Don’t ask why, I warned myself.
This Thursday morning, while I’m writing, it feels to me like the most contemptible thing about this book is how cowed I am by my affliction. Cowed meaning: I have failed to hate it. Even when I opened my mouth to inform one therapist after another perfectionism was killing me, its deprivations suited me to a T, ailment as apology: so sorry I never lived up to my brilliant promise. Psychically, perfectionism is home. Outwardly my history of therapy resembles an arduous grappling with the disorder, but did I ever believe I could live without it? For a synesthetic instant I tune in to Mick Jagger howling “Under My Thumb,” ventriloquizing the tyranny of my weird disease. But it is modest, the bureaucracy administering the cosmos between my ears: it would never howl for glee at having crushed me.
Why? I asked.
You were all scratched.
What?
Scratched, all over.
Scratched, how?
You did it to yourself. Inside.
Affectlessness had been replaced by an experimental almost-hostility, to me a worrisome change because I wasn’t sure who or what my mother was feeling hostile to—the nurses; me, now; me, the baby in the story?—and in general her experiments in so-called negative emotions solidified fast, she was vulnerable to becoming entranced by hostility, once she had started in on someone or other’s slighting behavior toward her the slight was magnified, she could be consumed by wrongs, her exaggerated woundedness often made it hard to figure out the truth of what you were hearing, how accurate her portrayal of injury was. Though I was afraid of what she would say next, I wanted the story, it had started off more interestingly than any story I could ever remember her telling me about herself, One scratch came right to your eyelid, though I well knew her to be a superb noticer in the realm of the visual, and in social dealings one of the ultra-exposed whose mood could be capsized by nuances those around her failed to register, when it came to talking about herself she might as well have passed blindly through her existence, her stories were uninteresting partly because of this weird detail-void, also because she would have considered it presumptuous to use any sort of metaphor while recounting an experience, as if a metaphor amounts to making a scene, as if to voice a detail would poison the self-deprecating wittiness of her self-presentation with show-offiness, the context for One scratch came right to your eyelid was this habitual disinclination, so when she presented a detail, as she just had, it loomed large, it demanded interpretation and I sat there picturing the scratch by the eyelid, its alarmingness, non sequitur was one of her favored modes of deflection and what she said next was There was an anesthetic called twilight sleep, whatever was happening between us was more bare-bones, less defended, than my mother ever was, or not an anesthetic really because the woman feels everything while it’s happening, all the pain, but afterward can’t remember anything, that was what they gave me, and I said Oh no, inadequate little Oh no, close to meaningless, but I was feeling disoriented and for some reason exasperated by my bedraggled bikini, not that she could see it but she knew it was there under the towel I was wrapped in and she loathed it and we both knew she loathed it and I couldn’t exactly leave to take it off while she was telling this story, however much more she was going to tell I was going to have to continue to be present with my breasts cupped, if barely, in faded pink slips of fabric, often my sense was whatever I became self-conscious about, she had been for some time critically aware of, and now it was as if I had been caught in the act of possessing this body, I was busy keeping to myself my sense of being loathed by her, if I didn’t acknowledge it sometimes I had a little power over it, or so it felt, after a second I thought to add That sounds terrible, wrapped in the striped towel I had no idea how to take care of her, no idea what could account for her spectacular lack of apology in telling me she had refused to touch me as a baby—was I supposed to agree that I had been repellent? I mean I could; it wasn’t hard to believe in the baby’s dark maroon, black-haired hideousness, it was only hard to believe that baby was me; the emotion I was a little wrecked by, which she appeared free of, was pity for the baby, but this wasn’t pity for myself, I didn’t feel a bond to that long-ago baby, and neither it seemed did she; what she was telling me appeared to strike her as a strange story involving only herself, unlikely to have any effect on me; or was her intention entirely different, in her own mind did this explain everything that had gone wrong between us? She said The baby on the Gerber’s baby food jar, do you know the one I mean? Babies came out like that, was what I assumed—perfect, smiley, those great big eyes. I had no idea the Gerber baby was six months old.
I didn’t ask aloud You had never seen a newborn? But hadn’t she, a nurse’s daughter—ever?
