Lying (6 page)

In the distance, a radio tower light blinked. A plow with chains on its wheels crawled through the thickness.

And then the red church doors opened and the nuns moved across the field toward me, and it took my breath away. I was only ten, but I knew beauty. Children do, you know. The nuns lifted their legs high in the drifts, and their white habits were a part of the weather, blowing around. A catch in my throat. A tip.

Sister Maria was the first to tip. It must have been the wind. Down, down she went, and I heard an “oh my goodness,” and saw a cluster of nuns come to help her up, and she stood up, laughing, shaking the snow from her folds.

And then, just like that, still laughing, maybe giddy on the excess of weather, Sister Maria pushed at Sister Agnes, who in turn threw a scoop of snow at Sister Katherine, and in the snap of some of the strangest seconds I’ve ever seen, this holy place became a beach party, a white-water fight, waves of snow hurled left and right, and habits flapping, and laughter, and laughter, and laughter, it caught, was fire, and I felt the glow in my chest, like my heart was Jesus’ heart on the outside of my skin. I sprinted out the door and whooped with delight, it was war, it was peace, it was wet, it was warm, I pranced with the silly nuns, and to this day I don’t know which sister it was who pushed me down, but down I went, the holy hand moving me down, falling onto ground, and all the snow was singing.

•  •  •

And so it was that I learned how to fall. The next day, and the next, and the next, I did it in class, for my physical therapist, who was so surprised and pleased she hugged me. I learned to buckle my knees and let myself loose, slipping southward, away from her, betraying her, yes, I did it, all my muscles slack.

•  •  •

You’ve probably heard of him, William James, brother of Henry, the Victorian novelist. Anyway, William was not a
novelist but a philosopher who, in my opinion, had some things to say. I love it most when he writes about will. Years later, years and years after the falling school, when I had long moved on from the nuns, and my mother, and my illness itself, I read a book by William James, and, like any good book, it did not teach me something new, but drew out the wisdom that was already there, inside me.

William talks about there being two kinds of will. Will A and Will B, I call it. Will A is what we all learn, the hold your head high, stuff it down, swallow your sobs, work hard kind of will. Will B, while it seems a slacker thing, is actually harder to have. It’s a
willingness
instead of a willfulness, an ability to take life on life’s terms as opposed to putting up a big fight. It’s about being bendable, not brittle, a person who is brave enough to try to ride the waves instead of trying to stop them. Will B is what you need in order to learn to fall. It’s the kind of will my mother never taught me, and yours probably never taught you either. It’s a secret greater than sex; it’s a spiritual thing. Will B is not passive. It means an active acceptance, a
say yes
, and you have to have a voice and courage if you want to learn it.

If you know Will B, you know your life.

You know what my mother never learned. That it is only by entering emptiness and ugliness, not by covering it up with feathers and sprays, that you find a balance so true, no one can take it away.

Sometimes you can crack open a cliché and find a lot of truth. If you don’t understand what I mean, think of the phrases
ride the wave, harness the energy of your opponent
.

Epilepsy is energy. It’s a windstorm in the brain. I had that kind of energy when I left for Saint Christopher’s, but when I came back home, I was a different sort of girl. I still had epilepsy, but my energy was Eastern; it was the blue petal in the inner chambers of the flame, it was hot, but it bent to the shape of the breeze blowing through.

•  •  •

My father picked me up at the airport. I had been away only one month, but a century had passed for me. This, this is a happy part of the story. In my new millennium I walked with my head held a little higher. At home that first night, I showed my parents what I’d learned at Saint Christopher’s, how I could fix the dripping kitchen sink—so easy, really—a few twists and snaps of the silver spout, a tightening of the washer, there. It didn’t drip after that. It flowed, when we wanted it to.

“That’s quite something for a ten-year-old,” my father said.

“All that money and she comes home a plumber?” my mother said, but I could tell she was impressed. I showed her how to shine the tiles on the kitchen floor with a secret solution of lemon juice and oil; I showed her how I had learned to plait my hair in fourteen seconds flat, and when we went to the hardware store I entered into an impressive discourse with the salesman on the relative merits of eyebolts versus snag hooks.

