OUTCAST ON THE MOUNTAINS

OF THE HEART

Aunts

Everybody has aunts. Sisters circling your parents like thoughtful birds. Of course, when you are a kid, you don’t see them like that. You see Mrs. Santa Claus. Or Miss Awfully Jolly. The Aunt I got to know best (one of my mother’s sisters) simply became my Aunt, as if she were the whole hill, and I awaited her appearance, whenever it was (for if the rails adults ran on were mysterious, their schedules were even more so), with an anticipation pleasantly secure in what it might expect; for she always carried a great black purse from which candies were, with much teasing, extracted, occasionally a toy—small things, simple but comforting—signs of her remembrance and her favor. So Auntie was always greeted with gaiety when she came through our door in a bustle of bags, alleging that this time her handbag was empty, insisting that her gifts were nothing at all, pleading unimportance for both purse and person, laughing, though nervously, every ill off—her cuts had healed, her flu was fine—finding a place for her hat and coat, a trivial task but never easy, removing with patience and incompetence such things as a rubber or galosh, shopping bag by her as though to steady her stance, panting a bit because of a climb, or an icy step, or a wind which was always unseasonable, I remember, producing an unexpected buffet, a draft deviously aimed, nefarious in intention, puffed firmly in the face.

Whenever we went back to Grand, I saw her. Among the sibs, she was the unmarried one, a little dumpy in the hips even then, though to kids such things are scarcely noticed and count for nothing. She had the heart-shaped face of the family, the shy smile, the almost private chuckle, a very light limp whose cause was never known and whose character was never questioned, though later in her life it grew more pronounced until she seemed to rock when she walked. She did secretarial work and had studied shorthand, a skill which left me incredulous; its curls and dots and loops and slashes were signs that said “let’s pretend,” hence I could not take their claim to significance seriously, while, at the same time, they suggested mysteries to me and the concealments which codes and ciphers could create, so they were a major player in my imagination. In addition to ruled pads of paper and bundles of sharpened pencils bound by wide red rubber bands, my aunt had a gray-brown book called The Gregg Shorthand System (something like that), which I used to hold in my hand just to heft it, and open only to open, the fine lines on the glossy white pages like souvenir hair, characters at which I stared as though they were living creatures. I could have been studying the Koran.

Although the arcane nature of her work impressed me, I had no idea what ‘shorthand’ itself meant. The word was a puzzle. I understood what it was to have a short circuit or to be short-handed or short with people or short of funds, and later I would myself suffer short-arm inspections, but if it weren’t at the end of a withered arm, what sort of hand was it? Longhand, I finally learned, was long because every sentence was supposed to contain all its words (that seemed reasonable), and each word was to be fully spelled, and all the letters properly made, while shorthand was like a short cut, its curvilinears symbolizing entire syllables, frequently used words, epistolary conventions, abbrevs., contractions, bodies of sound, paths across vacant lots, openings in fences, back streets.

You spoke into a pencil. The pencil then took your words away and hid them inside Gregg’s flagrantly gallivanting lines. Soon they were locked up inside a system, and only through the good will and skill of the stenographer could you get them off those helpful hooks and out of those squiggles again. Quietly, modestly, efficiently, shorthand took possession of your mind—not by understanding what you’d said, or by caring to know, but simply by conserving it, keeping it brand-new, a thought uttered yet unused, like a tie which hasn’t known a knot. It was a process which suited my aunt to a T. It expressed her essence. She specialized in skipping steps, too, in falling short, in incompletes, in not quite making do. Eventually, she would draw around a great part of my family life her unobtrusively constraining and secret lines.

Auntie was the single sister, so it was she who was wedded to her mother’s—my granny’s—care, and accompanied Granny when she went to visit her various children, staying for a time with her eldest son, Walter, then for a period with her middle daughter, Sophie, and so on, finding a new job, too, each time the burden of sheltering mother was shifted From one family to another, since everyone lived in a different state as well as another town. Granny was truly elderly. She had disposed of most of her flesh: on her breasts, her hips, her cheeks, her thighs; she had lost her hearing and much of her sight; her hair lay like a thin mist above a head where only bone shone; all of her English was gone, and a lot of her German; she seemed to me covered in scrawly blue lines and arbitrary wrinkles; and her back was humped and bent like something dried.

With the help of Auntie and a cane, she moved like a large light insect through the house, skinny as the skeleton she’d be buried as, scarcely touching anything, even the Floor. She never complained. She said “ja” a lot and nodded too, as if a nod were a necessary piece of punctuation. She crocheted, drawing together many things whose dyes were dubious, and we all pretended to need and admire what came out of the almost automatic motion of her needles and her hands. They swallowed many a skein of yarn. Occasionally, on account of her eyes, Gran would skip a step or knot some threads or tangle her knitting, and Auntie would intervene, though she couldn’t stick a needle through a muffin, picking at confusions with her stubby, sensible stenograph hands, damaging the damage, clucking over her ineptitude.

The day came when Auntie and Granny, bag and baggage, stepped down from the train for that lengthy stay which was our turn to shoulder, though it seemed quite a treat to me: to have the candy lady living in our own house, going off to work every day but regularly returning with little rolls of toffee or something curious from the office, yellow pencils on which had been printed strange names—the Chester Chair and Office Supply Company—or calendars the size of playing cards, with an entire year, official holidays, and all the weights and measures squeezed on one shiny side, or sometimes labels and stickers and clips of all kinds, as well as souvenirs in dubious taste, the gift of drummers from the plumbing companies, a miniature outhouse, I remember, fashioned from pretend bark, which was supposed to serve as an ashtray, and whose door had a moon the shape of a slice of cantaloupe cut into it.

The things that recollect us. Historians should keep our vagrant habits in mind, for, on the whole, we don’t remember the crowning of kings or financial panics—whatever they count as history—but tacky key rings made of building products instead, laminated four-leaf clovers and cellophane sacks whose interiors marshmallows have powdered, jars containing jellybeans, balsa planes with their wings chipped where they’d struck trees, or rolls of bright red yarn, ripe as fruit, a darning egg, cricket clicker, or knitting needles with long amber handles. I remember that when Granny and Auntie crept down the steps of the train, leaning lightly on one another and on the arm of the conductor, they were wearing what seemed to me were identical, glassily polished, black shoes pulled on over white lisle socks; shoes, socks, and laces, motionless for a moment on the top step, those scintillating toes at the level of my very wide eyes, arriving—what a surprise, shoes like that, coming into one’s consciousness—arriving as promised from afar, but arriving strangely there, on a metal step, four foreign feet waiting for collection in our car, and—what an astonishing thing—shoes soon to be found standing on the same rug over which my armies marched and I spread the Sunday funnies.

There was a trunk to follow. It was made of heavy cardboard covered in thin sheets of black metal, shiny like the shoes too, with a hasp which kept its secrets, and hinges as yellow as gold. The spare room was no longer a spare, but where a life would lie for years as though wrapped in transparent tissue. The bathroom and the breakfast nook grew crowded, doubled its soaps, took on toast. But Granny was exotic—it was like owning your own mummy, my friends were fascinated—while Auntie made fudge sometimes on Sundays, or popped corn, luring my loyalty as the settlers had the natives, buying my trust with little gifts and a refusal to interfere in my life which I found wholly appropriate for someone presumably living on the family’s fringe.

Granny had come to visit, and Auntie had come with Cranny, nurse with patient. I never thought about it, then, but when my father went off to the job he hated, and Auntie went off to the one she endured, and when I went off to school in the morning, it was my mother who was left at home to look after, care for, and tend. Meanwhile, Auntie and Granny settled in.

They slept in that one spare room with its single closet, small front-facing window, and an attic stair which broke through the wall like an afterthought. Now I can bear to wonder what it was like to sleep in the same bed with your emaciated mother—how many years was it? more than a few—watching your own death like a coming attraction; to wonder what it was like to bathe her, too, roll her over later when she grew that weak, steady her down the stairs at first and feed her finally, when she would eat only enough to exasperate everybody, like a sip of existence herself, until, one morning, my aunt said, “She’s dead,” in the tone of something long known, in a voice which showed neither sorrow nor relief, since Gran had returned to the ghost of her husband, to Germany, and spoke a language now her daughters didn’t understand, and had memories they couldn’t share, back before they were born and waiting their surrection.

It must have taken its toll, that decade of Auntie looking after Gran, of Gran being auntied, a tour of duty which had shaped them both and routined their relation into wordlessness before either had come to stay with us. Perhaps the prospect of such service had sealed my aunt’s sex the way a serious letter is with wax—not to be opened except, and so on—since I imagine it was shut even during the years when she was girlish still, and had worn those sailorette outfits, swung a tennis racquet, and looked cute in college. It never occurred to me that she’d ever been other than what she was, or that she wouldn’t remain that way like a stair rail whose function was to stand firmly upright as I passed, protecting and sustaining my climb. Grand wasn’t a great place to make a marital choice, and maybe Auntie had sensed that, had refused to let a hayseed seed her. Certainly, neither of her sisters made out well enough to cause Auntie any envy, although her own life—a life lived alone, even when alongside Gran, and carried on in other people’s houses, in spare rooms like ours—was no great shakes or occasion for pride, but, it seemed to me, though it sought peace at the expense of passion, and preferred anything level to any slope, was still built of pure boredom, and passed in abundant numbness.

My aunt was not a bell, silent until struck. She was not a bell at all, to ring when rung. She was absorbent, resilient as the wind, as persistently uncatchable as a handful of the sea. She kept her own counsel. Under lock and key. If she had opinions she never offered them, and the decisions she had to make were announced only when necessary and couched in careful negatives: she didn’t think she’d mind not having refused that job; perhaps the weather didn’t wholly prohibit a picnic; she didn’t hate the dress she’d bought although she’d bought it because it was on sale. She seemed to back toward her purposes as if their denial were royal; but acknowledging the possession of any aims at all was to be avoided if possible. Mostly, if a picnic weren’t out of the question, she would go about preparing for it. That’s how you were to understand her interest; yet if questioned, she’d deny the desire with a deprecating chuckle, and admit only to getting ready just in case you had, yourself, a yen. Nor did you have to eat the cake she’d baked, but here it was, nevertheless, not her favorite sort certainly, but only what the larder made possible, though fortunately of so few ingredients as not to lower the stock by any appreciable amount, after all, who’d miss such negligible items; however, in case you really didn’t want any, the piece she’d cut for you, you’d notice, was small, the plate mostly made of the accompanying ice cream which you could eat or not because now you had a choice, and the coffee was fresh, she’d brewed a small pot, no fuss involved, still it went well with this kind of cake, she’d read, and complemented the cool of the French vanilla, though you couldn’t really believe books or papers, the things they said, besides, if you didn’t want seconds, who would care, but if you did, why then it was there. By your elbow. Every layer waiting as though in a long line. Her overbearing deference drove my dad crazy.

Aunt had no preferences. Aunt was a guest, grateful, without requirements, adaptable, no one to worry over or accommodate—cup in its cupboard, spoon in a drawer—yet she hoped she was sometimes useful, and not always unwanted. Her characteristic response to any suggestion was, It makes no never mind to me. In short, she went along. When she went along. She had no plans, had formed no expectations, none she announced anyway, so no one was supposed to feel bound by what she might have intended, nor did she ever have to seem to sacrifice or bend. However, her secrecy was as limiting as a steel fence, her passivity as daunting as a cliff. How could you move if you didn’t know the location of the edge? It drove my dad mad. Aunt spoke less than the grave: never about money, though she paid board and room for Gran and herself, and liked to surprise you with little gifts; never about vacations, though she always had two weeks, and usually went along on our car trips; never about hopes, fears, health, happiness, friends from work, never of dreams about tomorrow or next year; never about special pleasures, hobbies, interests, or concerns. If there were any delights in her life, any anxieties, any loves, they were locked away out of reach like whatever was still in her trunk.

Say, Auntie, are you coming to the movies with us? Well, she didn’t know, what was playing? Ah. Was that the one with Crosby? Oh. She didn’t know. She’d see. And so would we. Because when we got ourselves ready to leave she’d be standing by the door in a big coat hung with bags, waiting. Then when Gran got so frail she couldn’t be left alone for more than a moment, Aunt would say she didn’t want to see that movie, didn’t have time, or, once in a while, to our surprise, she’d say she’d already seen it, but I never heard her declare that she’d better stay home with Gran, or insist that she was needed, or point out that somebody had to look after mother. All the same, we knew the reason, so my mom would offer, and Aunt would refuse, and everyone would stay by the door for a while to insist and decline, until my dad and I would grow impatient, whereupon he and I would get in the car and he’d pretend to drive away by revving the engine, which would encourage my mother to put an end to the exasperating ritual, to shut the door on my aunt’s soft faint forgiving face. It drove my dad nuts.

Never live with sisters, he said. I said I wouldn’t. Sooner a snake of any species than a relative of any kind. I understood. These two, for god’s sake, had inaudible squabbles. So I’d heard. They hated one another like Croats and Serbs, but couldn’t admit it. Was that so? They did these things to dismay their aged mother. Did what things? Threw out one another’s leftovers, for instance. Wore one another’s hose. He had drawn up a lengthy list of tally and retaliation. Disheveled one another’s piles of papers. It went way back, predated dad, he said, old feud, the Hats and Coys had nothing on these sisters. Had I noticed how they fought to be the last through a door? how they never said good night? picked at one another’s pastries? opened one another’s letters? never accepted a nut or a piece of candy from a sister’s hand? never wore or read or ate a gift, accepted the object but rejected its use? preferred opposites in films and radio shows? disliked different Andrews sisters? I hadn’t. Well. God. Take a gander. Get a grip. God. It drove him into conniptions.

Gran was all right. A good soul. She deserved. But her kids, all five, would I look at them? Where should I look, I wondered (not aloud), in the family album? Both boys were drunks and had married nags. Dad didn’t know whether there was a causal connection. The other sister was all bottom like a Russian doll, did I know the kind? They drove him bonkers. Mules the Muhlenbergs were, especially Auntie. She drove him around the bend. Well, I could agree with him about that last. She wasn’t simply stubborn in her core, deep down; she was stubborn from pip and pulp to stem and skin; she was stubborn in the pigment of her eyes, in her “go ahead” gaze: Do what you want, I won’t argue, I won’t resist, but I won’t change. She was stubborn in the way she maintained her privacy. It drove us both bananas. She was there in our house, very there, but her self was secret. See-cret, he said slowly, as if savoring the thought, as if it were—the word—some sort of solution. See-crete. That’s it. He was comforted, and raised his aching arms to form a hallelujah. Her secretions, my father said with a feeling and a fervor whose foundation continued to escape me, her secretions drive me dizzy.

