The Summer Without Men
After Lola was nestled beside her children on the bed, I sat down on the edge and stroked her head for about twenty minutes. She’s only two years older than Daisy, I said to myself. I thought of her, Lola, the silent little girl who couldn’t talk in school. The anxiety of speaking in a place that isn’t home, that’s outside, that’s strange. It had a name, as so many things do, selective mutism, not so uncommon in young children. I thought then of a young woman who had been a patient with me in the hospital, and I tried to remember her name, but I couldn’t. She hadn’t spoken either, not a word. Thin and white and blond, she had made me think of a tubercular revenant from the Romantic age. I saw her as she wandered stiffly up and down the hallway, hunched over, long pale hair drawn over her face like a veil, carrying a plastic pitcher she held very close to her mouth so she could spit into it, sometimes silently, sometimes noisily hawking up gobs of mucus from her lungs, which made the other patients snicker. Once, I had seen her dart behind a sofa in the common area, crouch down, disappear from sight, and then, after a moment, I heard the hoarse roar of her vomiting into the pitcher. Inside out. Keep the outside out. Seal me shut, tight as a drum. Close my eyes. Shut my mouth. Bar the doors. Pull down the shades. Leave me be in my wordless sanctum, my fortress of madness. Poor girl, where was she now?
I found a spot beside Flora and eventually fell asleep, despite the slumberland concert provided by my overnight guests: the whistling of congested little Simon, the masticatory noises of Flora as she sucked and chomped on her index finger, and the restless murmurs and single word emitted by Lola. Several times, in a small high voice, she said, “No.” Although I remained in bed with them, my mind roamed as was its wont onto thoughts of Boris and Sidney and the Pause and the sex diary in hiatus. I thought of writing about the innumerable dreams from which I had woken in full riotous orgasm or perhaps about F.G., whom I had called the Grazer because he was a nibbler and a chewer, who moved up and down my body as if it were a delectable green field. I then allowed myself several minutes of extreme irritation over the biogenetic fantasy that it was possible to calculate accurately the percentage of gene influence as opposed to environmental influence on human beings and began writing a scathing critique in my head, but the last thing I remember, which softened my mood considerably, was the RETURN TO TRAHERNE and his poem “Shadows in the Water,” which I had read several times to myself only hours earlier. It was prompted, I believe, by an idle musing about Moki and whether he lay invisible among us, the strong, wild little boy with long hair who flew only slowly, but needed comfort after the paternal eruption, needed pats and kisses from his very short, plump, newly wigless authoress.
O ye that stand upon the brink,
Whom I so near me through the chink
With wonder see: what faces there,
Whose feet, whose bodies do ye wear?
I my companions see
In you, another me.
They seemed others, but are we;
Our second selves these shadows be.
I woke to Pete, not in the flesh, but to his voice on the phone. It was not an angry voice but a composed one, polite but strained, asking for “my wife.” I couldn’t see the visitors—the bed was empty—but I heard them in the kitchen. Flora was singing nonsense; there was the clink of dishes and the dull bang of some object hitting another, which was then followed by the unmistakable smell of toast.
Lola took the call in the bedroom while I held Simon and supervised the second course of Flora’s breakfast, toast with jam, which she waved in the air between bites as she marched back and forth across the black and white tiles, still singing. The babe barfed milk all over my pajama top. The mild odor of the regurgitated milk, the stain that seeped through the cloth and wet my skin, the squirming, bucking body I held securely to my chest brought back the old days with my own Daisy girl, my fierce, agitated infant Daisy. I had walked the floors with her for hours in the first months of her life as I breathed soothing words into her tiny curl of an ear, repeating her musical name over and over until I felt her tense chest and limbs relax against me. I had had only one child, and it hadn’t been easy. And Lola had two. And Mama had had two. When Lola emerged from the bedroom, she paused in the door and smiled an enigmatic smile. I wondered whether Pete-of-the-Blasting-Expletives had begged forgiveness and caused that smile or whether I looked ridiculous holding the now howling Simon. Before she gathered her two charges, one in each arm, and trudged heavily across the lawn back to her sick, sorry, and sober husband, the laconic Lola said, “It never changes. It’s always the same. You’d think I’d wise up, wouldn’t you? It gave him a start, though, when I wasn’t home, scared him. Thanks, Mia.”
