My intervention meant that the fright wig remained on the young head. The mother was Lola, Harpo was actually Flora, and the person in a paper diaper was Simon, with whom I had a conversation of coos, nods, and smiles I found extremely gratifying. The four of us ended up in the professors’ yard drinking lemonade, and I discovered that Lola had attended Swedenborg College as an art major, made jewelry and sold it, that her husband, Pete, worked for a company in Minneapolis, which had been steadily cutting back its workforce, a fact Lola found “kinda scary,” that he did indeed travel a lot, and that Lola was tired. She did not say she was tired, but exhaustion was written all over her soft, round twenty-six-year-old face. While we sat together, she nursed Simon with an easy, practiced air and fended off Flora’s intrusions of false solicitude that threatened to unhinge her son’s mouth from her nipple. I tried to distract Flora by asking her questions. At first she refused to answer me. I spoke to her back and to the wig, but after prodding and several questions, she changed character, and I became audience to a chattering, dancing, singing show-off. “Watch my feet! Look at me jump. Simon can’t jump. Look, Mom. Watch me! Look, Mom!” Lola watched with a faint smile as her bald babe’s eyes flickered open and shut, open and shut, his little arms reaching tremulously for nothing, before he sank back toward her breast into sleep.
* * *
Boris wrote back:
Thank you for answering, Mia. I have a conference in July in Sydney. Will keep you posted on all dates. Boris.
There was no love to my love. I gathered he hoped to push our relations onto a civil but cold plane for the sake of the beloved, shared offspring, and I had a brief fantasy of bursting in on him and the Pause in the lab, and flying from one cage to the next. Mia, the Fury of perpetual anger, releases all the tormented rats from their prisons and looks on with malicious glee as their milk-white bodies shoot across the floor.
* * *
The classes continued into the second week, and as we eight sat around the table and wrote and talked, I began to sense an invisible undertow among the girls that ma me uneasy. I knew that the real pull of this force took place before and after class, during the hours of their lives that had nothing to do with me, and that its dynamics were part of the necessary secrecy and alliances of early adolescence. There were glances exchanged among them and barely discernible nods that sometimes made me feel as if I were watching a play that was taking place behind an opaque screen. The bits of their conversations I overheard were stereotypical in the extreme, a primitive banter punctuated by the words like and so, used chiefly to telegraph approval and disapproval.
Like why do that? I mean, that’s so retarded.
Well, isn’t it? Oh my God, don’t you know that’s like so uncool?
Did you see Frannie’s brother? He’s so hot!
No, dummy, he’s fifteen, not sixteen.
Did you see her bag? Like it’s so bad.
You called me a lesbian! That’s sick. Oh my God.
When I listened idly to their talk during the minutes before we began and after I had dismissed them, I often felt the girls’ speech was interchangeable, without any individuality whatsoever, a kind of herd-speak they had all agreed upon, with the exception of Alice, whose diction was not infected with as many likes and sos, and yet even she fell into the curious, moronic dialect of Early Female. But after each child had sat down, she became suddenly differentiated from the others, as if a charm had been lifted and she could speak for herself. Little by little fragments of her family story appeared, which altered my perception of her. I discovered that Ashley was one of five children and her parents divorced when she was three years old; that Emma’s little sister had muscular dystrophy; and that Peyton’s father lived in California. She was going to visit him in late August, as she did every summer. He was the parent with horses. Alice had lived in Bonden for only two years. Before that she lived in Chicago, and her repeated references to that lost metropolis inevitably set off a contagion of looks among the others. Joan and Nikki had become fast friends in the third grade. Jessica’s parents were serious Christians of some kind, perhaps of the newish variety that mingled pop psychology and religion, but I wasn’t sure.
