This Is Where We Came In

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  The program worked well: the more I exercised, the stronger I got. It didn’t help the fear, though. That would take a long time to simmer down, if ever. (I can see in what I’ve written here that some of the extreme feelings are a result of the fear. Though that doesn’t mean I disown them.) Beneath the fear was the sense of waiting, which outlasted the fear. Waiting for something, though I never figured out what. Maybe for the return of my former self. My former strength, endurance, fortitude, courage.

  As the weeks passed, I began to feel changes. This time I wasn’t changed utterly, only in small ways. I could walk up a hill or up the subway steps without growing short of breath. I could be with a friend for the duration of a brief walk. After a while I could go to a restaurant or a movie without feeling so restless that I had to flee. I became interested in the news again, the wars and natural disasters. It was even conceivable that with patience, I would stop being a patient and repossess the “more” I had once been. Yes, I might soon be restored to life, a real life, and this real life would last longer than it would have without the surgery. And as I tentatively began to feel inhabited by this “real life”—going out to a movie, talking to people in a café, caring about my work, enjoying family get-togethers—it was very like rereading War and Peace after a long hiatus: stepping into territory that was familiar and fresh at the same time, territory that was being renewed precisely by my own return.

  It was still hard to admit that the surgery was a good thing. Now that it was over I didn’t want to think about it, good or bad. What I did think about was the horse, whom I imagined grazing in a green meadow under a blue sky. Before he gave up his heart valve, of course. It occurs to me: is it possible that horses are killed expressly for their valves, as in the illegal traffic in human organs? On that day when I first met the surgeon, did he call a stable and order a horse’s valve? I wouldn’t want to be the cause of any horse’s death. Be that as it may, I am the beneficiary, and I feel grateful to the horse who pumps my blood so effectively.

  I never smoked those two cigarettes I brought with me the first day. When I got home I put the almost empty pack of Vantage in the bottom drawer of my night table, next to an unopened carton. They’re still there, almost eight months later. Even though I probably won’t smoke anymore (though you never know, I might regain my old nonchalance), I feel those two are owed to me.

  This Is Where We Came In

  Every Saturday afternoon, we went to the movies, a double feature at the Carroll Theater on the corner of Utica Avenue and Crown Street in Brooklyn. Carroll Street was one block farther up the avenue, so why the theater was called the Carroll rather than the Crown I never understood.

  We went sometime after lunch, whenever the mood struck and regardless of what was playing—comedy, drama, mystery, horror. Indeed, we had no idea what would be playing, unless we’d passed the Carroll a day or two before and noticed the colorful placards in their glass cases, with photos of the stars. It never occurred to us to look up the times either movie would begin: the notion of theaters making their schedules available to the viewing public was quite beyond us at the age of ten, or eleven, or twelve. Going to the movies meant drifting in somewhere in the middle of the first feature, then suspending its scenes in memory during the rest of the show—two hours or more—until the afternoon came full circle as the images began looking familiar.

  We were herded into the Carroll’s shadowy depths by the matron, a stocky, tubular woman dressed in a white uniform like a nurse, who seated us in the children’s section, off to the side, so we wouldn’t disturb the adults, of whom there were very few on a Saturday afternoon. Nonetheless the matron kept strict watch, striding up and down the aisles, hushing whisperers with stern warnings. Though we mocked her among ourselves, the matron was an object of fear because she could get us thrown out of the movie and then what would we do with the rest of our Saturday afternoon?

  Our nonchalant readiness to accept whatever was in progress on the screen might sound like sweet bygone naïveté, evoking nostalgia for the simple life: no checking the time, reserving tickets, waiting in line . . . I tended to regard it as such, until I discussed it with my astute friend Alice, also from Brooklyn, who pointed out that on the contrary, starting the movie in the middle had a distinctly postmodern cast, an omen of hypertext, even: we were dealing with the given information in fragments with no context, or only a slowly clarifying context.

