American Genius

by Lynne Tillman

  IN MY SLEEPING ROOM, LYING on the bed, with a white, bath-size, damp Egyptian all-cotton towel over my overheated body, and only the night-table lamp lit, I miss my wild cat and envy the inventor’s idiopathic behavior. It is, of course, what makes him, and I’m not him, yet I would like to expose my ass and act brazenly or indecently, though some here may believe I already have. Every day, my cat matures without me, housed by my mother, though fed by her paid companion, and my mother says she loves cats, especially hers, who now sleeps on her bed every night, but she had the family cat and my dog killed, which she doesn’t remember, so my own cat may not recognize me when I return. It’s a wonder that I have left my young cat with my mother, though I don’t really expect she’ll kill him, but, on many days and nights, I’m troubled by my abandonment of him, or exasperated by it, but I couldn’t help myself, they don’t permit animals here, they’re a nuisance or a bother to the staff, are considered unsanitary, and the staff might fear undulant fever, a bacterium that causes disease in both domestic animals and people, producing pain in the joints as well as great weakness, and which can be contracted in humans from infected animals or from consumption of their products. I’m not like the inventor, even if I’d prefer to be, I am primarily incapable of disregarding a rule that might put me on probation, take away my privileges, or summarily send me home, so I resist making trouble, though I am trouble to some, I have caused distress to some, I believe it’s inescapable, since human beings can be obstacles to each other’s peace. Yet I don’t want to be sent home in disgrace or, worse, to jail.

  Leslie Van Houten spends her days writing letters, reading, doing chores, working, hoping for release, teaching new inmates what she has learned being inside, and she washes her face and brushes her teeth, eats breakfast, lunch, and dinner, wants snacks, exercises and stays fit, and she goes nowhere in the large cage to which she has adjusted. Most human beings can adjust to almost anything, except severe physical and mental torture, though some have a higher threshold for pain than others, and our elasticity is a comfort, though I find change difficult and am resistant or reluctant to face or in a sense pardon the new for dispensing with the old, like the shoes I loved that the manufacturer stopped making, which may be why American history appeals to me, when it does, once almost exclusively, but less so every day, and design increasingly more each day because, though design has a history, within its history is a will to disown the past, too, or at least to sidle away from it, all the while looking back reflexively. I can configure or conceive from my mind and with my hand, but I must accept the hand history deals, since about most things I have little or no choice. For instance, I might be forced to leave this community before I am ready. Because of her actions, Leslie Van Houten was forced to live in jail and has accommodated herself to a highly regulated and restricted existence, she has matured there, received an education, made and lost friends, she may die there, though I believe they’ll let her out when she’s very old, as another kind of punishment, to experience completely what she has missed. I haven’t experienced her restrictions, I can’t know hers in my skin, just as I don’t know being imprisoned in my body with all my limbs paralyzed, or suffering the insane discomfort of full-body atopic eczema, or to have been a slave and borne the lash of a whip. When in the millennial year 2000, Van Houten was up for parole, she wore her partially gray hair in a bun, and instead of a dress that made her look like an executive secretary she wore a long-sleeved cotton T-shirt, mostly white with red sleeves, an aging cheerleader’s getup, for she was a cheerleader in her own defense, but to deaf ears, even though, in 1982, the chair of her hearing had told her she was “much closer than she might realize” to going home. But she isn’t home and still can’t leave her cell when lights are off and the block is in lockdown. But something could transpire, she could be paroled, and she’s asked, we’re all asked, to have hope. I don’t expect I’ll be sent to jail, but I might not return home, even to my young wild cat, and, to be honest, as the daughter of time must be, I regularly wish for an event such as was prophesied by the tarot card reader, a bright, definitive occurrence that transforms me or casts the next day into something I haven’t known, though I don’t wish for more catastrophe.

