I Am Commodified
The summer of that year I will give in summary: though Mittler was wholly absent from the physical dimension of my life, I did not engage in a single activity that was not at least partly a devotion to or distraction from Mittler, including my twice-weekly reopening with the knife of the cut in my palm, or my first ovulation, or my body's production of a pair of small breasts. So much for that summer.
In the fall, our new teacher was September "Skip" Hartman, whom I liked because she so obviously was making a lifelong effort to cultivate the raw material of herself through things like posture. She stood up in front of the class with her lovely spine and her blond hair saying, "'Be silent and take defeat'" and "'I knew a woman lovely in her bones'" and "'in sooth I know not why I am so sad'" and "'In the old age black was not counted fair'" and "'Time will say nothing but I told you so.'"
The first time Skip Hartman spoke with me in private she said the word sensation. Ms. Hartman was not an exclusive proponent of the open classroom. With her it was sometimes open, sometimes closed, sometimes halfway open or closed. One week the class resembled an old turn-of-the-century schoolroom with desks in rows; the next it resembled Gertrude Stein's salon with chairs in loose circles and, on the walls, abstract line drawings imported from the kindergarten, where the five-year-olds were busy producing them ("It's good not to lose touch with what the younger generation is doing," Skip Hartman said). All of which is to say that early in the semester, during the first grid era of the classroom, she came down along the column of desks and chairs I was sitting at the end of, with her hair and her posture and her loose silk chemise. Her darkblond hair when she was walking toward me was a machine like a music box with diverse moving parts that operated smoothly in concert with one another. She stopped by my desk and asked to speak with me about the report I was then preparing to write on Samuel de Champlain. She pulled a tiny children's chair next to mine and sat in it with her soft beige skin under the dark chemise. I elaborated on my plan to build a canoe or hut from paper and twigs and glue. Then, in the middle of a sentence, she told me sensation and, to illustrate, touched her own bare forearm below the chemise's rolled-up sleeve.
Some words (like sensation) she spoke, and some words (like chemise) she gathered around her, in the way that I imagine Saint Francis of Assisi gathered starlings. Her lips were thin and gave the words that passed across their threshold distinct shapes in the air; she imbued them with independent lives of their own. I wanted to use words that she had used, or words that accurately described her, the former because I was touching something that she had touched, the latter because I was touching something that was touching her. New England was another thing she told me, on more than one occasion. I liked her shoes.
Skip Hartman taught by implied confession. She was always in the process of revealing her own close relation to the knowledge she imparted: "'Whose woods these are I think I know."'
In the encyclopedia, I looked at the photograph of the mud hut of Samuel de Champlain - or Samuel D. Champlain, as I liked to call him - and built a quick version of it in my bedroom and carried it to school on one of Myra's food trays. This was the first schoolwork I had ever done, and I think Skip Hartman recognized the birth of an interest. Whereas Jane Building had conducted all her meetings in the shadow of the great mansion of her adult desk at the front of the room, Skip Hartman invited herself into the dwellings of the hoi polloi. At our second private meeting - where were all the other children? at lunch - we were alone at the back of the classroom amid the furniture of children. She said to me, "I'm very excited about your hut."
Having now the organized movements of Skip Hartman's hair as she walked toward me on low heels, I stopped carrying Mittler's knife, which ceased to have the voodoo power to cut me. I didn't stop loving Mittler, but this adult had enchanted me more than it was in the power of a child to do. So I would say that the intense bodily feeling I was in the habit of calling Mittler was crowded aside in the fall of my twelfth year by a new sensation named Skip Hartman.
Many of the same children populated Skip's class as had populated Building's. A new disaffection settled upon them. Perhaps this was a result of the previous spring's humbling spectacle of childbirth. Or perhaps the new teacher - voted Teacher of the Year for the two previous years - had a kind of charisma that did not invigorate her students so much as it made them experience their own inadequacy more keenly. Mittler and Dierdre found some consolation in smoking filtered cigarettes together by the smelly Dumpsters on the dark north side of the brick school building, but even that they did languidly, not in grandiose imitation of a wise and world-weary adult but out of heartfelt torpor and the inability to locate the interest in their own lives.
One day in October, Dierdre dragged Mittler over to see me on the playground just as school was letting out and said, "We think you should come and smoke a cigarette with us." The attitudes of cleverness and excitement she had used the previous year to woo me and then to cast me out had vanished. Her freckled eyelids were heavy now. Her thinness, once a sign of energy, had become anemic. Mittler stood by, doubtful, looking away. "She won't smoke," he said. "She loves that body of hers too much."
"I'll smoke," I said, "but not if Mittler comes along."
"Mittler, get lost," Dierdre said. Cruelty without pleasure, reduced to its essence of need.
Mittler shrugged and left.
"We can go to my house," she said.
The school was on the side of a long hill. Behind it there were a few dozen acres of woods sloping sharply upward.
Dierdre slipped her little arm into mine and leaned into me as we walked up the path through the woods.
"Why are you inviting me to your house?" I said.
"Feel like it. How did your brother die?"
"I killed him."
"That's what I figured. Would you kill someone else?"
"Shut up."
We reached a metal fence that bordered someone's backyard, where there was a small swimming pool resting on top of the ground. I crawled through a little hole at the bottom of the fence and Dierdre came through after me. Her purple flowered dress got caught at the hip on a sharp piece of the fence. "Ow! It stuck in me, and now it's on my dress. Get it off! Don't rip my dress!"
I grabbed her elbows and jerked her through the hole in the fence, which tore a hole about a foot long in the side of her dress.
"You made me scrape my knees and you tore my dress!"
"Too bad," I said.
