Essay Excerpt: Sad, Dead Girls

 

Sad, Dead Girls

an excerpt from a much longer essay in which I weave Sylvia Plath's diaries with mine.

*this essay was originally written the week of Juniper Summer Writing Institute, which was June 

11-17, 2023. It remains a work-in-progress.

-----------

On the drive from Amherst to Northampton, I peel an orange into halves, spitting seeds into a brown paper bag. I guide the steering wheel with one hand, using the other to part pith from fruit. When I first learned to drive, my mother refused to be in the car with me, citing her nerves. It was determined  that my father would be the one to teach me to: not her. I followed the road’s curves, parked neatly between white lines. Went when the lights told me to, waved to give permission. Drove slower in the first few minutes of rain, when runoff oil mixed with water, when a perfect stop could not be promised. My father told my mother that I would be a “neat little driver”. In the span of three years, I got into two accidents. I totaled my car; I got another one. At least you’re safe, my parents would say, as I filled out the necessary paperwork. Sketching rectangles and circles to recreate the scene, a child’s attempt at collision. A dying pen casts blame, assigns responsibility. They hit me here. It happened there.

I am late for my three-hour appointment in the Smith College Reading Room. I am going to see Sylvia Plath’s journals and realia, holographs of “Lady Lazarus” and proofs of “Mad Girl’s Love Song”, her typewriter and its unspooled ribbons. Google Maps promises an arrival time of 2:07, but I know I need to find parking that is not on the street because I do not believe in parallel parking, and I know I need to pay for that parking, and I need to manually lock all four doors of my Camry because it cannot accept its own brokenness, and I need to walk from my car to the library, and I need to ask for directions to the special collections, and I need to find the elevator so I can press its small gray buttons until they glow orange with light so I can board the car that will take me to Sylvia. I will be thirty minutes late. Not seven.

Exactly one week ago, I emerged from my melatonin haze for just long enough to email one of the public archivists at the Smith special collections, introducing myself as a “total Sylvia Plath nut… [who has been] obsessed with her life and poetry for the past ten years”. I would like to see her journals and her poems, pretty-pretty please. I do not usually take melatonin: I have strange dreams that feel too vivid, visions populated with people who stand too close, who blink too rapidly, who disappear and reappear, surfacing and resurfacing as if beneath a stagnant fog. My family affectionately calls this phenomenon “Ceiling Lady”. This week, I have met many Ceiling Ladies. They have been keeping me company.

-----------

I feel this pressing need to hurry. My years, though they are few, are a thorn in my side, a mountain I am too tired to climb. The life I longed for, the love I wished to give, [seem] like dust and ashes. Burned without a chance to explain themselves. I am companion to the unknown now. I am wed to obscurity. I suppose that’s the core of it, isn’t it?...If I didn’t feel so lonely, so pressured…if I didn’t have to stare that darkness in the face each time I read a novel, imagine how unstoppable I’d be.

Meghan Miraglia, journal entry dated March 28th, 2020

Nothing is real except the present, and already, I feel the weight of centuries smothering me. Some girl a hundred years ago once lived as I do. And she is dead. I am the present, but I know I, too, will pass. The high moment, the burning flash, come and are gone, continuous quicksand. And I don’t want to die.

Sylvia Plath, journal entry contained in JULY 1950-JULY 1953 diary

-----------

When I began writing this essay, I had the idea that I’d weave my journals with Plath’s, highlighting our shared doubts, anxieties, and feelings of apocalypse. But as I reflected on the first time I engaged with Plath’s diaries, I remember reading them not to understand the interior landscape of a deeply troubled writer: in fact, the entire time I read her Unabridged Journals all those years ago, my biggest concern was Which of these men would drive her to suicide? 

Now, I know the story. I often recite it as if it were my own. Plath and Hughes meet at a literary party in Cambridge, where Plath is attending university on a Fulbright. She has wanted to meet Hughes for ages, having read and loved his work long prior. The pair ends up in a coat closet (as poets tend to do). Hughes steals Plath’s scarf. She bites his cheek, drawing blood. It is star-crossed from the start. Sometimes when I tell that story, I can feel the dark space of that closet, can feel my teeth grazing the pockmarked valley of another’s cheek, the shock of metal, the surprise of biting down hard enough to do damage, mothballs and liquor weighing down already stuffy air. 

Within four months, they marry. They honeymoon in Paris. They divide their lives between England and America; the small dramas of literary love play out across an ocean. Hughes gets published; Plath does not. Plath gets published; Hughes does not. Plath wants to have Hughes’ children, writes about baking bread, perfecting cakes. She prepares lectures on Dostoyevsky in the evenings as part of her professor gig at Smith, edits poems at breakfast. The pair attends the odd neighborhood dinner party, and Plath describes each guest with scathing detail. Everyone in the whole world, it seems, is frightfully boring except for Hughes and Plath, who spend hours reading and writing at the dining table, critiquing each others’ work before falling into the same bed, content to repeat the delicious cycle of creating, revising, publishing, celebrating ad infinitum.