“How did you get to be so smart?” the salesman said. He tousled my hair. Now that I knew how to fall the right way,
I didn’t bruise so much anymore; the purple splotches had been sucked back into my body, and I looked clean and white, well kept and hardy.

My mother smiled, but it was in a weary way.

I liked to fall. It gave me so much confidence, so much pride. I was good at it, and I knew, even though I never could have said it, that the falling skill was widely generalizable, that I would be able to use it for years to come, use it in love, use it in fear, use it in hope. I became, even, a little addicted to falling. I would do it for anyone who asked, and sometimes for anyone who didn’t. I fell for Mrs. Slotnick, our next-door neighbor, and I fell for the Chaffin girls across the street, crashing onto the floor and standing seconds later, unharmed. Wow. “Wow” was what everyone said.

I went back to school and during recess I fell for the kids. “Look at this,” I said, and I dive-bombed down in a cloud of playground dust, and after that a few of the boys wanted lessons from me, which I gladly gave, for a small fee.

Was I happy? This, this is the happy part of my story, which does not mean I was happy. I felt proud, though, and I long ago learned what everyone should know, that dignity counts more than delight.

At night, sometimes, I heard her moving in the kitchen beneath my bedroom, and I crept down the stairs to watch her. Since I’d come back, she had changed as well. She had gotten weaker. Or maybe she had always been this weak, but I saw it more. She started smoking Kent cigarettes and drinking red wine, and she had less of an interest in me. She said I would never be a skating star. Sometimes she stared into
the space in front of her, and other times she tapped her finger very fast on her chin, over and over,
tap tap tap
, and still other times she went for a whole day without saying a word. I watched her at night. My mother, in her Christian Dior nightgown. She could never sleep. Her whole life she had fought to stay on the surface of things—to not argue with my father in public, to cover her emotions with a flashy smile—and it showed in her face, where lines of deep fatigue were grooved beneath her makeup.

“Mom Mom,”
I whispered. I always wanted to cry for her. I always will.

But this, this is a happy part of the story, a crash course in learning to live apart. A few weeks after my return from Saint Christopher’s, a tragedy happened. Our neighbor Mr. Slotnick had a heart attack while cleaning his pool, and he fell into his pool and died, not from the heart attack, but because he drowned. I hardly knew him, but it was still a tragedy. I went to the funeral with my parents, my first one. I let her do with me what she wanted, a black velvet dress, black tights with diamonds in them, somber pieces of pearl in my ears. I still loved my mother, understand that, please. But something had changed in me, and therefore between us, I could not have said exactly what it was. I didn’t want to cry only for her, but
for us
, and sometimes, in the middle of changing a lightbulb or fixing a sink or doing my English homework, I would have the urge to sprint into her lap, bury my face in her bosom, or better yet, do a perfect skating pirouette for her, all the while saying,
You are the one mom one mom one mom there is no one else but you
.

However, that wasn’t true. I was having an affair, you see, and it was with the world.

I thought, back then, that the affair would last forever, but now I see why it didn’t. Now I see there is a kind of confidence many ten-year-olds have—the age of industry, Erik Erikson said. The age before the breasts have come, and all the small smells that shame you—what a time it is. What a life.

We went to Mr. Slotnick’s funeral, along with the rest of the world. It was a very subdued and slightly disappointing affair, especially because in Jewish funerals they keep the coffin closed, so I never even got to see. There was a service, and then we all went to the graveyard, and along the way, the hearse had engine trouble.

Which meant we all arrived at the graveyard first, and for a damn long time stood out in the March wind, looking into a deep crater, already ringed with lilies.

I got bored. Above me gray clouds raced across the sky. I tapped the toe of my party shoe right at the rim of the grave hole.

“Stop that, Lauren,” my mother said.

But I couldn’t stop. I kept tapping and tapping, and it wasn’t because I was having a seizure. “Stop that now!” she hissed, but I didn’t want to. In my mind, or maybe it was in the sky, I heard a cardinal singing, “One tap more, oh, one tap more,” and there was a whole crowd of people, and I have always been a bit of a show-off, and I was her daughter, yes, but I was more than that too, and so I did it. I buckled my knees, let my limbs loose in the way I had learned,
and I collapsed down into the deep hole, the empty grave, where the coffin had yet to be lowered.

