Disturbances in the Field (32 page)

Through my years of experience as a mother, it has in fact come to my attention, as the funeral director would say, that the New York City schools are obsessed with turning out small household articles. For girls it begins with potholders, which Althea wove out of colored loops on an eight-by-eight metal loom that she brought home at the end of the year. One potholder even had my initial woven into it; a week later, so as not to appear sexist in outlook, Althea made one with a V, much more tricky. The potholders were useful and pretty but deteriorated rapidly, while Althea moved on to woodworking. Luckily Vivian took over and kept me well supplied; I have not bought a potholder in years, but soon I shall have to. I cannot ask Althea, at seventeen, to weave potholders on a baby loom. Besides potholders, we have half a dozen clay bowls, a dull-tipped letter opener, sand sculptures in applesauce jars, and a lamp made out of a Chianti bottle. We have a bulbous green vase that came home wrapped in newspaper like the Maltese falcon. We have ceramic ashtrays and ashtrays of mosaic tiles, although till lately only I smoked, and not very much. Now, unfortunately, Althea smokes an occasional cigarette. We have boxes made out of popsticks and boxes made out of toothpicks, boxes that hold seashells, playing cards, matchbooks, painted pine cones, stubby candles. All these things we welcomed with fulsome praise.

During his last weeks, Alan gave us periodic reports on a certain crumb pan he was making in the seventh-grade metal shop, successor to woodworking. He first mentioned it in his tongue-in-cheek way, like his father but more pronounced, with a toss of the head so his longish, tawny hair rippled then settled like a sleek cap. I was stumped. Was it something to put underneath a toaster, or maybe under a pie plate? “A crumb pan,” he explained soberly, “is like a dustpan, only smaller. You use it to sweep up crumbs.” “Oh, I see.” I wasn’t sure whether to laugh. “Do you make a little brush also?” “No, Mom, I’m afraid you’ll have to supply your own little brush.” Ah, so it was all right. “Well, good. It’s what I’ve always wanted, actually.” “I thought so,” said Alan. “I sensed there was something vital missing from your life.” “Yes, an unfulfilled need, as George would put it,” I said. Phil said, “We’ll have to leave more crumbs around, though. I think we may be too neat for a crumb pan.” “Yes, all you kids better start leaving crumbs.” We asked him at odd moments about his crumb pan—its dimensions (four by six) and its progress. “So, how’s the crumb pan coming?” It was taking what seemed an inordinate time. It was not the process that took time, Alan explained, but waiting to use the machine that bent the metal, of which there was only one, because of city budget cuts. He was unfailingly good-humored and deadpan, even when Althea said she could think of nothing in the cosmos with less
raison d’etre.
He explained carefully how it was made. First you do a stretch-out on cardboard, then you scratch the outline on a sheet of metal, then you cut it out of the metal with tin snips. ... Victor was the only one who saw some merit in this project; he had nostalgic memories of metal shop. “Did you make a crumb pan for your mother too?” I asked him. “No, I can’t remember what I made. Oh, a belt buckle, I think. Maybe a napkin holder.” “Well, we already have a napkin holder,” said Alan. “That’s why you’re getting a crumb pan.” “Yes, I know. Phil made the napkin holder.” “No I didn’t,” said Phil. “Alan made that too.” “Oh, really? I could have sworn you made it.” “
I
made a napkin holder,” said Althea resentfully, “but you never use it.” “Is that true? I’m sorry.” “Your napkin holder only held seven napkins,” Phil reminded her. “So what? It’s the principle. It’s not my fault they make napkins so thick.” “I use your little blue ceramic pot for thumbtacks,” I said to Althea consolingly. “That’s not hers, that’s mine,” said Phil. “Is it? I’m sorry. I’m sorry, children.” It was true, there were so many of them and so many artifacts, as though our apartment would someday be studied by archaeologists for clues to our joys and pains, like the Pueblo Indians’ dwellings, that I couldn’t keep things straight. But I would have remembered that the crumb pan was Alan’s. None of them but Alan could have described with such aplomb in the face of the ridiculous how it was cut and bent into shape. I can hear his voice lingering over the words “tin snips,” with a soft merriment at the sound. Now that I can never have my crumb pan I feel an absurd longing simply to see it. I could call the metal-shop teacher and ask if I might pick it up, in whatever its stage of development. Or I might just go in to look at it, after which the teacher could throw it out or, given the state of the budget, unbend the metal and reuse it, if feasible.

