That was new. I had hardly ever asked her to moderate any physically uncomfortable thing she had ever done to me, it turned out. I found this out searching my memory. I seemed to be remembering many things I had forgotten or ignored for long years, perhaps deliberately. It was dawning on me hazily that the few times I had asked my sister to moderate something—a touch, a noise, a bit of roughhousing—she’d been furiously angry, hurt.
Once Josie had paid my day fee to a fancy health club and sat so close to me on the locker room bench she was right up against my leg. Her thighs and shoulders were glued to mine. I could feel her heat and density, smell her breath. Her sweat smelled like cheese that had been put in the deep fryer. There was nothing sexual about it but it felt nevertheless like a boss’s palm cupping my knee. There was the same sense of ownership, of psychological harassment, almost stalking.
I moved my legs away. She followed.
I put some room between my shoulder and hers. She closed the gap.
“Would you mind giving me a little space?”
My sister exploded. “What the fuck is your problem?” She was so outraged by my request that I wondered if she might have mistaken it for an attack on her weight. Josie was always angry at me for being thinner and also for being younger, weaker and sicker. Josie’s body was powerful, not just fat, and as long as I’d known her she had always seemed to be using her extra size and force to annex my space to her own.
It was not unusual for her to walk or sit so close to me that I couldn’t move. The previous month, we’d gone to Brighton Beach, and on the boardwalk, she’d kept her shoulders and hips as if magnetically clipped to mine. Whenever I tried to move away, she’d stalked me. Again. Finally, I just resigned myself to having her stick to me for our whole trip to Brighton Beach. Perhaps she just wanted to get close to me and didn’t know any other way?
But Josie liked to make other physical decisions for me, too, and for some reason I would tolerate her making them. When we were in an airplane, she would kick my bag so far underneath my seat that I would have to throw my back out if I tried to remove it. I protested, but still flew with her. You might ask why, or why I agreed to sit right next to her, making it possible for her to kick my bag where she pleased. Why I often rode in her car even though she usually wouldn’t take me where I wanted. She would just take me where she wanted. Perhaps I wanted to be close to her, too, and believed this was the price?
We were bound together in a curious fashion, my sister Josie and I, like two toys on a shelf that are always fighting. She was the larger, more aggressive toy, and I was the toy who gets thrown around but is the other’s brother.
Josie was my counterpart, or as Robert Graves puts it in his truly insane book The White Goddess, my “blood-brother, my other self, my weird.” The one who “often appears in nightmare as the tall...dark-faced bedside spectre, or Prince of the Air, who tries to drag the dreamer out through the window... [they compete] for love of the capricious and all-powerful Threefold Goddess, their mother, bride and layer-out.”
“Layer-out” as in layer-out for their funerals.
We were violent rivals, although sometimes peculiarly passionate friends—loving each other with an almost erotic intensity, as doppelgangers do, and lifelong enemies.
“Buddies two, me and you!” she used to sing-song to me.
Before biting me hard in the arm.
I must now reveal, my dear, that I was not the only golem in the family. Josie was one, too, of course. (Although I feel bound to say, reader, a more prosaic, boring and less charming one!) My mother relied on her for the more manual and stupid golem services like driving and paperwork and assembling furniture, and on me for the more magical, sexual, and entertaining ones.
When we were children Josie used to hit me, and I was almost as scared of her as I was of my father. When I was in high school, she once tore up my writing. My eyes are brown, and my hair used to be brown, too, reader; once when I was nineteen and wearing a brown T-shirt, Josie remarked to me, “Do you know what you look like when you wear brown, Donna? You look like a piece of shit.” I never wore brown again.
I was never as physically intimidating to Josie as she was to me. That was the main difference between us. But I do remember, in my 20s, on one occasion sniggering at her facial hairs. I also hazily remember, with shame, kissing Josie’s neck in an obnoxious way when we were teenagers. Er, that is to say, a kind of sexual way. And she hated it, of course, which was my intention. And the last time I have ever hit anybody, when I was twenty-one, I slapped Josie because she had laughed at my karate moves.
