Good Girls

Remember the Billy Joel song “Only the Good Die Young?” I thought that song was a total scandal. How could he say what I somewhere deep thought was true– what scared me most?

But it wasn’t there because of Catholicism. I got that lesson from literature.

Clare Danes as Beth in “Little Women” 1994

Specifically, Little Women. Our mother read us a chapter a night from a variety of books. I remember three in particular: The Five Little Peppers, James and the Giant Peach, and Little Women. I adored the latter, with Jo the writer. I, too, had a sister I considered beautiful and artistic, like Amy. And we loved Beth best of all, because we all wanted to be pure and good. So when she goes off to take care of the Hummels we admire her and fear the worst. And the worst happens: she dies of scarlet fever. That was a rough night for the Sink women– we all sobbed when Beth died.

Elizabeth Taylor as Helen Burns in the film “Jane Eyre” (1943)

I’d have glimpses of this kind of thing later. “Beware the cough.” Home sick from school, I picked up my beautiful, long, serious Scholastic paperback of Jane Eyre. I was so excited. But in no time at all we were in Lowood School and her best friend, Helen Burns, a beautiful, intelligent, virtuous girl, was coughing. Not good. Sure enough, she died a few pages later. I closed the book and never picked it up again. I gasped (along with the whole audience) at the Music Box Theater in Chicago in 1984 at a double feature of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights to see an 8- or 9-year-old  Elizabeth Taylor come on screen in an uncredited role as Helen Burns. A vision of saintly beauty.

John William Waterhouse “Gather Ye Rosebuds” 1909

Of course, this trope from Billy Joel comes to us as early as the 17th century. Robert Herrick wrote in his poem “To the Virgins, to make much of time“: “Gather ye rosebuds, while ye may/Old Time is still a-flying./ And this same flower that smiles today/ To-morrow will be dying.”  Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society teaches it as “carpe diem.” Seize the day. Live while you’re young. Someday we all die, and we don’t know when. It’s a cavalier poem, a seduction poem. It pits virtue/religion against living in the world– acting on desire and embracing romantic experience. In Herrick’s poem, the speaker wants marriage. By the 1980s, there’s no sense of a lifelong promise, or even true love. Joel’s narrator wants to be “first” of her sexual conquests. But what she gets in return is liberation from the “burden” of a life behind a “stained glass curtain” that “never lets in the sun.”

But both the fever and consumption of Beth and Helen, and the cavalier seduction of Billy Joel and Robert Herrick, have as their message that goodness is death. For girls. And so I have always wanted to be good, but there was a goodness out there I feared. And still, oddly, I struggle with this image. (Both Beth and Helen are based on Alcott and Bronte’s actual sisters who died young. But one can suspect some hagiography in the portrayal, or their own thrall with the virgin/saint dilemma.) I’m not that girl who takes to bed with a serious illness– “when death brushes by.” As the chemotherapy goes forward, I know more and more the rhythm of the schedule and what I can do, and when I can do it.

I have my moments of fear, particularly when I can “feel” the cancer in my lung. I don’t like what’s going on in my lung at all– and I want it out of there via chemo, not a tricky and complicated operation that will make the hysterectomy look like a piece of cake. I fear the after-effects of the surgery more than the chemo. Another book I’ve closed and shelved recently is Susan Gubar’s Memoir of a Debulked Woman. She was clearly bringing bad news about the cost of the treatment on a body. I’m focused on healing.

And now and then Beth comes through my mind. And I want to not be that good. I want to misbehave, not be gracious, just do what I want and not be a good citizen, not mindful of others’ feelings. I want to yell at my husband and complain about the stupidest things. I am not selfless like Helen and Beth, that is true. And I have loved three men long and well, in and out of wedlock. I have carpe’d the diem in many ways. In fact, many of the poems in my book H is for Harry celebrate that seizing. In New York City, in Northern California, in Chicago, in Reno, in Los Angeles. By bicycle, by seduction, by reading, in nature, in Catholicism, in music, in language itself and what it makes. In life.

No, I have not been that good girl. And so I will live. Of course.