Fifty Contemporary Writers Page 3

  —The term “adult” is problematic, I think, and it’s too easy to say that my childwork is directly divisive to Matures, particularly Rigid or Bolted Matures. I may help accelerate a latent behavior, I may enable conflict vectors along the lines of the Michiganers, who fasted as a form of warfare, and I feign indifference to familial tension, but I think that success itself has been fetishized, and a certain nostalgia for growth has spoiled our thinking. I can be pro-family without coddling actual families. I can support familial fear-based clustering even if it involves admitting that we are most likely associated with the wrong cluster. There is that famous German phrase, which I can’t remember exactly, that describes a certain way to hold a gun to someone’s head. The literal meaning of the phrase is that you love that person deeply, just not at the moment. I argue for a love that functions perfectly in theory.

  —But you have destroyed an unprecedented number of families.

  —I don’t destroy anything. I do question the term limits of parents, and I’m not the first to promote child-driven power reversals. We have to remember just how much thinking Benner-Louis did on this subject, and how resonant her geological metaphors were. If prodding an object for flaws causes a momentarily resolved family to unravel, or, as Benner-Louis would have it, dissolve, then what you’re saying is that we should stay silent and paralyzed, the classic demand placed upon children. It is not my problem that families are hurt when we notice how they have hardened into stone, how they stoke each other’s failure instinct, and if Matures are not powerful enough to admit a stagnation, they are welcome to blame me, but that’s fairly evasive. I give choices to children, and I supply functional tunnels to those who have yet to become children. This is mapping as Parsons envisioned it: you don’t map a route that has been spoiled by the progress of others. Adulthood looks like an exhaustion farm. Who would knowingly purchase a ticket to that? In my work, I re-child certain people who have presumed a premature adulthood, and, most importantly, I question adulthood as a retreat from the power of infancy. I’m a supplier.

  —Which brings us to Maryland.

  —My tantrum work is still being fine-tuned, but you could reference an entire series of Chesapeake catastrophes that might seem now like open wounds, even as our daily perspective, as time passes and fewer of us can recall the perished, will refresh itself to show just how essential, for instance, something like the Lake Maneuver was. Assertive Submersion may not be pleasant, in the lived sense, but if the values of a social group are being collectively ignored, forcing Matures, through panic, to relocate their child-state, is an adequate way to broadcast a set of perspectives and beliefs that have been conveniently forgotten. Behaviors are advertised and promoted all the time. Why should we be penalized for making our case so powerfully that people nearly die from the overwhelming logic of it?

  —But can you sketch for me a picture of your ethics?

  —I think that fixed moral boundaries are harmful, even if they provide momentary comfort and save lives. I think our ethical duty is to eliminate the behavioral corsets that are cinched over children just as their explosive energy is at its most threatening. Is a tantrum disruptive or does it point to an emotional tunnel we’re afraid of entering? The doctrines of the tantras involve meditation, mantras, ritual, and explosive behavior. We’re talking about ancient ideas that are elementary and obvious to high schoolers. My ethics? I’d like to shed the strictures of adulthood and make maturity an optional result of a freely lived human life, not the necessary path to power and success, lorded over by depressed, overweight, unimaginative corpses. The twenty most central mantras have their roots in baby talk. No one is even disputing this anymore. A syntax comprising these mantras, which should not be confused with NASA’s failed language, can marshal the force of an entire infant society, but—and this is key—this syntax is not capable of instructional phrasings, so nothing can be taught, which keeps maturity and its death mask perfectly at bay.

  —Has it been necessary to denounce such important figures in child development as Dr. Spock? Where has that adversarial approach benefited your child program?

  —Dr. Spock reviewed existing children, but he didn’t promote new ones. His art was to survey the past and insure a predictable persona outcome. He devised solutions for the escape of childhood, very good ones, I might add. I think that some of his approaches are worth modifying, if only in service of a kind of dark science. We can bottle that kind of curatorial approach to behavior, but it won’t save anyone. These were tonics for escape, and they should have been marketed that way all along. I’ve simply asked for honesty. Spock’s entire approach presents infancy as a problem to be managed, to be grown out of, and I’m not alone in finding this condescending. Physical growth is (mostly) a necessity (although we’ll soon see about that), but emotional growth is something Matures crave strictly for others. Rarely is it satisfying to the person who accomplishes it. There’s a missionary zeal around this dirty word, development, and it’s exerted on otherwise defenseless people. A spell has been cast on all of us, and it leads to a spectacularly depressing failure we have come to call “adulthood.” The artwork of children is so often discarded because Matures cannot accept, let alone decipher, the chaos and disorder children depict after only briefly gazing at the crushed and gargantuan figures that supposedly serve them. Children’s art perfectly captures the sloppy, disordered, ugly world that awaits them if they choose the path of maturity.

