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Madeleine Faith Wirtz. Maddy-Monkey Wirtz. Sworn to secrecy, eventually exiled from her sisterhood, at 50, finally defies Foxfire rules more than 30 years later to tell her story. Their story. Perhaps as sort of a catharsis, as one last journey through her adolescence before the past becomes the past, she forsakes her sisters' solemnity for something much more precious to her: their memory.
"Never never tell, Maddy-Monkey, it's Death if you tell. But now I have told all I know, or nearly."
"FOXFIRE NEVER LOOKS BACK!"
But Maddy, cast out of the 1950s gang from fear, does look back. Just one last time. And the result is Joyce Carol Oates' poignant account of female adolescents conspiring to survive in Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang.
Oates, who was born June 16, 1938, in the Lockport area, where she grew up, was passionate about writing from an early age. Following her dream, she attended Syracuse University, then went on to earn her master's in English at the University of Wisconsin, before settling with her husband, Raymond J. Smith, in Detroit. Later, she moved to Princeton, N.J. But it was while in Detroit that she found her writing soul. "Detroit, my 'great' subject, made me the person I am, consequently the writer I am--for better or worse," she has said. But her fondness for the geography, the stark and unsettling landscape of Upstate New York, is present in Foxfire, which takes place in Hammond, N.Y., "near Lake Ontario, where we'd all been born, all of us FOXFIRE blood-sisters, and could not then have imagined ever leaving, the way a dream, while you are dreaming it, feels like infinity out of which you can never wake."
The first time I read Oates, I was in high school. It was an excerpt of her novel, Do With Me What You Will, and my creative writing teacher was surely pushing the envelope in circulating it. It was frightening writing, the undercurrent of violence pushing hard at the surface, chilling and eerie. My affection has remained, though I have only read, save Foxfire, one other novel--Because It Is Bitter, And Because It Is My Heart.
Her gift is in her ability to capture the wanderlust of the young heart and head, and get it down on paper. Those thoughts that drift in and out, that seem hazy, if only we could push them a bit farther to completion, flow freely in Foxfire, adolescent ruminations that scald with their brutal honesty.
"You can see how I am not a practiced writer--not leading this material but led by it, sometimes my heart fainting thinking God knows where I will be led, what shame and sorrow."
This from our narrator, the spindly and wondrous, intelligent and slightly closed-off Maddy, whose nearly-complete account (things were pieced together from newspaper clippings and whispers on the streets after she was exiled from the gang) takes the reader from the formation of Foxfire to its startling, but not unexpected, culmination in tragedy.
Oates chronicles the hardest years to stomach in life, the flush of childhood draining slowly, painfully, in becoming adult-like, and finally, an adult.
Margaret "Legs" Sadovsky--always called "Legs" by her sisters--was the gang's first-in-command, "you wouldn't have known except for the wild bushy ashy hair that she was a girl." Goldie, or Betty, Siefried, was the first lieutenant. Then there was Lana, or Loretta Maguire, Rita, or Elizabeth, O'Hagan, and finally, Maddy--who was sometimes called "Monkey," sometimes "Killer." Hardly one to joke, never one to incite, or partake in, violence, Maddy remains pensive, in recollection of her own story, and in her tone when telling it. Those young girls--the original members, whose initiation ceremony of homemade tattoos and marijuana and beer marked the beginning of girl-love, of do-or-die devotion--forged a bond made stronger by exclusion of others, their desires, their shared moments of laughter and crisis, and by their undying suspicion of the opposite sex.
An outlaw gang by self-definition, Foxfire girls were outcasts in their own lives. Broken homes, alcoholic fathers, parents on the fritz from sanity, the love for their children lost, long ago, to addiction, to guilt, to surrender.
"Yes, we committed what you would call crimes. And most of these went not only unpunished but unacknowledged--our victims, all male, were too ashamed, or too cowardly, to come forward to complain."
They shamed the perverts, reprimanded, sometimes with brutal and yet seemingly playful force, their perpetrators with plots to shame, beatings and justifiable theft through "hooking." But not the kind you think.
"...it was a time of violence against girls and women but we didn't have the language to talk about it then."
But action supplanted what words could not articulate, dictate.
Maybe the girls' hatred for men stemmed from the threat of their powerful lure breaking apart what made them collectively strong. But the hatred, at once a powerful bond, ultimately destroyed four years of hard work to remain untouchable, and yes, unbreakable.
"Nobody knows me. Nobody can hurt me."
Legs was the fire, was the untouchable heat that cleared the path to scold, in violent ways, men, to steal cars, to steal money and finally--their greatest triumph--live together under one roof, stake their claim in an old house that "was like a sliver of glass entering her heart." So painfully real, so depressingly beautiful.
