by Mary Gordon
Something happens to some girls at a certain age, a kind of madness, as if their own bodies were too powerful or too busy or too changeable; they are appalled. They indulge peculiar hungers; they want to stick their noses, their tongues into the filth of the world, maybe to reassure themselves that it doesn’t all come from themselves.
That year, Pearl would come home from school and eat horribly sweet things, things whose sweetness had no goodness in them, sweetness that turned to acid, cakes with frosting made entirely of chemicals, neon-colored icing, cream fillings white as toothpaste. Half-liquid fats: melted cheese, margarine out of the tub. Orange drinks with a touch of blue in them, chips whose coatings made her fingers looked diseased. Afternoons hating the company of her own body, wanting only to get into her unmade bed, where she’d explore what she believed were the disgusting parts of her own body: conjuring sights of huge-breasted women being pierced by men whose hungers were insatiable, who spoke humiliating orders: put this in your mouth, put that over your face. That year she went through all her mother’s clothes, wanting to touch them so they’d be defiled. That year she found, in her mother’s underwear drawer, the “adultery diary,” a notebook with sentences she read over and over as she fingered her mother’s lingerie. The sentences she can’t forget: I thought of myself as a poet. Now I’m someone who reaches into her pocket and finds a pair of underpants, taken off in a taxi so I can be finger-fucked.
That was her punishment, that knowing. Maria doesn’t know what Pearl knows, what her daughter read in the diary she thought was always hidden. Pearl reading her mother, who would have said she was committed to the sisterhood of women, calling another woman the walking vulva, talking about wanting to take all the clothes out of the woman’s closet—the closet that was next to the bed where she had sex with the woman’s husband—and burn them in the driveway. Saying of her lover, Jack Rappaport, that it was nothing but sex. A sentence that Pearl hated, yet that thrilled her as if she were being shown into the real life women lived: When he traces the curve of my breast, I feel in the league of women who’ve done stupid things for what they call love, but what they mean is sex. Excited when she read: There is no man whom I admire as I admire P., no one whose company satisfies me entirely as hers does. So her mother loved her best. Then, cast down, having to understand there were times she passed out of her mother’s sight: I think of P. and that she is not with me and that I do not miss her.
Her mother’s body, loved a year before, now horrifying. As her own, ignored a year before, becomes the site of revulsion.
Maria had believed that because of the way she’d brought Pearl up, and because of the way the world had changed, Pearl had been spared a sense of the hatefulness of the female body. And she shivers now, in anguish that she had been so wrong!
Of the malignities Maria traces to her upbringing, among the most heinous is the habit of thinking herself impure by virtue of femaleness. The female: insufficiently fine. The female: overfleshed.
There was nothing in her life to suggest that the female body was anything but something to be overcome. Who was there to say otherwise? She was a girl without a mother. Pearl Meyers, the first Pearl Meyers, dead at thirty-one of ovarian cancer, diagnosed a year after she had given birth.
The only other female in the house, Marie Kasperman, Joseph’s mother, revolted her: the thick greasy curls under the thin hairnet, the visible pores of her perpetually reddish, perpetually shining nose, the hands that always reminded Maria of raw meat. There was no time Maria didn’t flinch from her touch, and she knew Marie Kasperman understood and hated her for it. When she brushed Maria’s hair and braided it, Maria wanted to be sick. It was bad, this thing between the two females in the house. Perhaps Seymour Meyers should have seen it, should have stopped it. But he was a man. Even if he’d seen it, he wouldn’t have known how to name what he’d seen. Perhaps no man would.
And besides, Maria tried to keep it from him, because she’d endure anything rather than lose Joseph. She was proud of her silence, like one of the martyrs: Isaac Jogues refusing to deny Christ even when the Indians pulled out his fingernails. She was particularly afraid of having her fingernails pulled out or having bamboo stuck under them, which Catholic children in the fifties were often told was something regularly done to priests by Chinese Communists. Later, when she read in the lives of the saints about what were called silent martyrdoms, she saw herself. Like St. Thérèse of Lisieux putting up with the nun who deliberately splashed muddy water on her when they were scrubbing the floor on their knees side by side. She thought there could be no greater mortification than not flinching when Marie Kasperman braided her hair. Sister Berchmans encouraged her in this habit of mind with one of the catchphrases she could so easily reach for—all the nuns could, as if it were candy or a holy card at the bottom of the enormous pockets of their habits—and hinting at her own experience (thrilling for any girl: the sense of being given an encoded glimpse of convent life): “Quiet martyrdoms are the most trying.” The cult of martyrs. Maria remembers now: martyr means witness in Greek. Pearl says she is a witness. Does she think she is a martyr? Maria can’t imagine where she would get such an idea.
Maria couldn’t learn about being female from the nuns, their bodies hidden, praying to be delivered from the heaviness of the flesh. She could learn only from Marie Kasperman, both of them trapped in their interlocking hatred of the other.
Forty-two years later, Marie Kasperman afog in dementia, Maria Meyers, on a plane to save her daughter’s life, still hears the word filthy.
“Filthy,” Marie Kasperman would say, picking Maria’s underwear up off the floor, holding it away from her with two fingers.
