American Genius: A Comedy

by Lynne Tillman

  In the hot summers, where I grew up, near the ocean, though I couldn't hear its roar unless my father or someone else drove me close to it, on some of those sultry, long nights, even at some distance, I believed I smelled its green, roiling, salty odor. The sun and heat were fierce, the humidity terrible, and when I wasn't in camp, settled in the mountains' coolness, when I was instead at home, my skin erupted into prickly rashes on the insides of my thighs and on my chest. Also I was bitten and eaten by mosquitoes that, after I'd killed them, if I was able to kill them, would leave blotches of my own warm, salty blood on my arm, neck, or thigh, but my own blood sickened me, though sometimes I licked the blood off my fingers, the way I drink tomato juice, to taste it. I wish they wouldn't serve so much tomato juice and soup, because warm tomato juice especially tastes like blood. During the summers, our family cat, who was later given away and killed, because my brother and I were too attached to her, my mother explained, though it was no explanation, and she never said it again, because by then I couldn't discuss the miserable fates of our cat and my dog, would have her litters of kittens, usually three and sometimes four. The first dead thing I ever saw was one of her kittens, the fourth, whom she couldn't feed, or which didn't get fed because of its innate failure to thrive, its incapacity for life, an idea that has stayed with me ever since. The dead kitten was wrapped in a piece of plain black woolen cloth, my father's fabric, and lay near its mother's body, the mother who didn't want to or couldn't feed it. It was a black kitten, so tiny it could have fit into my six-year-old's palm, whose dead body I didn't pick up and hold, but instead from which I recoiled, frightened of the inert black bulge near the mother and her living kittens. They nursed at her succulent, sustaining nipples, unaware of or indifferent to their dead sister or brother, and the mother cat was also indifferent or unaware, but in nature such cruelty goes on every day, because the will to live governs, and survival depends on certain cruelties, which most consider necessary for the various species, although animals sometimes act, like human beings, against mere survival, to protect their young. A mother elephant and her one-year-old daughter stayed with an infant son and brother, who, after its birth, couldn't stand, while the pack strode away, and even though an elephant's survival depends upon staying with the pack, the two wouldn't leave the infant who struggled to get up. Born prematurely, the baby couldn't stand because the skin on its legs didn't stretch as much as was required for it to stand up, and, when finally it could, the baby rose on its legs and took its first unsteady steps, and the three elephants marched off to join the pack. The dead kitten has stayed with me, its perfect or imperfect mother by its side, because imperfection and failure are intriguing and devastating, and often I recall entering the garage where I had hoped to raise a Shetland pony and where the mother cat and her newborn kittens lay, protected from the outside world, which might hurt them, especially dogs and tomcats, and I was thrilled by the kittens, soft as balls of angora yarn, and by new life. They were blind, the mother sleeping, and then I noticed a piece of black cloth wrapped around a bulge lying in the corner of the box. Black is for mourning, white can be, also, though that may not have been why the cloth was chosen, my father may simply have had some black fabric nearby, a remnant stored in the garage, and while life progressed and vibrated alongside the dead kitten, its mother wholly absorbed in the three healthy kittens who suckled her, I stayed in the garage, entranced by the horror of death, with its egregious untimeliness that soon came again to shock, when I was very young, but which I never accept, no matter how often it strikes.