  My skin itches, the hard bathwater has dried it, I slather on enriched cream and stir greasily on my bed. I hadn’t thought about mail, but it’s an inducement and might be waiting in the mailroom in the main house, which hastens my dressing for drinks and then dinner. Everyday I wear the same thing, I buy several copies of the same shirt and trousers in different colors and shades, shoes, too, since, as much as possible, I don’t like to consider what I wear or look like. I bathe frequently and shower daily, I do my laundry weekly, with Ivory Snow, for sensitive skin, all residents are expected to do their own washes, one of the conditions for staying here, as it’s considered beneficial to perform sensible or practical duties and care for ourselves. One resident did her wash daily, because it made her feel worthwhile. My clothes are simple and free of ornamentation, though I like a cable stitch on heavy, all-cotton hand-knit sweaters, and I like stripes, solid bright and dark colors, small dots on cardigan sweaters, and loose pants I can put on and pull off quickly. My mother and father urged me to do things fast, it was important to them, and even now that my mother is very old, she grows impatient when I or she can’t accomplish a goal quickly, and one day I asked her, “Why is speed so important?” Without glancing at me, continuing to knit a yellow sweater for her internist’s granddaughter, not missing a stitch, though her hands tremble, my mother said: “Speed’s the thing.” Then I realized that modernity had a room in her old body. She also likes buttons, not as much as I do, I’d like to design buttons and might someday, I have a button collection which I occasionally spread on the floor, marveling at their intricate designs and details, God is in the details, also the devil, and innocuousness. Buttons are undone all the time, they’re supposed to be done and undone, one of the first things a child learns is to button a jacket and tie shoes, though zippers are fine and, like flight, fast; still, I prefer buttons, a well-designed and perfectly suited button cheers me up, and though buttoning a cardigan sweater can slow my getting dressed for dinner, if the button slides through its buttonhole easily, I’m not very inconvenienced, since a bit of beauty is worth it to me.

  Beauty is disputed, its relevance to society, whose values are temporary, beauty rises and falls like stock on Wall Street, since its fate is tied to the changing shape of history, crafted by good and bad times and events, and it’s either an impediment or an incitement, since it’s always arguable how beauty behaves and functions, for what reasons, yet it instills itself, with reasonable and unreasonable demands, holds sway or merely creates an insistent pressure. I have renounced its claims and been possessed and dispossessed by it, or I have embraced it as a renegade, disruptive hero. Once I carved the word “beauty” into a large bar of Ivory soap and floated the soap in a bath of hot water to efface the letters, it was beautiful. Once I wrote the word “beauty” a thousand times on a greenboard, but the word didn’t become nonsense. Once, late at night, I shouted the word “beauty” over and over, it never sounded ugly to me, and oddly I could repeat it again and again without its becoming nonsense; it’s only a word I said to myself, but I couldn’t negate what had happened, because I can’t pretend something didn’t happen. I told myself it was because the concept joins to something beyond me or so much a part of me I couldn’t recognize it, maybe an obstacle to my peace of mind. I like beautiful faces, though what kinds I think beautiful may not be anyone else’s, yet often they are, so a perplexing consensus on beauty, when its value is regularly disputed, begets trouble. History is not beautiful, not elegant, the way design and formulae can be. I prefer a beautiful chair and beautiful skin and beautiful fabric. In a corner of my sleeping room, like a soldier, stands a bolt of beautiful fabric, which my father and his beloved brother designed and manufactured. Golden threads are woven through it, a silk-and-nylon material, Junior ma
y once have carried it in his sturdy arms, and the fabric shimmers when sunlight hits it or when at night I shine my lamp on it. I call it the “Fabric Monolith,” at attention and on duty near my bed where I sleep, sometimes fitfully, an object never done but complete in itself, and, in a sense, finished. I have thought of designing and commissioning a shirt from it, but then I would have to undo the bolt, worse, cut into it with big scissors, in the process ruining the integrity of the Fabric Monolith, which may never have been unrolled, except in the presence of my father, his brother, their salesmen, and Junior. Now I long to unfurl it across a long, wide wooden worktable and hear the whooshing noise it emits when it breathes, but I don’t. I satisfy myself by imagining it, I can always imagine it without ever ruining it.

