by Mary Gordon
The person who told me the stories has been, for forty years, the lover of one of my closest friends. I will call the lover of my friend N. You should know that both of them are men.
We were sitting at the dining table, a long refectory table, in my friend and N.'s London flat. The flat is very beautiful; a place of elegance and order. N. and my friend are close to many artists; on the walls of the living room, or sitting room as they would call it, are paintings and drawings and some sculptures by the artists who are their friends.
N. is famously fastidious. Guests are warned: There are twelve rules for the bathroom alone. The toilet paper must unroll upward and not downwards. The towels must be two inches apart. The showerhead must be replaced exactly. There are more rules, but I do not remember them. I would like you to remember this, this fastidiousness, the lapse from which you will witness when you hear the third of the stories. I believe that there is an ideal of fastidiousness in the world. An ideal of impossible purity in a world that is, in its very essence, impure.
I don't remember why N. was telling me these stories, why he began telling me the story of his friend and her father. We must have been talking about fathers. I don't remember why or what we said. I am very often thinking about my father, but I work hard on not talking about him as much as I would like. In part, I think I can't talk about him because I have written about him so much that I'm afraid all talk about him is not real talk but literature. I do not want to turn my father into literature. So I talk about him rarely, when I'm sure that what I'm saying is something simple, something I have not gone over and over in my mind.
My father died when I was seven.
My father, whose love for me shines always on the horizon of who I am: pure, glowing, unblemished. The moon of my father's love over the lake surface of my life. Like a romantic painting: the black or purple sky, the black or dark green sea, the wide moon slinging spears of light across the darkness.
It is possible, of course, that I didn't mention my father at all, perhaps N. only mentioned the woman, only told her story because he was about to meet her for supper that night. I don't remember, I really don't. The story is so powerful that it obliterates the lead-up, like a wave that would obliterate a path to the shore. This was the story as he told it:
“My friend loved her father very much. He was a scholar and she herself became a scholar in the very field where he had achieved his eminence. Her father was very handsome and very charming and her mother was beautiful but cold. She did not love her mother and she believed her father did not love her mother. She believed, although they never spoke of it, that her father loved her more than he loved her mother. She was actually quite sure of that.
“Her father died when she was twenty-four. Some months after he died, her mother said she had something that the daughter must see. She took her daughter up to the attic of their house and opened an old trunk. In the trunk there were many notebooks.
“ ? found these after your father died,’ the mother said. ? think that you should see them.’
“When my friend opened the journals and began reading she discovered that they were the record of explicit pornographic fantasies that her father had had about her from the time that she was a very little child. My friend had a nervous breakdown. She has never recovered.”
When N. tells me this, I try to make a heading under which to file this story in my mind. I have several from which to choose:
Moments that are never recovered from
Causes of rage and hate
Unspeakable desires
Ugliness that should be hidden or destroyed
She thought she had what I have with my father: pure, unblemished love. Safety, clarity, a place as clean and sheltering as my friend's flat. Fastidious.
She was wrong. How could she recover from this? And the mother? How could she have shown her daughter such a thing? How could she act with, from, such rage and hate? Why didn't she destroy the evidence?
I ask N.: “What would make a mother show her daughter such a thing?”
He says, “She had to show it because it was unbearable to her. Because it must have been that the father and the daughter's love was always unbearable to her.”
I wonder what my mother would have done.
No, I don't: I know she would have shown me. She would have said, “I want to rub your nose in this. The stink.”
Because, although we never spoke about it, she must have known that my father loved me more than he loved her. And how could this not have enraged her?
But my mother didn't seem to be enraged by it: it was simply something that we, as a family, always understood. I think she was rather proud of it, that she had such an unusual husband, that she had married a man who would turn into such a praiseworthy father. It was not said that she loved me more than she loved him, but that was also understood. But of course, it must have been enraging for her. Something I have always accepted: the truth of my mother's rage.
Having told me the story about his friend and her father, N. tells me a story about his own father.
“This incident that I am about to describe happened just before my father's death. I was eight years old. My aunts had dressed me up for a costume party. They dressed me as a girl. They curled my hair and put ribbons in it. They put me in a dress and girl's shoes. They put lipstick and rouge on me. They took me to see my father, who was on his deathbed. He was in pain and very weak. They thought seeing me dressed up like that would amuse him.
“At first, I knew he didn't recognize me. Then a look of horror passed over his face. He didn't say anything. He turned his face to the wall. It was the last time I ever saw him. He died that night.”
As N. speaks, I think of something that happened to my father and me. I was six years old. It was the night of my dance recital. I had a solo. Two solos. I danced to “Easter Parade.” I wore a blue and yellow flower-printed dress, which I liked very much, and a straw hat with ribbons. “In your Easter bonnet with all the frills upon it, pas de bourrie, pas de bourne.” I can hear my dance teacher's voice singing these words. I had another number: tap. I was dressed in navy blue satin with silver stripes and a red border at the neck. I tapped to “You're a Grand Old Flag.” I was very proud of myself; I thought the whole thing very fine.