The nurses wouldn’t give up, she said. They kept coming back with you. Kept wanting me to take you. I kept not taking you, they’d take you away, but they’d come back, you know, they never
They must flirt with her husband when they hand over the baby, dimple when he calls her little bit, when he extends a forefinger for the tiny hand to clasp, scoffs That grip could use a little more pine tar, his teasing the baby stirs the nurses, has them freshening lipstick before they emerge from the nursery carrying the little nobody, when the first nurse wonders Pine tar? my father says Helps the batter get a good grip, the narrowness of his black tie, the decorum of his white shirt attest to government employment, when the second nurse asks he says Chemist—came straight from the lab, and at his pleasure in the assertion, his feeling there’s no time to waste in getting back to the baby, the second nurse falls in love, the third nurse laughs when he mourns the narrowly lost first game of the doubleheader the White Sox played the night the baby was born, every fumble grieved, every error, the black-and-white television a campfire the waiting-room husbands tended, bent forward, couches and armchairs shuffled from their backs-to-the-wall starting position into a clannish half-moon—Right down the line and it’s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . streeeeiike three!—concerted squeaking of the seats’ plastic as husbands sprawled back defeated, commiserating, lighting up. My father’s gestures when agitated: fists driven into trouser pockets (if standing), jangling coins in pockets (standing), tugs intended to close the shin gap exposed by a pants cuff riding up (seated), tilting the pack till cigarettes steeple out, instead of choosing he rights the pack, cigarettes slide from view, a tic noted by the fifth nurse, whose much older psychiatrist lover prefers tutorials to sex, who told her it takes balls to describe the sexuality of a child to a world that would rather not hear it, at balls the nurse had laughed, telling him men were always saying it takes balls to do x, y, or z, and he teased back What do you ladies say it takes to do x, y, and z, then Hey! Freud says of the maternal body “There is no other place of which one can say with so much certainty that one has already been there.” My father tears himself away from the baby to spend an hour with his wife. Loyalty to their antagonist prevents the nurses’ telling him his wife has been refusing to take the baby, much less feed it, it’s in her chart, this eccentricity of breastfeeding, doctors discourage it, she’s unlikely to have told her husband she’d dissented from her doctor’s advice, it would only have worried him to have his wife deviate from the norm, jeopardizing the baby’s health with unsanitary nipples, showing herself to be subversive—he doesn’t know the half of it, he comes in with his jacket slung over his shoulder, with flowers, my mother caught him admiring her bothersome new breasts and he grinned, the twilight she passed through isn’t the kind of thing they can talk about, despair not the kind of thing, he might be trying, when he says You’re a little down in the dumps that’s him trying, giving her an opening, but how can she even begin, can he bring her favorite lipstick next time, she asks, he says I like the one you’re wearing, takes off his glasses, says with the vague tone he uses when his glasses are off, It suits you, he can’t locate his handkerchief, his fumbling, patting search of himself makes her want to jump out of bed and run to him, Suits you
, he says, being a mother, puts his glasses back on, rolls down his shirtsleeves as if his work here is done, finds his hat, when she says Wait! Wait! he does, brows lifted in What can I do for you? patience. What can he do for her? He leaves whistling. With him goes my mother’s soul, pinned to his lapel. What’s it going to take, how long can my mother hold out in the face of lilting lectures on the inevitability of her loving the baby once she has it in her arms, doses of disapproval passed under her nose like smelling salts. The nurses come boldly into my mother’s room, fortified by their consultations with each other, convinced she is fixable. The tale of my mother’s resistance must find a lot of listeners, rising to fame within the hospital, or notoriousness, deviations from normal, inexorable mother love are spellbinding, intimating the precariousness of the whole deal, when my mother pulls down her panties to urinate the shavenness has grown an itchy five o’clock shadow, babies of senators are born here, babies of presidents, the nurses must know what they’re doing, in other matters relating to my mother’s body the nurses are deft and pitiless, only with the baby in their arms do they seem unscrupulous, appearance by appearance its skin pales from skinned rabbit to bitten lip, but its hair stays black as ever and it’s disconcerting, as if the baby should fade slowly all over, a Polaroid left in the sun, at its first cry the nurses hustle it back to the nursery as if full-blown wailing would strengthen my mother’s refusal but it’s already final, her refusal is a glacier, it’s the Berlin Wall, If she had her way, the second nurse tells the third, that baby would be abandoned in an alley, I don’t think so, says the third, she’d want somewhere with wolves, the second nurse stays on after her shift to hold the baby, they are a little sick at heart at how long this has gone on, at the last minute someone has the bright idea of brushing the baby’s black hair into a spit curl sticking up from the top of her head, fastening it with a big black bow, comically outsize, the nurses consider their handiwork, one of them says Who’s going in? and the second nurse says I will.
gave up, finally one of them got the bright idea of brushing your hair into a spit curl right on top of your head and tying it with a black bow and she carried you in like that and I
I will, and as if the mother’s having taken the baby and settled back into her pillows is nothing out of the ordinary, the second nurse leans in but not too far, not close enough to crowd them, if only the mother in her cat’s-eye glasses would think of unbuttoning her buttons, it’d be lovely if the mother thought of that by herself but the act of reaching for the baby seems to have exhausted her initiative, though she’s looking down at the baby, the second nurse takes that as a good sign, the mother hasn’t willingly looked at the baby before, the baby begins to thrash, startling my mother, and to prevent the thought of handing the baby back from crossing my mother’s mind the nurse says She’s really ready to latch on, there’s a trick to it. When she taps its cheek, the baby’s head pivots, its mouth gapes, two dimes of wetness appear in the aqua rayon of my mother’s bed jacket, blots slowly enlarging, sodden rayon outlining her nipples before the nurse can say See?
