Entry #2. Lucy Pumper announces to me on the school bus: “I know they have to do it to have children, but do they have to take off all of their clothes?” Lucy was Catholic—an exotic category: incense, robes, crucifixes, rosaries (all coveted)—and she had eight brothers and sisters. I bowed to her superior knowledge. I, on the other hand, looked through that particular glass darkly and had nothing to say. I was nine years old and understood perfectly that I would discover a reflection of some kind if I looked hard enough, but when I gazed ahead I had no idea what I was seeing. All of their clothes?
A side entry: I promised not to, but I can’t help it. His hair was dark then, almost black, and there was no soft, loose flesh beneath his chin. As he sat across the table from me in the Hungarian Pastry Shop, he explained his research slowly and lucidly, and he drew a model on the napkin with his Bic pen. I leaned forward to look at it, followed one of the lines he had drawn with my finger, and looked up at him. The electric air. He placed his hand over mine and pressed my fingers into the table, but I felt it between my legs. I felt my jaw loosen and my mouth open. It was grand, my love, wasn’t it? Well, wasn’t it?
* * *
I am screaming, All these years you came first! You, never me! Who cleaned, did homework for hours, slogged through the shopping? Did you? Goddamned master of the universe! Phallic Übermensch off to a conference. The neural correlates of consciousness! It makes me puke!
Why are you always so angry? What happened to your sense of humor? Why are you rewriting our life?
I remember pieces, parts,
A chair without the room,
A flying phrase, a shriek, a foggy scene,
hippocampal fits
that summon David Hume,
his I as pale and lean and phantom-like
As mine.
Dear Mom,
I’m thinking of you every day. How is Grandmother? The play closes in August and then I’ll come to visit for a whole week. I love doing Muriel. She’s a pip—a great part and finally comedy! The laughs have been huge. I told Freddy the scripts were awful, but he kept sending me out for those ghastly torture-and-kill-the-girl movies. Yuck! The playhouse is trying to raise money, but it isn’t easy here in off-off-off land. Jason is fine except that he’s hating my schedule.
I saw Dad for lunch but it didn’t go so well. Mom, I’m worrying a lot about you. Are you okay? I love you so much.
Your own Daisy
I sent my own Daisy a reassuring message.
* * *
“He wasn’t an easy man to be married to, your father,” my mother said.
“No,” I said, “I can see that.”
My mother was sitting in a chair, hugging her thin knees. I thought to myself that although age had shrunk her, it had also intensified her, as if the lack of remaining time had had the effect of stripping away all fat—both physical and mental.
“Golf, the law, crosswords, martinis.”
“In that order?” I smiled at her.
“Possibly.” My mother sighed and reached to pick a dead leaf from a potted plant on the table beside her. “I have never told you,” she said, “but when you were still small, I believe your father fell in love with someone else.”
I took a breath. “He had an affair?”
My mother shook her head. “No, I don’t think there was sex. His rectitude was absolute, but there was the feeling.”
“He told you?”
“No. I guessed.”
Such were the circuitous routes of marital life, at least between my parents. Direct confrontation, of any kind, had been extremely rare. “But he admitted it.”
“No, he didn’t confirm or deny it.” My mother pressed her lips together. “He found it very difficult, you know, to talk to me about anything painful. He would say, ‘Please, I can’t. I can’t.’”
As she spoke, a mental image of my father came abruptly into my head. He was sitting with his back turned to me, silently watching the fire, a book of puzzles at his feet. Then I saw him lying in the hospital bed, a long skeletal figure adrift on morphine, no longer conscious. I remembered my mother touching his face. At first, she used a single finger, as if she were drawing his features directly onto his body, a wordless outline of her husband’s countenance. But then she pressed her palms against his forehead, cheeks, eyes, nose, and neck, squeezing his flesh hard like a sightless woman desperate to memorize a face. My mother, both tough and blighted, her lips pressed together, her eyes wide with urgency as she began to grasp his shoulders and arms and then his chest. I turned away from this private claim to a man, this possessive declaration of time spent, and I left the room. When I returned, my father was dead. He looked younger dead, smooth and incomprehensible. She was sitting in darkness with her hands folded in her lap. Narrow lines of light from the Venetian blinds made stripes across her forehead and cheek, and I felt awe, only awe in that instant.
