Deserted Island [excerpt]

I was alone on an island. The grass was lush and green, but the windswept landscape was void of trees or large vegetation. Standing on the highest point, overlooking the ocean, I could see in every direction—nothing but the limitless sky and a vast, calm sea. Inhaling the ocean air, my whole being expanded to embrace the panorama saturated with sunlight and crystal blue hues. I felt energized, strong—ready to take on anything. 

***

It was week two of the pandemic shutdown, I lay in bed. I hated waking.

For some reason, a dream I had decades ago, came to mind. It only added to my self-castigation. 

Where had she gone? The woman on the island? The woman I once hoped to become?

With nowhere to go, most days I was free to lie in and burrow under my covers. I longed to return to my slumbers, and escape, but a slave to routine, I rose immediately. Crossing the room, throwing on my robe, I paused at my grandmother’s antique mirror.

I'm repeating family history, like my mother and my grandmother before me..

I remembered the lawyer, who drew up the papers terminating my previous marriage. She assumed I would return to my maiden name.

“No,” I told her, “it was my stepfather’s. I want my grandmother’s name—Montgomery.”

 
A gesture meant to honor the women who raised me, to restore their lineage. I once thought it could be that simple, but even that name belonged to a man.  

Trying to shake off the ghostly auras, I half-heartedly addressed my reflection out loud. “Come on Marissa, you're the poster child for optimism. Turn it around.” 

I always had an innate ability to lift others’ spirits and on rare occasions, inspire people—it used to surprise me, especially given my history, but my charisma had flat-lined months ago. Maybe it wasn't real in the first place.

A therapist told me it was a gift, born of resilience. Whatever the source, it had deserted me. I could’t access it, not even to fake it.

Just days before, Jasmine, my oldest friend, expressed her grief. “I feel like I've lost you and the positive energy I used to absorb just being in your presence. I wanted to bottle it and take it home with me, but Bill stole that from you.”

Or maybe I gave it away.

Despite having an acutely painful childhood, somehow I was spared the clinical kinds of depression that always plagued my family. When I do feel down, it’s brought on by circumstances—when I dropped out of college, after Harold, my father, died, and now. It wasn’t COVID, or the political charades, or the environment. All of these concerned me deeply. It was my marriage of less than two years. 

My energy and optimism were depleted by the constant stress of my marriage. The coffers of emotional and material resources were empty. . This time, I had lost too much. I could not imagine how I would ever bounce back.

There was a time I thought I could transcend my past. I was intent on building a life for myself and my daughters, it never occurred to me that I could slip so far backwards. Later on, I would discover that even after years of therapy, I had only scratched the surface of a far deeper reality.

Returning to the dream about the island, at the time it reminded of a book, Island of the Blue Dolphins, which I read in junior high. Assigned reading for countless school kids, it’s narrated by Karana, a native girl accidentally stranded alone on a remote island off the coast of California. Based on a true story, it recounts, in first person detail, Karana’s struggle to survive by mastering skills traditionally reserved for men and boys—fashioning weapons and tools needed to hunt, fish, and fend off wild dogs. Many considered Island of the Blue Dolphins a pro-feminist challenge to traditional gender roles.

I loved that novel. It was one of a handful of books that helped me survive the cruel circumstances of my childhood. My initial anxiety, triggered by Karana’s abandonment, was quickly eclipsed by excitement at the possibility of having an entire island to oneself, free of adult authority and social constraints. I yearned for the same, to live in my own skin and rely on my own instincts and abilities, to exercise that kind of freedom and agency. I admired her bravery and her resourcefulness—attributes she found within herself as she faced one challenge after another. I was captivated by her inner life and all that I experienced vicariously through her. For one hundred and thirty pages, Karana’s subjectivity expanded to fill her entire landscape—a feeling I have rarely, if ever, experienced in any lasting way. 

The conclusion was another story. It pulled the rug out from under me. Having identified with Karana so closely, her final rescue and departure from the island felt like a personal trauma—a bait and switch. When she carried her puppy, her pair of birds, and her few belongings onto that ship, I felt anxious again.

