by Martha Ronk
There’s no turning back, none at all, no way to get up and take up the game of cowboys and Indians where you left off years ago before lunch. The wooden slip bead on the cowboy hat I used to slide up and down with distracted pleasure when I ran about the backyard of my childhood is cracked in two. It has vanished into the thin air of the past. It ought to be sitting on my dresser in the morning. I ought to be eight. I can hear her crying in the kitchen. I can hear the door slam.
He moved out after I finished the essay on Japanese noodle cups for a new design magazine. Perhaps it was the wrong decision. Perhaps we had delayed the decision too long. What, one wonders, is “too long.” There’s the decision itself, and there is all that surrounds it like the space inside and outside the bowl, the air around which the clay clings, the space of the white porcelain against which the brush strokes sketch in pagodas, persimmons, dragonflies, drifting clouds. The noodle cup sits perfectly in the palm of a hand.
I couldn’t open my eyes. I put ice over my crusted lids. I did every incantation I could think of, swallowed so many antihistamines I walked about in a daze, bumped into door frames, fell asleep in the afternoon, couldn’t wake up in the morning. I sprayed my nose and lay compresses across my forehead. Were you hyperactive as a child, the shrink asks. Were you given medication to slow you down, keep you from throwing yourself against the wall?
I rode the bike with wooden blocks on the pedals for five hours every day or I rocked madly in the corner of the room. Just get out of here, go out, go run around the block five times, my mother said. I broke things. Even today when I walk into a room I look first of all for the breakables and try to move as slowly as possible. Walk on the bottom of the sea, I tell myself, go more slowly, you will break it, it will fall to the ground in pieces. If you turn a somersault into the French doors, the windows will cut your knees and you’ll have scars for the rest of your life, you will, I promise you, you will. If we had collected teacups, if we had walked through the antique mart and picked up suitcases covered in stickers from foreign lands. If we’d moved somewhere; if the bodies had behaved; if I hadn’t been allergic; if it were possible to hold air in one’s hands. If only one could be other than oneself, come in a body other than the one one comes in. On some tea bowls the blue ink is deep and almost black, on others so pale as to disappear into the clay itself, pale as a line of inquiry, the to and fro of a jagged line, broken as the bamboo broom I brought home from Little Tokyo thinking to sweep with it and leaving it abandoned in a shed.
Someone is hopping up and down on one foot. The moon rises on the tea bowl. One man watches. One hides his hands in the large folds of a gown. He is bald, he is always bald. The noodle cup has been broken twice and mended twice, once in the distant past with gold. I want my life, I said, please, I said. I threw out feather pillows, scoured for mold, wore only synthetic fibers, bought products whose labels I read and reread. I stopped using soap and splashed bottled water over my swollen face. I couldn’t breathe. He moved out.
I wrote a long article on Memphis ware, clear bright glaze. It’s one of my best pieces, often reprinted. I have a house filled with precious pottery. On every surface there is a bowl filled with air. In the background my mother stands at the counter and watches silently while we eat her mashed potatoes. The monk hops up and down, up and down. I move slowly as if I were underwater. I have perfect skin; everyone says so.
Old Nylon Bathrobes
But she’s so wonderful, he insisted, the man who was my husband, and she was. When I am scrubbing things, cleaning and tidying, sentences like this come back to me as childish phrases stick in my mind and repeat and repeat as if they would solve something or change the course of events, Doctor Foster went to Gloucester, in a shower of rain; he stepped in a puddle up to his middle and never went there again. Sometimes the sentences are incantatory to prevent what I hoped wouldn’t happen, but that sometimes did. She was wonderful in that offhand way that looks as giddy as a too-short summer dress. But on her it looked as right as the bright day lilies right there at the end of a corner lot dotted with blowing scraps of newsprint and tires.
