I watched Blythe, so gorgeous and fluttering in her iridescent nightgown, a winged thing, and said, “God.” I had never been religious, and even if I had been, my God would have been much more ancient and angry than Blythe’s prim Episcopalian one, but still, I sensed the hand of something vast in this swift transformation.
When Blythe clasped me about the neck at the end, I thought I heard her say something strange over the wind and the idling engine: Oh, Mother. Later I dismissed what I heard and climbed back into bed to fall asleep, happy for my friend.
BLYTHE AND I TOOK SHOPPING trips with the children, long walks, and soon we began to spend mornings in our separate houses on speakerphone to read a poem aloud (me), and to talk about additions to pieces (her). She’d been to the galleries downtown where she’d seen performance art for the first time, and she wanted badly to create her own. Blythe’s new subjects were fanged, bloodthirsty: insanity, suicide, adultery, incest, masturbation, wanting to kill her own children. She wrote things so internal they still had the slick and beat of an organ when they came from her.
“Listen, Harriet,” she’d say. “I know what I want to do so well. I want to mix my words with movement, you see? Visuals. Public, not static. In the moment. I want to crack open the words so people can step in. I want to give them to you, not just present them on a paper. I want whole rooms full of naked women smeared with blood, you know?” Her voice was hushed, and we held the moment until a child shrieked somewhere. The silence broke, and Blythe laughed at herself, at her solemnity, at my speechlessness.
Blythe was making up what she was doing as she went along. She began to work with food, smearing the dark red jelly her mother made on her face as she chanted; making an igloo of the housewife’s best friend, frozen peas, and saying a long prayer-poem; shoving a grape into her mouth with each new line of a dialogue about her sons so that she almost choked herself at the end. She showed me her food log, hardbound sketchbooks in which she had noted every morsel that passed her lips from age fifteen to twenty-one, which stopped abruptly when she tried to kill herself for the first time (aspirin, in her parents’ pool house, she said, with a low laugh). She watched me as I read parts of it, growing nauseated at the annotations beside the biggest binges: Nasty, nasty, hog beside three cheeses-teaks and a case of Coke; Filthy bitch beside entire red velvet cake.
“I want to use these,” she said. “I’ll record these entries and play them over a loudspeaker and eat an entire picnic of food in front of people until someone throws up.”
“Jesus,” I said, which sometimes seemed like the only thing I could say.
I admired how Blythe used her body, the shock of her, but there was too much Milton and Frost in me for my own stabs at such dramatics to be anything but undignified. While Blythe created new pieces at a fevered pitch throughout the summer and fall, I wrote of gardening and politics, of sense and memory, of things safely domestic. I saved the secret thrill of transgression for Blythe’s work, proud to help her birth her strange little creatures, because it was midwifery. I was the one to contact the galleries, to drive Blythe to the theaters, to call the press, to organize. I was the woman behind the camera for the videos of her performances, Blythe’s very first audience. All the while I scribbled poem after poem in the ragged notebooks I salvaged at the end of my daughters’ school year, and only dared to show Blythe the best.
SOON THOUGH, BLYTHE BEGAN to sleep very little and ate nothing, sipping only what she called her “magic potion,” a Bloody Mary with extra vodka. I could see the ridges of her back through a cardigan. And in November, fourteen months after we’d met, there came another midnight call. Blythe was sobbing this time: “I’ve finished the best, I’ve finished Darkling. I’ve made a sculpture of alphabet pasta, I am going to eat it. I’m going to eat my words. I need you to organize it.”
I had just nursed the babies through the chicken pox and was exhausted. I closed my eyes to the bluelit bedroom and leaned against my pillow. “That’s wonderful, B. I’ll do my best,” I said as Sam cursed into the mattress.
Blythe gave a half-wailed, “Oh,” and put the phone down. I waited again at the front door, shivering with chill, but this time there was no squeal of tires or Blythe spinning merrily across the lawn. This time, there was a heavy silence all night and into the next few days, then a call from Pritch a week later, on Blythe’s birthday. The girls were out gathering armfuls of leaves from the lawn. I pressed my hand to the glass, as if to protect them, when he asked me to watch the boys for a week. Blythe had had another break, he’d said, and under his words, I understood that something terrible had happened. My core felt frozen, and I began to shiver.
“It was so strange, Harriet,” he said. “She was wearing this disgusting lace dress that she’d had since she was nine. It’s this horrible thing she couldn’t even zip up. As if that was part of a formula. Vodka, pills, dress. So strange. Such a goddamn cliché.”
I said soothing things, but mostly to keep myself from panicking, from throwing the phone across the room. He seemed calm, but when we’d already said good-bye, he said, “I forgot.” Now his voice seemed just on the edge of breaking. “Some big gallery downtown wants Blythe to come and do her newest piece. Darkling, I think she’s calling it.” Then, hesitant, “I’ve never seen it. I’ve never seen anything she does. I won’t understand it, I’m not artistic, but I think I need to. Do I, Harriet? Should I look at the videos you made? Or should I read the work? Would that help?”
A long, cold moment passed before I could react. In one performance, Blythe had made a net of Pritch’s ties, and, catching herself in it, entangling herself, gave a monologue in which she used the lines “and wives are made / for fucking.” In another, she’d smeared red jelly across her face as she delivered a poem about one of her abortions. I had to turn away from my girls, whose hands were full of leaves burning red and orange, in the thinning afternoon. “Oh, Pritchard,” I said. “No, I really don’t think you should.”
All afternoon, watching the four children playing a board game, I couldn’t shake Pritch’s quaver out of my ears. I had been a bad friend. I had been too busy with my own life; I hadn’t taken care of Blythe. I could have stopped her free fall, if only I had been paying more attention. I knelt and buried my head in Bear’s mop of hair, ferociously breathing in his musky boy smell. Never, never would I make that mistake again, I promised. I would stop the despair the next time it came around and the next and the next, however long it took.
THAT WINTER AND SPRING I LEARNED the dark strain of recovery. Blythe at the hospital; home, but not allowed to be alone with the children; crying, gray and languid; then suddenly, as if infused with someone else’s blood, in a gallery, creating Darkling for a solemn audience. It was a long and painful piece: Blythe singing the same poem to herself as she ate the woman-shaped sculpture of alphabet noodles, until her voice cracked and her lips bled and she sank to a squat. She had insisted on performing it until Pritch and I had both caved in. When we did, she dimpled, kissed us both on the cheek, and we were charmed, despite ourselves.