American Genius

by Lynne Tillman

  Material is rarely soft enough, it’s rare to find good cotton. There are many kinds of cloth, material that is made of natural fibers, like the four basic, earliest fibers-cotton, wool, silk, and linen—and material from artificial or synthetic matter, like nylon and rayon, and later polyester. Rayon was the first synthetic material, the generic term for manufactured textile fibers or yarn produced chemically from cellulose or with a cellulose base, and for threads, strands, or fabric made of it. Cellulose is a substance constituting the chief part of the solid framework of plants, of cotton, linen, rayon, paper. In its pure form, it’s a white amorphous mass. The chemistry of cellulose is quite complicated. My father understood it and told me about yarns, synthetic and natural, when I was little. During World War II, my father and his younger brother innovated synthetics, nylon threads, because cotton was scarce and required for the war effort, but historically cotton is associated with enslaved African men and women toiling in cotton fields on Southern plantations, though I wear it usually without recalling that, and, even in the winter, a heavy cotton feels good close to the skin, because I don’t like being too warm, and good cotton, of a higher denier, is usually comfortable.

  There could easily be a mishap when dipping an infant’s tiny toenails, with their uncountable and inherent vulnerabilities that immature or unfinished adults still feel, but I forgot that the fantasy baby I supposedly bore was in the room. I had become absorbed in what I was doing, I was busy, and when I realized I had forgotten the imaginary baby, it had already crawled to an electrical socket, stuck a tiny pink finger into it, and was severely shocked, its toenails burned, or it was killed, for which I was to blame. Sometimes no one is to blame, terrible things happen, accidents and illnesses, and no one is to blame, yet I always want to bring something to account, or someone, often myself. I’d like to blame my father for the disappearance of my brother, or my brother for the death of my father, I’d like to blame one friend’s sickness on another, I blame the ocean, which I love, for its riptides that pull hapless swimmers out to its depths and swallow them, I blame a mountain for a friend’s accidental death, but with silly blame, there is added futility. I can’t do anything about riptides and incessant desire, so I usually try to make lunch last, though there is a limited quantity, and today I fail again, yet I always hope to invent new ways to make it last, but rarely do, except to choose not to eat it or to eat it an hour later, which is an option people with food disorders select. If they don’t eat now, when they are supposed to, they can eat later, which prolongs the possibility of a satisfaction that escapes them, just as the head cook escapes satisfying the residents here. If I like the soup that comes in the thermos, or even if I don’t, I pour it into a white china mug and sit before the fire, stir it, and then take a spoonful, attempting everything in a leisurely way, as if I weren’t hungry and had all the time in the world, which is what there is, nothing but time, and as languorously as I spoon the soup and stir the fire, as quickly does the fire wane and the mug empty. No matter how measured I am, how I alternate or retard my actions, eventually the lunch is eaten, finished, and the fire, if I don’t throw a log on it, burns out. Here is the death of lunch, I think, bemused, but nonetheless a subsequent apathy arrives, the dreariness of uncertainty, and the dread about what to do with myself, since now there’s nothing to do but face the afternoon and wait for dinner, though I’m not hungry, only perplexed and unsatisfied.

  The residents often remark, at dinner, that they hope to make their lunch last, though there is a limited quantity of it, because it’s a long time until dinner, and like me they need to find ways to make it last. Some do, but I never do. My brother played a game with me, one of the few we had, including Monopoly, though I wasn’t good at it, when I was seven, he eighteen, called: Who can eat ice cream the slowest? No matter how slowly I licked the vanilla ice as it melted over the side of the ice cream cone, how I juggled the sugar cone and walked fast, because we always competed walking back to the house I loved, he won, he would never let me win, though I was many years younger, and then he was triumphant. We would reach the front door to the house that was sold over my protests, but my brother was already long gone from it and us then, and he would still be eating his ice cream and enjoying his victory, and, strangely enough, though I was frustrated and had lost again, since he was bigger, I believed it was his right to win.

