“Polly? Are you okay?”
She turned abruptly to me and a strange animation, much like the puppetlike energy I’d noticed in her early on, surfaced suddenly.
She grasped my hands so hard it hurt.
“I ain’t about to ask you to pray for me,” she said. “But I know if you did, I’d be saved in a flicker! I shan’t ever forget you. You say what you want to, but you got more sand in you than any girl I ever see—you got grit, enough grit to turn roun’ Judas if you took a hang to doin’ so! It sounds like flattery, but I ain’t no flatterer. I don’t know if it would do good at all to pray for me, as I said, but if you took a notion to get me in your petitions, what with your grit, why I know leastways I’d get to the pearly gates, if not past ’em.
“Y’see, I knew a man fell down a well twice. He said he didn’t mind the first time, but he thought the second time was once too often. That’s about how I feel now. I been down that well twice over and as Providence has it, that’s just about enough. I may be dazed with admiration for this old world, but I can’t stand to be civilized, I can’t stand to be taken up and made much of—so it looks to me to be time to light out. I got no time to chaw over a lot of gold-leaf distinctions when I see a chance to hog a watermelon. Too much soul-butter for me with these churchly types. I’d rather go back down home on a steamboat, in style. Now, that ain’t no slouch of an idea, though a raft voyage suit me too. And sometimes I think these presidents and congressmen and wardens might be liars, maybe even humbugs and frauds. Y’see, you don’t want any unfriendliness on a raft—for what you want, above all things, on a raft, is for everybody to be satisfied, and feel right and kind towards the others.”
“Polly,” I said. “Can you hear me?”
“They ask me considerable many questions, but I ain’t up to answering all I’m asked. I ain’t up to answering—I can bear, just bear it—but I swallow the sawdust, I break my leg in the moat, tryin’ to hitch a rope-ladder to the battlements. Here a captive heart busted. Here a poor prisoner, forsook by the world and friends, fretted his sorrowful life. Here a lonely heart broke and a worn spirit went on to its rest. Oh, and a little music like the notes I hear in my head, but I ain’t standin’ on top of the bed, raising Cain.”
“Polly.”
She went on for a few minutes, then she gradually grew quiet. I sat with her in silence for a while, holding her hands. At one point she smiled beatifically at me, a beautiful ruined smile. When I got up, finally, to leave, she clasped my hand. Her gold-flecked avian eyes glittered. I sat down again.
“The angels are here,” she said. “They’re here now, arguin’ just out the window about who up to comin’ in first to ketch me a beckoning. I told them heaven for climate, hell for company, but they are an earnest lot and would druther spend hours wing-brightening. You could see through blindness with one wing-feather.”
Then she seemed to grow more aware of my presence and talked to me about the end she saw coming in very particular terms. She gave me a set of instructions about what to do with her personal effects. (“What part of me be assignable,” she said, quoting Dickinson.) Not much made sense to me, but I listened closely to everything she said.
I walked down the corridor, barely breathing. In the main hall downstairs, I leaned against the wall as inmates and C.O.s passed me, talking, cursing, calling out. He had come back to save her, the old man, Great Granddaddy—in his white suit and his white hair and his glittering, hot-tempered, great-hearted, profane, sentimental, run-river, sugar-hogshead style. The inimitable monument, winking. A good going-over, grace triumphant—sounding the river, her heart sounded, the heart of a child, wing-brightening.
He said if you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform. He said that the trouble ain’t that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain’t distributed right. He said, nevertheless, that on a raft, what you want above all things is for everybody to be satisfied and to feel right and kind toward the others. That’s what you want, Polly Lyle, the old man once said, if you can get it to happen.
The Ballad of Aliganth
My name is C.O. Aliganth
I don’t know how to sing
and I don’t know how to danth.
But I know how to write a poem
Because I’ve spent all this time
when I should have been home—
Guarding the poets, guarding
the class. If you don’t like this
poem you can take it fail or pass.
