Notable American Women (16 page)

Names

[Deborah]

THERE ARE ABOUT FIFTY known examples of it in the Rocky Mountain area, some dating as far back as 1931. They are thought to improve the people they encounter. The usual number of finished girls in a territory as common as “Deborah” is twenty-eight, with a quota of twenty and a maximum limit of thirty-two. Any more than this should suggest a dilution of the original Deborah, which produces strains of Amy or Ellen. Although the midcentury Rocky Mountain persons had utilized a Deborah to comfort the saddest local families, reserving the medical Deborah for only the most pressing cases of grief, the need for a cheer-spreading personage began to be felt at a national level, and abductions and faking occurred. There is consequently an extreme Deborah in the East, possibly of Colorado origin but bred through men of the Midwest (and therefore tall and reddish and chalky), dispensing a form of nearly unbearable, radical happiness into cities and homes. It is often housed in a little body, but its range is wide and its effect is lasting. To say “Deborah” is to admit to sadness and ask for help.

Statistics for Deborah:
She preferred modifications to her head when we called her this. No matter how far we launched her in the chair, my sister did not faint. Small emotional showings were on view: contentment and pleasure, occasional cheer. She attempted to embrace my mother, usually before bedtime, and my mother only barely escaped these approaches. Sometimes she endured long hugs from this Deborah.

[Susan]

From afar, the Susan appears to be buckling, shivering, seizing, its body exhibiting properties of a mirage. Up close, there is mass to Susan and it is real to the touch. There will be food for you if you are Susan, although possibly a pile of food for Susan is a trap, to be regarded with suspicion. It is an elegant and refined system that established a school for itself, The Susan House. Its doctrine, The Word of Susan, is useful also to versions of Julia and Joyce but can be harmful to Judith. All of its books have gone unwritten.

Statistics for Susan:
Quite poor weather during this phase. My sister aged considerably and showed signs of acute attention and superiority. Insisted on privacy. Dressed formally. Seemed not of our family. Our presence confused her. She once asked my father how he knew her name. It was a question my father could not answer.

[Jesus]

Women achieve their Jesus by speaking and studying their own name. The original Jesus figure examined his name, then derived actions and strategies from his analysis. This is the primary purpose of the Jesus noise—self-knowledge, instruction, advice. Women betray their Jesus when they forget that there is an answer at the heart of their name, to be divined by loud, forceful recitations of it in the streets, for as long as it takes. Simply saying “Jesus,” however, is ineffective. (Breathing is the most common strategy for remembering our names.)

Statistics for Jesus:
It was decided not to call my sister this. Mother felt we might lose her. But I tried it anyway one night when my parents were asleep. I had to use a low-volume setting on the naming bullhorn and I whispered it at her while she slept. It was during an early Tina phase. She never woke. I sat at her bed all night and used this name against her until my mouth was exhausted. Nothing happened.

[Father]

To refer to a woman as “Father” is to engage her inner name and fill her hands with power. It is a code that many American women respond to with energy and hope. It is therefore used as a healing noise, particularly at hospitals, where nurses utter the word “Father” to women who are ill or tired. When men make love to Father, they use hearty motion and often call out words of labor and ecstasy; they thank Father, and they ask Father for more. Men in Utah, where this sort of naming is most frequent, take Father to the baths and hold her while rinsing her hair, until she feels soothed and calm, until she is manageable and not crazy with power, or too big for her body, or at least not dirty and alone, which makes Father dangerous. In wealthy households, Father enters a boy's room and blackens it with a gesture of her hand, then starts in on the boy with warm oil on his thighs, squeezing the oil into his legs until he weeps or breathes easy. Father pulls back the sheets and she climbs in to treat the boy and teach him to live. A boy often first makes love to Father because she is gentle and confident, someone the boy can trust. He holds on to Father's hands when she straddles the bed and affects her graceful motion. A boy says “Father” as she leans over him to help, dipping and rising, although sometimes the boy is quiet, preferring to feel her deepening attentions and not destroy the moment with speech.

