A Shining Affliction

by Annie G. Rogers

  A companion photograph, taken a month earlier in a professional studio. Also in black and white. Her hair and eyes are dark, her eyes deep pools, but utterly unlike Blumenfeld’s. Her small, tight smile hardly covers her despair.

  In my father’s arms, my lips are parted slightly and my eyes open, alert.

  In my mother’s arms, I am pulling my upper lip over my lower lip; my face is tight, closed. Whatever it is I am feeling there, I recognize it, wordlessly. And I know I have avoided this recognition all my life.

  I feel as though I know everything, even if I recall almost nothing of this time in my life. I hold a whole history in my body, mine and theirs. This history is enveloped in silence and sealed tight. So these photographs whisper rumors, because I cannot bear their truths, which are also my truths.

  The snow collects overnight. It covers the metal fence, then melts in the noonday sun. The paintings she started she has left unfinished.

  Erin picks up brushes, puts them down, touches her paints the way one touches a lover when one has gone a long, long time without making love. She lifts the brush in her small hands. It quivers with her longing to know.

  She knows their faces, the blurred light on the windows at twilight, the lines of grass all over the world. And it is like going back, through the spring into winter, going back to not one thing, but everything, unstarted, unfinished.

  The snow collects, it falls whitening all sound, it muffles her refusal to know and her lack of forgiveness and her many and real failings and mistakes. It falls thick and fast, She lifts up, puts down her box of watercolors while the snow covers time and mortality and the metal fence and her father and mother.

  Could color, light, line bloom under her hands, hands with their nails bit back to nothing? No, Erin does not want to know; she does not want to paint.

  And I do not want to consider the box I left in Blumenfeld’s closet either.

  I sense that the things in the box belong together and that the reason they belong together would be discovered.

  I am afraid to open up any of this, either by myself or with Blumenfeld.

  Then something happens that forces me to talk about the box.

  One morning I wake with a searing pain in my lower abdomen and find blood in my urine. A week later, when I finally go to see a doctor, he informs me I have a kidney stone. Immediately I am checked into the hospital for two days to have it removed. During this time, and during the days that follow, I am afraid I will get lost again, I am afraid the snow will cover the entire world, not just what I didn’t want to know, but me, myself, because I do not seem to exist any longer—as me.

  71

  Entering Blumenfeld’s office the Monday after leaving the hospital, I am profoundly numb. My arms and legs feel laden down with invisible little weights. Sounds come to me muffled and dim. The streets are washed gray and white. And the inner world of thoughts and feelings, that world which I find so endlessly interesting, is covered up in a thick, milky fog. I sit in my chair and lick my dry lips and try to speak.

  Words elude me. My thoughts escape into the fog. I move my body over to the couch for the first time in weeks, and Blumenfeld takes up his place beside me, his foot firmly anchoring me in time and place.

  “Watch what comes to you and what eludes you,” he suggests. I close my eyes and hold my rabbit, by now a regular in my sessions, a bit tighter. Nothing. I lie still and begin to breathe more evenly and deeply, matching the rhythm of my breathing to Blumenfeld’s. The air conditioner hums along softly. Nothing comes forward to claim my attention.

  Lying on the couch, I feel as if I am lying in my hospital bed. The angle of my position is the same angle. I am tired and deeply numb. I can barely feel my arms and legs after a few minutes. I begin to talk to dispel this numbness.

  “When I was in the hospital, I felt like I was not me, not really alive. As if I were buried in snow.” I shake my head. “No, not buried—obliterated, completely crushed down. Not myself. I can’t shake off this feeling.”

  “Why would you want to shake it off? That feeling is probably going to be very valuable to us,” Blumenfeld comments.

  “The worst part was throwing up,” I say, brushing aside Blumenfeld’s statement.

  “No one told me a spinal block could make me that sick.” I pause.

  “No, actually, the worst was the numb feeling. I think it started when other people were making decisions about how much pain I was in, after the surgery. When they were deciding how much pain medication I needed or didn’t need,” I tell Blumenfeld.

