The Tao of Humiliation

by Lee Upton

  Before I tried and failed to transfer I sometimes saw him in the distance, walking across the snowy quad.

  I changed my major to demography. The study of populations, rather than individuals. After I withdrew from my professor’s class, I still took pains to sit in the auditorium so that he was in my line of sight at lectures by visiting scholars. He never went to the readings by poets or fiction writers, only the scholars. Often he was with a graduate student who looked enormously proud of herself, although sometimes he was with his wife. It should have been obvious, but it took me a while to put it together that the woman in the photograph wasn’t his wife.

  Even as late as last year when I saw his obituary in the alumni news bulletin I still didn’t know how to think clearly about the man who had been my professor. I knew, of course, what I was supposed to think. But after so many years I still felt the same enormous sadness for him that I began to feel by the time I left college. Have mercy on him, I kept repeating. As if he was the one who had missed the opportunities, as if I had to be the fortunate one.

  Less than a week after I saw the obituary I dreamed that I was leading a tiny man out of a room where he had been held captive for a very long time. The man was blinking and gasping. His hand in mine was moist and trusting.

  As soon as I woke up I thought the man must be my old professor. But then, seconds later, I knew better. It was Keats.

  The Floating Woman

  If I had deliberately caused you pain I would never have forgiven myself. But I would have understood. Do whatever you want to me; it doesn’t matter now—was that what you wanted to tell everyone? Your body that couldn’t defend itself.

  You always said you didn’t understand what made me happy. I’ve come to think that what made me happy was the sensation of expansiveness. That place I went to years and years ago—it’s a housing development now, with a display house like a big dollhouse. The land used to be all woods, owned by a man who kept sheep. As soon as I was there I felt like my soul was stretching out of my body and covering the place. That was so long ago, but I felt that I wasn’t just this little kid anymore but this spirit, this soul that was large and sealed itself over the place—like a Tupperware lid. You’ll laugh at me, but we had Tupperware to think about as a new thing in our house back then. I loved the sound of water passing over pebbles and falling in a lingering way toward the creek where boys made a dam. Once, I was cutting stalks of tiger lilies on the other shore of the creek and my mother was with me, and I thanked the trees, I thanked the sky, I thanked the stream. I did what I did when I was alone, saying my prayers to everything around me until my mother said, “What’s wrong with you—.”

  Darling, that’s a question I never dared to ask you.

  Please know, though, that I’ve felt close to you always, even after you left us. I’ve felt this way most in moments resembling this one, after I plow into the river and turn over on my back and float, and dog-paddle, and float again. I’m resting in the memory of a life where somehow both of us resisted our shame—shame for being so wrong so often and so overly earnest, even you. We were so besotted with Gladys, always planning for her. And now despite our interferences and fretting she has her happiness in Jeff and their little boy. One of the regrets of my life: that you weren’t around for that baby. The trustfulness of small children: you would have wanted to see that again. And the easy forgiveness of that little guy when their silky Labrador knocks him over.

  So many sensations speed through me from a distance . . . Forgive me. Forgive me, everyone. I haven’t forgiven everyone, though, that’s for sure. When my aunt said, “Stop pitying yourself” a week after our baby died . . . Oh, I couldn’t trust her anymore. I know she thought she was helping me, but I never trusted her again after that. It was as if she poured acid on my heart. If you can’t weep when the most terrible thing happens, when can you? My aunt’s dead now and I still feel angry at her. So many times I couldn’t feel any forgiveness for anyone. Until we had Gladys. Once Gladys and I were having one of our front-lawn picnics and she rested her head against my knee and turned and looked up at me—with that little round dimpled baby face of hers—and I thought—Thank you, God, for her. Thank you for everyone I love.

