As I learned this, inside her, she exerted her will on me: by clenching her insides, by looking, for an hour every evening, at thousands of postcards of pearly eyed infants and at the society pages of Harper’s Bazaar and the New York Times and Look, she made me pink-skinned, blue-eyed, blond. As I formed inside her, Mother erased herself from me. Believe me, it happened, it can happen, more powerful than science, the strongest magic in the world is the will, it makes miracles. After she made me she spit me from her like a peanut and never touched me again except to wipe the insides of my ears or tie my hair back in a ponytail. The nurse said, it’s a daughter, look, such lovely hair, and she said, yes, I know, and turned over and went to sleep. I never cried, either.
So I grew, and she took a second job, night accountant in a hotel, then a third, weekend organizer and tax-consultant for truck stops and small restaurants. All this so I could have eighteen-dollar haircuts in Second Avenue salons, little peacoats from Charivari’s, ballet lessons and perfect shoes from Stein’s to go with, so that people could exclaim as I emerged from some dark glass door, letting a cool breath of luxury and just, how to talk about it, just rightness out onto the sidewalk, so people could say how lovely, how darling she is. At these moments Mother would stand a modest two paces behind me, and people would take her for a starched and blessedly efficient maid. They would look at her brown, blunt face, her hands clasped in front of her, her flat shoes, and with a trace of covetousness they would ask who she worked for, and she, with a quick, tight smile of delight would shake her head and whisk me off. On those evenings she would mix me an extra teaspoonful of Ovaltine, and would take my hundred-stroke brush and pinch away coiled hairs, looking at me now and then, that secret smile on her face.
I grew up and never thought we were strange. I knew Mother worked hard for me, and so I worked back for her, and the other things I accepted naturally and thought nothing of them. I was vain, I understood why mother was vain of me, and I pitied her a little for the way she looked, and this made me even more eager to bring home those perfect report cards, to be more buoyant in my jetes. But when I was twelve I came home one afternoon and found Mother, in her between-jobs housecoat, watching, on her new twelve-inch television, a feathery puff of white smoke that trailed away into the sky. I sat next to her and watched with her as she flipped channels, moving from image to image of a thin sliver of white riding a huge column of vapor, finally leaving a drifting stain in the sky and a memory of a roar drumming against the ears.
“Look at it,” she said. “Just look at it.”
“Neat-o,” I said shortly, dismissing it with my too-usual and too-casual accolade. I started to flip through a copy of Life, a little scared and yet a little pleased to see the quick snap of her eyes in my direction. She had gotten angry at me before, but always about things I had done or neglected to do, it was always me, but now it seemed she cared about this other thing enough to be hurt about it. So now, in the weeks and months afterwards, I pretended that there was nothing weird going on, but there was: she collected every picture, every scrap of print she could find about those rockets that tore themselves free of the earth. I had to pick my way over stacks of Popular Mechanics and cheesy plastic models of Gemini II, clear my sofa bed of NASA publicity flyers at night, and stumble over paperback biographies of John Glenn in the bathroom in the morning. In the bathroom, on the pot, sleepy-eyed and fuzzy-mouthed, I abandoned my act and studied this John Glenn, his hopeful upturned face and clear blue eyes, and tried to figure out the connection. But I was young, and too attached to scientific fact myself, and so, unable to come up with a coherent explanation, I was forced to face the idea that my mother was strange. Always, my contemplations —made somehow comfortable by the smells of my body —were interrupted by Mother, who pounded rapidly on the door, saying, “I don’t understand how you can spend all that time in there.”
I did, though, more and more. As she followed her elegant machines, I unearthed my body in the darkness of the bathroom, the only place in our apartment where I could be alone. In the shower, under the rosy sting of water, I fingered and excavated, discovered springs of fluid, smells salty and sweet, expanses. Sure, I sent myself off with the joyous discovering enthusiasm of adolescence, I masturbated under the faucet, on the floor, bent over the sink, but it was more than that, the thing was that as I pressed against the wall, lips on the cool tile, or as I bounced around on the floor or stretched against the roughness of the towel, I knew it was there, I mean the world, its roughness, power, itself, I could feel it. What, you say, what the hell are you talking about? but you have to understand that outside, with Mother, I sometimes felt like everything was papery, flat, like light through stained glass, I felt myself floating sometimes, far away inside myself, and far away, everything, the exhalations of a ghost. When I felt like that I got breathless, but cool, like a stony calm chick, you know, a killer, or maybe a catatonic in a white hospital ward, so I’d lock myself away in the john and tear off my skirt, and mouth my forefinger, middle finger, thumb, then into myself, my radiant labia, my cunny (yes I’d started reading too, what did you think?), ringed pucker, silky curve of belly, tongue and teeth on shoulder, and I planted myself firmly again.
