The Summer Without Men (3 page)

“It was terrible,” I said in a flat voice.

“Yes.”

“I took care of him. I held him up. What would he have done if I hadn’t been there? How can he not remember? He turned into a stone. I fed him. I talked to him. I tolerated his silence. He refused to get help. He went to the lab, ran the experiments, came home, and turned back into a rock. Sometimes I worry that I’ll incinerate myself with my anger. I’ll just blow up. I’ll break down again.”

“Blowing up is not the same as breaking down and, as we’ve said before, even breaking down can have its purpose, its meanings. You held yourself together for a long time, but tolerating cracks is part of being well and alive. I think you’re doing that. You don’t seem so afraid of yourself.”

“I love you, Dr. S.”

“I’m glad to hear that.”

*   *   *

I heard the child before I saw her: a small voice that came from behind a bush. “I’m putting you in the garden, that’s it, and you mustn’t be sillies or willies or dillies … Absolutely not! Plop, here, here. Yes, look, a hill for you. Dandelion trees. Teeny wind blowing. Okay, peoples, a house.”

From my reclining position in the lawn chair where I was reading, I saw a pair of short, naked legs come into view, take two steps, and then drop to a kneeling position on the ground. The partly visible child had a green plastic bucket, which she dumped out on the grass. I saw a pink dollhouse and a host of figures, hard and stuffed, of various sizes, and then the girl’s head, which startled me before I understood that she was wearing a fright wig of se kind, a gnarled platinum concoction that made me think of an electrocuted Harpo Marx. The commentary resumed. “You can get in, Ratty, and you too, Beary. Look, you talk to each others. Some dishes.” Running exit, swift return, spillage of small cups and plates onto the grass. Busy arrangements and then chewing noises, lip smacking, and simulated burps. “It’s not polite to burp at the table. See, he’s coming, it’s Giraffey. Can you fit in? Squeeze in there.” Giraffey did not fit well, so his manipulator settled for the entrance of the fellow’s head and neck in-house, body beyond.

I returned to my book, but the child’s voice pulled me away now and again by small exclamations and loud humming. A brief silence was followed by a sudden lament: “Too bad I’m real so I can’t go in my little house and live!”

I remembered, remembered that threshold world of Almost, where wishes are nearly real. Could it be that my dolls stirred at night? Had the spoon moved of its own accord a fraction of an inch? Had my hope enchanted it? The real and unreal like mirror twins, so close to each other they both breathed living breaths. Some fear, too. You had to brush against the uneasy sense that dreams had broken out of their confinement in sleep and pushed into daylight. Don’t you wish, Bea said, the ceiling was the floor? Don’t you wish we could …

The girl was standing about five feet away, staring gravely in my direction, a round and sturdy person of three or four with a moon face and big eyes under the ludicrous wig. In one hand, she gripped Giraffey by the neck, a battle-scarred creature who looked as if he needed hospitalization.

“Hi,” I said. “What’s your name?”

She shook her head vigorously, puffed out her cheeks, turned suddenly, and ran.

Too bad I’m real,
I thought.

*   *   *

My bout of nerves before meeting my poetry class of seven pubescent girls struck me as ridiculous, and yet I could feel the constriction in my lungs, hear my shallow breaths, the small puffs of my anxiety. I spoke sternly to myself. You have taught graduate school students writing for years, and these are only children. Also, you should have known that no self-respecting boy of Bonden would sign up for a poetry workshop, that out here in the provinces, poetry signifies frails, dolls, and dowagers. Why would you expect to attract more than a few girls with vague and probably sentimental fantasies about writing verse? Who was I anyway? I had my Doris prize and I had my PhD in comparative literature and my job at Columbia, crusts of respectability to offer as evidence that my failure wasn’t complete. The trouble with me was that the inside had touched the outside. After crumbling to bits, I had lost that brisk confidence in the wheels of my own mind, the realization that had come to me sometime in my late forties that I might be ignored, but I could out-think just about anybody, that massive reading had turned my brain into a synthetic machine that could summon philosophy and science and literature in the same breath. I rousemyself with a list of mad poets (some more and some less): Torquato Tasso, John Clare, Christopher Smart, Friedrich Hölderlin, Antonin Artaud, Paul Celan, Randall Jarrell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Ezra Pound, Robert Fergusson, Velimir Khlebnikov, Georg Trakl, Gustaf Fröding, Hugh MacDiarmid, Gérard de Nerval, Edgar Allan Poe, Burns Singer, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke, Laura Riding, Sara Teasdale, Vachel Lindsay, John Berryman, James Schuyler, Sylvia Plath, Delmore Schwartz … Buoyed by the reputations of my fellow maniacs, depressives, and voice hearers, I hopped on my bicycle to meet the seven poetic flowers of Bonden.