Stop Karana! Stop! Don’t leave your island!

I was booted back to the present by sounds of commotion in the kitchen. Bill and I no longer shared the mundane routines I once counted precious. At some point our daily scuffle of coffee mugs, cereal bowls, and The New York Times spread across the small kitchen table, had become a site for subtle put-downs, insulting innuendos, and petty annoyances. Now I chose to linger in my room until after he finished his morning meal.

I scanned my surroundings. This cramped room had become a sanctuary, populated by my bed, a dresser, a bookcase, and my writing desk. I was grateful to have a place to retreat to, but it reminded me that my world had shrunk to the confines of this nine by eleven space.

Would I ever feel my being expand again, as it had in my dream?

After Bill cleaned up his dishes and retreated to his study and his daily writing routine, I made my descent to the kitchen. We had fallen into a new rhythm of eating separately. After two years fending off the verbal aggression, I was relieved. From the moment I had returned, just before COVID shut everything down, he started pressing his prerogatives, insisting I owed him.

Self-employed when COVID struck, most of my income dried up over night. Bill had me just where he wanted me—completely within his power. He took every opportunity to remind me that I was now his financial dependent. 

In one of our last dinner conversations, he said with a smug voice of privilege, “Since I’m paying for you to live here, I’ve been wondering, what is it you do for me?”

This typical start to our table tête-à-tête usually ended on a much nastier note. If I threatened to leave he’d throw it in my face, “Go ahead, where will you go? You have no money.”

A novelist, he had a way of twisting my words to outmaneuver me. No more courtship. No more love talk. As the last vestiges of respect crumbled, there was nothing left to hang my trust on. Like Erica in the film  An Unmarried Women, I felt no better than an uptown sex worker. With grim sarcasm it occurred to me, he’d probably treat a professional sex worker with far more politeness. Not to mention, at the end of the session the paid professional gets to leave.

My new routines, ordering groceries, hunting down toilet paper, and stocking cupboards with a modicum of supplies, quickly accumulated other associations. More than once, standing at the kitchen counter sterilizing items delivered by Instacart, he closed in on me from behind. 

“Just let me press up against you… Doesn’t it feel good?” 

It didn’t, but I let him, in part to avoid escalation, but also out of a coerced sense of obligation. I knew from Bill’s tone and demeanor, the pinched look around his eyes, that he no longer considered my feelings on the matter. With his syrupy voice in my ear, my only thought was to extricate myself without inflaming him.  

Holding up my hands, displaying my Playtex gloves in a feigned surrender, I tried my best to affect a kind of playfulness. 

“I have to finish this.” A delay tactic at best. I knew that later on, he would approach me again.

I didn’t share everything with my therapist or those close to me. They knew he harassed me, but I rarely confessed to my own needs. I was embarrassed. Despite all this, I desperately wanted Bill to act himself again, like he did in the beginning—when he hooked me. I kept going over the same "what ifs" in my head.

If he took his meds… if we could enter a treatment program for families impacted by bipolar disorder…with the right therapists he might learn to respect me…we could be happy again. 

Every time I rehearsed this, I could feel my desperation, pulled ever more taut as it reached its breaking point. Meanwhile, I sidestepped my only option—leave. It scared me. I couldn’t imagine how I’d rebuild my life in the middle of a pandemic. I had no confidence, no sense of self-worth, having lost the person I was before we met. On top of that, he was so good at deflecting blame—insisting that I was the one with the hang-ups, I half believed him.

Who was I kidding. Bill's bi-polar wasn't the only problem. When I think of all the degradation that I’ve been subjected to, one relationship to the next, and the countless other incidents with acquaintances and strangers, I started sensing that sex was just the tip of the iceberg, that something larger, more sinister was lurking below the surface. 

Thinking of how often Bill used to boast to his friends--"I get it every night"--I was convinced it had just much as to do with with Bill's sense of power and his reputation. His bragging, which he never hid from me,  proved to his friends that he was still a virile, sexually dominant male.

