Scratched

by Elizabeth Tallent

  The loss may have taken place long ago, it may already have been survived, but these realities fail to be communicated to the perfectionism devised to defend against it. At bottom perfectionism is petrified panic.

  Anxiety makes me a strictly eyes-on-the-road driver, but that evening I was scanning the road shoulder for teasels, whose prickly dried heads my son’s Waldorf teacher had instructed parents to collect for a crafts project the kids were going to do, and when?—tomorrow!, meaning the teasels had to be found tonight—in fact, since teasels are weeds and the campus where we lived was groomed to horticultural perfection, finding his teasels was a now-or-never proposition. News spun from the radio, traffic competing in the Silicon Valley style of signal-less alpha-male lane changes. The prospect of my son’s arriving at school tomorrow without teasels filled me with a shade of desperation peculiar to my years as a Waldorf parent. The aim of Waldorf pedagogy was to offer the lyrical, trailing-clouds-of-glory childhood available in 1843 in Somerset or somewhere, and hewing to this vision took incredible effort in Silicon Valley circa 1994, but the other parents were not kidding around, they really were constructing near-ideal childhoods for their offspring, or at least it looked that way, while I was managing no such feat. I hadn’t yet told the analyst I made the eight-hour round trip to Mendocino to see about my mothering fuckups, despite the tolerance of his therapeutic manner I was convinced this new twist on incompetence would cause him to think less of me, or make me seem like more work than I already was, or both. Meaning no disparagement, he had once casually declared my life tumultuous, and here was one more panic to add to the sweepings. Some lines of Plath’s occurred to me often—except occurred to me suggests a wafty felicity, whereas these lines issued from some underground workshop where my at-risk sanity was actively cherished. Unmoored as I was, I seized on their orientation: the child. Two weeks before her suicide, Plath had written the poem “Child” about her boy Nick. “Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing. / I want to fill it with color and ducks, / The zoo of the new.” That was as far as it got, in my head, but—color and ducks, I could do that, couldn’t I? I could do that or its equivalent. I could do that though I couldn’t sleep.

  In this evening traffic I doubted whether, if a patch of teasels showed up amid the scruffy grass, it would be safe to pull over, but I was fixated on the road shoulder when my son said, “Mom.”

  I turned the radio down. “Unh-hunh, what?”

  “What you need is more self-trust.”

  More tawny California slid by before I managed to say, “What?”

  “What you need is more self-trust.”

  Out of the blue.

  Also: wildly precise.

  He’d made up the word, his first interpretation of me, ever—its accuracy was piercing, and I would have said What? again, meaning Where did that come from?, but he mostly resisted repeating himself. Based on scant dealings with other people’s children, I had trusted motherhood to be a charming, monotonous fugue of why why why, and my professor streak meant I had looked forward to countless chances to explain the cosmos to a short, easily impressed interlocutor, but with him, questions came once, lucidly, as if much thought had already gone into them. As if he had gone as far as he could on his own toward an answer, and only then posed his question aloud. At times, though I kept it to myself, his deliberating manner struck me as sort of hilarious. He could not mean it. Could not really be so different from impulsive, scattershot me. But he was. With me, at least, that seemed to be how he believed crucial things should be proffered: uniquely. I could rise to the occasion, or not. I did as much rising as I was capable of, for love; I did a lot of hoping it was enough. On our drives home he sucked his thumb, a pastime he reserved for non-school hours; he had taken his thumb out to say his sentence and his gaze in the rearview had a diagnostic directness. He wasn’t condemning, he was merely, from the brimming sufficiency of his awareness of who I was, handing me an observation I could use, or not, as I chose.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll work on it.”

  The traffic hustled us past a couple of road-shoulder brush patches showing the tall, spiky seed heads.

  Long afterward I would come across a sentence of Plath’s: “The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

  Whose opposite is self-trust.