Of course there is not the remotest chance that I will pursue the crumb pan. I would never go mad in quite that way. My curiosity will have to remain unslaked, that’s all, along with my curiosity about how tall they would grow, how their features would sharpen, what surprises their talents would lead them to, what kinds of lovers they would choose, how they would take the world and its vicissitudes—would he really become a Quaker? would she always prefer sleep to spiritual communion?—and what they would be and mean to us, grown. “Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m sixty-four?” Last night, lying alongside of Victor in the dark—guarded, stiff, tense as stretched wires yet for all that companionable, an impossible, agonizing mix—I said, “Oh Victor! That crumb pan.” “Jesus, I forgot all about it. The crumb pan.” And for a teetering instant we didn’t know whether we would cry or laugh. But nothing happened. The moment settled in balance between us and we lay silent, breathing slowly.

I’m shaking and shaking this damned bank, but it’s too full for any dimes to escape. What a waste, to lose so many dimes. How often, in the early years of our marriage, fifty or sixty dimes would have made a difference. They would not have kept Con Edison from turning off the gas and electricity in the bleak old apartment so that I had to warm Phil’s bottles under the tap, raging, till Edith came, took a look around, and for the one time in her life, maybe, lost her temper and told Victor his pride was insane, and drawing in a deep breath for courage, turned to me and said I was no better, then snatched the bill from the kitchen table, slamming the door on her way out. But the dimes would have reheeled shoes, bought a steak or two tickets to a movie. Our pride was insane. But no longer.

I fetch a hammer and screwdriver, and sitting on the floor of Alan’s room, assault the piggy bank. The screwdriver is less violent but also less effective; I have to use the hammer, and mercilessly. The wood cracks and splinters, soft wood that, once split, I can even rip with my bare hands. I take care not to hurt them—I am not planning retirement again, oh no. Never that again. Dimes spill out on the floor, a small fortune in dimes. A legacy.

Finally I sit down on the wide windowsill, rubbing my ankle. I have come to savor that other, duller pain and would miss it if it left. On a nearby roof across the back alley is a young black woman with an Afro, a bright golden dress, and Frye boots, hanging baby clothes on a line. Even though it is warmish for early March, the sky is overcast, portending snow or rain. An optimist. I shake my head at her innocence, slowly, like an old lady.

Why did I lose my children? That’s what I want to know. But the question is loaded, no good because it’s not phrased right. It embodies some fallacy or other I learned about in school, an egotistical warp. As warped as asking why did Victor lose his children. A better question would be, Why did these particular children die? To that there are reasonable answers having to do with chance and the law of averages. Also, cosmically: everyone dies. Locally: whatever that official doctor said was the cause of death. I forget the Latinate phrase.

Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic and prig we used to mock, counsels that we be content with whatever happens to us: “Because it was done for you and prescribed for you, and in a manner had reference to you, originally from the most ancient causes spun with your destiny.”

But
why
did I lose my children? Precisely that loaded question is what I want to ask, whose obvious, built-in answer is that I didn’t deserve to have them. That’s crazy, be quiet, I scolded Victor for thinking that way. Do you think the whole world revolves around where you put your prick? No matter. Why didn’t I deserve to have them?

For the answer, months, years of my life that I repressed for my own ease come flooding back, now that I neither have nor seek any ease. They were not truly repressed, in the sense that psychiatrists use the term, but suppressed, as truth is suppressed but not forgotten under authoritarian rule and floods back with an upheaval. The dam breaks in one crucial place, we might as well let go the others. I need no longer pretend that I have always been this cheery, competent creature, my life a rational passage from sturdy rung to rung. Under interrogation, stripped and spotlighted, my body becomes an open book.

There is an essential and profound strangeness about being a mother that is rarely spoken of, and yet religion does make much of loving others better than one’s self, which suggests it does not come naturally. Maternity, though, is considered in the nature of things: that mothers gladly endure pain so that their children may thrive is a useful, sustaining myth. Also something of a cultural joke: the mother as sucker. And between saint and sucker, two sides of one thin coin, is little room to maneuver.

