I have to confess that a large part of my reason for being there was the beauty of the ritual, the solemnity and delicacy of it all. Justine had been right; Anna Granite would not have approved.
The Reverend Jane saw me and floated towards me. “Dorothy, so nice to see you, it’s been a while.” She rested her long arm across my shoulders, and her body warmth sank into my outer flesh and vanished. I uttered my greeting, and she stepped slightly away from me, her hand still resting on my shoulder. She looked at me, and her expression seemed to spiral inward as her eyes released darts of light that covered my forehead and cheeks with bright barbs.
“There seems to have been a change in you,” she said. “Quite recently. Yes.” Slowly her eyes eased back into their normal function and she smiled, emitting nothing but kindness and interest. “You’re probably not aware of it yet but you will be. A nice opening is taking place.” She nodded happily, and I was embarrassed by the little lilypad pulse that answered her from somewhere in my chest, eager for her words and voice simply because they were kind.
I saw Jodie and Marie, a couple that faithfully attended the meetings. I felt for Jodie a strange affinity born of our mutual awkwardness and our politeness in the face of it. We had nothing to say to each other, yet we felt a bond based on the unspoken sense of an elusive similarity between us and the fear that if we actually got to know one another the result would be disappointment. The similarity was not physical; she was a tall, sharp-featured strawberry blonde with an almost expressionless face and stiff Kabuki grace. Her girlfriend Marie, a young, sarcastic, alcoholic Southerner with gorgeous green eyes and bad skin, scared me, but I approached them anyway as they lounged by the snack table.
Marie regarded me resentfully as Jodie and I made our usual pointlessly locked-in eye contact and clumsy small talk. I wanted to talk to them about Justine and the interview but could find no way to do so as they knew almost nothing about me. Instead I made oblique references to a certain “strange person” who had appeared in my life and who was “playing games” with me, a person I could see was trouble, yet felt drawn to. In between sentences I directed hard, confusing thoughts at Jodie, and she seemed to sense the scrambled text beneath my banal phrases, for I could feel a reaction pressing against her austerity like a curious animal. Even Marie seemed sympathetic. “Get rid of her,” she said. “Don’t cut her any slack.”
Reverend Jane clapped her hands and called out, “Okay! Let’s begin!”
We sat in our circle of chairs, and Jane began her talk. She’d been thinking about the limitations we place on ourselves. She told of a story she once read in a National Geographic which reported that when tigers accustomed to captivity were taken to nature preserves, they refused to leave the perimeters of their cages, even after the cages were removed. My eyes scanned the attentive faces. Who were these people? Mostly attractive, healthy-looking women in their thirties who wore bright-colored clothing. One of them, a Puerto Rican woman with a sternly beautiful face and huge starved eyes, had recently lost her mother to cancer and her brother to AIDS. She sat in her chair as if she were a cactus drinking in the tiny rivulet of nourishment at the center of Jane’s voice; it was very little, but she was drawing on it with all her deep plantlike might. I felt for her.
“. . . and I just kept seeing that strong beautiful tiger in the midst of that lush greenery, with those wonderful tropical flowers and the fresh air all around him, yet unable to step out and live it. And I said to myself, that’s been me. That’s been a lot of people I know.”
