Free Drinking With Men : A Memoir (9781101603123) by Rosie Schaap

Hutchinson. “It isn’t fair, it isn’t right,” she protests at the end of Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery,” that exquisite American Gothic miniature well known to anyone who took high school English in the United States between, roughly, 1950 and the present. No, it certainly isn’t fair, isn’t right: Tessie, having drawn the slip of paper with the telltale black dot, is about to become the latest victim of a savage annual tradition—a human sacrifice—right there on the village green of her tiny New England hamlet. She is about to get stoned to death by her fellow townsfolk, her neighbors, her people. “The Lottery” is an exposure—distorted and magnified—not only of the brutality that lurks just beneath the serene surface of small-town life, but of the cruelty of which all people might just be capable.
    This particular territory, where poor, fictional Tessie breathed her last, is familiar to me. The town in which “The Lottery” takes place is presumed to be modeled on North Bennington, Vermont—where Jackson lived with her husband, the literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, who taught at Bennington College, the very small school situated just up the hill from the very small town. I’ve read that Jackson sometimes felt suffocated there, and often unwelcome, with four children to raise, a big weird messy house to run, and more talent and ambition than the role of faculty wife generally allowed for in her time.
    It’s well known that Jackson was fascinated by witchcraft, both in its literary and practical applications. She may have developed this interest before she settled in North Bennington, but it’s just the sort of place where such a sensibility can, with little effort, completely take hold. Were witches ever tried and burned there? I doubt it. But I always felt that the spirit of the place smacked of the mystic. Every full moon loomed hugely over the campus and the nearby village, illuminating swarms of fearsome bats fluttering below. One especially gray and ominous midwinter afternoon, I could’ve sworn I saw a wolf driving a battered old station wagon up Main Street, even though upon reflection it was probably just a hairy guy, of which there is no shortage in Vermont. Whatever or whoever it was, I was spooked, irrationally or not. And then there were the woods, through which ran the shortest path from the village to the center of campus. What kind of forces, wicked or benevolent or neutral, mastered and animated this small forest I cannot say, but many mornings I paused at the start of the path to offer a quick but sincere prayer that I might pass safely through. I figured it couldn’t hurt to ask. I am superstitious.
    Those woods enchanted me, surely in no small part because they frightened me. Starting in my freshman year, I would repair to them frequently for solace, for comfort, for inspiration, for the hope they extended—a hope fed abundantly by a steady diet of Wordsworth and Yeats and Emerson and Frost—that in them I might make contact with the spirit of nature itself and, by Romantic-Transcendental extension, with God, whatever that might be. There in Vermont, in as much nature as a native New Yorker might ever dream possible, I felt both more deeply connected with the natural world than ever and more set apart from it—out of nature,
supernatural
in the sense I believe, perhaps mistakenly, to be most heartbreakingly literal. In my freshman and sophomore years, when I still lived on campus, my roommate grew accustomed to tense telephone exchanges with my intransigently cosmopolitan mother.
    â€œWhere is my daughter?” she would demand without so much as a prefatory “hello.”
    â€œShe’s in the woods,” my roommate would answer.
    â€œIn the woods?”
my mother would bellow. “She’s from
New York
. She could get killed there. What is she doing
in the