Oneiron

  Sheila didn’t have any alternative. So she pushed a chest of drawers she had inherited from her grandmother in front of the hatch, and her father cut a hole in the oak back. This way she could choose for herself when she opened the drawer to accept the food her mother had shoved in, or the messages; all vital dispatches. However, now her mother couldn’t peek through the hole whenever she wanted. And Miriam definitely would have. Sheila could easily imagine her mother mopping the floor on her side of the hole, where something difficult to clean had supposedly fallen, something that had supposedly almost spread to the other side of the wall, so that she had to stick her head through and make sure nothing was left on the floor on Sheila’s side, because (now Sheila heard her mother’s feigned concern in her ears) if liquid gets in the chinks in an old wood floor (of course the substance that had spilled was “liquid”), nothing could save the floor, and they would have to replace a large swath of boards so they wouldn’t warp over time and ruin the entire apartment.

  Contrary to her mother’s fervent hopes, Sheila lost even more weight after the move. They had unwillingly given their daughter “her own space”, 21 x 21 feet, and a “chance to become independent”, as Miriam’s psychoanalyst friend had recommended. And what did she do? She took the delicacies her mother packed in cardboard out of the chest of drawers and threw them away! In a black trash sack on the side of the road, Miriam found a heap of untouched spinach pies, which she unquestionably recognized as her own handiwork. They had carefully pinched edges, the kind no one makes any more, except her. She would know her symmetric puff pastry pleats with her eyes closed. But her daughter refused to eat them. This caused a terrible row, after which a week passed before Sheila agreed to open the drawer again.

  Sheila waited for the deus ex machina of her life and with increasing determination continued to leave the meals packed in cardboard uneaten. And then god appeared, but a very different god than she had imagined. Sheila had imagined herself being caught up into the next world by accident as a result of her dieting hobby. But no, she didn’t swoon and fall to the stage (soon we’ll get to why she was on stage so much during that period) and no ambulance came to fetch her. She didn’t end up being operated on by people in white coats with stethoscopes, and her disfigured oh my god!!! body didn’t stop functioning after all. Not yet anyway. (With what pleasure Sheila had looked forward to her own funeral! Her mother, her father, her siblings, her uncles, her aunts, her friends, especially a certain Penny, all blubbering because of her, finally able to understand how hard things had been for her; standing around the grave they would regret that they hadn’t known how to help, that they had just nagged and shouted and judged and forced advice on her that she really didn’t need—what do you say now?) And then, suddenly and without warning, god appeared before her in the form of a man from Poland.

  Dovid had left his home, completely, eternally. (That’s also a long and complicated story, with more than enough anger and disgust and disappointment; we trust that things will become clear with time what kind of man this Dovid was and from what kind of ragged hole his determination, which ultimately quelled Sheila’s anorexia, welled.) Dovid traveled from Łódź first to London and then to the Big Apple, and there, at a certain experimental club, which novice Fluxus pioneers favored, he ran into Sheila. Sheila played drums, and for that reason she was often on stage. She played drums before The Velvet Underground’s Maureen Tucker! (Shlomith remembered to mention this in the Vanity Fair interview.) The band’s name was Entropy and in the wake of Shlomith-Shkhina’s rise it later gained cult status. Even John Cage was known to have attended one of their shows. In certain circles the band was called a “pacesetter”, and there was actually a grain of truth in that. These days the band’s only published EP (and a few muffled bootlegs) costs a tidy sum, by no means because of the lead singer, Penny, who in the mid-seventies decided she’d had her fill of messing about, became a jurist, and gave birth to three well-behaved girls, but rather because of Shlomith, crazy, genius Shlomith-Shkhina. But of course Sheila couldn’t dream of any of that at the time: everything was shit, shit, shit, shit.

