Over and over I would say to her, “I should hear that from her if she wants to tell me about it.” For of course, my mother’s versions of my sisters’ secrets didn’t ever draw me closer to them, but always further apart. Then again, she was always telling me my sisters were furious with me (and I’m sure, telling them I was furious with them).
She drove us all away from my father, too, of course—her fourth golem, as it were. One of my sisters remembers our mother discouraging my father from showing us too much affection or picking us up.
Of course, she gave us points for tormenting him, too. And she had occasionally lavished on my sisters and me the romantic ardor and sweet praise she denied my father. That, reader, I have always supposed to have been the main reason he hit me.
My mother, the trickiest ringmaster, had manipulated us all until the day she died—and even afterwards, we somehow felt, now from beyond the grave.
Early on in their marriage, when my father was still under the control of his own dad, Grandpa Phil, and my mother realized it, my sister remembers her shouting at him, “If anyone’s going to control you, I will!” And she did, apparently. From then on.
How do you break a golem spell?
It is not easy, my dear poppet and acolyte.
The only way there is, is feeling pain.
It is not that you need to be given more pain, it is that you need to feel the pain that’s there.
There was a lot of pain to go around, for a lot of different reasons. It was my sister Josie, I remembered, who had decided to send the letters at that particular moment, not my mother. Even I myself had caused some of the pain.
In the original Frog Prince story, the Princess does not kiss the frog. Instead, she suddenly throws him hard against the wall, BAM! And when he feels his body break upon the wall the frog turns back into a human man again.
The black knight gets out of C.S. Lewis’s Silver Chair by moaning and screaming and foaming at the mouth in physical agony that cannot be counterfeited, asking for help “for the love of God” until his three terrified visitors finally cut him loose from his cords.
It happened in a series of steps, over a long time, reader. It is as though I crashed through a glass wall into a new dimension, the dimension of feeling, where before I had only been in two dimensions like a comic-book character, capable of everything but growth.
My own screaming went on for so long that I could scarcely maintain a hope that it would stop some day.
It hurt. Both before and after she died, for five years.
My arms are what started to hurt, and then my innermost core hurt. Then everything hurt, like an ax inside my chest.
In alchemy, this process is called rotting, burning, and fermenting.
That, reader, is what I did.
I realized that Marla, who wanted me to die, was not a good intern for my needs. So I switched to a man who became my most frequently on-time intern, the sixty-year-old aspiring-gay-journalist John. But he occasionally made hurtful sexist and racist remarks, and sometimes showed up dead drunk.
So. I switched again to a man named Sam from the neighborhood, who I had met because he once had a job delivering laundry to me for the Eco-mat. I had to pay Sam much more than I did my writing interns, but the relationship was clearer. He was never resentful. And, reader, I never felt like I was tricking or cheating him.
He felt compassion for me, I believe, reader, but he was not helping me out of pity. Nor was he helping me because I was offering him sex, or promising to make him a famous writer, or listening to him call me a piece of shit whenever he felt like it.
It was because I was paying him $20 an hour, which felt like an appropriate exchange for his labor.
Sam used to joke in the beginning about what he claimed were “the wild parties” he was sure I was attending, but when I told him the jokes bugged me he never made them again.
And I stopped depending on Eileen to be my only friend, and found a few others who had a little more time to get together because they did not have small children and were not simultaneously embarked on graduate degree programs.
I learned, finally, about the Minkowitz death ray, which had been pulsating from my nervous eyes for all these many years.
Every member of my family employed the Minkowitz death ray, but I had never realized I was using it myself. It was a catalyzed yellow gleam from the eye-stalks, a sort of noxious flare, that turned everyone in the vicinity into a load of foully compressed garbage. There was a nasty smell afterwards for years, like the scent from a Mafia private-carting-company truck. People did not like the ray being used on them, at all. They scarcely wanted to be my friends, after I did.
I had started to observe my own death ray one day, but in the vaguest way I possibly could, out of the corner of my eye. It was when I realized I was using it on the counterpeople at the fancy coffee bar who hadn’t understood where to put my coffee.
I’d felt so frustrated. So helpless and denied. So utterly incapable of getting what I needed.
That ravenous sense of denied need, that frustration and powerlessness that all golems feel, had sparked out of my eyes and made me turn the counterwoman into a mountain of shit.
Though I hadn't understood it at the time, I had actually gotten a very faint first glimpse of my foul capacities some eight or nine years previous, with my then-best friend Becka.
It was 1994, and I loved an obnoxious woman named Sara Transom. She had cheated on me and finally broken up with me in a particularly cruel way, insisting that I not tell the acquaintances we were having dinner with that night so she could still bask in my then-fame among lesbians. And she had broken up with me in Minneapolis, where she invited me to come and visit her for a long weekend.
My best friend did not have much time to hear about it when I flew home. I tried calling her that night, but we only got to talk for a minute. Then I tried calling on a couple of mornings. Actually, morning was Becka’s designated writing time, I now dimly remember. Reader, I thought my friend was slipping away from me. I thought not only did I not have Sara, I was now under threat of not having Becka, either.
