Morningstar Read online

My parents learned about life from hardship. My mother lost her father when she was only sixteen. She had to drop out of high school, where she was the social committee chairman and a star softball player, and go to work in factories: bleaching linens, making artificial flowers, attaching snaps to American Tourister luggage. My father dropped out of school too, to escape poverty in rural Indiana. He joined the navy, and by traveling around the world learned how to eat in a restaurant, what kind of cocktail to order, how to tie a tie and polish his shoes. They married young—she was nineteen and he was twenty-one—and grew up together, learning how to raise babies and cook dinner and save money and build a home.

  Me? I learned from books.

  For as long as I can remember, I wanted something big, something I could not name. I did not know what it was, only what it wasn’t. It wasn’t in my small hometown. It wasn’t nine-to-five, or ordinary, or anything I had ever seen before. I would sit on the landing at the top of the stairs at home and look out the little window at Aunt Julia and Uncle Joe’s house across the street. Someday I will go beyond there, I would think. I’d look at the rooftop of Auntie Angie’s house. And beyond there. Then I’d look at the hill where Auntie Rosie and Uncle Chuckie’s houses sat. And beyond there. I’d focus on a distant point, and think: Someday I’ll even go beyond there.

  This was in the late ’60s and early ’70s. I’d grown up with the Vietnam War playing out on television. My brother, Skip, had changed from a boy in raspberry shorts and a matching polo shirt to a long-haired, bearded, cutoff jeans–wearing hippie. Newspapers splashed pictures of student protests, and the Kent State shootings, and marijuana and LSD. The same radio station played the Carpenters’ “Close to You” and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s “Ohio.” In such an upside-down world, how would I get beyond there? What did I want? Why did I feel this way? What did I believe?

  In 1967, when I was ten years old, our town finally got a library.

  I went there twice a week, walking past the children’s section and heading right for adult fiction.

  I can still remember craning my neck to look at all those beautiful books. I whispered the writers’ names: Evan Hunter, Victor Hugo, Harold Robbins, Herman Wouk, Fred Mustard Stewart, Dashiell Hammett, Edith Wharton, Dorothy Parker. So many books! At random I pulled one from the shelf. And then another. I filled my arms with books.

  And I read.

  I read about small-town gossip in Peyton Place and inner-city schools in The Blackboard Jungle; I read about Hollywood in Valley of the Dolls and a horrific crime in In Cold Blood. In that library I was handed a blueprint on how to live the mysterious, unnamable, big dream life I wanted. I was handed books. And through reading them, I grew up to find that very life.

  Lesson 1: How to Dream

  • Marjorie Morningstar BY HERMAN WOUK •

  WHEN MARJORIE MORNINGSTAR WAS PUBLISHED IN 1955, Time magazine referred to it as “an outmoded adolescent cliché.” Kirkus Review wrote: “It is the kind of book women—just past the age of illusion—will read with absorbed interest, occasional ironic recognition, and ultimate critical detachment. But—despite the ease with which the story can be criticized, it will be read.” And read it was. Marjorie Morningstar sold more copies than Gone with the Wind, and in 1958 it was made into a movie starring Natalie Wood as Marjorie.

  But as a teenager, I chose the books I read not by reviews or jacket copy or book sales. No, I chose by heft. I loved nothing more than the weight of a heavy book in my arms as I moved through the school hallways. In study hall, my homework finished, I fell into a fat novel that seemed to never end. That I didn’t want to end. Halfway through a seven-hundred-page book, hundreds of pages still waited for me. Doctor Zhivago. Les Misérables. James Michener’s Hawaii. Anything by Harold Robbins. I read indiscriminately. Highbrow. Lowbrow. Without any guidance from the librarians in my small mill town in Rhode Island. Their job seemed to be just to stamp due dates in the back of the books, not to recommend them. It was with this lack of direction, this love of novels the weight of cement, that I came upon Marjorie Morningstar.