  —Many people would disagree with that.

  —And I bet they’re old and “adult” and reasonable, accumulating comprehension as if it were food. It’s a laughable mistake, this certainty compulsion. Your entire line of questioning revolves around the notion that if not everyone agrees with me there must be something wrong with my ideas. This is a classic rhetorical tactic—I think it’s called the Consensus Chalice—for a Mature. The Fear of the Infant wasn’t just a successful film; it depicted a real aversion to kinds of discoveries that might be possible if Matures didn’t operate with such staggering fear. Baby talk has tremendous potential, despite its obvious dangers and its near total incomprehensibility. The only reason you don’t embrace it is your abject terror.

  —What’s next for you?

  —Meyerowitz, for all of his accomplishments, died as an adult, and it has shamed his entire family. His legacy, in the end, means nothing, because he left this world knowing and thinking too much, headed down the wrong road, with a body that weighed as much as six children. He attacked his own theories, in fear of the complexities and richness of innocence, and now he’s dead. I want to die as I am, as a child, looking out at a world that I can admit is too complex to know and far too terrible to join. I want to die. And I want to do it as a child: barely able to walk, careening through the fog of objects and people I can never know, wearing nothing at all but the tattered onesie my first mother bought me. This is my goal.

  The Beating

  Joyce Carol Oates

  STILL ALIVE! FROM THE doorway of the intensive care unit I can see my father in his bed swaddled in white like a comatose infant, and he is still alive.

  So long I’ve been away. So long I’ve traveled, and so far.

  Yet nothing seems to have changed in my absence. My mother and two other visitors are standing beside my father’s bed, their backs to me. From their demeanor you can deduce that my father is still “unresponsive” after the morning’s surgery to reduce swelling in his brain; he is unmoving except in random twitches and shudders; he is breathing—arduously, noisily—by way of a machine; his every heartbeat is being monitored on a screen above his bed; on this screen as on a TV screen an erratic scribble is being written, accompanied by an electronic beeping that reminds me of the cheeping of baby chicks. Grotesquely my father’s wounded head has been swathed in white gauze exposing a single bruised eye like a peephole someone has cruelly defaced so you can’t see in.

  Earlier that day my mother had asked me to leave, there wasn’t room for me at my father’s
bedside. Descending then three floors to the first floor of Sparta Memorial Hospital where there was a small visitors’ lounge adjacent to a small cafeteria beneath dim-flickering fluorescent lights. Such a depressing place! Such chill, such smells! This was July 1959. That long ago, you have to smile—I don’t blame you, I would smile in your place—to think that people like us took ourselves so seriously. You think But you’re all going to die, why does it matter exactly when? Yet this was the time, and this was the place, when my father was still alive.

  Madelyn! heard the news about your father, what a terrible thing, what a shock how is he?

  Madelyn! tell us all you can remember, all that you must have seen?

  Hadn’t changed my clothes since my father had been brought to the hospital two and a half days before. Slept in the clothes I’d been wearing at the time of the beating, Rangers T-shirt, khaki shorts, sneakers without socks, we’d been visiting my grandmother earlier that afternoon and we’d dropped by the Sparta Blues Festival on the river on our way home, and after that, a detour, as my father called it, to his office on East Capitol Street, and now my clothes were rumpled and smelly for I’d slept in them sprawled on top of my bed without the energy to undress and anxious to be prepared should someone from the hospital call in the night, if my mother came to wake me Hurry! get up! they want us at the hospital, your father may be dying. This terrible call had not yet come and yet every breath I drew was a preparation for it, I was fourteen years old and found myself in one of those cruel fairy tales in which a daughter must perform certain rituals and tests without question, that her father will be allowed to live. And when we were at my father’s bedside in the chill of the ICU where your fingernails turned blue without your noticing, and you could fall asleep on your feet like a zombie, and begin to crumple to the floor without your noticing, it could not happen that the terrible call would come waking us from our exhausted sleep for already we were awake and we were at the hospital. Softly my mother spoke my father’s name: Harvey? Harvey? I love you. And in an urgent undertone I said: Daddy? Daddy? It’s Madelyn. For to say I love you was not possible. For so desperately I loved my father, to have spoken such words I love you was not possible. I could not have explained why, there were no words to explain why. Seeing me you’d have thought A sulky girl, when she should be a good girl. My mother who was ordinarily very alert to my moods and to my “personal appearance” hadn’t seemed to notice that I’d been sleeping in my clothes and smelled of my body for having washed only my sticky hands and rubbed a washcloth over my feverish face, my red-rimmed pig eyes. (Those pig eyes in the mirror, I could not bear to see. Brimming with hot-guilt tears that spilled and burned like acid.) In the past two and a half days I hadn’t been able to sit down at any table to eat and had not been able to eat much as a consequence but I made certain that I brushed my teeth until my gums bled for I could not bear the sensation of anything between my teeth.

