I’m sorry I was such a wimp, Bea.
Let’s go to sleep, she said, and I said, Yes, and we did, and I didn’t take a pill, and I slept very well.
* * *
How to tell it? asks your sad, crack-brained, crybaby narrator. How to tell it? It gets a bit crowded from here on in—there’s simultaneity, one thing happening at Rolling Meadows, another at the Arts Guild, another at the neighboring house, not to speak of my Boris wandering the streets of NYC with my concerned Daisy on his heels; all of this will have to be dealt with. And we all know that simultaneity is a BIG problem for words. They come in sequence, always, only in sequence, so while I sort it out, I will refer to Dr. Johnson. Referring to Dr. Johnson in a pinch is a good bet, our own man of the English language, our wise, fat, gouty, scrofulous, kindhearted, witty glutton, a being of authority, to whom we can all turn in moments of trouble, a cultural pater familias who was so important he had his own man document him while he was still ALIVE. And that was the eighteenth century, well before every Tom, Dick, Harry, Lila, and Jane recorded each tawdry, moronic detail of his or her lamentable life on the Internet. (Please note the addition of Lila and Jane; there is no female equivalent of “Tom, Dick, and Harry,” which connotes Everyman; Everywoman, alas, is something entirely different.) Grub Street, however, to the great dismay of Dr. Johnson, was churning out countless confessions or faux confessions, just as lurid and hair-raising as today’s misery memoirs. But enough. We cite Rasselas, a section on marriage, in which our hero offers his appraisal of the sacrament:
Such is the common process of marriage. A youth and a maiden meeting by chance, or brought together by artifice, exchange glances, reciprocate civilities, go home and dream of one another. Having little to divert attention or diversify thought, they find themselves uneasy when they are apart, and therefore conclude that they shall be happy together. They marry, and discover what nothing but voluntary blindness had before concealed; they wear out life in altercations and charge nature with cruelty.
Willful ignorance disguises grim reality: You mean I’m stuck with you? But it’s different now, says the savvy reader. That was the old days. We are more enlightened than the Enlightenment, we of the twenty-first century, with our widgets and gadgets and high-speed winklets and no-fault divorce. Ho! Ho! Ho! is my response to you. The sorrows of sex are never-ending. Give me an epoch, and I’ll give you a sobbing narrative of conjugal relations turned sour. Can I really blame Boris for his Pause, for his need to seize the day, for snatching the pausal snatch while there was still time, still time for the old-timer he was swiftly becoming? Don’t we all deserve to romp and hump and carry on? Dr. Johnson’s own sex life remains under wraps, mostly, thank heaven, but we do know that David Garrick told David Hume, who told Boswell, who recorded it in his journal, that after witnessing Dr. Johnson’s pleasure one night at the theater, Garrick hoped aloue happy tohe eminent lexicographer would return often, but the Great Man averred he would not. “For the white bubbies and the silk stockings of your Actresses,” said the Sage, “excite my genitals.” We all have ticklers, adaptive or not, and it is our nature to use them. One can be sick with jealousy and loneliness and still understand that.
But there is another aspect of long marriages that is rarely spoken about. What begins as ocular indulgence, the sight of the gleaming beloved, which incites the appetite for around-the-clock rumpty-rumpty, alters over time. The partners age and change and become so accustomed to the presence of the other that vision ceases to be the most important sense. I listened for Boris in the morning if I woke to see his half of the bed empty, listened for the flushing toilet or the sound of him filling the teakettle with water. I would feel the hard bones of his shoulders as I placed my hands on them to greet him silently while he read the paper before going to the lab. I did not peer into his face or examine his body; I merely felt that he was there, just as I smelled him at night in the dark. The odor of his warm body had become part of the room. And when we had our conversations that often went on into the night, it was his sentences I attended to. Alert to the transitions he made from one thought to the next, I concentrated on the content of his speech as it unwound in my mind, and I placed it inside the ongoing dialogue between us, which was sometimes savage, but more often not. It was rare that I studied him. Sometimes after we had done the deed, and he walked naked across the room, I would look at his long pale body with its round belly and his left leg with its blue varicose vein and at his soft well-formed feet, but not always. This is not the voluntary blindness of new attraction; it is the blindness of an intimacy wrought from years of parallel living, both from its bruises and its balms.