Adolescence, as seen from the female point of view, as lived that way, is a wretched rite of passage that forces women to reconstruct themselves, and in that reconstruction, lose inordinate amounts of the precious innocence that came before it. Oates refuses to concede to happiness as a constant for these girls. And for any girls, for that matter. She swears to tell the truth, and does. No matter how badly it hurts.
Maddy and Legs were the best of friends in their group, which later would initiate new members, members who owned only part of what had been established before their arrival. Legs, a fierce creature whose cunning and need to avenge her sisterhood often eluded those closest to her. Snaking through life, leaving her mark, sometimes quietly, sometimes loudly, she was damaged to the core, growing up much too fast to notice what had happened. To know that so much so fast can corrupt the soul, render it helpless against the terrors of being a young, beautiful, strong and coveted woman.
Maddy, an introvert by comparison, was at once afraid of and beholden to Legs. She loved her, revered her, questioned, only in her own mind, to what extremes Legs would fly to accomplish her "goals." And when Legs was sent away for stealing and crashing the car of a well-known gangster, Maddy's heart was broken.
"So Legs was sent to Red Bank. And we couldn't visit. And couldn't write any letters from the heart, nor receive any--just those strange letters of Legs', and only three of them, folded in here in the old notebook. (I looked at them just now, tried to reread them. But my eyes filled with tears and I had to put them away.)"
A roughshod bully, Legs found herself victimized repeatedly by the juvenile lockup. A prisoner of her own misgivings, her resistance to control, in the end, or in her beginning, she experienced an epiphany, a "Turn of Heart."
"She was grateful, truly. Knowing at the young age of sixteen how power need never relinquish any degree of power; how those in control of our fates must be allowed to believe that not whim nor caprice not cruelty turned inside-out but genuine integrity has guided their behavior."
Oates style is both lyrical and choppy, rough and smooth, broken-down prose of the basest emotions, and tight strands of jeweled words come together with delicate precision. Her girls are lovely and heinous, riotous and silly, thinking and impulsive.
They love with no end, give without hesitation, thrive in the company of one another with grace, with dignity, and with the naivete of adolescent squalor.
In a biography penned by Greg Johnson, he writes: "The dramatic trajectory of Oates' career, especially her amazing rise from an economically straitened childhood to her current position as one of the world's most eminent authors, suggests a feminist, literary version of the mythic pursuit and achievement of the American Dream."
Oates, herself a girl of her fictional Lowertown stature, has, in what seems an as-yet unparalleled style for doing so, captured the essence of teen angst. Not the kind that speaks to wearing less-than-fashionable clothing, not having the best-looking boyfriend or being cast out of the most popular clique. Not the kind that embitters the adolescent soul with frivolous memories of not having made the cheerleading squad, or only being second-chair violin in the high school orchestra. The kind of teen angst about which she writes is that which inhibits trust, fosters self-love at the expense of secretly hating yourself, the kind that occurs when familial love is absent, when the four women you have as your friends are those who will make or break the rest of your life. When clinging to human life preservers is all you can do--the last thing you can do--before the tide sucks you under for good.
The kind of infallible strength that remains as such only in numbers.
These girls are barely survivors, hangers-on whose lives mesh together in sweetness and love, in near-rape and possible murder, in kidnapping and attempted extortion.
"I always wanted to write about the girls of my memory,'' Joyce Carol Oates told an interviewer in a 1993 San Francisco Chronicle article. "I was from a lower-working-class family,'' Oates said, "and I guess I was socially marginal myself." Her 22nd novel, published the year of that interview, resonates to that end.
Foxfire is a journey of self-discovery, of the pitfalls and glories of undying friendship, and of experiencing life as it comes, biting down hard on the truth, trying to rip into it, digest it. Maddy writes: "Say there's a mirror you have trusted to give you a solid unblemished surface reflecting the world then suddenly it breaks and shatters revealing a thousand new surfaces, miniature angles of seeing that must have been there all along hidden in the mirror's bland face but you hadn't known. Who is who was."
The novel is so strong, so fierce, it's often hard to read, hard to relive the memories of adolescence that bind us all--in fiction, in life.
"Don't think though that by the end FOXFIRE had no hurt to bear, or that those of us still living aren't bearing it to this very hour."
It's true, what Maddy said, the girls of Foxfire, who were proud as flames, wearing matching orange scarves, hot to the touch, always succumbing to the incessant flow of the ache of memory.
"FOXFIRE BURNS & BURNS."