Authors: Sam Michel
Still, I opened up my mouth and heard a stranger uttering preposterous nostalgias.
Did I really yearn to spit-up on my mama’s shoulder? Was my fondest want, in fact,
to spread my legs and have myself be powdered, creamed and diapered? By and by I learned
to keep my mouth shut. I sulked. I harbored. The little voice that rested at my teeth
grew wilder from its root, seemed to press against my teeth and grow back down my
throat and up into my brain. My chest filled, my belly, arms and legs. I complained
of headaches and of heartburn, suffered footcramps and phallalgia. I assured my wife
it wasn’t her. Not the child. I said I thought it only needed time, a change of diet,
maybe, exercise; I told my wife about a man whose life was turned around by sleeping
on his back. Yet
perhaps it would have helped us, as a family, had I observed aloud the budding kinship
I enjoyed to see between my piles and little Lincoln’s infantile proctitis. It was
there, my pleasure, in simple English, it might have burst out plainly from behind
my teeth, carrying with it all the innocent confusions of my lurching brain, my heart
and lungs and wadded, looping bowels. Why should he not suffer? I might have called
attention to my wife’s lumbago, her bleedy nipples and her tendinitis and her Kreuzerschmecht.
So the boy must cut his teeth? He has a blistered lip?
Parity,
I might have said,
tit for tat, some nights I just plain don’t like him.
What if?
Because it happened more and more that I could not recall the chastest hour with my
son without recalling from the hour also some inveigling of fear to weigh corruptively
against it. I cut his cord. I held him in my palms, a live thing, fisted, kicking,
squinch-eyed, “a miracle of God,” coated still, glistening in the vernix dew, mine,
ours, the desired end of seed and egg... and yet. And yet why should I be pleased
to see how old and bluish-gray he looked, how shriveled up and miserable to be here?
What dialogue, I wonder, might have followed had I told my wife that my distress was
underlaid by something near to happiness, an ebullient fascination with the clamps
and scissors, the bloody trimming of our manchild’s foreskin?
“I sort of like to take him for his shots.”
What if?
Might my wife—given a tradition in our house of honest talk, the past experience and
expectation in our lives that from such talk would fall our “growth” and “progress”—might
my wife have been encouraged to confess her own conflicted pleasures? Might she have
been freer to a moment, as I myself was not, some
occasion on the other hand when we might be encouraged to confess to a repugnance?
Perhaps there was this time my breath stank. Perhaps a time she gave me to believe
that I could not be far enough inside her, when her desire was to work me up and squeeze
me out and celebrate in silence my retiring disgorgement. For my part, occasions of
this sort increasingly returned to me. Squanderings, bygone glimpses into what I meant
and did not say, what I said and wished I meant that I were saying, what I felt and
could not find it in myself to say that I was feeling. Possibly I did not trust what
I was feeling. Likely I could not know what I meant. Perhaps I had convinced myself
that I must always be forever later than the truth, or possibly I was afraid of coming
to a truth I had suspected all along and did not want to come to.
In this way, I believe, among the others, a person settles on a paralytic comfort,
a simmering complacency he calls his habit, dresses up as ritual, exalts as a condition
of his God-given soul. He rises from his chair, sits down to his table, nibbles limp
asparagus; she pounds a slab of liver and alludes to the affections of a butcher.
That’s just the way things are,
we say;
a person loves as a person is able; that’s just who I am.
What could be achieved, I must have wondered, through the frank expression of a feeling,
in the confrontation of a fact? Every understanding I might come to of my wife must
be a halving; every protest I might issue for her hearing must be small and fleet
against her person. Does a husband talk his way to sympathy? In the old days, our
beginning, was it true I raised the blood up through the phallus by a fiction of the
boy I was, that boy’s horse; did the visions I invoked beside my wife of mares and
stallions speed her circulation? Did we determine anything at all by speech? Could
the word be first for us, did we think our sustenance in love was ours to reinvent,
or were we creatures moved
by circumstance, random conjugations of a length and scent of hair, of brine and tang
and ripeness, crossings of stars, alignments of planets, phases of the moon, accidents
of mood, spilled salt, slain doves, an ignoble war and a depressed economy we heard
persisted at the time of our conception?