* * *
During our penultimate call before she was to leave for the month of August, I told Dr. S. what I had never told anyone. A week before Stefan killed himself, the two of us were sitting together on our sofa at home in Brooklyn, waiting for Boris. My brother-in-law had been released from the hospital only two days before. He was taking his lithium, but he had been explaining that it made his mind flat and the world distant. He leaned back on the sofa, closed his eyes, and said, But even when my head is dead, I love you, Mia, and I said I loved him, too, and he said, No, I love you. I’ve always loved you and it’s killing me.
Stefan was crazy, but he was not always crazy. He wasn’t crazy then. And he was beautiful. I had always found him beautiful, worn and disappointed though he was. The brothers resembled each other, but Stefan was much thinner and far more delicate, almost feminine in his features. His manias starved him because he forgot to eat. When he was flying, he went on sex binges with floozies he stumbled over in bars and on book-buying sprees he couldn’t afford and, like my friend Nobody, he spouted mysterian philosophies that were sometimes hard to follow. But that day he was in a state of quiescence. I said something about his feeling being a mistake, about all the time we had spent together, that he had come to rely on me, stuttering in confusion, and then my sentences dwindled to silence, but he went on: I love you because we’re the same. We’re not like the Commander General. That was one of Stefan’s nicknames for Boris. In belligerent moods, Stefan sometimes saluted his older brother. Sister Life, Stefan said, turning his face to me and taking my cheeks in his hands and he kissed me long and hard and I let him and I loved it and I never should have, I said to Dr. S. Before Boris walked through the door I had told Stefan that we couldn’t and it had been stupid, all the usual claptrap, and he had looked so hurt. And it’s killing me. Sister Guilt. His terrible dead face, his terrible dead body.
I knew that I was not to blame for Stefan’s death. I knew that he must have decided in a moment of despair that he did not want to ride the dragon anymore, and yet I had never been able to reproduce our conversation aloud, had never been able to get the words out into those open fields under the vast sky. Hearing myself speak, I understood that by declaring our mutual weakness and anger at Big Boris, Stefan had bound himself to me with a kiss. It was not the kiss as such that had mortified me and kept me silent, but what I had felt in Stefan, his jealousy and vengeance, and it was this that had frightened me, not because the feelings belonged to Stefan but because they also belonged to me. The little brother. The wife. The ones who came second.
“But you and Stefan were not the same,” Dr. S. said, not long before we hung up.
Not the same. Different.
“In the hospital I felt like Stefan.”
“But Mia,” Dr. S. said, “you are alive, and you want to live. From what I can tell, your will to live is bursting out all over.”
Sister Life.
I listened to myself breathe for a while. I heard Dr. S. breathe through the telephone. Yes, I thought. Bursting out all over. I liked that. I told her I liked it. We are such strange creatures, we human beings. Something had happened. Something unbound in the telling.
“If I were there with you right now,” I said, “I would jump into your lap and give you a big squeeze.”
“That would be an armful,” sai
d Dr. S.
* * *
Around the same time, give or take a few days, even weeks, backward or forward, the following events were taking place beyond my immediate phenomenal consciousness, not necessarily in the order presented. They cannot be unscrambled by me or perhaps by anyone, hence in medias res:
My mother is reading Persuasion for the third time in preparation for the book club meeting to be held in the Rolling Meadows lounge on August 15. She assumes a position of ultimate comfort for this task. Lying on her bed with three pillows behind her, a soft neck brace to cushion arthritic twinges, hot water bottle for h cold feet, reading glasses for the bridge of her nose to bring the type into focus, and a special-order lap desk that holds the volume in position, she immerses herself in the lives of people she knows well, especially Anne Elliot, whom my mother, Bea, and I all love and chat about as if Kellynch Hall is down the hall, and good, old, long-suffering, sensible Anne might knock on the door at any moment.
Pete and Lola are fighting, a lot.
Daisy, who is still Muriel every evening at the playhouse, becomes Daisy Detective post-performance and trails her sphinx of a father around the city. The man has taken to long nocturnal perambulations, the meaning of which she does not understand. True to her character, Daisy dons flamboyant costumes for her gumshoe expeditions, which (although I know nothing of them or of her life as a spy at the time) seem likely to make her more conspicuous rather than less: Groucho Marx glasses, eyebrows, nose, and mustache; long blond wig with spangly red evening dress; tailored suit and briefcase; bowler hat and cane. Of course, in NYC, where the naked, the nuts, and the outlandish mingle freely with the staid and the conventional, she might have passed hordes of pedestrians without receiving a single glance. At around three in the morning, every morning, Boris returns to the apartment on East Seventieth Street, lets himself in, and vanishes from our daughter’s sight, upon which she returns to her apartment in Tribeca, throws herself exhausted onto her bed, and, as she put it to me later, crashes.
