Notable American Women

by Ben Marcus

  That was certainly a mouthful of a sentence. You might favor yourself by reading it again for clues.

  Or in plain speech: Watch yourself.

  Let me now describe a change in my beliefs, not interesting in its own right, but certainly bound to affect the so-called future moments of Ben, the only real topic to bind us at this late moment in your conscious life.

  While I once agreed that limiting Ben’s use of natural elements—rationing his light, air, and water, concealing his food, ironizing or curtailing the affection we dispensed (employing such techniques as the hug that just misses, the air kiss, the parent mannequins, the empty house in the morning, the growling sound track piped into his room at night, the wolf experience, the cruel girl in the field)—would theoretically create a hungrier, sharper, strong lad—better suited to become the kind of person we once agreed we would like to launch, a boy who only relied on natural resources as a last resort, in case a sound-out or blackout or food minus really did seize the current moment, or in case the current moment itself contracted and went airless and commenced to suffocate those persons living in it (as you predicted every day over breakfast, when words of doom were apparently once thought to render a young family dependent on the man who spoke them)—my team and I are discovering that the once-intriguing deprivations might now be too severe for Plan Ben, tiring the actual Ben’s little body beyond use, caving in his chest, withering his legs. In short, we are actually only teaching him exhaustion, fatigue, despair, and he is a very quick study, for he is becoming almost like some figure from literature: short of breath, despondent, frail, contrived.

  A “body bellows,” as you call it, is undoubtedly an important way to teach a man to earn his own life, something I still favor, theoretically. But I have a question: When do these devices exceed Ben’s Opponent Quota, and how many enemies to his natural sustenance can he rightfully engage before he loses the battle to become an upright man during the daytime? Are parents not enemies enough? In other words: Is our family project still interesting if Ben dies beneath a burden of homemade equipment? Does a child-rearing strategy effectively terminate when the child does? Is it possible that you are scheming to induce an exit in your child because you sense one impending for yourself, thus you have straitjacketed him with a bellows set on “high” and he is gently commencing to expire? And, if so, would that not be a somewhat derivative approach to the art of the launch? Is it not ultimately dull to abort your own launch? Are you so boring that you would try to kill Ben? Have you eschewed excellence simply because your own project as a man has failed?

  Make no mistake; I do remember your early work, if this consoles you at all, though my intention is to be correct, rather than to comfort you. It was fatherly of you to suit up in the body bellows yourself before apprenticing Ben to the project, though, if you’ll recall, young Ben steered himself well clear of his thus-attired father, and even I suffered more than my typical indifference touching you that month (yet the bellows did provide a difficulty that I had previously found your body to lack: Navigating the apparatus made me impatient enough to almost desire you, when your body was rendered inaccessible due to the wires that bound it). In those days, you could barely breathe, and often lay gasping on the floor, your eyes tearing, your skin a flat and terrible shade of blue. That was when our eroticism followed a medical model, me nursing you as though you were a huge and faulty mechanical bird, come crashed near my home, brave and stupid and near death, allowing the hardest kind of love, which would not have to be backed up in the morning. I could mythologize you beyond a walking mediocrity, a flesh-made disappointment. You were my broken machine, a cage with blood flowing through it.

  It is true that when you finally shed the bellows that early spring day down at the learning pond, there was something buoyant, if spastic, to your step, an odd and mismanaged freedom your body struck with the air, as though you would be more at home ballooning over Ohio alongside the clouds, a man to lead the weather out of our lives for good, some sort of pied piper pulling wind behind him. You had clearly become stronger, but it was not clear to what end, and this sums you up entirely: intriguing and original upon first glance, yet useless and vain in the end, a reminder of another pointless way life could have gone, and actually did go, but not before, thankfully, thankfully, I altered my own course wide, wide, wide from you, and got myself the hell out of your wrongful way.

  It puts me in mind of an instructive moment when I was a girl. There was a boy who was a runner, whose mother wanted terribly for him to win the races. Every morning we saw him jogging in his medical shorts through our neighborhood, a tall boy with a father’s portion of hair on his arms. While we girls were hidden in greatcoats, our scarves wired around us and hats stoppered on our heads, foolish lunches handed over that we would later trade for candy, this boy was steaming with fog as he ran down our streets, just about on pace with the cautious little cars that boxed us up to school. But all of the boy’s training didn’t put him ahead, because there was inevitably some other boy in another town who could run faster, and did, repeatedly, in race after race. Our boy was not a winner, and his huge desire to win only seemed to embarrass everybody, because his confidence in himself was so inaccurate.

  Then, revelation, his mother decided to handicap his training so that during races he would have more power. The first handicap was an oxygen tank that limited his breath. Come race time, having shucked his gear, he was not only pounds lighter but it was as if he had a sudden third lung, a power boost akin to cutting gills into his ribs. After that, he ran like an escaped lung patient, the tank on his back bobbing like an oversized coffee thermos.

  He was faster, but still not enough.

  Next, she hooked a cart to her boy, had him run like a mule carrying fruit to market. Except instead of fruit there was a man in the back of that cart who did things to impede the boy’s progress.

  Things?