I wondered if it had ever been me. It didn’t seem like it. I looked around the circle. People were nodding their heads. Then it was time to link hands, close our eyes, and focus inward, visualizing pure golden light bathing our heart chakras. Usually when we did this I found that while there was nothing much in my heart chakra, my head was a-boil with nasty little memories. The teenagers on the subway who called me “porky,” the cab driver who’d called me a cunt, bitchy Ms. Feigenbaum, the lawyer with illegible handwriting, all chattering hatefully to the accompaniment of the Top 40 trash I was subjected to from my work-mate’s desk radio. I sighed, linked hands, and encouraged my thoughts to skip with idiotic lightness over my recent plans for joining a gym and losing weight. Salads, I thought. Water. Threads of tonal music penetrated my skull. I must’ve been tired for I experienced a sudden cerebral dip, the startling change of level one feels when stepping into sleep, not one layer at a time, but down several layers with one elongated step. I yawned. I thought of my mother. This was not unusual; I thought of both my parents on occasion, usually with intense anger. But at this moment I felt acutely my mother as she was in Ohio, still young, still pretty, and in my child’s eyes so much more than pretty that “pretty” would demean features that to me were the fine articulation of her deep internal life, which made meaningless the social concept “pretty.” I remembered her rubbing my shoulders as I lay in bed ready for sleep, remembered her gentleness, her innocent undefended nature entering my body through her fingers. I remembered my body responding to her. All at once I felt my heart chakra, which was filled, not with light, but with pain.
I must have transmitted this to the women who held my hands, for I felt gentle squeezes on each side. This only made it worse. My mother was swallowed up in black.
“Okay, now we’re just going to go around the circle and give everybody the chance to say a few words—maybe to ask for support or to give thanks or whatever you want. If you feel like keeping quiet, just squeeze the hand of the person next to you. Ready?”
I sat shivering and cold as a woman began expressing gratitude for all the wonderful changes in her life during the last year. The image of Justine Shade flitted across my mind, and I wondered why. Was my life so empty? I thought of Anna Granite the first time I had seen her on the dais in Philadelphia.
I was so overwhelmed by my emotional response to Granite, that I could only comprehend her speech in fragments. She talked about how tragic it was when the individual was sacrificed for the majority, how the needs of the weak became an excuse for undermining the strong. I wept for the entire time, deep in the turbulent waters of my feelings, terrified by and agog at the fanged and finned beasts that swam by; I heard the speech only when I rose to the surface for air. What I heard corresponded with what I was seeing in my underwater maelstrom. I had been stronger than my parents. I had been damn strong to survive a childhood that was completely lacking in emotional or mental sustenance and in fact would’ve killed most people. And it was my strength that had made my father hate me. It wasn’t because I was worthless, not because I was ugly or fat. It was because I was worth something and he knew it and he wanted to destroy me for it. I wept with rage, yet with decorum. The handsome man next to me furtively looked, but not with anything but kindness.
When the speech was over, my tears were done. I sat quietly in the back row resting as I watched the audience crowd around Granite to ask her questions and to shake her hand, or merely to look upon her at close range. My emotions gently ebbed as the audience began to filter out of the building, their faces upturned and glowing. I wasn’t even surprised when the man who had been sitting next to me appeared in the aisle beside my seat and, putting his hand on my shoulder, said “Goodbye now”—even though no handsome man had ever touched or spoken to me in that way.
I waited until there were only a few people standing around Granite and she was reaching to collect her things as she answered their final questions. Then I rose and approached her. I saw her glance flicker at me and then back to the boy who was telling her of his plans to become an architect. I stood next to him, heavy with determination. I could feel her becoming aware of me, taking me in, trying to interpret the surge of resolve emanating from this silent fat girl. I could see the coarseness of her skin and hair, the deep lines on her forehead, her mouth creases, and the swollen pockets of brown and purple under her eyes. It didn’t matter anymore that she was not beautiful. She turned to me. Her aquamarine eyes w
ere shielded, questioning, very tired.
“I . . . I . . . I . . .” To my horror I was unable to speak. She frowned at me, she gestured with impatience. “I just had to tell you . . .” My feelings swelled up through my lungs and into my throat. I made a choked noise. My moment had come, I was before my savior, and I was falling away from her as if down a dark pit. Her face seemed to come apart, cracking like that of a witch in a mirror. Alarm bolted from her eyes. My hand thrashed out reflexively, as though to break my fall and then the miraculous thing; she stood and gripped my shoulders with both hands, and I felt her body heat enter my system with the blind muscularity of an eel whipping through deep water.
She said, “I can see you’ve had a lot of pain in your life.”