She was about to continue berating me but stopped. She nodded thoughtfully. "Too bad," she agreed softly, learning, it seemed, something she had wanted to learn. I suppose I have had a kind of luck in sharing my misery with others and receiving their gratitude in return.
She took me directly to her parents' bedroom and showed me the illustrated sex books. "I figured you'd want to see these. Do you want to smoke a cigarette now?"
"Could I borrow these books?"
"No."
"How about just one?"
"No."
"I'll give it back tomorrow.
"No. "
"Why?"
"My parents will know."
"Why, they're gonna have sex tonight?"
"I don't know, they could."
"Don't they know how to do it already?"
"Duh. They had me, didn't they?"
"What are the chances of them doing it tonight?"
"Forget I even showed you the books. Put that book down."
"You can't take back showing someone something."
"I knew you would be into these books. I don't even get what the big deal is."
"All right, listen: you go and smoke a pack of cigarettes and I'll stay here and just read this one book and I won't even take it out of the room, I'll just read it in here."
Dierdre left. I became a scholar of that one book, which surprised me here and there and confirmed some of what I had recently been suspecting was the case. Still, it was quite narrow in scope and prepared me only in the most rudimentary way for the astonishing thing that was about to happen to me.
I came out into Dierdre's backyard as the sun was setting and she looked sick from smoking a pack of cigarettes, "Do you want to try some of the stuff in that book?" I asked.
"With you? Eeew. We can touch tongues if you want."
We touched tongues for a second and Dierdre vomited in the dark grass of her backyard. I went home.
---
There are certain objects meant to be looked upon by certain eyes and vice versa. Such was the case with my Uncle Tommy's cape and the eyes of Skip Hartman. Things Tommy didn't quite know about himself were absorbed and understood by Skip Hartman, who was, it should be said now, independently wealthy. As for Tommy, when he entered Skip Hartman's classroom one Thursday evening in mid-autumn for the first parent-teacher conference and witnessed the erect posture, the short, straight, segmented blond hair, the crisp, pale-blue linen sleeveless dress, the black silk scarf, and the black suede lace-up boots with the Louis Quatorze heels, he gasped. I hope you don't mind my saying that's a delightful dress."
"And I hope you don't mind if I tell you something you are no doubt already aware of: namely, how precious is your niece."
There was everything that needed to be said. The rest of the conference was a mere formality, ending with Skip Hartman's grateful acceptance of Tommy's invitation to dinner the following night. On the way home in the car Tommy spoke passionately about the importance of a good education. Myra was at the conference too, in her way.
---
An hour before the arrival of Skip Hartman at our house for dinner, I entered the kitchen to find Myra's eyes, which had been dry for several months, leaking again. I have not ever come to a good understanding of the folkways of the kitchen, but I liked to observe Myra doing somber, orderly things to food in vessels with tools and heat. When she moved, I followed her. When she stood at the counter surrounded by the bright light of the kitchen, bashing something soft with a wooden hammer, I stood behind her.
"Why are you crying?"
"I'm not crying."
"What are those tears?"
"What tears?"
"The ones coming out of your eyes."
"I guess allergies."
"You don't feel sad inside right now?" "No."
"What do you feel inside?"
"I'm trying to concentrate on making dinner for you and Uncle Tommy and Miss Hartman."
"Are you making a special dinner?"
"Just trying to make something everyone will like."
"What are you making?"
"Veal."
"Do you like Miss Hartman?"
"Yes. Uncle Tommy likes her very much."
"Thanks for making such a great dinner for Miss Hartman."
"Trying to make something people like."
I was a skinny girl and short for an eleven-year-old. Myra was tall and big. I leaned in over her broad behind and hugged her ribs. Her large breasts rested lightly on my skinny arms. I pressed my belly and my little chest against the great contour of her behind. She continued bashing as if nothing had changed.
"Aunt Myra?"
"Yes."
"You're so beautiful."
She missed with the hammer and broke something delicate that fell on the floor in pieces. I felt a tremor shuttle through her body and heard a noise come from her. I let go of her and tried to get around to the front of her to see what was happening on her face, but she ducked down and away from me to pick up the shards of ceramic off the floor. I think you ought to get out of here with your bare feet," she said.
I want to see what everyone is going to wear for Miss Hartman tonight," Tommy said twenty minutes before she arrived.
"I will stand by the back door in the kitchen, since that's where she'll come into the house and see you first. I'll stand right here and you two come in wearing your outfits and I'll tell you if they're working or not."
Everyone became excited for this fun family activity. Our first outfits were all wrong. "Elegance, elegance, supreme elegance for the meal."
We returned in a pair of frilly pastel outfits that made us look like people who owned one good costume and saved it for Easter, though I didn't believe in God and if Myra believed in anything in particular, it's doubtful that she knew it. Tommy stared at the outfits for a long time with his close-set eyes and the hurt look that was really a quality of the skin. "This will be fine. I think we could do better but we're out of time. Why are these important decisions always rushed? Myra, why are these important decisions always rushed?"
"I'm sorry," Myra said.
In a stage whisper, I said to Myra, "Call him 'dear'. He wants you to say 'I'm sorry, dear.'"
Tommy said, "Ah, Christ, are you just gonna make weird remarks when the teacher gets here? Is that what I have to look forward to - you throwing off the whole dinner conversation?"
"If I just said normal stuff, I don't think Miss Hartman would be coming to dinner."
"Hell, Christ, what do I know, right, Myra?" Tommy said, looking at me. "I'm just the guy who bought the house where the whole dinner is going to be. What does that make me? Just some idiot with a tiny house in the suburbs."
Skip Hartman's long legs were sheathed in black leather when she stalked into the kitchen. She carried a lily of the valley and wore hand-stitched cowboy boots and an oversized white cotton chemise that hung loose over the pants.
