The Summer Without Men

by Hustvedt, Siri

  When I looked up, Abigail smiled.

  “It’s not what it seems to be at first,” I yelled in her direction. “The girl. The teeth. Where is the quote from?”

  “Hollering is not helpful,” she said loudly. “A firm loud voice will do the trick. Job. ‘O remember that my life is wind; mine eye shall no more see good.’”

  I said nothing.

  “They don’t see it, you know.” Abigail stroked a hearing-aid cord as she tilted her head. “Most of them. They see only what they expect to see, sugar, not spice, if you comprehend my meaning. Even your mother took her time noticing them. Of course, the eyesight around these parts isn’t too hot. I started doing it, oh, it was years ago, at my crafts club, made my own patterns, but it wouldn’t do to come right out with it—up front—you know, so I began what I came to call the private amusements, little scenes within scenes, secret undies, if you understand. Take a gander at the next one. It’s got a door.”

  I laid the small blanket on my lap and looked down at needlepoint roses, yellow and pink on a black background, with leaves in various greens. The stitching was flawless. There were also tiny pastel buttons sewn here and there into the floral motif. No door.

  “One of the buttons opens, Mia,” she said. Her voice shook as she spoke, and I could sense her excitement.

  After fumbling with several buttons, I looked up to see Abigail grab her walker, raise herself twice before she pushed herself up off her seat, and begin to move slowly toward me—walker tap, step, tap, step. Once she had arrived, her lowered head poised just above my own, she gestured toward a yellow button. “That one. Then pull.”

  I pushed the button through a hole and pulled. The rose fabric gave way to a different view. The image on my lap was another needlepoint, but this one was dominated by a huge gray-blue vacuum cleaner, complete with an Electrolux label on its flank. The thing was not grounded but airborne, a flying machine guided by a disproportionately small, mostly naked woman—she wore only high heels—who sailed alongside it in the blue sky, commandeering its long hose. The household appliance was engaged in the business of sucking up a miniature town below. I studied the two legs of a tiny man that stuck out from the bottom of the attachment and the hair of another pulled upward by the air, his mouth open in terror. Cows, pigs, and chickens, a church, and a school had all been uprooted and were soon to be digested by the hungry hose. Abigail had worked hard on the suction disaster scene; each figure and building had been rendered in tiny precise stitches. Then I saw the miniature sign that said BONDEN hovering just outside the vacuum’s mouth. I thought of the hours of work and the pleasure that must have pushed her forward, a secret pleasure, one touched by anger or revenge or at the very least a gleeful feeling of vicarious destruction. Many days, perhaps months, had gone into creating this “undie.”

  A low sound came from my throat, but I don’t think she heard it. I looked at her, nodded, smiled my appreciation, and said, careful not to yell, “It’s great.”

  Abigail slowly returned to the sofa. I waited through the taps and steps, and then through the lowering ritual that began with a double-fisted grip on the walker and concluded with a rocking drop into the seat cushion. “Did it in fifty-seven,” she said. “Too much for me now. My fingers won’t cooperate, the work’s too fine.”

  “You had to hide it?”

  She nodded, then smiled. “I was spitting mad at the time. Made me feel better.”

  Abigail did not elaborate, and I felt too much the outsider to press her. We sat together for a while without speaking. I watched the old Swan munch her cookie very neatly, gingerly wiping away a few crumbs that had settled at the corner of her mouth with an embroidered napkin. After some minutes, I said I had to go, and when she reached for her walker, I told her not to worry about showing me to the door. And then, in a fit of admiration, I leaned over, found her cheek, and kissed it warmly.

  What do we know about people really? I thought. What the hell do we know about nyone?