“Yes I have.” People were looking, but I didn’t care.
“There were times I didn’t know how I would survive. Even recently. I just wanted to die.”
Her eyes radiated the gentlest strength I had ever experienced, her tough, hot, callusy hands supported me with the full intensity of her life. “Yes,” she said. “I can see that.”
“But I did survive, and the reason I survived was you. I had to tell you that. I had to thank you.”
She looked at me and, as in my fantasy, she saw me, saw my pain—which no one had ever acknowledged or even allowed me to acknowledge. However, unlike my fantasy, to be seen and acknowledged by her wasn’t to be penetrated and ripped apart by an obscene burst of energy. I did not feel her gaze boring through my pores to envelop my swooning spirit; I felt her at the perimeters of myself, attentive, very close, but respectful, waiting for me to reveal myself. So I didn’t swoon. I stood and met her gaze and felt my self, habitually held in so deep and tight, come out to meet her with the quavering steps of someone whose feet have been asleep for a long, long time.
“Sit down,” she said. “I am very tired, but I feel we must talk.”
We sat down to talk as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Everyone else was gone, but I could hear people milling around behind the curtain, occasionally putting their heads out to see what was happening between Anna Granite and the unknown fat girl. She still held my hand.
“Tell me,” she said. “Just tell me.”
I did. What I had been unable to say to anyone, barely even to myself, came out in normal sentences. I didn’t even feel embarrassment, let alone shame. As I talked she sat erect, her whole body in a state of alertness, taking in, I felt, not only my words, but my voice, my eyes, my movements, the invisible mist of my secret bodily qualities, that which makes you sense a person before you’ve seen them. When I told her that my father had molested me, her eyes became suffused with such an extremity of feeling that they became walls of fierce unfeeling, inanimate as fire or radiation. I told of how I’d read The Bulwark, how I’d gone to college hoping to find meaning in my life and had instead been battered by everyone and everything around me, how once again her work had been the only thing for me to hold on to, how I’d come to the decision to leave college, cut myself away from my parents forever, change my name and become a student of Definitism.
When I was finished she stared at me in silence for a long moment, her hand still on mine. She said, “And how will you support yourself?”
“I can type fast,” I said. “I’m a good speller. I could be a secretary.”
There was another moment in which her eyes absorbed me slowly, and then she said, “Would you like to work for me?”
“Be your secretary?”
“Not mine directly. But for my protégé, Beau Bradley. It is part time, I’m afraid, but we are paying almost double the standard hourly wage. And for that we expect double the competence.”
She was talking to me as if we were both characters in her novels! I wanted to answer her like one, but I couldn’t quite. “Are you sure?” I said. “I’d love to try but I’ve never been a secretary before and—”
“If it doesn’t work out we’ll know soon enough. But I think it will. I see incredible strength in you. I also see intelligence, which is proven by the fact that you were drawn to my work. If you could live your life up to this point in the face of such terrible opposition, I think you will do amazing things now that you have removed that opposition. I want you to know that. And I want you to report for work tomorrow.”
The last words between us occurred as I was on my way to the door. She said, “Oh, wait, you haven’t told me—what is your name? I mean your real name, not the one your parents gave you.”
And I said, “Dorothy. Dorothy Never.” And she smiled and repeated it.
And now we’re going to open our eyes,” said Reverend Jane.
I opened my eyes to the sight of happy strangers unclasping their hands and looking around. I caught Jodie’s curious glance and looked away.
“Why don’t we end the service with a little song,” continued Jane. “I always enjoy that, don’t you?” We reached for our songbooks.
I remembered Anna Granite and me alone in the hotel hall like two lovers clasping hands in a closing restaurant. I remembered leaving her that night and walking through the streets feeling my secret slowly releasing itself from my body. I felt my inner tissue open and lie breathing and restful. I felt yellow flowers blooming on my internal organs.
But now Anna Granite is dead, and sometimes I think my memories of her don’t mean as much to me as I’d like to think they do. I remember my sense of release and freedom that night, but only cerebrally. Well, Granite would say that is the most important way, I guess.
