Memories of the Future, page 11
I bent over the sandwich and realized that retrieval required avoidance of a cigarette butt that had already shed ashes on the wax paper. What I had imagined would be a deft, instantaneous gesture turned into a more elaborate job. Bent over the can, I carefully brushed the ashes from the opaque paper and then folded the sandwich inside it. I was excited, Page. I could taste it. But as I raised my head, I saw that the woman had stood up from the bench and was staring at me with an expression of disgust on her face. My eyes met hers, and I felt a tremor in my lips and then there were tears of shame, and I ran. I ran with the sandwich all the way to the apartment and, as soon as I was inside the door, I pushed it into my mouth, and I chewed hard, and I ate it up, and it was so good, and I cried all the way through the eating of it because I was so ashamed. There it is. My degradation. S.H.
February 16, 1979
I’ve been making the rounds again of the bars and restaurants. Nothing so far. I’m not feeling very strong. Wobbly is the word. Headache. Kari called. She’s full of her senior year in college. Loves her genetics class. It seems so long ago that I was there, too, in another world. I lied to her. Gus called. I lied to him, too. I am a big, fat liar. I have to hide.
Here is Simone Weil on the problem: “Too great affliction places a human being beneath pity: it arouses disgust, horror, and scorn.
“Pity goes down to a certain level but not below it. What does charity do in order to descend lower?
“Do those who have fallen so low have pity on themselves?”
Do I pity myself? I am sitting here asking myself this question.
Today I drank so much water my stomach sloshes when I walk.
February 17, 1979
The pale young man was outside today, and when I saw him, I realized he has been gone for weeks, and the moment I saw him again, I felt as if I were looking in a mirror, and I knew I had changed. I smiled at him and he smiled back at me—a sad little smile from only one side of his mouth. I walked past him as it was getting dark. You see, I was on the prowl with my flashlight.
It took some digging to uncover my meal, but as I went from can to can, as I shone a light into the dregs and the running liquids and poked the cans and newspapers and butts and bottles with my torch for lurking comestibles, I understood what was needed: another story. The story is entitled The Introspective Detective. The heroine of the new story investigates real-life philosophical problems. She, the Introspective Detective, otherwise known as ID—isn’t that wonderfully Freudian and suitable?—is prompted by her empty belly to conduct experiments at the very threshold Simone Weil articulated with her incisive honesty—that limit where pity ends and charity begins. ID’s adventures go well beyond the mere thought experiment. No smug, armchair, risk-free mental pirouettes for this girl; she is living the question. SHE HAS BECOME THE QUESTION ITSELF. I found ID more than comforting. She filled me with JOY.
And, my dear Page, I met with success: three untouched slices of pizza in a box in one of the park cans! No one saw me as I peered under the cardboard lid and spotted my prize. No one saw me as I shut the box and lifted my treasure into my arms. And, as I strolled jauntily up Riverside Drive and turned onto 109th Street, hordes of people saw me, but what do you suppose they believed? They believed I had ordered my cheese pizza at the pizza parlor, that I had paid for my pizza, and that I, a free and careless young woman with tens and twenties in her wallet, was on her way home to feast on hot baked bread and tomato and thick running cheese. I felt jubilant, and, after returning home and heating one of the pristine, perfect slices of pizza in the oven, I ate it. I ate it, and it was delicious.
After an hour, I ate the second slice.
Earlier today, before I was sated with pizza, I checked the air shaft to make sure no BODY was lying there. I haven’t done that for a while. It’s compulsive. It’s because Lucy is disturbing me. I believe she is plotting REVENGE. I have no idea what she plans to do or how she plans to do it, but other people are involved. Patty is among them. The Introspective Detective is on the case. Isn’t that funny? Ian and Isadora are asleep on my desk. I can’t write them. My teenagers in Verbum are not up to the job just now. I want to follow them, but I am following Lucy instead. Things will turn around when I get work and money. I’ll wake up the two kids and get them off and running again, but my nerves are standing on end, and I breathe too quickly. Mohammed told me to come back tomorrow. They might have something. I also called about three research jobs. Two had been filled. I called the third, but no one answered. I will try again tomorrow. Something will turn up. It’s ten thirty now and Lucy is silent. No talk, no TV. She may be asleep already, but she chatted on the phone tonight. She’s been whispering a lot, and I can’t hear the other side of the conversation so the transcript is full of holes, but here it is, Page. I wish to hell you could tell me what you think of it:
“It’s me again, Patty. How are you? [Silence.] I know. It’s arrived . . . looks of shadows. When I’m finished, I will let you know.” [Silence.] “The crippled gardener is the one to follow, yes, I understand that . . . [inaudible] Old dawn, Sam Haynes, that’s right. You know, I want to punish him . . . [Long listening silence.] I live for it. Why do you think I spoke to you? [whispering]. What are switches for, then? . . . No, no, listen to me. What if he’s guilty? I can’t live without knowing. I can’t live. [Silence.] We have to get her back to tell us. We have to call her back. [Listening silence.] I have pictures, documentation. Dolls. You have dolls? [Silence, breathing.] Mmmmmm. She crossed the bridge. I will tell myself. She crossed the bridge. [Pause.] That’s all. [Pause.] Yes, I promise. It’s helpful. [Silent listening, musical murmurs.] Can you cut the fear out of me? [whispers]. Yes, it may help me. The magical child, ya, ya, tomorrow three o’clock . . . [inaudible whispering] . . . hey, mad Lena, mad Lena, mad Lena . . . [laughter] . . . Goodbye, no, I won’t forget. Lavender oil in distilled water, thyme, two and a half tablespoons of vodka. Okay. Yes.” She hung up, whistled—not a sad tune but an upbeat something or other—and dialed again. “It’s me. I’m ready for tomorrow. Yes, I rehearsed. Can temptation. [?] It’s here in the book [whispering]. No, it’s true. [Silence.] Until tomorrow, then, dear sister.”