  On those commutes home from day care in the evenings, I wasn’t overjoyed to find an icon of suicide in my mind, where some verifiably sane form of consolation ought to have emerged instead, to support the worrisomely expensive work I was doing with the Mendocino analyst. Plath’s voice, even in bearable fragments, wasn’t one I wanted to keep hearing. Whenever the thesis that perfectionism is linked to suicide is advanced, Plath gets name-checked, the genius sufferer who understood it from within: “Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children.”

  Of the twelve lines of “Child,” the final three spell out what she wishes the child’s eye had not been filled with: “Not this troublous / Wringing of hands, this dark / Ceiling without a star.” For the longest time I thought it was strange for a poem that begins by exulting in the newness available to be given by the mother to the receptive child—the two of them brightly alive and desirous in stanza one—to trail off into the fourth stanza’s dim clichés of abandonment. The impetuous joyousness of “I want to fill it” fixes the mother’s living, breathing presence—nothing makes a person as real as giving something beautiful away—and the child’s receptivity is figured by the first three words: “Your clear eye.” Subtly, it’s eye, singular, because the child is in profile—rather than anxiously watching the mother, he’s sufficiently secure to gaze away from her, at the world, which it is the work of a child to get his fill of. The confidence evident in his gazing away, so necessary if the child is to go about the business of becoming, is a collaborative achievement, proof of her good-enough mothering, and for this treasurable bondedness to vanish from the poem, for the pronoun I and the pronoun you to slip away, leaving in their wake the disembodied “wringing of hands” and the cliché-y dark ceiling the presumed but not named child-eye stares up at seemed not emotionally deliberate, but weak, like the poem just got tired of the joy it started with. I didn’t think it was good. I didn’t think it was strongly executed. That was a forlorn disavowal of an ending, it seemed to me.

  I would read it differently now. In their cadenced brevity those last lines manifest wounded responsibility: the speaker trusts the reader to see what seeing is, and what enables or cripples it. Given her presence, her steady nearbyness, the child can gaze out at the world. The stakes, though obliquely conveyed, are high: he needs to take in enough world to become a full self. It’s as if the essence of mothering is enabling clear, delighted seeing. She has, till now, companioned his gaze, desired more for it. With her imminent disappearance, such seeing will cease to be possible. He can’t do it alone. His chance at realness and beauty and variousness: that’s what’s at risk, and the poem’s most fugitive question is What world will he be able to make for himself if I disappear?

  The deceptiveness of perfectionism may partly account for its being famously difficult to eradicate. Its aura of emergency seems endlessly renewable, and strikes the sufferer afresh each time, making it hard to identify perfectionism’s futility as futility: its urgency cloaks its pointlessness. Often when I am in its grip I feel sensationally lucid, supremely ambitious. If a detached observer objected What you are doing is actually incredibly stylized and repetitive, the opposite of creative, their reasonableness would be steamrollered by perfectionist heedlessness in pursuit of some fantasy or other.

  By shepherding energy to predetermined destinations, perfectionism allows no margin for those serendipities of noticing that make the world real to us. “Child” is about fucking up the “one absolutely beautiful thing,” about the awful erroneousness of having transmitted damage instead of the variousness, beauty, exuberance the world offers for the taking—the particular kind of taking that is clear seeing. The child’s clear
eye isn’t the only locus of absorbed gazing in the poem. When the poem begins, the mother sees the child clearly. Conceivably the one absolutely beautiful thing in any individual’s possession is her own life, possibly the poem secretly mourns the closing of her own clear eyes.

  He, this analyst—he’s my last try.

  Last try at solving perfectionism.

  Because he was my last try I kept my rented loft in a renovated barn in blink-and-you’ll-miss-it Little River while teaching at naggingly complicated Stanford, and whenever my son was with his father I made the drive to Mendocino in order to come to this room again—except that sounds simple, and as if I knew what I was doing, when my decisions were made messily, often at the last minute, and ceaseless second-guessing was my style

  Over the couch hangs a painting of three harlequins whose gondola is passing facades of rose pink, amber, and turquoise, colors that seem unlikely, but how would I know; I’ve never seen Venice.

