Winner of the National Book Award: A Novel of Fame, Honor, and Really Bad Weather

by Jincy Willett

  When she was out on bail and holed up with me, and the press besieged us night and day and camped out on our porch and we couldn’t use our own telephone, I felt rather as if I had gone back in time, to the familiar nightmare world of Abigail’s adolescence.

  The implication that Mother did not prepare her daughters for the fact of menstruation is an actionable lie, or would be if Mother were still alive. But this is how my sister works. She loved our mother as much as I did, but Mother is gone now, and so, in Abigail’s mind, incapable of being wronged.

  Mother prepared us by sending us to talk to Father, who prepared us by drawing diagrams on manila paper with a number two pencil. The picture he drew, again and again, was an excellent rendition of that cross-section of the female reproductive system that we see everywhere, in gynecologists’ offices and on tampon boxes, the one as familiar to us as the Bambi face in the “Famous Artists” ad.

  I have never had a head for maps. I remember thinking it was interesting, and understanding that it was important, without being able to relate the map to any portion of my body. I still have great difficulty following maps. Spiritually I always face north.

  We sat on the couch on either side of Father while he told us about our wombs and the little nests our bodies would soon begin to build and then discard. My mind kept wandering. I would have missed the whole thing except that Abigail’s attention was so thoroughly engaged that I couldn’t help homing in from time to time. She never took her eyes off the diagram and our father’s hands elaborating, shading. Her mouth hung open and she kept forgetting to breathe out, just like a three-year-old child, so that his lecture was punctuated by her explosive little sighs. She was rapt. “This is the egg chamber,” our father said, “and this is the long passageway leading from that chamber to the Great Hall…”

  I don’t know. Maybe he didn’t actually say this. The way I remember it now, he spoke, really, to Abigail, while I hung around and eavesdropped in a desultory way. But that is unfair and, I believe, untrue. I believe he addressed us both, and turned to me as often as to my sister. Both our parents were scrupulous in the division of their attention. But of course he was really, really speaking only to her.

  And she was listening as intently as a son would have listened to his father explain, for the first time, the mechanics of the rifle. Today we have naming of parts…

  Not that it matters in the least, but I got mine first. I hid it from Abigail for three months. I don’t know why I did that. Partly self-protection, I suppose, because I expected her to be jealous and angry; partly the pleasure of secrecy, or, I should say, a twin’s pleasure in secrecy. Something you have to be a twin to appreciate.

  When she found out about it she behaved, briefly and strangely, like a handmaiden, honoring me for it, and expecting me to honor myself. She ran and told Mother. I think she hoped we would hold some sort of ceremony. “Well,” Mother said, looking at me, smiling. “Dorcas is a woman now.”

  “I am not,” I said.

  “You are too,” Abigail said.

  “No I’m not.” I was still small—I hadn’t begun to get my height yet—and scrawny. I didn’t even look like a girl, much less like a woman. I looked like a child, which is what I was, and knew it well. My body was built for running and climbing, not for having babies.

  Abigail, in contrast, looked ripe when she was green. She was taller than me by a head and outweighed me by twenty pounds. At ten she was as moist and plump and dimpled as she had been as a baby; as she has been all her life. She still used baby talc. She still does. She has always had a baby smell, a sweet and intoxicating scent that makes you yearn, in an immediate, objectless way, and underneath the sweetness you detect the sour; and over the years the sourness grew more complex, jungly, powerful, and the sweetness stayed the same.

  At ten she had the breasts of a plump man. You could tell they wanted to be real breasts, and would become real breasts if given half a chance. Mine were just pink disks stuck on a bony little chest, with no promise or inclination to become anything more. They looked like the suction cups of two toy arrows.

  As to how I felt about this, I felt very little. I didn’t dread “becoming a woman.” I expected it to happen. But somehow it just didn’t seem very important. To put it baldly, I felt, and was, redundant.