  It would be fun to describe Entropy’s music in more detail, but our competence is insufficient. To our ears, it was mostly buzzing and squeaking and onomatopoeic wailing. Sweating profusely, Sheila pounded a steady beat on the bass drum, adding violent drum fills that resembled landslides, but at what point these came we don’t know because the music sounded like a chaotic avalanche and the fills seemed to join the mix unexpectedly. But the music wasn’t random because, as if by a stroke of magic, with complete control, the orchestra stopped producing its croaking, beating, acid-hacking wall of sound. Silence. Shhhhh!

  The spotlight falls on the singer, sunken-cheeked Penny in her tight T-shirt decorated with the letters L.H.O.O.Q., who plays a special role in Sheila’s funeral fantasies. (Penny falls to her knees on the floor of the synagogue, crushed by guilt as soon as the reading of the first psalm begins.) Then the drumming begins again, puduTum, puduTum-Tum, pudupudutratatatataTUM, and Penny starts howling through the mouthpiece of a soprano saxophone she has brought to her lips. It is the agony of a tortured small animal, and Sheila’s tom-toms torment the whimpering creature more. The saxophone creature bellows and moans louder, the bellows and moans convulsing the pit of the listener’s stomach, causing an intense nausea (at least in anyone who had eaten too little before coming to the show and had drunk a couple of pints on an empty stomach). And then. Silence. Shhhhh! Once again seemingly at random. Penny and Sheila don’t even glance at each other, apparently sensing when the right moment comes (people with the capacity for improvisation have a sixth, even a seventh or eighth sense), and so Penny gently lowers the saxophone to the floor and lies down next to it.

  But the bliss doesn’t last long. Suddenly Penny wakes up and attacks the saxophone, straddling it and beginning to spread her legs. She does a graceful spiral, like a gymnast, and finally bends her upper body with surprising flexibility over the metal instrument. Then Sheila starts pounding the bass drum pedal again. The bassist and guitarist join in, howling, whining, and banging their instruments. And Penny begins to sing. Lying on the floor, she sings in a transrational language that lashes its sensual message straight into the heart, as the critic at the Village Voice wrote in his two-column review of the show on March 16, 1965. “Penny McQueen is one of the most charismatic and unique female artists of the decade on the East Coast,” was the ending of the short article, without a single word about the drummer! At least the critic wrote about the band, since Entropy was something different from the hippie and acid lineups, singer-songwriter combos, and folk artists who sang God only knew what childishness. Oh, how Sheila detested those do-gooders walking around with guitars on their backs! Penny and she had agreed on this point: We will never write lyrics like that. Freewheelin’ Dylan was good, there was no point denying it, but most of them were unspeakable. They just bummed around Washington Square Park, sitting on the edge of the fountain and strumming their off-key balalaikas. Entropy wasn’t like them.

  At least someone saw the value in this originality, this out-of-step Dadaism, but that was no thanks to Penny, one of the most charismatic and unique female artists on the East Coast. No, it didn’t go that way. That was simply wrong, because Sheila, not Penny, was mostly behind the original ideas. Sheila had asked Penny to meow into the microphone like a cat, and it had instantly sounded fantastic. Penny was actually her instrument, but of course no one realized it. Not even Penny. Least of all Penny.

  It looked exactly how it shouldn’t have: like Penny, her little marionette Penny, was the wellspring of Entropy’s originality, that Penny with her sallow cheeks rampaging in ecstasy on the stage was the one who made everything work. Sheila was hidden behind her drums, even though she was the BRAIN and BACKBONE of the band, and also a phenomenal spectacle, at least in the same class as the singer! And besides, there was something extra in her that there would never be in cryptobourgeois Penny from her
middle-class home: Sheila was in mortal danger.

  What you might imagine happened did. In that moment of blessing by the Village Voice, Penny became the biggest bitch on Bleecker Street. She loafed around the streets carrying her soprano saxophone like a shoulder bag and made clear to everyone with only the position of her head that it was due to her that Entropy’s gigs began to be so crowded, that people were coming to see her specifically, and that this meant she had to start giving them more. That was why she wanted a tail made of peacock feathers for her leather trousers. That was the final straw for Sheila. Oh, so Penny wants a peacock ass, does she!

