My Mother My Self by Nancy Friday

Author:Nancy Friday [Friday, Nancy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-76373-0
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-06-05T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

MEN THE MYSTERY

To this day I make M’s. When I scribble while on the telephone or write in the sand, it’s always M’s. M stands for Morgan, and Morgan stood for Man Incarnate, Man the Mystery, Man Unobtainable. From the beginning—around age thirteen—I focused on Morgan. I never took my eyes off him, though he never put his hands on me. Except to punch me. Whenever one of us girls teased him, pushed him too far, trying to get something (what?) out of him, he would haul off and give her a swift rabbit punch in the arm. He did it dispassionately and without words, as if she were a fly. It was a badge of honor to carry one of Morgan’s bruises. We had been touched.

Morgan belonged to the crowd of boys our own age, the ones we girls started on. We went to dancing class together, and theirs were the photos we carried in our Genuine Leather wallets, along with the eighth-grade graduation head shots of one another autographed, Love ya’, Mary Beth. Within a couple of years we would outgrow the local boys and graduate to the cadets at the Citadel—a military college for men in name, but in fact a repository for southern boys. But throughout all those years and beyond, I remained faithful to Morgan in fantasy. He stood for an idea of manliness, the person who would stand opposite me and make a woman of me. He was the promise of my sexuality, the white heat of my glandular fever, the ache I loved living with while I waited. I grew to love the waiting too, and was so in love with love that something in me still waits for Morgan. My husband knows I dream of Morgan at night, and smiles at what he calls my “persistence of emotion.” How can I expect him to understand? He grew up in New York, that very unadolescent city, safe from the sexual heat of small southern towns, the drive-ins and drugstores, matriarchy and male supremacy. Besides, he is a man. Only women understand waiting, how years of it train you to dream, to never expect it will happen, or to recognize it if it should.

Occasionally I wonder what sort of man Morgan grew into; I imagine myself sitting opposite him, me grown splendid and sexual, Morgan now the one suffering from the white heat in the groin. But in this fantasy, we are not in some smart bar but in Schwettman’s Drug Store, and while I look like one of those women in a vodka ad, Morgan is still fourteen. On those infrequent trips back to Charleston, I never seek him out. I do not choose to confront the old fantasy, to ruin it. How can you update a god? To me Morgan will always be slouched behind the wheel of his black Chevrolet, wearing a maroon windbreaker with the sleeves rolled up, and a tough look. Morgan never smiled.

When he chose one of my best friends as his girl, I kept right on dreaming about him.

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