  But not sad, or left behind. Having Abigail for a sister made my “becoming a woman” unnecessary. Not impossible: just unnecessary. I could not have become Abigail’s sort of woman, but, after all, there are other sorts of women. Stella Mylonas, the chocolate-haired girl, was going to be a woman, and she was lithe and watchful, like a deer, and a sprinter, and the boys loved her. She got all the valentines in the Valentine Box. Abigail actually got very few. Stella had a collection of toy horses, wooden, plastic, bronze. Stella would be a beautiful woman. (I was wrong about this. She became a nice-looking woman with a trim figure. She was beautiful only as a child.)

  And there were other girls, not pretty like Stella, but plump like my sister, who did not, like my sister, look purely functional; who were able to blush and giggle around boys, and give off their own weak, intermittent signals, and still operate on some level apart from the sexual. They were going to be women too.

  But not like Abigail.

  Chapter Four

  The Universal Choking Sign

  Chapter 4

  Jabez

  By the standards of their day, Mathilda Wallace Mather and Jabez Mather had an excellent marriage. Jabez was a “devoted family man,” which is to say that when he wasn’t working he was at home, with his family. There is no evidence that he was ever unfaithful to Mattie, or literally [!!!!!!!!] abusive to his daughters. Visitors to the Mather bungalow must have envied this happy man, the “king of the castle,” the object of devotion for no fewer than three females. “The sun rose and set on my father,” Abigail says now.

  I’m going to skip the next few pages. Clearly Hilda is about to depict our father as some kind of pampered, vaguely perverted, pleasure-swollen sultan, lolling and rolling about on tasseled hassocks while “no fewer than three females” scurry through the “bungalow” fetching sweetmeats and aphrodisiacs. With all the inevitable tragic results.

  Our father worked for the northeastern division of International Bean. He stocked the grocery shelves of Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts with bags of dried legumes. He was able, just, to make a living this way. At least one meal per week was meatless, and centered around a vat of some kind of pasty goop. We ate them all, since we got them for free: lentils, navy beans, great northern whites, limas, chickpeas. Mother did her best, but to this day neither Abigail nor I can bear to take our protein in this form.

  I think Father enjoyed spending fifty hours a week pushing dried legumes just about as much as most reasonably bright people would. To compensate, he became a dedicated, though fickle, hobbyist. Over the years, and without discipline or any kind of overall plan, he educated himself (with the inevitable tragic results). He got on what Mother called “kicks.”

  He was a gardener of erratic brilliance, working pitiful wonders with the tiny bit of land we had, and the miserable Yankee soil. One of his longest kicks was rose-grafting. He tried to perfect a new rose for each of us—a “Mattie-Lou,” a miniature “Baby Pilgrim” for me, a “Honeysuckle” for Abigail (respectively scarlet, blue-tinged white, and coral, as I recall)—but he never could sell the AARS judges on any of them. They were always, in my opinion, beautifully shaped, but they would fall short in “vigor” or “foliage” or succumb at the last prequalifying moment to some ignoble disease. Abigail’s rose, the biggest and loveliest of all, had none of these flaws, but gave off an offensive perfume, a cloying, hypocritical scent. It smelled like a cologne-drenched Bourbon princess six months after her last bath.

  He would get on reading kicks, bingeing on one subject, reading everything he could get his hands on about it, like the Boer War or the Roman aqueducts or the Gadsden Purchase, and for weeks he would talk of nothing el
se, until, inexplicably, he would stop talking about it altogether.

  I remember him telling Mother about the Battle of Rorke’s Drift. I must have been pretty young at the time, because I got the impression that he was reporting to her the events of his working day, during which a handful of stalwart English troops, commanded by an engineer, held off an army of warring Zulus. This wasn’t pure naïveté on my part, for there really was an immediacy to his prandial book reports, such were his excitement and enthusiasm. I think now that he was as suggestible to books as a hypnotized subject, so eager was he to be taken out of his humdrum life.