  “No, that’s not it either. I really am very good at making pain go away. I count to myself and can make the pain go away. Sometimes I don’t even have to count.” I pause again and sigh with the unnatural heaviness of an unspoken truth.

  “I was constipated from all the pain medication and I thought, I was afraid that they would, they would... maybe the worst was the sense of foreboding I had all the time—foreboding, and then the numbness got out of control.”

  “A foreboding?” Blumenfeld asks. “As if you knew something terrible would happen to you?”

  My breathing becomes shallow. I am afraid that he will know what I almost know, what I can’t bear to hear in words, so I rush into it, out of my fear. “Yes. A foreboding. And then what I was afraid of, it did happen. They gave me an, an ...” I feel myself blushing and stop.

  “I hate this word, I can’t say it.”

  “An enema?” Blumenfeld asks.

  I close my eyes and feel my hand playing with the green velveteen ribbon on my rabbit. “Yes,” I whisper.

  “And did the sense of foreboding go away then, Annie?” Blumenfeld asks.

  “No, it got worse.” I can’t depict the unknown, for him or for myself. It fills me with all its possibilities.

  “As if you knew something worse could happen?” Blumenfeld asks.

  “Yes, like that,” and I feel the electricity of a little bit of my knowledge shared.

  “When you feel you know the future, you can be sure that you are reliving the past, Annie, because nobody knows the future.”

  As he says these words to me, I know he is right. I tell him, “That makes me think about the poem I wrote to Ben. There’s a line that goes, “What you fear most has happened already.”

  “Yes, that’s right. And what has happened already, Annie?” he asks, his voice low and gentle.

  I see the box on the top shelf of Blumenfeld’s closet. I float inside vivid, faraway images—tiny, boxed images I can’t make out. I feel myself suddenly light and rise up a little out of my body and float toward them. I grab the sides of the couch, lest I float up to the ceiling or fly out of the room.

  “The box in your closet. I keep seeing it now,” I tell Blumenfeld. “The things in it are in littler boxes. Graham crackers and grape juice, comfort foods. Graham, graham—Ma. I had grape juice and graham crackers in nursery school, away from my mother. Other foods I ate too, but I wasn’t hungry. I choked them down, unable to swallow, maybe knowing if I didn’t eat, I’d get tied up.”

  “Tied up? How?” Blumenfeld asks.

  I want to take it back. Suck the air and the words back inside, like a vacuum cleaner, take them back. “Not tied up, tied up inside I mean, in knots, my insides taken out of me.”

  In how many ways do I use this technique, a little touching up of things I can’t stand to know? Would it be worse to know?

  I pause. “There was rope in the box at first, in my apartment, and then when I got it here, the rope was gone.”

  “Mmm-hmm,” Blumenfeld says, and he waits for me.

  “I keep seeing knots and knots I can’t untie. This is not memory. This is nothing.” I do not want to think about this.

  “I have to disagree with you there, Annie,” Blumenfeld says softly.

  “My mother was always saying I had a wild imagination and made up things that never happened to me,” I counter, as if this is an argument on my behalf.

  “Is that what
you were given to believe?” Blumenfeld asks. I catch something new in his tone and open my eyes and look at him. His face is flushed with anger.

  I look away. My God, he is angry for me, I think to myself. Perhaps there is some reason to be angry.

  I feel the sensation of cold air on my legs and my bottom. Exposed. Terrified. Suddenly I am back in my mother’s kitchen as a child, but not as myself.

  In the kitchen, it is Galle, younger and smaller than I, lying on the little yellow table, facedown. The little red chairs are in the wrong places, at the four corners of the table, with ropes tied to them. I hear Galle beg to be let go and watch her struggle against her bonds in terror. Then I watch my mother part this child’s buttocks and insert the black enema tip into her rectum.