  Who was it? they’d asked. Who did this to your father?

  Try to remember if you saw. Must’ve seen.

  Hospital rules for ICU differed from rules for the rest of the hospital: no more than three visitors at a time were allowed at a patient’s bedside. And so when my father’s older brother and his wife came to see my father, my mother asked me to leave. Of course this was a reasonable request. Of course I was not angry at my mother, or my relatives. Yet quickly I walked away, avoiding the friendly smiles of the ICU nurses who’d come to recognize me and my family Don’t look at me! Please don’t smile at me! You don’t know me! Leave me alone. I took the stairs down to the foyer, not the elevator. I dreaded being trapped inside an elevator with strangers, still more I dreaded encountering someone who recognized me as Harvey Fleet’s daughter who would take my hand in sympathy or hug me, and I would push rudely away, my face would break and turn ugly with tears glistening like snot.

  How small the Sparta Hospital was, in 1959! Yet no one then seemed to have known.

  Such silly people. It’s easy to laugh at us.

  The very air exuded a spent, sepia cast as if faded by time like an old Polaroid photograph. Though the hospital was air-conditioned, cold as a refrigerator, yet there was a just-perceptible odor of stale urine, fecal matter, rot beneath the sharper odor of disinfectant. Visitors to the hospital and hospital staff appeared stiff and clumsy as mannequin figures in a painting by Edward Hopper. Voices were overly shrill and emphatic as TV voices and if there was laughter it was not convincing laughter but reminded me of canned TV laughter. Of course I was one of those figures myself, a solitary girl of fourteen in rumpled clothes sitting at a table, at the edge of the cafeteria. My eyes stung with fatigue, my head ached, and there was a sour, dark taste at the back of my mouth. Badly I did not want to be in this place but had nowhere else to go, for if I left the hospital, and went home, my father might die, and I would not be at his bedside. I’d brought a library book with me but couldn’t concentrate, how insubstantial were printed words, passages of type in a book of dog-eared pages, I could think only of my father trapped in his hospital bed in the intensive care unit, unconscious, made to breathe in anguished gasps by a machine, his ravaged head and face swathed in white gauze and a single bruised and bloodshot eye exposed … . And I thought of how I had found him lying on the floor of his office on East Capitol Street. Thinking at first that he had lost his balance somehow and fallen, struck his head on the sharp edge of the desk, for he was bleeding from a head wound, and he was bleeding from injuries to his face. He was whimpering and moaning through clenched teeth. The door to my father’s office had been left open and so I stood in the doorway for an astonished moment uncertain what it was I was seeing. Before I had time to be frightened the thought came to me Daddy would not want me to see him like this. He would not want anyone to see him like this.

  I began to see how memory pools might accumulate in such places as this cafeteria and in waiting rooms through the hospital. In corners, in the shadows. Beneath tables like mine. These memory pools made the worn tile floor damp, sticky, discolored as by mildew. And maybe there were actual tears, soaked into the floor. I felt a shiver of dread: you could not walk anywhere in such a place without the anguished memories of strangers sticking to your shoes. Their dread of what was to come in their lives, what ruptures, what unspeakable losses. Early that morning my father had undergone emergency surgery to reduce pressure on his brain, into which burst blood vessels had been bleeding since he’d suffered “blunt force trauma” to the head. Yet my father was but one of how many thousands of patients who’d been hospitalized at Sparta Memorial Hospital over the years … . One day with precise scientific instruments certain of these memories might be exhumed, I thought. Like organic matter identified from the stains of long ago. And so there might be a future time when these thoughts that so tormented me now would be calmly recalled; when all this, in which I was trapped—the hospital, the visitors’ lounge, the slow-ticking afternoon in July 1959—would be past.

  He lived! He did live, he survived.

  He died. “Passed away.” There was nothing to be done.

  Yet at this time, I was safe from such knowledge. At this time, my father, Harvey Fleet, was still alive.

  “Madelyn?”

  Vaguely I had been aware of someone approaching my table, coming up behind me, as frequently individuals were making their way past in this crowded space, and I had been aware of someone pausing, looming over me. I looked up in expectation of seeing one of my male relatives but instead I saw a man whom I didn’t recognize at first, with a two days’ growth of beard on his jaws, amber-tinted sunglasses, and thick disheveled graying hair that seemed to rise like a geyser at the crown of his head. “Madelyn Fleet. It is you.” The surprise was that this man was my seventh-grade math teacher, Mr. Carmichael, whom I had not seen in more than two years and then only in our school building. The way in which Mr. Carmichael had intoned Madelyn Fleet was his teacherly teasing way, which I remembered. I had to remember too, with a quick stab of emotion
, that I’d been in love with Mr. Carmichael, in secret, when I was twelve years old.

