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, stuck 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.”
That weirdness seemed to grow stronger with puberty. Insomnia hit, and at night beneath my gingham bedspread I’d watch Johnny Carson and then Tom Snyder on my tiny portable black-and-white television. After Snyder, TV ended, and I would read until my eyes drooped. But once I turned off the light and got on my side, panic gripped me. My heart raced and I’d sit up, turning the light back on, almost certain I would find something there. What that something might be, I can’t say. We were a family that believed in ghosts, and often at breakfast we reported sightings: mysterious bruises on my father’s arms came from a ghost pinching him; the dip of the bed beside my mother was a ghost sitting next to her; the soft breeze my grandmother felt even though the windows were closed tight meant a ghost had kissed her. Perhaps I was expecting to find my dead great-grandmother or aunt in the room, but the fear felt bigger than even ghosts.
When my mother called out to me and asked what was wrong, I could never name it. “Nothing!” I would say. Everything, I would think. Many nights she got dressed and drove me to the Dunkin’ Donuts down the street, where we’d sit in a booth and drink coffee and eat glazed doughnuts until I’d calmed down. It didn’t occur to me until I was an adult how difficult those forays into the night must have been for her—she had to be at work at the candy factory by seven the next morning. By the time I emerged from my grateful sleep for school, she was long gone.
THE SUMMER OF the beads, I read The Bell Jar. I remember the cover. A pink so pale it almost looked white. The black letters with their curlicued T and B and J. The red rose stretched across the edge. Unaware as I was of things like book reviews, I didn’t know that the book I’d plucked from the library shelf was a new one, just published in the United States. I didn’t even know—though surely this was in the author’s bio—that Sylvia Plath had committed suicide on February 11, 1963, just a few weeks after The Bell Jar had been published by Harper & Row in Britain under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. After her death, her estranged husband, poet Ted Hughes, promised her mother, Aurelia Plath, that the novel wouldn’t be published in the United States during her lifetime. But the wild success of Sylvia Plath’s poetry collection Ariel and the rumors that Victoria Lucas was indeed Plath, made the demand for The Bell Jar in the United States huge. Bookstores in New York City sold bootleg British copies of the novel, but it wasn’t until an editor at Random House learned that it was no longer eligible for copyright protection, thereby forcing Harper’s hand, that The Bell Jar was finally published here, despite Hughes’s promise.
An immediate bestseller, Plath’s story of beautiful, brilliant Esther Greenwood’s breakdown spoke to my generation. The minds of women were just being discussed openly as feminism soared. Questions of career, sex, marriage, and finding yourself were, I suspect, what kept me up at night. In my small town, only a handful of graduating seniors went on to college. People who were born in West Warwick tended to stay in West Warwick. But I wanted to leave. For what I cannot say, nor could I say then.
I wanted to be a writer—in fact, was a writer in many ways, filling purple notebooks with poems and stories and short plays—and imagined a writer’s life, perhaps in Greenwich Village or Paris. Certainly there were no writers in my town, or as far as I knew, in all of Rhode Island. When my ninth-grade guidance counselor asked me what I wanted to do with my life, I told him I wanted to be a writer. Mr. Stone, in his brown corduroy suit and tinted aviator glasses, shook his head sadly. “Ann,” he said, “people don’t do that.”
My eyes drifted to the shelves against the wall. “Then how do we get all these books?” I asked him.