  The transvestite's badly scarred face, her naugahyde-like skin pulled over lumpy bones, when I have seen it in passing, entranced me. She is not a female, I sometimes think, but a male in out-of-fashion women's clothes and make-up, a contemporary antique, who has many friends in the neighborhood. Sometimes I think she's not male but female, a girl who may have been burned in a fire at an early age, whose entire existence has been tendered strange by disfigurement. An ordinary sunburn is a first degree burn. Both first and second degree burns will have complete recoveries, without scars forming or other blemishes. But if the heat is extreme, underlying skin tissue can be destroyed, which happens with third and fourth degree burns, when in the third there is an actual loss of tissue of the full thickness of the skin and even some of the subcutaneous tissues. The skin appendages are also destroyed so that there is no epithelium available for regeneration of the skin. An ulcerating wound-skin ulcers are rounded or irregularly shaped excavations that result from a lack of substance due to gradual necrosis-is produced and in healing leaves a scar. A fourth-degree burn is the destruction of the entire skin with all of the subcutaneous fat and the underlying tendons, and this may have happened to the transvestite, she or he. The pain would have been unimaginable. Both third and fourth degree burns require grafting for closure and are followed by constitutional symptoms of varied gravity, their severity depending upon the size of the surface, the depth of the burn, and, particularly, of its location. The more vascular the involved area, the more blood vessels affected, the worse it is, and the greater the symptoms: Shock, toxemia caused by the absorption of destroyed tissue on the surface of the wound, and symptoms from wound infection. The prognosis is poor for any patient, my dermatologist told me, as I reported to him on the so-called transvestite, while he listened thoughtfully, perhaps wondering at my interest, checking my bare back for irregularly shaped nevi or moles, and especially poor, he went on, if the majority of the body surface is involved. But I haven't seen her naked and don't know if just her face was subject to extreme heat, though I figure more was, that she ran from an engulfing fire, her hair ablaze, the skin on her face, her limbs, and her clothes on fire. I expect she'd been asleep and was in flannel pajamas. I nurture this fantasy each time I see her, and it is how I fit her or him into my categories of experience, which is what I have and that are also historical, specific to my time and place and its antecedents. I can't fail to notice her skin deformities and surface imperfections and not just them, but also how she marches past people, as if they were not there, head high, bun toppling and falling forward, to spare herself the embarrassment of others' brazenly curious gazes. People who glance or stare at her or him never believe they're being noticed, a contradictory condition for self-conscious beings; it may in some way be necessary, this blindness or sightlessness, but I know I do stare, I catch myself, vigilant, but I can't stop myself.

  My father, his brother, who was his partner, or junior, the stockboy, would unroll a bolt of their cloth on a long table, the fabric's unfurling like an exhalation of breath, accompanied by a whooshing sound, and then one of them would search for minute imperfections, humps or lumps in the weave, discolorations, since so much could be wrong. Briskly, my father would have taken out his magnifying glass, a golden instrument, shiny and compact, and carefully scrolled it down the length and width of the cloth, the fabric of his and his brother's design, to ascertain the cloth's status, its condition for selling. Watching him read the cloth, I saw that his face was calm, in repose, when mostly he wasn't, but his concentration assured me of its possibility, and one day I wanted to be absorbed, too. I have a bolt of his fabric, and, in small boxes and cartons here, swatches of fabric and some yards of cloth I've saved and that I won't sew into clothes or curtains, because I don't know how. I possess them because I like the material and the touch of them reminds me of places and times I can't visit. My mother sewed, as well as knitted, but after several procedures on her brain, she forgot how, but then was retrained by the patient ministrations of an instructor, though now she's forgetting again, her brain is tired, but having the swatches and cloth remind me of the bolts in my father's stockroom, the intimacy and care with which he looked at material, as well as the stockboy, junior, his forthright helpfulness to my father who fired him later because business was bad, so usually I don't want to remember junior or consider his fate.

  Textiles didn't seem to matter to the Polish woman, though while I s
poke of them and my father's work, when I searched for topics she might like and that we could discuss, she managed a decorous smile, and a look of interest (littered on her attractive, broad face, which was also distinguished by its vacancy, but whether that was because she worked at a job she disliked, endured daily annoyance and boredom, which cemented her face in a placid mask, her serving face, or because she was dull, I don't know. When she urged me to have a massage from her, after two years of my having facials, though she wasn't especially expert in its practice, she expressed the determination that I relax, she didn't talk about my sensitive skin, she kneaded my skin like dough, and she might have noticed the cherry on the back of my upper thigh, but about it she has never remarked.