  AFTER LUNCH, I SOMETIMES TAKE a walk, it’s good to get exercise, but I dislike exercise for its own sake, and the fire is still burning. I’m reluctant to throw water on it, because later it might be harder to start another, when the ash is wet, the floor of the fireplace damp, but I’m reluctant to leave it burning, because it might consume the place where I make and unmake things or do nothing, which is mine for a short while and on whose walls I’ve affixed photographs, to remind me of my friends, as well as places I’ve never been and places I’ve been, where I may want to return. Some of my friends are smiling, some not, some will never be anywhere again but in photographs, and their weight burdens me. It is disagreeably stuck in me like undigested food, so I walk closer to their pictures, whose lack of animation might be undone or upset by my movement toward them, but they are always dead. Of a mountain’s treacherousness, a bad heart, a brain tumor, a murder, AIDS, cancer, a car crash. On another wall are photographs of friends’ well-fed, bright children, who are amply encouraged but who will anyway have problems and may one day turn against their parents, who can’t help themselves, have tried their best and probably won’t deserve their enmity, though people live with the consequences of their actions. No one can foretell the events that will have weight in a young child’s life, which also incites anxious parents to more worry, but then most things in a child’s life can’t be accounted for, and they will remember almost nothing that happens before the age of three, four, even five. From the time I learned to count and read, when I read or heard a number, I saw a color, and when I heard or read the word for a color, or saw a color, I registered its numerical value and equivalent. Orange four, black ten, white one, red five, purple nine, blue eight, powder blue three, pink three, yellow two or three, depending upon how light, muted, or bold it was. The elements had weight, numerically, and shades and hues of color. Numbers and colors were figures in my imagination that fused into patterns about which I never spoke, though in some way it helped the world make sense, as things added up in my young mind. But the weight of death is heavier, there is no scale for it, and I shove it into a corner, where it lies, an insurmountable lump, threatening to spread its ugliness.

  The Polish woman’s salon is near where I normally live, an easy walk, and one I know so well I may no longer actually see where I’m going, but at least I’m unaware of exercising, unless I force myself to think about it, but then if I do, I also think about how little I actually exercise and that I’m hastening my end or allowing for a more difficult old age, though I’m reluctant to acknowledge I’m aging, that death’s around a corner, while I also know that I’m dying and think about death daily, like a prayer I’m expected to repeat. Not taking exercise may hasten my end, or final rest, though it’s not rest, just a nothing and something we can’t know, but maybe thinking that is restful. Also I’m lazy, impatient, and dislike pain, though my dentist and a physical therapist have told me I have a high threshold for it, which also doesn’t surprise me. I have watched people who are exercising, grimacing and grunting, especially when lifting weights or contorting themselves into peculiar shapes that are hard to achieve and hold, but many enjoy their effort, they may enjoy effort itself, as it makes them feel they’re accomplishing a goal and also effort could make them feel alive. Many people don’t feel alive.

  The Polish woman is a great one for exercise, exuding a heartiness of appetite, which I feel is repulsive and attractive, when I’m lying on the chaise lounge, covered in a soft pink or fuzzy blue blanket of one hundred percent cotton, as she ministers to me in her attentive way, though it is sometimes perfunctory, because she doesn’t really c
are about me or my skin, it is of no genuine concern to her, and she doesn’t think about me or it when I am not with her. Her healthy face can look bored or vacant, the emptiness of which is intriguing and unpleasant, though her skin is unlined and, like a rough linen, straddles her broad Slavic cheekbones. She has a light red mole perched close to the corner of her lip, and it is that area of excess on her face to which my eyes often return. She has no facial scars, none I have noticed, while she, sometimes known as an aesthetician, has, I imagine, noticed every imperfection on mine. Once or twice she has given me a massage and seen or felt all or most of the skin on my body, where she perhaps noticed the scar above my knee, which is an inch long and a quarter-inch wide. It’s ugly, but it is not on my face, whose placement might have inflected the course of my life, I might not have gone out in company much or been considered in any way a desirable partner, for sex or dinner or even talk, if several deep scars covered my cheek, chin, or forehead, if my face had been slashed to ribbons with a razor or knife. If the cat I put to death because it attacked me had clawed my face and not my calf, if the cat had clung to my face with its sharp nails the way it clung to my left leg, I would now have four depressions on my cheek or forehead, which would make me a less suitable partner in many situations, and some sensitive people, such as myself, would have to ignore the imperfections or never engage with a character so scarred. But instead the scars were carved into my calf when so much tissue oozed from my leg that small craters formed, whose depressions could not ever again be replenished, so much tissue was disgorged, and my left calf will never be normal or beautiful again, but forever marked by the action of an insane cat, who will always be remembered for that, as well as for the mystery of its animus toward me and my inability to quench or limit its unrepentant hatred or protect its deformed life, and if it had attacked my face, my life would have been changed.