In order to scrape at their inner worlds, the ones I felt were as distinct as their stories, we began to work on the “secret me” poems. I introduced the cleft between outer perceptions and our own sense of inner reality, the misunderstandings that can sometimes shape our relations with other people, that most of us have a feeling of a hidden self, that the social self is different from the solitary self, and so on. I emphasized that this was not Truth or Dare, a game I remembered from my own youth, not an exercise in confession or betrayal of secrets we want to keep hidden. I suggested contrasting two lines: You think I’m … and But I’m really … We discussed metaphors, using an animal or thing instead of an adjective.
I praised Joan’s lines.
You think I’m bland and a little silly.
But inside I’m a red-hot chili.
Emma compared her inner self to mud, but it was Peyton who produced the most startling image. She wrote that on the inside she was a “chipped piece of a door that looks like an island on a map.” When she read this, Peyton’s thin, narrow face had a pensive, taut expression. She hesitated, then explained. When she was eight, she told us, her parents had a terrible shouting fight while she was lying in bed. Her father left the house in a fury and slammed the door so hard, a part of it loosened and a chip fell off. The next morning she took the piece that had fallen and kept it. We were silent for a few seconds. Then I said that sometimes a small thing, even a bit of debris, can come to signify a whole world of feeling. “Nothing was the same after that,” she said quietly.
As I walked toward the open doors after class, I noticed that Ashley and Alice were in deep conversation on the steps just outside the building. I saw Alice nod and smile, then hand over a book or notebook. After that, Ashley stepped to one side and began to type madly on her telephone. When I passed her as I left, she looked up at me and smiled. “Really good class.”
“Thanks, Ashley,” I said.
That night as I lay in bed, a June storm rolled in over town, and it thundered loudly, sharp cracks like a series of detonations mingled with resonant booms above me, echoing again and again. Soon after came the rushing noise of thick, fast rain outside. I remembered the great winds of my childhood, remembered waking up in the morning to see that branches had fallen all over the street. I remembered the enchanted stillness that came before the twister or tempest, as if the whole earth were holding its breath, and the eerie green color that tinged the sky. I remembered the immensity of the world.
* * *
Dr. S. said, “You sound like you’re enjoying yourself.”
I was shocked. How could I enjoy myself? A woman who had been abandoned by her husband and gone bananas in the bargain, however “briefly”; how could she enjoy herself?
“You seem to have struck a chord with your young poets.” (I heard a chord on a guitar—metaphors often do this to me, even the deadest of the dead.) “You seem to like being with your mother. Abigail sounds very interesting. You’ve met the neighbors. You’re writing well. You answered Boris’s e-mail.” She paused. “I hear it in your voice.”
Feeling stubborn, I made a sound of dismissal.
Dr. S. waited.
I thought, Could she be right? Had I been clinging to an idea of wretchedness while I was secretly enjoying myself? Secret amusements. Unconscious knowledge. There was a little girl who had a little curl, right in the middle of her forehead. When she was good, she was very, very good … “You might be right.”
I could hear her breathe.
“There was a storm last night,” I said, “a big one. I liked it.” I was rambling, but that was good, free association. “It was like listening to my own rage, but rage with real power, big, masculine, godlike, magisterial, paternal bangs in the heavens, the kind of thundering rage that makes the lackeys hop to, a
baritone roar shaking the sky. I could almost feel the town move.”
“You think if your anger had power, paternal power, you could shape things in your life more to your liking. Is that what you mean?”
Is that what I meant? “I don’t know.”
“Is it perhaps that you felt your father’s emotions had power in the family, power over your mother, your sister, and you, and you were always stepping around his feelings, trying not to upset him. And you’ve felt the same thing in your marriage, perhaps reproduced the same story, and all the while you’ve gotten angrier and angrier?”
Lord, the woman is sharp, I thought. I answered her with a small, meek “Yes.”