In response to my silence, my mother continued. “I am telling you this now,” she said, “because I sometimes wished he had risked it, had thrown himself at her. He might, of course, have run off with her, and then again, he might have tired of it…” She exhaled loudly, a long shuddering breath. “He returned to me, emotionally, I mean, to the degree that it was possible for him. It went on for a few years—the distance—and then I don’t think he thought of her anymore, or if he did, she had lost her power.”
“I see,” I said. I did see. The Pause. I tried hard to remember sonnet 129. It begins, “Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame,” and then the lines about lust, “lust in action.” Somewhere the words “murderous, bloody, full of blame…”
Enjoyed no sooner, but despised straight;
Something, something … then:
Mad in pursuit, and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.
“Who was she, Mama?”
“Does it matter?”
“No, maybe not,” I lied.
“She’s dead,” my mother said. “She’s been dead for twelve years.”
* * *
That evening, as I turned the key in the lock, I felt a presence on the other side of the door, a heavy, threatening being, palpable, alive, there, standing just as I stood, its hand raised. I heard myself breathing on the step, felt the cooling night on my bare arms, heard a lone car engine start up not far away, but I didn’t move. Neither did it. Stupid tears rose in my eyes. I had felt the same weighted body years ago at the bottom of the stairs at home, a waiting Echo. I counted to twenty, delayed for another twenty beats, then pushed hard at the door and turned on the light switch to face the reasonable emptiness of the mud hall. It was gone. This thing that was not a superstition or a vague apprehension, but a felt conviction. Why had it returned? Ghosts, devils, and doubles. I remembered telling Boris about the waiting presence, invisible but dense, and his eyes had lit up with interest. That was back in the days when he liked me, before his eyes went dull, before Stefan died, the little brother, who leapt and crashed, so smart, O God, the young philosopher who knocked them out at Princeton, who made them quake, who loved to talk to me, to me, not just to Boris, who read my poems, who held my hand, who was dead before he could visit me in the hospital where he had been, too, landed, too, on his flights to heaven and drops into hell. I hate you for what you did, Stefan. You knew he would find you. You must have known he would find you. And you must have known he would call me and that I would go to him. For half a second, I saw the pool of urine on the floor mixed with watery feces staining the floorboards. No.
Stop thinking about that. Don’t think about that. Go back to the presence.
Boris had told me about presences. Karl Jaspers, wunder Mensch, had called the phenomenon leibhaftige Bewusstheit and somebody else, a Fr
enchman, no doubt, hallucination du compagnon. Had I been crazy as a girl, too? Bats for a year? No, not a whole year, months, the months of the cruelties when I had felt the Thing waiting at the bottom of the stairs. “Not necessarily crazy,” Boris had said to me in his voice, thickened by cigars, and then he had smiled. Presences, he said, have been felt by patients, both in the psych ward and those in neurology, as well as by just plain folks. Yes, hordes of undiagnosed innocents, just like you, Dear Reader, whose minds are not cracked or disorderly or shredded to bits, but merely subject to a quirk or two.
I triedrd to remember then, as I lay on the sofa, presence-free, to unearth the distant cruelties of the sixth grade, “calmly and objectively,” as they say on television and in bad books. There had been a plot or several plots, a grandiose word for the doings of little girls, but does the age of the perpetrators or the location of intrigue really matter? Playground or royal court? Isn’t the human business the same?
How had it started? At a slumber party. Just fragments. This is certain: I didn’t want to breathe in until I fainted, gulping in the air over and over to propel me forward flat onto the mattress. It was stupid, and I had been frightened by Lucy’s white face.
“Don’t be chicken, Mia. Come on. Come on.” Whines of complicity.
