Self-Help (Vintage Contemporaries) Read online

  “You mean, I’m just another one of the fucking gang?”

  He looks at you, puzzled. “Charlene, what I’ve always admired about you, right from when I first met you, is your strength, your independence.”

  Say: “That line is old as boots.”

  Tell him not to smoke in your apartment. Tell him to get out.

  At first he protests. But slowly, slowly, he leaves, pulling up the collar on his expensive beige raincoat, like an old and haggard Robert Culp.

  Slam the door like Bette Davis.

  Love drains from you, takes with it much of your blood sugar and water weight. You are like a house slowly losing its electricity, the fans slowing, the lights dimming and flickering; the clocks stop and go and stop.

  At Karma-Kola the days are peg-legged and aimless, collapsing into one another with the comic tedium of old clowns, nowhere fast.

  In April you get a raise. Celebrate by taking Hilda to lunch at the Plaza.

  Write for applications to graduate schools.

  Send Mark the banker a birthday card.

  Take long walks at night in the cold. The blonde in barrettes scuttles timelessly by you, still carrying her shoes. She has cut her hair.

  He calls you occasionally at the office to ask how you are. You doodle numbers and curlicues on the corners of the Rolodex cards. Fiddle with your Phi Beta Kappa key. Stare out the window. You always, always, say: “Fine.”

  WHAT IS SEIZED

  My mother married a cold man. Not that he couldn’t make her laugh, because he could do that: he’d pull some antic in the living room—sing nursery rhymes in an Italian accent, safety-pin an olive to his lapel, tell jokes about chickens, elephants, or morons. And because he performed with the local musical theater group every spring and fall, and usually got the funny parts, he sometimes practiced in the kitchen while she was doing stuff, making her grin in spite of herself, making her giggle into the batter bowl. My father taught clarinet and math at the high school in town. He seemed to know how to get people to like him, to do crazy stunts with furniture or time-rate problems. I would usually hear about these secondhand. People in Crasden seemed to think he was amazing somehow. Special, they said. Talented. But when he made love to my mother, he kept his eyes closed the whole time, turned his head away from her, and afterward would give her a hard, angry gaze, roll stiffly over to his side of the bed, face the wall, shake her off of him with a shudder or a flinch if she kissed his shoulder, rubbed his arm, lay a palm against his bare back. She told me this before she died. She just stared off to one side at the drapes and told me.

  We lived on a lake and used to hear the water bang and slurp at the dock pilings at night. We also had a rowboat tied and afloat at the end, which would clunk against the wood when the water got rough. “Old man boat, old man boat,” James would sometimes sing to be funny, instead of “Old Man River,” which my mother had taught us. James and I shared the large bed in the lakeside room upstairs, in the morning often waking up staring into each other’s eyes, and at night spending hours listening for the underwater world in the lake to come magically to life, when no one was looking, when it was pitch black and still except for the quietest rocking, and the good, shy fish would put on pink and orange jackets and smile and go to balls, with violins and oriental fans.

  James was my foster brother—half Indian, half Pennsylvania Catholic. His parents had met in college. In 1958 his father returned for good to a small city north of Calcutta, and his mother had a nervous breakdown, came to Crasden to live, but later got sick and died. James became a public ward and came to live with us when he was five and I was four; we never talked about his past. He had smooth black hair and a wide white smile. I thought it was funny that his lips were brown and that every night he scraped his tongue with a wooden scraper. “Be kind to James,” my mother said. “He is your brother now.” Sometimes he would cry, but not that often.

  The rooms in our house were like songs. Each had its own rhythmic spacing and clutter, which if you crossed your eyes became a sort of musical notation, a score—clusters of eighth notes, piles of triplets, and the wooden roundness of doorways, like clefs, all blending in a kind of concerto. Or sometimes, as with the bathroom, with its motif of daisies and red plastic, they created a sort of jingle, something small, likable, functional. It was the bookcase in the living room that seemed particularly symphonic, the books all friendly with one another, a huge chorus of them in a hum; they stood packed behind glass doors with loose metal knobs. My mother also kept photo albums, scrapbooks, yearbooks on the bottom shelf of the case, along with the big, heavy books like Smith’s World History and the Golden Treasury of Children’s Stories. In one book she had black and white pictures of herself, starting from when she was little. Gray, empty days I would take that book out and look at it. By the time I was nine, I knew all the pictures by heart. To stare at them, to know those glimpses, I felt, was to know her, to become her, to make my mother a woman with adventures, a woman in a story, a book, a movie. The photos somehow seemed powerful. Sometimes I still look at them, with a cup of coffee, with the television on.

