HOLY DAYS – The Nazi

     Gloria Wisher has an imaginary Nazi lover. I had an imaginary Nazi lover.

    Like my heroine in Holy Days, Gloria, I was born in 1951. Though WWII had ended six years before, my parents and grandparents talked a lot about the Nazis. I heard fearful stories about the Nazis in the same way I heard fairy tales or nursery rhymes. I was just as afraid of the wolf in “The Three Little Pigs,” and constantly asked my mother, “What’s our house made of?” “Wood.” “Is that the same as sticks?” “I guess so, why?” “Because the wolf can blow down sticks.” I asked the same kind of questions about the Nazis. My mother went around the house saying, “The Nazis fixed everything, they fixed everything.” By that she meant they had taught us how to kill and how to be cruel on a global level. Usually this outburst was sparked by an atrocity on the news. The adults frequently made remarks such as “The Italians would have been next because they changed sides during the war.” “But Grandma’s Italian!” I had heard tales of what could happen if you had a Jewish grandmother and I was worried. “Oh, don’t worry, the Germans lost the war.” Or when my mother would answer my queries with, “Oh, the Nazis would have loved you! You got the blonde hair and the green eyes!” Daddy said, “They would’ve come after people with freckles next.” “Do I have freckles?” “A few.” “Don’t worry, the Nazis lost the war.”

     But, I worried. I could hear a certain tone of stunned admiration in the adult’s voices. I knew in my child’s heart that they secretly admired certain qualities of their Nazi enemy. Power. Control. Cunning. Relentlessness. The singular awe that the Nazi terror and the Holocaust had actually occurred. That awe would remain hanging in the air in the inevitable silence that followed every discussion.

     And, the movies. As a shy child, I watched a lot of television by myself rather than going out to play, where I was constantly bullied by kids who beat me up for getting As. I stayed in and watched many, many black and white movies about the Nazis: Nazi experiments, Nazi concentration camps, the French Underground, weeping men and women as the Nazis marched into Paris, people living in bombed out shells of buildings, people pulling hidden bottles of wine, sausages and loaves of bread out from their tattered coats to share with Jews hidden in their walls. I saw “The Diary of Anne Frank,” I saw “The Pawnbroker.” When the pawnbroker said, “I didn’t die. Everything I loved was taken from me and I did not die.” I was oddly comforted. At the time, I was a devout Catholic child who believed in the trials of the Catholic saints. Like the Catholic saints, the lesson learned was: if it’s not the boiling oil, if it’s not the concentration camp, then you are going to be okay. You can take it. I had been abused and I was already wondering what had happened to me, wondering why such a thing had been done by the very person who was supposed to be protecting me, but I knew that it was not as bad as what had happened to the pawnbroker, or the saints, and, if I had anything to say about it, I was going to be okay.

     I was eleven. I had no conscious knowledge of the fact that I had already been abused when I was three years old. But that wouldn't have changed my determination.

     I wrote Holy Days for the children. I know children can’t read the book because of its sexual content, but I also know that children are out there ironically enduring and suffering from the very acts they cannot read about and really should read about because they would know if they read Holy Days that they’re going to be okay, that they can be okay. I hope adults will read it and start treating children like cognizant beings who know something’s going on about which they need to be told the truth and comforted.

     I created a Nazi lover and I gave this Nazi to Gloria to help her gain some power and control over what was happening to her. Here is her first encounter with the Nazi, which she uses to try to explain a sexual assault by “the boy next door,” her mother’s best friend’s son, who did everything the Nazi does to Gloria in this scene:

THE NAZI

The Nazi officer came into the room. He looked at me where I was, on the bed. There was nothing in the room but a bed, lamp and table. No curtains on the window, which looked out on a bleak, winter field.

            The Nazi was handsome. He was always handsome. I wasn’t afraid of him. I loved him because he kept me safe in this room and he was never cruel to me; he was always kind.

           Never was there any question of my family or my friends, never any betrayal, or any politics, only this handsome man slowly removing his uniform, coming over to me where I was on the bed.