Simon laughs for the first time. While Lola and Pete lean over the princely crib, their faces contorted with adoration, he looks up at his two devotees, waves all four limbs in a rush of excitement, and chortles.
Abigail works her way through my six slim collections of poems, all faithfully published by the Fever Press in San Francisco, California: Lost Diction, Little Truths, Hyperbole in Heaven, The Obsidian Woman, Dang It, and Winks, Blinks, and Kinks.
Regina forgets. Neither my mother nor Peg nor Abigail can say exactly when they first notice the decline in their friend’s memory. They all forget bits and pieces of recent reality, after all. They, too, occasionally repeat questions or stories, but Regina’s forgetting has a different coloring. The three Swans (four when George was alive) have tolerated Regina’s vanity, self-absorption, and restlessness (she could not eat at a restaurant without changing tables three times) because she knows how to have fun. She has arranged teas for them and called for tickets to this event and that one. She has told charmingly garbled jokes, and rarely appeared at the door of her friends’ apartments without an offering: a flower or decorative box or candleholder picked up somewhere on her life’s journey across continents; but the advent of potential thrombosis—“straight to my lungs and I’m dead”—has given her already flighty character an extra propeller that has started to whirl at high speed. Her growing amnesia for appointments, conversations, the location of her keys and purse, her glasses, and some faces (not Swan faces, but others) quickly turns into panic and tears. The deficits the other three joke about as “senioritis” or “old-lady brain” seem to devastate Regina. She has been rushing to her doctor three or four times a week, has sulkily repeated that she simply can’t believe, can&x2019t believe that she, she, Regina, who was once, by marriage anyway, a crucial player in the world of international diplomacy, has ended up in this place, a home—that’s what it is, isn’t it, a home? It strikes her as an outrage. And so, little by little, without anyone being able to pinpoint the moment of transformation, the old coquette has alienated herself from her far more stoical friends.
Flora becomes psychological: “Mommy, you know what’s funny?”
“No, Flora,” says Lola.
“Sometimes I love you so, so, so much, but other times I really, really hate you!”
Ellen Wright calls the other mothers, calmly recounts Alice’s story, and arranges a meeting of parents and children at her house. She asks me as well, but I beg off due to Bea and say I will reorient my class toward verses that promote the greater good—mutual understanding, warm camaraderie, melting kindness—although I have no clue how I will achieve this. I do know that the colloquy took place the Sunday after the fatal Friday when Alice poured forth the unsavory details of her persecution. The mothers and daughters (Alice’s father is the only male personage in attendance) convene around the time Bea, my mother, and I are having a glass of Sancerre as we prepare our farewell dinner for Bea in my rented kitchen—a succulent roast chicken with garlic, lemon, and olive oil, a new-potato salad, and beans from Lola’s garden. The secondhand reports cannot be reassembled perfectly, but the drama unfolds, if not as follows, then in a way very much like it and, as we all know, even eyewitness accounts are hardly reliable, so you will just have to swallow this report as I have decided to render it.
Six tense mothers straggle into the Wrights’ living room with sullen, irritable daughters in tow. (Whether or not anyone glances at the large poster of Goya’s priest defeating a robber in six frames from the Chicago Art Institute that hangs over the sofa, I cannot say, but it is a great work even in reproduction.) Ellen Wright, who once trained in social work, now employed as an administrator at the Bonden Health Clinic, opens the forum with a short speech, during which she uses the current verb of choice to describe the events in question: bullying. She notes its prevalence, its potential damage to long-term mental health, notes that girls are sneakier and more underhanded than boys (my adjectives) and that these activities do not go away by themselves; it takes a village. I am not responsible for the dead phrases that litter the discourse of pop sociology. Mrs. Wright then articulates a heartfelt desire to listen, to open the floor to all players.
Silence ensues. Several pairs of eyes glare at Alice, who sits between parental buffers.
Mrs.-Lorquat-of-the-frowning-Deity, mother of Jessie, wonders aloud how, when so much of what went on was anonymous, can it be known that her Jessie was even involved.
