by Susan Hahn
Some things definitely are not yet finished for me—maybe never will be—like the impulses to fix, explain, and protect my family. Surprisingly, unconcluded business is okay here—it is the norm. You can imagine when the psychiatrists arrive here how appalled they are, actually stunned, by this fact and it makes the more thoughtful ones doubt doubly what real use they were in life, and rush to seek out Freud and Jung to talk about it and find out what they think.
Here, I have started traveling to Lao Tzu—the Chinese philosopher born five hundred years before Christ, because I need some lessons in the letting go of ego—that which Freud thought to strengthen, as he did with his construct of superego and, of course, there was also his mission to weaken the id. Lao Tzu believes the opposite, that our true nature when left unfettered—untethered by society’s aggressive competitions and demands—is quite lovely, gentle, and kind and should be nurtured. (I know this way of thinking is problematic when considering the behavior of a man such as Herr M, so I am left somewhat confused. Probably because I am only at the beginning of an authentic understanding of this new way of thinking.)
Recently a specialist has been hired to carefully move my mother’s arms and legs. While he is doing this, he sings Hungarian lullabies to her. This knowledge especially touches me, because I imagine it is reminding my mother of her mother singing to her when she was an infant—a time when Grandmother Idyth was at her calmest, when she had only one child to care for and Grandfather Cecil was very much alive. I picture him reading his books, his head bent over, his frameless spectacles on, with a smile on his face, as Grandmother Idyth sings to their baby Rose in their native language. A rare, almost singular, above-the-ground moment where everything peacefully and naturally connected for the Slaughter family, when it was at its smallest and, perhaps, at its best.
Because my mother cannot move the right side of her body at all, her private caregivers prop up her in a chair and comb her waist-length hair. There, she watches herself in the mirror, wasting away. Cecilia’s hair, too, is almost waist-length. And yes, I did—still do—envy Cecilia a bit—her longer life, her distinctive beauty, her high-spiritedness, her explosions of talent. But for all of it this, I am forever aware she pays a large price.
With her auburn hair, deep violet eyes, and pale skin Cecilia is almost a rainbow of contrasts. My mother’s eyes have no depth, almost look like cheap blue glass, but coupled with her long blond hair, the result had a striking effect—that is, for a Jew. “The Golden Calf Effect” was what Cecilia called it, and my father made sure his “jewel” was bejeweled with emeralds, diamonds, sapphires, couture clothes—her favorite, Dior—and a white Mercedes—a car which Aunt Lettie always made excuses not to ride in, would not go near, as she would not anything German.
I was the plainest plain—not quite ugly, just rather poorly defined. I looked like my father, with imprecise jelly features, a nose with too much cartilage at the tip, so that when I would smile it would bump into my upper lip and make my face look almost cartoonish. When I wore lipstick, which was not often, there would always be a smudge of it on my nose stem between my nostrils. I was forever scrubbing it off. Early on I gave up on makeup. The most I ever had on was when I was embalmed.
I was, however, highly accomplished with a PhD in English from Princeton “no less.” My father would tag on the “no less” every time he said Princeton. When my sickness reappeared the final time, I had been the associate editor of a journal entitled Contemporary Philology for well over six years. My parents would brag about this, too, and it always made me queasy. My face would grow hot and I would start to sweat. I had no grace.
My most distinctive feature was enormous breasts with huge areolas and long nipples—everything about them felt and looked cowish to me. Only one man obsessed on them. I was, however, quite taken by the whole of him. He was a mechanic—all hands that moved with quick precision. I found his rough, scabby skin and his dirty nails quite sensual—quite reptilian. When he touched me I always felt I was experimenting with the forbidden. I became Eve after the knowledge of all the trouble this could cause, and I did not care.
I loved the soiling stimulation. Our house was kept so antiseptic spotless and intact, filled with furniture made in England and France, rugs flown in from the Orient, and crystal from Waterford and Baccarat. If the smallest figurine collected a bit of dust, it was quickly wiped off by a housekeeper, or if an object were for some reason moved from its place, it was upon my parents’ notice, immediately set right according to their rules and taste.
I met Wyatt—a high school dropout—when I was sixteen and he eighteen. My mother’s car was in the shop a lot and one day, after I got my driver’s license, she asked me to pick it up. I bicycled over there and it was Wyatt who lifted my bike with one arm, as if it weighed nothing, and put it in the trunk for me. I saw the curves of his muscles—their flex—and the strength in his huge hands. I thought, “If it had been a motorcycle he could have done it with equal ease.” Soon after, he started putting those powerful, greasy hands on my breasts and eventually on the rest of me.
He nicknamed me “CT,” a play on “Ceci.” It was for what he called my “cow teats,” which he would milk forcibly with great prowess. The pain I would feel from this was at once excruciating and exhilarating, like continuously being annihilated and then brought back to life. Afterward I would look in the mirror and study how my areolas flamed to a blood red and my nipples further elongated and were cracked from small cuts made by his teeth. Of course, at the time I would have never used such descriptiveness. The seasoning of being here has made me freer.
