by Sarah Gorham
Q2: How do you feel this emotion in your body? Draw anything you wish.
Hundreds of pen scratches were stacked, layered one over the other, the human shape with lines crossing and recrossing every inch of its body. Some strokes spill over the edges too, though they concentrate in several places: palms, radial arteries, and most obviously, the torso—a fat black smudge from lower abdomen to the tip of the skull. Fear lives in the body’s core, taking up light residency in the extremities, where we experience that tingly feeling as an oncoming bus nearly side-swipes us standing at the curb.
The on-call resident flipped back the sheet so he could observe her incision: a jagged eye shape below and to the right of her navel. It was time to remove the drain. The wound would stay open, heal from the inside to prevent infection, he explained, but first this catheter’s got to come out. He planted himself at bedside, unclipped the waste bag, let it fall to the floor; then prodded around the outside of the incision with gloved fingers, hoping to force the tube out by itself. With each bit of pressure, the patient sucked in her breath and held. She was not a vocal child, but she was hurting.
A thin nylon cord snaked within the tube and this the doctor stretched, released, stretched, released, stretched, released. My daughter twisted right and left, angling for the ceiling or anywhere else but here. The resident’s tug of war was past her bearing, but he scarcely looked up. He focused instead on her belly and his trouble unhitching the thing, as if he’d hooked a fish somewhere deep inside her abdomen and was now wrestling it into the air. She whimpered, “Can we call for someone else?” when finally the apparatus popped out with a spurt of bacteria-rich fluid.
A nurse muttered pessimistically, “Looks like secondary infection to me.”
“Fear, jealousy, money, revenge, and protecting someone you love,” said Max Halliday, listing the five important motives for murder. I was furious: Whose fault would that be, all that stirring around in her wound by a novice, a novice who doesn’t half know what he’s doing, would you please get someone in here who does, this hurts, she’s hurting, PLEASE? I then chose this moment of all moments to slip away from the child, swing through the hallway, down the elevator, through the automatic doors over the blacktop and into my parked car. There I let loose a howl—cheeks drawn, mouth like a pie plate. My tongue dropped into the pocket of my lower jaw. The sound was coarse, unmusical, void of letter, syllable, or phrase. What else can I tell you except no one screams like this in the movies, it was too chest-deep and ragged. Inhalation, sigh, inhalation, then another animal wail into the sour air of our Toyota van. Fear, not surprisingly, makes you stink.
Q3: Where do you feel fear in your body? Draw one spot only.
And now the emotion rises from the paper like a corpse from water. Just the forehead, nose, mouth, throat, and chest. Damp spots in the gut. We know the figure has arms and legs for the silver imprints where his hands, groin, thighs, and shins would be. But he has forgotten them. Fear looks like a mounted insect, or a skeleton without the small connecting bones. One envisions a body semiburied in mud, clay, or sand, the archaeologist patiently brushing.
Q5: Does your fear have direction? If yes, draw arrows.
Cue the giant made of arrows, hundreds of them, like a disorganized Celtic wicker man. Throw in a few twigs and broomsticks. His belly stuffed with whatever might be conceived as desirable or delicious to the gods: cattle, chickens, garlic, goats, criminals. Burn it, set the wicker man aflame as sacrifice. If you believe, it will put your mind at ease.
Quietly I wished for a bit more of my rightful inheritance and spoke of Marianne’s promises. We were close, and the jewel casket reminded me of her reassuring cornflower-blue bedroom with its canopy bed and Chinese carpet. So the mothers and fathers and aunts and uncles suggested they ship it to Sarah. Upon my return from Wisconsin, the little casket was lying inside my front door wrapped in bubbles, duct tape, and a white cardboard carton delivered ground-to-ground by FedEx.
I named it the God Box and, right here and now, apologize if I must for the born-again, Hallelujah touch. A no-nonsense friend suggested this reasonable alternative to praying, which at the time I didn’t really care for: Write it down on a note card. Drop it in the box and let God handle it. Repeat as necessary. Don’t worry if you fill the thing up. Just keep stuffing it in there.
