Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (11 page)

“I have a very high pain threshold,” my mother mentions casually. This is undoubtedly true.

I stand by uselessly and cover my ears as my mother, a very small woman, lifts the blunt end of a pick axe over her head and slams it down on a metal pipe she is driving into the frozen ground. Any portrait of my mother should include a blue-black fingernail.

“I breathe, I have a heartbeat, I have pain…” I repeat to myself as I lie in bed at night. I am striving to adopt the pain as a vital sensation. My mother, I know, has already mastered this exercise.

Her existence, like my father’s, pains me. This is the upper fixed point of love.

Once, for a study of chronic pain, I was asked to rate not just my pain but also my suffering. I rated my pain as a three. Having been sleepless for nearly a week, I rated my suffering as a seven.

“Pain is the hurt, either physical or emotional, that we experience,” writes the Reverend James Chase. “Suffering is the story we tell ourselves of our pain.”

Yes, suffering is the story we tell ourselves.

“At the moment we are devoid of any standard criteria as to what constitutes suffering,” Reverend Chase writes in his paper on genetic therapy, which is more a meditation on suffering. “Since we do not have agreed-upon criteria, it would be negligent to make decisions for others regarding suffering. We might be able to answer this for ourselves, but not for others….

“If we come to the point where we have no place for suffering, to what lengths will we go to eradicate it? Will we go so far as to inflict suffering to end it?”

Christianity is not mine. I do not know it and I cannot claim it. But I’ve seen the sacred heart ringed with thorns, the gaping wound in Christ’s side, the weeping virgin, the blood, the nails, the cross to bear…. Pain is holy, I understand. Suffering is divine.

In my worst pain, I can remember thinking, “This is not beautiful.” I can remember being disgusted by the very idea.

But in my worst pain, I also found myself secretly cherishing the phrase, “This too shall pass.” The longer the pain lasted, the more beautiful and impossible and absolutely holy this phrase became.

The Worst Pain Imaginable

Through a failure of my imagination, or of myself, I have discovered that the pain I am in is always the worst pain imaginable.

But I would like to believe that there is an upper limit to pain. That there is a maximum intensity nerves can register.

There is no tenth circle in Dante’s Hell.

The digit ten depends on the digit zero, in our current number system. In 1994 Robert Forslund developed an Alternative Number System. “This system,” he wrote with triumph, “eliminates the need for the digit zero, and hence all digits behave the same.”

In the Alternate Number System, the tenth digit is represented by the character A. Counting begins at one: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, A, 11, 12…18, 19, 1A, 21, 22…28, 29, 2A…98, 99, 9A, A1, A2, A3, A4, A5, A6, A7, A8, A9, AA, 111, 112…

“One of the functions of the pain scale,” my father explains, “is to protect doctors — to spare them some emotional pain. Hearing someone describe their pain as a ten is much easier than hearing them describe it as a hot poker driven through their eyeball into their brain.”

A better scale, my father thinks, might rate what patients would be willing to do to relieve their pain. “Would you,” he suggests, “visit five specialists and take three prescription narcotics?” I laugh because I have done just that. “Would you,” I offer, “give up a limb?” I would not. “Would you surrender your sense of sight for the next ten years?” my father asks. I would not. “Would you accept a shorter life span?” I might. We are laughing, having fun with this game. But later, reading statements collected by the American Pain Foundation, I am alarmed by the number of references to suicide.

“…constant muscle aches, spasms, sleeplessness, pain, can’t focus…must be depression…two suicide attempts later, electroshock therapy and locked-down wards….”

The description of hurricane-force winds on the Beaufort scale is simply “devastation occurs.”

Bringing us, of course, back to zero.

Mary Clearman Blew

 

MARY CLEARMAN BLEW
is the author of
Lambing Out and Other Stories
,
Runaway: Stories
,
All But the Waltz
,
Balsamroot
,
Circle of Women
(with Kim Barnes),
Bone Deep in Landscape
,
Sister Coyote: Montana Stories
, and
Written on Water: Essays on Idaho Rivers
. She teaches at the University of Idaho.

 

December 1958. I lie on my back on an examination table in a Missoula clinic while the middle-aged doctor whose name I found in the Yellow Pages inserts his speculum and takes a look. He turns to the sink and washes his hands.

“Yes, you’re pregnant,” he says. “Congratulations, Mommy.”

His confirmation settles over me like a fog that won’t lift. Myself I can manage for, but for myself and
it
?

After I get dressed, he says, “I’ll want to see you again in a month, Mommy.”

If he calls me Mommy again, I will break his glasses and grind them in his face, grind them until he has no face. I will kick him right in his obscene fat paunch. I will bury my foot in his disgusting flesh.

I will walk through the glass doors and between the shoveled banks of snow to the parking lot where my young husband waits in the car.

“You’re not, are you?” he says.

“Yes.”

“Yes, you’re not?”

“Yes, I am! Jeez!”