After swallowing a first small mouthful of prosciutto at the family dinner table in the kitchen, Skip Hartman said to Tommy, "I am making the supposition that you are some sort of public-interest lawyer."
"Nope." Tommy beamed. She had instinctively picked the best lie. "I would have been a lawyer but I did poorly on the LSAT. I would have done well if it weren't for the time limit. I think there are plenty of jobs in the field of the law where you don't have to think fast. Oh, I can think all right, but I need time. I wouldn't make a good trial lawyer - I know that about myself and I accept that limitation about myself - but there are plenty of jobs within the field of the law I could have done, if it weren't for the damn time limit on the LSAT."
"It is perfectly all right - I daresay advantageous - to think slowly, if one thinks thoroughly. Many people who think quickly think sloppily," Skip Hartman said, indicting by implication anyone whom Tommy might have envied.
For the sake of the rapport that had to develop between Uncle Tommy and Skip Hartman, I refrained from making what Tommy would have called weird remarks at the table. I tried to interject funny, niecely things into the mutually respectful dialogue, just as Myra provided the kind of wifely silence that deepens the harmony between the husband and, shall we say, the husband's prospective business partner.
After two glasses of brandy in the living room (did he get these moves out of a book?) Tommy, talking more and more like Skip as the evening wore on, said, "Miss Hartman, I'm glad my niece is in such capable hands as yours. Mary, would you like to show Miss Hartman your bedroom, where you do all your schoolwork?"
Skip Hartman and I strolled to the threshold of my room.
"Well, my child," she said, looking dizzy and frightened.
There was only one thing I wanted to show her in that dark little room with the false wood paneling and the cheap orange carpet. I took her hand and led her to the empty army cot by the window and stood with her before it, saying nothing.
"This is where your twin brother slept," she said.
I nodded.
"'Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?'" she said to herself and me. And to me: "You miss him terribly."
I nodded, and the tears started leaking, and then in the presence of Skip Hartman I let my body go. I felt jolts of electricity pulsing through me and when Skip Hartman took me in her arms I could not imagine a more intense pleasure than sobbing and being held by Skip Hartman. She was a head taller than I, and presumably knew what she was doing while I did not, and yet what we were doing did not feel like an adult hugging a child. No doubt the treachery of retrospect comes into play here, but those two people in that room seem to me now like two women hugging, each with something to give the other for comfort.
I stopped crying, and some space opened up between the fronts of our bodies, which had been pressed together. Skip Hartman lightly touched the sides of my body underneath my arms. She put one hand on my face, in my hair. "You are such a beautiful child," she said, and kissed me on the mouth.
"Did you two have a nice time in there?" Tommy said, back in the kitchen, showing Skip to the door.
"Splendid," she replied.
"It got cold outside, and you in your cotton blouse. Take this." Tommy removed the cape from his shoulders and held it out, gorgeous black wool with the crimson inside.
"Mr. White, I must admit that I have been admiring your cape all evening, and I must also say that I find your generosity breathtaking," she said, leaning against the wall in the tiny foyer for support, dizzy again, overwhelmed by the luck, if you could call it that, of having discovered such a family, if you could call it that, "but I have also observed how very important your cape is to you and I do not wish to be the cause of a separation between you and your cape."
"You can give it back when you come to dinner a week from tonight," Tommy said.
"That I do wish for, and that I can accept," Skip said, and grinned. "That I wholeheartedly accept."
On the night that followed, Tommy asked me to play catch with him. I said no. "Please please please please please please?" he said. We gave it a shot, but I kept forgetting to catch the ball or throw it, and that was because I was thinking of a song. It was called "You Do Something Something Something" and was one of the show tunes my father used to sing, incorrectly I suspect, when he was alive:
Let me live 'neath your skin,
I will not leave you if you lock me in.
---
"How do you feel about mutual funds?" Skip Hartman said to Uncle Tommy at dinner number two.
"I'm not sure."
"What's your gut instinct, yes or no?"
"No?" The blood roiled up beneath his pale freckles.
"Me too!" Skip exclaimed, the pleasure of this mutuality shooting up through her straight spine into her neck and head.
I feel I can talk to you about my financial instruments," she said.
"I'm not sure I could add much to the conversation, embarrassed to say," Tommy said.
"No, no, that's quite all right. I feel I can talk to you nonetheless and you will listen. I'll show you my portfolio of investments and you either say nothing or you say anything that occurs to you."
I have never in my life seen someone understand someone else as uncannily as Skip understood Tommy. It was now Tommy who looked dizzy. Myra's face was blank and indecipherable as usual, and Skip had the good sense not to try to draw her into the conversation more than perfunctorily. I can't even tell you how hard it is to remember Myra. For all I know she spoke all the time, and I have simply forgotten everything she said.
In my room, Skip Hartman sat on Paul's bed and held me in her smooth arms as if I were a baby. I liked when she walked toward me and I liked when she held me in her arms. Then I held her in my arms and played with her hair. I rubbed it and tried to mess it up. She thought that was funny. We went over to the little mirror above the dresser and watched ourselves put Skip's hair in different positions. She made faces at me. She asked to feel the muscles of my upper arms. "Oh, my, but you are a strong little girl, she said. She felt the muscles of my calves and said, "Oh, my, but you are a strong little girl." She felt the muscles of my thighs and said, "You are such a strong little girl." This seems like a good time to say, if I have not said it already, that I both did and did not know what I was doing at age eleven, just as now I do and do not remember what really happened, because I think that after Skip Hartman said, "You are such a strong little girl," I climbed on top of her on the rug and affectionately gave her my virginity.
"Should I still call you Miss Hartman?" I asked.
"Call me whatever you would like to call me."
