Study in Perfect

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by Sarah Gorham


  when my sister began asking her desperate questions.

  I called our older sister Isabel

  and gave her hazel eyes and long blonde hair.

  I had her run away to California

  where she took drugs and made hippie jewelry.

  Before I knew it, she’d moved to Santa Fe

  and opened a shop. She sent a postcard

  every year or so, but she’d stopped calling.

  I can still see my younger sister staring at me,

  her eyes widening with desolation

  then filling with tears. I can still remember

  how thrilled and horrified I was

  that something I’d just made up

  had that kind of power, and I can just feel

  the blowdart of remorse stabbing me in the heart

  as I rushed to tell her none of it was true.

  But it was too late. Our other sister

  had already taken shape, and we could not

  call her back from her life far away

  or tell her how badly we missed her.

  The first false sentence the speaker recalls in this poem—the pronouncement and vague shape of another sister—is the easiest. But a lie is seldom solitary; it begs another and another, until an imaginary skeleton is built, bone by bone, muscle and flesh, a sister-hologram with hobbies, home, hair. The greater the detail, the less likely she will crumble. The longer her history, the greater the strain, until he can’t even make the truth believable and must suffer “the blowdart of remorse.”

  Initially, the speaker lies to get what he wants. Perhaps it began with a whim. Or big-brother meanness, like the homemade blowdart. Perhaps indeed the speaker was “toying with loss,” or probing “the ache of imaginary wounds.” Whatever the motivation, the lie flatters the liar. Like Joni Mitchell’s makeup denial or the frigate bird’s magnificent feathers, the lie allows him “that kind of power.”

  True consciousness, the recognition of self, separated from world, occurs at around age seven, the age at which a child also begins to lie. Teenagers are notorious liars. They lie about their whereabouts, drugs and alcohol, school attendance, grades, boyfriends, sex, mostly to avoid punishment from various authority figures. But they lie to their friends as well, boosting their intelligence, sexual experience, cool quotient. The high social pressure of adolescence makes them desperate for any and every kind of “spell.” It is often a way of being. Bonnie once told her teacher she had been abused and now her parents were divorcing. She noticed how victims were getting all the attention, their status clearly elevated to the point of celebrity. Again, we were pulled into the Sister’s office as the first step in a kind of intervention. We could see the open training manual on her desk, as well as a Xeroxed list of professional counselors.

  Perhaps lying follows the natural curve of a child’s independence—my lie makes me NOT YOU. My lie makes me ME. Human beings are not ants who, lifelong, remain committed to their basic job description. We have the ability to depart from communal dependence. The lie, whether to avoid or get something, is the primitive beginning of the effort to distinguish oneself.

  Like most young people, I experimented with a variety of personas, from Amazonian firefighter to urban botanist to country schoolteacher. Only the poet stuck, but even then, in order to write poems, I faked masculinity. I dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt, sat at a table swept clean of comforting objects. Then I imagined how a guy would see the mule grazing in my front yard, the piles of rotten Osage oranges, dirt road winding out to our mailbox, and grackles decimating the few tomatoes left in our garden. I feigned confidence. My voice deepened and I began to write, using description as a way in.

  Back then, this maleness was where most of the published works came from, where the good ideas lived, or so it seemed. My poems had almost nothing to do with my true life; they were chill, disembodied fabrications. But I believed in them, and they were successful, published in prestigious literary magazines.

  Not long after, I married and had a baby—a colicky no-sleeper whose very existence squashed my conceit like an egg carton. Pretend to be a man, when your entire body is in service to a famished child, a female at her functional peak? After three years of this, I hardly recognized the person who had written my poems. It was absurd, even impossible to lie, to play the cowboy again and pick up where I left off. I began a slow crawl back to some semblance of honesty in my work, and then to publish these poems at the level I had before. Now I partition off my identity, using my maiden or “professional” name for poems and essays, my married name for church newsletters and legal documents, and a little bit of both for my work in publishing. This fits right in with shifting notions of the self. We are made of many selves, not just one. Over a lifetime, we float between honesty and fabrication, between conformity—our dependence on others—and the urge to be separate from them. Maybe the natural truth is dependence and the denial of it necessary for us to accomplish anything beyond basic survival.

