Hess: The accident?
Smith: The accident when I was eleven. I was on my way to ballet class with three of my friends. Jessica’s mother was driving, and I was in the passenger seat because that day the girls decided I smelled bad. Honestly, girls can be so stupid and mean. I pretended I was too good for them. They all hopped into the back, said there was no room for me, and I ended up in the front seat, which is a highly important detail because a few minutes later a car sped through the light at an intersection and smashed into the side of the car where I was sitting. The last thing I remember was the sight of the dirty gray bottoms of my ballet slippers lying in my lap. When I woke up, I was in the hospital with cracked ribs, torn ligaments in my back, a dislocated shoulder, a broken jaw, and a sliced-up face. I could easily have died, so everyone said I was lucky. They sewed my face together, but I had to have six plastic surgeries over the years to repair the keloids and scar tissue.
You know, what’s funny is that right after the accident, things were better, in the family, I mean. Mom stayed with me, and she seemed pretty sober, and after Dad left work he came straight to the hospital. He didn’t talk much, and my jaw was wired shut so I couldn’t say a word to him. Even nodding hurt me in the beginning, but he held my hand and he’d tighten his grip and loosen it and then tighten it again, and he smiled at me with a pitiful look on his face. Rune made me little houses from Popsicle sticks, which I liked, and Jessica, Gina, and Ellen, who had walked out of the smashed car without a scratch, were so guilty they brought me cards and flowers, and that felt good.
The doctors did a great job on me, and as you can see, I only have a few minor souvenirs, but it was hard losing my old face. When Mom first saw me, she sobbed and sobbed. I’m sure she thought my life was over. I mean, what was a girl going to do with a face like that? I became a craniofacial technician because I understand what it means to lose your face, to look different and have to live with distorted features. It is extremely interesting work, and believe me, there are people much worse off than I ever was, and whatever I can do to help restore a person’s identity is positive. I don’t think that’s so comical, do you? When Rune made The Banality of Glamour, I know he was thinking about me in the hospital. He was thinking about my surgeries and how tough they were. That work was personal, you see. In the book, Case makes it seem as if nothing Rune did was personal. He makes him into a robot, not a person, but that was not my brother at all. His problems, and he certainly had them, were personal. And now that I’m on a roll, I want to say Dad did not drown those kittens.
Hess: But kittens drowned?
Smith: It happened before the accident. When I was seven and Rune was eleven, we sneaked a stray cat into the house, Joe, who turned into Josephine when she gave birth to a litter in our hamper. We were not allowed to have pets, and we were scared Dad would find out. It didn’t happen often, but every once in a while Dad blew his top, and when that happened we’d both run like the wind because you didn’t want to be in his way. He didn’t hit us, but he threw things. Mom and Dad were both out, and that’s when Rune grabbed the six pink, blind kittens and drowned them in a big bucket in the garage while I scratched, kicked, pounded on him, and screamed bloody murder. They died right away. Rune stood there looking down at them with a sad and surprised look on his face. I don’t think he knew himself why he had done it. I buried them in the dirt under the holly bush in the backyard.
I should mention that there were people in Clinton and on the farms around town who drowned kittens routinely. I thought and still think it’s inhumane, but animal rights wasn’t such a big concern then as it is today. I didn’t speak to my brother for two days, but then he came crying to me because he felt so bad, and I forgave him. And Case was right about one part of the story. Rune took good care of Josephine after that. She never became a house cat. She was a roamer, but Rune had her spayed and fed her every time she came around for food.
Hess: Are you saying that Rune regretted what he had done?
