It could be taught to women, and to slaves.
It could even be taught to me.
Years ago, my day camp counselor had laughed at me one day when I tried to jump rope with the human girls, which I only did because the counselor had earnestly urged me to. “I know you can do it, “ she said. But I hadn’t ever been able to jump rope; I was now nine. The counselor hadn’t realized I was made of such cheap materials. When she figured it out, she laughed.
After she’d laughed, I fantasized about buying a gun and killing her.
My father had started punching me two years before this, and it had not helped my consciousness of my body and its extent and parts, and how to make those different parts work together.
People had always been pointing out my rag-doll aspect.
“Whenever you eat, you close your eyes,” the other kids had informed me in fourth grade. I hadn’t been aware. Perhaps I’d enjoyed my food a lot?
“Thank God you weren’t born a boy,” my best friend in high school, Andrea Lichtman, told me. “You’d be absolutely unbearable then! You’re already so absent-minded and disconnected from reality.”
One semester in 10th grade I even claimed to be taking an adult education course in “Slimnastics” at the Forest Hills Jewish Center so I could get out of gym class. I filled out a school form and signed in the name of the instructor.
I didn’t want to hear any negative comments about the way I related to my body. Then again, my mother had made all sorts of positive comments about my body, which had been enormously worse.
When I was eleven and bought myself a pair of long blue-and-white two-toned boots, she said “I love those boots, they make you look like a dominatrix.” I’d never heard of a dominatrix before, so my mother was delighted to explain.
When I was twelve, my mother had smiled salaciously at my waist and hips, smirking, “You have a great figure.” Her eyes and lips would look wet and gleaming as she said it. She smirked this every year at me, till I was thirty-six.
She laughed at Josie for sleeping with her bra on. When Josie was a young adult, my mom would roll up Josie’s blouse and pretend to peek at her tits.
The last time that I slept in a bed with my mother was around 1983, when I was in college. I was visiting her in her tiny apartment in Brooklyn and we slept in the big bed together. Shortly after we retired to bed, she intertwined her legs with mine.
I had to battle with her body all night to keep her legs from around my hips and calves.
Did she forget that it was me in the bed? Was she only dreaming? But why has no one else I’ve ever slept platonically in a bed with—sisters, acquaintances, friends—ever intertwined their legs with mine, waking or sleeping? Did my mother want to copulate with me?
When I started karate, I was living with my mom in a different apartment before going off to grad school. I had my own bed—a couch that folded out in the living room. I had insisted that my mother put up a door to the room, which she kindly agreed to purchase for me at “The Door Store,” a famous Brooklyn emporium. But when she brought it home, it turned out to be a little, incomplete, swinging saloon door, like the one through which the bad guy bangs in a Western. It did not lock.
I don’t remember much from that first summer with karate except that I loved it. And that my mother kicked me in the shins when she erroneously thought, as I have explained, that I was going to hit her when I demonstrated my new moves. And that my sister Josie, now installed in an elite management program, laughed at me when I practiced for her.
“You look so funny," she said.
But I was off after only two months to life-killing graduate school upstate—an assay in even greater academic dryness than college had been, which I thought would establish me in a humanities professorship, a dream of my mother’s. It was not till I had escaped back to New York City the following January that I immersed myself in martial arts thoroughly.
When I was doing karate, I felt a number of things I had never felt before. What I remember most: How upset I would be whenever anyone’s punches actually connected with my head. (We had a rule in our school that punchers were supposed to stop their punches a few inches shy of their opponent’s head. But sometimes everyone messed up and mistook the distance. )
Yet this wasn’t a bad thing. Strangely, it felt good to feel upset when this happened. For the first time, I was able to actively feel, almost taste, my memory of being hit by my father. I had always known that it had happened, but it was a bare, dry memory, like a dim and wispy recollection of my grandfather’s face.
Feeling that sudden profound sense of sadness and defeat whenever Jill accidentally punched me in the head—and Sara, and Ginnie, in their turns, and knowing clearly where that sadness came from, was like remembering his smack in the face for the first time.
