by Bella Pollen
“This from somebody in sexual thrall to a ghost?”
“Harrumph,” I answered.
To begin with, Sarah appeared to me only at night, but recently she’s taken to hanging around during office hours too.
“What are you doing?” she asks, swinging coltish legs off the edge of my desk.
“Working.”
“On what?”
“A book.”
“And is this book by any chance called ‘Where to Buy High-Waist Jeans with a Pencil Leg’?”
I close the tab. See, this is the downside of virtual shrinks. They get into your head, they get into your hard drive, and soon there is nowhere to hide. The upshot is that the carbon footprint of virtual therapy is small. Recently, Sarah has taken to bringing an overseas colleague with her.
“Kim” is strong and fierce. The fact that she bears the same name and physical attributes as my American literary agent is also weirdly coincidental. Kim is spectacularly untroubled by any form of self-doubt, and for this reason alone I find her a little scary.
“Please,” Kim says. “This self-deprecation/humble-bragging thing. It’s not doing you any favours.”
“I don’t know why you’re here,” I grumble. “Either of you.”
“Oh, we think you do,” Kim says.
“I’m not blocked, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Really? How long since you last published?”
“I’ve got tons of ideas.”
“Show us one, then.”
“Early stages,” I mutter.
“Uh-huh.” Kim gives Sarah a knowing look.
“Hasn’t anyone ever suggested you might need to work through your past in order to move on to your future?” Sarah asks.
“Nope,” I snap. “Never.”
But after they leave, I dare myself to think about it.
Maybe at some point in life everyone comes to a full stop. A point at which people are forced to question who they are and what they stand for. If the story I’ve sold myself isn’t the real one, then what is? Maybe the narrative of your past life can’t be changed, but would it really hurt to check whether anything’s been learned along the way?
“Memoir? That’s what you’re thinking?” At the first hint of literary productivity, Kim reappears, arms crossed, against my filing cabinet.
“It’s not exactly my genre,” I say.
“Rubbish.” Sarah cleans her glasses. “Everything you’ve ever written is lazily disguised autobiography.”
“That’s because books are like nightmares,” I say sullenly. “They, too, grow out of grisly past experiences.”
“Don’t be glib.” Kim is already rifling through the box of old photos in the corner of my room. “How good is your memory, anyway?”
I clutch my forehead, wishing them both gone. I don’t trust memory—edited footage run through the spool of sentiment and nostalgia. Memory is impure. It springs from the tiniest seeds of reality, and on the way to flowering it produces offshoots of nuance and tints of every colour. Memories are life as you choose to remember it. Life the way you wish it had been. Memory betrays us all; or maybe, in the end, we all betray our memories.
“Lighten up,” Sarah says. “Nobody cares about the colour of the napkins.”
“Christ, what does that even mean?”
“It means write about what’s important to you.”
“Though an overarching theme would make it easier to package.” This from Kim.
I look from one to the other. “But where would I start?”
“At the beginning.”
“Everyone has more than one beginning,” I say. “One end but a thousand beginnings.”
“This is no time to be pretentious,” Sarah counters. “Keep it simple.”
“What were you like as a child, for instance?” Kim asks.
“As a child?” I pluck a random photograph from the box. “Well, now you come to mention it . . .” I run my finger over the faded image. “Kind of adorable.”
NEW YORK
VILLAIN BABY
The photograph was taken in the study of our New York apartment. On first glance it is a Hallmark tableau of a happy, close-knit English family abroad. Fear not, though—it is anything but.
The photo is originally intended for a newspaper—some odd publication whose name I can’t remember—and for the purposes of artistic composition, we, the Pollens, have been arranged. Children centre forwards; parents at opposite corners of a linen sofa set against an intellectually abstract wallpaper that seems very much of its time.