No. I wouldn’t do it. Why would anyone want to faint? I felt too vulnerable. I didn’t like to be dizzy.
The girls whisper near me. Yes, I hear them but don’t understand. My sleeping bag was blue with a plaid lining. That I remember clearly. I’m tired, so tired. There is something about an aim, aiming at someone, then aiming a knife. A cryptic joke.
I laugh with them, not wanting to be left out, and the girls laugh harder. My friend Julia laughs hardest of all. I fall asleep after that. Confused and ignorant little girl.
The note in class: “AIM, dirty fingernails and greasy red hair. Wash yourself, piglet.” I saw my inverted name all at once. Mia in Aim.
“My nails are clean and so is my hair.”
Gales of laughter. High winds of cackling from the group, blowing me down into a hole. Don’t say anything. Pretend you hear, see nothing.
The pinch on the stairs.
“Stop pinching me.”
No expression on Julia’s face. “What’s wrong with you? I didn’t touch you. You’re crazy.”
More surreptitious pinches, my “imagination,” in the girls’ locker room.
Tears in the toilet stall.
Then, mostly, I don’t exist.
To reject, exclude, ignore, excommunicate, exile, push out. The cold shoulder. The silent treatment. Solitary confinement. Time out.
In Athens, they formalized ostracism to rid themselves of those suspected of having accumulated too much power, from ostrakon, the word for “shard.” They wrote down the names of the threats on broken pieces of crockery. Word Shards. The Pathan tribes in Pakistan exile renegade members, sending them into a dusty nowhere. The Apache ignore widows. They fear the paroxysms of grief and pretend those who suffer from them do not exist. Chimpanzees, lions, wolves all have forms of ostracism, forcing out one of their own, either too weak or too obstreperous to be tolerated by the group. Scientists describe this as an “innate and adaptive” method of social control. Lester the chimpanzee lusted after power above his rank, tried to hump females out of his league. He didn’t know his place and, finally, was expelled. Without the others, he starved to death. The researchers found his emaciated body under a tree. The Amish call it Meidung. When a member breaks a law, he or she is shunned. All interactions cease, and the one they have turned against falls into destitution or worse. A man bought a car to take his sick child to a doctor, but the Amish are not allowed to drive cars. After that breach, the powers that be declared him anathema. No one recognized him. Old friends and neighbors looked through him. He no longer existed among them, and so he lost himself to himself. He cringed at the blank faces. His posture changed; he folded inward; and he found he couldn’t eat. His eyes lost their focus, and when he spoke to his son, he realized he was whispering. He found a lawyer and filed suit against the elders. Not long after, his boy died. A month later, he died. Meidung is also known as “the slow death.” Two of the elders who had approved the Meidung also died. There were bodies all over the stage.
It seemed to me at the time that I had fallen under an evil enchantment, the source of which could not be proven, only guessed at, because the crimes were small and mostly hidden: pinches that didn’t happen, hurtful notes written by no one: “You are a big fake,” the mysterious destruction of my English paper, the drawing I had left on my desk—found scribbled over—jeers and whispers, anonymous telephone calls, the silence of not being answered. We find ourselves in the faces of others, and so for a time every mirror reflected a foreigner, a despised outsider unworthy of being alive. Mia. I rescrambled it. I am. I wrote it over and over in my notebook. I am. I am Mia. Among my mother’s books I found an anthology of poems and in it, John Clare’s poem, “I Am.”
I am: yet what I am none cares or knows
My friends forsake me like a memory lost,
I am the self-consumer of my woes—
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shadows in love’s frenzied, stifled throes—
And yet, I am, and live—like vapors tossed
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise …
I had no idea what “self-consumer of my s tossedx201D; meant. It might have helped. A little irony, child, a little distance, a little humor, a little indifference. Indifference was the cure, but I couldn’t find it in myself. The actual cure was escape. That simple. My mother arranged it. St. John’s Academy in St. Paul, a boarding school. There I was smiled upon, recognized, befriended. There I found Rita, co-conspirator with long black braids and Mad magazine, fan of Ella, Piaf, and Tom Lehrer. Lying each in a bunk, we crooned out in faltering harmony every verse of “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park.” (I felt bad for the fictional pigeons, actually, but the sweet camaraderie of Rita far outweighed the pinch of pity.) Her pale brown legs. My white ones with a few freckles. My bad poems. Her good cartoons.