I fell for centuries, and as I went down, I opened my mouth, and the cardinal flew out, and was free.

“Oh, my God!” I heard people screaming. I opened my eyes at the bottom of the grave. I searched the crowd for my mother’s face. I could not find it, though, in the blur of heads and hands bending down to help me.

So many people have helped me on my way, I want to thank them here. Thanks to the nuns, my physical therapists, especially Rosie and Jane, I couldn’t have done it without you; thanks to my father for his wise rabbinical story, and to Dr. Patterson for his diagnostic skills; thanks especially to Leonard Kriegel, essayist par excellence, whose story
Falling into Life
, from which I have so generously borrowed, helped me to find my own true tale; thanks to my good friend Elizabeth, who is critiquing me as I write this book, and to the librarians at Brandeis, who have provided me with so much material, to Lisa Schiffman, Audrey Schulman, Rob Brown, and Meaghan Rady, for listening, and to my editor, Kate Medina, for the contract and the money.

So many hands, so much help, most of it, really, not my mother’s.

Thanks to my mother, for having me, for giving me the special kind of grit I later learned to use.

I opened my eyes at the bottom of the grave and there were so many hands extended, I didn’t know which one to take. I was unbruised, unharmed, and I knew how to help
myself. So I stood, and brushed the dirt off, and made myself toeholds in the dank earth.

And I climbed up, and up, and, forgive me my imagery, but I emerged, headfirst, and then bellied my way over the ledge of the motherland, and as I did, squiggling up, my torso pressed flat against the walls of wet earth, I felt a strange, tender pain in my chest, what I didn’t know then—the beginning of breasts.

Not quite.

This is a work of nonfiction. Everything in it is supposed to be true. In some instances names of people and places have been changed to protect their privacy, but the essential story should at least aim for accuracy, so the establishment says. Therefore, I confess. To the establishment. I didn’t really fall into the grave. I was just using a metaphor to try to explain my mental state. The
real
truth is I went to the funeral, the hearse had engine trouble, the coffin was late, I looked into the grave, and I thought about falling in. I imagined myself falling in. I knew I could do it. It was eight feet under but, dammit, I knew I could do it. Didn’t divers leap from cliffs forty feet into the air? Didn’t they enter the crystal water without so much as a smack? Doesn’t the body bend and ripple in all sorts of ways we would never believe it could? I closed my eyes. And in my mind I let myself low. And a cardinal came out of my mouth. And when I hit, the soil was soft, and all the sisters came back to greet me, and offered me holy hands, and when I stood, I saw I was back in Kansas, my land of lemon drops and witches, only it was not a dream. I missed my mother, but there are many places other than home, a shame, a blessing both. The nuns were there. And the red doors opened, and I saw I was strong. And all the snow was singing.

Every night before dinner I say grace. I light two white tapers, and even though I was born a Jew, I clasp my hands and give thanks to a Christian God for the kindness he has shown.

For most of my life I’ve had a relationship with God. When I was ten, and learning how to fall, I felt personally connected to God, who also knew how to fall, fleshing out his body and bowing into vulnerable human form. Children understand intuitively that God lives in leaves and skin. I knew God when I was ten, when the nuns touched me and an easy sureness filled my lungs, so even the snow was singing.

I came home from that convent school as strong as
I had ever been. I have a few pictures of me from that time, and, although it was winter, I look mysteriously tan, my body a rich brewed color, my teeth flashing. In those pictures I grin like an imp. I grin like a girl with know-how.

If you had asked me back then, one month, two months after the convent, I would have told you what the mind learns it cannot forget, that the new and bendable body signals the same for the brain. I had no idea how the body changes as it ages, how at ten there is a certain stability to the skin that hormones, and longing, eventually leach away, until you forget the self you once were. I forgot. I grinned like an imp and then I didn’t. I turned eleven; I turned twelve; I turned thirteen, and the rich brewed color faded back to the frailer peach of a girl on the edge of sex and weakness.