            I was naked, under the covers. Warm and naked. I was giving him something he could not get outside this room.

            He lay on top of me, but, suddenly, he was wearing his full uniform again! He pushed himself hard against me, and again, hard.

            Then, he was naked again, and he held me. His warm, wet lips brushed against my cheek, which was cold, exposed as it was to the chill in the room.

     We see two more encounters with Gloria and this Nazi, but Gloria makes it clear that she has created many such encounters, scenarios in which she controls the action. I don’t think people are aware of how many times beautiful women are sexually assaulted in their lives. Beautiful women are treated as objects of desire for the entitlement of men. They are presented this way in the media and in life. Like Gloria, men stopped their cars for me as I walked to the library, to school or to church from the time I was about twelve years old and could go places alone.  Many, many times I could have been killed if I had been a different sort of girl, an adventurous girl who might have thought a car ride was preferable to walking alone. Luckily, God made me shy. My life was saved over and over by the fact that I preferred to walk by myself. After a while, beautiful women begin to value men who do not try to have sex with them, men who actually like them for conversation, friendship, and dare I say it, their minds. But, I digress. My point in digressing is that Gloria had many, many incidents she needed to explain to herself, many times when she needed the Nazi to protect her. Why she didn’t choose the Allies, I cannot say, except that by conquering the Nazi (who also finds respite from the war in that room), she had conquered the worst enemy of all.

     During her many lonely hours of reflection and observation watching television, Gloria also sees the resemblance of our culture to the Nazi ideal. Over and over she sees the physical perfection of advertising models, TV personalities and Hollywood actors. “Perfection,” Gloria decides, “is the minimum daily requirement.”

     And when President Kennedy is assassinated in 1963, Gloria is twelve.

NOVEMBER 22, 1963

THE MOMENT

What difference does it make to history or anything else where any of us were at the precise moment we heard?

            The difference is this: that was the moment we all, collectively, stopped believing.

            We stopped believing in goodness.

          Mama used to click her tongue, whenever she thought about it, in her vague, muddled way: “The Nazis fixed everything, they fixed everything, they fixed!” She was right. The Nazis made it so we could get used to anything. Someone, a man who had survived the death camps, talked once about being forced to shovel graves for the Nazis. He talked about how enormous the hole was and how cold he and the other shovellers were, how very cold. He talked about seeing a weed blowing in the cold wind and thinking how happy he was to be alive, just to see that weed, to know the weed was alive under the freezing snow and how grateful he was to feel the terrible cold because he was alive - and he knew, then, that human beings could get used to anything.

           For a long time, the Nazis were very far away. First, they were in Europe, then, they were in the past. The Nazis were not us, but we became them. We invited them in.

          From the moment the shot rang out, the Nazis, like the devil himself, rose up from hell and rushed to our side. From that moment on, we learned to turn our heads and check our backs; we learned suspicion and fear. At first we were horrified at ourselves and then, we got used to our fear. And then, we got used to our horror. And, then, we became proud of our horror and began to wear it ahead of us, not as a shield, as a medal.

         We were so frightened by the Nazis, that we became the Nazis in order to keep it from happening to us again. We had the comfort of knowing, no matter what we did, no matter how evil, we could never be as bad as the Nazis.

         In Revere, bad had become a virtue. Bad was it. I heard of kids who wouldn’t come to Revere. That struck me as funny, because there were other cities, like Dorchester and Roxbury, where I was afraid to go, even in the car with my parents. Sometimes, bad is all there is. It starts to look good after a while. Bad makes you tough. It makes you ready.