Grinding my morning coffee as I stared out the kitchen window, my thoughts returned to the island and Karana’s final chapter. I had my suspicions. All these years, teachers and parents have held up Karana as a model for girls to imitate, but looking at it in the light of my current situation, her example felt more tragic than inspiring. The fact that girls can do just about anything boys can do, that’s not even an argument anymore. Even Bill, my husband, will agree that men and women are equal. That doesn’t mean he respects me or makes any real attempt at reciprocity. If anything it makes him feel superior, each and every time he brings me to my figurative knees.

After breakfast, I transferred my coffee to its usual spot beside my computer. Breaking from routine, I skipped over the news and my emails to scan the internet. Sure enough, I found an ebook of the latest edition of Island of the Blue Dolphins. Reading the editor’s introduction, I noticed for the first time that Island was written by a man, Scott O’Dell, during the late 1950s. In the note at the end of the book O’Dell calls her the “girl Robinson Crusoe.” This struck me as contradictory. Thinking this over, it wasn't Defoe’s masterpiece, but Disney’s Pocahontas that came to mind—the evils of Western colonization dressed up as a fairly tale. In addition, O’Dell made Karana a teenager and the daughter of a chief. She was neither in real life. Then, when she’s finally rescued, O’Dell has Karana don a dress and apply traditional face-paint to indicate that she’s unmarried—a virgin. For what purpose? How did that impact all the girls who identified with the story? She survived all that she did, just to get married?

What would happen to Karana when she rejoined the world of men?

The deeper I went with this reverie, the more it loosened the threads of my own tightly wound, inner narrative. Before Karana, when I was seven or eight, I was obsessed with Princess Aurora from Sleeping Beauty. I had all but forgotten her place in my life. I had an illustrated Golden Book I kept next to my childhood bed. I had the Sleeping Beauty coloring book… and the LP of songs set to Tchaikovsky’s original score.

Why did she fascinate me? Was it marketing or something more? 

I even wanted her name—Aurora—after the Roman goddess of the dawn.

“Ha,” I uttered aloud, “a fitting irony!” 

Never questioning her destiny, or taking hold of her potential in any real way, Princess Aurora falls in love at first sight with a man chosen for her at birth. With her gaze focused entirely on him, she fails to glimpse even a glimmer of her own horizons.

Despite everything that Karana had learned and built on her own, fate cuaght up with her., as it had with me.

When she’s rescued, in a paragraph so brief, it broke my heart, Karana leaves everything behind—the island, the animals, her independence---like so many Disney princesses, she never questions her options or challenges her rescuers. Her freedom and the hard won accomplishments that kept her alive disappear in the wink of an eye—end of story. O’Dell doesn’t tell us whether Karana ever regretted it, or lived happily ever after. In the note at the end of the book, he actually leaves out the story’s factual ending. I suppose the author hoped to spare his juvenile readers the more gruesome details of its real life closure. Tragically, the Lost Woman of San Nicolas died seven weeks after her rescue, from dysentery or an infectious disease for which she lacked immunity—a metaphor?

This made me wonder. Does that same narrative arc apply to men and boys—Huckleberry Finn, for instance? What about my other childhood favorites? When men overcome adversity, they get the prize: a crown, a ring, a sword of destiny. They get the princess, too. Reading these stories during adolescence, all that romance eroticized my senses too early. I missed the bits about feminine identity. Back then it never occurred to me that the women were short-changed. I was blind to their losses—an insight that emerged only recently, with my marriage to Bill.

Now, it dawned on me. In so many stories, the romance hides reality. When women are rescued or married, be it Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, or The Little Mermaid, they’re carried off like a prize to serve the man’s needs and aspirations, but rarely their own. When all that they have built, accomplished, or cherished is left behind or jeopardized, it goes unnoticed. Even as I grew older and more suspicious of fairy tales like Cinderella, it didn’t dissuade me from doing the same. I lacked some sort of immunity. When I met Bill, just two months of love-bombing demolished my resistance.