I remember my mother as she stood in the doorway to our room on the first day. She was so much younger, and I can’t summon the precise features of her face as it was then. I do recall the worried but hopeful look in her eyes before she left me, and that when I hugged her I smashed my face into the shoulder of her jacket and told myself to inhale. I wanted to keep the smell of her with me—that mingled odor of loose powder and Shalimar and wool.
* * *
It is impossible to divine a story while you are living it; it is shapeless; an inchoate procession of words and things, and let us be frank: We never recover what was. Most of it vanishes. And yet, as I sit here at my desk and try to bring it back, that summer not so long ago, I know turns were made that affected what followed. Some of them stand out like bumps on a relief map, but then I was unable to perceive them because my view of things was lost in the undifferentiated flatness of living one moment after another. Time is not outside us, but inside. Only we live with past, present, and future, and the present is too brief to experience anyway; it is retained afterward and then it is either codified or it slips into amnesia. Consciousness is the product of delay. Sometime in early June, during the second week of my stay, I made a small turn without being aware of it, and I think it began with the secret amusements.
* * *
Abigail had arranged for me to see her handicrafts. Her apartment was smaller than my mother’s and, at first glance, I felt inundated by the shelves of tiny glass figurines, the embroidered pillows and wall signs (“Home Sweet Home”), and the multicolored quilts folded over furniture. Various artworks covered most of the walls and Abigail herself, who was decked out in a long loose dress embellished with what appeared to be an alligator and other creatures. Despite the dense arrangements, the room had that neat, newly dusted, proud feeling I had come to expect from the swans of Rolling Meadows. Because
she could no longer stand upright, Abigail used a walker to deftly propel herself around in the doubled-over position. She opened the door, shifted her head sideways to eye me, and, fingering her hearing aid with her free hand, looked intently in my direction. The auditory devices were not like the ones my mother wore; they were much larger and protruded from her ears like great dark flowers. Thick cords dangled from them, and I wondered whether these were extra technology for her extreme deafness or a throwback to an earlier era. Although not nearly so big, the contraptions reminded me of ear trumpets in the nineteenth century. She settled me into a chair, offered me cookies and a glass of milk, as if I were seven, and then, without any preliminaries, she brought forth the two works she had selected for me to examine and placed one on top of the other on my lap. Then she slowly made her way to the green sofa and carefully deposited herself in a position that was painful to look at, but her cheerful, direct expression mitigated my discomfort, and I picked up the top piece.
“That’s an old one,” she said. “Doesn’t bother me. That’s the best I can say. At least that one doesn’t bother me. After I put them up, some of them get to bothering me, and then I have to put them away, go right in the closet. Well, what do you think?”
After taking out my reading glasses, I looked down at an elaborate scene of what appeared to be a cliché: In the foreground a cherubic blond boy made of felt cutouts danced with a bear against a background of riotous flower patterns. Over him was a yellow sun with a smiling face. Happy-wappy, I thought. The derisive expression was Bea’s. But then as I continued to look, I noticed that behind the dull boy, nearly hidden by leaf patterns, was a tiny girl embroidered into fabric, her form rendered in threads of muted colors. Wielding an oversized open pair of scissors as a weapon, she grinned malevolently at a sleeping cat. Then I noticed a set of pale pink winged dentures above her that, without scrutiny, could have been mistaken for petals, and a gray-green skeleton key. As I continued to investigate the shapes in the foliage, I saw what appeared to be a pair of naked breasts in a little window and soon after some words, the letters of which were so small I had to hold them away from me to read: O remember that my life is wind. I knew I had read those words but couldn’t place them.
The Summer Without Men Page 3