As far as I know, my mother entrusted the story of her refusal to hold me only to me. Her chaste tendency was to keep any and all bodily experiences to herself—by way of chiding me for the mess of bloodied Kotex in a wastebasket he’d ended up emptying, my father told me I’ve lived with your mother two decades without seeing even a trace of blood. While she was alive there was never a moment when I could have asked why she told the story to me and what if anything she hoped would come of having told it, never between us the remotest chance of sweetly dumbfounded confession, despite my fantasies of being able to say, and be laughed at for saying, But your affect was weird!—so cold!—it freaked me out! And why then, that day, why, with no preface, start right in? Later I was to think it was the apparition of my nineteen-year-old sensuality that did it, my unscratched nakedness. To my letting myself in through the sliding door, was her response I didn’t want you then, I don’t want you now, or is it too dark to believe she may have meant that, unjust, just wrong? Could she have intended the story as background, context that could inform my understanding of my later troubles, thus: This happened to you, you should be aware it happened, I’m the only one who can tell you? Because it’s true, I value having the story, it feels to me like a necessary piece of my life, she could have known it would be valuable, could have thought how it got told—detachedly—was going to end up mattering much less than its necessariness. In our lives, silences abounded. Does the very act of telling—by a secretive person, a perfectionist disinclined to confide her deviations from the norm—count as love? As bravery? As she told it to me on the couch I was aware of not having a clue what the story meant to her. As I write it I am aware of still not knowing, of trying to hold the story right, of there being a version that might strike her as the truth, which would amaze and move her, because I carried it in for her to see, to reach out for. What I want are tears in her eyes.
Everybody makes mistakes. A caregiver, someone he trusts, has confidently told him so, maybe in the course of reassuring my son for a mistake he made during the day, I can’t tell, I don’t know the circumstances, only that when my son looks up from his spill it’s in order to test whether it’s true or not, this thing he’s never heard from me.
When I was eleven I became obsessed with my face.
The font of this obsession was a foxed mirror in a dim upstairs bathroom, exceedingly narrow, ornately high-ceilinged, tiled in chilly pink.
As was true throughout the house, the bathroom’s renovation had run out of gas. In one corner crouched a Victorian radiator shaped like an accordion squeezed to utmost compression; its heat fumed to the distant ceiling, and all you got was its dusty boiled-metal smell. The fifties-era tub and the toilet shared the walls’ Pepto pink, the floor was quarter-sized white hexagonal cells grouted with black grime, then it was back to the thirties for the sink, whose white porcelain HOT and COLD faucet handles, chubby four-fingered Mickey Mouse gloves, each morning fooled me into turning the wrong handle, since HOT ran cold and COLD ran hot and I invariably believed what I read. Over that basin hung the old mirror with, across its top, a ghostly fleur-de-lis flanked by rippled ribbons.
If I stood just so, the fleur-de-lis sprouted from the crown of my head, a pale brain-flower. The fleur-de-lis was a given—just there, nothing to do with me. And so, I felt, was the face below.
The face was nothing to do with me.
I can’t be it.
Instant, transfixing: can’t.
My father believed my reflection held for me an insatiable enchantment. Before breakfast his slippers would pause in the hallway outside the heavy oak door long enough for the droll recitation Vanity, thy name is woman, and I would say Okay, Dad. If I had risked a smart-ass comeback like If you say so, there would have been trouble. If I had said something close to the truth, like Is it vanity if you hate what you see: trouble.
He would have turned my hating what I saw in the mirror into a critique of him—at least, that was what I feared. In a perfect household no child would suffer from revulsion at what the mirror held, no child would need to stand staring for hours, seeking to dispel disbelief, to achieve the psychic equivalent of holding her arms out to what was there. My heartbeat might as well have been translated can’t-CAN’T, can’t-CAN’T. If a child was immobilized by the need to stare, if what the child was staring at was her inassimilable self, the craziness of the whole rigamarole had to imply the father’s failure to lay the groundwork for inevitable happiness. All-encompassing, never-failing responsibility was his job. Insanely, the time asked this of men, and so, I might write, and so no wonder he assumed everything was about him, but some other, non-public belief pertained, a belief or beliefs he held about me, which menaced me by seeming inscrutably unjust. This year, the year of my turning thirteen, was a year of confrontations with his wounded conviction that I was out to wound him. This year I was often in trouble with him, and often when I least expected to be.
In general he was prone to interpreting things I said or did as covertly malicious. I would listen astounded as, in his parsing, remarks of mine were revealed as subtle contrivances meant to inflict mean little injuries. No! No! That’s not what I meant! I would say.
Scratched Page 3