  In Harrison’s poem the speaker lies to his sister, his incentive a whim or cruelty or the need to appear larger than life, like the magnificent frigate bird. But what of the poem itself? Is the writer telling the truth? Was there a sister at all, trusting and loyal? If not, what are the writer’s motives in deceiving us? What can we make of this enchantment inside an enchantment, writing that casts a spell on the reader too?

  The con man may employ wit and cleverness in his scam, but his lie remains a poor man’s lie, with close ties to evolutionary pressure. His enchantment is basic and blunt. Freud would place the artist only slightly above the criminal. In his assessment, the artist “desires to win honor, power, wealth, fame, and the love of women.”

  But art is not solely a form of greed and self-aggrandizement. Harrison’s poem, by the nature of its medium, will never bring him more than a few dollars. At best, a successful poem will garner a thousand extra readers, hardly the legions of adoring fans that flock to rock concerts. Doesn’t the artist also: Compose a suite of songs to remember, or reactivate some past music in herself? Paint to safeguard the view from a farmhouse window, visualize a betrayal, pleasure, loss? Write to understand, clarify, generalize, move from the micro to the macro, the personal to the public, like a set of Russian nesting dolls opened in reverse?

  Artists play with reality, whether they manipulate language, paint, or a digital camera. Call it poetic license, embellishment, or outright lying, they are loose in their allegiance to facts. How interesting that the word fact comes from the Latin factum, “to do or make.” It’s the same root for artifice, counterfeit, facade, facsimile. Icarus’s wings did not melt when he defied the warning and flew close to the sun. A princess cannot really feel a pea under dozens of mattresses. Artists prevaricate in order to tell the truth.

  Here’s another poem (mine), rife with deception:

  HOMESICKNESS

  On another continent, mother circles the farmhouse.

  She steams gnocchi, tosses them in butter.

  Mother and daughter have matching teeth, like a zipper.

  If daughter flies home she’ll lose eight hours. If her car were

  amphibious,

  the loss would be hardly perceptible.

  There’s always the mail. And the cell phone, like a human

  cowbell.

  Especially if you are loved.

  Mother rings her from the bus stop, train station, grocery

  store.

  When it’s time to pay, she says hang on. The bus pulls up,

  gotta go, so long!

  Emotion: from the Latin emovere—to move away, “in

  transport.”

  How would a jet land in the country, gravel roads

  and all those electric fences?

  She opens her mail, a blue mountain of Mit Luftpost, Par

  Avion.

  Genes are a kind of blue letter from a mother

  to her daughter: Good news, bad news.

  What is a mother but a to
oth’s way of producing another

  tooth?

  My mother never lived in a farmhouse; she was raised in suburban Milwaukee. My mother and I do not have matching teeth. The zipper came first as an image of connection/disconnection; our teeth match only in the sense that all teeth match, although I had braces and she did not. It is not true my mother rings me on the fly, in fact, cell phones did not exist during her lifetime. “What is a mother,” I conclude, “but a tooth’s way of producing another tooth?” This is a rather cold statement stumbled on by fusing genetic “blue letters” and those matching teeth—a drastic reduction of a mother’s role, true to the poem, true perhaps of some mothers, but definitely not true of mine.

  Asked about the origins of poetry, Nabokov responded, “When a cave boy came running back to the cave, through the tall grass, shouting as he ran, ‘Wolf, wolf,’ and there was no wolf, his baboonlike parents, great sticklers for the truth, gave him a hiding, no doubt, but poetry had been born—the tall story had been born in the tall grass.” Tall tales, yarns, fish stories—there are many names for this sort of lie. But in most cases, the motives are similar: to entertain, yes, but also to get at a truth the facts won’t allow. Perhaps lying has, by its narrow definition, been given a bad name. Maybe Ulysses is an elaborate lie, originating on the same ground as the Mafia don denying the assassination of an entire family. The difference is complexity and, of course, motivation. The Mafioso’s lie is simple survival. The lying artist hints at a deeper definition of self and a greater organization of the world. My lie to the nun was pure greed and selfish desire.