"I like Miss Hartman."
"Miss Hartman likes you. And what shall she call you?"
"She shall call me Paul."
"All right, Paul."
"She shall call me Paul only sometimes."
"All right, Paul Only Sometimes."
---
You may wonder what it was like to continue to be a student in the sixth-grade class taught by the first person I had ever made love to. The answer is that I wanted to see her as often as possible, and that seeing her and speaking with her at school, yet knowing that we could not speak as we spoke in private, caused in me an excitement that slipped easily into discomfort and confusion. The confusion came about when I tried to understand what the words we said to each other in that public space really meant, because they did not seem to mean the most obvious thing that was conveyed in them. "Mary," she happened to call out one day in the classroom, causing a small commotion just below my chest, "would you please demonstrate for the class the proper way to add fractions, using the case of one half plus one half as a straightforward-enough illustration?"
"Yes Miss Hartman."
I went to the blackboard. The air near my head was buzzing. I looked around and tried to see my classmates, which I did, but I had a hard time composing them in my mind; I saw individual elements of them, and of objects in the class - someone's neck, a plastic hairpin, the bottom of a chair leg. I drew the two figures on the board and made some manipulations of them using a logic that was perfectly clear to me in the state of mind I was in. I then turned to my teacher and said, "Miss Hartman, I believe that one half plus one half equals two."
"All right," she said, and approached me. She took the chalk from my hand and, in doing so, touched two of my fingers with one of hers. She redrew the equation on the board and arrived at the correct answer, which was apparently one, and explained how she had done it.
"I still believe it's two," I said, standing next to her.
She looked frightened, as she had in the foyer of our house. "Mary," she said, controlling a quaver in her voice that was audible to those who knew to listen for one, "perhaps you are confusing arithmetic with religion or poetry. Religion and poetry are matters of belief. Arithmetic is, unfortunately, not. In poetry in particular, one half plus one half may sometimes equal two. In arithmetic it cannot and will not."
I returned to my seat. Nobody knew about the quaver except Skip Hartman and me, and possibly Mittler, the disaffected prodigy; I thought I could sense this in the way he stared out the window, whistling to himself very softly.
---
To dinner the following Friday, Skip Hartman brought pairs of shoes. For Tommy she brought two-tone brown leather wing tips. He squealed with delight. He put them on during the gazpacho and paraded them around the kitchen, He left the kitchen and shouted from the hallway, "Watch when I enter the kitchen. The shoes will be coming in first. I want to know everyone's reaction."
He reentered the kitchen with elongated steps. We all applauded, even Myra. Then Skip held out Myra's shoes to her across the table. They were wisely moderate black flats.
"Please, you mustn't give these to me."
"But I must." She continued to extend the shoes over the table.
"It's so kind, but I couldn't wear them."
"Try them on. If you can't wear them I'll get you a size you can wear."
"It's not that."
"Oh, you're being demure!"
Myra looked down abruptly at her plate of linguine with fennel and sausage. If only Skip had understood Myra one hundredth as well as she understood Tommy (arithmetic being, here, a matter of belief). She didn't realize she was causing Myra pain, as anyone did who described or noticed her. I whispered in my teacher's ear, "Take back the shoes and she'll feel better, but do it quietly."
"You know perhaps I'll see if there's a different color that would be more suitable at some future date as yet to be determined at which point everything may not be so . . ." She rounded out the sentence by pulling the shoes back over to her side of the table and slipping them into her oversized purse. Even if one did not understand Myra, one wished to do some thing for her. just as Skip Hartman was rescuing me from my orphanhood swashbuckler style in her leather pants, so I wished that someone would find a way to rescue Myra from wherever it was that she was stranded - inside her body, was how I chose to locate it. But some people never get found, never get rescued.
To this third dinner at Tommy's house, Skip Hartman had also brought a toothbrush and deodorant and fresh underwear and a sweatshirt and jeans. When we were alone in my room after dinner she said, "And would you like me to call you Paul this evening?"
I would like you to call me 'teacher.'"
"Oh, really." She took a step back away from me and folded her arms and frowned.
"Yes, really. And you have to go sit in that little chair over there, and if you want to speak you have to raise your hand."
She looked at me, not sure what to do. "And what will you call me?" she said.
"I shall call you Skippy. Skippy, sit down now, please."
She sat down. She raised her hand.
"Yes, Skippy?" I said, prancing back and forth in front of her.
"How much is one half plus one half, teacher?" she asked.
"One half plus one half plus religion plus poetry plus arithmetic plus Skippy plus teacher plus you plus me plus you plus Skippy plus Skippy plus Skippy Skippy?"
"Yes, teacher."
"Now I have a question for you, Skippy."
"Okay."
"Here's what I want you to do. I'll stand on the bed and you hop around the room in circles like a giant kangaroo."
"I don't think I want to do that."
"Excuse me, Skippy?"
"I will not do that."
"I will not do that what?"
"Mary, please."
"Skip-py!" I commanded, leaping onto the bed with both feet.
"What?"
Skip Hartman stared up at me. I stared back down at her. Slowly, she stood up. She took one cautious hop.
"Good girl, Skippy" I said very gently. "Try it again."
She removed her pumps and took a few more hops.
"Very good, Skippy. Oh, Skippy, I'm so proud of you."
She hop-hop-hopped around the room. Her head, which she usually held vertically in place atop her spine, bounced from side to side on her shoulders, which I found perfectly charming.
"Now I will ride you."
Skip Hartman hopped over to me and turned her back and bent down. I jumped onto her back and grasped her kangaroo flanks tightly between my legs. She hopped around the room while I messed up her hair with my hands. "Now make kangaroo noises!" I said.