The night of the recital, my father came down with stomach flu. I was heartbroken that he wouldn't be able to see me dance. But he said nothing would keep him from watching me dance. He said he couldn't sit down because he might have to keep jumping up to go to the bathroom, but he would stand in the back.
When he sees me on the stage, my father runs up the length of the aisle and stands at the edge of the stage. I can see his smiling face. I can hear him saying, “That's my little girl.” I am dancing for him. I sometimes wonder if there is anything in my life I am not doing for him.
No one has ever looked at me again like that: as if everything I did was miraculous.
My father's adoring gaze.
N.'s father, turning his face away from him. A father: turning his face to the wall.
N. is dying. Of all the people I know, N. and my friend have loved each other the most purely.
My friend cannot bring himself to tell N. that he is dying. When N. asks the doctor what is happening to him the doctor says: You're waiting. N. does not ask: For what.
My friend does not want to face his lover's death. He does not want his lover to face it. He does not want it faced. He wants to turn his face away. And with loving fingers, to turn his lover's face. From the thing that cannot be faced. The face of death.
When N. told me these stories, his death was in him. Of course, all our deaths are always in all of us, but this death, this particular death, was sickening in him, growing in him, consuming him. He was being consumed by something inside himself.
Now I need your help. Now, as I am about to tell you the third story. Because I don't understand why, to the two stories that N. told me, both of us sitting at his table on a September
afternoon, I connect the third.
I hope you understand that I know that the place where the third story happened is a strange place to be writing about. A place that I would not have imagined myself writing about when I was young and thought of myself as writing, thought of what I might be writing as a woman in her fifties. When I was young, I might have imagined myself a woman alone in a sunny room with a dog asleep on a blue rug at her feet. But I did not imagine that I would be writing about something that took place in a gym. I wouldn't have been able to imagine myself using the phrase “I belong to a gym.” Belong and gym?. I would not have put the two words together in connection to myself. Who knows what sentences I will be speaking as an eighty-year-old woman that I cannot imagine now? It is possible that I will never be an old woman, that I will die before I am old. Before I am eighty. When I was thirty, I did not believe I would be fifty-five. I may have pretended to believe, but I didn't, not really. No.
It isn't difficult to imagine that I will be dead before I reach eighty. So many around me have died. N. will die in his sixties. He will die quite soon. He does not know it. Or does he? He does not speak of it, he does not speak of knowing that he knows.
Gym. Gymnasium. We only use the nickname. We never say, “I'm going to the gymnasium. What gymnasium do you belong to?” And when we say the word gymnasium, we do not think of the European, the German word gymnasium, pronounced with a hard g. Kafka attended a gymnasium. It is difficult to connect Kafka with the kind of gym I am about to describe. Ridiculous to connect the two words: Kafka and fitness. Kafka is all that is not health.
But perhaps you find it ridiculous that I intend to describe my gym to you. My gym. Mine. In the sense that I belong to it. In the sense that I am a member. In the sense that I have paid what some people whom I respect would believe is a shocking amount for this membership.
For two reasons. Because it is a place that I can dance to Broadway show tunes and disco with other women. Fantasizing ourselves in the chorus. Chorines. A word that has disappeared from the language: chorine. Impossible to imagine what words we now commonly use that in the future will have disappeared.
I have also paid the money for this gym because of the terror of becoming fat. Perhaps this is why most of the women are here, except for the few athletes in training, or the semi-invalids here for therapy. In the locker room, women are naked in a pretty unself-conscious way, although, being women, we all know, we must know that we are looking at each other. I think that most of the women in my gym have better bodies than mine. I tell myself that many of them are younger, but some are not, and I know that, I acknowledge that, I take that in. There is, however, not unmixed with judgment and self-hate, some sort of sisterhood in this room. We are safe here, except from the eyes of each other, and even the sharpest eyes do not linger, do not dwell.
Always clothed, always completely clothed, are the women, Latina and quite young, who clean up after us.
One day when I'm getting dressed in the locker room, there is a terrible smell. I think it must be me: I must have stepped in dog shit and not noticed it. Perhaps my dog vomited on my coat and I (how could this have happened) didn't see. Furtively I examine the bottom of my shoes, all my clothes. Pretending I am searching for something in the locker, I sniff my armpits. I squat down so that my nose is nearer to my crotch and sniff. Nothing. It is not coming from me. The relief. But where is it coming from?
I haven't told you that most of the time the locker room is exceptionally clean. Snowy towels, as many as you need, rest on counters in immaculate piles. In the air: the scents of different shampoos, conditioners, moisturizers, perfume, and over all the eucalyptus that is sprayed in the steam room.
So where is this smell coming from? From which of these clean-seeming naked women?
I am ashamed to suspect the Latina women, but I do. They are the only ones in clothes. Clothes: sign of the dirty outside world.
The Latina women begin shouting angrily. One of them comes by with a hose. The floor is sluiced with water. Others run in with buckets, mops, rags.
None of the naked women has said anything, but for a moment we all love each other in our innocence.
