Scratched

by Elizabeth Tallent

  In “Perfectionism and Personality” Joachim Stoeber et al. explain:

  Hewitt and Flett’s (1991) tripartite model of perfectionism . . . differentiates three forms of perfectionism: self-oriented, other-oriented, and socially prescribed. Self-oriented perfectionism reflects beliefs that striving for perfection and being perfect are important. Self-oriented perfectionists have exceedingly high personal standards, expect to be perfect, and are highly self-critical if they fail to meet these demands. In contrast, other-oriented perfectionism reflects beliefs that it is important for others to strive for perfection and be perfect. Other-oriented perfectionists have exceedingly high standards for others, expect others to be perfect, and are highly critical of others who fail to meet these expectations. Finally, socially prescribed perfectionism reflects beliefs that striving for perfection and being perfect are important to others. Socially prescribed perfectionists believe that exceedingly high standards are being imposed on them. They believe others expect them to be perfect, and think that others will be highly critical of them if they fail to meet these standards.

  As Hewitt and Flett calmly note elsewhere, these are three heads of the same Cerberus: “We believe that each of these dimensions is an essential component of overall perfectionistic behavior.”

  In the faraway future my son will come home from an afternoon at day care, tip over his cup, and look up from the spill to say Everybody makes mistakes. Using the voice he uses for testing out other adults’ assertions on me.

  But the sentences—two decades’ worth—written in pursuit of transcendence were dull. For the sake of perfection I took a voice, my own, and twisted until mischance and error and experiment were wrung from it, and with them any chance of aliveness—stories thrive on exactly those risks perfectionism forecloses. On behalf of beauty, stiltedness and inhibition broke the back of every sentence. Aversion, the approved response to imperfection, suffused my pages, even when the mistakes were gone the aversion remained, my prose broadcast the deadness instilled by infinite tiny acts of killing-off. At times the whole rigid apparatus of my self-excruciation became visible and I was scared of myself for having invented it. Because it’s still going on, this squelching, these disavowals, I’m not writing from the loftiness of triumph or authority. My view is partial, inexpert, immersed. If you don’t have the clarity to disavow the perfectionism deforming your life, where do you start? I guess I will start here: confronted with, ashamed of, my enthrallment. It doesn’t matter what it’s cost me, perfection’s destined deliverance is what I believe in, unerring rightness, beauty the barest millimeter beyond this page.

  The hospital is submerged in night. My mother has always loved hiding, she resolves to stay as hidden as a person can be in a hospital bed, a natural magnet for intrusion regularly encroached on by strangers bearing trays or gadgets or clipboards, each arrival entailing niceties my mother is too wrung out for, their expectations of being heeded and answered and smiled at constellated around a shared conviction of being welcome, whenever they appear and whatever they want, welcome, Can you do x, y, or z for me and I need to take a quick look at, so highly regarded are they, so revered their competence in whatever it is they are up to, they cross the threshold in a nightlong sequence of intrusions she can’t help but play hostess for, the instant the switch’s switched on she’s charming, my mother’s pretty-comedienne self-deprecation disarming in this context of professional rousings and tappings and proddings, their smiles have a surprised edge, their laughs, it’s not hard so long as none of them brings what she doesn’t ever want to see again. What’s crept up on her is a sense of needing to salvage the twilit hours, to travel through them alertly, interpreting as she goes, listening, piecing together in order to understand how she ended up shorn of memory, isn’t that the saying, her pubic hair razored away, that shearing she was present for, politely spread-legged, and while it was evident she was not supposed to intrude on the procedure by watching it, she’d craned to see past her belly to the grime of wet curls scooted off the blade by the nurse’s napkin-wrapped thumb into a stainless steel basin. Subsequent ministrations can be conjectured from bruises and aches. Surely it’s not necessary to know everything that has happened to you. Perhaps of all the twilit minds only hers emerged from the cloud enraged. What does rage have to do with her? How punishingly, without her consent, it bends toward remembrance, it wants and wants and wants. She closes her eyes. From its psychic aftermath—atomized brilliance drizzling through vacancy—she identifies terror. That’s real, she’s salvaged a scrap, she’s asleep.

  When I’m at a loss perfectionism is available for me to fall back on. To take refuge in, because however I characterize perfectionism now—as affliction; as personality disposition—it first arose as a defense against despair. It is a cure turned ravenous wound. It’s a wound I don’t know how anyone lives without. Everybody makes mistakes, says my son looking up from his spill. Waiting.