  I propel my body off the bed, Where does this will come from? castigating myself for malingering when the promise of mail, drinks, and dinner awaits. Like breakfast, dinner is a complicated affair but, unlike breakfast, the meals are inconsistent, the quality varies widely, they are rarely good, though not regularly as poor or inadequate as lunch consistently is. At dinner, a hot meal is expected, and the head cook is even more constrained by everyone’s diets, allergies, and preferences, which are both frivolous and serious, for a diet lacking in vitamin D will cause rickets or defective bone growth in children, insufficient B1, or thiamin, appetite loss, beri beri, and nervousness, a deficiency in vitamin E causes sterility in rats and possible sterility in humans, but here many take vitamins, though I imagine the bulimics among us disgorge any nutritional benefits after eating. Of the three meals, dinner most challenges the head cook’s capacity to meet, with flavorful, variegated dishes, the residents’ diverse tastes, needs, and desires, but a rumor persists that she is leaving, since she has been working a long time, she is past retirement age and pleasing fewer and fewer residents, whom, over time, she views as disagreeable. During dinner, in the same room where breakfast is served, but with a different atmosphere, the lights are lower, because I lower them, disliking the harsh glare of electricity and also publicity, people talk about their day or don’t, but most tell stories. Residents are more expansive at dinner than breakfast, and I listen attentively for the eruption of the unanticipated, an exceptional reminiscence, attitude, or behavior that enlivens and affects me, even with consequence. Though this hardly happens, it has, and, at the time, the moment appeared not to have contained a direct consequence, so I was unaware of its potential for harm, as when I spurned the callow advances of a man who’d sent me a lurid seduction note that accomplished its opposite, but he made sure I’d suffer for my lack of interest, which mission he accomplished stealthily, so our dinner talk and my subsequent rejection had consequence. He is now an enemy, but he behaved dramatically, and a man who would seek revenge and hurt a woman who wouldn’t consent to have sex with him is oddly impressive. Revenge is a great motive and regularly indispensable for drama, and, if I ever see him again, especially here, it will be uncomfortable, but I’ll pretend I don’t know what he has accomplished and be kinder to him than he has reason to expect and for which he might feel unworthy and have sleepless nights. Health professionals medical doctors, and laypeople have long recognized the importance of restful sleep. John D. Rockefeller, Sr., quoted in How to Sleep and Rest Better, lived by this single rule: “I do not permit myself to look at a timepiece after retiring at night,” and I remembered the Count, who surrounded himself with timepieces and looked at them for consolation, but then he didn’t retire at night, he arose. Going to bed should never be used as a punishment, the manual says, yet I trust the vengeful man’s sleep will be shattered by punitive dreams in which he is rejected constantly, and though cognizant that such a vicious hope might rebound in my own sleep and distress it, I can’t stop myself. “Go confidently in the directions of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined,” Henry David Thoreau extolled, and I would prefer to be an exalted American dreamer. My mother’s sleep is poor, in the middle of the night she awakens not knowing night from day, in thrall to devastating dreams in which she is again with her husband, he’s alive, he’s waiting for her in the car someplace she can’t find, her sister is alive, her brothers, she’s with her mother, no one is dead, her dream life is indistinguishable in her damaged brain from a waking reality that includes death, so she is often fearful and confused, and no one can help her when she awakens at 3 a.m. believing that she’s not in her own bedroom, that she is a prisoner, and in a way she is, but not imprisoned by anyone, though she can’t leave. Unlike Leslie Van Houten my mother has never been in jail, but she can imagine and fear it, the way Kafka did but not Genet.

