Incredibly, it had worked. All those other therapists who’d tried to help Holly work through the despair and the unconscious sources of all her anguish, to drag them to the surface and observe them in harsh light: Ha! Total wastes of time! What Holly had needed to learn was how to suppress her feelings—something human beings had been doing successfully since the dawn of time, the evidence for which was that they’d managed to get out of bed, eat, procreate, despite death’s unknowable horror potentially and inescapably waiting around every corner. Despite the fact that no one could really be sure that he or she would make it through the day, people did crossword puzzles and dug ditches and flossed their teeth. And, unlike the millions of Americans who needed prescriptions in order to do these things without panic or despair, Holly had been taught to do it with a rubber band!
Of course, she hadn’t been writing poems, either, since Annette Sanders had cured her of—
Of what?
Of grief? Fear? The human condition?
Still, it was worth it, wasn’t it? Rilke might not have thought so (If my demons leave me, my angels will, too—a quote one of her mentors in graduate school had hauled out every few weeks to warn the student poets—unconscionably?—against the psychotherapy and antidepressants some of them clearly needed), but, Holly felt sure, the cure had nothing to do with her writer’s block anyway. Her writer’s block had to do with how busy and cluttered her life had become with Tatty and Eric in it:
Married life! Family life! Motherhood! Work life! Her writer’s block had to do with how many hours she spent behind the wheel of a car, getting to her office to write her ten million business-manager-memos a day instead of poems, and getting to the grocery store, getting back home, taking care of Tatty and Eric, going to bed to wake up to do it all again the next day. When would she have found time to write, whether she had writer’s block or not?
Perhaps, in fact, writer’s block was a blessing, since her life could certainly not have contained one more activity without shattering into a billion pieces. And Holly didn’t care that (as Eric sometimes shouted at her if she whined too long about having no time to write) some poets had written, and perhaps still wrote, poems on the walls of their jail cells. That some poets were doctors, like William Carlos Williams, or insurance executives, like Wallace Stevens, and absurdly prolific. Sure, freshly written poems had been found in the pockets of the war dead of every war since time immemorial, and Miklós Radnóti wrote his last poems while in a forced labor battalion, despite having to endure beatings by the Nazi guards for it. When the mass grave in which he was buried had been dug up after the war ended, his wife found a book of poems written in pencil in a small Serbian exercise book in his back pocket. The pages had been soaked through with Radnóti’s blood and body fluids, so she had dried them out in the sun.
Many of those poems had been love fragments written to Radnóti’s wife, and in graduate school Holly had memorized translations of nearly all of them, although the only lines she could now recall were Somewhere within me, dear, you abide forever—still, motionless, mute, like an angel stunned to silence by death or a beetle inhabiting the heart of a rotting tree….
It didn’t help Holly’s writer’s block to think of these poets, or for Eric to remind her of the tales she’d told him of such poets. He didn’t mean to be cruel, but he also didn’t understand what she needed in order to be a poet. To be a real poet. To be the poet she’d wanted to be when she was in the MFA program. An American poet of the world, like Carolyn Forché, or a poet of the deepest interior, like Louise Glück, or a poet of love and loss, like Marie Howe, or a poet of humor and irony, like Tony Hoagland (whose poem “Hard Rain” had been the inspiration for her ringtone). Those were the poets she’d set out to be.
Now, with Tatty back in her room, Eric of course would say, “Go write a poem now! What’s stopping you?”
He had no idea. He had no idea how much she wanted to do that. But she couldn’t sit down and write a poem. A poem had to come to her. She couldn’t go to it. And no poem had come to her for a decade and a half.
Fine. She was not a poet. She could admit that now. If she were, the poems would have come. She was not a poet like the ones she’d admired, or the ones who’d been in that MFA program with her. Even the fellow students who’d never published a word (which was most of them)—Holly knew that they were still out there writing. That they were scribbling in their studies somewhere. That they managed to find poems while they were shopping at the mall, working at mindless jobs like Holly’s. They were even managing to scribble on their lunch hours, or in the car while they waited for their kids’ ballet classes to be let out. They could not even be discouraged by rejection. If they could not get their poems published in journals, they published them on websites they started themselves. Holly had seen those poems on those websites, and, she couldn’t help it, had felt contempt for that self-advertising, that commitment by those poets to an art that had abandoned them. She hated, didn’t she, that they continued to write, and to write, and to write?
Well, that was never going to be Holly’s path, was it?
For Holly it had always been futile, hadn’t it? She was fallow ground. She’d always allowed herself to believe that there could be something there—given the right amount of time, the right pen, the right desk—but she never got those things, because those were things she would have had to dig for with some tool she would have had to invent herself. Impossible. “Just sit down and write!” her husband would say, but Eric would never be able to understand this frustration, her frustration, the clear sense Holly had that there was a secret poem at the center of her brain, and that she’d been born with it, and that she would never, ever, in this life, be able to exhume it, so that to sit down and write was torture. It was to sit down with a collar around her neck growing tighter and tighter the longer she sat.
It was the collar:
When, at twenty-five, they’d told her at the Campion Cancer Center that (of course) she had the gene mutation they’d tested her for, Holly felt that collar being slipped over her head and put around her neck. The lovely red-haired oncologist had held her hand and said, “I really believe, Holly, that if you want to live to see fifty, maybe even thirty-five, or thirty, you need to have your breasts and ovaries removed.”
They’d told her to take at least six months to think about it. Take six months to think about whether you wanted to die the way your mother and sister had. As if it would really take six months to choose between that fate or living to see fifty, or thirty?
Still, Holly had taken the six months—the longest six months of her life. They’d been a lifetime, those months. She’d been a woman at the top of a tower during that half a year, surveying the land in every direction for thousands of miles. That land was flat, and familiar. There were gardens full of cabbages. And the weather never changed. A lukewarm drizzle all night and all day. She could see her mother’s and sisters’ graves out there, from that tower, and she could also watch the children she wasn’t going to give birth to playing on rusty, dangerous playground equipment. But she could see that she was out there, too—growing older, without disease, without passing her mutation on, and, except for this collar, for the rest of her life, nothing would be any different than it had been before: