by Terry Reed
Finally I said, “Are we talking about good-looking, or what?”
“Yes, I mean physically beautiful.”
“Okay, do you think that’s even possible, under the circumstances?”
“See? That’s the problem.”
“Okay, even if I believe you, how are you going to make it happen?”
She brightened up. “The Parallel I’ve chosen for you is starvation.”
“I’m not even fat!”
“It’s the fat on your brain I’m worried about. It’s keeping you from being what you could be.”
This sounded like an insult, even though I knew it was science.
“For ten days, if you do it, you’ll have only coffee, milk, and pipe tobacco. And you’ll consume only books.”
“Am I going to eat them?”
“Don’t take me too literally, Boyce. Or Zu.” She hesitated. “Do you mind if I call you Zuzu?”
I never could stand the wretched name, none of my friends used it, most of them didn’t even know it, I’d made sure of that, but I kind of didn’t hate the idea of Mary Parker using it because she actually knew what it meant, even if it only meant I was a three-year-old moron. So I finally said it was fine.
“So, Zuzu,” she said, nodding and trying the new name out. “Listen up.”
Then Mary Parker told me that in her experiments, she’d discovered that starvation of the body has a profound effect upon the will. She believed that the body welded with the will during starvation, that, in effect, the body fed off the will to sustain itself. Therefore, one’s wishes or dreams, which Mary Parker considered of the will, would be “physicalized” through starvation. So, if I wished and dreamed and believed in being beautiful while simultaneously starving myself and reading good books, I would be beautiful! And soon too.
I said, “Why milk?”
“That’s how babies do it. You’re starting from scratch, see.”
“Can’t we just go with Gandhi? I think there’s more potential in starvation there.”
“Maybe we’ll get to him later. I feel more comfortable starting you out on Scarlett O’Hara. This is all new ground, you understand.”
“Sure, sure. Just as long as you don’t mix them up. I’d hate to end up being as beautiful as Gandhi and as good as Scarlett O’Hara.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that. I’m going to oversee the experiment carefully. I’ve already selected your books.”
“You have?” I really stared at that hole in the Rapid floor now.
“Your mind and your heart are, in essence, your will. I’ve checked you out, I wouldn’t try this with anyone. I think your heart is in the right place.”
That was a compliment, so I said, “Thanks.”
“But your mind could stand, well, some enhancement.”
Old Zuzu again. I was going to have to take this up with my father, for sure.
“Please listen carefully because I’m only going to say this once. Are you listening?”
I was a little startled at Mary Parker’s deep seriousness. I nodded yes I was, and got ready to concentrate.
“I’ve chosen mostly philosophy and poetry for you to study, in some cases, memorize. I’m hoping you’ll be able to search beyond the boundaries of the rational or known. I want you to reach past reason, because pure reason is confining and limits your imagination, thus your ability to create. And your major responsibility in life is the creation of your self. You can’t do this successfully if you’re limited to the rational. The books I’ve chosen will help you incorporate all that life is that you don’t see, the part of life past consciousness. I can’t tell you how crippling it is to accept only that which is made evident by observable fact and reason as the whole truth.”
“So … to be beautiful, you believe I need books.”
“Absolutely. You should also see lots of movies, though I’m not sure why. I think, maybe, because they perpetuate myth, and myth is an important part of your self-creation. And see them twice through, at the very least, at a sitting. And then go back and see them twice more. Of course, you don’t have to do it. But it would be an important experiment for me.”
I figured, whatever. Now that teenage life had thrown me into a kind of diminishing returns beauty contest with Mickey Knight and all my other drop-dead friends, I might as well give philosophy, poetry, cinema, and starvation a shot. “Okay. I’ll do it.”
“Good. One thing, though. I’m going to try to give you knowledge. But wisdom you’ll have to get on your own.”
I nodded. That was profound.
“And one other thing?”
I looked at her, waiting to hear something else to remember for life.
“If you want the persona we’re talking about?”
“Yes?”
“You have to lose the crew cut.”
My hand rose immediately to what there was of my hair.
So, because I believed then, as maybe I still do now, that there was no one smarter than Mary Parker, I allowed her to conduct her wild experiment on me. I began to starve myself, under her guidance. Each morning, I skipped breakfast at home, saying I had to go work on a special project at school. Then I skipped lunch at school. Then every day at four, I came shakily through the back door and listened for Clarine. She should be in the basement, doing laundry. Everybody else should be out doing sports. The boys should be practicing football or basketball. Cabot should be riding or taking tennis lessons. Lucy should be skating. Mother should be coaching any number of them, because Mother was the all-round best athlete in the family.
I’d take off my shoes and carry them into the kitchen, careful not to alert Clarine. Then I made my daily pot of coffee. At first I didn’t know how to make coffee. At first I put eight tablespoons of coffee grounds into the basket, and one cup of water into the pot. Next Assembly, I passed a note up to Mary Parker, asking if I could switch to tea. But then she wrote down how to make coffee the real way, with eight tablespoons of coffee and eight cups of water. If I wanted to, she turned around and whispered, I could throw in one for the pot. “One what?” I asked, plenty worried.
