It never occurred to me to think of my mother as sensitive, even after hearing her pain-filled screams, when I could only imagine the bloody scene, just as I imagined a mother whose animal-like cries and moans echoed in the neighborhood where I lived, when she found her three-year-old daughter dead in bed from walking pneumonia, and afterward I didn’t want to be a nurse or doctor, though I admired our family doctor’s hard black bag and read stories about nurses, especially. I learned to doctor from my mother, who would have been a good one but with a poor bedside manner, since she believed truth should be served unadorned and cold, like our food here often is at lunch. Since the time I heard her screams, I have been afraid of blood, the observation of it, and any wound, and have fainted at witnessing it or from a vivid picture of it. Watching operations in movies, like the one in Bullitt, which was not sensational, but scrupulously filmed, observing the details of a celluloid operation, I fainted in my seat. When I was thirteen, a friend asked me to accompany her to her doctor’s office, where, unknown to me, her blood was going to be drawn. It was a hot summer’s day in the place I grew up, not far from the ocean, where our house sat on land that once was swamp, as the water is very close to the surface, lying just beneath the sandy earth, so I reflected on water often when I was a child, how it flowed magically beneath our feet, the house I loved, moving and unseen. Though I was pulled out to sea once, nearly drowned in an undertow, and swallowed gallons of salty water on another occasion, when wave upon wave knocked my eight-year-old body down and dragged it under, not letting me breathe, I loved the waves, the ocean, and, in the summer, going to the beach.
In the summer, on mysterious, sultry nights, mosquitoes viciously attacked my family and other families—I was not then concerned with other families, except that I compared mine negatively to them—though we had screens on all the windows of our comfortable house, I loved more than anything except our cat, the ocean, later my dog, who was my present for Christmas, when I was ten. I had begged for one, our cat having been killed by my parents, after my ice-blue parakeet was decapitated by the cat, and my father had refused me a Shetland pony that could have lived in our garage, I had implored. No one, or very few, had air conditioners then. At night I’d lie in bed and listen to insistent electric fans, insects hovering close to lightbulbs, the thrum of the electric night, and, outside, high above, to the sound of powerful engines, jets flying low, readying to land or to fly far away. Sometimes on those long, hot nights, I could smell the ocean. My father loved the ocean, my mother feared it, and I loved summer, the ocean, and the beach.
It was during one oppressive summer, at the end of August, and I was home from camp, when fans were ineffective because only hot air was stirred, that the sight of blood caused me to faint for the first time, outside a doctor’s office in my hometown, where many people of the same religion lived. I grew up among clannish people, who have nothing to do with my life now, and in the doctor’s office, I stood next to an anxious friend, whose face and name I don’t remember, when he drew blood from her, which I didn’t watch, and then her doctor directed me to hold the vial of her drawn blood. His nurse was not around, or he did not have a nurse, and I didn’t say anything, since it’s often better not to say anything. I did what I was told. The doctor handed me the vial of her hot, dark red blood, even the tube was hot, like the heat of the day, and I began immediately and for the first time in my life to feel faint. The word occurred to me, though I didn’t know how I knew what it was I was experiencing, or what I was going to do, and I rushed out of the doctor’s office, abandoning my friend, whose name and face I don’t remember, who is no longer in my life, as most of those people are not, and, once outside, under a determined, blazing sun, dropped onto the doctor’s neatly mown lawn and fainted.
My father had no stomach for the sight of blood, either, but I didn’t know this, along with many other things about him when, as a small child, I saw his penis as he urinated or when he took me to Thanksgiving parades. I remember the parades better than his penis, but I remember both vaguely, and I couldn’t describe his penis at all, maybe because he held it in his hands when he urinated, and I can’t detail the parades, which we attended for some years, though I can’t say how many, since I retain only sensations about both, along with an image or two. He is standing at the toilet, I am standing to his side, his left side, and the parades are crowded, noisy, colorful, there’s movement everywhere, it’s cold and I’m bustling with life, my father smiles, excited, his face is flushed with pleasure and red from the cold day. He had a full face like mine now, and, like a child, he loved parades and carnivals.
When my mother, in anger, pushed her arm through a glass storm door, which led to our patio with its smoky gray and blue slate tiles, cutting her arm badly, there was blood everywhere. My father, who was a good driver and proud of it, though he wasn’t proud of much, certainly not his two children, was unable to drive her to the hospital, since he was faint. I didn’t see my mother push her arm through the glass door, fighting and furious with my father, who became dizzy, but even so he accompanied her to the hospital. Her arm swathed in towels, or in a tourniquet of some sort, but bleeding profusely, she drove herself and him, he almost fainted beside her, to the emergency room. When a Christian Scientist bleeds, bandages must be allowed, and if the girl in the infirmary had cut her arm badly, white gauze strips would have been bound around her little arm, to stanch the flow, but since those who believe in divine intervention and miracles like the Red Sea’s parting do not allow medicine, they could reject bandages. They might rely on prayer to make the blood clot quickly, though why anyone would is another mystery, and the little girl could have bled to death, which might have been a better fate than having been forced to linger in an infirmary sickbed all summer, unable to play under the sun, but eventually to die, in any case.