Curious, how anxiety matures over a lifetime—pure imagination at first, like masked men under the bed or giant lizards in the basement. Later some realism slips in—car accidents, airplane crashes—bicoastal flying possible only with fingers and legs crossed and palpitations at the very sign of turbulence. At forty, on folded index cards, in complete sentences, I scrawled my grown-up requests: Keep my girls safe and healthy. Find me a job. Stop his drinking. Later, as these fears recurred, I took to shorthand: Jeff. Martha. Paycheck. X-ray.
Psychologists hypothesize that fear motivates religious faith. For this dreamer—who willingly suspends disbelief in literature, even in bad movies, who toyed with the idea of an afterlife blanketed with clover and poppies, who saw the world as unlikely without a sentient, larger-than-the-world being—it helped. Sometimes for a minute, sometimes for a week. My anxiety, transferred to featherweight bits of crumpled cotton and water, sat apart from me, mingling for a time with the rest of the world’s dander and dust. I felt oddly light and insignificant and that was good.
If you can listen objectively, the sound of fear is amplified tinnitus. Movies have caught on with their edgy violins. What would a murder be without that dissonant sawing? Eagles scream. Harpies, winged death spirits, scream. There is even a bird called the American Harpy Eagle named for the mythological bird with a woman’s head. Harpy means “to snatch.” Food. Fleeing creatures.
The earliest recorded use of the noun scream was in 1513. The sound appeared as soon as there was a mouth, any kind of mouth or beak or scaly slit. German artillery in flight in World War II made a terrifying noise and thus, the term screaming meemies came into existence to describe battle fatigue caused by exposure to enemy fire.
A scream is the prayer of an animal who cannot speak or write or draw or assume the posture of a saint.
My daughter’s body torqued on the sheet like a butterfly pinned to white paper. Reason enough for a mother to shriek like a harpy.
Dear Mr. Cornell,
I hear you have fashioned a box, specifically, a wooden jewel casket lined with velvet, in honor of the great nineteenth-century ballerina Marie Taglioni. I heard you had a vision, seated in your kitchen next to the stove. Peering out the window, lifting your gaze to a nearby office building, you caught sight of her pirouetting across the top floor. You believed she was real. Did you call out to her? Wave with a handkerchief? Somehow I think not. If indeed she had danced across centuries and continents to appear before you, I think you were too shy, too frightened of notable women.
Instead, this spectacular jewel casket. Three rows of four glass cubes, each inserted into square indentations, each atop a base of blue “windows.” And below that, ever so visible through the cubes: bits of sand, crystal, and rhinestones, all resting on a mirrored surface. May I say how much I love the blue label fastened to the inside of the lid? May I test your patience and transcribe it here?
On a moonlight night in the winter of 1835 the carriage of Marie Taglioni was halted by a Russian highwayman, and that enchanting creature [was] commanded to dance for this audience of one upon a panther’s skin spread over the snow beneath the stars. From this actuality arose the legend that to keep alive the memory of this adventure so precious to her, Taglioni formed the habit of placing a piece of artificial ice in her jewel casket or dressing table where, melting among the sparkling stones, there was evoked a hint of the atmosphere of the starlit heavens over the ice-covered landscape.
Not an explanation, of course. You were sparing with those. Frugal with money, retentive with meaning.
I too have a jewel casket. It gives me great comfort. It’s older and plainer than yours, dating t
o the mid-nineteenth century. Fashioned without Bacall, Sontag, Miranda, or Taglioni in mind. How poignant that your infatuations were never consummated. But how else would we have your boxes to treasure and appreciate? Would that all our coping mechanisms resulted in masterpieces!
An aside: Some say you were agoraphobic. Oh, fear can wreak havoc on a body. Remember when Helen caught sight of you outside Whitman’s, doubled over, moaning on a bench in Madison Square Park? Dyspepsia, they called it, and didn’t you suffer until that gentle, fellow salesman suggested Christian Science. You called it “the natural, wholesome, healing and beautiful thing.” Prayer and devotion, an excellent way to ease anxiety, to hold bodily impulses in check. I wonder now if religion helped with your stomach pain. What do you think, Mr. Cornell? I’d be most curious to know.