It is true, sometimes in the physical life there is a convergence between over-excitement and humiliation. Even early on I felt this. Had I lived longer I would have written an in-depth essay or, perhaps, a book on it, connecting it to the classical myths with their own seductions, strange conversions, abuses, and exaltations—Zeus as the swan and Leda opening up wider and wider to him, needing to swallow him inside her as much as He needed to enter her, no matter the pain. I had many incidents with Wyatt to draw on.
One winter Sunday afternoon when we thought my house was empty, we curled into each other in the library on the wine color leather couch, naked, covering ourselves with the thickly braided, ecru cashmere afghan that my mother had knitted. All the family agreed it was so absolutely plush and gorgeous, which, in fact, it was. Under its beauty, Wyatt and I made a tent of baseness—quite the opposite of the dignified decor of the room.
The library’s walls were lined with photographs of my parents with the newly rich and, sometimes, truly famous. Over the couch there was a large photograph of my father shaking hands with Eleanor Roosevelt and next to it my mother solicitously bending over Carl Sandburg—her décolletage revealing more than a hint of breasts—offering him another helping of beef as he sat at our dining room table for dinner. He had a polite, but quizzical expression on his face as if saying to himself, “Who are these people and what in the world am I doing here?” When the day of that dinner arrived, Cecilia, at ten, told me almost prophetically, “I’m never cooking for Carl Sandburg. I’ll just be him and then your mother can cook for me.”
Wyatt had abruptly spread my knees apart with his muscular thighs—as he always did—and was about to jam himself into me, when my father and my uncles stormed into the room. I still remember how the air smelled with that unexpected burst of old, winter soot. They yanked at Wyatt—pulled us apart—and threw him out of the house. I do not think anyone except Uncle Emmanuel saw my naked body. He focused on my breasts. I saw his long pause and he knew I saw it.
Everyone knew Emmanuel Slaughter to be a smutty man, knew he caused his brother Abraham, Abraham’s daughter Cecily, and his own wife Sonya, great unhappiness. After his death Aunt Sonya bleached her gray hair blond again, bought stylish clothes, and put an ad in the personals and, of course, cut her age by fifteen years. Obviously, this did not sit well with the family, but it did give them a lot to talk about. Celi
ne, her daughter, never acknowledged this. In her mind her mother will always remain “that dowdy, beaten-down, long-suffering broken woman”—something Celine has vowed never to become. After Celine put Aunt Sonya into the ground, she turned away, never looking back, never returning to her mother’s grave. And although Cecily promised Celine never to write about her, she is putting Aunt Sonya’s “man-packed” grave scene into one of her plays—the men being part of Celine’s ever-increasing collection.
Cecily loves to write about our family. The only person she never writes about is her father, Uncle Abraham. While fighting in World War II, he was captured for well over a year, returning to this country a prisoner of his own mind. He was the only person who could brighten Grandmother Idyth’s eyes, give them a little life. She would even take his hand. Maybe because he was her youngest—her baby—or maybe because she could tell he understood what it meant to have, if not a broken mind, at least one badly cut into—something Cecily believes she, too, understands well.
When Uncle Abraham returned after the war, as an outpatient in the rehabilitation hospital, he made a bracelet for Cecily. It was a strip of pliable tin with her name carved into it with open delicate spaces around each letter and small, carefully hammered pinpoint indentations in the shapes of two flowers at both ends. She was just a baby then, but as she grew up and grew into it, she has never taken the bracelet off. Because it is so tarnished now and oddly bent, it goes well with the stained look she has costumed for herself—“the stain” first put there by Uncle Emmanuel.
When Uncle Abraham died he left Cecily his Purple Heart. She feels it is the color of her own heart gone bloodless and when the anger and isolation she experiences grows too large, it is then she takes out her pen to fill the festering emptiness. I do understand this—to a point.
Unlike Aunt Lettie, Uncle Abraham never spoke about the war. About what it was like being held by the Japanese for so long. About what exactly had been done to him; what he saw being done to others. Yet he always listened intently to Aunt Lettie’s stories, his face crimson, while everyone waited and hoped that he, too, would say something. That never happened. He took all those experiences into the ground with him.
If you go deep enough into most family histories in this cemetery you will find a gulag, a stalag, a pogrom, a concentration camp, and the souls who stayed so silent in their lives about what happened to them in such places talk freely to each other here. Sometimes the dead historians are allowed to listen. They then find out that their writings, their books, are so incomplete because the many voices who knew so much chose silence and it is also then that the dead historians worry that is why these horrors keep happening over and over again, which indicates an over-thinking of the power of themselves and their writings.
In the weeks and months after Wyatt left, I would pull hard at my nipples, not just for the excitement it would bring, but for how much I needed to remember that he had once been there—in my life, in me. That he truly had existed and how he had the power to make me feel—feel wonderfully wild. When I would tell Cecilia, “He Was My Greek God, My Satyr, My Myth,” she would laugh with such joy, and when she quieted, she would take both my hands in hers and whisper the most melancholy, “yes, yes, Ceci, oh yes.” She never tired of how many times I needed to say this and needed to hear her response. I can still hear her sweet girlish voice.