Quizzical, a half smile on his lips, my father looks athletic in a grey suit over a pressed shirt. His cufflinks are enamel, his tie skinny, though not overly so. Dad’s hair is bitter black, his skin pale, his nose from the Jewish side of the family. Heavily rimmed glasses lend him a bookish, if somewhat Clark Kentish, look—but this is just so. When at home, he is the English square, a true blue of Eton and Oxford. When away, however—and he is often up, up, and away—he is the superhero of the art world. Clues to his dual identity? The cowboy boots, the hair too long for his job, the gravitational force of his charm. Dad is the authoritarian but also the instigator of the Sunday-morning pillow fight. The president of the auction house bunking off work to take us to the movies. The aesthete who believes in the majesty of a hot-dog breakfast.
And my mother?
A Somerset Maugham beauty whose complexion remains English rose despite growing up under the blistering African sun. She wears a necklace of three jade strands and a wrap-around jersey dress whose psychedelic print is tastefully muted. When she laughs, and she’s laughing now, her eyes crease to happy and her hair—rich as carob—swings under her chin. My mother, a volunteer teacher in Harlem, is 100 percent love and roast chicken picnics in the park. She is the draughtsman of boundaries, the rule maker, the advocate of a prettily said thank you. At home, where she is almost always to be found, she is the answer to every question, the entity around which our stratospheric demands orbit. Custodian of the bedtime story, coper, secret smoker, it is my mother who is the moral backbone of the family, then, now, and forever more.
But lo! What do we have here, perched so coyly on the sofa arm behind her? Eldest Child in her patent Mary Janes, so very clean and polished. Hair black as bog earth, complexion clear as water. Eldest Child is serious, clever, the prism through which every first-time parental neurosis has been filtered. She is neither smiling nor laughing. She is a million emotions away from joy, and though we are not done with her, not by any means, enough of the spotlight on sister Susie. It’s time to pay attention to the photo’s bottom right-hand corner, where little Marcus—that eminently kissable lambkin of God—is straddling a red plastic London bus, with the unquestioning delight for public transport that only a four-year-old can muster.
Apart from his pudding bowl of black hair—yes, again with the hair colour—there’s nothing noteworthy about Youngest Child.
So what’s noteworthy about the photograph in the first place, you might wonder. Why the inch-by-inch scrutiny, the wordy discourse?
Here’s what’s special about this New York Hasselblad moment.
I am.
I am what’s special.
Me.
Right there, sitting between my parents on the sofa. Between my parents. See how I am the absolute focus of their interest? Note, if you will, that this very shutter second, recorded if not for posterity then certainly for the painful longevity of my siblings’ existence, represents the outcome of a desperate and bloody battle.
In other words: it’s the happiest moment of my life.
My sister, my brother, and I begin at the beginning, our ID cards clean and unstamped. Not yet nicknamed “Sticks” or “Froggins” or “Fish,” we’re bland and harmless—three little pastas waiting for sauces. We muddle through the honeymoon period of newborn without discernible stereotyping, but labels soon apply. Eldest Child is Numero Uno. Top Doggie, Head Girl. First to walk, first to talk, a p
ipper past every post. The whites of her eyes reflect nothing but gold stars and Best in Show rosettes. She is the Queen Bee, the Bee’s Knees. She is brand-new clothes, later bedtimes, and the highest tax bracket of pocket money. Her position is unassailable; her ambitions are undetermined but lofty.
Baby brother is Dauphin of the Upper East Side, Caliph of our Ninety-Second Street apartment. The boy whose syrupy dimples make even the dourest of doormen smile. Marcus is First Caste Male, Man Cub, only and much longed for son, whose maggoty little penis carries the genus of the family name. Though currently the owner of no more than a handful of chewed and sticky baseball cards, he is heir to the glittering fiefdom of Pollen. Amenable, pudgy, he aspires to be a fireman but also sometimes a vet.
Then there’s me. Tot Two, Second-Hand News, No Novelty, Replicant. I am Old Hat, Superfluous to Needs, a dreary amalgam of hand-me-downs and repeat-routine. Share the bedroom! Halve the space! Sidelined and out in the rain, I am insecure and jealous, left to gnaw on the entrails of exhausted parental affection. Pre-packaged to feel hard done by, I am a spiraling vortex of need prepared to leech the last dregs of unconditional love from the marrow of my mother’s bones. I am Omen clone, pedalling my horrid little tricycle across the family’s happiness and peace of mind.