  Now my mother is sitting in her chair by the big table. I stand behind her. I raise my head and look over my mother’s shoulder so that everything I see is framed on one side by the curves of my mother’s shoulder and head. Everything in the kitchen seems to be in its place, and the back door is open to the morning light. My mother has a burn scar from knees to neck, and she does not sweat there. But in the heavy air of the kitchen, beads of sweat collect in the shadows of her white flesh beneath her knees and around the graying edges of her dark hair. Standing behind her, I am able to use the shade of her body as a shield from the hot sun streaming in from the screen door.

  My mother stares straight out, past the mesh screen where the fence is covered with purple morning glories, to a dark horizon. I watch the morning glories in a light wind turn into tiny evil-looking human faces that laugh at me. I turn to go into the living room. My mother’s voice stops me. “Bring me the Q-Tips, ” she says.

  I go into the bathroom, climb up on the toilet and sink, and reach for the blue box in the medicine cabinet. As I hand my mother the Q-Tips, however, she reaches out and catches me by the arm. “You need to have those ears cleaned out, ” she says. She draws my head into her lap, one ear against her thighs, the other ear exposed. There is darkness and a surprising breeze on the back of my head. It is hard to breathe. My throat aches and tightens, then closes.

  My mother pushes the Q-Tip gently into Galle’s ear and twirls it around. My mother turns the child’s head to the other side. Galle’s cheeks brush against the soft cotton of my mother’s skirt. Then my mother repeats the same motions on the other ear and releases her. Galle stands straight up and the room tilts and spins into vertical position again.

  I stand in my own straight body. I push my nails hard into my palms to be sure of it. “What are you imagining now?” my mother asks me. She is often amused by what I imagine, and I like to amuse her, but this time I say, “I’m just thinking about what to do today.” And I smile for my mother.

  I dig my nails into my palms, and turn on the couch to look at Blumenfeld, to be sure he is there and I am here. Minutes pass in silence. I don’t know how to tell him any of this.

  “The box, the thing, what place does that thing have in the box? I can’t say it. The, the... I can’t say it.” The word itself terrifies me, and I need another name.

  “The intruder,” I whisper.

  “The intruder? The enema?” Blumenfeld asks.

  “Yes,” I say. “I was tied.” That’s just how things are, I think, but this is unthinkable.

  “No, just held down. No, not tied, that couldn’t be. My mother loved me. She loved me. I must be making this up for some twisted reason. I’m a liar. I do make things up.”

  Blumenfeld is quiet. Then he says, “There are no lies here. Even what you would call ‘making things up,’ maybe those things especially, are truths in this room.”

  “Hot water and soap. I can’t move, tied or not. Baby bottle and en ... I can’t say it.”

  “Some things must go on and on. That is just how it is. Don’t expect life to be fair to you.” I hear these words, but they are not my words. My mother irons my first-grade school uniform, blue and white, cleaned, pressed, ready for me. Her words cannot be true.

  “Things were poked into me, one into my mouth, the other into... It was a kind of daily torture.” I carry a feeling about this, a sense of recognition, even if I don’t want to believe it. The room is shaking, as if we are in an earthquake.

  I shiver and remember, “When I was an adolescent, I used to force myself to drink hot, soapy water, sometimes shampoo. I did it all the time.”

  “And did you throw up?” Blumenfeld asks softly.

  “Yes, but I could never get the taste of soap out of my mouth. It seemed better than... I don’t know... Soap and that thing pushed into me from behind.”

  My body feels tiny. I know all at once that this was happening to me when my father was alive.

  “Make it stop! It’s too hard, it’s too hot, it burns, oh God it hurts, it hurts!”

  I sit up abruptly, put my head in my hands and hold my breath. I feel a familiar choking sensation, but do not cry. Did I hope against hope that this would not happen again if I didn’t cry, if I didn’t acknowledge it?

  “My mother loved me!” I tell Blumenfeld again. “This is not what happened to me. This could not be.”

  “Her love was mixed with something terribly poisonous, terribly dangerous. The enema must have felt like rape to you.” Blumenfeld pauses.

  “No,” he says. “That is wrong, Annie, and my words are very important here. The enema was rape, over and over again.”

