by Lucy Ellmann
Everything seemed STUPID to Dot after her mother died. Stop signs were STUPID, bicycles were STUPID, mothers driving their kids to school were STUPID, SCHOOL was stupid, world events were stupid, mayors, policemen, mailmen, dry cleaners, dogs, brothers, getting up in the morning, changing your clothes, white sugar cubes in a BOWL, and anyone else’s pain. SNOW was stupid, and falling in it.
DOT GOT FAT. Dot in the universe was expanding! Fatness is a WARNING: I’m not so nice. But Dot’s didn’t BEGIN as a protest but as a perceived NECESSITY: nobody was feeding her! For lack of a mother she fed herself. And for lack of a mother, she recompensed herself with food. How much recompense was REQUIRED, to assuage the loss of a mother? Dot ate until she felt sick, then ate some more. Despite having a psychoanalyst ON THE PREMISES, Dot began to hate herself.
She had VIOLENT THOUGHTS, longed for everything to go WRONG for everybody, wanted the world to be even WORSE. When she saw a dam, she wanted it to collapse. When she was in a store, she hoped it would be raided by armed robbers. She longed for fire, flood, famine, BIG NEWS ITEMS. None of the disasters on offer could satisfy her.
One day, Dot lay down on her bed, having decided to DIE. From looking at her mother in her coffin, Dot knew how to die, and how to LIE, hands across the chest. She was wearing her favourite jeans. If rigor mortis set in, she could be dumped straight into the grave just the way she was (she’d left instructions to that effect in the suicide note under her alarm clock).
But, though fat and furious, Dot was also fourteen, fairly healthy, and she hadn’t bothered to avail herself of an actual SUICIDE METHOD. So she didn’t die. Instead, at 6:00 Yetta yelled for her to come to dinner and Dot hauled herself off the bed to go eat cold boiled chicken and green beans (which Yetta considered slimming). Dot added an angry amount of salt. I COULD HAVE DIED TODAY, she thought, and nobody would have CARED. She was right. Ferdinand was gone, her father had retreated to his Den to paint pointillist pictures of her mother (a little like de Kooning but done with dots), and Yetta merely upbraided Dot for crying CROCODILE TEARS and blamed everything on her mother for SMOKING.
Destruction and Dismay
The garden went into shock, became MORIBUND. Peas died on the vine unpicked. Birds, skunks, squirrels, chipmunks, raccoons and possums came and ate everything. Later it rallied though, giving up its vegetable functions, and burst forth with dandelions.
Pepito died. Pets always die at the WORST TIME, when no one is looking after them properly. It’s INTOLERABLE. Pepito had fits, writhing on the floor, wetting himself. Sam took him to the vet and that was the end of him! (Animals are also never allowed to die NATURALLY.)
For lack of a clear refusal, Yetta moved in permanently ‘to take care of things’, alligator shoes tapping, mouth snapping. She was always ordering Dot around. She cleaned as if she hoped to rid the place of the last TRACE of Maisy. She scrubbed floors all afternoon, pulled things out of closets, tore up photos and pieces of paper unless Dot stopped her in time. Meals were now REGULATED, a half-hour to eat and a half-hour to wash the dishes after, and the food was Matzo Ball Soup and soft flat baked NOODLES with RAISINS! Dot thought she would die of MALNUTRITION. Nobody was taking care of her. She missed Ferdinand. She missed her mother. She missed PEPITO.
Dot went to the library and got out all the books they had on near-death experiences and paranormal phenomena. She was waiting for her mother (or Pepito) to reappear and SAVE her.
She felt her father was ACTING dead, always locked in his Den painting and listening to Bessie Smith, or staring at the revolving steam-train lamp. He was probably DYING OF MALNUTRITION. Dot brought him cheese-on-toast one day but he wasn’t there. She saw his paintings stacked against the wall and decided to have a look. The pointillist phase was OVER. These were wild, nearly abstract pictures of breasts, thighs, lips and high heels, the paint wrenched down the canvas, always downwards. Across each picture he’d scratched deep the word: ‘LIMBO’.
Dot had HAD it. She stomped to her bedroom, collected all the money she had and a few duds and LEFT, planning never to return. She stomped along the highway towards Cincinnati. Anyone WALKING in suburbia provokes honking and the throwing of beer cans. One guy yelled ‘Whore!’ from his pick-up truck. Why does every man need his own stupid TRUCK? thought Dot.