I would have to bow myself off the karate floor so I could attempt to calm myself. We students were allowed to leave the training floor if we were ever overwhelmed by uncontrollable emotion.
Karate, indeed, touched its finger over many different sites of passion in me, not just the grief and weeping caused by being hit. I think it touched these points of emotion in all of us who were first training that year in that little women’s dojo in Brooklyn. There was the new ability to feel positive about being sweaty, the strange capacity we discovered in ourselves to develop muscles (still a new capacity for women; this was the '80s). The mysterious and dangerous power to strike others. The very shocking fact that we could defend ourselves.
I had grown up not knowing that punches could ever be blocked, or ducked. It was a sweet amazement to me to learn that they could; and also to learn that attackers large or small could be, and frequently were, dissuaded from continuing by resistance as minuscule as yelling, throwing things, or making a scene.
Karatekas had perfected the yell, and instilled in themselves the ability to run away with no embarrassment whatsoever. If we had to, we could punch and kick; if not, our tradition said, “the best defense was not to be there” for the blow.
Sex was another place that karate kept stroking in us, and indeed, as a 90 percent lesbian institution, we had winds of lust continually blowing through the school, from the great high windows blowing seed-pods in, to the trembling sweat on our twenty-something arms and the sweet strange perfume of women.
The winds of lust blew in, and also, slightly differently, the winds of beauty. For karate was not just very sexy, it was also beautiful in its own right. Our katas—the dance-like combinations of movements through which karate had traditionally been taught—were beautiful, far beyond the practical benefit of the self-defense strikes they taught. They were the most beautiful movements I had ever done, or seen done.
Apparently, somehow, I looked attractive doing them, because first Jennifer and then several other girls in the dojo and the activist scene asked me out, and I did have sex with them, reader. The winds of lust blew in even for me, and I did feel them again, sweet reader—most memorably with a girl who picked me up on the bus to a march on Washington against the first Gulf War (1991), a very young woman named Georgia from Texas who was impossibly handsome, muscular, and roguish. Yet when I had sex, I could tell I was only capable of a dim, thin shadow of the humans’ feelings. Doing the motions but with not much payoff, like a giant robot dildo. The dildo could have a sad sort of spasm that was like a washing machine going through a very feeble spin cycle. It didn’t feel much.
And I still didn’t even know really how my body looked. That I had a waist and curves for example, or a derriere. I didn’t ever have a full length mirror until I was thirty-two or so—I had never had one growing up— and I had no idea that my body looked beautiful in a feminine way, or that my waist and hips curved nicely.
Despite her low-throated, fulsome praise about “my figure,” I think my mother actually hated feminine bodies other than her own. One of the first things she ever said to me about the female body was her telling me gleefully, when I was four, how her own mother
had once informed her, "Miscarriage is when you give birth to a cat. “ Grandma Ruthie had supposedly told my mother this when my mom was little, and my grandma had just had a miscarriage.
There was a strange series—seemingly, an infinite series—of confusing and shocking and inappropriate remarks here. It was clear from my mother’s tone that she hadn’t understood the “miscarriage-cat” remark when she was a child, that she’d been shocked and frightened by it. But I surely didn’t comprehend the remark any better, at four, myself. Still, if she had been frightened and shocked and disgusted as a child, I was to be frightened and disgusted now, by way of a sort of transferred revenge on the part of my mother. First of all, what was a “miscarriage”? I had to ask because I had, of course, never heard of one. And to me, the simple definition of miscarriage was upsetting, but not as upsetting as the image of a bloody, clawing, mewling cat coming out of a woman’s vagina.