After the boy, I began to recollect the doubter at the center of my every act and
story. When we were poor, I knew that we were poor and wished that we were not; when
we were not poor, I knew we were not poor and wished we were. I wished that Beverly
had not been diabetic. I wished that O Street had no precedent, no antecedent; I wished
we could afford to live on streets named after trees; I wished we lived where neighbors
paid their visits after having ridden half a day to you by horse. In the change-room,
when we fucked there, I wished my wife had not wrenched her hip. I sat in my chair,
watched her hold the boy against her chest and wished that sucking did not sound so
much like sucking, wished that crying did not sound so much like crying, that shitting
did not smell so much like shitting and that days did not transpire so much like weeks
in convalescence. Some nights, long nights, early, early morning hours I might sit
and wish that I could hurry our lives forward, see the boy off to a boarding school
back east, see him grown up old as I was, see him to his marriage and paternity, his
debts, his illnesses, his grave; wished that I could push him head-first back into
his mother, press his swell out from her belly, mold him through her belly to the
size he once was of a plum, the pit of a plum, his embryo, her egg, my seed, a precious
little something bound at last for nothing. I sat and looked across the lampstand
at the boy asleep beneath the naked gazing of his mother and I wished that love could
last a little longer, please. I wished that I
could be transported, sleep as he slept, where he slept, be him, loved, reloved, be
born again into a self-created future.
“If wishes came true,” I thought, “then beggars would ride.”
This was Mother. My one true mother.
Bow,
she said,
remember, don’t forget, don’t beg.
So I did not beg. I kept my wishes to myself. I was my mother’s boy, after all, and
my father’s, too, a stoic, a rural, a rustic in an easy chair, transplanted, bowed,
cowed, mute. Urge and faith, please, I told myself, no further talk from me of love.
I was who I was, made as I was made, an ejaculant, a dispensation, dispensed, precipitate,
how protest? To whom? Overcome myself, I thought, and be where? Where were we? How
had we come so quickly to be given what we told ourselves we wanted? How did what
we wanted swerve so wildly from the things we had been told? My wife, what did she
not trust herself to say? We sat, saying nothing, saying anything, talking smally
while we knitted socks and read the evening paper and the weeds grew chokingly inside
us every night we turned our backs away from one another to escape awhile in sleep.
Sweet dreams,
we said;
kiss-kiss, night-night.
I thought most everybody must be like us. I thought we glossed ourselves in talk
and very few of us were really talking.
A woman, I believed, any woman half a decade older in domestic life, whether she resided
here on O Street, there on Elm, or over there in Rome or Paris, this woman, I believed,
was choking. If I asked her, I believed that she would tell me of her husband that
his early charms repulsed her now; his whistling, his humming and his clucking tongue,
the pet name he still called her seemed by now to her to be a bit of shabby magic
she reproached herself for having failed to see the slouching wizard who performed
it. He stained himself. At the armpits, at the crotch. He yellowed. He shed hair.
Forgot to flush. He spoke to her in shrugs and grunts and meant-to’s.
Husband,
she said,
father, duty, law, lament.
Paris, Rome, and O Street, I believe she must begin to shrink a little from the reach
of her husband’s hand, the probings of his bristled lips, the hard, thin mouth he
thrusts at her as if to say,
Kiss this.
She predicted him. Endured him. Found a man or two from town whom she could conjure
while her husband jabbed away at her until he rolled away from her and she could hurry
to the toilet. She became another woman on a telephone. She became another woman at
a luncheon with her lady-friends, recapitulating interchangeable narrations from their
weeks of longing and regret. She waked up tired, wept by noon and found by suppertime
another way to blame her husband for her having come to be another woman.
This isn’t me,
she said.
I don’t blame. I never gossip. I’m not really like that.
She lifted her shoulders, as I saw her, showed her palms and said,
That’s life.