"Arfl" she said. "Arfl Arff" We both were laughing now and we collapsed onto Paul's bed and laughed for a while. Her face was bright red. "Oh, my darling teacher," she said.
"Yes, my darling Skippy?"
"Come put your ear close to my lips. I must whisper something." I did as she said. She whispered, "I am discovering aspects of myself that I had not an inkling existed, thanks to you, my teacher."
"My little Skippy is soooo cute," I whispered back, and patted my excellent pupil on that fantastic machine, her head.
---
On the day before the first day of summer, a big door at school slammed on my fingers and September "Skip" Hartman lost her place in the world. She happened to see my fingers resting lightly on the door frame as the door approached them. She happened also to be the person who had pushed the door with mild vigor, not knowing my fingers were there at the time she had pushed it, a big oaken door easy on its hinges. "I saw your hand and I looked very quickly up at your innocent face," she said to me the following evening, when we were reunited in my bedroom and she was helping me to pack my things. "Your face was turned the other way. You did not see the door coming." She perched on Paul's bed, controlling the skeletal muscles and tear ducts of her erect body but unable to keep her voice from rising and rising. "Mary, all in a moment I felt myself about to shriek, was seized with fear, and then did a terrible thing: I did not shriek. I did not warn you, my dear child, of the pain I was about to cause you," she said, as Tommy sauntered into the little bedroom to supervise the packing.
The pain was surprising and intense, and you might say that the shriek Skip Hartman did not utter came out of me. She had been leading our entire class through the hallways of the school to the gym. After the door slammed, she put my hand that was not hurt inside of her hand and commanded the other children to remain still while she took me to the nurse's office. Once we had rounded the corner she stopped a moment and could not prevent herself from bringing my injured hand to her lips and whispering into it, "Oh, my precious precious."
"I hate you people," Mittler said. He had rounded the corner behind us. "I knew you couldn't wait to kiss her hand, I knew it! I'm telling everybody about you two. I'm telling the principal, I'm telling all the kids, I'm telling everybody! Mary, I want my knife back right now!"
"I threw your stupid knife away!" I roared back at him. "Miss Hartman sleeps in my room once a week!" I roared, and turned to my lover and threw my arms around her neck.
"All right, dear, we'll go to the nurse's office now," she said and removed my arms from around her neck. "Mittler, I understand your agitation. Please join the rest of the class and I'll speak with you later."
The rest of the class, however, had joined Mittler, and most of them had heard what he'd said, and what I'd said, and seen a few things they didn't quite know how to see, and now they stood there, some of them staggering like people newly blind, as if they had used up all their eyesight looking at the strange pair of us. Skip Hartman took me by the elbow and led me to succor.
---
In light of September Hartman's six years of devoted and intelligent service, and to avoid a scandal, the school administrators canned her quietly and did not make public the wrongdoing of the Teacher of the Year, nor did they press charges. The central outcome of the door slamming was the transfer of guardianship of me from Thomas and Myra White to September Hartman. In exchange for the transfer, the Whites received from Ms. Hartman a lump sum of $ 100,000, and would also receive weekly payments of $500 for the duration or such time as she remained my legal guardian.
On the day that Skip and I moved to Manhattan, the weather was hot enough for Skip to put the top down on her little black Porsche when she came to pick me up. Just the same, Tommy wore the woolen cape in his driveway to send us off. Myra did not appear to be on the verge of voluntarily kissing me good-bye, so I leapt on her in the driveway and knocked her down, accidentally breaking her elbow. I didn't care about her elbow. At the time, caring did not strike me as a useful activity. Little did I know that all the caring I didn't do then was being stored up inside me and that I would eventually become a young lady full of care.
Tommy did not kiss me good-bye, but he made a definitive flourish with his cape, bowing deeply before me and the Porsche, such that I saw the individual drops of sweat lined up along the border of his pale forehead and his delicate blond hair. He whispered, "I'm sorry if I have failed you." As Skip and I climbed into her car, Tommy went to where Myra was lying in the driveway to attend to her elbow, which had already swollen up in much the same way that Paul's face and torso did after the bees stung him and just before he died. New York City, here we come!
More Wrong Songs
Sooner or later everyone finds a way to be mistreated. Some more easily than others: Skippy and I, for example. But sometimes mistreatment is better than no treatment at all.
In the early days of living in her house in New York City, Skip and I lay on top of the white duvet on her king-size bed facing the French windows that opened out onto one of the pristine streets near Fifth Avenue on Manhattan's Upper East side. My favorite time to lie on the bed with her there was early in the morning. At that time we heard four or five or six kinds of birdsong, and Skip was someone who could attach a great many bird names to the songs in the world that belonged to them.
At other times of day I did not like to lie on the bed. Late morning for example, or early afternoon, or late afternoon, or anytime in the evening before ten-thirty. But Skip Hartman wanted me on the bed with her, and I thought the arrangement was that either I stayed on the bed or I got kicked out of her house. If she kicked me out of her house, I thought, she would also stop paying Tommy the weekly stipend, and then he would not take me back into his house. At the age of twelve, I was not ready to live on the street without knowing a soul who would help me, so I stayed next to her on the bed, usually naked, eating or listening to her pronounce the litanies she had taken pains to learn and loved to say, such as the names of all the popes or all the kings of England, or the countries of South America, or the lakes of northern Finland, or the provisions of the Bill of Rights, or, as my father used to sing, "'I'll quote the facts historical, now please don't get hysterical.'"
One afternoon when I was feeling especially perspicacious and Skip especially vulnerable, she revealed to me in a vocal tremor and tic of the mouth that it was I who allowed her to keep me in her house, not she who allowed me to stay there. I may desperately have needed the enclosure of her house, but she needed the enclosure of the slim radius of air around my body. She could not bear to be away from me. Or so I became convinced that she imagined.