     I still think of Gloria’s assessment when I watch the news. When I watch cops beating people in the streets, when I watch race riots, when I see women’s rights being taken away, when I read stories about children being sexually abused or sexually trafficked, when I see old people being disrespected, when I see LGBTs being mistreated, when I see the sacred lands of indigenous peoples being fracked, when I see our veterans neglected, homeless, jobless, and suffering from their wounds, when I see the earth melting, and the DNA of everything God created being arrogantly altered for money, I think of what the Nazis taught us: how to be ruthless, how to take from others, how to hurt and maim and tear apart – but not destroy – no, because ultimately, like Gloria I believe in the triumph of good over evil. I need to quote a hero (who shall remain anonymous, unless you recognize her) from a sci-fi thriller, a line that has helped me survive: “God never lets the devil win.” Ultimately, whether we become Nazis or not is our choice. Ultimately, no matter what we suffer, we get to choose whether to be good or evil. Evil cannot kill us. But good can help us live. As my dear Gloria said: “They tried to kill me in this place of love and horror. They tried to kill me but they couldn’t because I loved too much.”

©Patricia Goodwin, 2015

Patricia Goodwin is the author of When Two Women Die, about Marblehead legends and true crime and its sequel, Dreamwater, about the Salem witch trials and the vicious 11-year-old pirate Ned Low. Holy Days is her third novel, about the sexual, psychological seduction of Gloria Wisher and her subsequent transformation.

HOLY DAYS - The Pink Gun

     In Holy Days, in the chapter, “The First Shot,” Gloria comes up with a fantastic idea suitable only for a fantasy novel. One of those twisted tales that asks the question “what if” – What if certain privileged people had a duplicate being that lived only as a personal organ donor, in case they needed say, a kidney or a liver, after they had been in an accident or had trashed their own? What if women lived separately had no rights and only existed to procreate? What if society wouldn't let us read and firemen burned books? What if we were kept hungry and forced into combat for the amusement of an upper class? (Pause on that last one. It’s too real.)

     Gloria asks herself – and society at large – what if an abused child could legally kill her abuser? What if, Gloria asks, what if women were legally allowed to kill?

    In “The First Shot,” Gloria rushes out the door in the middle of the night to tell her new friend everything about herself; a sleepy June climbs out of her bedroom window and the two girls huddle on the curbstone to talk. After revealing to June what happened to her, even at risk of losing June forever, Gloria has an idea. This is what Gloria proposes: “I think a girl should get five shots, five legal shots at birth. She should get five pink bullets and a pink gun, numbered like a social security number, handed to her on her tenth, or maybe her eighth, birthday. If anyone bothers her, she has the legal right to shoot, but she has to decide, whether to use the bullets up or not. After her fifth shot, it would be murder. But, you see, the beauty of it would be, no one would know how many legal shots she had left! Men would have to be on their best behavior. And” - I added, considering that girls might need to be protected before their eighth birthday – “any woman who has a daughter, right in the hospital, she should be given a special mother’s gun with an undetermined number of shots, no one knows how many, not even her, to protect her daughter.”

            Junie laughed, “You’re dreamin’!”

            “I know, but think how careful men - and boys - would have to be! How - respectful! It would be hilarious to watch them cower!”

     What Gloria imagines is a kind of pink mutually assured destruction. Sure, she’s dreaming. But, for one second, imagine like a teenager might, like a bitterly angry, stunned and frightened teenager who still believes violence can solve problems. Gloria lives in a world where might makes right. She also lives by the hero’s code. She thinks she should kill her abuser. But, she knows she cannot. For many reasons – one, she’d be arrested; two, she needs him for food and shelter; three, she loves him. However, she wants to save other children from what she’s suffered, so she imagines this threat of legal retribution, like a nuclear bomb hidden in her pocket, like the power of God coming down to intervene, to literally step between child and abuser, so that the child told to suck his dick can cry out, like Gloria does when, one fateful day, she commits murder to protect June, “Suck mine!” before shooting that legal, authorized, sanctioned pink bullet into his rotten heart. What if abusers knew they could be legally killed for what they were about to do?

     What if.

Disclaimer: Holy Days is a work of fiction. I am not suggesting that we should arm our children. (Though, apparently, as I discovered when researching pink guns, many people would disagree.)

 The idea Gloria has is that the threat of a child legally shooting his/her abuser will keep the abuse from happening and give power back to the child. Like mutually assured destruction - the threat of nuclear war keeps nuclear war from happening. We hope. Gloria is a dreamer. But, she's not the only one.

