07
August
August
Girl Under Water – Synopsis
Suppose a life doesn’t make sense until the one before it is taken into account. One whose end was traumatic, leaving a residue of fear, of helplessness. Perhaps a leftover desire to arrive in a certain place. Anyway, say something lingered, remained unfinished. Seeped into dreams. Then suppose this person in need of a rationale revisits dark corners. Turns on the lights. Throws back the curtains. Makes connections. Wonders if the soul’s need for discovery is life’s need to overcome death.
Outwardly, Girl Under Water is about a vibrant young woman from the mid-west who had several husbands and four children before she was out of her twenties. But mostly it is the story of her second child, the daughter she conceived in between her two marriages, and passed off as the child of her second husband. She fretted about all her children, but this second daughter’s shyness and lack of initiative seemed to irk her particularly. The girl was sent to acting school to bring her out of her shell.
The family was living in New York now. The father worked in television, and they were relocated by the network in 1955. Outwardly they led a middle-class life, but at home, the Depression era parents studied Marx and Lenin, and taught the children the Communist Manifesto. The father conducted Science Sunday School before breakfast, and taught them labor union songs. During the Sixties they protested the war in Vietnam, marched against City Hall to protest police brutality, and marched for Civil Rights in Washington, D.C.
The marriage ended alongside the riots and assassinations, the sense that the entire nation was coming undone. The mother, now with five children and unhappy with her lot for years, changed the locks on the front door. Between custody battles and fights over money, she dated men of other races and nationalities. The oldest daughter escaped to Canada with her husband to avoid the draft. The second daughter escaped into shoplifting and dreamed of an acting career in England. The two younger boys engaged in their own forms of naughtiness, while the third daughter withdrew from them all.
The summer of 1967, dubbed “The Summer of Love,” was when the daughter with acting ambitions graduated Performing Arts High School and decided to overcome her ignorance of sex by losing her virginity. All it did was hurt her pride and bruise her heart. Then her mother, thinking she was still a virgin and not wanting her to go off to college completely inexperienced, “gave” her to her own boyfriend for initiation. The magnitude of such a betrayal being too much to contend with, the girl told no one and left for Carnegie-Mellon where she had received a scholarship.
At college a miracle happened: she met a boy who shared her dream of living in England and studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. They fell in love. By the time she came home for Thanksgiving, her mother had broken up with the boyfriend, and all seemed back to normal. But “normal” will forever remain elusive, as a year later the mother decided to tell the girl the truth about her parentage—her secret Jewish father. They located him in Houston, and six months later there was a reunion in New York. To the mother’s disappointment he didn’t seem to want, or have the capacity, to take responsibility for his daughter. The daughter, who was nineteen now, fled to London to take up life with her boyfriend.
Part Two is the story of a fragile personality confronting the pitfalls of show business. Good intentions backfire. Strength is seen as weakness. Nothing is as it was supposed to be. She finds the only way to survive is through masking her true self.
Three years pass before she is able to go home for a visit, and there she finds her mother with bouts of paranoia, her brothers selling drugs, her sister more withdrawn, and her aging father helpless to do anything. She returns to London. Between acting jobs there are stints as a Playboy Bunny and then as a hostess in a Japanese night club, until she becomes the mistress of a wealthy Japanese businessman. Life picks up with a charge card at Harrod’s and travel to European capitals. But when her secret father dies suddenly, she starts to unravel. Psychoanalysis brings up long-buried pain she is unable to contend with until she finds protection in the confines of a psyche ward. Facing the truth brings about a spiritual awakening. After seven years in England she gives up acting, sails home on a Polish cargo ship, and her mother angrily confesses she was conceived in revenge for World War II.
This was a shock, yet it reverberated deep within. Perhaps it was the shock of recognition. I had no reason to doubt her. I already knew my conception had been something of an event. Eight years before, when I was nineteen, hadn’t she suddenly come out with the news that my father wasn’t really my father? That my real father was Jewish, and she met him on a bus?