  Of such a carefully contrived space you can find yourself saying, as I did in my first session, Wow, the light is beautiful—light being more innocently praiseworthy than the actual room, if the person responsible for its order is a straight male, liable by virtue of his gender and orientation to detect an insinuation of effeminacy in praise of the room’s effect, whereas admiration for light leaves maleness unclouded, something was wrong with the way I was warning myself against fractal offenses against maleness, whatever was wrong about that was wrong with me not only in relation to the analyst but all the time, it was as if maleness were an incredibly frail construct requiring kid-glove handling, and after saying The light’s beautiful in here, I stopped, and twisted around to gaze at the painting.

  That perfection obsesses him as well, this intensely curated room has already informed me.

  When I turn back, he’s older. Even sitting, his bearing emanates sturdy authority. His beard is close-cut enough to seem like a kind of white glaze around his mouth, his sclerae are keenly white and, backlit as he is, the last unruly white filaments flare from his bald crown. He’s maybe the least harlequin-looking person in the world.

  The charm of the harlequins lies in their louche self-approval, the tallest of the three using his pole to prod their gondola along, and the most frequent thought prompted by the painting is one I might have about an enviable writer, the thought I need something like that, like boldness, or authority, or joy, qualities inoculating the writer against the erasure with which I instantly oblige internal criticism. Between appointments I lust for this bad painting with the debauched longing a Gauguin might deserve. The door of the room has a window of opaque white glass. If it were valuable or even likely to be mistaken for valuable the painting would never have been left in a room whose door is inset with glass, because valuableness would be an invitation to breaking and entering. Does this mean everyone involved, analyst and clients alike, tacitly recognizes its shoddy whimsy, and for its nonvaluableness to be plain to one and all, doesn’t a painting have to be more than mildly bad, doesn’t it need to be flagrantly so, and if it is, what is wrong with me that I’m obsessed with it? It’s hung high enough to be safely above the head of a patient much taller than I am, but unless they want to sit directly under the painting, clients must choose either the right or the left sides of the couch—probably right-handed clients prefer the right side, as I do, but in my mind the spot belongs to me alone. Beyond his armchair looms a ficus tree, really three individual trees whose slim taupe trunks had been braided together when they were supple twigs. Their plastic pot has been fitted inside a basket whose chunky coils are patterned with chevrons mesmerizing as a rattlesnake’s; it must have been brought back from the travels he had as yet only hinted at—Vietnam, Kenya. Clots of fake moss have been positioned inside the pot to hide the soil, a detail I puzzle over. Who is bothered by naked soil? If the ficus has been recently watered, petrichor is added to the room’s other scents. Possibly the ficus is not rotated often enough, one side is lush, the side toward the wall twiggy and bereft. On its lush side, almost hidden within glossy leaves, hangs a single Christmas ornament. Forgotten. Or a joke. The unassertive gray-green velvet of the couch is silk, not synthetic, showing the rub of use, it’s slowly wearing out, and for two years, then going on three, I’m in the habit of running both palms across that velvet as soon as I sit down, again whenever I can’t think what to say, if a shrink was going to mind the poor transparent seductiveness of a client’s stroking the couch he shouldn’t have gotten velvet in the first place, I can’t be the only one, I’m not trying to be original and I’m not trying, not seriously trying, to get to him—for me the stroking is more private than that, like telling the couch over and over softly I’m here, it’s me, as when in a trance of private repetitiveness my son rubs his nose with the index finger of the hand whose thumb he’s sucking, a gesture my father can’t witness without saying Take your thumb out of your mouth because eight is, to his mind, well past the age when thumb-sucking ought to have been abandoned, when I argue that thumb-sucking counts as self-soothing and for a person, even a person only eight years old, to find in his own body a harmless, continuously available source of