American Genius

by Lynne Tillman

  My mother loved tomatoes, when she didn’t have trouble eating them, but now she requires the skin removed, and she once grew beefsteak tomatoes in her garden, the only vegetable, though a tomato is sometimes called a fruit, I remember her growing or that she had success with. Her tomatoes were tasty, large and firm, with real red, solid flesh, a glorious red deeper than skin burned under a Florida sun in April, southern Florida being closer to the equator, or a sirloin steak cooked over a charcoal fire to a perfect, rare purple, a deep bluish red. The beefsteaks were sweet and salty, warm if eaten fresh from the garden plot beside the house, and they smelled of rich black earth beneath which lay sand, the swamp on which our house was built, and even the streams that ran and flowed to the ocean I loved. My mother’s tomatoes set the standard against which I judge all tomatoes today, just as my father’s steaks cooked over a charcoal fire set a standard, too. I watched my father charcoal-broil while sitting on the grass or on the poured concrete steps that led from the blue and gray slate patio to the storm door to the back of the house, where my mother pushed her arm through the glass, and he was happy broiling steak over a fire, which he composed of briquettes and newspaper but never doused with fuel, which would, he explained, ignite it quickly but ruin its taste. My father loved the taste of good food, he took pleasure in eating, though he was never fat, sometimes plump, and he considered nutrition and diet and read serious books on the subject before the trends or fads, because he wanted to take care of himself and his body, and, when he became sick, his heart failing him, he always researched the latest medicines and procedures known for his condition. The texture of steak mattered to him, the texture of materials mattered, he held cloth in his sturdy hands and felt it with a tender knowledge, though he didn’t think he was sensitive and didn’t love animals. He liked our dog when she rode in the car with him, her sleek tan head resting on the back of his seat, her short body stretched as far as it could from the back seat to the front seat while he drove. He always liked to drive, he relaxed then, but he didn’t really like animals.

  The Count was rational, selective, and secretive, people who are secretive are often seductive and treacherous, though sometimes unattractive and without any real interest, but anyway they invite a field of controversy that can be deliberate and cover their inadequacies and lack of engagement in others. Some betray themselves, some betray others, I’m no stranger to these conditions, qualities, and circumstances. The Count collected extremely valuable antique timepieces and clocks, and I learned shortly after he arrived that he turned night and day around, arranging his life according to his own version of time, for when I awoke, he went to sleep, so his breakfast was dinner, and in this manner, he designated how he spent time. The mysterious Violet, or Contesa, wily and agile of mind, kept a close eye on him, since they’d been magnets to each other years ago, repelling and attracting each other, and it was when I realized the extent of their ill-fated, tempestuous past, I named her Contesa. In public I called her Violet, as did everyone, but during this period, when we were in seclusion together, sometimes, in her presence I’d mouth the secret name, especially when she wore shades at breakfast. I also toyed with the notion that she might be the person who could change my life, even as I renounced the idea, along with the tarot reader’s charmed reading but not his charms. I didn’t impose on Contesa, she didn’t on me, I believe she understood the joys and limits of friendship, and her stories sometimes bore sharp points, though she wasn’t a moralist, for which I was grateful, because they’re dreary characters. A friendship grew between us as much by what passed unspoken and understood, though this can be misunderstood. When she says she’s of a dying breed, I always think of the Shakers’ unwitting resolve for extinction and their stiff-backed chairs.