* * *
Good old Mama Mia, who lies alone in the great king bed with its wide-open spaces, a blank expanse of white sheets she fills up with inner speech and memory, a whirligig of words and thoughts and aches and pains. Mia, Mother of Daisy. Mia, Mother of Loss. Once, Wife of Boris. But O the heavy change, now thou art gone. O Milton on the brain. O Muse. O Mia, rhapsodic boob, blustering bimbo, pine no more! Roll up your troubles, wipe up your stains, kick off your shoes, and sing something silly for your own sake as you sail on kingless in that great groaning schooner of a bed, not a tawdry queen for you, Bard of the Laughing Countenance, but a king.
* * *
Thursday afternoon, Boris wrote the following. Explication de texte included:
Mia,
It has ended with [proper name of French love object]. I am staying in the Roosevelt. In the last two weeks I have thought more about my life than at any other time. It has been a black period for me. I even called Bob [psychiatrist friend doing research at Rockefeller. The even here is an example of the radical understatement of which B.I. is capable. He has always stubbornly, vehemently resisted any oughl kinds of psychotherapeutic intervention. Calling Bob suggests desperation.] It has become obvious to me that I have acted precipitously in order to escape parts of myself, parts of my past, and you have suffered because of this. [Read: mother, father, Stefan, and remember, Boris is a scientist. His prose is going to thud forward. It seems to go with the job.] When [proper name of young Francophone bewitcher] and I were together, I found myself talking to her a lot about you. This, as you probably can imagine, did not go over well. She was also annoyed by my domestic habits or lack of them. [Read: cigar butts piling up in ashtrays, recently read papers from Nature, Science, Brain, Genomics, and Genetics Weekly stacked in piles on every surface of apartment, clothes thrown on floor. Also read: Despite three postdocs, claims he is unable to master the technology of dishwasher, clothes washer, or dryer.] I came to see her as someone I had idealized from afar, and I suspect that she had done the same with me. [The unreal no longer occludes the real.] Working together and living together are different. [You bet they are, Bub.] I would like to see you, Mia, and talk to you. I have missed you. I am sharing a meal with Daisy tonight.
Boris
I concluded that reality had to coincide with either A or B or D. Both C and X appeared to have been eliminated.
* * *
If this little epistle strikes you as inadequately emotional in light of what had happened, I cannot disagree, but then you haven’t lived with the man for thirty years. Boris is scrupulously honest. I knew every word he had written was both considered and truthful, but I also knew that the man was prone to a wooden demeanor. In some people, this indicates a genuine lack of feeling underneath, but this is not true of Boris. The entire letter turns on three sentences: “It has been a black period for me.” “I even called Bob,” and “I have missed you.”
* * *
Boris, I replied. I have missed you, too. Your letter is oblique, however, as to who left whom? You can understand that from my point of view, this matters. If the Pause threw you onto the street, and this act caused a reconsideration of our marriage, it is very different from an alternative, which is that you decided to leave her, after reconsidering your relationship with her because of your former
relationship with me. Those two are also distinct from a mutual decision to part ways. Mia
(If he wasn’t going to write “Love,” I sure as hell wasn’t going to stoop to that devilishly tricky noun.)
