The Summer Without Men (6 page)

as white as eggs.

An underground of string—

these violent lines

of what used to be called

the heart, lost to

my now-bitter mouth.

“A tangle,” he said.

No, knots.

Not this or these.

She was distinct,

I believe. Shelved.

Put her away.

Inanimate thing.

Put her away,

And let her rock.

*   *   *

“Dear Mia,” Boris wrote. “Whatever happens between us, it is very important to me to know how you are. For Daisy’s sake, too, we have to be in communication. Please send a message back when you receive this.” So reasonable, I thought, such stiff prose:
in communication.
I felt like biting something. He was obviously worried. He had seen me on the day after I landed in the hospital, when I was
acute,
delusional and hallucinating,
bouffée délirante,
and I was convinced he was going to steal the apartment, push me into the street, a conspiracy cooked up with the Pause and the other scientists at the lab, and when he sat across from me in the room with Dr. P., a voice said, “Of course he hates you. Everyone hates you. You’re impossible to live with.” And then, “You’ll end up like Stefan.” I screamed, “No!” and an orderly pulled me away and they injected more Haldol, and I knew
they
were in on it.

His brother
and
his wife. Poor Boris, I could hear them say. Poor Boris, surrounded by crazy people. I remember babbling to Felicia, who had come to clean. I remember tearing down the shower curtain, explaining about the plot, yelling. I remember it perfectly, but now it’s as if I were someone else, as if I’m looking at myself from afar. It all fell away after Bea arrived. But I had frightened Boris, and because he had “agitated” me on the ward, they didn’t want him to visit again. I stared at the message for a long time before I wrote back: “I am not crazy anymore. I am hurt.” The words seemed true, but when I tried to elaborate, all further commentary seemed merely decorative. What was there to
communicate
? And the irony that Boris wanted communication was almost too much to bear.

I don’t want to talk about it. I’m waking up. Let me have my tea. We’ll talk later. I can’t talk about it. We’ve been over this a thousand times.
How many times had he uttered those sentences? Repetition. Repetition, not identity. Nothing is repeated exactly, even words, because something has changed in the speaker and in the listener, because once said and then said again and again, the repetition itself alters the words. I am walking back and forth over the same floor. I am singing the same song. I am married to the same man. No, not really. How many times had he answered Stefan’s calls in the middle of night? Years and years of calls and rescues and doctors and the treatise that would change philosophy forever. And then the silence. Ten years of no Stefan. He was forty-seven when he died. Boris was five years older, and once, only once, the older brother had whispered to me after two scotches that the most terrible thing was that it was a relief, too, that his own beloved brother’s suicide had also been a relief. And then when his mother died—the flamboyant, complicated, self-pitying Dora—Boris was the lone survivor. His father had dropped dead of heart failure when the boys were still young. Boris did not grieve in any demonstrative way. Instead, he receded. What had my father said? “I can’t. I can’t.” I had longed to find both men, hadn’t I? My father and my husband, both prone to long disquisitions about torts or genes and so mute about their own suffering. “Your father and your husband shared a number of traits,” Dr. S. had said. The past tense: shared. I looked at the message.
I am hurt
. Boris had been hurt, too. I added, “I love you. Mia.”

*   *   *

The sex journal was not providing me with the release I had hoped for. Recording my early, furtive masturbatory journeys up a mountain that had rather suddenly presented itself as
something to climb;
the tongue dives with M.B. that had left my mouth sore in the morning because neither I nor said youth had dared venture into territories farther south; the later, daring advances by J.Q. under bras and into jeans as he pressed on despite colonial resistance, the forces of which admittedly weakened over time, had accumulated a bathetic quality I found hard to ignore. Who cares? I thought. And yet, why did the mature woman look back at the girl with such coolness, such lack of sympathy? Why did the aging persona produce only expeditions into irony? Hadn’t I sighed and heaved and longed and wept? Hadn’t I lost my virginity in a heated but deeply confused state, still unaware, despite my adventures with M.B. and J.Q., of how exactly it all worked? I remember the wooden stairs to the second floor, the bunched sheets and blankets, but no color or details. Only that there was a dim light that shone through the window and that the branches of the tree outside moved and the light moved with them. There was some pain, but no blood and no orgasm.

*   *   *

The second message read simply:

Looney.

Mr. Somebody.

Although it was unsettling, I decided not to worry. These missives had a puerile ring to them, and what harm could they really do? Without an answer, the sender would tire and disappear into the nebula from which he had come. He was no more threatening than the presence behind the door—nothing but a felt absence.

*   *   *

From time to time my neighbors on the left, the parents of the diminutive Harpo who had turned up on my small lawn, quarreled loudly. The content of these disputes was mostly inaudible. What carried into my domain was anger: the screech of her voice that changed register when it cracked into sobs, and his booming tenor—both of which were occasionally punctuated by a crash. The crashes were frightening, and I found myself looking closely at the house and its residents. They were a young, pink, pudgy pair. I saw little of him. He drove off in the morning to some job in a Toyota and sometimes didn’t return for days, a young man who must have traveled here a there for work. The young woman stayed home with her Marx brother and an infant no more than six weeks old—a person in the still floppy, stunned by visual stimuli, sucking, arm and foot waving, grunting, grimacing phase of life. How I had loved that stage in my own Daisy’s path of becoming. One afternoon, while I sat outside on the rickety chaise longue that had become my reading furniture, I saw the mother through a gap in the bushes. As she held the flailing, screaming baby in her arms, she leaned over her bewigged three-year-old, deeply engaged in fierce, if controlled, negotiations about the false hair: “You can’t wear it every minute. Your head must be sweating. What about your own hair? I can hardly remember what it looks like anymore.” “It’s not sweaty! It’s not sweaty!” I put down my copy of
Repetition,
which I was reading for the sixth time, and wandered a few yards to offer my help.

