by Lee Upton
Jacob. He deserved better. Even before her first operation Iris was never accustomed to her own body, never entirely comfortable with it. Passing her reflection in store windows and not recognizing who she was or else despising what she saw. And she and Jacob—never touching anymore. What was the problem? She could not imagine what Jacob saw when he saw her body now, or she could imagine, and did not want to forgive her body.
If it would make a difference, Iris was thinking, she would punish her body for being weak, for making her breathless, for surprising her with failure, for establishing an agenda of its own—for being too slow and for being full of pain and etched with scars. For shattering and then shattering again. For never giving her a child.
“It’s part of the act,” Amy whispered. She told the twins it was time to leave, Aunt Iris is looking tired.
To her sister Amy whispered, “I thought it would be—cuter? Fire-swallowers. A bearded woman. Fat Lady. Cuddly types. Old-fashioned. Like a drawing on a bag of cough drops. I’m stupid. I’ve scarred the boys for life. Stupid me.”
“Gator Woman,” Iris said, making herself laugh until Amy laughed too.
At Applebee’s one of the twins shoved his head at his brother. Iris couldn’t even tell which twin it was. Seated, they were the same height.
“You hate my hair, don’t you,” Amy said.
“No—I just noticed how long it is,” Iris said. “It’s gorgeous.”
“You think it looks funny.”
“I didn’t say that. It just—it looked like you must be hot when we were outside. I couldn’t stand long hair in this heat. Your hair looks really nice. You always look nice. Great. You always look great.”
A grimace crossed Amy’s face before she said, “I should just chop it all off. Like yours.”
The boys’ lemonade arrived. Crushed strawberries lined the glasses. “Hairy livers,” one of the twins said. The other twin pulled the straw from his drink and dribbled pink liquid over his napkin.
Amy was talking: “There’s a woman I work with—you don’t know her—she’s pregnant and she’s forty-three.”
Translation: there’s still time for you, Iris.
And then Amy went on, “We shouldn’t have come. I’m really sorry. Stupid. I’m so stupid. You’re sick and I’ve made you sicker.”
On the drive back the boys wrestled and got their seat belts tangled. Keeping one hand on the steering wheel, Amy twisted around and shouted so loudly that Iris turned too and cried out to the boys, No, and then, Stop it! She swatted at their thrashing legs. The twins stared, their eyes goggling.
Iris could have slapped their faces. She could have bent over the seat and clobbered both of them. Amy might have plowed into the car right in front of them when she turned to scream at the boys before Iris started in on them. What was wrong with the twins—so rowdy and loud—and not so very young that they shouldn’t know better. A three-year-old would know better. Iris felt the way she did years ago when a group of kids on the bus picked on her little sister. Except now she wanted to swat Amy’s own children.
Her forehead was hot. Poor Amy, she thought, I can’t take care of you anymore.
She wouldn’t let Amy or the boys into the house. Amy nodded, her eyes darkening, holding back tears. Repeatedly Iris assured her sister she was fine—she just had things to do before Jacob got home.
Iris lay on the couch. The living room was cool from the air conditioning. She pulled a blanket over her legs. She hoped she could make herself rest before Jacob got home. Try to be refreshed enough to be a good listener. She could give him that much, at any rate. They could talk. She could tell him about her day and hear about his.
From where she was lying, Kippers’ rubber bone was visible under an armchair. Iris and Jacob had given up the dog—temporarily, supposedly, until Iris recovered. They both knew better. Jacob delivered the collie to one of his colleagues who had children. She and Jacob would never get Kippers back. The idea was idiotic to begin with. Kippers would be a loaner dog—to see if the colleague’s kids could be responsible for an animal before they got one of their own permanently. The real reason the dog was gone: Kippers kept jumping on Iris. The longer her recovery was taking, the more anxious Kippers had become, tripping her on her way into the kitchen, hurling his paws against her chest. Jacob was working such long hours that he was dead tired when he got home and didn’t feel like walking the dog. In other words, they’d come to the point where even a dog was too much.
The entire house was too much—the rubber bone looked furred with dust. When Iris and Amy were girls their mother made them get up before eight on Saturday mornings to help clean the house, top to bottom. How Iris hated it. She wound up doing the dusting for Amy who always cried long enough to escape the ordeal. The experience had bred into Iris conflicting emotions—a distaste for housework and a heightened attentiveness to disorder. These days just putting dishes into the dishwasher got her panting with exhaustion.
As if from a distant planet the phone rang. It must be Jacob. He would be the only one likely to call at this time—if he was going to be late getting home. He must have taken the first-floor phone out of its charger and forgotten it on the second floor.
She threw back the blanket and headed up. It felt like there were several more steps on the stairs than she remembered. Maybe it was an illusion, but telephones did sound different if something was urgent. By the time she got to the dresser and picked up the phone no one responded to her breathless hello. The phone felt cold in her hand. She was tempted to lie on the bed, but she wanted to be in the living room—to come immediately to Jacob when he let himself into the house. She made her way downstairs, leaning into the banister.