  I like having a place to go toward, a direction consoles, and there are many places around here for escape. I could walk around the grounds and search for elusive deer or shy moles, I could stroll into town and have coffee in a café where local residents gather, or go at any time to the library, where the odd inquisitive woman might await me, or wander around the local historic cemetery, with its tombstones, graves, or resting places, supposedly a sanctuary for the living, though for me this has never been true, as it is predicated—like some schemes and plots, whose repetitions advance an old story and make it appear inevitable—upon hoary untruths about eternity, since also life and death are repetitious, and if I know where I’m going, to town, to have a coffee or a tryst, to buy socks, and that I have a reason to go there, it doesn’t feel like exercise. It’s an adventure, even if the goal isn’t exciting, but I become excited easily, like my father, when we drove to the Thanksgiving parade or returned to the fierce gray-green ocean in winter, where he made me exercise, run along the sand to build up my calf muscles, one of which now has four indentations from the claws of my insane cat, but my father wasn’t alive then. My everyday, unremarkable shoes are hidden from me, as I’d inadvertently located the spot most unlikely for them, but finally I discover them in the place I told myself I’d remember they’d be but didn’t, slip them on and notice my all-cotton socks, which I like, because they were simple to buy. In the place where I grew up, girls and their mothers shopped relentlessly for clothes they didn’t need but wanted, and I didn’t ever want to join them, but sometimes went along, secretly dying because I was wasting time doing what I disliked, shopping and trying on clothes in too-small rooms where, awkwardly, women and girls undress and saleswomen ask them to come out and show them how the clothes look, or stand in larger rooms surrounded by other women and girls, strangers, who are undressed and then dressed, looking at themselves in mirrors, displaying expressions that betray avarice, despair, glee, and no one says anything except, Try this on, I don’t like this, it’s too big, small, tight, I like this, how much is it, and it’s often better not to say anything at all. People have baker’s dozens of yeasty, unspoken wants, they often especially want objects to make up for what they never had, and some ask for them, which makes them vulnerable, and those who never make demands may feel less vulnerable, but they are not, as they are hungry too, and unlikely to be fed, since they are afraid to ask for what they need. Sustained hunger must be worse than the discomfort of undigested food or the phantom pangs of unrequited love everyone suffers, but hardly anyone wants it known they do, since sometimes it’s better not to say anything. Some people want to feel hungry, women, especially, who can afford to eat well but who deny themselves, some even want to feel faint with hunger, because they become alive then, eating themselves alive. Spiritual people also want to feel hungry, they renounce and deny the flesh, along with the rest of the material world, and when they fast for a week, they become light-headed and feel closer to a higher power, which in high and hallucinatory moments they may be.