Statistics for Father:
Chaos at the house. My real father was banished during this phase. He slept in the shed. I wanted to call him a girl's name, but I was not allowed to see him. My sister clearly thrived as Father: she boomed; she boasted; she tore through the house. She smashed the behavior television; she burned her old sleep sock. Mother was scared. A soothing litany of vowel songs was used on my sister to calm her down, without which she might have escaped. By the time the name would have worn off, she would have reached Akron. We restricted the study to two days. When we stopped calling her Father, she shed the hardest skin of all the names. My mother removed it from the house with a shovel before inviting my father back inside.

[Mary]

Every five minutes, a woman named Mary will stop breathing. It is a favorite of children, and every five minutes there are children standing in witness to the ending of Mary. Children clap at it when they see it. They are thrilled and they weep. Sometimes they become excited by a Mary that comes to die before them and they chase it and hit it. The Mary takes a wound. It holds up an arm and shields what is coming. It holds a wound in its hand, and the children are delighted.

Statistics for Mary:
She was mostly slumped over. This was near the end. We tried to groom her, but her body was cold. Her hair broke when you touched it. She weakened visibly every time we said “Mary.” She refused all food. In the mornings, she wrung her hands and wept quietly. Mother collected something from her face. Possibly some scrapings, possibly the smallest bit of fluid. Mary was the last thing we called her. It was possibly the name that killed her.

Certain factions of women go by a nonname and therefore participate in a larger person that is little seen or heard or known. It cannot be summoned or commanded. Generally, it walks stiffly, owing to its numerous inhabitants. A body such as one not named can be toppled, no doubt—felled and pinned to the turf, brought under control with water and a knife, some rope, and hard words. It is the primary woman, from which many women have emerged, to which many will return. It is believed to reside in Cleveland. Probably it is bleeding and tired. By now, it might be nearly finished.

Statistics:
We treated my sister with silence at the end. We used an openmouthed name that failed to break the air, no different from a deaf wind. A great deal of hissing was heard in the house, though we could not find the source of this sound. My sister's skin was clear. It would not peel. It would not shed. We waited near her slumped body. She stayed nameless. She retained her skin.

5

The Launch

AT THE TIME OF THIS WRITING, I am going to be Ben's mother my whole life, no matter how extreme, inspired, or innovative my behavior. It is not a role I requested. My projects with emotion removal and silence would have thrived similarly without him. I do not seek your agreement on this topic. There was no invitation or application to this motherhood, only your oily body seeking to seal our obligations to each other. You inter-coursed all over me in order to finally obligate me to you. I can't forget you with your back arched like a swan's, your teeth bared, clutching the sheets on each side of me as you funneled noiselessly between my legs, forgetting to breathe, until I felt you slowly wilting inside me, then a pool of dampness leaking down my bottom, which you asked me to stanch with your handkerchiefs. Your apologies afterward hardly made a difference. As soon as Ben was conceived, he was apologized for. A detail conveniently omitted from the prelaunch forecast we made when we cataloged our vision for the person he might become.

As much as I had hoped to court ambiguity, complication, and mystery regarding my basic relationship to Ben, to somehow annex my motherhood to my other projects, so that I was not merely shepherding another average person into the midwestern atmosphere, there is a fate that I am not imaginative enough to outdistance, a biology I have yet to surpass. I would like to alter it with chemicals. I would like to zero my heart, enter a silent house, and perform the gestures that will deliver me from all of the sameness. To be new in this awful, old job. I would like to outsmart the role that is destined for me. But I can't. I have failed to destroy my category.

Did I ask to be Ben's mother? I did not. Did I know that you were having sex with me? I did. Did I enjoy it? I did not. Encourage it? No. Did I realize that your rampant thrusting over my deliberately inert body would lead to a child such as Ben? I don't think so. Whose fault is it? Mine, of course. Is anyone else to blame? You are. Do I want something from you now? You'd better fucking believe it.

First, listen to what is happening to him; attend to my
decay
narrative.
Next, note my requests of you. Note them. Note them. Note them. Last, learn what has been decided for you. One, two, three. Is there a punishment in store for you? Possibly, probably, awfully certainly. Yes. Better to think of it as a fate, a result, a consequence to what you did and didn't do. I mean to extract some final favors from you. You will soon see why you will be compelled to grant them. Pay attention.

