Lying

by Lauren Slater

  • • •

  My father picked me up at the airport. I had been away only one month, but a century had passed for me. This, this is a happy part of the story. In my new millennium I walked with my head held a little higher. At home that first night, I showed my parents what I’d learned at Saint Christopher’s, how I could fix the dripping kitchen sink—so easy, really—a few twists and snaps of the silver spout, a tightening of the washer, there. It didn’t drip after that. It flowed, when we wanted it to.

  “That’s quite something for a ten-year-old,” my father said.

  “All that money and she comes home a plumber?” my mother said, but I could tell she was impressed. I showed her how to shine the tiles on the kitchen floor with a secret solution of lemon juice and oil; I showed her how I had learned to plait my hair in fourteen seconds flat, and when we went to the hardware store I entered into an impressive discourse with the salesman on the relative merits of eyebolts versus snag hooks.

  “How did you get to be so smart?” the salesman said. He tousled my hair. Now that I knew how to fall the right way, I didn’t bruise so much anymore; the purple splotches had been sucked back into my body, and I looked clean and white, well kept and hardy.

  My mother smiled, but it was in a weary way.

  I liked to fall. It gave me so much confidence, so much pride. I was good at it, and I knew, even though I never could have said it, that the falling skill was widely generalizable, that I would be able to use it for years to come, use it in love, use it in fear, use it in hope. I became, even, a little addicted to falling. I would do it for anyone who asked, and sometimes for anyone who didn’t. I fell for Mrs. Slotnick, our next-door neighbor, and I fell for the Chaffin girls across the street, crashing onto the floor and standing seconds later, unharmed. Wow. “Wow” was what everyone said.

  I went back to school and during recess I fell for the kids. “Look at this,” I said, and I dive-bombed down in a cloud of playground dust, and after that a few of the boys wanted lessons from me, which I gladly gave, for a small fee.

  Was I happy? This, this is the happy part of my story, which does not mean I was happy. I felt proud, though, and I long ago learned what everyone should know, that dignity counts more than delight.

  At night, sometimes, I heard her moving in the kitchen beneath my bedroom, and I crept down the stairs to watch her. Since I’d come back, she had changed as well. She had gotten weaker. Or maybe she had always been this weak, but I saw it more. She started smoking Kent cigarettes and drinking red wine, and she had less of an interest in me. She said I would never be a skating star. Sometimes she stared into the space in front of her, and other times she tapped her finger very fast on her chin, over and over, tap tap tap, and still other times she went for a whole day without saying a word. I watched her at night. My mother, in her Christian Dior nightgown. She could never sleep. Her whole life she had fought to stay on the surface of things—to not argue with my father in public, to cover her emotions with a flashy smile—and it showed in her face, where lines of deep fatigue were grooved beneath her makeup.

  “Mom Mom,” I whispered. I always wanted to cry for her. I always will.

  But this, this is a happy part of the story, a crash course in learning to live apart. A few weeks after my return from Saint Christopher’s, a tragedy happened. Our neighbor Mr. Slotnick had a heart attack while cleaning his pool, and he fell into his pool and died, not from the heart attack, but because he drowned. I hardly knew him, but it was still a tragedy. I went to the funeral with my parents, my first one. I let her do with me what she wanted, a black velvet dress, black tights with diamonds in them, somber pieces of pearl in my ears. I still loved my mother, understand that, please. But something had changed in me, and therefore between us, I could not have said exactly what it was. I didn’t want to cry only for her, but for us, and sometimes, in the middle of changing a lightbulb or fixing a sink or doing my English homework, I would have the urge to sprint into her lap, bury my face in her bosom, or better yet, do a perfect skating pirouette for her, all the while saying, You are the one mom one mom one mom there is no one else but you.

  However, that wasn’t true. I was having an affair, you see, and it was with the world.

  I thought, back then, that the affair would last forever, but now I see why it didn’t. Now I see there is a kind of confidence many ten-year-olds have—the age of industry, Erik Erikson said. The age before the breasts have come, and all the small smells that shame you—what a time it is. What a life.