Maria had loved her body, but there were so many voices telling her this was wrong; it was a danger and could, by its very nature, hurt itself and hurt the world. Corrupting and corrupt. So she considered the joy that she took in her body’s life a mystery: and a victory over all the forces she would keep her own child far away from. But she has kept her child from nothing. Her child wants to die.
. . .
Maria’s eyes fall on the woman in the seat across from her. The woman stretches, raises her hands above her head, intertwines her fingers, circles her neck three times, puts her arms down, refolds her hands in her lap. As tired as she is, Maria feels the woman’s pull. The woman stands in the aisle and raises her arms again; her breasts are lifted, and her skirt reveals just a little of the flesh above her ruby-colored boots. Her hair is copper curls, her sweater—soft cobalt wool—shapes the curves of her breast and waist, and the skirt, light gray, has a slit up the back, perhaps (but Maria suspects not) set there for easy walking. The men’s eyes fall upon her because they want her; the women’s because they want to be her. I was once the one, Maria thinks. I could stand up, raise my arms above my head, show the red inside of my mouth in a fine yawn, and pull them toward me, everyone, the eyes of everyone: I knew I could make them fall on me. Not anymore, she thinks. I am no longer young.
She thinks of all the bodies she has had: the little girl’s body, the desiring and desirable body, the childbearing body, the body that moved through space, that swam and danced and ran and ran, and now the aging body, feeling the first bites of the inevitable bad news. None of the bodies lost, all contained in the same envelope, reliving their histories, sometimes insistently, sometimes muted for long periods, dormant but not quite asleep.
Now she remembers, in her discomfort in the closed space of the plane, how as a child she would run and run, for the plain joy of running; she would make Joseph race—he never wanted to—and she would always beat him. She loved her boyish body then. It never occurred to her that her body was different from his. She loved the pumping of her blood against stretched ribs, loved that her legs would slice through space, sail over roads. And she wanted to win; she couldn’t bear not winning. She would have died trying to win. Afterward, after she’d won, she loved lying on the ground, flat on her back, dizzy with the aftermath of effort,
loved her fast breath, her breath matching Joseph’s, and the sky wheeling above her, the hint of moon in a sky still glazed with daylight, loved chewing blades of grass or leaves, the harsh, unfleshly taste. For a long time she believed that if something was growing and it looked good, it would be good to eat: it would taste like what it looked like. She ate an iris once; she thought it would be sweet and crisp with a soft, confectionery coating; she imagined the yellow centers would taste of cinnamon. She was shocked when the flower hurt her throat. After that she no longer ate plants.
When she and Joseph ran, they were a pair of running animals. Then she’d put on the final push and he wouldn’t. She knew he wasn’t trying, but she couldn’t stop. He could have beaten her if he’d wanted to. Later, when they were grown, she asked him why he never did. He said, “You wanted it so much. I could never want it as much as you.” She was touched by that—ashamed, a bit—but she didn’t dwell on it for long.
Maria hasn’t had a lover in more than a year. The long adulterous affair with Jack Rappaport, judge of family court, came to an end when his wife died and Maria perceived that he thought of her as a potential replacement. She liked adultery; even the accoutrements amused her: phone calls from public booths at freezing hours, fake accents, Can’t talk to you now. She could see that as an adventure. But she has never wanted to be married; she dreaded the stasis, the old feeling of being fixed in a rifle sight, right in the middle of the crosshairs. Trapped. What she told the young mother of the crying baby was the truth: she can’t stand being still. The stillness of marriage felt to her like incarceration, incarceration under the name of protection. So now she is fifty years old, unmated. All the years of a desiring body, the intoxicating longing, foolish headlong yearning muted now. She wonders sometimes if it is possible that she will never be a man’s lover again.
The woman with the copper-colored curls is slipping now into her seat and buckling her seat belt. The trick, Maria thinks, not for the first time, of the female body. Here it is, the prize above all others prized, only you must hide it, call it dangerous or something worse.
She wonders what the state of Pearl’s body is now. She thinks of all the ways she’s known that body, all the bodies it has been (as her own has been many bodies), none so loved as the earliest, the infant’s; then the child’s skin, desired to the point of swooning, the point of exhaustion, a tenderness far more complete, more heartbreaking than the love for any man. Then the child’s body taking on its competence, charming, comic with the comedy of animals. The fear, then: I send this body on its way (because I cannot stop it) into a world on whose hard surfaces these beautiful feet, barely articulate in their new bones, must walk. Then the body more the world’s than mine: rounded breasts, lengthened limbs. To be a mother is to be perpetually stolen from.
The starved body of her child. The shock of the word starved: the dry hard single syllable, formed at the roof of the mouth.
If she could see Pearl’s body now, unclothed, she would be shocked. There is a sprinkling on her arms and legs and breasts of a fine coating of light hair—lanugo, it is called—the starved body’s protection, the same hair grown by babies. Pearl’s teeth now are too big for her face; her hair is dull and brittle, her nails broken, her skin tinged yellow-green. Maria doesn’t know any of this, but she knows enough to be afraid of seeing her daughter now, the sight of whom was always the most desirable thing she could imagine.