reassurance and pleasure encourages not the infantilization my father dreads but self-reliance, at eight years old that is what practicing resourcefulness and self-sufficiency looks like, moreover his devotion to his thumb is his right, I’m going to want him to understand his dominion over his body as only and absolutely his own, an understanding that begins with my regarding his pleasure in thumb-sucking as natural and actually wise, if his need for oral gratification is satisfied by thumb-sucking he’s less likely to smoke or drink later, I professorize to my father, meanwhile wondering if his irritation at his grandson’s thumb-sucking reflects his having been made to give up his own thumb-sucking long ago, my father’s irritation has a mean kick to it, bespeaking deprivation, when I can I prevent his speaking to my son in that peculiar injured, repudiating tone attesting to his own long-ago hurt because I think that’s how fucked-upness leaps from generation to generation, in that tone exactly, and for once, explaining the new thinking about thumb-sucking, I’m indifferent to the sullenness of my father’s withdrawal, a sullenness I can scarcely bear, otherwise, the sullenness I do whatever is within my power to placate, otherwise; not this time; it’s informative to stand up to my father without cravenness; so this is what it takes, the supreme love I have for my son. That’s how I tell it to the analyst whose room this is, who when the worst stories are being recounted takes on an air of having been bruised or mauled, himself, but most times emanates a large, unaffiliated empathy, only a little ragged around the edges from fatigue, I’m not good at telling people’s ages but he has to be sixty-something, spruce, eager, fastidious, the precision of his arrangements dear to him, and apart from my velvet stroking, which fails to bother him, his reliance on order is rather easily jostled, he’s got a particular wince of a frown for the instant of noticing something slightly awry, it’s delicate, his investment in the proper arrangement of objects and issues, it’s vulnerable, it’s like me, I’m in love. So this is what it takes. I say Now I know. I say The problem is I’m never sure what I know will translate to other areas of my life, areas desperately in need of my knowing that thing, and he says What thing? and I say That I can be uncompromising, and not get killed for it. The delicacy I attribute to the analyst, his body contradicts. He might be hardly taller than I am, but his is a much denser presence, despite the gentlemanliness his clothes vouch for he’s bandy-legged and barrel-chested, above the gold-rimmed Chekhov spectacles his forehead is a balded-back scoop confrontational as rhinoceros horn, and maybe fittingly for someone who makes his living listening he has cunning ears, small, ornate, tucked close to the skull. His living is also made by talking, the teeth showing now and then within the close-cut beard are fine, the voice accentless though he is from Kentucky, not that I know that then, but cadence can be harder to eliminate than inflection and to my mind a trace of evangelical call-and-response informs his
analytic style, whose beckoning pauses I condemn as overly directive. On both sides, from early on, there’s irritation. The distractedness I’m prone to irks him—mildly, he will ask why I am wasting our time. Two incompatible versions of him take turns dominating my attention. The first is flawless. Unerring in empathy, appropriately opaque. Chaste. Imperturbable. Wise. The second is a lonely, joshing con artist as mercurial as I am, as fallible. Vain. Also: mortal. His brute bald head casts his body into puniness, could his short-statured bandy-leggedness be the consequence of polio—given his age, it’s possible, and I fear polio’s threat to him as if it lay in the future instead of decades behind, I dread any incapacity that would deprive me of his presence (of his alternating presences, whose every shade and variation I’m indiscriminately in love with), when I say so he neutrally points out my seductiveness. But its being pointed out doesn’t mean it’s not working, is what I think. I come to this room for the love he’s bound to let show, the arms he might yet hold out to me.

  We have our set pieces. It’s deadening my writing, I will complain of perfectionism. Suppose it was no problem, he will answer, suppose you wake up tomorrow and your perfectionism is—snap of his fingers; another instance of his being too theatrical for my taste—gone, nothing’s stopping you, you can write anything you want, what do you write?