The Summer Without Men

  Lola and I stayed put, however, for another few seconds, just looking out the window in silence before she made her way back to the party to comfort her baby boy.

  * * *

  Homo homini lupus. Man is a wolf to man. I found the sentence in a work by that grand old pessimist Sigmund Freud, but it apparently comes from Plautus. Sad but true. Look around you. Look even at the little girls, at their grasping for status and admiration, at their ruthless tactics, at their aggressive joys. As their “I”s continued to revolve from one child to the other during the week, I sometimes lost track of which person was playing whom, but they had no such problems with identification. Although there were few further revelations, the story I had entitled “The Coven” began to take shape. Ashley had been toppled. She fell with her lie. I doubt whether she would have felt any genuine remorse had she not been caught, but she suffered her loss of power keenly. She was a survivor, however, and began to adjust to her new role in the group: On Wednesday she made a formal apology to her victim, and this, whether sincere or not, helped lift her reputation among the others. Emma had been jogged hard by the mention of her ill sister, but the sympathy the girls felt for her lot as the healthy but ignored sibling softened her considerably, and she volunteered amendments to the story and her role in it that I thought were brave: “It made me happy when Alice cried.” Jessie’s narcissistic platitudes had taken a beating. She understood that she had believed in herself too much. She’d fallen for the wicked plot with hardly a thought. As the week went on, Peyton cried less and less and relished her roles as the other girls more and more. The catharsis of theater. In fact, by Thursday it was obvious that a tacit script had already been written, and the children had thrown themselves into their own melodrama with gusto. Alice lost something of her stature as romantic heroine, but her suffering was acknowledged by all, and she entered the lives of her tormentors with such zeal that by Friday, Nikki cried out, “Oh my God, Alice, you like being the mean one!” Joan, of course, agreed.

  The story they all took home on Friday was not true; it was a version they could all live with, very much like national histories that blur and hide and distort the movements of people and events in order to preserve an idea. The girls did not want to hate themselves and, although self-hatred is not at all uncommon, the consensus they reached about what had happened among them was considerably softer than the one advanced by the Viennese doctor I quoted earlier. As for me, by the end, I felt my encounter with the Coven had done me good. I was hugged by all seven, my praises were sung, and I was presented with a gift: a violet box filled with an odiferous soap, hand lotion in a bottle of an undulating shape, and a container of large crystals for the bath tied up in a lilac bow. What more could anyone ask for?

  * * *

  And then my Daisy blew into town. This tired expression, with its Wild West connotations, nevertheless suits the beloved offspring. The girl has a windy quality, an ability to stir things up without really doing much. When she jumped out of the cab, large leather bag over her shoulder, its zipper gaping open to reveal messy contents, attired in tiny T-shirt, man’s vest, cut-off jeans, boots, a straw fedora, and enormous sunglasses, she seemed to embody agitation, excitement—in short: a small tornado. She’s a beauty, too. How Boris and I produced her is a puzzle, but the genetic dice fall every which way. Neither of us is homely, and my mother, as you know, believes me still to be beautiful, but Daisy is the real thing, and it’s hard not to look at the child when she’s around.

  She’s an affectionate little devil, too, always has been, a hugger and a kisser and a nose rubber and a stroker, and when we got our arms around each other on the doorstep, we hugged, kissed, nose-rubbed, and stroked for a couple of minutes before we let go. And, as it sometimes happens, it wasn’t until that moment that I understood how much I had missed her, how I had pined for my daughter, but I did not, you will be happy to know, burst into tears. There may have been a touch of wetness in the vicinity of my ducts, but nothing more.

  We spent the evening at my mother’s and, although I remember only bits of what we said, I do remember the animation in my mother’s face as she listened to Daisy tell us stories about the theater and Muriel and her nights trailing her father and how he hadn’t discovered his “tail” until she confronted him outside the Roosevelt with the words “What the hell is going on, Dad?” And I recall that my mother had more news of Regina. She had been rescued by one of her daughters. Letty had arrived and was making arrangements to move her mother to Cincinnati, where there was a “home” very close to Letty and her family. My mother confessed to not knowing how that would all go, but it was certainly preferable to the “horrible jail cell” in the Alzheimer’s unit.