*   *   *

As I looked around the table at my pupils, I grew calmer. They were indeed children. The preposterous but poignant realities of girls on the cusp asserted themselves immediately, and my sympathy for them almost choked me. Peyton Berg, several inches taller than I, very thin, with no breasts, constantly adjusted her arms and legs as if they were alien limbs. Jessica Lorquat was tiny, but she had the body of a woman. A false atmosphere of femininity hung about her that made itself known chiefly in an affectation—a cooing baby voice. Ashley Larsen, sleek brown hair, slightly protruding eyes, walked and sat with the self-conscious air that comes with a newly acquired erogenous zone—holding herself chest-out to display growing buds. Emma Hartley withdrew behind a veil of blond hair, smiling shyly. Nikki Borud and Joan Kavacek, both plump and loud, appeared to function in tandem, as one giggling, mincing persona. Alice Wright, pretty, large teeth covered by braces, was reading when I came in and continued to read quietly until the class started. When she closed the book, I saw that it was
Jane Eyre,
and I felt a moment of envy, the envy of first discovery.

At least one of them was wearing perfume, which on the warm June day mingled with the room’s dust and made me sneeze twice. Jessica, Ashley, Nikki, and Joan were dressed for something other than a poetry workshop. Adorned with trailing earrings, lip gloss, eye shadow, T-shirts with messages that exposed their bare bellies of various sizes and shapes, they had strutted rather than walked into the room. The Gang of Four, I thought. The comfort, the safety, the group.

I gave my speech then. “There are no rules,” I told them. “For six weeks, three days a week, we’re going to dance, dance with words. Nothing is prohibited—no thought or subject. Nonsense, stupidity, silliness of all kinds are allowed. Grammar, spelling, none of it matters, at least at first. We’ll read poems, but your poems don’t have to be like the ones we read.”

The seven were silent.

“You mean we can write about
anything,
” Nikki blurted out. “Even nasty stuff.”

“If that’s what you want,” I said. “In fact, let’s try
nasty
as a trigger word.”

After a short explanation about automatic writing, I had them write a response to
nasty,
whatever came into their mindin a ten-minute stretch.
Poop, pee, snot,
and
vomit
appeared under several pencils in short order. Joan included “Period mess,” which prompted giggles and gasps and made me wonder how many of them had crossed that threshold. Peyton discoursed on cow pies. Emma, incapable, it seemed, of letting herself go, stuck to moldy oranges and lemons, and Alice, who obviously inhabited the realm of the incurably bookish, wrote, “sharp, cruel, pointed, like piercing knives in my soft flesh,” a line that caused Nikki to roll her eyes and glance at Joan for confirmation, which quickly arrived in the form of a smirk.

That shared look of disparagement registered itself in my chest, like the briefest stab of a needle, and I noted aloud that
nasty
was a word that included more than objects of disgust, that there were nasty remarks, nasty thoughts, and nasty people. This went over without objection, and after more talk, embarrassed giggling, questions, my directive to keep their work in a single notebook, and an assignment to do more fast writing at home to the word
cold,
I dismissed them.