  I thought this over and saw that Alice was right. Not only did we have to locate ourselves midplot, seeking a foothold in a zone of utter ignorance. We had to invent, by intuition, who the characters were and surmise their histories. We didn’t know if the figures on the screen were friends or foes, lovers or married, and we didn’t know who was bad and who was good. If someone was murdered, we didn’t know if he deserved to be murdered and we should be happy, or if he was an innocent victim and we should be sorry. If characters kissed, we didn’t know if it was their first kiss or their last. We didn’t even know if we were close to the beginning, or in the middle, or near the end.

  Far from producing unease, the condition of not knowing was thrilling. Until we gained some inkling of the goings-on, the plot was wide open, a vast expanse of potentiality, gradually narrowing as the possibilities sorted themselves out, some evaporating, others looming large, until an intentional pattern emerged.

  When the movie was over, so many tantalizing questions remained: how did the whole imbroglio evolve, who was the sinister old man who turned up near the end, what treachery had taken place in that august mansion? Why was everyone bent on keeping the lovers apart? Who was the dead man everyone kept talking about? Was there anyone else we had not yet met?

  It was a long time before our curiosity could be appeased. In the interval came the Disney cartoons, then a new installment of Superman—resuming whatever peril we’d left him in last week—and Movietone News, with its perennial opening footage of skiers executing stupendous leaps down the Alps, followed by highlights of current events. After the coming attractions, which we promptly forgot, we watched the second movie in the ordinary way, from beginning to end. At last, the original movie, to be summoned from memory. Now we had to reshape all the premises we’d worked so hard to formulate. So those two were not really friends at all, but rivals for the estate, pretending goodwill. So the murder we’d seen was the ultimate in a string of gruesome murders. So that man was the renegade father, that woman the long-lost daughter.

  As we reassembled the plot, superimposing the actual story against the one we’d constructed from insufficient data, things began fitting together reassuringly. The movies of my childhood, a more stable, trusting era, were linear, their plots meant to be comprehended. A reliable directorial hand would guide us through the landscape. And yet the effort of reassembly, I see now, was very much like watching today’s movies, so many of which are built of fragments scattered in a jumbled time frame. Arriving in the middle transformed those simple movies of the past into postmodern films. We were, in a sense, being prepared for the future, for movies that replicate, unwittingly, our experience of arriving in the middle.

  The curious thing is that although I loved figuring out the movie and revising my assumptions, I don’t love current movies with their short, baffling scenes, deconstructed mosaics that must be rebuilt on the spot—or more likely, in discussions afterwards, over coffee or standing on the sidewalk. There are always a few pieces I can’t find a place for. Today’s moviemakers are teases rather than benevolent guides; they mean to obfuscate; they set us down in the center of a labyrinthine design and abandon us. I’m quite aware that the change reflects a cultural shift: we’re no longer as certain of anything as we once were, and naturally movies reflect that instability and ambiguity. But that awareness doesn’t change my feelings: outside, I may have to live in chaos and bafflement, but inside the movie house, I long for an orderly world restored.

  Predictably, on those Saturday afternoons, a sense of déjà vu would insinuate itself. A s
cene would look familiar, then another and another. We shifted restlessly in our seats, nudging each other, provoking the matron’s fierce glance. Someone would murmur, I think this is where we came in.

  Now and then one of us wasn’t quite sure, couldn’t quite recall, so we’d wait a bit until she said, Oh, right, I remember. Okay, I guess this is where we came in. Or someone else might urge, Let’s just stay till the cops find him hiding in the bushes, or till the mother realizes it’s her long-lost child—I want to see that again. And so we waited until everyone was satisfied and ready to leave—unless the movie was so entrancing that we stayed, by consensus, to see the second half all over again.

  We didn’t worry about making noise as we shuffled out; the matron’s power no longer mattered. Once we hit daylight, blinking in the dazzle of late-afternoon sun, we had so much to discuss—weaving the segments together, patching them with remembered details, collaborating to achieve a design entirely congruent to the original movie meant to be seen from start to finish. Far from mere passive observers, we became moviemakers ourselves.