Smith: Yes, he seemed really sorry, and I think he was. Rune played perfect, if you know what I mean, the model citizen, the all-around nice American boy, but it was partly an act, a put-on. I used to see it happening when he talked to Mom and Dad or other grown-ups. He’d get this special hidden look on his face, a disguise, really. With his friends he was different, tougher and cooler, but was that really him? I don’t think so. It was lonely for him. That’s why he needed me. If you hide yourself too much, you get isolated and sad. We had fun together, even during the really bad time after my accident and Mom was sick, and Dad was pretty much useless except for going to work and coming home. Rune used to help me with my makeup to cover up some of the scarring, but he’d do my eyes and mouth, too. The artist in him was hard at work with sponges and brushes, and he’d say, “Look at you, glamour girl.” He’d be really proud, and sometimes he’d turn me into a witch, and we’d laugh so hard we had to lie down on the bathroom floor and hold our stomachs.
Mom passed only a year later. I had turned twelve and Rune was sixteen. Rune and I were home. We’d been in the house for an hour, but I peeked in the door and I thought Mom was sleeping. When Dad came home, he went in to get her up and then he saw that she wasn’t breathing. It was pretty bad for all of us. After she was gone, we felt lost. We had all spent so much time worrying about her and taking care of her and loving her and hating her, we didn’t know how to organize ourselves anymore, how to be together. Before Rune left home, he had black moods, days when he’d go into his room and stay there, lying on his bed with a towel over his face. Once he broke the mirror with a baseball bat. Dad and I heard the crash, we ran into Rune’s room, and he was just standing there, grinning. I helped him clean it up. Dad turned around, walked out, and never said a word about it.
After Rune left home, Dad and I were alone in the house. He had his Thursday poker game and we went to church every Sunday. Dad was a sort of quiet believer, I think, and he liked the church suppers and the company. I was glad when he went out, period. Then I left home for college and worried about him because I could see him shuffling around the house, fixing himself hot dogs and beans or a Swanson’s frozen dinner in the evening, and it depressed me. I called home every week but Rune didn’t. I sometimes felt my brother had departed for another dimension Dad and I couldn’t have entered if we’d wanted to. I think I was partly right.
He came back, though. That’s another thing. Rune lived with me in Minneapolis when he supposedly dropped out of sight and couldn’t be found. He had come home to visit Dad, and while he was staying with him, Dad fell down the stairs. Rune called 911 and a little later he called me. The doctors told us he’d had a stroke. They guessed it happened while he was on his way down to the basement, and that he fell and then injured himself more. He never regained consciousness, but he lasted a week, and then he passed away. Rune took it so hard. Dad and Rune never got along too well, and after Mom died, I think Rune reminded him of her—too much of her, if you see what I mean. They looked a lot alike. Dad also thought it was absolutely nuts to be an artist, but that’s a pretty typical attitude. Our father was not some strange bird in that regard. Dad recognized the Mona Lisa, knew that Van Gogh had cut off his ear, and that Picasso made pictures of people with scrambled faces. That was about it, but so what? I was closer to Dad because we understood each other, I guess. I used to work to try and cheer him up when he was down. I’d do little dances for him, play him something on the clarinet, show him my good report cards, rub his shoulders, whatever. Sometimes my little schemes worked. He used to call me “his brave, hardworking girl.” After Dad’s funeral, all the air went out of Rune. He was so depressed he could hardly move, so I said I’d put him up for a while. I had graduated from college, done my training, and had my first job.
Rune would lie in my den on the sofa, staring at the ceiling for days on end. I finally got him to a doctor, who prescribed medication. Whether it was the drug he was taking or something else that got him going again, I don’t know
, but he started moving around, eating a lot more, and fiddling with his sketchbooks, but he turned nasty. He complained about my cooking, my clothes, the way I talked—that nasal Midwestern accent, ugh. One morning he was actually out of bed before I went to work, and he started criticizing my apartment and the convertible sofa he had been sleeping on for months. “Do you have any idea how cheap and tacky this thing is?” He started kicking it with his foot. He called the furniture vulgar and crass. It was unbelievable. “This is what you want?” he said. He kept saying that. “You want Jim and shag carpeting and some middle-class shithole ranch house for the rest of your life?” Jim is my husband. He was my fiancé then. We met at work. I said, yeah I wanted Jim and a house and my work, and I wanted children, and what the hell was his problem? He told me he’d “severed” the name Larsen from his existence. Did I know that? He and I were no longer related. He hated Mom and he hated Dad and he hated me. I told him not to bad-mouth the dead. You have to understand I had been supporting Rune. He didn’t have much money then, and it wasn’t any fun to have Jim over with Rune moping around, but he was my brother, and I stuck with him. I did what I had to do. I took care of Rune. He had taken care of me when I was little, after all.
