Any Woman's Blues (25 page)

I look at Sybille helplessly, an old habit. But I am starting to comprehend what she means.

“Leila, it takes courage to lead a life,” Sybille says, pouring tea. “It takes more courage to lead a great life. It’s not easy to do what you’ve undertaken. You were singled out somehow to make pictures of the world. In another age, you’d be dead in childbirth, you’d be stoned as a witch. You were given a rare talent. All you have to do is protect it—even when you least want to.”

“And then?”

“You can’t lead a courageous life without making these leaps of faith. Sometimes everything looks terribly bleak and you think you know the end of the story. But you don’t. And by writing the end of the story, in some sense you doom it to happen. Or you hypnotize yourself with negative thoughts. The most important thing you could possibly learn is not to do that—but to affirm the positive even when you don’t know the outcome. Do you know what has been learned about people who excel in every field?”

“No, what?”

“That they have a high tolerance for not-knowing, for ambiguity, for not being in control. Because it’s only when we can tolerate
not
being in control that we make a place for the miraculous to happen. Art, falling in love, magic. Not-knowing makes a window for the miraculous. Not-knowing makes it possible to know.”

“I want to know if I’ll ever get laid again.”

“The cards say yes,” Sybille says, and laughs. “But the cards also say you’ll have to pay your analyst ten dollars every time you do.”

She takes out a red cookie tin with the name “Amaretti di Saronno” lettered on the side.

“Ten dollars for every lay,” she says. “And when we have enough money, we’ll go out and celebrate.”

And she enfolds me in her huge motherly embrace.

 

 

I went back to meetings, my work, my twins. No more dating. No more searching for the holy grail of cock. Enough already. I would wean myself away from love, deliver myself from sex, learn to scratch the itch myself or cease to feel it. I would transcend sex and become a nun.

Never mind that for years I had thought it the life force. Never mind that I thought sex and creativity were one. I could not get involved with a man without wanting (eventually) to drink, and not wanting to drink, I would not get involved with men.

I went for an AIDS test, was terrified for a week and then vastly relieved when the nurse called with the following euphemism: “Your viral studies are negative.” It was a brave new world we’d made—and sex was a casualty of modernity.

Eventually we’d all live in space capsules anyway, communicate digitally, and wear silver space suits in which our genitals were so far from view that we forgot they existed. Sex would go the way of the appendix or the nusiform sac, and we’d all be, probably, much happier. That great motor of fertility and yearning which God had given us would now be turned over to the techies and translated into computer language. Bytes instead of bites, input instead of intercourse, file instead of fuck. We’d all change directories and become dissolving blips on a flickering screen. Which we were anyway. In God’s computer of starry blue. In vitro fertilization, central hatcheries, Skinnerian training of infants. Instead of mothers, we’d have “surrogates.” Instead of fathers, we’d have “donors.” Instead of children, we’d have—what? There was the rub. Human beings were too little too long. That was the crux of our evolutionary dilemma: the glory and the pity. In twenty-five years of dependency, we certainly learned some strange habits.

 

 

My twins, at ten, were so self-sufficient that I often felt like an interloper. (One mother of twins once told me: “Until they’re three you can’t even brush your teeth; after that, they don’t need you at all because of their bond with each other.”)

Often I envied them—their self-sufficiency, the fact that they were never lonely. United against the world, they went to school, to camp, to Daddy’s, to Mommy’s. United against the world, they rode their Appaloosa ponies—Heaven and Hash. United against the world, they went berrying, climbing, biking.

One is the indivisible number. But one is lonely. Two is divisible but unafraid. As their mother, I was glad for their connection. But it left me out in some deeply painful way. Sometimes I wished I had a singleton for company.

 

 

One day at a time, the green summer stretched out in Connecticut. The trees turned dark and leafy. The crickets’ singing and the bullfrogs’ basso filled the nights. I read Thoreau, Lao-tzu, Suzuki. I tried to cultivate a beginner’s mind.

