I am not happy with my choice of tote bag this particular late afternoon. I had considered footwear, the practical walking clogs, but not the handbag, which is black leather and rides too high up the armpit. I find myself lugging it along, feeling the sweat form in my grip on the handle, the heaviness of the paperwork and lunch remains inside it weighing on me. The others, they are no better equipped: the girls, what few of them there are, have dainty purses jangling on long cords from their shoulders that bounce on their hips; their shoes are the kind that pinch and cause blisters. Our instructor, grayed and fraying, a cloud of pure white frizz forming a halo of hair on her head, makeup-less with that typically leftist appearance, has smartly worn hiking sneakers with a fanny pack strapped to her menopausal paunch underneath.
The instructor is leading us, corralling us, this pack of wild college students, through history. Or this was the intent she had planned on, fruitlessly pointing at monuments, at tombstones, at vagrant shrubbery bushes of arboreal interest. We met collectively at the cemetery's gates, brought with us packed snack items and boxed drinks with cellophane straws. I am the only one in this group paying much attention, which must resemble a tourist party shrunken down to youth, cigarettes in hand instead of leaflet brochures, baseball caps replacing sun visors. Camera-less, unenthralled. I feel sorry for this woman, who is too interested, too passionate, too intensely animated about this foray, this excursion she has decided to take us on as part of the syllabus: The History of Boston Park Systems. It was there listed in the catalog of offered electives, it sang out to me in newsprint images of bygone eras, romantic all of them: Victorian strolling grounds, large hoop skirts flouncing and swaying, rickety carriages rolling along dirt paths. Or else victory gardens, tomatoes flourishing like beating hearts on vines, plump as buttocks, back when produce equaled victory. Defeat over nature. Back in the day when such places as this- Roxbury, Dorchester, Jamaica Plain- were not slummy ghettos but proper residences of Bostonian elites. I signed up for it, picturing field trips much like this one, tracing over the intentions of turn-of-the-century architects and planners, going back in time. Outdoors. Too much time spent cooped up, stuck in rotating buildings, one after another. Stale air. If asked, if questioned by others as to why, I simply would tell them that I needed the fresh air.
The sun is setting low into the sky; it is sunset on a September evening. The air is still warm, the insects still shrill in the distance, every leaf of every tree remains steadfast. Nothing knows what is to come. I awoke this morning, pulled the socks over my feet, the layers of clothing, the strata of preparation that has grown more tiring, more weigh some day after day, and knew something dreadful was going to happen. Today, above all other days on the calendar, something would go horribly amiss. The day before, a Tuesday, Oprah aired an episode on amazingly miraculous stories, stories of average women surviving unthinkable odds: eight months pregnant and impaled on a microphone stand, being followed home and raped at gunpoint, having your dependable sedan suddenly berserk out of control. These stories simultaneously terrified me and pleased me. How frightening to have no control over such occurrences, no notice of what was to come and therefore no logical way of avoiding it, yet pleasing to know that there were ways out, always, despite it.
On my way up the long street linking the end of the Orange Line with the cemetery, I considered the neighborhood. Sagging two families encased in vinyl, porches ripe with the signs of Young Creatives: the potted plants, droopy with heat and a bit sun-scorched, rocking chairs with missing rungs, prayer flags fluttering like faded party napkins over doorways. Like
This neighborhood here: a girl was raped last week. It’s been all over the local news, a college girl like myself, steel-minded, level-headed, minding her own business in her own neighborhood. Two black men (were they black?) wearing pillowcases on their heads (black pillowcases? Was this the mistake she had made?) in a car, pulling her in with them, driving down that long stretch of
In the park, which is not so much a park as a carnival for the dead, tombstones lined all around, winding up pathways, parked next to fern swamps or else well-manicured plots surrounding vaults with stained glass insets, I am doing my best impression of someone intensely interested in everything there is to interested in, for her benefit. I nod my head in agreement that yes, Frederick Law Olmstead was an amazing planner and yes, those cherry blossoms are gorgeous. I tilt my head to the side thoughtfully as she speaks, look knowingly at her when her eyes meet mine in explanation. I understand completely is the look I am going for. The others, with their defensive laagering and disinterest, or else their useless rote memorization, are not like me. I am the picture of passion for all things historical, botanical, architectural. But really, my mind is off and running. I am focused instead on sounds beyond the instructor's impassioned shrill or the monotone sighs of my classmates, birds in the distance; I am focused on each tombstone, and the way they are divided into neighborhoods, suburbs, of the wealthy historic slate and marbled etched with oak leaves, withering palm fronds, winged skull heads, and the more modern and sedate granites and finally, the Chinese section, flat as pancakes on the ground, inscribed with characters and bedecked with small red lanterns and bouquets of artificial flowers. The ponds surrounding are filled with ducks, green-capped mallards, frogs trilling, water bugs making backstrokes on the surface, which reflects the darkening sky. Its the mix of nature and manmade monument, specifically monument made for the dead, that collide of the dead and the living that I'm thinking about as we traipse over the markers of bones, of petrified history.
She leads us further, past the historic neighborhood of headstones and into the land of fifties' granites with their Times New Roman inscriptions, attempts at something classical, back-to-basics. Further and further we venture off, off from the main pathways and into the dense thickets of untended coarse shrubs. She is trying to find the grave of Anne Sexton up here, she says, as if to herself, as if a reminder, a to-do. This is not a literature course, we are not English majors specializing in contemporary poets or else a Women’s' Studies class with sights set on the Great Female Thinkers of our era. Yet here we are, coursing through graves in the hopes of finding Anne Sexton, no doubt also in Times New Roman, something unflashy to go with her Metro West upbringing; something classy and unimposing. Probably no witty quip on the back, no advice in quotes for us still living, something cutely cynical like "Wish you were here". Despite the Anne Sexton books lining my shelves at home, despite thinking 45 Mercy Street was an excellent poem, I surprise myself with my complete lack of interest in finding the marker of her existence, or rather, her non-existence. Afterall, the sun is quickly setting, night is falling heavy on us, our legs ache and we've all lost interest. She gives up finally, exasperated at herself for not finding the grave, and we march downwards towards the front gates. Classmates smugly find their cars, manage to make it out before the gates begin to close for the evening at dusk, and I mention to the professor, her hair glowing incandescent white in the dim light, that I have to get to the subway station, back towards the pathway that winds past the greenhouse, past the caretaker's shed, and finally through another set of gates which opens up to that long street with the vinyl houses. She makes an expression on her face that reads as Get going, then. I walk briskly, the bag in my hand no longer sweaty but heavier than ever, and make it to the gate only to see that its locked shut. It is darkness now, the street beyond looks hopelessly more cheerful than before, windows are lit yellow, the clank of dinner dishes can be heard through the open windows. It is dinnertime for the world beyond this gate, which is twice my height and coated with spearheads on its top, that separates me and thousands of historic corpses, some of them political nobility, monetary empires, or the writers of schizophrenic poetry from the land of the living. In my mind, silent, I scream for help that does not come.
I picture instantly the rapists, surely lurking around all corners, pillowcases in hand, waiting. I picture myself impaled on the spears of this gate, a failed attempt to climb over it turning tragic. I have the intense urge to fling my leather tote bag over the fence, but reconsider the loss of my wallet, conjuring images in my head of my body found, my head decapitated, with no form of identification on me. They'd have to fingerprint me, which would delay my family knowing that their daughter was found headless, a raped corpse, in
All to find the grave of Anne Sexton, never located.
THE GRAVE OF ANNE SEXTON.