“Never mind.” She grinned. “Either way, it’ll make your hair grow.”
So after I learned how to make coffee properly, I decided I even enjoyed it. I’d pour it into one of those mugs with the TV station call letters Dad was always bringing home because he was in advertising, sit at the breakfast room table and stare out the leaded windows into infinite space. I’d seen Mother and Clarine, both beautiful, do the exact same thing for years.
After my eight cups of coffee, it was time for my hand-rolled, pipe-tobacco cigar. I tiptoed from the kitchen to the library and and locked the door. Then I took an envelope from Mother’s secretary and the tobacco pouch from Dad’s desk. I cut off the flap of the envelope, then shaped that into a square. I folded the bottom of the square and sprinkled pipe tobacco into the crease. Then I rolled it and licked the gum on the envelope, ending up with a sort of huge, ecru cigar, sometimes with the words “Cranes” or “Tiffany & Company” engraved on the side. I slid this into the breast pocket of my uniform, slipped up the back stairs to my bathroom, opened the window, and lit up.
The beauty of it was, I was able to think so brilliantly. Four days into the experiment, I’d already found some very feasible answers to some of the very complex philosophical questions Mary Parker had posed to me. And I had my reading list to stimulate me further. Sartre. Nietzsche. Aristotle, Socrates, Kant, and others. Plus the poets. I read their great works in the bathroom, while smoking the ecru cigar.
After six days of experiment, I wasn’t what you could call hungry, but I was what you could call high. I went through the paces at school, though often laughed inappropriately, cried inexplicably, and fell asleep at my desk uncontrollably. Then, as I lay awake at night, I felt my body feeding off itself, as Mary Parker had predicted it would, feeding from my heart, my mind. My will.
To avoid dinner at home, I claimed I had to go back to school to wo
rk on the special project. What I in fact did evenings was sneak around on the Rapid Transit to see movies two times with Mary Parker. We saw mostly old ones, at the revival house, but we saw new ones too, at the mall. We saw Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Spencer Tracy, Bette Davis, Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, and many more.
Clarine was the first to come right out and say I was stoned to my face. On the second to last day of the experiment—the “penultimate” one, I had learned from reading the fat dictionary on the list—she found me sitting in the breakfast room with eight mugs lined up in front of me, and a pot of coffee in my hand. I had noticed that no matter how carefully I measured the water and the coffee into the pot, it never seemed to come out to eight cups. So I had decided to conduct an experiment of my own. I had poured four test cups, and didn’t have much coffee left in the pot, when Clarine suddenly appeared at the breakfast room door.
“That’s coffee you’re playing with,” she said in a low, shocked whisper.
I smiled up at her. And tilted my head to the side like a cocker spaniel. After nine days on my Parallel, I felt like a cocker spaniel. A thin, brilliant cocker spaniel, but still a cocker spaniel. I must have worn a spaniel’s expression of happy expectancy, and I still believe if Clarine hadn’t entered the room at the very moment she did, I would have made an enduring discovery not only about the nature of coffee but also about the nature of reality as perceived by a small dog.
“That’s coffee,” she said for a shocked second time. But I just whimpered and cocked my head to the other side.
She snapped her fingers in front of my face.
I put the coffeepot down and smiled up at lovely Clarine. She was tall and immaculate, as usual, and, in her white uniform, maybe not unlike a spaniel’s vision of God. My eyes widened attentively, my ears lay back on my head.
She leaned over the table and peered into the cups. “You’re not drinking it, are you?”
I pawed at a mug, managed to pick it up and offer it to her.
She scoffed at it, even though she had a bit of a coffee habit herself. “Explain yourself, young lady. You know you’re not permitted to drink that trash.”
Trash. I shrugged into the cup.
Then something strange happened. While Clarine rattled off about a billion reasons why I wasn’t supposed to drink coffee aka trash, including growth stunting, growth spurting, heart stopping, heart racing, suddenly her voice started sounding real slow and way way underwater. “Clarine,” I interrupted, “you sound really southern.”
“What? Whas’ the matter with you, girl?”
“See!?” I cried.
Then, what I did, I started sounding really southern myself. It was like when they say your life flashes before your eyes before you die, but they say it flashes really slowly, so slowly you have all kinds of time to look it over, and it gets so dull and boring it’s like a three-hour movie but just not a good one, and you totally want to die. And they say that takes the edge off the actual dying. That’s how slow I suddenly sounded.
Clarine gaped at me in astonishment. “Are you mocking me, girl?”
“I’m on a Parallel!” I blurted in my own defense.
“You’re on a parallel,” Clarine repeated, nodding her head. “I see. Then I do see. You’re on a parallel what?”
“Jus’ a Parall’l,” I mumbled, very southern, growing very worried that I’d let the secret slip. In the tradition of all great experiments, no one was supposed to know.
“Well, lemme see now. You on ‘parall’l’ bars? You on ‘parall’l’ planes? Or are you just on a ‘parall’l’ universe? Huh? Just what type of’parall’l’ do you think you mean?”
Now who was mocking who. Whom. I scowled up at her. “Just let me think.”