I have half a mind to follow Lucy to that three o’clock appointment. I have four subway tokens left.
P.S. I ate the third slice. I couldn’t let it sit in the fridge and torture me. It will help me sleep. Good night, Page. I love you. Minnesota.
* * *
No, I never forgot picking through the garbage for dinner, and, yes, it is still terrible to remember the woman’s face in the park because her revulsion was mine, too, and the burn of shame cuts straight through time. And, yes, I pity that girl now, and I move beyond pity to charity because she was young, and I can detect that just under the bright, brittle tone and all those capital letters lies a wail of near hysteria induced by hunger, willed isolation, and stupid pride. Her desperate circumstances did not last, and it is obvious to me that she did not believe they would last either. Her color and class inoculated her from such pessimism. The very next day, she called the number she had taken from the bulletin board at Columbia, a woman answered, and the two of them scheduled an interview for the same afternoon, and by the time she had left the splendid duplex apartment on Fifth Avenue with its view of Central Park and a cobalt-blue Yves Klein sculpture of a headless, armless, legless woman—the sex parts only—on a pedestal that stood in the corner of a room, where she had perched on a grand low-slung white sofa with a cup of aromatic tea and ingested seven grainy biscuits (five while the interviewer had disappeared to answer the telephone), she had a new boss: Mrs. Elena Bergthaler.
CHAPTER SIX
February 1, 2017
“I’ve been watching TV,” my mother said to me yesterday when we spoke on the telephone. “Can that man be president? He’s so ill-mannered, so vulgar. He doesn’t make sense.”
“He’s an ignorant, swaggering buffoon.”
My mother clicked her tongue and sighed. “I used to follow politics so closely. I forget now. It must be my age. How old am I?”
“You’re almost ninety-four.”
My mother laughed. “That’s old, old, old, my darling, really old. I lie here, and I look out the window. I doze and dream.” She took a breath and said in an alarmed voice, “You aren’t losing your hair, are you?”
I reassured my mother that hair still sprouted from my head.
“I must have dreamt that, you see. Sometimes I can’t be sure if I dreamt it or if it’s true.” She paused. “I think of Mama.” She fell silent. “Sometimes I wake up and think she’s still alive.” I waited. “And I think of you as babies. You were such beautiful babies. I am looking at your baby pictures right now on the top of the cabinet.” She paused again. “Did I ever tell you about the day we were having breakfast at home? Oscar was in the Philippines somewhere. We didn’t know where, and we hadn’t had a letter for a while. We read the papers. Father’s heart, you know, his heart was bad. He was awfully winded in those days. The stairs were especially hard. Well, the three of us were around the table one Sunday. The war had turned for the better. I know that. My father had finished his coffee and my mother was just about to pour him another cup when he noticed that the cup had a tiny crack in it—a crack no wider than a hair—and he said to her, ‘You should have taken this one. It’s damaged.’ It wasn’t like my father. It wasn’t kind. Later, Mama took me aside and said, ‘You know, he never would have said that if he wasn’t ill and if Oscar were home.’ ”
“No,” I said. “I don’t know that story.”
“Yes, the cracked cup. It didn’t leak, just a hairline. I loved my father, but he disappointed me when he said that. I never forgot it. I wish you had known him. I wish you had known Mama. They died too young. Well, my beloved child,” my mother said. “Isn’t it funny how these stories come back? There are times when I think Mama is still alive, especially after a nap. I am confused sometimes, but then I’m old. I send you kisses and hugs through the phone. And Freya, Freya is all right?”
“Yes, she’s doing well, working hard at her music. We heard her sing last week. She has an album coming out soon.”
“Does she have anyone special?”
“No, not now.”
“How old is she?”
“Twenty-nine.”
I heard a soft note over the phone—neither a sigh nor a murmur, but a noncommittal hum.
“And,” my mother paused. “Oh, your husband. What’s his name?”
“Walter.”
“Of course, dear Walter, and he is still at Rockefeller, and his important work with mathematics and biology—isn’t that it?—that’s going fine?”
“Yes, that’s it, and he’s fine.”
“And your book, darling? You’re writing your book?”
“Yes, I am. It’s coming along.”