His feelings are hurt. But he persists: “I just don’t think you are. I just don’t see how you could be.”

He has a theory on the correct use of condoms, a theory considerably more flexible than the one outlined by the doctor I visited just before our marriage three months ago, and which he has been arguing with increasing anxiety ever since I missed my second period. I stare out the car window at the back of the clinic while he expounds on his theory for the zillionth time. What difference does it make now? Why can’t he shut up? If I have to listen to him much longer, I will kill him, too.

At last, even his arguments wear thin against the irrefutable fact. As he turns the key in the ignition his eyes are deep with fear.

“But I’ll stand by you,” he promises.

Why get married at eighteen?

When you get married, you can move into married student housing. It’s a shambles, it’s a complex of converted World War II barracks known as the Strips, it’s so sorry the wind blows through the cracks around the windows and it lacks hot-water heaters and electric stoves, but at least it’s not the dormitory, which is otherwise the required residence of all women at the University of Montana. Although no such regulations apply to male students, single women must be signed in and ready for bed check by ten o’clock on weeknights and one on weekends. No alcohol, no phones in rooms. Women must not be reported on campus in slacks or shorts (unless they can prove they are on their way to a physical education class), and on Sundays they may not appear except in heels, hose, and hat. A curious side effect of marriage, however, is that the responsibility for one’s virtue is automatically transferred from the dean of women to one’s husband. Miss Maurine Clow never does bed checks or beer checks in the Strips.

When you get married, you can quit making out in the backseat of a parked car and go to bed in a bed. All young women in 1958 like sex. Maybe their mothers had headaches or hang-ups, but
they
are normal, healthy women with normal, healthy desires, and they know the joy they will find in their husbands’ arms will — well, be better than making out, which, though none of us will admit it, is getting to be boring. We spend hours shivering with our clothes off in cars parked in Pattee Canyon in subzero weather, groping and being groped and feeling embarrassed when other cars crunch by in the snow, full of onlookers with craning necks, and worrying about the classes we’re not attending because making out takes so much time. We are normal, healthy women with normal, healthy desires if we have to die to prove it. Nobody has ever said out loud that she would like to go to bed and
get it over with
and get on with something else.

There’s another reason for getting married at eighteen, but it’s more complicated.

By getting married I have eluded Dean Maurine Clow only to fall into the hands of in-laws.

“We have to tell the folks,” my husband insists. “They’ll want to know.”

His letter elicits the predictable long-distance phone call from them. I make him answer it. While he talks to them I rattle dishes in the kitchen, knowing exactly how they look, his momma and his daddy in their suffocating Helena living room hung with mounted elk antlers and religious calendars, their heads together over the phone, their faces wreathed in big grins at his news.

“They want to talk to you,” he says finally. Then, “Come on!”

I take the phone with fear and hatred. “Hello?”

“Well!!!” My mother-in-law’s voice carols over the miles. “I guess this is finally the end of college for you!”

She uses a Maytag washing machine with a wringer and a monotonous, daylong chugging motor which, she often says, is a damn sight better than a washboard. She starts by filling the tub with boiling water and soap flakes. Then she agitates her whites for twenty minutes, fishes them out with her big fork, and feeds them sheet by sheet into the wringer. After she rinses them by hand, she reverses the wringer and feeds them back through, creased and steaming hot, and carries them out to the clothesline to freeze-dry. By this time the water in the tub has cooled off enough for the coloreds. She’ll keep running through her loads until she’s down to the blue jeans and the water is thick and greasy. My mother has spent twenty-five years of Mondays on the washing.

I know I have to tell her I’m pregnant.

She’s talking about college, she’s quoting my grandmother, who believes that every woman should be self-sufficient. Even though I’m married now, even though I had finished only one year at the University of Montana before I got married, my grandmother has agreed to go on lending me what I need for tuition and books. Unlike my in-laws, who have not hesitated to tell me I should go to work as a typist or a waitress to support my husband through college (after all, he will be supporting me for the rest of my life), my grandmother believes I should get my own credentials.

My mother and grandmother talk about a teaching certificate as if it were a gold ring which, if I could just grab it, would entitle the two of them to draw a long breath of relief. Normally I hate to listen to their talk. They don’t even know you can’t get a two-year teaching certificate now, you have to go the full four years.

But beyond the certificate question, college has become something that I never expected and cannot explain: not something to grab and have done with but a door opening, a glimpse of an endless passage and professors who occasionally beckon from far ahead — like lovely, elderly Marguerite Ephron, who lately has been leading four or five of us through the
Aeneid
. Latin class has been my sanctuary for the past few months; Latin has been my solace from conflict that otherwise has left me as steamed and agitated as my mother’s whites, now churning away in the Maytag; Latin in part because it is taught by Mrs. Ephron, always serene, endlessly patient, mercilessly thorough, who teaches at the university while Mr. Ephron works at home, in a basement full of typewriters with special keyboards, on the translations of obscure clay tablets.