Scratched

by Elizabeth Tallent

  A new dress would have been a mistake anyway, I tell myself, newness wouldn’t jibe with so passionately complicated a union—and $1100, did I want to be paying that off forever? But my declining to show myself to the analyst in the ravaged beauty of the dress is only the first entry in an increasingly long list of things I want to hide from him—surely a dire sign for our looming marriage, and I keep returning to Mendocino Vintage, paging through its racks for the garment magical enough to substitute for the one that had been whisked away. When the price on a dress’s tiny white cardboard tag is accompanied by the warning As Is, I know to conduct due diligence, checking for split seams and underarm stains. When the flaw eludes me I carry the dress to the counter, where the antiques dealer lifts the shade from an alabaster lamp and angles the fabric close to its bulb, whose light sprints through a half dozen moth holes. “But those are tiny! Do you always remember what the ‘As Is’ is, after you’ve written it on the tag?” I ask, and she shrugs. It’s the shrug of a blonde androgynous boy in a vintage rodeo shirt. “Sometimes there’s actually nothing specific, just an ‘As-Izzy’ feeling,” she says, and to my surprise, maybe hers, I end up telling her about the lost Comme des Garçons dress. If I were prepared to believe what I’m feeling, which I’m not, I would understand I want to tell her all my stories. That I want to go home with her. Back in the dressing room tattered beauty after tattered beauty slides down my uplifted arms, I twist to see my beaded or brocade backside in the mirror of the renovated garden shed that serves as Mendocino Vintage’s dressing room, a length of jet-beaded black twenties silk skims like cool black oil coating my nakedness. I buy not only that dress but, in the coming weeks, four others, each more far-fetched, more thrillingly unsuitable, than the last. When I bring them home, the analyst tries to hide his disapproval, he holds his tongue, but where was the perfectionist he’d believed he was getting, whose aversion to frayed hems and AWOL buttons, to shabbiness and stains and unraveling could have been taken for granted? If I want to test how frowningly far I am from ideal, all I have to do is put on one of those five dresses and pad barefoot into the living room where he is reading. All that’s necessary to elicit his dismay is give a shy spin, saying What do you think—this one? Why I keep up the pretense of not knowing how much these dresses bother him, I have no idea. I can’t help understanding that my tattered-dress obsession is going sinisterly wrong, and if what I want is his happiness, I should cut it out. He hasn’t changed, he is orderly and meticulous as ever, and within the bounds of the household whose bachelor rigor my son and I upset, he’s companionable, he is reasonable, he’s looking forward to getting married as if the Yes after Do you take this man will return his reverent analysand to him. Uncharacteristically, since he is the supreme homebody, he coaxes me to try other department stores—what about a trip to the city? The date’s coming up on us fast, he warns. And it is, but all I want is to go back to Mendocino Vintage. Sometimes I leave off molesting the dresses to try on jewelry, one afternoon when I can’t get a Victorian charm bracelet with tinking hearts and ornaments fastened she reaches across the counter, saying, “Hold on,” she takes my wrist and bends to the clasp and then comes an intimation, a sort of truth-electricity communicated by her touch. The teensy alligator snout slides into its filigree housing, the news of who she is to me comes as a small, quiet, unprecedented click, I want this, I want her—and there it is, the imperative: clasp.

  I right away start talking myself out of what I’ve just discovered.

  The analyst must have had his doubts about getting married, those doubts must have been painful, and I could write He went through with it anyway, but what I feel surer writing is I went through with it. Ours wasn’t a lightning-bolt disillusionment. Instead it grew by accretion, like trust, but in the opposite direction. What began to emerge between us was an aggravated mutual boredom, or so it seemed to me. We were two people who had conspired to remain, throughout hundreds of hours of talk, ignorant of each other. Our falls from grace—his from forbearing analyst into hurt, critical husband; mine from seductive analysand into elusive, spendthrift, antagonistic, ultimately unfaithful wife—grieved us both.

  The argot spoken by antiques dealers names—nicknames—the kinds of damage different categories of objects are heir to. By its specificity, dealers are advised to look closely, to hold the unearthed whiskey flask up into the light, to run a fingertip around the teapot’s spout. It is an undespising honesty, conceding to the world, and time, their power to mar, counting the ways. In addition to its colloquial genius, can slang be thought of as possessing a tone? Antiques dealers’ does, ruefully proposing discrimination without exclusion. Clouded glass is sick, glass that has been minutely chipped shows a little aggravation. Porcelain has fleabites or hairlines. Books are foxed. A language for imperfection that refuses to cast out the imperfect, a whole language for that.

  If you are really alive, you end up spilling plenty of milk, I say, and you, you’re going to be the alivest, you’re going to make mistakes and think fearlessly about the mistakes and go from there to the next thing that interests you, and lots of things will. And I’m going to love seeing what does, and his expression might be the expression of being told more than you need to know at the time, but if it is, he’ll choose what’s valuable and let the rest slide, the spilled milk of overexplanation easily mopped up. I’m surprised to think I think that was good enough.

