Helen of Troy with no Achilles to save her May 26, 1985
She’s gone. Like
a spirit suddenly exorcised, losing all corporal substance. They backed up
their truck and vanished west, not beggars but possessed in their search for God,
after the Devil won here in the east.
Mary Ann moves,
not out of economic necessity, but by a need too sooth the ache she still has
from years ago, the choice between two men who claimed to love her.
She mentioned having
the same nightmarish dreams ago. Johnny agreed for the same reason, having
benefited uncertainly by her choice.
I overheard him
on the phone complaining about Mary Ann’s books.
“We can’t have
our daughter growing up around such sinful stuff,” he said, in a dark
uncompromising tone.
This reminded
me of his mother and her almost devilish obsession with austerity, a version of
Calvinism stretched thin. While my first impression of her has since mellowed,
the shreds of it remain, she is manipulating both Mary Ann and Johnny from
behind her veil of piety.
She and Johnny
work on saving Mary Ann’s immortal soul, and Mary Ann has changed. Before
leaving, I heard Mary Ann call her one-time best friend, ‘trivial and
uninteresting,” out only for a good time. She shed no tears leaving them, or
from her two other closest friend, roommates and confidants from a time when
she acted and sounded just like them, and now hates that part of herself.
Had she chosen
the other man back when this began, she might well now hate the inner demon
that disguises itself as faith today.
I don’t think
she really hates the good times, a fact Johnny suspects as well, pointing out
how she has chosen to keep all the clothing she used to wear in the clubs, clothing
she hasn’t even looked at in years. Her
books, her photographs, her recollection vanished without a trace – with me
discovering how Johnny gave them away to Mary Ann’s brother just before they
left.
Johnny and his
mother seem determined to remove temptation that might send Mary Ann back into
that life again and could not control her if she clung to those things that reminded
her of a more pleasant time.
The apartment
they abandoned stood as a fortress against their reconstruction.
But out west,
in the heart of the Bible Belt, Mary Ann will be isolated from her old world,
surrounded by other – to me – Demonic forces determined to reshape her and her
life.
She told me she
needed to do this. Yet on the phone, she broke down crying and said she was
doing it for Johnny and their child, so that they will have a chance to live a
life they cannot live here.
She is Helen of
Troy, taken off to the besieged city with no Achilles to save her, isolated
from her roots, stolen from her family who remain here.
I wanted to
talk her out of it; I could not.
This morning,
they left, they and Johnny’s mother, a dark angel determined to save her soul.
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