She hitched to New Haven. It took her three days, but Dot was fuelled by fear and fury and hardly noticed. She stayed at Howard Johnsons on the way. Nobody seemed to care. She was not raped or murdered. She got a HEADACHE but recovered.
Ferdinand was surprised to see her and called home immediately to tell them where she was. Dot heard her father ask if such a visit would interfere with Ferdinand’s studies. He doesn’t care about MY studies, she thought, and it was true — her parents had never expected much of Dot.
Dot hid in Ferdinand’s room for a while, eating food he brought her like a DOG and watching him read his science books. But nobody much cared who was in the dorm, they were too busy smoking dope and protesting against the Vietnam war. Ferdinand had no FRIENDS to bother them. So Dot got braver, going out for walks in a long hippie skirt she’d bought for herself, dotted with little mirrors. At night she’d meet Ferdinand in a basement bar to drink jugs of beer.
She soon figured New Haven out: there’s an East Rock and a West Rock and a train station in between with trains to New York, that’s all you really need to know. Dot and Ferdinand would go to New York every month or two for the DAY. She also snuck into a few Yale lectures and Women’s Lib meetings. The rest of the time, they ate pizza and pursued a quiet life, in unspoken imitation of their parents.
Sex became so automatic, Dot no longer thought about it. No longer noticed Ferdinand lying down beside her, merely knew and liked the feel of him there. How could she not come to rely on that warmth, assume it to be hers, TAKE it? A nightly business, like sleep, without consequence. They never SPOKE of it. They were a living breathing TABOO! They didn’t stand around waiting to sign AFFIDAVITS. They knew how UNAMERICAN it was, to take sex beyond the aerobic WORK-OUT it’s supposed to be and make it meaningful.
Everything was hunky-dory in fact, until Yetta called one day to say their father was sick. Dot and Ferdinand caught the next plane to Cincinnati and went straight to the hospital where they found their father MORIBUND. Self-neglect, said the doctor, but Dot suspected malnutrition (YETTA’S doing). He revived enough though, when Ferdinand took his hand, to lean forward and say conspiratorially, ‘The name … is … Weiselberg.’
Dot and Ferdinand had no idea what he was TALKING about. To Yetta’s vexation, he repeated it, gasping, ‘The name is Weiselberg!’ before dropping back on the pillow. Then he stopped BREATHING. Ferdinand pumped his father’s chest in an attempt to save him, but he died (secretly hoping there’s an afterlife).
Yetta took over the funeral arrangements, burying Sam in a brand-new Jewish cemetery with room left over beside him for HERSELF. Dot and Ferdinand were left to sort out his affairs: papers, paintings, tax stuff, bank stuff, Death Certificates, magazine subscriptions — remnants of a life. (Curiously, no mention of the name WEISELBERG anywhere, leaving their father’s last words a mystery.)
At night they lay in each other’s arms, shocked to be orphans, listening to odd creaks and thumps in the Den, which they assumed were YETTA, cleaning. They were wrong. It was their father’s GHOST in the Den, searching exasperatedly for his Birth Certificate, the ORIGINAL not a photocopy, and Yetta was outside their DOOR. Ferdinand’s room had a lock so they’d always considered themselves safe in there, but Yetta had a bunch of keys she’d found in the basement during one of her big Spring Cleans and she opened the door with EASE. Dot and Ferdinand jumped out of bed but that didn’t help: they were NAKED. They hoped she might faint, or DIE, at the sight, but Yetta TRIUMPHED, grabbing Dot by the hair and tugging her out of the room. Ferdinand was sent straight back to Yale, and within days Dot was at the doctor’s, where it was decided she was PREGNANT (just as Yetta had predicted). An abortion was coldly arranged,
Yetta driving Dot from one appointment to another, haranguing and harassing her.
‘Incest. INCEST. Such a crime.’
It was quite a while before Dot thought up her mumbled reply: ‘Who did it hurt?’ But Yetta had never listened to a thing Dot said and she didn’t listen now. She was trying to concentrate on her driving. She shouldn’t have been driving AT ALL. She was shaking with fury and she could only see out of one eye. But if it meant killing a cat, or driving into someone’s trash-can, so be it, as long as she was able to get Sam’s delinquent daughter to the abortion clinic on time.
Dot’s humiliation seemed complete, but wasn’t! New facts emerged during the abortion, of a physiological, gynaecological, ILLOGICAL nature: Dot had two vaginas and two wombs.