  One of the Count’s unimportant secrets, divulged to tease me, I now think, was how best to start a fire. He taught me, as an uncle does a nephew or niece, on a moonless night after a lackluster dinner, the cook pleasing hardly anyone, in his studio where books on clocks and watches, mostly, but also of ancient history and poetry—Rumi, especially—tragedies and comedies, and mythologies lay stacked in the corners of his room and also lined two long shelves. Whenever he gave me the time, I asked him about his collection and interests, and his answers were brief, though responsible. Always, he looked at some clock, actual or imagined, while his lightly pocked skin never was anything but grayish green, from lack of sunshine, and I could feel his horror of losing time, it slipping from him in perilous minutes and seconds, and yet I also knew how it augmented his daily drama by punctuating and compelling action and opinion. Day was night, night day, and this difference set him apart, as he was impelled to thwart time, which probably bore down on him with a unique force, pressuring his willowy, aging body, but he was someone, unlike the tall man and the disconsolate women, who didn’t complain, and like Contesa, he refrained from ordinary disclosures and responses, having lived long enough to understand the futility of certain communications. I always believe I’ll remember the best technique to start a fire, his method, but I don’t. Today the fire caught easily, but I don’t know why. Yesterday I placed the kindling in approximately the same way, and it didn’t. There is a blazing fire now when yesterday the fire died out, because of the wetness of the wood or a slight difference in the configuration of the kindling or small logs with which I always begin, or because I became absorbed in other matters. Actually, I’d forgotten I’d started a fire, and because I didn’t tend it the way the Polish woman tends me and remembers to return to the room where I sometimes lie with a heat lamp above my face, the fire died. If the Polish woman didn’t remember, and I have at times worried that she wouldn’t, when she speaks especially fast in Polish to people who telephone her, probably some of the men she is or is not dating, because of her mother’s objections, my dry skin might crack or be singed by the heat, or I might develop a rash or be burned and disfigured, and if the rash were chronic, full body atopic eczema or psoriasis, or if I had a type of recurrent dermatitis that was difficult to treat, I would probably visit her salon even more frequently, for other kinds of treatments, which might have no medical value, but which might help me, in some way. The salon offers a Glycolic Smoothing Treatment, an Intensive Lifting Treatment, a 100% Collagen and Elastin Mask, a Back Cleansing Treatment, and an Aromatherapy Treatment, which lasts one hour and twenty minutes and costs eighty dollars, and provides “deep hydration and proper nourishing of the skin, improves circulation and regeneration of supporting fibers in the deeper layers of the skin.” A Collagen and Elastin Treatment requires the same amount of time and money and “helps to enrich the skin with Collagen and Elastin. It nourishes and relaxes, rejuvenates and exfoliates skin impurities. This treatment will create a younger-looking skin.” Just reading these descriptions comforts me, since a word like “nourish” is soothing, because of its open vowels, a diphthong, since to pronounce the word, I must purse my lips, opening them as if I were about to kiss a lover, and though pursing my lips might etch lines around my mouth, I still like to say the word “nourish” aloud, but more I like to hear and read it. Also these descriptions, found in many catalogues or on salon wall signs, whether accurate or not, whether they actually produce what they proffer, are comforting, for I can immediately imagine a more pleasant future for myself when I read the delicious words.

  In my Zulu language manual, it says that “the acquisition of a vocabulary is a primary and inescapable consideration in learning a language. Without words we are dumb.” The magnitude of the second, simple five-word sentence plagued me yesterday, and now today I learn the words for my father, ubaba, and my mother, nnama, baba, and mama . . . while eat and enjoy are the same word, dla. Chair is isihlalo, isifo is disease, umzimba the body, hleba to tell tales. The English–Zulu dictionary gives no word for skin, the largest organ of the body. People who suffer from eczema may have to be restrained from scratching off their perniciously itchy skin and some suffer a daily agony. It is impossible to feel another’s ago
ny the way the sufferer feels it, and nothing makes someone feel more alone than suffering, whether it is mental or physical, pain is unbearable but borne. I could have talked, this morning, to the woman with psoriasis, who needed attention, and given her the name of my dermatologist, and told her about treatments available that might soothe or temporarily remedy her skin, even if she and it were never cured. The young woman’s psoriasis was in full bloom this morning, livid as the complexion of an ancient alcoholic, so that for her it appeared being in love assaulted her calm, the idea of love had attacked her peace of mind, as symptoms flourished on her cheeks, her elbows, and the backs of her hands. The tall balding man, it’s rumored, has had many lovers, sometimes simultaneously, but when he is in love, Contesa generously explained, he is intense and engaged, so that the woman he directs himself toward in that moment feels she alone exists for him; and no matter that he has left many a woman brokenhearted, all of whom have felt the way the young woman might now, her hands blazing with discomfort, and reason demands that this will happen again, each woman thinks she will be the one to change him, as she does now.