We held our songbooks before us and sang: “Happiness runs in a circular motion/Thought is like a little boat upon the sea/Everybody is a part of everything anyway/You can have everything if you let yourself be.”
Justine Shade rolled down the cheap black socks of a large male patient. She dotted glue on his thick ankles and applied the clamps.
“Just rest your arms at your sides,” she said gently. She moved to glue and clamp his wrists.
What an idiotic thing to spend your days doing, she thought. She looked at the heavy man on the table, exposed in his underwear. He looked calm and potentially very purposeful, despite his passive body. She wondered if he was a Definitist.
“Mr. Johnson, have you ever read The Gods Disdained by Anna Granite?”
“No, I haven’t. Although I think I’ve heard of her. Why?”
“I don’t know. You remind me a little bit of a character, Skip Jackson. Maybe because your name is Skip, too.”
“What’s Skip Jackson like?”
“Well, he’s an industrialist supercapitalist. He’s brilliant and rich. He’s one of the only successful supercapitalists left in the world because the liberals and weaklings have pretty much taken over and are trying to destroy the strong, productive people.” He looked interested. “Most of the other supercapitalists have hidden out in a capitalist paradise with the head capitalist and are just waiting for the world to collapse without them. Which it does.”
“What happens to Skip Jackson?”
“He gets to the paradise with the others and then comes back in the end to take over the world.” She worked the knobs of the machine. “Plus there’s some romance and some sex.”
“That sounds interesting. That sounds like something I might like to read. I haven’t read for years now.”
“I told Skip Johnson he reminded me of Skip Jackson in The Gods Disdained,” she said to Glenda that afternoon.
“Ah, what a compliment.”
“Now he’s probably going to read it and think I have a crush on him.”
Glenda laughed throatily. “You know, he really isn’t anything like the character. Do you know he is forty-five years old and he lives with his mother?”
“Oh my.”
“That’s right. His mother is Regina Johnson who comes in about every six months. She is really the mover and shaker of the family. She still manages a floor of Bloomingdale’s and she is sixty-seven years old.”
“That’s wonderful.�
��
Justine filed patients’ cards and brooded. According to Definitist thought, for every imperfect entity, be it human or material, there exists a perfect counterpart; a lovely princess for every pimply shop girl. This perfection was not an annulment of the shop girl, but an ideal for her to aspire to, and the clerk who whistled at her in the street could see and love the princess in her, just as she could see the glamorous playboy in him. That is why, said Anna Granite, advertising is deeply moral; its smiling billboards are openings into the perfect beauty that we can all strive for and attain, to one degree or another, depending on our individual components.
Maybe, thought Justine bleakly, there is a perfect Justine Shade somewhere. A tall, full-lipped beauty who wears silk and leather. She lives in a beautiful, austere apartment and condescends to write a half-dozen or so brilliant pieces of journalism a year. They all sound the same, and they are never ambiguous. She has lilac-point Siamese cats and a few strong, handsome, powerful lovers who never stand her up or make her feel awful, instead of a series of eccentrics, instead of a tiny apartment filled with gewgaws and balls of dirt, instead of a job putting clamps on old people and arranging cards in alphabetical order.
This can’t go on, she thought. Somehow, I have to get out and Live.
On the other hand, Anna Granite’s heroines rarely got out and Lived. They didn’t want to either, as it would require that they mix with the herd. They just worked hard at their careers, thought, and were beautiful in grand, square-jawed isolation, at least until the hero appeared who had also, until this point, been sitting alone in his room when he wasn’t working hard. Perhaps there was something starkly beautiful about her simple job and her functional apartment, her daily subway ride, her small bags of groceries and neat dinners, her staring vigils over the clanking typewriter. It was possible, except there was nothing stark or beautiful about the gewgaws or the dirtballs. Maybe she would begin sweeping more regularly and throw some things out.
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