©Patricia Goodwin, 2015

Patricia Goodwin is the author of When Two Women Die, about Marblehead legends and true crime and its sequel, Dreamwater, about the Salem witch trials and the vicious 11-year-old pirate Ned Low. Holy Days is her third novel, about the sexual, psychological seduction of Gloria Wisher and her subsequent transformation.

HOLY DAYS – Faith, Devotion, Freedom – It’s Not What You Think

I was doing the dishes one evening, my husband standing by my side drying, when he remarked, “You really love getting the dishes clean.” Or I was cooking something and he said, “You’re always cooking something good.” I don’t remember exactly what I was doing, but I do remember what I answered, without thinking, I said, “Of course, it’s my faith.”
What is my faith? What is my devotion?
In Holy Days, Gloria Wisher loved to turn to the end of the chapters in her History book where the art, literature and music of the period were depicted. There, she was introduced to the paintings of Vermeer, Renoir, Degas, Matisse and Monet, to name a few. In one scene, she remarks to her friend, June that she has decided the subject of the paintings – women and the work of women – is the most important thing otherwise artists would not go so far out of their way to paint women washing clothes, women cooking, women taking care of babies. Women are beautiful, she says, but the work of women is also beautiful. Gloria realizes that what we have been taught to consider an interruption of life, what we must get through in order to get to our enjoyment of life, our relaxation, our play – the chores we must do in order to survive – the feeding and washing of our bodies and our children’s’ - are not an interruption of life, but life itself, beautiful, God-given expressions of our love and care.  As Gloria says about life, "Every day is a holy day." Because each day makes us who we are. But, if it were not for the Old Italians, her grandmother and her mother, who came home from work and started cooking dinner in her coat, showing Gloria every day what devotion was, and the art, music and literature in the back of her History book, showing her what beauty was, I don't think she would have made it.

