A Brief History of Male Nudes in America (5 page)

Later Werner Kausman, a rolfing specialist and part-time primal rebirther, suggested that I loved Eldon far too much and that these feelings had thrown me out of balance. Werner had this great shock of white hair and huge, expressive hands, and one afternoon we started kissing in his office. Putting on my lipstick before I left that day, I asked him if he was going to charge me for an office visit or for a full-blown consultation. He didn't think that was funny.

It was Rosaline D'Ametri, the owner of Rosa's Shrimp and Chips, who sat me down at her counter which overlooked the Crystal Pier and told me not to worry, that one man is simply not enough for a woman. “Maybe some day you settle for one,” she said, “but right now ...” She shook her head and patted my hand. We looked dreamily out the window together, into light fog and what passes for a sky in southern California.

In Kansas there are no leaps of faith necessary when you look up—the sky veers suddenly into your path, deep and unavoidable. Sometimes
it is a low, dark roof over your head, and at other times it is high-strung and electric.

On the day of the reunion there is a sense that the sky is about to fall, that the wavy horizon is the not-so-distant edge where things begin to crumble. My sister's eyes are hungry and bright, and her long, straight hair recalls both pleasure and beauty. My relatives don't know her well enough to see what is happening. They think of her as thin and distant. Even Jean successfully ignores what she probably couldn't do anything about. It seems like a long time ago—Balboa Park or the wet, marbled stretch of some beach—when Jean handed Katie over to me, just relinquished the best, most beautiful thing in her life without a word.

On an early June morning Katie and I watch my relatives pack in the food that will feed not only us, but all the 4-H'ers on this side of the scrub-oaked Missouri bluffs. I watch with polite anticipation while Katie watches with something more akin to dread. All of the food is in Tupperware or under double layers of plastic wrap. Some of the food is cut into chunky, fist-sized pieces. The milk gravy is ladled with a coffee mug, and the big, broad serving spoons on the table suggest appetites that are beyond the body's simple needs. In cake pans and chipped brown crockery, their food is a reckless affirmation of here and now.

When it's time to eat, someone says a short, quick prayer so that the major operating principle of the day won't be compromised: hot food hot and cold food cold. We are people who are headstrong and in love with the world when we have paper plates in our hands. We can work a two-sided buffet line with a snap of our fingers. We have homing devices that can take us within inches of where the desserts are being hidden—the cherry pie with the sugared crust, the punch-and-pour chocolate cake. I take Katie a slice of banana bread and two brownies. “Let's see,” she says when I put them in front of her, “would it be animal, vegetable, or mineral?” Any answer I give would not interest her, though.

After the meal there is a lull under the yellow and white canopy.
Bee's twins are asleep in their high chairs, cracker crumbs spread in a three-foot circle around them. Their bald heads fall to their chests like sprung toys, and I ask Bee if we should take the boys into my grandparents' house and lay a blanket on the floor for them.

“Oh no,” she says. “They like to sleep like that.”

As if in response, the breeze quickens and the huge trees—the oaks and the cottonwoods—stir with the softness of nets being cast. It is an old, cool wind that blows in off the Missouri, south through the Lansing orchards, and over the silent, seminal fields of wheat. It is a wind that carries the voices of the Hillcock children who are in the green and sunflowered pasture where only Pig Latin is allowed. Then, too, it is a wind that spirals up a thick, sweet smell from the storm cellar—a little homegrown that burns quick as rope and eases the teenaged boys into the afternoon. For them, the skating rink in Centralia has become boring. The shopping mall in Manhattan is no fun since they can't drop snow cones onto the shoppers below anymore. For them, Kansas is the cold, dead center of an otherwise teeming world, but I could tell them differently. I could say that the miles of openness—green and gold and quaking silver—might be closer to reality than anywhere else they could drive; that in the seven miles between Circleville and Fostoria there is more meaning than in the entire Rose Bowl Parade.

