I said, “Out of sympathy.”
She said, “I don’t want that kind of sympathy—I want to be cheered up.” It was much worse, much more hysterical and shrill, than I’m showing.
“How do you want to be cheered up?”
“I don’t know—you’re so smart: you figure it out.” But if I tried to cheer her up she’d say, “You’re talking like a fool.”
The Golden Rule seemed to me inadequate; she wanted something given to her that had nothing to do with what I wished for myself.
I finally caught on; she yearned for a certain kind of high-flown, movie dialogue: “Mother, is the pain
any
better today?” “No.… No! I can’t bear it.” “Didn’t the nurse come today and give you the morphine shots?” I would say, sounding like a doctor, calm, fatherly. “Don’t mention the morphine! I don’t want to think about the morphine!” she would say like a rebellious girl or flirtatious woman.
She liked it if I pretended to be floored by her bravery whether she was being brave or not. Often she made herself up for these scenes. Doris could not bear to be just another patient for her doctors and nurses and could not bear her relative unimportance to them. My father had minded that too. But Doris plotted; she kept my report card face up on her bed when the doctor came; one day she told me to stay home from school and to cry when I let the doctor in. I said I couldn’t cry. She became enraged.
It was her notion that people were good for their own pleasure or out of stupidity and were then used by people who were capable of extorting love: love was based on physical beauty, accident, and hardness of soul: that is to say, hardness of soul aroused love in other people.
It was a perfectly good set of notions, I suppose, but I have never noticed that women thought more clearly than men.
One day I decided just to do it, finally, to sit down and actually imagine myself being her, middle-aged, disfigured, and so on.
I bicycled to some woods at the edge of town—a woods cut down since—walked and carried my bicycle through the trees, until I came to a glade I knew about where there was a tiny stream between mud
banks that were in spots mossy. Enough kids used the glade that the undergrowth had been worn away in the center and the ground was mud, moist, smooth, quivering, lightly streaked with colors. As woods went, that one was threadbare, but I thought it very fine.
I’d cut my classes.
I leaned my bicycle against a tree and I sat on the moss. I’d asked Doris’s sister things about what Doris was going through, and the nearly senseless answers I’d gotten had unnerved me; the casual way people expressed things so that they did not tell you anything or care or ever in words admit to what they knew really bothered me. Perhaps they didn’t admit it to themselves. Doris had a niece who was very intelligent and talkative but she didn’t like me: it wasn’t anything personal, but in the family there were assignments, and she’d been assigned to my sister; and my sister hated me, and out of politeness to my sister this cousin did not show any liking for me. She was rigorous in this (until one day she had a quarrel with my sister, and after that she was medium friendly to me). This particular cousin was outspoken and talked about things like menstruation and desiring boys, but she would not talk to me, although she was polite about not talking to me. So I didn’t know if Doris was going through menopause while she was dying of cancer or not. I didn’t know if one canceled the other out or not.
I don’t think I made it clear to myself what I was doing. I did and I didn’t know, I was definite and yet I crept up on it. Sitting in the glade, I thought it was all right and not upsetting to imagine oneself a young pretty girl especially if you didn’t do it in detail but it seemed really foul to imagine oneself a middle-aged
woman.
It would be easiest to imagine being a very old woman, a witch, or a rude dowager—that was even sort of funny. But to think of myself as a middle-aged woman seemed to me filthy.
I wondered if I thought middle-aged women sacrosanct, or monstrous, or disgusting, or too pathetic or what. It seemed a great transgression, a trespass to think so ill of them, although a lot of boys that I knew laughed at and scorned middle-aged women, married women and teachers both. Simply contemplating the fact, the phenomenon of middle-aged women, I seemed to myself to have entered on obscenity.
Well, then, I ought just to take them for granted and avert my eyes. But then I could not imagine what it was to be Doris or what she was going through.
All at once I did imagine myself a girl, a girl my own age; it was a
flicker, a very peculiar feat—clearly I was scared to death of doing any of this. But I did it a couple of times without really pausing to experience what it was I was as a girl: I just performed the feat, I flickered into it and out again. Then, carried away by confidence, I did pause and was a girl for a second but it was so obliterating, so shocking that I couldn’t stand it. I was sickened. The feeling of obliteration or castration or whatever it was was unsettling as hell.