So it went on. Me in the bathroom, Mother outside, me humping and hunching across the cold tiled floor, me at school, serious and nervous. The boys chased me for a bit and then told ugly stories about me. I think I was pretty, but I hesitated, because in spite of everything I wanted to be right for Mother, I tried, I bore the pulping weight of her expectations and tried to become the thing she dreamed for me. All those years we lived together, not saying much to each other, I knew her pride in me, and I felt something else grow like a thorn in my chest, a tight place of resentment that I was ashamed of during the day. But I think I would have done it, I would have let her make me what she wanted to, if she hadn’t cut me.
She cut me, I mean literally. She scalpeled into my flesh, chiseled away at my bone, and so then I hated her. But before I hated her I had wanted to fly for her, I had thought about it and thought and finally I decided that I would become an astronaut for her. The decade had passed me with all its anger and its distant jungle war, and I still knew I had to repay her. I knew she expected something from me, something that was a lot, but she never said anything and so I never knew. In my senior year I saw a movie at school, for a science class, ships silently curving toward each other against a deep black, people turning slowly, connected by silvery umbilical cords, and I thought, that’s what she wants. She wants me to do this, and so I said, quite suddenly, out very loudly, “I want to be an astronaut.” The kids laughed at me, but the teacher, a spiky old Irishwoman, smiled, and I smiled on the bus home, but on the kitchen table Mother had a brown manila folder open, full of glossy brochures and copied pages from medical journals. I could see cross section drawings in black and white, bone and cartilage neatly laid out and explained.
“What’s all this?” I said.
“For you,” she said. “This is the one we’ll go with.”
“For me? For me, a nose job?”
Well, it seemed she had watched it for years, my nose. I looked at it now in a mirror, and it seemed to me all right, but she said it was too broad and flat.
“Too broad and flat for what?” I said, my voice rising. “I like it just fine.”
“Not for anything,” she said. “It just is.”
In the mirror it was a good nose, straightforward and blunt, not disfigured or ugly in any manner that I knew, but she had this thing in mind, she drew it for me on a yellow pad: it was supposed to start from the brow cleanly and well defined, on the thin side but not too thin, then proceed like a blade to the tilted and diamondlike tip, over nostrils sharp and hidden. She had worked on this concept for years, it was the distillation of years of research, and this is what she wanted from me and for me, and again I wailed: “For what? I don’t need a new fucking nose.”
“Don’t curse,” she said, not even angry. She had b
een putting money together for years, and I was now old enough, so the question of not doing it was not even real.
“Next Thursday,” she said, straightening away her folders. “You’ll have Thanksgiving break to recover.”
She was smiling a little and I understood now that I was supposed to be grateful, this was a gift to me.
“Mother,” I said. “Let me ask you. What do you think I should be?”
“Anything, dear,” she said. “You can be anything.”
I guess it was that stupid damn tale of hope she was trying to feed me, but then it also occurred to me that she didn’t really care what I became, as long as I rose, escaped from her grimy prison of separateness and fit in, got the goddamned nose of belonging. So she cut me. Sure, it was a guy called Schwartz who held a cold chisel to it and in a single tap cracked away the cartilage from the bone, sure, but it was her hands I felt on me. Me, I sat there shuddering at the sound of it, feeling nothing, numb at least locally, I shut my eyes and felt the front of my face freeze. He talked to me, okay, honey, you might feel something now, nothing to worry about, all right, here it comes, and then far away, like an earthquake on the other side of the earth, crack, he broke it. I thought, bitch.