“Hey, Donna,” Becka said cheerily, and a bit wearily, when she picked up the phone. “I can’t really talk now.”
“I wish we could talk more than we do.” I tried to point my need out affectionately, jocularly. “Hey, I want more of you than I’m getting!” I said smiling.
To my surprise, she did not take what I said jocularly. “You should wait until I call you back. You know, when you call, I might want to be doing something else. I might want to be writing. Or if I feel like talking on the phone, maybe I’d rather be talking to Dan Lumpson than you.” Dan Lumpson was a clown who we had gone to college with, a friend of Becka’s.
I was horrified when she said maybe she’d rather be talking to Dan Lumpson than me.
“But we’re good friends. What if I really need to talk to you?”
“You have to wait until I call you back. The person who doesn’t want to talk, wins!”
I felt so hurt, reader. And so powerless to get what I needed.
I did what I remembered my mother doing in situations like this. Used my internal powers. “No, I’ll make you talk to me! You’ll talk to me whether you want to or not.”
Becka did not like the death ray and she never spoke to me again.
I don’t know if I ever used it again on other actual friends after that. It was Olive who first told me about my weapon, six years later, because I’d used it on her.
How did she describe the infernal thing? I can barely remember a word of it now. Perhaps she just said I became very hard to take sometimes when I was angry.
Part of the spell that governs use of the death ray involves a deep forgetting while the golem is making use of it, as though the golem had been moving in a dream. But the murder-ray is woven into us, just as deeply as the white thread that is only there so our masters can cut it to erase us.
“I’ve never seen what you’re talking about,�
�� I said to my shrink stiffly. “However, I’m willing to believe I might be doing it, because you’ve said other things that turned out to be true.”
After that, I actually observed myself using the weapon a few times, with strangers. I understood what I was doing to the coffee counterwoman, at the very moment I was turning her into a pile of dung. I understood what I was doing a year later, when a group of twenty insufferable radical drummers decided to perform on the street in front of my window for half an hour.
I went downstairs and made them stop, by touching them and sucking the life force out of them.
They weren’t an imminent threat to my life, although they felt like it. Part of me cracked that day. I was no longer able to assume that I was innocent, and powerless. And survival stopped being the thing I wanted at all costs.
In the rubedo (fermenting) phase, right after a final shattering of contaminants there is something called “the peacock’s tail” in the substance that is being worked on, a brilliant display of colors that resembles the colors of spring after winter, or the Aurora Borealis in the sky.
I started hanging out with storytellers, people who don’t even believe in writing the damn thing down. And I started going to a gaggle of dating events—yes, dating events, little reader. In New York, it can be hard to meet people, especially if you’re a lesbian.
I’d always had a most laborious, awkward, and terrified time flirting. Because I was so frightened of every person I was attracted to.
Lots of them looked like my mother. The femmes, in particular, were inviting and sparkly in the same way she had been. I felt as though every time I wanted a woman, I was contaminating her with my disgusting desire. I felt I was doing something horrible to her. Part of the golem-magic that had bound me to my mother was the trap she’d laid for me of frustration and desire, of seduction and humiliation, and it had bound me in my interactions with all other women, too, for all these years.
“If anyone’s going to control you, I will!”
But Pilates, which I had begun studying at a place called the Integrative Care Center, taught that I could “integrate” all my many parts—including the part that wanted to kiss and go on dates—and develop a practice of wholeness, of entirety, through which I would not be able to be controlled by anyone but me.
I’m not kidding you. It was Pilates! Mr. Joseph Pilates had developed it in an internment camp for German citizens in England during World War I, where he himself was a prisoner. He called it a “return to life,” and it was a way that physically weak, wounded, and exhausted persons, locked up for their nationality alone, could, by trying and receiving help, become strong even if they'd never been so before.
In “controlology,” as Joseph originally called his method, all the various muscles of the body were supposed to be “cooperative and loyal" to one another, each supporting the others so that no one body part (the lower back, say, or the knee) had an unhealthy burden. All aspects of one's body, mind, and spirit were supposed to work mutually. No part was the slave, as it were, and no part was the exploitive master, lording it over the others. Being "loyal" to one another—integrated—they would develop—finally—a happy living structure in which each cell contributed to let the whole move around “with minimum effort and maximum pleasure."
I was surprised by how my teacher, Red, was able to help me develop strength in my stomach and legs that helped uncurl my twisted torso and draw life into my shoulders and arms and hands.
After two months, I was able to bend in ways I hadn’t been able to in twenty years. I hadn’t imagined I would ever be able to do leg-raises again—after a back injury I had gotten from my crappy student job in the Yale library. Then, after my arms were blighted, I did not think I would ever be able to curl my chest open. Or get enough circulation into my shoulders again that I would actually be able to build muscles in that place. Before I started training with Red, the return of what Joseph called the “pure, fresh blood” into my shoulders had been too painful to tolerate.
Pilates was a method of integration, not of magic. As Dr. Mayhew advised, I kept using voice dictation software, because typing could easily reinjure me. I continued not carrying groceries, or bags of trash, and let my arms get stronger gradually. As Red suggested, I allowed Dr. Sing's mantra to apply for me also to Pilates: "Little by little, step by step."