“Well, my dear child, I send you hugs and kisses over the phone all the way to Brooklyn.” And, as I listened to her voice, I thought to myself, Kari and I are still the darlings, and the lilt in her words pulled me back, far back to the time when she had supernatural powers.
I told her I loved her and hung up.
* * *
The mother I was startled to find sitting motionless on the floor in the kitchen after Kennedy’s assassination, the mother who said she would leave for Canada if Goldwater was elected, the mother who shook her fist at George Wallace’s image on television, the mother who walked beside me to protest the Vietnam War, the mother who followed the intricate minutiae of the Watergate hearings, the mother who just a few years ago reported on the arcane doings of politicians in her district I knew next to nothing about has disappeared and been replaced by a mother who turns on the television to witness a mass of fluctuating pictures and garbled sounds with confused emotional meanings. “Can that man be president?”
My mother’s brain has lost the stretch of now, that temporal yawn that moves us from the immediate past into the immediate present with the expectation of the immediate future, all wholly elusive, receding and reappearing at a rate beyond our comprehension. We live at a perceptual speed that makes me wonder why we don’t fly apart. It is this tumbling, unfathomable sequence of experience my mother no longer registers, and it is both fitting and ironic that she will never preserve the details of the new man in power, that as she leans forward and squints at the images on her small flat TV, her fragmenting memory will make no sense of what is, in fact, political obscenity.
A squat, mad, would-be despot rushes up and down the croquet field bellowing, “Off with their heads!” We live in Wonderland now. It does not matter that he lacks decorum, that his sentences are crude and ugly, or that he lies. He is a great man, the hero of the people, and they, “the people,” love his swagger and his rage and his fuck-you-fancy-schmancy-city-slickers-who-think-you’re-too-good-for-us, for US, the real people, us white people out here on the plains. Yes, the real people swoon for the nullity of his superlatives shouted at the cameras that are all trained on him all the time as he worries in public about size, the size of his victory, the size of his crowds, the size of his hands, the size of his dick. They love Dick.
“Think you’re too good for us, is that it?” The little girl who sits in the kitchen with her hands folded in her lap as she waits for her father to emerge from the bedroom doesn’t reply because she knows the woman with the thin wrinkled face and pointed nose is not asking a question, and it would be impolite to answer a question that is not a question, but the girl does not forget the fury and hatred in the woman’s voice as she mutters those words, and the girl feels shame for the woman and when she feels it, the shame is hers, too. I told my mother that Freya and I marched in Washington the day after the inauguration, but she doesn’t remember. The house is going to pieces, Mother. The wall has cracked open: the world of the bad dream has bled into the waking world. It’s not what he says, it’s what they, the worshipers, feel when he speaks. The feeling moves like an illness through the crowd. The crowd is feeling, and the great man is their route from shame to pride.
I cannot read what lies ahead of us. All I can say is what old Mr. Jensen used to say as he sat on the stump outside his barn: “It don’t look good.” As for my reading of the past, caution is in order on that front as well. I am a sophisticated narrator, to be sure, mature, learned, mostly kind, sometimes cruel, and as prone to delusion as the next person, despite the fact that I try to keep myself honest by admitting to holes in my own story. I am humming my song in my own way, Madam, humming my way down avenues and back alleys and into buildings where I take the elevator or climb the stairs and open and close doors and, yes, listen at walls with pen and notebook.
* * *
We left our young heroine, Minnesota, on East Seventy-Fourth Street in late February 1979.
From Mead:
Mrs. Bergthaler is a woman of uncommon solicitude and sweetness, who has a habit of clasping her hands together just below her chin to communicate joy and surprise. “Let me take your coat, dear.” Vigorous yanks at navy peacoat eventually free my arms. Closet door glides noiselessly open to house shabby peacoat and red scarf beside long furs within. Closet door glides shut. Much chatter about bags piled in hallway. I am to pretend large sacks of unwanted clothing on their way to charity do not exist. They are not to be given a second thought as they are soon to be whisked off by helper named Kyle, “a sweet boy,” who may ring bell in the next hour and interrupt us, but we two (if her manner is to be believed) have already, in the course of three minutes, become cozy conspirators (she has linked her elbow with mine and has patted my wrist with her free hand several times) and should Kyle, the sweet-boy-bag-snatcher, arrive at the door, it won’t take but a second because despite immense workload and responsibilities that would strain even the most organized of humans, Mrs. Bergthaler has everything under control. And then after my maybe future employer has literally pressed me down—with her hands firmly on my shoulders—into the largest sofa I have ever seen outside of Architectural Digest, she communicates her eagerness to know all about me, but before I can open my mouth to reply, she calls for tea from a hidden person in the kitchen named Lilibeth and continues to speak. And behind the Klein, isn’t that a Giacometti, a small standing woman? And who knew that lemons in a blue bowl on a table could look so beautiful? But even that light costs money, Page, that bright daylight from the window illuminating the lemons. I hope you are aware of this fact. In the city, light is in short supply and reserved exclusively for those who can afford it. The rest of us creep about in the shadows with the roaches.