  * * *

  After only a week of class, my seven girls emerged from behind their adolescent wardrobes and their tics, and I found myself interested in them. Ashley and Alice, the two A girls, were friends. Both were bright, had read books, even some poets, and they vied for my attention in class. Ashley was poised, however, in a way Alice was not. Alice was inward. A couple of times she absentmindedly picked her nose in class while she worked on a poem. She was inclined toward stilted Romantic images—moors, wild tears, and savage breasts—that indicated her immersion in the Brontë sisters but often sounded merely silly when she read her works aloud in emotional tones that made her compatriots writhe with embarrassment. But in spite of her pretensions, she wrote grammatically and with far more sophistication than any of the other girls and came out with a few lines I truly liked: Silence is a good neighbor and I watched my sullen self walk away. Ashley, on the other hand, had a strong sense of what would fly with the others. She liked rhymes, the influence of rap music, and impressed her friends with her agility, matching fret and Internet, for example, and plate with investigate. The girl had perfect pitch for workshop politics and dealt out praise, comfort, and delicate criticism in beneficent doses to her peers. Emma lost some of her shyness, pushed aside her hair, and revealed a sense of humor: “Never put a rainbow in a poem. Never rhyme true with you, but scarf and barf will do.” After a few classes, Peyton had become so relaxed, she set herself up with an extra chair to accommodate her long legs. Like Alice’s, Peyton’s body lagged behind the other girls’. The hormonal onslaught of puberty showed no signs of having visited her person, and though I’m sure it worried her, I couldn’t help but think that backwardness in this area had its advantages. In all events, that is how I read the grass stains on her shorts and the fact that horses, not boys, continually found their way into her poems. Jessie looked the little woman already, but I sensed she was waging an internal battle. The mature body must have come fast. The camp that welcomed it preened and smelled musky, while the other side donned roomy T-shirts to disguise ample breasts that appeared to be growing apace every week. Whatever else took place in Jessie’s inner life remained hidden behind clichés. The grinding stupidity of phrases such as “You just have to believe in yourself” and “Don’t let anything get you down” recurred without cease, and I soon understood that these weren’t just lazy expressions but dictates of dogma, and she would not have them wrested away from her without a fight. After her early efforts, I had gently suggested she reconsider her wording and had watched her face close. “But it’s true,” she would intone. I gave in. What did it matter? I asked myself. She probably needed these slogans to end her war. Nikki and Joan remained a team, although I came to see that Nikki was the dominant of the two. One day they both arrived with chalky faces, heavy eyeliner, and black lipstick, an experiment I decided not to notice. The Halloween getup had no effect on their personas, however, which remained chirrupy. Their tittering back and forth was equaled only by the expansive delight they took in fart poems, which was mostly contagious, and they responded warmly to my short lecture on the scatological in literature. Rabelais. wift. Beckett.

  I was not deluded that I knew what was going on in the lives of these seven. After class, telephones suddenly appeared in their hands, and I watched the girls’ thumbs pick out text messages at high speed, half of them, it seemed, directed at friends on the other side of the room. After a Tuesday class I found an e-mail from Ashley.

  Dear Ms. Fredricksen,

  I had to tell u how great the class is. My Mom said I would like it but I didn’t believe her. She was right. You are really different from other teachers, like a friend. No like an ANGEL. I am learning a lot. I guess I just had to say it. Also, you have great hair.

  Your very devoted Student,

  Ashley

  And then another message from an address I didn’t recognize.

  I know all about you. You’re Insane, Crazy, Bonkers.

  Mr. Nobody.

  I felt slapp
ed. I remembered the sign from NAMI on the wall of the hospital unit’s small library: FIGHTING THE STIGMA OF MENTAL ILLNESS. Stigmatos, marked by a sharp instrument, the sign of a wound. Sometime much later, the fifteenth century, maybe, it also came to mean a mark of disgrace. Christ’s wounds and the saints and hysterics who bled from their hands and feet. Stigmata. I wondered who would want to harass me anonymously—and to what purpose? Any number of people probably knew that I had been hospitalized, but I couldn’t think who would want to send me this note. I tried to remember if I had given my e-mail to another patient, to Laurie maybe, sad, sad Laurie who had shuffled around in her slippers with her diary clutched to her chest, making small moaning sounds. It was possible, but unlikely.