Nor did his life differ much, the husband’s in relation to the wife’s, not as I was
living it. His life through her for me was an exhausting exercise in neediness. Her
needs, my exhaustion, the impression I began to take away from her that I would never
get it right. Say that it was bed. Say that it was how I dressed, my table manners,
her need to have me hold her hand, caress her temples, tell her she was lovely when
she needed me to say that she was lovely, without her having to suggest to me she
needed. Her teeth seemed sharper, less enticingly suggestive, more cruelly ordered
after an evolving, species-wide regime of rend and crush. She seemed a mill to me,
a mill-mouth, a grist maker, a reducer of a blooded, whole-boned man to pulp. She
wasn’t sweet; she was unfresh; I used to tell myself she smelled of her labors, the
pulp she meant to make of me; I thought I might have fled the courthouse, had I known
how often I would come to lie in bed and listen
to her gargle sterile, mock-mint rinses. Then came plastic tubes, ceramic ramekins
of firming gels, defoliating scrubs and foaming toners, wraps and masks of mud and
weeds she wound about and slathered over her encurdled flesh, the arid, panting hide
of her embarrassed carcass. She, too, yellowed. She, too, was an easy mark upon which
I might fix a blame.
This man, a lump of sallow putty, meat-pulp in an easy chair, a dreamless self-deceiver,
who other than a wife could make him me? From across the lampstand, I would think,
there she sat, a dilapidated house whose musty rooms I sometimes toured, spellbound,
impotent, jealous and confused. I wanted to shake her, beat her rugs, strip the blankets
from the tables, chairs and beds I sensed were looming heavily unused inside her.
I wanted to repopulate my wife with happy girls who rushed to see a rainbow from a
spotless pane. I wished that she could carry in herself the scent of fresh-baked gingermen.
I wished that she could reproduce for me the face of the child she saw inside herself,
a hurried, patient, grateful child who sat up in her bed one summer Sunday afternoon
to listen for the first time to a brand new favorite record. I wished I weren’t such
a wisher, such a sap. I felt sapped, slippered and pajamaed. Better, stronger off,
I thought, to loathe the boy with his convertible and pot of beans. Better to stand,
point a finger, arouse myself with those scenarios in which I asked my wife if she
might love me with some gusto if I ceased to eat, as this boy had ceased to eat, if
I ceased to sleep, as this boy had ceased to sleep, if, for my wife, in the spirit
of the boy, I quit my work, knocked my head against the bricks, let myself grow very
pale and threatened, on occasion, suicide by knife, or else by noose, or else to slowly
die away by good old-fashioned heartbreak.
Or better maybe not to die, I told myself, safer to live, keep my seat, nurse the
heartbreak, or deny it, find my way to strength through fruits and grains and vegetables,
a cultivated trust and gratitude for all I had been given. Be strong in faith, the
humble bounties. Home and hearth and family. The outward is the mirror of the inward.
Make of your littleness a muchness. Were these the secrets shared among my more enabled
neighbors? I wondered: Could my neighbors be as happy as their lawns? Were their hearts
as clipped and ordered, as efficiently productive of a bloom as were their hedges?
Surely, I began to tell myself, I have not been being honest. Possibly, my wife and
I had not been so exclusively revered as we suspected. I told myself to look around
a bit, relax, our lives were likely gentler than we had contrived them. O Street,
I discovered, whose graded sage our house was first to call a home, well, I hardly
knew it, never really fathomed its misleadingly prosaic human beauties. A kitty in
the tree, a trike in the drive, a wading pool, an idle mower. All of these I sought
to see renewly, as if at last beyond a third dimension. What met the eye in the form
of that hydrant was transmuted to the spirit as security, good sense, communal care.
I plunged ahead and called such caring love. Love, I told myself, love lay in those
stumpish arms and iron head; love, I thought, the sublimely simple recognition that
we all of us are in this life together. My neighbor waxed his car for me, for my eyes,
perhaps because he loved me. Perhaps he voted Yes on No. 5 because he loved my son.
Love, care, community, the human contribution to the Great Plan we detect in witnessing
the sudden beauty in a swath of breeze-blown grass. I wanted to take part. In those
early days of recognition, had the roof leaked I would certainly have fallen straight
to fixing it. I would have held on to
my job, foregone my surgery, repaired the fence; Hope, I thought, might still be with
us.