  Business reverses, the protracted death of ambition, perhaps even the postwar anxiety which afflicted most Americans on a subliminal level…these are at least some of the possible causes of Jabez’s perceptible withdrawal from Abigail just at that time of her life when she most needed him. At the age of ten, at the brink of womanhood, she sensed a growing coldness in him. “He didn’t want me to be affectionate with him anymore,” she says, with sorrow surviving in her voice. “I felt as though I had done something unforgivable, so bad that no one would tell me what it was.”

  Abigail Mather’s great sin was, of course, in growing up. Her father, likely out of his own inchoate sense of guilt, precognizant of his own incestuous desires, withheld from Abigail the male approval necessary to her erotic self-esteem. Just when she had the greatest need of him, he declined to validate her sexuality….

  …with

  THE INEVITABLE TRAGIC RESULTS.

  I’m staring at the wall in front of me. I have been reduced to that already. Happily, the wall is not blank. There’s a black and white poster on it spelling out the Heimlich maneuver in a series of cartoon vignettes. The Board made me put it up. T. R. thinks it’s a Good Idea. T. R. is one of those people who apparently believe that if you are sufficiently cautious you stand a real chance of living forever. A hypothetical disaster—“I could have been killed!”—is as horrible to her as a real one would be, has been, to me.

  The centerpiece of the poster is the central metaphor for our times. A middle-aged woman, mute, imploring, grimacing, clutches her own throat with one panicky hand. Underneath is the caption:

  THE UNIVERSAL CHOKING SIGN

  T. R. doesn’t think this is funny. I had seen these posters before in restaurants, but had never studied one closely until T. R. put it up across from my desk. We had just the one conversation about it, which became absurdly heated and hateful, and I have not mentioned it since.

  “You can laugh,” she had said as she taped down the last corner, “but I personally can’t think of anything worse than choking to death. I’m haunted by the idea of asphyxiation.”

  “You’re haunted by the idea of death,” I said. “Last week you said you couldn’t think of anything worse than Alzheimer’s disease.”

  “Alzheimer’s can’t be avoided. Choking can.”

  “Well, now that we have this poster, anyway.” T. R. blushed and zipped her lip. She is a resentful youngish woman, unfunctionally fat, and will do just about anything to throw a fight in her opponent’s favor. She was not born to lose: She has been conditioned to prefer it, the disadvantaged position, like so many of her generation. (She is a child of the sixties; I am a child of the fifties.) She is happiest when sullen, most assured when outnumbered, most peaceful in defeat. The high point of her life came and went long ago, when a policeman’s horse stepped on her foot and smashed her big toe during a peace demonstration in South Kingstown.

  She was busy now figuring out ways to lose her argument with me. “All right,” she said, “tell me what’s wrong with showing people how to perform the Heimlich maneuver. It’s not intuitive, you know. If you plant your fist in the wrong place you can break the guy’s ribs.”

  “I’m not talking about the Heimlich maneuver. I’m talking about the damn sign. What is the point, T. R., of this picture? Is it supposed to familiarize us with the appearance of a choking person? So that the next time we see someone turning purple and grabbing his throat and gagging we won’t assume he has a tension headache and pass by in discreet silence? Or…maybe it’s to give us some idea of how to act when we ourselves are choking to death, so that we won’t make the common mistake of doing nothing and waiting for people to guess?”

  “You’re always making fun, Dorcas. Well, it’s easy to make fun.”

  “I’m not having fun here. I’m serious.”

  T. R. was slightly mollified. “Of course you’re right,” she said, “that ninety-nine out of a hundred people don’t need to be reminded of what a choking person looks like. Probably nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand. But think about that exception, that one in a thousand, and the life he could have saved if he’d seen this poster.”

  “I am thinking about him. I can’t stop thinking about him. Where’s he from, Neptune?”

  “What harm does it do, for God’s sake?” T. R. whined. “Even if it doesn’t actually save anybody, you’re totally disregarding the spirit in which it was conceived—”

  “No, no, no. The spirit of the thing is exactly what I’m complaining about. This…artifact,” I waved my hand at the poster, “is not a flash in the pan, or the work of a single demented soul.