And then he told me that he was having a fight with Dad before he fell. I felt sorry for Rune. It made sense that he fell apart. I said it must be awfully hard to live with that, and he said, “How do you know I didn’t push him?” I screamed at him that Dad had a stroke. He just stood there smiling and said, “But we don’t know when he had it.” I was stunned, literally. I mean, if someone had bonked me on the head with a bowling ball, I couldn’t have been more amazed. He must have let a minute go by, seriously, a whole minute. Then he started laughing and said, “Oh my God, you believed me, didn’t you? You must think I’m the devil. You think I could kill my own father? What kind of a sister are you?” And then he said he had another one for me to try on. He said Mom had climbed into bed with him when he was little and touched him sexually, more than once. “Do you believe that one?” he said to me. He said that and just kept on smiling. I didn’t believe it. “You’re crazy,” I said. I told him he had to be out by the time I came home from work.
When I came home that day, Rune was gone, but my apartment had been trashed. He had broken all the glasses and plates in the cupboards and turned over chairs and burned the sofa bed with cigarettes and cut my rug into pieces and left his turds smeared on the toilet seat.
You know, a normal person doesn’t do those things. A normal person doesn’t say, “Maybe I pushed my father to his death,” and then, “Maybe my mother molested me,” and then destroy his sister’s apartment. I kept saying to myself, My brother must be out of his mind. Without Jim, I don’t know what I would have done. Jim and I got married sooner than we had thought we would because I didn’t want to stay in that place anymore. We didn’t tell Rune, and he didn’t call or write to apologize or anything. My own brother scared me. Of course, I found out that he had gone back to New York and plunged into his art again. Things went really well for him, but without the Internet I wouldn’t have known. My friends here in Minneapolis aren’t keeping track of artists in New York City. I know he was famous, but he wasn’t famous out here.
Hess: You weren’t in touch with Rune?
Smith: No, not for years, not until September 11, when I panicked. I called his gallery, that’s how I was finally able to reach him. Nothing really mattered to me then, except knowing that he was all right. He was the only family I had in the world, except Jim and the kids. We started calling each other once in a while, and eventually I asked him about the awful things he had said. It’s hard to explain how terrible it is to have those ideas in your mind, even if you don’t believe them. It pollutes your thinking. Someone comes along and throws dirt into your head, and you can’t clean it out. He said he had lied to hurt me and that sometimes he just couldn’t help himself. He liked to be outrageous just for the heck of it.
Hess: But you didn’t visit each other?
Smith: No, Jim didn’t want him near the kids. I had to respect that, and the truth is, after that terrible day, Rune made me nervous, too. I wasn’t sure of him anymore.
Hess: I have to ask if he ever mentioned Harriet Burden to you.
Smith: Yes, a couple of times. At first I thought he was talking about a man, but then I realized Harry was a woman. He told me he was cooking up something with her.
Hess: Those were his exact words?
Smith: Well, I don’t know if those were his exact words; something like that.
Hess: Anything else?
Smith: He seemed to be enjoying himself, and he thought she was refined. Refined was a big word in Rune’s vocabulary. He said she was really smart and had read a lot and they had things in common. I don’t think there was anything else.
Hess: He didn’t say what they had in common?
Smith: No. You explained to me that he might have stolen her work. It sounds awfully complicated to me, and she sounds fairly nutty herself, using those guys to show art that was actually hers, but I just don’t know. He didn’t talk about Beneath at all until after the show, and then he sent me some clippings. Listen, I wish I could tell you he confessed everything to me, but I can’t.