  For most of my life the police state inside my head has gone about its business invisibly. Indefensible though this wish is, I confess to having longed sometimes to trade my affliction for the flare of alcoholic self-destruction so there would be a chance of someone’s being moved to intervene, to sit me down and say You need help or Work these twelve steps. I didn’t want the now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t illegitimacy of a malady all in my head, I wanted to be handed a map of recovery. To be told Make amends to everyone you have hurt.

  From: Elizabeth

  Subject: Re: bracelet closures

  Date: November 13, 2018 at 1:41:52 PM PST

  On Nov 13, 2018, at 1:24 PM, Elizabeth Tallent wrote:

  Okay my beautiful source. I need names for kinds of closures on Victorian bracelets, what I want specifically is the kind that would have been on the bracelet you fastened around my wrist. Barrel closure? I’m thinking it had one of those long narrow wedge-shapes that compresses when you slide into the matching housing—what’s that called? Are there technical names for the closure’s separate parts?—specific words—help!

  On Nov 13, 2018, at 1:34 PM, Gloria wrote:

  Bracelet closures . . . not a barrel clasp on a Victorian bracelet. More likely it was either a box clasp, which I like to call tongue-in-box clasp; a V-shaped “tongue” is inserted in a hole in the box and clicks into place. Another style would have been a fold-over clasp—the hinged side is inserted into a slot on the other side and then folded closed. Kinda like a lot of watch straps these days.

  To: Gloria

  Seriously—tongue in box? How, how, how am I gonna get away with that in the scene of how we meet?

  Cancer, though—cancer is imperfection with a mind of its own, a blister-like squamous cell carcinoma under my lower lip appearing barely a month after my son and I moved in with the antiques dealer. I tried for a long while to believe it was a cold sore whose persistence was owed to the stress of my divorce from the analyst. After the diagnosis, in the months of waiting for surgery at Stanford, the blister doubled in size, aggressive but not invasive, they said; it grew as big as a ladybug or fattened tick, and as its legs fringe a tick’s outline, miniature blood vessels emanated from the cancer. At five or six, unable to tell left from right, I had learned the oval callus on the middle finger of one hand, if rubbed by my thumb, would unerringly embody right. The cancer was oval like that callus, and the same size, and indicated a direction as surely as had the callus. I wept for the loss of my looks. Would the antiques dealer fall out of love, and if she did, who could blame her for leaving a girlfriend with canc
er on her lower lip? Meanwhile, I was involved in various magic transactions with the cancer. Primitively, I construed it as punishment. That I had brought it on myself by uncensored blurting, by my smart-ass offensiveness—How will you ever get anywhere, my father had said, with a mouth on you like that? They said the cancer might grow fast but wouldn’t travel elsewhere in my body, it was not a mortal threat, but I kept dreaming it had turned up in my armpit, in my labia, in my blood. This wasn’t an emergency, or was an emergency only to me, and the kind of surgery known as Mohs, in which tissue samples were analyzed during the surgery, which continued until a slide showed zero cancer cells, meaning the margins of the incision were clean, proved difficult to schedule. Thus the wait, during which our three lives, my son’s, the antiques dealer’s, and mine, became more closely intertwined, not only because we were living together, but because she was on her way to becoming a mother, and we alternated nights of reading to him, Where the Wild Things Are, The Golden Compass, Oliver Twist, a series he loved in which the Wars of the Roses were fought by armored and helmeted hedgehogs and foxes and mice, and one night he said softly, “What do I call her,” and I said, “Call who,” and he said, “If you are Mom, then what do I call her, Other Mom?” and I said—so, so pleased with this stroke of genius—“What about like in The Cat in the Hat, you know, where to tell the cats apart there’s Little Cat A, then Little Cat B—what about I’m Mom A, she’s Mom B, does that work?” Because I wanted the A slot, I wanted to be the first, tallest-top-hatted cat, and her lovableness was kind of threatening in that regard, and her honesty and unpretentiousness, and her being very funny, and her always doing what she’d said she was going to do, and her being the mother without cancer. I wanted my kid not to have to witness the cancer’s visible progression, or my fear, or my tears, but he proved optimistic and sensitive and calm, as did the antiques dealer, her steadiness an improbability I was hardly better equipped to believe in than I was to believe in cancer. Both struck me as mysterious. One seemed deserved. The other was love.

  There’s a sentence, only four words long, I’ve always been a little in awe of. It appears in certain books at the end of the Acknowledgments. Longer, funnier, or more charming variants occur, but in its irreducible form the sentence is: “Errors are all mine.” “All mine,” in other contexts, lays claim to something desirable, and can ring with a possessiveness exasperated or sensual, but, either way, alert to impingement. Consorting with what’s often repudiated, error, “all mine” registers as a minor tonal departure in this sentence whose essence is straightforwardness. Probably, in many works in which it appears, it’s the plainest sentence in the book, the least vulnerable to misinterpretation, and the last thing it wants to do is to startle its reader the way it startles me, disclosing, as it does, a relation between writer and error free of shame, or one in which, at the very least, shame has been sufficiently managed for the necessary honesty to make it into print. It’s not meant to leave you wondering what it feels like to write it.