  Deep in the clockless night a different nurse comes with the baby. Here she ii-iiiiis, the nurse sings as if in tickled acquiescence to my mother’s demand, but it’s a trick, a deception the nurse hopes my mother will sleepily consent to be fooled by, there was no such demand, my mother had not implored, as has been implied, Bring her to me, my mother finds her cat’s-eye glasses on the table by the bed, and when the blanket is pushed back it’s the same dankly preserved bog-burial face with its drench of hair, sleeping with tight-fisted solitariness, its gnarled aloofness alien as its ugliness, my mother’s disconcerted by the baby’s having continued to exist, the scratch near its eyelid causes my mother to scratch the inside of her own wrist with a scratch exactly as long, a preventive sharpness in lieu of empathy, in this dreamlike opening in the night only the three of them are left on earth. Of this three, two of them want nothing to do with each other. Only the third, the nurse, is confused and hopes for connection. It’s in your chart you plan to breastfeed, the nurse says. This close she smells of Ivory, starched cotton, hairspray. My mother fears she smells of perspiration, iodine, blood. When the baby mews the nurse frowns downward double-chinned and says Hold your horses, you. Her manner of holding the baby does my mother vicarious good, she is a little bit held herself, the nurse has a warm voice and is wearing lipstick and my mother feels she could almost talk to her but worries how unkempt she must appear, the curls of her recent permanent askew, no lipstick, my mother in her aqua rayon bed jacket with the lace-edged peter pan collar has to evade the baby, all she can think of to want that she might be able to have is a cigarette, on the table beside her bed an aluminum ashtray gives permission for the cigarette she longs for, she’s a Washington, DC, wife and understands the delaying grace the gestures of smoking afford in even intensely embarrassing public plights, which this is, and the nurse says, again missing the point entirely, Such a sweet mood she’s in, this’s when you want to try, the baby stirs and mews but the nurse looks exclusively at my mother. A scrap of harsher sound emerges from the baby. My mother shakes her head with a finality that should do the trick. The nurse doesn’t get it. Genuinely does not. She’s going to need my mother to put it in words: I don’t want her. Can that be said. The nurse doesn’t mind standing and waiting for the desired response, and at her smile my mother looks away and looks back hoping for understanding but ready to resist more plainly if need be, open defiance not exactly a mode she’s well versed in, fraught with the risk of being disliked, the inevitability of judgment if she persists in refusing to take the baby dawns on her, she should probably have thought of that sooner, and my mother startles them both by asking But what’s wrong with her?

  The nurse echoes What’s wrong with her?

  The—scratches?

  Oh those! Jeez, never mind those, sometimes just Baby’s nails grow too long in utero, after the due date it gets to be a tight fit, never mind those, they go away, leave no trace, she’s fine, lusty pair of lungs, I can vouch for that, good appetite, jeez, I can vouch for that, and if the nurse’s consideration in touching the ba
by, smoothing her black hair as if to reassure her that her mother didn’t mean it, implies the baby is worth something, if the nurse’s manner conveys Glad I could clear that up, the whole amounts to a friendly insistence that my mother take the baby, the nurse hasn’t lost the thread, and my mother, who will all her life prefer the mutable insinuations of sentences left unfinished, says Please can you—

  But the nurse’s disinclination to fill in the rest extorts the conclusion:

  —take her away.

  The nurse leaves a lull sufficient for my mother to change her mind, an optimistic space my mother appreciates even as she declines its invitation, such discretion constitutes good manners between women and she hasn’t made my mother feel ashamed, though that’s incredibly easily done, the nurse tells the baby You’ll have a nice bottle, we’ll let Mama rest now won’t we, and at her voice, its lowness, its confidence, the baby blinks. The nurse revolves the baby so that its gaze radiates outward, as fused to its moment as light is, without moving so much as her little finger my mother eludes the gaze, unclouded by personness, awaiting whatever the world will offer, whatever the world’s going to offer doesn’t include her, my mother remains apart, neither focused on nor recognized, a mitted fist, worked free of the blanket, lifts and bobs, the nurse takes advantage of the flailing to pinch the forearm and cause the mitt to wave bye-bye, the nurse takes the baby with her and closes the door as the wailing begins.

