NONFICTION - 
​      With a Theme of Time    

"As an English teacher my entire adult life, I have been doomed to re-experience literature,
admitting its surprising intrusions and associations into that life."
               Photo by Weebly                                   

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Me and Miss Brill
by  Jackie Davis Martin

The couple, without any gear or fuss, crawled across me as I half-stood, not yet buckled in. I was grateful for the aisle seat. The man and woman were slim, brunette, young. He settled next to the window, and she snuggled against him under his arm, leaving ample room in her middle place and isolating me. I wanted to acknowledge them, to smile an approval of sorts, but to them I was no more than a bookend. I felt self-conscious in my invisibility and wanted to call across to them, “I am not Miss Brill! I have known romance—known it well, in fact. My husband was always waiting for me! No. Not Miss Brill!”
 
Why did Miss Brill come to mind? As an English teacher my entire adult life, I have been doomed to re-experience literature, admitting its surprising intrusions and associations into that life. In Katherine Mansfield’s story Miss Brill sees herself as an important part of an audience as she attends a weekly concert in the park. That is, until she overhears a young couple, who are apparently making out at the end of the bench where she sits, talk about her. “That stupid old thing at the end there!” “Why doesn’t she keep her silly old mug at home!”
 
I remember teaching that story years ago, when I was fairly young myself—thirties, I guess (the days when I identified with Cleopatra being then the age of Shakespeare’s title character). I had the greatest empathy—pity, even!—for poor Miss Brill. I felt a solicitous detachment, a sympathetic pang, for the old lady on the bench. I directed my students in appreciating this isolation, not truly understanding myself what it was about at all.
 
Linda Pastan, in her wonderful poem “Ethics,” presents a debate she once had in a college Ethics class:  “. . . if there were a fire in a museum/which would you save, a Rembrandt painting, or an old woman. . . ?” Pastan remembers how clever they all felt arguing the issue. Later in the poem, as an “old woman/or nearly so,” she stands before a Rembrandt and thinks: “I know now that woman/and painting and season are almost one/and all beyond saving by children.”

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I do not think of myself as the old lady on the bench, or on the plane, or even in the museum, but I have been forced to realize that others do. When I attended a writing conference in Portland twenty years ago, I was already struck by the contrast of me to the other participants. My “fellows,” that is, younger women, were bare of leg and flip of comment, sporting anxieties and edginess. As an “older person,” you must be gracious or have some claim to fame that allows eccentricity. At the martini-gatherings, I wanted to be asked, “What’s your particular angst?” Instead, the questions most frequently posited to me were, “How old are your children?” and “What does your husband do?”
 
I’m older than Willy Loman. I’m older than Raskolnikov’s pawnbroker. Reading Crime and Punishment in college, I totally identified with Raskolnikov’s annoyance with society, applauded his ingeniousness, suffered his guilt. Twenty years later, teaching the novel, I gasped through the pages seeing only his mother’s point of view. My goodness, that poor woman! She doesn’t know! And how she loves him. Raskolnikov became my son, mysterious, brilliant, and I, the mother in the wings. Add more years and teaching the novel again, and I shift again. When Raskolnikov prepares to kill the pawnbroker (“an old woman who doesn’t know why she’s alive”) I was outraged. How dare he! Once, to me, the pawnbroker was not distinguishable from a plot mechanism, a pawn.
 
I have measured out my life not with Prufrock’s coffee spoons, but with dog-eared paperbacks from whose words (underlined, circled, symbolled) pieces of my life spring into the classrooms with the characters. I have in my time identified with Hardy’s Tess Durbeyfield and Eustacia Vye; with Flaubert’s Emma Bovary; with Ibsen’s Nora and Hedda, and, of course, with Hamlet. I have also shifted to Mrs. Yeobright (Eustacia’s mother-in-law) to Gertrude (Hamlet’s mother), even to Jean Valjean in Les Miserables. I am now beyond all of them.

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Still, I left teaching reluctantly. I often wondered—and tried not to think too closely about—how my high school students, even college students, saw me. Did they ever see an individual? Or just a teacher: old.
 
            O would some power the giftie gie us
            To see ourselves as others see us!
 
. . . so Robert Burns (who died young) wrote, no doubt aware that even when we look, we see what we want to, what we choose to see. Sylvia Plath (who didn’t reach thirty) makes the narrator of her poem “Mirror” a mirror, who says: “In me [a woman] has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman/Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.” My students had winced in pain at the image and looked to me for confirmation: Is that how it is? Yuk!
 
I wanted to tell them that my mirror is more kind than brutal, reflecting vestiges of my youth, like guppies swimming to the surface, letting me sort and choose. It’s the rest of the world that does not have this selective perception and that sees, not a woman on a bench excited to be at a concert, but old Miss Brill.
 
Well, time passes. I am no longer Hamlet, but Lear, old King Lear, who learned late that appearance doesn’t matter, that love does (even though his supporting cast saw just his age), and I will carry on as long as I can. I’ll just avoid sitting by myself on benches. 

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​​Jackie Davis Martin’s stories have been published in anthologies, as well as print and online journals; prizes for fiction were awarded by New Millennium, On the Premises, and Press 53,  among others. In addition, she’s published two memoirs: Surviving Susan and Those Several Summers, as well as a novel, Stopgaps, and has just put together a story collection: A Life, Fictively. She enjoys the arts of San Francisco: SF Ballet, SF Opera, SF Symphony, the theaters.

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