I wondered what would have happened if Island of the Blue Dolphins had ended on a different note? What if spear in hand, dressed in her sealskin belt, her yucca fibers, and her otter cape, Karana stood firm and stated, 

“I’m not leaving.” 

It might have helped me resist the rip currents that stripped me of a better future, if just for a little while longer—enough to grow stronger. 

In another flashback from middle school, I caught my silhouette standing at the entrance to the school auditorium. I was frozen in place. Having just started my period, I felt too self-conscious to walk through that crowded space to find a seat. In the same way we use our cell phones to hide our social anxiety, I hid my face in the test results I had carried from homeroom. Reading them for the first time, I was shocked. Then pressing them close to my chest, I tried to absorb them. I had scored in the top percentile on the state proficiency exams. Honestly, I had no idea I was capable of such a thing. I didn’t know I was smart. 

Bolstered by this discovery, I gave new attention to my studies and started excelling in most subjects. Winning awards in science and Spanish, I grew more confident. I was exhilarated, taking pleasure in my newfound abilities and the benefits they brought me. Coming from a home where I received little positive attention, my teachers were the first to give me any real recognition.

All that changed when I entered high school, where—no exaggeration—I was greeted by an onslaught of male attention and expectations. I wasn’t ready. I needed more time to secure my newly discovered self! Being pretty made it all the more difficult. Coming from an unhealthy home environment rife with negative models, no-one helped me stay the course. I had no inherited resistance to the inevitable intrusion of male demands upon my physical and my emotional space. 

The first day of tenth grade biology, I overheard Gregg, the blue-eyed boy I had crushed on for most of ninth grade. Sitting at the lab table directly behind me, he and Rick, a boy who has recently moved to the school district, were accessing which girls in the class were worthy of dating.

When Rick asked Gregg, “What about the cute girl sitting in front of us?” a jolt of electricity heightened all of my senses. 

Just like that, Gregg’s reply sent me plummeting. “I wouldn’t bother, she’s a brain.”  

I pretended not to hear, but that one sentence, ricocheted through my inner being. I can't help but wonder if on some subliminal level Gregg was really addressing me. I had built a secure place for myself in my studies, but sadly, Gregg’s comment was all it took to derail me. Within months, the girl who had risen to the top of her class, a member of the debate team, a MVP halfback in girl’s varsity soccer, lost interest in her grade point average and school activities. You could say, Gregg’s comment served an important social function, prodding me back to my proper place, removing a potential rival for the kind of attention usually reserved for boys and men. Gregg went on to become a successful doctor. Sadly my life followed a far more circuitous course.

The long term effect was devastating as I made one mis-step after another. I dropped trigonometry so I could hang out with my boyfriend in his study hall. I skipped classes. I gave up academic study—I deserted my island. I wish someone had stopped me.

“Stop, Marissa! Stay put! Don’t leave!”

My guidance counselor was visibly upset, but I ignored her protestations. Her calls to my parents made no difference. They lacked the emotional space or resources to invest in me or my future. All that I had previously invested in myself, I squandered. I spent my weekends drinking, going to parties, anesthetizing the self-hatred already festering within me. If I had stayed true to myself, I probably would have saved myself from some of the suffering that lay in wait. No-one in my family intervened—why would they? I had taken my place in the social narrative. That was the end of my Robinson Crusoe story, which bound me and Karana, and countless adolescent girls to smaller horizons. As much as I still love Island of the Blue Dolphins, I wish they would stop assigning it to school kids. Why not replace Scott O’Dell with Virginia Woolf? And with it, replace Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre with her sister’s lesser known novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall—lesser known, but full of warning.

My runaway reverie came to a full stop, as this last thought made me pause.

I had been warned.

Before I married Bill, my sister’s nursing colleague pulled her aside. “Lizzie, Bill’s a monster. His ex-wife is a close friend of mine. She told me everything. You have to warn your sister.” 

