Channeling Mark Twain

by Carol Muske-Dukes

  I stopped writing and pondered the plight of my students behind bars: locked up for copping a tube of lipstick, for snagging a bottle of Rain. (If I’d slipped a glass bottle into my pocket that day at Kiehl’s—would I be locked up?) Women behind bars for loitering. Behind bars for palming a nickel bag, for lifting a handful of potato chips for a two-year-old, for blowing a pimp’s head off.

  I would not be locked up. I was white and educated and middle-class. Society would provide me with all the answers. Unlike my imagination, which asked all the questions. What I had written would not interest society, I thought. I wasn’t sure it would interest anyone, even me.

  I went back to work on my poem.

  I come from twin cities: Dark and Light.

  Two hours later, K.B. came in. He put his bag down, shrugged out of his jacket, and waved. His collar and tie were pulled askew and he sported the beginnings of a beard, red-brown five o’clock shadow.

  “Have you been writing?” he asked.

  “I’m dragging,” I said. “Dragging the muse. Cellblock slang.”

  “I’m starving,” he said. “Let’s get dressed and go out.”

  “A penny for your thoughts, Holly,” K.B. repeated. He laughed.

  “Or a cool million for the entire syntactical map.”

  We were dining at a French bistro in the neighborhood. I loved to go out to dinner—I loved candlelight and flowers—a glass of wine, tête-à-tête conversation. I admitted this to almost no one (How bourgeois was I?), but K.B. of course knew. So on his nights off, we sometimes indulged. He put on his dark brown corduroy jacket and a tie and I wore a granny dress and boots. I always thought that the waiters assumed we were brother and sister, with our long blond hair and twin nervous gestures. Brother and sister, sometimes holding hands, wrapped in intense conversation, faces candlelit.

  I put down my menu. “It’s just the usual,” I said. “I don’t know where I’m supposed to go with this class. What good is it to teach people how to write poetry or write about their lives when they’re either locked up for stealing penny-ante stuff or facing life in prison? Or in the madhouse?”

  “I would say that’s exactly the reason to do it.”

  “But you help people—I mean, you help them in practical ways. They end up healthier, they get knowledge about medical care. You find a wheelchair for somebody, free X-rays. I try to help them find a way to express themselves—but every poem sounds like a cry for help and I can’t do a damn thing.”

  K.B. looked tired, as always: dark circles under his eyes. He’d been up late all of the preceding week. He brushed his hair back from his eyes and nodded to the waiter. He had such quiet acuity, such grace in restraint and authority in that restraint—his family had Quaker roots. He had an uncle, a pacifist, who had stood on street corners in Sacramento in the fifties wearing PEACE and BAN THE BOMB signs, a teacher who lost his job because of his quiet protest. When K.B. and I were married in Minnesota, this uncle, Gordon, had sent us a silver hurricane lamp and a poem by Rabindranath Tagore.

  “Language,” K.B. said, “words, the power to express consciousness: that’s monumental in terms of the brain. And then poetry, the power to express consciousness perfectly: beyond our ability to describe neurologically. Some combination of the limbic and pure lateralization? No wonder it’s considered the highest art. And in terms of the brain, a mystery.”

  The waiter arrived. We ordered, wine was poured.

  “Here’s the thing,” said K.B. “I have a patient who has aphasia—you know, aphasia?” He looked inquiringly at me, over a pair of invisible spectacles.

  “Post-stroke? Where the patient loses speech?” I struggled to remember what he’d told me, what he’d read to me at random from his clinical texts.

  “Or ability to communicate through writing or any sign. It can be ataxic, which means motor, or sensory—or both.”

  “I’m not sure I remember the difference.”

  “In motor aphasia, patients know what they want to say but can’t manage to get it out. They just can’t coordinate the muscles controlling speech. With sensory, if the auditory center is involved, the patient is unable to grasp spoken words. If the visual word center is affected, we have simple visual aphasia: the patient cannot see the written word, a.k.a. word blindness.”

  “Word blindness,” I repeated.

  “And then there’s a version called fluent, where the words are easily spoken by the patient but those words are incorrect and may be unrelated to the import of other words articulated. It sounds like nonsense, but with structure. Then there’s optic aphasia, where a patient can recognize a thing but cannot name it—the patient has to have sound, touch, and taste all involved in order to identify anything.”

