Scratched

by Elizabeth Tallent

  The answer was somber. He was grieved to confront this fresh deviousness, denial. I know what you were thinking.

  Dad! No! I didn’t think that!

  What he could do, and undo, with a shake of his head.

  Astounded, I wrote above, but astounded doesn’t begin to cover the violence of my objection, and the panic-grief, and the passionate shame of futility at each wasted uprising against his casual slaughter of my sense of myself.

  Whose outcome could have been my adoption of his sense of me. How I loved him; how easily his word could have become law. The law would have involved the corkscrewing self-betrayal of my beginning to lace stray remarks with mean double meanings, enacting the covert viciousness he attributed to me. Instead, with ardent futility, I committed to honesty, and I will put a ghost finger lightly down on this page: there. There. A writer begins there.

  I can’t write To my credit, I kept trying without wondering: credit? Does wanting to live free of perfectionism reflect well on you, or is that like a drowning person taking credit for craving air? Each consulting room was church, where I went to pray for writing. The intimations of freedom a long series of analysts shepherded me toward extended their brief reprieves. I married the last in the series, a psychiatrist whose ruff of white beard tidied the heavy bones of his face into a complacent Persian-cat breadth, and whose joyous infatuation with me redacted objections to marrying one’s former analyst. In connection to my account of the liminal allure of the perfect sentence, he told me a story:

  Freud is sitting on a bench in the garden of Berggasse 19 with its famous upstairs consulting room (which my last analyst, big on pilgrimages, has visited). A notebook rests on Freud’s knee. Down a gravel path, a high-wheeled baby carriage is parked in quiet shade. While their existence affords peripheral pleasure, carriage and child require no particular attention from the grandfather; they are an aspect of the reverie that is his summer afternoon. All is going well—that is, Freud is working—when concentration is broken by an unexpectedly distinct word of the boy’s. Fort. It’s a word whose English translation is gone. Over the side of the carriage, tossed from within, flashes an object. A toy, a painted top suspended from string, dangles down the wicker side of the carriage, almost touching the mown grass. From his bench patterned over with leaf shadow Freud observes in a state of bemusement. Pressed for a prediction, Freud would be compelled to confess uncertainty. Mild uncertainty, ordinary small-scale domestic puzzlement about what a child is up to, when had he ever had time for that with his own boys? Moreover, why is it pleasurable, the suspense of being unable to predict a child’s next move? Yet it is, it’s delightful; he would not intrude for the world; the toy continues to dangle on its string. Da! and it bobs upward, reeled back in—Da! which means Here! The toy regained—perhaps turned this way and that; perhaps simply held. Fort! The toy leaps forth, hits the string’s end, tick-tocks to a stop; gone, lost, dead, vanished; what can a child come up with; the leaves overhead quiver, Da!, here, saved, alive, back, Fort!, the train of the silk dress fishtailing out the door, down the stairs. Da!, the string reeled in, silk rustling across the threshold, perfume as she bends in for a kiss, the recognizing dilation of those pupils at the heart of the cosmos, the mother’s gaze back from the dark, Freud on his bench turning a page to note down this news of the psyche’s genius in pitting retrieval against disappearance, an insight fortuitously granted him by the fair-haired boy who will die (it can’t be foreseen, it can’t dim this revelation inked onto the sunlit page) of tuberculosis at five years old.

  Bad days, everything falls within perfectionism’s ken. The unaligned spines of a shelf of books, the phoniness of my handwriting. The mild humidity of my skin tends to kink the hair at my nape, and though the kinks are hidden under my long hair, they have to be ironed to the pin-straightness of the rest. My transparently insincere response to a greeting in the hallway, surely barely registered by my colleague, involves me in several hours’ hate-reverie about my falsity and overall weirdness, Why can’t you why the fuck don’t you know by now how to what is wrong with you what is wrong what is wrong will you ever get it right. Rarely do I get through an afternoon’s office hours without some lapse or other, the scald of my inadequacy burning below conversation like those fires supposedly fuming in abandoned mines. Occasionally these failures are serious—holes in empathy or generous-mindedness—but mostly they’re slivers of infraction only I’m aware of. But it’s strange, perfectionism’s blindness to the size of mistakes. Its indifference to any rational hierarchy of offenses means it flays significant and trivial with equal gusto.

