“I didn’t know that,” Peyton said loudly.
“She’s got ADHD, you mean?” Nikki said.
“She didn’t say what it’s called; it’s something…” Ashley said, eyes clouded.
“Half of school’s on something, Ritalin or something,” Peyton announced. “That’s no big deal.”
I saw Emma give Peyton a hard reproving look. Emma was not subtle.
Enlightenment about Alice was not forthcoming. I smiled at the little group gathered around me and said very slowly, “It may be hard to believe, but I was young once, too, and moreover, I remember being young. I remember being exactly your age, in fact, and I remember jokes, too.” It was a cinematic moment, and I was fully conscious of it. I did my best to don my most all-knowing, authoritative, good-teacher-beloved-by-the-students expression, a cross between Mr. Chips and Miss Jean Brodie, and then I slapped Theodore Roethke shut, stood up, and made my exit. In the film, the camera would follow my back to the door, my high heels—sandals in reality—clipping smartly on the floorboards, and then I pause, just for a moment, and turn to look over my shoulder. The camera is now close. Only my face is visible, and on the screen, it is gigantic, perhaps twelve feet tall. I beam out at you, the audience, turn again, and the door shuts with a loud Foley click behind me.
* * *
Something seemed to be wrong with Abigail. My mother was sitting beside her on the sofa, stroking her back. Regina was making noises: high-pitched, staccato wails.
“She fell,” Mama said to me, her face white. “Just now.”
Abigail was examining her knees with a confused expression, and I felt a spasm of fear. I bent over her, took her hand, and asked all the usual questions, beginning with “Are you okay?” and moving on to particulars about pains and odd sensations. She didn’t answer but stared hard downward and then began shaking her head slowly.
Regina flapped her hands in the air and in a strangled voice said, “I’m going to pthe string for help right now. I’m going into the bathroom to yank it. She can’t talk. Oh my God. I have to call Nigel. He’ll know what to do.” (Nigel was the Englishman, and exactly what he was going to do in Leeds for Abigail in Bonden was a secret known only to Regina.)
Abigail turned her head toward her panicked friend and said in a loud even voice, “Shut up, Regina. Someone help me adjust my bra before it chokes me.”
Regina looked offended. She folded her hands and sank back on the sofa, a ladylike frown on her still remarkably pretty face.
Together, my mother and I managed to pull down the offending garment, which had slipped upward in the excitement, and settle our mutual friend on the sofa.
“Abigail,” my mother said. “I was so scared.”
Falling was a universal fear at Rolling Meadows. Some people, like George, never got up. Hips snapped, ankles cracked, and they were never the same. Old bones. That Abigail had not broken some piece of her frail skeleton struck me as supernatural. I discovered later that my mother, perhaps unwisely, had intervened with her own body and turned a crash into a slow tumble.
At some point during the conversation that followed, I understood that Abigail felt considerably better, because she began to signal me with her eyebrows, a gesture followed by peering down at her lap. I had no idea what she was up to until I saw that she had her hands in the pockets of her embroidered dress and was exposing small parts of their red linings. The woman was wearing a secret amusement. Concealed inside her pockets was some subversive message, erotic needlepoint, or other undie, no doubt created years ago. I telegraphed back my silent comprehension that the dress was loaded, so to speak, another hidden fabric in Abigail’s private arsenal, and this tacit knowledge between us appeared to give her genuine pleasure, because she smiled slyly and gave me some extra eyebrow lifts to confirm our complicity. Peg arrived then and, after hearing the story, took it in the vein most true to her nature, declaring Abigail “blessed” and my mother a “hero” (a designation my mother adamantly disavowed, but which she clearly enjoyed), and then she moved on to Robin Womack, a local television personality with abundant hair. She ended her eulogy with the phrase “He can put his shoes on my bed anytime!” Although I found the reference to shoes superfluous, this permission clearly imparted a fancy for Womack and his serious hair.