There wasn’t any place in Gran and Auntie’s little lodging for the shiny black steamer trunk, so it was elevated to the attic. I had stored a few large old toys up there—a cardboard castle, I remember, a table for a train—so occasionally I’d find an excuse to squeeze past the dresser and the bed in their room to reach the stairs and the attic’s special dusty gloom. The trunk had a solemnity, a self-importance, which impressed me. It must contain treasures, mysterious maps, enigmatic objects. Perhaps it was full of Gran’s memories, souvenirs of her old-country past, and its lid hinged onto history. It looked locked, so I assumed it was. Naturally, with valuable contents, it would be. Months passed before I even tried the hasp, which flipped back as if sprung, and I lifted the lid, and looked in on nothing—unoccupied darkness. The trunk held an appreciable volume of disappointment. That was all.

The hollow, though, the hollow it held, eventually became its treasure for me; it was the mystifying object whose essence, if discovered, would be a key to something grand, something special, something crucial. It was the woman in black of the movies. It was the mysterious black map of Africa. It was the morose black Falcon. I would think of it up there, not the trunk but the pure space its interior defined, waiting to be brought to life, yes, possibly, creepily, by a kiss. To be occupied. As if it were the body of a being, waiting, waiting ages, eons, to be souled.

Kid’s game, of course. Kid’s dream. Then I would imagine it was a true space suit, a suit I’d don, the kind of costume which transformed its wearer into a creature of the stars, powerful in some fresh way hitherto unconceived; perhaps it would render me invisible when I wore it, make of me a space as well, and maybe it held many that way, enveloping others, since none of us would any longer bulk but be as Being was possibly meant to be, and in so being be what I would later realize was the philosopher’s concept of pure extension, res extensa; yes, that’s how I felt about it, not knowing the words, but, just the same, it would be magical indeed to be there, being Being without being this or that (writing about it now, I realize, makes my mind and memory German), disappearing into dark space, no, not into the power of the stars (wrong about that, though a natural error), but into an inner rather than an outer emptiness; yes, that’s how I felt about it, having no metaphysics, simply sensing it as exceeding any symbol of inwardness, the dark bowl your brain shapes when you close your eyes, or the space where all the notes of music flare and sounds speed from place to place as swiftly as thought; yes, though then I couldn’t have made the comparison—seen it as the ultimate container of consciousness—yet even the word ‘trunk’ led me instinctively toward the truth, suggesting as it did a torso, a pair of lungs, the vital fluid of the soul, some such, before I had the terms I could dispose in any adequate way to describe it: Gran and Auntie’s steamer trunk had borne into our house the character of consciousness itself, empty, of course, thus universal, thus potential, like that of the unborn, or a monster without the electricity of life, or the maiden asleep, waiting to be energized, lived in, filled, a volume; yes, no wonder it ought not to be let out, diluted by things already made, felt, thought, imagined, desired—dragged about, disgraced, defiled, deformed—for it was inwardness without anything in it, without any outside having crept like a wounded animal into its den to hide, perhaps to heal there, a world of material mess and misery, not yet royally imagined, not yet made more than merely into mind.

The day itself was dark—gray with clouds—when I lifted a leg and was half inside, an excitement in me which sex would never succeed in achieving, holding the edges of the trunk with my hands to lift my right leg next, but leaning back, my arms, my grip, behind me, the leg coming up as if to kick, and crossing above the latch, lowering itself into the space where I now sank and sat, tubbed; yes, rubadubbed of reality, I rested, struggling to control my breathing, now holding my knees near my chest, and bowing my head as though, with this gesture, I could drop my self—what? my soul with my body?—below the trunk’s upper edge; yes, I wanted that immersion, I didn’t care simply to conceive it, I desired that depth, so I thought I’d just lower the lid for a moment to get the full feeling of that emptiness I’d entered, that region meant only for realization, but I heard a little click go lightly off like a gunshot and my head banged the top so hard my neck was cricked, I was caught by my own knees, saw, if not stars, searing light, and shuddered simultaneously, forcing my arms up against the firmly latched conclusion of my foolish dreams. I had killed myself. I wasn’t cabined, cribbed. I was coffined. I’d be buried in my box of being. What a joke had been played on me!

If pure Being was pure panic, I knew what pure Being was. I had no time to imagine how I’d smother. I had nothing in my mind but “out!” Yet there was an instant after my initial moment of terror, equally brief, in which I did feel the stillness of the undisturbed, during which I grasped the grid on which the mind lay, and saw, otherwise unmarked, the space in which the imagination moved, guided by feeling, fueled by desire; yes, and I gulped a great gulp, the remainder of my air, and banged the side of the trunk with the sides of my arms, whammed them against it, ready to shout, to scream and be embarrassed about it later, whammed the side and headed the lid, headed and whammed, when suddenly the lock in the latch popped, and the latch flew back from its whamslammed side of the trunk, and my head went through, it seemed, every roof, whew . . . aaah, I eloquently said, or some such low-volumed howl, when I rose out of the box, and oooh, eloquently again, when I fell back inside and the lid returned to close me. My arms were well up now, though, and I grabbed my tub’s edge and rolled ungracefully out, scraping a lot of skin even through my clothes, shit, out of there, sliding, wiping dust up from the attic floor like some mop, god, so, I’m on my knees, on my feet, down steps, through the spare room’s room, hallward bound, my own raum, my own bed, facedown, blubbering, a stupid scared shit for sure, but full now of a more manageable fright, and overcome by a weakness which made me feel all in . . . all in . . . in fact, as I had been.

Aunt did things for people they didn’t quite want done. She ironed our handkerchiefs into folded squares; she tied the ends of our freshly washed socks, into knots; she fed you snacks more frequently than your greed and nerves would have chosen by themselves; she saved stories from the newspapers you had passed over purposely; she remembered how much you had liked peanut butter ice cream the first time you had it (although her memory wasn’t your memory, which was of a distinctly grungy tongue and cleavy mouth); she reminded you of unpleasant appointments; she’d clean half of a copper-bottomed pan, store leftovers in unlikely dishes, and pick up after you, but only while you watched; she raked the yard, which got me in trouble with my old man; she bought too many gooey pies and layer cakes, which got mom in trouble with dad, since he hated both sweet desserts and waste, and, in addition, Aunt; she wiped dry the dishes I washed without getting rid of the soap; and she brought home jigsaw puzzles said to be cut in one thousand minuscule pieces, each with apparently identical heads and hollows, slopes, bumps, and grinds, and waited for us to turn them over and spread them out before saying she was sleepy and would see us all in the morning.

She would unwrap the last caramel in the dish and then, with a conspiratorial smile, present it to you covered with her fingerprints.

After volunteering, then persisting over our heartfelt objections, and furthermore refusing all assistance, Aunt would take all day to do dinner, moving from one emergency to another like an ambulance, while dirtying every dish, pot, spoon, and pan, spilling on the stove and spattering the countertop, cutting, staining, scalding herself like a stereotypical male, only to declare herself finally too tired to eat and only able in her apron to stare at her plate while we’d pick at our, after all, simple fare, and pretend to converse.

I think my Aunt knew that, except for her fudge, I hated her food. I know she knew I’d be expected to clean up. So I took her dinner preparations to be acts of aggression undertaken against me. I wondered what I’d done. I wondered how I could get even.

Offices where my Aunt worked—well, they loved her. She was always on time, rarely missed a day, never complained, was a source of little tidbits and tasties, remembered birthdays and so forth with cards, seemed cheerfully ready to work overtime, even on Saturdays and during inventory, listened to hard-luck stories from the other help and gladly subbed for them when they were sick: in sum, in every hallowed business way proved her worth many times over. Yet give Aunt a few faithful years, and only she would be able to find an invoice, locate a shipment, repair an error, expedite an order, know where absolutely anything was. By then, she would have installed her own system, and the work of the firm would have to pass through her in order to be complete. In all modesty, I’m sure she’d say she was only the small intestine of the corporate body. As was her way, Aunt had taken down all the company’s operations in her unreadable, unreachable shorthand. Locked in her scheme of placement and relation, the affairs of the business--a wholesale office supply in the most signal instance—were beyond anyone else’s reach and reckoning.

Which the owners would eventually realize, though it took years to face the cruel truth that they were caught in Auntie’s coils. At first, they would simply and sympathetically attempt to loosen her grip, because, after all, the condition was a natural consequence of her devoted service, and not the result of malice or ineptitude. But Auntie would turn Aunt in such circumstances, grow more secretive, more silent, slow every request to a crawl, divert every directive, undermine every order, resist reorganization by becoming increasingly uncooperative, and when management grew insistent, respond by shutting down her system as though she were closing a valve, and reducing the firm’s performance to the final few shakes of an embarrassed piss.

I particularly remember the day her office supply firm fired her. As luck would have it, I was home from school with a somewhat imaginary cold. She appeared at noon, a wholly unusual break in routine, and so unresponsive I knew something serious had happened. She usually got a lift, since she didn’t drive, but this time she arrived in a cab, was laden with shopping bags I offered to bring in, assistance which was brusquely refused. I suggested some tomato soup which I was heating for my lunch. Wearing a grimly noncommittal look, Aunt stumbled up the stairs, bags at the end of both hands, each heaped with mysterious stuff. Crackers? cheese? a bit of ham? I was feeling better by the minute. Her stocky body spoke only of persistence. Gran had died the year before, but I still wondered where Auntie would stash all that—whatever it was—she was lugging up to her room.

There was not a word out of her, ever, not in answer to my mom or dad, certainly not in answer to me. I’m making a change, said she, but that was announced to a neighbor whom she spoke to in the yard. The outhouse ashtray disappeared, and would no longer embarrass its downstairs table. In the same swift way also vanished all the copies of a builder’s magazine which used to lie uselessly about, and pads of her office paper that did telephone duty. Oh yes. A pen and pencil set bearing the name of a carpet company in supposed gold—gone. Who cared? Long out of lead and ink.

It wasn’t many days before she had another job, real estate this time, even an improvement, fewer hours, slicker paper in the pads she replaced by the phone, cardboard houses you could put together by sticking tabs in slots, better quality of candy, which signified the presence of a superior drugstore nearby, fewer klutzy advertisers’ favors, but now she had to go to and from work on the bus. I imagine my Aunt received excellent references. Her employers would be anxious to be rid of her, yet they would feel guilty, too, for she had served them well—wouldn’t they have to think?—over many years, unstintingly, without complaint; moreover—wouldn’t they have to believe?—she had become impossible by inadvertence, not by design, by dint of her devotion. Yes, that discomfort would produce, I thought, a lot of praise. So in no time Aunt was well placed and apparently comfortable in her new position, although now she had a three-block walk from the bus, and would be less inclined to bring home heavies, bulkies, ashtrays disguised as outhouses, samples of glass brick.

It was Christmas, though, when my Aunt came into her own, when she played Auntie to the hilt—Santa Auntie, my father said in some disgust, she drove him crazy—because the secular side of that holiday, its entire commercial taint, its petty bad taste, its obligatory cheer, its inherently hypocritical character, suited her, put her in red flannel, grew her a beard, but above all, gave her leave and license: to do everybody in with dinkies and gimcracks, to cheapskate her way to victory in the Christmas present competition.

Out of step as she was, Auntie was nevertheless a real woman of the future, because she believed in the power of the package, in the force of sheer amounts, in glitz and glitter, of which there could not be too much. The Christmas tree, which went up early, and on which she did not hang a single geegaw herself, groaned from the weight of slivers of shiny lead foil she forced us to drape on it, from great green blue red silver ornamental balls, skeins of tarnished gold rope, strings of multicolored lights whose paint had flaked, candy canes stiff in their staleness, little papier-mâché dolls whose painted paper faces grinned demonic grins, on and on, as if they’d seen something permanently silly, a few heirlooms, too, from Gran’s Tannenbaum, lost among the borne-down boughs, drowned in trinkets from Kresge and Woolworth; then dingy stars and tissue paper angels whose bodies were full of jellybeans and hard Christmas candy, which had to be thrust back within the branches because of their weight, clip-on birds who belonged in a jungle, glitter domes through whose celluloid windows you could almost see what might be generously called “a snow scene,” little dangling doodads of no known species, like the rest of the tree’s decorations, saved from year to year with a parsimony unknown to medieval monks, and reamassed, and reapplied, each Christmas, to the tree as if it were Christ on His Cross and they were the nails, short and small like brads, perhaps (and, like stapling the moon to the sky, it would take a few); until it stood there, our Christmas tree, once more a mountain of kitchykoo, a-blight with litter and gloss, resplendent with frost dust, topped by the holy star itself, the whole shebang producing a generous shimmer which conferred upon all who came within the radius of its radiance its cut-rate blessing.

Beneath this tribute to Christmases past, a piece of green felt was—not exactly wrapped, nor laid—say, swirled; then upon its scarfy sward were placed pieces which belonged to a crèche the way the hotels of Monopoly belonged to the game: a camel, I remember, larger than a palm, some real straw and a cow from one of Auntie’s former occupations which said “Holsum” on the side we turned to the wall, a little rabbi-looking Fellow, the first I ever saw, and a naked baby on its back, probably bawling because it had no sex.

This tender scene was scarcely incompleted before the war of the gifts began: first Aunt, with a small elegantly wrapped present which appeared to have been stolen from Van Cleef and Arpels, then my mom, with a tie box done in green Christmas tissue and stickered with red bows; then Aunt, with a tube done in black like a diploma, and enlivened by a white ribbon wound around it in a slant pattern borrowed from a barber’s pole, followed by my mom with another flat package, scarf or hankie likely, this one in red tissue paper dotted with lots of stick-on silver stars; then Aunt with a big square one in heavy purple stock whose crisply folded ends were sealed with yellow gauze fluffed to resemble a rose, and mom, who responded with a shoe box enveloped in of course white tissue whose lid had been topped by a large green perfectly toothed tree lit with smears of crayon; then Aunt again, this time with two dainty ring boxes, one blue, one pink, glued to the ends of a tongue depressor, while my mom weighed in with a ball bound in waxy red and noosed at the neck by red string, which one would say concealed popcorn on account of the runny irregularities of its slopes; however, these treasures were only the beginning, because each evening for two weeks, more packages would appear, in competing pairs, to cover up the crèche, if it was ever there, to blot the baize, if it had once been swirled about the trunk with a bit of flair, and to flop out onto the floor around the tree in an increasingly encroaching ring of wealth and generosity: gifts wrapped in papers with metallic sheens, or relieved by embossments or by messages of love and entreaty like Peace on Earth and Joy to the World, papers printed with gay scenes—coaches driven by grinning men in high hats, sleighs pulled down lanes of snow by horses hung with silver bells, cheery-faced Santas lugging bursting bags, beery-cheeked carolers, socks stuffed with sticks of peppermint, skies filled with melting snow-shaped stars, wise men decked out in turbans and festooned with gems, a few sheets full of beach balls in big bright colors meant for a baby but made, here, to do for another day, as I always felt the blue rabbits had done, hopping over from Easter; and there were gifts stickered to a faretheewell with Prancer and Vixen, with St. Nick in postures of welcome and jollity, Snow White and all her dwarfs, why not? Christmas seals advertising tuberculosis, gum-backed wreaths, boughs, berries, snow-covered cottages, mailboxes with welcoming red ribbons, stickers stuck to stickers, as well as assorted gnomes, candles, elves, and sugared cookies; tags too, glued on, tied with string, printed with scenes reminiscent of the good old days, gifts both large small medium and shapeless, bedizened like whores, got up like clowns, suggestive, seductive, with built-in rattles, or capable of other mysterious sounds, some skinny as pencils, or big enough to be a bike, finally spilling up instead of over, sitting about on the sideboard in the dining room, encircling a blue mirror flocked with talc and afloat with swans.