SOME TIME AGO I FOUND it especially hard to leave the breakfast room, since I was caught in an unfolding drama or a scene which suggested its possibility, when the demanding man’s recitation of his dream provoked interpretations, which he sought as if he were starving, though he’d eaten plenty, and also the young married man seemed especially upset reading the paper, all of which didn’t augur well for my peace of mind. He slapped the newspaper’s pages open and then, turning to another page, shook his head and looked around, priming himself for the telephone, positioning his body so that his ear was directed toward the old wooden booths, and he kept glancing toward the hallway that led to them, since his wife or mother might call soon, since they must miss him, the way he was missing them. He told me at dinner one night, where he liked company and ate with his usual gusto, no matter what he was served, but without the newspaper in front of him, that human beings create all of their own problems and that the universe itself is perfect and beautiful; and just as breakfast reached its end, everyone finished, those of us who hadn’t yet fled watched the newcomers arrive, two men, who were accompanied by one of the staff, the most effervescent of a generally sedate crew. The new white man, Henry, was a melange of pigment, with light acne around his nose, stubble on his chin and above his lips, and a rash, which turned out to be sycosis, a chronic inflammation of the hair follicles, especially of the beard and scalp, and he was thin and short, while the other new resident, Arthur, was black, several shades darker, but his skin, in places, was mottled, especially on his cheeks, and he was taller but rounder, with a slash of red like a ribbon at his throat from, I believed, a recent shave, and just as when I arrived, many heads involuntarily looked up and then, voluntarily, down, mine did, too, much as I didn’t want to but was helpless against the effect of new stimuli, as if I had a nervous system like a leaf and was exhibiting a tropism. I heard them say each other’s names familiarly; maybe, I thought, they’d arrived as a couple, sometimes that was permitted, with some goal established between them. The whiter one, Henry, has thinning blond-gray hair, the darker one, Arthur, a full head of longish, loose and braided black hair, and both trod on the floor in a lively,
determined manner. Later, they explained they were partners in every aspect of their lives, they had no secrets from each other, which discomforted me in my skin, but they must keep secrets from others, and they finished each others’ sentences, so at first and in some ways it was hard to separate them, even though they were physically quite different. They had met in dental school, where they trained to be orthodontists, after Arthur had quit studying physics in order to be in a less abstract world. Their project, if they had one, was maintained in secrecy, Arthur had frail lungs, Henry acid reflux disease and an ulcer, and they never wanted to talk about their work, since they came for a break. Both had a penchant for poetry, Arthur especially, he might have been writing some, but I forced them to talk about teeth once, by telling them that orthodontists were teeth designers and sculptors of the mouth, but I didn’t admit that if I were a dentist, oral surgeon, or orthodontist, which I couldn’t be, because of the spilling of blood, I’d be tempted to take out teeth and not put them back in, to set teeth crooked, but in a beautiful way, and then remove my handiwork and start all over again.
The demanding man groaned and slapped at a buzzing fly that had settled on the table, but didn’t hit it, and everyone else was silent as the two new men, partners, walked into the kitchen, to tell the cook what they would and wouldn’t eat. I wondered in a mild way whether these people would be boons or obstacles in my life, but then the tall balding man slapped the table hard and killed a large bluebonnet fly, and Contesa muttered, “Beautiful specimen.” To what she referred I wasn’t positive, since either the fly or the new men might have been in her sightline. When the men disappeared into the cook’s theater, I knew they would instantly establish a good or bad rapport, which would likely worsen or ameliorate during their time here, with the cook and the kitchen staff, since certain attitudes shift before they settle and harden. “Beautiful specimen,” Contesa repeated, as we all rose from the table. The phone rang, clamoring, finally, for the young married man who raced to it, while Contesa scooped the dead blue-and-black fly off the table. The newcomers might have precipitated the drama, for the tall balding man sputtered and then uncharacteristically pushed or shoved the demanding man, who was lingering around balefully, and one of the staff saw the incident, scurried over to them, and guided them, presumably, to the director’s office. None of us said a word, Contesa’s gray eyes found mine, but the disconsolate anorexic clutched her friend’s arm and shuddered. Another fly buzzed around me, and I slapped it harder than I meant, killing it. The dis consolate women frowned at me, and I left the dining room soon after, without being introduced to the two men, whose partnership I envied and disliked.
