After Gary asked, "Will we ever read
any normal people in this class?" and I quipped,
"No, of course not," and after the laughter had quieted,
we ambled through "Song of Myself," celebrating
our "respiration and inspiration," traveling along
with the voices of sailors, prostitutes, presidents, and tree toads,
in sync with the poet's vision. No one
this time—not even Gary—grumbled about
Whitman's disgusting ego, and yet when we came to the place
where God is "a loving bedfellow"
who leaves "baskets covered with white towels
bulging the house with their plenty," I was the one who
wanted to stop. At that point, I've always
been puzzled. I get it that a lover could
be like a god. But towels? We'd just finished The House
of the Seven Gables, and I wondered if
Hepzibah or Phoebe ever sold linens in their shop. Yet
we never hear Hawthorne talking about blankets or sheets or
how anybody washes his face or her hands,
let alone armpits or "soft-tickling genitals"—leave
those to Uncle Walt. The store Hepzibah opened: a first step
in leaving the shadows of her cursed
ancestors, of joining the sunlit world. Last summer
when my husband and I moved back into our old house after
a massive redo, we gave away box after box
of sweaters and tchotchkes. We even disposed of old
books, including those with my neon markings in the margins
blunt as Gary's outbursts in class: "Ugh,"
"NO," and 'Wow!" It was time to loosen the mind
beyond the nub of the old self. My mother used to huff through
the house every year like a great wind,
and when she settled down, not a doll over
twelve months old remained, not a dress, not a scarf, not even
lint wisping in a drawer. One year during
a flood, my husband's letters from lifelong friends
drowned in the garage, morphed back into pulp. I never hoped
the past would vanish into a blank, and yet,
when Holgrave in the novel cries, "Shall we never,
never get rid of this Past!" I, too, want it washed clean, to wake
in the morning released from echoes
of my father's muttered invectives, my mother's
searing tongue. I've now torn to rags the rust-stained
towels from my former marriage and
my husband's bachelorhood linens, raveled
threads drooping like fishnets. How Hawthorne's Phoebe
opened that heavy-lidded house
to the light. I used to scorn her chirpy domesticity,
praying along with Emily Dickinson—whose balance
Gary had also questioned—"God keep me
from what they call households." And yet, after
my husband and I returned to our remade, renewed house,
what did I do but go shopping
for towels. Back and forth to seven strip malls,
bringing home only to return I don't know how many colors,
till, finally, I settled on white. And as I
pulled out my MasterCard to pay for the contents of
my brimming cart, a gaunt, wrinkled man entered the check-out
line, hands pressing to his chest
two white towels just like mine, eyes lifted
to the fluorescent ceiling as if in prayer. I doubt that Gary
would think it normal to greet the divine
while clutching terry cloth. But now I see that Whitman
knew what fresh towels could mean for a dazed and puffy
face, white towels unspecked by blood
or errant coils of hair, towels that spill from
a laundry basket like sea-foam. Like cirrus clouds adrift while
we're loafing on tender, newly sprouted
blades of grass growing from the loam under our boot soles,
from graves of the old and decaying, all we've finally buried.
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