  * * *

  The very next day, we were told that Abigail had had a massive stroke. She was alive, but the woman we had known had vanished. She did not know where she was or who she was. The alarm clock had gone off. The very old languish and die. We know that, but the very old know it far better than the rest of us. They live in a world of continual loss and this, as my mother had said, is bitter.

  * * *

  I saw her for a few minutes over in Care two days later. My mother did not want to come. I understood why; the specter of losing every faculty that made life life was too close to her. Abigail was lying on her side; her curved spine meant that her head was near her knees, so she occupied only a small part of the bed. Her eyes flickered open every now and again, but their irises and pupils were empty of all thoughts, and when she breathed she rasped loudly. My friend’s thin gray hair looked a little greasy and uncombed, and she was wearing a flowered hospital gown she would have detested. I smoothed her hair back. I talked to her, told her I remembered everything, would get the will from the drawer when it was time and would do everything in the world to get the secret amusements into a gallery somewhere. And before I left, I leaned over and sang into her ear very softly, the way I used to sing to Daisy, a lullaby, not Brahms, another one. A nurse startled me when she came through the door behind me, and I lurched back, embarrassed, but she was cheerful, matter-of-fact, and said it would be fine to stay, though somehow then I couldn’t. Two days later, Abigail was dead and I was glad.

  * * *

  I wrote to Nobody about her, about her works and the long-ago love affair. I don’t know why I told him. Maybe I wanted an answer of some grandeur. I got it.

  Some of us are fated to live in a box from which there is only temporary release. We of the damned-up spirits, of the thwarted feelings, of the blocked hearts, and the pent-up thoughts, we who long to blast out, flood forth in a torrent of rage or joy or even madness, but there is nowhere for us to go, nowhere in the world because no one will have us as we are, and there is nothing to do except to embrace the secret pleasures of our sublimations, the arc of a sentence, the kiss of a rhyme, the image that forms on paper or canvas, the inner cantata, the cloistered embroidery, the dark and dreaming needlepoint from hell or heaven or purgatory or none of those three, but there must be some sound and fury from us, some clashing cymbals in the void. Who would deny us the mere pantomime of frenzy? We, the actors who pace back and forth on a stage no one watches, our guts heaving and our fists flying? Your friend was one of us, the never anointed, the unchosen, misshapen by life, by sex, cursed by fate but still industrious under the covers where only the happy few venture, sewing apace for years, sewing her heartbreak and her spite and spleen and why not? Why? Why not? Why? Why not?

  In all his bleakness, he made me feel better, strangely better. Why? Although for the first time I wondered if Mr. Nobody couldn’t just as well be Mrs. Nobody. Who knew? I wasn’t so sure he was Leonard anymore. But I realized I didn’t care. He or she was my voice from Neverland, from neverness, from Why, not Where, and I liked it that way.

  If I ever do anything really stupid again, nail me to the wall.

  Your Boris

  * * *

  Daisy was standing behind me when I read this message on the screen, and I fe
lt her hands on my shoulders. “What’re you going to say, Mom? Tell me, Mom.”

  “I’ll have my staple gun ready.”

  “Oh, Mom,” she groaned. “He’s trying, caand you see? He feels bad.”

  My daughter rolled back the desk chair I was sitting in, jumped into my lap, and began cajoling and wheedling me to say something encouraging back to dear old Pa. She pulled at my earlobes and pinched my nose and used various accents—Korean, Irish, Russian, and French—to plead with me. She leapt off my lap and soft-shoed and shuffle-ball-changed and waved her arms and wished loudly for the reunion of the aging couple, one Mommy and one Daddy, Sun and Moon or Moon and Sun, the double orbs in her childhood sky.