Sometime past two or three o'clock—I don't know; time tapers and descends in those afternoons—the traditional softball game is started. We have no gloves and the ball is rock-hard and lopsided from being left out in the rain, but if spirit counts for anything, we are rich and well supplied. The bases are marked by rags held down with rocks, but the overgrown grass in the pasture where we play makes the bases impossible to see, and so we end up simply running for each other—toward the first and second and third basemen, whoever they are. Once in a while someone hits the ball senseless, and then time flies as we formally search the grass for the ball—a dingy, white speck in a storyteller's green ocean.

My relatives do not make spectacular catches, and in the outfield
they appear as shy, bighearted people among the goldenrod. Whoever steps up to bat is a good-for-nothing, a nearsighted dog, a puny traitor from the other side. The pitches range from halfhearted spitballs to loop-the-loops. Everyone gets a chance to knock the ball to hell, but mostly we tap it to the shortstop.

My aunts and uncles and cousins are big, loose people. They run the bases, always looking forward. Their thick hair shines like a lesson in light, and when they bend to pick up the ball or merely to scratch their feet there is no misery or misfortune in the world.

I like to think of the rest of that June day as the softball game. I like to imagine all of us—connected by blood or name or something even less tangible—in a pasture bordered by a creek that eventually runs past Meriden and Valley Falls and the Kickapoo Indian Reservation and empties into the dark, bridgeless Nemeha.

In actuality, the day does not end in the pasture. It proceeds onto the porch and into the kitchen. There are those who gather in the living room to watch the six o'clock news, and in the front yard someone's gallbladder operation is being retold with amazing detail and authenticity.

My relatives do not give up a ship easily. They stay past dark, sometimes past their welcome. Their children are inventive and find games to play in closets and parked cars, at the side of the house, and in the rubble around the toolshed.

When my relatives clear a table for the night, they do so carefully. They cover the food and wipe the table down. They leave the sugar bowl out, and fill the salt and pepper. Each small act is a gesture of confidence that there will absolutely be a tomorrow and tomorrow.

In Kansas the night surrounds a house; it does not swallow the house, it does not turn the house to stone starting from the inside out, as sometimes happens in California. You can think of the Kansas night as a hand covering a flame. You can imagine the dusk as a fine, dark cloth being laid in a line over Mayetta and west toward Wamego and farther west toward Abilene and Great Bend.

Though it is a sweeping, dramatic darkness, it is not black. In fact,
I can see Katie sitting in the dark under the yellow and white canopy and I can already make out the strong line of her jaw and her thin, hairpin wrists. Like Katie, I am unable to properly name these bones.

In Kansas in the dark, my sister is all softness and memory as she sits there rehearsing the silence that will steadily grow around her. Katie—the riddle of woods, the renderless garden. Not far away, I am looking at her, thinking of her. I am listening to the crickets shape and reshape this fierce world.

I
remember a birthday when there was hardly anything for me—a pair of blue mittens wrapped in a Husted's Dry Cleaning sack, brown twine tied in a lopsided bow around it all. With her eyebrow pencil, Libby, my mother, had written on the package: To Janice, Our Angel. I sat with my arms folded and refused to move. I didn't want to turn nine that year in the dull, beat-up world of Idaho and welfare.

Besides pretending that it was ribbon fit for an angel, Libby used the brown twine to secure the lampshade on the lamp and also to tie the back door shut, which had no lock. “You want the whole world coming in?” she'd ask, her small chapped hands struggling to tie a box knot over the doorknob, but in fact, if burglars had ever come to our house, they would have looked around, pulled the stocking caps off their faces, and laughed. A chenille bedspread at our front window for drapes. An empty orange crate painted red as an end table.

I was miserable when my mother laid that birthday package on
the table, the dry cleaning label face-up and taunting me, but then my father, Noel, arrived with chocolate. Not a box, but a sack with the assorted specialties from Selfaggio's—Twin Falls' best gift and confection shop, though Noel always said it “gift and affection.”

We did not talk. We sat back with chocolate melting on our tongues and fell into the sugary comas that often mark the lives of the poor. My little sisters folded their hands in their laps and swung their feet—scuffed saddle shoes, penny loafers with the stitching popped, high-topped leather baby boots not fit for learning the art of walking in. Despite our outward circumstances, my parents believed that we were cultured, in a sense—could distinguish German from Swiss chocolate, a good hazelnut from a bad. They taught us how to savor, how to close our eyes and be romanced in the thick language of taste.