“We should find perfect existence through imperfect existence,” said Suzuki. “We should find perfection in imperfection.” “We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep,” said Thoreau. “The sage puts his person last and it comes first,” said Lao-tzu, “treats it as extraneous to himself and it is preserved. Is it not because he is without thought of self that he is able to accomplish his private ends?”

I tried to cultivate the art of taking no action. I tried to regard life as a pastime, not a hardship. I tried to do nothing, because nothing is the hardest of all things to do. I tried to teach myself to sit still.

I would sit at the edge of my pond and watch the surface ripples of the water, the blue of the sky within the green of the water, the clouds scudding across the ripples, the frogs leaping through heaven, the insects drowning in clouds.

“A field of water betrays the spirit that is in the air,” says Thoreau. “It has new life and motion. It is intermediate between earth and sky.”

At the edge of my pond, on the edge of the universe, I came to know that certain gates open only to solitude and certain palaces are unlocked only by tears.

Sometimes the death of a june bug would move me as deeply as the death of my own mother, and I would weep. Sometimes the dance of the molecules would make itself manifest to me, and without drugs I would join that dance, the intoxication becoming all the more powerful for my having come to it straight. My arm, throwing a pebble into the water to break its surface of sky blue, would become one with the air it moved through, one with the rock it cradled. The molecules of sky, flesh, stone, all interconnected, dancing together in a primal dance, whirling together in a primal whirl.

I understood that arm, sky, and rock were all one, that flesh was sky and sky was flesh, that stone was no more solid than water or air, and that there was nothing to mourn, because death was just another part of the dance, and the dance went on forever.

I sat at the edge of my pond, gazing at the surface of the water, the surface of eternity, and my mother came back to me.

She arrived through the leafy woods, stomping over rotting logs, wearing a crazy red hat. She looked like a meshuggener out of a Singer story.

“
Louise,
” she said, “you’re a rotten mother and a rotten daughter. When was the last fucking time you visited my grave?
Flowers.
I don’t even
expect
flowers. Or a phone call. That’s right, you never call me.
Ma, Mother, Mommy.
The words never pass your lips. You go to Emmie, to Sybille, to Lily. How the hell do you think
that
makes me feel? Like when you went to your father’s floozie on Eighth Street and told
her
your problems. How the hell did you think
that
made me feel? Huh? Answer me, Louise—
excuse
me—Leila,
Ms.
Sand. You’re such a big shot now, I can’t even get you on the phone without talking to your assistant. ‘Leila Sand’s residence.’ I remember when I used to wipe your ass!”

We are sitting together in a Chinese restaurant near Dyckman Street. The Fortune Dragon, it’s called. Theda is getting drunker and drunker on daiquiris (she keeps ordering them with her lemon chicken and sweet-and-sour pork). She is grilling me about my father and Max. I don’t want to answer. I don’t want to be in the middle.

“Do they fight a lot?” she’s asking. I just sit there sullenly.

“Answer me! Do they fight?”

“I don’t know, Ma.”

“You rotten kid! Answer me!”

“Ma—I don’t know.” (I am perhaps sixteen, my ovaries always in an uproar over Snack, my life out of control between Dyckman Street and Eighth Street, my life a subway ride between two lives.)

Suddenly, out of the blue, she brings her pocketbook down on my head and bashes me. Then she sweeps the lemon chicken onto the floor and starts smashing plates and glasses, screaming, “Answer me! Answer me!”

I get up, grab my green book bag, and run home, hoping to pack my stuff before she comes back.

I am in my room, cramming a suitcase, when the door opens and Theda rushes in, brandishing an umbrella.

“You love your father more than me!” she screams. “Admit it! Admit it!”

“I do not, Ma.”

“Admit it!” she yells, clobbering me with the umbrella. “You love him best!”

“I love you, Ma,” I mumble, “but you can’t hear!”

“You don’t love me!” she screams. “You’re a rotten lousy kid!”

I shut my suitcase, grab it, and race out of the house.

