Red Earth and Pouring Rain (51 page)

In Manhattan Mother took a job as typist in a medical insurance company, where there was some hesitation at first about hiring
her, but once they had seen the relentless regularity of her fingers against the typewriter keys, her amazing speed, they
engaged her quickly and soon began to depend on her. She worked without breaks, except the regulation hour to eat lunch, and
showed, even at the end of the day, no signs of exhaustion. The other workers, mostly stiletto-heeled Hispanic girls, started
to call her “La Machina,” and spent many coffee breaks making up horrifying stories about what Mother did after work. But
what she did was simple enough —with her first paycheck she bought a set of dumbbells, and with the next another, and she
spent her evenings alone in her small, yellowed room, lifting weights. This was long before the health boom, but I remember
her very clearly, standing before a cracked mirror, regarding her body with a distant hostility, paying intelligent and unswerving
attention to each small part, working on it, bit by bit, bit by bit, sweating and groaning until each curve, each dip, was
firmly sculpted, until it all shone in the dim light like a brown statue tortured and polished by a thousand years of sea.

How do I enter this picture, you ask? Where did I come from? I think I was necessary because she never herself believed that
she could fly, and so every Saturday she put on a loose green dress that flattered her skin and walked the bars, protected
by that seriousness that had marked her from the start. It took her a long time to find what she was looking for, because
in those days it was hard for a woman like her to meet a man, say a Yalie, down to Manhattan for the weekend, weightless and
windswept in white flannels, perhaps a navy sweater, fine blond hair a sweep over a thin forehead, long delicate hands and
half-mooned fingernails. That’s what she wanted, and after a year and a half she found him in a jazz club on Amsterdam in
the upper nineties. She seduced him not by feminine simpers or coy fluttering, but by looking at him very directly for half
an hour, and then walking up to him: ‘Come home with me.’ He went, winking over her head at his friends,
and was confident all the way into her apartment, until she turned to him and pushed him onto her bed, straddled him, and
whipped off his belt in one movement. She refused to kiss him, and what frightened him more than the rocky strength in her
biceps and shoulders was the way she looked at him in the darkness. After he had fled, she took a long shower, and slept a
very deep sleep.

So I grew within her, cell by cell, washed in her blood, a body of her body. For the most part, she ignored the fact that
she was pregnant, and worked just as ceaselessly, acknowledging all the half-snide inquiries with a curt nod. She typed, “On
the afternoon of February 3, Mr. Hardin was struck in the facial area with a baseball bat, resulting in avulsion of three
permanent teeth from the upper jaw,” and I think I heard, somehow —I know it sounds crazy, but it’s the only way to explain
what happened later, what I did. “Mr. James stepped into a hole at a construction site and fell onto his left hand. He sustained
a rotary subluxation of the scaphoid, and soft tissue damage of the left wrist and hand, including the metaphalangeal joint
of the thumb. He subsequently developed de Quervain’s disease and carpal tunnel syndrome.” “There are small areas of increased
signal intensity posterior to the C4–5 and C5–6 intervertebral spaces, with mild extradural impressions upon the thecal sac
and the anterior aspect of the spinal cord at these levels —representing possible bulging or herniated intervertebral discs,
or degenerative posterior osteophytes.” “Mrs. Quevado was struck by small pieces of glass from the windshield, resulting in
lacerations of both corneas.” I grew with this knowledge of the fragility of the body, of its brittleness, of how it breaks
and where it mends, of how it twists and mortifies, its strange humors and expulsions, its stenches and its ugliness, its
suffering, and yet after all I was unable to regard it as she did, with such fascination and with such grief.

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 been 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.