  Now I was fourteen, and much changed. In my former teacher’s eyes this change was being registered.

  Smiling down at me, Mr. Carmichael was smoking a cigarette for in 1959 it was not forbidden to smoke cigarettes in a hospital, even in most hospital rooms. How strange it was to see my seventh-grade math teacher unshaven as none of his students had ever seen him, and his hair that had always been trimmed short now grown long, curling languidly behind his ears, and threaded with silvery gray wires. It was a warmly humid midsummer and so Mr. Carmichael had rolled up his shirtsleeves to his elbows; the cuffs hung free, at a rakish angle. The front of Mr. Carmichael’s shirt was damp with perspiration and looked as if it hadn’t been changed in days. From such signs I understood that Mr. Carmichael too was an anxious visitor to Sparta Memorial Hospital, yet even in his state of distraction and dread he was smiling at me, and his eyes behind the tinted lenses of his glasses were alert and intense in a way I did not remember from when I’d been his student. When he inquired what I was reading I had no choice but to show him the cover of the book, which was a novel by H. G. Wells that elicited from Mr. Carmichael a remark meant to be clever and knowing, for at our school Mr. Carmichael—whose first name we giggled to see was Luther—had a reputation for being clever and knowing if also, at times, sarcastic, sardonic, and inscrutable; a teacher who graded harshly, at times; for which reason, while some girl students admired Mr. Carmichael and strove to please him, most of our classmates were uncomfortable in his classes, and disliked him. Even boys who laughed at Mr. Carmichael’s jokes did not wholly trust him, for he could turn on you, if you were not cautious. There were rumors about Mr. Carmichael being complained of by the parents of certain students and perhaps by certain of his fellow teachers and vaguely last year I’d heard that Mr. Carmichael no longer taught at the school … . As if he could hear my thoughts and wished to commandeer them, Mr. Carmichael leaned over me, saying, in a lowered voice, that he thought he’d recognized me as I crossed the lobby and came here to sit, he’d thought it might be me—“Or some older sister of little Madelyn Fleet”—but he wasn’t sure that he could trust his eyes—“You’ve gotten taller, Madelyn. And you carry yourself—differently.” In embarrassed confusion I laughed, leaning away from him, my face throbbed with blood; I was overwhelmed by such attention, and did not know how to reply. There was nowhere to look except at Mr. Carmichael’s flushed and roughened face, and his eyes so warmly intent upon me beyond the smudged lenses of his sunglasses. Mr. Carmichael’s breath smelled of—was it whiskey?—a sweetish-sour odor with which I was long familiar, for all my male relatives drank whiskey at times, and certainly my father drank whiskey. It had not been the case during my year of seventh-grade math that Mr. Carmichael had singled me out for any particular attention, or praise; I could not have claimed that Mr. Carmichael had ever really looked at me as an individual; though I’d been one of five or six reliable students who’d usually received high grades, I hadn’t been an outstanding math student, only a doggedly diligent good-girl student. Nor had I been one of the popular and flirtatious girls in our class who’d had no trouble attracting Mr. Carmichael’s attention. Yet now he was asking, “Why are you here in this depressing place, Madelyn? I hope it isn’t a family emergency … .” He did not seem to be teasing but spoke sincerely, with sympathy; lightly his hand rested on my shoulder, to comfort. I was frightened now for such sympathy left me weak, defenseless; I did not want to cry; in my bedroom I’d cried until my eyes were reddened and swollen like blisters but I had not cried in front of anyone except my mother. It would be held against Harvey Fleet’s daughter that she was “cold”—“snotty”—stiffening in her relatives’ embraces and shrinking from their kisses with a look of disdain. Yet how could I bring myself to say to Mr. Carmichael, My father is upstairs in the intensive care unit, he had surgery this morning to reduce swelling in his brain, he has not regained consciousness after a terrible beating … . Quickly I told Mr. Carmichael that my mother had come to see a friend in the hospital who’d had minor surgery and I’d been with them for a while then became restless, couldn’t breathe, came downstairs to read my novel but couldn’t concentrate, and now I was thinking of going home. (For suddenly it came to me; I could leave this hateful place, I could go home without my mother.) Mr. Carmichael said he’d had enough of the hospital too. More than enough. He’d drive me home, Mr. Carmichael said now, nudging my ponytail, and I laughed, saying thank you but I could take a city bus, or I could walk. (In the heat, the three-mile walk would be punishing. My mother would be astonished and would not know if she should be apologetic or disgusted with me.) Mr. Carmichael squinted down at me through his sunglasses, saying in his brisk-bemused-teacher voice that his car was out back: “C’mon, Madelyn. I’ll drive you home.”