I had more than once imagined having breasts. Other boys and I had discussed what it must be like to have breasts: we’d imitated the way girls walked; we’d put books inside our shirts to simulate the weight of breasts. But I had not imagined breasts as part of a whole physical reality. Now suddenly, almost with a kind of excitement—well, with a dry excitement as in writing out an answer to an essay question on a test, working out an outline, a structure, seeing a thing take shape—I suddenly saw how shy I’d been about the physical thing, and with what seemed to me incredible daring (and feeling unclean, coated with un-cleanliness), I imagined my hips as being my shoulders: I hardly used my hips for anything; and my shoulders, which were sort of the weighty center of most of my movements and of my strength, as being my hips. I began to feel very hot; I was flushed—and humiliated. Then after a moment’s thought, going almost blind with embarrassment—and sweat—I put my behind on my chest. Then I whacked my thing off quickly and I moved my hole to my crotch. I felt it would be hard to stand up, to walk, to bestir myself; I felt sheathed in embarrassment, impropriety, in transgressions that did not stay still but floated out like veils; every part of me was sexual and jutted out one way or another. I really was infinitely ashamed—there was no part of me that wasn’t
dirty,
that wouldn’t interfere with someone else’s thoughts and suggest things. I seemed bound up, packaged, tied in this, and in extra flesh. To live required infinite shamelessness if I was like this. I was suddenly very bad-tempered.… (Possibly I was remembering dreams I’d had, ideas I’d had in dreams.)
I felt terrible. I tried to giggle and make it all a joke, giggle inwardly—or snort with laughter. But I felt a kind of connected hysteria, a long chain of mild hysteria, of feeling myself to be explosive, hugely important, and yet motionless, inclined to be motionless. I suddenly thought that to say no was what my pride rested on; saying yes was sloppy and killing. All this came in a rush. I was filled with impatience and incredible defiance and a kind of self-admiration I couldn’t even begin to grasp.
The life in me, in her, seemed a form of madness (part of me was still masculine, obviously, part of my consciousness) and maddened and mad with pleasure and also unpleasantly ashamed or stubborn. I really did feel beyond the rules, borne over the channels laid down by rules: I floated over
everything.
And there was a terrible fear-excitement thing; I was afraid-and-not-afraid; vulnerable and yet emboldened by being
dirty
and not earthbound—it was like a joke, a peculiar kind of exalted joke, a tremendous, breathless joke, one hysterical and sickening but too good for me to let go of.
I began to shake.
I had only the vaguest idea of female physical weakness—women controlled so much of the world I was familiar with, so much of University City; but all at once, almost dizzyingly, almost like a monkey, I saw—I saw
connections
everywhere, routes, methods (also things to disapprove of, and things to be enthusiastic about): I was filled with a kind of animal politics. But I was afraid of having my arms and legs broken. When I was a man, I saw only a few logical positions and routes and resting places, but as a woman I saw routes everywhere, emotional ways to get things, lies, displays of myself: it was dazzling. I saw a thousand emotional strings attached to a thousand party favors. I felt a dreadful disgust for logic: logic seemed crippling and useless, unreal; and I had the most extraordinary sense of danger: it almost made me laugh; and I had a sort of immodest pride and a kind of anguished ambition and a weird determination not to be put in danger.… I was filled and fascinated by a sense of myself. Physical reality was a sieve which I passed through as I willed, when my luck was good. (I had read a number of books about women:
Gone With the Wind, Pride and Prejudice, Madame Bovary.)