Then a very old woman walks from the lavatory into the locker room. She looks like an Indian: long white skirt, black shawl, another black shawl covering her head, her hair hanging down her back, incomprehensibly dark and glossy. She glides out, like a ship progressing through calm water.
A woman I know says: “Somebody had an accident on the bathroom floor.”
An accident? At first I think she means a collision of automobiles. Crash! Metal upon metal, flashing lights.
But then I realize: what she means by accident is shit.
We know, all of us, the naked women, the women with hoses, the women with mops and buckets, the women with rags, that it was the old Indian woman who sailed by us a moment before. She was the one that did it. We know that it was she and what she did but we do not know why. Could it have been some kind of colonial revenge, that she hated us as a group, for our cleanliness, our prosperity? Is she the mother, the grandmother of one of the cleaning girls, enraged that her beautiful daughter, her beautiful granddaughter has to clean up after these fat white bitches? Is that why we are all ashamed?
We know that we are all ashamed. But we do not know why.
Breaking the silence, one of the naked women says, “I thought it was me.” “Oh, God,” says another. “I thought it was me.” “Me too.” “So did I.”
What can it mean: that all of us, clean, naked, believe that we are carrying, only temporarily, only inadequately hidden, something that stinks. That being female, the corruption we are carrying is more than the seed of our own death, it is noxious, poisonous, to ourselves and to others, that the task of our life is to seal it up.
You must believe me: it is only now I begin to understand why I connected the three stories. Only after I have told them all. Told them to you. It is only now that I see: that the woman whose father thought about her with unspeakable desire, that N.'s father, who saw the female in his son, that all of us clean naked women believe that we have somewhere in us the dangerous, the foul thing that will make everyone turn away.
Is that what we believe?
If we do not it would not be surprising if we believed it.
But why do I believe it? What about my love for my father and his love for me?
That pure love. Fastidious.
And who was that woman? And why was she there?
You can see why I need you to hear me.
Why I would not want to be considering these things alone.
My friend's lover is dying.
It is difficult not to be ashamed.
The Baby
When people asked Kathleen if she was homesick in America, she said she wasn't, and it was the truth. She'd come over with Kevin from Ennis, County Clare, a week after their wedding; they had a honeymoon at Niagara Falls. People teased her about it afterward, and she pretended to know why. She laughed along with them, and made a face to show she got it, but she never did.
At first it was like a big holiday. There was the wedding, and the airplane ride, the food on the little trays. There was her trip to Niagara Falls on the train, Kevin telling her she was great not to be feeling the jet lag. And her first night ever in a hotel. Her first night really alone with Kevin. The week after the wedding they'd spent in her parents’ house; her brothers had cleared out of their room and were sleeping on the sitting room floor. It made her and Kevin self-conscious, trying to sleep together in her brother James's bed, too narrow for them, only they couldn't give up what seemed like the treat of sleeping in the same bed. The times they'd been together before in the back of someone's car or in a field she'd felt a little bad about it, but she hadn't wanted to say anything for fear of spoiling Kevin's time. Maybe he'd felt bad about it too, it seemed to mean so much to him, sleeping in her brother's cramped bed, with the pictures of footballers looking down on them. “It's great no
t to have to sneak around, not to have to skulk home afterward, to look your mam in the eye, not feeling lonely for you in the bed, thinking of you while my brothers were snoring,” he said.
Kevin had no sisters; he'd come from a family of seven, all boys. And in her family, she'd been the only girl. Everyone was thrilled when she and Kevin had the baby and it was a girl. They named it Margaret after Kevin's aunt, who'd died young, but they called her Maggie and not Peg, as the aunt had been called, to break the bad luck. So that was another part of the holiday, having Maggie fifteen months after she'd set foot in the States, decorating the nursery and buying baby clothes. Kevin was doing well so they could afford to splurge, and she'd banked her whole salary while she'd been pregnant.
Her life had been wonderful the last five years, everything was better than it had been at home. She even looked better a bit older. She always knew she'd been good-looking, but there were little things that had tormented her that seemed to have gone away after the baby. Her face used to break out, and that had stopped. And there were secret deformities that possibly no one had noticed but were a torture to Kathleen. Before the baby her palms and fingertips had always been damp, so that she'd dreaded shaking hands with anyone for fear she might disgust them. And her fingernails had had little ridges cut into them, so that she felt she never could wear nail varnish, because it would draw attention. But now her hands were perfectly fine; she didn't think of them at all now.
After the baby, after she got her figure back, she'd looked at herself naked in the full-length mirror. She'd never done that before in her life. She was surprised at how pleased she was at the sight of herself, surprised and a bit ashamed. She understood what Kevin meant now, that her breasts were round and lovely. She liked that she had a waist, some women didn't even if they were thin, and if she wished her thighs were a bit smaller, she knew it wasn't really serious. She'd always known she had nice eyes, green like the sea, Kevin said, and she began wearing a bit of makeup, blue eye shadow and black mascara, and she was pleased with the way it made her eyes look bigger and brought out the color.