I got out of bed and got dressed and walked out the front door and onto the sidewalk. She followed me. "Where are you going?"
"Need some air."
"Tell me."
"Tell you what?"
"Tell me when you are going to do something like go out for air. I cannot abide a system of communication wherein you do not consult me before leaving the house. We need to, I think we ought to, we need to-" Skip stood at the top of the short flight of stone steps between our house and the street, while I stood at the bottom of it. Her face was flushed and even her hair was beginning to show signs of disorder.
"Okay, okay, okay, so don't have a fucking fit," I said. I saw that the word fucking startled her, coming from me. "Don't have a cow," I added. "Don't have a pig. Don't have a goat. Don't have a canary," I said, to make her laugh and bring her back to an area of comfort: lists of names of things-animals, in this case, that a woman would not ordinarily give birth to.
"Mary, would you like to go out to a restaurant?"
I want to do something."
"Such as?"
"Do you have a stopwatch?"
I have a wristwatch with a stopwatch function."
"Go get it."
Startled again.
"Please."
She stood still for a moment, thinking perhaps that when she returned with the watch I would be gone. She went inside and came back, breathing hard. "Now what?" she said.
"Now I run around the block and you time me."
"Where are you going to run?"
"I said around the block."
"Which block?"
"Duh. The block that we're on."
"Do you mean that you'll run to Fifth Avenue, take a right and go north for one block, take another right and go east to Madison, take another right and go south for one block, another right and return here?"
"Yeah, okay."
"Go!"
It was five P.M. on a Thursday in early summer. The sidewalk along Fifth Avenue was crowded with wealthy adult pedestrians and tourists. I liked weaving among them, defining my speed by their slowness, my youth by the rigid expressions of fear and annoyance on their faces. As I reached the farthest point in my journey, I began to miss Skip Hartman. My heart beat wildly inside my chest; I missed the pressure of her hand on the skin that surrounded my heart. I tried to picture her face and could not. I sped up. As I rounded the corner onto our block I saw her lips moving. "Forty-nine," she was saying, "fifty, fifty-one-"
I ran to her and threw my arms around her, being careful not to knock her to the sidewalk, as I had done to Myra. (Fancy that, reader: Mary learned from a mistake. She's growing up so fast!) "Fifty-one point three two seconds," she said.
Varying the route, we enacted this little game many times that summer and over the next several years. We called the game Going Away and Coming Back. It was one of the ways we loved each other.
---
"You must learn to lie still," Skip Hartman tried to explain to me, on her bed one morning after the end of my brief period of compliance.
"Why must I?"
"Just as it is important to cultivate useful activity, so it is important to treasure idleness. One might even consider idleness a skill."
"You're full of shit."
Startled yet again. (To startle and be startled: this was another of the ways we loved each other.)
"Why's everything have to be useful and cultivated and treasured?"
"Because life is short."
"I don't care."
"Don't say that."
"Why, because not caring isn't useful?"
"No, because it hurts me."
Across the hall from the bedroom where we slept on the second floor of the Hartman apartment was another, slightly smaller bedroom. Most of the available wall space in this room had been covered with bookshelves. The books, which nearly filled the shelves, were arranged both alphabetically and by category I had not seen such a room as this before in a private home. By the window there was a small antique rosewood desk and matching chair. Next to the desk there was a four-story wooden filing cabinet, and on the wall beside the cabinet hung a large glass-framed print depicting a small unhappy child flying a red kite in a scarred purple sky.
Just after the beginning of the unending period of my noncompliance, there followed the period of Skip Hartman's weeping. She sat at the desk in this room and looked at one particular page of a certain book and wept for most of the day. I didn't want to go into the room where she was weeping, so I sat on the wooden floor in the hallway just outside the open door. There I tried to re-create my dead brother, Paul, inside myself in the form of a Philosophical Conundrum. The conundrum was not supposed to replicate exactly the situation of the weeping; it was meant as an idealized conundrum about weeping. Let us say, the conundrum began - for all conundrums must begin with this supplication - let us say that you are in a room. And let us say that there is a room adjacent to the room you are in and that someone is weeping in this second room. There is no door to the room in which the person is weeping, and there is no door to the room you are in. Nor are there windows to these rooms. Each of you, then, is sealed in a room with no way in or out. The walls of this conundrum, then, are the walls of the two rooms, which are the walls of the world, for the purposes of the conundrum. It is your task to stop the person in the adjacent room from weeping. Why is it your task? It is your task because it is your task. And it is your task because you cannot sleep with the ceaseless weeping. The weeping distracts you from everything in your life that is not the weeping. You have already tried calling to the person. First you called softly and tenderly. You said, "Oh, my child, I am right here beside you, and though you cannot see me or touch me, I will always be here beside you." But that only made the weeping more abject, more disconsolate. You have also tried calling loudly and angrily: "Will you shut up already! I am your neighbor, and your sorrow is not my sorrow!" That, too, intensified the weeping. At this point in the conundrum, reader, I noticed a difference between this conundrum and the ones Paul used to instruct me in. In Paul's, there was generally a choice to be made among two or more distinct courses of action, and it was implied that only one of these courses of action was correct. Whereas the conundrum I had invented to instruct myself presented a situation unresponsive to anything I might do to attempt to change it. Either it was a conundrum without a solution or the solution consisted of a mental adjustment to a situation I was powerless to affect. I believe this was the point in my life at which I abandoned conundrums altogether. In this way, the memory of Paul's life loosened its grip on my mind.
For a few days, I sat outside the door to the room of the weeping woman playing the game of jacks that I had brought with me from the suburbs in a red cloth bag.