  How beautiful after all is an intimation of beauty that declares every sentence dead on arrival? Isn’t aliveness the ball game, in prose, and not beauty, not perfection, whatever that is? I wish questions like that, questions I can hear myself hypocritically posing to a student fettered by perfectionism, actually mattered to me, but I have subsisted on the unobtainable so long the wise alternative This is good enough pierces me like a lie when I say it to myself.

  The amoeba of spilled milk snouts toward the table’s edge.

  Midmorning of the second day yet another nurse appears with the baby. Is this their usual rotation of shifts, or are they testing which nurse my mother might like and therefore give in to? This third nurse, the youngest, proves harder to deflect, but my mother prevails, and when after several hours the door opens and it’s the third nurse again, my mother is really almost angry to have to sit there in the narrow bed mustering the energy for resistance—it feels, too, as if the simplicity of bare refusal is being drained, overture by overture, of its legitimacy and may before long acquire the taint of sullenness, to ensure the nurses’ goodwill cleverer, more ingratiating forms of No are called for, an almost nuclear-arms-race-like parity of charm in response to their improvisations, if they are improvisations rather than scenarios plotted in advance, as my mother is beginning to suspect, the winsome beggary of the nurse’s Just hold her for one minute, then I’ll take her appears rehearsed, as does the blithe follow-up One minute! With the baby’s weight slung in an arm the nurse draws her sleeve back, meaning she’ll track the sixty seconds on her wristwatch, medically; she’ll honor the bargain; my mother need not fear that the act of receiving the baby in her arms will roll out into an infinity of holding, of sickened intertwinement, but the nurse might as well be assuring my mother that the boa constrictor she’s draping around her shoulders can’t possibly wrap itself around her throat, obviously that minute is never going to end, its skin-to-skin revulsion crawling across my mother’s nerve endings far into the future, the actual, incapacitating loathsomeness of the baby remains invisible to the nurse, with her pretty wristwatch exposed by her tugged-back sleeve she awaits what must seem to her the simplest of yesses, the consent communicated up and down this ward dozens of times a night, hundreds of times a week, in her next, even more beguiling One minute? my mother hears a promise akin to You will only be obliterated for one minute. With her chin up, my mother gives a fractional shake of the head. One minute?—sharply. My mother holds the nurse’s gaze, aware of the threshold that can be imperceptibly crossed, on whose far side the designation irrational awaits, and what then? They must talk among themselves of her refusal, weighing its import. Poor thing, they must say, of the baby.

  If I say perfectionism cost me two decades of writing, I intend a description of measurable loss, as if the pages of unwritten books can be numbered, their weight calculated. But the more elusive losses were of boldness, of amplitude. Of the generosity that, put into continuous practice, could have enlarged my work. Perfectionism is a form of being terrified of, and what follows that of is a blank every perfectionist would probably fill in differently, but whose large, generalizing term may be loss. In external reality the loss may already have occurred. Suppose what is feared is the retraction of parental love: this may have occurred over and over, and been denied by the child for whom the retraction of a parent’s love amounts to a mortal threat. From a purely logical perspective, a loss that has already happened—a loss that long ago did its worst; a completed loss—might seem deprived of its mojo, irrelevant to the ongoing business of consciousness. But it’s as if the news of the loss’s being over travels through the psyche in the pouch of the friar charged with getting the letter about the faux poison taken by Juliet into Romeo’s hands. If the perfectionism lasts for a lifetime, that loss so long ago feared achieves mortal immortality: a whole life may be lived in relation to it.

  In my experience of it perfectionism’s worst cost eludes quantification. It lies in the diminishment of my share of reality, which perfectionism starves down to a joyless, manageable minim.

  Right here, a paradox lurks, because why would my mind, or anyone’s, come up with a defense against loss that inflicts such losses? To the psyche implementing it, what can possibly justify the expense of perfectionism’s deadening of vitality? The first answer that comes to me is Of course nothing can ever justify it. Perfectionism is a terrifying mistake of the mind. But does that judgment, righteous though it may be, downplay the threat perfectionism arose to defend against? Is it equivalent to saying Hey, you should have saved your life more efficiently, without all this collateral damage?

  Should’ve devised a form of rescue with a clear expiration date?