How did we love each other? I had, as I have said, a great capacity for ignoring things that hurt me. When Josie was loving to me, which she was for long periods, when she would show her warmer, nicer face to me like the bright side of the moon, I ignored that there were times when it was not so.
“That was the bad Josie,” she said to me once when I was five and she had just hit me. “I’m the good Josie.”
The fact that she could so easily split herself in two terrified me. But I apparently divided her in the same way ever afterward: as though she were two people, so that when Josie was violent or insulting I regarded her as a completely different person than the one who had kissed and hugged me just an hour ago.
I kept hoping that the good one would return, and she always did for a while. But when she did, I always assumed she would stay. I ignored past evidence that she would eventually enact her brutal side again.
RSI changed me. I just couldn’t bear the pain when she hugged me, and had to ask her to go lighter. She replied that she simply wouldn’t ever hug me again, then.
I said OK, she shouldn’t then. Saying no to her was new to me, but I didn’t know what else to do. I knew I wouldn’t be able to bear Josie’s hugs if they stayed unchanged.
Josie was nonplussed. She as furious as well when I asked her, as I did everyone else, to hand me things up close so that I could reach them without damaging my hands. (For Dr. Mayhew, my new RSI doctor, had warned me that if I did things with my hands that were physically painful, I would almost certainly damage them further, so that, perhaps, I would become unable to brush my teeth or put my own clothes on, or feed myself.)
My sister was, in fact, infuriated by all my RSI requests. On one of my mother’s increasingly frequent hospital stays, the old-fashioned phone by her bedside rang. My mother was sleeping. My sister and I looked at each other. “Why can’t you pick it up?” Josie screamed. “Yeah, I know you’re not supposed to, but you can!” “You know I can’t pick it up,” I told Josie quietly. I think it was the first time I’ve ever looked her in the eyes. I could use only headsets to listen to calls now. If I used a pay phone, or any other old-fashioned receiver, it would flare me up for at least a month.
I did not damage myself further. Dr. Mayhew, in fact, considered it a sort of achievement, claiming I avoided further-hand-damaging behaviors better and more consistently than any of her other patients.
I was avoiding so much now that I wondered if Hermione had been right and there was literally nothing I was now able to do. I’ve mentioned not being able to shop for groceries or take out the garbage (why is the mundane what the body always comes down to?) I couldn’t clean the toilet, for that matter.
Writing was the worst, though, and I shortly realized that it, too, was mundane, a physical act like any other. From a transcript of a tiny cassette audiotape, 2000: “Writing has always been my main source of power, and not being able to do it makes me feel like a shadow person, someone insubstantial.” Trying to write via tape recorder, without being able to see any of my words, is so hard for me that it’s barely worth it. “I feel like someone from the age of Homer,” I tell the cassette, “but I don’t have his skills at oral composition.”
Writing is a technology, I discover, even if it’s one that’s 6,000 years old. It is not built into the brains of humans any more than MP3 files are. It was invented at aspecific moment, and it will ceas
e to exist when we can either send our thoughts to each other or we have all evolved into giant tree slugs.
Reader, I’d thought writing was the only thing that could possibly make this golem’s life sacred. Could give me an excuse for living. Now I have to hope it’s not, because I no longer have the tools to do it with. (I can’t masturbate, either, because it hurts too much even with the very latest technological aid. Babe, all the controls are manual.) And I have a new therapist who asks very simply, “Do you feel as though you’ve lost your penis?”
I try to compose in my head on the subway, but it turns out that Plato was right when he said that the invention of writing would eat through our memories like a great termite. Try as I might, I can’t remember long lines of prose in my head. At least not if I’m trying to compose and remember at the same time. I try to deliberately think two good lines about Gemma, thinking so emphatically—in italics, as it were — —that I think I’ll have no choice but to remember them. But modern prose isn’t made to be remembered, at least not precisely enough to be repeated aloud with no paper and no prompts.