  The internecine rows and melodramatic disappearances began. First Penny was offended and didn’t show up for band practice for days, and then Sheila began seething with rage and went missing. We don’t know where Penny was, but Sheila was jogging in Prospect Park. When the anger didn’t subside, she defiantly started running in Green-Wood Cemetery, on narrow lanes lined by pure-white tombs and massive family mausoleums, despite the guards’ angrily driving her away, time after time. Have some respect for the departed, miss!

  All this turbulence resulted in embarrassingly weak performances, bungled rhythms, and public crying fits, which were followed by even more appalling fights: recriminations, insults, thrown drum sticks, and one split lower lip, which almost ended up in court. “I would have ended up dead if Dovid hadn’t showed up on the scene,” Shlomith said in a tremulous voice to the Vanity Fair interviewer, who was so spellbound by Entropy’s story that he could hear the drums pounding in his ears and see the bony arms with veined biceps swollen like apples from beating the drums in his eyes: in the interviewer’s imagination the arm that worked the hi-hat was an impressive sight with its muscles outlined in almost anatomical relief, although in reality during those years Sheila’s arm was only brutally thin and ugly. “I would have died sooner or later,” Shlomith repeated, swallowing dramatically, wiping tears from the corners of her eyes, “if Dovid hadn’t approached me at that bar and just blurted out what he saw: ‘Girl, you aren’t healthy.’”

  Dovid decides to heal Sheila—and has a brilliant idea

  Dovid bought haggard Sheila a Bloody Mary. This man had such power that he was able to get Sheila to drink it even though she hated the tomato juice, the equivocation of the drink, and how spicy it was; it all felt excessive in her mouth. Very quickly they fell in love. “You have to heal,” Dovid said as he fed Sheila pudding with a spoon; “Have a meatball of love,” he said as he speared one and filled Sheila’s cheeks.

  Dovid had the same black curly hair as Sheila, only shorter. He was twenty centimeters taller than her and ruggedly handsome, and that was how Sheila wanted to be too, but she was more rugged than handsome; she was a withered promise, 35 kg, and something had to be done about it quickly. And it wasn’t long before a brilliant idea struck Dovid. He wanted to take Sheila away from New York, where there was too much of a “pathological atmosphere”; where madness was preferred, where unhealthy stunts were practically encouraged. Sheila also wanted out of her home city, out of Penny’s increasingly capricious and egotistical circle of influence. She wanted away from the people standing by the front of the stage, whose stares changed the moment their gazes shifted from the singer to her behind the drum kit. Time and time again when she wasn’t pounding her drums, blind with rage, she saw something twist painfully in those gazes: the unreserved admiration burning in people’s eyes gave way to an expression of struggle between that and disgust. For a person who loved contradiction, it wouldn’t have been any problem, but Sheila was still in the initial phase of her journey—she was not yet Shlomith-Shkhina. Sheila was unsure (Shlomith-Shkhina rarely felt such feelings). Sheila was scared to death that her message would be misinterpreted, that people would see her as sick.

  So what did she want to communicate with her conspicuous thinness, someone might have asked, although people talked about such things significantly less then than now. Presumably Sheila would have said that at least she wasn’t looking for sympathy. She wanted to do art “on the edge”. (This was also an idea that was dear to Shlomith-Shkhina later.) She wanted to show her strength, not by lifting weights but by dropping weight. It was precision work, which the more or less fat people behind the gazes would at least respect. If something irreversible happened, that would also be her own choice: a creative leap over the line.

  And besides, in addition to everything else, this was her back door. When an evening ended in dizziness, when the bed seemed to spin, when she felt that familiar chill, she knew that everything was alright, that her weight in the morning would be about the same, that her input and output were both under control. One teensy-weensy shift and she would be permanently on the other side of the line. Where no one could touch her. At least it was good for her mother to know this. To wit, her mouth was no hole in the back of a chest of drawers, one more hatch in an endless row of hatches, a hatch which her mother could open whenever she wanted, into which her mother could shove as much pie and porridge as she wished. Her mother had to be very careful with her. Because she had the power, all the power over everything.

