The Life of the Mind

by Christine Smallwood

  When Dorothy was ripp’d untimely from her mother’s womb, the anesthesiologist had given her mother such a heavy dose of sedative that mother and daughter had not met until half a day later. Dorothy didn’t know who had held her in those hours while her mother was sedated. Maybe a nurse did. Maybe no one. In those days it was not thought so essential to hold a newborn.

  “Watch where you’re going, bitch,” a head attached to a pair of legs sprawled across the sidewalk said. Dorothy apologized and redirected her attention to avoiding the obstacles of the street, keeping one hand buried in her bag, gripping the leather wallet where the evidence of her watery insides was creased between dollar bills and ancient ATM receipts.

  * * *

  —

  That night Dorothy put on her nice black pants and went downtown to meet her mother and Rachel for the underwater puppet show. If anyone other than Dorothy’s mother had invited her to an underwater puppet show, she would have thought it was a joke. In a way it was. Not the invitation itself, but its presentation. “I want to have a cultural evening with both my daughters,” her mother had said on the phone. That was the joke: “both my daughters.”

  Rachel was her mother’s mentee, or surrogate daughter, or friend; Dorothy was never quite sure how to refer to her, even in her own mind. Rachel was a junior in high school. She had parents of her own, but there had been conflict at home over Rachel’s boyfriend, who was twenty-three and a student at the local community college, as well as other rebellions, and Dorothy’s mother, who knew Rachel from the neighborhood, where they both walked the same breed of terrier early in the morning, had become her mentor, or surrogate parent, or confidante. She took Rachel to the movies, the mall; they talked on the phone. Had Dorothy herself entertained the affections of a grown man when she had been a teen, her mother would not have been nearly so forgiving; age or distance had mellowed her, and Dorothy supposed she ought to respect her mother’s growth, although she couldn’t help but feel jealous that Rachel received the kind of relaxed acceptance that Dorothy had been denied. Her first therapist had theorized that her mother liked Rachel because it was a way not only of rewriting the kind of mother she had been to Dorothy, but also of extending her maternal temporality. If her mother ever felt that Dorothy growing up and swimming away meant that she herself was old, she didn’t have to feel that way with Rachel. Dorothy was old and had made mistakes and had turned out a certain way, which meant she had not turned out other ways, but Rachel was young and her most meaningful mistakes were still ahead of her; when Rachel got old, Dorothy’s mother could get a new Rachel, which is to say, a new new Dorothy.

  As a theory it sounded plausible to Dorothy, though it also suggested that the cycle of surrogacy could go on forever, in the way that people use pets. Where children are always changing, demanding change, where their bodies are clocks marking the passage of years, pet ownership stops time, allowing a person to dwell permanently in the same routine. As soon as a pet is housebroken they have learned all they will ever learn; they are on a course of absolute stasis. Thus, Dorothy reasoned, the trauma when a pet dies—not only has the owner lost companionship, but time itself has ruptured or split open.

  Dorothy didn’t like where her mind was going—did she really think a pet dying would be more disruptive than the death of a human child?—but the point, she thought, was that Rachel was her mother’s pet, and allowed her mother an existential recursion. Everyone had their way of denying linearity. Men left their wives for younger women; women acquired mentees. If you wanted to fool yourself that something wasn’t ending, you just had to go out and start something that was pretty much the same. This hurt, of course, the feeling of being replaced or replaceable, the sense that one daughter was not enough for her mother. Not that her mother saw it that way. Her mother told her repeatedly how much she loved her, that she would love her no matter who she was or what she did, though such assurances hardly helped. Love, Dorothy believed, should be unconditional in the sense that one is so intrinsically and beautifully worthwhile that no crimes or foibles or stupidity can diminish one’s essential attractiveness, sympathy, and worth, but conditional insofar as it depends on one’s unique appeal. The problem with parents was that the love they offered, while necessary, was ultimately tautological. They loved their children because they were their children; they would have loved whoever they got, which meant that it did not matter who you were. Dorothy’s mother once said that the purpose of motherhood was to teach your child how to love other people, to show them the right way to leave you, which sounded noble, although the presence of Rachel indicated that mothers could not live on nobility alone.