Curiously, Grandma Ruthie was the only adult female we ever got to see regularly other than my mother. (My aunt was still a teenager.) My mother seized the opportunity to make fun of her mother’s body every chance she got. “Her breasts hang down all the way to her toes!” my mother chortled to me. I was about five. “I bet she could fold them up like a bedsheet if she wanted to!” I was completely uncomprehending of what this meant, although I knew that Mommy was making fun of Grandma’s breasts. What did it mean for breasts to hang down all the way to your toes? I wasn’t all that clear on what breasts did when they were in their normal, presumably un-hanging state.
But my mother really got merciless on the subject of Grandma's vagina. Ruthie must have been going through menopause at the time. “Her vagina is dry and her doctor told her to go get a vibrator for it!” she announced delightedly to me when I was six. Finally, I comprehended this a little better—my mother had succeeded in getting across to me that Grandma Ruthie’s vagina had dried up because it was old. But what I comprehended most from the experience was my mother’s ecstatic, cackling, scornful joy that her own mother’s vagina was now dry.
I myself, as far as I knew, didn’t have a woman’s body. My golem body was styled with two imitation-X chromosomes, but it was in fact inert and sexless as a worker bee’s, female only in some dust-dry way that could never be expressed. Why my mother had made me female despite hating and envying other women’s bodies I do not know, except that she hated and feared men’s bodies even more. She often told my father, as we kids were sitting at the table, how disgusting his body was, smelly and ugly. In a more jovial mood, she would often laugh with my sisters and me about how horrid and funny penises looked, “like turkey gizzards.” I had never seen one, so I had no basis for comparison. It was my mother who was constantly naked in our household, never my father.
My mother frequently said she couldn’t have been a good parent to a son. “I would have hated him too much to take care of him.”
We have to backtrack here, reader: it's 5th grade.
Apropos of nothing, my mother starts telling us about the New Testament figure Salome, the daughter (or adoptive daughter) of King Herod, who demanded John the Baptist’s head on a plate as the price for her sexy dance in front of her father(or adoptive father).
My mother’s studying the Bible at Union Theological Seminary. She begins talking about Salome all the time, bringing her up even though it has nothing to do with anything. Mom adores Salome, though I never can tell why. It’s probably the sexy dancing, which my mom imitates by dressing in jeweled belts and skirts that make you think of the dance of the seven veilsin all those Middle East moviesthat havethe babes with the palm fronds. "Don’t I look like Salome?” she says.
If you don’t know the story, Salome really does get the guy’s shaggy head on a plate.
My mother also often references, for no apparent reason, a rather disgusting Old Testament story in which a young girl is put into the bed of the Jewish king, an old man, "to warm it up." She loves this story and seems pretty turned on by it; it makes her chuckle.
One day, my mother casually tells us that her older brother Stanley saw a movie one year and came home and wanted to tell her all about it. He said, "Do you want to see what they did in this movie? I’m going to show you right now." And he raped her.
I have no idea how old they were.
Reader, I’ve met Stanley a bunch of times, twice when we went to visit him in the mental hospital. He was big and tall and fat, with filthy grey-black hair.
His wife is a shiksa elf named Elwyn, a starving-thin blonde who looks terrified all the time. (Years from now, she will slit her own throat. No lie.)
My mind can’t figure out what to do with this new knowledge. I grasped years ago that my pain can never be compared with my mother’s, that it will always be as nothing in comparison with hers. And that was because she had cancer! After she came home from Sloan-Kettering, she taught me it was wrong for me to ever be angry, sad or depressed because she just shouldn’t have to deal with those feelings from me. She had too much on her plate already. But as she often says, I’m selfish. I go on feeling these things anyway. How could I go on feeling them after this news, though!
I am an even worse person than I thought, to have made her feel bad at any time, because of anything. Any pain of mine really doesn't matter after this, ever.
After Stanley, another man raped my mother when she was a teenager, when her parents had put her in a home for incorrigible youth. The man was the incorrigible home’s director.
Stanley the rapist eventually left my mother all his money when he died. She had given him a lot of money, too, when he was ill. In a way, they were always going to be closer than anyone else could be, she explained.