Later that night I opened my gift. “Next year,” Libby said to Noel for my benefit, “don't you think Janice will be ready for a bike next year?” For me, it was not that dangling promise which never came true, but the dark, rivery liqueur centers of the candy that made nine seem possible and, at least for a moment, even good.

My past, in the most simple terms, was a series of awkward, shameful gifts, starting with those mittens, starting when the Twin Falls Mill closed and my parents discovered that they liked the shabby life of leisure. One year there was a pair of men's scruffy, used downhill skiis for me. I never got boots or poles to go with them, was never once taken to a ski resort. Noel, I later learned, had taken them as payment on a bet he'd won. At first he refused them, but then remembered that my birthday had passed uneventfully two days before, so he loaded them in the junkpile Pinto he drove.

In Idaho on welfare, skiing lessons were not possible; ballet classes were totally out of the question. There was black and white TV if the electricity had been paid. There was a deck of cards with naked women on the backs which could be used if Libby was not enrapt in solitaire. And, of course, from time to time there was chocolate.

One year it came from Ghiardelli's, shipped to us in a discreet
brown package, the chocolate wrapped in soft insulated foil. It was a five-pound block, and Noel slowly unwrapped it much like I thought other fathers might unwrap a bowling trophy or a beautiful Father's Day tie. By slivers, we ate that block of chocolate, tasting how the bitter and the sweet were suspended together, which was the lesson of life in windy Idaho, where the snow or the dust was always blowing—either “salt or pepper,” we always said.

I remember not wanting to turn eleven, not wanting to turn twelve, and then not wanting Christmas. Under the tree there was a huge toad in a cracked glass aquarium for my sister Marnie. She was six and terrified of the dazed thing that kept jumping against the glass until it finally and forever lay still. A used crock pot for Libby that had the faint odor of someone's burned chili still in it. We maneuvered through that Christmas and its gifts like, I suppose, you tip-toe through land mines. Relief and wet underarms when it was all through.

The impossible darkness of turning sixteen took hold of me, and honestly I can't say what it was that birthday that Libby and Noel dreamed up: a garage-sale coat, somebody's worn-out flute with a six-pack of loose sheet music which, of course, I wouldn't have been able to read. By then I was so full of wanting that I couldn't see straight.

It took the next twenty years to get beyond all that. Cordell Murphy, my husband, paid for me to forget. Massage, long afternoons of counseling, three weeks in the Alps in total silence. Finally discouraged with my slow progress, he took me to the side of our house one Fourth of July and hit my head twice against the shake shingles. I kicked back and then it was over—the foul taste of powdered milk. My irrational yearning for silk, for trinkets, for shoes, for socks. The gruesome details of chocolate.

I
f it weren't for my body, I could fly, I could go anywhere, I could be anything. I learned this fact long ago, and yes, there was regret and suffering from it, there were nights I cried, there were whole summers spent in an upstairs bedroom where I surrounded myself with ladies' magazines and poetry and my brother's borrowed
Penthouse
. Lying across the bed or spread on the parquet floor, I was the tall, sad witness to myself: arms and legs and all the rest of me that I wouldn't have given fifty cents for.

When I think of my body, I usually see Martin Heffler trying to pull open the stage curtains for our fifth grade's rendition of How
the West Was Won
. Martin was only a fourth grader, and maybe that had something to do with it, but really, it was the curtains that wouldn't budge—gold brocaded velvet, beautiful to look at, but ponderous as a ton of wet laundry. At the far right of the stage Martin was up there grunting, actually grunting. He was red-faced and the curtains
weren't going anywhere. Cruelty, inattention—I don't know what it was, but the teachers just let poor Martin struggle for a while, which was wrong because they basically understood the laws of physics. The curtains were a rock and Martin was a pebble.

How
the West Was Won
turned out to be more an assignment than an artistic creation. The pioneers were deadpan and the Indians communicated only with timid war whoops. By far, it was Martin Heffler who had stolen the show and lent me this image of my body as something heavier than night and beyond the laws of physics: the cumbersome gold curtains behind which Emily Mills, dressed as the state of California, waited to be discovered.