  Sister Paulette wore an indigo habit of the modern style, skirt just below the knee, sensible shoes. She was sturdy and moved nimbly for someone her age. I couldn’t help but notice she’d sprung for the more expensive graduated lenses for her wire-rimmed glasses. After years spent absorbing and dodging various crises, demands, and fibs, she was a solid combination of common sense, spiritual discipline, and perhaps the slightest hint of vanity.

  Or, there were no graduated lenses, no sensible shoes, indeed, no Paulette or Catholic school. Like Harrison, I have designed a sister-hologram with language and imagination, instead of bone and blood—all inventions to dramatize the story, to underscore the flagrancy of a lie and its uncomfortable consequences. Perhaps Bonnie went to a huge public school with an overworked staff and a multitude of misbehaving students. Perhaps we picked her up as usual on Thursday and hit the road early the next morning. Her absence on Friday would hardly have been noticed. It doesn’t really matter. I’m almost not sure myself after all these years—a lifetime of truths, lies, truths that turned out to be lies, lies that turned out to be true. It’s all part of the effort to explain what I’m doing here, on earth.

  PERFECT

  Water

  A tricolored flag from west harbor to east dock. Near stripe of amber, middle aquamarine, finally black with touches of evergreen. So clear, so spotless this early in the season, too cold for human swimming. Presumably fished out, though every day a man wades out to seduce a smallmouth bass.

  A dinghy named Pesto zigzags through the water. Zig. Zag. The rower can’t see behind, where she is going. She steers toward Anderson’s buoy, avoids the deep and also the shallow where stones would gouge into the boat. Her oars give warning—clank, scrape, jerk—instead of the smooth glide forward. She marks her progress against the shore, past boat docks, sagging green cabins, and the ancient Trollhaugen guesthouse.

  She’s not even a little wet but feels like she’s taking a giant bath of peridots, a gemwater rinse from scalp to toe. Her boat leaves a meandering wake of darker emerald trimmed with foam. The oars send off tiny whirlpools on both sides. Sometimes she stops to watch their retreat, how they chase each other, then flatten, barely five feet out, and blend into the current. The sound is hushed and delicious and makes her mouth water. It’s tempting to take a drink, so she lowers her hand, holds it under till her fingers go numb.

  Next year, she’ll arrive later in the summer when the water’s temperate, better for swimming, but laced with bits of algae that slither across her ankles.

  So it goes with perfect: its anchor drifts, catches again in time, some other immaculate place.

  Marking Time in Door County

  I’m sitting on the pier, first morning of our ten-day vacation. Green Bay is in party mode. Whitecaps collide and dance from crisscrossing wakes. Pontoon boats putter along, their riders squawking like chicks in aluminum baskets. I breathe in the odor of juniper, mown grass, beer, and yes, alewives, a dozen of them, curled and bloated inside the marina. A storm’s on its way, but sky-wise, there’s only a distant smudge of cloud over Horseshoe Island. Inside the house the girls are waking up—Laura at the fridge, Bonnie rummaging for her hairbrush, best friend Kristin humming in the shower. A fly finds its way to the honey at the bottom of my teacup.

  Ten thousand such mornings have passed since my grandparents purchased a house called Gray Logs, with a lean-to kitchen and 150 feet of waterfront in Ephraim, Wisconsin. In 1947 the village held a few rustic hotels, an ice-cream shop, and Anderson’s dock with its graffiti-clogged barn. American Indians, the French, and Norwegians were among Ephraim’s early visitors. We are the latest, one of fourteen third- and fourth-generation families who now share this property with its Scandinavian log buildings, its hemlocks and swamp, its flocks of mallards and gulls. We come from all over the country—Maryland, Kentucky, Idaho, California, and New York—to ground more constant and welcoming than the fourteen places we call home.

  The approach from Highway 42 winds through Egg Harbor, Fish Creek, Ephraim, and finally, to Gray Logs, at the bottom of a deeply shadowed driveway. Then the sky opens out and water fills in the spaces. We can see Horseshoe Island, Eagle Bluff, and remarkably, Three Sisters Islands, several miles away over swells and sails. No streetlights or lane markers here. And the trees are not the kind I worry about in my own backyard, yellowing and sparse. They are grand, gracious ladies in evergreen dresses; they are here to soothe, to whisper reassurances. Stendhal defined beauty as “the promise of happiness.” I walk out onto the rickety pier and let the wind with its odor of grass and Green Bay hit me from all sides. It’s possible when this idea occurred to him, Stendhal was standing in just such a place.

