Chapter 33

Pat was unhappy with the advice Michel gave her daughter. She thought her daughter had better things to do than draw or play all day -- like study and do homework. She did not realize -- could not understand -- how drawing and making things up could help her daughter in school. Michel explained that he had kept those qualities, and look how successful he was. Still, Pat began thinking Michel was being a bad influence on her daughter.

Pat looked around the room -- the slowly evolving, moving, transforming pile of papers, toys, plates, glasses, and miscellaneous items seemed to never vanish, though somehow there was always something clean to eat with -- with a grim look than only disappeared when one of her lovers came over. Jessie, though, got to see her mother every day, when no one was over, and so got to see her mother’s melancholy more often than most -- though when Michel changed lovers, he too began to see Pat was rarely happy. Never, he began to think, though he could not be in her mind, so did not know for certain. I suspect he was right. She was like my ex-girlfriend Donna in that respect, taking everything too serious. Except the things that should be taken serious, like love and affection, which seemed absent from her repertoire of feelings -- probably pushed out by her constant anger. At what, I never knew, and don’t claim to know with either Donna or Pat. I think there was a great hatred there for herself, a hatred that prevented her from loving or allowing herself to be loved. I don’t think she thought she deserved it. As I begin to understand the truth behind Donna, I am beginning to see how similar she is to Pat -- something I had not intended. But it is true. The two are almost identical. Considering Donna lost her virginity at thirteen and doesn’t think there is anything wrong with it (or the fact that she slept with much older men at that age), it would not surprise me if she not only allowed but encouraged such behavior in her own daughters. This is not to say there is anything inherently wrong with having sex, but it is unquestionably best if you know what you are doing and what the psychological consequences of your actions are. In that respect, many much older adults are still not ready for sex. But one of the consequences of sex at such a young age in the late twentieth century is that it can lead to feelings of low self-worth, as society judges people who have sex at a young age or are very promiscuous, as Donna has been (I think she gained a pound with each new man she slept with), as being lower than those who have chosen to wait until they were older or have remained monogamous. What society says, most of us believe. If society says people who started having sex at a young age or are promiscuous have less worth to society, then those who fit that mold will think that of themselves and have low self-worth. And if you do not love yourself, you cannot love anyone else. When faced with love, these people will reject that love, do what they can to destroy it so they can prove again to themselves their own lack of worth. They cannot allow an individual to come along and disrupt what society has told them about themselves. That is why Donna has done what she did and left me. That is why she pushed and pushed, trying to push me over the edge, so I would not want her any more, until she had to go to such an extreme as she has to make me not want her. Which is true. I don’t want her any more. I still love her, but I don’t want her. Her presence is unhealthy. So long as she continues to believe she has no value, her presence will be unhealthy to any man. She will always push until she proves that he cannot love her either. So she will hop from bed to bed, from man to man, never happy, never satisfied, always searching for something she cannot have because she does not understand her problem. She is Pat. Pat is her. And Jessie will be just like them.

But none of that matters any more. I cannot live with someone who does not love herself enough to love me. The only thing I’m waiting for now is for her to get her stuff. I have half her things and all her pictures - pictures of friends, family, most importantly, her mother, and herself - her pictures are her memories. She is too attached, too blindly attached, to the past to ever give up her pictures. That is why I know she'll be back. Still, if she does not come back soon, I will have to take drastic measures and throw away all her things. If that means her pictures too, then so be it. I’ve grown tired of her games. She will undoubtedly be acting the same in thirty years as she does now.

Take Pat, for instance. Pat acts the same way, and she is around the same age as Donna. Still, we see Pat with the added responsibility of Jessie, and she had not changed, has not improved, but only turned her daughter into a smaller, younger version of herself. While Pat is in bed with her neighbor, Florence, Jessie is behind the bushes, shoving Hopes’ hand down her panties. Later, when Pat is in bed with Florence’s husband (neither knows the other is having an affair with Pat), Jessie will be over Michel’s. Donna too is probably doing one of the two herself, fucking some guy or woman while preventing either one from touching any more of her body than she has to. Perhaps she’s fucking someone right now, while you are reading this. Now there’s an image -- as if the ones I’ve given you of Pat and Jessie weren’t enough. At least Pat and Jessie let their lovers touch them. Both of them are more mature than Donna in that way. We all know about that stage children go through where they hate being touched or held. Donna, it appears, has never matured past that point, another milestone of adulthood, where we cherish the touch of those we love.

I’m listening to The Beatles’ White Album, “Blackbird”, “Blackbird singing in the dead of night / Take these broken wings and learn to fly. / All your life, you’ve been only waiting for this moment to be free. / Black-bird fly!” I’ve been listening to most of my Beatles collection tonight, and much of it has touched me deeper than it has before. “Blackbird,” the lines I quoted above, seem so appropriate for where I am. I need to take my “broken wings and learn to fly.” That is what I was trying to do when I first slept with Donna, when I went to get her so she could move in with me. In trying to get rid of the ridiculousness of my virginity, I made the mistake of falling in love with the woman I only went to fuck. Over a year later, she’s left me. I had been drawn in by her promise that she loved me. I now know she never did. I was used so she could get out of her house -- only she did not realize Texas would, in her opinion, be worse. Between that and the poverty that comes with being a graduate student, she gave up on me. Love stays. Donna left. Some day I hope I can find the one who stays.