  Perfectionism’s swiftness, its emotionally intense discriminations, its power to disrupt, its addictive excitements—if only writing felt like this, I would write all the time.

  Down on my knees in Texas it had been a mistake, one I couldn’t talk myself out of, to believe in my connection to the antelope that did all the seeing it was ever going to do from that eye socket an inch from my sunburned nose—a mistake to believe the last atoms of soul cradled in that eye socket recognized me. But I did. The heat, closest of enemies, inspired elaborate counter-harangues directed at internalized detractors, including my faraway adviser, whose talent for comic condescension made him in my mind as in reality an incomparable scorner and derider, to whom it was possible to say in fantasy as it would never be in reality that I was right to devise a little religion, a sense of sacredness can’t hurt, archaeology’s dry, dry, pummeling rationality sought to reduce once-gorgeous life to measurement and grids when intuition might see more, learn more, hear something as faint as the panicked pulse that had met death twelve thousand years ago. Right here. From the tamped ocher dirt the antelope had risen back into the light centimeter by centimeter, resembling, at first, a small alligator whose spine creases the silted pour of river. Had risen!—ain’t that the usual grounds for faith? I imagined teasing my dad, who laughed the laugh it seemed I was always hoping for from him. With the finest brush that had been available at the hardware store in town, with what the clerk assured me was real sable, I whisked grains of sand from the business end of the skull: antelope jaws may be narrow, but they’re arrayed with formidable deep-rooted teeth etched by hard use, very possibly embedded with analyzable motes of ancient pollen—with luck the samples I meticulously labeled would reveal what it had fed on its last day on earth. On this terrace carved into an ancient bank, mine was the only square yielding bones. The rest of the terrace, though still neatly gridded off with string, had been abandoned as unprofitable, and I was companioned only by a lanky boy from Kentucky, digging several meters away, whose conversation I was mostly able to avoid without, my hope was, much offending him. His long-sleeved plaid shirt amazed me, its pearl snaps fastened primly to his Adam’s apple—I didn’t want it to, but as soon as I saw him in that shirt my imagination started unsnapping. He was a Christian. Other boys on the dig wore Levi’s and wifebeaters, girls some combination of swimsuit or halter top and cutoffs. My own state of partial nakedness I had adapted to as a child adapts to bathwater that starts off far too hot, but when courtesy compelled conversation with him, my nakedness heated up again and I had to wear it like a stupid blush. I wished he had been assigned elsewhere; nonjudgmental though he seemed to be, his Christian-ness impeded the quiet talking I would have done, the foolish songs I would have made up if the antelope and I were alone. Above us, on the rim of the tawny bluff, the boy’s radio sang out the top ten country hits in maddening rotation, another thing I held against him. Now and then one of the complicatedly married graduate-student directors, either the stocky bearded husband in his sweat-drenched Texas Tech T-shirt or the wife with her black yard-long braid tapering to the slimmest of tips and her bikini top more faded even than mine, would appear on the edge of the bluff to call down How’s it coming? The boy would stand, lift his hat to scrub at his sweaty hair, and he and whichever director would drawl through a seminar on the bloody proficiency of the Clovis hunters. I have always loved hiding and wa
s happy to remain hunkered down with the antelope, whose bones displayed none of the marks of butchering sorely needed for the directors’ dissertations. By the luck of the draw this square was mine; they would have preferred it to be the boy’s, as his experience was greater, his talkativeness better adapted to their anxieties than my crouched concentration. The boundaries of my square were clear, the wooden stakes at the corners connected by taut string powdered the ocher of the carved-away bluff, and the single instant that pleased me most in any given day was when I got to take that casually possessive step over the string into my plot: it was as if I had always wanted a single square on the face of the earth to be ruled off and entrusted to me, small enough so that every task within its boundaries could be executed flawlessly, the shaving of the trowel, the whisking of the sable brush cordoned off from the unruly rest of existence. Reeds would have rustled as the antelope legged it down to the water, ears pricked. When the lanky boy leaves for lunch, I bend close and ask Did you see it coming? The dig’s finances are precarious, the directors have been seeking publicity. Early one morning before the heat gets too bad a magazine photographer, slung with cameras, asks me to pose with the antelope, and keeps asking until from his square the lanky boy declares I’ll come over. The photographer shrugs okay to the boy in his straw-hatted pearl-buttoned uptightness—he’s plenty picturesque, also professional, a nice combination, but exiled to the dry-grass edge of the bluff, I feel the anger peculiar to violated privacy. I’m exasperated by the sweat in my eyelashes, by the music caterwauling from the grass, by the boy squatting on his boot heels by the skull, by having bewildered myself by saying No, by having said No in the first place and then needing to say several more Nos to back up that original No, each more convincing than the last, none entirely convincing, which is why the lanky boy piped up. From up here the volunteering pity of the boy pisses me off. He must believe I’m ashamed of the revealingness of swimsuit top and cutoffs, that ragtag impudent minim of clothing I’m actually proud of, as proof I belong here, but it’s not me, it’s him who’s at home, down in my square; he tips his hat back, vaporizing long days on my knees imagining the numinous dark eye gazing back from the skull; Great! he is told; You’re a natural!; at the click, I am well and truly out of the picture; A natural! for some reason stings, it’s covetable, also infuriating—his having been called that when his being down in my square is precisely not natural, that’s my hard work the square displays, the delicacy of my brush cleaning orbits and sinuses, my patient laying-bare of the partly dovetailed, partly askew arcs of ribs; as the photographer’s packing up the lanky boy says Hey, want to swap squares awhile, and I almost shake my head—almost; the hesitation’s his opening; if I shook my head he wouldn’t argue, wouldn’t say another word, though we both know the antelope changed hands the instant I refused to be photographed sweaty and bold and in charge of my bones.