Faith and devotion. To get up every morning and begin work, even as you rise, the turning of the bed covers to air them before making the bed, the opening of the windows, the turning off of the night light, opening the shades, turning on the coffee, throwing water on your face, putting up your hair, rolling up your sleeves. To continue work all day into the night, whatever is needed until your head hits the pillow at night – and even then – rising in the middle of night if need be.
What is in your mind and heart as you reach to do the task, as your hand touches the task? Anger? Frustration? Resentment? Feminists have taught women that housework is drudgery, that women are meant for so much more. The old post WWII suburban angst. Now that we’ve won the war, now what? Why am so unhappy, so unsatisfied? Could it be because women – and men, who also must contribute to the tasks - have lost the mission of their housework – which is to take care of life? I used the word housework because it is the least glamorous word I can use. But, let’s change that and say, instead - care of life. In fact, that is Gloria’s definition of a man; she has the same definition for a woman – “Someone who loves and takes care of their loved ones.”
       What is in your mind and heart as you reach to do something, as your hand touches the task? Anger? Frustration? Resentment?
Why not reach for the task with love? With care? With devotion? With faith?
That is true power.
I’ve watched as women who’ve entered the work force leave their true power at home. Women have been taught by feminists that cooking dinner is beneath them. They bring home take-out or buy microwave meals in boxes for their kids to heat up on their own. This kind of fake food only leads to illness, emergencies and long, horrific battles with degenerative disease, drug-use and other problems. But, I can tell you from experience of my own and many other families that cooking good, wholesome dinners with love and intention is your greatest freedom, your greatest power. You will create love and appreciation as well as health. Sitting down with your children, looking them in the face and truly listening to them. That is power. That is freedom. For you and your child. Many people use the phrase, “I would die for my children!” But would you live for them?
       I remember the woman who answered feminists when asked what she did, “I make future citizens of America, it’s an important job, I’m proud of what I do and it’s a full time job.” Full time being 24/7/365. Joni Mitchell, when asked if she was a feminist said she had a problem with feminists because they didn’t respect domestic women and she had a lot of respect for domestic women. Her own mother had been domestic, she said. Not to be confused with a domestic. Not someone who goes out to take care of someone else’s home – usually before and after she has taken care of her own – but someone who loves to take care of their own home. Patti Smith also commented about domesticity: "I’m not a celebrity, I’m a worker. I’ve always worked. I was working before people read anything about me, and the day they stopped reading about me, I was doing even more work. And the idea that if you’re a mother, you’re not doing anything—it’s the hardest job there is, being a mother or father requires great sacrifice, discipline, selflessness, and to think that we weren’t doing anything while we were raising a son or daughter is appalling. It makes me understand why some human beings question their worth if they’re not making a huge amount of money or aren’t famous, and that’s not right."
I recently saw a short video on Gwyneth Paltrow’s goop site of a young couple who, in an almost choreographed dance, made real food breakfast and packed lunches for their kids and themselves before taking the kids to school and going to their jobs. My own daughter does what she calls “food prep” every weekend to create healthy lunches for the week. She takes these portions to work and is able to stay well and not waste her time trying to find a meal every day.
This kind of faith and devotion may be what the Catholic Church or any other religion preaches, but it does not need a religion to back it up. Atheists may have this kind of faith, this kind of devotion. Atheists may also reach for their tasks with love. Mostly, however, one thinks of God. One honors God, one is grateful to God each and every minute. One feels a higher cause to the placing of the food on the table, to the ironing, to the gardening. It’s not only about one’s needs, or one’s family’s needs – it’s about taking care of life itself in every movement. This kind of care spreads into the community, and, subsequently, into the world in the form of caring people. The creation of people. People who were taught by example at home to respect life. That is quality. That is power.
        Quality of life. Many people have told me that I can keep a clean house because I’m always home. I don’t work outside the house. I don’t spend eight hours a day at an office or a factory or a store and I don’t need to commute or pick up kids or shop. But, I did do those things and I still kept faith. When I was a young mother, I did errands and laundry and picked up my kid from school and took her to painting class or her job at the toy store. For several years, I had a string of part-time jobs. Now, I’m retired from a small publicity business I ran for ten years. Of course, many nights while I worked, as I took out the clean pans to make dinner, I would think, “I’m so tired right now, I’d like to go to bed, not start cooking. Why don’t I?” The answer was so obvious, I didn’t bother with it, I just kept moving.
         I would like to add that my decision to be home came first. I am home so that I can take care of the home. I ordered my life to be as simple as possible so that I could live as well as possible. Some people may call that a sacrifice, but it was not a sacrifice. I don’t own a house or a condo or a car. I had only one child. I never wanted a career outside the home. I wanted to write and take care of my home. I wanted to do both well. That simple. I love nothing better than, after doing my daily chores, to put on a pot of beans or soup that will become our dinner and sit down to my writing.
Quality of life. Think of it this way – would you rather be stuck in traffic for two hours a day or caring for your home? Would you prefer to be bending over for an unreasonable boss just so you can buy that new grill or go on a vacation you’re dreading? Or keeping things simple so you can have more freedom?
I don’t expect everyone to do the same things the same way. I hate the word  “should” and I don’t use it. And, I’m not preaching a perfect, clean home. I get it that lots of parents want more than one kid and they want to play with them and help them with their homework and read to them and sometimes leave the dishes or the laundry. And maybe the dog hides the dirty socks or throws up on the rug. I think, maybe that’s a different faith, a different devotion, or a different expression of the same faith and devotion. I do think people would be happier if they approached their homes with love and care rather than impatience or disgust. What do you feel when you look at the mess? Is it endearing? Cute? Frustrating? Exhausting? Do you wish you had the energy to clean up? Or do you truly like the house messy?
I love a clean home. I need a clean home. I need the kind of serenity I can only receive from clean, shining, uncluttered surfaces. Wood floors, wood surfaces shining, clean windows sparkling. Sunlight. I need to have the time to really stop and admire the sunlight in my home. Lots of books, paintings, music, happy plants and most of all - happy child, happy husband. I remember a visitor coming into our home after we’d had a birthday party the day before. The balloons were still tied to the chandelier and she laughed, “This is a happy house!” Indeed.
If everything changed tomorrow and I had to go back out to work, or start up the business again, I would still try to keep as much of this quality and freedom as possible.
That is my faith and my devotion: to create happiness and beauty. To love and take care of my loved ones.