  As I lay in bed that night, roiled by the usual tempests—Stefan’s note: It is too hard; the Pause shaking my hand in the lab and smiling, the memory of Boris in bed and the weight of sleep in his body, then his shrouded face as he comes out with his decision, and Daisy, tears running, the sound of her shuddering breaths and sniffs; she is sobbing about her father leaving her mother, and I think of my own inscrutable father’s passion for someone else—the word crazy returned, and I pushed it away, and then the word in the note Ashley had capitalized, ANGEL, appeared for a moment on the screen behind my closed eyelids. I thought of Blake’s celestial visitors, the legend of Rilke’s supernatural gift, the first words of the Duino Elegies, and then of Leonard, my fellow inmate on the South Unit. He had proclaimed himself the Prophet of Nothing. He pontificated and he discoursed and he clearly loved the stentorian tones of his own bass voice, expounding to anyone who came near him. But no one listened to him, not his fellow patients, not the staff. Even his psychiatrist had looked blank as he sat across from Leonard in a meeting I glimpsed through one of the large glass windows. He interested me, however, and his grandiose appeals had genuine brilliance. On the morning of my release I had sat with him in the common area. With his balding pate surrounded by graying curls that fell near his shoulders, Leonard looked the part. He turned toward me and began his prophecies. He talked to me about Meister Eckhart as a messenger of the Nothing, who influenced Schelling, Hegel, and Heidegger. And he told me that Kierkegaard’s angst was an encounter with Nothing, and that we lived in a time of actualized Nothingness, and this was essential and mystical; “It should not be amiss,” he said, waving his index finger, “to open ourselves to the truth that Nothing is the primal ground of this world.” Leonard may have been mad, but his thoughts were not nearly as addled as the powers that be in the hospital assumed. He continued his oratory by explaining that this was all related to the deeper levels of Buddhism, and as I walked toward Daisy, who had come through the door to take me home, he drifted on to Goethe’s Faust and his descent into the realm of the Mothers and his union with the nothing, and that was the last I heard.

  Lonely man. He couldn’t be Mr. Nobody, could he? After I had left the hospital, I regretted that I hadn’t made it clear to him that I was following at least some of his leaps, but all I could think about then was my daughter’s face. That something was all that mattered.

  To recall me as she,

  rocking in rooms

  as white as eggs.

  An underground of string—

  these violent lines

  of what used to be called

  the heart, lost to

  my now-bitter mouth.

  “A tangle,” he said.

  No, knots.

  Not this or these.

  She was distinct,

  I believe. Shelved.

  Put her away.

  Inanimate thing.

  Put her away,

  And let her rock.

  * * *

  “Dear Mia,” Boris wrote. “Whatever happens between us, it is very important to me to know how you are. For Daisy’s sake, too, we have to be in communication. Please send a message back when you receive this.” So reasonable, I thought, such stiff prose: in communication. I felt like biting something. He was obviously worried. He had seen me on the day after I landed in the hospital, when I was acute, delusional and hallucinating, bouffée délirante, and I was convinced he was going to steal the apartment, push me into the street, a conspiracy cooked up with the Pause and the other scientists at the lab, and when he sat across from me in the room with Dr. P., a voice said, “Of course he hates you. Everyone hates you. You’re impossible to live with.” And then, “You’ll end up like Stefan.” I screamed, “No!” and an orderly pulled me away and they injected more Haldol, and I knew they were in on it.

  His brother and his wife. Poor Boris, I could hear them say. Poor Boris, surrounded by crazy people. I remember babbling to Felicia, who had come to clean. I remember tearing down the shower curtain, explaining about the plot, yelling. I remember it perfectly, but now it’s as if I were someone else, as if I’m looking at myself from afar. It all fell away after Bea arrived. But I had frightened Boris, and because he had “agitated” me on the ward, they didn’t want him to visit again. I stared at the message for a long time before I wrote back: “I am not crazy anymore. I am hurt.” The words seemed true, but when I tried to elaborate, all further commentary seemed merely decorative. What was there to communicate? And the irony that Boris wanted communication was almost too much to bear.