(or fill in your own line here!)
My name is C.O. Aliganth
and I get stuck with Gene/Jean,
neither woman nor a manth.
My name is C.O. Aliganth
And if you took the time to care
You’d know my first name: Nanth.
—NANCE ALIGANTH, POET
thirteen
If Superintendent Ross had suffered momentary doubts or any dark moments of the soul relative to the loss of Akilah Malik, a high-profile, highly controversial “political” prisoner about to be extradited and tried on a Murder One felony charge who had vanished—poof!—into thin air, then parachuted from a cloud down into Havana, all on her watch, she wasn’t letting on. I had hoped that whether or not she acknowledged the scandal of Akilah Malik’s departure, it could happen that she would admit that they had systematically brutalized Polly and that it might also be possible to find a way to help her. But Ross sat sphinxlike before me, acknowledging nothing. I suggested that Polly needed care—that I knew a neurologist (K.B., of course) with experience with inmate patients who could visit her. She took his card and nodded. There was nothing else to say.
I called Information in New Orleans. There were two Clements listed. One number was out of service when I called it, and the other was answered by a woman who had never heard of Polly Lyle Clement, but asked me if I wanted to subscribe to her Save a Pet newsletter. There was no other information.
I took out my key to our apartment on West Twelfth, but decided to knock before entering. I’d phoned K.B. to make sure that he was home before I’d come over. He didn’t respond to knocking, so I opened the door and then stood in the doorway.
“Kenny?”
He called out, “I’m here,” and I recognized the range of his voice—he was in the kitchen.
As I walked in, he was fixing himself some scrambled eggs, shaking the frying pan and adding Tabasco sauce and pepper.
It made me sad to see him there, in his scrub-tops and boxer shorts. I put my purse down and kissed him.
“I’m hungry,” I said.
After we’d eaten, I presented my case.
“Maybe she’s a kind of ‘fluent’ aphasia,” I said. “She speaks readily and easily, but the content of the words, the words themselves, do not necessarily reflect what she’d like to say.”
“So it’s all a kind of nonsense?”
“No, it’s not nonsense altogether,” I said. “It’s her focus, perhaps? She shifts into this free-floating alternative diction when she’s kind of giving up on the reality of the present.”
“Are you saying that she’s suicidal?”
“I’m saying that I think that if you could visit her, if you could diagnose her—it would help get her better treatment. That’s all.”
He took a sip of coffee and smiled at me.
“I can request a visit as her personal physician,” he said. “Is that who I am?”
I smiled back at him across the table.
“That’s who you are in order to help Polly Lyle.”
He put his head down, then lifted his plate and fork and stood, wearily, up.
“I’m telling you that I’m also me,” he said. “K.B. I am also me.”
I was working alone at Samizdat, reading manuscripts, when K.B. called to tell me that he’d finally been allowed to see Polly Lyle. I had been staring at a collection of stories written in the “Eastern European” style—Dr. Floppo’s Blue Sedan.
“She’s in bad shape,” h
e said. “She’s seriously bruised, possible concussion, and may have a broken rib or two—but more worrisome than that trauma is her psychological state. She’s in shock from being beaten and from seizing. The epileptic incidents have depleted her, and her personality is clearly fragile. She needs to be hospitalized, and I’ve recommended that.”
“Will they do it?”
“It helps that I’m affiliated with a hospital on the outside—they may respond to that. Or not. But my concern is that Polly is so depressed—she kept bringing up death. She’s not strictly aphasic, Holly. Though you’re right, she’s lost in her own ‘language.’”
He paused. “When I had to leave, she put her hand in mine,” he said quietly. “Like a child. And she asked me to take her out of there. Like a child—she just wanted to go home.”
“I know,” I said. “She just wants to go home.”
We both waited. I began to cry, then caught my breath.
“How soon can she be taken to the hospital?”
“If they cooperate—in one, maybe two days.”