Exactly how we arrived at poetry I am not certain, but the Swans fondly recalled some loved lines from their earlier days. Peg wandered lonely as a cloud, and my mother read aloud Wallace Stevens’s “The Reader.” There are no words on his reader’s page, only “the trace of burning stars / In the frosty heaven.” And Regina recalled Joyce Kilmer’s immortal American “tree,” and I recited Ron Padgett’s poem “Haiku.” “That was fast. / I mean life.” I had always laughed aloud at that poem, but not one of the Swans emitted even the briefest chuckle or snort. My mother smiled sadly. Abigail nodded. Peg’s eyes glazed over with what I gued were memories. Regina appeared to be on the verge of tears, but then she hoped aloud that I hadn’t given my girls “that poem,” to which I responded that it would be entirely lost on them because at their age life truly is long. Time is a question of both percentages and belief. If half your life ago you were six or seven, the span of those years is even longer than fifty for a centagenarian, because the young experience the future as endless and normally think of adults as members of another species. Only the aged have access to life’s brevity.
Regina then informed me, in a muddled speech of frustrating vagueness, that something had “happened” to one of the girls in my class. She simply couldn’t remember the name of the child, “Lucy perhaps, no, Janet, no, not that either,” but whatever the girl’s name was, Regina had heard from Adrian Bortwaffle’s brother-in-law, who was a close friend of Tony Rosterhaus’s (Tony’s connection to my class was completely unknown to me and to Regina), that there had been an accident of some kind, and the girl had spent a night in the hospital.
There are times when the fragility of all living things is so apparent that one begins to wait for a shock, a fall, or a break at any moment. I had been in this state since Boris left me and my nerves exploded—no, earlier than that, since Stefan’s suicide. There is no future without a past because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition. I had begun to expect calamities.
My mother and I walked Abigail to her apartment and then helped her get comfortable on her sofa. She ordered us several times to “stop fussing,” but in her face I read relief that she was not alone, not alone yet. She promised to see her doctor and kissed us both before we left.
Later that evening, I saw the multicolored bruise my mother had sustained on her side when she rescued her friend from the floor. The walker had somehow been involved and my mother must have banged into it hard. “You mustn’t mention it to Abigail,” my mother said. She said it several times. I promised several times. We sat together in the living room and I felt the hush of the building, nearly silent except for the sound of a distant television.
“Mia,” she said, not long before I left her. “I want you to know that I would do it all over again.”
My mother sometimes behaved as if I had access to her thoughts. “What, Mama?”
She looked surprised. “Marry your father.”
“Despite your differences, you mean?”
“Yes, it would have been nice if he had been a little different, but he wasn’t, and there were so many good days along with the bad days and sometimes the very thing I wanted to change about him one day was the thing that made another thing possible another day that was good, not bad, if you see what I mean.”
“Such as?”
“His sense of duty, honor, rectitude. What made me want to scream one day could make me proud the next.”
“Yes,” I said. “I understand.”
“I want you to know how good it’s been to have you close, how happy I’ve been. I’ve had fun. It can be rather lonely here and you have been my happiness, my comfort, my friend.”
This rather forma
l little speech made me glad, but I recognized in the hint of ceremony the ever-present pinch of time. My mother was old. Tomorrow she might fall or be stricken suddenly. Tomorrow she might be dead. When we parted at the door, my small mother was wearing flowered cotton pajamas. The pants ballooned around her tiny thighs and stopped just above the knobs of her scrawny anklebones. She was holding a liver-colored hot water bottle in her arms.
* * *
Daisy wrote:
Dear Mom,
I saw Dad for lunch and he didn’t look so good. He had stains all over his shirt, smelled like an ashtray, and he hadn’t shaved. I mean, I know he often waits a couple days, but he looked like he hadn’t shaved in a week, and even worse, I thought he might have been crying before he saw me. I told him he looked bad, like a clochard, but he just kept saying he was fine. I’m fine. I’m fine. Mr. Denial. Any thoughts? Should I keep trying to get him to talk to me? Send out a detective? It won’t be long now, Mamasita, before I see you!