* * *
Excitement usually comes at a clip. Agitation in one corner is often mirrored by a similar hubbub in another. There tleo rhyme or reason to this. Correlation is not cause. It is just “the music of chance,” as one prominent American novelist has phrased it. Long, lazy, uneventful periods are followed by sudden bursts of action, and so it was that the very morning after Pete’s screeching exit from his wife and children, another equally dramatic departure was taking place over at Rolling Meadows, which I discovered when I paid my daily visit to my mother. Regina had gone to the beauty parlor to have her long hair “professionally put up,” packed two suitcases, called the three Swans to announce that she couldn’t bear her incarceration in the Home any longer, and then, after slamming the door to her apartment, had made a speedy march down the hall (or as speedily as was possible for Regina with her delicate leg). My mother and Peg (Abigail was indisposed) had followed the fugitive to the front door, where they cross-examined her about what in heaven’s name she was up to. Her three daughters had counseled her to stay. She had ended it with Nigel, hadn’t she, after the story about the gold watch and the buxom barmaid? Within seconds, they concluded that Regina had no idea where she was going. Her flight was pure flight, that is to say, flight without a destination. Moreover, she had rambled on about Dr. Westerberg, whom she claimed had threatened her, and said that if she didn’t “get away” she was convinced he would “put her away.” After a quarter of an hour, my mother and Peg had cajoled Regina back to her apartment. A tearful scene had followed, but in the end, she had seemed resigned to her fate and had promised her friends to stay put.
Chapter 2: Only a couple of hours before I arrived, my mother had knocked on Regina’s door to check on her state of mind. Regina had refused to let her in. Not only that, she had claimed she had pushed the furniture up against the door as a barricade against enemies, especially Westerberg. When my mother reported this, she shook her head sadly. I could only sympathize. When paranoia arrives, it does little good to tell the paranoiac that the fear is unfounded. I understood. My brain had cracked, too. And so, after trying to reason with her unreasonable friend, my mother had gone to the nurse to report on the developments in No. 2706, and the medical staff had been summoned, including the diabolical Westerberg, and the door had been unlocked, and the furniture had been removed from the doorway, and after that Regina herself had been removed to a hospital in Minneapolis for “testing.”
When she finished this story, my mother appeared to gaze straight through me. She looked sad. Sadness was chasing us all, it seemed. I was sitting beside her and took her hand but said nothing.
“I don’t think she will come back,” my mother said. “She won’t come back here, anyway.”
I squeezed my mother’s thin fingers and she squeezed mine in return. Through the window I saw a robin alight on the bench in the courtyard.
“She had spunk,” my mother said. I noted her use of the past tense.
Another robin. A pair.
My mother began to talk about Harry. All losses led back to Harry. She had often spoken of him, but this time she said, “I wonder what would have happened to me if Harry hadn’t died. I wonder how I would have been different.” She told me what I already knew, that after her brother’s death, she had decided to be perfect for her parents, never to give them any grief, ever again, that she had tried so hard, but it had not worked. And then she said what she had never said before, in a barely audible voice: “Sometimes I wondered if they wished it had been me.”
“Mama,” I said sharply.
She paid no attention and continued talking. She still dreamed of Harry, she said, and they weren’t always good dreams. She would find his body lying somewhere in the apartment behind a bookshelf or chair, and she couldn’t understand why he wasn’t in his grave in Boston. Once in a dream, her father had appeared and demanded to know what she had done with Harry. When Bea and I were children, she said, she had had periods of terror that something would take us from her, an illness or accident. “I wanted to protect you from every kind of hurt. I still do, but it doesn’t work, does it?”
“No,” I said. “It doesn’t.”
My mother’s melancholy didn’t last, however. I told her Boris had been in touch, which both cheered and worried her, and we weighed several possible outcomes and discussed what I wanted from my husband, and I discovered I didn’t exactly know, and we went over Daisy’s acting life and how precarious it all was, but how damned good the kid was, after all, and then Bea called while I was still there, and I listened to my mother laugh at some witticism of my sister’s, and over dinner she laughed again, hard, at one of my own. She embraced me tightly when we parted, and I sensed that her earlier gloom had been dispelled, not forever, of course, but for the evening. Twelve-year-old Harry would always be there, the ghost of Mama’s childhood, the empty figure of her parents’ hopes and of her guilt for having lived. I imagined my six-year-old mother as I had seen her in an old photograph. She has red hair. Although it is impossible to see the color in black and white, I add the redness in my mind. Little Laura stands beside Harry, a head shorter than he is. They are both wearing white sailor suits with navy trim. Neither child is smiling, but it is my mother’s face that interests me. By chance, she is the one looking ahead, into the future.