And in fact, I was enjoying life so much more this way. I felt feelings from the tips of my toes to the top of my head. My head felt effervescent, as though a flowery beer had been poured into it and my hair was curling up from the blood vessels in my scalp to the tips of my curls. The response I got at the dating events was, startlingly, strengthening my ego as much as Pilates was strengthening my spine. I found that women were attracted to me.
Learning that I was attractive was rather shocking. But nice. It made flirting ever so much pleasanter. Olive got me started by dinning into me that if, by chance, I ever asked out someone who said no, that did not make me shameful and disgusting.
She said, “People get rejected most of the time when they ask someone out. There’s no shame to it whatsoever.”
In 2003, I met—at an event called Date Bait—a pretty young woman named Dulcie. She was sweeter and more loving than anyone I had been with previously, and also, I believe, prettier.
Like I told you, good-looking women had terrified me, reader!
I dated her for seven months, but honey, she turned out to be much nastier than me when she got mad, made jokes about my being Jewish, and was “afraid of my vagina” as she told me, which explained why she didn’t want to touch it very much at all.
We broke up. Olive said, “What a great chance this was to practice!”
But when I was still seeing Dulcie, both my dead parents had begun coming to me to tell me they were sorry, often in public bathrooms. They particularly liked the bathrooms of the Cosi Sandwich Bar, which were always colorful, bright orange, and clean. But they also liked Dulcie’s bathroom in Bronxville, and enjoyed visiting me out in the open, among the chairs and tables, at Starbucks.
My father had come to me now and again in a low-key fashion, and smiled, or sometimes cried, over the years. But now he was a just bit more physically present than he’d been, and now my mother was suddenly coming, too, and she would say silently to me, telepathically as it seemed, “I’m sorry I hurt you” and “I wish you well.” I could see her face as she said it, at the same time sad, regretful, and loving. Her face had lost some of its prednisone puffiness. She and my father had both been utterly healed, they told me, and loved me very much from wherever they were.
I spent even more time with the storytellers, who were part of a strange new movement to put new life into the oral tradition of myth and fairy tales.
A few of them were shamans, but none were wizards as far as I could tell. These wandering folks were into sharing power with others, not accruing it. I went to even more dating events then, and as I experienced the happiness of casually talking to women it felt like spring after winter, and sun on the leaves. I went to the Sundance Outdoor Adventure Society, and Women About, voluntary organizations that went on hikes up mountains and had spaghetti dinners, respectively. I went to the Girls Meet Girls at Brighton Beach bathing party and Russian-food jaunt, where I made a date with a woman who seemed full of life and turned out to be a member of the New Alliance Party, a neofascist cult. But I was amused and only a little ticked off when I found out.
I went to Date Bait several times, where I always met women I liked. I went to a venture called Deeper Dating, which was not light enough for me by half and included a therapist warning us at the get-go that it was extraordinarily difficult and painful to enter new relationships. I even went to Congregation Beth Simchat Torah’s Lesbian and Gay Speed Dating event, where I, a former golem, exchanged numbers with a young Orthodox Jewish medical student and a semi-trans looker with a bow tie.
Eventually, I made my way back to Date Bait, my perennial best event. I knew the ropes by now
, and so I understood that I was not limited to meeting the women by filling out the little SAT-like computer form with pencil in the right circles, and officially “matching” with them in the Date Bait owner Rafael's proprietary computer program. You “matched” if you put someone’s identifying Date Bait number on your scorecard and if they also put your Date Bait number on theirs.
When the July 2005 Date Bait was over, I had matched with six women, but the one I really wanted to talk to had been busy during the entire official “chat each other up” segment. A flock of girls had been monopolizing her in turn. In the seventy-person microphone go-round that every Date Bait begins with, this woman said she was interested in finding someone “passionate and intellectual.” I figured I could probably fit in that description. But more than that, she just seemed extraordinarily pleasant, reader.
“Cute,” I wrote in my notes. But beyond that, there was a mysterious welcoming quality to her, as though she had the scents of lavender and lemon verbena on her fingers and iris root emanating from her chest.
In Pilates, “teachers start with sense organs,” as Joseph says in his book. “We must...really be able to enjoy ourselves... All forms of play tend materially to renew our vitality... The term ‘play’ as we use it here, embraces every possible form of PLEASURABLE LIVING.”
I had never known an unthreatening sense of play before, certainly not from my lovers. Yet it seemed to emanate from this woman. Most peculiarly, there was a singing tenderness coming out of her breastbone, like the warmth from a camp stove.
I knew I wasn’t going to match with this woman because we hadn’t spoken. But I decided to go up to her at the very end.
“Hi,” I said. “I didn’t get a chance to talk to you, but I really wanted to.”
Karen smiled at me. “Keep talking to me. Just walk around with me, though, because I need to sweep.” She had gotten free admission by working the event for nothing, and Rafael was a hard taskmaster, insisting that she not only sign women in during the first hour and collect their computer cards during the second, but sweep the floor when the shindig was over.
Growing Up Golem Page 20