  I don’t like tending a fire, since I’m easily distracted, I have many ideas, which are spread about the room and on the floor, and none I want to realize, but most I’d like to undo, if I could, like relationships and many experiences, and I don’t like having to check on a fire to verify that it’s burning well and not going out of control, the way the Polish woman tends to me and makes sure that, because my skin’s sensitive, there’s not too much heat coming from the chamomile concoction over which I lower my face, to absorb its cleansing and rejuvenating goodness, steaming open my pores, since too much heat is bad for such sensitive skin as mine, she tells me. Sometimes she won’t permit me to place my face above this potion but instead positions me under a heat lamp, which is supposedly kinder to skin like mine. Then she leaves the room. I can hear her making phone calls, writing notes, or opening nail-polish bottles, because she also gives manicures, though I have never had one from her, because during a manicure, you sit face to face, and I don’t want to see her face that long. She speaks in Polish to those she calls or who call her, though not to clients like myself who don’t know the language, but especially to the owner, who phones often; I don’t understand what she’s saying, I don’t seriously imagine she is talking about me, yet it’s not impossible, since there are many things we don’t say to each other. We talk about the same things again and again when I visit, rarely diverging from these by now-familiar subjects, and I have no way of knowing what she is saying in her native language, her mother tongue, but she returns to the room within twenty-five minutes, to lift my head from the benevolent vapors of the chamomile potion and dote on me like a baby.

  I once tried to imagine, to the extent I could, because I had scant knowledge of it, having a baby and caring for it. I didn’t give it a sex, I wanted to see if I would ever want one, or if I could care for one, because I don’t want one, yet women are supposed to want one, and if you’ve had the fate to be born a female, about which I had no choice, you have no choice about the most important things in life, it’s expected and encouraged that you should want a child, that it’s unnatural not to want a child, and that in some way you’re selfish to have life without bringing more life into it, offspring who will be dependent for years. Human beings care for their young longer and longer, prolonging their infancy and effecting a mature infantilism in them, who will probably disdain those who raised them for a good part of that dependency and also later, tied to them with a hatred that’s also love. My mother and my dead father live, in a significant way, with me, and lodge in an abstract section of me that I can’t excise, mostly because I have no control over it, since I don’t know where it’s located or what its function is, unlike my relationship to other objects, which I understand better and whose design, like a chair’s, either pleases or displeases me, but unlike a chair I have no choice about its position.

  When I first arrived, intent upon settling in, becoming as comfortable as I could, I spent several days finding a chair I could sit upon and look at, too, but there was only one, finally, that served, though I never really loved it, it was never comfortable enough, and it was certainly not beautiful to my eye, and also I had to get a cushion for it, so sitting on it was awkward, I had to keep adjusting the cushion. It was serviceable, so I accepted the chair and its limits, just as I learned not to hate my mother, to accept her more or less, or maybe even love her in the way an animal might, for warmth and comfort, which I never really received from her, she merely represents those qualities, but it doesn’t matter anymore, since she’s old, too old to fault, though my brother does, presumably, because he never contacts her, though our father is dead, my brother hated him more than he hated me, I think. My brother and father fought, I watched them, my mother took her husband’s side, I was too young to know what the subject of their endless argument was. My brother hid, he slammed his door, locked it, I don’t know what he was doing in his bedroom, he must have grown inward like a stubborn, short leg hair and become inflamed with pus, his furious objections never pierced and placated, and, as I record him now, his mouth is cast in a grimace. Scowling, he disappeared. I’ve known his kind of anger in others, I may seek it out, but I don’t want to look for him.

