Disturbances in the Field

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  “I don’t mind. I like it. Just … carry on.” I leave them to make my drink. I was afraid I’d inhibit them but my fears prove groundless. From the kitchen I can see the black girl, June, continue her impersonation.

  “‘I’m sure you’ve all heard various myths concerning masturbation.’” She switches on a leering, mechanical smile. “‘Now, what are some of the myths you’ve heard?’”

  “Blindness? Rings under the eyes?” They inspect each other’s eyes.

  “My dick-o will fall off?” the boy called Jose whines. “Oh my God!” he gasps in falsetto, clutching himself.

  A jumble of cries: “Oops! Catch it, quick! Over there! Microsurgery can do wonders.”

  Convulsions of laughter. Rolling on the floor. How long since Althea’s friends sat there performing such antics? Long; Althea’s friends have been long past that. The gradations in those years are subtle, the stages brief. I have forgotten how much I liked this barely-sixteen phase. I like the irreverence, the anarchy, the absence of control. Then it vanishes. They become proper, law-abiding citizens. They become us.

  “That’s nothing compared to menstruation. You missed it yesterday,” Ilana says to Phil, beaming a sassy smile. “You cut, you delinquent youth. ‘What myths have you ladies and gentlemen heard about menstru-a-tion?’”

  “If I wash my hair it’ll fall out?”

  A boy reaches over to grab a clump of hair. “Look at this! Comes off right in my hand.” Paroxysms.

  I take my drink and slip quietly through the room, making an effort not to limp. I can walk right if I concentrate. The limp teeters on that line between voluntary and involuntary. Sometimes I worry that it will cross over to the wrong side and become a species of tic like the woman on the bus had. Or like Mr. Zeitlowitz.

  “You’ll poison any food you touch!”

  “Help!” One boy grips at his stomach and pretends to retch, another tosses a fistful of gorp back into the bowl.

  I shut the door of my bedroom. Happiness has come to Phil and I am glad. A fine thing, too, to be educated and to relish one’s education so. Brava, courageous teacher of the nasal voice and the straight face. And bravi, boisterous outspoken children who can laugh away their discomforts. When I was a girl there were indeed whispers going round that it might be dangerous to wash our hair during menstruation. But could Phil even dream that his great-grandmothers in Eastern Europe probably visited a ritual bath after each period and had to show a bloodless white cloth to the guardian at the door before their husbands could screw them once again? Does June imagine that her ancestors in Africa shut women up in isolated huts every month for the duration? Does David understand that they bound his grandmother’s feet so she would not run away from her biological fate, and as a result here he is, cozy in these United States?

  They have a Beatles record playing now, Vivian’s favorite—the White Album, whose theme she insisted was animals. “Blackbird singing in the dead of night”—so loud I can hear every word clearly—“Take these broken wings and learn to fly. All your life, you were only waiting for this moment to arise. You were only waiting …”

  I was only waiting for this moment to lie down, after the rotten rehearsal. I undressed and stretched out. Way across the bed, on Victor’s nighttable, was the book he had been reading just before he left. Bronislaw Malinowski’s Magic, Science and Religion, opened and turned face down. Myths in abundance. I had never touched it all these months but I did now, slithered over the wide stretch of Victor’s side and reached for the book. Let’s see, at last, what myths were on his mind. What put him to sleep nights, after we lay silent or had our desultory talks or made our grim love? Victor, it appeared, had been reading about the ghosts of the deceased in the Trobriand Islands. The ghosts go to an island called Tuma, where they enter the earth through a hole especially made for that purpose, a passage Malinowski coyly calls “a sort of reversed proceeding to the original emergence.”

  Oh Victor! Is this what fed your dreams? While I slept, or stole into Alan’s room (not Vivian’s, not to startle Althea, be a mother at all costs) and stood in the dark fingering the furniture, testing the bed to see what it had felt like to be Alan and lie there safe, knowing parents lay right across the hall strong and ready for any sort of rescue? While I lay there breathing in pain you were dreaming about the souls of the dead crawling back into the earth, a reverse proceeding? God, I wish you had told me. No, you were right not to. I might have shrugged and said something dismissive, told you to go to sleep. You were right to leave, a reverse proceeding. Better than staying with me in a snowy pit in the earth.