  A photo where she is six and has bangs bleached pale from the sun. She is in a white sundress, standing next to a large tricycle, squinting and frowning into the camera. Crabface. That’s what my mother called it: “Oh yeah, there’s me, ole crabface, pouting for soda pop.”

  My mother liked to sing, but she would wait until my father wasn’t around because he would correct her pitch and straighten her posture and insist she use her lungs and diaphragm better. “Don’t sing like a disembodied mule. You should use your whole rib cage. And sitting on the piano bench, she would poker-stare straight ahead at the sheet music and play the C above middle C over and over again with one finger, a sort of hypnosis. “Go mow the lawn, Enrico,” she would say sometimes. Which was a joke, because my father’s real name was Sam and because we really had no lawn, just a craggy, pine-needled slope, which galloped wildly from the road down to the lake. On the other side of the house was a slow, tiny stream, which trickled and glided gingerly over rocks, like something afraid of hurting itself.

  At night with the lights out, after she had heard our prayers, my mother would sing to James and me, and we thought she was great. She’d sing “Down by the Old Mill Stream” or some Cole Porter hit she knew from college. She loved Frank Sinatra. She would stand by our bed, crooning imitations into one of the bedposts as if it were a microphone, and afterward we would clap in the dark until our hands stung. (At the end of “Pennies from Heaven,” she would place a penny on each post for us to find in the morning.) “Thank you, thank you,” she would whisper with a low, wonderful laugh, smiling and bending over us to wetly kiss our cheeks, her hair down, long, black, and sweeping against my chest and chin, smelling soapy and dry. And if the moon was out it lit up the lake, and the lake light shone into the room through the slats of the blinds, tentatively striping her hair and face or the arm of her sweater. And as she moved—to kiss James, to tuck in the blankets—the stripes moved up and down her. When she left she always kept the door slightly unlatched, the lamp from the hall framing the door in cracks of light interrupted only by hinges. She always called in a whisper, “Good night my sweet sparrows,” that expression only later in my life seeming silly or indulgent or mad. And often James would be on his back next to me humming late into the night, invisible in the dark, singing the words to “Old Devil Moon” when he could remember them, or sometimes just whispering, “Hey, Lynnie, how does it go again?” his legs jiggling under the sheets.

  A photo where she is eight and her hair is darker, wavier, and she already has the bones of her adult face beginning to grow inside, cheekbones awakening behind the skin. She is grinning in a striped shirt with her arm around Uncle Don, her blank-faced little brother, in front of a house they lived in just outside of Syracuse, a white house with a closed-in front porch and a brick chimney painted white, two large tamaracks on either side, their branches dangling curved and prot
ective over the roof, like large mustaches. Uncle Don comes up to her chin.

