But she said she averted her eyes, knowing it would humiliate me. She remembers him sliding off his belt; she remembers me pleading each time the belt hit; she remembers him telling me, as he was beating me, in rhythm, why he was doing it and what I shouldn’t do the next time. I would come out, trying not to show how I had been afraid for my life, how I had pleaded without pride. I thought those things would have made her hate me.
• • •
I remember the hitting, but not the feeling of the hits; I remember falling and trying to cover my legs with my hands.
I remember the time I came home with a migraine and begged him not to beat me. “Please, please, daddy, it hurts so bad.” I could hardly speak. I had to walk level, my head a huge cup of water that might spill on the floor.
Why couldn’t he see my pain? My head seemed to be splitting open, my eyes bleeding. I didn’t know what might happen if I tipped my head even slightly. He saw me walking like that, as if someone had placed delicate glass statues on my arms and shoulders. I begged him, not now. I knew I had it coming. I had gone out with the Childs, and he had left a note telling me not to go out.
• • •
The Childs lived on the fourth floor. Sometimes, they brought down the best rice with butter and just the right amount of salt and pepper. They had no children. They had a little bubble-shaped car. We all seemed glad to roll the windows down and go out to their niece’s. She turned her bike over to me. It was so much fun pumping it up and down the hill, letting my hair fly. I forgot my father, as I had forgotten the bug bites, as I forgot what it felt like to be beaten. I just thought, I’m pumping harder so I will go faster and let the air hit my face and arms, and then I’ll stop pumping at the top and fall down and down, my feet up off the pedals. And I didn’t feel fat: My body lost weight—it just went with everything going in that direction, and the wind flew against me in the other direction. Though it blew in my face and began to sting, I couldn’t stop pumping, couldn’t stop trying, one more time, to bring myself to that moment of pleasure and accomplishment right before I’d let go.
I had never felt such power, earning it by my own work and skill. I could ride it. I was the girl in charge; I had the power to bring myself there.
XXV.
Shortly after I was married, we had a dog that kept shitting on the floor. Once, I took a coat hanger and was going to hit her with it, but she drew back her lips and snarled at me in self-defense and fury. I had no idea that she would defend herself. I was shocked. I thought she was going to attack me, and I put the hanger down. I respected her in a different way after that.
She lived for sixteen years and was a great mothering presence in our household. It seemed every dog and cat that came in the house had to lie beside her, with some part of its body—a paw, the hind—touching hers. Once, I heard a strange noise during the night and went to investigate. A kitten my son had found on the railroad tracks was nursing from her, and she was sleeping, as if she just expected to be a mother. When I would come home, after I had been away for a while, she’d jump up on the bed and curl her butt into my belly, and I’d put my arms around her and hold her like a lover. When she died, I missed her so much I realized that she had been my mother, too. She taught me it was beautiful to defend yourself—and that you could be unafraid of touch.
• • •
I remember how, occasionally, my father’s dogs would pull back and snarl at him when he was viciously beating them. His anger would increase immeasurably. They had truly given him a reason to kill them. “You think you can get away with that in my house?” he’d ask, the same as he’d ask me.
Once, to get away from him, one of his dogs leapt through the glass storm door in the kitchen and ran down 14th Street bleeding to death.
XXVI.
You would think that the one treated so cruelly would “kill” the abuser, throw him out of the brain forever. What a horrific irony that the abuser is the one most taken in, most remembered; the imprint of those who were loving and kind is secondary, like a passing cloud. Sometimes, I thought that’s why my father beat me. Because he was afraid he would be forgotten. And he achieved what he wanted.
In the deepest place of judgment, not critical thinking, not on that high plain, but judgment of first waking, judgment of the sort that decides what inner face to turn toward the morning—in that first choosing moment of what to say to myself, the place from which first language blossoms—I choose, must choose, my father’s words.
The twisted snarl of his unbelief turned everything good into something undeserved, so that nothing convinces enough—no man or woman or child, no play or work or art. There is no inner loyalty, no way of belonging. I cannot trust what I feel and connect to; I cannot love or hold anything in my hand, any fragile thing—a living blue egg, my own baby—in the same way that I never convinced my father I was his. And I must rest on it, as on bedrock.
XXVII.
The time I had the migraine, after my father had beaten me, he made me bathe. He drew the bath, felt the water with his fingers and made sure it wouldn’t burn. He told me to go in there and take off my clothes.
The water, when I put my toe in, was like walking in fire. I stood there, holding myself.
And then—instead of letting my father kill me or bashing my own head against the tile to end all knowing—I crouched down, letting the lukewarm water touch me.