  Hunger narrows perspectives: on that point Andrea Dworkin was exactly right. Taken to a certain point, hunger refreshes, sharpens, electrifies, and clears the mind, as anyone who has fasted knows, but as the fast continues, the lack of nutrients clouds and slows the thoughts. So it may be that in this enervating process of flagellation, “the universe” shrivels from the vast expanse of space to take on the size, appearance, and feel of the withering person herself—from the perspective of space to an insignificant grotesqueness.

  Sheila, Shlomith, and Shlomith-Shkhina disagreed with this at nearly every point of their life (in order to save time, we’ll overlook a few moments of crushing doubt). And because talking sense didn’t help then and doesn’t help now, let the bed spin and Sheila along with it. Let life continue until life ends. But Sheila couldn’t understand this idea any more. To live or to die? This was the question. She constantly had to choose. This is why Sheila lived in an intermediate space. She saw herself choosing during each bite of food, each kilometer she ran, each push-up she did, to be or not to be.

  “Deep inside, every anorexic wants to rebuild the Oedipal theater of her childhood,” Sheila’s mother’s psychoanalyst friend said, “but now the arc of the drama is slightly different. The child refusing to eat—let’s ignore that in this case she’s already on the verge of adulthood—sets up her mother to be guilty for her starvation. Even though the acute battles are mostly fought between mother and daughter, the anorexic’s fundamental message is directed at the father: ‘Save me from that harpy.’ The less flesh there is on the child, the less the evil mother can enjoy her. You know the story of Hansel and Gretel, right? So you’ll do well to give your daughter more space. Let her become more independent. When no one is metaphorically threatening her any more, eating up her living space, she’ll find her own body and gradually learn to enjoy it. Believe me, Miriam, Sheila will get better if you just give her a looser leash.”

  Who would have guessed that in the end, right at the last moment, Dovid would find Sheila’s abandoned body. Sheila’s family viewed Dovid’s motives with suspicion, to put it mildly, but this attitude only bound the lovers closer together. “YouR motheR is cRazy,” Dovid whispered to his future wife on the evening after his third visit, in a cute accent that bounced on the R’s and finally convinced Sheila: her mother was crazy, not Sheila, so she had to get away. Far away. To a place where she could be a little (not a lot but a little) plumper. Because in New York Sheila had no intention of giving in. That would be the act of a traitor. Was she going to fatten up and admit that her parents had been right and now she was going to fall back in line? Never.

  Dovid’s idea sounded more than promising. It sounded like life after death, with the difference that now Sheila didn’t need to die. Moving to Kibbutz Methuselah sufficed. Honest work close to the earth. A healthy society. Everything shared, everyone honest
. Submission to the land, the dirt, the sun, manual toil, and a purposeful walk. If this wasn’t paradise, then what was?

  Sheila fought and fought and finally decided: Let’s do it. The two of us are going on the run like Bonnie and Clyde, exiting the stage with flare. Goodbye, worm-eaten Apple! And besides, another’s embrace felt better with more flesh, spooning at night; ten more kilos and her bony knees would stop leaving bruises on her bowed thighs. “They aren’t very beautiful, dear,” Dovid said gently, as he placed his hand on the bruises. The xylophone of ribs, the clavicle crossbones, and the shoulder-blade platters that protruded from her skin also weren’t beautiful. “But you are beautiful,” Dovid said, “and we’ll find you again in there once you fill out a little.” Then Dovid baked Sheila a honey cake. “You have to build your strength so you have the energy to work in Israel.”

  The interviewer from Vanity Fair could barely stay in his skin. The details of the story that was beginning now had never been told anywhere. This stage of her life (or lie?) had always felt to Shlomith if not shameful then at least too private for public consumption, but now the situation was different. Surely a lauded and controversial sixty-year-old artist could give her admirers (and haters) a slice of her failed kibbutz experience. It was part of the jagged picture of her life, and it was also the story of her name. Keeping silent wasn’t going to change it, so Shlomith decided: Let’s do it.