  * * *

  On the day of Abigail’s funeral, it rained, and I thought it was right that it should rain. The rain came down on the mown grass, and I remembered the words she had stitched in needlepoint: O remember that my life is wind. Rolling Meadows was heavily represented in the pews that afternoon, which meant there were a lot of women, since women were the ones who lived there, mostly, anyway, although the lecherous Busley showed up on his Mobility Scooter, which he parked in the aisle, toward the back. I saw the niece, who looked old, but then she was probably in her seventies. My mother had been asked to speak. She clasped her speech tightly in her lap, and I sensed she was nervous. She had tried on several black outfits before we left, worrying about collars and pressing and what may or may not have been a spot on a skirt, and she finally decided on a tailored cotton jacket and pants with a blue blouse that Abigail had always admired. The minister, a man with little hair and a suitably grave demeanor, could not have known our mutual friend very well because he uttered falsehoods that made my mother stiffen beside me: “A loyal member of our congregation with a generous and gentle spirit.”

  My small, elegant mother took the steps to the pulpit carefully but without difficulty, and once she had adjusted her feet and reading glasses, she leaned toward her listeners. “Abigail was many things,” she said, her voice quavering, hoarse, emphatic. “But she was not a generous and gentle spirit. She was funny, outspoken, smart, and if the truth be told, angry and irritable a lot of the time.” I heard a couple of women laugh behind me. My mother went on and with each sentence I could feel her warming to her subject. They had met in the book club the day Abigail shocked her fellow members by denouncing a novel they were reading that had won the PULITZER Prize as “a complete load of stinking crap,” a verdict my mother had not opposed but would have worded differently, and she went on to praise Abigail’s creative ability and the many works of art she had produced over the years. She called what Abigail had made art, and she called Abigail an artist, and Daisy and I were proud to have such a grandmother and such a mother. I knew Mama wouldn’t weep for Abigail. I don’t think she wept for Father. She was a true stoic; if there’s nothing to be done about it, away with it. The Swans were dying, one by one. We are all dying one by one. We all smell of mortality, and we can’t wash it off. There is nothing we can do about it except perhaps burst into song.

  We must leave us for a while, leave me and Daisy and the brght Peg, too, sitting beside Daisy, leave my mother as she stands there giving testimony to her friend. We are going to leave her even though she shone that day and later she was congratulated heartily by many for telling what was generally agreed to be something true because it is well known that the dead often go to their graves wrapped up in lies. But we are going to leave us there at a funeral as it rains hard beyond the stained glass windows, and we’ll let it unfold just as it did then, but without mention.

  Time confounds us, doesn’t it? The physicists know how to play with it, but the rest of us must make due with a speeding present that becomes an uncertain past and, however jumbled that past may be in our heads, we are always moving inexorably toward an end. In our minds, however, while we are still alive and our brains can still make connections, we may leap from childhood to middle age and back again and loot from any time we choose, a savory tidbit here and a sour one there. It can never return as it was, only as a later incarnation. What once was the future is now the past, but the past comes back as a present memory, is here and now in the time of writing. Again, I am writing myself elsewhere. Nothing prevents that from happening, does it?

  Bea and I have been skating on the rink over by Lincoln school, and we are waiting for our father to pick us up, and we see him coming in the green station wagon. On the way home, he whistles “The Erie Canal,” and Bea and I smile at each other in the back seat. At home, Mama is lying on the bed reading a book in French. We jump on the bed, and she feels our feet. They are so cold. Ice, she says the word ice. Then she strips off our four socks and takes our naked skating feet and puts them under her sweater on the warm skin of her stomach. Paradise Found.

  Stefan is sitting on the sofa, gesticulating as he makes his points. As I look at him, I worry. He is too alive. His thoughts are pressing ahead too quickly, and yet I am ignorant then of what will happen. I am innocent of the future, and that state, that cloud of unknowing, is impossible for me to retrieve.