  An infant’s tiny fingers and toes are terrifying, the least thing might damage them, and I don’t want to look at photographs of their tiny toes and fingers, each toe is too little, the nails on their fingers like thin ice, and I hate to think of their nails being cut by scissors or clippers that are bigger than their feet and fingers. Their nails are dead skin, oddly, a newborn arrives with dead skin, hair, also, both shooting from delicate fingers or heads, the skulls of which are not yet closed at the crown, the crown covered by a membrane or slither of cells of alarming fragility. Their neurological systems are also not yet complete, so infants arrive unfinished and at risk. I once fell hard on the back of my head, by jumping backward down the poured concrete stairs leading to the patio of the house I loved, because I was curious if I could jump backward down stairs, but I never mentioned my fall to anyone, though my head hurt for months, because the act embarrassed me, and after it I was less curious about feats that might incur physical injury. I believe my crown has never entirely closed. Adam and Eve acquired a knowledge of death for their human curiosity, the pair weren’t innocent of sex but of mortality. Einstein said both human stupidity and the universe were infinite, but he was less sure about the universe’s infinitude, and, as the very first humans couldn’t have known about death, it still existed outside their experience of the future, it must have been an eternal punishment to suffer its awareness, which distinguishes people from other animals, except maybe elephants. Over a hunk of raw meat, which they tore with their hands and teeth before the invention of tools and fire, one of the cave dwellers—bush people were the first humans—clutched his heart and fell to the floor, lifeless. Or, Eve’s death came first, maybe during a painful childbirth, though some people die in their sleep, and then it’s intoned, “They just went.” Death lives, but only for others, as Duchamp said, it’s an impossible idea, the gravest in life, and every day I stare at pictures of my dead friends with wonder at their perpetual absence. But creatively, I believe, which is my will to bring into existence something I have not grasped before, both literally and figuratively, since even in undoing, there is a making, at least for me, I forge them into my life, and, also, looking at them, inert, I rehearse my end. I’d like to be prepared for it. Though change confounds fate, there it is, even death is a change, but also hope persists because there is change, but about hope and its virulent partner disappointment I am querulous.

  I HAD RASHES OFTEN WHEN I was a child. In the winter, where I lived, near the ocean, which was a desolate gray-green, the cold wind whipped the sand in circles, and I was forced to wear heavy woolen pants and sweaters. My body felt on fire. I was uncomfortable and itchy, the inside of my thighs were hot and sticky, and uns
ightly rashes, little red bumps, would spread on my inner thighs, around my neck, and on my chest. In the winter, the harsh wool of sweaters and pants plagued me. Even the thought of a heavy wool sweater or a pair of pants stiff to the touch could bring discomfort, and I’d start to feel warm, my forehead would become hot, I’d sweat and turn beet red. Now I try never to wear clothes that cause me to itch or that irritate my skin. I can barely stand to touch materials that could torment my flesh, like a hair shirt, which was worn voluntarily, to cause discomfort, and instead I search for fabric that’s gentle, one hundred percent cotton, or a silk or cashmere, and whenever I choose something to wear, or when I’m in a store surrounded by clothes hanging on racks or decorously displayed on shelves, surrounded also by women and men, or just women, who want something new to cover their bodies, to make them feel differently about themselves, even for a moment, one that evaporates so quickly they will soon need to visit a store again and buy something else to wear, first I notice colors, then I touch fabric, twisting the material between my fingers, to test its gentleness, and sometimes I press it to my face, to see if it is soft enough. I also breathe in the material, hoping to like its smell, and, in doing so, use a sense with no sense, though with consequences and blind motivations, since the senses have no insight, but a smell triggers the recurrence of a past moment or a scene which dissolves as fast as mercury slides, like the vainglorious past, and with it comes the realization of its loss, and these are called sense memories.