  I don’t want to talk about it. I’m waking up. Let me have my tea. We’ll talk later. I can’t talk about it. We’ve been over this a thousand times. How many times had he uttered those sentences? Repetition. Repetition, not identity. Nothing is repeated exactly, even words, because something has changed in the speaker and in the listener, because once said and then said again and again, the repetition itself alters the words. I am walking back and forth over the same floor. I am singing the same song. I am married to the same man. No, not really. How many times had he answered Stefan’s calls in the middle of night? Years and years of calls and rescues and doctors and the treatise that would change philosophy forever. And then the silence. Ten years of no Stefan. He was forty-seven when he died. Boris was five years older, and once, only once, the older brother had whispered to me after two scotches that the most terrible thing was that it was a relief, too, that his own beloved brother’s suicide had also been a relief. And then when his mother died—the flamboyant, complicated, self-pitying Dora—Boris was the lone survivor. His father had dropped dead of heart failure when the boys were still young. Boris did not grieve in any demonstrative way. Instead, he receded. What had my father said? “I can’t. I can’t.” I had longed to find both men, hadn’t I? My father and my husband, both prone to long disquisitions about torts or genes and so mute about their own suffering. “Your father and your husband shared a number of traits,” Dr. S. had said. The past tense: shared. I looked at the message. I am hurt. Boris had been hurt, too. I added, “I love you. Mia.”

  * * *

  The sex journal was not providing me with the release I had hoped for. Recording my early, furtive masturbatory journeys up a mountain that had rather suddenly presented itself as something to climb; the tongue dives with M.B. that had left my mouth sore in the morning because neither I nor said youth had dared venture into territories farther south; the later, daring advances by J.Q. under bras and into jeans as he pressed on despite colonial resistance, the forces of which admittedly weakened over time, had accumulated a bathetic quality I found hard to ignore. Who cares? I thought. And yet, why did the mature woman look back at the girl with such coolness, such lack of sympathy? Why did the aging persona produce only expeditions into irony? Hadn’t I sighed and heaved and longed and wept? Hadn’t I lost my virginity in a heated but deeply confused state, still unaware, despite my adventures with M.B. and J.Q., of how exactly it all worked? I remember the wooden stairs to the second floor, the bunched sheets and blankets, but no color or details. Only that there was a dim light that shone through the window and that the branches of the tree outside moved and the light moved with them. There was some pain, but no blood and no orgasm.

  * *
*

  The second message read simply:

  Looney.

  Mr. Somebody.

  Although it was unsettling, I decided not to worry. These missives had a puerile ring to them, and what harm could they really do? Without an answer, the sender would tire and disappear into the nebula from which he had come. He was no more threatening than the presence behind the door—nothing but a felt absence.

  * * *

  From time to time my neighbors on the left, the parents of the diminutive Harpo who had turned up on my small lawn, quarreled loudly. The content of these disputes was mostly inaudible. What carried into my domain was anger: the screech of her voice that changed register when it cracked into sobs, and his booming tenor—both of which were occasionally punctuated by a crash. The crashes were frightening, and I found myself looking closely at the house and its residents. They were a young, pink, pudgy pair. I saw little of him. He drove off in the morning to some job in a Toyota and sometimes didn’t return for days, a young man who must have traveled here a there for work. The young woman stayed home with her Marx brother and an infant no more than six weeks old—a person in the still floppy, stunned by visual stimuli, sucking, arm and foot waving, grunting, grimacing phase of life. How I had loved that stage in my own Daisy’s path of becoming. One afternoon, while I sat outside on the rickety chaise longue that had become my reading furniture, I saw the mother through a gap in the bushes. As she held the flailing, screaming baby in her arms, she leaned over her bewigged three-year-old, deeply engaged in fierce, if controlled, negotiations about the false hair: “You can’t wear it every minute. Your head must be sweating. What about your own hair? I can hardly remember what it looks like anymore.” “It’s not sweaty! It’s not sweaty!” I put down my copy of Repetition, which I was reading for the sixth time, and wandered a few yards to offer my help.