In childbirth we tunnel through a dark passage to the new and strange place, to find there that the myth about mothers is true and so is the joke, the corrosive humor. At one in the morning in a room barely lit, two nurses from Trinidad sat at either side of the bed where I sweated in panic my first time, and in between discussing young men they had known in Port of Spain—Desmond, a big spender, Hugo, a terrific dancer, and Patrice, out for what he could get—they peered up my legs. There was going to be a party on Saturday night. “And do you think William be there?” the plump one asked. The thinner one sounded irritated. “I don’t know if William be there, but if he be there he better not be looking for nothing from me. Or that brother of his either. No, mon, I finish with William and William whole family.” The plumper one giggled. “Not if he treat you right I bet. Offer you with sugar coating.” I groaned in pain, and she took another look. “Nothing doing yet, lady. You got a long time yet.” Panic locked like a shackle. This was another country entirely; I had no preparation, no passport. “I wept and mourned when I discovered myself in this unfamiliar land,” Gaby had read aloud in the dorm. She had a baby now, yet neither she nor any book had ever told me it meant this. I asked for the doctor. I only wanted a familiar voice and face. “Don’t put me to sleep. I told you I want to be ...” But he jabbed me, stopped the world. I went out with the luscious West Indian rhythms vibrating in my ears—their voices were lilting and trilling and hard, like a xylophone.

The drug was sodium pentothal, also called a truth drug, also used on criminals. You wake as though from heavy blank sleep, but in truth you have been awake all the time (telling the truth), living in scenes that live only once, never to be retrieved by memory and granted their proper place in your life. Sensations and all their possible harvest vanish without the supreme gift of the echo that graces them with humanity. For everything that promises our lives the resonance of a third dimension must recur. Even hearing music for the first time is not truly hearing it, only the prerequisite for hearing. The next time, and the next, we hear with the fullness of anticipation and foreknowledge, having had the pertinent nerve paths cleared for the feelings that will travel them, strewn like seeds. Everything destined to be real and permanent happens to us over again, in the act of remembering. What abides, along with Empedocles’ elements, fire and earth, water and air, is the past. We possess nothing securely but the past and that simple gift of turning and turning, to recreate it, to come round right. Nina was wise when she took those early morning solitary walks in college, trying to reconstruct the events of the previous day in their proper order, after the edict of the Pythagorean Brotherhood, “that there is nothing more important for science, and for experience and wisdom, than the ability to remember.” And for salvation, they might have added. This I know from my own life.

So that what happens only once, like Althea’s birth, never to recur in the life of the spirit, didn’t happen at all in any subjective sense. It happened like the tree falling in the forest: I not there to hear it, and yet all the while there for strangers, telling them the truth. What truths? Universal? Hardly. The most secret and incriminating, probably, the ones I would never have told a soul. That after Victor and I decided to marry I called George, one last fling for old times’ sake? And did I say what a good fling it was? Exactly how, and how many climaxes? That while in college I shoplifted a bra from Macy’s by wearing two out of the store, to see what it felt like? I had been reading Gide; I wanted to perform an
acte gratuit.
Or that earlier, much much earlier, against my mother’s express injunction I opened the locked drawer in my father’s bureau and found pulp magazines with stories set in Paris and pictures of girls in black stockings and garter belts kneeling with men’s penises in their mouths? What a peculiar thing to be doing. It didn’t seem quite sanitary. I was sure my mother wouldn’t approve. The doctor who heard my true confessions, the sloppy stitcher, is dead now, which gives me satisfaction. The nurses wouldn’t remember: they must hear volumes of it; they must watch that feather of truth rise on the balance scale every day, mortifying even us milder liars. But I, I remember all about Patrice and Hugo and Desmond and William!

When I awoke, alone in a bare room, my stomach was flat. Hours later they brought me a creature swaddled in a pink and white checked blanket, and I was expected to assume that she and the lump absent from my stomach were the same. I did as commanded: civilly, I offered her a breast. Not till the next day did I undo the blanket, count her fingers and toes, look at her eyes, her ears, up her nose and in her mouth, and at the rotting black knot of flesh at her navel. Mark of Eve. In sorrow, meaning travail and pain, shall you bring forth children, but I had had little travail or pain. I had fallen in the forest; all unfelt. I had plenty of pain now—the stitches stung and ached—but even I knew that infected stitches from an episiotomy were not the pain God was referring to.