Then I went into the room.
"Hi," I said.
Skip Hartman sat in her chair. She was not actively crying now. She was in that red-eyed resting place between crying and more crying. She was looking down at a picture in a book abut northern Renaissance painting. I pulled a book down from one of the shelves and opened it and touched the pages and tried without success to figure our what the book was about. I put it back and pulled down another book and touched its insides and put it back. I did this to maybe two thirds of the books in that room. Then I left the room and went out of the house. Skip Hartman did not follow me this time. I imagined she was still in that chair looking down at that page of that book. I went into Central Park and wandered down to Bethesda Fountain and watched two squirrels alternately frolicking and standing still. I came back to the house and made a sandwich and ate it and went to sleep. When I woke up I went to the book room again. She was looking down at the book, crying.
"Hi," I said.
"Hi."
I wanted to do something nice for her but I didn't know how, so instead I pulled down the books again, all of them, and I did not replace each book before pulling down the next. In the middle of the floor, I made a huge unruly pile of every single book in that room except the one that Skip was staring down into. Then I put the books back on the shelves in no particular order, as if I had not already left my smudge of randomness on Skip Hartman's life.
---
"0oh, this is fantastic," Tommy cooed in the entrance foyer. He was looking at a tall, ancient, rectangular mirror with a mahogany frame, to which a pair of coat hooks was attached on either side of the reflecting glass. His pale red silk shirt, his lavender cravat, and his delicate, smoothed-out-baldava skin looked patrician in the tarnished surface of the old mirror. Myra was still wearing the hard rough white-plaster shell that the doctor had put on her forearm the day I felled her on her driveway. She was dressed in a brown cloth in which fragile produce might have been wrapped to be shipped overseas.
Tommy gazed at that mild narcotic, the image of his own face in the mirror. "Oh," he said. Myra looked at an area of the white wall in the foyer that had no mirror or window or painting.
"Would you like to see the rest of the house?" Skip asked.
It was the end of August and the ostensible purpose of this, the first visit from my aunt and uncle, was to discuss plans for my education, but nobody seemed to want to do that, except possibly Myra, but then one has to invent virtually all intentions and attributes of Myra.
Tommy checked his collar and cuffs in the mirror. He was not quite ready to leave the mirror. He stepped away from the mirror and rushed back to it. "I forgot the cape!"
"As lovely as your cape is, Thomas," Skip said, "it Seems to me more of a winter cape. Perhaps an autumn cape is in order."
Now Tommy could safely turn away from the mirror, having found another place that reflected him - Skip Hartman - and the tour of the house could begin.
"I want books," he said, when we reached the book room. Skip had not returned the books to their previous arrangement but, by using a mnemonic technique she had learned from the Roman orator Cicero, she had asserted the ordering principle of her own mind on the chaos of book placement.
"Perhaps I could lend you some, she said. What sort of books would you like to read?"
"I don't necessarily want to read them, at least not right away. I just want to have them around. I don't want you to lend them to me. I'll go out and get some. I'll build a nice bookshelf in maybe Paul and Mary's room so it can be the room where the books are, the way you have this room. Do you know where I could get some books like this?"
"In a bookstore, I imagine."
"I don't want the kind of books they have in bookstores. I want this kind. Old books that are about things most people don't know about. I want to read but I'm easily distracted. I want to know things. I think I could work up to reading books by first owning them."
Skip Hartman stood tall in the center of the book room while the rest of us stood around her. She cocked her head to the side to consider Tommy, which gave me the opportunity to consider her long, curved, graceful neck. "I own many more books," she said. "Some of them I keep in the basement. Some are quite rare."
"Rare - the word alone gives me a feeling," he said.
"Rare and juicy," I said.
"Succulent," Skip added.
"Succulent doesn't give me the feeling," Tommy said.
"Why don't I box up a couple gross of books and have them carted up to you," Skip said, with the faintest Brooklyn inflection waxing and waning in the course of that sentence.
Tommy was too intoxicated with the aura of the rare books in the room to notice the irreverence. In the chair on which Skip had wept for a month, Myra sat looking at the floor, while the fingertips of her left hand grazed the cast on her right arm.
"Further, let me simply hand over some cash to you," Skip said. "Here." She removed several hundred-dollar bills from her wallet and handed them to Tommy.
"Thanks."
"Look under 'Books, rare' in the Yellow Pages and you'll find many more books that I'm sure you'll read with relish."
"And mustard," I said.
"And not only that," she said. "We must now hurry you off to my tailor, who will make you an exquisite autumn-weight cape.
"Maybe after we eat," Tommy said.
"Oh, no! You must visit the delightful hot-dog cart on the way to my tailor on Fifth Avenue. That is where you will have your lunch. Visiting the island of Manhattan without eating a hot dog from a cart would be the equivalent of visiting Paris without climbing the Eiffel Tower."
"Or teaching sixth grade without having sex with one of your students," I said.
"Just so," Skip said.
"Hey, come on!" Tommy said
Skip hustled Tommy down the stairs and out the door. She stood in the foyer and said, "How often do you suppose we must have this uncle of yours to the house? I don't enjoy his company.
We noticed then that we had not sent Myra out of the house with Tommy. She stood on the stairs above the foyer and had heard what Skip said to me. For an instant, she looked at Skip with what appeared to be hatred, and then the hatred - if that was its name - was swallowed back into the affective abyss of her body.