Big kisses from your own Dazed-and-still-disappointed-in-
Daddy Daisy.
* * *
I replied:
Your father couldn’t have been crying. He only cries at the movies. But do check on him.
Love, Mom
* * *
I had known Boris for perhaps a week when he took me to Elia Kazan’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn at the Thalia on Ninety-fifth and Broadway. There is a moment in the film when the young heroine, played by Peggy Ann Garner, walks into a barbershop to retrieve her dead father’s shaving mug. It is an affecting scene. The girl adored her drunken, sentimental father, with his false hopes and impractical dreams, and losing him is a massive blow. I don’t believe Boris sniffed, although he may have, but for some reason, I turned to look at him. The man beside me oozed tears in two heavy streams as the liquid dripped steadily off his chin and onto his shirt. I was so astonished by this display of feeling, I politely ignored it. Later, I came to understand that Boris responded far more directly to the indirect; that is to say, his real emotions surfaced only when mediated by the unreal. Time and again, I had sat dry-eyed beside him while he snuffled and wept over actors on a big, flat screen. I had never, ever seen him cry in the so-called real world, not for Stefan, not for his mother, not for me or for Daisy or for dead friends or for any human being who wasn’t made of celluloid. That said, I was shaken by the oddly frightening thought that Boris had changed, that if he hadn’t met Daisy immediately after a movie (which seemed unlikely since he worked all the time and had mostly watched films on DVD in recent years) the Pause might have altered the deep structure of Boris’s character. Was he crying over her, the Frenchwoman searching for new neuropeptides? Had the wall come down for her?
* * *
Nobody was on the rampage. Nobody understood Nobody—that was the gist of the problem. The two of us had stumbled onto “the hard problem”: consciousness. What is it? Why do we have it? My highly conscious correspondent inveighed against the monumental stupidities of scientism and the atomization of processes that were clearly inseparable, “a flow, flood, wave, stream, not a series of rigid discrete pebbles lined up in a row! Any idiot should be able to divine this truth. Read your William James, that stupendous Melancholic!” A Thomas Bernhard of philosophy, Nobody indulged in splenetic rages that had a weirdly calming effect on me. I loved the Stupendous Melancholic, too, but I steered him to Plutarch’s flux and flow, the Greek wit who railed against the Stoics in his On Common Conceptions:
1. All individual substances are in flux and motion, letting go parts of themselves and receiving others coming from elsewhere.
2. The numbers and quantities to which they come or from which they go do not remain the same but become different, as the substance accepts a transformation with the said comings and goings.
3. It is wrong that it has become prevalent through custom that these changes are called growth and diminution. It would be appropriate that they should instead be called creation and destruction (phthorai), because they oust a thing from its established character into a different one, whereas growth and diminution happen to a body that underlies the change and remains throughout it.
The story is old. When does one thing become another? How can we tell? He attacked Boris, too, as a naïf, a man whose notions of a sub or primal self were absurd, misplaced. “You can’t locate the self in neural networks!” I defended my alienated family member with some vigor, arguing that self was an elastic term certainly, but Boris was quite specific about what he meant—that he was talking about an underlying biological system necessary for a self. According to my invisible comrade, not only Boris but everybody was asking the wrong questions, with the exception of Nobody himself, isolated spokesman for a synthetic vision that would unite all fields, end expert culture, and return thought to “dance and play.” A utopian nihilist is what he was, a utopian nihilist in a manic phase. I kept thinking what he really needed was a good, long head rub. And yet, I did say to myself, When I was mad, was I myself or not myself? When does one person become another?