So I lay in my bed, my eyes black-ringed, a white bandage taped across my face. I guess I could say that of the Thanksgiving turkey I casted only bitterness: the capsules Schwartz gave me filled my mouth with a sour taste that stayed for days. I went to school with the swelling nearly gone, but with a big white strip still across my face, and I found that I was already a heroine. They liked me even before they saw the new nose —I guess it was the effort they appreciated. The nose, after Schwartz had removed the stitches, settled slowly into its new shape. Every morning I got up and found a new configuration, and Mother said, it takes a while to get into its normal shape. Truth was that I didn’t really care what it finally looked like, I couldn’t care, it was raw enough just to watch it move, just to see this new thing on me. I mean, this is obvious but it looked the hell like somebody else, now and then I touched it tenderly and my fingers felt for the old, now-invisible contours. I felt done, I felt like I had been fitted.
What about Mother, you say, but I kept quiet and was carefully thankful, biding my time for I don’t know what. I was waiting. I didn’t know what I was going to do but I knew my reply would have to be momentous. Anyway, I knew my NASA plans were off, because even the thought of getting on a plane to go to Texas or someplace like that made me pukey. On the weekends I got up early to go to the park, where I watched the morning workers sweep up the leaves and work with the water and manure. Also I read a lot, mostly, why I don’t know, but mostly folktales, German and Indian, Icelandic sagas, stuff like that. I guess it made me feel better. I talked to no one.
After a while I started to go to the park in the evenings too. I told Mother it was boys, dates, parties, and eagerly she believed me. I sat on the grass and waited as darkness came in, then I got on the last bus and went home. I should have been scared but I wasn’t. One day, I fell asleep and woke up to the sound of sprinklers, a soft shushing sound repeating itself, I felt the water float onto my skin and bead and make it cool, and as I tried to raise my head I couldn’t, it was as if my muscles had given way. I thought then that if I let myself go I would disappear into the earth, become mud and soil, and I sat up and came to myself with my heart pounding. Holding my chest, I scrambled up and started to walk. I went outside the park and walked on, and I walked past many things. First, near the park, were the houses of the rich, big and glowing, the windows like precious soft bits of hot metal, like barriers which hid a whole world. Then I walked past the houses of the ordinary people, past the orderly rows of boxlike, dark bulks. Then came a festive, noisy mall, the lots filled with cars. Then I saw scrubby grass lots, factory buildings, tin sheds. Then I walked past the homes of the poor, rows and rows of apartment houses, stoops, rotting vehicles. Then there was a huge empty place, gray and abandoned, strands of wire here and there, a white animal skull and barking in the darkness, here and there the scattered fragments of a building. Then a long moment of nothing, complete darkness, not even a road. Then, finally, a red glow in the darkness, a circle of neon, a jagged script with lost letters in it, spelling “Joyland.”
When I went into Joyland they assumed I was looking for a job, and I didn’t say no. Because I was so young they were nervous and yet obviously they wanted me, so I let them go through their moves, bargain and slick and wheel and deal, I knew as soon as I walked in. They took me behind and I waited in the wings until it was my turn. Then I walked onto the stage, ignored the music, sat on the edge and slowly pulled off my clothes. I mean it wasn’t a show or anything, I didn’t even try to dance, I just took off my clothes, but they seemed to love it because after a while I called for the lights to come up and I looked them in the face and met their eyes and just sat there and took them all off and then I sat there some more and stretched back a little and that was it. I mean it wasn’t much and I’ve often wondered why there was that sudden quiet and the other girls stopped moving around on the floor and everyone just watched. I sure as hell don’t believe that I have the kind of looks that stop people from drinking and buying stuff and going on just because I take my goddamned clothes off, so I wonder what it was that first night. I don’t know. Maybe it was just that I looked everyone in the eye and I wasn’t trying to sell anything.
So I started there. I don’t want to tell you that it was all pleasant: there was booze on the floor, women working to feed kids and others, drunks in the bathrooms, all those men sitting in the darkness, their eyes, knifings now and then, cruising cops, bad money from the Families, all that. But three nights a week I told Mother I was off to see Eddie and Barbara and Pennel, and instead I went down to Joyland and did my thing. Why, you ask, who knows, it did good for me. I would have done it anywhere, I think, on the street or on a bus, but at Joyland it was all set up and I could do it, so I did.