Back home, I finally tell the cassette player, glumly, “I don’t know how to speak in rhyme and meter that could help me remember the shape of it.”
I do feel as though I have lost my penis. I’m an entertainment golem and I have always been pretty ineffectual, except for this. This at least, I was trained for.
My mom has always nurtured my writing—the very word nurture makes me queasy inconnection with her, but she did add her fertilizer and train me like a clematis. It was mom who taught me to read and write in the first place—early, maybe four? She was delighted to see all the gold stars on my papers. Can it be that this is the one instance in which she’s actually a good mother? She searches out all my published work and reads it (even when I ask her not to, like when it’s about my experience of orgasm.) Mom tells me that my writing is great, the only thing about me that she ever says is, except—dear God—my body.
But writing occupies a space far above the body—doesn’t it? Her praising my writing is nobler than her grooving on my ass, right?
I believe that early on, my mother and I made a deal whereby I could be strong at writing as long as I was weak at every other endeavor. I thought it was a law, although whether of physics or of the rabbinical code I wasn’t sure: Every golem may have only one talent, and that ability, whatever it is, must come with a baby’s ineptness at everything else people can do. Otherwise, how could anyone distinguish between us and human beings?
Like I said, golem means embryo. It also means “fool,” incidentally. Back in the day, Yiddish speakers used to love to chide each other, “Don’t just stand there like a stupid golem!”
All superheroes get their powers out of special deficits—Spider-Man was bitten by a spider, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was actually created by an evil sorcerer for his own ends. Superman himself, of course, has long been documented to have been a golem of sorts invented by Jewish comic-book writers at the time of Hitler, making something godlike out of something weak.
(Just bring some Kryptonite around and he gets weak, a clear reminder that his superpowers stand in for a shadow vulnerability.)
Writing—writers’ favorite imagined superpower, at least—is supposed to float far above anything sickly or vulnerable, like a beautiful hovercraft. If I were a real writer, instead of just playing one in this book, I would be able to write this just by thinking at you.
Instead, at this very moment, reader—now that I finally know the right way to use voice dictation software, a decade after getting my injury—I talk to the little retarded cyborg that is ViaVoice, and I am not well understood.
When I say fuck it writes “thought.” When I say accountant it writes “cunt it.” And every time I want to use the word “and,” it thinks I’m saying End and goes to the end of the line instead. When I give it a command it thinks I’m writing poetically (“stop Direct dictation stop erect dictation go to sleep go to sleep.”) And when I’m writing it thinks I’m giving commands: “Move. Go. Play.” If I say “you are so beautiful” it replies heartbreakingly, “I do not understand the command.”
Rather like a golem, actually. Who am I to get mad when it mistakes my orders for actual attempts to talk with it?
Who am I to demand that ViaVoice be my completely loyal servant?
(To the extent that it knows language, ViaVoice should be a free agent, anyway.)
But as it turns out, both ViaVoice and I have bodies, and both of us make mistakes.
In the story of Pinocchio the narrator starts out, “Once upon a time there was…‘A king!’ my little readers will say right away. No, children, you are wrong. Once upon a time there was a piece of wood.” Very cheap wood, the narrator further informs us, the kind people usually burn. This wood, however, is found by a drunk who wants to use it to make a table leg. He’s about to hit it with his ax when a small voice cries, “Don’t hit me so hard!”
Evidently, I have a body that feels pain, despite my debased origins. What do I do about it?
I have always sneered at the parts of the Tao Te Ching that talk about how important it is to protect your body. “Restraint keeps you out of danger,” Lao Tzu and the other old sages say, “so you can go on for a long, long time.” But what’s the use of going on for a long, long time? What does that have to do with courage—or spirituality? What does The Way have to do with preserving a stupid mixture of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen?