  He heckled him. He pulled on his “reins.” Objects were tossed in his path. There was some occasional tackling.

  The cart, too, failed to improve his performance, though it certainly complicated it and introduced new ways for him to thrive. Had there been a cart-pulling race, our boy would have taken first place. He could run under duress. If there was ever a war, for instance. Et cetera.

  Next, she abandoned constraining her son’s body and took him off the roads entirely. She went in for visualization, had him picturing stuff that hadn’t happened, to prepare his body for when it would. He was entirely on blocks, stretching out his brain. Our boy stopped running down our streets and we no longer saw him, except when he was a normal citizen in the classroom, plain and powerless. I remember how disappointed I felt watching him do math. I refused to accept him as a citizen, so dull in his school uniform. Someone said that each day before and after school he sat in a “running room” his mother had designed, thinking about running. I pictured his brain fat with thought, his scalp pale, his drumstick calves pulsing with unbidden twitches.

  The result at his next race was surprising. He was serene, calm, sort of floating along, driven not by his legs, it seemed, but by some strange current of energy the air had sent into him alone on the racing course. A mind-powered runner. It was beautiful to watch him. If you squinted, you could almost see thin strings of light feeding his muscles as he ran. He had grown slightly thick at the waist, and his legs had lost their veiny, snakelike strength, yet the other runners looked crippled next to him, awkward and near death, as though he were the only man on a gassed battlefield who could breathe. He brought a lyricism to the art of motion that made everyone at the race nervous to even try to walk. I felt stupid and ashamed and my hips ached. It hurt just to stand there. I creaked and cracked on my sockets as though my bones were made of cookie. The result of the race? His original style proved unwinning. He came in third. Speed seemed irrelevant to his gestural fluidity. He was getting worse.

  His mother was perplexed. She had fetishized his rehearsal, mistakenly believing that
people practice, physically or mentally, for some event in the future. Her solution stunned everyone in the neighborhood, however, and I credit her remedy with solving my own already-erring emotions at the time.

  Here’s what happened: His mother decided to train for him. She had not been helping him directly enough, had made no sacrifice of her own whatsoever. There had always been the two of them, but only he had been training. So this time the boy stayed home and his mother did the running. She was weak and fat and out of shape. She lacked the flashy gear. Mostly, she trained in a long denim baking skirt, her hips jostling like sacks of flour tied around her waist. We could very nearly walk faster than she ran, but we stayed away and watched her circling their block, sometimes all day on weekends, while the boy watched through binoculars from the window, tied down with weights, noting God knows what in a ledger. Sometimes at night, we could still hear her sharp, chipping steps and her breath, as painful and awkward as someone might produce if her head was wrapped in plastic.

  Clearly, she wasn’t showing her boy how to run. So what was she doing? How could her pained, palsied trotting possibly help him get faster? Her running itself would never help him; it was what her running led to—namely, her death one morning several weeks into her training, right in front of the house, the boy positioned at his perch in the window (some would say he was chained there). Her oily heart went cold and lurched too hard. She faltered, brought her hands into her bosom, looked around the street accusingly, as if such pain must have been wished on her from someone nearby, and, as her eyes settled on her watching son and her body settled on the asphalt in front of him, she died.

  I will not patronize you with my interpretation of this little anecdote. We have outsmarted our lives too much as it is. Understanding is overrated. To hell with it. Yet I will again ask you to consider the depth and scope of your fatherly sacrifices with regard to Ben. I will ask you to do some real thinking for a change. I will ask for these things from you, and I will wait by my window, in my room, in the field—all the while conducting my experiments in silence and the final shedding of my feelings—I will wait for some sign from you that you have heard and are ready to comply, to participate, to finally fulfill your real role as a father to Ben, to ascend, however much it will harm your physical self. I will ask you to do these things. Then I will no longer ask you.

  We must always be prepared to admit when a theory is merely lyrical, but fucked in practice. Today it is clear to all of us that the Black Room and the Wind Quota were fine ideas when we first blueprinted Ben’s development narrative—in those days when having a child was like writing about something that hadn’t happened yet—but now we must concede that Ben does not even resist his daily wind-ambush baths down at the learning pond. He simply allows himself to blow wherever the machine fans carry him, and I suspect that any benefits of this disruption—the technical elements of surviving a weather ambush, for instance—are lost on him. He knowingly walks into the collision every day, having learned nothing, apparently, from the successive regulated wind attacks we designed to occur like an invisible sunset, one made of air, which, according to you, took you and knocked you down and reset you for the next day, breathless and hungry for something new to happen.

  It’s as though he walks into the same dark alley night after night, even though he knows a man with a knife awaits him. Possibly Ben subscribes to a statistic that asserts perfectly awful events cannot recur with such precision day after day. He cannot believe that a calamity can repeat from the same coordinates, as though every house and every yard and every father can only produce one disaster, and the disaster, once discharged, cannot return to where it was stored. He is not learning from his injuries. It’s the old French idea that Father never strikes twice. I forget who said it, but it’s a pretty notion, if only it were true. It certainly isn’t true about his father.