  * * *

  —

  The three women and their tiny paper cups of espresso squeezed onto a red velvet couch and waited for the ushers to let them downstairs. “I was asking about your day?” her mother said. “Did you have a productive day?”

  Dorothy’s mother had told her so many times that she was not disappointed by Dorothy that Dorothy had to assume her mother was very disappointed, or at least deeply ambivalent, and could express it only through disavowal. Her mother had told her so many times that she would have loved her the same if she had been a garbageman that Dorothy could only conclude that her mother would have preferred that profession for her, or perhaps that academia and sanitation were, in her mother’s mind, somehow equivalent. Alas, while sanitation workers disposed of trash, performing an essential and worthy civic function, all Dorothy did was move it from one pile to another.

  “Also,” her mother said, “you have something in your teeth.”

  Dorothy picked at two wrong places and dug fruitlessly in the right place until she took her phone out to use it as a mirror.

  “You got it,” said her mother and Rachel at the same time, and laughed.

  Because the blood was dawdling its way so slowly out of her vagina, because it wasn’t something she felt until it was already half-dry, because actually there was so little blood at this point that she didn’t even feel it on the liner, and only knew she was bleeding because she wiped it out with toilet paper—for all these reasons it wasn’t a lie, when her mother looked at her with strange, half-illuminated worry, and asked how she was feeling, that Dorothy didn’t acknowledge anything below the waist.

  “My shoulder hurts,” she said truthfully. “Also my wrists. From the computer.”

  “Do you have tingling in the fingertips?” her mother asked. “I get that from my phone.”

  “It’s more of a stinging sensation in my cuticle,” Dorothy said. “But just this one.”

  She held up her right hand and rubbed the side pad of the ring finger.

  “It throbs a little and when I push on it, it’s sore,” Dorothy said, demonstrating. “Also, shooting pains in my forearms.”

  Rachel, who played the double bass and knew about repetitive stress, asked if Dorothy had an injury.

  “It’s called the twenty-first century,” Dorothy said, and her mother rolled her eyes.

  “Is that a joke?” asked Rachel, and then it was time to go into the theater.

  * * *

  —

  Earlier that day Dorothy had taken her mother’s advice and read up on the postshow backstage tour, which was optional but which no one in their right mind would skip, and served as an informal epilogue to the performance. The “puppets” were abstractions, not characters, consisting of ribbons of fabric and other items readily available in craft stores, like scarves and pom-poms. On the tour, audience members would discover that the puppeteers wore wetsuits, that they were extremely strong and acrobatic, that some of them worked suspended from wires and cables and actually flew over the aquarium tank, dipping and gliding their tools. (Others of them reached into the tank from a raised platform.) The show, which had debuted decades earlier—this was a reprisal—was the brainchild of a young and bold third-generation puppeteer who had gone
on to a celebrated career in more traditionally narrative puppeteering. In a program note, he compared himself to Kandinsky. The show, the same review explained, had no plot; it was pure color and light, something like an animated painting or canvas, and it was performed to a live accompaniment of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, which also gave the show its name—Symphonie Fantastique.

  Rachel, it turned out, had recently learned this very Berlioz piece, Symphonie Fantastique, in the youth orchestra in which she played double bass, and had somehow, through her precocious perusal of the arts listings, or the advice of the director of the orchestra, learned of the run. While tardier ticket-holders filed into the rows behind them, Rachel, who had grown several inches since the last time Dorothy had seen her, and whose face was expertly highlighted and shadowed with products whose names Dorothy could not even guess at, explained that her favorite movement of the piece was the fourth one, where the artist, who throughout the symphony is on a kind of romantic quest, has an opium dream in which he witnesses his own execution.

  “It’s the fatal blow,” Rachel said, and Dorothy felt sure she was quoting.

