On the coffee table: oversized magazines whose pages exacted from a usually slapdash child the delicate touch and visual insatiability of a curator. Whose arrival was an event—at dinner: The new LIFE came today—and whose disposal elicited an elegiac tone: Are we done with that LIFE? There was TV, of course, but TV watching was closely monitored: these magazines were the source of my knowledge of the world beyond our suburb. These pages had held the bleakly unremarkable Book Depository, the knoll where a father had thrown himself into the grass, covering his crew-cut sons (there was so little touch in our family that I envied those boys, I wanted an instinctive arm to press me down while sirens careened, or maybe just to feel adrenalized protectiveness radiating from a male body, maybe it was Freudian, the wish to be toppled and yanked close while emergency wheeled through the air), Oswald’s lean fox face, its expression not much different from the shamed, dissembling insolence of certain boys in my class, boys known for cornering and tormenting, whose viciousness was revered. There was Audrey Hepburn in a striped sailor shirt; there was the hammy smile of a chimpanzee in an astronaut suit, harnessed into the coziness of a space capsule; there was an American soldier, rifle on his knees, watching five slight Vietnamese men, hands bound behind their backs, step barefoot into the narrow boat with him. In those pages Jenny Small and I read that when police entered the apartment of a woman murdered by the Boston Strangler a record was still spinning on the turntable. From the hulking cabinet stereos in our living rooms we knew the grainy hiss and snap of the needle riding that last groove, the diamond of needle with its gliding listlessness and its failure to notice it had come to the end, and it came home to us on the rattly aluminum-framed faded turquoise-and-white plastic-webbing chaise longue in Jenny’s backyard that as girls we were on the way to becoming wanted by rapists. We might feel cunning and self-sufficient and male, but look, none of those things was true. It was as if we had been two boys, till we read that. It was just luck that we read it on Jenny’s backyard chaise longue, me on the rickety end where a sunbather’s feet belonged, Jenny sitting close to but not leaning against the cranked-up back support, the magazine spread across her lap, a flexing slippery V of glossy pages with, on each side, an island of brown knee. I seemed to see the left knee with the keenest focus I had ever brought to bear on any object. The horrifying page that rested against it made that knee exquisite in the composed human beauty of bone under skin. What did what we had read do to us? That it was terrible, Jenny and I acknowledged in silence. We were in this together, but what did being in it mean? Later that day, after supper when nobody cared where children went, we looked for and found each other (we were not best friends, and didn’t possess best-friend telepathy) and went to Jenny’s backyard again, behind an overgrown lilac where, with the Boy Scout knife borrowed from her older brother’s drawer and singed for sterilization with matches also found there, Jenny and I nicked x’s in the palms of our hands and, sitting cross-legged, held our palms together, interlacing our fingers and gazing nobly into each other’s eyes while the x’s bled into each other. Only they didn’t. One of us noticed and said Wait, there’s not enough and it’s not getting into each other. From the edges of the cuts emerged little rubies, bead after luscious bead, but, true, it wasn’t flowing, so we rubbed and smeared our palms, and that was the only thing that hurt, the edges of the cuts peeling back, the nervy insideness of one hand in electric contact with another, the streaky finger painting mess we were making of our palms, meaning bleeding into each other was not glamorous, but messy and determined, amateur and startling. That didn’t matter too much compared to the feeling that the ritual was working—that it was doing what we’d wanted it to, though neither of us could have said what that was.
Set apart: time of midmorning departure, time of highways’ infinity, time of the gritty-glassy echoey unscrewing of the lid of the red plaid thermos usually reserved for the beach, time of lemonade a-tilt in the red plastic cup-cap. Time of that cup’s rim, wiped between turns so no one would die from the other’s germs. Time of children’s immersion in the atmosphere of their parents’ marriage. Time of getting lost and whose fault it was. Time of the hotel swimming pool with its confidence-inspiring stench of chlorine. Time of signs warning there was no lifeguard, of the cement margins where the chaise longues held sunglassed mothers and fathers whose wary nakedness causes the child’s heart to thump in the child’s skinny chest from delight at this exposure, which the child feels as a coming closer, a confounding of realities. Every unhappy family is periodically ransacked by joy. It is the way the family haunts itself, through the unknownness that is always, powerfully, in the parents’ possession, the unknownness whose casual revelation on the chaise longues on the hot cement margins of the hotel swimming pool in a never-before-seen city suffuses a child’s exaltation with fear. Time of the child comprehending why grown-ups say of something or other that it is enough to break your heart.