  Let’s have some evidence: If you look at Ben’s films, particularly the behavior footage of the wind ambush, you’ll see that Ben is just a boy who apparently believes that every morning he will be swept from his feet by the wind and slammed into the barn or the silo or the now-crumbling lip of the well, after which he must brush himself off and be on his way, limping and possibly bleeding, but grinning, as if to deny his attackers the pleasure of seeing his pain (although the grin has never been proven to be anything more than acute facial discomfort, a gestural insecurity that the face adopts when other gestures are not forthcoming).

  Aside from simply wishing Ben were smarter (which only means I would like to feel more intimidated, surprised, or baffled by him), one must observe that he certainly is no more kite-like or nimble in the wind than he ever was, if such a talent is even possible or useful or interesting, or even a talent at all.

  In the end, Ben has fewer maneuvers than a stone. Your idea of a “Kite Boy” was once provocative, in the perfectly harmless way that ideas are: potent and fascinating and useless. To be fair, there was a time when we all wanted to envision Ben somehow immune to what made the rest of us so “miserable,” before we understood how sadness was dosed over our household in a systematic, midwestern, medicinal wind, emotions carried in on the unstoppable weather: a relentless blowing, blowing, blowing, wherever we went, a skin-piercing wind that made the inside of our bodies so distractingly loud and cold and raw, no matter what clothes we wore and what walls we erected in the field to block it, despite the calisthenics we devised to alter how our bodies met or skirted the air. Before we windproofed our lives with special birds and thick trees and houses built just so, when even deep in our beds there was this inevitable final voiding of privacy, from a nature that was so jealous of the objects inside it that it could do nothing but eavesdrop all the time, sending wind on reconnaissance inside every porous body to snoop around, dispatching the air as a final spy to ensure that absolutely nothing, nothing, nothing would occur without its notice.

  It was thus easy to dream of fashioning a boy who would evolve beyond this vulnerability to such meddling, hard air. An immunity we longed for, if not for ourselves, then for our little person. He would be shielded. What else was evolution for but to correct the deepest miseries of a person, and shouldn’t Person Rearing in America simply accelerate our mastery over the Sorrows from the Outside, so that people might live in secret, be less noticed, more covert, possibly untraceable? Did God not ask Jesus to be new and unknown, to crawl through water, to move his hands in front of his enemies’ mouths so their language would be rendered babble? Did Jesus not stitch his own mouth after filling it with cloth, rendering his sermon muffled and anguished? Did not this cloth, and others like it, soaked in the oldest language, become holy, so we could swab ourselves with his word, wash our heads in sermon?

  Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. But Ben is simply going to be killed, and this is not an interesting-enough way to die.

  When he emerges each Tuesday from the Black Room, it seems that not only speech but also written language alarm him and cause his chest to become flushed, welts blooming on his body as though he were boiling on the inside, his skin poured over him as if it were glue, to hide the real person inside. You’ll say that it is the women’s speech his body is rejecting, that he has developed a listener’s rash to the mouth allergens spewed out when we open up our heads to speak. Go ahead and say it. I know your argument by heart. I know you by heart. The things you say are just symptoms of your corrupted mouth, your distorted palate. But each Tuesday evening, Ben is submitted to my Motherhood Messages, on cassette tape, at ample volume. And although we can’t judge by his emotions, which I understand to be decoys meant to put me off my guard and compel me to repeat the mistakes of Persons That Have Died™, who once indulged in The Having of Emotions, and thus digressed their entire lives into indulgent and self-congratulatory reflection, pursuing Rewards of Insight and Rewards of the Mouth, I have observed Ben to soften at his own mouth as he curls his pajama-clad body around the tape machine in the Affection Room. His breathing goes slow, and his lips become moist and slack be
fore he falls asleep.

  The small wet mouth is an interesting symptom in child rearing. When it is exhibited, it is the only time I am almost tempted to touch him. I avoid the booth at such times. I wring my cloth until the feeling passes. I do my stretches. Possibly a bit of duct tape over the area would discourage my impulse. Yet that would clog his language apparatus, and it is on Ben’s language apparatus that we are pinning most of our hope, looking for unprecedented utterances. New words, old words said newly, nonwords, sounds. Maybe something else. It’s a big hole there. Anything could come out of it.

  Hear me out. If we are to have a person between us, we should have a full-sized one with a fully functioning mouth, an enlarged and intricately structured palate, a cavity that will accommodate as well as generate the messages that will command the citizens of the town and elsewhere. We require a boy who will come to use the Ohio language like the other alleged children in the neighborhood (I absolutely refuse to comment, but every word in that entire phrase should be in quotes, italicized, underlined, asterisked, and, if that fails to send up a warning flag, fucking burnt to the ground). Even if the things Ben comes to say do not subscribe to our traditions of sense, even if he turns out to be a shouter and complainer.

  Or, or, or. Using words in other popular ways, as we have observed from him all too many times:

  Breaking open his own mouth with foreign languages (the Ambassador).

  Redescribing basic household events in terms of his own discomfort (the Patient).

  Bemoaning his exclusion from events that occurred before he was born or while he was asleep or otherwise incapacitated (the Anachronist).