  I first read Herman Wouk’s novel in 1972, when I was fifteen years old. And I have reread it almost every year since. As an adult, I saw the similarities between the Morgensterns and my own family. Marjorie’s father had come to the United States at the age of fifteen, “a fleck of foam on the great wave of immigration from Eastern Europe.” I lived with a dizzying array of Italian immigrant relatives. In the novel, Mr. Morgenstern owned the Arnold Importing Company, “a well-known dealer in feathers, straws, and other materials for ladies’ hats.” Like my own father, who commuted several hours every day to his job in Government Center in Boston so that we could rise above our blue-collar immigrant roots, Wouk writes of Mr. Morgenstern: “Every year since his marriage he had spent every dollar he earned on the comfort of his family and the improvement of their station in life.” And like Marjorie, who understood her father’s sacrifices—“her parents had done much to make up for their immigrant origin. She was grateful to them for this, and proud of them.”—I too took pride in how my parents, two high-school dropouts who’d married before they were old enough to vote, had bought our family a slice of the American Dream: two cars, family vacations, T-bone steaks on the grill, and Tanqueray and Johnnie Walker in the liquor cabinet.

  But at fifteen, that first time I read the novel, I thought that Herman Wouk had somehow climbed into my brain and emerged with my story. I was Marjorie Morningstar. Slightly spoiled. Boy crazy. Curious about sex. Terrified of sex. Raised by prudish, old-school parents. Although we lived far from Manhattan and an apartment on Central Park West, my life seemed a mirror image of Marjorie’s. West Warwick, Rhode Island, my small hometown, was once famous for Fruit of the Loom manufacturing and a bustling main street with two fancy women’s clothing stores and a men’s shop that sold expensive suits. But by the time I was a teenager, the shops and mills were mostly boarded up and the Pawtuxet River, which had helped those factories run, was polluted. The one factory that still operated made soap, and that was the smell that filled the air on hot afternoons. At Christmas, they opened their doors and sold Jade East soap on a rope at discount prices.

  My immigrant great-grandparents left Italy in the late 1800s to work in the great Natick Mill, buying a house right up the hill from it. The Natick Mill burned down in 1941, the summer before my mother turned ten. But her family stayed put, working in factories around the state. I grew up in the house my great-grandparents bought when they arrived in the United States, where my grandmother married and had ten children, where my mother at the age of eighty-five still lives. The house is small, just three bedrooms with sloping ceilings upstairs and one bathroom downstairs.

  As I’ve said, as a teenager I would sit at the top of the stairs, staring out the tiny window there. I could see the rooftops of three of my aunts’ houses. I could see a distant water tank. On a clear day I could see all the way to the next town. Someday, I would think, I’ll even go beyond there. Just thinking this would thrill me. Deep inside, I had a gnawing, a yearning, for something I could not name. All I knew was that I wouldn’t find it in West Warwick, or even in Rhode Island. It was beyond there. Despite my parents’ warnings, I threw myself into the path of everything that might take me beyond there. At fourteen, I became a Marsha Jordan Girl, one of eight teen models for Jordan Marsh, the fancy Boston department store that had opened a branch at our new mall. That job took me all over New England. My friend Beth and I went by bus and train alone to modeling jobs, landing spots in fashion shows for Brides magazine and Mademoiselle. With the money I earned, I took vacations to Bermuda and the Bahamas before I finished high school.

  But that wasn’t enough for me. As a junior I tried out for and won the coveted role as teen editor from Rhode Island for Seventeen magazine. I wrote dispatches from Rhode Island on fashion, pop culture, and trends. At the end of my yearlong tenure, I won a Best Teen Editor Award, which gave me another year at Seventeen and a heavy silver
charm with their logo on it. All of these things were somehow going to get me wherever it was I was trying to go. And this yearning I felt was the same one that Herman Wouk expressed so perfectly in the character of Marjorie Morningstar.

  Marjorie defies her parents by taking a job as an actress in a summer stock company in the Catskills. And then she defies them even more when she falls in love with and begins a sexual relationship with the director, Noel Airman. What is evident to everyone—her fellow drama club friends at Hunter College, the other summer stock actors, and Marjorie herself—is that she is special, talented, destined for great things. Before she meets Noel, Marjorie dates many boys, all of them worthy suitors. She enjoys teasing them, flirting, kissing. But her traditional Jewish parents warn her about the dangers of sex, warnings that she holds dear until the summer she’s nineteen.