“K.B.,” I said, “I don’t think she’ll last that long.”
There was a sigh at the other end.
“You want me to go back tomorrow?”
“Or sooner,” I said, and held my breath again.
I tried holding my breath in order to hold my tongue the next day at the Women’s House. I was in the middle of a meeting with two newly recruited AfterCare workers—who looked like members of the Ladies’ Liturgical Society—and Dr. Bognal, who was delighted to be shocking them with his highly idiosyncratic priapic view of the Psychology of the Inmate Patient. He sat back in his sweat-stained padded chair and spoke to the ceiling, his eyes rolled upward, smiling to himself as the timid new employees listened.
“First thing you’re lookin’ at here is that these are mostly hard-line hookers—they suck the chrome off a bumper for five bucks. You’re up against bumper-suckers, pickpockets, petty thieves, what have you.”
He looked up and nodded in my direction.
“Now, Ms. Mattox over there…”
He winked at me.
“…doesn’t believe in the Stanford-Binet standardized IQ test. She thinks she can raise a whore’s IQ by giving her poetry writing classes.”
He noted this in a falsetto tone, wiggling his little finger at me.
“Very therapeutic!”
I looked at him: his face reminded me of a big dull chromeless bumper—on a car about to be pushed over a cliff.
“Dr. Bognal,” I said to the two ladies, “knows he could raise his own IQ by holding his breath for three minutes. It’s been proven effective.”
I smiled, and Bognal smiled too. The two churchly women coughed nervously. One stared at me, truly shocked.
“Ms. Mattox,” he said, “likes to think of herself as funny.”
I did not think of myself as funny, certainly not at that moment. I thought of myself as defending the real world of real women against the leveling force of the Bognal Bumper. If hookers were skilled at blow jobs, they were even better at wallet extraction, accomplished as the chrome was being removed. But they were best at remaining unimpressed by men. This was the actual touchy topic under discussion, I thought—that in fact women tricked men because they found them trickable. Or that women were cynical the way Bognal found me cynical—he thought that I believed the profession of headshrinking was no more therapeutically significant than the much older profession of giving head.
Either way, Bognal wasn’t going to let me have the last word.
“I’ll pass around some of these intake files,” he said, reaching for a pile of manila folders. “And you can decide for yourselves about these hopeless cases.”
I let myself drift away, ruminating about Polly, then thinking about hopeless cases in general. I was one. As my mother had long ago predicted, I pissed men off, and I knew now I always would—particularly men who assumed they had power over me. Hopeless Case Number Six Million and Two: Me. Always in trouble with men.
And once really, as they say, in trouble. A story I’d never told anyone—because I could not find the language to do so. This thing had happened to me, but I had no way to express it.
All my life it was there: the thing that I could never write about. It had happened to me, but I could not tell anyone.
I had gone to California from Minnesota for graduate school—by way of New York City. I’d stopped to see K.B. in med school before I flew to San Francisco. We spent an idyllic weekend, then I waved goodbye walking to the plane.
Two months later, I discovered I was pregnant. I didn’t tell K.B. and I didn’t tell my roommates. I did not want to be pregnant. It was right before the law changed, right before Roe v. Wade, and I knew that in California women had three realistic ways to approach termination. First, private physicians performed the operation—if one knew the right people and had enough money. Second, there was Mexico. Just across the border in Tijuana, it was possible to arrange an abortion—but this way was frightening and dangerous. Finally, if a psychiatrist stated that the woman would be psychologically damaged by giving birth, the state would provide the operation.
I knew no private physicians in California and didn’t have a lot of money. I did not, however, want to go to Tijuana and take the chance of ending up bleeding in a back alley. So I went to a psychiatrist, a woman, who had no sympathy for me at all.
“You’re a smart girl who didn’t think things through,” she said. “A smart girl who got herself into a pickle—and the system doesn’t provide for girls like you. You’re not unstable, you were just unlucky.”