  And there was the time when I learned that my body was my own again, and Dr. Chulamu smiled, and I walked out of his office as if I were on strings and drove to the track at the high school—it was summer, and I was wearing my regular work shoes but it didn’t matter—I just kept running and telling myself I am not dying and I am made of air and I didn’t stop until my knees buckled and I went down and said Thank you, thank you, life, thank you, I’ll live better, and when I got home and walked through the front door you said, “No one and nothing can stop you.”

  And then the time that our daughter was about to get married and you weren’t alive to influence her—the boy was on his way to becoming a monster—and already he wanted to stop her from seeing her friends, and the night before the wedding I couldn’t sleep and suddenly she burst into my bedroom and said, “This cannot continue,” and she and I drove out of town to avoid the more violent people from his family—and for a month Gladys (“Why did you give her such a little old woman’s name?” her groom-not-to-be complained to my face), Gladys stayed with your sister in Washington and I thought, You would be proud of us, you would be proud . . .

  Last night I watched Pal Joey. I misremembered everything. I thought it ended badly but it didn’t.

  Do you remember Bruce, who named his baby Ragnar after Ernest Borgnine in The Vikings? Ragnar throws himself into the wolf pit. But Valhalla waits. Because he dies with his sword. Initially, they thought he’d drowned in the fjord. It’s kind of a toss-up—drown in the fjord or jump into a pit of wolves. Oh, honey.

  And do you remember the Christmas display? Three flaking Wise Men. One rubber baby. A camel. Three sheep. A goat. That outsized Frosty the Snowman. And those lights you put up that ran around the house like a frenetic rash? Everything’s out in the garage at this time of year and I’m afraid to tell you at every time of year—like a sad little migrant camp. And the dentist who used to live next door and complained about our Christmas lights and the music that came out of Frosty and the dentist used his leaf blower so much that you called him Horatio Fucking Leafblower? Do you remember?

  Do you remember when Gladys didn’t get to be the jewel in the parish priest’s feast day crown? I forgot to mend her red jumper, which would have been perfect for the play, the perfect red for the ruby in the parish priest’s crown. Did you know—I don’t know if you remember—do you know that she wore that red jumper for the audition, with worn spots in the corduroy and the strap broken and the chief nun looked at her in that perfect red—the color of open heart surgery—and she turned to the little Vatar girl who happened to be wearing a dark but citrusy orange with tiny polka dots like some kind of thrush disease on a lily, and the nun said that the Vatar girl made a better ruby than Gladys did?

  That was around the time when you were flirting with the Australian woman and I was sick at heart, and then you came back inside the house from examining the sinkhole in the yard and whispered to me that you found a condom on Frosty’s nose—hideous neighborhood kids—and you had scraped the condom off with a stick? The condom must have looked like a little flag of surrender—for a mouse—and after you washed your hands you took Gladys in your arms and told her that you wouldn’t want your daughter parading in red like some South Seas maiden in a hula ceremony before a syphilitic missionary and Gladys, thank God, didn’t even know what you meant but she stopped crying. And that night in bed when you brought up the issue of the Frosty condom again I turned over and said, “So, Frosty’s in love,” and I think that did it for the Australian woman. I mean, would she ever have said that? I could feel the air going right out of your desire for that woman at that very moment. So Frosty’s in love.

  When one is in a bad situation the mind must pause, the mind must relax, and as you always advised me: Just feel
, babe, just concentrate on sensations—let your mind rest and then there’s hope. Never panic. Why couldn’t you have followed your own advice?

  It’s funny how I remember things. The tiny delicate-looking man in the bar in Malaysia—when we were always traveling somewhere after the baby died and before Gladys came along. That man approached us with such friendliness and courtesy. He was wandering around in the bar wearing a brown suit. “How good to see fellow countrymen,” he said. His accent was British. I laughed and told him we weren’t his countrymen. “Ah, so I’m among the formerly colonized,” he said. “Excuse me, but how good to meet you!” And there it was: that elaborate courtesy we liked so much—and ebullience too, a lightness in his nature like that of a man used to meeting new people and being welcomed. We were on our second scotch when some couples arrived and took the next table over—they were British like him—and one of them said, “He’s playing you for drinks.” We looked at our charming new friend. What had we been talking about? His adventures in Kuala Lumpur, I think—and he transformed instantly, cowering, sinking lower at the table. “You here, sponging again,” someone at the next table sneered at him. And for the first time I really saw the brown suit that the man at our table was wearing and how it was frayed at the cuffs and dirty. His jacket was too small and heavy and buttoned up despite the humid weather.

