First, let me start by saying that I understand this is not the paper you wanted me to write. I know what grade I will receive and I’m fine with that. Wait, I don’t want to use the word “fine.” I’ve been thinking about that word so much for the past year and a half. How we say we are “fine” when we really aren’t. How we use it to accept a situation we don’t know how to deal with. “It’s fine.” When really, in our heads, if you could see, would be these words, scrawled in giant permanent marker: “Help me.” I don’t want a poor grade, but I also realize that I don’t have a lot left in me at this moment in my life and that this paper, as my brother Joey might say, “is what it is.”
I first read The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James last year, for another class. （Is that cheating if I reread something I read for another class? It can’t be, can it, since teachers assign us some of the same books for years on end; remember, I’ve been reading The Scarlet Letter for about four years now. Maybe it’s not that we don’t want to read it, but that by now, we’re bored of it. Something for you to think about when you plan the book list for the future.） Now, as then, I don’t know if I fully understand what happens in the novel, but I loved it anyway. Isn’t that strange? To love something you can’t fully grasp? It isn’t even something I can attach one of your required literary terms to. I just felt a sensation while reading it—I felt swept up, transported, enveloped, comforted, even. I sank into the book. Isabel Archer is batted about not necessarily by any choice of her own, but by what is expected of her: to conform, to belong, to be married, to take her place as a woman of privilege and intelligence, regardless of her own dreams and wishes. Forces that shaped her life long before she was even born. I guess I identified with that because of who I am in my family, in this town, even this high school. I don’t feel like I get to make many choices on my own. They were set out for me before I was even a thought to my parents, polished and gleaming. They were set out for me the moment the first brick was laid for the Mill.
Do you want me to talk about the Mill? I’m sure you’ve heard that my mother is going to sell the buildings and the land to a nonprofit, instead of a ritzy condo developer. There’s going to be a big fight, probably. Zoning things I don’t quite understand. It took my mother some time to make this decision and I hope Mill Haven, as a whole, accepts what she’s trying to do. Did you know, long ago, that the whole idea behind the Mill, besides money, was also one of benevolence? I think that’s a fantastic word, by the way. Build the Mill, the foundry, and fan out, across the town, with dormitories for the workers （who were, in the beginning, farm girls）， and then, because the workers needed it, build the school, give them a hospital, a library, houses, and on and on. And when the Mill closed, a part of the town died. The river was dead. It just sat there, for years and years, a ghost at the end of town. If I stand in my brother’s attic room, on our hill off Aster Avenue, did you know I can see practically the whole town? All the big houses on our hill, and then down to Main Street, and to the east Polish Town, where the houses are smaller, and the west, where they are smaller still. From my hill, I see everything, and at the very end of it, always, is my beginning: the Mill. I think my mother is grappling with that. How to be benevolent again. But you can’t push her; I’ve learned that. I might be getting ahead of myself, here. But I’m thinking of that word, benevolence, a lot. We could all probably be a little more benevolent in life. We all live here, after all. We all share the same mighty good company of the stars at night, and everyone deserves kindness, and survival. Everyone deserves to be seen.
You know who I am. Or you think you do, much like people think they know Isabel in the book. Presumptions based on her appearance, her background. I’m quiet, I like to read, my family has a lot of money, my life will be safe. I am a good and safe girl, is what you probably think, and your job is to guide me through my intellectual development. But （and no offense intended here）， as Isabel says in the book, “I don’t need the aid of a clever man to teach me how to live. I can find it out for myself.” And for better or worse, that’s what I’m doing right now.
I think that might have been one of the problems with your book list. You chose that list because those are the books that you loved, that you know, that you think we should read （and also, Lolita is completely inappropriate for high school; I don’t know why you thought you could sneak it in there. Plus, do not underestimate Liza Hernandez; if anyone from Mill Haven is going to make their mark in the outside world, it’s Liza）。 You didn’t really look at us as individuals when you made that list. You just probably saw us as one seething mass of hormones and cell phones and memes and sighs and boredom that could be whipped into shape with a healthy dose of symbolism, allegory, and foreshadowing, just to name a few of the literary terms you asked us to use in this paper.
Someone I used to know said that’s the problem with adults. They just see kids as they want them to be, what they aren’t, and not as they are. I think about that all the time. Like, how much time and pain and suffering could be eliminated if you just accepted the kid in front of you and stopped trying to fix them. Maybe there is no “fixing.” Maybe there is just heartbreak and love and trying to help them stay alive, whatever it takes.
You don’t really understand that sometimes we need to see ourselves in the books you assign, in all our messiness and confusion. And in case you think I haven’t learned anything literary all semester, I can tell you that foreshadowing happened at my kitchen island in August, after my brother Joey returned from rehab and was presented with a list of rules he had to follow if he wanted to stay in our house. He came into the house with his head held high. He left the table with his head down, after reading all he would need to do to be loved. If I’d spoken up then, maybe what happened wouldn’t have happened. If I’d told my parents he relapsed, maybe what happened later wouldn’t have happened. I don’t know for sure. A smart person once told me that life is working against us all the time, inside and outside us, in a thousand different and silent ways that are invisible to us, and there is nothing we can do about it. You just have to do the best you can and go on, and hope for the best.
This is not going to be the thirty-page paper you wanted. I have to get up early in the morning and drive to see my brother at his new rehab center and that is my priority at the moment, not a school assignment. I think that in the grand scheme of things, you should be able to understand this. My brother not dying is my priority at the moment. And other things, too, like me figuring myself out a little （because I am a mess）。 And I know you are probably rolling your eyes at this moment and thinking that I could have “managed my time” better and that the due date has been on the portal forever, but I really couldn’t. I was busy being a liar, a wanton girl, a jewel thief, an enabler, a safecracker, a sister, and a daughter. Someday, I would like to read a book about that girl, to be honest. Find it and put it on your future book list, please.
The last thing I will say about The Portrait of a Lady is this: yes, it was written by a bespectacled old white man who, of course, controlled everything about Isabel and her interior thoughts, but there’s a lot he got right. And I think the thing he got most right is what I really hold dear about this book, and why I will probably read it several times over the course of my life.