The copper-colored beauty, bored, looks in a mirror she takes from a bag at her feet. She plays with a comb, rearranging her lush hair. Devorah, Maria thinks, remembering the red curls of her beloved friend, now dead. Grotesquely dead, catching the heel of her shoe in the hem of her skirt, facedown in the dirt of a ficus plant. Copper hair. Red hair. Devorah’s.
My friend is dead, my friend is dead, my daughter wants to die, she thinks, over and over, pressing the heels of her hands against her eyes. Surely this is something she should be allowed to weep for. She searches in the seat pocket for the sleeping mask. Does it matter, she wonders, if someone sees tears dripping below a mask? My friend is dead. My daughter is dying. I am alone.
Surely she can be allowed to pray to Devorah. What is prayer, after all, but asking for help, any kind of help you want, saying anything that comes to your mind? That was what she did with Devorah all the time; they helped each other, they told each other everything. They understood each other completely. Neither of them ever judged the other; always, they took the other’s side. Why can she not do that now, talk to Devorah as she always talked to her, ask her for help as she always did? If that was prayer, it must be a permissible kind, even when you are not a believer, when you’ve staked your life on having left belief, in the name of justice, in the name of truth. And who will know she is praying to Devorah? Who will censure her, punish her if she prays for her child who wants to die to the friend of her youth?
But what is the language of prayer for someone like herself who has staked her life against all that prayer stands for? She thinks of her favorite poem, Herbert’s “Prayer.” She has Herbert with her. Her copy with Devorah’s handwriting: To Maria on her twenty-first birthday. With all my love.
She no longer believes in prayer, but it is still her favorite poem. Learned by heart. Yet her heart has proved inadequate, because she doesn’t in fact remember the whole thing, only phrases, disconnected from the whole: “A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear . . . the milky way, the bird of Paradise . . . the land of spices; something understood.” She had memorized it once, as a Christmas gift to her father: Christmas 1966. She’d learned it in Mother Emmanuel’s class and loved the speed of it, each phrase a whole world, each phrase a complete vision of the desirable. “Heaven in ordinary, man well drest, the milky way, the bird of Paradise.” She had thought it wonderful, the jump from the plain words ordinary and well drest to the extravagant world of stars and feathers. Proudly, she had recited it to her father on Christmas morning in his library. He tapped his fingers together. “Very fine,” he said, “but without, I think, the spiritual complexity of Hopkins.” She realized she hadn’t pleased him, and immediately she knew why. She had offered him something outside the protectorate of the church. Herbert was an Anglican; therefore he must be named inferior, somehow lacking. He must be condescended to. Did her father feel his response had been inadequate? Did he regret dashing his daughter’s joy? I don’t think so; he would always have seen before his eyes the beacon of his duty, the singular vision, one way and one way only of right being in the world. She excused herself from her father’s study and went up to her room, not to cry but to be alone with the dryness in her heart. There had been a lively warm place where the flame of excitement at the idea of pleasing her father lapped and climbed. Now there were only ashes in an empty and cold grate.
And yet it hadn’t made her love the poem less. She doesn’t believe in anything on the other side of prayer, but she believes in the language of that poem, the potential of language for transformation, the forcing of the miraculous, for comprehension of all that seems to be incomprehensible, a place of rest at last. Surely it is all right to go to your friend, your dead friend, with your wish for the miraculous, your wish for consolation. Surely, at a moment like this, you can speak as you like. She closes her eyes, hoping no one sees her folding her hands, and speaks to her dead friend in what she knows is the language of prayer: the speech of perfect freedom, pure desire. There can’t be anything wrong with it. She presses her head against the cool plastic surface of the window and looks out into the sky, which is beginning to lighten; it is nearly 6 a.m. She will talk to her friend. She will say whatever she wants, as she always did.
Devorah, help me.
Where are you now? We are both in the sky but I can’t see you. Are you part of something now, something that makes sense of everything?
How can this have happened? I loved her so much.
And now she’s saying that her life is worth giving up. All I want to say to her is, “Nothing is worth your
life.”
I will stop it. Help me, Devorah. Help me to stop it.
I will stop her.
I will stop her death.
I will make her live.
Help me.
The voice of the pilot interrupts her.
“About to make our descent into Dublin,” says the Irish voice.
And now, Maria thinks, it will begin.
12
“I’m Dr. Morrisey. I’m in charge here. We’ve got to get her to a hospital. We can’t wait any longer.”
A man’s voice responds, one of the policemen. “So you come on a white horse, riding to the rescue, and she gets her fifteen minutes of fame.”
Pearl looks up. She sees men and women in uniforms and then one woman, not in uniform, wearing a camel-colored coat. She leans down, takes Pearl’s wrist. “I’m Dr. Morrisey. I’m going to take you to hospital. It would be easier if you’d cooperate.”
Pearl has expected this. They will tell her to cooperate; she will resist. Civil disobedience. Gandhi and Martin Luther King. She will say nothing; if they hold her she will kick and thrash. Not to hurt anyone but to protect herself.