  The inventor loved his dog, who was always with him, except at mealtimes when he entered the big house, where his disregard of the community's pet prohibition would be noticed by the authorities, and where he also met and fell in love with a woman who seemed to appreciate him, but then she stopped, or she never did like him; his friend, another resident, told me she was too classy for the inventor. He confided his suspicion after the inventor had dropped his jeans and exposed his rosy ass from the dark wood balcony, so I wondered if the woman had been disillusioned by an act of cheap bravado and considered him vulgar. She left before I could ascertain if she was a classy character; anyway, class is meant to he shunned, and here anonymity fosters and superintends the myth of American classlessness, an aspect of American Exceptionalism that also claims the nation as an entirely new world, unlike its parent Europe, especially England, so it can't have an empire and doesn't have a hierarchical social order. Still, I'd be surprised if she had lost interest in him for that, because while it might be considered an outrageous act in our motley, possibly disreputable community, his well-turned ass was beautiful. I was surprised that it affected me, that I perceived his skin as a riotous invitation, tempting, and often I wish I were a dermatologist. Mine advised me to stay out of the sun years before others acknowledged the terrible damage it can do to skin, but people still lie under a blazing sun, without sun block, and imagine they are soaking up its beneficial, natural rays, when, in fact, they are harming their skin, aging it, and making themselves sick. People with sunburns look clown-like under their coat of sick skin, though when I was a child I was often tan and hoped to get as dark as I could, though when I was two or three, I saw a dark brown or black infant, dressed in blue, in its carriage on the street and loudly asked my mother why the mother didn't wash him. At this time our family had a maid who was black who came to the house three times a week, and she had a son, whose name I don't remember, with whom I played. We roller skated, there's a photograph of us with our roller skates on, I'm looking at him, he's smiling at the camera, I usually didn't look at the camera. It was an awkward moment on the wide sidewalk, the two embarrassed or humiliated mothers, who were strangers, with their innocuous children, one older than the other and talking, and my white mother, who's not sensitive, must have been stunned by her child's impertinent, revelatory question, because she apologized, and the black mother graciously or uneasily accepted her apology. Then my mother apologized again, grabbed my hand, and yanked me away. It is my earliest memory of skin, though it's possible that when my father first remarked on the cherry on my upper thigh, I was the same age, and that could have been the first reference to skin I heard. When my friend and I walked around Vienna, and it snowed, he joked about how it was telling us something. My friend explained he was at greater risk than I, because he was a young, black man prey to other men's aggressive impulses, if he read on the subway, he might he challenged to a fight, and generally men die before women, and I do have more dead male friends than female, they must take more risks, be less concerned with their health, less observant of danger, or in some sense court death more. He lost his life on a mountain, where it was snatched from him, so he will never return. The cherry may still be there, fading on the back of my upper right thigh.

  In my sleeping room, lying on the bed, with a white, bath-size, damp Egyptian all-cotton towel over my overheated body, and only the nighttable lamp lit, I miss my wild cat and envy the inventor's idiopathic behavior. It is, of course, what makes him, and I'm not him, yet I would like to expose my ass and act brazenly or indecently, though some here may believe I already have. Every day, my cat matures without me, housed by my mother, though fed by her paid companion, and my mother says she loves cats, especially hers, who now sleeps on her bed every night, but she had the family cat and my dog killed, which she doesn't remember, so my own cat may not recognize me when I return. It's a wonder that I have left my young cat with my mother, though I don't really expect she'll kill him, but, on many days and nights, I'm troubled by my abandonment of him, or exasperated by it, but I couldn't help myself, they don't permit animals here, they're a nuisance or a bother to the staff, are considered unsanitary, and the staff might fear undulant fever, a bacteria that causes disease in both domestic animals and people, producing pain in the joints as well as great weakness, and which can be contracted in humans from infected animals or from consumption of their products. I'm not like the inventor, even if I'd prefer to be, I am primarily incapable of disregarding a rule that might put me on probation, take away my privileges, or summarily send me home, so I resist making trouble, though I am trouble to some, I have caused distress to some, I believe it's inescapable, since human beings can be obstacles to each other's peace. Yet I don't want to be sent home in disgrace or, worse, to jail.