Later, I learn that Hughes was in bed with another woman at the time of Plath’s suicide. I learn that she left out bread and milk for her children’s breakfast before dying: a final act of care. I read the unpublished letters documenting Hughes’ abuse of Plath. He beats her; she miscarries. He wants her dead. She writes to her mother, “I am writing the best poems of my life. They will make my name”.

                                                                                    -----------

I feel as though I hadn’t done enough; like I haven’t done anything. I haven’t seen any of the world! I haven’t read all that much! I have hardly seen any art…I have barely written anything…I have had no great love of my life. 

Meghan Miraglia, journal entry dated January 5th, 2017

I am feeling depressed from being exposed to so many lives, so many of them exciting, new to my realm of experience. I pass by people, grazing them on the edges, and it bothers me…But what do I know of sorrow? No one I love has ever died or been tortured. I have never wanted for food to eat, or a place to sleep…What have I to complain about? Nothing much. 

Sylvia Plath, journal entry contained in JULY 1950-JULY 1953 diary

-----------

In Northampton, families and students clump in front of the Academy of Music. Blue dress shirts rolled up to awkward elbows, black dress pants fall slack over knobby knees. My lipstick blots, migrating to the corners of my mouth. I brush potato chip crumbs from my lap, squirm in the driver’s seat. The traffic lights in front of the library are stuck at red: pedestrians bob and weave through the crosswalk’s teeth. Someone honks, but there’s nowhere to go. I accidentally drive where I’m not supposed to, bumping over streets marked AUTHORIZED VEHICLES ONLY!. My Camry, with its broken air conditioning, questionable interior odor, and doors that cannot lock, is not authorized for anything. It is barely authorized to sit in our driveway back in the suburbs, where it is constantly poked at by my father, who scuttles around its silvered form like a surgeon unsure of where to plunge his scalpel. I don’t belong here and I know it, twisting around patches of greenery, cringing apologies from behind the steering wheel. 

I am late because I have just come from workshop. Everyone in workshop is brilliant. They have MFAs in poetry from Boston University. They are going to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop this fall. They are pursuing an MFA at UMass Amherst after having received their doctorate at another fine institution. My poems, submitted long before this writing institute, sat on their stapled pages for all thirty-seven minutes of Open Studios. I told X about them: I sent the fish poem about my sister, and this other poem I wrote last year. It’s one of the first ones I wrote about my grandmother, and I don’t feel great about it. It’s not done; I haven’t touched it in a while. But I figure, hey, that’s what workshop’s for, right? Everyone in workshop says brilliant things about my use of parentheses and semicolons, which is surely a way of paralleling the whale and its ribs, and oh, you move from the car to the domestic back to the car again. Isn’t that interesting? 

  [...]

During workshop, I receive form rejections from magazines I paid $3 to submit to. While we loved reading your work, we feel it is not best for our magazine at this time. Without submissions from writers like you, we wouldn't exist! I don’t win the prize judged by this poet, or the contest judged by that one. The winner will be announced in our Spring '23 issue. A former host teacher asks if I am looking for a position at their school. Someone has decided to leave teaching, are you looking for a job? My Fulbright application portfolio needs to be edited; the Statement of Grant purpose must be drafted. I’m still taking melatonin. I need to sleep without fixating on the bruises this mattress leaves on the sides of my knees, the slope of my hips where muscle turns to fat, parting from bone. I need to sleep cleanly, without hurting. I cannot wake fully in the mornings, but at least I can’t remember my dreams anymore. Can't picture the strange, swimming visions that cut through the midnights prior to this week. I don’t know if that makes up for the cloudy writing sessions hunched over my computer, drinking coffee that tastes like water, reaching for language that sometimes does not come. I have not seen Ceiling Lady, or any of her comrades. I don’t think she got the memo about Juniper. Either that, or her prose was deemed too weak, not worth the acceptance letter. I picture the Ceiling Ladies packing up their things into carpet bags, trundling through the web of my subconscious as if ousted from their jobs. It makes me laugh, if only for a moment, and I pull into a parking spot with startling confidence.

-----------

I feel as though I hadn’t done enough; like I haven’t done anything. I haven’t seen any of the world! I haven’t read all that much! I have hardly seen any art…I have barely written anything…I have had no great love of my life. 

Meghan Miraglia, journal entry dated January 5th, 2017

I am feeling depressed from being exposed to so many lives, so many of them exciting, new to my realm of experience. I pass by people, grazing them on the edges, and it bothers me…But what do I know of sorrow? No one I love has ever died or been tortured. I have never wanted for food to eat, or a place to sleep…What have I to complain about? Nothing much. 

Sylvia Plath, journal entry contained in JULY 1950-JULY 1953 diary