Where was this? The chain-link fence that warned there was no lifeguard, the mothers who called No running, I mean it, no running. The outlandish names of other children flung out, though our mother, a devotee of discretion, would never raise her voice in public. The not-so-distant freeway doing a steady business in semis, cumulus clouds brighter for the level radiance from the west, our shadows’ legs staggeringly long, our sleek wet heads so alike we were tribal, except within that tribe were the sharper alliances of brother and sister, and in our wet swimsuits we were more brother and sister than we had ever been before, eagerly, competitively, near-nakedly brother and sister, and when, unpredictable in his boyness, my brother followed me up the fifteen-foot ladder whose rungs I remember for their wet-metal smell, the flattery of his following so close lit my skin like sunburn and drove my climb to the pinnacle, whose galvanized aluminum slide descended to a slapping, light-scattering heaven ringed with wavering child-bodies that left an open space for the next slider. My brother was right behind, and behind him came the oppressive almost-sexiness of other children’s wet bodies clambering up the ladder. Maybe he wanted to impress these strange others, maybe too many cartoons whose victims rebounded laughing had led him to believe no real harm would be done (that was to be our parents’ theory)—whatever causes converged in his shove, I was off balance, trying to correct the asymmetry of my pose there at the top, and thus went over the metal-pipe railing, the arm thrown in front of my face hitting first, then my knees, and I was slammed flat, silence closing in, circling as if I was a drain it wanted to go down. Through wet eyelashes I saw a world peaceful down to the grains of sand or grit on the cement, each grain cherished by its shadow, the grains brightly lit and far apart and astounding as an array of boulders on the moon, and whose meticulousness placed them with this unearthly distinctness, what did that, and did it know about me? Then: voices, grown-up voices, grown-up feet, confusion, thrilled interrogation, solicitude. Dark fur against gaudy whiteness: those were my father’s legs, this was my father crouching to ask questions, but the magnitude of my alertness crushed the desire to answer him. Nobody maintained in those days that you shouldn’t move a person who’d fallen, rescue was a more casual prerogative, and I was carried back to our hotel room in my father’s arms; this once, his arms; I was left alone on one of the double beds in the air-conditioned gloom while my mother and father conferred outside the door in the heat of early evening, other grown-ups stopping by, their questions politely deflected, their kids’ voices ringing from the pool like clamor from a past life. Standing outside the room in his baggy swim trunks, assailed by well-meaners, my father would feel humiliated and full of blame, these emotions unrelievable by the surgery he habitually inflicted on his nails, but sufficiently disguised by his charm that only I, listening in the dark room, could detect the hazardousness of his mood, which sought, which had to seek, an object. At ten I believed nobody else had real insight into my father, not my brother or sister, who understood hardly anything, not my mother, whose adoration of him outwardly resembled suffering omniscience but who w
as in fact easily deflected by his contrarieties. Now it was she who intervened. My little brother had not meant to hurt anyone, had he? That tender, harassing spell cast by adults coercing a right answer: it was surprising how instantly we welcomed that (their welcoming it was plain in their voices, and as for my welcoming it, I could feel that). Outside the door my brother was crying; he was (I closed my eyes and knew this for sure) shuddering, goosefleshed, shaking his head no, no, no, no, no, no, and in that dark hotel room I was relieved that my mother knew how to manage the questioning by which he could be forgiven, and within relief a doorway opened into sleep.
