a song demanding a stand against oppression. I actually learned the song from Joan Baez and not from any Jewish relative. Hearing the plaintive minor key, Babci left the living room, where she was visiting with my husband, her doted-upon grandson, and stood by the children’s bedroom door. 

You have to sing that song?

I love it, I whispered. When I sing it, I see ancestors my kids’ll never know.

Well, Babci huffed. They have Christian ancestors too.

PARENTAL PERSPECTIVES

From the moment Richard announced to his family that we were a couple, the deep schisms between his world and mine raised alarms.

Richard’s parents were appalled that he would want to marry someone older than he was, that he would choose a non-Catholic. After all, as far as they knew, he had wanted to be a priest as recently as the year before.

To be clear, Richard’s father never wanted him to be a priest. But pre-teen Richard was determined. He spent his early childhood fantasizing about the priesthood, nearly swooned every time he donned his altar boy robes to assist the parish priests. His father insisted he would be an engineer, something stable and concrete.