Oh, water, how can you hurt me this bad? What did I do to you? I was whimpering. I don’t know if I still had hope he would hear me, or if I just couldn’t stop the sound from leaking out of my body.
But my father came and lifted me out of the water in his arms, took me naked, laid me on my bed and covered me lightly with a sheet. Then he went away and left me in the dark as if to cool down, and he brought cut lemon slices for my eyes and a cool towel or pads of alcohol to put on my forehead. He bathed me in tenderness, as if he really knew I was suffering and he wanted me to feel better.
I wondered if he finally believed. If he realized from within himself that I had been telling the truth, that I wasn’t evil. Maybe he had some idea of how much he had hurt me. I knew that, sometimes, men beat their women and then make up. I didn’t know which daddy was real.
Afterword:
I hear in myself a slight opposition, a wounded presence saying, I am me, I know who I am. But I am left with only a narrow hole, a thin tube that the words must squeak through. Where words might have gushed out as from a struck well, now, instead, I watch it—watch every thought. It wasn’t my father’s thought that I took in; it was his language. It is the language in me that must change.
The undertaker’s daughter
Terrified at a reading to read
poems about my fears & shames,
a voice in me said: Just
open your mouth. Now
I read about Anubis, the God of Egypt
who ushered the dead
to the underworld, who performed the ritual of
the opening of the mouth
so they could
see, hear & eat.
Had it been my father speaking,
giving me back that
depth of taste & color,
fineness of sound
that his rages stifled,
twisted & singed shut? I had thought
it was a woman’s voice—
though I had hoped
all my life that my father would feed me
the milk my mother could not
make from her body.
Once, when I opened the door & saw
him shaving, naked, the sole of his foot
resting on the toilet, I thought
those things hanging down were
udders. From then on I understood there was a
female part he hid—something
soft & unprotected
I shouldn’t see.
Sunday afternoon at Claire Carlyle’s
My mother & father, light-
skinned, but too new
to make the upper cut,
were, nevertheless, welcomed
into the marble foyer
under an icebox-sized chandelier
to mix martinis with double-edged
men and women trained to outwit
and out-white the whites. Almost all
were light & straight-featured
enough to pass—some did,
some didn’t.
Claire’s brother Bob
passed. If seen weekdays,
he wasn’t
to be spoken to. Light and dark
did the same—an inward
move to protect those
fortunate enough to choose.
But why did my mother
(who looked as white
as Loretta Young—& as beautiful) see
Bob one weekday walking
toward her up Woodward
and cross
to the other side? Why,
when anyone would
only have seen
two white people?
It was something in my mother
not visible: in her
mind’s eye
she was black & wore the robe
of it over her fine features. Perhaps,
she crossed in case
some inner misstep
might betray him
(the inner world
being vast & treacherous)—
as if they were slaves running
for their lives.
Dolls
To be born woman is to know—
Although they do not speak of it at school—
Women must labor to be beautiful.
W. B. YEATS
Teng ai, a love imbedded in preverbal knowledge,
accompanied by unspeakable pain, and shared
only through the empathy between the two bodies
(mother and daughter) alike.
WANG PING
I.
Take care of your little mother, my aunt told me
shortly before she died. My little five-foot-four-inch mother,
whose clothes I outgrew when I was ten, already
proud of my big bones—(Nothing could overpower
me if I was made of my father’s bones). My mother was astounded—
I should put bricks on your head & she kept dressing me
in pinafores & ruffled socks. Toi, she called me,
as if I was supposed to stay small.
II.
Sometimes it seemed I couldn’t have come out of
her, that something was wrong. When I stood behind her I felt
ungainly, like something that flopped about without
gravity. I was excessive, too much.
I thieved her clothes until it was impossible to make them
fit—hers was the only body I knew how to make beautiful.
III.
My grandmother bought me a doll I couldn’t touch. She
had peaches & cream skin, breasts, a taffeta dress,
& porcelain green eyes. Her fingers were delicate & curved
like eyebrows. I broke my dolls, so we had to put her up
high to admire, like a storeowner sticks a manikin
on a black pole to show off what he’s got.
IV.
My mother gave me dolls that peed, that you had to feed,
that you had to bathe in a little plastic Bathinette.
Everything smelled clean like rubber. You had to
learn to be a mother. Even the pee. One of the bottles
refilled itself when you turned it upright. It was o.k. for a
doll to pee. The more work you did the better mother you were.
V.
I was hard on my dolls. The ones that had stuffed bodies
came up missing arms. Monkey-bear had his insides ripped out.