I often wondered if money were involved—if my father gave Wyatt money to leave me alone—for he never called again, and eventually I learned he had left town. I know it was then that the cells in my body began their slow mutations into an unrelenting grief that would chew at me piece by piece and eventually swallow my life. Of course, there were other factors that conspired with this. I had put myself on birth control pills when they were filled with mega-doses of hormones, which I continued taking for over seven years, always hoping for Wyatt’s return. Celine knew a doctor to whom I quite eagerly, boldly, and naively went and came away with a large prescription. Having such a beautiful mother also did not help my anguish, especially as I grew older. I would see the alarm in people’s eyes when they first met me, as if I were an alien, a mutation, a mutt, not just a physically unattractive person.
Alan Gross did not help either. He was the editor of Contemporary Philology. At first we got along quite well, but when I started getting published in places where his work had been rejected, he became quite cruel—verbally abusive—called me awkward, ugly, fat, and stupid. One day I taped a bulky recorder to my chest and put on a loose-fitting sweater to cover it. When I saw him, I ran into the ladies’ room and in a stall, I clicked it on. It was perfect. I caught all his meanness on that tape. However, when I went to Human Resources at the university, the woman there said my evidence was not good enough. I did see her eyes tear up as she listened to his words—she did feel how they burned, how they branded. But, she then composed herself and said, “There is nothing I can do with this, no matter how terrible it truly is. There has to be proof of physical abuse or that he has stolen something personal from your office or your purse for you to file a complaint.” I remember her voice. The tremble of it.
I found out that day that legally you could say such things to women in the early 1980s and easily get away with them. Alan Gross’s just verbal assaults, however, did have a terrible effect on my still living body and soul. He did, in fact, steal something from me. I cannot blame him for my illness, but I will forever believe he helped put a halt to its remission.
I remember the day he told me, “Look it, if there’s to be one star in this office, it’s going to be me.” He always used too many words when he spoke. Throwaway ones like look it, you know, and like maybe. He loved himself much more than any affection he had for language. However, I thought it so odd when he claimed one-star status. His perception was so off, his vision so narrowed, as if he were trying to shine a lit matchstick on himself. Philologists are never famous in the larger world of fast food, wide Technicolor movie screens, television sitcoms, easily accessible pornography, and missiles that can take out cities far away.
Everything about him I found repulsive and ridiculous, although I loved his last name because of how well it fit him. He had a bulbous nose, with at least a double layer of cartilage—far worse than mine. Sometimes when I looked at him I thought this might be why he was always so angry. I obviously had my own longstanding issues with unattractive excess, so I could almost understand his problems with Gross homeliness. Though he did not lack for sexual favors from women—mostly his students. In the eighties you could also easily get away with this. They bought into his cachet because they were so young and thought that they, too, could become famous philologists.
In Greek philos means “love” and logos means “word.” I loved the ancient texts, the myths—the study of grammar, the classical traditions associated with a given language. For this I had a passion even larger than when Wyatt long ago had so deftly—and ferally—manipulated my breasts. Of course, looking at all the Greek god statues, especially in their nakedness, did remind me of him and the glory of his body, which always resulted in reigniting my despondency.
I would take out Frank Sinatra’s “Only the Lonely” record album and play the music over and over, while staring at its cover—Sinatra with that one tear running down his cheek, looking like a sad clown—looking like Perriot.
Secret references to my obsession with Wyatt and my memories of his sculpted image can be found in the papers I wrote, and writing these did give me some amount of pleasure—as does the fact that they are still being discussed in tiny circles along with the one book I published. I do admit to still liking a small amount of polish on my own ego—something I continue to work on.
Alan Gross is never talked about except by he, himself to his most naive students, although having sex with them is far more problematic because of recent university rules and the fact that he is now old. Soon he will die and the stars will stare down on him in all his anonymity. He will never have even a moment of the
twinkle and shine he still hungers after, unlike my mother, who has enjoyed a long stay in the spotlight of a small space—center stage.
I am readying myself for her arrival. She will lie between my father and me. My father exhausted himself in life from all his bloat about himself, causing not only his ego but also his soul to fragment from the fatigue of needing to work so hard to keep itself whole, and he remains quite scattered and quiet. I, however, have spoiled well—that awful, thick makeup they smothered me with is long gone and I am left with just sleek bones and a few fibers of the white silk chemise that was slipped onto whatever the doctors did not cut from me—and I have also been quite spoiled by the richness I have found in all the worlds I can now enter and the freedom they bring to my words.
Here, no one cares to—or can—yank from me my story.
TRICHOTILLOMANIA
Mother twisted every action
to suit my father’s mood,
which ran from sour to bittersweet.
Mother only had one motion of her own—
she picked
her scalp as if searching for the right
hair would lessen
all the tension. I’d watch
her hand curlicue into a question
mark, tear out the nervous
answer, examine what
she plucked, toss her head,
then pat it
as she would to soothe
my cousin’s in the crib.
Once I brought a tweezers
to help her
grab what I thought
she wanted. She let me explore
the ruins underneath her beauty
shop creation. I touched
the sores and stubble, tried to
yank out all the trouble