* * *
Try at another sex entry:
It started in the library with Kant. Libraries are sexual dream factories. The languor brings it on. The body must adjust its position—a leg crossed, a palm leaned upon, a back stretched—but the body is going nowhere. The reading and the looking up from one’s reading brings it on; the mind leaves the book and meanders onto a thigh or an elbow, real or imagined. The gloom of the stacks brings it on with its suggestion of the hidden. The dry odor of paper and bindings and very possibly the smell of old glue bring it on. It wasn’t difficult Kant: The Critique of Practical Reason, much easier than Pure, but I was twenty, and Practical was quite difficult enough, and he leaned over me to see which book it was. His warm breath, his beard, very close. Professor B. in his white shirt, his shoulder an inch from mine. My whole body stiffened, and I said nothing. Then he was reading in a low voice, but the only word I remember is tutelage. He said it slowly, enunciating each syllable, and I was his. It ended badly, as they say, whoever they are, but his eyes watching me as I undressed—No, your blouse first. Now your skirt. Slowly—his long fingers moving into my pubic hair, then withdrawing, teasing me, smiling, creating desration—these wanton pleasures in the library after it had closed, these I keep safe in memory.
* * *
“George is dead,” my mother said, and pressed her index finger to her mouth for a moment. “They found her this morning on the floor in the bathroom.”
“Poor George,” Regina said. She pursed her lips. “I doubt I’ll get to one hundred and two; it’s really extraordinary when you contemplate it, even for a moment.”
Did people contemplate for a moment?
“Not with my leg,” she continued. “I had never heard of what I have, you know. The doctor told me if I’m not careful, one day it goes right to your brain or your lungs or somewhere and you’re dead, instantly.” Her eyes looked moist. “If I forget the Coumadin, then, well, it’s over.”
“She loved to tell people her age.” Abigail was steadying her hunched self with one hand on the edge of the table. She turned her head in my direction. “Never tired of it. Her oldest daughter’s seventy-nine.” She breathed in. “It seems another one goes every day. Alive one minute. Dead the next.”
Peg examined her hands on the table. They were heavily spotted and lined with great protruding veins. “She’s with her Maker.” Peg had a true warble in her voice, like the throaty sound of a pigeon. “And Alvin,” she added.
“Unless they’ve remade the man in heaven, God save her from Alvin,” Abigail said forcefully. “The most persnickety little tyrant I’ve ever seen. His pens had to lie just so, an inch apart, his collars had to be ironed flat, flat, flat. The bed, Lord, the bed and its corners. George was lucky to be rid of him. Had twenty-seven blessed years without that bald, nasty little despot.”
“Abigail, it’s not right to speak like that about the dead,” Peg said, her voice lilting sweetly.
Abigail was not listening. She was pressing a piece of paper into my hand under the table. I closed my hand around it and tucked into my pocket.
My mother shook her head. “I’ve never thought it was right to turn people into paragons of virtue after their deaths, either.”
I murmured an agreement.
“Nothing wrong with looking on the bright side.” Peg’s voice lifted a whole octave on the penultimate word. She smiled.
“Not at all,” Regina said in her oddly accented voice. “With my leg I must His pens n bright and hopeful. What else can I do? If it bursts, that’s it, straight to my brain or my heart, dead in a second.”
We were sitting in the game room, around the bridge table. The summer light came through the window and I looked out at the clouds, one of which drifted upward like a smoke ring. I heard a dryer flapping clothes somewhere down the hallway and the low sound of a motorized scooter, but that was all.
Four Swans.
Mia,
I have more to show you. Would Thursday be suitable?
Yours,
Abigail
Each word was a tremulous but careful scrawl of letters. I remembered what my mother had once said: “Getting old is fine. The only problem with it is that your body falls apart.”
* * *
“Your poetry’s cracked,” my anonymous tormenter had written. “Nobody can understand it. Nobody wants twisted shit like that. Who do you think you are?!#*
Mr. Nobody.”