©Patricia Goodwin, 2015

Patricia Goodwin is the author of When Two Women Die, about Marblehead legends and true crime and its sequel, Dreamwater, about the Salem witch trials and the vicious 11-year-old pirate Ned Low. Holy Days, her third novel, is about the seduction and transformation of Gloria Wisher.

HOLY DAYS - Love & Horror

“They tried to kill me in this place of love and horror. They tried to kill me, but they couldn’t because I loved too much.” – Gloria Wisher, Holy Days

This morning I read an AP news story about the terrorist shootings at a Tunisian resort in which a shooter opened fire on tourists relaxing on a beach. The writer, Elaine Ganley described the scene: “From accounts of the attack by shocked survivors, tourists who stayed on, lifeguards and beach employees who helped at the site of the massacre emerge stories of love and horror.”

The same can be said for the terrorist bombing of the Boston Marathon, during which some people ran from the disaster and others ran toward the horror to do help all they could. Or the 911 terrorist attack on the World Trade Towers, most people ran away, others, some of them trained professionals, some extraordinary citizens, ran toward the danger to give aid. Our own soldiers rush toward horror in war and they do so out of love, love for country, love for duty, love for honor. Abused children, it has been noted, suffer from the same PTSD as our soldiers. However, in the case of child abuse, the trauma is ongoing like war, not past, until the child grows up.

This morning, I was struck by the similarity of the words Gloria speaks about her home and the description of a terror attack. I have often compared my character, Gloria Wisher to someone who is being terrorized. Nothing so overtly terrible as gunshots or bombings is happening to Gloria. She is being covertly harmed by the very people who are supposed to love and protect her. However, unlike the other terror victims, Gloria is too small to run away. In Holy Days, Gloria Wisher has no choice but to remain in the place of her horror, in the family and the neighborhood where she is being molested.

In another sense, Gloria also runs toward the horror. Gloria never stops loving her family, and her father. In a larger sense, Gloria also loves her home and her neighborhood. She clings to them as a kidnapped victim clings to her kidnapper for food, shelter, comfort – and identity - creating a  Stockholm Syndrome of childhood. She loves the boy who will rape her. How can this happen? Maybe it’s because Gloria, though young, is a devout Catholic. But, this love does not involve the Catholic Church or Catholic doctrine. She loves as Jesus loved. This love is not about forgiveness. It’s pure love. Love of life, love of the pain as well as the joy. Gloria’s rapist was hit by a truck when he was little, but survived with a disfiguring scar over his eye that mirrors his disturbed mind. Gloria admires him for surviving such an ordeal. She admires his toughness and his bravery. But, she is also afraid of him. The rapist in Holy Days is a metaphor for the larger scene of horrors that Gloria must struggle with every day. How much of what happens is a part of her? How much should she transform or reject? Gloria loves the people, the smells, the roughness, the softness, the fear and the comfort. On one hand, we love our homes, on the other; we are sometimes hurt by what happens there. By no means am I suggesting that women should love their rapists. It is a fact, however, that the terror of a bad home is very bound up with love.

            A few years ago, I was asked to write a poem for peace. The occasion was a Day of Peace, and I wrestled with this request. Many of my friends were going to be present. They were all writing poems. I was expected to come up with a poem about peace. But, I was bitter. I did not believe in peace. I did not think mankind could ever achieve what my wonderful friends and colleagues were so starry-eyed and hopeful for. So, when I sat down to write, I began with those words, “I do not believe in peace.” I ended the poem with these words, words that describe terrorism of all kinds: “And, I do not believe in hate, because all hate is really love of something else.”  

©Patricia Goodwin, 2015

Patricia Goodwin is the author of Holy Days, about the survival and transformation of Gloria Wisher, When Two Women Die, about Marblehead legends and true crime and its sequel, Dreamwater, about the Salem witch trials and the vicious 11-year-old pirate Ned Low.