The Gang of Four led the way out with Peyton and Emma fast on their heels. Alice lingered at the table as she carefully, self-consciously inserted her book into a large canvas bag. Then I heard Ashley call to Alice in a bright, brittle voice, “Alice, aren’t you coming with?” (
With
is a preposition allowed to hang unaccompanied by a noun or pronoun in Minnesotan.) Looking toward Alice, I saw her face change. She smiled for an instant and, gathering up her notebook from the table, ran eagerly toward the others. Alice’s undisguised happiness combined with Ashley’s tone had for the second time in a single hour touched a raw spot in me, more bodily than cerebral. I had been called back to a young and hopelessly serious self, a girl without the distance of irony or a gift for covering up her emotions. You ARE overly sensitive. The two tiny exchanges between girls lingered into the evening like an old and annoying melody in my mind, one I understood I had never wanted to hear again.

The girls and their blooming bodies may have been an indirect catalyst for the project I launched that same evening. It served as a methodical way to ward off the demons that arrived every night, all of them named Boris, and all of them wielding knives of various lengths. The fact that I had spent over half my life with that man did not mean that there hadn’t been a period Before Boris (from now on to be designated B.B.) There had been sex, too, in that long-lost era, voluptuous, dirty, sweet, and sad. I decided to catalog my carnal adventures and misadventures in a pristine notebook, to defile the pages with my own pornographic history and to do my best to leave it husband-free. The Others, I hoped, would take my mind off the One.

Entry #1. Was I six or seven? I would say six, but it isn’t certain. My aunt and uncle’s house in Tidyville. My older cousin Rufus lounging on the sofa. If I was six, he was twelve. Other family members were around, I recall, moving in and out of the room. It was summer. Sunlight shone through the window, specks of dust visible, a fan blowing from the corner. As I passed the sofa, Rufus pulled me onto his lap, nothing unusual. We were
cousins
. He began to rub me or, rather, knead me between my legs as if I were dough, and a strange warm feeling arrived, a combination of dim arousal accompanied by a sensation of the not-quite-right. I put my hands on his knees, gave a push, dropped off his lap to the floor, and wandered away. This drive-by groping must count as my first sexual experience. I have never forgotten it. Although it was not traumatic in the least, it was novel, a curiosity that left a definite imprint on my memory. My view of the event, which I never told anyone about, except Boris, surely qualifies for what Freud (or, rather, James Strachey) called “deferred action”—early memories that take on different meanings as a person grows older. If I had not escaped so quickly, if I had not been able to retain a sense of my own will, the molestation might have scarred me. Today, it would be considered criminal and, if discovered, could send a boy like Rufus to jail or into treatment for sex offenders. Rufus became a dentist who now specializes in implants. Last time I saw him, he was carrying around a magazine called
Implantology
.

Entry #2. Lucy Pumper announces to me on the school bus: “I know they have to
do
it to have children, but do they have to take off
all
of their clothes?” Lucy was Catholic—an exotic category: incense, robes, crucifixes, rosaries (all coveted)—and she had eight brothers and sisters. I bowed to her superior knowledge. I, on the other hand, looked through that particular glass darkly and had nothing to say. I was nine years old and understood perfectly that I would discover a reflection of some kind if I looked hard enough, but when I gazed ahead I had no idea what I was seeing.
All
of their clothes?

A side entry: I promised not to, but I can’t help it. His hair was dark then, almost black, and there was no soft, loose flesh beneath his chin. As he sat across the table from me in the Hungarian Pastry Shop, he explained his research slowly and lucidly, and he drew a model on the napkin with his Bic pen. I leaned forward to look at it, followed one of the lines he had drawn with my finger, and looked up at him. The electric air. He placed his hand over mine and pressed my fingers into the table, but I felt it between my legs. I felt my jaw loosen and my mouth open. It was grand, my love, wasn’t it? Well, wasn’t it?

*   *   *

I am screaming, All these years you came first! You, never me! Who cleaned, did homework for hours, slogged through the shopping? Did you? Goddamned master of the universe! Phallic Übermensch off to a conference. The neural correlates of consciousness! It makes me puke!

Why are you always so angry? What happened to your sense of humor? Why are you rewriting our life?