* * *
I read the message several times. The more I read it, the more peculiar it became. The repetition of Nobody followed by the pseudonym, Nobody, made it sound as if he, Nobody, did understand it and did, in fact, want twisted shit. Who do you think you are? became another question entirely in that case. Sliding meanings. It seemed unlikely that the phantom was ironic, making some superior joke about the novis dictum for “accessible” poems or playing with the words twisted shit and cracked. Unless it was Leonard, released from South, and annoying me for some preposterous reason of his own. It was true that for years I had been toiling away at work few wanted or understood, that my isolation had become increasingly painful, and that I had harangued Boris with my diatribes about our shallow, debased, virulently anti-intellectual culture that worships mediocrity and despises its poets. Where was Whitman Street in New York City? I had whined about the poets who wrote for the few remaining middlebrow folk in the United States who bothered to glance at a feeble line or two in their copy of the New Yorker and satisfy themselves that they had just nibbled on a morsel of “sophisticated” poetic sentiment or wit about lawns or old watches or wine because, after all, it was in the magazine. Rejection accumulates; lodges itself like black bile in the belly, which, when spewed outecomes a screed, the vain rantings of one redheaded lady poet against the ignoramuses and insiders and culture makers who have failed to recognize her, and poor Boris had lived with her/my bawling ululations, Boris, a man for whom all conflict was anathema, a man for whom the raised voice, the passionate exclamation scraped like sandpaper on his soul. Paranoia chases rejection. During the days of my complete clinical derangement, hadn’t I been paranoid? They plotted against me. Now the words on the screen, the words of Nobody, had taken the place of the accusing voices in my head. Everyone hates you. You’re nothing. No wonder he left you. It was as if Mr. Nobody knew, as if he understood where to strike. I thought of George lying dead on the bathroom floor that same morning, and the future turned suddenly both vast and barren, and doubt, the deforming constant doubts that my poems were shit, a waste, that I had read my way not to knowledge but into an inscrutable oblivion, that I, not Boris, was to blame for the Pause, that my truly great work, Daisy, was behind me seemed all to be true. Now, menopausal, abandoned, bereft, and forgotten, I had nothing left. I put my head on the desk, thinking bitterly that it wasn’t even my own, and wept.
After a couple of minutes of full-throated sobbing, I felt someone’s warm breath on my arm and flinched. Flora and Giraffey were standing very close to me. The child’s eyes were round with attention. A piece of her own light brown hair stuck out from under the wig and the skin all around her mouth had been stained pink from some unknown substance. We looked at each other. Neither of us said anything, but I felt she was observing me with the cool eyes of a scientist, a zoologist perhaps. Her sober gaze was digesting
the whole animal, pondering its behavior, and then, without a word, she acted. She lifted up Giraffey and held him out toward me. It wasn’t at all obvious what she intended by the gesture so, rather than take him, I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand and patted the filthy creature on the head.
An instant later I heard Lola call her daughter loudly and urgently and, taking Flora’s hand, which she accepted easily, naturally, I walked with her into the other room to greet Lola and Simon (in Snugli) outside the open screen door. I saw Lola register my face; what it looked like I have no idea—a red-gray mash of tears and mascara, probably—but her brow furrowed for a fraction of a second in sympathy. The young mother looked bedraggled at that moment, almost slovenly, in her cut-off jeans, a pink halter top, and earrings of her own making, two golden birdcages that hung from her earlobes. She had pulled her bleached hair back, and I noticed that she was a little sunburned across her nose. I remember these details because all at once I understood how glad I was to see her, and the emotion I felt has fixed the particulars of the encounter. By then it was around seven-thirty in the evening. Pete was off again and she was going to try to get the children to bed, and then, she said, with an open smile, she had a plan to break out a bottle of wine and eat the quiche she had made that day, and she would love me to join her, and I accepted with an enthusiasm that would have embarrassed me in almost any other circumstance, but which in this instance seemed entirely “normal.” My mother was at her book club discussing Austen’s Emma over a variety of cheeses, and I had no obligations of any kind.
The Summer Without Men Page 5