---
At noon on Labor Day of that year - the day before what would have been the first day of school in some normative version of my life - I answered the doorbell and saw before me slightly older, wickeder versions of Dierdre and Harry, my elementary school classmates, who had somehow obtained my address. Had my twelve-year-old body not felt so woozy and sated after a morning of love with my thirty-seven-year-old guardian, I would have been shocked to see those two. They were no longer the disgraced elder statesmen of the schoolroom. They did not look wounded and chastened so much as dirty and arrogant and theatrical. Dierdre had dyed her hair black against her pale skin and freckles. She wore black mascara and lip liner. Harry had grown taller than Skip Hartman, and massive. Random light hairs grew from his jaw. He wore a scuffed black leather jacket. He looked down at me with an expression of amusement that suggested he had come as far from wanting to tussle with me as a rhinoceros would be from wanting to tussle with a penguin.
"How's the sex going?" Dierdre said.
"It's about the only thing that's going good," I said.
"Why? What's wrong?"
I heard Skip on the stairs behind me. I turned to look at her. She was wearing a white terry bathrobe and her hair was darkened by water and smoothed down on her skull in combed stripes. The skin on her face glowed as if lit from within. This was the classic postcoital Hartman look. Dierdre and Harry stared at her. "Here comes the pervert," Dierdre said, meaning to be funny, but no one laughed. "Sorry," she said. "Can Mary come to the park with us?"
"Mary may do what she likes. I am not the keeper of Mary." Skip did not descend the few final steps to greet the two children, one of whom had been her student.
A thought you were her guardian," Dierdre said.
"Legally, yes, but it is perhaps best to behave as if we are equals in all things, even while we are not equals in all things: in age or in experience or knowledge, for example."
"Or money," I said.
"I thought it was understood that you own everything I own.
"But you own me."
"Perhaps," Skip said, "this particular can contains worms enough for only two people, in which case it would be impolite of us to open it in front of your little friends. Why don't you all run along to the park, and we'll discuss this in the evening after they've returned to the suburbs."
"But I want them to stay for dinner. Can they?"
"Here again, a decision is being thrust upon me that is not mine alone to make."
We entered Central Park at Seventy-second Street and walked over a small grassy hill shaded by large trees and down to a concrete area next to the Sheep Meadow where people were roller-skating to dance music in a tight ellipse. We stood in a crowd, presumably to watch the skaters. But I was distracted by the pronounced sensation that much of the crowd was watching me. I felt the hair sticking to my neck and I felt the crowd looking at my arms and my neck and the black clumps of sweaty hair sticking to my pale, unblemished neck. Have you ever wondered, sexual reader, if people are looking at you funny when you're out in public just after having had sex?
"Watch what Harry can do," Dierdre said.
We followed Harry to the low chain-link fence that served as the border of the Sheep Meadow. A skinny black boy of Harry's height nodded at Harry. Harry approached him and nodded back and the boy shook hands with him and described several arcs in the air with his hands and arms while saying something to Harry. He handed Harry a small green object, which Harry brought to his face and smelled. Harry reached into his pocket and gave some money to the boy, who jerked his head around in all directions and walked away quickly.
"Scored us some dope," Harry said.
Dierdre said, "I got high just watching you," which seemed false. She turned to me and said, "You want to get high, Little Mary Sunshine?"
"By what? Taking marijuana? Is that what you just bought?"
"Yeah," Harry said. "We could go back to Miss Hartman's house with the air conditioner and 'take' some marijuana."
Skip was not home when we returned. We sat in the kitchen and Harry rolled some of the marijuana into a little cigarette. We smoked it and my heart raced and my two friends looked like insects to me and I burst into tears. They were very gentle and stopped looking like insects, but I could not stop wheezing and shaking. They fed me bowls of sugared cereal and I shook until I was exhausted. They poured a quart of oil into a pot and turned the electric stove on high and put the pot on the stove with the intention of deep-frying some strips of potato. But they forgot to cut the potatoes and, in fact, forgot that the pot of oil was on the stove. Starting with a small explosion, an oil fire consumed the wiring of the oven and stove and burnt the wooden cabinets above them.
By the time Skip returned from wherever she was, Harry had found the carbon-dioxide fire extinguisher and put out the fire. When Harry explained how upset I'd become after smoking the pot, and how the fire had started, Skip was gracious. She thanked them for taking care of me. Harry and Dierdre left because they had the first day of school to rest up for.
The walls of the kitchen were smeared black with smoke residue. The smell of burnt wood and plastic mingled in the air. I cannot remember what my reaction to the fire was. I was stunned, I imagine, and drugged. I sat in a kitchen chair and Skip Hartman stood behind me stroking my cheek. "How come you I re not mad?" I asked.
"I am grateful to your friends," she said. "They tried to feed you with warm food. It seems this fellow Harry had the presence of mind to extinguish the fire shortly after it began. I am thankful that you are unharmed, that you are here next to me."
Skip Hartman left off stroking my cheek and strolled around the kitchen table slowly and carefully several times. She looked as if she were balancing a stack of books on her head. I liked the way her quiet thighs came down out of her pelvis; the way her hands swung forward wrist first as she walked; the way, at the very front of the pendulum swing of her arms, her fingers flicked forward slightly. She had a monumental style of walking. Watching her walk was like watching the stars fix themselves slowly, over the millennia, into the shape of a woman walking.
"Well, I suppose it's time for bed now," she said, and headed toward the threshold of the kitchen, and stumbled on it, and was jolted, and kept walking away.
"But it's only six-thirty."
She turned and came back to the doorway. "Oh, well, then, I'll fix us some dinner. I'll prepare those flounder fillets I bought at the farmers' market."
"Skippy?"
"Yes?"
"You can't prepare anything because the stove got all burnt to a crisp."
"It did?"
"In the fire."
"Yes, the fire." Skip's pink face was dazed. "I hope you had fun with your friends. I so want you to be happy."
"Skippy-doo?"
"Yes?"
"I love you."
"Come to me," she said. I did.