  Marjorie falls for Noel the summer before, but he is involved with another actress. That winter, she goes downtown to Bank Street to stand “across the street from the shabby red brick house where he lived, staring at the windows, while snow caked her beaver coat and caught in her eyelashes.” I read this as if I’d made a great discovery. I sighed. I read the passage again, out loud. I remember where I was—on my bed with its yellow-and-white checked bedspread— and what I wore—my faded Levi’s and red peasant blouse. In my doorway hung long strands of colorful beads that I’d spent months stringing; taped to one wall was a Jules Feiffer dancer cartoon; on the stereo Simon and Garfunkel sang “The Dangling Conversation.” That song spoke to my yearning too, to my desire for a love in which “you read your Emily Dickinson, and I my Robert Frost . . .”

  Why did Marjorie standing on a snowy street staring at the apartment where the man she loved lived so affect me? Perhaps because sometimes at night I sat in my parents’ Chevy in front of Peter Hayhurst’s house—he who had broken my tender heart—hoping for a glimpse of him? Perhaps because as she longed for Noel, Marjorie let Wally Wronken court her, just as I let boys take me to the movies and kiss me in their convertibles while I longed for Peter Hayhurst? Perhaps because Marjorie’s romanticism, bravery, idealism, and foolishness were just like mine? Marjorie Morningstar knew me. She was me, and I was her.

  The light outside had dimmed as I sat reading, and I leaned over to turn on the light by my bed. In the very next chapter, Marjorie goes on dates with dull boys and walks alone on Riverside Drive, mooning for Noel. “The soft April air blowing across the blue river, the smell of the blossoming cherry and crab-apple trees, the swaying of their bunched pink branches, filled her with bittersweet melancholy. Often she would slip a book of poetry in her pocket, and would drop on a bench, after walking far, to read Byron or Shelley or Keats.” I remember having to put the book down. I remember crying, filled with my own teenage bittersweet melancholy. Like Marjorie, I dated dull boys who tried hard to impress me, buying me steaks at Valle’s Steak House or taking me dancing at the Ocean View by the beach. I too took long solo walks—not on a city street, but on the beach—and sat in the salty air to read Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost, Allen Ginsberg and Rod McKuen.

  When I composed myself, I picked up the book again. Wally Wronken appears at the Morgensterns’ apartment to invite Marjorie to accompany him to the Cloisters in a rainstorm. After the rain stops, he leads her “around a corner of thick bushes into a curving shadowy path filled with a curious lavender light.” He has led her onto an avenue “solidly arched and walled with blooming lilacs.” With water dripping on her upturned face, Marjorie takes Wally’s hand. “She was not sure what was rain and what was tears on her face. She wanted to look up at lilacs and rolling white clouds and patchy blue sky forever . . .” Yes! my brain, my heart shouted. That’s what I want too! So moved by this is Marjorie that she looks at ugly, young, pathetic Wally and kisses him on the mouth. “They were holding each other’s hands, and raindrops were dripping on them from the lilacs.” “I’m going to plant lilac lanes all over town,” Wally tells her in a hoarse voice. But Marjorie is already done with him. “It’s fading,” she tells Wally. “It’s becoming just a lane of lilacs.” Still, she promises him there will be another kiss only when they find such lilacs again.

  Somehow, that yearning I felt was taking shape as I read Marjorie Morningstar. I wanted a man like Noel Airman. I wanted to move away from home and defy my prudish Catholic parents and have sex with a man I loved. But I wanted the kiss under the lilacs too. That kiss and those lilacs seemed enormously important to me, even though less than a hundred pages later, when Wally and Marjorie see each other at South Wind the next summer, she doesn’t remember them.

  What I understood when I read Marjorie Morningstar as an adult is that of course Noel Airman will break Marjorie’s heart and destroy her dreams. “I eat little girls like you,” he tells her. Then he does just that. But as a young girl, I held my breath as I followed every twist and turn of their affair. I felt the sharp pangs of heartbreak along with her, recalling how Peter Hayhurst broke my own fragile heart.

  But it is the final nine pages of the novel, written in the form of Wally Wronken’s diary, that truly break my heart every time. Marjorie gave up on her acting career, married a lawyer, and moved to Westchester. Marjorie Morningstar became Marjorie Schwartz, suburban wife and mother. Critics argue that Wouk is suggesting that Marjorie is lucky: she has had sex with another man, yet still marries a nice Jewish doctor. Perhaps, some critics contend, Wouk is telling readers that sex and rebellion and striving aren’t as great as young women hope they will be.