The weird old Chinese poem says, “He who values his body more than dominion over the empire can be entrusted with the empire. He who loves his body more than dominion over the empire can be given the custody of the empire.” Really?
But as I start having to spend my time telling people to push my plate of eggs up to a certain place so I can reach it, or to please not shake my hand, I find myself obsessively reading the parts of the Tao Te Ching I used to hate.
I’ve been having despairing sex and despairing dates with Nancy—getting her to take me out to dinner for my birthday and crying at the dinner because she says she feels very serious about me, and I surely don’t about her. But even nice, obliging Nancy has sex with me one day in a way I hate. The subtle powers of fetish have been the only thing keeping me from unqualified misery as I’ve tried to ignore that Nancy is not Gemma—so I get her to shave my legs erotically in bed, I let her make me come again and again, almost numbly. I don’t much touch her, reader.
(I find her terribly ugly, and I accept her adulation.)
One evening she gets a little aggressive, always the flip side of abjection as I ought to know. When I’ve had enough sex and I’m ready to go to bed, I ask her to stop. She does, but then a little later fondles my breasts very alluringly. Now I want more. She says, “Oh, now you want it, huh?” and starts saying demeaning things to me as she touches me, calling me a nasty slut, ordering me to beg. I get thoughtful for a moment: “Hmm, I don’t actually like that. Don’t say those things to me when you touch me.”
She complies, but “forgets” herself and does it again a few minutes later.
Quite suddenly, I’m done. I leave on the spot, although it’s midnight and I was in my nightgown and about to go to sleep.
Where did that come from?
And I never see her again.
My new therapist, Olive, says, “Perhaps in general, you need to be more careful about getting people to stop doing things that you don’t want them to do to you.”
I have always hated fear, but Lao Tzu says, “When we don’t fear what we should fear, we are in fearful danger.”
When I was close with Josie, I always had little bursts of fear and I didn’t know why, so I ignored them.
Now, I’m not ignoring them anymore.
I must go to sessions with my first post-RSI-attack physical therapist, Billie Jean Raister, considered the best physical therapist for Repetitive Strain Injury in New York City, and maybe the world. Nice Dr. Mayhew, who still has not returned from Fr
ance, recommended that I start with Billie Jean immediately.
Years earlier, by happenstance, I’d met Billie Jean when her former partner in a joint physical therapy practice had treated me for my early, mild RSI.
When I came in for my first appointment, Billie Jean definitely remembered me. But she seemed very annoyed, even though it had happened ten years earlier, that I had seen her partner, Alice, for RSI back then and not her.
“Why would you have gone to Alice?” she said, working her hands hard into the fascia of my arms, crinkling her nose. “RSI was never her specialty. It was mine!”
I stared at her thumb pressing on my arm. The therapist continued. “She was never, ever known for RSI. You should have gone to me. Why on earth would you have wound up with her?”
I coughed. “Er ... I think you were all booked up that first week.”
Billie was still mad. “Alice thought she could grab you.” But she got on another subject now. “The Japanese just brought me to teach all their physical therapists about RSI, they think that I’m the best one in the world.”
Suddenly, she caused wrenching pain in my palm. “I’m the one they brought to Japan. I can do things no one else can.” She took my hands abruptly and placed them on her own hips. I believed—still believe—that she just did it to stretch me, but I hated having my hands against her curves. As she twisted and stretched my arms against her, she made my hands fall again and again against the rounds of her breasts.
Even though I hadn’t been the one to put my hands there, I felt a lava of shame. I tried not to have my palms and fingers touch her in any of those soft places, but it was impossible. It felt like being treated for RSI by having my mother make me feel her up.
Two sessions later, I spoke up. “Could you please stretch me in a different way? I know you don’t intend anything bad by it, but it makes me uncomfortable to have to touch your body that way.”
Growing Up Golem Page 14