I am Middle Child.
Plus, I am blonde, sort of.
“Adopted,” whispers Eldest Child, before turning her soft-soaping face to thank Mother for the baloney sandwich. “Thanks, Mumsie. You’re truly the bestest.”
Not all talents are bestowed upon us at birth. The cutting snideness and instant retort that will one day become my trademark have not yet kicked in. Right now, brawn is all I have.
Middle Child likes to keep a metaphorical knife in her hand. To hell with roast chicken picnics in the park. She wants roadkill, her sister’s carcass on a plate. Susie is her sworn enemy—for the homework she completes, for the straight A’s she achieves, for the shocking articulacy she employs in the face of adult interrogation. See her—wearing her gaudy Miss Diplomatic Immunity sash—adopt a world peace expression of enrichment. Watch her smile and feign thoughtful intelligence. Later in life, when the difference in our hair colour is rendered unimportant, when we are inseparable, a witches’ coven of two, I discover that my sister is genuinely thoughtful and intelligent, while from my own mouth will always slip things putrid and slithery. But for now, age six to her seven and a half, my ambition is to slaughter her and keep her head in a pickling jar.
Let the record show, however, that I have no plans to execute King Baby. Oh, no. Him I will subjugate. Put a ring through his nose and teach him to dance to my tune. I will bide my time, the puppet master behind the throne, and when he is finally crowned, the strings of power shall be mine.
One day opportunity comes. The entry-phone buzzes, the elevator rises, and Nanny opens the door.
“And how does nice Mr. Axelrod take his coffee?” she asks.
The photographer is professional, courteous. He remarks on the calm of the household, the children so tidy and well mannered. He sees only our surface, Lake Placid, but none of the currents roiling beneath. He begins arranging. A glass paperweight, art catalogues, the vase of flowers my mother has brought in from the bedroom. The photographer’s concerns are the afternoon light and the paper’s deadline. At length he turns his attention to the family, moving us here and there, in and out of frame, until quite suddenly the music stops, and I’m sitting where I’m sitting.
Between my parents.
Oh, the luck. I can scarcely believe it, for although I’ve always been told that the Lord giveth, let’s face it, he often taketh away again almost straight after. Our father who art in heaven, I silently implore. Please! Let me stay.
“All right, everybody freeze!” Mr. Axelrod says drolly, and it is done.
The fists of Middle Child clench in triumph, a flame ignites in her heart, and as it catches and burns, the sky above the water tanks tinges red and a hot wind blows across the Hudson.
Now the photographer directs my parents to look at me. That’s right—not at Eldest Child, not at King Baby, but at me. And because it is so unexpected and so thrilling, because it is the thing I want above all else, I panic.
In my embarrassment, in my agony, I blurt out something silly, accidentally witty. It is possibly the silliest, accidentally wittiest line anyone has ever come up with, and I wish I could remember it, but it’s gone.
A flash of amusement crosses my father’s face. He removes his glasses and pinches the bridge of his nose. My mother laughs and curls her hair around a finger. The invisible bubble coming out of her mouth says: Oh my! We’ve been so foolish! It’s been you all along, right under our very nozies!
Why yes, my father’s bubble concurs. It is you, after all, Oh Favoured One, oh so very centred middling child, neither too tall nor too squat, too old nor too young, too near nor too far. Your very in-betweenness means you are ideally positioned to realise our every hope and dream. You and you alone shall be the carrier of the Olympic flame.
And thus, the match flares, the baton passes, and Eldest Child’s lips thin to invisibility. She has missed the writing on the wall. Too late she has understood that she is to be usurped, tipped off her perch, cut down in a hail of bullets. She is Queen Bee stung to death by the very colony over which she presides. The hare, fucked over by the tortoise. Perched on the arm of the sofa, eldest paws snatching at the grey linen, she gazes into the abyss. Sneak preview of Eldest Child’s future? A cheerless meditation on the game of nepotism she has played and lost.