  “I Wish I Could Say the Same”

  I never witnessed the primal scene, Freud’s keyhole drama in which the child spies the parents in the act. I’m not especially curious about how mine disported themselves in bed. But I have lately become curious about what it felt like for her, my mother. Granted, it’s a subject I don’t know much about. Whatever I write is conjecture, intimations from what I saw and heard, or didn’t—what was conspicuous by its absence. I have a sense that her deepest satisfaction was in the vanity department, and the connection between vanity and sexual pleasure is even more obscure than are the facts in this case.

  My father, who was such a vivid presence for me in his lifetime, has since his death been fading like a Polaroid photo going in the wrong direction, from color and definition back to milky blur. I once thought I knew him through and through, each atom; I had studied him with critical scrutiny, as daughters do. Now I’m not sure I knew anything at all except the surface. Now, unless I make a conscious effort to locate the particles of him that lodged in me, he’s like someone I used to see around all the time but never knew very well—the letter carrier or the man who drove the ice-cream truck. Certain people, whether living or dead, need to be physically present in order to be fully apprehended, while others leave traces that more readily adhere. My mother remains as vivid as when I last saw her alive twenty-six years ago. I know her better now than I did then.

  My mother was not prudishly silent about sex. Many mothers of her generation behaved (and looked) as though sex were not part of the basic human repertoire. For that difference my friends envied me, growing up, and it’s true I didn’t bear the burden of the common inhibitions. I had others, though, so I’m not sure their envy was warranted. I imagine that my childhood friends managed to get over their sexual inhibitions (people do, as a rule), but other kinds of learned fears may be more tenacious.

  From remarks my mother let drop, it was clear that she and my father engaged in sex (“did it,” as we used to say), that she assumed one day I would do the same, and that it was a good thing in general. The crucial words are “let drop.” Sex was something to be alluded to coyly, even lewdly—a born performer, she could do a great delivery of off-color jokes, though never very gross ones. But it was not a topic for extended discussion, either entertaining or serious. I once asked her what we would do if I had a baby before marriage. “Out of wedlock,” as we then said. That was a calamitous thing to have happen, or so it seemed to me. She smiled at my question; the likelihood must have appeared remote. Besides being ten years old, I was bookish and unworldly and had shown no signs of incipient promiscuity. “If you had a baby, we would take care of it,” she said kindly. End of story. I was touched by her answer. I still am. Nowadays I suppose an enlightened mother would probe into the whys and wherefores of such a question, but at the time I was satisfied.

  My father was the more close-mouthed on the subject. To me he never mentioned anything concerning sex, though I found out years later, with some dismay, that he was more frank with my older sister. “Sleep with him if you must,” he advised her about one boyfriend, “but don’t marry him.” What I would have given to be addressed that way, as if I were capable of both judgment and passion! Probably he was more frank with my younger brother too, in the manner of fathers and sons, whatever that might have been. Did he think I was too intellectual ever to think about sex? Or even to require advice? In our staid little backwater, being “intellectual” and being sexual were considered mutually exclusive; it took me a while to realize that this was not true, that the contrary might often be true.

  But it’s not totally accurate to say he never mentioned sex. When my teenaged friend next door and her boyfriend necked ostentatiously on the front porch, offending my father’s sense of propriety, discommoding him as he sat on the other side of the low brick wall reading his paper and smoking his cigar, he suggested sarcastically to my mother that the boy, who was poor, apply to the girl’s father, who was rich, for “the privilege of sleeping with your daughter.” Not only were the neighbors rich but they were deeply stupid, and the injustice of that combination—wealth and stupidity—drove my father wild, he himself being smart with no money. He was so pleased with his bon mot that he stomped around the house repeating it whenever provoked; my mother had all she could do to keep him from proclaiming it on the porch. I myself thought it very funny, if cruel. I found my father’s verbal bursts of spleen dashingly clever. The eager couple did eventually marry. We all went to the wedding.

