Perfectly Miserable: Guilt, God and Real Estate in a Small Town - Hardcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

CHAPTER ONE
FLEEING MARMEE

Concord, Massachusetts: a Protestant Disneyland.

IF YOU COME FROM NEW ENGLAND, the creeping certainty that you are a bad person is always with you. It wakes you with a start at four a.m. with the remembrance of a thank-you note forever unwritten. It asks you to please explain yourself when you pick up your dry cleaning onONE DAY SPECIAL three weeks late. It darts out through the dental hygienist’s reprimand that you are the captain of your own ship. Whoever and wherever you are, if you come from this stern mother of our country, a spark of your innate unworthiness is embedded in your soul.

But then, there are those brief, shining moments when you don’t hate yourself. Joy is everywhere. We see it in the old houses and historic town centers that deepen our landscape with a past whose beauty surmounts its burdens; we see it in the endless meadowlands and fields and woods running wild under our careful conservation. Yes, we are sinners in the hands of an angry God; still, looking around us, we can’t help but believe that someone up there might like us just a little bit more than He likes everyone else. We are like our Puritan forefathers who loathed themselves on the one hand, and thought they were above everyone else on the other. We love our Puritan ancestors, as most of our friends are sick of hearing—though sometimes we wish they’d left us a little more money.

New England can be as stingy with its welcome as it is stingy with its weather. But catch New England on a good day and there is a cozy uplift to the scene that takes the breath away. The sight of the hardy, high-spirited children, released from school on a perfect September afternoon to run through the antique towns, will draw even the most confirmed West Coaster to the window of a local realtor. And yet, it should never be forgotten: New England is an unforgiving place. Like the adored but disapproving mothers who populate it, it grips its children in the vise of its impossible expectations.

My hometown was the cradle of it all. Concord, Massachusetts, settled by Puritans in 1635, is “America’s oldest continuously inhabited inland town,” an official Facebook page will inform you, and the fact of this slightly qualified boast puts resolution in its residents’ hearts today. Here, for the glory of God, rich English Puritans slept in mud bunkers penetrated by heavy rains, and sang psalms of thanksgiving, even as they cut their flat Indian bread into thinner and thinner slices. The rivers overflowed the pastures, the cattle died, the horses and sheep couldn’t live on the land, and the wolves ate the pigs. But did the Puritans complain? No, they bottled it up, making “griping” a punishable offense.

Here, Patriot mothers stored gunpowder in their chambers and sent their sons to war so they could have taxation with representation. Here the great Emerson conceived a religion so lofty nobody has ever been able to explain it, yet lagged for fifteen years behind his wife in the antislavery cause. Here, for his whole life, Henry Thoreau lived, above it all perhaps, but still with his mother, and—despite his independent spirit—unable to live anywhere else.

Here also Nathaniel Hawthorne lived, next door to Louisa May Alcott and her pontificating parents: the useless Bronson, lounging on his front lawn with an apple, hoping to tempt someone (anyone) into conversation; the guilt-tripping “Marmee,” overburdened and not keeping that fact to herself, slamming the door of Orchard House as she bustled in and out with moralistic platitudes and baskets of good deeds. Marmee who made her daughters grieve each selfish thought; Marmee who couldn’t resist dragging a quiet moment down with a lecture; Marmee who reprimanded the rich, even as they gave to the poor, on why they didn’t give more. Hawthorne avoided Mrs. Alcott at any cost, slipping through the woods behind his house seeking alternate routes to town; his wife, Sophia, had looked both ways before stepping out, fleeing at the sight of Marmee.

Yet it was Marmee, the most disapproving woman of all time, who inspired the most popular girls’ book of all time, Little Women. And it was her daughter, Louisa May, who, though not perhaps the most profound writer of the revered “Concord Authors,” was for me the most affecting. Not that I wouldn’t have happily married the wise and handsome Emerson, at any age you’d care to pick (if only for his house); not that Hawthorne’s Puritan guilt doesn’t make me feel at home; not that Thoreau’s quest to regain his childhood isn’t mine. But it was Louisa who’d been a girl in Concord, scrabbling for money with three siblings and mental illness in the house; Louisa, whose wishful, saccharine version of life with Marmee was far more of a utopia to me than Thoreau’s no-frills cabin in the woods.

Even now I see Marmee, dusty and patched, falling exhausted in her chair by the warm but shabby hearth, her “little women” scurrying to plump a cushion. This very day I cannot turn to the loving group around Marmee in the frontispiece of Little Women without suffering a pang of longing. Even when I know there was no servant Hannah in the kitchen, but Louisa herself, scrubbing and cooking, when she wasn’t churning out “moral pap” for children—all to take care of Marmee. For what girl or woman among us does not long for a nod from Marmee, to be assured that she is not as bad as she knows herself to be?

To this day in Concord, Marmees still bound from the bushes: matrons of steel, born and bred to outlast the men who once found something to marry them for; no-nonsense women of indiscernible ages out walking their dogs, slickered and zippered against the most promising weather, huffing disapproval as they go. “Why are the young always fixing up their houses?” one cries out to a near-twin companion. “What this country needs is a good depression!” These were the matriarchs of my youth, a landscape of cherished but not always cherishing women—mending their swimsuits, buying gingerly at the A&P, holding up the bank line with their satchels of rolled pennies, attacking their lawn with broken bamboo rakes. Some I have loved and some I have not, but all, with the flattening of a smile, could conjure a mother’s rejection, reducing me to a speck on the floor. I fled them at eighteen. I went to Cambridge, to California, to New York. Away, away, and finally happy and married and writing advertising copy on Madison Avenue, and living blissfully beyond our means in a New York suburb, and writing a novel at last, and paying too much for things and never wasting one paper towel when I could waste six. And then I had children. Suddenly I was homesick for a childhood I had invented as surely as Louisa Alcott had invented hers. Suddenly nothing would do but return to the cold heart of New England. Whether to defy the mothers of my youth, or become them, I did not know.

—

AND SO, pregnant with my third child, I decided to move back to my hometown. “So the kids can have swimming lessons at Walden Pond!” I explained breathlessly to my husband, Charlie. I was in my thirties at the time, still radiant with the delusions that brighten the threshold of middle age. I’d just sold my first novel, which I shyly conceded would probably become a best seller. I had become the mother of two charming, kneesocked little boys, who I knew would never play with toy guns or grow up to be mortified by their parents. The future, in the days one dared contemplate such a thing, beckoned.

Of course, growing up, I had hated swimming lessons at Walden Pond, almost as much as I had hated hearing about Henry...