In later life, my mother liked to sing me an old song from Yiddish vaudeville that seemed to perfectly capture her feelings about herself, the genders and our own relationship.
In an old man's comic voice, with a Yiddish accent, she sang:
"I ... don’t like men,
Women I don’t like, too,
Do I like myself?
I don’t, don’t, don’t
But I do, do, do like you!!! "
As for me, I had felt like her magic mirror for so long. Like the sexless wooden mirror of the Witch that had kept having to reply to her question, "Who’s the fairest one of all?”
And having to answer with the same word, "You!” always.
So it was that, even with the way karate made me shimmer, I wound up having paltry relationships for a rather long time, reader, seventeen years.
The problem in relating to a human being wasn’t even the sex.
When I connected to a person in a way that involved the golem’s arms and lips and head and pussy—well, OK, so maybe the problem was about the sex, but that was not the whole of it. It was about how the body of the golem connected to my Self—there were so many ways that just having a golem’s body got in the way of my having a self at all. Coming close to a real human person with my—the golem’s—body, with the golem’s self, never worked. I was afraid that like my golem ancestors in the 16th century, like the sci-fi robots who become too smart, I would be violent and uncontrollable. But on the other hand, I was afraid that the human being I was with would always end up commanding me—as indeed, is the correct and proper relationship between humans and golems, between humans and "robots,” which word comes from the Czech for slave or drudge.
But, reader, I did not want to be commanded! Reader, I have always desired with all my teeth, my mouth, my energy, to escape my bounds, and to violate the golem’s sacred charter!
Chapter 6
My prolonged study of the history of golems has convinced me that, if I were ever going to create a golem, I would first make sure to provide it with a really good trainer. Some instruction and molding after the initial efforts by the magician, to prevent the golem from going bad, or getting too strong. I'd get someone like a dog whisperer, or a really talented dominatrix.
But the perfect golem whisperer, I now know, would be
a therapist.
I had had terrific schooling in high school and college, of course, and even a little graduate school, but it was not education aimed specifically at me as a golem. Indeed, my mother had sent me to all those schools not as a way of warding off the inevitable golem violence, but because she was a great big snob about academics, and intent on making each of her creations able to get work as a college professor or better.
My secondary training as a golem came later—came, in fact, at this very moment in the story, reader—when I acquired my very own mental health practitioner. And I thought I had sought out the therapist of my own accord. I just wanted a little help with the few technical problems I have mentioned, problems in getting my mossy clay to work OK in relationships with humans. I had started therapy at the same time as karate. But it seemed to be doing the exact opposite of what karate did for me. Where karate made me hot and alive, therapy was making me squarer, more rectangular, less like a human, colder—
Oh fuck, reader, I can't pretend anymore not to care about this.—Sadness everywhere, so thick around my chest it makes me tight, makes me quiet.
I am embarrassed. I am ashamed. And I am sad.
Oh reader, how sticky, hot, and entangled, how putrid, and how sad this place is!
I started going to Edna’s little house at the age of twenty-two. She was in her late forties then, with a homely, pleasant Jewish face and discordantly burning eyes.
My mother’s own shrink, Jane, was the one who had supplied me with Edna’s name and number, through my mother. Jane had pointed my sister Josie to her therapist, too. My mom, in her more triumphalist moments, claimed that Jane was "the boss of all the therapists,” like the Mafia capo di capos, and that mine and Josie’s therapists took orders from hers. I thought she was only kidding!
I’d always liked tall, deep-voiced, very lesbian Jane. She had been almost a member of my family from the time I was eight, when my mom had started seeing her at the Speech Institute, which had many free services for laryngectomees. I’d often accompany my mother to therapy and send for the whole hour in the waiting room outside Jane’s office, reading a spattered copy of the New Yorker (the first and only time I ever saw it). It was fun. Sometimes my mother took me out of school early to get a drum lesson from Julian, another client of Jane’s, while mom had her session. He was a laryngectomee, alcoholic musician who lived in a flophouse.
Growing Up Golem Page 6