  I buy one hundred percent cotton socks whenever I can, though often there’s just a mix of eighty percent cotton and twenty percent nylon around, so I’ve mastered wearing chis combination, adjusted to it, since it’s healthy to be flexible, but many people aren’t, and I, too, in my mind or especially my body, where habit and rigidity shape demands and inclinations, sometimes can’t exhort myself to the plasticity or fluidity I know is good for my health, and often I think few would survive if war came and deprived them of what they thought was necessary. If they couldn’t eat what they wanted here, many would be lost. Some fabric combinations are still better than others because better cotton is used, and the best thing about my father was how he touched material, how he let it drift through his adept fingers, while the expression on his face changed, his concentration attuning itself to the feel of the material, or when he looked through a small magnifying glass at a thread or weighed one on his golden machine, whose sharp needle could quickly pierce the skin on your finger. Socks can also scratch, but I have no worry about how they look or what they mean, though I accept they have some meaning, since nothing has no meaning, though some theologians think evil is nothing since a god wouldn’t create it, but I dislike religion, since people are often promised a better life, a glorious afterlife, and worship deities who censor or condemn them to wretchedness on earth. Calvinism doesn’t forgive its congregants, and most religions threaten those who don’t subscribe to their beliefs, everyone suffers because of religion or from faith or the lack of faith. I don’t know what to have faith in, except people, who are as irascible as the Bible’s Jehovah, though not as omniscient.

  I’ll wander into a store and casually buy a pair or two of socks. Jerry Lewis throws away socks after he wears them once, and I’d like to do that, because it may be wrong and is certainly indulgent, and also because doing laundry is repetitive, and throwing away socks makes less laundry, though I dislike washing dishes and doing laundry less than I did when I was younger, when everything imposed on me was a big waste of time, but now I’m not certain what’s a waste of time, or what’s nothing, since I may find something when not looking, and because time is all we have, inexplicably. Almost lackadaisically, I toss a pitcher of water onto the blazing fire, dousing it while explaining to myself the reasons I shouldn’t have, because I’ll have to deal with the aftermath later, but I do anyway, as it’s urgent that I leave this room, a temporary shelter or refuge, though some people here refuse to accept temporariness, although it’s all there is. A woman chained herself to her bed, a man boarded his door against intruders, and they were removed, forcibly, returned to their respective homes, and I can understand not resigning yourself to the inevitable, but I wouldn’t tie myself to my bed, I don’t think. The woman who chained herself there also sucked men’s toes, and, at night, uninvited, though some left their doors unlocked, she entered their bedrooms, they’d awaken with her at their feet, their toes in her mouth, she was sucking greedily, and some were annoyed, but some enjoyed it, though they never admitted it. Some may have a phobia about all types of sucking, and the library’s sex
manual cites many fears I’d not heard of or that may be out of fashion, like “Clavestitism, a morbid desire to put on the dresses one wore in childhood,” or “Syphilomania, an inclination to attribute all illness to syphilis,” though “Venerophobia, a morbid fear of sexual intercourse,” persists, and one night at dinner, following a lackluster day, I recited some of the more remote sexual fears to the table, and Spike, with her enthusiasm, ready laugh, and brilliant, long hair, who always liked talking about sex, though rarely had an opening, joined in, charged especially by hearing about “voice fetishism,” of which the dictionary said: “The voice is one of the strongest sexual fetishes, many men actually fall in love with a voice, even with a voice heard over the telephone, and cannot free themselves from its spell.” I understand coming under a spell, though I didn’t expect in my case it was a voice that seduced me, but I could imagine it, and I didn’t mention my thralldoms to anyone at the table, and only Spike spoke uninhibitedly about men’s voices she grooved on, she said, and phone sex that the dictionary anticipated but didn’t define, in which she engaged with her necessarily absent lover, but the demanding man’s skin flared and darkened, the disconsolate women’s faces sunk, the psoriatic character shoved her food almost off her plate, while the tall balding man smiled, though not at her, since blatancy might shriek his mating call, and I thought: I won’t do this again. Although, in some way, to be honest, the way the daughter of time must be, their active disdain also satisfied me. Not long after, a Turkish man appeared, a translator and poet in need of a long rest and quiet—his commercial interests allowed him to write what he wanted and to travel, he owned a paper-and-carton factory—and he muttered to me before dinner that there should be more sex here, everywhere, and that I in particular should have more sex in everything. He was passionate about his beliefs, especially about translation, sex and sexlessness, and he and I would discuss this more soon enough.