She lay on the couch again and drew the blanket over her legs. And now she couldn’t sleep.
The sensation started: an electric wire under her lungs. Every time she breathed she felt sliced. Like a diabolical force from outside herself, like some crazy stranger dipping a hot electric wire into her chest. After an eternity the torture passed, but by then the pain had worn her out.
Soon a breeze lifted strands of her hair from around her forehead, fronds of hair shifting with the breeze. She could feel herself climb a hill, her legs wet from the grass, her dress tissuey with moisture.
She was climbing higher and higher. She wasn’t even aware of her breathing. How easy it was. Her feet didn’t hit against gravel or slide. There was no pain in her legs, no strain. Rain streamed around her—like no rain she had ever experienced. The wetness was soft, and then her skin was being gently pulled and folded back. She was pushing her face into a warm towel that appeared out of nowhere, and then the towel fell away to nothing. The lids of her eyes closed, and yet she could still see.
The blanket had fallen from the couch.
As she emerged from that space between dream and waking, Iris managed with great care to shift her weight and rest her right hand above her waist. She could feel the warmth of her palm through her blouse, the consoling warmth.
Relief flooded her, relief to be lying on the couch, alive and no longer in pain, relief to be awake and warmed by the balm of her dream, so much relief that—although she fought against self-pity often—she let herself pity herself. And her body. We’re more than our bodies, aren’t we? But if we’re more than our bodies, then aren’t our bodies defenseless against us?
What if she had always been wrong about everything? What if she should ask her body for forgiveness?
How much a body bears. Her body that deserved to be protected. Her body that was innocent, had always been innocent. She thought then of her husband’s body. His lonely body. His faithful, lonely body that must miss her body. Her own faithful, lonely body. And in her gratitude she at last endured a stinging truth, as if she were newly aware of and repentant for a crime she never meant to commit, had been helpless to commit. She wept for how she had kept two lovers apart.
My Temple
The retrospective exhibition was in honor of forty y
ears of my father’s documentary photography, in tribute to the breadth and seriousness of his interests. Some of those in attendance were the same people I had met at his funeral. We were now celebrating what the exhibition catalogue called “a life dedicated to an art of consequence.”
A window behind us was open—the heat was bad—and early evening gusts sent napkins fluttering on the table against the wine glasses. After a while I was ignored, and grateful to be able to travel the room and look at my father’s photographs at my own pace.
I was staring at a sequence in a corner of the gallery when I saw it: my temple. It had to be my temple, although just a corner of it was visible. There were the same pink, winding staircases and, in the foreground, the same pool that I had seen all those years ago. The background was fuzzy, but clear enough—I too find it hard to believe, but it is true—and there you can see a woman leading a child by the hand, and I am that child.
There I am, walking toward the pool, my hand held by that woman, although at first it appears that two children are holding hands and walking together until you look closely. And in the foreground: the pool that held both my father’s and my attention.
In the photograph nothing at all appears on the surface of the pool but, horrifically, piles of children’s sandals.
I remember the temple with such clarity because that afternoon I lost my father. It was while searching the grounds for him that I came across a long line of flowering bushes, like a tunnel of bushes. When I gave up trying to find my father I returned there and crawled under the branches, breathing in drifts of pollen that smelled like nutmeg. Around me, white and yellow trumpet-shaped blossoms hung, and underneath my bare feet the ground was as smooth and cool as talcum powder. Through the branches I could see if my father came near, while I imagined I was invisible otherwise.
From my hiding place I watched a man and a girl in the distance, most likely his daughter. The girl walked behind her father, although the two of them appeared connected, as if roped. Every few feet the man turned to make sure his daughter was there. Watching them, I was sick with envy, although I wanted to call what I was experiencing a word that I respected: heartache. My father’s—and my own—experiences convinced me that I didn’t deserve to complain of envy, given the nature of the sufferings we witnessed everywhere we traveled.
Only a week earlier I had heard the word heartache when a British woman applied the term over dinner to how much she missed her children, and it was a word that made sense to me. It seemed like a medical condition; I had heartache, as if there was a space where my heart should be and that space ached. When I was bored after trips and came home to my dolls I peered into their arm sockets or the creases at their necks and envied how clean and simple their bodies were. Often I wished that human bodies were like that.
Right after the daughter and her father passed out of sight, scratching noises flittered inside the branches around me. The scratching grew frantic. Whole branches thrashed as if an animal was trapped and fighting to get out. In panic I scrambled to the opening through which I had crawled. It was then that I heard my mother’s voice.
I saw the woman’s flowered dress first, flowing over her knees. The woman pulled me up by my arm. When I stood I saw that her face was broad and bunched with gray knots. She had my mother’s voice, even something like her intonation. But she spoke in a language I didn’t know. Nevertheless, it was clear she was scolding me.
By then, my mother had been dead for almost two years.
A small crowd gathered around us. The men wore clothing like my father’s—dark pants and short-sleeved shirts that breathed in the moist heat. The women were swathed in long dresses like silky banners that shook in the breeze. It was as if the men were the background from which the women emerged like brilliant watery flowers.