A double hysterectomy was immediately carried out, neither womb being considered viable. But the surgeons left the two vaginas (they constituted no risk to health) and left Dot to her disgust. She couldn’t believe she’d been carrying all these ORGANS around without knowing it. Female genitalia are weird enough; it was hard on Dot to have the WEIRDEST.
On hearing the news, Ferdinand had a nervous breakdown. He had to skip half a semester. Not only had he been caught fucking his SISTER, by his GRANDMOTHER, with his FATHER lying fresh in his grave, but she had TWO VAGINAS and he hadn’t even NOTICED. He was supposed to be a GENIUS.
First the shiksa wife, now the disastrous daughter. Where had Sam gone wrong? Yetta wondered. But she had a PLAN, a punitive plan (the modern equivalent of a convent!).
As soon as Dot could WALK again, Yetta proposed that she go to CHARM SCHOOL and learn something about the REAL WORLD. Full of self-loathing, Dot agreed to this immediately. She could think of nothing better than to devote herself to charm.
So Dot proceeded onwards. It was a HABIT.
Dot the Body
Armed with diet pills, lingering abdominal pains, gynaecological peculiarities, and an uncomfortable underwire bra, Dot went off to Dallas which offered the toughest, meanest, most UNCOMPROMISING Charm School in the country, perhaps the UNIVERSE.
Dot was taught how to sit upright on a chair, stand, carry a book on her head, get in and out of a car gracefully, and bow to royalty, including WHICH ONES to bow to (some only deserve a wave). She learnt that she too could have a flawless back, that one should always dine on fish, wear hats at an angle, lick the glass before drinking (to avoid lipstick marks), and apply mascara to each eyelash INDIVIDUALLY. She learnt that glamour doesn’t come easy, beauty comes from within, cleavage and chiffon don’t mix, perfume once opened lasts six months, the double-breasted look is very hard to get right, red and orange should never be worn together, stilettos should be worn with pride, gin and vodka have half the calories of beer and wine, and butter is LIQUID FAT.
Dot went to classes in: How To Wake Up Looking Gorgeous, How To Wear Grey, and Kissable Hair: How To Get It. She was taught how to find a RICH MAN, and how to make a (rich) man happy. Magazines, for instance. Never leave a load of magazines on the FLOOR. Men HATE that. Roll them up, tie them with string and stand them upright in a box (the mags, not the men).
They taught Dot everything they knew! She had her teeth capped, her body buffed, and her pubic hair SHAPED. They starved and sculpted her, these experts who somehow never TIRE of the human body or lose track of how they think it ought to look.
Dot learnt that the perfect and the beautiful have to deal with shit and snot too — the trick is to make it seem EFFORTLESS.
There is water running through the body, through the land. Dot was told to drink two litres of it a day.
She was a receptive pupil. It takes a certain type of person to put up with this sort of crap, but DOT WAS THAT TYPE. A nice sharp-nosed blonde can do very well in Dallas with the right training. One day, walking through a Mall at her most wan, Dot was spotted by a CHEEKBONE connoisseur and invited to become a MODEL. Modelling work was one of the highest ambitions formulated at Dot’s Charm School (the others being Beauty Queen or First Lady). Dot leapt at the chance, in fact she leapt a little inelegantly at the CONNOISSEUR, but only because she was delirious from malnutrition. Within days she had been welcomed into the fucked-up world of FASHION.
At seventeen and now weighing only 88 lbs., Dot was almost too fat and old to BE a model. But her enervation won acclaim, and the name Radziwill was a help. Dot was posed, poked and prodded until she produced IMAGES FOR OUR TIME.
She found it hard at first to get used to the attitude of her fellow models to designers, squealing like TARTS about their PIMPS. They had FAKE ORGASMS just saying the NAMES: ‘Oh, Lagerfeld …’ ‘Oooh, Yves Saint Laurent, isn’t he GREAT?’ they drooled. They starved, simpered and SUFFERED to please these guys, who in turn had fake orgasms thinking about all the ART they could buy with the money. Full of contempt for women, they promoted: THE BOYISH LOOK.
But just how baby-soft does skin have to BE, how concave the female abdomen? In all this glorification of youth and beauty, what happens to the MIDDLE-AGED? In all the sickening concentration on CHILDREN (really a form of paedophilia) and CHILDHOOD (so beloved of psychoanalysts), all this IDEALISATION of children — their needs, their desires, their EQUIPMENT — what about US, what about the middle-aged? WE’RE the ones who are scared and alone.