  Perfectionism hits a perceived error hard, its scorn aura’d with eloquence, and it moves fast, faster than conscious thought, which might be why perfectionism in action feels more real than ordinary thinking, why perfectionism has this air of lightning-strike inevitability, because it’s like the brain-stem wordlessness of drives and reflexes, searing communicativeness suited to nanosecond life-and-death decisions. Like those reflexes, perfectionism feels unerring. Like you shouldn’t distrust it or you’ll die. The instant of consenting to perfectionism’s excisions is a radiant alliance with grace. To resist perfectionism is hard for a number of reasons, but one of them is how lumbering and flat-footed conscious thought is revealed to be in any contest with instantaneous certainty.

  Don’t you know.

  Don’t you know I thought you were going to be perfect.

  Everybody makes mistakes is the notion my son announced, looking up from his spill, with an assurance he was only trying out, because it might be the wrong thing to say, because he had never heard, from me, any such thing.

  Five syllables terminating with the smug spasm of ism make it sound like I know what I’m talking about. The very word perfectionism signals that this book knows what it wants to unfold, when what interests me is perfectionism’s resistance to being narrated. So far I’ve been pretty much the opposite of a clear-eyed or articulate sufferer: I’ve acted as if its screwy mysteries were god’s. As if it was a black hole any attempted description would be sucked into. The discrepancy between my intimate submission to perfectionism and my understanding so little about it makes me ashamed, and that shame is loamy, breeched by slim green shoots of story. That dirt smells of finally. Finally wanting to tell.

  Part II

  Was it partly the times?

  If, according to Freud in “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” written in 1915—

  [We find it difficult] to abandon the belief that there is an instinct toward perfection at work in human beings, which has brought them to their present high level of intellectual achievement and ethical sublimation and which may be expected to watch over their development into supermen. I have no faith, however, in the existence of any such internal instinct and I cannot see how this benevolent illusion is to be preserved. The present development of human beings requires, as it seems to me, no different explanation from that of animals. What appears in a minority of individuals as an untiring propulsion towards further perfection can easily be understood as a result of the instinctual repression upon which is based all that is most precious in human civilization.

  —then does it follow that the ethical sublimations of certain eras may be more pervasive and rigorous than those of others, more excruciatingly productive of perfectionists?

  Suppose you wish to design an epoch capable of instilling the “untiring propulsion towards further perfection” in the maximum number of individuals, how close did 1950s suburban America come to the ideal incubator?