  Rattled, though wanting to live a life I might imagine, but haven’t yet, and to escape myself, in seconds I throw on my thick, all-cotton black trousers and a real red cashmere cardigan sweater, and, with what I believe to be a determined air, quit the sleeping room to engage society again until I may return to this room and sleep unimpinged by its demands. There are loose ends, my mother loses a stitch and picks it up, I lose the will to resolve a problem, then pick it up the next day. Before dinner, when a productive or nonproductive day is nearly done, I can have a drink, often a Campari and soda, for my nervous stomach, my second heart, and read the newspaper, since I remain attached to the world and remote events, which may or may not have significance or consequence to me, like the relationship of the tall balding man and the disconsolate woman, anorexic and psoriatic, and others I notice, who should have no real interest for me, and, still, because I’m discontent or in need of distraction from worse contemplations, I pay a subversive’s attention. There is a half hour before dinner, and the main room or lounge is almost empty of people, few residents have arrived, they include the dour man and fretful woman, with whom I have no relationship, or enmity, and to whom I nod and walk past, addressing myself only to the mailroom at the side of the main hall. It is larger than a spacious walk-in closet, and once inside this simple enclosure, I have minutes alone to experience hope or disappointment, since mail or no mail is a daily fate. In the wooden slot, with “Helen” marked on it, there is a square kelly-green envelope and a postcard. I open the envelope, invariably it’s envelopes first, the envelope’s pale green letter contains a one-line question: “Where Were You When It Happened?” The alarming words were printed by a person with sloppy penmanship, which is common, since a neat hand no longer matters and few write by hand, as I don’t. My mother learned a perfect script, but now when she writes, her hand trembles and her words are written by a spider. My father crossed out or wrote over individual letters, to make them clearer, rendering them less readable, but drawing and making graphic the insecurity he felt, and I have often felt, when my mother’s handwriting never showed doubt, that it should have, because she killed the cat who loved her more than anyone, to protect me, she explained when I was nine, because the cat had killed my parakeet. I didn’t care about my parakeet, and it was soon after my brother left home, before my dog was given to me for Christmas, who was also killed by my parents but for whose sad demise I accept blame. “Where Were You When It Happened?” I read again, and in the closet-like space that smells of pine trees and Murphy’s Oil, my skin clamors, my cheeks redden, my nose grows cold, and, quickly, I turn to the second piece of mail for relief from the first, and, as if I’d willed it, which occasionally happens, something I hope for turns up, so I can believe I’ve caused its appearance, people conjure anything to believe they are in control of their fates, there is a third postcard, this time of a church in Italy, its stamp Italian and franked ten days ago. Typed on its message side, three elliptical sentences: “We are thinking of buying a church. Would you come visit me? I promise you nothing, and everything, too.” The familiar, indecipherable, birdlike signature at the bottom, the same as on the other two, might represent two people, or the royal we, so once more I am enmeshed in a serial drama, its welcome embrace, and, instantly, I decide not to think further about its significance but rather to nurse its inscrutable promise. With this third postcard
, the series’ provocative messages intimated possibility, I could anticipate more treasure as well as cherish the postcards already received from the sender or senders, and, with the third, since good things come in three, though I don’t totally subscribe to this, I do usually think it, I may hope for a satisfactory coda.

  TONIGHT, BEFORE DINNER, I SIT on the plump pillows of a twoseater brocade couch, on impact they make a whooshing sound like the couch in the living room in my family house that was sold against my protests, but I don’t have to plump these pillows beneath me now. I reach for the newspaper, scan the headlines of the first section, read all the small items, a man has been indicted for the murder of his female lover, whom he met at a convention for devotees of the 1960s TV show Dark Shadows, then turn to the obituary notices and stock market prices, but in my mind I tenderly carry and weigh the image of the scholarly Irishwoman, so when the tall balding man and the disconsolate woman enter, separately but close in time, their intimacy flies around the room with an angel’s fragile wings. Now they stand by the fire, not far from me, close to each other, speaking in low tones, as the Count and Contesa emerge through separate, noisy doors. The Count will sit beside me soon enough, and the Turkish poet, who is often late to dinner, which disturbs the staff, especially the head cook, and also Contesa. Though I should resign myself to or accept change, since it’s inevitable, and flexibility signifies health in body and mind, though someone who changes too easily is perceived as weak, I dread the arrival of new residents, who may present fresh obstacles, as well as some of the older residents, like the demanding man, who arrives with a sigh and a wave of his hand, so that all will notice him, though most don’t. At dinner, he will inevitably grab a chair at any table that has one free. I avoid his company, but it is sometimes thrust on me like a cold. Meanwhile, I discreetly study the fragile couple and new residents who arrived in the afternoon, while I was walking into town, visiting the shop, buying a postcard for the Polish cosmetician, or seeing the kitchen helper and his two buddies, and my dry skin tingles. I sense beet red rouging my cheeks, it could be the heat of the fire, and many here are aware of how sensitive my skin is.