  We went to Mr. Slotnick’s funeral, along with the rest of the world. It was a very subdued and slightly disappointing affair, especially because in Jewish funerals they keep the coffin closed, so I never even got to see. There was a service, and then we all went to the graveyard, and along the way, the hearse had engine trouble.

  Which meant we all arrived at the graveyard first, and for a damn long time stood out in the March wind, looking into a deep crater, already ringed with lilies.

  I got bored. Above me gray clouds raced across the sky. I tapped the toe of my party shoe right at the rim of the grave hole.

  “Stop that, Lauren,” my mother said.

  But I couldn’t stop. I kept tapping and tapping, and it wasn’t because I was having a seizure. “Stop that now!” she hissed, but I didn’t want to. In my mind, or maybe it was in the sky, I heard a cardinal singing, “One tap more, oh, one tap more,” and there was a whole crowd of people, and I have always been a bit of a show-off, and I was her daughter, yes, but I was more than that too, and so I did it. I buckled my knees, let my limbs loose in the way I had learned, and I collapsed down into the deep hole, the empty grave, where the coffin had yet to be lowered.

  I fell for centuries, and as I went down, I opened my mouth, and the cardinal flew out, and was free.

  “Oh, my God!” I heard people screaming. I opened my eyes at the bottom of the grave. I searched the crowd for my mother’s face. I could not find it, though, in the blur of heads and hands bending down to help me.

  So many people have helped me on my way, I want to thank them here. Thanks to the nuns, my physical therapists, especially Rosie and Jane, I couldn’t have done it without you; thanks to my father for his wise rabbinical story, and to Dr. Patterson for his diagnostic skills; thanks especially to Leonard Kriegel, essayist par excellence, whose story Falling into Life, from which I have so generously borrowed, helped me to find my own true tale; thanks to my good friend Elizabeth, who is critiquing me as I write this book, and to the librarians at Brandeis, who have provided me with so much material, to Lisa Schiffman, Audrey Schulman, Rob Brown, and Meaghan Rady, for listening, and to my editor, Kate Medina, for the contract and the money.

  So many hands, so much help, most of it, really, not my mother’s.

  Thanks to my mother, for having me, for giving me the special kind of grit I later learned to use.

  I opened my eyes at the bottom of the grave and there were so many hands extended, I didn’t know which one to take. I was unbruised, unharmed, and I knew how to help myself. So I stood, and brushed the dirt off, and made myself toeholds in the dank earth.

  And I climbed up, and up, and, forgive me my imagery, but I emerged, headfirst, and then bellied my way over the ledge of the motherland, and as I did, squiggling up, my torso pressed flat against the walls of wet earth, I felt a strange, tender pain in my chest, what I didn’t know then—the beginning of breasts.

  The End

  Not quite.

  This is a work of nonfiction. Everything in it is supposed to be true. In some instances names of people and places have been changed to protect their privacy, but the essential story should at least aim for accuracy, so the establishment says. Therefore, I confess. To the establishment. I didn’t really fall into the grave. I was just using a metaphor to try to explain my mental state. The real truth is I went to the funeral, the hearse had engine trouble, the coffin was late, I looked into the grave, and I thought about falling in. I
imagined myself falling in. I knew I could do it. It was eight feet under but, dammit, I knew I could do it. Didn’t divers leap from cliffs forty feet into the air? Didn’t they enter the crystal water without so much as a smack? Doesn’t the body bend and ripple in all sorts of ways we would never believe it could? I closed my eyes. And in my mind I let myself low. And a cardinal came out of my mouth. And when I hit, the soil was soft, and all the sisters came back to greet me, and offered me holy hands, and when I stood, I saw I was back in Kansas, my land of lemon drops and witches, only it was not a dream. I missed my mother, but there are many places other than home, a shame, a blessing both. The nuns were there. And the red doors opened, and I saw I was strong. And all the snow was singing.