  “Even more important,” says Malinowski, “even more important is the fact that after a span of spiritual existence in Tuma, the nether world, an individual grows old, gray, and wrinkled; and that then he has to rejuvenate by sloughing his skin.” Me. You sloughed me like an old skin. “Even so did human beings in the old primeval times, when they lived underground. When they first came to the surface they had not yet lost this ability; men and women could live eternally young.”

  They must have done something, committed some bodily sin, masturbated or washed their hair during menstruation, to suffer so huge a loss. For all the myths show self-indulgence punished by a stripping away. Just look at them go! those treasured indispensables—penis, hair, eyesight, clear skin. Tough. Let the body have its way and you lose, you lose. Careless and pleasure-loving and greedy, having babies beyond your fair share … With all my schooling I should be above such superstition, but it seems I’m not. Reason has flowed in and out of me light as air, leaving no trace except an image of the flying hair of Professor Boles. So okay, tell us, Bronislaw, what did we do to lose eternal life? Since surely we all did it, in the person of the original offender.

  They lost the faculty, however, by an apparently trivial, yet important and fateful event. Once upon a time there lived in the village of Bwadela an old woman who dwelt with her daughter and granddaughter; three generations of genuine matrilineal descent. The grandmother and granddaughter went out one day to bathe in the tidal creek. The girl remained on the shore, while the old woman went away some distance out of sight. She took off her skin, which, carried by the tidal current, floated along the creek till it stuck on a bush. Transformed into a young girl, she came back to her granddaughter. The latter did not recognize her; she was afraid of her and bade her begone. The old woman, mortified and angry, went back to her bathing place, searched for her old skin, put it on again, and returned to her granddaughter. This time she was recognized and thus greeted: “A young girl came here; I was afraid; I chased her away.” Said the grandmother: “No, you didn’t want to recognize me. Well, you will become old—I shall die.” They went home to where the daughter was preparing the meal. The old woman spoke to her daughter: “I went to bathe; the tide carried my skin away; your daughter did not recognize me; she chased me away. I shall not slough my skin. We shall all become old. We shall all die.”

  After that men lost the power of changing their skin and of remaining youthful.

  Foolish, negating creature. She refused to recognize the persevering life beneath the ravages of time. She didn’t want the miracle; she turned away, intimidated by a vision of regeneration, dazed and cringing before an eternity of opportunities, when to recognize that simple gift was to be immortal. She was punished for her failure of nerve, and we shall all die.

  The room had grown dark. I sank lower into the pillows on my side. It suddenly seemed very easy to die. Maybe the philosophy professor on the bus was right. Not as bad as we think. Not to be so dreaded. Fear had left me—it seemed the easiest thing in the world. All you had to do was give in. Yield and be taken. I was schooled for the opposite: to persist and to take. The world, they taught us, was ours for the taking. For the thinking. But I see now how to do it. You lie in a dark room and forget (I have made my bed in the darkness, Job said). You lie ready, you close your eyes, chase away will and desire like naked strangers. Easiest thing in the world. Like sl
eep. Like travel.

  I woke in a pitch-black place, cut loose. What’s the shape of the room, where are the windows and doors, what place is this? There’s only me—not a body with a past but rather a sense of me, intrinsic and impalpable. Me, ageless, and a familiar ageless panic at the dark. For I cannot even tell how far the space extends, the darkness is so thick. I have to get hold. I am in a bed somewhere. My bed feels small, set in a corner perhaps, perhaps against a smooth, paneled wall? Just above it a window, overlooking a dark comforter of trees? And maybe, yes, twelve feet off diagonally, an open door. To my left, another small bed? My right hand fumbles along the wall behind my head for the cord. There was always a light there to scatter my fears, but no more. I thrash around in the void and knock something over. Reaching down—but the floor is wrong, a rug; it should be tiled—I find a switch on a fallen lamp and turn it on.