  My father played Liza Doolittle’s father in My Fair Lady and the knight with the dog in Camelot. On Sunday afternoons my mother would bring us to watch them rehearse in the Crasden High School auditorium, but in 1956, so that it was new and strong and maroon and velvet and hadn’t lost its polish. I loved the dark slope of it, and would gallop along the rows of empty flip-bottom seats as if they were my own private corridors. The director would pace out in front of the stage, a few feet beyond the orchestra pit. At early rehearsals they just used a pianist, a puffy woman named Mrs. Beales who took many trips to the ladies’ room. “The entire action to the right and further downstage, downstage,” the director was always shouting, waving both arms like a semaphore. He had thick, white, horse-mane hair that he combed straight back from his brow but that nevertheless flopped into his eyes from time to time. He wore white shoes and usually dressed in something of pale blue silk. My father would say things during scene cuts on stage that we couldn’t hear but that made everyone laugh—a talky, theatrical, group laugh, filled with ho-ho’s and oh-no’s and affectionate hissing and stomping. Sometimes the director would wear sunglasses and prop them on top of his head and say, “Oh shit, let’s take a break.” And then the lights would go up and the actors would head for the cafeteria two long marble hallways away, and as the school was empty and lit up like a bowling alley, you could hear the echo of their steps and their loud chatter, the woman who played Liza Doolittle still screeching “Aow,” adding, “Did you phone the babysitter, Ron?” and Professor Higgins, not with them but seated on the stage’s edge, eating a sandwich he had brought, his legs dangling, sneakers thumping against each other, like a Little Leaguer. During these breaks, James and I would dash up onto the stage to see my father, and, if it was a dress rehearsal, we would giggle at his orange face or his wig or his fake eyebrows arched way up into his forehead. But then we would be struck by shyness when he would say, “Hi, kids,” but look past us, over our heads, then turn and head busily backstage to take care of something. Standing there on the stage, we would turn and look out onto the hill of auditorium seats, spot my mother in the tenth row where we had left her reading a book, and she would wave and we would wave, then we’d race to her, like racing home, and climb hungrily all over her lap, as if looking for something. Sometimes we played with the bobby pins in her hair, which she used to hold it in a twist in the back, making antennae, making antlers, my mother allowing it all. “Your father is a talented man,” my mother said, sounding like my teachers at school who said similar things to me, my mother sensing our disappointment in never getting his attention for very long. “Talented men have very busy heads. They may seem unkind sometimes.” And I would think about this for a long time afterward, chewing my nails, writing letters.

  A photo in which she is nine and dressed for a ballet class in a long-sleeved black leotard, in the living room in front of the fireplace. She is doing an arabesque, one arm bent slightly over her head, one arm out to the side; because it is a front view, only one leg shows, and she looks something like an amputee, the tip of her ballet shoe just visible above the outline of her shoulder, her whole body leaning into the camera as her eyes gaze off to one side of it, looking half sorrowful, half comical. “She looks like a greasehead,” James said once, sitting next to me, taking note of the tight wet way her hair was pulled off her face into a bun. “You’re a greasehead,” I said, nurturing fantasies of becoming a ballerina myself, and I punched him in the leg. He moved farther back on the couch, a little away from me, and just chewed his gum harder. Sometimes when we had fights, I would say I’m sorry, and sometimes he would. He liked to look at the pictures, too.

  “Cold men destroy women,” my mother wrote me years later. “They woo them with something personable that they bring out for show, something annexed to their souls like a fake greenhouse, lead you in, and you think you see life and vitality and sun and greenness, and then when you love them, they lead you out into their real soul, a drafty, cavernous, empty ballroom, inexorably arched and vaulted and mocking you with its echoes—you hear all you have sacrificed, all you have given, landing with a loud clunk. They lock the greenhouse and you are as tiny as a figure in an architect’s drawing, a faceless splotch, a blur of stick limbs abandoned in some voluminous desert of stone.”

  “Dear Mom,” I wrote back. “I am coming home on the 23rd, so should be there for the candlelight service on Sunday. Hope all is going well. Exams are merciless. See you soon.”

  A photo of my mother when she is fourteen and the adult bones are at last there—stark cemented lines, startling as the curves in a mountain road, from eye to jaw, her skin lineless, and although she is not smiling there is no sadness in her face, simply an inquiring, a wide stare of scrutiny, a look of waiting, of preparedness.

  My mother was the only mother I knew who wore her hair long. Sometimes she would wear it in a single braid that hung like a dark tail, marbled with auburn sun streaks, down the middle of her back; other times she wore it in two side braids that would swing back and forth when she bent over. “You look like a featherhead Indian lady,” James would tell her. He was just being made aware of the distinction between India Indian and the kind you saw on TV. “How,” my mother would joke, holding up a hand. And James, not getting it, would tug impatiently at her braids and say, “Because of these, because of these.”

  She is fifteen and has Tonied her hair into a wild frizz that dances, dark and frenetic, way out beyond the barrettes she uses to clamp it down. She is sitting on a bench in a park somewhere, eating an ice cream cone, blue jeans rolled up mid-calf, legs spread wide and feet pigeon-toed, ankles caved outward, and she is hunched a bit forward with her cone, making a crazy face that involves sticking out her tongue and crossing her eyes.

