Page 51 - WTP Vol.X#1

photographer with curly brown hair flopping across his eyes. We call him Heathcliff.”
She barked a laugh and leaned over the tea pot. “I’m not sure that portends a long and happy marriage, deah.”
The image of unruly Heathcliff wandering across the Yorkshire moors married to the wrong woman and yearning for his beloved Cathy crossed my mind. “Too true. Well, maybe he’ll be but a passing fancy.” Literary allusions seemed fair currency in England. Dropping them into conversation made me feel slightly hip.
I don’t remember which tea Mrs. Bed drank. Per- haps it was in fact Indian, reminding her of Sri Lanka, that pearl of an island dropped off the coast of India where she’d spent her childhood as the daughter of a British engineer. She was born deep in the British Empire on one of the original spice islands, in the capital city, Colombo, a multi-cultural town. As I came to know her and as I gossiped with my fellow English majors, we often resorted to our simplistic understanding of her tropical upbringing to explain something of the glamor of this intrigu- ing but unknowable woman whom I first met that October afternoon.
~
That autumn, under Mrs. Bed’s direction, I read so- phisticated, erotic poetry by seventeenth century greats such as John Donne. Although I had a hard time dealing with the poems’ sexuality directly, I now think the wonderful verse I read that fall satisfied, at least in part, my young yearnings—gave me a place to feel, however tentatively, erotic.
It’s hard to underestimate how naïve I was about sex. My parents had implied I wouldn’t need to know much about it—until I was cured. Although I was
as curious as any other adolescent, I’d bought their argument. I knew no one powerful enough to coun-
ter their beliefs—not my brother who loved me but saw me as unlikely to attract men, not even my “boy- crazy” cousin Connie, two years younger than I, who came from Pittsburgh to stay with us every summer. Outgoing and kind, Connie wanted to hang around the toned life guards on their stand at our beach town. “C’mon Anne,” she’d say, “let’s go where the boys are!” I’d hide behind a book, under my parents’ saddened but approving eyes. Although I didn’t let myself admit it, I wanted young men to be interested in me but mostly they weren’t—partly because a teen with a skin disorder does have a hard time attracting guys. Partly because I had drunk deeply of my mom’s caution, so I gave out a “I know you won’t want to come near me, so don’t’” vibe. I felt as if I stood on
a beach at dusk looking at an alluring ocean liner steaming far out to sea.
In my Catholic single-sex high school and even in my Catholic women’s college, many of my classmates and I thought of sex as a mysterious realm which would be revealed when we finally had it. Few books in the local library could teach us how our bodies worked— how and why we would find a man arousing. Only sophisticated girls knew a doctor who could fit an IUD. Birth control pills weren’t really available to us. If we got pregnant, we would be expelled, so sex was surrounded by danger—making many of us shy away even more. Still, I simmered with yearnings I didn’t understand and didn’t dare associate with sexual desire.
Then came Oxford—and Mrs. Bed’s take on erotic Renaissance poetry. She wasn’t asking me to dance around sexual themes as the nuns who had taught me did. As I worked on my weekly essays for her, I began to let myself enjoy poems such as “The Canoniza- tion,” in which Donne argues that he and his lover are positively saintly because of their sexuality—saintly enough to be worshipped by spoilsports who are not in love. “For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love,” he practically shouts at those who berate him.
I managed to chuckle with Mrs. Bed over poems such as “The Sun Rising.” Donne argues for the joys of staying in bed with his girlfriend as opposed to getting up.
Busy old fool, unruly sun.
Why dost thou thus
Through windows and through curtains call on us?
I still couldn’t identify with the girl in the poem but under Mrs. Bed’s wing I began to open myself to the sensuality of poetry more and to give my natural
(continued on page 69)
44