  Ah, this. This big new bed. His side and my side. Cut loose by sleep I was almost elsewhere, in the room I shared with Evelyn in the brown house that idyllic summer, with a high window over the bed and a lamp above my head, and across from me my sister, and I was nine. If only I had not switched on the lamp. If only I could have tunneled through a hole in time to that room, that house, my parents, my sister, myself. Three broad harmonious stripes of sky, sea, and sand, and when we were lost all we needed to do was look for the yellow and white umbrella with the blue slipper hung on the broken spoke.

  On the nighttable is my sister’s latest letter, sent from Switzerland in its flimsy airmail envelope bearing her calligraphic writing in green ink. I pick it up but there is no need to reread it; I know it. She talks about her summer in the mountains, the radiant light. How she always loved heights. Yes, on the beach she claimed the enormous dunes as her own and now she is much higher, gazing down at the lands below, if she even cares to gaze down. She mentions that summer when we debated the merits of bay side and ocean side, and she was the Princess of the Beach while I struggled in the waves. She was afraid of the waves, she confesses, and she envied my rushing towards them on such intrepid feet. She thought then that unlike herself I could bear any turbulent tossing, and she thinks so still. She recalls the children, whom she saw only at wide intervals, with unbearable accuracy. She asks to be remembered to Victor and says we must make up at once. That is the term she uses, like a child, make up. Her husband Rene is well, traveling a lot. Anytime I want to come to Switzerland she will be there to receive me. Love, Evelyn. I did love Evelyn. She was my little sister. For a long time I felt deserted by her. Then when she came in February and slept in Vivian’s bed and sat by my side for five days growing paler and quieter by the day I finally understood that she simply needed to breathe thinner air than the rest of us, and I let her go home.

  I switch off the lamp, and after a while the room is not so dark any more. Not that dawn has come—dawn is still far off—but my eyes have grown used to the dark. If I close them I can feel myself in that old room with Evelyn sleeping nearby. Rich and strange, to have awakened in that room and that summer of a perfection so powerful that it endured in me and abided, dormant, ready to spring to life in the dark. For all at once the whole summer crowds around me, seeping into every sense—the briny smell of the air and the feel of the hot sand and our mother breaking off green beans from the vine for our breakfast and our father explaining that nature goes in cycles—even though I know this is the bedroom of now, which has sheltered the joys of love and its miseries, and I lie in it and weep. Not for my children and not over Victor, but in gratitude for the memory given me, a simple gift. It is incredible that in all our nights of whispering I never told him about the summer in the brown house—really told him, I mean, beyond the facts. I’ll have to tell him now. Call him up. Not speaking is so silly, I told Phil. Didn’t we love each other twenty years and he say he could look at my face forever and not tire of it? A quarter to one—I must have slept for hours—yet not so wildly late to call; I hear the soft pounding of Fleetwood Mac from Phil’s room; none of us sleeps much these days. I’m crying and smiling together, feeling utterly silly and overcome. I don’t even know what I’ll say. I’ll tell him I’m myself now, he should come back and be himself too; turning and turning we come round right. I’ll tell him about Vivian singing that Shaker melody from Appalachian Spring in the shower in her pure steady voice; about sleeping in the brown house with Evelyn and how like Vivian she was then, born so full of grace; how she was not terribly articulate either but could hold long converse with flowers, and how I used to see Evelyn every time I watched Vivie running down a beach kicking up puffs of sand, clouds of glory trailing at her feet. That he should come home right away, I see it all now. I understand everything the way you do sometimes waking abruptly in the middle of the night, but then you lose it in the sharp light of day so I had to call now, right away. Tell him about simple gifts, turning turning, the valley of love and delight. And that Phil needs him.

  I dial his studio but there’s no answer so I hurriedly dig out the slip of paper with that other number, the one in case I needed him for anything, the one I almost tore up in fury but buried in the nighttable drawer instead. It rings three times before a voice answers, “Hello? … Hello?” The voice of a middle-aged woman, sleepy, heavy, capable, and good-natured. The voice of a woman getting on in years but very much alive, very game. Breasts like melons? Her inner thighs still sticky, maybe, from him? “Hello?” She sounds concerned and maternal, and rather nice. The breath I have been holding so long escapes into the receiver. Oh Christ, I didn’t mean that, I would have spoken to her, but prudently she hangs up fast.