  “I LOVE EVERY INCH . . .”

  I never saw my parents in a genuine embrace. When my father left with his briefcase in the morning and returned at dinnertime he kissed whomever was in the room, including my mother, quickly but affectionately on the cheek, and during the time I was in erotic thrall to him (that didn’t last long, perhaps until the age of seven or eight) I would shout “First is best,” if I’d been first, “Last is best,” if last, and so on. He found that cute and varied the order on purpose, just to hear it. During one phase of my erotic thralldom, when I was about four or five, I didn’t like to let him out of my sight, even to go to the bathroom, and so he sometimes let me accompany him there, where he managed to urinate—I still don’t know how and keep meaning to consult my husband about it—in the most discreet manner, never exposing a millimeter of flesh. He said he was watering the toilet and this satisfied me. Precocious as I was in some ways, I must have been a naïve child, or exceptionally gullible.

  The closest thing to an embrace that I saw was their dancing together at family weddings, my father’s rather short arms, in their suit jacket, settled firmly and formally around my mother’s thick, fleshy middle. Otherwise his public displays of conjugal love took the form of mock violence. He would twist her arm behind her back, she would wince and protest in mock pain (or real pain, for all I know), and he would give an exaggerated leer. When their friends came over, he would slap her genially somewhere on her vast cushiony torso and say, “I love every inch of it.” Maybe these professions were why my mother never suffered the self-loathing common to overweight women. When they went out, she dressed in tight, bright clothes and flaunted her bulk, as if she came from some distant culture where fat was prized. Paradoxically, none of this deterred her constant efforts to lose weight. She once tried some medication that did help with her weight, but it also made her chatter so incessantly that we wondered if the fifty lost pounds were worth it.

  When I was very small and sometimes curled up for a nap with her, I would tell her she smelled good—talcum powder, I think; complacently, she would answer, “That’s what your father says too.” I regarded her naked body, which she never hesitated to show, as a kind of grotesque marvel. If I was around while she dressed, she would ask me to hook her enormous long-line bras, either “on the tight” or “on the loose” hook, depending on her state of digestion or her plans for the day: home or out. I was impressed by he
r nonchalance, for I myself didn’t care to be seen other than fully dressed; I think this had less to do with my body per se than with my already extreme penchant for privacy, my sense of the great divide between the inner life and the outward performance.

  I accepted my mother’s size as a given, never having known her any other way. She was charming, well-dressed, and eminently presentable—more, she was charismatic—so I could take her anywhere, so to speak. Still, I felt that her weight made her different from other mothers. I knew for certain at a young age that I would never let my body get like hers. This resolve never lapsed. When I was close to forty, I found myself climbing up a ladder into a swimming pool behind my mother, confronting the backs of her thighs. I was appalled at their state. I wondered if anything like that could ever happen to my thighs; I resolved all over again to make sure it didn’t, as far as was in my power. I also resolved never to let my children walk behind me on a pool ladder when I got old, or maybe even sooner.

  “HE MANAGED TO CALL ME . . .”

  I never heard my father call my mother by her name. Like her fat or his twisting her arm and leering, this was simply the way things were in our family. When I thought about it at all, it seemed a form of contempt or denial—he called everyone else by name; she called him by name—but I never stayed with the thought very long, even though I was considered a thoughtful child. I was thoughtful, but my thoughts were about what I read in books, not what was near at hand. I rarely pondered how it might make her feel, though I do now. Nor did I ever discuss the absence of the name with my sister or brother. We didn’t talk much about our parents. We were spaced far apart, and as we acknowledged to one another later, we all had different parents, in a manner of speaking: my sister the young ones, I the early middle-aged, and my brother the late-middle-aged. Anyway, often children can’t distinguish between what is curious and aberrant and what is not, since they get to grow up in only one household. But surely we heard our friends’ parents call each other by name; in fact I remember all my friends’ parents first names because in our gossip sessions we referred to them chummily that way, which wasn’t the custom in public—always Mr. and Mrs.