Down into the bowels of the subway, the hot-popcorn and candy-wrapper mouth of subterranean New York. The rush of the trains, the people swaying together in sweat, the unwashed, the poor, the muttering, the miserable, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

Miss Subways is a beautician but wants to be a model. She’ll never make it. The Wrigley twins want to “Double Your Pleasure, Double Your Fun.” Speedwriting is proffered as the answer to all problems. And night courses at the Robert Louis Stevenson School.

“I want out, out, out,” I mutter to the click of the train wheels, in which I also hear my mother’s voice screaming at me. I hear her in train wheels, in the ocean, in the rush of running water. Always I hear her—even to this day.

“Ma—I love you!” I scream. “I really love you!” And with that Theda vanishes into the middle of my pond like a rock making infinite ripples.

My face is wet with tears. They fall to the mica-flickering rock on which I sit.

“
Mother!
” I scream into the green leafy woods. “
Mother!
”

And the echo tells me she has heard.

And then it comes. The earth beneath me—pebbles, soil, insects, all—suddenly becomes transparent, and I am sitting poised above a starry sky.

Below me, there are constellations—Orion, the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, the Pleiades. Below me the infinite emptiness and fullness of space. A rush to my head tells me I am
seeing
for the first time. In my stillness, there is infinite activity; in this activity, there is infinite stillness.

I know that sex, the dance of hormones, the shimmer of flesh, the gleam of the grape, the linseed oil drop, the tear, the turpentine, are but small manifestations of this changeless and ever-changing infinity. And I know that this infinity is what I was meant to see, and that without sobriety I would never have the eyes.

“Knock on the sky and listen to the sound,” goes a Zen proverb. I knock.

“
Mother!
” I call, like Hamlet to his father’s ghost. “
Mother!
” And the green leaves of the trees rustle back: “Hush, Louise, I love you, I will never die.”

Then silence. The woods settle down to their own sounds—cricket, leaf, the fall of a sparrow.

Out of the forest walks a doe, followed by two little Bambis. They graze and nibble on low-hanging branches and tender shrubs, perking up their big ears, putting down their delicate hooves, walking very close to where I sit in my practiced stillness, on the edge of my pond.

The mama deer walks to the edge of the pond and peers in, as if at her own reflection, and the babies follow suit, making delicate twig-snapping noises with their little hooves. The woods are alive with life of all sorts—deer, raccoons, mushrooms, insects, grubs, snakes, worms, butterflies. “Nature will bear the closest inspection,” says Thoreau. “She invites us to lay our eyes level with her smallest leaf and take an insect view of its plain.” It is as if the arrangement of molecules settles on different forms—now deer, now man or woman, now leaves—in response to some divine energy force field, but that all these forms are, in some sense, one.

Two wild little human Bambis whoop out of the woods, screaming, “Mommy!” And the doe and her Bambis are banished, back to the shimmering green world of the forest, lost in its dapple.

“Whatcha doin’, Mom?” asks Ed.

“Nothing.”

“Why?” asks Mike.

“Because it’s the hardest thing of all to do.”

“She’s cuckoo,” says Mike to Ed, “but lovable.” And they come to hug me on the edge of the universe.

—
Bessie Smith

 

 

I
had never qualified at a meeting. I had seen others do it—tried to hear them and not to hear them—but I was terrified to make that leap. Now Emmie thought I
should
make that leap. I hadn’t even been sober a month. I wasn’t
qualified
to qualify. Nonetheless, one day I went to a meeting in my little white church and the slated speaker did not appear.

“Who needs to speak?” asked the secretary of the meeting.

My hand went up as if without my conscious knowledge.

“I do!” my sane mind blurted out.

And before I knew it, I was sitting at the shaky trestle table before the whole group, spewing out my story to the smoky room.

Can I even remember what I said?

Qualifying at a meeting is like childbirth, like falling in love, like The Land of Fuck. It is hard to remember what you did there, said there, cried there. The words tumble out, burst between your lips—and somehow, without your knowing what transpired, your whole life is altered.