  Leslie Van Houten spends her days writing letters, reading, doing chores, working, hoping for release, teaching new inmates what she has learned being inside, and she washes her face and brushes her teeth, eats breakfast, lunch, and dinner, wants snacks, exercises and stays fit, and she goes nowhere in the large cage to which she has adjusted. Most human beings can adjust to almost anything, except severe physical and mental torture, though some have a higher threshold for pain than others, and our elasticity is a comfort, though I find change difficult and am resistant or reluctant to face or in a sense pardon the new for dispensing with the old, like the shoes I loved that the manufacturer stopped making, which may be why American history appeals to me, when it does, once almost exclusively, but less so every day, and design increasingly more each day because, though design has a history, within its history is a will to disown the past, too, or at least to sidle away from it, all the while looking back reflexively. I can configure or conceive from my mind and with my hand, but I must accept the hand history deals, since about most things I have little or no choice. For instance, I might be forced to leave this community before I am ready. Because of her actions, Leslie Van Houten was forced to live in jail and has accommodated herself to a highly regulated and restricted existence, she has matured there, received an education, made and lost friends, she may die there, though I believe they'll let her out when she's very old, as another kind of punishment, to experience completely what she has missed. I haven't experienced her restrictions, I can't know hers in my skin, just as I don't know being imprisoned in my body with all my limbs paralyzed, or suffering the insane discomfort of full-body atopic eczema, or to have been a slave and borne the lash of a whip. When in the millennial year 2000, Van Houten was up for parole, she wore her partially gray hair in a bun, and instead of a dress that made her look like an executive secretary she wore a long-sleeved cotton T-shirt, mostly white with red sleeves, an aging cheerleader's get-up, for she was a cheerleader in her own defense, but to deaf ears, even though, in 1982, the chair of her hearing had told her she was "much closer than she might realize" to going home. But she isn't home and still can't leave her cell when lights are off and the block is in lockdown. But something could transpire, she could be paroled, and she's asked, we're all asked, to have hope. I don't expect I'll be sent to jail, but I might not return home, even to my young wild cat, and, to be honest, as the daughter of time must be, I regularly wish for an event such as was prophesied by the tarot card reader, a bright
, definitive occurrence that transforms me or casts the next day into something I haven't known, though I don't wish for more catastrophe.

  My skin itches, the hard bathwater has dried it, I slather on enriched cream, and stir greasily on my bed. I hadn't thought about mail, but it's an inducement and might be waiting in the mailroom in the main house, which hastens my dressing for drinks and then dinner. Everyday I wear the same thing, I buy several copies of the same shirt and trousers in different colors and shades, shoes, too, since, as much as possible, I don't like to consider what I wear or look like. I bathe frequently and shower daily, I do my laundry weekly, with Ivory Snow, for sensitive skin, all residents are expected to do their own washes, one of the conditions for staying here, as it's considered beneficial to perform sensible or practical duties and care for ourselves. One resident did her wash daily, because it made her feel worthwhile. My clothes are simple and free of ornamentation, though I like a cable stitch on heavy, all-cotton hand-knit sweaters, and I like stripes, solid bright and dark colors, small dots on cardigan sweaters and loose pants I can put on and pull off quickly. My mother and father urged me to do things fast, it was important to them, and even now that my mother is very old, she grows impatient when I or she can't accomplish a goal quickly, and one day I asked her, "Why is speed so important?" Without glancing at me, continuing to knit a yellow sweater for her internist's granddaughter, not missing a stitch, though her hands tremble, my mother said: "Speed's the thing." Then I realized that modernity had a room in her old body. She also likes buttons, not as much as I do, I'd like to design buttons and might some day, I have a button collection which I occasionally spread on the floor, marveling at their intricate designs and details, God is in the details, also the devil, and innocuousness. Buttons are undone all the time, they're supposed to be done and undone, one of the first things a child learns is to button a jacket and tie shoes, though zippers are fine, and, like flight, fast; still, I prefer buttons, a well-designed and perfectly suited button cheers me up, and though buttoning a cardigan sweater can slow my getting dressed for dinner, if the button slides through its buttonhole easily, I'm not very inconvenienced, since a bit of beauty is worth it to me.