Enormous suitcases, jade and beige and navy, jammed together in a rattling bulwark smelling of sunstruck plastic, shade a narrow canyon lined with a flannel sleeping bag whose hunters and retrievers alternated with flushed pheasants. The fact that the pheasants are bigger than the hunters and their dogs and if they flew at them instead of away could crush them with a few decisive wingbeats arouses an aesthetic revulsion intense to the point of nausea: I need to correct this, to write a letter to the sleeping-bag people, enclosing a pheasant-setter-hunter drawing so piercingly right they would wonder who this girl was and resolve to find her to hire her to design all future sleeping-bag-flannel vignettes. My forehead sweats, the roots of my hair sweat; sweat runs from between my shoulder blades down my spine with a feeling like being crawled on and not minding, and I close my eyes and coax that sensation to the center where it’s the war of slow-sliding creepy arousal versus pain. If you have three children in the back seat, one is always in the middle, nudged and bothered and taunted from the left and from the right. The answer is always no, but every trip begins with someone begging to ride in the rear of the station wagon, called in our family the Wayfarback, sweet as a vacant house is sweet, as only unclaimed spaces ever are, carpeted in clean scratchiness, offering what can be found nowhere else in our life, the ambiguity of being close yet unseen: a child in the Wayfarback can’t be surveilled by glances in the rearview mirror. Can’t be seat-belted in, either, making it appealingly dangerous. So why is it mine, this hot rumpled hidey-hole? Attuned to injustice—savage keeners of no fair!—my little brother and sister are quiet in the face of this travesty, gratified by their own quietness, which seems grown-up and inexplicable. Mother-and-father silence followed my saying plaintively, two or three times before we left the hotel room this morning, Something’s wrong. With my left arm, with the little finger and the fourth finger and the thumb of my left hand—something’s wrong, it feels really strange. To which no one said even It’ll be all right in a little while. Wearing the same clothes as yesterday I was standing there saying Look with my whole incredulous body. My mother who didn’t like to touch me helped me work my swollen arm out of the sleeve of my shirt, but even then she didn’t do the thing I wanted, she didn’t look, and because she didn’t look it changed into something not quite mine, my arm, and I got a little divorce from it, like getting distance from a lie you’re going to disown before long. I couldn’t knot the cowboy bandana I was obsessed with, so she did, though she hated it and was always trying to talk me out of it on the grounds girls didn’t look good with rags around their necks. Then unforeseen license: You can ride in the very back. With the smashing of strictness, the air in the station wagon brightens, my father calls my mother honey, which makes everyone feel as if they’ve been called honey, my brother and sister trade the Etch A Sketch back and forth, and I lie on my stomach in the Wayfarback, turning the pages of Smoky the Cowhorse. It was my hand Smoky snatched the apple from, my sunburned neck the bandana circled, only now (I suddenly realized) the bandana could be used to wrap my forearm—a feverish cowboy would do that if he were shot with an arrow. When the wrapping seemed to help, I found the rag used to wipe condensation from the back window and swaddled my hand, figuring out how to encompass the outsize, yammering fingers, too, although the thumb remained an orphan with a big, throbbing heartbeat. I wished I had a scrap for it. Eternity could be broken into bearable slabs by the ritual of loosening the bindings and winding them tighter, the baseball game fading and reviving on the radio and my father calling out Attaboy! and the sun lasering between suitcases to ignite hot stripes on my legs while I slept, and I slept a lot, and when I woke there was a fraction of an instant when my old life rushed back and all was well, and that was snatched away. How wrong I’d been not to have loved my unbroken arm more. My mother unfolded the map of America with every Howard Johnson’s on it. My father said Shoes on, kids. The back door swung up, me blinking at the loss of my cave, clambering out to the asphalt, where the bare-legged beauty of the other four struck me sharply. Glass doors opened into the mercy of air-conditioning in a circus-bright barrage of orange and turquoise, the gauze bow in the small of the waitress’s back led us in single file between tables of families, and I held my scarecrow arm close to my body, but more than one waitress raised her eyebrows and would have inquired if she hadn’t, in time, registered my parents’ unwillingness to engage. There was another hotel-room night; there was bacon and eggs and Tang that astronauts drank; Look, kids, the Cumberland Gap, your great-great-grandpa rode through here on his way home after he lost his leg at the Wilderness, we’ll go to that battlefield sometime; Rode home one-legged?; He could get a prit good hold, his stump was long enough, down to the knee; Bill! Don’t go into details!; there was prit to evoke the ghost’s voice and prove the Civil War had happened; there was fog, the headlights’ shafts alive with rolling plumes, the dented guardrail the only thing between us and the abyss; there was my father’s tale of the Model A he first learned to drive and the red mud it foundered in, and how it was pulled out with a neighbor’s mule who could count and do tricks and would neatly, with its big mule lips peeled back, take an apple from between its owner’s wife’s teeth; there was my father imitating the mule’s grimace and, when my mother didn’t laugh, doing it again; there was my mother’s Yankee reticence and delicacy and irony, about to become drawbacks in the encounter with my father’s family. She was hard to make sense of, in Tennessee.