While I did, I searched Clarine’s beautiful brown eyes, not unlike pools of coffee themselves. Then, as if from a great, slow distance, the thought I had been waiting for suddenly arrived like a locomotive in my head. I had been waiting for it for over a week. It was the answer to a major philosophical question about the nature of reality, and when I had the thought clearly in hand, I grinned at Clarine and decided to give it to her as a peace offering. I started to speak, but no sound came out of my mouth. I looked miserably into a coffee mug and looked back up. A terrifying frown had now inhabited Clarine’s face.
I started to speak again, but no sound came out again. I tried once more, but all that came out was a growl. I didn’t sound southern anymore. I sounded like a cocker spaniel.
“What’s the matter with you, child?” Clarine studied me with a look of amazement on her face, as if she had just noticed that I sometimes elongate or contract. Meanwhile, I kept forming very distinct yet soundless words with my mouth.
“Speak up,” she said, nodding her head, then shaking it sideways, as if encouraging an infant or an animal to try to articulate. “You sure look strange, and different,” she finally said.
“CLARINE!” I said, way too loudly. There.
“Clarine,” I said, modulating. “Did you know that all knowledge of reality … that if you take the empirical world … that is that pure logical thinking … that, that, that you can’t get it that way?”
Rats. I blinked up at Clarine, feeling robbed.
Clarine drew herself up, waited, and delivered. “WELL, HOW DO YOU DO, MISTER EINSTEIN.”
Oh no.
“That who you think you are, Miss Smarty Pants?”
I adamantly shook my head. The last thing you wanted was Clarine saying she thought you thought you were Einstein.
“Pure logical thinking cannot yield us any knowledge of the empirical world. Is that what you’re trying to spit out, Miss Intelligence? I’m afraid that one belongs to Mister Einstein.”
Very surprisingly, “Pure logical thinking cannot yield us any knowledge of the empirical world” was totally what I had been trying to say. I was quite taken aback that Clarine, not to mention Einstein, had said it first.
“I know that one. You’ve been acting so strange, I took a good look at those books you’ve got your nose buried in. You had the one about pure logical thinking highlighted in every color in the rainbow. It made it look like mud.”
“That isn’t what I was trying to say at all,” I lied imperiously.
Clarine leaned into my face, spent a good ten seconds searching my eyes, and concluded her investigation by pounding the breakfast room table with her fist. “Well, I’ve been doing some logical thinking for myself,” she said. “And you know what my logical thinking is saying to me?”
I shook my head no, but I was pretty scared to hear it.
“That you’ve been smoking reefer! That’s what.”
• • •
Then she examined me. My eyes, my ears, my uniform. She grabbed my school blazer off the chair and went through the pockets. Luckily I hadn’t yet rolled my ecru cigar. She dropped the blazer and frisked my jumper. Then she went for my knee socks.
Finally, she made a slow circle around the table, then suddenly came up from behind and lunged for my wrist. She picked up my arm. “Look here, how thin.” She dropped my arm. It flopped on the table.
She came around front again and started staring at it as if she couldn’t stop. So I got interested in it myself and started staring at it too. There we were in the breakfast room, staring at my arm.
Finally, she picked it up again, and carefully turned it over, and over again. She looked into my eyes. I looked into hers. We both looked back at the arm. I think it was at that moment that we both realized: what we were dealing with here was the surprisingly graceful arm of a young woman, no longer to be confused with a choirboy, or even a choirgirl.
I felt an intense thrill of total recognition. The experiment had worked.
As she put my arm respectfully back on the table, “Why baby, you’re all grown up” was all Clarine said.
Not that that was the last of it. There followed an intense period of surveillance wherein I had to eat almost constantly while Cl
arine milled around with arms crossed and watched me stuff face, plus I had to convince both her and Matt behind closed breakfast room doors that I was not some kind of junkie. I think Matt had been called in for his supposed authority on the subject of “reefer,” which sure made the burden of proof a lot easier on me.
Guarding my best friend’s secret, I explained away my unusual behavior and dramatic change in appearance as perfectly natural, considering my coming of age. That I billed as strictly time lapse, total rapid transit. What with my abstruse references to the tenuous nature of reality and the importance of redefining the empirical world, eventually, they both bought it. Although, to be honest, Clarine did outdebate me, and definitely Matt, on several key philosophical points.
In between bouts in the breakfast room, I headed to my bathroom to gaze at myself in the mirror. What I saw there, I really wanted to be real.
I was beautiful. No, not beautiful.
“[Boyce Parkman] was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charms….” Almost verbatim the way Scarlett O’Hara’s story was written.
It was only then that I began to fully appreciate the genius of Mary Parker.
Not only had she made me beautiful, she had made me brave. Fear, she had taught me, was the opposite of love. The heart and mind is will. All stories end in death or marriage. All happy families are alike…. And pure logical thinking cannot yield us any knowledge of the empirical world.
SIXTEEN
It’s summer after such a sorry sequence of events I suppose I shouldn’t even think about it, but I suppose I shouldn’t have ended up looking like Lolita either. I’ve been sent to Florida for it, in the summer, and if that sounds pleasant, it’s really just a polite way for Mother to say, Go roast in hell.