With utmost respect and most sincerely yours,
During the days that followed, we saw a good deal of hand washing as nurses entered the room and when they left. But no special gowns or masks, and visitors weren’t encouraged to follow any sanitary procedures at all, though I played with my daughter’s hair, applied cold washcloths, and assisted with bathing. Orderlies dragged mops around, and the trash was emptied listlessly.
Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus or MRSA is a perilous variety of the common staph infection. It’s prevalent among patients with open wounds, invasive devices (such as chest tubes or drains), and weakened immune systems. The press dubbed it the “superbug” when it was identified in 1961, but it’s taken a long time for protective protocol to become standardized in hospitals. For three decades the bacteria was busily making its own rounds, setting up warm little colonies on elevator buttons, bathroom door handles, and cafeteria cutlery.
Today, medical staff wear sterile gowns, gloves, masks, and puffy disposable slippers. There’s vigorous cleansing with special soap containers permanently affixed to the wall. MRSA-infected patients are isolated from the rest of the hospital community and large yellow warning signs are posted outside their rooms. All this just a little too late for a post-op thirteen-year-old girl with a gaping wound in her abdomen. Here, our precise follow-up instructions:
1. Lay out the wrapped saline flush syringe, alcohol wipe, IV cap, sanitizer, and IV bag.
2. Punch the IV bag with tubing, squeeze to release the air.
3. Sanitize hands, wipe down the PIC and IV portals with alcohol.
4. Remove the syringe cellophane, tap and push to release any air, screw it into the PIC line, and flush.
5. Unscrew the syringe, remove the IV tube cap, push the tube into the PIC line.
6. Release the flow of medicine from the bag and wait for an hour while the drug enters with a chill into the patient’s body.
Vancomycin is one medicine of choice for MRSA, a powerful antibiotic commonly used in worst-case scenarios. A PIC line is threaded under the skin through a vein near the elbow to a larger vein in the chest. It stays in place for a month, or however long the treatment. Visiting nurses named Meredith and Tiffany came by the house at the start. They frightened the dogs but were understanding and quick. Their aim was to pass the job on to Dad or Mom or anyone with a stable hand.
Perhaps a step or two has been conflated, though my memory of IV protocol is mostly pristine. It was a kind of knotted safety rope through scary terrain. Certainly this is how soldiers, police, and firefighters contain their fear, bearing down on the small points, the physical routine of unpacking the hose, oiling the weapon, unscrewing the coupling counterclockwise and easing it back. Focus the eye and the mind, narrow it as if through a camera lens or binoculars. The mind avoids everything but this six-or-seven-step system, repeated once in the morning, again at night. It’s even possible to abstract the body lying on the bed, together with its wincing. Though I often stroked my child’s arm, it became just an arm or a wrist, any body’s arm or wrist, and I pretended not to love it.
In the year 433, St. Patrick prepared to confront and convert Lóegaire, high king of Ireland. He was aware an ambush lay ahead aiming to slaughter him and his group en route to the court. He wrote a prayer to strengthen himself with God’s protection, not unlike St. Paul’s exhortation to “put on the whole armor of God.”
Christ be with me, Christ within me,
Christ behind me, Christ before me,
Christ beside me, Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me.
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all who love me,
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.
During the march they sang the sacred song. As the druids lay in hiding, ready to kill, they saw not Patrick and his men, but a gentle doe followed by twenty fawns.
St. Patrick and his men were saved.
The prayer became known as The Deer’s Cry, The Lorica, or St. Patrick’s Breastplate. A lorica is an incantation spoken for protection. In addition to being recited by monks, loricas could also be found inscribed on the shields or armorial trappings of knights, who might whisper or sing them quietly before going into battle.