We had used birth control, but something had gone wrong. I knew if I had a baby it would take away my life: no graduate school, no writing, no future. I was too young and I was not ready for a kid. I was trapped by my own body, which was now changing daily. I developed morning sickness, my breasts swelled. I knew that there had to be a doctor somewhere who believed in the right to choose and who would sign the form.
So I tried again. I went to a psychiatrist at a San Francisco hospital. In the waiting room, a thin pretty black girl was reading a magazine. She looked like a child. We began talking and she told me that she was eighteen. Her uncle had raped her one night—he pushed into her bedroom high and violent—and now she was pregnant and wanted to terminate immediately.
“I can’t go this way to term or I will die,” she said. “That he could do this thing and get away with it is drivin’ me wild—that he make me bear his child is hell on earth.”
She looked so very young. She was chewing bubble gum and as she chewed, tears ran down her face. I began to cry too. My story was nothing like hers, but our connection was the sense of being trapped and helpless. Our bodies had betrayed us. They had become prisons.
We held hands for a moment. Tears rolled quietly down her face as she quietly blew bubbles and quietly popped them. It began to rain outside and rain ran down the glass as our tears fell. There was a clock on the wall, but time had slowed down to a near-stop. We were in trouble, we were in the waiting room, waiting for a man to decide what would happen to us.
Then she was called into the office and was inside for about fifteen minutes. I jumped as she came out—she pushed blindly through the door, weeping. She didn’t speak to me or say goodbye. I stared after her—I wanted to call to her, but then I remembered that I hadn’t asked her name.
Then my name was called and I went in.
The psychiatrist was a professorial-looking man with glasses and unruly hair. He wore a checked jacket that was too big for him in the shoulders. He was smoking a cigarette and fiddling with his Zippo lighter, popping the top open and shut in a maddening way. He stacked and unstacked the papers, then turned to me.
He greeted me courteously enough, scratching his ear, and seemed to listen as I began my statement—about how I would be giving up my life if I had a baby, how I was not ready to be a mother—then abruptly interrupted me.
“You know,” h
e said, rubbing an eyebrow. “I can’t stand these black whores. They get knocked up by family members, then they come whining for help. The last one, just before you, was such a slut she actually stank. I had to open a window.”
In my mind’s eye, he began to shrink until he was the size of a tiny crocodile—in fact, he suddenly looked exactly like a crocodile as he smiled at me.
“It’s pleasant to see a nice girl like yourself,” he said. “After all this trash.”
I sat forward—I looked into his tiny darting eyes.
“Tell me,” I said. “How does it feel to combine the energy of a whippet with the IQ of a concrete slab?”
I left with his signature on my form. I was granted an abortion because I was “hostile, aggressively unstable, and unfeminine.” I hadn’t planned it this way. I may be the only woman ever granted a medical procedure on the grounds of lack of femininity.
But I told no one—and I did not tell K.B. And I would never know what happened to the gentle girl who cried and blew bubbles in the waiting room. I had taken the form and I had done what needed to be done, but I never did try to find my friend from the waiting room. All of my life, I have wished that I had.
As my poem grew, line by line, a sense of clarity and resolve about Sam Glass grew in me simultaneously. “If the snow grew/ steeped in blood, they raised a Court. But no one/out-thinks the two-in-one.” I made up my mind—for good.
I met Sam Glass, as planned, for a drink.
“I don’t want to see you anymore,” I said to him. “I mean, except professionally. As poets. As editors.”
“That’s groovy with me,” he said. “I’m getting a little tired of all the ambivalence. I want someone who is into me unequivocally.”
“The way you can’t be into anyone,” I noted.
“The way you can’t,” he returned in a schoolyard taunting tone. “You are incapable of even liking a man. Why don’t you face it?”
He then set forth a list of qualities he expected women with whom he spent time to possess—all qualities I lacked, like “excellent cook,” “understands wine,” “hip to design,” “literary but not competitive.”
Channeling Mark Twain Page 23