When I first met her, she was a teenager and hung out in Porter Square kicking tires and smoking cigarettes and dope with a bunch of kids and Rog. He was the only one whose name I remember because she took up with him later, before or after my husband I can’t recall, or won’t, the memory stuck in the off position, I guess. Her father worked at the See’s Candy factory, you could smell burning sugar from blocks away, although I never saw him there, only imagined the chocolate dollops on a conveyer belt, and saw him in fact only once before he died. He was on Disability and at home, thin and looking even thinner in a worn nylon bathrobe with amoeba squiggles all over it like the ones that ran all over the Formica in my childhood bathroom which I attempted to count more times than I can remember so I wouldn’t have to worry about growing hair or breasts or unmanageable desires which kept sneaking up in cars late at night. If I could only count them all, put them in some sort of scheme or pattern, although of course the whole was designed to resist pattern and not to show the dirt.
He was very ill by then and too frail to rein her in or even see her clearly. Her blond hair stood out like light streaks in that battered room with its battered stuffed furniture here and there and even on the porch. It has always seemed to me the saddest state of all, the smell of outdoor stuffed chairs, never drying out from the damp winter through the whole of the hot summer. When you sit in them you feel old yourself, as if they would pull you into the undertow, envelope and surround in a way that in normal circumstances might be comforting, but in this particular case is not.
I stared at his bathrobe so I didn’t have to think about fate, his or mine or hers, and I thought about the one I wore in a house that smelled the same, moldy and mildewed in the days when all of us thought it was cool to wear secondhand clothes, when we were young enough to toss on thrift-store shirts and look just fine, when I thought there was plenty of time and that everything would, if I waited long enough, shape up. My bathrobe was black with faded roses, my husband’s was light blue and he wore it even in the darkroom so that it smelled of fixer, a smell I hadn’t thought of for years until I walked into a store in Riverside to pick up recent prints and there he was, my husband, in his blue nylon bathrobe smelling of fixer and invading my mind.
The bathrobes painted by Jim Dine suggest inchoate gender, although why I’m not sure, except as they are like the bathrobes themselves, covering, uncovering, Frosted Night Robe III glistening with white chalk, the body beneath it white and overripe.
The Woodcut Bathrobe was begun as a single color lithograph; from this print he traced the outline of the robe. He then cut his tracing into sections and had pieces of plywood cut to match these patterns. After each wooden section was inked a different color, the plywood robe was reassembled. A Sheet of Natsume paper was relief-printed by hand by rubbing with a spoon from the back.
They hang in the pictures like sad flags, although someone who knows me well says that I say that because my childhood was sad and therefore I am sad and project it onto everything. If this sort of causality is true we might as well give up, don’t you think, not that I would argue for much human agency, but a modicum, at least, even once in a while would be fine. My husband’s sexuality wasn’t inchoate, I don’t think, a bit promiscuous perhaps, but not inchoate, indeed his gender a sort of gift he might have said, even to me. And we all are given or not given gifts, of course, her blond hair, for example, glowing there in the dim room while her father was thinning and dying.
Her mother had disappeared years ago. Married right after the war, she then freaked out and left, back to Europe somewhere or wherever she went in a babushka, folded into a neat triangle and tied under her chin, her resolve to get away, out of their poverty and sagging chairs, not what she had imagined America would be, leaving two children behind with a man who tried to give them to relatives who wouldn’t taken them. They found the girl already so tru
ant that after he died, they took her in for only a short while and then gave up, sending her back to be truant in her own neighborhood which is how my husband taking photographs in the parking lot came across her.
There they were, those kids, leaning into cars, not their own, but leaning into them nonetheless in the way of adolescents as if cars provided the ancestral hearth missing everywhere else. And my husband, the photographer, saw all this and found her wonderful, vivid and blond and wising off, which he loved more than anything in those days. In those days he too was on the edge and liked his own explosive and dramatic hyperstates, hugged them to him like silk wrapped around and tied about the waist. He liked complete irreverence and what he disliked about me was that I was tidy, scrubbing and cleaning and making doctor’s appointments and scheduling things and formulating plans in my Week-At-A-Glance, despite how young I was, buying practical shoes and marching off to work.