Mrs. Hartley, mother of Emma, pokes her child to prompt words. Several pokes later, Emma, red-faced, confesses to messages cooked up by an ensemble cast. And she names names: Jessie, Ashley, Joan, Nikki, and herself. But they hadn’t really meant it; it was just stupid stuff kids do.
Nikki and Joan alternately make short exclamatory remarks to the effect that they, too, had not intended to do any real harm. It was just that Alice was always talking about Chicago and she was always reading books and acting better than they were and so they thought she was kinda stuck-up and everything and so …
Mrs. Larsen, mother of Ashley, weary-faced, meek-voiced, inquires innocently of stone-faced daughter: But I thought you and Alice were such good friends.
We are!
Peyton, squirming under an avalanche of guilt, shouts the word liar and unloads revelations that will come as no surprise to either you or me, while Mrs. Berg tries to dampen her daughter’s zeal by saying quietly, Don’t shout, Peyton, but Peyton shouts anyway that Ashley took the photographs and posted them, that she suggested the Zack deception, and that she, Peyton, went along with it and she feels bad, really bad. But Peyton isn’t finished. There is more. Peyton says she was scared to tell, freaked, because she, Ashley, started a club called the Coven. Before joining the group, each girl agreed to cut herself with a knife and bleed enough to sign her name in blood to a document, in which she swore her allegiance to the other members and promised that their dark alliance would remain a secret forever. Peyton produces small scar on thigh of very long
left leg as evidence.
This gothic twist on the proceedings, with its air of satanic ritual, creates a stir among the adults. Poor Mr. Wright, a chemistry professor, accustomed to shepherding premed students through the peaks and valleys of predicting formulas with polyatomic ions, is uncomfortable in the extreme and begins an intense examination of his fingernails. Mrs. Lorquat issues a gasp, as bloody documents are even more offensive to God than D. H. Lawrence. The mothers of Nikki and Joan, friends for life, seated side by side, drop their jaws in unison. Aghast questioning of Coven members ensues.
Ashley commences crying.
Alice watches.
Ellen watches Alice.
What Alice thinks at this juncture we do not know, but it is more than likely that she feels some satisfaction that the pubescent witches of Bonden have been exposed. At the same time, Alice isn’t going anywhere. She is staying in town with the little she-devils, her friends.
* * *
Commentary: The instruments of darkness tell us truths. What are they? Boys will be boys: rambunctious, wild, kicking, hanging from the trees. But girls will be girls? Gentle, nurturing, sweet, passive, conniving, stealthy, mean?
We all start out the same in our mothers’ wombs. We, all of us, when floating in the amniotic sea of our earliest oblivion, have gonads. If the Y chromosome didn’t swoop in to act on the gonads of some of us and make testes, we would all become women. In biology, the Genesis story is reversed: Adam becomes Adam out of Eve, not the other way around. Men are the metaphorical ribs of women, not women of men. Most of the time, it’s XX = ovaries, XY = testes. The renowned Greek physician Galen believed that female genitalia were the inversion of the male’s and vice versa, a view that held for centuries: “Turn outward the woman’s, turn inward, so to speak, and fold double the man’s and you will find the same in both in every respect.” Of course, outward trumped inward every time. Inward was definitely worse. Exactly why, I can’t say. Outward is pretty vulnerable, if you ask me. In fact, castration anxiety makes a lot of sense. If I were carrying my reproductive organs on the outside, I’d be pretty damned nervous about that delicate little package, too. As with the human navel, the ancient sex model had innies and outies, which meant that an innie might just surprise you by becoming an outie, especially if you went around behaving like someone who already had an outie. That hidden, folded-over yard might just make a sudden appearance. Montaigne, great literary peak of the sixteenth century that he was, subscribed to the innie/outie thesis: “Males and females are cast in the same mold, and, education and usage excepted, the difference is not great.” He repeats a well-known story about Marie-Germain, who was just plain Marie until the age of twenty-two in Montaigne’s version (fifteen in other versions), but one day, due to strenuous exercise ( jumping over a ditch while chasing pigs), the male rod popped out of her, and Germain was born. Incredible, you say. Impossible, you say. But there is a particular family in Puerto Rico and another in Texas with a genetic condition in which XY looks for all the world exactly like XX. In other words, phenotype disguises genotype, until puberty that is, when late in the game the little girls become little boys and grow up to be men. Carla turns into Carlos! Darling daughter becomes darling son without a surgical instrument in sight. What is certain is that in utero, the sex differentiation story is fragile. Things can and do get all mixed up.