DURING THE SUMMER, AT CAMP or at home, mosquitoes buzzed close around me, and I had extreme allergic reactions to their bites, fat, pink welts budding on my legs and arms, and later I required antihistamines whenever bitten, but back then calamine lotion regularly dotted my body, its hot pink a humorous retort to my tanned legs, chest, back, and arms. I tanned under the sun for hours when I was young, listening to the ocean or rock and roll on a portable radio set close to my ear, but mostly I listened to the waves as they tossed themselves thoughtlessly against the sand, landing and lapping patiently and repetitively, then retreating, and I had a feeling of contented exhaustion, so complete and good that I knew it wouldn’t last, that the best things don’t last, and that I should try to preserve a moment which would, like a wave, retreat, but unlike a wave, maybe never come back. I associate this happy exhaustion only with going to the beach, lying on the sand after swimming in the ocean, whose waves sometimes dragged me under, compelling me to acknowledge forces much bigger than myself, whose will I couldn’t shake or dent, of walking under a hot sun on the wet sand, leaving footprints whose impressions faded quickly, and letting the ocean nip at my toes and ankles, when standing at the edge of the ocean and the world I knew. The waves crept higher and higher, almost to my tanned knees, depositing a salty residue on my skin, and I thought I never wanted to be anywhere else but at the foot of the ocean and wished I could advance and recede like a wave.
There was always a pink mark on the back of one leg, a birthmark that my father called a cherry, which seemed to please him, either the word “cherry” or the fact that I had one or something else which was unimportant or which has gone with him to his ocean grave off the coast of Maine where his shards were tossed over the side of a sleek white yacht, by his wife, his daughter, his wife’s sister, his only living friend, who was also on his way out, as my mother noted, but not his prodigal son, as my father had regularly referred to him, nearly with pleasure, as if citing the Bible condoned his son’s absence or made it palatable, because it was traditional and historical. He told me the cherry birthmark would be a way to identify me always, though it puzzled me why I would need to be identified, and I imagined terrible fates for myself, when it would become necessary to flip my limp body over and find the cherry, so as to be able to record, with certainty, that I was who I was. But in the years since, I often forget I have a cherry on the very top and back of my upper thigh and usually can’t remember which leg it is on, but I do know that it could be used to distinguish me from others in time of war, or if I suddenly fell down in the street, unconscious, and did not know anymore who I was. I have never told a doctor about it, or friends, and it may be scarcely noticeable, since, as I’ve grown, it must have grown smaller, comparatively, and it might even have completely disappeared, which would be sad, as if much more had also vanished, and that’s true, it has, so I don’t want to look for the cherry, since with its diminution or demise, my father, along with everything else from the past, is deader.
The cherry isn’t part of my medical records, since our family doctor, whose visits when I had sore throats were never welcome, but who was a good man, with a face I vaguely recall, especially because of his black, bristly moustache, and whose ministrations I remember better, since once he tricked me with the pain-free rubber needle and could have noted my reaction in his file on me, along with my sore throats, childhood inoculations, allergic response to mosquito bites, sensitive skin, must be dead for a long time. His files must be lost or were discarded after his death, and unless I pointedly remark, Please note the cherry birthmark on the back of my upper thigh, and record that in my file, no one will know about it, it wouldn’t identify me. My mother wouldn’t remember it, she is not who she was, though she knows her name, often is lucid, and realizes, sadly, that she is incapacitated, but as her memory falters, she knows less of herself and others. One day when she was exceptionally present, she asked rhetorically: If I can’t remember, who am I? It’s not an uncommon idea, but a poignant observation, the kind I hadn’t ever heard her make, she was, throughout my childhood, usually blunt and even brutal in her expressions. Some years before her illness or condition presented itself undeniably, before she and I knew her brain was under pressure from an abundance of trapped fluid, we walked past a store in front of which a man, the apparent owner, stood, when my mother uncharacteristically commented, “I think I know that man. He looks helpless. He’s waiting for customers.” But even then, as I took note of her unique, jarring comment, I didn’t understand it might have indicated or been a harbinger of her own incipient helplessness.
It was my father who first made me conscious of the cherry on the back of my upper thigh. My father paid attention to color, because he had an eye and was in the textile business, and, once, when the Polish woman was gently rubbing my face, in preparation for the steaming my skin needed, the probing of my oil-clogged pores, when she squeezed out any impurities she found, I told her about my father’s business. I don’t imagine she was truly interested, but I felt that her interest, if it was interest, maybe involvement, in skin, was akin to my father’s in fabrics. He had looked, I explained to her, through a special magnifying instrument to measure the warp and weft of every fabric he designed and had manufactured, he weighed individual, single threads with another simple machine, and early on I knew that even a thread,
which appeared to be unimportant and without substance, had weight.
American Genius Page 11