  My grandparents are here too, invisible comfort, solicitous ghosts. One waving from the kitchen, the other still in bed with her tray of coffee and toast. They traveled the world but always returned, for there was no place they found lovelier than Gray Logs. My husband and I sleep in their room, shower in their once off-limits-to-kids bathroom. Though decades have passed since they died, it feels a little bit like trespassing. The girls have staked out the upstairs. We make short shrift of unpacking, and with bathing suits under our shorts and water shoes in hand, the celebration begins.

  No swimming for me, not just yet. I have a ritual I must attend to on every visit. I say hello to the house by kissing the smooth gray banister, by shedding my shoes and running my toes over the flagstones, by opening the linen closet and counting the blue-and-white-striped towels.

  I’m expressing my thanks for safe arrival. Not just this one in 2002, but all my arrivals. Here on the braided living room rug, center of the house, where everything is stored, no whisper or footstep is excluded. I listen, breathe deeply, sniff for the raucous poker games on the folding card table, red and blue plastic chips careening about like unsure bicycles, Bicycle cards leaping when John or Chuck or Nan slam down a faux-furious fist. The sweep of our grandfather’s terrycloth robe, his tray of perfect over-easies and sausage. And my father vexing the floor-boards with early morning back stretches and leg lifts, creaking inside the body and out. I touch the maroon slip-covered sofa. Down into the fibers I go like a medical detective, uncovering wet towels, shed bathing suits, the crumpled wrappers of great-grandfather’s red anise, which he used to lure us little ones closer until we hated the candies, even as adults. He was too old and his forehead too shiny. Between the pol
ished floor planks went 221 baby fingers picking up lost cinnamon imperials. I inhale the dander from Scotties and Westies, bassets, pointers, and mutts. Thirty-nine years of no-see-ums, yellow jackets, and dust.

  I say hello to the house and then I’m ready for a swim, one of many this August, with its record heat. The water level rises and falls, depending on snowfall and conditions north in Lake Superior. We’ve seen the rocky beach grow by a hundred feet or, worse, waves lap at the solarium windows. There was talk then of moving the house back, but my grandmother, with her second sight, was adamant—wait, she said, it will recede. Now we slip and stumble over the rocks to reach deep water, that creamy green-black essence like liquid malachite.

  I wonder if the experience of time varies, like metabolism, in relation to a creature’s size. A second may be long in the life of the horsefly, buzzing around my head, affecting everything from the rate of a vibration to holding that exact angle as it approaches my naked stretch of blood-delicious skin. For humans there is infinite variability: dashing-dream-and-movie time, suffering-pain-bored-ugly-chore time, when we are aware of every second ticking. Long ago, the Chinese maintained two separate official calendars, one for the peasant, which followed the seasons, and one for the scribe, a pure number system. At home we are scribes, rousing in the dark to the numeral 6 and a sound like a security breach. But here we are peasants relishing food, water, and blankets under the skies. We have unplugged the digital clocks. The tarnished mantel clock chimes capriciously. Time to rise when the sun reaches the Swedish painted bed. Time to swim when it soaks the glassed-in porch and the breezeway is thick and still. Time for dinner when “counter-twilight,” a reflection of the sunset in rust and purple, appears in the east. We sit happily in one minute, two, three, as the earth rotates and colors drain from the sky.

  I think of my vacation as a miniature lifespan. During the first wide-eyed days, like the first weeks of a newborn, time is sluggish, even static. The nurturing first breakfast—oatmeal and cream, or pancakes with fresh-picked raspberries—stretches on forever. We wrap our arms around the kids, around each other. There are long, luxurious hours till lunch. We can bike to the park and run to town for batteries. A nap feels like a full night’s sleep. So lapses Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday. The girls have occupied the roof with cushions and towels, their tanning salon. I nibble at my novel.

 

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