They would take hours to open, this plethora of presents, since we approached them like dishes, one at a time, and opened them carefully, with spatulas and scissors, because as many wrappings as possible would be sat on and saved, flattened, folded, and put away for use on another day, possibly another Christmas when Aunt would even iron some, smooth them into newness, but possibly, depending on the ambiguities of color and design, employ them to wrap an office birthday present, or a wedding gift or christening rattle (white would always do); and the department store boxes, too, would be reused, so you could never be sure what would be in them, certainly tie boxes rarely held ties and ring boxes never rings, while many were oatmeals made over, or other commercial containers, tobacco tins, egg cartons, or those for cigars, shoes, cigarettes, and candy.

To look at this pile of packages (at “the loot” as it was called) one would think we were a family both rich and profligate, but, like everything else about us, that too would be an illusion. In the first place, the purchase of necessities was put off until Christmas, if possible, so many of these finely wrapped wonders would contain shoelaces, toothpaste, socks, underwear, shaving cream, and similar sundries; or they were goodies we habitually bought anyway, like peanut brittle which Auntie hauled home regularly in a little white sack, or cigarettes in a wreath-covered carton, although the holidays sometimes earned us a larger treat than usual, a row of candy bars or bundle of gum packs instead of singles; on top of that there were the so-called customary presents, and this quota was met half by office theft and half by hurt items on desperate sale—slightly soiled shirts, or a sweater an odd size, rummage remainders, samples you could get free by sending coupons through the mail; then occasionally Aunt would pass on to my mom (who was always angrily aware of it) a blouse or slip she’d received somewhere else and didn’t want, pink as a pair of wax lips perhaps, or a bit too big, too lacy, or too deeply cleaved.

The wrappings which weren’t recycled from former service, but bought brand-new, were obtained at after-Christmas sales where prices were greatly reduced, strings of lights, too, and little glass balls as well as packages of ribbons, tags, stars, and other stickums. So our Christmases were reasonably economical, not to say cheap, although for Aunt they were certainly lots of work. And the rites were as slow and predictable as a glacier. I’d unlace a delicately done-up little froufrou to find a tin of black shoe polish. Ah, I’d exclaim. just what I wanted. The worst of it was, it was what I wanted, but not wrapped the way it was wrapped, not hauled by a red-faced fatso down the sky across half the world and put under the tree to draw the eye and tease anticipation—not as the pretense of a gift I would be given at Christmas, which was matched by the pretense of my appreciation.

My Aunt was the Princess of the Inappropriate Present. She knew I liked books, and that I read a lot of biography, so any history which came to hand, any life, if it was of Frances Willard, would do, and received her first-class Christmas treatment. She would buy my mom liquor-filled chocolates and my dad a subscription to a left-leaning magazine. She drove him ditzy. But what lured Aunt most often into opening her purse were sales of perishables like boxed cookies, chocolate-covered cherries, cereals like Cream of Wheat, potato chips, dried fruit, mixed nuts, and I would find sacks of these items stored in the basement, a hedge against depression, drought, or other disaster. You never know, she’d insist, with her disarming chuckle. Just in case. For a rainy day. Having a little extra can’t hurt. A saver is like the savior. Dead as a door and full of nails, I didn’t say.

Little by little, and with Aunt it was always that, she took over the laundry, the mending and ironing. Then it was she who plumped the pillows for my father’s hack, found his slippers where they’d hid under his chair, fetched American Legion magazine or The Saturday Evening Post, switched on his reading light as day became dusk, helped him into a warmer shirt, poured him fresh coffee when his ulcer allowed it, made certain his prescriptions didn’t run out. Little by little my mother lapsed into petulant whining and crying. Aunt suggested menus, drew up grocery lists, eventually shopped. Soon she was keeping all the household accounts, paying the bills, seeing about services: she had the furnace cleaned, a wooden ramp built for my father, the gutters checked, the windows washed. My mother more and more looked on, heaped in a chair like a pile of towels, while Aunt took hold of the movement of life in our house, such as it was.

Now she bought the gifts my father gave my mother at Christmas, and those my mother gave my father, and those they both gave me—secondhand textbooks, mostly—as well as some presents the tags said they gave to Auntie herself and also those from Santa to the entire family. She wrapped them all too, as fancily as ever, directed me during the crucifixion of the tree, and when Christmas morning came, and we had slowly painfully gathered, picked out our presents for us, held them under each appropriate nose, unwrapped the wrappings like a surgeon, modeled the gloves, held a sweater to its appointed chest, and helped the recipients say it was just what they wanted, gee, what a lovely color, exactly my size. She ate most of the candy, most of the Christmas dinner, and put away most of the presents too, the way she stored the boxes and the wrapping paper, for use another time, perhaps at a birthday, maybe at Easter, or when Christmas came again.

I learned to hate holidays, anything which seemed to call for the closing of the family fist. They were strange; these people, who listened to Jack Benny of an evening, each in their appointed perches, who perused newspapers and magazines without enthusiasm, sometimes putting a puzzle together, sometimes playing a game, but who mostly complained of one another and the world with a bitterness which had grown tame through repetition and the reduction of their energies. Three pools of pain, I would think, before I remembered where and what I was myself, also listening to Jack Benny, arguing about whether something he’d said was funny, hunting for a double-bumped straight edge which was mostly red—sure, I was puddle wonderful too. Is this a night for Lowell Thomas?

The day came when I had to put mother and father in their different hospitals, and Auntie and I came face-to-face. The commitments had rattled her and skewed her schedule. She had nearly no one to manage. And I intended to escape her grip if I could, though it wasn’t easy. Father, before his final weakness, had begun complaining to me that Auntie was rich; she had all sorts of investment policies, he said, was a terrible tightwad about money, had never shared the burden of the household, and had squirreled away great sums over time, securing them in equity funds—the terminology was too much for me—and by the clever purchase of stock increasing her worth many times. How was I to know? More than this, my father felt that she was—well—stealing from him now that she had taken over his financial arrangements—his health insurance, his few stocks, his retirement fund—and sweetening her fruit with his sugar. I had no way to judge these allegations. Maybe Aunt had finally smoked my father loco. I knew it troubled him to have her handling his affairs, but there really was no help for it. That Aunt was a saver had become increasingly apparent—to a point past stereotype. In a basket hung behind the door to the basement, I found a ball made of strings in all kinds of lengths, materials, and colors, another of foils, similarly various, many torn from cigarette packs, and nearby a cigar box crammed with assorted rubber bands. At the foot of the basement stairs stood a table now piled with newspapers, magazines, and grocery sacks, folded neatly in several stacks and weighed down with Geographics. My Auntie had become a pack rat.

Real proof of this arrived on that Saturday morning when I found myself alone in the house. Aunt worked till noon and sometimes stayed downtown to shop. I hadn’t been in the attic in ages, and I was intensely curious about that bedroom I could now not cross, even to relieve a toy from its dusty third-floor confinement, for I felt myself too old to employ that excuse. Our bedroom doors had locks, but the keys had been lost long ago, so there was no way she could keep me from her secrets. Nothing but my embarrassment stood in the way and delayed my sortie for an hour while I felt foolish about my desires and castigated my vulgar curiosities.

I had no idea what I would find, and, in a way, nothing is what I found. Empties would almost be the better word. At first, when I entered, the spare room resembled itself in a reassuring way. Bed, chest, chair, little table, its lamp and its frilly shade—each was in its customary place. Nor were the walls hung with anything new: the hand-carved and hand-painted Swiss scene in its tight wooden oval rimmed with something resembling animal horn was still there, and a photo of Gran with tinted cheeks, and one even of me, aged twelve, pink as a bedroom pillow.

I hated that pork-faced picture.

The attic stairs presented a different sight. They were heaped—each step—with packages and sacks, so many there was nowhere purchase for a foot, even the railing was obscured, the accumulations reached that high, and went solidly across from wall to wall, row after row, to make for a full house, not a seat empty, right to the uppermost balcony. I could guess, from some of the things which threatened to topple out of the sacks, that many were full of Christmas tree decorations; I could see the point of a large star, a bit of dirty silver rope, extension cord, roll of colored tissue paper—but the remainder bulged with mystery. There were walls and towers of boxes, too, in calm cream, gray, and off-white colors, as well as a few bright vulgar ones in Scotch plaid or Chinese red; typical sizes, too, the disappointing shape of a shirt carton, or a sock, tie, and hankie wallet, the more promising shoe box, and so on, ones you expect to find bathrobes folded in, or suits, disciplined by their cardboard inserts, sticking out over the treads, many with embossed and mottled and satin-slick surfaces, one or two with a diagonal slash of color across their faces, most of them fresh-looking, almost new, as if they had been allowed to see little of life, and had gone rather directly from package factory and department store to Auntie’s attic, for it was clearly hers now, the attic was, though I couldn’t really see beyond the landing.

What was in these piles besides boxes? I felt like Alice, or someone similarly situated in a fairy tale, and it was with the sense I was committing a magical act that I took down several good-size containers and slipped off their tops. Of course. There was nothing in these boxes but box. Inside a square carton, the size appropriate for a basketball, was a blue cube right for a small hat, and inside that was a sturdy white one with a tabbed top suitable, say, for a drugstore clock, while, finally, in place of the missing timepiece, lay a small flat cotton-padded bracelet case containing, besides its soft stuffing, a forgotten Christmas tag: Best wishes, Bill; but I couldn’t remember ever giving Auntie anything that small, or of that kind, so who was this Bill? with the unknown grown-up hand? the name on the lid was that of a jewelry shop in where? some Ohio town I had hardly heard of—Chillicothe?—and certainly never visited.

The other large carton unpacked in the same way—box into box—but the feeling it gave me was the opposite of that suggested by the endless nest of Russian dollies it otherwise resembled, for what I was opening was a den of spaces which now covered the floor near my feet. It was plain that every ten-by-ten-by-eight container contained cubes which were nine by nine by seven, and eight by eight by six, and seven by seven by five, and so on down to three by three by two, as well as many smaller, thinly sided ones at every interval in between, so that out of one box a million million more might multiply, confirming Zeno’s view, although at that age, with an unfurnished mind, I couldn’t have known of his paradoxes let alone have been able to describe one with any succinctness. What I had discovered was that every space contains more space than the space it contains.

But Aunt’s actions, in packing volumes into volumes in this way, were the opposite of what I was doing now, poking into her affairs, because I was letting each box burgeon, whereas Aunt was cutting them all down to one size; she was collapsing them in upon one another, creating an omnivorous spatial appetite. Her room—our spare—had become a pitiless and always empty stomach, where each of these small houses—dwellings for scarves, for socks, for shoes, for slips—would be swallowed, digested, and disappear; indeed, my own home was being borne into this room, box by box, to be absorbed bit by bit.

The closet, on the other hand, was so packed with coats and clothes as to prohibit movement. I could not imagine drawing out a hanger with its skirt or blouse intact. It would be like extracting a single sheet of paper from the middle of a ream. Beneath the bed, however . . . well, there was no beneath, for that normally wasted space was box solid. I slid, with difficulty, a wide flat spring-marked carton into view and opened it. Almost nothing, a tear of tissue paper, but then I suddenly had in hand, as if it had faded into its white cardboard floor only to reappear now, a lone luncheon napkin made of fine linen, otherwise plain, except for a monogram sewn in one corner: FK. K for Kohler? F for . . . ? giveness. There were things—gifts?--entombed here, mislaid without ever having been enjoyed, or items lost, like this napkin, from sets, sets forever marred and incomplete. I felt compelled—and compulsion is the correct characterization—I felt forced to unwedge and pull out another. Nothing. Another. Nothing. Another . . . another—finally I turned up one linked pair of pink baby booties cornered by the bullying edges of yet another container, itself empty except for a pearl-headed pin, which, given the opportunity, rolled into view like an unconfessed sin: small but exotic, sharp but far from deadly, missing but never missed.

That was the solemn other side of this situation: that no one had cared to care for them, these booties; no one had noticed their absence when it would have counted; no one had undertaken the simplest search—to lift a layer of tissue paper, shake a box, tip whatever was in it out, recollect, after only the fewest minutes, the occasion when, with feigned surprise, they had been pleasantly received. I found a narrow knit tie, before I put the boxes back, a half-slip, a comb made of some animal’s bone. Panning for gifts in the bed of the bed.

I remember feeling chilled, as though I had swallowed a tray of ice, since the cold came in a rush from within. It was obvious that their true interiors had been ignored, but would Aunt notice that the order of her cartons had been disturbed? that a few stacks were straighter than they had been, or that a package from the Higbee Company was resting on its side? I’d not stirred much dust, but perhaps Aunt had wired her stash with gray hairs I had disturbed, and whose unsettling would give me away. How many such secret beams had I broken, even though I hadn’t drawn out a drawer of the dresser or opened the lid on a pot of powder? Nevertheless (and the chill came from this, I think), I knew now I had to climb to the top of the attic stairs. What was left beneath the hat of the house that she had not stuffed with her crazy collections? caches I then took to be the hoards of a miser. Aunt hills, Culp would surely call them. I didn’t open these containers as if they were symbols; certainly they were nothing womblike or vaginal. I did not see them as expressions of insecurity. It never occurred to me that Aunt might have known little things had been left in her boxes like unborn babies. Or that she was withdrawing all these simple and ordinary objects from the arena of their eventual consumption. Even when I came on a carton which was filled with valentines and other kinds of greeting cards, and another which was packed with old letters, it never occurred to me she was in fact a curator of the commonplace, a kind of savior for the ephemeral, for tie clasps and pencil stubs, report cards and date books, the litter of life. She was not a novelist. She was simply nutty like the rest of the people around me, a family in need of fumigation. That was all. A mind without a stock of ideas to graze and fatten on its grass, alas, is not a meadow. Still, I had to know how far her collection went, although I knew enough already to be alarmed, if not quite frightened.