  She felt sure, too, that Rachel, despite her attempts to manufacture sophistication, and her expertise at illuminating her face, was too young to know anything of the horror of what she was saying, that to her, “the fatal blow” was an empty, glittery bit of vocabulary, flying around in the air, that she could grab with her calloused fingers and sprinkle around her persona for decoration, whereas Dorothy, despite not having witnessed her own execution, had suffered other failures, the twisted-metal catastrophe of real life. Dorothy was at the age where choices revealed themselves as errors, increasingly acquiring the patina of irrevocability. For Rachel, life’s tragedies still had a premature, anticipated quality; they were romantic. She looked to the future, careering along toward a glorious climax of love or death. Rachel didn’t understand the small, bureaucratic, quotidian, present tense. Dorothy did not mind her mother adopting Rachel, or Rachel adopting her mother, did not mind Rachel tagging along or even tagging along with Rachel, whichever way it was, but listening to Rachel prattle on about Berlioz, and lower her voice at the word “opium,” as if it were the scandale of the season, that was a bridge too far, sororally speaking.

  An older couple, their teenage son, and his shopping bag settled directly behind Dorothy’s party. After they had removed their jackets and argued about where to put the shopping bag—the boy wanted to give it its own seat, but the father insisted it go on the floor, and finally the mother consented to put it on her lap—they commenced to argue about where to eat dinner, and what time the last train left the station.

  “Oh, he took opium,” said the woman, who must have been leafing through the program notes.

  “He had a dream,” said Rachel, turning around. “He saw his own execution.”

  “Did he!” said the other mother.

  “Is she yours?” said the other mother. “She’s very smart.”

  “They’re both with me,” Dorothy’s mother said.

  “Why don’t you tell her that I’m your real daughter?” Dorothy whispered.

  “Dorothy!” her mother tsked. “I don’t need strangers knowing our business,” she added softly, and for once, Dorothy agreed.

  * * *

  —

  An “underwater puppet show” was not the kind of thing Dorothy would normally attend, because, she acknowledged silently to herself as she sat in the front row, spellbound and in a heightened state of sensory receptivity, she was a snob, and worse—fearful and fundamentally closed off to new experiences. In matters of aesthetics she was a philistine, a slave to bourgeois narrative conventions. She had believed characters mattered, events. Chasing the little slips of ribbon and paper with her gaze, Dorothy chastised herself for having expected Symphonie Fantastique to build to some kind of crescendo, to increase in drama, to achieve a frenzy or orgiastic fever of choreography, color, texture—something. She had not consciously anticipated the build. But she experienced the absence of build, the unmet expectation. While the music came to at least one climax, just as Rachel had explained it would, the visual performance, resplendent with sparkles and arabesqueing handkerchiefs, offered instead, from act to act, a dreamy stasis. Even as the melody built or retreated, telling a story that culminated, according to Rachel, in a witches’ dance, the fabrics swirled and popped, disappeared and scattered, with a rhythmic eddy that mimed the music’s beats but whose overall effect was at once stimulating and soothing and that never fundamentally increased in intensity. It rose and fell but the peaks and valleys were within a compressed range. There was nowhere to get to, Dorothy realized at a certain point, and half-expected the show to suddenly end with her epiphany; instead, the show went on. The work had no relation to her ideas about it, or rather, her ideas were free to come and go as they pleased, just as these glorified bits of seagrass, made out of—was it construction paper? Waterproof construction paper?—came and went. This was art without progress, a succession of images, immersing its audience in an ongoing present. It didn’t matter if Dorothy remembered what came before or if she was prepared for what came next, there was nothing to prepare for. This wasn’t to say that the performance did not contain surprises, only that the experience was constant surprise, which she experienced not as interruption but as rolling transformation.

  She felt herself in a lucid dream, where she could control the puppets with her mind. They did exactly what she wanted them to do, or perhaps whatever they did turned out to be the answer to hitherto unknown desires that came into being only in the instant of their satisfaction; she was totally gratified and also falling asleep. She sat up straighter, not because it would be rude to fall asleep—she felt, on the contrary, that it would be the highest compliment one could pay to such a fantasia—but because she did not want Rachel to think she was bored. Ego battled languor, a state that superficially resembled boredom but was in fact evidence of absolute satiation, even bliss.

  In the space between the pianist’s notes she could hear the boy behind her breathing. His breaths turned into snores—gentle, choking sounds, like someone inhaling through a mask.