Some of the women despised me, and others took care of me. The men circled and watched, not at all sure what to think, and all kinds of rumors flew. But still, you want to know, what did I get out of it, what did I feel, didn’t I feel cheap and used or something? No, what I felt, under the sharp moon of the spotlight, was just me, the sweat on my skin. I think for sure there were others who danced there who despised those who watched and themselves, but to me that wasn’t even important, that, or money, wasn’t why I walked to the edge of town. It was that it anchored me. In there I was free of the knives of progress, at least for a while. And it was truly for me very innocent: I went straight home afterwards, ignoring all the invitations, the sad and hopeful queries.
Time went: I graduated, and did what I did, and one hot July night I walked home, and everywhere small groups of people gathered in front of store windows, watching a gray, rocky surface, a small white craft floating in black. When I got home Mother was sitting upright at her table, and in the back the television spoke softly, urgently. She was looking at me.
“You know?” I said.
“I know.” It was no use to ask how, there were a hundred men who came to my shows, and so somehow she knew. She had her hands flat on the table in front of her, her face was in the darkness, but flashes of light danced over her head from behind.
“You filthy creature,” she said, in a voice more full of wonder than anger. “You could have been anything, you could have done anything. But instead you —” and now her voice cracked, “you chose SHIT.” Her gesture as she held out the world to me, my future, took in the small kitchen, the Saturday Evening Post covers framed on the wall, and especially the image on the screen behind her. She stopped, turned away from me, looked deeply into the television, then dismissed me: “You barbarian.”
So I left. I walked down the street, and you know what I saw on the hundreds of brightly lit squares on both sides of the streets, in shop windows and in living rooms, you know whose voice followed me, repeating again and again, metallic and hissy
from thousands of miles of space: “That’s one small step for a man, but a giant leap for mankind.” You know what I watched: a white form, light and clean, pushing a flag into the moon. So I found a telephone, and I called. There had been people asking me things, to do things, so now I called, and in a few hours it was all ready: a creaky metal bed in a faraway, smelly house, a torn mattress covered with a cheap but brand new cotton sheet, two small baby spots on metal stands, an ancient and scratched but working sixteen-millimeter camera, a photographer, and a man. At first the man, long-haired but cowboy-booted, thirtyish, and drinking from a small bottle, at first he smiled at me, baby don’t worry I’ll take care of you, but I didn’t say a word and he shut up. I mean I was calm. In a minute I had everything off and I said, let’s go, and he looked over behind the camera, surprised, I think he thought, maybe wanted, that I’d be scared. He sat on the bed and I rolled over him, skimming and struggling off his shirt, and then there was the bumpy skin on his shoulders, the slight sourness of his underarms, neck and pulses, sharp taste in the mouth, bourbon, smoothness of the inside of the lip, eyes darting under closed eyelids, each hair on the chest distinct, goose-pimpled nipples, my tongue like a dart, a swallow, teeth pinching skin, the trembling breath in the stomach and the twitching muscles, blessed solidity and the warmth, welcome hint of a pungent bouquet underneath, nose nuzzling and burrowing, wrinkled skin, so soft, and sliding and precious underneath, mouth opens and comes up to welcome: cock is good, and then visiting the knees, the poky and scarred childhood knees, extended ankles and curled toes. I swing up, and he moves kiss by kiss over my back, the side of me, arms and neck and ears, small wet animal, warm and nipping, vibration along breasts, nipples alert, scoots down and I hunch over his face, smell of myself, lips over me, each movement a long lightening into my heart, labia luxuriant and thick, ballooned, circling tip searching clit and finding and losing, hands spread on cheeks, my fingers on myself: sweet inexhaustible goodness of cunt. The camera whirs, I lean back and reach under, take him, now bouncy against my hand and muscled, move my hips until I hold him, then settle back, the sting takes a scream from me, but I can see my body shining and wet and above his, holding him inside the reach of him feels so strange, the thought of it —I have him in —so unexpected and wonderful that I laugh, he trembles and laughs too, and for some reason the giggling takes us, and we laugh and laugh until I slump and still laugh and the camera stops and all I can hear is the three of us laughing.