So I cleared a footpath quite systematically—at any rate, for me, with great deliberation—lifting out piles and putting them on her bed and bedside table, on the floor and out into the hall, in an order of climb as if numbered: tread #1, tread #2, and so on, till tread #top. As I progressed, piton after piton, toward the summit, I could see more soft heaps of sacks and fewer stacks, more lumpy piles than built-up blocks. There were rolls and folds and flats of paper—all kinds, all colors, shopping bags of rags and other refuse, small bottles by the trayload, medicine mostly, with dropper tops, calendars from a dozen different years whose months were never leafed through or rolled over, containing thousands of unmarked days, millions of unfilled hours—my god, the ticks untocked there, waiting, perhaps, their time to pass in the history of another era—several sets of dishes of the kind that are given away, flyswatters advertising window screens, catalogues of plumbing fixtures, packages of party napkins, paper tablecloths, wax-covered cups and cardboard spoons—the world will end as trash, in middens of scrap, rot, rust, and mildew, gaseous with decay—rolls of toilet paper, just in case, vases florist’s flowers come in, rose, amber, and green, like traffic lights, sacks of hard candy, peanuts in their shells, confetti, nail polish, spot remover, kitchen gadgets such as bottle stoppers are, hot pads, wooden trivets, magic slates and funny puzzles, cartoon books, assorted mailing labels and identifying tags, boxes of paper clips, pins, and tacks, mucilage, art gums, pens and inks—what else?—scratch-sided cartons of kitchen matches, ant and roach powders, traps for mice and bait for rats, old shoes, slippers, soap on a string, suspenders, clothespins, sunglasses in colorful cardboard frames, a jar of clear glass marbles—gee—Halloween masks, and several paper parasols in a dirty toy golf bag which had disappeared years ago but once was mine.

In the middle of this mess, the trunk. Endeavoring to gleam through a settlement of dust. What somewhat surprised me was the fact that there was nothing whatever on its lid, not a tear of tissue, not a nub of pencil, nor a paper clip, not even, on its hazy top, a fingerprint. And now I felt the chill like a premonition. As if, which could not have happened, Aunt was standing behind me. There was no sacred space inside. The trunk was now full of what—when I examined them—I found to be receipt books, lists, and ledgers, volumes marked RECORDS and ACCOUNTS, notebooks full of blank checks, sales slips and order forms, pads for interoffice memos, and on them, everywhere, the name of Aunt’s previous employer. Here was what she had hauled home in a taxi the day she was let go. And it was obvious these books belonged to the company. Had they any value? Would the police come and get her? I didn’t know. Yet why the delay if these papers were significant? Had she simply extracted her bookkeeping system when she left, as if she’d gone home with what brung her? I didn’t know.

I worked hard, for an hour, to restore the scene to its original confusion, backing down the attic stairs, tread #top, tread #7, tread #6 . . . tread #stop. The next few days were full of my sidelong looks, but I detected no change in Aunt’s attitudes or posture. She bustled about her business. Bought oranges to bring to my dad, who wouldn’t be able to peel them, and a large jar of rock candy for my mother, which I doubted the hospital would allow her to have. For me, I was grateful, she had “picked up on” (as she always put it), she had picked up on nothing.

In my father’s will, Aunt was given the use of the house for the length of her life. I suppose she filled it at least to flowing. Its image as Auntie’s basement-attic was one I couldn’t bear to examine closely. Though I would dream of being back in my boyhood bed, beleaguered by boxes which were toppling into my room through the window, the only way in since I had barricaded my door. My school desk drawers would be crammed with lint and sewing threads and toothpicks in packets like needles. Once I escaped to college, I never returned except in my nightmares. The homeland of my family was hers.

Mother Makes a Cake

I remember when the years didn’t roll by, time didn’t fly. I remember when it dragged its weary length along, stubbornly slowing as it neared the designate of my desire. For most kids and most occasions, that’s the way it worked. You ran after what you wanted as if you were Achilles attempting to overtake the tortoise, while, to ensure your misery, the path of hot pursuit and the line of time you’d need to pass the horny little waddle formed a converging, never convergent, series. Nearer but not yet, they teased. Closer and closer . . still . . . not quite. For the celebration of my chance arrival in the world, however, the strategy was reversed, because, as my birthday approached, the clock’s hands always accelerated wildly, the dreaded date bearing down on me as though it had become an appointment with the dentist. Desperately I wanted to ward it off, but I couldn’t. Remember how the gloved hands of cartoon clocks would whirl, or how the pages of a calendar would peel from the screen, years curling back and flying off like fall leaves? Zeno was thereby zonked, never mind the math. Remember how the heroine was carried in her innocent canoe toward the falls? The roaring of the water grew always louder. The boat pitched, and—wowee—was it tossed. No one would reach her. Surely she was lost. Then To Be Continued would appear in a placidly florid box on the screen, and, since the cruel conclusion to the heroine’s plight had been postponed till next week, everyone was excused to see what of Saturday afternoon remained on that other reel. Well, there was no respite like that to the recycle of my arrival. On the contrary, the boat bearing my helpless body would barely drift into the rapids when pieces of me could be seen below the torrent, clinging to rocks.

Early in life, I learned to fear my birthday. Later, Christmas would follow close behind in the measured amount of my dislike. Finally, every holiday, even the Fourth of July, my former favorite, would fill me with apprehension. But it was the onset of my birthday which made my palms sweat.

Now, of course, I can ignore the event. It passes without incident, often without any notice, not even by a casual, fleeting, or self-pitying thought. And I have to calculate my age afresh each time a form must be filled out, an application made, an answer of that kind offered up. An historian who hates dates—that’s me.

The newspapers are full of foolish remembrance.

FIFTY YEARS AGO TODAY

—this or that happened, they will say. I say skip it. Where’s the significance? Fifty years ago this hour I was enjoying my first shower. Or they burden us with a list of famous people born on the same day, though those days may have dawned and died in different years. I want to know what’s alike about them. On every February twenty-fifth does it rain? do men named Smith eat shellfish for dinner? Astrologers have to be crazy to go ape over these meaningless conjunctions. So and so’s team, the sports page proclaims, hasn’t defeated Hopscotch High since 1963. Let bygones go bye-bye, say I. Moreover, in the news, weather is never weather. It is the excuse for an historical reverie. We have to go back to ‘06 to find a snowfall as deep as this, a drought nearly as severe, heat as hot, hail as heavy, a sky so crystal clear. And they—the press, at the apparent request of all of us—confer continuous life on past events, awarding them birthdays as though they had been born like babies:

 

THE JOHNSTOWN FLOOD IS THIRTY

YEARS OLD TODAY

—SURVIVORS REMINISCE AT A REUNION HELD

IN A LOCAL HOTEL.

What the hell. There’s no point in having a history, if this is what it’s going to be used for: almanackery. Twenty years of marriage, fifty of life, six since you bought the Ford, forty since you touched your first tit—why not?—and would my mother want to date her first drink, and dream back to it, and have another swallow now in its honor?

The newly hitched have monthaversaries until there’s nothing any longer new about being wedlocked, nothing really wed about it, nothing more monthly than the bride’s curse, nothing to celebrate, nothing they wish to memorialize. Old-marrieds turn to anniversaries in order to extend the time, between scheduled reminders, they have a license to forget. Public monuments are constructed of similar confusions. I could understand it if the Jews put up a cenotaph or something to commemorate the hour Adolf Hitler’s body burned to a cinder, but why beat the drum for the deaths of the so-called good guys? Dante is done for. Hurray. Let’s have a holiday. Issue a stamp. Mint a coin. Toss a party. Hold a dance. Not on my time. Not with my dough. Have a birthday? Not a chance.

You are supposed to be glad you’re alive. Then why the bribes? Are the gifts you get intended to be rewards for making it through another year without committing suicide? Here’s a sawbuck: act happy to be here. Or are the gifts you get imitations of the gifts which were given Jesus? Is each of us born in a barn beneath a star? is each of us holy, and a chip off God’s block? and is that why we shall all be crucified? Does giving a gift make me a magus? Or are we honoring, really, our dear mom, dear dad, who fucked so furiously to safely seed us, or just mom who did all the work after that, threw up, got fat, then had her insides unzipped so a guy in a white coat could pull the lucky newborn one of us out like a hurting tooth, hold us head over heels like a prize catch, to howl when we had our asses slapped?

Mom and dad are just so happy we’re here. Overjoyed. We are the light of their lives, the hope for their future, proof of dad’s potency, the leading citizens of mom’s maybe second-class marital state, but her own little domain, nevertheless (küche, kirche, kinder, karpool, koffeeklatch, kuckoldry, kountryklub, kancer of the koterie, kaput), konsequently we’re a little like pots and pans, thanks a lot; and so they are remembering with pleasure the day we appeared, and showering us with gifts of gratitude, sure, for all we’ll do, clearing away bloody slops from dad’s butcher shop, cleaning up after a party enlivened by bootlegged booze, making the folks proud, getting well wed and only then bred, buying a car, purchasing a home, getting ahead, caring for them then in their cranky old age, letting them meddle in our marriage, meddle with their grandkids, while dying by the dollarload, expecting we shall keep their memories green and tend their graves—good luck; hence the pretty packages and the chocolate cake, the whoop-de-do, which still sounds like a bribe to me; because I know my folks weren’t grateful that I was a badass back-talking brat, with all my own ideas, a liar from my first cry, because I wasn’t hurt, just bored by being born, and quick to walk so I could run away, quick to talk so I could sass, soon to pull my pudding, fast on a bike and an accomplished player of hooky, a kid who took unkindly to them, whined as though it were a profession, complained with talent, screwed up with skill, and generally filled their life with satisfaction, fun, and pride. So natch they should load my plate with love on my birthday, and bring my friends to see me as though I were dying, and con gifts from them too, or rather from their parents, with the promise of party favors and a peek in one another’s trousers, a piece of cake and a horn to blow through, as well as a stomachache to take home and nurse all night.

They say gifts are just love’s substitute; that presents replace regard; or they say that it’s the intention, the feeling, the spirit, that matters, and that no one merely counts the cost, reads the tag and saves the label, or mostly admires the wrapping, or sometimes actually appreciates the thoughtfulness in a perfect choice. People like to get things because they’re just plain greedy (but that’s not stressed), or give things because the gesture demonstrates how well off the giver is, and what he or she can afford to be free with (we’re Lady Bountiful, aint we? Lord Largess). Gift giving! golly gee! It proves how much affection can be purchased with a chocolate bunny, or a bra with nipple peeps, a fake-fur coat, clean used-once used car.

Okay. How much? Never enough.

A birthday is a saint’s day; it fastens you to a star; it pencils you on a page of the population problem (given the birthrate, it’s too early for the indelibilities of ink). A birthdate gives you soulmates, makes you orbital with others, wakes your snoozy Fates to take a look at your lifeline. Above all it puts you at a place of birth like a suspect at the scene of a crime; it fastens you down, the way one day your grave will, to a spot on the earth. Otherwise you might never know you were a Hoosier, though you were one; you would be deprived of an ancestral home, a hearth, a passel of cousins, the molestation of uncles, the doting ministrations of faint great-aunts and other distant connections; your arrival would not be noticed by the papers, no one would know where to come to call; there would be no place, years later, you could pay a nostalgic visit; above all, your sense of self would lack teeth, lack bite, lack assurance—an ‘I’ unattached to any ‘dentity’—without a town, state, country, and household of origin—a family, clan, class, language, race—to determine who you were.

Some things are amazing. Without lifting a finger, you can be born a Protestant.

It never happened to me. I was spared. But I have read books. I have been to the movies. Birthdays, like weddings, anniversaries, baptisms, bar mitzvahs, wakes, are occasions to retie family ties, renew family feuds, restore family feeling, add to family lore, tribalize the psyche, generate guilt, exercise power, wave a foreign flag, talk in tongues, exchange lies, remember dates and the old days, to be fond of how it was, be angry at what it should be, and weep at why it isn’t.

All this is frosting. Let’s get to the filling.

It was going to be my birthday. My mother said she would make a cake. Chocolate because chocolate was customary. She’d coat it liberally too, but not with the white stuff which gave frosting its name, but with sweet thick fudge; then she’d dot it with chocolate kisses and stake it like a building lot with multicolored candles, each erect in its rosette, wick ready to sustain flame and be blown in a single breath. Out. And the guaranteed fulfillment of a wish would follow upon the deed.

This party was going to be my first. And a surprise. My mother told my father she would make a cake. The cake would be a chocolate cake, she said, because there was no other kind, not for a boy’s birthday. Chocolate was manly—not wimpy like lemon or girly like vanilla—and this cake would be manly through and through, frost to foot. And because boys would want big pieces, my parents decided to invite five; that way the cake could be deep-sixed, and slices of a challenging size obtained. It would be, my mother said, a three-layer cake, the middle layer surrounded with a kind of chocolate pudding, the top covered with semisweet, swirled and eddied, kisses puckering its Pudgy face, frosting hanging down along its side like a small round table’s cape. It would be a cake baked at some sacrifice; the cost, my father complained, would be considerable, couldn’t two layers suffice? but my mother replied that the cake would look low then, meager, flatter than a hat; and a proper boy’s birthday cake should be high, rich to the point of being raucous, he knew boy’s ways, surely, boy’s eyes. My father wondered if candy kisses weren’t like rouge on a rose, a bit much; however, my mother insisted on them; it will sit surrounded by kisses in their shiny silver foil, she said, a goody among goodies, its great shape a tower to the small, the darkness it was cloaked in like night above the bright: that’s the way she wanted it to be.

It would be a cake consumed at some sacrifice, my aunt said, since there’d be not even a crumb left if it were cut in sixths to serve six; there’d be scarcely a smear on the cake plate for others to enjoy. You can lick the pans, my mother said, there’ll be cake pans, saucepans, mixing bowls, stirring spoons, spatulas—lots to slather. Maybe one of the kids will be home from school sick and won’t be able to come, my aunt said with little confidence, knowing her luck. Do you know how to cut a cake into six pieces, my father asked. Anybody knows that, mother said, with unusual certitude. I mean six equal pieces, equal to all those gut-greedy eyes, equal as that. I’ll practice on a piece of paper, my mother replied with unheard-of resourcefulness. That’s what the cook wants when she’s cutting cake—to be watched by greedy eyes, encouraged by hungry tongues, advised.