  CHAPTER 4

  SINCERELY, YOURS

  JANUARY 18, 1998

  DEAR READER:

  Every night before dinner I say grace. I light two white tapers, and even though I was born a Jew, I clasp my hands and give thanks to a Christian God for the kindness he has shown.

  For most of my life I’ve had a relationship with God. When I was ten, and learning how to fall, I felt personally connected to God, who also knew how to fall, fleshing out his body and bowing into vulnerable human form. Children understand intuitively that God lives in leaves and skin. I knew God when I was ten, when the nuns touched me and an easy sureness filled my lungs, so even the snow was singing.

  I came home from that convent school as strong as I had ever been. I have a few pictures of me from that time, and, although it was winter, I look mysteriously tan, my body a rich brewed color, my teeth flashing. In those pictures I grin like an imp. I grin like a girl with know-how.

  If you had asked me back then, one month, two months after the convent, I would have told you what the mind learns it cannot forget, that the new and bendable body signals the same for the brain. I had no idea how the body changes as it ages, how at ten there is a certain stability to the skin that hormones, and longing, eventually leach away, until you forget the self you once were. I forgot. I grinned like an imp and then I didn’t. I turned eleven; I turned twelve; I turned thirteen, and the rich brewed color faded back to the frailer peach of a girl on the edge of sex and weakness.

  For me, the adolescent years were not about ripenings. Instead, I felt used up and dependent. If others did not admire me, I thought I would disappear.

  I had seizures once a day, sometimes in school. The seizures horrified me; they were thrashing humiliations, especially when I wet my pants. I’m sure it was for this reason alone I did not attain popularity. When I thought of the word popular I saw a pert pink flower open in the sun. The sky was blue. A girl smelled good. Not me.

  My mother, it turns out, had her own popularity issues. Once, she had thought I might do it for her, be a skating star or a genius. Now, however, I was just a person with a disease. Our paths went wider and wider apart, until at last, one day, I saw I was alone in the woods, with the worms and crows.

  And where was she? She turned into a writer of maxims. She said she had an editor by the name of Suki Israel who would one day publish her work. “Dress for the position you want,” she wrote, “not the one you have,” and “If it’s not a beautiful morning, let your cheerfulness make it one.”

  The year was 1976, and all over the country love was flowering. My mother caught on. Those were the days when you could go into a bookstore and the entire front display would be of happy meditations. On the fridge, where once had hung a picture of me in my red-and-white skating skirt, was now the maxim she said was her best yet: “Even when you don’t feel brave, pretend you are, for this is how courage comes.”

  And so as I went down, down into adolescent sickness and skin, down into daily seizures, she went up, up into the clear air of adage. She sent her work off to Hallmark, to poetry contests listed in the back of Good Housekeeping, contests where you had to pay thirty dollars and renew your subscription for the next five years, contests that would turn you into a star. I loved those entry forms, their tiny lines and boxes making it seem so neat, and the promises written in bold black: $8,000 AND A WORLDWIDE READERSHIP! With her pen, she scratched her way toward it.

  Sometimes weeks and weeks, months and months, would go by, and she’d get no reply to her submissions. The longer she waited, the happier she got. Oh, she was lovely in her state of limbo, when the whole world stretched out before her, the moon a bright surprise above. “It means,” I heard her say on the phone to Nance, or maybe Emma, or maybe even Suki, “it means I am under serious consideration.” I was not, anymore, under her consideration, serious or otherwise. I was free, free to fall, to smoke, to spit, to kiss; free to dress in black, or in crushed velvet, or in ratty tuxedo tails, it was dizzying.

  Over and over again, my mother and I crashed, and in some essential way, we were graceless. Eventually, she would get a reply, a rejection of course, after which she would lie in a darkened room for hours. When she cried, it was for things so utterly separate from me that her tears were personal insults. I told myself I didn’t care. But sometimes I think all the corruption that followed had to do with the fact that there was a space between us, and, when I was thirteen, in an extra rickety world, I needed to fill that space with something, and it would not be her. I told myself I didn’t care, but my dreams were full of women; women lifting me, women treading toward me, while above the moon burned in a beautiful way.