  But you. You ordered the man at our table another drink and said, loudly, “What a gift you’ve got, man, for a story. My wife’s hair is standing on end!”—which was a joke because I was always washing my hair right before bed and when I woke up in the morning my hair had these funny cowlicks. And then we both were laughing, and we made sure to laugh at every joke our new friend told us because, even if he was sponging from us, he was our guest and one of the things we hated most was to see someone made to feel ashamed.

  I know that Wesley is usually up early too and takes the boat out and he’ll see me out here, far out, and he’s made of curiosity . . . Unforgivable of me . . .

  I thought that you would never forgive me for so many of my failings—but then, yes, I learned that you would, because one day after we were married for eleven years I turned to you and said, “You are my happiness,” and while you hated sentimentality you held your tongue and I saw your neck blush and the blush soak up over your cheeks and I thought, Oh, that I can make you feel this way—I had no idea—because we had taken some wrong turns, but there you were, the whole opinionated breadth of you.

  And later, after you weren’t with us anymore, I thought: I will reach you again, dear, on the other shore. I knew you would laugh at me—you didn’t believe that we had a life after this life—and you were certain of it. If you could talk to me now and I could hear you I know what you would say: Think straight, Dorothy. Think. You don’t swim well, so why have you done this? You shouldn’t have been so absent-minded. You have to take account of your limitations. People will think you killed yourself. Don’t give them the pleasure. Gladys will be sickened and crazy and confused. What were you thinking, just getting up in the morning and walking out into the water and flopping over onto your back and floating along despite the sneaky current and telling yourself little stories?

  But you can’t struggle now. Try for shore, dog-paddle in that hilarious way you dog-paddle, and then before you get tired lie on your back and keep on floating. Keep calm. Remember what I told you when you were punishing yourself so long ago. You said, “I can’t help but feel guilty—all the things I haven’t done, all the suffering and sadness I haven’t stopped when I could have stopped it.”

  “Do you think you’re God?” I asked.

  “No,” you said. “I don’t think I’m God. I just feel so guilty for all I haven’t done to help people.”

  “God’s the one who should feel guilty.”

  I’ll say it to you again: God’s the one who should feel guilty. Lie back now. Don’t be afraid. Fear never helped us at all.

  The indignity for Gladys, but she knows me, our Gladys. She has forgiven us, even for giving her such a name. They call her Glad, that’s what her friends call her. And it fits her.

  I think of Gladys when she was hardly more than a baby, maybe a three-and-a-half-year-old, and we were splashing about together in the bathtub and I was a young mother with her balanced in the tub on my knees, and I wasn’t yet grateful for being young, although I was grateful for Gladys. She kept babbling about something and then she cried out in this suddenly mature voice, “Do you think heaven is this nice?”

  Did you teach her to say that? I’ve had my heaven, you used to say—a joke—after a decent meal. Your one bit of hyperbole. You left the other hyperboles to me.

  Even now I want to tell myself that you’re waking up Wesley, my possible rescuer. You’re interceding, bending over Wesley’s face, his wet old mouth, making him wake up and decide it’s a good day for fishing. It will be good for Wesley, thinking he’s saving me.

  It is odd, I suppose, to think that it will be good for you too—a rescue. Given your suffering, given that you thought there was no goodness left. Given that you must have thought you were saving Gladys and me from suffering because of how you suffered and how we would have to endure your suffering. Given that you thought you made the right choice for all of us.