There would be balloons, it was determined, one for each guest, with a couple as spares in case one or more went pisst; however, the color provoked concern until they settled on mixed; no need for special napkins, that sort of thing, my father said, but my mother pushed for paper tablecloths, straws, hats, and favors all round. My god, he’s just a kid, we don’t have to crown him. My mother claimed everybody at parties had them: hats, straws, favors, paper tablecloths, napkins covered with cute cavorting animals you could wipe mouth-chocolate on. You don’t want him to be ashamed of his own birthday party, do you? Hell, he won’t notice, my father said. You don’t want shame to come to me either, do you? Honest true-to-form parties need favors, she insisted. They need funny buttons. The kids’ mothers will bring their kids to the do and then fetch them again when it’s over, so they will naturally see something of the house, the decorations, and hear from their kids how it went. We can’t help that. It’ll happen. We’ll be judged. I’ll be at work, my father said. You don’t want them to think we’re small. I never had such a party, my aunt said. It’s tacky not to have games with prizes. Games like what, I heard my father ask: like throwing balls through windows? games like Kiss My Ass? or Spin the Bottle? By themselves, boys don’t play Spin the Bottle. They sure play Kiss My Ass. Not at my birthday party, my mother said, with a rare edge to her voice.

That’s how I learned my mother was going to have a birthday party—by accidentally overhearing them arguing in the kitchen while I was sitting on the back steps counting the inches the water would have to rise in order to engulf me and my men, cast here, on this little rocky isle, by a storm so severe that last night while I tried to sleep it had blown down limbs, and the driveway was covered with prematurely graying green leaves.

I kept the secret secret though it was no longer a surprise. For many years I believed in Santa Claus just to let squared-off adults continue to round their customary corners. Why should they think that a cynical kid who, at twelve, had already thrown out God along with the baptismal water; why should they think that such a skeptic would continue to believe in polar elves and flying sleighdeers and a bag-bearing fatso in a funny suit, breaking and entering like a burglar half a billion homes in one eve; why should they imagine I would even receive let alone entertain such a set of silly notions? Well, I suppose they didn’t. I pretended to believe and they pretended to believe me. It is the paradigm of successful human relations.

Okay. That’s the first layer. Now for some pudding.

I shouldn’t have kept the secret secret or planned on pretending to be surprised. By remaining mum, by not derailing the birthday train before it got out of the yard, I had no say about who would be invited—five friends. They’d be boys, because boys at the age boys are called boys haven’t even boy friends, they have pals, or chums—five chums, then. But I hadn’t any real pals. I hated all my friends. They believed in Santa Claus. They wouldn’t let me be the Indian scout or the captain or the chief of police. When the water rose over the last rocks, they would be the first to drown. Already I could see their limbs flailing wildly in the sea’s angry surge. No weeps from me when they went under.

So my father drew up a list I never saw and consequently could not correct: Fat Freddie, for instance, the bully who loved to bump me on the school steps so my books would spill, I’d have cut him off; or little rascal Richie, a squint of a kid whose nose ran out his mouth, and whose sniveling was not only continuous but obnoxiously loud, he’d have been erased; and King George, the snob in fancy pants, who hadn’t invited me to his own birthday shindy, so shit on him; and Larry, who did just what I ordered, always, but never did it well, he wouldn’t have been worth having; certainly not the Squat, either, who was nothing more than a set of gestures, all obscene; however, these were to be my guests, I later—too late, later—learned.

‘Guest’ is a treacherous word. A guest is an ungrateful gobbler. Guests make me feel imperiled like my aunt (whose sweet tooth was huge but never lucky), because they ate the piece you wanted, broke your favorite toy, got bossy and

tried to take over, played with the present they’d brought, if they’d brought one, and were people generally you were obliged to be nice to, even though I never was, because they were that word, ‘guest,’ as terrible a word as the word ‘sister.’ I bet you’d like a little sister, some simperer would pretend to ask, and I would smile and say, No, and I don’t want a pony either.

Now for the central layer, the layer surrounded by goo as I was surrounded on all sides by water while I pondered the loss of my men, foolishly swept away, foolishly inclined to eat their own fingers and drink sea, such sea as they dared to collect in the spray which filled the creases of their clothing, at which they foolishly sucked, although I had sternly warned them. I was in a tight spot.

I don’t know what made my mother want to make a cake and have a party. She hated strangers in the house. She was generally too drunk to attend, not to say give, parties. Of course I didn’t know she was a drunk, then. What’s a drunk? And nobody knew I knew. Anything. My mother knew I didn’t know what, in fact, I knew. I knew that. We felt it worked—religiously not knowing. It became a cult. Of course I didn’t know what an agnostic was. What’s an agnostic? But I seriously didn’t know what made my mother want to make a cake and invite five kids in off the street to eat it. Off the street as far as she was concerned. What did she know about my friends? She refused to believe I didn’t have any. Naturally, her son was popular as a holiday with everybody. So I pretended to have a lot. Of this and that. Funs. Hobbies. Friends. She also decided she knew I wanted a sister, and she explained to me time and time again how her cesarean, the operation which had relieved her of me, had made further children impossible. Your mother is unbearable, my father said, making what he thought was a joke, but meaning it of course, every word, and we all knew it, though we imitated a laugh.

For the life of me, nevertheless, and to this day, I don’t know why she persisted, how she got her way against my father’s better judgment and his allegedly tight wad, or how she got my aunt to help her while keeping my aunt in a subordinate role—not a bit easy—because my aunt always wanted to be Lady Glad Handout herself. She deserved a medal, my aunt did: bribery’s bronze star. Still, my mother did persevere, and did buy paper napkins with cartoon creatures on them, and hats with crimped edges, balloons in mixed colors, though mostly green, straws with Coca-Cola printed along their length, paper plates which looked suspiciously Christmassy, and candles for the cake which were the color of small cigars. In little packs of five. Cigarillos? Por favor. So chocolate was the theme—the whole shebang was to be the color of dung and have the wallop of a stimulating drug.

I don’t know why my mother wanted me to have a party for this particular birthday, either. There was nothing special about it, not like one’s first birthday would be, or those which arrive at standard divisions of time like five or ten, or when you’ve reached eighteen or twenty-one, hit forty or sixty-five. Besides, I’d never had a party of any kind, though, of course, I’d gone to some, even if none I went to were thrown by King George. So shit on him. Maybe she thought I should have a party before I died, or she died, or while she thought she could still make a cake without getting baked herself.

My birthday that year fell on a Friday, and Friday was a school day, so the party would take place just following school, in order to ruin the participants’ dinner. That was okay with me. Since I didn’t know there was to be a party—ha ha—after all, I hadn’t been invited—maybe I’d go somewhere else when school let out, maybe to a sweetshop or a movie, and not show up at the house, and not have to deal with reality. Or be nice to anybody. Or have to say “Thanks a lot.”

I suppose my mother made the cake that afternoon, so it would be as fresh as it could be and still surprise me, even though I could smell it when I walked in, and I could see the paper cones and green balloons driftbouncing about on the floor, the disheveled stack of paper napkins, the orange Halloween horns. I went all the same upstairs with my symbolic load of books as if I’d noticed nothing. My father at the store. My aunt in the hideyhole she called her room, because I could hear her rustling about as soon as I reached the landing. My mother, therefore, in the kitchen. Having a nip. No doubt.

Well, we’ve hit, I think, cake bottom. Because nobody came. That is, none of the guests. My father, home from the store, leaned in at last on his cane, puzzled because there was no noise, no hilarity, no party. Where is everybody? Who is everybody, I asked. Well, Freddie, for one. Freddie! Freddie hits me! Every day! Hit him back, then, what’s the matter with you. Shit on Freddie, I didn’t say. Who else? That George . . . George Cullen kid. That guy, gosh! He never invites me. To anything. He has a party every time he shits, I didn’t say, I did say breathes, and he never invites me. Jeez. Who else? Now my father is angry and defensive, though I don’t know what defensive is, just what angry is. My mother, my aunt, and I pretend not to notice. I forget who else, my father said. We try to do something for you, you give no thanks, no thanks is all we get, you got no friends, I can see why, who would come here anyway, look at this, you call this a party, why are the balloons on the dining room floor? I blew them up myself, my aunt says, tenderly puffing her cheeks as if they ached or were sore from their exertions.

What have you done to the dining room? Where are the chairs? What’s this green crepe? Why the balloons?

I remembered the plates, my mother said, her voice muzzy, but I may have forgotten to mail the invitations. You could have, my aunt says, as if supportive, you could have forgotten. Who are the other guys? the other guys who aren’t coming? The little giggly fellow, I guess, my aunt answers, because no one else volunteers. My mother is watching my father watch her watch him. She has just come out of the kitchen with the cake. She passes a vague hand across her face. I’m sorry, she tries to say. I found the envelopes in a drawer this morning, she confesses. With the forks. I was looking for a knife, she explains. The envelopes were nicely addressed. These plates are pretty for paper, my aunt says, as if supportive. Usually paper isn’t pretty. But these are. Forgot, my father doesn’t thunder because it hurts him now clear down in the bones and sinews of his chest to thunder, so he says it in a tone of total exasperation, as if he were dealing with someone he dare not damage but wishes to destroy. I think so, my mother says, because the envelopes—addressed—were in the drawer. Just the envelopes? Yes. I think so. I don’t remember. My aunt starts to pick up this and that as if the party were over. My mother’s eyes are red from drinking or weeping or maybe stove smoke. Did something spill in the oven, I ask. The kid who dances, my father suddenly says. He was invited. I don’t tell him that the Squat lifts his leg like a pissing dog because he’s pretending to be a pissing dog, right down to the pissing, the pissing stream itself. My aunt pops a balloon. She cries out in pretend pain. So my father begins shooing the balloons out of the house. The balloons are mostly green and roll out into the backyard like large limes. He is quietly cursing his arthritis and the fact that he cannot kill them with his cane. He is quietly cursing his wife and his sad situation in life. He is quietly cursing me, of course. And my no-show friends. I am these balloons he is golfing now into the yard. My mother and my aunt and me. My no-good no-show friends. I bought hats and horns on sale, my mother tried to say, I think she said, her voice faint and distant, desolate as an empty bottle.

Boy. We almost had a good time. But I’m looking at my chocolate cake, which is sitting perilously on an edge of the dining room table. The table has been interleaved to its limit, and over it, at places, paper cloths have been tossed, as blankets are for a picnic. I wonder if she forgot the favors. What favors? The favors you said you were going to get. I’ve hardly finished my sentence when I realize I’ve given the game away. They have to know now I knew the whole time. But no one is paying attention. They don’t want to know anyway. Caring makes you miserable. They’d be happier—possibly less sad? less hurt? no, not a mite less miserable—if the word ‘cake’ had never been baked.

What happened to the cake, I said. The candles were all tipped like short masts on a high sea. The frosting was more than quietly glaciating, it was visibly oozing down the cake’s sides, puddling around its base where all the silver kisses were, elevating some as if they were about to be set afloat and, like a kind of benevolent lava, overtaking and covering others. On the top of my surprise, beneath its outer coating of fudge, I could now see a showing of dark brown cakey skin. Naked cake, I thought. ‘Naked’ was a word I liked at that age. The cake, I said. ‘Cake’ was becoming a favorite. By the minute.

Looking closely I could see granulations. The filling was also easing itself from between the cake’s layers. It was pudding all right. And it wasn’t staying pud. It went its own way, my mother almost wailed. It was supposed to be sticky. Through the door to the kitchen, which swung, I could see nothing but calamity. It feels sticky. It tastes sticky. Why won’t it stick if it’s sticky? A pale blue haze, some sort of baked smoke, still hung like gnats near the ceiling light. In the sink there was a shipwreck of soiled pans. There was something runny and faintly yellow on helter-skelters of the floor. Knives and spoons encased in the dried blood of cake lay about on the counter. The aspirin bottle my mother kept her gin in was standing prominently in the midst of the mess.

Back at the cake, the frosting was falling, no longer merely sliding or seeping off. Its dark divested body looked even darker now, rising like a toy volcano would amid the flow of its molten make-believe rock. The confection was beginning to sag where the filling of pudding had escaped. This emergent bubblier substance was a darker shade of dark, as if there had been different eruptions on different dates, and one wash of the magma, which in my mind made up the center of the earth, was now cooler than the other. Maybe the whole thing would turn into a hill of glass. The silver foil gleamed wickedly now, as if the little candy cones were the domes and tips and crowns of covered towns.

All my men had shortly before been drowned, accidentally carried off on message day, the day I had inadvertently learned I was to celebrate my birth by means of a chocolate cake covered with chocolate frosting and lit with chocolate-colored candles, and surrounded, at its ample base, with an applauding crowd of kisses. Some kids have it all. Others are swept away into an indifferent sea.

I wondered how my mother had managed to talk herself into this ill-fated project, for any plans made her nervous, which was an excuse to drink; outsiders, strangers, guests, set her off into alcohol like a gambler cast away among casinos; and complex problems, requiring several steps and the satisfaction of many simultaneous demands, would frazz her so she would be spooning or forking or sewing or cleaning, while swigging during every pause between them, like punctuation: stir nip, wipe nip, thread nip, chop nip, whip nip, nip nip.

Why, when my mother found the envelopes in the utensil drawer, and knew, then, that she had forgotten to mail the invitations, let alone collect regrets, did she go ahead and bake such an ambitious cake, the recipe for which would make even an accomplished cook a little nervous; even if her anxieties might have been relieved by knowing no one was coming; although she would have to expect her husband’s exasperation, and believe in my disappointment at not being surprised? Go figure. Maybe she felt from the first she had to do the right thing by me, and throw a party for my birthday, and make me a cake as it was customary for mothers to do, and carry on, in spite of every obstacle, perhaps with the help of a swallow or two of gin, which may have enabled her to forget the invitations in the first place, but forget, when she remembered she’d forgot, that she’d forgotten. Go figure.

Gin didn’t make her feel good; it often made her sick; but at least the gin didn’t cause her to Feel sorry for the things she should have felt sorry for. Tears of frustration had surely been shed. There was my father’s fury once more to contend with, and she must have felt silly about the invitations and her quite complete failure as a baker. But I think she’d drunk enough not to feel sad on my account, or guilty again about being an alcoholic mom, numb in that regard, and able to wait in a chair like a pile of discarded clothes for my aunt and me to clean the kitchen (my aunt trying to lick a spoon or two with her usual lack of luck), aslump in a chair, watching as well as she was able to watch, through the haze of her unhappiness, the birthday cake become birthday lake—and were those white shining swimming somethings the necks of swans?

Well, everything works out for the best, I would later learn Dr. Pangloss often says. Anyway, what works out is not always the worst. I had been saved. I had been picked from my rock by a helicop. The friends I hadn’t wanted to be invited weren’t invited; and even though the cake slithered and melted and sagged itself into a bog of chocolate the size of a small swamp, and we ate on paper plates for a week, and used napkins the color of grass for quite a spell, the party hadn’t failed because it hadn’t been held, and nobody had been embarrassed or made to feel ashamed of themselves in front of strangers (we were beyond that with one another); only my father passed through a period of painful shrugs, not too bad, considering; and, after all, none of those elaborate calories had been consumed either; my aunt saved quite a few pieces of idled paper, hats, and horns—who knew what uses they might someday serve? The favors never showed up.