Note: All quotes of you are taken from real things you said. I will quote you liberally. I will paraphrase you. I will channel your voice, imitate you. Since you apparently believe first and foremost in yourself, since you only subscribe to ideas of your own issue, I will allow your own words a front-and-center role. By pretending to be you, I will finally have you believe me. In case you get bored. In case you fool yourself into thinking another person's words, even your former wife's, are beyond, beneath, or beside your notice. Just in case. Put this aside at your peril. Read this at your peril. Do nothing at your peril. Breathe at your peril. No matter what, your peril will be the featured attraction of that portion of time we have been conservatively, cautiously, fearfully referring to as the future. If it is bad, and it hasn't happened yet, rest assured it will. You can look forward to it. At your absolute, total peril.

Now. Because we have withdrawn to opposite wings of the house this season, where we cannot audit the growth of our “son,” or even gather at the behavior farm to chalk-talk an emotion-concealment style for his upcoming Akron debut, I am submitting a memorandum to you that demands your immediate attention. My concern is manifold and complicated and probably beyond your narrow comprehension. You need only know that my worry is for the boy we made together, who roves the Marcus property so cautiously, so breakably, that even our domestic animals could probably molest him for their own amusement.

Yes, you have visitation of Ben as part of the
Allotment for
Father.
You ostensibly observe him at work and at play, alone, with others, asleep, at table, weeping, laughing, bleeding: the basic behaviors. But can I rely on you to be appropriately alarmed when Ben is less than average, inferior, loathsome, predictable? I cannot.

My aim is to forestall the demise of this new person we once shared ambition for. Although our launch objectives may have forked (yours into God knows where), we are each, I imagine, still vested in Ben's success enough to revise our separate child-rearing styles, which might ensure his feeble life at least through this season's behavior trials.

It is not appropriate—indeed, it is alarming—for a boy of Ben's age to be developing the hairline of a much older gentleman, and the apologetic body style of a low-riding dog. He appears to be someone who might more appropriately carry a cane, or use a walker to get himself comfortably from the couch to the toilet, if he even moves at all.

When Ben broods over his blocks or puzzle pieces, when he manipulates the domestic action figures you carved of him and his sister, or when he rotates the birds in his model aviary to reflect a religious system where birds act as transport vehicles for wind and prayer, I cannot help feeling I am watching a man who has, for some reason, based himself on a dead person. (Is it childish to believe that the more easily killable things of this world, most notably the birds, as delicate as lightbulbs, and seemingly randomly tossed aloft, have any agency? Is it childish to attach power to supposed objects of beauty? I only mean to establish whether Ben's nostalgia for birds might be useful in our ultimate plan for him.)

The goal, lest your exile has promoted yet further dementia in your defeated person, is still for him to launch into the greater Ohio—and whatever failing world lies beyond—with an unprecedented persona. I am not ashamed to want to make a boy who will one day set the mold for what might be called—if we gain any say over the conduct styles of our time—the New Behavior. If your goal is otherwise, or if, upon scrutiny of your strategies as an apparent man of Akron, you find that your fatherhood impulses have gone girlish along with your body—your trembling hands, your failing back, your dizziness and frequent wobbling, your sulking response when a conversation veers from your topic, exceeding your imagination or intelligence, your whimpering in your sleep, a list that barely touches on your array of feeble traits, which tempts me to create
an entire other document
cataloging your failures, a critical edition of my husband, an anthology of disappointments, a kind of best of the worst of the man I used to walk with, back when affection toward another person seemed like an answer to my own mediocrity, when a husband was just another blame hole—Ben will soon be removed from your part-time care and you might stop your reading here, pack your smart little bag, as if being ready for your journey will matter, and sit still until the quiet sisters knock on your door to remove you for all time from the visible world.

Knock, knock.

To the point: Things are getting worse with Ben, and I will soon overwhelm you with examples of his steady slide from excellence, his conspiracy against originality. Aside from a small, vanishing father, a difficult nutrition system meant to suppress or surface specific emotions, and an arsenal of equipment even two grown men would have trouble hauling around (helmets, packs, sleds, mouth-guards, grief biscuits, etc.), there are behavioral errors registering from our boy that were not in our forecast, wildly unchecked emotional displays that embarrass our household (though I would suggest that there can be no other
kind
of emotional display, and even the word “display,” which in one of the major foreign languages means to spread one's ass cheeks as wide as possible without tearing the skin, should suggest the value of having emotions at all). These are detours of his person that we failed to map in advance. What is unknown about Plan Ben, or previously unpredicted, is unacceptable. It bespeaks an imprecise launch, and, as such, invites our quickest mastery. “To parent,” in Greek, means “to know.” I think. In German, it means “to cut trees, clear a path, and invite people into the space you have made.” The French use the word “father” for “failure.” “Dad” means “an underwater passage to the afterlife, a constricted tube, a drowning pipe.” Access is difficult. There will be water everywhere. You could drown midway. “Ben” means “never; not on your life; you're out of your mind.” “Ben” means “the best I could do.” In some cultures, the word serves as an apology.