  My son and I collaborate, mopping up milk. I’ve just said It’s so cool you know that. My response bears expanding on—clearly he’s interested in this question of mistakes and who makes them and how to feel about them—but I leave it there. Within my family each mistake was fingerprinted by its maker’s personality. Each was a unique indictment. A mistake confined to the moment of its materializing, dispatched with a reassuring phrase, would be a mistake deprived of charisma. Of its power to haunt—and who, unhaunted, is safe in this world? To offer this notion of a bland pool of mistakes fed by blameless everybody feels like an instance of caregivers inadvertently transgressing against a belief the parent holds sacred. To believe it, as he seems about to, will mean a parting of ways, subtle, at first, at first small, bearable, necessarily bearable, but hateful nonetheless and tending to widen, because it will widen, nonperfectionism will carry him off. And will end a certain lineage extending back god knows how many generations, to boot. I fear the rift that will come of his being free of the perfectionism binding one of the families he comes from, mine, in which only the lusty prosecution of mistakes—one’s own, others’—proves one’s integrity. He won’t speak our language.

  Thinking: This is one of the ways he will be himself. His own self.

  Thinking: Come on! Come through for him.

  The summer my mother told me the story of how she had not been willing to take me I was nineteen, just back from my first archaeological dig, a grid of square meters staked down the length of a terrace carved into the flank of a gulley rich in the ghost flora and fauna of once-thriving Pleistocene wetlands. August in the Texas Panhandle branded the parting in my hair into my scalp and seared my back, where the slippery strap fastening my bikini top was edged with pale alternative stripes like the haze of profiles when the sitter ruins the daguerreotype by glancing away, the same phenomenon showed where
my leather gloves ended at my wrists and my cutoff Levi’s frayed into thread, basically wherever edges lay against skin, first the private, very white white against which veins show turquoise, then the dimmed white of intermittent exposure, then the hard-won color I was proud of but that failed to offer protection, burns blistering up even where my skin was darkest. I wanted to get in closer to the skull I was working on, but the bill of my faded baseball cap got in the way, and my sunglasses slipped down my zinc-oxided nose. Brushes of real fur whisked grains of sand from its teeth, crowded forward at a slant suggestive of the dewed doeskin muzzle. Quivering whiskers had rayed out from that nose. I felt hidden, and expert, and as if, if I could dig with enough love, an eye would gleam from the bone. Returned from the dig I lurked through my mother and father’s house, awkwarder than any guest. In that single square meter of ancient lakeside, my life had burned bright in me, and I could hold on to that, or its companion sensation, by exposing my skin to the light of the nearest star. By now the pink bikini I’d worn all summer long was bedraggled, the two triangular scraps covering my breasts supported by fraying strings over my shoulders, the seat of the bottoms bagged out. I loved the bikini, I wasn’t about to give up its mojo, but its scantiness was offensive to my mother, who said my father said it was barely there, who said the neighbors could see when I sprawled my baby-oil-marinated self across the striped beach towel to read for hours on the second-story redwood deck the kitchen’s sliding doors opened onto, and it was one afternoon when I came in from a session of slow-motion Midwestern August heat and slid the glass door through the familiar glitches in its transit till it clicked closed and turned around barefoot and burned, glorious to myself, alight as I had probably never been before where my mother could see, she was on the couch facing the sliding glass doors, sitting where we never sat, and from the dread that undid my gloriousness I understood she had been waiting, I repented the pink bikini’s droop and cling, my oiliness, the sunglasses whose opacity could read like superiority to her, the towel I was holding was clean and I wrapped myself in it before I sat down on the couch, we’d never sat there before, none of us ever sat there, I’m not sure I ever had sat on one end of any couch with her at the other end, it wasn’t how we talked in our family, not a way we arrayed ourselves, but she’d beckoned, the couch had a faux woven texture but was really plastic and baby oil couldn’t hurt it, when I took off my sunglasses she said Did you know when you were born they couldn’t get me to take you and I made a sound in my throat, actual words might derail her, she could be quick to bristle at a wrong intonation, and it was unusual for her to tell a story of any kind, barely had she begun spinning the thread before I feared its abrupt severance, it didn’t matter that I knew full well I should dread what she was about to say, her tone would have alerted me even if the preface Did you know hadn’t, hurtfulness from her was often prefaced by a dodgy Did you know when there was no chance you did, but this, the soft, urging vowel I kept low in my throat, surely wouldn’t strike her as either impudence or excessive interest, either extreme was to be avoided, and I must have avoided it because she went on. They kept bringing you in and I kept telling them to take you away.