In short, I had been spared. Helicopped. Normally, my nightmares were made of might have beens: those ubiquitous, ugly, and tormenting “what ifs.” What if you gave a party and . . . ? So I had suffered a stroke of grand good luck: one of those sadistic “what ifs” had been realized, but to my benefit. What a gift! Such a favor from fortune would not be bestowed soon again. Future birthdays could count upon being blown and blighted. Guests might arrive, but only to view the ruins. Or dinner might be perfectly prepared and perfectly served to faddists who ate only Japanese noodles. My balloon had burst, yes, but in nobody’s face, so I should not try or tempt fate and expect to escape every oncoming commemoration as easily. Instead, I should spend life standing still, and exhale slowly only out a window in a wind. Then nothing might inflate. Nothing break.

Speaking of balloons, they rolled languidly about the yard until punctured by the spines of acorns and other normally innocuous little sharps. Most died in soft blats or slow fizzes rather than in bursts. The balloons had never been bigly blown. My mother had put her cake straight onto its tarnished silver tray without employing a paper doily, and that’s where we are wading around now, hip deep in snake swamp, most of my men bitten through their boots by serpents who—I do say who—are silent and swift as wavelets. How many have I lost? I’d say forty: fourteen Freddies, seven subjects of King George, two Richies, eleven Larrys, and six Squats. Lost not without remainder. There, lying on the tawny surface of the quicksand, are the felt fragments of their hats—gray-green, leaf-green, and balloon-green----each hiding a grisly secret, a head still held upright underneath the foamy scum. Later I would read of burial practices like these: prisoners, politicians, peasants, sunk like posts into the ground.

Maybe the party was intended to remember my mother’s past, and not to count the slender years of mine, to recall those days when she wasn’t in one, when she was sort of what she wished for me—hopeful, trusting, sweet—in a dress made of nine or seven skirts, and whirled in a happy spiral by her father through a blue blue movie sky, he crying Happy birthday, Margaret, I’ve brought you a pony from the fair. Because it is possible that those good old days she claims in her cups to remember were really good old days indeed. No. I cannot believe it. Only in books. In books I no longer read. My lies lie on my past like a haze, and romanticize the landscape. In the present, the past is always picturesque. And were there good old days—if there had been—then their loss would be unendurable. Had Margaret had a pony, as she always falsely claimed, she would have been thrown from its back and maimed. Even in those books I no longer read, she would have sadly lost her seat. If we hadn’t been expelled, Paradise would soon have felt like a small dull town and we’d have caught the first train. I know better than to pine, for I am a student of history, which is, after all, a chronicle of missed opportunities, invitations unsent though nicely signed, plans gone awry, cakes half baked.

I remember, after the kitchen had been cleaned and my mother sent to bed, I buried the cake in a paper bag, though not before I had picked out the candles from the goo where they had fallen to rinse them off under a lukewarm tap; and the Hershey’s kisses too, still in their foil and flag and armor, which I did arrange in ranks as I washed them, marveling at their resilience, because they had come through it all with nothing which could be called a scratch, whistle bright and happily silver, tents on a blot-dry plain, there, where an army camped, in disciplined ranks, in just, even royal, repose—indifferent, unenjoyed, invincible.

Blood on the Living Room Rug

Menopause, for my mother, did not signify a cessation of flow; for if, by “flow,” one meant the ongoing passages and rhythms and changes of life, then hers had puddled long ago, was at best marshy, at worst wholly stagnant, a life

whose simplest and most requisite routines were increasingly impossible to maintain, like finding hay for your elephant in Santa Fe; whereas, if one put one’s emphasis upon cessation, that wouldn’t be appropriate either, for my mother’s monthlies now were day to day; she had a permanent pad on, though I don’t wish to suggest that she was often able to change a sodden napkin for a fresh one, or that she even cared, since she apparently didn’t, just dripped willy-nilly, wherever she was, which was either in bed, on the davenport, or possibly in the breakfast nook where she played solitaire or worked her crossword puzzles.

As far as I was concerned, the chief change occurred at the unspecifiable moment when I ceased to call my mother by her many Margaret names and began calling her mother, as if I knew she deserved the respect and distance of the dead; as if I knew she was my mother because the fact had been attested to by several certificates; because Peg, Meg, Marg, and so on, suggested an intimacy no longer possible; because, though I certainly lived in the same house with her, and on what could be called “intimate terms,” only a nearby life, not a close one, was possible. I had become a walled enclave in a slum and I went out only when I felt certain I could not be seen, and kept away from windows, and each day made my ramparts a little higher, my vigilance more vigorous.

Apparently her “flow” would be dry for a while, and then suddenly go poom like an arroyo, releasing frightening amounts all at once, in varying degrees of freshness and ranges of color, as if her bleeding had been going on somewhere without her help, in an inside far away, among a distant range of hills. How much her irregularity was the result of her drinking, and how much was due to a disordered but sober nature, it was difficult to know, although there was no obvious effort to find out, either. My father would simply tell her she should see a doctor, and fall back in bed himself, unable to slide easily away from the puddle she’d made on her side of the sheets; my aunt would nag Peg about it every a.m., but the nag was more like the noise of a chirpy bird who has come to the feeder every morning for months, at first anticipated, then ignored, so that only the absence of tweet and flutter would have registered; while I pretended to be innocently ignorant of all things female, including what it meant to have a cunt, in order to hear no complaint, see no problem, and speak no sympathy, supposing secretly that it was the consequence of every woman’s life of sin, of drinking too much, with daytime on your hands in an empty house, because sooner or later there’s nothing to mind, nothing to mend, nothing to mum, only dishes and dinner to do, solitaire to play, crosswords to solve, the radio to sit by and the wall to watch, all the while curiously breasted, crotched, wombed, and cursed, of course, with the curse of the unclean—cursed by God Himself, I’d heard the radio, Sundays, say, in another one of God’s petulant moments, I supposed, since, for an omnipotent deity, He clearly had trouble getting His way—which was seeing to the transmission of a single sin through generation after generation, and consequently to centuries of retribution. And people complained of the Nazis? if we did as God does, we would do just what we do do: we live, we judge, we plan badly—consequently one day we also bleed upon the rug.

So nothing was done until, I suppose, it became pointless to try, when it was no longer possible to ignore, when she would vanish into a fantasy too extreme to tolerate, or when she would hemorrhage and collapse on the carpet, and I would come home from school and find her there, bathrobe hanging open like an unhinged gate, flannel dark and sopping, hair unpinned, her face folded against the floor like a discarded hankie, and call for an ambulance which would take her away once more to an anonymous ward where they would cauterize her sex down there deeper than a dick goes, I was told, before sending her on to the asylum to have her brains betrayed, the cells shaken up and shocked, rerolled like dice thrown out of a cup into never a winning number.

The doctors diagnosed her then as in deep depression, a slough of despond, so to speak, like a sea her hormones had slid her into; a melancholy hastened and helped along by her possible dismay at growing old, at the loss of romance from her life, my increasing independence, her husband’s progressively crippled condition, and so on; factors, they felt, they had seen before, since her case certainly wasn’t unique or even unusual, though not so common as the cold, still frequent enough as to cause little interest, and whose treatment could be spelled out in diagnostic books along with its description—mal de mom, the housewife’s hysteria—but I heard little beyond the phrases which secured the status of the medical profession to the wall of greatest resistance; they had a license not to listen. Mostly I remember the tap tap tap of one physician’s pencil against the pages of his appointment book—tap tap tap, while he talked, telling me how grown up I was tap to take this commitment tap tap upon myself tap acting tap as it were tap tap for my father tap in our sordid family business tap tap the business of getting rid of mother tap tap tap by entrusting her tap to the tap tap State and the tap tap therapy of tap tap shock since we couldn’t afford tap anything tap tap better, you tap betcha, you tap tap bastard, you tap tap doc.

I signed things though I couldn’t buy a beer. I attested to the squiggle that was my father’s scrawl, and did her in in duplicate and then accompanied her in a cab to the hospital as if she were going just for a test or two, an office visit, sitting in the backseat with her fist in her mouth so as not to throw up, and beseeching me silently the entire trip to assure her everything would be all right, she wouldn’t be left alone (although loneliness was what was wrong with her, we all thought), begging not to be cast adrift, not to be abandoned for long; whereupon I stood before the elevator which had a folding fence for a door, to place a last kiss on her forehead like the kiss of Judas; it should have bled, burned her, scarred, and maybe it did, the kiss I put on her powdered forehead like a print; muttering that it . . . it—what?—it . . . would all be all right—it . . . sure soon not long only a mo just a min no time at all but a bit I said as she slid up out of sight toward her DTs and her sober fits and the jimjams and jars they would give her brains like frying beans and the, in effect, crazed corner of the loony bin which would catch her, jail she would die in, a prisoner of tip tap, recipient of top tup, victim of the zzizz zapp.

I learned not to think about it. I learned to forget even the little dents her dirt-dark red nails made in my fingers where she clutched them while we traveled to the hospital in the cab, bag in the back, a bag too big to bring for a simple one-nightie, for a dinky round of medicinal drinks, blood lets, and hot spa merry ha-has. I nearly gave the game away, as I was always doing, by forgetting to bring her suitcase in, as if I knew she’d never need it again, as if she’d live for as long as she’d live in a little tie-sided white tent, not actually so different from her bathrobes, crookedly buttoned when they still had buttons, occasionally pinned, and which had the bad habit of flapping open, exposing her discombobulated body, which nevertheless must have done the trick, hey hey, it must have got the breadman to go for it, to try for the hole-she-bang, as Culp writes the words, straight from his fucktruck, carrying cake in a wire rack, raunchy as a French loaf and that soon stiff, a fucktruck sidepaneled with, appropriately, a decal of rompy rabbits.

She knew; she knew; deep down, she knew without catching on, without that moment of actual ah ha (four letters, exclamation of surprise), because she’d always been carried in on a stretcher before, and scooted to an examination alcove on a gurney; she had always been taken to the city, too, damn near down the street, yet here she was this time, dressed as she would be for her coffin, with a purse hung over one arm, her white hair in a white hairnet, holding my hand with the tight pinch of those of her fingers which weren’t squinched in her mouth to cork its contents; clutching me, hoping to hang on to my heart as if it could keep her afloat (my heart, which was studying how to turn to stone); clutching me the entire, seemingly endless though only hourlong, up hill and dell down, gently curving, riverside drive to the State Institution, a place past anything you would call “just out of town,” its windows, beyond reach and remedy, steel screened, its doors chained, even its care made of glazed brick, leached of color to match my mother’s blood-drained face. Because she was going to be “committed.”

My father was too weak just then to get out of bed, too tortured to walk, too pained to pretend this was only a little visit. There was no way he could even get to the car, let alone ride any distance in it while whistling and humming as if he were merely accompanying his wife to her preliminary poke in the gizzard, singing not to worry, Peg, not to fear, in a soft alto. No. He was out of the question. My aunt, when asked, simply burst into snivels, without troubling to run through the repertoire of her peculiar yet practiced passivities, despite the fact that she possessed all the cowers of an accomplished cur, merely whimpering in her highest register and by this means alone demonstrating her unfitness for any but the most elementary and emotionally neutral tasks. So I was defaulted into the duty, though I threw my own tantrum, a doomed and futile gesture, because there was nary a friend, by this time, to call on, nor a relative nearby whose help might be enlisted, hence I had to be the goat—Benedict Iscariot, the duplicitous double agent. The feeling became useful later when I tried to understand the ambivalent emotions of those who fingered friends to punitive authorities and gave up loved ones to their fate.

Perhaps the precipitating absurdity had occurred a few months earlier. My father had been wasting away for some time. I must admit that the attention given him, the care for his condition, was far from adequate. My aunt made broths, and I spooned them. My mother stood by in a daze and spoke irrelevantly of earlier times as if they were historical ages so notable they deserved names and numbers like national holidays. I don’t believe the broths had much that was consonantal to them, and you cannot live on `awe’ alone, even if it’s encased in ‘brawn,’ not for long, at any rate; meanwhile my father’s tortured bones were beginning to poke out of his body at alarming angles.

I decided he had to receive decent treatment so he could somehow regain his strength, though for what worthwhile task it was hard to envision. I knew my aunt would continue to make soup out of something not yet water, so I created a condition of calm in myself and made the call: come and get him; because once they had him, I felt, they would have to do something for this Belsenated body; they would have to hover, holding white robes over their normal indifference; they would at least sedate him, though it hurt most when he tried to move and right now he was too weak and too emaciated to succeed, except it still seemed to pain him when he lay there willing what would not lift to lift anyway, lying on his bedsores not so successfully as a fakir, and making a map of his little local hell by means of the skeletal configuration of his arthritic aches, staring through the ceiling at the what above? not attic dust, not stars, not sky, I supposed, but buzzards, other soaring birds, dying in a movie desert, his eyes larger than before because they saw now, for a skull.

My mother, that day, had slipped into her funk before noon, and had fallen into a low snooze upon the sofa in the living room. I thought this was fortunate, because asleep she was at least out of action and would not ask uncomprehending questions of the stretcher men when they came, or try to prevent them from taking her husband away, nor would I, then, be called upon to calm her, to describe with excruciating clarity what she drank to keep from confronting, or be required to comfort a creature it gave me the creeps to embrace.

I learned not to think about it. practiced being out of sight of my mind. When catastrophe came to call, I would not be in. I read bad books and busied myself with masturbation. I kept to my room, stayed after school, spent time at the homes of friends, went to movies, dreamed about how, at the back of my closet, beneath the curtain of hanging clothes, there was a secret sliding panel and a freefall of Escher-style stairways, winged, I remember, as if they were on loan from Disney . . . goodbye all, goodbye, goodbye.

My mother was snoring softly, good, my aunt was at work, good, the guys had better get here quick, good and quick. I remember frantically begging the fates for such a favor. The ambulance passed the house, wasn’t it stopping? but it wasn’t the ambulance, I learned, when I went to the window to look out, but the rabbit man’s bread-filled hearse. A stocky sort of guy, his face set in the shape of bewilderment’s features, a sap; so keep going, go on past, goodbye, whereupon, answering both prayers, the ambulance turned in, hushed its engine as if its drivers were in no hurry, and soon, sure enough, they very deliberately descended from the van to fetch their long rolled-up sticks from its—I didn’t wait till they bonged the bell; I didn’t want my mother to wake; I let them in ahead of their arrival; in a conspiratorial whisper, I began to describe the condition, character, and location of their patient; then the telephone rang, and I ran to the kitchen to wring its noisy neck.

