Susanna J. Sturgis: Writer • Editor • Martha's Vineyard

Here's another one from To Be Rather Than to Seem. Click on the link for an explanation of what I think I'm doing!

"What did you know and when did you know it?" During the summer of 1973 I followed listened to as much of the Watergate hearings as I could, on TV and radio. Repeated to witness after witness, that question imprinted itself deep in my mind and remains indelible thirty-six years later. What did you know and when did you know it? And, while we're at it, how did you figure it out? In congressional hearings and trial courts precision is expected and fuzziness is suspect. In my memory, it's the other way round: fuzziness is expected and precision is suspect. An epiphany I'm sure took place in 1981 turns out to have been the conflation of two events, one from 1980 and the other from 1982. I'd swear that my indelible image of a person came from an experience we shared, until I come across a photograph of that person with precisely the remembered expression, in precisely the remembered light.

My mother is driving. I'm in the passenger seat. I'm twelve or thirteen. We're on South Avenue headed toward Auburndale, where we do most of our shopping because it's closer than Weston center. At the busy intersection that manages traffic entering and exiting Route 128, the multi-lane highway that parallels the Charles River just ahead, the light is red. Waiting for it to change, I ask my mother why I, alone among my siblings, don't have a middle name. She says that when I get married, I'll drop it. Immediately I know that I'm never getting married and that I need a middle name.[*]

Over the next several years I experimented with different middle names, and by the time I graduated from high school I'd settled on Jordan, for the country. I've been Susanna J. Sturgis ever since.

Not only did I never get married, I eventually became a feminist and a lesbian. But if feminism was in the air in 1964, when resolution surfaced in my mind, I hadn't sniffed or felt it. What did I know about marriage and middle names that coalesced instantly into "I will never get married, and I need a middle name"?

The fissures in my parents' marriage were deep by the time I hit my preteen years. By the time I was fourteen, divorce was under consideration -- and I was dead set against it. Why, when the situation at home was close enough to intolerable that my siblings and I spent as much time as possible somewhere else, and I saw it as a good reason to avoid having friends over? With maturity came the understanding that when you're in a bad situation, it's hard to imagine that any change could possibly be for the better.

My mother was actively alcoholic and obviously unhappy. Of course I identified, and was identified with, my father: I was the brain of my generation, as he had been the brain of his. Through grade school and high school I tried to pretend I had nothing in common with my mother. My upbringing was remarkably gender-neutral for the time, and I went to a girls' school where intellectual achievement was expected of students and nearly all the teachers were women (many of them single); nevertheless, I knew both that I had plenty in common with my mother and that what we had in common would drag me down if it could.

At that moment, sitting in the passenger seat of my mother's Pontiac station wagon, I knew that I needed a middle name and that I better not get married. That's what I knew, and approximately when I knew it. How and why I knew it remains a mystery. To this day I remain my father's left-brain-dominant daughter, but over and over over the years a whole-bodily way of knowing has improvised me a path around obstacles and dangers that even my cautious rational mind didn't recognize. This might have been the first time I glimpsed it in action.

In hindsight . . .

[*] The car was stopped when my mother and I had this conversation. My best guess is that we were stopped at a red light. During my childhood, however, traffic lights replaced a rotary on South Avenue just west of the Charles River and Route 128. I remember the rotary. Was the rotary still there when this epiphany happened? I'm guessing not. My mother might have slowed down to enter the rotary, but she wouldn't have stopped for longer than an instant. But I don't know for sure.

My Middle Name