Decades passed. I forgot my mother’s angry confession from 1977. I became an artist, painting people on fire, people falling into the sea, drowning. Then one day a little girl emerged on the canvas, sitting at the bottom of the sea with her eyes open, and a voice from inside told me I’d painted enough; it was time to write about it. Okay, I thought. But I didn’t know what to write; I didn’t know what the paintings meant, or the dreams. I had a slew of questions. Why did my mother do what she did? Why did things happen the way that they did? I asked a psychic in London once. She replied that I chose my parents, and everything that happened. I was too surprised to ask why. The thought that on some level I had chosen my life was more than enough to digest at the time. It was ten years before I began the memoir, and by then I’d forgotten about the burning, drowning people, and the little girl at the bottom of the sea.
The factor on which my premise rests—soul memory, did not come up until after 9/ll, when my own city became a war zone. I was living across the river in Brooklyn then, but I saw the smoke. I smelled the ash. I knew those buildings, those streets, those people. I had been one of them, working in the South Tower at one time. Only the year before I had been a receptionist for Deutsche Bank at Number Four, picking up a coffee at Au Bon Pain, drinking it by the fountain before passing through the security check on my way upstairs. Now, amidst despair at the scenes of destruction, I remembered my mother’s confession. When I felt a correspondence with her anger, I remembered. Anger, along with love and grief, is one of the great unifiers.
Until 9/11, World War II had been abstract, historical. I’d seen it in the movies, gone to school with the children of refugees from concentration camps, heard my father’s stories, even fingered the shell fragment he brought back from Italy as a souvenir. But that war happened before I was born. I wasn’t touched by it in any concrete way. I had to breathe in the dust of concrete, along with that of pulverized human beings, in order to feel the mobilizing force of anger.
Remembering my mother’s confession from 1977 was like awakening from a stupor. Wasn’t I supposed to have done something? Been something? Stood for something? It was those kinds of questions that caused me to delve deeper, flesh out clues I had ignored until now, such as the medium at the British Spiritual Society when I was twenty who said, “Leslie Howard is looking after you.” She offered no further details, and I was too much in awe of the idea to ask for any. It stayed in my mind, a tantalizing mystery. Now, thirty years later, I craved information.
I had known Leslie Howard was shot down in a plane during World War II, but had assumed it was a fighter plane, and he was in the RAF. Now I learned it was a passenger plane on route to London with two little girls on board, shot down by the Nazis over the Bay of Biscay on June 1, 1943. And then I realized I had been born exactly six years and six months later, to the day.
The theme of death permeated my dreams and drawings in childhood, like the recurring nightmare of being trapped in a steel cage with water pouring in and no way out. I had an overwhelming desire to live in London. When my life there fell apart, I got real in the psyche ward. And when I was discharged, right away I dreamed of being shot and falling into the sea. It was a frightening dream, but along with the fear was an element of bliss. The bliss of surrender, I think, for unlike the nightmare of childhood, I gave into death. Giving into it brought about a reprieve. The specter of bliss. A vision of light from within. A feeling of union. I think because I felt connected to my soul.
Putting all the pieces together has meant picking up the threads of my earliest memories and following the trail back into Ariadne’s cave. For unlike Theseus, for whom freedom meant getting out, for me it was getting back in. Divining my own complicity in events I felt no control over. Because they were the events that caused me to remember. Perhaps for me, remembering was what it was all for.
3 Responses
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this is fascinating. is the book finished? and where/when can i read it? also we were neighbors i lived in nyc all my life and queens, specifically, during 9/11. i am enjoying your site and your art.
January 10, 2010 at 12:51 pm -
Thank you so much for your comments!
January 10, 2010 at 5:08 pm
Lou, my book IS finished and has been for quite some time, although I am currently updating it with some recent insights I have had. I plan to bring it out in the spring this year. I will certainly let you know!
Am so glad to hear you are enjoying the site.
Thanks again for visiting,
Nancy
What a great synopsis! Fascinating story of how the soul discovers itself, forces itself into consciousness and then takes hold of the life. Bravo!
September 10, 2009 at 11:09 am