I brushed if off. Even Lizzie was convinced that Bill’s ex must have planted those lies in her head. Having readily accepted Bill’s portrait of his ex-wife’s jealous, conniving character, we never considered he might be exaggerating. We were brought up to believe Bill's narrative over is ex-wife's.

A month into dating, one of my elderly clients, who knew Bill from church, couldn’t contain his disbelief, “What are you doing with him? He’s the most selfish man I ever met.”

A friend who worked at his old publisher knew of complaints filed by staff members concerning rude, dismissive behavior. That should have prompted some kind of inquiry on my part, but I ignored it all. We all did, Lizzie, my mom, even Jasmine, who was usually more suspicious. When I look back at the beginning of the relationship, I can’t make sense of it. I had sworn I wouldn’t repeat my previous mistakes, but that’s precisely what I did.

Why?

Suspended for a moment by the same question that pressed me again and again, I turned to my female ancestors. “Please help me understand. You were educated, professional women ahead of your time, but I never saw you in your glory.” I only saw their undoing.

By the time I knew them, their marriages had collapsed their worlds into petty kingdoms ruled by their husbands, but I remember the stories they used to share over dirty holiday dishes, after the men had retired, or during summer evenings at the beach house, when aunt Silvia, the most eccentric, would leap at the chance to reminisce about her days in the diplomatic core. A mirror image of Grace Kelly in more ways than one, in her beach robe and sandals, her bleached hair turned in a french twist, a martini in hand, she entertained us with lively accounts of exotics lands and state parties hobnobbing with foreign dignitaries. Of all the women in my family, she held out the longest, waiting until her thirties to marry a man, who by my lifetime, had turned stonewalling his wife into performance art. Silvia fell the hardest.

Her older sister, Lorraine, my mother’s mother, had interned at the Mayo Clinic. A hospital administrator,  she earned more than my grandfather. She died of lung cancer at age sixty, but had lost her spirit decades earlier. She was fascinated with all the talk of sexual liberation, civil rights, and women’s equality. Despite this, and despite her demanding career, she never broke stride modeling the perfect wife and homemaker. 

When I was a child, she brought me books and encouraged me to read. I asked her now, "Were you aware of the contradictions? The costs and the burdens passed to your daughters, to me? Now that Emma’s in high school. What do I tell her?" 

I had already failed at modeling anything liberating.

At the end of their lives I sensed that their past accomplishments only made them more bitter, swallowed up by a status quo that erased their losses and their suffering.

Their mother, Gwendolyn Montgomery, an educator who treasured the Danish author, Isak Dinesen, had raised them to be a new generation of women. I tried to imagine her sorrow, having to witness their academic and professional ascent conclude with their tortuous downward spirals, like so many crashing rockets burned up by the atmosphere.

I think guided missiles brought them down.

Still at my computer, I sat fixated, having lost myself in a blank stare, until the screensaver, acting on cue, replaced my online activity with pictures of cute little kittens. I had to smile at this evidence of my daughter Emma’s constant tinkering with our cell phones and computers. Returning me to the present, these images reminded me that she had refused to return. Feeling even more deflated, I fell back in my chair. I was failing as a mother.

Marissa, your downward spiral is accelerating. Do something, if not for yourself, for her!

Just then, as if I had turned a lock on some hidden door, an intuition shifted my mental frame ever so slightly.

The dream is more than just a memory. Every time you return to it, you return to the island and the crystal blue horizons of forgotten possibility. Something awaits you there.

The countless rounds with Bill had left me a pile of wreckage, but in the midst of that rubble I recognized an old inner voic.

Get up Marissa!

I didn’t know it then, but the restoration of the dream to my memory was a form of intervention. In the weeks and months that followed, my sleep was repurposed. My escape hatch from reality became a dig site for excavating long buried memories, and with them lost versions of myself still alive, still active deep in my psyche.

**To continue reading, please purchase full access***

All characters and their particulars found in the book Pillow Talk are based in reality, but do not correspond with actual persons, places, or events.