Winesburg, Ohio

 Fading Into The Wallpaper


Author's Note: This is my final response to Winesburg, Ohio.  I wanted to make a similar story like one in the book called Mother.  It's about a mother who really has no one to go to to talk to so she doesn't really talk at all.  Her husband is a very harsh, business man type of man and he is a very cruel person.  The response is about how people become secluded and why they can't really be helped sometimes because they are such broken people.  I don't really know what to think about this piece because it's one of my few fictional pieces.

All I want to do is leave this place - this ghost town of a place.  There is nothing here, no people, no life at all.  I walk through this town and look at the grim faces of the townspeople and I grimace myself.  Who would want to live in a place like this?  A place where the people are too "normal" - what is the point of even trying to be normal or even close to it?  I find normal just lackluster, and I feel like every boring person is slightly psychopathic but that might just be me.  When you look into their eyes you see the weird person inside and you see the secrets they are trying, desperately, to hide from the world.  I am alone in this place of mummies.  I barely know any of them and they seem too scared to take the chance and I want to leave but maybe the whole world is like this.  Maybe everyone is closed up, even I'm starting to get lost inside myself because really there is no escape.  I will probably never leave this place because it will get me, I will lose myself and never come back.  I will turn into my mother, who brings herself out in her garden and not to real human beings.  I often find her kneeling down and whispering to her favorite white lilies about things I don't even know about and will ever know about.  My mother didn't used to be like that; she used to be the person at all the parties that would strike up the most interesting conversations and say what she really felt about the important topics at the time.  She used to sing in public and didn’t care that people were staring at her.  She was so carefree and even though those are little things; I noticed the change.  I noticed the change of life in her eyes.  The caring and wildness dropped out and was replaced by slow and growing anger.  I miss my mother quite a lot and I wish that she would come back but she's not going to - my mother is gone.

As my mothers hair starts to gray, so does her life; it begins to gray - to fade away.  She met my father when she was visiting her aunt in Chicago and he was studying in Business at Northwestern.  My mother was staying for the summer with her aunt, who owned one of those expensive condos on the lake. Her aunt also had an apartment that was closer to her work so she only came to the condo on the weekends so my mother had the place all to herself.  My grandparents thought it would be a nice way for a nineteen year old to get used to the real world. She would walk to streets and the parks near the shore and meet new people and talk to them as if she had known them her entire life.  She did whatever she wanted, when she wanted because she wasn’t exactly the type of person who believed in consequences.  Out of the little things she told me, she said that this was the best summer she’d ever had.  She said that this was the only time that she felt really free from everything and everyone.  In those few times when she actually came in at night to say goodnight, she would sit there for a little and reflect on that summer with me.  Her eyes would glass over and she would dive into her memories.  She only mentioned once to me that she met my father that summer but she often talked about another man.  She would talk about a man who she called Davie.  He was the first person she met that summer and she said that he was her best friend.  He warned her about my father by saying that he was known for dragging girls in with his charm but breaking them with cruelty.  She didn’t listen and, even though she didn’t admit it  to me, I knew that she wished she had.

It was easier when me and my brother were younger because then if she told us something we wouldn’t really know what it meant.  We were like little diary entries that were constantly being erased then rewritten with different words.  I remember when my mother would take us out to the garden when we were about five years old and sit us on the bench while she worked amongst her varieties of flowers.  We would sit there and listen to her rant on and on about ideas we couldn't possibly understand that young but at least she was talking to someone other than herself.  It was when my father started to spend nights at the office that things started to change.  My mother and him were fighting constantly about what seemed like nothing.  They would stand there and yell at each other about my mother making the coffee wrong or forgetting to iron my fathers  tie.  Eventually, my mother just stopped responding all together.  My father would call her out and she would just cringe back into the wallpaper and turn invisible but he always found her and he always had something to say.  She stopped talking to me and my brother.  Home became the prison and school became the escape from all the silence.  You never really realize how much you need noise until there is none.  The silent dinners were the worst.  My brother and me would come into the dining room and take our seats, then our father would come in and sit at the head of the table then Nani, our housekeeper, would bring in the food.  Most nights, my mother wouldn’t even bother coming to dinner and when she did she wouldn’t look any of us in the eyes.  We knew she was broken and we knew that we couldn’t do anything about it.  

She blames herself, really, for how my father treats her.  She thinks that if maybe she were a better wife than everything would have turned out okay.  She would of been fine and our family wouldn’t be broken but I know that it was my father that betrayed her.  He promised her a life of love but she received none.  She loved him but he only saw her as a necessity in life, merely an object to be used not to be cherished.  I loved my mother but what she has become is something I don’t know anymore.  That’s why I need to leave this town and this house. I need to leave and never look back. She is a empty shell being tossed about in the ocean of my father’s world.  She has become what he wanted, someone to be there but not under her own control.  I must leave them to be alone together in their misery because no matter how hard I try I will never be able to free them from themselves.  I’m leaving soon and I can’t wait until the day I hop into the old truck that Nani used to drive before she passed away and I get to drive out of this town and see places far beyond it’s limits.  

Author: Sherwood Anderson


Author's Note:  This response is about the first chapter of the novel Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson, called Hands.  It's about an old man named Wing Biddlebaum who is known as the mysterious and shy person in town.  No one really knows him except for one, George Willard, a journalist for the towns newspaper.  Wing Biddlebaum used to be a teacher and loved his students very much.  He is a type of innocent because he would show affection towards the students as if they were his own children but he didn't understand that people would take it the wrong way so they ran him out of town and he ended up in Winesburg, Ohio.  Where he now picks berries for a living and hides his hands and doesn't talk to anyone because he is ashamed of what he did and well, that's pretty much it so enjoy.  

Society puts us down.  We can never fully express ourselves because society has all these rules that we feel we must follow.   We are scared that people will judge us even if they secretly fear the same thing.  They fear that we will judge them if they don't point out our flaws first or if they don't make us feel uncomfortable with ourselves before we get the chance to do that to them.  There is absolutely nothing wrong with the way we look or act because we are human and we all have the right to express ourselves differently.  There should be no shame in showing love or affection for another person because we all know that is all we need as people.  We need to feel close to people and we want people to let us know that we are needed and wanted.  Social rules say no though, they tell us that affection in public is wrong.  They tell us that by simply touching another person that should make them feel uncomfortable, not feel loved. 

In the chapter, Hands, Wing Biddlebaum is run out of town because of small, nonchalant actions.  By simply tousling a students hair with his hand he is deemed inappropriate.  Just because he did this doesn't mean he is physically attracted to the students, it means that he loves his students and cares for them so by touching their shoulder or ruffle their hair he shows his expression.  It is his way of showing what he feels.  Wing Biddlebaum also has a certain innocence about him.  He doesn't really know any better than to tousle a students hair even though a regular human being would know what other people would think so when he is forced out of town, he never really knows what he did wrong.  He hides his hands because he is scared and he is ashamed of himself.  By hiding his hands, he is hiding his past, tucking it away in the pockets of his jeans and only to be seem by few people because he doesn't want to feel guilt again for being himself and showing affection.