  The waiter brought plates of food. We barely noticed him as he set them down in front of us.

  “I have a patient, a woman, who has fluent aphasia—she sounds inspired, till you really listen to what she has to say. Today she said to me something like: ‘Doctor, why are the windows crying? I want to talk to you about the wings, the colors I’ve been waiting to break here on my shoulders.’ I memorized it, because it was so wild.”

  “But that’s poetry. She was speaking poetry.”

  “That is language pathology, a neurological deficit. She cannot communicate what she thinks she is actually saying.”

  “But maybe it’s not a deficit. Maybe the stroke bumps language to a poetic plane? Maybe she is communicating perfectly—it’s the rest of the world that is limited in understanding. If evolution has given us language—and if poetry is its highest expression—then as far as poetry can go represents the far edge of consciousness. A refinement through pathology—is that possible?”

  “Holly—she was trying to ask for her knitted shawl, because she was cold.”

  K.B. smiled at me across the table, then touched me lightly under the chin with his fingertips.

  “Let’s eat, Holl,” he said. “This is going to get cold. Speaking of cold.”

  “Meaning,” I said, “is just something we all shake hands on. I mean static meaning, imposed meaning. Look at my mom. I can track her syntactical leaps—is she a linguistic blender, or an evolving alternative form of consciousness?”

  “Holly,” he said. “That’s a filét of sole in front of you. There’s also rice and a couple spears of asparagus. And a glass of pretty good wine. Drink up.”

  “Okay, K.B.” I said. “Why are the windows crying?”

  “Holly.” He gazed into my eyes, smiling. “She’s still freezing cold, she still needs that shawl. Are you going to praise her poetical aberration—or are you going to translate, and get the poor woman what she needs?”

  I began to wonder if I myself were suffering from a form of aphasia—a word loss, a word disconnection or twisted desire that made me unable to confront K.B. in language, talk to him about what I was feeling. What was there in my past that made me unable to articulate what I most wanted to say?

  I thought of my father—a man who spoke directly, but as a salesman, a businessman. He believed in self-reliance and industry. His looks reinforced his views. Six foot three and blue-eyed, his thick black hair turned white at thirty. He towered like a snowcapped peak.

  His mother, my grandmother, looked like a mountain as well. She was untouchable, not one to hug—tall, strong-boned, with a graduate degree in education: lone teacher in a one-room Dakota schoolhouse. An angelic presence gone hard, her red-gold hair pulled back severely, her pale freckles. “Uff da,” said my grandmother, taking me aside in the parlor of their farmhouse and opening her family Bible to show me the frontispiece—the list running down the page. “My parents, my sisters,” she noted proudly. I looked at the column of names, writ in a delicate spidery hand, then out fell a sepia photograph. She pointed to a blurred figure.

  “Caroline, my mother’s sister, in our town, outside of Oslo,” she said. “Before the family came here.

  “She wrote poems,” she added, and glanced down at me. “It m
ade her excitable. She ran outside in the dead of winter to look at the night sky—with her long hair soaking wet from her bath. She did not dry herself properly, Caroline, she ran outside! And listen here, Holly, she died of pneumonia, her little poem in her hand. Yah, yah, think of such a thing!”

  She clucked disapprovingly, her pale brow a kind of insurmountable statement, composed. I thought of her suddenly as Plato, Plato in a housedress and apron, throwing all the poets out of the Republic for being irresponsible, for making it seem somehow intoxicating to run outdoors in glacial cold, half toweled off, wild wet hair blowing, to recite poems willy-nilly to the sky.

  I stared again at the shadowed figure in the snapshot.

  She’s mine, I remembered thinking, secretly thrilled about the poems, the wet hair, the White Night sky. My ancestor.

  Maybe that was it, I thought. Maybe I’d acquired the gene for dérangement, as in the image of the Poète Maudit. Yet somehow the decadent passions of Baudelaire or Rimbaud simmering in the DNA of my Norwegian ancestors seemed less likely than a legacy of stolidness: I was just another stiff inhibited leaf of the family tree.