Rune and I loved each other as kids and then we grew apart. It wasn’t easy for either of us at home, but was it that bad? I don’t understand what happened to him, why he turned out the way he did. His death was just plain sad, and I don’t really care if he wanted to kill himself or not. He must have known that taking those pills was dangerous, that he might kill himself if it went wrong. After all, that’s how Mom did it. There are days when the whole story comes rushing over me, and I get pretty low. I try to keep a positive attitude, but it isn’t always easy, and then I just feel like crying. But that’s not every day. And I say to myself, Rune will send my kids to college. The money from his estate will pay for Edward and Kathleen, who never even knew him. Something good will come out of all the sadness.
Harriet Burden
Notebook U
April 9, 2003
My anger is returning, a sweet fury.
He will not get away with this. I have made a vow.
I am leaving messages, sending e-mails. He will not get away with this.
Bruno says: Your philosophies will bury you alive. No one knows what you’re talking about, Harry.
You are all alone with your thoughts.
Today, you accused Dr. F. of not listening. Why? Why did you accuse him? Fierce and caustic you were. Then we talked about it. He is listening. He is always listening to you, and you felt bad, bad again.
April 20, 2003
Four works have vanished from the studio overnight. I am desperate. My windows. It seems impossible, but they are gone. I will look again tomorrow. Perhaps one of the assistants has moved them. No one can get into this building without using supernatural powers. Bruno tells me to remain calm. I must.
(Undated)
I wait for redemption from R.B. And before I sleep, a few notes on the beloveds:
Bruno’s Confessions are getting fatter. He himself is growing fatter. Fat old granddad.
Ethan’s story is called “Less Than Me.” I have been wondering what he means by it. His character S wakes up one morning and is somehow different. Some crucial aspect of herself has gone missing, her me-ness, her essence, her soul has fled her body. She doesn’t look any different in the mirror. Her apartment is the same. Her clothes are hanging in the closet. Her cat knows her, and yet, she is certain she is not the same. She begins to behave differently. She is a vegan but finds herself ordering meat dumplings from a Chinese restaurant. She takes a cab to work. She never splurges on cabs. She speaks her mind to a colleague at work. She never speaks her mind, and so forth. She begins to suspect her upstairs neighbor O, whom she has never met, a loose and merry girl with a bright wardrobe and a slew of boyfriends she bangs loudly enough for S to hear the couplings through the ceiling. Ethan doesn’t expl
ain the suspicion. It just happens as it might in a dream, or in a fit of paranoia or a delusion. S spies on O. She keeps tabs on her comings and goings. She follows her in the street. She finds out everything she can about O, her favorite movies, books, shopping habits, but every new clue tells her nothing. Then S decides to build a monument to her lost self, an object that will be all that she is not anymore. She works hard every night after work and finally she finishes “the Thing.” We don’t really know what the Thing looks like, but it is some kind of body with writing and images on it. S invites O for dinner. O arrives, looks at the Thing, and says, Oh, it’s me.I
I called up Ethan. I was excited, pleased, wanted to tell him what I thought. We are more than the accumulation of empirical data, I said, more than a heap of recorded trivia, more than our wanderings and our meetings and our jobs, but what is that moreness? Is it what we create between us? Is it a neurological business? Is it the product of narrative, of the imaginary? It’s so interesting, I said. But Ethan was sullen, monosyllabic, said I had no idea what he had meant to say. S and O were signs in an arbitrary game of exchange. I said nothing to that. Then I said we artists mostly don’t know what we’re doing, and he told me not to tell him what he knows or doesn’t know. He never takes off that horrible wool hat. He’s worn it for about a year now, a helmet, really, to hide under. When I said we two seemed to have a headwear theme going in the family, he looked horrified. He does not want to be like his mother. I believe he wanted to rip the hat off immediately, but he is too proud. I don’t know how to reach across the chasm. I do everything wrong.
I did not say a word about it to him. But is it possible Ethan doesn’t know that his “Thing” resembles nothing so much as some of his mother’s artworks?
The Blazing World: A Novel Page 33