Jeannette Angell: Answers, What I Didn’t Know
Answers
It was my friend Rachel who said, I love Emily Post. She asked me to let her know
when the big white book filled with intricate orders of service for everyday
(and not-so-everyday) events and occurrences arrived at the bookshop. You read Emily
Post? I asked her, waiting for some ironic laughing response (for Rachel was the
coolest of the cool in those days and I was a little in awe of her). But she was serious: I love
the big white book, she said, her dark eyes filled with wonder.
Where else can you go and it says it has all the answers? I lost Rachel later in the
flotsam of those years that were unkind to so many of us: but later I was in a bookshop
myself, my hand lingering on that thick white spine, and I pulled the Emily Post
down off the shelf. It was heavy in my hands, weighty with wisdom that
proclaimed it had an answer to everything, and now I think I know
what Rachel was talking about. We all need limits, and you have to know what the
rules are before you break them: but the night of Cece’s suicide I understood that
nobody has all the solutions, not even Emily Post, not even little lost Rachel, and
what the book gives you at best is a consolation prize: something to cling to
when you still believe that somewhere
there might yet be answers.
What I Didn’t Know
You said, we’re safe from all that, laughing at the women’s shelter where we donated clothes and
helped out at holidays: at least we don’t
need to worry about abusive husbands or boyfriends, now that we’re out and proud. And I
believed you were right—women
are not the cause of violence in the world, but what I didn’t know was that violence wears
disguises. And the first time you made fun of me
in front of someone I never saw it as the beginning of something bigger. I looked out past the
rocks to where the humpbacks rise and fall and
began to feel something else was out there, just under the waves, something dark and lurking:
what I didn’t know
was that it had never been out there. It was always in here. When it—they tell me it always does—
got worse, I never labeled it (though
I stopped going to the women’s shelter: their eyes were too-bright mirrors and I couldn’t stand
the reflection) still believing you, that it was
my fault, my inadequacy, my lack of whatever it was you wanted in that moment: that I could
never make it up to you, for being me: you made me believe
and trust only your skewed version of reality. You never hit me, and that was why I stayed,
because I couldn’t believe what I couldn’t label:
what I didn’t know was that what you did was far worse, stripping me of feelings and thoughts
and my sense of self. And when I finally understood you cried
and asked me — you dared ask me — what you would do without me. The humpbacks have come
and gone eight times since then, and I sometimes still see you in town,
entwined with another woman, but I close my ears to the gossip we delight in here at the end of
the world and remember only that last question, and wish I’d had
the strength to answer with the words I want to say now: that, as a man would say
I simply don’t give a damn.
Jeannette Angell is a poet, playwright, and novelist who lives and works in Provincetown at the tip of Cape Cod. More about her at www.JeannetteAngell.com.