The woman scolding me was hardly taller than I was, although the power rolling off her was immense. She pressed her face to mine without looking into my eyes. She smelled like old onions, and vaguely like an Australian woman my father and I had met at a hotel that month. I twisted in every direction to find my father.
Soon the woman and I were passing into the bright sun, and then into shadow. I was passive, limply accepting the disorienting whims of an adult as inevitable. I had a habit of taking off my sandals and running barefoot no matter how many times my father warned me to do otherwise. Soon my feet started to hurt. None of the people followed us. Now it occurs to me to wonder if she had lied to them, saying I was her child or that she was in charge of me.
When at last the woman let my arm go, we were at a temple. The walls glowed in the late afternoon light, pink staircases curling on the outside walls. I was spun around and pushed forward. The woman’s breath beat against the back of my head. Then, just beyond the tips of my feet, the temple pool flickered. As I stared harder, shadows crawled in the pool. Miniature breastplates that tiny soldiers might wear were moving just past my feet.
I wondered if I was dreaming, if I was really seeing what was there. The clouds moved off the sun and then I thought I understood. I was looking into a pool of turtles. The pool was filled with turtles, turtles stacked upon turtles, shining as if polished. And below them there had to be more turtles upon which those turtles crawled. So many turtles squirmed in the pool that it was impossible to see where one turtle began and another ended. Some turtles, like horseshoe crabs on the beach, were upside down and looked blown out from inside.
The woman pushed at my shoulder, shooing me forward. The pool turned black and white like pixels. I knew that I could fall forward and never stop. I pressed my feet hard into the earth. I stiffened, holding my ground.
It must have been a long time before my blouse moved softly on my back as if it had been pinched and lifted. There was a breeze, and I knew that, at last, no one was behind me.
That evening the lights from the parking lot shot through the edges of the window shade in our hotel room. My father lay sleeping in a narrow bed against the wall. He had a tendency to whimper in his sleep—my mother used to complain to him about it—and so he kept on the television to cover the sounds he made. The walls flickered as if we were in an aquarium.
From far below on the walkway a radio jeered. I remember not being able to sleep and feeling I didn’t deserve to sleep. Who was I to complain? Nothing had happened to me, really. And yet I felt that my life had been changed.
Never once did I tell my father about the woman who took me away. Somehow I thought he knew and approved.
At the reception for my father I endured more strangers’ curiosity as well as the kindness and sympathy of some well-meaning acquaintances. And then, after everyone but the curator left, I asked to be alone with my father’s photographs. The curator allowed me the privilege with such courtesy that my eyes stung.
For a long time I studied the final image in the sequence. There was so much horror in the world, why would my father have set up his own tableau? Or was I the one who misremembered everything? Never did I see children’s sandals in the pool. Did my father see the truth whereas my imagination betrayed me, or protected me?
As you must already know, I’m incapable of recording truth as my father did. To capture a child’s face numb from terror. To let the shrubs behind that child fade off into the background while the child’s eyes demand to be looked into.
My father often said that reality was worse than whatever he could capture in a still image. On that afternoon so long ago, had my father been dissatisfied with how little he could find as evidence of a greater truth? Had he planted images upon duplicate images to suggest—to horrify—to illustrate what he knew to be true and to make us imagine what we could not witness? Had he created an art of consequence? Had he faithfully documented a dimension of the truth that would otherwise remain invisible?
I stared into the photograph of the temple pool, knowing what I might find among those children’s sandals—given that the transformation would have been so easy for him, so convenient for him. How could my fat
her be guilty of manipulating both the visible and the invisible worlds?
I told myself again that my own life was slight and safe compared to anything my father had witnessed. Whatever I discovered about the photograph, it would not change the fact that my father had created an art of consequence.
Still, I looked at the temple pool until my heart jolted as if it had been stuck for years. Could I even remember my sandals? Didn’t they resemble any child’s sandals? They were ordinary, weren’t they? Brown and scuffed and ripped near where the heels rub and worn away there into small pale circles. Why should my sandals be in the temple pool?
And yet, of course—of course they were.
Beyond The Yellow Wallpaper
It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer.
—The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman
How we exhausted her! Night after night, the woman lay awake. We peered hard into the pupils of her eyes. We clung to one another and breathed her breath. We stirred when she stirred. We looked into her wide-open eyes until at last our reflection wasn’t returned to us and we saw.
Given our past experiences, we had so little hope for the woman. She was nervous, complaining (fruitlessly), self-absorbed, napping at all hours, waking to fretfully mention a baby. We couldn’t understand why she slept so much. But sleep was, admittedly, an effect we often had on occupants of the room.
And then there was her husband. A physician and amateur scientist, he studied pond scum under a microscope, spied on the jumpy little planets and crooked hairs squeaking: life pressing into new constellations, into colonies of jittery beads (as if rain falls inside rain itself!), into tiny nests and twigs, looped as if roped, or as if a bird’s nest were blown apart in a storm.
You would think such visions would make him humble, would make him see where others saw nothing.