It was the hospital. Had the ambulance arrived? I would have to come in to make the arrangements. What physician did I want called? How did I know whom to want? didn’t dad have a dozen doctors—to hear him—all bad? He’s been a patient before, I said. So has my mother. Really? Name. I said Kohler again, and explained. But the men were there? Yes. Would I have the one with the sandy mustache call in? could he use this phone? after he’d certified his load. Certified his load? Did I have a physician I wanted called, that was customary, of course they could simply appoint one, but in that case, it would be catch as catch can, all the staff doctors were delightful of course, Dr. Tush was on duty right now, I should make up my mind and let her talk to Fred, the fellow with the sand on his face, Fred the driver of the ambulance, Fred her friend.

I went into the living room to find Fred, the friend, and found the boys bearing my mother out the door. Not the one down here, I shouted with some exasperation, the one up there, I said, pointing at the ceiling which concealed the room above, where my father lay like a corpse ready for its ritual washing. My shout bestirred mother and, as they were gently lowering the sling, she lurched awake and fell off the stretcher onto the floor. Her nose began immediately bleeding. She wants you, Fred. On the phone. The phone’s for you. The phone? Fred said, Gee me? and he stepped over mother in order to get going. She’s on the phone now? gee.

My mother on her hands and knees watched her nose bleed on the carpet. If not her, who? the other guy asked a little crossly. Like I said, I said, upstairs, in the first bed. Mr. Kohler? who called? My dad. Dead? he wondered. No, I said. Just practicing. I had to help my mother to unsteady feet, and then search for something to staunch her nose. Got a hankie anywhere handy in that ambulance, I asked, just to make conversation. Friend Fred, I found out when I went into the kitchen looking for a rag to wrap around an ice cube, was talking to his girlfriend, Jill, because he called her sweetie and said Jill a Jillion times, well Jill, yes Jill, sorry Jill, soon Jill, we’ll do that Jill, we will Jill, when Jill? well, right away Jill, say Jill, are you crying? gee Jill, we will Jill, don’t sweetie, wait sweetie, I got to go sweetie, this guy says he needs to use the phone, okay? hey Jill, don’t Jill, no Jill, okay sweetie, pie pie, goodbye. I could have killed him and been knighted for it.

I did my best to disremember. He’s light. He don’t bother to weigh much. Down the narrow stairs they bore him just like a body, briefly pausing at the landing to shift hands, keeping him nearly level as they descended by raising one pair of arms while lowering the other set; I was sort of impressed. My mother sat insecurely on a hassock holding her nose into a dust rag where I’d wrapped a couple of ice cubes, not, of course, at the edge of one nostril in the strategic place I’d told her to put it, having seen kids get kicked playing football, and so on, but managing to mash her face so she couldn’t see him strapped on the canvas like a real member of the deceased, bobrocking slowly down and out the door into a day which had become gray and into a van which was Red Cross—red and sanitation-white with business-blue trim, okay, sign this, so you’ll follow us in, eh? I don’t drive, I said. My mother doesn’t drive. I can see that, Fred said. My aunt isn’t here, I hope, she doesn’t drive either. Oh. My dad does the driving, I said brightly. Yeah. I mean he used to do the driving even though he could no longer steer. Yeah? swell, well, you follow us in anyway, they’ll want you at the hospital, somebody needs to take responsibility, and decide and sign and so on. Is that what Jill wants? I yelled after the dwindling taillights. Is it Jill’s will? is that it?

In the living room, my mother was back on her hands and knees trying to wipe up the spilled blood or stay its staining with a corner of rag and a residue of cube. I can’t remember whether cold sets it or unsets it, she said. Everything sets it, I said. You don’t know noodles about such things, Billy, stains and the like, blood and such, she said, with a mildness both alert and correct. It certainly surprised me. Blood won’t wash, either off or out, I’ve read, I said. You were always such a great reader, my mother said; I remember how you would read all day on the porch swing, and then come in and read all day in that chair— Not now Peg, Marg, Margaret, mommy, mother. You would, though; we were so proud, your father and I, watching you sit there, whole hours, nose in a book, fingering your hair, learning about life. I guess I’ve got to go to the hospital to sign dad in. I’ll need to call a taxi for that. Do we have any cash in the house? No . . . No cash. No. Nothing. My mother began to sway from side to side. Not a bit. He won’t let me have a cent. Not even for food. I have to beg. I have to cry just to get cream for our coffee.

I knew the subject of money was a tender one—one, if you knew better, you never touched, sore spot, sure to produce complaints—because my mother hid, in addition to her bottles, money to buy them. And always pretended to be tapped out, desperately in want, strapped like a badly latched trunk, poor as the proverbial church mouse. She squirreled away bills in the damnedest places. Once I found a stash of folding fed in a box designed for playing cards. But she rarely went out anymore, even to the stores or to the bank, and needed her hoard. The breadman was her supplier now. She gave the bastard a carton of cigarettes for Christmas. Well, he fetched her gin in for her, under loaves of mattress dough, and came off in her, too, I don’t doubt—god—what a doubtful payment.

Gin, the cheapest kind, pretending to be London dry, was then distributed among smaller bottles, containers she believed were innocuous and could sit around the house like old friends, unnoticed, permitted, like aspirin bottles and peanut butter jars and mustard pots, even though gin didn’t come in paste or tablet form, and didn’t resemble—at least, to me—a bread spread.

She gave the fucker a carton of Luckies. That is, she gave me a package wrapped in wreaths and candles to give to him, he wrapped in Bunny blue overalls when his dickie doodad wasn’t hanging out, I guess, his name in white stitch just above the pocket—I looked, it wasn’t Randy—and the question was whether to cut off her supply and let her suffer until she’d found another source, or let the cake company’s visiting cock continue to plug her, so he smiled a smile as tentative, when he saw my look, as a squirrel’s gesture toward a peanut in someone’s proffering hand, and put the carton away with soft and cautious thanks under the loaves of squeezy sandwich bread and goo-slathered Christmas rolls in a spot now empty because he’d already sneaked the gin in in it; since the question was what to do about an addiction (an addiction my father never understood but I knew was necessary), an addiction she needed, not to survive, but to endure survival, since even the curtains in that house hung over every hope the heart had like a scrim of decorated dust, and the days drew the slowest of painful lines, for instance, when my father still went to work in the morning, rising like Lazarus, though from a night’s life more pitiful than death, stiff in every joint which then had to be released from its rust and moved against its will, while forgoing any easing oil, grimly into underclothing, feet with their painful pullovers, legs into a pair of wide-mouthed trousers soon to be suspended from his frail bent shoulders like a horse’s harness, arms through the sleeves of a plaid shirt made of soft cloth, the whole works covered with suit coat, clothes from an uncrippled time, now never a match; and then, aspirined up, to totter to the head of the stairs where he’d commence his hitchhope and helpstep descent, with frequent rests, and a groan at every riser, a sigh for every tread, the pain rising from his foot’s fall in a shiver to his head, horrible to watch, which was only the beginning, my god, why not a little nip to numb the blows of each brutal day? so the question was whether to throw the fornicator out of the house hurling his Lucky Strikes after him and take away—for a time—her sogdate drunkrape life, or leave her alone to die in her own way, except that her own way proved increasingly unendurable, her mind drifted off course like a floe of ice, she could no longer assist my father down the stairs, someone had to help her, and I would get dad down, and then, miraculously, mum, because she would often pull away suddenly to fall in an unwadding ball like laundry, as if bits of her were landing everywhere, silently, half unconscious when she hitslid the steps.

I got to hate those stairs, and I campaigned to redo the dining alcove so it could serve as my father’s sickroom—we always ate in the breakfast nook anyway—an alteration which finally came to pass when he became almost wholly bedridden and couldn’t make it to our single bathroom any longer, even from his bed nearby, so why not relieve himself in a pot behind—say—a modest folding screen and thereby save himself the pain, the bother, the time of the climb, and so on; and save me, too, jesus, because then I’d merely have to land mom and not the whole family plane; although it was also true that my father’s only therapy was his stubborn insistence on going up and down and out and on, so that by the end of a day at work his joints moved when he told them to again, even if, as he said, they didn’t do dance.

They didn’t do screw, either. Once in a while, I’d bring myself to wonder whether my mother wasn’t simply suffering from a serious loss of love. Perhaps she’d been passionate and needful and now was, in effect, in mourning for deeds of darkness which were no longer ever done; but that was before I found myself in the same situation. Now I do what I always did: eat and grow angry at the least thing, call down curses on this or that head, devour a lot of soft cheese, retire to my study, dig into other people’s pasts, write scurrilous verse, conceive worse. I never imagined that the breadman’s amorous pawing could give her any lasting satisfaction. Maybe, for men, a spasm is a spasm, however it is brought to pass, but women make love, I’ve learned, with their longings, their fantasies, as well as their insecurity, and require, if they are to come, dream homes, comfortable bank accounts, and lots of caressing—the kiss of the green as well as the lick of the tongue.

My mother needed money so she could wet her whistle. She wouldn’t spend her grocery allowance on groceries. Hence the broths. I lived like a college student on peanut butter, Kool-Aid, chips, and candy. My aunt brought the candy home—a habit of buying affection which was a hangover from my baby days. Consequently, there wasn’t much to sustain my father’s body, even though it had only its interior business to do: breathing, beating, hurting. My mother didn’t eat either. Pale and powdered, she looked like a bunch of unseparated dinner rolls, but her poor soft being was all bloat and water. She had two expressions—a dreaminess marked by distant petulance, and a wary one which would flip into actual alarm—each always chapped-lipped, wet-eyed, faintly snot-nosed. Her thoughts bobbed back and forth on the wake of her motherly past, as she relived made-up days—or just lies, according to my dad—when she imagined she cooked and partied, or when, as a girl, she wowed them at dances or, with her wisdom, saved many a maiden from making a mistake—mistakes which came, it seemed, in only one kind.

Maybe that explained the breadstud’s attraction; maybe he loved those flour-dusty Parker House dinner rolls.

At first, my father tried reasoning. He explained at length the dangers of drink. He had stopped drinking himself. (And look how healthy and happy he was, I didn’t dare exclaim.) He had cousins who drank, so he knew; Peg had brothers who hit the sauce and the skids at the same time, so she should know too; worms became petrified in alcohol, hadn’t she heard? the cells of the brain went blank as bulbs; boy, was liquor expensive; she shouldn’t hide her inadequacies behind it, besides it had turned her into a sneak and a liar, she was altering her past in a crazy and shameless fashion, snoozing half the day; what about keeping house? she just sat around and did puzzles, what good, what fun, was that? letting herself go like the end of a rope; what was she so sad and sorry for? there was an entire world to worry about, everybody down on their luck (ten letters, down or across), yet he provided despite the difficult times, didn’t he? no one in the family was in want; she’d better lay off the stuff or he’d kick her out; what example did she conceive she was setting for her son? they had no social life, didn’t she ever want to get out, see friends, take a trip? but the last trip we’d taken, and it would be the last trip, had included crossing a dry strip of Canada, where Peg felt a foreigner, she said, without familiar sights to reassure her, and she’d come down with the shakes during the late afternoon, just about the time we normally started looking for a motel, and I had noticed she’d been nervous the entire day, especially after we had gone over the border, growing worse and worse as we drove more deeply into the country, until she began in fear and need, I didn’t know which, to shiver, and try to still a trembling hand with a trembling hand. At that point, I became really alarmed, and argued with my father who insisted on finding, first, a place to stay, which we finally did—thank god, that trip, we didn’t have to deal with my aunt, who’d had enough of our family journeys and wouldn’t travel with us anymore, and had to have her own room, which made finding accommodations all the harder—in a but behind a filling station—a shack, that’s all you could call it—and I was sent out, having rolled my mother in blankets, to find some “medicine for mom,” though I couldn’t buy it even if I could find it, shit, I was too young, and then, after an hour of walking up and down the streets of a strange small town, and returning, defeated, to—who knew?—what sort of situation (I cursed the god I had no care for, but god damn him anyhow, damn him to . . . what about a rest home in his own hell? red-hot rocking chairs on a cloud of steam), when—it was a miracle—I went into the garage where a mechanic was listening to himself gun an engine awheeze with pneumonia, and there I saw half a bottle of scotch on top of a green steel tool cabinet—god, my god, god is good—I looked at that bottle as if I were a drunk myself, and, near tears, persuaded the guy to part with it ‘cause my dad would beat me if I didn’t come back to the—the cabin—with something for him to drink, even though he knew this was a dry town and I was underage, so the mechanic sold it to me between zoom-a-cough-zooms for most of my dough, and for a minute I felt almost jolly, what a dunce, forgetting—out of money—for a minute, for mother, what life was, what a dunce, because, back at the—the cabin—things weren’t rosy, my mother was screaming in sort of a falsetto, and jerking about (how many letters? well, remember how the frog’s leg twitched to our surprise during those experimental days back in zoology? so six if Across, seven if Down), my father looking on and listening to her in a frantic fearful fury, he couldn’t hold her Down, his hands were the shape of crabs, they could hook to a steering wheel, that’s about all, and the place was so scummy, I had a cold cot in a corner, the bedding was damp, buggy I bet, I really felt sick, and now I started, holding the half-filled bottle out in front of me, to cry from relief, in despair, what a jerk, and my mother stopped, not at the sight of the scotch but at the sound of me, and somehow stilled herself for a second, while I held the bottle for her to swig from, shit, how it leaked over her chin, but she swallowed and swallowed, and shook again, and then swallowed some more, I didn’t think it was going to work, it wasn’t working, too much was spilling, she was shaking again like the chill side of a fever, maybe not so violently, I held on, held the bottle, tipping it, her hands now up around it, around mine, in a sort of pose of prayer, while the level of scotch dropped, there wasn’t going to be enough, and mother’s eyes grew glassy, as if her teary gaze were freezing, and she shuddered some instead of shivering some, and slowly slowed, while I held her hard, harder than the bottle, empty ultimately, she, Peg, Marg, Margaret, mommy, mother, she asleep and snoring.

Cold-cocked by the scotch.

After that we thought of the gin as mother’s medicine.

Not mother’s nemesis. Water of her life. What she couldn’t do without.

Despite my family training in forgetting, it all came back—those terrible memories did—when she grabbed my hand so desperately while we taxied to the—well, what shall I call it?—to the hospital, asylum, snake pit, nut house, loony bin. Taxied. Jeez. To take a taxi to your death. Just around the next corner, driver, you can’t miss it. It’ll have a porte cochere in front like something fancy, a hotel. And someone like a porter will greet us when we arrive—isn’t that the myth? Hey, if dead, she can say she stiffed the driver. So, little funny guy, who’s going to pay the meter? You, kid? you? Me. Me Me.

Her hand clasped mine, mine grasped for dear life that goddamn bottle; its green glass held the sloping whiskey; the whiskey, in its turn, clung to its alcohol as only a chemical can; the alcohol, okay, hung on to its effect, which, in the long run, was the habit which gripped my mother, and made her shiver for it, and seize me, so that, like spent swimmers, we all went under, we all drowned, went woody like that intoxicated worm the teacher of temperance held up for the class to gasp at—actually she dipped worm after worm in the clear water-looking liquid, so we could each snap one in half like a dry twig—and experience for ourselves the consequences of a drunken wormy snap-in-half life.