Removing the Thymus
While Dot was reaching the pinnacle of her effectiveness at WEARING CLOTHES, Ferdinand was gaining prominence at Yale. His scientific interests had been rewarded with fellowships, grants, and honorary degrees! Recognising him as some kind of Zoology GENIUS, Yale had given him a professorship, his own lab, and NO ADMINISTRATIVE DUTIES. Ferdinand had it MADE.
His main focus was the study of marsupials, which he considered a much-maligned branch of the mammalian tree. In numerous badly written articles in scientific journals, Ferdinand had questioned the lowly status of marsupials, arguing that since they had somehow SURVIVED for millions of years, their evolutionary choices (such as the pouch) must have some validity. The truth was Ferdinand just loved pouches. What could be better than a built-in BAG in which to feed, shelter and transport progeny? How many other animals come equipped with their own CARRY-COT? What a great IDEA.
So Ferdinand pottered around his lab studying marsupials. How we love animals in cages! There is nothing so deeply pleasing to a carnivore as seeing a lot of prey caged, especially if they’re ALPHABETICALLY ARRANGED (the reason we like wildlife shows on TV so much is that the TV set looks like a cage!). Specimens were shipped dead or alive from Australia for him. He studied the anatomy, social structure and behaviour of the Kangaroo (Red and Grey), the Koala, the Quokka, the Cuscus, the Tammar, the Bandicoot, the Great Glider, the Fat-Tailed Dunnart, the Wombat and the Wallaby. Then there was a hiccup in funding. Ferdinand was forced to investigate a cheaper source of supply. He quickly settled on the Virginia Opossum. They were abundant in his native land. In fact they were, to speak unscientifically here for just a moment, A DIME A DOZEN, particularly in the southern states, though they ranged as far north as Ohio. Ferdinand had seen a dead one once in the gutter near his home. He’d been impressed by the THUMBS on its back feet, and for years had assumed the word ‘opossum’ was some kind of elision of ‘opposable thumb’. Anyway, if Ferdinand didn’t buy them they’d only get skinned for their fur or put into Possum Stew (or BOTH), and though Ferdinand TRIED to be unsentimental about animals, he really hated hearing about marsupials being EATEN.
So he cleared the lab of its dead and refilled it with possums, their funny ears and crocodile mouths pointing at him from all directions as he carried on his IMPORTANT SCIENTIFIC WORK of removing and dissecting things in order to determine which bits of its anatomy the Virginia Opossum can do WITHOUT, and for how long. There was no knowing how this information could ever be used for the good of HUMANITY or anybody else. It was pursuit of knowledge FOR ITS OWN SAKE. Hoorah!
Ferdinand studied the opossum STOMACH, finding it to be deeply sacculated. He studied opossum chromosomes (very low karyotype), their pituitary gland
s (necessary for follicular growth and ovulation), their diet (omnivorous). He explored the thermoregulatory influence of the hypothalamus by placing fine electrodes on it and evoking behavioural responses through electrical stimulation. He tested the dehydration rate of embryonic possums in the pouch by taking them off the teat and checking how long they survived. He examined opossum kidney function (relatively thick medulla and nephrons with loops of Henle) and found that their renal concentration ability was inferior to that of other marsupials. But their immunological competence was good: if inflicted with a dirty wound, infants under seven days old couldn’t fight it, but over that age they COULD. The development of lymphoid tissue was grossly affected by removing the thymus when the creature was a week old.
He studied the pampiniform plexus, the adrenal cortex and the masticatory apparatus (molars), and did some well-regarded research on the opossum brain, comparing it to the HUMAN brain — Ferdinand found the opossum brain to be inferior. In opossums, the fore brain is divisible into an anterior telencephalon and posterior diencephalon and the hind brain is divisible into an anterior metencephalon and posterior myelencephalon. For the purposes of motor function the axons of large neurons pass via the corpus striatum and the cerebral peduncles. Ferdinand concluded that opossums are stupider than us because: A) they have no clear ability to think, either in abstract terms, or in terms of the past, present and future; B) they have no ability to PLAN; C) they have no decipherable language; and D) they have no art. (He left out our capacity for BITCHING, SWINDLING and WAR.)
Ferdinand explored the opossum’s ability to ‘play possum’ when shaken by a predator (Ferdinand). He also investigated ‘torpor’ (the opossum’s particular brand of hibernation) by drastically lowering the temperature in the lab — those who refrained from torpor died.