  Dr. F. tells me to push. Push now! And I push with all my might and later I discover I have broken blood vessels all over my face, but what do I know about it then, nothing, and I push, and I feel her head, and then voices cry out that her head is coming out of me, and it does, and there is the sudden slide of her body from mine, me/she, two in one, and between my open legs I see a red, slimy foreigner, with a little bit of black hair, my daughter. I remember nothing of the umbilical cord, do I? Nothing of the cutting. Boris is there, and he is weeping. I don’t shed a tear. He does. Now I remember! I said that he had never bawled in real life, but that’s wrong. I had forgotten! He is standing there right now in my mind crying after his daughter is born.

  I am walking into the AIM gallery, a women’s cooperative in Brooklyn, to attend the opening of a show called The Secret Amusements.

  I am standing beside Boris in our apartment on Tompkins Place. Do you promise to love him, comfort him, honor and keep him in sickness and in health; and forsaking all others, keep thee only unto him, as long as ye both shall live?

  Well, do you? Speak up, you redheaded numbskull. That was then. I said yes. I said, I do. I said something in the affirmative.

  My mother has turned ninety, and we are celebrating in Bonden. Her knees are giving her problems, but she is lucid and doesn’t use a walker. Peg is there, and my mother introduces me to Irene. I have heard a lot about Irene on the telephone lately, and I pump her hand to show my enthusiasm. She is ninety-five. “Your mother and I,” she tells me, “have had some really fun times together.”

  Mama Mia is writing poems at the kitchen table. The little Daisy girl is stirring in her crib.

  Mia is in the hospital now, diagnosed with a brief psychosis, a transitory alienation of her reason, a brain glitch. She is officially une folle. She is writing in the notebook BRAIN SHARDS.

  7.

  An insistent thing—

  but speechless,

  not identity,

  a waking dream that leaves no image,

  only agonies. I need a name.

  I need a word in this white world.

  I need to call it something, not nothing.

  Choose a picture from nowhere,

  from a hole in a mind

  and look, there on the ledge:

  A flowering bone.

  11.

  I blibe and bleeb on rovsty hobe

  With Sentecrate, Bilt, and Frobe,

  My buddles down from Iberbean,

  The durkerst toon in Freen.

  21.

  Once over easy, love,

  Twice over tough,

  Piss and vinegar.

  Turds and stout.

  What’s this all about?

  She is sane again, and she is in the Burdas’ living room reading a biography of that coy but passionate genius, the Danish philosopher who has been irking and unsettling and bewildering her for years. Th
e date is August 19, 2009.

  * * *

  I have come round to myself, as you can see. Only a few days have passed since the funeral. I have come round to who I was then, during that summer I spent with my mother and the Swans and Lola and Flora and Simon and the young witches of Bonden. Abigail is lying in her grave on the outskirts of town. There is no stone yet. That will come later. It wasn’t so long ago, after all, and my memory of that time is sharp. Daisy was still with me. In the days previous, the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth, Boris Izcovich had been wooing me in a steady, earnest manner and had even sent me an egregious but touching poem that began: “I knew a girl named Mia / who knew her rhyme and meter / And onomatopoeia.” It fell off badly after that, but what can one expect from a world-renowned neuroscientist? The sentiment expressed after those introductory lines was, as described by Daisy, “total mush.” That said, only the most hard-hearted among us have no use for mush or blarney or those old ballads about lost and dead lovers, and only bona fide dunces are unable to take pleasure in the stories of ghostly figures who wander across moors or fields or out in the open air. And who among us would deny Jane Austen her happy endings or insist that Cary Grant and Irene Dunne should not get back together at the end of The Awful Truth? There are tragedies and there are comedies, aren’t there? And they are often more the same than different, rather like men and women, if you ask me. A comedy depends on stopping the story at exactly the right moment.