I knew, in that hospital, my mother would shake and scream. All right. Perhaps she would only moan. I tried to tell myself it would be for the best if both of my parents were put away. My aunt was yet another fruitcake. The two of us together could not take care of an unopened can of corn. It would be best this way, it would be, and oh, indeed, it was: the house was quiet; empty for most of the day, it stored up silence, and spent it in the evening when I would lie like a length of silk ribbon in the crack of a book, and read the way the famished eat, almost wildly for a while, and then slowly as though the words made up my cud. It was accomplished; they were gone for their good and I was glad; the house was quiet; there was a calm to its objects which involved more than their sitting in their customary situations—which is nearly all they did anyway—because they had to feel their release from the accidents of ill or drunken ownership deep in their braces, slats, and naps, as if the dust they continued to collect was no longer the dust of indifference or of slovenliness, it was silence’s sand, and so was suitable to the quiet light which fell now through afternoon windows, and the hush which hung like another drape where their stuff stood as a sentry stands in watchful place: like my father’s things racked in the hall closet, his gangsterish felt hat, his pot, too, stored his trays, and cane, and chair pushed into a corner, waiting for the day of his death whence their removal, dispersal, and sale; since, when the sounds of such a sad life went, when the pain, the acrimony, which contrasted with this claim, departed, they didn’t go away for a week’s vacation, a trip taken for their health; they were sounds doomed, nevermore to be made, as the poet says no more piss hiss in the pot, or the carpeted tap of my father’s cane, his soft groans, I always thought, like rotting fruit, and the small sniffs and elongated sighs my mother emitted like something on low heat, or the radio tuned to Jack Benny or the voice of my father talking back to the news, the special rattle, I remember, of his paper, as he wrestled to refold its pages, the snip of coming on in the dusk, water running in the kitchen sink, the scuff of my mother’s slippers over the linoleum which told me if she was well enough to fix dinner, the click of the cards she played, and the sound of their shuffle when we die what we do dies; good or ill, both lose their patron; when we leave our house, our place of life, however sordid, what we did there leaves, and the rooms we occupied—insulted, misused—breathe, as though in and out a different lung, another atmosphere; yes, I had forgotten that fact, that we then—ma and pa, father, mother, me—when we die what we do dies. What a loss! what a never matter! what a mercy!

I would have to visit her in her hospital. I would have to visit him in his. I was only fifteen, god damn it, why did I have to visit him in his hospital, her in hers. Oh horrible, I knew, hers would be, the bonkers in their barnyard. But first I would work one of her crossword puzzles. There the book was, cracked flat in a scatter of crumbs, idle on the breakfast table, pencil nub resting in it, ready to do a definition: Lascivious look. I always thought these word games went backward. How much more interesting it would be if 11 Down were: Leer, fourteen letters. And I hated—it was unfair-21 Across: Running, comb. form, five. That wasn’t a word. Combining forms weren’t words. ‘Aero-’ wasn’t a word. Nor was ‘woe,’ taken out of ‘won,’ one. Or the deliberately mean defs like 47 Across: Ymir’s Audhumia, three letters, no doubt each queer. Or the familiar friends, the same old hats, the Essenes, for instance, as the answer for 14  Down: Ancient ascetics. On the other and, fame would be finding yourself asked for: Nobelist for peace, 1934; Long-distance runner, two words: Drunken Irish poet; Another name for traitor, eleven letters, aha, don’t need hint or help, I have it: Billy Kohler.

I had to taxi. I’ve hated taxis my whole life. I sit there fearing I’ve not got enough for the fare; that I’ll be overcharged, dropped in the wrong place, won’t know what to tip; that I’m weak or I’d walk, inept or impoverished or I’d drive myself; I know I’ll be forced to talk baseball or sometimes even politics, always the weather, and where are you from? son? Embarrassed, too, about my destination, ashamed of my home’s address, will it be found? Will the car arrive when it should? will it go where it’s been told? Like telegrams they mean sorrow, sickness, or death. I know because that’s what I think when I see them, roof-lighted like cops, draw up at anyone else’s house. Only the ambulance is worse. Or the Bunny Bread Truck . . . with Bunnies Abounding.

I think when I first saw my mother working those puzzles, I thought the words had to be connected at a level deeper than their spelling: I believed there had to be some message which wrestling with those clues unlocked—a maxim of conduct, a forecast of the future, a friendly warning—otherwise why would anyone bother with 31 Down, Treatises on animals, or 31 Across, either, Dandy’s partner. The satisfaction of simply figuring out something essentially silly (knowing what 6 Down, Grounded at Oxford, meant), this pleasure permanently escaped me; but my mother, who could no longer give to words any consecutive sense, put hours of concentrated study into the meaning of these, for her, mostly unfunctional, signs (what do you call—in six letters—a native Hawaiian?), because they occupied her mind with innocent and disconnected ideas—so I supposed—though when I am obsessed, everything speaks to me of my idée fixe: how about 22 Across, Heart of the matter? Then 24, Has the willies? and 27, next, it’s one of those fill-in-what’s-blank, ____ compos mentis?

Non. Okay. ‘Non’ is right. Three square boxes. For N O N. Three bees in the letter hive. I waited in a little room with a great big table in it surrounded by chairs, so there was scarcely space to squeeze by. I had to decide where to sit (was there a significance in that?), and then cant the chairs a bit one by one to get past: sure, the arrangement meant that sudden movements were impossible. There were two doors, the one I’d come through, and another, at the other end on the same side. I didn’t know which to watch. There was nothing else there but the shining surface of the table, nearly as wide and long as the floor, as if the floor, in fact, had risen to the height of one’s thighs (was there some significance in that?). Up, inches, 35?

1 Across (let’s begin at the beginning, show some system, demonstrate discipline), 1 Across is what? Moonlighter’s second job. Shit. It’s one, two, three . . . eight letters long. Nothing immediately comes to mind? Try 1 Down, then, Fudgelike candy, that should be easy, only seven. A hand held the unentered door open. Couldn’t I figure out anything? 7 Down, Not long past: would that be ‘lately’? ‘recent’? neither was the right size, five. A voice said, It’s all right, you can go in. I recognized her: it was 25 Down, Confidential helper. Who said again: It’s all right, you can go in. And my mother entered wearing her starchy tent. She couldn’t have hairpins; she couldn’t own a comb. Her gray hair was even scrubbed of its customary soil and consequently drifted about in every direction. I remembered then how fine her hair had been. 23 Down was six letters and meant Beauteous place. I couldn’t answer any, get one. Oh yes I had, I’d gotten N O N. Her wifely white face, when she stopped, was reflected in the table. She was unable to manage the chairs. With the help of 25 Down she fell into the first one she came to. That put us eight or nine letters apart. I never had much luck with long words. She sort of looked at me. I think she felt ashamed to be in the bin, in this room full of table, to be dressed as she was, her hair as connected to her head as a cloud to a peak. But then I realized that the strange configuration of her face was due to the absence of teeth—a bridge I didn’t even know about had been removed. No belts, pins, jewelry, cosmetics, teeth. This was a place in which she was supposed to get better? They probably didn’t provide a mirror. She could only feel how her unkempt tent concealed her, and how her lost teeth added hollow corners to her mouth. She could feel it if she had an ego left to feel with, because all vanity was in vain here, where they collected every shred of self-respect as if it were evidence of evil, since, if you were to retain any, you might become suicidal—combs, pins, teeth, were lethal. The Wagnerian earth goddess was 54 Across. ‘Ersa,’ ‘Erde,’ who? I hate it when they want you to know myths or music. My mother, alas, was neither. I thought she’d lost weight or water, but maybe it was just the teeth. Her eyes still swam in some sort of liquid. I asked her several inconsequential things. It occurred to me, absurdly, that she would probably know 39 Across, Devices for inducing rain. A question like that might produce an answer. Catch her by surprise. Give her an alertness. Instead I said I’ll bring you a comb next time I come. Can’t have a comb, she said. I might kill myself if I had a comb. Is that you, Billy?

My mother must have played thousands of hands of solitaire, though they were mostly the same kind of game, one of the classic forms, I was given to understand; and I thought of this occupation, too, as mysterious, a kind of fortune-telling. Occult questioning was curiously for women only. A man in a black suit would suddenly—this or that—appear, become significant in your life. The king of clubs. What the jack of spades said was always vague. Warnings were a staple, for what could one do with the future but fear it? Women in red. Temptations of all types. The falseness of friends—how was it put?—the treachery of someone close to you. Well, my mother had betrayed my trust by letting my father bully her and by becoming a drunk. Later I would learn to look out for the queen of spades. Pique dame. Dark lady. Madame la Mort. I betrayed my mother by misleading her to the madhouse. I found out that my mother frequently cheated at crosswords by checking solutions in the back of the book, and at solitaire by peeking under piles of cards which were supposed to remain facedown until an up card was legitimately removed. I could never figure out the rules. My father betrayed all of us by allowing my mother to kill herself in this slow liquidly way. My mother said her bridge had broken during shock. She shook loose from the straps, too, she said, with a suggestion of pride in the spacing of her voice. Shaking seemed to be the thing death did in my life. DTs had probably aided her in that, I privately thought. My aunt tried to take over the rule of the house, not through a coup but by profiting from the prolonged attrition of a weak wife’s weak estate. What the hell—we all connived. So would she be seeing a dentist, I asked, to get her bridge repaired? She didn’t shake at this, she shuddered. What’s the diff? the number of letters? Okay. She became animated by her distaste for the dentist. Not a chance of me seeing such, her shiver said. A shudder is one square stronger. I’ll bring you a comb next time I come. I don’t have to comb my hair in here, my mother said. Her statement was unusually clear and direct. She understood something. The matron, nurse (who knew her definition?), an attendant made of stiff white paper, signaled, so I rose, made my apologies—try ‘profuse excuses,’ the right length—received only a withdrawal symptom in reply, and stumbled slowly through the space between the chairs, as inept as if I ought to be a patient, overcome by the conviction that someday I would be one: I would be sent away to some asylum on the pretext of a friend; I’d be packed in a cab, slack-mouthed and dull-eyed, and arrive tombless, unkempt, compulsively pulling on my cock in a corner.

The breadgoon, who usually stopped his fucktruck in the street, drew into the driveway like a taxi big as life, like an ambulance, a moving van, legitimate delivery man. And was soon standing on the front stoop with neither loaf rack, shitty smile, Christmas cig in sappy mouth, nor pack of Bunny buns in hand. I said, Yes? I saw the am-bu-ah-lance, he said, is someone sick? Sure. We are. I actually answered . . . I answered . . . My dad. He wouldn’t speak until I said My dad. He wouldn’t move until I said My dad. Oh, sorry. I was worried. The shit said. The shit said: I was worried it was your mother. Said the shit. To think I’d given him those Lucky Strikes. The shitbreadgoonfuck. Stick around, I said. She goes next.

And did.

Mother would elaborately lay out the cards. In a carefully even row unlike her nature. I remember her hands, always dry and cracked. The red nails she mispolished—flaked too, rough, dirt-packed, riven—would tip the pasteboards over, flick them flat, and then they would be ceremoniously placed upon the table—clat—that was the sound, I think—clat. She would hold the remaining cards, the play-from pack, in her left hand, which was steady because it would be at least midmorning when she began play and she was therefore numerous reassuring nips into the day, her nails running around the small stack like a blunted picket fence; then she would slowly squeeze one from the top with her thumb and, tipping, study it; she would study its face, as if it had said something ambiguous, before finding a place for it to play, which often meant making changes in the general configuration of the cards, requiring movements in the serially numbered rows and commonly colored fans—how? why?—accompanied by sighs of satisfaction or moues of dismay—what was the issue? why the distress?—you always lose at solitaire, she said, smiling a rare, mother-made smile: crosswords are never completed, only given up, and card games like these are never won; that’s why I play them.

Later, of course, I made a wholly romantic connection between her time-eating activities and my own weight, between staring at the cards and this scribbling I do at night—head-hunting for a word, hoping for a heart, peeking to locate an ace, and, by staring, penetrating previously driven holes in a drunken dark—afraid to sleep because when you slept you were no longer alone; and knowing loneliness like a spouse, as if it were simply the only condition of life, however unfriendly, however ugly and hard; hating loneliness, yet fearful of anything else but loneliness; having been disappointed—the word is too weak—at every social turn: no longer going out, attending church, having dinner parties, playing bridge with friends; and as your husband’s illness becomes his new profession and your household tank nears empty and you fail to find a function that isn’t merely a filler like a spare tire’s air, waiting to be wanted and of use until you’ve lost all inner pressure; well, you have a little nip now and then, what harm? it’s small expense, you’ve saved a bit on duds since you don’t have any need or interest in pretty clothes, no one looks at you with desire, or touches you with pleasure, or talks to you as if you might be amusing, or finds it fun to be in your presence, or delights in your appearance, or compliments you on your looks, or wit, or skill with food or figures, facts or kicking, so you have a pick-me-up now and then, just to jolt the spirits, merely to erase a little melancholy when it comes on in the middle of a morning, when you’ve already peeny-buttered everybody’s lunch, and there’s no friend to phone, so why bother to watch your weight or wash or read books or plan for the future, the future is your enemy, only the past can be stood, because the past is thank god dead, perhaps a little toast to that, all those increasingly gloriously golden days, when your breasts were young, and you thought, I can do that, and then did it, possibly a small swallow to honor the old ways, hair of the dog, as they say, though you remember you didn’t keep up with your French or your tennis, and had you—had you—had you—what would life have been? well, so what, now—clat—because, when no one is tender to you, what’s the use—red nine on the black ten—and when you are in that state of superfluity, no one will love you, you can count on that—clat—so let your cunt look out for itself—uncover the queen—breasts are no business of yours—is every play blocked?—may health and life and its illusions of point and purpose make their own propaganda, because what you learn, the wisdom you have, when the gin has brought you to a state dismal enough to discern it, is that solving a crossword is better than being pawed and bedded, mounted and knocked up and having a baby, because you can do it alone, nobody cares if you fail, no one envies your success, no one troubles your nose with the bad breath of their being, no one hates you for letting them fuck you or bringing them into the world, no one curses you for your kindness to them, no one bothers you, unlike husbands or younger babies, because babies are slavery, and you can lie on the rug of your living room, in the warm yet cooling puddle of your pee or monthly bleed or sniveled tears, all day—kid gone, sis gone, old man off in his own pain—all day without causing trouble, because who needs the trouble, who needs it? because if you can’t live your own life, you can at least die on your own grim terms, and give people a lot of satisfying misery while you’re doing it.