Some people hate going to work, but I’m not one of them. I’m grateful to have someplace to go where I can tick off items accomplished, but these things make some people crazy and so his finding at random a girl with vast enthusiasm for sex and drugs and rock-and-roll was everything he hoped for and everything he wanted on the other side of his camera. She took so many drugs so often she had to crash at our apartment, arriving at two A.M. in a state that demanded immediate attention, most of it from me, he taking photographs from various angles and with various flash attachments there in the hallway as I recall, although I can’t seem to locate any of the pictures, certain as I am that I put them carefully in orange boxes on the top shelf of the closet.
Like any good mother, I made her warm milk and bananas, wrapped her in bathrobes and blankets, while she told stories in rapid fire, hiccoughing and laughing until the room filled up with it and crying like a child and then almost ready to sleep, but he wanted the gory details so she’d comply, not, to her credit, particularly interested in reliving the night, but she knew she had a safe place to crash, and she was willing to pay. I actually think people should be allowed some privacy, but of course he was a photographer, a voyeur already in place and wanted to know how many tabs or snorts, how many boys, how many cups of coffee even though you’d think this bit wouldn’t be of interest but for him everything was of interest, the all-night cafés and the girl with the multiple earrings and the tiny turquoise bra and the endless cups of coffee. It was his love of Bartók got me, the aching and percussive harshness. The attraction is that men are so dependent and assertive at the same time, so full of rights and vulnerabilities, of enthusiasm and collapse. They sweep one along like leaves, thinking is out of the question.
When I returned from work one day the apartment was transformed by shopping carts. They had pushed ten or so over from the Star Market and decorated them all with crepe paper and hung balloons and put Christmas wrapping paper over all the white walls and Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta was blaring and it was my birthday they said, although it wasn’t, she of the bright hair, my husband, the car kids and clearly it had been going on all day and how could I refuse. One tried saying no, I can’t go along, really I can’t, I’m sure it would be grand, I’m tired, been on my feet all day, but there was no way not to join in. It was, they said, my birthday. I sat in a chair like a convict waiting for the explosions to stop, for her blond hair to stop sprouting, for everyone to stop eating the blue icing on the cake, for the nausea to pass, the drugs to have had their day.
Later one walks from one room to the other, in the bathrobe designed for such walking from here to there or from sleep to waking or from waking to getting, as they used to do in black and white movies, to bed with the pulled-down sheets, tightly tucked hospital corners my mother used to make me do on all the beds. After they’d left, I found myself walking mechanically about, repeating phrases and snatches of song, moving farther and farther back into the dark house, shutting off lights and curling into corners until I found the right one, the best one always turning out to be the one in back of the clothes in the closet, up on a wide plank of a shelf where I had a collection of buttons and bits of cloth that had been torn up for rags kept in the back closet for waxing furniture and dusting moldings. I’d done it as a child, and I did it again. I sat for hours in the dark before I got under the clean sheets and waited for the sound of the front door.
I didn’t leave him after his affair with her, although perhaps I should have. It didn’t then seem part of a pattern, just a painful lapse, just a having-been-taken-up, drawn in, unable to help himself, and perhaps it didn’t even happen that time, although the fine line between rhapsody and the sheets is often very fine. But whatever it was, it was brief and seemingly uncomplex and I didn’t allow myself to think about it so I’m as much to blame as anyone. I just didn’t want him to go away. It’s more than love. It’s the being taken with the reality of another person, you just can’t stop believing in it, though all the evidence tells you to turn him into an object. Get over there on the shelf, you want to say. You are a frayed robe, go hang yourself up in the closet, your arms droop, your hem is uneven, you have no chest hair. I said, Can’t we talk about it or get a therapist or find out what’s wrong or something, but he said, Talking fucks up everything and I knew he was right. I just couldn’t help thinking there must be something to do, some way to fix it.
Some years later she disappeared into Mexico—lost and druggy, more of that fate, I’m afraid, playing itself out, although it happened years after I feared something bad might happen. No one’s been able to find her. It was random, a one night of raucousness she hadn’t planned for or counted on, or at least her boyfriend told me that, it just happened, random-like he said, as if there were no way to make more sense of it than that. She just disappeared, he said. Where were you, I accused, but he returned with familiar lassitude, It doesn’t matter really does it, it just happened, he said and I thought, If only you had or if only I had, and then I stopped myself because there is no way of making any sense of it or of that life that comes into one’s life in the human form that takes the air out of us.