As for the Prince Regent? See the wheels on his bus go round and round? See that vacant expression on his face? Shock. For the first time in his toddly life, he has been rolled outside the magic circle. No longer warmed by the embers of favouritism, he must navigate the remainder of his life numb and alone: the shambles of adolescence, the bafflement of adulthood, the indignation of middle age, and the ignominy of death. Not even a fleet of red plastic London buses will palliate the horror of this journey to come.
Oh, Dear God, if this moment could only be set in concrete, snow-globed for eternity.
But wait.
It can.
It already is.
Because photographs are forever.
Farewell, sucker siblings.
The era of Middle Child has begun.
PIECES OF EIGHT
One thing I knew about my father’s Sotheby Parke-Bernet job: it meant throwing a lot of cocktail parties. Women stood elbow to elbow, smoking, tortoiseshell bracelets chinking as they debated vital matters such as Lyrical Abstraction or the Paradigm of Cubism. Their sideburned counterparts, snug in black turtlenecks, nipped at martinis and leaned in doorways looking charismatic. These men smoked too, but then everybody smoked last century. Entertaining in 1960s Manhattan required imagination. No cubed cheese and pineapple on toothpicks for New York City’s art elite, and so caterers were hired to produce trays of ingenious canapés that we, as the host’s children, were expected to hand around. This duty required us to be formally placed on best behaviour, a state, as explained by our parents with their patented brand of loving sarcasm, a notch or two above our normally polite, helpful selves.
I had no objection to handing round food—any proximity to food was fine by me. It was the small talk I found galling. In the way that some people are socially hampered by lack of spatial awareness or a third nipple, I was born with zero talent for polite conversation.
Alcohol is not available to third-graders, even in measured calming doses, so I was soon labelled a disagreeable child, prone to bouts of idiocy. It wasn’t fair. For instance, when my father’s colleague Mr. Whipstein remarked, “Goodness, child, you’ve got tall!”
I, paralysed by self-consciousness, blurted back, “and you’re fat!”
Both statements were equally true, but I’m pretty sure Mr. Whipstein’s didn’t cost him a week’s pocket money and the mortification of an apology. Still, I can’t pretend not to know what my pa
rents wanted from us at these parties: to scamper from guest to guest, bearing toothpaste smiles and crying, “Delighted to make your acquaintance, do try the shrimp,” all the while parrying enquiries of a personal nature, if not with charm then at least with tact.
“How’s school?” the interrogation would begin, and from there slalom viciously downhill to, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
And there it was. The dread question. How was I supposed to know? At eight years old, I’d barely worked out whether I was animal, vegetable, or mineral. All philosophical uncertainties are scary, but “Who am I?” has to be the most terrifying of all. I mean, is it really a matter of choice? Does the chicken actually ask to produce the egg? Conversely, I also resented the question for its implication that children were of no interest in their own right, but merely being kept in a holding pattern until they were old enough to pursue that mysterious trajectory known as a career.
At six, I was given a book called the Big Bumper Book of Jobs. It portrayed the daily lives of hard-working ginger cats outfitted as police officer, firefighter, nurse. Across terse double-page spreads, dedicated tabbies could be seen arresting loutish toms or saving sputtering kittens from flaming buildings. Other illustrations depicted attractive felines with curling lashes peeping out from under Florence Nightingale bonnets, while ripped-looking Manx cats in hard hats yowled orders across building sites. The book was inspiring. But I didn’t want to be a civic, goody-goody cat; I wanted to be a different kind of cat. A fun, cool cat, like the fifteen- and sixteen-year-old Puerto Rican kids my mother taught how to read in her Harlem school. Like Bill Latimer, doorman of Parke-Bernet, “mayor” of Madison Avenue, and confidant of Eleanor Roosevelt. Bill was also a buddy of star quarterback Joe Namath and would take us to Shea Stadium to watch Jets games, always allowing us to eat hot dogs while hoisted onto his shoulders, irrespective of how much ketchup we slobbered down his neck.
“You can be anyone you want to be,” was my parents’ default line, but I was pretty sure I’d be laughed out of the party and sent to bed had I indicated a desire to be a six-foot-tall, fiftyish black doorman, so I kept quiet and proffered shrimp.