The dirty mummification of my arm impressed my cousins as if I had carried a filthy stray cat into their house and insisted on holding it close. This was seen as boldness on my part: the lawlessness they imagined for me was an outline I would have poured myself into if I could. They wanted to touch and poke and unwrap, and since that would earn me more attention of the kind boys pay only to what slightly sickens them, I would have let them. But my aunt said Boys. Now you leave it alone. My cousins stuck close, honoring the leprous itness of my arm. Asked by my aunt about the pain, I don’t think I was constrained by loyalty to my parents’ version, which was that nothing was broken. The doubleness of my vantage point—aware they were wrong but sure they were perfect—derailed my awareness of them; where what they want belonged, there was a blank. I was honest with my aunt, and relieved by the distress she let show. Reined in only by my aunt’s Southern-lady-ness, that distress verged on an indictment of my parents, especially my mother; but my aunt held her tongue and didn’t accuse her of anything, not where I could hear, and, I think, not to anyone, because accusation wouldn’t have served any purpose, not really, or made it any easier to accomplish what she right away determined to do, which was get me to a doctor. My aunt had brown eyes so dark they were often described as black, enviable eyes, as hers was an enviable high-cheekboned drawling beauty that hadn’t gotten her into too much trouble, either because she was naturally sensible or had set out to cultivate happiness. She’d married my father’s droll, soft-spoken, easygoing little brother, and their household seemed miraculous to me, so much so that on previous annual visits I had insisted on watching my aunt do every little thing, spellbound by her gentleness and determined to attract as much of it as I could to myself. This greed of mine for my aunt’s company didn’t go unremarked, and it embarrassed my mother; if she’d liked my aunt less, she might have held it against her, or conjectured to my father late at night when they were finally alone that my aunt was e
gging me on in my ridiculous infatuation, with the secret aim of making Bill’s Yankee wife look bad. My aunt’s nature was equable and warm and self-effacing, qualities my restless hypercritical mother did not possess but religiously impersonated. As sometimes happens, two women who seem exactly positioned for mutual loathing ended up forging a spirited conspiracy, whose great staple was discussion of their men, those very different brothers.
At the hospital I was sugah’d and sweetheart’d, endearments good as opium. The dream of benevolence was pierced by my fear when the doctor bent close. I hadn’t bathed since the accident and my skin radiated the stench of fever and chlorine, but the possibility that he would be repelled by me did not concern me—that wasn’t it, though what I was afraid of was like smelling bad: it was present, like a taint, when the doctor leaned in. It was the possibility of being deeply shamed. With his mannerly Tennessee-slow inquisitiveness the doctor might assent to my parents’ view that nothing was wrong, and attention-lover that I was I would be seen as having impersonated brokenness and spun a fable of pain. Could that be, could I have done that? Across a wall, at adult eye-level, ran the sequence of black X-ray sheets, and I gazed up at the frail light of my bones while grown-up voices took polite turns, the longest, Southernest turn belonging to the doctor. You know how if you take a little stick and give it a good twist it will splinter out with the strain but not snap clear through? What’s called a greenstick fracture. Fractures here, here, and here, too. The truth of x-rayed bone, the lifted-up feeling of rescue, the sensuousness of the expert winding of plaster-soaked gauze, spindly as layers of papier-mâché, around and around until the hurt arm vanished.
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