  “Committees turn these things out. They probably had some kind of poster contest, and this won. A group of educated adults decided how many tens of thousands of these things to create, and how to disseminate them, and of course the government’s in on it, and it’s a federal offense not to put this up on a restaurant wall, and every day millions of people look at it, whether they realize it or not, and the real message comes through, sinks in, we absorb it like trees absorb carbon dioxide, and the message is:

  THERE IS NOTHING SO OBVIOUS

  SO NATURAL

  SO INSTINCTIVELY RIGHT

  THAT IT CANNOT BE SPELLED OUT

  AND MADE SIMPLE ENOUGH

  FOR A MORON

  LIKE

  YOU

  T. R. surrendered then, needlessly of course, as I was just flailing around, and she smiled her triumphant loser’s smile. “I’m not going to go through this again with you,” she said. “You’re just going to start trashing Ralph Nader.”

  “It’s sinful to treat adults like children. It’s sinful to insult the intelligence of any sentient human being. It’s unpardonably sinful to do these things for the person’s own good.” Every time I said “sinful” T. R.’s smile grew thinner and more obnoxious. First off, the antique notion of “sin” amuses her, and secondly, she knows that when I stop wisecracking she’s got me, and I had gotten onto a subject about which I have very little sense of humor, because willful stupidity on this scale is criminal, abominable, and giggling at it is an act of capitulation.

  The Universal Choking Sign is not funny, it is tragic, the product of a culture in extremis, choking in a moral vacuum, and I will not laugh at Hilda DeVilbiss either, and poke easy cowardly fun at her psychobabble, except to make the obvious, yes, brain-numbingly obvious point that if Father had failed to “withdraw” from Abigail when she entered “that time of life when she most needed him”—that is, when she started to sweat like a bad rose, carry herself like a tubful of liquid gold, thicken the air around her into honey, menace the innocent world with her delirious, half-lidded stare—if, that is, Father had undertaken to

  VALIDATE HER SEXUALITY

  he would have ended up at the

  ADULT CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTION AT HOWARD

  doing

  TWENTY TO LIFE.

  Chapter Five

  The Death of Marilyn Monroe

  I tiptoed, or belly-crawled, past the fifth chapter, the one about Mother. It is entitled, unless I am hallucinating, “The Third Sister,” and the term “role model” pops up on every page. I assume that Mother is shown to be deficient in the role model department with the inevitable tragic results. “Child-bride” and “child-woman” also pop up a lot, along with “dream world” and “denial mechanism.” The stark, minimali
st beauty of this sort of writing is best revealed when we highlight the clichés and blank out the lines connecting them, which are just filler anyway. Only the clichés themselves, particularly spaced, are required. It’s like those children’s connect-the-dot puzzles. The dots alone reveal their true configuration to the patient, discerning eye. You don’t have to connect them at all.

  Hilda’s idea, that Mother was our “sister,” is just stupid enough to be original with her, and not part of our terrible, post-celebrity mythology. Mother, for all her softness and vulnerability and innocence and maddeningly cavalier attitude toward the truth, was in no sense our sister. That she had given birth to us, and would precede us in death; that she had come before us, and made us possible; these were the central facts of her life, I think. More important to her, even, than her marriage, which was affectionate and enduring.

  When she would tell us our birth-story, the true part about my being mistaken for a boy, she would always end by saying, “I knew you were both girls. I always wanted daughters.” She loved the phrase “my daughters,” and referred to us whenever possible, to the most casual stranger. She didn’t bore people with snapshots or cute stories. Often she didn’t even refer to us by name. Just: “my daughters.” Never “my children” or “my kids.” Her only sorrow was that there weren’t more of us. Now that I think of it, she was a modern mother. She said “my daughters” with exactly the sort of proprietary, foolish pride with which mothers of boys say “my sons.” Mother felt herself special, I think, because she had produced girls.

  And though she wasn’t the sort of mother you could turn to for teenage guidance, for sensible maternal advice, she never wanted to be our girlfriend, to stay young with us, and when her modest beauty faded she took it cheerfully, as though it still existed, instantiated now in Abigail. She passed her beauty on to Abigail, and her love of books to me.