Then I saw why, maybe, Doris was a terrible person—it was her attempt at freedom. Her willfulness was all toward being free; now she was ill and caught. Briefly, I felt I understood Doris a little, only a little, for the first time. I felt I understood part of the stormy thing in her, and the thing where her pains blocked out the world and her obstinate selfishness and the feeling of having a face. I did not have entire confidence in my penetration, but still I admired my sympathy for her, but dully, almost boredly—with an open mouth, half wondering what to think about next—when suddenly, without warning, I really imagined myself her, Doris, middle-aged, disfigured, with loose skin, my voice different from what it had been: my voice was not that of a young
woman. My mouth hurt with the pressure of my bitterness: my mouth was scalded. (In my own life, when I was unhappy, it was my
eyes
that hurt; my vision would hurt me: people would look like monsters to me and would seem to have evil glances, as if black cats inhabited their eyes.) It was almost as if there was steam somewhere in my throat; really, I burned with the pressure of angry words, with a truth I wasn’t willing to modify, a truth meant to be wholly destructive to the errors and selfishness of others. To their complacency. I imagined all of it—not being liked by my family anymore, my husband hating me, being forsaken by my mother and sister. By my friends. As myself, as someone young, I could bear a good deal; but it takes energy to feel depressed, and when I imagined myself to be Doris, when I was Doris, I hadn’t the energy anymore to die; too many things had gone wrong; I was too angry to die; I felt too much; there was no end to what I felt—I could do nothing but scream.
I
DIDN’T
know if I was faking all or any of this. What does imagination consist of? I was thirteen and perhaps a superficial person. There was no guarantee I felt deeply or that I possessed any human grace at all. The trees around me, the tiny creek (like an endless parade of silvery snakes of varying thinnesses rustling over pebbles), the solitude suggested to me a gravity, a decency, a balance in life that was perhaps only the reflection of my Middle Western ignorance, or idealism. It is hard to know. But as long as I held on to the power to pity her, even while I imagined myself to be her, I did not, in my deepest self, suffer what I imagined her suffering. With what I would consider the equivalent confidence and folly of a boy playing at chemistry in the basement, I held up a mental snapshot of what I had in the second before half experienced in imagining myself to be Doris: it was a condition of mind, of terror and bitterness and hate, and a trying to win out still, all churning in me, and it was evil in that it was without bounds, without any fixity or finality, and suggested an infinite nausea—I was deeply afraid of nausea. It was a condition of mind, a sickening, lightless turmoil, unbearably foul, staled; and even to imagine it without going crazy myself or bursting into tears or yelling with horror, not to live it but just to conceive of it without going through those things was somehow unclean. But with nearly infinite coldness, a coldness that was a form of love in me, I held the thought. The mind’s power to penetrate these
realities is not distinguishable from the mind’s power merely to imagine it is penetrating reality. My father had twice contemptuously called me the Boy Scout. Did Doris live much of the time in that foulness? I thought there was no end to her wretchedness, no end—I was thirteen—to the uselessness of her misery.
The thing about being a bad person, the thing about being free and a little cheap and not letting yourself be owned by other people at all, by their emotions, was that then you had to succeed, at everything you did, all the time: failure became an agony. And there was no alternative to that agony when it began except to become a good person. Not a saint, nothing extreme. It was just that if I imagined myself a middle-aged woman like Doris with both my breasts cut off and my husband dying, hating me while he died, turning his back on me and saying all the years he’d spent with me were foul, and with myself as selfish and hungry for triumph still, I was deprived of all justice, of all success, and my pain and terror were then so great that I would of course be insane.
Which magnified the agony.
Clearly—it seemed obvious to me as I sat there and reasoned about these things—unselfishness lessened such pain if only in the way it moved you outside your own nervous system. Generosity emptied you of any feeling of poverty anyway. I knew that from my own experience. Extended generosity predisposed you to die; death didn’t seem so foul; you were already without a lot of eagerness about yourself; you were quieted.
I
BICYCLED
home, to bear the news to Momma, to tell her what I’d found out.
I was adolescent: that is, I was half formed, a sketch of a man. I told Doris unselfishness and generosity and concern for others would ease most pain, even her pain; it would make her feel better.
God, how she screamed.
She said that I came from filthy people and what I was was more filth, that I came from the scum of the earth and was more scum. Each thing she said struck her with its aptness and truth and inspired her and goaded her to greater anger. She threw an ashtray at me. She ordered me out of the house: “Sleep in the streets, sleep in the
gutter,
where you belong!” Her temper astounded me. Where did she get the strength for such temper when she was so ill? I did not fight back. My forbearance
or patience or politeness or whatever it was upset her still more. I didn’t catch on to this until in the middle of calling me names (”—you little bastard, you hate everybody, you’re disgusting, I can’t stand you, you little son of a bitch—” “Momma … Come on, now, Momma …”) she screamed, “Why do you do things and make me ashamed?”