  * * *

  —

  The pianist had the kind of curly hair that is caused by electrical shock. He was a replacement pianist. The real pianist was sick.

  Of course, this guy was real, too. Just look at him. His arms pumped up and down like he was shoveling the notes up out of the ground.

  It was odd, she thought now, soothed/hypnotized by a screen saver come to life and hydrated, how she didn’t even know what verb to use to describe the movement of blood out of her vagina. It wasn’t coursing. It wasn’t draining. It wasn’t flowing or seeping. It was like paint on an old house that occasionally peeled off in a slab. It flaked out of her. Or trickled, like the syrup too stubborn to come down from the inside of a jar after being upside down for days and fucking days.

  A bright yellow curtain pleated and accordioned in and out in the water, imitating bellows, or lungs breathing. Or it wasn’t imitating anything, it was just itself, a meditation on—pleats. Dorothy hadn’t known that pleats stayed in fabric when it got wet. Maybe not if it got too wet? She didn’t understand how they got pleats into fabric or what made them disappear or how you ironed them back in if they disappeared. Dorothy refused to fault herself for being unable to perform the most basic domestic tasks. She was the achievement of feminism. When buttons fell off her clothes, she paid the dry cleaner to sew them back on. But if this was victory, why did it feel like defeat?

  But now, Dorothy wondered: What was failure? What was success? Ribbons swirling in a cold tank. Life was not a story that ended on a resolution or a revelation. It was like this puppet show—a gentle, ongoing state of ups and downs that contained moments of illusory transcendence and ultimately built to nothing, no epiphanies, or so many epiphanies that they ran together and were fo
rgotten. Maybe it breathed like a paper flower, expanding and contracting. Maybe it was something you did just to pass the time.

  Eventually the puppet show ended, with the same lack of fanfare with which it began, but it ended. At this moment and only this moment did it concede to convention. It spoke the universal language of endings: The curtain came down, the lights came up. One world receded and yielded to another. Dorothy said, as they waited on line for the backstage tour, that she could have watched it for twice as long and, conversely, would have been happy with it being half its length. Rachel claimed to have been riveted the entire time, though she admitted that the snoring that came from the row behind them had been a distraction. Dorothy’s mother was fresh and awake. She had silently power-napped through the whole last movement.

  “I got the idea,” she said. “I don’t feel like I missed anything.”

  That night there was bright red blood on the toilet paper. Rog had started buying the brown recycled toilet paper, which Dorothy didn’t really believe would make the world better but at least wouldn’t make it worse, and the bloodstain looked like fall, like one veiny, vibrant leaf on a tree. Was she a tree? Or was her body a slot machine randomly ejecting globs of blood? It was a feature, not a bug. She stuck her finger all the way inside and pulled it out again. Nothing. She sniffed it. She walked into the bedroom pantsless and turned on the fan. She dug around in her bag and wallet and pulled out the photo from the morning and studied it in the yellow glow of the lamp. She wished there was someplace she could put her body down for a while, just a little while, before getting back into it.

  A Few Weeks Later

  Without warning, in the grim hotel bathroom, the toilet paper returned a large brown lump. Cable news was blaring from the television. From inside the bathroom the pundits sounded less like invited company and more like forced entrants. It had been three weeks at least since the bleeding had stopped, but now that stop had to be called an interruption, the last bleed no longer the last, but the last until now. But was it really bleeding? Leaving aside the issue of tissue vs. blood, even if she was using “bleeding” to indicate any emission, this bleeding was more like a delivery that had been lost in the mail, like starlight, a dead message from the past. Dorothy’s pants were bunched below her knees. The professor in her was pleased that her menstrual vocabulary, previously limited to terms such as “light,” “heavy,” and “spotting,” was expanding. Again photography had been proven to be a distortion of reality. This mass wasn’t at all what the sonogram had forecast. It was clotted, not tendrily. She contemplated an Internet search, but knew it would only return information that would be terrifying and irrelevant, and anyway, the doctor had told her not to worry. She tried to pull the lump apart with her fingers; it was like resin, sticky and congealed, and she felt a stab of guilt for trying to take apart what so clearly wanted to be whole.