  But perhaps I was more an Ibsen character—a woman struggling to free herself from repression, the bonds of misogynist convention? I began to warm to this idea—perhaps this was the explanation for what seemed wrong with me. Maybe having been a misfit as a little girl was truly the basis for enlightened feminism, not a clumsy resistance to self-expression. (I hadn’t noticed that I’d come full circle in my thinking.) Then I thought of my tribe of brothers and jotted down a memory:

  “She’s like a mad dog,” my older brother said to my mother, looking over his shoulder scornfully yet fearfully at me. “She gets punched and kicked, but she won’t let go. She gets you by the ankle and hangs on with her teeth.”

  My mother set down a mixing bowl and sighed. It was a hot July day and my other brother had recently demonstrated to her that he could burp the entire alphabet in the key of G and she was not tremendously interested in this new yet familiar sibling information.

  “You let your sister play—whatever the game is,” she said. “‘She has a heart too soon made glad’—so you let her play.”

  She went into the pantry for more flour and I grinned horribly at my brother and held my nose. I was ten years old, skinny, with bedraggled pigtails.

  “Hey, Einstein,” my brother sang out, “how does it feel to be ugly beyond all human comprehension?”

  “Hey, you tell me first how it feels to combine the intelligence of a concrete slab with the energy of a whippet!”

  We traded quick brutal blows, silent and deadly. He grabbed my upper arm and twisted it in an Indian burn, slow and steady. I kept pummeling him with my free fist, and I did not cry out though my arm hurt a lot. I was more or less indifferent to the pain inflicted by my four brothers. I was spectacularly unpopular with the male sex, mainly because I tagged along, the lone girl, to events to which I was not invited. I was used to hockey sticks tripping me up on the skating rink, beanballs, bloody noses, my head held underwater for long counts, a long string of drool suspended above my face as I was held down, then the drool cheerfully sucked up at the last minute: I would never cry out or give up, ever.

  My mother came back with the flour and my brother quickly released my arm with a final pinch and banged out through the screen door. The truth was, despite the fact that I thought my older brother was the funniest person I’d ever known—in my terrible proud heart I believed that I was smarter than my brothers, that I was stronger and braver, and I would not accept evidence to the contrary. Death was preferable, I thought, to conceding defeat.

  My mother looked at me as I balanced on one foot, twirling a little, mindlessly, rubbing my arm.

  “Holly Ann,” my mother said, “I see a difficult life ahead for you, especially when it comes to men. You have a mouth that could stop a twenty-ton truck and a heart full of pride.”

  She strode to my side and took my arm—still sore, though I didn’t wince—and looked into my eyes.

  “There are actually young women who think about pleasing men—who dress nicely and flatter these men and try to get along with them. If you persist in your willful stubborn and unattractive behavior—not only will men run screaming from you—if they somehow get stuck with you at some point, they may try to push you out the window, you know?”

  I looked into her wide face like mine, her light eyes like mine, and smiled.

  “Bring them on,” I said.

  “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall,” she quoted. “You know that.”

  I knew that, but I was that terrible combination, martyr and arrogant troublemaker. I had read, with the encouragement of nuns, about the virgin martyrs. For example, Saint Maria Goretti, a young Roman girl, whose fevered face floated before a kind of banner: DEATH BUT NOT SIN. I wasn’t clear on what the sin was supposed to be, but I liked Maria Goretti’s allor-nothing style. I thrived on extremity. Maria had been stabbed for refusing to commit whatever sin it was. I had made her approach my own, though my motto was slightly altered: Death but Never Concede.

  “Though it’s true,” my mother added as an afterthought (it was her afterthoughts that drove me crazy—the coda that usually contradicted what came before), “that I was named salutatorian at graduation. I should have been valedictorian. But that honor always went to a boy. Is that unfair? Yes. ‘Wail, for the world’s wrong!’ And, Holly? It’s men who keep it that way.”