* * *
Below, without commentary, an epistolary dialogue made possible by racing twenty-first-century technology that took place the following day between B.I. and M.F. on the scenarios A, B, or D, and so on.
B.I.: Mia, does it really matter what happened? Isn’t it enough that it is over between us, and I want to see you?
M.F.: If the story were reversed, and I were you, and you I, wouldn’t it matter to you? It is a question of the state of your heart, old friend of mine. Heart dented by rejection à la française, unhappy and surprisingly helpless alone, Husband decides it may be better o begin reconciliation proceedings with Old Faithful; or, Seeing the error of his ways, Spouse penetrates his Folly (ha, ha, ha) and has revelation: Worn Old Wife looks better from Uptown.
B.I.: Can we dispense with the bitter irony?
M.F.: How on earth do you think I would have made it through this without it? I would have stayed mad.
B.I.: She broke it off. But the thing was already broken.
M.F.: I was broken, and you came to the hospital once.
B.I.: They wouldn’t let me come. I tried to come, but they refused me.
M.F.: What do you want from me now?
B.I.: Hope.
I couldn’t answer “hope” until the next day. The reversal I had dreamed of had come, and I felt as hard as a piece of flint. My answer to the big B. arrived in the morning: “Woo me.”
And he, in high Romantic style, wrote back, “Okay.”
* * *
Mr. Nobody had not written in some time, and I began to worry. We had been lobbing balls back and forth on the subject of play, that is, playing with play. He threw me a Derridian fastball first, the endless play of logos, round and round we go without end and without resolution, and it’s all in the text, the doing and the undoing, then I threw back Freud’s “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through,” in which the esteemed doctor tells us that transference, the spooky place between analyst and patient, is like a spielplatz, a playground, a terrain somewhere between illness and real life, where one can become the other, and then he hurled back a beautiful quote from the great mountain himself: “If anyone tells me that it is degrading to the Muses to use them only as a plaything and a pastime, he does not know, as I do, the value of pleasure, play, and pastime. I would almost say that any other aim is ridiculous.” I fired back with Winnicott and Vygotsky, the latter dead since 1934 but a brand-new love of mine, and after that, my spouting phantom went si
lent.
I decided too much time had passed: “Everything okay? I’m thinking of you. Mia.”
* * *
The book club is big. It has been sprouting up like proverbial fungi all over the place, and it is a cultural fm dominated almost entirely by women. In fact, reading fiction is often regarded as a womanly pursuit these days. Lots of women read fiction. Most men don’t. Women read fiction written by women and by men. Most men don’t. If a man opens a novel, he likes to have a masculine name on the cover; it’s reassuring somehow. You never know what might happen to that external genitalia if you immerse yourself in imaginary doings concocted by someone with the goods on the inside. Moreover, men like to boast about their neglect of fiction: “I don’t read fiction, but my wife does.” The contemporary literary imagination, it seems, emanates a distinctly feminine perfume. Recall Sabbatini: we women have the gift of gab. But truth be told, we have been enthusiastic consumers of the novel since its birth in the late seventeenth century and, at that time, novel reading gave off an aroma of the clandestine. The delicate feminine mind, as you will remember from past rants inside this selfsame book, could be easily dented by exposure to literature, the novel especially, with its stories of passion and betrayal, with its mad monks and libertines, its heaving bosoms and Mr. B.’s, its ravagers and ravagees. As a pastime for young ladies, reading novels was flushed pink for the risqué. The logic: Reading is a private pursuit, one that often takes place behind closed doors. A young lady might retreat with a book, might even take it into her boudoir, and there, reclining on her silken sheets, imbibing the thrills and chills manufactured by writerly quills, one of her hands, one not absolutely needed to grip the little volume, might wander. The fear, in short, was one-handed reading.