  Men then were more alike than they are now. In their alikeness, which the time required, they had a conscientious, replicable beauty—boy cleanliness, haircuts that showed their ears, white shirts, black ties. Ironed handkerchiefs. Shoes whose shine needed tending to. In winter, imposing overcoats that made them seem like soldiers in the army of seriousness and made it hard to tell them apart, especially from a distance, so that if a child saw her father far down the sidewalk she would have trouble knowing for sure it was her father and she would stand in her oversized rubber boots, using one mitten as a gas mask to diffuse the freezing air, until it was him or it wasn’t. This was long ago, during the war known as Cold. The early-morning unison of the fathers’ departure would have shamed a flight of blackbirds; under the vaults and domes of the capital, behind locked doors, at the fathers’ gray steel desks, at the ends of their pencils, the war was going well, it was going badly, it was a matter of interpretation, it was work. The daylight absence of the men, the fathers, imbued the suburb with the suspense of desertion. Every blade of grass in every lawn was waiting. Every wife was waiting, every dog with pricked ears was waiting, and each blade of grass, each wife, each dog and child, whatever else they did, held still. Whatever else it was for, the suburb was for holding still. Look: black circles have been cut from the lawns and into these circles have been inserted slim upward-striving trees. Against the possibility of their flying away to unite with other trees they are tethered to the earth with wires.

  The explaining voice pauses; the pause is not a lull, not neutral, but active and soliciting; the voice belongs to the movie you are watching, and watching is what has been asked of you so far, but you learn from the pause that watching no longer suffices and some other engagement is required, but what that might be, you can’t say, there isn’t time. Over the Hiroshima of the black-and-white classroom movie, the bomb rolls from the belly whose riveted steel plates have a homemade frankenstein crudity: how strange to see how the plane is made; that clouds float by; how mutely the bomb peels away into the long arc of descent. In its revolving slowness it’s left to its own devices; it’s smaller and smaller and farther and farther behind; it can al
most be forgotten about. Below, between parting clouds, a plain, the city branched through by rivers, a clutteration of tiny roofs, infinite holding still.

  Saturday you might see your dad in a T-shirt, your brother might be asked if he’d like to throw a ball around, and from a corner of the lawn you might sit and watch, sick at the injustice of being a girl, wild with stoppered grace. Saturdays your dad was his own man, he said. Whose was he when he wasn’t his own? Opposing the soft amused handsomeness of his face, his glasses had an architectural authority, the naked lenses dominated by the heavy black plastic bridge and earpieces. His hair memorized its side part. On a high closet shelf lived the hats forsaken when Kennedy took his oath of office bareheaded, trusting in his rashness and eloquence, in how confident he was, how his youth seemed to mean he could face things without the old inhibition and correctness, with, instead, brainy resourcefulness, undeluded cunning; and how fear relented with the bareheadedness of JFK; how fear was no equal for wind rifling the dark hair of a handsome man.

  Deprived of my mother’s attention, my father would narrow his eyes and try to set something on fire, some dogma or other, till she faced him to argue. His voter registration was discreetly partyless to ensure his survival from administration to administration, but he was a Democrat. Pained by her Republican convictions, offensive not only in themselves but as the emblem of some ultimate elusiveness in his wife, he persisted in the belief that she could be harangued into converting. PhD or not, he came from a long line of forceful soul savers, river-dunking, hellfire-extolling Baptists. When troubled, he would take nail clippers from his pocket and excruciate tiny parings from his already short nails. He didn’t seem to regard this as a private act, and the fact that he couldn’t tell this habit annoyed other people filled me with wretched solicitude, as if nothing stood between him and disaster. When he took his glasses off, it was like he lifted away his sly intelligence and left a face naive as a sleeper’s. When he crossed his legs, the white calf with its corkscrews of black hair alarmed us all (my mother wondered aloud sometimes why no shank showed when JFK crossed his legs). He was an avid taker of offense. The word hillbilly overheard by chance—in a joke on TV—riled him like a just accusation. His gaucheness wasn’t completely lost on him and in the right mood he could mock it with a kidding lightheartedness impossible to reconcile with his prevailing touchiness. My little brother and sister and I longed for these fits of clowning, but they were like weather, immune to coaxing. In the token sartorial task assigned him, his oxfords submitted to the polish-stained shoe brush. The happiness of buffing called for snatches of sinister, lilting country. I know a girl lives over the hill/If she won’t do it her sister will.