  I found myself more confused than ever. K.B.’s shawl for the aphasic woman wasn’t enough, I thought sadly, or Naomi’s shawl, held out for wheat or sex, sugar-coat. Surely great kindness and passionate love both deserved words beyond the gesture itself. And how could I determine what anyone in the workshop needed beyond lessons in how to write a poem? Each one of my students’ faces appeared before me. I found myself staring as I thought of Roxanne’s megawatt smile. Just the week before, Roxanne had stopped me at the classroom door and confided in me. She’d been busted with a very famous counterculture celebrity. She’d been his date and hadn’t really known what was up, she said. They’d been smoking dope, then doing lines of coke. They ended up at a party at the Chelsea Hotel, where she suddenly grasped that a major coke deal was going down. “I had no idea,” she kept repeating. “I had no idea that he was carrying all that blow.” The celebrity attempted to sell several grams of pure pharmaceutical cocaine to what turned out to be narcotics agents. She and the celebrity were arrested and taken away. They were both released on their own recognizance. The next thing she knew, he’d skipped town.

  “He disappeared,” she said, her Liza eyes wide. “Nobody knows where the fuck he is.” In the wake of his disappearance, she was taken into custody again and held without bail.

  “So you’re the fall guy,” I said, recalling a screaming newsstand headline in the Post.

  “No,” she said. “If they’d’a got him, they’d’a thrown the book at him. They were gloatin’.”

  “So now they’re going to throw it at you?”

  “Here’s the thing,” she whispered. “I just don’t want anyone in the workshop to know who I am. He’s so famous, you know? And the case has been all over the papers. My name’s kind of been in the background and I want it to stay there. Plus I want to protect him, you dig? My pal X?”

  “Sure,” I said, without really understanding. “I won’t say anything. Don’t worry.”

  She smiled at me. “It wasn’t even great blow,” she said. “It was overcut with Menit, a French baby laxative. You know what I mean? Inferior shit. Must’ve kept those narcs fuckin’ regular for a month.”

  She laughed for a while at her own joke. It was only after I’d left the prison that day that I realized she was probably going to turn state’s evidence against her pal X, the counterculture celebrity, in order to save her own ass. And who, knowing the score, would ever fault her?

  “I wrote something different than everybody else’s so far,”
she said in the workshop. She passed out copies of her poem that she’d somehow gotten made, probably in the Social Services office.

  “I wrote about astrology,” she said. “The stars, you know?”

  “The wilderness of stars,” said Polly, sitting back and closing her eyes. “You can set sail in them stars.”

  “A good place to start,” I said. “The wilderness of stars.”

  Roxanne’s poem was funny. The workshop was laughing together for once, and it made me happy, even in my uncertain mood. I looked around the table at the faces—Never, Sallie, Polly, Akilah, Darlene, Gene/Jean, Baby Ain’t, Billie Dee, and Roxanne—and I thought, I’m so lucky. I thank my lucky stars that I’m here in the company of these women. Even Akilah was laughing—I’d never even seen her wholeheartedly smile before, and now she was throwing her head back and wiping her eyes. I glanced at Aliganth, and she was smiling too.

  It was good that we had that moment, because the Future was preparing a little something for all of us. Those ink-black eyes staring out of the unknown (not Where We Come From but Where We Are Headed), those eyes staring back into the self as the dead stared back at those gathered around the bed weeping—in long-ago days, when pennies were placed on the eyelids of the gone. Back when a mirror was held up to the dying mouth, the hand holding the mirror trembling, the heart hopeful for a little cloud of breath on the clear surface. We also stared, and laughed, as if prison were a kind of hypnotic state and we were all just waking up from a trance. The Future could be imagined even in this stopped time, this detour around life: prison. I was not a prisoner, but I felt it too. What kept the mind hypnotized was the idea of Someday. Someday we’ll walk free, Someday step out of jail—Someday saunter out of confinement, smiling out of the new self, moving forward. But it wasn’t going to happen like that, on that day or any other day. Not for any of us. We were going to pay for the pennies to close our eyes, for the splinter of mirror to confirm our stopped breath. Pay for our elbow room in the morgue. You had to be able to afford Hope. It belonged, like Justice, to those who could handle the bills. We were all moving toward that future, one Polly Lyle Clement knew about. Polly Lyle, who had the gift of Sight, looked into each of us and knew what was to come. These were women who had come up against the law, and the law was not going to be any kinder to women in the future. I believe that that’s what she was thinking then, though she said nothing at the time; she only smiled, and when Baby Ain’t winked at her, winked back.