  As a young woman back then and today as a middle-aged woman, those last nine pages slay me because Marjorie has let me down. “And if she wasn’t the bright angel I thought, she was a lovely girl,” Wally tells us. “And where is that girl now? She doesn’t even remember herself as she was.” Wally acknowledges his own loss in Marjorie Morningstar becoming Marjorie Schwartz: he will never have that second kiss under the lilacs. “Yet how beautiful she was! She rises up before me as I write . . . her face wet with rain, nineteen years old, in my arms and yet maddeningly beyond my reach . . .”

  What I know now looking back at that girl on the bed with the yellow-and-white checked bedspread in the sad mill town, is that Marjorie Morningstar moved her so much not just because she saw herself in Marjorie and her family in the Morgensterns. No, Marjorie Morningstar gave her—me—the passion to never forget the bright angel who wanted everything, all of it, to go out there, wherever that might be. What I decided, what I knew in the deepest parts of me as I read those final pages through tears that wouldn’t stop, was that I would, in the final analysis, not be anything like Marjorie at all.

  Maybe that’s why I reread it every year. Maybe, as time beats me up and grief or loneliness or a new kind of bittersweet melancholy take hold, I need to remind myself to keep going, keep reaching, to not forget the girl who believed she could have everything and anything at all. Maybe even now I am still waiting for that metaphorical kiss under the lilacs. Maybe I always will.

  Lesson 2: How to Become a Writer

  • The Bell Jar BY SYLVIA PLATH •

  IT WAS THE SUMMER I SPENT STRINGING YARDS OF beads to make that curtain for the doorway to my bedroom. I did other things that summer, of course. I rode the waves at East Beach and Scarborough, slathered Coppertone on my long skinny body, lay under the hot sun with lemon juice in my hair and sand in my bikini bottom. I learned to play Frisbee. The boy who taught me was a college boy, nineteen years old, a friend of my brother Skip’s. I was only fourteen, and to sit beside that older boy in his white VW Bug was one of my greatest pleasures. That summer, he took me to movies I didn’t fully understand. Getting Straight with Elliott Gould and Carnal Knowledge with—surprisingly to me—Art Garfunkel, whose angelic voice sang some of my favorite songs from my record player—“The Sound of Silence” and “April Come She Will” and “Kathy’s Song” and “Bridge over Troubled Water.”

  Those beads.

  Where did I get them, that summer of 1971? Too young to drive, s
tuck in a town with a main street of boarded-up stores and an X-rated movie theater and dark bars, somehow I acquired enough beads to fill a doorway. I remember the oblong garnet ones, the round amber and the clear teardrops, the midnight blue and cobalt blue, the tiny silver. Although I remember them as glass—the way they sparkled as I strung them in my backyard under the sun!—surely they must have been made of plastic. So many beads! I kept them on a cookie sheet (though in my household cookie sheets were called pizza pans) so that I could better see them, the sizes and shapes and colors, and decide in what order I should string them.

  My bedroom was girlish—white furniture trimmed in gold, yellow-and-white gingham bedspread with matching curtains, a frilly bedside lamp—and I suppose that beaded doorway was meant to show who I really was, or who I was trying to become. A girl who didn’t match, someone exotic and mysterious and deep. I would lie on that gingham-covered bed and play “The Dangling Conversation” and I would yearn for a boy who knew who Frost and Dickinson were, who would read beside me, who would understand this peculiar person I was. I would play “I Am a Rock” and I would cry as Simon and Garfunkel sang: I have my books, and my poetry to protect me . . .

  I had nothing at all to be depressed about, or even to cry about. My parents adored me. Skip—five years older than me—had finally stopped farting in my face and turning his eyelids inside out to scare me; and after years as a lonely, alienated child, adolescence had brought me friends and slumber parties and all the giggling and inside jokes I needed. Still, a rock of sadness settled in my gut, immovable and heavy. When my ninth-grade English teacher taught us about haikus and then set us free to write our own, I wrote: Waves wash away sand / Just as He washes away / The life we cherish. “Is Ann depressed?” the teacher asked my mother in an emergency conference. “No,” my mother said, “she’s just weird.”