  Strangers were working on me. I followed their small talk, listening for the sound of something going wrong. As surgeons whose patient was awake, their conversation was necessarily upbeat and trivial. At the same time, their voices were entirely conscious of each other, as if, like me, they could know each other only through their voices. I was lying on my back, eyes slitted against the radiance eighteen inches above, a whiteness of such depthless intensity it did not seem like light at all. I lay there figuring them out, liking one voice for its confidence, disliking another because it was flirting with the first and flirting counted as a distraction, loathing the third, which was too bad, because the third was going to work on me as well: asked by the first if she was ready, the third voice said, “I love to cut.” There was a fourth and a fifth who hadn’t done more than make low sounds of agreement. Possibly some people left, while others came quietly into the room, because once there seemed to be a sixth voice, even a seventh, while four and five were either altogether silent, or had departed for more interesting surgeries. It was a teaching hospital and observation was an essential step in instruction. Theoretically I was for that, but how many hands were actually going to cut into my lip, and how inexperienced would they be? The hands I’d seen (or half seen, my eyes narrowed against the light) so far belonged to the main voices, one, two, and three. Right now, I love to cut was wielding the scalpel I could not feel. Her saying I love to cut was, in part, flirtatious, the kind of flirtation that consists of a woman’s asserting her indifference to blood or filth or anything usually regarded as repellent, but her tone had been too emphatic, the definiteness with which she proclaimed boldness only made her insecurity clear—in short, she terrified me. The doctor cluster extended an array of arms into my field of vision. Somebody’s forearm rested on my right shoulder as if it were the edge of a bookcase, another arm angled in from the left, a third from directly over the crown of my head. Local anesthetic had been needled in and my head fastened into some kind of bracket whose cradling viselike rigor I welcomed because at least my head couldn’t do the wrong thing. The rest of my body was on its own and that was a cause of worry to me. Before my long-ago cesarean, I was racked by powerful shudders, which struck without my even having been aware I was afraid, and though my anaesthetized lower half of course remained immobile, my wrists had had to be buckled into restraints. Now I didn’t know what to do with my hands and tried to figure out what placement would appear most calm. My ridiculous striving for politeness was the only support I could offer their concentration. From what I could sense from their movements, the surgeons needed more space, they shuffled and reconfigured at whim, or what seemed like whim, and when people are sliding past each other with hardly an inch to spare, then even if you are horizontal and they are vertical, it seems a natural acknowledgment of their superior liberty to make yourself smaller, and I kept my arms straight and close to my sides. To have palms up seemed to be inviting scrutiny, as if palms could, like breasts, be naked. Cautiously enough not to attract attention, I turned my hands over. Palms down. That was better. More private. Behind and around and above my head, surgeons rustled. They gave off whiffs of intensely clean laundry. The first voice was pointing something out in the glad, peremptory tone of an interesting discovery: “Look here, right here, see these little pearls, these little pearls? These are salivary glands. Salivary glands. See?” The second voice said, “Very cool.” I love to cut said nothing because, I hoped, she was concentrating on what she was doing. I understood that while they were theoretically aware that I could hear every word, the surgeons believed their actual relation to me was the relation of awake persons to someone who had inexplicably fallen asleep in their presence. That is, they might be careful not to jostle or otherwise disrespect my body, which was laid out right there in my ordinary clothes—that had astounded me, that it wasn’t deemed necessary for me to change into sterile garb—but whatever respect would ordinarily have been accorded to my sensibility was nullified by my horizontal availability to the scalpel. A sleeper keeps breathing, her heart keeps beating, desire and fear generate images in the sleeper’s brain, but the sleeper needs no acknowledgment from others that she exists and in fact such acknowledgment would be a weird mistake, a failure to recognize the apartness of the sleeper. Their conviction that they were alone and I was not there was so natural-seeming that I began to wonder if I was supposed to be asleep, but no, I had been informed only local anesthetic would be given, because I was going to have to be able to answer questions. When I moved I was told sharply, in an astounded tone, “Hold still.” Just as if this were any other situation I thought You asshole and was sorry, because it feels dangerous to think You asshole about someone concentrating on the incision she’s making in your face. Mostly, people are aware of anger directed at them; anger begets anger, even if unconsciously. This was my mouth. That was a knife. My part in making this surgery go well was to imitate the sleeper they were pretending I was, to not hear those things that would disturb or scare me
, but was I really capable of that? I closed my eyes, I tried to prevent what was coming. It was as if the need to cry fled up from below, from the base of my throat, like champagne bubbles ascending a flute in harmless urgency, as if that wasn’t enough the same desire, this time sourced in the darkness of my brain, crowded forward to wet my eyes, and with it came my mother’s face, lost to me for years, her face in cat’s-eye glasses, and I needed her so badly, the tears started out and ran down. One winkled into my ear, a cold bead coming to rest against, it felt like, the eardrum. “Oh come on—really?” fumed the second voice, and seemed on the verge of reproving me when a huge gloved hand swam across my vision, touching a tissue to my temples where the tears had run down, blotting, and I love to cut said, “Better, now?”