Big Rabbit couldn’t stand. His legs & feet were
bent forward so that, when we played school—with his
Little Buddha smile that,
no matter how much I swung him around in a circle & beat him
against the floor, just stayed there—he would topple off his
seat & have to be shaken again.
VI.
The dolls that cried mamma came up with a busted rattle in
their throat, their eyes clunked open so that they couldn’t go to
sleep but stared perpetually up at the ceiling like middle-aged
insomniacs. One doll had a problem with her eyes, they were out
of kilter, so that they didn’t open unless you whacked
her on the back. Then they were stuck open, so she seemed
dead. We had to work on her too hard to make her do the most
ordinary things—just to open her eyes! Her eyes clunked shut &,
way back in the pit of her skull, we could hear her thinking.
VII.
When I was born my mother sat up, hysterical, on the delivery
table. She said it was the drugs. She couldn’t stop laughing.
Her toxemic body had been pumped out & I was a robin’s egg
blue, a pale, delicate thing whose blood vessels you
could see from the outside. My “inner life” stared up at you
through translucent skin, the way you can see a face
floating up to a lake’s surface.
I put my inner life right in her hands.
VIII.
No, that isn’t the way my father saw it. He said
when he looked in the nursery he saw a baby so hairy
he thought it should be swinging from a chandelier.
Though he really loved me for my excesses—
for eating too much, for stealing French fries from his plate
(That girl can really hold her liquor, he’d brag
when I was twelve. They call her old hollow leg),
& even my hair—he’d lift me up by it
& carry me up four flights of stairs. He loved my hair.
IX.
My mother suffered, oh did she suffer, the way all
light-skinned women were supposed to suffer. She suffered that
& more. She proved that she didn’t like it. She proved that of all
the un-black women, the ones babies didn’t just come
popping out of—
& even of the ones that babies came roaring
through like a train, of even them—she was one of the most,
most suffering.
X.
During pregnancy, she wore the right shoes. She ate the
right foods. She read the book that the doctor gave her with
pictures of white women in plain suits. She tucked it in a place
sacred & hidden, in her sewing box. She pierced it with needles
& thread either punishing it or marking it
with a hundred little, colored banners.
She used to like sex, my
father once said, puzzled.
XI.
My mother with the peaches & cream skin, my mother with
the eyebrows of a blackbird’s wing, my mother with eyelashes
that brushed halfway down her cheeks, my mother with the high,
creamy breasts, my mother in her slip & socks on her knees
scrubbing the kitchen floor, or weeping in the doorway,
my lovely, delicate, little mother.
Mistrust of the beloved
I must explain to you what I must explain to myself: that there, where
love, desire and want spring from the most natural source, there, in that
spot, in that moment, is the scalding fire; and, instead, springs to life the
unwanted and beaten girl, her whole soul face and body shiny with burn
scar, inflexible, taut and hard, immersed anew in the conflagration; for,
as long as the route turns to that inward burning, it cannot take her out
again into that place where her f
ather proved he did not love.
The heart of one so riddled must keep to itself: We spoil what we want
for the deeper motive, for it is deep in the brain where instinct lives, as
another withdraws a hand from fire.
PART II
A Memory of the Future
I see my father after his death
I caught a plane at about eleven in the morning, and we were at the
funeral home at about two. My father had been dead about ten hours.
We had chosen the mortician who had been my grandfather’s old
competitor, whose son, unlike my father, had stayed in the family
business. I wanted to see my father before he was “ready,” but the
mortician didn’t want to take me back. He talked about germs, about
me washing my hands after. I didn’t know if he was afraid of my
emotions—that I would burst into uncontrollable tears?—or if there
was something back there he didn’t want me to see. Maybe it was dirty,
or maybe it just wasn’t the rule—so often people can’t break the rules.
It was clean, like an old-fashioned kitchen, with tile and stainless steel
sinks and counters. There was a huge blue bottle in the corner with a
siphon in it, a black-and-white tile floor. It looked efficient, not spiffed
up like his French provincial waiting room. Then I came upon my
father, swaddled in a layer of linen, zipped in plastic and bound with
tape, his face the only part of him free.
The color was pure, as if he had been drained of age and illness. That
look of dark acceptance, that fixed stare that penetrated without hope
or understanding, had been left behind. There was a softness I had
never seen, his forehead, unlined and smooth. He had been given a
second beauty as a death-gift. The monster had flown out on its hard
dark wings, and left behind, not a shell, but one tortured a lifetime and
released.
• • •
Even when he had been in a coma—his legs inflexible, locked in fetal
position, nurses turning his body every few hours like something basted
over coals—I would take the covers back and look at him. It was under
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