My intervention meant that the fright wig remained on the young head. The mother was Lola, Harpo was actually Flora, and the person in a paper diaper was Simon, with whom I had a conversation of coos, nods, and smiles I found extremely gratifying. The four of us ended up in the professors’ yard drinking lemonade, and I discovered that Lola had attended Swedenborg College as an art major, made jewelry and sold it, that her husband, Pete, worked for a company in Minneapolis, which had been steadily cutting back its workforce, a fact Lola found “kinda scary,” that he did indeed travel a lot, and that Lola was tired. She did not say she was tired, but exhaustion was written all over her soft, round twenty-six-year-old face. While we sat together, she nursed Simon with an easy, practiced air and fended off Flora’s intrusions of false solicitude that threatened to unhinge her son’s mouth from her nipple. I tried to distract Flora by asking her questions. At first she refused to answer me. I spoke to her back and to the wig, but after prodding and several questions, she changed character, and I became audience to a chattering, dancing, singing show-off. “Watch my feet! Look at me jump. Simon can’t jump. Look, Mom. Watch me! Look, Mom!” Lola watched with a faint smile as her bald babe’s eyes flickered open and shut, open and shut, his little arms reaching tremulously for nothing, before he sank back toward her breast into sleep.

*   *   *

Boris wrote back:

Thank you for answering, Mia. I have a conference in July in Sydney. Will keep you posted on all dates. Boris.

There was no love to my love. I gathered he hoped to push our relations onto a civil but cold plane for the sake of the beloved, shared offspring, and I had a brief fantasy of bursting in on him and the Pause in the lab, and flying from one cage to the next. Mia, the Fury of perpetual anger, releases all the tormented rats from their prisons and looks on with malicious glee as their milk-white bodies shoot across the floor.

*   *   *

The classes continued into the second week, and as we eight sat around the table and wrote and talked, I began to sense an invisible undertow among the girls that ma me uneasy. I knew that the real pull of this force took place before and after class, during the hours of their lives that had nothing to do with me, and that its dynamics were part of the necessary secrecy and alliances of early adolescence. There were glances exchanged among them and barely discernible nods that sometimes made me feel as if I were watching a play that was taking place behind an opaque screen. The bits of their conversations I overheard were stereotypical in the extreme, a primitive banter punctuated by the words
like
and
so,
used chiefly to telegraph approval and disapproval.

Like
why
do that? I mean, that’s
so retarded
.

Well, isn’t it? Oh my God, don’t you know that’s like so uncool?

Did you see Frannie’s brother? He’s
so
hot!

No, dummy, he’s fifteen, not sixteen.

Did you see her bag? Like it’s
so
bad.

You called me a lesbian! That’s sick. Oh my God.

When I listened idly to their talk during the minutes before we began and after I had dismissed them, I often felt the girls’ speech was interchangeable, without any individuality whatsoever, a kind of herd-speak they had all agreed upon, with the exception of Alice, whose diction was not infected with as many
like
s and
so
s, and yet even she fell into the curious, moronic dialect of Early Female. But after each child had sat down, she became suddenly differentiated from the others, as if a charm had been lifted and she could speak for herself. Little by little fragments of her family story appeared, which altered my perception of her. I discovered that Ashley was one of five children and her parents divorced when she was three years old; that Emma’s little sister had muscular dystrophy; and that Peyton’s father lived in California. She was going to visit him in late August, as she did every summer. He was the parent with horses. Alice had lived in Bonden for only two years. Before that she lived in Chicago, and her repeated references to that lost metropolis inevitably set off a contagion of looks among the others. Joan and Nikki had become fast friends in the third grade. Jessica’s parents were serious Christians of some kind, perhaps of the newish variety that mingled pop psychology and religion, but I wasn’t sure.

In order to scrape at their inner worlds, the ones I felt were as distinct as their stories, we began to work on the “secret me” poems. I introduced the cleft between outer perceptions and our own sense of inner reality, the misunderstandings that can sometimes shape our relations with other people, that most of us have a feeling of a hidden self, that the social self is different from the solitary self, and so on. I emphasized that this was not Truth or Dare, a game I remembered from my own youth, not an exercise in confession or betrayal of secrets we want to keep hidden. I suggested contrasting two lines:
You think I’m …
and
But I’m really …
We discussed metaphors, using an animal or thing instead of an adjective.

I praised Joan’s lines.

You think I’m bland and a little silly.

But inside I’m a red-hot chili.

Emma compared her inner self to mud, but it was Peyton who produced the most startling image. She wrote that on the inside she was a “chipped piece of a door that looks like an island on a map.” When she read this, Peyton’s thin, narrow face had a pensive, taut expression. She hesitated, then explained. When she was eight, she told us, her parents had a terrible shouting fight while she was lying in bed. Her father left the house in a fury and slammed the door so hard, a part of it loosened and a chip fell off. The next morning she took the piece that had fallen and kept it. We were silent for a few seconds. Then I said that sometimes a small thing, even a bit of debris, can come to signify a whole world of feeling. “Nothing was the same after that,” she said quietly.