Let's examine how well we've lived up to these terms.

On those difficult evenings when the parenting schedule requires me to touch our young man's head in a Mothering Action before putting him to sleep, under the labored shushing sounds of the Ideal Breathing tape broadcast into his bedroom, hissing, hissing, hissing, rendering his room like a wind tunnel, I sense his skull to be smaller than that of other boys, softer and shapeless and altogether too fragile for my liking.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but his head should not conform to his mother's hand, even a hand that could once repel an advancing, trouserless husband, a man who deployed actual military circlings on his approach to our shared bed, techniques from an actual book, requiring me to be similarly strategic in resisting his attempts at the aggression he called intimacy, the chafing lurches into my body that caused his face to collapse with relief. Yet to battle this man (you) was also to accidentally touch his bare legs and bottom and crotch as he conducted his wagon circle of my overtired person, leaving me to effectively only fight the top half of him, the clothed half, or else possibly incite his arousal even further, a handicap that resulted in a woman (myself) who learned how to beat a man's trunk, his arms, his face, while avoiding all that lay below.

Case in point: The neighboring Smith children, when they pile over the south fence, and commence to lower their heads and charge the wall that encircles the listening hole, seem only temporarily stunned by the collision. Apart from questioning their aim in such a pursuit (namely, why would a young Smith risk what is arguably its best asset—its head—in order to knock down a wall that it could easily surmount with a ladder; what could be the launch objective of the Smith parents in allowing such a battery to occur, particularly on someone else's property?), one must observe that there are no blackouts among that bunch of youngsters, no fainting, no discernible concussions, contusions, or spells. Just a white cloud stunned from the wall by the ramming of their heads, rendering the Smiths as dark shapes inside a haze, blaring like foghorns as they wait for clear air (a bluster that must challenge the decoding tactics of our young listeners laboring in the hole). The Smiths roughhouse as though they were smash puppets, and one observes no resulting decay in their persons, whereas our Ben, let us confess, flinches if his own hand comes too near his face, as with eating, for example (he is too facially cautious to feed himself soup; we have lately resorted to a blindfold), or grooming (I observed him fastening his hairbrush to the wall, his arms keeled back while he burrowed his head against it, as though truffling for some message in the bristles that might rub off on his face). He is so shy of himself that he often ducks his own motions while leaving the house or carrying seeds to the Storm Needle, as if a bee were dive-bombing his face and his hands had produced a sign language to ward it off. If he continues to smother his own actions, he will simply be a boy who spins in place, erasing every gesture he makes until he is busily still, a kind of hummingbird person at best, fascinating to watch, but in the end just another curiosity, merely pitiable. While such a repertoire might suffice if he were a dancer, parodying the way people sabotage their own progress, a palsy meant to ridicule the very idea of motion, as a person it is not acceptable for his actions to symbolize, even satirically, the failures of others. The parallels are too chancy, and our Akron neighbors should not be expected to supply all of their own irony, to comprehend that Ben represents something other than himself, which was never our intention for him. We seek to put people in mind of absolutely nothing when they observe him. We desire primary behavior from our boy. Let him be new, or let us remove him from the yard, the house, the world.

Okay, problem articulated. Now, Ben's mania toward his own head is evidence of something, but what? He is either afraid of himself (not exactly irrational, and in some sense impressively shrewd of the boy to identify his own self as a threat, a discovery that takes other people years, if they make it at all), or he's instinctually protecting his head from harm, which is one more boring way he is just like All Other People to This Date, not just weak and death-prone but glaringly, theatrically weak, almost asking to be killed. My feeling? Do not, do not,
do not
fuck around and ask for something like that. It is too damn tempting. At least
pretend
to want to live.