my actual dreams and in the events in my life that seem scripted from dreams, I have collapsed, stricken, because the central thing I need has been stolen. “Lucy Locket lost her pocket and doesn’t know where to find it” is a chant that lingers from childhood. My mother read it to me from a favorite library book. How could you lose your pocket, I wondered. It sounded like losing your soul. And what to make of the correspondence between the heroine’s name, which links her very identity to possession of an internal, hidden compartment (for wasn’t a locket a type of pocket?) and the loss of that essential part? And, if the girl doesn’t have it from the outset, can it ever be restored?
I recalled Lucy Locket years later when venturing off to see a psychotherapist—something I did often in my early thirties, trying this expert and then that in a string of offices across Manhattan, some of them perched atop midtown towers, others in brownstone basement hideaways, and still others in those chambers buried in the megaliths of the Upper West Side, hushed twilight consulting rooms whose limestone portals flank the side streets of the apartment blocks, normal-size doors set within towering mortised frames—like entering the side of the Sphinx itself. In each case I approached the therapist’s office feeling both hopeful and ill. I yearned to be cured of my unhappiness but clutched within myself a certain truth I couldn’t bear to have validated, or rather, a truth I didn’t want to be told was significant, essential.
I was terrified to hear that my clumsy, coarse unhappiness actually mattered, perverse as that sounds. At the time, my life with my husband was going through a malaise; I didn’t feel he was attracted to me, and it seemed to me that all around the city stood women and men necking in doorways, women and men in evening outfits waiting on line to go dancing, to drink, to kiss, while I myself felt sealed shut, exempted, somehow increasingly virginal.
But sex was simply just the most nameable part of what seemed wrong. Things within me had become off-kilter, increasingly loosely connected, even frankly oblique, as if I were a rattletrap jalopy that needed to have its bolts tightened, or as if I’d missed a crucial life lesson that everyone now took so entirely for granted they couldn’t even articulate it; they had incorporated it. Still, might I be cured without having to discomfit those with whom I lived—my husband, and, at a greater distance, my parents, not to mention my own self? Could I be fixed, that is, secretly? I desperately wanted to feel better—the sense of meaning had dropped out of my life; I felt there was nothing really to look forward to—while at the same time I did not want to believe that the actual felt experience of my life ought to be of crucial significance, even to me.
After these therapy sessions, which felt like bacchanalias of self-revelation, I staggered up the blazing sidewalk unable to make full use of what I’d heard from the therapist. Fragments of her responses swirled in the air. And so I set her words into notebooks. I believed that the notebooks would make what the therapist had said feel more real—the statements would resonate ever more loudly between cardboard covers—while also saving up the insights for the future time when I might afford to act. That is, the notebook both reinforced what the therapist had said and, at the same time, buried its power. It was real-making and denaturing, at once.
One notebook gave way to another. Soon I had a shelf of them. I had a wall. The notebooks received my revelations with endless nonjudgmental attention and so I remained ignorant while they grew wise. I could rarely bear to open them, although occasionally, when moving from one home to the next, I found myself turning the pages of a crackling yellow-paged volume. A gust of delirium pixilated me, while at the same time my head grew heavy and I longed to sleep. The notebooks reminded me of all I had left unfinished and aroused a sense that life was passing me by.
But then my life took a turn. I accepted a job, my first real grown-up job although I had entered my forties, and I was flung out into a demanding world of classrooms—for I was a professor now—in which it was imperative that I allowed myself to know what I knew both about literature (which I had been studying passionately for decades) and about the internal world of feeling-states (essential to understanding the nuance of stories). I had to trust my instincts and make use of gut knowledge, whereas before I’d been cerebral, cautious, and sequestered—passing much of my life in the tiny, shadowy, silent room at the rear of our apartment.
I was visible every day now, and although in the beginning the person in the classrooms felt fraudulent—how she craved approval, at the outset!—more and more of the time she seemed true, she seemed me. My voice slowed and even lowered somewhat. I took my time. I breathed more deeply. I felt increasingly real, and alive. I challenged my husband when it felt asphyxiatingly urgent that I do so—before this, little about my emotions seemed urgent; all was infinitely malleable—and, over time, I discovered how to advocate for myself with less drama and more grace. It was not such a big deal! I just said what I thought, without having to first get all worked up about it.
I hadn’t known that this was part of the problem between us—a certain reticence. My husband, taking my cue (or perhaps he’d been this way all along), seemed to welcome this new directness. I caught him looking at me in a new way. Things were simple, not so thickety and wrought as before. “Stay in your body when I hug you!” I told him, for I realized that he seemed to evanesce, as if he’d become an empty suit of armor. He had his reasons for distancing himself and I heard them, and it was the beginning of the journey back for both of us. What I had been looking for had arrived in this boomerang way.
Lucy Locket lost her pocket—she flung open the clasp of herself only to see a flat absence. She was a person who called out but heard no echo. She looked out and didn’t see, on others’ faces, a response to her own. That had been my own childhood truth, of course. My own mother had been depressed. She said I was “too much,” and I believed I was. Too loud, too energetic, too needy, too stupid, too intense. She wanted to sit in silence and read a magazine, turning the varnished knife-blue pages of McCall’s, feasting on the happy families since her own original family had left her bereft. I sat beside her on the linoleum and quietly turned the wood blocks of alphabet letters, astonished at how a W became the jagged empty slots of a twin canoe, and an I the beam on which an entire house could rest.
My mother’s ankleted foot beside me, the air hissing from the radiator steam, I built the wood blocks into towers, holding my breath, as if, if I were quiet enough, the god of physical reality would grant me a special dispensation and allow my efforts to end in success rather than failure. I might erect a column to the very ceiling! One winter morning I sat so rigid and breathless that my pulse jumped in my cheekbones, and a seventh letter allowed itself to rest on the bending wood tower of the other six. Oh, my gosh, yes. I’d never arrived at seven.
My hand poised an eighth on top and I held it, my chest thudding. My eyeballs itched from staring, but I was afraid to blink. Then, molecule by sticky molecule, I gradually opened forefinger and thumb. The tower held. The blocks stood glued together by some triumphant, kind divinity—oh, the beauty that I’d been granted to see!—and then, as I watched, utterly motionless, all came slamming down with a clattering crash. My mother did not look up. She was in her own hard-won, separate world. I fetched the letters back and began again.
As I grew, the kingdom of letters increased its thrall. Afternoons during grade school I sat with a book on a sky-blue wood chair in front of my Bronx apartment building. My favorite volume, printed on glazed leaves and far heavier than it looked, shone inky letters up at me, each one the color of Superman’s hair. It told biblical stories of majestic beauty. The letters themselves composed a dark palace, and sometimes I read the stories and sometimes merely gazed at the tiny, glistening blue-black mirrors reflecting the shimmer of the world behind my shoulders, each flickering ghost suggesting a reality I couldn’t discern directly.
And thus, like my mother, I began to enter my own hard-won separate world, in a culture where women were still encouraged to remain locked inside a dream. It wasn’t until many years later, in classrooms where I welcomed the lost and wandering aspects of my own students and then ultimately of myself, that I was able to feel coherent. What I had inside me, what my students had inside them, was both valid and crucial, I finally could believe.
Psyche must journey into the underworld to win back the treasure she lacks. The underworld of the ancients is not, I discovered, Hell. It is, instead, the land of