  I have been told I make things up, I imagine things, I don’t know what is real. Here is someone telling me these things are real, and he is calling it rape. Hearing him, it is as if a truth, consigned to a dark cell in some corner of my mind, heaves a little groan.

  “I felt so completely crushed,” I say in a whisper, not looking at Blumenfeld. I feel his presence, too near, and I move away a little. The truths in me, denied yet still alive, seek his presence, but I am afraid of him.

  “The worst part is that sometimes, sometimes with my mother, even though it hurt me, sometimes, I felt that this, this horrible ritual, was what made me most interesting, most worth my mother’s time. Most of the time she was far away, pulled inside herself, and I wanted her time, her attention. Sometimes I felt, I felt kind of ... excited about it.”

  “Aroused?” Blumenfeld asks. I nod, knowing he has found the right word for the helpless excitement I felt as a child.

  “Terrified and aroused at the same time?” Blumenfeld asks.

  I nod again, and slip a little farther away on the couch, feeling myself to be too despicable to be near him.

  “Your body’s response, which you couldn’t help, couldn’t stop, created a need you kept on feeling,” Blumenfeld says softly. “What you felt was a kind of induced need for arousal, created by adults, that young children find absolutely overwhelming, Annie.”

  I nod, crying. “But even when I was big enough to fight back and I could have run away, I didn’t.”

  “You did run away, Annie. You fled into yourself, into your mind, and you became dangerously numb in your body. And you keep right on doing that now—because the things that happened so long ago go on and on, don’t they?”

  As if in answer to his question, Margaret Mary, a little girl named for my mother, comes back to me.

  Margaret Mary sits up in bed in the darkness that was never just dark, but always filled with low whispers and shadows. Although the night is hot, she pulls the bed covers up to her chin. She watches the leaf shapes flicker in the purple streetlight against the white paper shade.

  The chair in the corner moved. She is sure of it. She caught it out of the corner of her eye and now she waits to see what will happen next. She hears a hum coming from the chair, like the hum of a refrigerator, from that corner. As it grows louder, the chair seems to get larger and larger, the chair back huge, its slats like great bars. When the hum becomes a high screeching in her ears, the chair explodes and breaks apart. The room suddenly fills up with animals—rabbits, wolves, snakes, bears, insects spinning and humming with the same menacing hu
m of the chair. The leaf shapes still dance against the purple-and-white paper shade. She pulls her head under the covers.

  At six, Margaret Mary, the brown-haired, brown-eyed girl who looks just like her mother, tears off the covers and runs into the kitchen where her mother sits up reading a book. She runs to her mother and leans against her. Her mother puts her arm about the child’s shoulders. Margaret Mary climbs right up into her mother’s lap, closes her eyes, and whispers, “Tell me about how you used to float your Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls down the creek when you were little.”

  Her mother laughs, the finest low laugh in all the world. She pulls a chair up right in front of her for Margaret Mary to sit in and pulls the child’s bare feet into her lap to keep them warm. She begins her story, and her soft, low voice goes on and on in the night until the child is sleeping in the chair,

  The next day, and the day after, forever and ever, going out and into this happiness with her mother, Margaret Mary would float her dolls and stuffed animals down the creek, and whatever happened in the time between these sweet adventures with her mother would simply vanish for her.

  I pull myself back from Margaret Mary, from that night of my childhood. I feel a strange sense of jealousy, of wanting this night with my mother, this night that wasn’t really mine, and much, much more.

  Blumenfeld is patiently waiting by the side of the couch.

  “I wanted my mother’s attention,” I tell him. “And I was ashamed to want it, but I did. I wanted her time and attention. I was unreasonably jealous of anyone who took that from me.”

  “Of course you wanted that. And your wish made you feel so confused and ashamed—wanting her attention, feeling jealous.” Blumenfeld pauses. “Because when she gave you her attention, it could come in so many unexpected ways, and some of them were devastating, weren’t they, Annie?”

  Shame covers my whole body, the shame of wanting, endlessly wanting, never being satisfied; then the sense of devastation—it washes over me and threatens to drench the rabbit too.