But as anyone knows, descriptions don’t match facts, but rather are made in the space hanging between, in this case the girl and my husband, who described her with hands, gestures, face, smile, and the bland phrase she’s so wonderful which could never convey his being taken by her grit and giddiness, the way she leaned against the hood of the car, hooking one toe under and putting a hand on a hip to sway and pull at the knotted sash. My own awe was, of course, tempered by jealousy, not at her youth, since I wasn’t so much older and didn’t have much sense of what that might mean until years later, but by her way of plunging into things.
I might wish it were otherwise, might wish I were different, might even wish things had arranged themselves differently, but they hadn’t. The fate of all of us seems determined, looking back as I am now, by that moment with her and him and the bathrobes. When I met her father in that collapsing dim room with the open boxes of half-eaten chocolates, I saw her fate written on the bathrobe he was wearing, everything contained in paisley scrawl: her fate, his fate, my own perhaps. There’s a pattern I’ve come to see behind everything that happens—nothing psychological or traumatic, but a pattern etched somehow in the objects one encounters so that everything has to turn out as it does. If it were only aesthetic, I suppose, we wouldn’t mind the power of objects so much; if it were just the making of a pattern, concave, convex, light and shade, the positive and the negative space in a painting by Jim Dine, but, of course, it never is.
The Score
The man without memory remembered everything. He knew the dates especially for historical events that happened in The City, the name for the city of San Francisco. You don’t understand, I said to my friend, it isn’t that he doesn’t remember, it is that he can will himself to forget. Now that’s a gift most don’t have, I mean not if you’re not immoral or criminal. I mean, those guys might be different and I’m not talking different, just slightly. It’s the kind
of willpower you mostly get with ballplayers you know, I mean when you watch them you know that they can just will most anything.
My friend says yeah, run right up to the hoop fast as you can, and then just before you shoot, relax the hands. What I’m talking about, I said, except this guy’s no ballplayer, way older and out of shape and it’s like what you said, full speed ahead and then nothing, not a jot of a night that you had a conversation that changed your life and even his maybe and where does it all go, I asked, watching Kobe put it right through.
I ask the man without memory if he will talk to me about what he says he doesn’t remember and he says it’s no use, nothing’s any use if you have to talk about it. The past is the past, he says. No use going over the past. I say, remember it was in the fifth year we were together and it was when we realized there’d be no time like the present and I’d get older, and then we’d just have the house and the dog even if we did get some other animals or something. I’ve seen other couples, I said, with more than one dog, three sometimes even in the small apartment, and walking them all in the park late on Sunday afternoons with the dying eucalyptus and the dust blowing up all around. Anyhow, even then we realized it would be later on soon enough, and then it’d all be carved out for us and we couldn’t change it. You know those decisions that loom as substantial and are, even if you pretend they aren’t and even if you pretend time will slow down because you want it to and you won’t be left high and dry. You want everything in slow motion like walking to school on a snowy day when you lived where it snowed and time just seems to keep on being the same time for a long time.
Later he takes me to the oldest bar in North Beach and we sit there surrounded by wood and glass and Cinzano, gleaming red from the highest shelf, and he tells me about the baths near the pier and about the old guys in rubber caps who plunge in the icy cold in the winter, year after year. Now those are guys, he says. I say, could we go back over it please, and he says of course first, first he says of course before he talks about how he lost his wedding ring on the edge of a washstand in a gas station in North Dakota where he remembers the exact town and the exact date and wanted to fish it out of the drain but the attendant said no. And I say something about how he’d said of course, but then the moment has passed and after this we get to watching the game on the TV overhead and we just think then about the movement of the teams from one end to the other and neither of us says much or remembers anything but the score which changes from time to time in the small square at the bottom of the screen.
