An open access publication of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences
Fall 2007

Dilly

Author
Mary Gordon

Mary Gordon is the author of five novels, including “Final Payments” (1978), “Men and Angels” (1985), and most recently “Pearl” (2005), as well as numerous short stories and poems. Her nonfiction works include “The Shadow Man: A Daughter's Search for her Father” (1996) and “Seeing Through Places: Reflections on Geography and Identity” (2000). She is the recipient of many honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship.

When I first met Dilly, my husband had just left me. He had left me for another woman, but I didn’t know that, not at the time, although it seemed that everyone else knew.

He had a lot of money, my husband, and he satisfied his conscience in regard to me by making sure that I would never have to worry about money–that “my lifestyle wouldn’t have to change” as a result of losing him. I forbade him to use the word “lifestyle” again, taking a sharp pleasure in at least forbidding him certain words. “All right,” he said, “I don’t want you to have to change your way of life.” I realized then that it meant nothing to him at all that I had made him modify his language, and I felt a fool for my brief moment of false triumph.

I was exhausted from fighting a battle that I couldn’t win, and that I didn’t really care that much about winning: what I cared about was not being perceived to have lost. So I gave up, and I indulged myself by hiring a cleaning woman for our house in the Berkshires, although I was the only one there (our children, my children, were far away–one in California, one in Buenos Aires) and I could easily, in some ways, clean up after myself. But I didn’t want to clean up after myself; I wanted someone else to clean up for me. The truth is, I have always been untidy. Tidy people think untidy people are comfortable in their untidiness, and some may be but I was not. My living quarters were important to me, and when they were orderly and clear I was much happier than when they were in disarray; it was simply that keeping them that way was a task I found overwhelming or beyond me, as if someone were asking me to scuba dive without an air tank or a mask.

I told myself that I was making this decision as a sign that I was serious about my writing. I was three-quarters of the way through a novel, and I thought that the best use of my time would be to write compulsively till it was done. The writing would be both a distraction and a satisfaction, and if the book were a success, a fuck you to my husband, who had never created anything but capital and who’d claimed to be “really impressed” by my ability to “make things up out of whole cloth.”

.  .  .

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