  Ah, well. A pretty silly idea in the first place. Wipe your foolish face. Blow your nose. One of those middle-of-the-night ideas that turn out to be ludicrous in the morning. I lie back and try to breathe evenly. It’s quite all right, nothing to be surprised at. Not as if you didn’t know. Breathe. Remember to breathe. Everything will be all right. And I do take some comfort. Because I still possess the brown house and all that went with it. That isn’t lost; the memory is mine, and the vision, the myth, however mocked and contradicted by facts. I am still the person who lived it and made the mistake of trusting it. Anyway—and I light a cigarette to wait with—he’ll call back. I give him five minutes. One minute to ask her about the call, four minutes to pour a drink, brood, and make up his mind.

  All that went with it: I remember the one thing about the brown house that was anomalous, menacing. The one not idyllic thing. The toad in the garden. Down in the clearing bordering the stand of trees that became a comforter at night was the plank of wood about twenty feet long and raised off the ground like a seesaw, only it wasn’t a seesaw. It didn’t go up and down; it spun in a horizontal plane, describing a circle. And anyone in its path, anyone inside the circle, could get knocked over, or, as my father liked to warn, sawed in half. Our parents never let us go down there alone: we couldn’t judge the extent of the circle. We would give the plank a push, then stand around nonchalantly, targets in a field, but they yanked us out of range in time. Riding it, either alone or with Evelyn, was the greatest of thrills. The world whipped around us and we kicked at its pebbly surface to make it whip faster. Our hair flew, we squealed, while our parents hung back near the surrounding trees. They were right—a dangerous toy, and it is curious that Mr. Wilson, the benevolent proprietor, should have set it in that hidden clearing in the idyll.

  The telephone rings. The desire is gone but I can’t not answer; he would soon come pounding at the door.

  “Lydia? I’m really sorry to call at this crazy hour but I had to talk to you. Are you up?”

  “I’m up, Rosalie. What is it?”

  “I feel bad about tonight. I didn’t mean to hound you, but—”

  “That’s okay. Everything you said was true.”

  “Ah!” She laughs with relief. “It’s not that I want to take any of it back. I just hate to have bad feelings between us. We’ve been together so long. But this is so important.”

  “I don�
��t have bad feelings. For a little while, maybe, but not any more. I know exactly how important it is, believe me.”

  “Well, good. I’ve been lying here thinking—the ‘Trout’ is … oh, such a sort of communal work. You know what I mean. If we mess up that aspect we’re betraying something more important than the music, even.”

  “God, Rosalie, only you could find a way to make a quintet into something political.”

  “Say what you like, Lyd, but you know I’m right.”

  She is always right. That’s the trouble. “I suppose so. By the way, since we’ve gotten so critical with each other suddenly, there is something …”

  “What?”

  “Could you not sing along? You sound like an extra instrument sometimes.”

  “Oh my! Was I that loud? All right, I’ll try not to. Definitely not at the performance. Would it bother you if I wore the green gypsy dress again? I know it’s a bit much but I kind of—”

  “Why should that bother me? You look terrific in everything. It’s only the singing.”

  “Okay, got you. I’m hanging up now. Karl is here. Right beside me, as a matter of fact. Sleeping.”

  “I figured as much. Well, have a good night. And listen—thanks for calling.”

  The moment I hang up it rings again.

  “Lydia, are you all right? The line was just busy.”

  “I’m fine. It was Rosalie.”

  “Was that you who called a few minutes ago?” I say nothing. “It was, I know. What’s wrong? Phil?”

  “No, we’re both fine, really. He had a gang of kids over tonight. It was nice.”

  “You must have called about something. Do you need anything?”

  I can’t stand that ragged edge in his voice, any more than I can answer that question. I’ll try the plain truth, as Gabrielle suggested. “All it was, was … I was remembering a summer vacation up at the Cape when I was a kid, and I had an idiotic urge to tell you about it.” There. He’ll think I’ve gone off the deep end. The plain truth stinks, Gaby. Sucks, as Alan used to say. Decimals suck. Percents suck. Fractions.