Do you remember, I wrote to Boris, that evening two years ago when we realized we had just had exactly the same thought, not an obvious one at all, a rather eccentric notion that was brought about by some mutual catalyst, and you said to me, “You know, if we lived together another hundred years we would become the same person?” Ton amie, Mia
* * *
When Alice didn’t show up in class and I asked for information, the girls played dumb, or at least, that is what I guessed. I didn’t know whether the hospital rumor was true, and it seemed silly to perpetuate it, so I went to the source. I called Alice’s house, her mother answered, and she told me that Alice had been ill with severe stomach pains and had been rushed to the hospital, but the doctors had found nothing and had sent her home after a night of tests. When I asked how her daughter was feeling, she said she seemed to be out of pain but was listless and low and refused to go back to class. With all the delicacy I could muster I said that there had been talk about “a joke” on Alice among the girls, and it had worried me. I wanted to speak to Alice. The woman was obliging, even eager, I thought, and I heard in her voice that particular note of maternal fear founded not on evidence but on a feeling.
Alice did not get up for me. I was ushered into her abnormally neat pale blue room, where she lay on top of her pale blue bedspread covered with white cumulus clouds and stared at the ceiling, her arms crossed over her chest like a corpse that had been prepared for burial. I pulled a chair near her bed, sat down on it, and listened as her mother discreetly pulled the door shut behind her. The girl’s face was masklike. As I spoke to her, she didn’t move a muscle. I told her we had missed her in class, that it wasn’t the same without her, that I was sorry she had been ill but hoped she would return soon, once she was fully recovered.
Without turning her head to look at me, she said to the ceiling, “I can’t go back.”
Not telling is as interesting as telling, I have found. Why speech, that short verbal journey from inside to outside, can be so excruciating under certain circumstances is fascinating. I pressed her, kindly, but I pressed. All Alice did was shake her head back and forth. I mentioned “the joke” then, and her face broke into an expression of pain. Her lips disappeared as she curled them inward, and I saw a tear dribble from each duct, and because she was supine neither fell. Rather, they sank into the skin of her cheeks.
We are going to leave Alice lying there on her cloudy bedspread with her shiny cheeks. We are going to take a respite, because, although I remained sitting there in person, I left myself for at least half an hour. I took a mind walk. It is not easy talking to a thirteen-year-old who does not want to talk to you or, if she does want to talk to you, must nevertheless be coddled and coaxed and wheedled for the few precious utterances that will resolve the mystery of the crime. To be frank, it’s a bit boring, so we shall dispense with the long and tortured job of getting the words out of the child and return to her once she has produ
ced them.
* * *
Why I thought of that erotic explosion I can’t say. The clouds, the bed, the light that shone through the girl’s window that afternoon, a thick haze of summer illumination—any or all may have done it. Boris had accompanied me to a poetry festival, where I had read to a crowd of twenty (quite good, I thought) and we had wandered about San Francisco in the foggy air. A fellow poet had recommended a massage therapist, a man of sterling quality who altered human bodies with his hands. This was an attractive idea for someone whose crammed and speeding head occasionally lost sight of her body far below. The man’s name was Bedgood. Archibald Bedgood. I am not a liar. It may have been his name that started the whole enterprise. Nothing is certain. Anyway, while Boris waited in the wings (a restful room with New Age music designed to turn all human beings into somnambulists), I lay myself down naked but for a towel covering my rump on Bedgood’s massage bed, with some anxiety, if the truth be told, and the man began to rub. He was methodical, decorous—by some magic the towel never lost its purpose as modest covering. He took each body part individually, all four limbs, feet and hands, back and head, even my face at the end. I had no sexual feelings whatsoever, no erotic leaps or fantasies. I had no thoughts that I recall, but after an hour and a half, Bedgood had reduced me to jelly. Mia was missing, missing in action, so to speak. The person who emerged from the massage room to find Boris snoring on a soft pink sofa had been transformed, just as advertised. She had been remade into a limp, empty-headed, but altogether euphoric being. After rousing Izcovich from his pastel divan, this redone personage (who deserved a new name: FiFi or Didi or Dollface or just Doll) sauntered arm in arm with Husband toward Poetry Hotel, and that is where on the somewhat too soft bed I (or she) was split open, broken into flaming pieces, and transported to Paradise four times in quick succession.