  There were nights my parents fought, woke us up with their fighting, and James would put his pillow over his face and I would lie wide-eyed, terrified and paralyzed by my father’s bellowing, the doors slamming, something metal always clinking somewhere to the floor, the pounding on the walls, and my mother’s “Oh god, oh god, just leave, why don’t you.”

  One afternoon, the day after one of these night fights, I brought my friend Rachel home on the bus with me. We walked in the kitchen door and I reminded her to wipe her feet. Down the hallway that led to the bathroom I suddenly saw my mother, sitting on the toilet with the door wide open, her legs and hips bare and white, her underwear coiled at her ankles, her long hair all unbraided, a mane of unbrushed ripples floating out and downward toward her waist. She didn’t move when we walked in. She just sat there in an old black shirt like some obscene statue, her head leaning frozenly on her hands, her elbows propped on her knees.

  “Is that your mother?” whispered Rachel.

  And I said maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t.

  My mother never saw us, but continued to stare like a drunkard at something on the floor just ahead of her.

  “Come on,” I said, and led Rachel upstairs to my room where James, on the bed, was reading a bird encyclopedia: cowbirds, starlings, cuckoos. “Look at this,” he said. “A blue-booted boobie.” And we looked and saw it was just some dumb black-faced bird. And then all three of us played “Careers” and Rachel bought a farm and lots of happiness, but I was the first man on the moon and loaded up on stars, winning everything.

  Her high school graduation picture. The yearbook caption reads, “Salutatorian” and “Best All-Around.” Her friends write things like, “Beautiful Anna, we will miss you off in Chicago, come back to visit.” “The Windy City has a treat coming its way. Good luck.” “Stay as sweet as you are. Remember the Bluebird Dance. We had fun. Good luck at U. of Chi. Love, Barbara.”

  That night, or was it another night, my mother came into our room late after we had already tucked ourselves in and she laid our schoolbooks on the floor next to our bed and then stood in the doorway awhile, looking wraithlike, silent, in a long white sleev
eless nightgown, one bare arm dangling loosely at her side, the other bent upward, hand cupped around the back of her neck, thoughtfully, her head tilted toward the dangling arm, her dark unpinned hair obscuring one shoulder like the hood of a cape. And there was a bird outside on the lake, hooting, calling, and it was the only sound, and James murmured groggily, “That’s a loon, a ruby-throated loon,” and my mother turned and disappeared until morning.

  “Your father wrote music, too, you know, but he never shared it with us,” my mother said, a bit breathlessly, as I smoothed out her blankets. “Music ultimately left him unstirred. Like a god irritated with his own tinkerings. Despite his talent, or perhaps because of it, he heard only the machinery, the clanking and spitting. He felt nothing. No compassion.” She coughed. “You would think creating something would necessarily be an act of love or compassion.”

  “Mother,” I said, remembering the nurse’s instructions. “Perhaps you should take your pill now.”

  She leaves behind all her friends, including Barbara. A picture of this, with streamers and cake and wine bottles. At college she falls in love with a sophomore named Jacob Fish and works toward a degree in fine arts. After four years she leaves him, inexplicably goes back home, paints and designs sets for a local Syracuse theater group. Kismet. South Pacific. See the scenery. She also sings in the chorus; that’s her, there.

  I remember overhearing a brief snatch of a fight my parents had once. Or rather my mother was crying and having difficulty explaining why to my father, as he seemed angry and distant, she said, and soon he was screaming at her that she should stop her goddamn crying and perhaps get some exercise for a change. At this my mother cried even harder and my father stormed out of the house. But the next day, and several times a week for years afterward, my mother was running along the lake in sweatclothes and old sneakers she didn’t mind getting wet. Once in a while I went with her, jogging next to her, watching her breasts float up and down beneath her sweatshirt, imitating the way she breathed in and out with quick snorts. Twice we saw dead birds washed up on shore and we stopped to look at their bedraggled carcasses, their eyes already crawling with small black bugs. “What is beautiful is seized,” my mother said. “My grandmother used to tell me that.”