  • • •

  The spring of my thirteenth year was unlike any other. Frail rain fell, casting a silver net over the neighborhood. Then the sky cleared. The sun went down in a pool of red, and all the flowers smelled like lotion.

  A little boy came to our school, a Japanese boy by the name of Sumio Yakima. I was cruel to him; I told him “thank you” was pronounced “fuck you,” which won me points with the popular people.

  I was inspired. At that point, I was still trying to outrun my seizures, and I thought I might accomplish that by being mean. I did other cruel things involving lima beans and bananas, the specifics of which I will not mention here. The worst I ever did, though, had nothing to do with hurting another human being. It had to do with God, in whom I believed even back then, and whose name I had promised myself never to take in vain. One day Sarah Kushner gave me a red Magic Marker and dared me to write on the wall “God = shit,” which I did for her attentions, and I pinpoint that as the moment when what I meant versus what I said parted ways, and, with a whimper, my adolescence was born.

  • • •

  Words came in a rush, then, and none of them were mine. “I would love a cerise-colored outfit,” I said to Amy Goldblatt on the trolley one day. “I look like an absolute hag,” I became fond of announcing in the girls’ room during recess, a place with mildewy-smelling green stalls, gunk in the grout of the cracked tile floor, white washbasins with rings of rust around the drains. In there, girls leaned toward the mirrors, fell into their faces’ reflections like it was love, like it was hate, snapping open clam-shaped compact cases and patching up their oily skin. Everyone’s skin was so oily, and girls squealed like they were only half person and the other half was pig, it was so sad, and I trotted along on my little high hooves with the rest of them, rooting about for beauty.

  But no matter how much makeup I wore, I was still a girl with epilepsy, a girl who pissed herself, a girl convulsed; was there a way to make sickness sexy? That was the year I read nineteenth-century novels, in which tubercular heroines coughed up blood, and died in feather beds. I bought foundation two shades lighter than my actual skin. I wore a dark velvet ribbon like a choker around my neck, and I took my Medic Alert bracelet off my wrist and sported it instead as an anklet, the scarlet serpent dangling down.

  And still, Sarah Kushner did not invite me to her party Friday night. Danny Harris wouldn’t like me. “I am dying,” I whispered to Sarah in English class one day.

  “You’re dying?” she said to me. “What’s wrong?”

  “Cancer,” I said.

  “I thought you
had epilepsy,” she said.

  “Epilepsy causes cancer,” I said. “Can you believe it?”

  She believed it. She invited me to her party lickety-split, and Haskell Crocker danced with me, and Danny Harris held my hand, and every girl brought me pink punch, such beautiful punch, with foamy globs floating on top, and slices of orange and lemon in it. Sweet. Sweet. The whole time, it seemed, Elton John was singing about the sun going down, and I saw it, all the wolves howling while the sun went down, casting steep shadows, marks of sin on me.

  • • •

  My mother picked me up from that party. Before I left, Sarah said, “You could come again next time.” On the one hand, I was thrilled. The cancer story had been a brilliant idea, brilliant. On the other hand, there was something wrong with the tone of her invite. She’d said it in such a soft, gentle way, in a voice so full of pity I felt pathetic.

  I got in the car with my mother. I had a numb feeling, and when I looked at my hand it was not mine. That’s all I can say.

  “Mom?” I asked.

  She didn’t turn to me, though. She kept driving. Her mouth was grim and pressed while above her passing streetlights floated in her beehive hair. The car so quiet. I saw a dead dog on the side of the road.

  I thought I might have a seizure. Sometimes I said a little prayer, “Please, God, prevent it from happening, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.” The counting to ten was the most important part of the prayer.

  I prayed then, counted to ten, and looked out. The car hummed along in a smoothly sinister way. I recognized nothing, not the houses, not the yards. “Where are we?” I said.

  Still, she didn’t answer.