  But you must admit that we barely saved ourselves after you were gone. Admit that I have not had my heaven because of you. That there were times when I nearly ended my own life. Admit that you must face it, face me: what you did to yourself, to life—what you did will go on forever. But admit that I have never let you leave—listen to me talk to you at any time at all. And that somehow I will see your face again and I’ll want to hear your stories. What was death like for you without me? And, laughing, painless, shameless, wrong about everything and free, you’ll tell me.

  The Bottled Mermaid

  I didn’t expect to inherit anything at all from my uncle. Certainly I never would have expected to inherit his house. He had had stepchildren, after all, and although it’s true that he and their mother divorced and she remarried and her subsequent husband adopted her children, I still felt strange that my uncle would give me his house. Guilty too. The stepchildren, however, weren’t forgotten. They had inherited from my uncle the tavern in the lot across from the house.

  No other place lived in my memory like my uncle’s home and the nearby properties—the woods and the creeks and—a forty-minute walk away—the ocean. He was my mother’s brother, and I loved him, but it was his house I remember best. Even before I returned I could describe every room’s wallpaper. And the shelf that was carved to look like its edges were festooned with grapes and grape leaves. And the horsehair chair that always scared me in a delicious way, as if a giant bear had taken up residence in my uncle’s living room. And even the room he kept closed, the windows shuttered, because it was a shrine to my mother. He kept many photographs of her there and lumps of turquoise and tiny sculptures and wooden rosaries she had sent him from her travels with my father.

  For nearly three years after my parents’ death, and starting when I was eight, my uncle took care of me. Then my father’s parents sought custody.

  I have never been so unhappy as when I left my uncle. My grandparents were well-meaning but joyless and judgmental people. Their attempts to mold me only made me unhappier. In my memory I cried for what might have been months. I missed not only my uncle and his house but the plum trees on his lawn and the fields behind the house and the long walk to the ocean, and I missed my freedom, given that I was generally unsupervised while my uncle was busy with the tavern.

  From my uncle I learned many things that were important to me: how to catch and clean a fish and make a campfire in the woods and cook the fish right there; how to find beer bottles on the roadside and turn them in to the tavern and get quarters; how to grow catnip and make catnip tea.

  After my grandparents gained custody I wrote to my uncle but received no letters back. I was never sure at the time that my letters weren’t confiscated
. Then something went wrong. My uncle got into “trouble with the law.” Every year I thought about my life with him less and less.

  I was my uncle’s only living blood relative, and I learned about his death and my inheritance days after my accident. My medical bills from the accident were astonishing. For months I could hardly afford rent. Having the house and a little extra money from the inheritance saved me.

  As for my uncle’s stepchildren: their names were Conor and Glynnis Alberon. During the last summer that I lived with my uncle they had the run of the property. Although Conor must have been my age and Glynnis two years younger, they called my uncle by his last name: Dewey. Conor and Glynnis were beautiful golden beings. I was always hiding my face in a book to protect myself from them. The girl was a tiny ball of anger and need. The two of them came in and out of focus unpredictably: watching me, the boy pained and careful with his sister, both of them with every gesture and every glance taking possession of my world. By then my uncle was falling in love with their mother. They must have known that my world would soon become theirs.

  I discovered a few things about their subsequent lives before I arrived to settle into the house. Glynnis worked at the bakery in the town center and lived with her brother, and Conor had already been bartending at the tavern for nearly a year before my uncle’s death. Conor was a widower, although it seemed strange to call such a young person a widower. His wife had drowned the previous winter, which must have led to all sorts of speculation, given the oddity of a drowning in that season. She was an artist of some sort and her name (she had kept her maiden name) was Anita Ellemenz. After I moved into my uncle’s house I made sure to introduce myself to both Conor and Glynnis when they were pointed out to me by the lawyer who handled the estate. They were sitting at a table at the bakery where Glynnis worked, and the introduction was pretty perfunctory. I couldn’t be sure that they actually remembered me.