One way to dispel one’s fears is to inscribe them on paper, hide them in a box, or imagine them sailing off on little boats into heaven or wherever God lives. The St. Patrick’s Breast-plate is different; it calls the protector down, into, and around the body like a blanket, a tent under the elements. We are singled out, safeguarded, beloved. I first chanted the Lorica on a flight to Atlanta while the plane pitched and groaned through a thunderstorm. Each line was another layer of safety, and I imagined them settling one by one until I was surrounded, warm and dry.
Because a spark small as a comma can blow a bridge off its foundation. Because fear like an ant will bear a whole mind away.
At first, skin heals the way a river dries up. The depths of the wound grow shallow and we are no longer afraid to look at the bottom with its mysterious eddies and darknesses. One can imagine poking a stick, but tenderly, tenderly, and feeling some immediate, reassuring resistance.
Then the edges begin to draw together, in slow-motion, a gradual knitting of one shore to the other. A raised and reddish scar is the final evidence of the river on a map. The water is gone, sunk down far beneath the riverbed. Then the scar too diminishes, drains of blood till it is a twist of quicksilver across the belly.
After her incision healed, the trauma disappeared from the girl’s mind too. She remembered nothing about the drainage tube, bed, injections, and ache. A near-complete erasure that one can easily forgive. A kind of wisdom.
Not everyone forgets. Not Mother. I’ll fly over this territory again and again. The fear for my daughter’s life is now part of who I am, the suffering savored.
I dream of an observation deck above Niagara, close to the engorged, blue-black current before its fall, and fleetingly, think about falling. I could play dumb, dare myself. The temptation rings in my teeth, like ice chips, or a tuning fork pressed to the bone.
At ease, Mother.
PERFECT
Sleep
Free from any flaw or defect in condition; faultless.
I remember only one such sleep, following my firstborn’s delivery by C-section. I was under the influence of morphine and a pure, thorough, body exhaustion. The first course was upward, a mix of things half-heard, only partially understood, and so wrapped in imaginative ribbon. The rattle of a blood cart became a tree with spoons in place of leaves. A nurse became a lifeguard with layers of zinc on her nose. Her announcement over the intercom, the answer to all those dream exams.
I say upward, because so much sleep is depicted as falling. Mine was not so. The room with all its detail receded, and I rose with a slight toiling up up up into the sun, to the second course, a kind of plateau. This was new land, very flat, very white, a salt field or desert made of chalk. Patches of dream flew against the sun—a miniskirt, some costume jewelry—but they didn’t engross me. When I was hungry, I ate coconut. When thirsty, I drank the
milk. This went on for hours, this perfect sleep.
I reached the end by backstroke, the mind carving shoulder blades and wings in the sand. I stroked and coasted, sculled and skidded. Soon I began to wake, down into the township, the atrium, the bed, then lower into a squalling sound. I found the baby’s face in mine: Oh, there you are.
On Selfishness
Everything has either a price or a dignity.
—KANT
I did not have three thousand pairs of shoes.
I had one thousand and sixty.
—IMELDA MARCOS
Roger Hargreaves’s storybook character Little Miss Selfish is green, shaped like a beehive. She wears yellow heels, blue gardening gloves, and a bright yellow hat tied with a blue and red ribbon. Her mouth is turned down in a snotty frown. Little Miss Selfish doesn’t share. The only thing she ever thinks about is herself.
In the French version, she’s a Mrs.—Madame Moi-Je. A double-thick me/I.
Always first in line for brunch, she helps herself to the buffet, sits down at the family table, polishes off her bacon and waffles, and leaves before anyone else is served. A blood sugar dive could be the instigator. In that case, she’d do anything to get her hands on a piece of bread, even pluck a half-eaten roll off someone’s plate. The blood demands sustenance, beats against the brain till it secures quick satisfaction. Yes, there are plenty of medical excuses for bad behavior. During the trial for the murder of Harvey Milk, a psychiatrist testified that Dan White’s diet of junk food exacerbated his depression and mood swings. Diminished capacity or, as it came to be known, the Twinkie Defense.